The Belting Inheritance (4 page)

“Who is?”

“The joker.” And with that Peterson picked up her bundle, nodded to me, and disappeared round a corner, bound for a cupboard or storeroom.

I walked down the staircase, through the big hall and out on to the gravelled courtyard in front of the house. Inside the hall it was dark and cool, outside it was bright, and it was brightness I needed at that moment. Old Thorne was laboriously clipping a hedge – although he had twenty different duties inside the house he was always likely to stray outside and work in the garden on a fine day – and I stopped to talk to him. He said nothing about the letter, so I did not mention it. I walked down a small alley lined by privet on either side, which led to a little gazebo. There I sat contemplating the idea that the letter might be a hoax, and thinking about Lady W, until the sound of a car in the drive announced that Uncle Stephen had come home. I got up then and made my way to the stream. There was an uneasy feeling in my stomach, like that one has before an examination or an important interview, and I associated this with my concern that a trick was being played, in one way or another, on
Lady W. I could not realise how completely the letter was to change all our lives.

I heard more of the letter, and what had been done about it, at dinner that night. Uncle Stephen greeted me with his customary cold handshake, Aunt Clarissa gave me her rough cheek to kiss, Uncle Miles congratulated me effusively on getting the scholarship, but nothing was said about the letter until the pudding was finished and Thorne was out of the way. Lady W no longer came down to dinner, and although Stephen had not taken her place at the end of the table there was a distinct change in his attitude, not to me particularly but in the way that he did such things as ringing the bell or pouring out the wine. He had always done these things deferentially, now he did them as of right. He took the decanter of port from the sideboard, poured some into Clarissa’s glass and then into his own, and said: “No answer. It seems to have done the trick.”

Miles twiddled his glass. “I wouldn’t be too sure.”

“It needed a little firmness, that’s all.”

“And the money,” Miles said.

“If you ask me the money was a mistake.” Clarissa drank half her glass and thumped it back on the table, as she always did. “A great mistake.”

The decanter had come round to me. It had been established twelve months ago that I might have the ration of one glass, no more, no less. I poured it now, and looked at the red liquid. I felt Stephen staring at me.

“You don’t know what we’re talking about, do you? Or has she shown you the letter?”

“I’ve seen it,” I said. “And I’ve talked to Peterson. I know you’ve written to – to the man. But I don’t know about any money.”

I felt hostility in the way they looked at me, even Miles with whom I had always been friendly, and I could understand something of what they must be feeling. Stephen and Miles were Wainwrights, and Clarissa was one by marriage. I was an interloper, brought here for no better reason than the whim of an old woman. But when the silence was broken by Miles’ voice, he sounded as friendly as ever.

“Well, then, that saves us a lot of explaining. You see, Stephen wrote and told this fellow that if he came over here or pestered Mamma any further, he’d really be in trouble. It was done to scare him off, and it’s done just that. And at the same time, this is what Clarissa was talking about, he sent the man twenty-five pounds.”

“I see,” I said, although I did not see at all. “You think, then, that the letter isn’t from David.”

“From David!” Stephen got up, pushed back his chair and began to walk about the room. His eyes, dark like his mother’s, but small and intense where hers were large and lustrous, stared at me. “Of course it’s not from David, David died in the war. Don’t you understand that this sort of thing is the commonest kind of confidence trick when a woman’s lost her son, don’t you know that?”

“Just why I was against giving him money,” Clarissa said, evidently continuing a long argument. “Give it ’em once, they come back again. Twenty-five quid’s not bad pay for a begging letter.”

“There is no question that this letter is a forgery, no question, do you understand?” Stephen went out of the room, almost ran in his eagerness, and came back with a letter which he put before me. The date was 1941, the letter began “Dear Stephen” and was signed “David.” “The writing is quite different, you can see that.”

“Yes, it does look different.” I went on half-apologetically, “This letter’s signed David.”

“Well?”

“The other one is signed Rikki Tikki.”

Stephen turned away impatiently. Miles said, “That was the name Mamma used for David.”

“I know that. How did this man know it?”

The three began to speak together, and then Miles held up a hand. Like Stephen, he seemed anxious that I should believe what he was saying.

“Use your common, my old Christopher. David’s plane was shot down, there’s no doubt he was killed. But say that this chap was someone in his squadron, a friend of his even. There are a dozen different ways he could have known about the name. Maybe he saw David writing letters, maybe he was a censor, perhaps he saw a letter from Mamma that began ‘Dear Rikki’.” Miles beamed and mopped his red brow. Stephen broke in.

“The important thing is that this was the only bit of identification. The rest is the sort of stuff anyone could have made up.”

They were curiously anxious to convince me, I thought, and then something else occurred to me. “But she’s expecting him. She told me so.”

Clarissa slapped her thigh with her palm, almost as though her hand were a riding crop. “You’d better tell him.”

“She’s written to him.” There was silence. “So he’ll write back to her.”

Miles did not look at me. Stephen gave me a glance, then looked away. It was Clarissa, always impatient of fine feelings and subtleties, who spoke. “Come on, come on. What’s done is done.” To her husband she said, “What’s done is right.”

Stephen gave her an uneasy look and I realised, as I had never done before, that behind the stiffness and starch he was a weak man. She turned to Miles and then, seeing that he too would say nothing, back to me. “For God’s sake, are you frightened of the boy? He’s got to know.” She spoke to me directly, her thick neck reddening with the words. “She did write to him, but Peterson took the letter. We told her to. We destroyed it. And if he writes another letter to her, we shall make sure she doesn’t get it.”

For a moment I could not take it in and then, looking at Miles and Stephen a little shamefaced, and Clarissa with her lower lip out-thrust like one of her own dogs, I knew that it was true. “You can’t do that,” I said.

“Oh, can’t we?” That was Clarissa.

Miles interjected something about trying to understand, but I ignored him. When I thought of that poor old woman upstairs I felt angry.

“No. I shan’t let you.” I stood up, and knocked over the little that was left in my glass of port. It stained the cloth, but none of them so much as glanced at it. They were watching me. “I expect you’re right about the letter. But to do it this way, to let her write to him and expect to see him when she never will – ” I couldn’t find words for what I thought about it. “I shall tell her.”

I had begun to move towards the door, but my way was blocked by Stephen. He came towards me with creeping steps, his white face distorted with hatred. “
You
will tell her. Do you understand your position in this house, do you know that nobody wanted you here, that Mamma simply took you in out of pity, do you know that?”

“Go on,” I said.

“You have been fed and clothed and sent to school at our expense, and now you have the audacity to tell us the way in which to behave to Mamma. If she were told the truth it would kill her, do you understand. If you tell her and she
dies – ” For a moment I thought he was going to spit at me, then he turned away.

Uncle Miles rubbed a hand over his head in embarrassment. I knew that he hated scenes. “Don’t be hasty, Christopher, try to understand.”

This is all ridiculous, I thought, it belongs to Victorian melodrama. When Uncle Miles asked me to think about it I said I would, but that it would make no difference. I did not want to prolong the argument, and in my hurry to get to the door tripped over a rug before I reached it. My exit was hardly a glorious one.

The Coming of the Claimant

In the morning things always look different, and on this particular morning the scene of the previous night seemed more than ever ridiculous. Belting was the kind of house where at night it was easy to believe in machinations of a good old-fashioned kind, wills hidden in the secret drawers of desks, the return of the long-lost heir, even cupboards and passages leading from one room to another. In daytime, on a fine July morning, such thoughts seemed absurd. I drew the curtains, got back to bed, propped up the pillows behind my head, and looked around the room, pleased with what I saw. Lady W had agreed that my Thomas Lovell – which was the name I had invented for my bedroom based on a word fantasy worthy of Uncle Miles (I had once called the bedroom “beddoes,” Beddoes was a poet, drop the surname and you have his Christian name Thomas Lovell left) – might be done over to my own taste, and I had had the walls covered with a Japanese grass paper, against which I had put Hokusai prints, some Chinese wall mats, and several drawings by a modern Japanese primitive who had lost his reason and committed suicide at the age of twenty-three. Dotted around the room were bits of Japanese pottery. There was a lacquered desk at which I sometimes wrote poems, and a lacquered table with a chessboard top at which I worked out chess problems. I dare say these may sound incongruous accompaniments for a bedroom which contained also an old-fashioned washstand and an uncompromisingly Victorian brass bed. I can only say that at the time I got great pleasure from it.

I meditated for a while in my Thomas Lovell, and came to the conclusion that I had probably been rather silly. No doubt Stephen and Miles were doing what they thought best for Lady W, it would be wrong even to think anything else, and it was not for me to criticise them. I felt the force of this, although I was still determined that in some way or another Lady W must learn that the letter was a hoax. She was the kind of tough old lady who would always prefer the truth, however much pain it might cause her, to an easy lie, and if her sons had not been so much afraid of her they would have realised that. If necessary I would tell her myself, as I had said. With this settled in my mind I got up, washed and spoke aloud two lines of a poem by somebody or other that had got stuck in my mind:

What shall we talk of, Li-po, Hokusoi,

You narrow your long eyes to fascinate me.

I narrowed my own eyes in a fairly hideous Victorian looking-glass, looked out at the bright morning, and went downstairs in a good temper. In the breakfast-room I found Clarissa and Uncle Miles – Uncle Stephen had already gone to his Folkestone office – and it seemed that they too were anxious to forget last night’s scene. Clarissa was tucking into a great mound of scrambled egg at considerable speed, in the intervals of making telephonic arrangements for the vet to come and have a look at a couple of the dogs, sorting out notes for a talk she was to give to the Women’s Institute called “Getting the Best out of the Breed,” and arranging about lunch with one of the dailies who also did some cooking. Uncle Miles greeted me cheerfully, gave me one of his winks when Clarissa was not looking, and returned to consideration of the
Daily Worker,
which he took because he said they had the best racing correspondent in the country. Racing and cricket were Uncle Miles’ chief interests. Everything seemed to have returned to normal, even to Uncle Miles’ slightly furtive extraction from his pocket of a small book in which he began to make pencilled calculations, calculations that would, I knew, turn into elaborate doubles, trebles and accumulators, rather than simple win or place bets.

Later I tried to see Lady W, but Peterson told me that she never saw anybody in the mornings now, because it was not her best time. Uncle Miles had disappeared, and the yelping of dogs told me of Clarissa’s whereabouts. I did not mind being alone. For the first day or two of the holidays I liked simply to luxuriate in being back at Belting, I sank back into the delicious country idleness of life there. I took Max Beerbohm’s
Works
and went out into the garden. Almost at the door I met old Thorne.

“Just a minute, Mr Christopher.” I stopped, and he seemed uncertain how to go on. “Is there any truth in what I’m hearing, that Mr David’s alive and he’s coming back?”

There the question was, and what could I say? I tried to equivocate. “Who told you that?”

“Marley, he does a bit of gardening you know, said Miss Peterson told him. Said she had it from her ladyship.”

Thorne and Peterson were barely on speaking terms. I made what seemed to me an adroit reply. “As far as I know there’s no truth in it.”

“Because if Mr David’s coming back he wants to watch out for himself. There’ll be trouble.”

I stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“You won’t remember, no more will Mr Miles very like. But he wants to think about it. There’ll be trouble.”

Thorne’s nose was bent very much to one side, a fact that gave him a misleadingly crafty expression. I asked again what he meant, but he shuffled away muttering. Later, when Uncle Miles appeared, I asked him too.

“Don’t know what he’s talking about. I sometimes think old Thorne’s brain is going a bit soft. But since there’s no question of David’s appearance it’s what’s called an academic point. Meaning, a bit of nonsense.”

I said awkwardly – boys don’t find apologies easy – “I’m afraid I made a fool of myself last night.”

He beamed. “Stephen didn’t do so badly either.”

“I’m going to apologise to him. After all, he’s old – ”

“He’s a year older than I am.”

“I shouldn’t have spoken to him like that. But I still feel Lady W ought to be told what you’ve done. She’s tough enough to take it.”

Uncle Miles smiled so often that it was strange to see how his mouth turned down, how sombre he looked, when he was serious. “Yes, I can see you would feel that. Leave it till this evening, and we’ll talk it over with Stephen. I promise there’ll be no fireworks tonight.” He smiled, and it was as though the sombre look had been sponged away, so that the Uncle Miles I knew could return. “Is your name Dennis?”

“What?”

“Because I really came out to say ‘Tennis, Dennis.’ Meaning to say that you ought to be able to beat an old man by Miles.”

“I can only reply like the boy who was asked by his teacher if he could say what was Napoleon’s nationality.”

“What was that?” Uncle Miles asked incautiously. “He said ‘Of course I can’ and got top marks.”

These jokes look enormously silly put down on paper, but they were the sort of thing that amused Uncle Miles, and in those days they amused me too. It seems ridiculous to say that from the time I came to Belting Uncle Miles had been my best friend, when he was more than double my age, but I can’t find any better way of putting it. That evening when he got down on the floor and played with the mechanical bowler was only the first of many. He had a passion for all sorts of adolescent games from l’Attaque and Buccaneer to the sort of indoor cricket that you play on paper by picking words out of a book. I remember finding in his room one day a complete record of a series of Test matches between England and Australia, in which the England team were the actual players of those days, Hutton, Compton, Bedser and the others, with the addition of M Wainwright, who did remarkably well with both bat and ball. I had just reached the age at which I was beginning to find Uncle Miles’ make-believe absurd, but unlike most day dreamers he was quite a useful cricketer and tennis player in real life. Now, when we got our rackets and played on the old hard tennis court, he was delighted when he beat me. Afterwards we went and sat by the strippling ream – and now I have brought my narrative up to the point I had reached on the first page, and high time too, you may think.

Why did I feel embarrassed about that Max Beerbohm quotation, the one in which he said at the age of twenty-three that he would write no more? Well, during my six years at Belting I had learned a good deal about Uncle Miles, both from other people and from what he had told me himself, and I could see that the remark might have a personal application. I knew that at Oxford Uncle Miles had been one of the stars of the OUDS, that against his father’s wish he had insisted on making the stage his career, and that he had never done much good as an actor. Then there was something about a marriage that had broken up, although I didn’t know the details. On the grand piano there was a photograph of Miles, looking gay and eager, and with a fine thatch of dark hair. It was impossible for me to recognise in this photograph the little bald man I knew, whose mouth turned down at the corners, who played a cunning game of tennis, was devoted to county cricket, and spent an hour a day in placing bets on horses. But the chief reason for embarrassment was Uncle Miles’ novel. At the age of twenty-two he had published a novel called
On the Road to Roundabout.
There was no proper library at Belting, but books were to be found in almost every room, in no discernible order, and I had discovered a copy of Uncle Miles’ novel one day in, of all places, the Pam Moor. It was one of those light, bright, slight novels about nothing very much that young men published between the wars. Of course, he found me reading it.

“Thought I’d got rid of all those,” he said, and gave his occasional deprecating giggle. “Know how many copies it sold? A hundred and eighty-nine. What do you think of it? Don’t say, I can tell from the look on your face. Know what the reviewers said, the four who noticed it? They all said ‘promising.’ You can’t have a deadlier word than that, young Christopher, it’s the kiss of death. I never wrote anything else.”

You can see why it was a maladroit quotation from Beerbohm. But Uncle Miles did not seem to be upset by it. He said, to himself as much as to me, as he sat staring across the stream, “You don’t know what the Wainwrights are really like, do you? Or what Mamma’s like?” I lay on my stomach and listened. “She’s a remarkable woman, no doubt about that, but she never had any life outside the family, never wanted any of us to go away. And none of us did, until the war took us away.”

“I thought Hugh started his own business.”

“So he did, but where did he do it? Folkestone. And he went on living here.”

“What were they really like, Hugh and David?”

“They weren’t like what Mamma may have told you. Hugh was tough in a sort of way, and he was always talking about what he was going to do, but he never did it. Did she tell you he wrote plays?”

“Yes.”

“So he did, but I’ll bet she didn’t tell you what they were like. He was dotty about Ibsen, and these plays were Ibsen and water. No producer would look at them, and I don’t wonder. Of course Mamma insisted that he was a misunderstood genius, but I don’t think she really ever believed it herself. It was David who was the apple of her eye, he was so handsome. Hugh was pretty wild.”

“How do you mean?”

“He had all sorts of bright ideas that were going to make a fortune. One was to charter a lot of river boats which he was going to buy cheaply and rent out during the summer. Another was some sort of patent de-ruster. Another was a racing system, something to do with backing second favourites.” Uncle Miles snorted, with the contempt of a man who has tried all racing systems. “And what did he turn out to be? An estate agent, and he was no good at that, when he died they found out the firm was bankrupt and it had to be closed down.” His voice had become slightly shrill.

“What about David? You say he was the one Mamma really liked.” It was always a slight effort to me to say “Mamma”.

“David was a charmer, it’s true, but he never did anything either. Very shy, and then when he’d got over the shyness he’d be – flippant, I suppose you’d call it. Went to art school, but he wasn’t much good. Then he wrote poems and sent them to little magazines. A few of them were printed, and of course Mamma was in the seventh heaven over that, but it never amounted to anything. He and Hugh were very close, he relied on Hugh in lots of ways.” Uncle Miles turned towards me, and on his little red face there was the pain of talent unacknowledged. “Mamma’s told you they were both geniuses, I dare say. Take it from me, Christopher, they weren’t. Hugh was good company, talked a lot, got on well with people. David was a kind of shrinking violet, tremendously sensitive and all that, but what did either of them ever
do?
Nothing. I was the only one who ever did anything, ever published a book. And I was the only one who got away from home, too. Even if I was never a good actor, I did get away. I only came back after Hugh and David died. Mamma wanted me to, and it seemed I ought to. I thought I should be able to come back just for a few weeks, but I never got away again. She eats you up, you know. She eats you up.”

There was bitterness in his voice now. I was uncomfortable, because I had never known him like this. “What about your father?”

“He was never much interested. Four sons, and not one a professional soldier. Anyway, Mamma swamped him too.”

“Uncle Miles. Why would it be such a catastrophe if he – this man – if he were David? I know he’s not,” I added hurriedly. “But supposing it were true, why should you and Stephen be so upset?”

Far, far away a small car beetled in off the main road, and began to crawl along the drive. Uncle Miles pulled up some bits of grass, put a couple of pieces in his mouth. “I’ve made a mess of things,” he said. “But it’s not all been my own fault. I want something back out of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Money.” With an attempt to regain his usual flippancy he said. “To be frank about it, young Christopher, filthy lucre. When Mamma dies Stephen gets the house, you get your whack, old Thorpe and Peterson get something and so on, but there’ll be a tidy sum for me. I don’t know how much, but – well, a tidy sum. Now, supposing David came back, what do you think would happen, who d’you think would get the house then?”

“I see.”

“Horrible old Muncle Iles with his eye on the chain mance,” he said. “That’s what you think. But it isn’t quite like that. I’ve earned my inheritance, Christopher, and I want it.”