A Dangerous Deceit (23 page)

Weighing up the possibilities, he had been forced to acknowledge it was not a feasible proposition, for him or for any of them, in the ultimate. Estates like Maxstead, families like theirs, the Scroopes, looked increasingly unlikely to have any future in this post-apocalyptic world. Nothing was ever going to be the same after that last war. Tell Maxstead's predicament to the man in the dole queue, waiting for a pittance handout to feed and clothe his family, and hear what he would say about it! His mother shut her eyes to this and Binkie didn't give a fig – all he cared about was that the estate sucked up money like a whale sucked up plankton. Symon knew that although he could have succeeded in keeping things ticking along, sooner or later the axe was bound to fall. The attempt to discuss it with Binkie had ended in a row, and he had tried to tell himself these were decisions it was not up to him to make, though this did not assuage his guilt.

He looked at other ways of spending a useful life and had surprised himself by the career he had been drawn to, never before having thought himself religious. He had excelled in his studies and by the time he was ordained as curate, clearly before him stretched the path towards preferment, with its eventual goal. Here, however, when his thoughts reached the archdeaconry in the cathedral close, he abruptly checked such pleasurable meanderings before they should stray as far as the bishop's palace. Yet he chose to believe that it was not sinful ambition or false pride that drove him, but an inborn conviction that one day he would surely be directed there.

At that precise moment in his thoughts, the lights went out. He gave a long-suffering sigh, put his teacup down and went to seek candles and matches where he knew they would be found, lit oil lamps already primed for such a regular emergency, while reflecting grimly that the unreliability of the electricity supply might be a profound metaphor for Maxstead's precarious existence.

He hadn't lit all the lamps when from the front of the house came a roar and a scrunch of gravel that proved to be the arrival of what was known in the family as Binkie's Yellow Peril. Maude gave a distracted cluck. ‘What are they doing here? They were only down a few days ago and— What a surprise! Julian darling, Opal. Lovely to see you, but where are the children?' she cried, hurrying out to greet her son and his wife as they came into the hall.

‘Oh, they have a little cold, we thought it best …' Opal replied vaguely.

How odd this was. And where was the baggage train that usually arrived with Opal – the suitcases, hatboxes, trunks, even if only for a few days? Just one overnight valise for the two of them. And both of them looking … well, Binkie, always pale, was even more so, and drawn, too, nervously slapping his driving gloves against his thigh. But Opal! Maude had never seen her so distraught. Her face was white and pinched under the grey of the velour cloche hat pulled down close to her ears, and it was obvious she wore no make up at all. She had quite clearly dressed in a hurry; when she took off her coat, underneath was a mismatched collection of unsuitable clothes. Being Opal, all this spelled some dire disaster.

‘My dear!' Summoning a kindness she normally found difficult to show to her daughter-in-law, Maude sat her in a chair near to the fire. Opal held her hands out to the blaze and Margaret poured tea and handed it to her, with a scone which she left untouched on her plate.

Binkie ate nothing either, but thirstily drained a cup of tea and then, immaculate as usual, stood up with his back to the fire, cleared his throat and prepared to make his pronouncement. ‘Rather glad you're here, Symon. There's something I have to say, and you should hear it.'

Opal's hand flew to her mouth. ‘Binkie …' she began, but he stopped her with a dark look. She was terribly afraid he might be going to confess.

It was too bad Symon was here, with Margaret, too. Opal, for all her sophistication, didn't know how to talk to him. He always listened courteously, which somehow made her inconsequential chatter and gossip sound too silly for anything. Binkie said he was a prig, but she supposed he couldn't help that, being a parson … Meanwhile, she couldn't think of a single thing she might do to stop Binkie. He continued relentlessly.

‘It will probably be a shock to you all, but I have decided to sell Maxstead – if anyone can be found to buy it, that is. As well as most of the estate.'

Into the stunned silence following this announcement, old Henry, lying at Maude's feet, gave one of those single deep, rumbling barks he sometimes made in his sleep. As if it were a signal, the lights came on again, flickered uncertainly once or twice and then settled down, though no one moved to turn off the now redundant oil lamps.

This was it, Maude thought, feeling the energy drain from every part of her, from her very fingertips; this was what she had been afraid of for so long. ‘Why?'

‘Because this house is eating money; it costs a fortune simply to keep it standing up, as you all know. Don't worry about yourself, Ma. You needn't move too far. The Bothy will be empty when Frith leaves. It's a nice house, perfectly acceptable for you to live in, without the constant worry this place brings.'

The Bothy
,
as Frith's Scottish wife had whimsically named it,
was
a nice house, reasonably sized, manageable and pretty, but it's not mine, thought Maude, not the house I love, where I've lived for thirty years and hoped to die.

Symon had his eye on her, knowing what must be going through her mind, but after the first tremble, her lips pressed together in a firm line. She had lost colour, but otherwise seemed quite all right. He suddenly stood up. ‘A word in private, Binkie. Not here, come with me. Look after Ma and Opal for now, Margaret, please.'

‘I don't think so.' Binkie abandoned his position on the hearthrug and threw himself down into his former seat with every intention of staying put.

‘Then think again.' Symon's hand fell on his shoulder, gripping it hard, drawing him upward in spite of himself. Symon was bigger than he was, stronger and fitter, and seeing his expression, the will to resist suddenly left Binkie and he allowed Symon to propel him with some force out of the room, along the corridor and into what had always been called the garden room, an untidy repository for flower vases and baskets, gumboots and mackintoshes, deck chairs, and plants being nursed by their mother on the windowsills. It was cold, and a tap over the sink in the corner dripped intermittently.

‘Right,' Symon said, letting him go, but still facing him. ‘What's all this damned nonsense about Maxstead, and Ma?'

‘Maxstead has nothing at all to do with you, and Ma will be taken care of.'

‘Maxstead has everything to do with me. Come on, spit it out or I'll knock your blinking block off. And take that smirk off your face.'

The juvenile threat had come from nowhere and colour ran up under Symon's skin even as he heard himself utter it, but his eyes darkened ominously. Binkie, finding it hard not to grin, didn't notice this, nor his brother's clenched fists. ‘The last time I heard you use that sort of language was when you were sixteen.'

When they had been good friends, easy with each other. And here you are now, a reverend gentleman in a dog collar, though let's not be fooled by that, Binkie thought, now very much aware of Symon's scarcely controlled rage. In truth, Binkie had written off his younger brother when he had chosen a vocation that was to him incomprehensible, relegating him to the ranks of the God-botherers. Only now did he see his mistake. Attempting to show sangfroid, he raised an eyebrow but said nothing more.

Symon turned from him in disgust and perched himself on the edge of a scruffy old wooden table, his folded arms holding in his anger, while Binkie, taking the opportunity to distance himself by exhibiting more nonchalance, sank into an old garden basket chair and threw his leg over the arm.

‘You've got yourself into some sort of scrape again, that's obvious. What is it now?'

The tap dripped monotonously while Binkie picked up and examined an old yellow pigskin glove relegated now for use when pruning roses. A minute thorn was embedded in the thumb and he spent some time trying to remove it with his fingernails. Symon leant forward, snatched it from his hands and tossed it to the floor. ‘Well?'

There wasn't much use in prevaricating. He knew Symon of old. Once he had his teeth into something, he was like a terrier with a rat. Tell him, then. But not everything … just enough.

He shrugged and said in an offhand way that he'd made some ill-advised investments which had failed, that he had debts which there was no prospect of covering, and that the only solution was to get rid of encumbrances.

‘Encumbrances? That's how you see Maxstead, is it? And Ma? Is she an encumbrance as well?'

‘I've told you, Ma will be OK. I'll see she's all right.'

‘She'll be happy, packed off to The Bothy, no doubt. That's what you think?'

‘She will be when she ceases to have to worry about this place. It's the only way,' Binkie added, beginning to feel desperate.

‘What sort of investments?'

Binkie shrugged.

‘Come on, you've never been a speculator before, you're not made that way. What the devil made you risk everything? Who got you into this?'

In his mind Binkie ran through a list of those old school friends of his who were successful in the money business, those he might lie about: bankers, stockbrokers, whom he might better have consulted than the disreputable – and with hindsight, plainly untrustworthy – Wim Mauritz, and then realized that was no good. Symon knew most of his acquaintances almost as well as he did. They'd all been to the same school; they'd grown up with many of them. ‘You wouldn't know him. He was nobody.'

‘
Was?'

When the two brothers had disappeared they'd left behind them a silence. Nobody seemed to be able to find anything to say, or even want to. For something to occupy herself with, Margaret went around turning off the oil lamps, then returned to the couch where Opal was sitting, nervously twisting her engagement ring, a lovely marquise-set fire opal surrounded by diamonds. Margaret had never imagined it would be possible to feel sorry for her prospective sister-in-law, but she did.

‘My dear,' Maude said then, ‘why don't you go upstairs and lie down for a little while? I'll have them bring you some hot milk and whisky. If you don't mind my saying so, you look as though you might be in for a cold, like the babies, and I'm sure you could do with a nap.'

Horrid as the hot milk sounded, Opal was astonished by the unexpected kindness, at the same time feeling an undreamed of stab of admiration for her bossy old mother-in-law, dimly sensing how much greater a blow to her this terrifyingly unexpected situation must be than to anyone else. The ring bit into her palm as she twisted it. They had said opals were unlucky when she and Binkie had chosen this. Unlucky Opal! She felt tears coming; she had a thumping headache after not sleeping last night, and would have liked nothing better than to go upstairs into the room that was always kept ready for them and weep and weep, or better still lie down and sleep for hours, but she was too afraid of what was going on between Binkie and his brother.

‘Oh, goodness, no thank you,' she said brightly to the offer. She stood up. ‘Where have they gone?'

‘Into the garden room, I believe,' replied Lady Maude, attuned to all the sounds of the house. ‘But Opal—'

Opal left the room. She walked along the passage and opened the garden room door. Both men turned towards her as it opened.

‘Go away, Opal,' Binkie said immediately.

She took another step inside and closed the door behind her.

‘Opal, my dear, I think Binkie's right. Leave this to us.'

She knew from the atmosphere that Symon must have got everything from Binkie already, even though he spoke kindly to her, just as his mother had done, as if to a child who didn't understand these things. And though she didn't, not at all, it suddenly annoyed her intensely to know they all thought her such a brainless thing, nothing but a social flibbertigibbet, incapable of deep feeling. Drawing herself up very straight, she said, ‘Binkie had nothing to do with the murder of that man Mauritz—'

Binkie sprang up out of the chair as if he'd been electrocuted and grasped both her wrists, tight as handcuffs.
‘Shut up,
Opal!'
His eyes were not sleepy and hooded now, they were wide open, and this time as she looked into their grey-green depths she was frightened, really frightened, something she had never thought possible of her own husband. ‘Not another word, you little fool. Not – another – word!' he repeated, enunciating each word separately. ‘Do you hear me?'

‘That's enough,' said Symon, stepping up to them.

They all three stood in the centre of the shadowy room, looking at one another, as at last the threatened rain began in a sudden crashing deluge. Then Binkie let go of Opal's wrists and sank back into the chair, his head in his hands. Symon went back to the table and again perched there with his arms crossed, looking stern and accusing and yet, Opal felt, in a funny sort of way, oddly reassuring. There seemed to be nothing more to say, and the sound of the rain drilling on to the paving outside made the silence within all the more intense.

‘Well, what am I going to do, Reverend?' Binkie asked at last, looking up.

‘You're a bloody fool, Binkie,' answered the reverend forcefully. ‘But that doesn't mean you don't know damn well what you have to do.'

The following day, Reardon received a telephone message from Maxstead Court, requesting his immediate presence over there, concerning the matter they had previously discussed. Could this be a breakthrough, coming, as it so often did, through someone deciding they'd be better off telling what they knew? He made a thumbs up sign to Joe, but replied very politely indeed that if Sir Julian wished to speak to him, he would be here all morning at the police station in Folbury.