A Shilling for Candles (18 page)

Yes, Meg had been helpful. She did not know what had become of the family,
of course. Chris had left Nottingham the day after her mother’s funeral, and
because the rent was paid up to the end of the week Herbert had stayed on
alone in the house for several days after. Meg remembered that because he had
had one of his “meetings” in the house—he was always having meetings
where he could hear the sound of his own voice—and the neighbors had to
complain about the noise of the singing. As if there wasn’t enough row always
going on in a tenement without adding meetings to the din! What kind of
meetings? Well, as far as she could remember he had begun with political
harangues, but very soon took to religion; because it doesn’t matter how you
rave at your audience, when it’s religion they don’t throw things. She
personally didn’t think it mattered to him what he was talking about as long
as he was the person who was talking. She never knew anyone who had a better
opinion of himself with less cause than Herbert Gotobed.

No, she didn’t know where Chris had gone, or whether Herbert knew her
whereabouts. Knowing Herbert, she thought that Chris had probably gone
without saying good-bye. She hadn’t said good-bye to anyone, if it came to
that. Meg’s younger brother, Sydney—the one that was now in
Australia—had had a fancy for her, but she didn’t give him any
encouragement. Didn’t have any beau, Chris didn’t. Funny, wasn’t it, that she
should have seen Christine Clay on the screen often and often, and never
recognized Chris Gotobed. She had changed a lot, that she had. She’d heard
that they made you over in Hollywood. Perhaps that was it. And of course it
was a long time between seventeen and thirty. Look what a few years had done
to her, come to think of it.

And Meg had laughed her ample laugh and revolved her ample figure for the
detective’s inspection, and had given him a cup of stewed tea and Rich Mixed
Biscuits.

But the detective—who was the Sanger who had assisted at the non
arrest of Tisdall, and who was also a Clay fan—remembered that even in
a city there are communities who have interests as narrow and memories as
long as any village dwellers, and so he had come eventually to the little
house in a suburb beyond the Trent where Miss Stammers lived with a toy
Yorkshire terrier and the wireless. Both terrier and wireless had been given
her on her retirement. She would never have had the initiative after thirty
years of teaching at Beasley Road Elementary School to acquire either on her
own behalf. School had been her life, and school still surrounded her. She
remembered Christina Gotobed very clearly indeed. What did Mr. Sanger want to
know about her? Not Mr.? A detective? Oh, dear! She did hope that there was
nothing serious the matter. It was all a very long time ago, and of course
she had not kept in touch with Christina. It was impossible to keep in touch
with all one’s pupils when one had as many as sixty in a class. But she had
been an exceptionally promising child, exceptionally promising.

Sanger had asked if she was unaware that her exceptionally promising pupil
was Christine Clay?

“Christine Clay? The film actress you mean? Dear me. Dear me!”

Sanger had thought the expression a little inadequate until he noticed her
small eyes grow suddenly large with tears. She took off her pince-nez and
wiped them away with a neatly folded square of handkerchief.

“So famous?” she murmured. “Poor child. Poor child.”

Sanger reminded her of the reason for Christine’s prominence in the news.
But she seemed less occupied with the woman’s cruel end than with the
achievement of the child she had known.

“She was very ambitious, you know,” she said. “That is how I remember her
so well. She was not like the others: anxious to get away from school and
become wage earners. That is what appeals to most elementary children, you
know, Mr. Sanger: a weekly wage in their pockets and the means of getting out
of their crowded homes. But Christine wanted to go to the secondary school.
She actually won a scholarship—a ‘free place,’ they call it. But her
people could not afford to let her take it. She came to me and cried about
it. It was the only time I had known her to cry: she was not an emotional
child. I asked her mother to come to see me. A pleasant enough woman, but
without force of character. I couldn’t persuade her. Weak people can be very
stubborn. It was a regret in my mind for years, that I had failed. I had
great feeling for the child’s ambition. I had been very ambitious once
myself, and had—had to put my desire aside. I understood what Christina
was going through. I lost sight of her when she left school. She went to work
in the factory, I remember. They needed the money. There was a brother who
was not earning. An unsympathetic character. And the mother’s pension was
small. But she made her career, after all. Poor child. Poor child!”

Sanger had asked, as he was taking his departure, how it was that she had
missed the articles in the newspapers about Christine Clay’s childhood.

She never saw Sunday newspapers, she said, and the daily paper was handed
on to her a day late by her very kind neighbors, the Timpsons, and at present
they were at the seaside, so that she was without news, except for the
posters. Not that she missed the papers much. A matter of habit, didn’t Mr.
Sanger think? After three days without one, the desire to read a newspaper
vanished. And really, one was happier without. Very depressing reading they
made these days. In her little home she found it difficult to believe in so
much violence and hatred.

Sanger had made further inquiries from many people about that
unsympathetic character Herbert Gotobed. But hardly anyone remembered him. He
had never stayed in a job for more than five months (the five months was his
record: in an ironmonger’s) and no one had been sorry to see him go. No one
knew what had become of him.

But Vine, coming back from interviewing the onetime dresser, Bundle, in
South Street, had brought news of him. Yes. Bundle had known there was a
brother. The snapping brown eyes in the wizened face had snapped ferociously
at the very mention of him. She had only seen him once, and she hoped she
never saw him again. He had sent in a note to her lady one night in New York,
to her dressing room. It was the first dressing room she had ever had to
herself, the first show she had been billed in,
Let’s Go!
it was. And
she was a success. Bundle had dressed her as a chorus girl, along with nine
others, but when her lady had gone up in the world she had taken Bundle with
her. That’s the sort her lady was: never forgot a friend. She had been
talking and laughing till the note was brought in. But when she read that she
was just like someone who was about to take a spoonful of ice cream and
noticed a beetle in it. When he came in she had said, “So
you’ve
turned up!” He said he’d come to warn her that she was bound for perdition,
or something. She said, “Come to see what pickings there are, you mean.”
Bundle had never seen her so angry. She had just taken off her day makeup to
put on her stage one, and there wasn’t a spark of color anywhere in her face.
She had sent Bundle out of the room then, but there had been a grand row.
Bundle, standing guard before the door—there were lots even then, who
thought they would like to meet her lady—couldn’t help hearing some of
it. In the end she had to go in because her lady was going to be late for her
entrance if she didn’t. The man had turned on her for interrupting, but her
lady had said that she would give him in charge if he didn’t go. He had gone
then, and had never to her knowledge turned up again. But he had written.
Letters came from him occasionally—Bundle recognized the
writing—and he always seemed to know where they were, because the
address was the correct one, not a forwarded affair. Her lady always had
acute depression after a letter had come. Sometimes for two days or more. She
had said once, “Hate is very
lowering
, isn’t it, Bundle?” Bundle had
never hated anyone except a cop who was habitually rude to her, but she had
hated him plenty, and she agreed that hate was very weakening. Burned you up
inside till there was nothing left.

And to Bundle’s account of Christine’s brother was added the report of the
American police. Herbert Gotobed had entered the States about five years
after his sister. He had worked for a short while as a sort of houseman for a
famous Boston divine who had been taken (in) by his manners and his piety. He
had left the divine under some sort of cloud—the exact nature of the
cloud was doubtful since the divine, either from Christian charity or more
likely from a reluctance to have his bad judgment made public, had preferred
no charges—and had disappeared from the ken of the police. It was
supposed, however, that he was the man who, under the name of the Brother of
God, had toured the States in the role of prophet, and had been, it was
reported, both an emotional and financial success. He had been jailed in
Kentucky for blasphemy, in Texas for fraud, in Missouri for creating a riot,
in Arkansas for his own safety, and in Wyoming for seduction. In all
detentions he had denied any connection with Herbert Gotobed. He had no name,
he said, other than the Brother of God. When the police had pointed out that
relation to the deity would not be considered by them an insuperable obstacle
to deportation, he had taken the hint and had disappeared. The last that had
been heard of him was that he had run a mission in the islands
somewhere—Fiji, they thought—and had decamped with the funds to
Australia.

“A charming person,” Grant said, looking up from the dossier.

“That’s our man, sir, never a doubt of it,” Williams said.

“He certainly has all the stigmata: greed, enormous conceit, and lack of
conscience. I rather hope he is our man. It would be doing the world a good
turn to squash that slug. But why did he do it?”

“Hoped for money, perhaps.”

“Hardly likely. He must have known only too well how she felt about
him.”

“I wouldn’t put it past him to forge a will, sir.”

“No, neither would I. But if he has a forged will, why hasn’t he come
forward? It will soon be a fortnight since her death. We haven’t a thing to
go on. We don’t even know that he’s in England.”

“He’s in England all right, sir. ‘Member what her housekeeper said: that
he always knew where she was? Clay had been more than three months in
England. You bet he was here, too.”

“Yes. Yes, that’s true. Australia? Let me see.” He looked up the New York
report again. “That’s about two years ago. He’d be difficult to trace there,
but if he came to England after Clay he shouldn’t be difficult to trace. He
can’t keep his mouth shut. Anything quite so vocal must be noticeable.”

“No letters from him among her things?”

“No, Lord Edward has been through everything. Tell me, Williams, on what
provocation, for what imaginable reason, would a Champneis, in your opinion,
tell a lie?”

“Noblesse oblige,” said Williams promptly.

Grant stared. “Quite right,” he said at length. “I hadn’t thought of that.
Can’t imagine what he could have been shielding, though.”

SO the candles weren’t the kind you go to bed with, Grant
thought, as the car sped along the embankment that Monday afternoon en route
for the Temple; they were the kind you put on altars. The Brother of God’s
tabernacle had been none of your bare mission tents. It had been hung with
purple and fine linen and furnished with a shrine of great magnificence. And
what had been merely an expression of Herbert’s own love of the theatrical
had in most cases (Kentucky was an exception) proved good business. A
beauty-starved and theatrically-minded people had fallen hard—in hard
cash.

Christine’s shilling was the measure of her contempt. Her return, perhaps,
for all those occasions when Herbert’s Lord had seen fit to deny her the
small things her soul needed.

In the green subaqueous light of Mr. Erskine’s small room beside the plane
tree, Grant put his proposition to the lawyer. They wanted to bring Herbert
Gotobed to the surface, and this was the way to do it. It was quite orthodox,
so the lawyer needn’t mind doing it. Lord Edward had approved.

The lawyer hummed and hawed, not because he had any real objections but
because it is a lawyer’s business to consider remote contingencies, and a
straightforward agreement to anything would be wildly unprofessional. In the
end he agreed that it might be done.

Grant said: “Very well, I leave it to you. In tomorrow’s papers, please,”
and went out wondering why the legal mind delighted in manufacturing trouble
when there was so much ready-made in the world. There was plenty in poor
Grant’s mind at the moment. “Surrounded by trouble,” as the spaewives said
when they told your cards: that’s what he was. Monday would soon be over and
there was no sign that Robert Tisdall was in the world of men. The first low
howl had come from the
Clarion
that morning, and by tomorrow the whole
wolf pack would be on him. Where was Robert Tisdall? What were the police
doing to find him? To do Grant justice the discomfort in his mind was less
for the outcry that was imminent than for the welfare of Tisdall. He had
genuinely believed for the last two days that Tisdall’s nonappearance was due
to lack of knowledge on Tisdall’s part. It is not easy to see newspapers when
one is on the run. But now doubt like a chill wind played through his
thoughts. There was something wrong, Every newspaper poster in every village
in England had read: TISDALL INNOCENT. HUNTED MAN INNOCENT. How could he have
missed it? In every pub, railway carriage, bus, and house in the country the
news had been the favorite subject of conversation. And yet Tisdall was
silent. No one had seen him since Erica drove away from him last Wednesday.
On Thursday night the whole of England had been swamped by the worst storm
for years, and it had rained and blown for two days afterwards. Tisdall had
picked up the food left by Erica on Thursday, but not afterwards. The food
she left on Friday was still there, a sodden pulp, on Saturday. Grant knew
that Erica had spent all that Saturday scouring the countryside; she had
quartered the country with the efficiency and persistence of a game dog,
every barn, every shelter of any description, being subjected to search. Her
very sound theory was that shelter he
must
have had on Thursday
night—no human being could have survived such a storm—and since
he had been in that chalky lane on Thursday morning to pick up the food she
left, then he could not have gone far afield.