Penhallow (28 page)

Eugene smiled sweetly at him. ‘What a touching picture of loyalty you do present, to be sure, Con!’

Bart looked dangerous, and took a step towards Eugene’s chair. He was arrested by Raymond, who caught his eye, and jerked his chin imperatively in the direction of the door. After hesitating for an instant, he shrugged, and turned to lay hold of Penhallow’s chair. He pushed it out of the room, Reuben following him.

‘And to think,’ said Aubrey, stretching himself out at full length on the sofa, ‘that this evening has been but a foretaste of what we shall be called upon to undergo tomorrow! Oh, I do think, don’t you, that Father is becoming quite too dreadfully oppressive?’

Chapter Sixteen

Raymond was long in falling asleep that night. Unable to lie still in his bed, but continually tossing and turning, he got up after an hour, and, putting on his trousers and a tweed jacket over his pyjamas, and thrusting his feet into a pair of brogues, went downstairs, and let himself softly out of the house into the moonlit garden. Here he walked up and down with his pipe gripped between his teeth, and his head filled with hard, tangled thoughts, until the chill of the night, and his own physical and mental fatigue, finally drove him in again. The broad stairs creaked under his feet as he went up them, and as he crossed the upper hall the door into his sister’s room opened, and Charmian came out with an electric torch in her hand.

‘Who’s that?’ she said sharply.

The moonlight, streaming in through the great uncurtained window above the stairs, made the torch superflous. She switched it off as she saw Raymond, with his hand already upon his bedroom door-handle.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Sorry I woke you.’

She had cast a severe, masculine dressing-gown over her shoulders, and now slid her arms into it, and tied its cord round her waist. ‘Anything wrong?’ she asked, observing his attire.

‘No, nothing. I couldn’t sleep, that’s all.’

‘I thought you looked a bit off-colour at dinner. Have you been out?’

‘Yes. Couldn’t get to sleep.’

She glanced shrewdly at him. ‘Getting on your nerves?’

‘Is what getting on my nerves?’

‘Oh — !’This place.’

‘No,’ he replied.

‘No, of course you’ve always been ridiculous about Trevellin. Father, then.’

‘I haven’t got any nerves.’

‘Don’t be too sure of that! How long has Father been like this?’

He looked at her under his brows. ‘Like what?’.

‘Oh, don’t be a fool!’ she said impatiently. ‘You know what I mean! He wasn’t as bad as this when I was last here. Is he breaking up?’

He shrugged. ‘Lifton thinks so.’

‘I never had the least opinion of that old idiot. What do you think?’

‘I’m not a doctor: I don’t know. I should say he’d last a good few years yet.’

‘Well, I think he’s going mad!’ Charmian said roundly.

‘He’s not mad.’

‘He may not be technically mad, but he seems to me to be perfectly irresponsible. Do you know that he told Aubrey today that he was to come home and study forestry, or some such nonsense? Aubrey! And why has he suddenly removed Clay from college?’

 ‘Thought he was wasting his time there. So he was. Clay’s a waster.’

‘He won’t cure him of that by encouraging him to chop and change about. What was the sense of sending him to Cambridge at all if he meant to take him away before he got a degree?’

‘There was never any sense in sending him there, except that it got rid of him. You’d better get back to bed you’ll catch cold if you stand about much longer.’

He opened his own door as he spoke, but she detained him for a moment, saying: ‘Well, I’m not worrying my head about Clay, but I wish you’d tell me if Father’s in the habit of drawing out vast sums of money by way of petty cash.’

‘Why? What’s it got to do with you?’ he asked.

She disregarded this question. ‘Why the hell don’t you put a stop to it?’ she asked.

‘I have no power to stop Father doing anything he wants to do,’ he replied roughly. ‘Good night!’

He went into his room and shut the door. When he got into bed again he still could not sleep, and lay for a long time flogging his brain over and over the events of what had surely been the longest day of his life.

It seemed to him that he had been to sleep for only a few minutes when he was awakened by a hand shaking his shoulder, and Reuben’s voice insistently speaking his name in his ear; but when he opened his eyes he found that the sunlight was flooding the room, and that the hands of the clock beside his bed pointed to eight o’clock. He raised himself on his elbow, yawning, and passing a hand across his sleep-drenched eyes. He realised that Reuben’s voice sounded unusually urgent, and said:

‘What’s the matter?’ Then he saw that tears were running down Reuben’s lined cheeks, and this extraordinary sight fully awoke him, and he sat up with a jerk. ‘What the devil’s up with you?’ he demanded.

‘Master!’ Reuben said, his lower lip trembling grotesquely. ‘He’s gone, Mr Ray!’

‘Gone?’ Raymond repeated. ‘What do you mean, gone? Gone where?’

‘He’s dead!’ Reuben said. ‘He’s dead, Mr Ray. Cold dead!’

‘What?’ Raymond ejaculated incredulously. He flung back the bed-clothes, and got up quickly, snatching up Iris dressing-gown. ‘When? How?’

‘I don’t know when. He must have gone in the night. You should know how, Mr Ray!’

Raymond tied his dressing-gown cord, and groped for his slippers. ‘What the devil do you mean?’ he asked.

Reuben drew his sleeve across his eyes. ‘It was you setting on him the way you did, trying to choke the life out of him, and him as good as bedridden! I told you then we’d know whose door to set it to if he was to go off sudden! Yes, sure, I told you!’

‘Don’t be such a blithering old fool!’ Raymond said roughly. ‘He was perfectly well last night! I had nothing whatsoever to do with his dying! More likely what he ate and drank at dinner. Who knows about this? Who found him?’

Reuben followed him to the door. ‘Martha found him, poor soul! Stiff, he is. He must have gone in his sleep. And today his birthday! I told him how it would be if he ate that lobster! I told him!’

‘Shut up! There’s no need to rouse the whole house yet!’ Raymond said, turning into the corridor at the back of the house, and going swiftly along it to the narrow stairs down which Faith had passed the day before.

As he approached the small hall at the head of these stairs, the sound of wailing reached his ears. Martha was lamenting over Penhallow’s body, and it was plain that this noise had already awakened those who slept at the end of the house. Eugene’s door stood open; and even as Raymond set his foot on the top step of the stair, Aubrey came out of his room, in a very exotic-looking pair of black pyjamas piped with silver, and asked plaintively what new horror had come upon the house.

‘Reuben says Father’s dead,’ Raymond replied over his shoulder.

He did not wait to see how this news was received, but as he ran down the stairs he heard Aubrey exclaim: ‘Oh, no, not really? I simply can’t believe it! You’re not serious, Ray?’

In Penhallow’s room, Martha was rocking herself to and fro on a chair beside the vast bed, and Vivian, with a kimono caught hurriedly round her, and clutched together with one hand, was standing in the middle of the room staring as though she could not believe her eyes, first at Martha, and then at Penhallow’s still form. When she heard Raymond’s footsteps, she turned, and said in a queer, hushed voice: ‘He’s dead!’

‘So I’ve heard,’ Raymond replied, brushing past her, and bending over the bed. He straightened himself after a moment. He looked a little pale under his tan, and he did not at once say anything. He was indeed so much shaken by this unexpected turn which events had taken that he was unable immediately to marshal his wits into some sort of order. Through the medley of thoughts racing past one another in his brain, one more persistent than the rest kept on recurring: that Penhallow’s death was of immense importance to him, since he could never now betray the secret of his birth. He remembered that Penhallow had spoken of papers to prove his story; the picture of him jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the cupboards in the head of his bed flashed vividly across his mind. He glanced from one to the other of the three persons gathered about the bed, a coldly calculating light in his frowning eyes. He addressed Vivian. ‘You’d better go and get dressed!’

She pushed her hair away from her brow. ‘Yes,’ she agreed mechanically. ‘I — I don’t seem able to take it in. He’s really dead! I shan’t have to live here any more! We’re free!’

Martha lifted her head. ‘You shameless malkin! There he lays, gone dead, and you stannin’ there as bold and as heartless as yer mind to! Eh, my dear, my dear, the proper man that you was! Out of this, you wicked hussy! You shanna’ stand staring at un! You shanna’, I tell you!’

Vivian coloured slightly, and seemed as though she would have retorted. Raymond said, before she could speak: ‘Go on! You had better let Eugene know what’s happened. Reuben, get Martha out of this! We can’t have this row going on. And send Jimmy down to Lifton’s house at once, do you hear?’

‘That young runagate!’ Reuben said bitterly. ‘For anything any of us knaves he’s laying abed still!’

‘Kick him out, then! Martha! I say, Martha, it’s no good crying like that! You go and lie down, or something. Where’s Sybilla, Reuben?’

The tears started to run down Reuben’s cheeks again. ‘She was cooking his breakfast. She’s got him some thickback beauties, just the way he liked them, and he won’t never eat them now!’

‘Well, take Martha to her!’ Raymond said. ‘If that little swine, Jimmy, isn’t dressed, send one of the girls down to Lifton’s on her cycle, and ask him to come up as soon as he can. Get a move on, man!’

‘I won’t leave un!’ Martha moaned. ‘You shanna’ make me leave un! There’s never another soul shall touch him! It’s me and Sybilla will lay him out decent, the way he’d wish for us to do!’

‘Oh, all right!’ he said, trying not to let his impatience to be rid of her get the better of him. ‘You can do that, but not until Lifton has seen him.’

Reuben looked at him with hostility in his reddened eyes. ‘It’s little you care, Mr Ray!’ he muttered; but he seemed to feel that Martha could not be permitted to continue wailing over Penhallow’s body, for after a moment’s indecision he bent over her, and coaxed and bullied her into going with him to the servants’ hall.

As soon as they had left the room, Raymond quickly closed the double doors, and returned to the bed. He did not waste a glance on the inanimate figure in it, but began with feverish haste to pull open the cupboards and the little drawers above it.

A magpie collection was disclosed, ranging from receipted bills, most of them for trivial sums, and many of ancient date, to such irrelevant objects as a champagne cork with a tarnished silver top; a tattered copy of Handley Cross; an old hunting-crop; the stubs of countless cheque-books; several boxes full of paper-clips and rubber-bands; a repeating-watch with a broken face; bunches of keys bearing the rusty appearance of having been unused for decades; numerous bottles of iodine and embrocation, jumbled amongst boxes of canine worm pills, mange-cures, and alternative powders; and a tangle of gold chains, fobs, and seals huddled into a screw of tissue paper. One of a cluster of shallow drawers was so full of old letters and papers that it could only with difficulty be opened. Without the smallest hesitation, Raymond pulled out the sheaf. Any moment Reuben might come back into the room, or some member of the family enter to put an end to his search. He had no time to do more than glance hurriedly through the papers, casting back into the drawer such immaterial items as old advertisements torn from periodicals, a collection of laded snapshots and picture post-cards, some of his and Ingram’s school-reports, and a miscellaneous assortment of letters which he saw, from their superscriptions, could have no bearing on the secret of his false birth. The rest he stuffed into the pockets of his dressing-gown, his ears straining all the time to catch the sound of an approaching footfall. Drawer after drawer he opened, without discovering either a birth certificate or any other document relating to his birth. There were the pedigrees of dogs and horses, a copy of Rachel’s marriage-lines, old account-books and Bank pass-books, an expired passport, and some old diaries which seemed to contain nothing but the records of day-to-day engagements, but which he also pocketed.