Nigel closed the book, put it back, and locked the drawer. A quarter of an hour later, when Stephen Protheroe returned from the conference, Nigel stared at him for a few moments, as if he could not recognise in this shrimp of a man the creator of that merciless, passionate masterpiece, Fire and Ash.
‘Anything wrong?’
‘We’ve got to have a talk,’ said Nigel. ‘About Paul Protheroe.’
Chapter 13
Transpose
STEPHEN PROTHEROE’S REACTION was not what Nigel might have expected. After regarding Nigel meditatively for a few seconds, he gave a little, sad, abstracted smile, and said:
‘Ah well, I suppose it had to come out.’
‘Paul was your son, by Millicent Miles.’
‘No, no, you’ve got it all wrong.’
‘But it’s registered at Somerset House—’
‘I know … Look here, let’s go and have something to eat. I can’t confess on an empty stomach.’ There was a glint of mischief in Stephen’s eyes. He refused Nigel’s invitation to a restaurant, saying that such places gave him claustrophobia. ‘Come back to my flat and I’ll run you up an omelette.’ Then, as Nigel hesitated, ‘I’m a tolerable plain cook. And if you don’t care to eat a man’s salt when you’re accusing him of a dark deed,’ added Stephen, with a grin, ‘you can damn’ well eat your omelette without salt.’
There was no refusing this. Stephen Protheroe appeared to have taken control. In the taxi, as though Nigel must be relieved of any embarrassment, Stephen gave a droll account of the travellers’ meeting; he showed no sign of awkwardness, let alone guilt; indeed, he was more vivacious than Nigel had ever known him—from relief, perhaps, that he would at last be unburdening himself of his secret.
Nevertheless, when they were in the neat little Holborn flat, Nigel did not let his host out of his sight. He had no intention of being caught napping. There were other weapons than razors, and poison was one of them, absurd as it seemed now to connect the amiable Stephen with such things. Nigel followed him into the kitchen, saying:
‘Do you mind? I’m everlastingly curious about the way other people live.’
Stephen Protheroe lived, it was at once plain, with remarkable efficiency. His kitchen was spotless, well equipped with labour-saving units, everything in punctilious order and ready to hand. Stephen himself set about preparing the meal with concentration that won Nigel’s approval. Breaking the eggs, he said over his shoulder:
‘You’ll find some wine in the cupboard by the door. Let’s have a bottle of hock. Run the cold tap over it for a bit, will you—not what the pundits would approve, but I haven’t an ice-bucket. Corkscrew in the left-hand drawer of the dresser.’
Nigel followed the instructions, still keeping his eye upon Stephen, who seemed much too absorbed in his work to notice that he was being watched.
‘I must say you’ve got a ‘high-class cuisine,’ Nigel remarked.
‘Well, I like looking after myself and I enjoy cooking. After Paul was killed, I was able to launch out and indulge myself a bit.’ The surprising little man turned round, handing Nigel his omelette on a plate. ‘This won’t poison you, at any rate. Go and eat it while it’s hot. Through there. You’ll find the table laid. I’ll bring in the wine and some bread and butter.’
The sitting-room too was scrupulously tidy. There was a place laid for one at the round table, and a vase of freesias on the mantelpiece; comfortable armchairs, long low bookshelves painted white, a reading stand, a crimson fitted carpet, a Matthew Smith blazing with colour over the fireplace.
Nigel strolled across and examined two photographs on the mantelpiece; a small boy riding a tricycle, and a young man in military uniform.
‘Yes, that’s Paul,’ said Stephen, who had entered silently. ‘Do come and eat your omelette. Unless you prefer it leathery.’
Meekly, Nigel sat down and began, while Stephen set a place for himself and poured out the wine.
‘Your health,’ said Stephen. ‘How’s the sinus trouble?’
‘Not much better, I’m afraid.’
‘Salt?’ Stephen’s voice, at its most resonant, made a challenge of the word; his fine eyes held Nigel’s.
‘Thank you, I will. Without prejudice.’
Not till they had eaten the second course—fresh fruit from a bowl of Italian pottery—was the subject in both their minds mentioned. Nigel had his own reasons for wanting Stephen to introduce it again; but Stephen seemed in no hurry to do so, preferring to talk about his flat, of which he was pleasantly proud—he was so comfortable here, he said, and enjoyed his own company so well, that he very seldom went away. ‘Solitude suits me. Solitude in a crowd,’ he added, with a gesture towards the enveloping city. ‘Are you married?’
‘I was. My wife is dead.’
‘I like women. But I don’t want them around all the time; they demand too much attention, and what’s worse, they pay one too much—you know, watching every expression that passes over one’s face—is he getting tired of me? Or is it just a twinge of his indigestion?’
Nigel laughed. ‘You never thought of marrying Millicent Miles then?’
‘Great Scot, no! Even at the time, she made me sick.’
‘At the time when she had your child?’
Stephen shot him a swift look, then motioned him to one of the armchairs. ‘Coffee for you?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Well, let’s get started.’ Stephen rubbed his hands briskly. ‘Tell me how you discovered about Paul.’
‘I got the impression early on that there was some longstanding relationship between you and Miss Miles. Then her autobiography spoke of a love-affair she’d had, at nineteen, with a man who subsequently deserted her.’
Stephen drew in a sharp breath, as if he had been stabbed, and his face contorted. ‘Deserted her!’ he exclaimed. ‘Never mind. Go on.’
‘She apparently told Ryle that she’d been seduced when a girl, and had a stillborn baby.’
Stephen looked puzzled. ‘But is there a reference in the autobiography to her having a child?’
‘Not exactly. Reading between the lines, though—’ Nigel broke off. This passage had to be handled with the utmost delicacy. If Stephen was the murderer, it was he who had substituted at the end of the chapter the page which stated that Millicent had not had a child by her early lover; and if this were so, Nigel’s disregarding the information given by this page would show Stephen that Nigel believed it to be a fake, and put him on his guard. On the other hand—still assuming that Stephen had committed the murder—he could not, without betraying himself, reveal his knowledge of the substituted page.
‘I was trying to find a motive for the stetting of the libellous passages in Time to Fight,’ Nigel resumed. ‘It had clearly been done in order to damage either the publishers or the author or General Blair-Chatterley. I couldn’t find any adequate reason for anyone wanting to damage General Thoresby or your firm, and I was totally bogged down. Then, after I read the autobiography, it occurred to me that, if Miss Miles did have a child in 1926, it would be twenty-one in 1947—the year of the massacre at the Ulombo barracks. I rang General Thoresby and asked him to look through the casualty list. One of the names on it was Paul Protheroe. Somerset House did the rest.’
‘I see. Yes.’ Stephen seemed to lapse into abstraction.
‘And today Miss Wenham told me that you’d had some sort of a breakdown in 1947,’ said Nigel gently. ‘The shock of your son’s death—’
‘Oh, but Paul wasn’t my son.’ Stephen’s face was averted.
Nigel stared at him. ‘What? But the records at Somerset House—’
‘Damn Somerset House!’ Stephen got to his feet, gazed for a moment at the photograph of the child on a tricycle, then went over and sat by the window. ‘It wasn’t my secret,’ he slowly began. ‘That’s why I’ve been keeping my mouth shut. And then, of course, I didn’t know what sort of trouble I might get into if it was found out that I’d made a false registration.’
/>
‘Of Paul’s birth?’
‘Yes. But I’d better tell you the story from the beginning. I did meet Millicent years ago, when she was seventeen or eighteen. Quite by chance. In a bookshop at Wimblesham. Is that referred to in her book?’
‘Yes. But she doesn’t give your name—just mentions a man who encouraged her in her literary efforts. She calls him “Rockingham”—a verbal association with another man she’d met about the same time.’
Stephen Protheroe leant back on the window-seat, relaxing a little. ‘She had talent then, of a sort. I was too young to realise that her heart was made of—of synthetic rubber. Well, I had a brother. Peter was two years younger than myself, and I’d always been protective and aunty-ish towards him. In 1925 he was at a theological college in Oxford, training for the ministry and I was struggling along with freelance literary journalism. During the vacations, Peter used to share my rooms in London. Millicent turned up one day to ask my advice about a story, and she met him there. That’s how it all started.’
‘You mean, Paul was your brother’s child?’
‘Exactly. Peter was a fine young chap. He had a very strong sense of vocation—and the passionate nature that so often goes with it. He was also, as far as women went, totally inexperienced, repressed, absurdly romantic—the ideal prey for a girl like Millicent. No doubt she had a tough struggle with his religious convictions—she’d have enjoyed that—but she succeeded in seducing him.’
The sad anger on Stephen’s face deepened, and he pounded the window-seat cushion with his fist.
‘You’ll see before long why I loathed that woman. Peter came back for the Easter vacation the next year in a terrible state. He hadn’t dared to write to me about it, but I soon got it out of him. Millicent was two months pregnant, and threatening to expose him to his college authorities.’
‘If he didn’t marry her?’
‘Worse. If he didn’t procure an abortion for her. He told me she’d been working on his nerves like a fiend. I could see it; he shuddered with disgust when he talked about her. But the practical problem seemed insoluble. Exposure would mean the end of his career, his vocation. Naturally, he would not entertain the idea of an abortion. Marriage, even if she could be brought to accept it, would mean tying himself for life to a woman whose nature he had plumbed deep enough already. And besides, he couldn’t begin to afford it financially; he was scraping through college on a legacy; our mother was then a widow, living on a small annuity.’
Lighting a cigarette, Stephen puffed at it jerkily as he went on.
‘Well, I hope I never have to live through anything like that April again. Peter was in a turmoil of panic, guilt and disgust. He’d fallen deeply in love with Millicent, only to discover that he’d fallen into a—a pit of—you don’t know how a woman like her can flay a decent man. Peter was near suicide. She’d turned his love into an abomination, and then flung it back in his face—that’s how he felt it.’
‘And that’s how you came to write Fire and Ash?’
Stephen’s head turned sharply towards Nigel. ‘Oh, you’ve read it? Yes. I started writing it then, to keep myself sane. Millicent never forgave me for that book—it penetrated even her thick hide.’
Comprehension dawned on Nigel’s face. ‘So she had a really strong motive for tampering with the proof copy of Time to Fight. I never thought your opposing the reprint of her novels was a strong enough one. She did it to get her own back for Fire and Ash. I suppose she thought you’d be bound to be held responsible for the stet marks. Or was she threatening to tell the partners that she had actually seen you doing it?’
‘I’ve no notion what was in her mind,’ replied Stephen with some impatience. ‘There’s no proof it was she who did the stetting, is there? If she did, you can dismiss any idea that she did it to expose Blair-Chatterley and avenge Paul, anyway.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she never cared a damn what happened to Paul,’ Stephen bitterly replied. ‘As far as she was concerned, Paul never existed. That was part of the bargain.’
‘The bargain?’
‘Yes. I went to see her. A fortnight after Peter had told me about it all. Thought I could plead with her, soften her somehow—I was nearly as ignorant and idealistic a young ass as Peter. I met her several times that month. Not at her home, of course; A.B.C. shops—that sort of place. It taught me a lot about women. She was only nineteen, but by God she knew all the tricks. Innocence betrayed, pathos, indignation, panic, evasiveness, the brave face—she tried everything. Well, I finally got her to realise that she could expect nothing more from Peter. I made her a proposition then—said I’d arrange for the child to be born up in the North, pay for everything, go up there with her, pretend to be her husband, and take the child off her hands. She made up some story for her parents that a London doctor had told her she’d got T.B. and a friend had offered to pay for treatment at a sanatorium. They seem to have accepted it. She was the most accomplished liar I’ve ever met, even at that age.’
Stephen Protheroe fell silent. The brooding look on his face, in profile against the window, reminded Nigel of that time, over a week ago, when he and Stephen had talked about disinterestedness. ‘Perhaps we have lost what the word means,’ he had said. Well, Stephen had done one purely disinterested action in his life. He began to say this now, but Stephen cut in harshly.
‘And a hell of a lot of use it was. It didn’t take the load off Peter’s conscience. He went into the missionary field and died of a tropical fever two years later in some god-forsaken place.’
‘And the boy? Paul? You looked after him?’
‘Nobody else was going to.’ Stephen went off at a tangent. ‘Millicent’s flair for evading responsibility was incredible. Of course, as I said, it was part of the bargain that I should take him off her hands. But she’d hardly given birth to him before she contrived somehow to dissociate herself from him entirely.’
‘Ah. The word Mrs. Blayne used.’
‘Who’s she?’
Nigel explained.
‘Did Millicent confide in her?’
‘Not about the baby. But she told me that, even as a girl, Millicent could dissociate herself from her own mistakes, etc.—pretend they’d never happened, and take herself in quite successfully.’
‘Yes. I remember, when she was suckling the child—she had to do it for a bit till I found a wet-nurse—she looked utterly detached from him, as though she was doing a favour to somebody else’s baby. It was quite absurd; I couldn’t help laughing once. She hated being laughed at. Humourless girl. When I told her why, she positively glared at me. “I never wanted this creature,” she said; “I never want to see or hear of it again, and I’m starting now.”’
‘And did she?’
‘Did she what?’
‘Ever see or hear of Paul again?’
‘No. She turned the whole episode into a bad dream. And I’d no desire to keep in touch with her.’
‘Not even when he was killed?’
‘No. Paul was told his mother had died in childbirth. He accepted me as his father.’
‘But when Miss Miles turned up here—?’
‘That was an exceedingly unpleasant reunion for us both.’
‘But surely you told her about Paul then?’
‘Oh, I see, yes. The subject did come up presently. She had the infernal nerve to ask me how my son was. My son! I told her he’d been killed in action ten years ago.’
‘How did she take that?’
Stephen Protheroe grimaced, gave one of his volcanic sniffs.
‘It was unbelievable. She went straight into a bereaved-mother routine. Why had I kept Paul from her? Why had I allowed him to get killed? I just saw red—went for her good and hard.’
‘That must have been the quarrel Jean heard. When Miss Miles called you “Goggles.” Which reminds me that Susan—’
‘You can understand why I didn’t tell you all this before. Paul wasn’t my secret alone.’
Ni
gel rose to look at the photograph again. ‘There’s a likeness to his mother.’
‘It was only physical, thank heaven.’
‘You became very fond of him?’
Stephen nodded. His face, from the noble brow to the small receding chin, looked suddenly smaller; the lips quivered for a moment. ‘After a bit I began to feel as if I was his father. He was a lovable little chap. Quiet and serious, like my brother, with plenty of fire behind it.’
Stephen went on to tell Nigel how the baby Paul had been entrusted to foster-parents—a Greengarth farmer and his wife, whom he himself had known from boyhood. He visited the farm from time to time, and later paid for the boy’s education at a small public school. It was to support Paul that he had taken the job with Wenham & Geraldine in 1930, for his freelance literary work was still not bringing in enough money. The farmer had offered later to adopt the boy; but Stephen felt it as a duty to his brother’s memory that Paul should be ‘kept in the family.’ Paul had shown, as he grew older, an unusual aptitude with animals, and Stephen had been saving up to buy him a small farm when he came out of the army. But he never came out alive; so the money was spent, some of it, on the creature comforts with which Stephen was now surrounded. And a pretty poor substitute they must be, thought Nigel, for that promising nephew and all he had meant to Stephen.
‘You realise,’ said Nigel, ‘that the police may inquire into all this? Is there anyone who can corroborate your story?’
The farmer and his wife were still alive. To protect his brother, Stephen had told them he was the child’s father and that its mother had left him shortly after the baby was born. How far they had believed this fiction, he never knew; but they agreed to tell Paul, when he asked, that his mother was dead, Nigel was welcome to their name and address. Other confirmation there could be none, for the whole affair had been conducted with the utmost possible secrecy. Stephen and Millicent had lived together in rooms at Greengarth for several months before the child was born, as man and wife. In view of Millicent’s condition, they occupied separate bedrooms. It had been a protracted and grisly farce, keeping up the pretence.
End of Chapter Page 17
