The Belting Inheritance (5 page)

“I suppose so.” He was right, it did seem to me horrible to be concerned with money in that way. I liked Uncle Miles, but what he was saying now seemed to me disgusting.

The beetle car clattered across the cattle grid and turned into the drive of pollarded yews that led up to the courtyard in front of the house.

“If I could have my time over again – ” Uncle Miles said. The beetle stopped in the courtyard and two men got out. He got to his feet. “What’s that?”

“Probably the vet to see Clarissa.”

“It’s not the vet,” he said quite sharply. He began to walk with his springy, slightly hurried step, towards the house. I followed him more slowly. As he neared the house Uncle Miles broke into a trot, holding the panama hat on to his head with one hand. I trotted too, rather ridiculously, after him.

As we came past the tennis court and on to the gravel I saw the two men properly for the first time. One was hook-nosed, tall, dressed with a sort of spurious elegance in a suit that gave the impression of being too small for him. He looked at the front of the house, then at his companion, then at Uncle Miles, with a perpetual small smile in which there was something uneasy. But it was at sight of the other man that a shiver went up my back as though the day were cold, for I knew without anything being said that it was he who had written the letter from Paris. He was just above medium height, and he carried himself with a natural grace that contrasted with his companion’s uneasiness. He wore an old and shabby blue suit and his face was worn and lined, but when he looked at us, as he did now at Uncle Miles and me standing beside him, I saw or thought I saw the boyish seriousness on the face of the photograph on the grand piano. He stepped forward with his hand outstretched and said, in a voice that was easy and pleasant with a ripple of laughter beneath it, “If it’s not old Miles, looking all hot and bothered at sight of me. Miles, old chap, how are you?”

Uncle Miles retreated a step, as though the outstretched hand was the reared head of a poisonous snake. His voice was hoarse as I had never heard it as he said, “What sort of game is this?”

“Oh, come on now, Miles, I haven’t changed that much.” He turned to me and said, “And who are you?”

“My name’s Christopher Barrington. I’m – ”

“You’ll be the son of, let me think, of Jimmy Barrington and old Jonathan’s daughter, right? I’m David Wainwright.” He grasped my hand. “And this is my friend Silas Markle. Markie, meet Christopher Barrington and my brother Miles. I’d know Miles anywhere, although he doesn’t seem to be so sure of me at the moment.”

The hook-nosed man bobbed his head and said something, and then two things happened. A little way behind the visitors stood a number of topiary birds, and from a ladder just behind one of these descended in an uncertain manner old Thorne. At the same time Clarissa turned the corner of the house that led to the stables, three bull terriers in tow on leads.

“Mr David,” Thorne said. “It is you, then, you’ve come back to us.” He advanced upon the stranger, who clasped him warmly, while the old man repeated over and over, “I knew you’d come back, I always said you’d come back.”

Clarissa approached. If there had been uncertainty about Miles, there was none in her. She recognised the enemy immediately. “You wrote that letter,” she said, and there could be no mistaking the hostility in her voice.

The stranger disentangled himself from Thorne. “You’ll be my sister-in-law Clarissa. We haven’t met before, but I must give myself the pleasure of greeting a new relative.”

“Just try it and I’ll set Brush and Bounce on you.” At mention of their names the bull terriers snarled appreciatively or threateningly. The stranger took a couple of steps towards her, then stopped and said rather lamely, “Not what I’d call a friendly reception, eh, Markle?”

Clarissa stood square as a stone. I never liked her, but I almost admired her at that moment. “You had our letter, Mr Stiver or whatever your name is. You got your money, though you’d have had none if I’d had my way. Now you’re here for more. I can tell you there’s nothing doing. You and your friend can get back in that car and go back where you came from, do you understand? I’ll count ten, and if you’re not in the car and driving away by then I shall set the dogs on you. Believe me, you’ll wish you’d got in the car if I do.”

The stranger looked at Markle, Markle shrugged his lean shoulders slightly, and I don’t know what might have happened then, had the situation not been totally changed by a diversion. A moment before I had heard the sound of a window opening, but had been too absorbed in the scene before me to look round. I think Uncle Miles had been the only one looking towards the house, for he raised and dropped his hand in a hopeless gesture at the same moment that Lady W called from the open window: “David. David, my boy.”

She was there at the window, her white hair wild and her arms like two long sticks outstretched, and it was as though her voice had broken a spell. The stranger cried joyously, “Mamma,” ran to the house and disappeared within the entrance hall. Clarissa looked for a moment as if she would release the dogs regardless of the fact that Lady W was watching, and then marched over to Miles and snapped that he should hold the dogs. When he asked where she was going, she flung over her shoulder the words that she was going to telephone Stephen. Thorne also had made his way towards the house, no doubt to spread the news. Markle, who had not spoken, now took out a cigarette case and offered its contents to Miles, who refused with an angry shake of the head, and then to me. When I also refused he snapped the case decisively shut and said, “We may as well go in. Cooler indoors than out. Will you lead the way, young man?” There was something unpleasant, in the tone rather than the words, but still there seemed nothing for it but to go into the house. I left Uncle Miles tugging away at the dogs’ leads, trying to get them round to the stables. They were waiting for their mistress.

Dinner and Afterwards

I shall never forget dinner that evening. Lady W came down to it, came down with her hair restored by Peterson, not quite into its old pyramidal elegance it is true, but still looking marvellously fresh. Nothing could make her appearance now anything but gaunt and beaky, but cosmetics had given her cheeks the illusion of health, and her eyes blazed as though a little fire had been lighted inside them. She did not look well, but there was a vivacity about her that it was disturbing to see. It seemed even to disturb David (I had better call him that now, since Lady W had accepted him immediately as her son). She was at the head of the table and he sat on her right hand. Again and again she leaned over to touch him, the touch being made to emphasise a point or to ask a question. It seemed to me that these touches, and the very animation with which she talked to and at him, made him uneasy. When he looked at her and spoke to her he seemed nervous, whereas the few remarks he addressed to Stephen and Miles were made with a jaunty assurance that obviously infuriated them. The brothers said very little during dinner. Stephen, at the other end of the table, opposite Lady W, watched David as though he grudged every piece of food that went into his mouth. Once or twice I thought he would burst out and denounce his “brother” as a fraud, but if he thought of doing so an exchange that took place early on must have checked him.

“You are a very naughty boy, Rikki,” Lady W said coquettishly, just touching his arm and drawing back.

“Why?”

“Not answering my letter, just arriving like this. If I’d known, I should have made proper preparations.”

There was silence. David glanced at Markle, then looked directly at Stephen and I knew that he guessed what had happened, that Lady W’s letter had never been posted and that Stephen was responsible. Stephen ran a hand inside his collar and waited, with a piece of meat on his fork. Then David said, lightly, gaily, “I’m a bad hand at writing letters, Mamma, you know that, and when I had the chance of coming over I just came.”

“And now you’re here, you’ll stay?”

He looked at her, but the words seemed to be spoken to us all. “If you’ll have me.”

The rest of us said little. Uncle Miles only picked at his food, and Stephen did the same. Clarissa, who sat opposite David, was a powerful trencherwoman and she champed through the meal as usual, giving David an occasional glare to which he responded with a bright smile. Markle, next to her, was watchful, his gaze flickering from one person to another as though he were all the time assessing reactions. And I, what did I feel? I watched what was happening as though it were a comedy being played out before me. I realised that Stephen and Miles were silenced by fear that David would reveal details of the letter they had sent, and still more by concern about the letter of Lady W’s that they had intercepted. Since I had felt indignant at the shabby trick they had played, I was pleased that they were hamstrung. I did not question that the stranger was David, for a mother must surely know her own son, but still there was something about Markle, and about the way in which David had let his brothers know that he held the whip hand, which made me uneasy.

With dinner over, fruit was put on the table. David selected an apple and peeled it, beginning at the centre. Lady W exclaimed happily.

“Still just the same, beginning at the centre. I’ve never seen anyone do it quite like that.”

“Still the same. I’m unique.” He cast a quick, amused glance round the table.

“You promised upstairs that you’d tell us – ” Lady W said, again coquettishly, almost as though she were a little girl asking to be told a bedtime story. Beneath the rouge her cheeks were waxen.

“My dreary history, yes. That is, if you’re sure you want to hear it.” Again the quick glance round.

“Of course we want to hear. We want an explanation.” That was Stephen, and Clarissa added in a tone far from friendly, “You don’t meet a new brother-in-law every day.”

“Don’t we still have a glass of port?” When David had filled his glass he began to talk, and as he told his story the constraint he had shown at dinner fell away, and he talked with an ease and fluency he had not shown since the few minutes after his arrival.

“I don’t know how far back I ought to go. Let’s begin at the beginning. You know when I was posted missing, in a raid on the synthetic oil plants in the Ruhr. Hell of a night, hell of an operation. Too much low cloud for Mosquitoes to mark the target as they were supposed to, but visibility above cloud was very good, just what the doctor ordered for Jerry fighters. We lost more than twenty kites and mine was one of them, right? Missing, believed killed. Well, I wasn’t.” David took a sip of port. There was no doubt that he had our attention.

“By rights I should have been killed. We were shot up by two Jerry fighters, Blakeney the navigator and Copp the gunner were killed, and two others were hit. We can’t have been more than a few hundred feet from the ground when we parachuted out. I don’t know what happened to the others, there was a lot of flak about, very likely they were shot before they reached the ground. I was in luck. I landed with a broken arm, decided I might as well give myself up, knocked on the door of the nearest house a few minutes’ walk away. The man was a mine foreman, a Socialist, fed up with the war. He and his wife took me in, kept me in a room until my arm was better, got me a fake German passport. Then Hans, that was the miner’s name, arranged to get me on a lorry going down south. I was crated up as some sort of machinery, and Hans put in food and drink to last me for a couple of days. The idea was I would get into occupied France and try to contact the resistance groups there, and Hans had given me some names. But that was the point at which my luck ran out. The lorry went south all right, but it went to Hungary, which as you may remember was on the skids at that time. The driver must have taken some sort of wrong route, because they ran slap into the Russians. The Russians decrated me, but they wouldn’t believe I was British, or what was I doing with a German work permit? I believe they came to the conclusion that I was some sort of German spy trying to get information. Anyway they sent me to this labour camp, Novoruba. I’m talking too much.”

“Oh, no,” Stephen said. “We’re very interested.”

I looked at Lady W to see if she had taken in the malice of Stephen’s tone, but she was sitting back in her chair with eyes half-shut. I could not even be sure that she was listening to David.

“Novoruba – I don’t really want to talk much about that. I was there for years, I don’t know how many. Eight years, I suppose, something like that. We lived in huts, sixty to a hut, with one small stove to keep us warm in winter. Deaths were something like twenty per cent a year. One day after an old man had died, he was a Pole and he simply died of cold and semi-starvation, I asked for an interview with the camp commander. I got it, which was a pity. He asked what I wanted and when I told him I had a complaint he listened to it. I lost my temper a bit, and said the Russians were in every way worse than the Germans. That put him in a towering rage. He shot off a whole stream of Russian I couldn’t understand, and then I was hiked outside and frogmarched away in a direction away from our hut. I told them I wanted to go back, and when they took no notice I punched one of them in the guts and started to run. That was a mistake because I never had a hope. When they caught up with me, two or three of them whanged me on the head very thoroughly with the damned great wooden staves they carried. One of them also did a nice job of stamping on my hand and breaking some bones in it. Nobody bothered whether they mended properly, and they didn’t. That’s why my writing isn’t what it was.

He held up his right hand. Two of the fingers were much shorter than the others, and the whole hand was bunched together and contorted like the hand of a sufferer from arthritis. His cheek twitched, his face was heavy with brooding.

“I can remember every detail of life in the camp, but I can’t distinguish one day from another, one year from another even. I’ll tell you what I remember. Breakfast. Every day it was a sort of soup, either thin with bits of gristle or stiff with some kind of filthy coarse lentil. Then bread, disgusting uneatable bread that gave you dysentery. Sometimes a bit of sausage as a treat. Rock sausage we used to call it, because one day somebody broke a tooth on it. Then we worked all day, we were supposed to be constructing some kind of dam I think. I had to work even when my hand was healing. Afternoon meal, or dinner or whatever you call it, was the same as breakfast except that sometimes you got a few vegetables in the soup.” He shuddered, and the violence of it went all through his body.

“I can’t – I can’t talk about it much, I’ve tried to forget it. They treated us like animals, and in the end you turn into an animal if you’re treated that way. There were exceptions. Some of the guards were decent. I remember one of them, a boy whose name I could never pronounce. I called him Ivan. He always used to be slipping us cigarettes or bits of chocolate, I don’t know where they came from or what would have happened to him if he’d been caught. Two or three times I thought about trying to escape, and once I tried it when Ivan was on duty. I began to work farther and farther away from the rest of them, and from Ivan too. When I was out of sight of everybody I began to think that Felix, he was a Rumanian who always claimed that escaping was easy though he never tried it himself, was right. And then Ivan suddenly appeared. He shook his head at me and pointed to the plains all around us, flat as a pancake and said,
“Niet.
Nix. No good.” When he said this he pointed to his tongue and I understood, what I’d known all along really of course. Since I spoke only a few words of Russian how the hell could I escape? That was a bad evening, I can tell you.” He drank the rest of his port. “They let me go, let a whole lot of us go, quite suddenly, just sent us across and dumped us in West Germany. And they gave me back my fake German work permit. I worked my way across Germany, and into France, then hitched a lift to Paris. And why didn’t I tell you I was alive, why didn’t I come straight back?” He seemed to ask himself this question. Lady W, to whom he had been talking almost as if the rest of us were not there, was leaning back in her chair, the red spots on her cheeks conspicuous now as the skin beneath them showed yellower. Markle had lighted a cigar, and was puffing away at it. The rest of us were silent.

“I don’t know that I can give a single answer, a simple answer that is. Remember how I always wanted to live in Paris, Mamma, when I was studying art, and I never did? Here was the chance. I had no money, I had to get a job, and in the last year I’ve had half a dozen, porter at a hotel, clerk in a shipping office, waiter in a café. Hard life, I’ve had enough of it. That was one thing. But the other, the chief reason, was that when I came out of the camp I couldn’t think of myself as a human being. I didn’t feel it was possible to come home, face up to all of you, to English life. I wasn’t ready for it.”

“But you’re ready now?” Uncle Miles asked. He sat with the corners of his mouth turned down disapprovingly. Lady W looked at him. David nodded, and then shrugged.

“I don’t know. I hope so. You’ve got to understand what it was like in the camp to be able to realise what I felt. You’re – degraded, degraded by the sort of things that happen to you, the things you do yourself. You get to a point at which the only thing you’re fit for is the lowest, most mechanical work, the only people you want to be with are scum, the sort of stagnant scum you don’t find in ordinary society. I used to think that Russian writers were exaggerating things, but not long ago in Paris I read Dostoievsky’s
House of the Dead,
and my God, it’s true enough. Life in Russia – they live like pigs and dream about heaven. Am I making sense? I can’t help it if I’m not. When I got to Paris I felt I couldn’t face English life, and then a couple of weeks ago – ” He stopped.

“Yes,” Stephen said. “What happened a couple of weeks ago?”

“I took an overdose. The chap who ran the wretched little hotel I was in found me all right, perhaps I never meant to take a lethal dose, but I knew then it was no good. It was then I wrote to you, Mamma.”

Lady W sat up in her chair, opened her eyes wide. “I shall go to bed. Rikki, your old room is ready for you. Mr Markle, you’ll stay here, of course.”

Markle took his cigar from his mouth. “Very kind of you, Lady Wainwright, but I shouldn’t think of imposing. I’ve already booked a room at the Rising Sun.”

As Lady W stood up she swayed a little. David was at her side in a moment. “The excitement. A little too much for me. It’s nothing.”

“I’ll come upstairs with you.”

“Yes. And then if you’ll tell Peterson.” The smile she gave us was ghastly. She went out of the room leaning heavily on David’s arm. The door had barely closed when Stephen said in his thin, acid voice, “Now, Mr Markle.”

Markle stubbed out his cigar and smiled at Stephen, who said, “Why are you here?”

“I’m a solicitor. Steinberg, Markle and Fasnach. I’m here to look after Mr Wainwright’s interests.”

“You know that we dispute his identity,” Clarissa bayed at him.

“Your husband wrote a letter to that effect. I have it in my possession. He offered my client money, which of course we shall return.”

We had sat a long while at the dinner table and now Susan, the maid who had helped to serve the meal, came in, not for the first time. As we were going through to the drawing-room Markle excused himself, saying that he had some papers in the car that might interest us. He came back briskly cheerful, with a briefcase under his arm which he unzipped. I looked at the things it contained with a curiosity which may be imagined, and ended my inspection rather disappointed.

The things he put upon a table were a copy of Donne’s
Songs and Sonets,
bent at the edges and obviously much read, and a tattered wallet. In the manner of a lecturer he described them. “This little book was given to my client by Mr Miles Wainwright. There is an inscription inside the front cover.” There was, too:
David from Miles, Christmas 1943
. “You don’t dispute that this is the copy you gave him?”