The Lily Hand and Other Stories (20 page)

They found him in that coffin, lying composed and quiet, in evening dress as he'd come home from his last party. He'd been having trouble with his heart for some time, it turned out; this time he must have felt it coming, and lain down there to wait for it.

Round the window in Bond Street, the noise was like keening, only rather more ladylike. Sophistication will out. Believe it or not, that scene and the noise that went with it were quite something, even in a reporter's life. I began to think how little anybody really did know about Felipe, and to wonder what else there was.

That window of his, for instance. It was smallish, and just draped with soft silks, usually pastels, sometimes sudden dark silvery greens and almost-blacks. Nothing at all in it, ever, except the most beautiful small arrangements of flowers and the silver lettering of his personal sign along the foreground, with the sign itself just behind: ‘The Lily Hand'. Everybody knew it, it was unique, probably the most famous trade sign in Britain. A classic pair of hands folded together, dignified and sure. In white jade, made to his own drawings, so they said.

And I got to thinking, well, why? Was there a real woman in his life, a special woman, that he'd never been able to get out of his mind? Because the more I came back and looked at those hands, the more certain I was that nobody could have dreamed them up. They'd got the mark of portraiture all over them.

So who was she? There might be more of a story in that, if only we knew it. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to know.

My best line, I decided, was the smart, black-coat-and-skirted secretary. I hung around until the grief squad had finally dispersed; then I inveigled her out for a drink.

‘If you've worked for him for ten years,' I said, ‘you must know more about him than pretty well anyone else.'

‘That wouldn't be hard,' she said, ‘and you still wouldn't have much if I told you the lot.'

I said: ‘I suppose he
did
have parents?'

‘If he did, he took good care to shed them a long while ago, before he got into the big money. I came to him when he first opened his London salon. He'd already made his effort. Before he launched himself he had his personality all ready-tailored, and the day he took that place he put it on. I doubt if anyone's ever seen him naked since – even himself, in the bathroom mirror.'

‘And the sign?' I said. ‘Did he have that ready, too?'

‘No, he started work on the drawings for those hands during the first months after he knew he was a success. I know, I saw him at it in his office sometimes, there was no secret about it.'

‘Then he didn't have any model for them?'

She shook her head. ‘No, there was no mystery beauty sitting for him, if that's what you're thinking. I've often wondered myself.' She paused and I ordered another drink.

‘You know,' she said presently, ‘I used to wonder if it was just that that was wrong with him. Felipe made a point of being seen everywhere with beautiful women but none of them ever got past the reception rooms of his life, so to speak. You can take it from me he lived like a frigid old maid. That's the first thing about him that's always made me feel there was something odd in the whole setup. And then there's the little matter of his past, as you said. He buried it, all right. Nothing gets lost as completely as that just by accident. He came here to London when he was ready to go to the top, and whatever had stuck to him from before he brushed off then – once and for all. And then there's the third strange thing … You knew he had religion?'

‘I know he was supposed to have it – badly.'

‘He had it, all right – as bad as you'd need it. I give you my word there was nothing normal and rapturous about
his
religion. He took to it the way hypochondriacs take to patent medicines, or drowning men to driftwood. Because it was sanctuary – and there was something after him.'

‘Something out of that past he didn't have?' I said.

‘Something he'd done – to somebody, sometime, how should I know? Something he spent nine-tenths of his lifetime shoving underground, and one-tenth repenting. When he talked about guilt, he meant it.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa
—' She emptied her glass and put it down with a tiny crash on the tray.

‘And what do you deduce,' I asked, trying to look very different from the way she was making me feel, ‘from all that?'

‘I deduce the same as you do,' she said. ‘A woman. Back there, in the time we don't speak of any more, the time he wanted forgotten, a woman he played hell with and walked out on – how do I know what he did to her? Only it was something pretty final, to haunt him ever after. And if you ask me, it's because of her that he couldn't get away from female beauty, but had to make it his life work – and because of her he could never let himself go with a woman again. Her face kept getting in between, I suppose – and her hands, I saw you looking at the hands,' she said. ‘You were only thinking what I've thought many a time –
that was a real woman
.'

I covered the funeral. That was pretty much of a high-class female riot, too, in a quiet way. They were all the same kind, clients of his, groomed out of their lives. There wasn't one of them who looked as if she had a story. Then right at the end, when the crowd had gone, I saw one who didn't belong.

A little stooped, middle-aged body she was, provincial down to the toes, very neat in black and violet. She came toddling up humbly, and put a little bunch of violets at the foot of the grave, and stood looking at it for a few minutes and then she turned round and made off demurely.

I went after her, caught her up at the first crossing, and gave her the treatment. I told her I was a reporter but she wasn't in the least put out.

‘Oh, dear me, no,' she said, when I asked her, ‘I'm no relation of his. It's only that I had him as a lodger once, a long time ago, before he was such a great man. It's quite something to remember, for an old woman like me.'

I took her to tea, and pumped her like mad, and she liked it. She'd lost her husband a year ago, and come to settle with her sister in London, but before that she'd kept a boarding house in Liverpool, and twenty years ago and more she'd had a boy of eighteen staying with her there, a young man who worked for a chemist who had three shops in the town, and manufactured cosmetics in a small way. And that was Felipe! Only his name was just Phillips then – plain George Phillips.

She gave me the chemist's name, and I brooded about it for days, and then, after all, I took a trip to Liverpool. Because there he'd been at eighteen, it seemed, without any girl trouble, living in lodgings, which suggested he'd got only a loose sort of family at best; and then here he was, Felipe, with his name made, and the woman – yes, the undoubted woman – somewhere already in the past.

The chemist had handed over the business to his sons some years before, but the old man was still alive and messing about in the warehouses, getting in everybody's way and giving them half-senile hell. When I told him who I was and what I wanted, he wasn't impressed. The great Felipe meant nothing to him but a name, but he did like reminiscing about the old days. So he talked, and I gave the talk a push now and again in the direction I wanted to go, and picked out the bits I might want from the flood.

Luckily it was the kind of old-established shop that prides itself on keeping records back to the year dot. He turned up the books from way back, and there was the boy all right, straight from grammar school, George Phillips, and an address in a motley quarter down towards the docks; and then, not three months after he started work, a switch to the old lady's ultra-respectable boarding house. Yes, as soon as he felt secure he'd made a bolt from the low lands. He was on his way up already. Somewhere on his journey between Liverpool and Bond Street, there'd been a casualty. The longer I thought about it, the more sure I was that she'd been a fatal casualty. I kept seeing the hands, and they'd begun to look to me like a piece of exorcism that had gone wrong.

‘I remember him all right,' said the old man, pawing over his years and years of books with pleasure. ‘A bright lad he was, I'm not surprised to hear he got on. He meant to. Worked hard, and spent all his spare time trying out new experiments. I always thought he'd make a go of it.'

I said: ‘He didn't waste any time running after girls, then?'

‘He did not, and if they ran after him they never got far, I can tell you. No, if anything he seemed to fight shy of women. He looked at them, if they were worth it – but he kept his distance.'

‘You never met his family?' I asked.

‘No – never meddled with my employees unless they invited it. No, he did his work, that was all I asked of him. I always had the feeling he was pretty much of an orphan, but there might still be some remnants of 'em,' he said indifferently, ‘down there in the docks.' He gave me the name of the firm the boy had joined on leaving his employ, and I went off rather satisfied with myself, and as I'd got quite a lot of time to spare I went down to the docks and looked for the house.

It wasn't there any more. Neither was the street. There was nothing there but one of those blank spaces you find in so many towns since the war. If I hadn't still had over an hour to fill in before I could get a train, I probably wouldn't have troubled to take it any further, but as I had, I went to the municipal offices, and asked about the people who must have been moved from that road after the bomb fell – where they'd been housed, and whether anyone named Phillips had survived. It seemed there was an old widower of that name, who'd escaped because he happened to be a retired seaman, back on Mersey tugs for the duration, and away on duty when the street got flattened. They gave me an address for him, in a colony of prefabs out of the town, where all the survivors had been rehoused after the war. As far as they knew, this must be the Phillips I wanted.

I went there at once; it seemed a pity not to get a look at Felipe's father, or whatever he was to him, while I was here; after all this work that wasn't going to pay me, for all I could see, in anything but satisfied curiosity.

I found the right number and knocked on the door, sure he'd be out, and then there he was, staring at me across the step. Quite a presentable old chap, a regular marine type, neat as you like, clean-shaven, and the colour of teak, and almost as tough to look at. The little house shone behind him, real seaman-style. Also he had that self-sufficient look of a man who lives alone, and has done for years; but tempered by something in his eyes that made it a different kind of self-sufficiency from the kind a bachelor has.

I told him I was a nosey reporter who couldn't get somebody else's business out of his mind, and he didn't throw me out. I think a visitor was a luxury, in a small way, and he was willing to enjoy me. He let me come in and sit with him, and I offered him my cigarette case, but he liked his pipe better. It was a very modest household, but kept better than many I've been in.

I said: ‘Unless I'm making a mistake, your son died recently, and he was a great man in his way. That's what brought me here looking up his early days.' And I looked at him to see if he knew what I was talking about, because very likely pictures of Felipe didn't come his way very often, so the old man might easily have missed the connection. But he knew all right. He knew a lot of things he never talked about. He knew about the woman. I could tell by the way he was looking at me, without any surprise, because he'd been over all that ground himself before me, and locating the exact spot at which I'd arrived was child's play for him. And it was then I began to feel the ground giving under me, simply because he knew. How could he know? It couldn't have happened until long after George Phillips left here.

I talked a lot, because I had to have something to fill in the time until I got my bearings. He listened without saying anything, and when I dried up he knocked out his pipe, and said:

‘So you came looking for a romance. You won't find one. He was the only son we had, and we did our best for him. And when he was working, he suddenly turned round on us and said he was getting out – for good – and we let him. We could have stopped him for a few years, I suppose, but he was gone already at heart. He knew where he was going, and he meant getting there, and we were his handicaps, so he left us behind. You can't stop the heart. If that's the word for what he had. I shouldn't bother to look for any other story but that one; you'd be wasting your time.'

I didn't know what to say. He was doing the talking now. There wasn't much of it, I could feel the minutes slipping from under me, and soon I should be out on the doorstep. He looked at me, and said: ‘He might have lived me down, you see – but not his mother. She was the nearest perfect of any creature you're ever likely to know, and she loved him like women do love their only sons when they've lived their lives round them for eighteen years. And the minute he had a pay packet he could live on, he turned round and told her he was done with her, that she wasn't going to ruin his chances. And he went, and she let him, but she was never quite alive again. He broke her heart – did you know people still die of that? She didn't last quite a year after. The last letter I ever wrote him was to tell him she was dead, but he never answered it. He went right ahead, and became a great man, the same way many another has – over other people's faces.'

His mother! It hit me so hard I couldn't take it in all at once. It was something I'd never even thought of, and I wanted to ask him why, why, what sense does it make? But there are things even I can't do. All I could manage was to babble a sort of apology, and a promise to drop the whole thing, and then try to get myself out of there and leave him alone. I got on to my feet, and he didn't try to stop me, and all the time I knew I should be eaten alive by that unanswered why, as long as I lived. To know so much, and not know
why
!