Children of the Archbishop (54 page)

A shudder of icy coldness ran right through Dr. Trump at the words. Now, if ever, was the moment for him to play the ace. And when Dame Eleanor looked up impatiently he coughed.

“There is one other matter as the whole Board is asembled,” he said, keeping his eyes down on to the blotting pad. “Normally I should have reported it next month. But in view of its importance I would not wish to withhold it. It is”—here Dr. Trump looked up, and the Board could see that, though his face was deathly pale, his eyes were blazing—“
the laundry has begun to show a profit
”

It was, indeed, his singular triumph with the laundry that provided Dr. Trump with his one consolation. For, with Felicity
still down at Broadstairs with Sebastian, even his home was not his own. Life at the moment was being lived upon the lap of his mother-in-law. The sight of her sitting opposite to him at his own breakfast table enjoying, visibly enjoying, the first cigarette of the day, sent a shudder right through him. That, indeed, was one of her chief crudenesses: she enjoyed things so much. She even had a way of stirring the sugar in her teacup and scooping the marmalade on to her toast that verged positively upon the voluptuous; and more than once he had watched her mentally comparing the size of the egg in his egg-cup with the one within her own. Morning after morning, he sat there silently hating her.

But there were other qualities as well that he had not suspected—dangerous, seductive, feminine qualities. High-coloured and rather puffy as she now was, it seemed that in her youth she had been nothing less than a hunting nymph, a siren. The past revealed itself startlingly in stray sentences that popped up from nowhere.

“I could
sit
on my hair when I was first married,” she had once confided after Dr. Trump had incautiously admitted that he was getting worried about his own. And another time, when she had arrived down to breakfast in a pink knitted jumper that Dr. Trump had carefully avoided noticing, she had suddenly remarked: “I've always looked my best in pink, and that's not just my opinion, either. There are some others you could ask, I can tell you.”

Nevertheless, as the days passed, he was forced to admit that amid the cheapness, the tawdriness of her nature, there was a warmth, a geniality, that somehow had not been passed on in the inheritance to her own daughter. Dear Felicity, he had to confess, possessed simply none of it. Whereas, Mrs. Warple dedicated herself to him. She served, she slaved, she wooed. Her care for his comfort was overwhelming. What did he eat? What didn't he eat? Did he want quarter-rubbers when she sent his shoes to be repaired? Was his shaving-water hot enough in the mornings? Were there sufficient blankets on the bed at night? Why hadn't he told her that a button had come off his trousers and that it was this that was giving him that extraordinary, hitched-up sideways look? Wouldn't he rather change his study back again to a room that caught the sun?

But cautious, apprehensive, even hostile, as he was, there were advantages in so much solicitude that he would have been foolish to deny himself. It is so often the little things in life that count. Indeed, life on the material plane, he had to admit, was distinctly more comfortable with Mrs. Warple than it ever had been with
her daughter. And it was obvious that Mrs. Warple for her part was enjoying herself thoroughly. With no one to gainsay her, she now exhibited a fierce technical efficiency, a kind of professional household competence that left him marvelling.

It was her nightly glass of milk stout that still made a main barrier between them. But, as her doctor had ordered it, what could Dr. Trump do to countermand it? Sipping his own cocoa and averting his eyes as soon as he heard the throaty
glug-glug-glug
as the noxious frothy stuff came thrusting out of the vile, black bottle, he nowadays sat quietly in the evenings, listening to his mother-in-law's conversation. And the later she went on, the more indiscreet she became. Not that she ever told him anything exactly. Hers was the conversational method of hints, pointers, and half-glimpses. Sometimes an entire evening added up simply to nothing, and then a chance remark dropped on the following night or a whole week later would explain everything.

There was, for a start, a lot of talk about the hotel business: it was the recurrent theme, the background against which Mrs. Warple's early life had apparently to be observed. There were no names, no addresses. Dr. Trump could not even satisfactorily determine the size of the hotel in which she had spent those early impressionable years. In the end, however, he concluded that it must have been quite a small one. How otherwise, he asked himself, could one young girl—even a girl of Mrs. Warple's youthful energy—have grown to know so much about its several sides, the dining-room, the open-air teas in summer time, the lounge, the room set aside for billiards, and the part that she referred to cryptically as “the Public?”

It appeared to be at this hotel that Mrs. Warple had first met her future husband—though whether she had been a permanent resident, or daughter of the household or even employed in some comparatively menial capacity, she did not enlighten him. There was no explanation either of what the late bishop had been doing there. There was, indeed, only one firm, unwavering fact to go on. And that had emerged just before bedtime one night as Mrs. Warple stamped out her last cigarette and remarked suddenly: “Archie's folk didn't approve of me, you know: they made that clear right from the start. If only they'd known; my word, if only they'd known. But things being as they were, I couldn't very well enlighten them. It was Archie's job to do that, and I often wonder if he ever did.”

And the significance of referring to Bishop Warple as “Archie” was considerable. It served still further to loosen the last strings of reticence.

It was Archie's “bossiness,” she said that had first made an invalid out of her and induced her to keep to her bed for all those years. And, she added grimly, Felicity was every bit as bad.

“I don't mind telling you,” she said, “the day of the funeral when she asked me to come and live here I said to myself' good-bye liberty.' And I meant it. It's all right now. But when Felicity gets back, that's when the trouble's going to start. One word from me and up she goes like a sky-rocket, just the way Archie always did. …”

And on Saturday when Dr. Trump, with these disclosures still ringing in his ears, went down to see his wife and son, there was another revelation, just as startling, awaiting him amid the medley of bead mats and stencilled fancy runners.

Felicity, it seemed, was just as relieved to be separated from her mother: “She was always on top of me,” she explained. “I know she didn't mean it. But when I saw her coming I could scream sometimes. Really, I could.”

And then, slowly, the dreadful truth came over him. Despite the dead set that Felicity had made at him, he had been the means merely and not the end. It was not a husband any more than a mother that Felicity had wanted: it was a son. And having not only got a son, but actually got him with her, she asked for nothing more.

Dr. Trump and Mrs. Warple, the two unwanted ones, were high up on the self same shelf together.

Desirée was at Deirdre Gardens at last. Had been there for nearly six weeks now.

And they had been radiant and blissful weeks. Finding that she had really no money of her own at all, Mr. Prevarius had been
suitably indulgent in a coy would-kitten-like-to-put-her-paw-in-daddy's-pocket kind of way, and kitten's paw had dived in obediently every time. In the result, kitten now had a new fur wrap, two complete sets of silk negligée—one coral pink and the other amber—as well as a double row of pearls so highly cultured that they would have made a Cambridge don appear illiterate.

And then, without warning, into the very midst of this first-floor idyll came the bomb, the bolt, the thunder-flash. Mr. Prevarius's nerves were all on edge to start with. The presence of Desirée all alone in the flat, pining, unoccupied and defenceless, drew him like a magnet. He had now taken to slipping out of the Hospital almost every evening round about 6.30 and not returning until nearly midnight. And Dr. Trump, he could not fail to recognise, had begun to notice what was going on. Indeed, on the last two evenings in succession he had even been standing there at Sergeant Chiswick's lodge ready to say a cold “good-night” as Mr. Prevarius entered.

For the time being it was all right: Mr. Prevarius had put him off with an ingenious fabrication about carol practice at the B.B.C. But that wouldn't last for ever: to be precise it wouldn't last one day beyond December the twenty-fifth at the latest.

And there was another little matter that was worrying Mr. Prevarius. Up to the present he had always been so careful, so circumspect about his little affairs. Stray addresses in Maida Vale or Paddington are practically untraceable, and therefore innocuous. But this was different. This was so open, so obvious; so positively defiant in its boldness. And the last thing that he wanted to do was to take any risks.

Indeed, in his position, he could simply not afford to do so. For more than twenty years now he had been concealing something, keeping a dark secret hidden. Successfully, too. The Archbishop Bodkin Hospital hadn't got so much as a trace of it in their dossier—Mr. Prevarius knew that for certain because he had once managed to distract Miss Phrynne long enough to take a peep at the records. His private card showed the typewritten entry “Single” against his name, without so much as a hint to suggest that it was inaccurate in the only way in which so important a particular can be.

And in any case, it had all happened so long ago. Mr. Prevarius could scarcely remember the lady. Certainly could not remember any motive that could possibly have induced him to marry her. She had been so genteel—at least he remembered that much. And so
entirely sexless, too, in a tweedy, chilblainy kind of way. Even to remember that awful wedding night when it was only the sound of her coughing that had kept him awake at all, was to plunge again into a whole ocean of melancholy.

It had been, he supposed now that he came to reflect upon it, a marriage of impulse; and, what had made it worse, of
restrained
impulse. He had married her in order to save him from himself.

It had all taken place in Dumfries in a February. After the unfortunate affair of the dean's daughter, Mr. Prevarius had fled up north in order to escape the censure of malicious tongues. And naturally he had been lonely. He was still the Rev. Sidney Prevarius, B.D., at the time—the machinery of the Church was only slowly getting into motion—and he was acting as curate to the Rev. Phineas McTurk, the Anglican vicar of St. Crispin's. It was Miss Jeannie McTurk, the second daughter—the one who wore a black bandeau round her long, yellow hair, and gave music lessons—whom he had married. She was tall, a good six inches taller than he was, with a pathetic flowerlike droop to her long back; and her hands, and feet too he discovered later, were always cold with a chill that suggested stone, metal, even ice itself—anything in fact except living flesh-and-blood.

The marriage lasted until mid-August, though even summer itself it seemed could not warm her. And then the ecclesiastical court uttered: Mr. Prevarius was suddenly in holy orders no longer.

Mr. McTurk, a bearded, whiskery old thing with fierce Celtish eyes turned him out the same night. Mr. Prevarius had been living with Jeannie's people all this time. And Jeannie herself, urged on by her fanatical parent, swore that she hated Mr. Prevarius for ever, and would remain indissolubly married to him for life.

It was after this lamentable upset that Mr. Prevarius had slipped south across the border, alone, and after a spell in a preparatory school and another in canvassing for a popular encyclopedia, had reached Archbishop Bodkin's where Canon Mallow had been so guilelessly ready to take him in.

But that was why it was so important that he should continue at the Archbishop Bodkin Hospital. His miserable salary there was enough to persuade even a firm of Dumfries solicitors that he could not afford to make any contribution to a deserted wife. The only peril that he dreaded was that with one false move, he might somehow become involved in the sort of scandal that would lead inevitably to resignation, if not actually towards dismissal.
Then the consequences might be terrible. The solicitors might even contrive to get their hands on some of the golden earnings of Mr. Berkeley Cavendish.

He had, right from the start, always been very careful as to what he should tell Desirée. And he had come to the conclusion that even so much as a hint of Jeannie McTurk would be an error. There seemed, after all, to be no point in worrying Desirée about something that was such ancient history. And so, whenever the topic of marriage cropped up, he treated the subject lightly and airily, brushing it aside and into the future somewhere.

Indeed, last time it had arisen, he had merely made a deprecatory sweep of the hand and said smilingly: “I may be anything my poppet says, but I don't think that she could accuse me of being old-fashioned. And I have never yet seen any evidence to support the theory that a wedding ring and marriage lines help people to love one another, dontcher know.”

Not, of course, that Desirée was content to leave it at that. There were tears, misgivings, hesitancies. She had her good name to remember, she said. She demanded to know what her friends would think of them—which seemed strange to Mr. Prevarius because he had never met any of her friends. She wanted to know what kind of a woman he thought she was, and was not content when he replied: “But I've told you, dear. I've told you, I've told you so many, many times.”

All the same, now that she had overcome her scruples, things were going along very smoothly. The one-room flat had proved to be a bit small for the two of them—largely because the grand piano and the Buddhist altar took up so much of the space; and Mr. Prevarius had taken the best bedroom as well; Miss Lewis's own best bedroom, in fact. Re-furnished in pale blond satinwood and with strip-lighting over the dressing-table it seemed somehow to provide Desirée with some solace for her own invidious position.