The Belting Inheritance (6 page)

“I don’t dispute it.”

“Good, good. We’re making progress. Now, this is the wallet he had during the war. You may recognise it? No? Well, this is the one. Contents, pay book, letters. One here from Lady Wainwright, one from his brother Hugh, one from a lady friend named Joyce. A few other odds and ends, like this small key with a lion’s head on it, perhaps you recognise that? Well, there you are, gentlemen.”

“These don’t mean anything,” Stephen said. “They could have been taken off David’s body.”

At the same time Clarissa asked, “How does he happen to have them still in his possession?”

“A good question, Mrs Wainwright,” Markle said, still in his lecturer’s rôle. “The Russians took the wallet, let him keep the little book of poems, which you can see was his constant companion in camp. Then when the Russians let him go they handed back his wallet intact.”

Silence. Then Stephen said, “As far as I’m concerned these don’t prove anything, if that’s all he’s got to show.”

Markle shrugged. “What do you expect? You heard his story, it’s a marvel he was able to keep anything at all. His mother knew him at once.”

“She believed what she wants to believe.”

“That old man in the garden recognised him.”

“He’d heard this tale about David being alive.”

Markle’s mouth curved in a sneer. “You two gentlemen are what might be called interested parties I understand, and Mrs Wainwright too. Perhaps even this young gentleman here.”

“That’s an outrageous insinuation,” Stephen cried.

“Oh, come along now, you won’t pretend you didn’t want to keep my client away from here. That was your object, wasn’t it? To buy him off. On the cheap.” Markle sat in a cretonne-covered wing arm-chair with his legs stretched out, odiously at ease, and looked around him with surprise. “This really is a period piece, isn’t it? Must say I’ve never seen a room like it. Might be something out of a film.”

Stephen confronted him, trembling with indignation. At this moment David returned, and took in the scene.

“Trouble?” he asked.

I can’t convey what a difference I felt in his attitude in the way he spoke that one word. It was as though he were saying, “All right, the fancy talk is over, let’s get down to business,” or as though he had been wearing a mask at the dinner-table and this had dropped for a moment to reveal his true face. These are not afterthoughts, they are things I thought at the time although I didn’t formulate them clearly, and you can dismiss them if you like as the fanciful notions of a literary young man. But it is a fact that I had been completely convinced by the evident sincerity with which he told his story, and that the first moment when I really doubted that he was David Wainwright was when he said in that cheerfully aggressive voice, “Trouble?” I think perhaps he knew that his tone had disconcerted me, for he changed it again in a moment.

For the next hour he sat answering questions from Stephen and Miles, and he did so with remarkable coolness and conviction. They asked him about school, about incidents in their childhood, about servants they had had before the war. He answered nine out of every ten questions at once, and obviously what he said was correct. When he didn’t remember something he admitted it. At one point Miles said, “What about Durdle Door?”

“What about it?”

“What happened there? On the cliffs? You were ten and I was seven.”

“I don’t know.”

“If you were David you would know. I got stuck on the cliff. You crawled up and helped me to get to the top. We agreed we wouldn’t say anything to anybody about it, and we never did.” Spitefully – I had never known Uncle Miles spiteful before – he added, “I don’t suppose you even know where Durdle Door is.”

That last sentence was a mistake, because if David had been on the hook, now he was off it. He laughed. “Of course I do, it’s near where we used to go for summer holidays. About the cliff, honestly, Miles, I don’t remember a thing. Try and be reasonable, old man. It was thirty years ago and I’ve forgotten a hell of a lot since then. For a while after I got out of Russia there were great yawning gaps so that if you’d asked me then what school I went to, I wouldn’t have known. Since then a lot’s come back to me, but I know there are still some holes.”

“If you were David you’d remember,” Miles said obstinately.

Markle had lighted another cigar and now he sat forward in the wing chair, pointing with it. “Remember you were the one who got stuck on the cliff. Maybe that’s why you’d be the one to remember, eh?”

He looked about for smiles, but found himself ignored. David went on talking. In the time I knew him I never saw him lose his temper, but now he showed his feelings plainly – or was it that he gave a calculated display of anger?

“As a matter of fact I think you’ve been pretty unreasonable altogether. If I weren’t your brother, how the hell do you think I could have answered half your questions, how would I have known my way about the house? I don’t want to harp on it, but that letter you wrote, Stephen – well, I don’t imagine it’s the sort of letter you’d want people to see.”

There was a threat in the words rather than in the way they were spoken, but it struck home to Stephen. He pulled at his collar and said something unintelligible. His white face was twisted so that for a moment I thought that he might cry. Then he walked quickly, almost ran, out of the room. Clarissa followed him.

“I can’t say I admire Stephen’s taste in wives,” David said. Markle laughed. “That doesn’t apply to your wife, though, Miles. You haven’t married again I suppose?”

These apparently harmless words made Uncle Miles clench his fists. David said tauntingly, “You don’t want to do anything silly, Miles. Mustn’t have a fracas on my first night back under the family roof.”

“You’re a scoundrel.”

“Oh, come along now. I’m your brother. You remember, the one who rescued you from Durdle Door.”

Miles stamped his foot in anger at this mockery, a gesture pettish rather than angry. “Why did you come here? If you don’t go away I’ll – ”

He didn’t say what he would do and this uncompleted exit line was comic, or if you liked Miles as I did, pathetic.

That left the three of us in the drawing-room, David and Markle and I, and again I seemed to detect in David a change, this time a sense of relaxation as though a hurdle had been surmounted and a breathing space was possible. As David wandered about the room exclaiming at the odds and ends and knick-knacks he remembered, a papier mâché chair and a frame for an embroidery panel, and as Markle said that he must be getting along or they would lock him out of the Rising Sun, I said casually and with no sense of putting a searching question, “What made you choose that name – Stiver?” I hesitated about adding “Uncle David,” and decided against it.

Markle merely raised his eyebrows, but David’s head jerked back as if we were boxers, and I had shaken him with an uppercut. “What do you mean?”

What had I meant? “Well, it was a kind of joke I suppose, was it? Not having a stiver, that means not having any money. Was that it?”

“Yes, of course.” It seemed to me that he accepted this suggestion with relief. “It was a joke. A pretty bad one, you may think, but a joke, that’s all.”

I don’t know why I should have been dissatisfied by this explanation, but the feeling of dissatisfaction stayed with me as David saw Markle out, and then said goodnight to me. I went up to bed, along the corridor that no longer held terrors, with my mind in a whirl. I was in my pyjamas and brushing my teeth when there was a knock on the door.

I do not know who I had expected to see standing there, but I was certainly surprised to see Stephen. He too was in pyjamas and dressing-gown, and I was fascinated to see that his neck, when not confined by a tight collar was white as an asparagus stalk. He looked round at my wallpaper and prints with a dislike which I could see he did not want to express, and it was with a humouring air that he said, “I see, you like this sort of thing, do you?” To this remark I made no reply. He tugged at his dressing-gown and burst out, “You’ve got to help expose this fraud.”

I have made it clear that there was no love lost between Stenhen and me, and the effect of this remark was to make me feel immediately more kindly disposed towards David. “Why do you say he’s a fraud?”

“It’s obvious. Don’t you think I’d know if he were my brother?”

“What about the wallet and the book?”

“This man must have taken them off David, or got possession of them in some way.”

“And Mamma recognised him.”

I knew that it infuriated Stephen to bear me calling Lady W, Mamma. He controlled himself with an effort, and said as he had done before, “She’s determined to believe it.”

I sat down on the bed. “As a matter of fact I think he may be a fraud too.”

He asked me why, but did not seem impressed when I told him about the name. “I don’t believe that idea, about not having a stiver, had occurred to him before. He just accepted it when I suggested it.”

“Does it matter?”

“My æsthetic sense tells me there’s something wrong about it.” I could not resist adding, “You see now that there are advantages in belonging to the Æsthetes’ Society.”

“What?”

“At school. We burn incense while we worship Oscar Wilde on prayer mats.”

This was strictly untrue, but I think Stephen half-believed it. The stalk of his neck bulged with his effort to keep his temper. “Are you willing to help?”

“What do you want me to do?”

“While that man is here I shall not leave this house. The ascendancy he has gained already over Mamma is appalling.”

“Uncle Miles is here.” Stephen made no reply to this, and I was left to wonder whether he was doubtful of Miles’ capacity to deal with David. “I suppose you’re afraid that Mamma may change her will.”

“If she did, you would be affected too.” He stopped again, realising I suppose that this argument was not likely to affect me. He stared at one of the Japanese primitives, and turned away from it with distaste. “Christopher, I know this man is a fraud, and I am going to prove it. Miles and I are agreed that we should both stay here for the moment. We want you to go to London tomorrow and see two people who should be able to help. If you agree, I will write letters to both which you can take along, and I’ll telephone and tell them to expect you.”

I had already decided to say yes when I asked, “Who are they?”

“One is named Betty Urquhart, the other Vivian Foster.”

“Hadn’t you better tell me why I’m going to see them?”

He bit off the words reluctantly. “Foster was a great friend of David’s. He was a doctor. He’s in Harley Street now. Betty Urquhart was – she runs some sort of gallery – she was a friend of David’s too.”

Something about his tone made me ask, “You mean she was his mistress?”

“Yes, I believe so,” he said unwillingly, and with something odd in his glance. When I said that I would go he patted me on the shoulder and said “Good man” two or three times. He was a great one for old-fashioned slang, Uncle Stephen.

Betty Urquhart and Vivian Foster

So it came about that just before midday the next morning I found myself outside the People’s Art Gallery, just off Leicester Square. I had seen Lady W, and told her that I had arranged to go up for the day to see a friend in London. A year ago she might have been annoyed that I was spending a day in London so soon after the beginning of the holidays, but now she was so completely occupied with David’s return that she hardly noticed what I was saying. The gaiety and vividness of the previous night had all drained away, and although she was cheerful I thought that she looked dreadfully ill. David and Miles had not appeared by the time I left, Clarissa was with the dogs, and so I was left with Stephen, who was looking even more pinched and near-strangled than usual. He gave me the letters, and said that he would ring both Betty Urquhart and Vivian Foster late in the morning.

“We’ll spike this fellow’s guns,” he said as I left, a phrase which made me decide to add up the number of clichés he used and award myself some sort of prize when I’d reached twenty. It was only on the way to the station that I looked at the letters and saw that they were not only sealed but stuck down at the back with sticky tape, a reminder that Stephen was not simply a comic character but a mean one too.

The door of the gallery clanged as I went in. Nobody appeared, so I walked round looking at the pictures. About half of them were abstracts and the other half were social realist, showing labourers with enormous muscles shifting great lumps of iron, that kind of thing. My own preference at the time was for the neat and finicky. Pretty well the only modern pictures I admired were surrealist paintings done with a fanatical, naturalistic attention to detail, and I didn’t like any of these very much. I was trying to decipher one of the artists’ names when a voice behind me said, “Yes?”

I turned to be confronted with what seemed at first glance to be a thin young man. Only the first of these adjectives proved accurate, for in fact I faced a woman, wearing paint-stained trousers, who was of the same age as those I counted old, like Stephen and Miles. I had been deceived by the loose smock that concealed the breasts, by the trousers, and by the bronze curls that topped an eager, open face innocent of powder and lipstick. “You must be Christopher Barrington. I’m Betty Urquhart.”

“How do you do?”

“I do pretty well. I see you’ve been properly brought up. What do you think of Destrello? You were looking at his paintings.”

“I don’t like them very much.”

“No need to be so bloody cautious, if you think they’re no good, say so. He’s a genius.”

“Is he?”

“So the people who know tell me, but if you think he isn’t, there you are. Perhaps you’re right.”

“Do you work here?”

“Work here? I own the place. I’m promoting Destrello because he’s a genius. Smoke?” She sat down behind a small desk, took some canvases off the only other chair and invited me to sit on it. I sat down, but refused the cigarette. I gave her Stephen’s letter. She tore it open, read it, struck a match on the heel of her shoe, lighted a cigarette, and made a face. “How do you get on with Stephen?”

“I don’t like him much.”

“I haven’t seen him for years, but he reminded me of a starving crow. I couldn’t make head or tail of what he was saying on the telephone, but this letter helps. My God, he’s a creep, that Stephen, don’t you think so?”

I hesitated, then said “Yes.” We both began to laugh. She opened a drawer, took out half a bottle of whisky, reached behind her and found two small glasses. “Damnation to all creeps.”

I had drunk whisky only two or three times before, and didn’t really want to now, but I felt that I might label myself a creep if I refused. So I drank damnation to creeps. She put her feet on the desk. “Now, perhaps you’ll tell me the truth about all this cock over someone coming along and pretending to be David.”

I told her what had happened, about David’s return and Lady W’s acceptance of him, and his brothers’ scepticism. While I talked two or three people came in to look round the gallery. She paid little attention, simply telling them to look around, and handing a price list to a man who asked for it. They had wandered in, as people do in art galleries, and they wandered out again. When I had finished she poured more whisky into both our glasses, and drank half of hers at one gulp.

“I don’t get it. What does Brother Creep expect me to do? Why should I care whether it’s David or not?”

I hardly knew how to reply. “He thought you might be able to – to say it wasn’t David, I suppose.”

She swung her legs off the desk. “God Almighty, they’re his brothers. If they can’t recognise him, how the hell can I?”

“They do. I mean, they don’t. They’re certain he isn’t David.”

She stared at me. “Well, then?”

“But they want proof. After all, you were – you had an affair with him.” The whisky had gone to my head a little, or I would never have said such a thing. But she was not offended.

“So I did.” She paused. “Did Miles know you were coming to see me?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“Perhaps not. But I guess Miles wouldn’t have wanted you to come, and Brother Creep kept it from him. And I can see he didn’t tell you the whole story. Miles was my husband.”

I gaped. She got up, put what was left of the whisky back in the drawer and said, “Drink up. I’ll take you out to lunch.”

Five minutes later she had yelled to a young man named John to come down and look after the shop, and we were in the first-floor restaurant of a pub called The Fighting Cock, just a few doors away. I should have liked to stay downstairs, where a good many young men in beards were talking to girls who wore jeans, but Betty (she had told me to call her that) said that if we didn’t go straight up we wouldn’t get a table. She ordered lunch for two, including a bottle of wine. Then she looked at me.

“You’re not TT, are you? It’s a bit late to ask. So you don’t know a thing about Miles and me. Would you like to hear?”

I said yes. It was true enough that I wanted to hear, and I could see that she wanted to tell me.

“Miles was going to be an actor, I was going to be an actress, that’s how we met. We both had walking-on parts in a farce that made the West End, then flopped. Miles was young and handsome, anyway I thought so. I was fairly bowled over, I can tell you. Then he took me down to Belting to meet the family, and I stayed the weekend. My God, what a morgue.” She saw my look of surprise and distress. “All right, you like it, but you weren’t a prospective wife on trial. The old General sized me up as though I were a mare going to stud with a Derby winner, did everything but look at my teeth. He was harmless enough though, in a way I even liked him, it was she who was what you might call the Negress in the woodpile.”

“Lady Wainwright?”

“Who else? She’s a real vampire that one, sucking the blood of her children, and all of them saying how wonderful she was while she did it. I saw what she was like straight away. I didn’t like her, and the feeling was what you might call strongly reciprocated. It made me sick to see the way they all fawned on her.”

I echoed the words in surprise. I had not gathered the impression that Hugh or David were likely to fawn on anybody.

“That’s what it amounted to. Not so much Hugh, though he never got away from her for all his talk. There they were, stuck in that bloody great barracks of a house pretending to be artists, except Brother Creep of course, Hugh writing his bloody awful plays, David drooping away in a corner thinking up the rhyme scheme for a sonnet, and that old bitch pretending they were all geniuses.”

“You knew Hugh as well?”

“Oh, I knew Hugh.” She gave me a glance out of the corner of her eye in which there was something provocative. “After that visit I married Miles.”

“They didn’t approve?”

“That’s putting it mildly. Mind you, I think if I’d said to her that I’d go and live at Belting she wouldn’t have said no, because you see Miles was the only naughty boy, the one who wanted to get away. But after that weekend I told him I was never going there again, and if he wanted to marry me we’d do it in a registry office in London. So we did just that, and told them afterwards. There was a row, but there was nothing she could do about it except cut off Miles’ allowance. It was the General who wrote the letter, but her fine Italian hand was behind it.”

“And then?” I wanted to get on to the affair with David.

“I loved Miles. You know, I really loved that man and in a way I still love him, because he was perfectly sweet, the sweetest man I’ve ever known.”

“I like him too.”

“But it never worked out. And why not? The truth is, when I went down to that ghastly place and met the family, I fell hard for Hugh.”

“For
Hugh
?” I said in surprise, “But I thought – ”

“Yes, I know. I’m coming to that. You’re shocked.”

There was only one possible answer to that question, and I made it, waving my glass a little as I did so. A little wine spilled on to the cloth. Betty ignored it, and so did I.

“There was something about the way Hugh looked, a sort of boldness – I can’t describe it, and you’re too young to know what I mean, but it’s the kind of signal that sometimes passes between a man and a woman when they meet, and they know they’re on the same wave-length if you get me. So there were Miles and I installed in a little flat in Kensington, and Hugh and David would come in to see us sometimes. It made me sick, I can tell you, the way they used to talk about Belting, with Miles lapping it all up. Every so often, while Hugh was saying something to Miles about the old homestead I would catch his eye on me, a sort of look as though he knew I was hating it, and that pleased him. I found it very exciting, can you understand that?” I nodded untruthfully. “And then the day came, and I’ve always thought Hugh somehow engineered it, when Miles was out and Hugh called.”

She paused, looked at me, and went on. “I like sex. To me, you know, having a man is like having a good meal, and you don’t always eat at the same restaurant. So loving Miles didn’t make any difference, you understand? Oh, damn it, you don’t understand, but what does it matter, I don’t know why I’m trying to justify myself to you. Anyway, there we were together, and I knew it was going to happen and I wanted it to happen, and Hugh got most of my clothes off, and then do you know what? There I was sprawled on the bed and he was bending over me, and he smacked my face and said, ‘Do you think I want Miles’ leavings?’, and he put on his clothes and walked out.” She cocked an eyebrow at me, and then laughed. “What a situation for a girl. They call some girls teasers, but what would you call him? I never saw or heard from him again. Why did he do it, you ask?” (Though I hadn’t asked.) “I thought about it a good deal afterwards, and though I should like to think it was my fatal charm that lured him on, I don’t think that’s true. I think he set out to humiliate me. Deliberately. And I suppose you could say he succeeded. Luckily for me, though, I’m like an indiarubber ball, when I’m hit I bounce back.”

“Why should he want to humiliate you?”

“Who knows, Chris? Basically he was queer, I suppose, probably that’s why.”

“What did Miles think about it?”

“He never knew. Or at least I never told him.”

Greatly daring, I said, “What about David?”

She put her chin in her hand and considered David. “He was much more handsome than Hugh, madly good-looking, but in a mother’s boy Rupert Brooke sort of way. I’m sure he modelled himself on Rupert Brooke. David went on coming to the flat, even though Hugh didn’t, and, well, I told you I was like a rubber ball. I bounced back at David.”

I protested. “But you didn’t
like
him.”

“Oh, I liked him all right in a way, you couldn’t help it, he was serious and boyish and brought out the mother impulse that’s lurking somewhere in every woman. And then there was another thing. This happened in the early part of the war, David had gone into the Air Force like a patriotic lad, and he was in uniform. I’ve always gone for uniforms, though of course he wasn’t in uniform when we did it.” She laughed. “Now I have shocked you.”

She had. I bravely said, “Not at all.”

“Good for you, even if you don’t mean it. Well, as you’ve gathered, I don’t take sex seriously, you enjoy yourself and that’s it. But David wasn’t like that, he pretty well went crazy. He was stationed not far from London at the time and there were letters, telephone calls, sudden visits. If Miles hadn’t been as blind as they come, and working part of the time, he must have known what was going on. As it was, we went on for six months, with David feeling guilty, wanting to tell Miles, weeping round the place, wanting me to get a divorce and marry him, and writing bad poems about it all the time. It was perfect hell for me, I can tell you. I was almost glad when the balloon went up one day, when Miles came home and found us together. There was the most tremendous scene, with Miles and David shrieking at each other like actors in a Jacobean tragedy. I sat back and enjoyed it.”

“What happened then?”

“What would you expect? They went home and told their tales to Mamma. I’ve always thought that she settled it, like an umpire at cricket, you know. Miles and I parted, he took it very hard, and David wrote me reams of letters about how he loved me but we’d better not meet again. I answered one or two, but then I got fed up with them, and just about that time I got tied up with a BBC war correspondent, and – well, that was the end of it. Except that Miles got a divorce. He had plenty of grounds. David wasn’t named.”

My first reaction was excitement at this glimpse of a sexual bohemianism that I had only read about. Betty Urquhart suddenly appeared to me an entirely different person. What had been a rather old boyish-looking woman in dirty smock and trousers was transformed into an ideal image of sexual freedom. It was hard enough for me to imagine Miles, Hugh and David in the rôles she had allotted to them, but that the first woman who talked to me about having sexual relations with men should wear no make-up and have grubby hands seemed to me almost unbelievable. I drained my glass, and thoughtlessly accepted the brandy she offered. She said abruptly, “I expect you think I behaved badly to Miles.”