The Decayed Gentlewoman

by E. X. Ferrars

  “How do you manage these sales?” Colin went on. “Do you sell the things on a commission basis, or do you buy them yourselves and then sell them for whatever profit you can get?”

  “Sometimes one, sometimes the other,” Joe said. “Depends on the customer. I generally tell them it’s in their own interest to let us work on a commission basis, because you never can tell how the bidding’s going to go. Apart from shows like last Thursday, you always get the day when for some reason everyone in the place seems to have set their hearts, say, on some lousy old lot of blankets, and the price goes rocketing up above what you’d have to pay for them new. Or the ladies —it’s generally the ladies—just get out of hand. They’ve come there to buy something and they’re bloody well going to buy something, and they bid each other up and end by going home with something they’re never going to be able to use in a hundred years. But there you are, they’ve had their fun, which was what they really came for. Well, naturally, if we’ve bought the stuff outright, the original owner doesn’t get any benefit out of that sort of thing, it’s us who get it. And naturally, when we do buy the stuff ourselves, we aren’t going to gamble on luck like that. We make an offer for what we know we can sell the stuff for, minus a bit of profit.”

  Joe had talked himself out of his momentary nerviness. His feet were still.

  “All the same,” he went on, “you get the type from time to time who doesn’t want to be bothered, doesn’t want to wait, wants to be shot of the whole show, put a cheque in his pocket and push off. Or sometimes they’re suspicious of you, think you’ve got a deal on with someone who’s going to be there bidding and you aren’t going to push the prices up for them. Well, if that’s how they are, it’s all right with me. I tell ’em they’ll lose by it, and they do lose by it, but they know their own business best is what I think.”

  “And how did you handle Mrs. Sibbald’s property?” Colin asked.

  Joe Lake did not answer for a moment. Then he raised his voice and shouted, “Beryl!”

  She reappeared in the doorway, empty-handed this time, except for a cigarette which she was holding between two tobacco-stained fingers. She had short, broad work-roughened fingers, although everything else about her was delicately made.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Beryl, Mr. Lockie’s just been asking me how we handled the Sibbald stuff,” Joe said. “It was straight sale, wasn’t it? We bought the stuff.”

  “You know we did,” she answered.

  “Yes, well, that’s what I thought.”

  “It was your idea too, so far as I remember.”

  “I thought it was yours.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t want to handle it at all.”

  Joe sighed. “Of course, I see what you’re getting at, Mr. Lockie. You’re wondering who’s been the loser over this picture. And I suppose you can say Mr. Sibbald’s lost most of that hundred and ten pounds we got. All the same, I treated him right. I made him a fair offer, according to what I valued the stuff at myself, and the fact may be, he’s well out of things with that, if it turns out there’s going to be the smell of stolen property about it.”

  Beryl Lake looked quickly at Colin, lifting her eyebrows.

  “Mr. Lockie, you aren’t serious about that, are you?”

  It was Ginny who answered, “I’m serious, Beryl.”

  “Darling, we know it.” Beryl gave a dry laugh. “Mr. Lockie, Ginny’s told us how you lost a picture somewhere up in the Highlands and she’s told us she’s dead sure it’s the picture we sold here on Thursday. But will you tell me how that picture could possibly have got into Mrs. Sibbald’s attic? Joe’s been telling you about her, hasn’t he?”

  “Yes,” said Colin.

  “And about how she lived and what her house was like?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t have to believe him, if you don’t want to. You can go round in Oldersfield, asking anyone else the same things.”

  “I’m quite ready to believe him,” Colin said.

  “Then you can’t be taking Ginny seriously.”

  With a spark in her eyes, Ginny broke in, “But the fact is, green-faced Greer paid a hundred and ten pounds for a piece of junk out of Mrs. Sibbald’s attic, and Joe’s just told us he thinks Greer knew what he was doing.”

  Beryl spread her hands helplessly. “All right, darling, he did. And Joe and I often don’t. There’s nothing I’m readier to admit. I’m quite ready to grant there was one quite good thing in among all the rubbish in that house and that Joe and I missed it. We probably miss things every day of the week. But I don’t see how half-blind, half-dead, poor old Mrs. Sibbald got possession of a stolen painting.”

  “Nor do I, but I mean to find out,” Ginny said. “Because you see, I recognized the picture. I can’t explain that if you don’t understand it. It’s simply a fact. For four or five years of my childhood I used to spend nearly all my holidays in the house where that picture belonged. Colin and I used to play in the room where it hung. And actually it wasn’t just a picture to me. It was—almost a sort of person. When I was young enough, it used to give parties and ask the other pictures to tea.”

  “And that’s turned you into an art-expert?” There was a bite in Beryl’s voice that matched the hardness of her eyes. She turned back to Colin. “Mr. Lockie, Ginny’s very sweet but her imagination is just a bit uncontrolled. That’s your affair, however, and so’s the rest of the business and Joe and I don’t mind what you do about it. Go to Mr. Greer, if you want to, and if you can prove the picture’s the one you lost, you’ll be able to get it back. That’s the law, I believe. And you can tell him from us, if you like, that he can have his hundred and ten pounds back without our kicking about it.”

  “That’s right,” Joe said. “Can we say more than that? All we want is to keep out of trouble. Of course you realize that in a job like this we’re very vulnerable. We can’t always know where the stuff we handle really comes from. The most we can do is to be honest ourselves and hope to get by.”

  “We’re assuming,” Beryl added in a flat, deliberate tone, “you aren’t actually trying to make trouble for us—well, just for trouble’s sake.”

  Colin decided not to answer that. He stood up, took Ginny’s arm, thanked the two Lakes, and steered Ginny out.

  As they started back to the Green Tree Café, he asked, “Does your friend Beryl often say that sort of thing? That last remark practically accused us of trying to blackmail them.”

  Ginny laughed. “Oh, that’s just Beryl. It’s her way of talking. She’s a fairly hard life and it’s made her suspicious. Joe’s so easy-going, she has to be tough.”

  “Well, why did she so ostentatiously keep out of the discussion, and yet stay near enough to the door all the time to hear what was going on?”

  “Did she?” Ginny asked.

  “Yes, I could see that bright green she was wearing through the hinge of the door.”

  “Oh well, perhaps she likes Joe to think he’s handling things by himself. I expect she thinks it’s good for him. Good for his ego, you know. Good for his pride.”

  “I’ve a feeling the ego of your friend Joe can take care of itself.”

  Ginny gave a sigh. “Whenever people say, ‘your friend So-and-So,’ it’s always meant to be unpleasant. They always mean, ‘So-and-So, whom I can’t bear the sight of and whom I utterly despise you for liking.’ Well, I knew you wouldn’t like Joe. All the same, you’re wrong about him. He’s perfectly honest, even if he does say so himself. His good name means a lot to him.” They had reached the door of the café. “Let’s have some tea now, and decide what to do next.”

  “Is there anything to be done?”

  “Then you don’t believe I’m right about the picture. You don’t think it’s the same one.”

  “How could it be, Ginny?”

  “You could at least go to see Greer.” She pushed open the door. “Anyway, come in and let’s talk it over.”

  They had tea, as
they had had lunch, beside the electric fire in her mother’s basement room. There were more customers in the café than there had been at lunch time, and more tramping backwards and forwards over their heads. Ginny said that she would soon have to go and help as they were just reaching the busiest part of the day.

  “The market packs up in about half an hour,” she said, “and lots of them come in then for a high tea.” She poured out a cup of tea and pushed it towards Colin. “If you’d stay on till tomorrow, when I shan’t be so busy, I could go with you to see Greer. And then I think we ought to talk to the Sibbalds.”

  “The Sibbalds? In London?” Colin had been looking out of the barred window at the ankles of the people going by on the pavement above. He had been thinking still about the interview with the Lakes. He turned to look curiously at Ginny. “This whole affair seems to mean a great deal to you,” he said. “I don’t quite understand it.”

  Under his gaze, her thin cheeks reddened.

  “The question is, shall I come with you?” she asked.

  “Can you leave this place for the day?”

  “Oh yes. For one thing, Mother gets back tomorrow.”

  “Then come, if you want to.”

  “Only the trouble is,” she said, “you’ve begun to suspect that I’m getting you into something or other for some mysterious reason of my own—something you’re afraid you won’t like when you find out what it is.”

  “I hadn’t got as far as that, Ginny,” he said. “I’m simply puzzled.”

  “I know. And I realize there’s something awfully queer about the way the picture’s turned up where one of the very few people who could be counted on to recognize it was bound to see it. That is what you’ve been thinking about since we got back from the Lakes, isn’t it? You think it’s just too much of a coincidence to have happened quite by chance.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” he said, “coincidences happen. They’re always happening.”

  But later that evening, in the room that he had taken at the Black Swan, he pondered those words of Ginny’s. For of course he did not like coincidences. He thought them dangerous things, to which you should allow as little credit as possible, otherwise you could be sure that the very thing which you had dismissed as pure chance, pure accident, and altogether irrelevant, would turn out to be the one thing that would have made sense of the mess of data which you had been nearly killing yourself for weeks, or months, or years to interpret.

  Getting into bed, he turned out the light and lay gazing up at the faintly stirring pattern on the ceiling made by the shadow of some trees in the now quiet street. He frowned in the darkness. He thought of the strange intensity with which Ginny seemed to want him to believe, against all reason, that the picture in the Lakes’ saleroom had been the picture stolen from him in Argyll. He thought also of the curious matter of John Clitheroe.

  Ginny had said that it had been through a man called John Clitheroe, who was in the department of History, or Economics, or something like that at Edinburgh University, that she had known where to look for Colin when she wanted him. But, before going to bed, Colin had looked through the pages in his University Diary which gave the names and addresses of all the University staff, and had found no John Clitheroe there. Not in History, not in Economics, or anywhere else.

  So what was really behind it all? But sleep was creeping up on Colin. Images were becoming far clearer in his mind than ideas. A road seemed to stretch before him, a curving road, disappearing into a dark distance. He could hear sea-gulls crying. The last streaks of a sunset were shining in a sky of broken clouds. A blur of copper lay on the surface of a slate-grey sea, seen between hills covered with rusty bracken.

  He found himself getting out of his car. He was going towards a figure lying in the middle of the road. He was bending over him. As he did so, the man moved a little. His eyes opened and looked into Colin’s.

  As always happened when Colin found himself going through this scene on the edge of a dream, he saw the man’s face surprisingly clearly. It was a puffy face, with thick, dark eyebrows and eyes that gleamed with ugly brilliance between puckered lids. Colin always thought at that point that if he ever saw the man again, he would know him. But then he slid down into sleep, and in the morning, when he woke, he would recall hardly anything about the man who had lain there in wait for him…

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOUR

  « ^ »

  The next day was warmer, sunny and wind-still. Mixed with the protesting roar of the traffic trapped in the narrow main street, there was an exultant singing of birds.

  Colin arrived at the door of the Green Tree Café at ten o’clock and was greeted by Ginny, who was wearing a short sheepskin jacket, a tweed skirt, and a bright-red sweater. Her face was bright and eager, as if she were looking forward to what they had agreed to do.

  “We’ll borrow Mother’s car to go to Hopewood,” she said. “It’ll be nice on a morning like this. It’s a very pretty village and it’s got a nice pub. We might have lunch there.” Thinking that there was something very attractive about the thought of driving through Kentish lanes, where there would be catkins quivering in the hedges and celandines in the ditches, to have lunch with Ginny in some thatched and half-timbered Kentish pub, where the beer would be much better than it ever was in Scotland, Colin answered, “All right, let’s go. But let’s forget about Greer, Ginny. I’ve been thinking it over. It can’t be the same picture. Let’s forget the whole thing.”

  “Oh, we can’t do that,” she said. “One can’t just drop things in the middle.”

  “Sometimes it’s a pretty good idea,” Colin said, “when there’s no point in going on.”

  “No, I’ve seen much too much of that sort of thing.” The set of her jaw was stubborn as she led the way to a red Mini-Minor parked in a corner of the square.

  It took them about half an hour to reach Hopewood. The only Kentish lanes they drove along were those of a three-lane highway, busy with the week-end traffic from London. But the village was as pretty as Ginny had said. It was a cluster of weatherboarded cottages built around a triangular green, with a screen of great chestnuts protecting it from the main road and a duck-pond in one corner. The fat, sticky buds on the chestnuts were beginning to split open, showing the crumpled tufts of new leaves. Some pussy willow by the pond caught the light of the morning with a sheen of silver.

  “We’d have been sensible to ring up first in case the man’s away or refuses to see us,” Colin said, as Ginny stopped the car in front of a squat church that stood among yews in a trim churchyard.

  “I’ve done that already—at least, I got Joe to do it for me,” Ginny said. The warmth of the sun made her unbutton her sheepskin jacket. “I thought it would sound better coming from him than from either of us. He said Mr. Greer sounded a bit stiff, but told us to come along if we wanted to.”

  “You’d probably sound stiff too if you were rung up and told you’d been buying stolen property,” said Colin. “You realize we aren’t going to get anywhere with him, don’t you?”

  “He told Joe you could look at the picture, and that’s something, isn’t it? And, as a matter of fact, Joe didn’t say anything about its being stolen.” They had started to walk along the edge of the green, looking for Hopewood House. “He didn’t say anything either about giving Greer his money back, and for Joe’s sake, I don’t think we ought to mention it, except as a last resort.”

  “Meaning we try first to see if Greer will peacefully part with the thing for nothing?”

  Something in his voice made Ginny give him a quick glance. “Colin, you’d really much sooner not go ahead with this thing, wouldn’t you? Well, if you like, I’ll see him on my own. Only of course it won’t be the same thing. It’s your seeing the picture that’s important.”

  “No, it’s all right, Ginny, I’m coming,” Colin said. “But for some reason I wish you hadn’t brought Joe into it.”

  “But Mr. Greer knows him a little and it’ll save us
a lot of explaining. And you’re all wrong about Joe. I tell you, you can trust him.”

  “Somehow I can’t feel your confidence,” Colin answered with a dubious smile.

  “I’m afraid you aren’t a very trusting person, are you?” she said. “You know, a thing I generally dislike very much is making silly generalizations about nationality and race and so on—they’re usually about a hundred years out of date, if there was ever any truth in them at all—but you really do strike me as a fairly distinct specimen of the cautious Scot.”

  He burst out laughing. “Some time I’ll tell you how you strike me, Ginny!”

  “I think I know how I strike you,” she answered sombrely. “Me and my friend Joe. We needn’t go into it.”

  They had reached the far end of the green. A passing villager, pointing at a house, told them that that was where Mr. Greer lived. Built right at the edge of the road, without any garden surrounding it, it gave a curious impression of having turned its back on the village, perhaps in an ambition to be mistaken for a small castle or even a prison. For there was only one small door opening on to the road, and there were only two narrow windows at different heights to break the grey severity of the stone walls.

  “I’m glad he knows we’re coming,” Colin said. “I shouldn’t much care to have to take the place by storm.”

  “Perhaps there’s another way in round the other side,” said Ginny. “Let’s go and see. It would be a tactical error to arrive at the back door.”

  They went on along the road. A high wall, they found, was built straight out from the side of the house, and a little way on down the road there were wrought-iron gates. Through the gates they saw lawns of extreme neatness, dotted with uninteresting evergreens, and an impeccably kept gravel drive.

  On this side the house had a commonplace Victorian façade, with tall sash windows and a pompous doorway.

  “He’s got money,” Ginny said, as they started up the drive, “and he doesn’t like people.”