Gay Phoenix (17 page)

‘That was quite nice, my dear man. But not nearly so nice as with Charles Povey.’

He had stared at her blankly. Seconds before, he had been conscious only of appropriately languorous ease, and now he hadn’t ceased staring at her in a stupid incomprehension when she spoke again.

‘So you must be Charles’ wet brother.’ (She certainly had the air of having arrived at this conclusion only within the last few minutes.) ‘Is that right?’

‘What do you mean – Charles’ wet brother?’ As he uttered these words Povey was aware of them as singularly futile and feeble. He was going to do even worse than when first unmasked by Butter.

‘It’s what he always called you. He didn’t seem to like you very much.’

‘I didn’t like him.’ Povey had decided that deception was useless. Perhaps he could presently strangle Perpetua Porter, and put the blame on somebody like Mrs Corp’s imbecile son. But for the moment frankness was the thing – frankness and playing it cool.

‘Neither did I, as a matter of fact.’ Pops spoke as if her new lover had gained considerable ground with her. ‘Of course I could put on a turn for him. A girl has to be able to do that. You saw me at it.’

‘I certainly did, Pops.’ Povey had been rather struck by Miss Porter’s ‘girl’. It somehow suggested quite humble beginnings in the less socially esteemed of her professions. He wondered about the other one. She had clearly achieved some standing in this decorating and designing nonsense; even if some benevolent admirer had set her up in it she must be pretty smart to hold her own in a crowded field. And Butter must have heard well of her before taking her on. It must be a precarious living, all the same. For a moment Povey felt almost sympathetically disposed towards the lady. When he spoke, however, it was with an air of greater friendliness than he actually felt. Those first words he had spoken after what had seemed to him a creditable performance were still rankling a good deal.

‘Look here!’ he said urgently. ‘Aren’t you kidding? Didn’t you spot I wasn’t Charles at once – just as soon, I mean, as we met in that drawing-room?’

‘Really and truly not, darling. I may still call you darling? But I do know your real name. Charles mentioned it several times. It’s Arthur.’

‘Yes, it’s Arthur.’

‘I must say you’re terribly like Charles. You speak like him, and move like him. So I don’t think you’ll do badly at whatever little game you’re up to.’ Miss Porter offered all these observations in a commendatory tone. Then she laughed – robustly and not particularly kindly. ‘Only I think you must be careful about going to bed – or into this very nice park – with
any
of Charles’ old lady friends. In fact, and to be quite frank, I’d strongly advise going to work elsewhere.’ Miss Porter paused thoughtfully. ‘Do you know? It’s been just like something in the Bible.’

‘What the devil do you mean by that?’

‘Don’t you remember? “The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.” And it’s about stealing a birthright, or something.’

Povey ought perhaps to have been edified by this evidence of his companion’s unexpected command of Holy Writ. But in fact he was extremely shocked, and his flicker of kindly feeling for her faded. He found himself, indeed, grinding his teeth and much inclined to take an immediate swipe at her. Folk tales, he was recalling, have frequent recourse to what literary historians call the Bed Trick, and he seemed rather to remember that Shakespeare himself makes use of it at least twice. You get into bed with a woman in the dark, and she quite fails to tumble to the fact that you aren’t somebody else. Of course with Pops there hadn’t been a bed, and it hadn’t been dark either. His vanity was quite acutely injured, all the same. Pops hadn’t ceased to be extremely desirable. But he was absolutely certain he was never going to
like
her again. As he was now in her power, this seemed an unfortunate thing.

‘And I wonder what you
are
up to,’ Pops said thoughtfully. She was gazing out over the park as she spoke – but it was absently, and as if she were surveying a prospect she couldn’t yet clearly define. ‘Does Mr Bread know?’ she asked.

‘His name isn’t Bread. That’s just one of his silly jokes. It’s Butter. He says he knows which side his bread’s buttered on. Butter’s always making idiotic cracks. And yes – he does know.’

‘Does anybody else know?’

‘No, nobody.’ Povey weighed his words. ‘It’s just us three,’ he said. ‘We might be described as in it together.’

‘What fun! I suppose you murdered Charles? He
was
rather a pig.’

‘I did nothing of the kind!’ Arthur Povey was horrified. He was also frightened. Strangely enough, it had never occurred to him that, if he were one day exposed, this calm assumption of Miss Porter’s might well become the conclusion of the law.

‘But he is dead?’

‘Yes, he is dead.’ Povey persevered in his resolution to be candid. He had to face it: he was back on Square One. His next move, he supposed, must be to suggest that suitcase stuffed with ten-pound notes.

‘There’s an awful lot of money?’

‘Quite a lot.’

‘And is your friend Bread in on the thing for his health?’

‘Butter. And you might say he’s in on it for the jam.’ Povey thought a tone of mild gamesomeness might suggest he was effortlessly keeping his end up. He was badly in need of time in which to plan a course of action in facing this hideous new threat. ‘It’s a long story,’ he added lightly and vaguely.

‘You’ll have to tell it to me.’

Povey didn’t at all like the way Miss Porter said this. There was a hint of command in it. In Butter he already had one master; it looked as if here was another. Or rather it looked as if here was a mistress in both senses of the word. He much doubted whether his possession of her in the one sense (even if it continued) would make up for her possession of him in the other.

‘I’ll be delighted to tell you the whole thing,’ he said. ‘But, oddly enough, it mayn’t be easy. You see, it’s largely lost through something queer that’s happened to my memory. What the doctors call amnesia.’

‘Arthur, darling, don’t make me laugh.’ Pops uttered this demotic formula for incredulity with considerable force.

‘Well, now, that’s just it.’ Povey took one of his rash intuitive plunges. ‘You’re certain that I’m Arthur Povey. So am I – just at the moment. But not always. Sometimes I’m not pretending to be Charles. I
am
Charles.’

‘That’s absolute rubbish.’ Miss Porter was plainly shaken. ‘Such a thing just couldn’t happen.’

‘There, I assure you, you’re quite wrong, Pops. I’ve read it all up.’

‘Trust you for that. You’re cunning, Arthur Povey. It makes me feel I might do worse than come in on the act.’

‘You’d have to be invited, my dear.’ Povey spoke with a robustness he didn’t feel. ‘But as I was saying. I’ve read all about the psychology of imposture. Butter talks a lot about psychology, but hardly has a notion of what the word means, the low bastard.’ Povey checked himself in this irrelevant expression of feeling. ‘Impostors do sometimes come to believe in their own imposture. Lambert Simnel, Perkin Warbeck: people of that sort.’

‘I’ve never heard of them. But that must be when there’s some real mystery about their birth or origins.’

‘Yes, in a way.’ Povey realized that Pops, although not perhaps extensively educated, owned a strong natural intelligence. ‘But, in that case, they’re not strictly impostors. They’re claimants or pretenders, on the strength of evidence that can be read one way or another. And I repeat the plain fact that sometimes I
am
Charles. I find myself – although usually not for more than minutes at a time – puzzled by what Butter is saying to me. You see, it all began, or all but began, in a very confused way.’

‘When you believe you’re Charles what do you believe about Arthur?’

Povey blinked and hesitated. He found this question – which again testified to the sharpness of Miss Porter’s wits – obscure and difficult.

‘I think I believe he died at sea.’

‘You’re at sea yourself, if you ask me.’ Miss Porter stared seriously at her new and problematical lover. She seemed disposed to acquit him of mere imbecile fabrication. ‘Does Butter know all about this complication?’

‘I sometimes feel he suspects it. I come out with silly remarks about the inside of my head. But I haven’t confided in him.’

‘As you have in me, darling.’ Miss Porter, perhaps significantly, had returned for the first time to this familiar endearment. ‘Which is quite right, of course. I’m the natural person for that. Or I’m going to be.’

‘You’re going to be?’ Povey, in his turn, stared seriously at his newly acquired mistress, but it was a stare tinged with a fresh alarm. Dimly, he knew what she was driving at.

‘Of course, I needn’t
know
. I needn’t be known to know, that is. If there was a crash, I could still be in the clear.’

‘You’re an unscrupulous little bitch.’ A tinge of admiration infused this judgement.

‘Well, darling, it does look as if a good deal of unscrupulousness has to be the order of the day all round, doesn’t it?’ And suddenly Miss Porter laughed her clear unkindly laugh again. ‘Can you tell me – but, of course, I’d have to consult lawyers in a discreet way – just how marriage settlements and things are affected by bankruptcies?’ Pops paused. ‘And other misfortunes?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Don’t be feeble, Arthur. Of course you do. And we mustn’t waste time. The first point is how to handle Butter.’

‘Butter isn’t easy to handle. He has a flair, curse him, for doing the handling himself.’

‘Yes, do let’s curse him. But think of a little action as well. Our engagement had better be private for a start.’

‘Our engagement?’

‘In fact until after the wedding. And you must get a special licence at once. I think it’s from the Archbishop of Canterbury. But you mustn’t be too frank with him. He probably has rather strict ideas, wouldn’t you say? About people knowing who they really are, and so on.’

And now it had all come home to Arthur Povey. The woman was going to be a life sentence – which was probably a bit more than even convicted impostors receive in court. He remembered with a sudden chill that, although known as Pops among her intimates, Perpetua was her actual name.

‘I hope the church sale was the usual enormous success?’

The Applebys had been abroad for some months, and Judith was conscientiously catching up on the local news. This was her first luncheon party since getting back. There were only three guests: Dr Dunton and Colonel and Mrs Birch-Blackie. An elderly lady had cried off at the last moment on account of a sudden and alarming indisposition which had befallen an equally elderly horse.

‘Just over three hundred pounds,’ Dr Dunton said. ‘By no means a record, but a most satisfactory sum nevertheless. And the day was fortunately fine. Nothing but your own absence, Lady Appleby, clouded the general enjoyment.’

‘Quite right, Padre,’ Colonel Birch-Blackie said. ‘Dashed good. Jolly neat.’ Colonel Birch-Blackie, although not intellectually distinguished, was a wholly amiable man. ‘Amazing lot of things for sale. Found I’d bought a pair of bedsocks. Thought they were something for polishing a car. Gave them to our cook. Woman with uncommonly large feet.’

‘Although I ought honestly to mention,’ Dr Dunton pursued, ‘that there was one somewhat untoward incident. However, it was quickly over. And one can’t really blame the old man, considering that he is so far advanced within the vale of years. Moreover, I may well have committed an error of judgement in making the arrangement I did. It was designed as a composing and harmonizing gesture, and I fear that it misfired. I hadn’t realized the strength of latent feeling in the parish. Had you been available, Lady Appleby, I should, of course, have consulted you in the first instance, and the momentary embarrassment might have been obviated. However – and as I say – I don’t reproach old Mr Hoobin. The behaviour of Mrs Corp was undoubtedly provocative.’

‘Hoobin?’ Appleby explained. ‘Good heavens! What has the wretched dotard done? Publicly walloped his unfortunate nephew for filching from the bun-and-cake stall?’

‘Nothing of the sort – although it is true that Solo Hoobin must be described as having been to some extent involved. The senior Hoobin’s action amounted to a kind of testifying before the congregation. It was triggered off, as they now say, by the spectacle presented by Sammy Corp. But I see, my dear Appleby, that a more orderly exposition of the unfortunate incident is required.’

‘Dashed good idea,’ Colonel Birch-Blackie said. ‘Found it a bit bewildering myself, I’m bound to own. Distracting, too. Probably why I bought those damned bedsocks. I’ve always said a fellow needs all his wits about him at a church sale. Once thought I was buying a bottle of Jerry Linger’s port dirt cheap at a couple of quid. Being his nobs and his lordship in these parts, old Jerry feels, you know, that he must turn in something with a bit of class to it. Damned bottle proved to be old Mrs Somebody’s rhubarb wine.’

This anecdote, although interesting in itself, didn’t at the moment command much of the Applebys’ attention. They were naturally anxious to determine the extent of the impropriety committed by their aged retainer.

‘Just how did the trouble begin?’ Appleby asked.

‘Let me see.’ Dr Dunton appeared to consider this question carefully. ‘It must be said to have begun, I suppose, when I had this unfortunate thought of inviting Mrs Povey to open the sale. At the time, it seemed quite the right thing. She’d actually brought her husband to church one Sunday. Didn’t stay for communion, but listened to the sermon most attentively. It was the one about the loaves and fishes, Lady Appleby. I dare say you remember it.’

‘Yes, indeed. It’s one of your best.’ Judith Appleby was quite firm about this. ‘But do you mean that Mr Povey of Brockholes has turned out to be married, after all? Everybody understood him to be a bachelor, didn’t they?’