The Ghost Writer

by John Harwood

  "But this is beautiful, uncle. Why have you kept it locked away all these years?"

  "We must come to that soon. But look around first."

  The canvas beside it was very different. It showed a woodland path in dim, greenish moonlight, winding beneath tall, skeletal, overarching trees. About half-way along the path, a solitary figure, slightly hunched, was approaching. You could not quite decide whether it was man, woman, or child, or make out its features in the pale light, but its whole posture was expressive of profound unease, of someone trying to hurry without appearing to do so. Perhaps twenty yards further back, on the very edge of the path, something humped and hooded-or was it only a bush? or a small rocky outcrop about the height of a man?-seemed to be detaching itself from a thicket.

  "This is his too?"

  "I believe so."

  Moving around the room, Cordelia saw at least a dozen landscapes strongly reminiscent of the tranquil waterway she had so admired. These, even at a cursory inspection, were the work of a man fascinated by the play of sunlight on water in all its manifold forms, not only liquid, but ice and frost, vapour and mist, haze and fog and every variety of cloud, a man in pursuit of some celestial vision in which air and fire, light and water were as one. But interspersed amongst them were at lea$t as many pictures which could only be described as works of darkness: as melancholy, even malignant in feeling as the daylit scenes were joyous, a world of dark woods and crumbling, labyrinthine ruins, fraught with insidious menace.

  "Imogen told me that he painted those when his melancholia was at its blackest," said Theodore as she examined another moonlit scene. "He called them exorcisms."

  This one showed a series of high stone arches, some complete, some partly collapsed, each framed by the one in front, receding into the far distance over rubble-strewn ground. Shattered remnants of whatever they had once supported lay all around; the light gleaming on the debris had a greenish, phosphorescent tinge. Cordelia could not look at it without feeling that she was being drawn vertiginously into the picture. Again she found it difficult to believe that the canvas next to it, a study of sunlight on a fog-bank at dawn, had come from the same hand. Even in that grey, wintry light, the luminosity of the fog was extraordinary.

  "I don't understand," she said at last. "If Ruthven de Vere hated him-Henry St Clair-so much, why did he keep his things? And why leave them to us? I thought 'the contents of the room' would be something horrible, from the way you spoke."

  "So did I, my dear, when I read that will. It was written as if the bequest were a trap-or a curse-with the annuity as bait. That was why I went to see Mr Ridley, de Vere's solicitor, on Arthur's behalf.

  "By a fortunate coincidence-one of the few in this dark affair-Mr Ridley's father and mine had been friends; we had never met, but it gave me an opening. And I could tell from the outset that he hadn't liked de Vere, and was himself uneasy about the will.

  "It was a cold day, and he had a fire burning in the grate in his office. Rather than speak to me across his desk, he invited me to take a chair by the fireside, and very soon we were talking like old friends.

  "'I cant tell you what you most want to know,' he said, 'that is to say, the precise purpose behind the condition, because he didn't reveal it to me. But I'm afraid you're right in suspecting him of malign intent.'

  "Then he asked me what I had made of the report of the inquest. I said I didn't even know there'd been an inquest into de Vere's death. And after a little self-inquisition, he told me everything he knew."

  The mention of a fire had made Cordelia aware that she was shivering with cold. They locked up the room and hastened along the gloomy corridor to the sitting room at the other end, where the coals of an actual fire were still smouldering.

  "After the separation," Theodore continued, once they had got a good blaze going, "de Vere kept up his accustomed round of dinners and grand receptions. He let it be known that Imogen had suddenly resolved to make a religious retreat, and wanted no further contact with the world. The boy was being privately educated in the country. De Vere was even heard to say, 'She has taken the veil'-profoundly disturbing, even in retrospect; I was glad not to have known it at the time. No doubt his chivalrous behaviour was much admired.

  "So he went on for another decade or more, until people began to notice that he was not as charming or attentive as formerly; he seemed troubled, abstracted, preoccupied. It was rumoured around the City that de Vere was losing his grip; he was certainly losing money. By the time of Imogen's death-of which, according to Mr Ridley, he certainly knew-he had sold his interest in the bank, withdrawn entirely from society, and discharged all but three of his servants. His appearance, too, had altered profoundly. Once the epitome of elegance in all matters of dress and grooming, he now, in these last months of his life, received Mr Ridley at Belgrave Square in a crumpled suit, carpet slippers, and with a grease-stained dressing-gown draped about his shoulders. His white hair-which only recently had been iron-grey, and immaculately trimmed-was long and scanty; he had lost most of his teeth, and his face had fallen in upon itself. He was sixty-seven, and looked twenty years older.

  "I asked Mr Ridley if he thought de Vere had been of sound mind when the will was drawn.

  '"Sound,' I remember him saying-he made a steeple of his fingers, like this-sound, now that's a very broad church indeed. In the eyes of the law, yes: he knew the meanings of words; he knew exactly what he wanted, and he insisted on having it. Further than that I shouldn't like to go.'

  "There was malice in him, Mr Ridley told me, malice but also fear, a morbid pressure of anxiety as palpable as the ill-will. De Vere had his chair hard against a wall, opposite the door, and all the time they talked, his eyes were darting about the room. And that was the last Mr Ridley saw of him until-as the executor-he received a note from the attending doctor, saying that de Vere had died in a fall from an upstairs window, and inviting him to step round.

  "The room from which de Vere had fallen was the room containing everything that had once belonged to Henry St Clair.

  "As de Vere's valet-though he cant have had much to do in the way of valeting-would later tell the inquest, St Clair's possessions had remained undisturbed, so far as anyone knew, in the upstairs boxroom until about a year before, when he had happened to see Mr de Vere unlocking the door. From then on, his master had visited the room more and more often until he was spending hours there every day, or rather night, for it was at night that he mainly went there, always with the door locked. Mr de Vere had made it clear from the outset that he was not to be disturbed during these visits. As to why he spent so much time in the room, or what he did there, the valet-whose name was William Lambert-could not say. Sometimes when he passed the door he would hear bumping and scraping noises, as if things were being dragged about, but mostly there was no sound at all.

  "On the night of his death, de Vere had locked himself in the room at around ten o'clock. It was late in the autumn, a still, cold night. At about midnight William was dozing, fully clothed, in the attic on the next floor up-his master was in the habit of demanding refreshments in the small hours, and then sleeping very late-when he was woken by a splintering crash, followed by a thud in the area below. He ran downstairs and found Mr de Vere lying dead on the flagstones.

  "The doctor, suspecting foul play, had the police summoned and the boxroom door forced. But there was no one within, no possible means of escape, and no sign of a struggle beyond the shattered window through which Ruthven de Vere had made his last exit. Closer examination suggested that he had run full tilt at the closed window, and dived head-first through the glass.

  "According to the servants, he had not received a single visitor since the signing of the will. The maid and the housekeeper spent most of their time below stairs, and so the valet was the principal witness to the final weeks of de Vere's life. William told Mr Ridley privately that he had sometimes watched unobserved as his master approached the boxroom: it had seemed to him that de Vere was drawn to it
almost against his will, like a man defeated by his craving for drink, or a murderer compelled, as popular belief has it, to return again and again to the scene of his crime. This never came out at the inquest, at which the coroner, for reasons best known to himself, cut short the valets halting attempts to characterise de Vere's mental state, and prevailed upon the jury to bring in a finding of death by misadventure.

  "In Mr Ridley's view, the verdict should have been suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed. I pressed him further on the matter of de Vere's sanity at the time the will was drawn.

  "'If you're thinking the terms might be challenged on that ground,' he replied, 'I can't hold out much hope. The man's instructions were precise; he questioned me closely about the effect of the wording; there was nothing capricious or repugnant-that is to say, inconsistent at law-in the terms he required. Speaking privately, I am sure his intention was malign, but it was also founded upon a delusion: namely, that in bequeathing Mr St Clair's effects to your nephew, he was visiting some sort of evil upon him and his descendants. So there's really nothing to object to: the intent to harm was no doubt real enough, but the danger is almost certainly phantasmal.'

  "I asked why he had said almost certainly.

  '"Professional caution, I suppose. One never quite knows… there are more things… I suppose I had wondered, whether the man might have concealed something dangerous amongst St Clair's effects. What sort of danger, you ask? Well, to cite another authority, it would cease to be a danger if we knew the answer to that. Most improbable, of course. A thousand to one the man was simply deranged. Of course, if you were to discover anything dangerous amongst the contents of that room, it would be a nice point, at law, whether the trust could require it to be left in situ. But if I were your nephew, I should accept the bequest, take the income, lock everything away securely, and think no more about it.'

  "If we hadn't needed the money so badly," said Theodore, "your father would certainly have refused it. He loathed the idea of gratifying his own father, even in death, and insisted on having the entire income paid direct to me until you should reach the age of twenty-one; it is what we have lived on for the past seven years. I comforted myself with the thought that we were, in effect, recovering money that should have been Imogen's. But now that you are twenty-one, the income, and the responsibility, are yours alone."

  "I should, like things to go on just as they are," said Cordelia without hesitation. "Only… you haven't said why you brought out the portrait, and left all the other pictures shut away,"

  "Simply because I could not bear to think of her-her picture-locked away in the dark. As for the rest, it was your fathers preference."

  "And, did you do as the lawyer suggested, look to see if he-I suppose I must call him my grandfather-had hidden something dangerous in the room?"

  "Well, I watched while St Clair's belongings were brought up from the cart-your papa had taken you and your sister out for the day-and saw nothing sinister. But it was not my place to examine things closely."

  Cordelia stirred the fire reflectively.

  "I think I should like to bring some of the other pictures out," she said after a while. "Am I allowed to do that? Would the trust stop me? How would they know?"

  "The trust is three elderly gentlemen in the City, Mr Ridley's successor, a Mr Weatherburn, acts on their behalf; Mr Ridley retired soon after I met him. You are supposed to write to Mr Weatherburn once a year and assure him that the conditions have not been breached. He or his representative may appear at any time and demand to see that everything is in order. In fact we have been visited only twice: once soon after everything had arrived here, and again after I wrote to tell them of your father's death. Once you have made your own decision, I imagine they will send someone down: there are papers you will have to sign. You could ask whoever they send."

  "I have already decided, uncle; I will accept. But-just supposing I said I didn't want the money, what would happen to the pictures?"

  "Everything would be taken away, and stored by the trust until your eldest child reached the age of twenty-one; then the same offer would be made to him. If he declined, the entire contents of the room would be burnt to ashes-that's the actual phrase-under the supervision of the trust. As will happen in any case, when the line dies out or upon the death of your eldest child."

  "How horrible! That makes me even more determined to bring them-well, perhaps not the exorcisms, but all the others-into the light where people can admire them. And-what if Henry St Clair is still alive? How old would he be now?"

  "About sixty, I suppose."

  "Then-shouldn't we try to find out? I mean, they are his things, really; my grandfather stole them, just as he stole Imogen's money. Though of course, if we gave them back, we would lose the income, wouldn't we?"

  "Not only that, my dear. In law, those pictures are the property of the trust; supposing we found St Clair and returned them to him, we should all be charged with theft."

  "What an evil old man! I hate to think of him as my grandfather. I suppose that's how Papa felt, only worse… So there is nothing we can do, in the long run, to save the pictures from being burned."

  "I fear not, my dear."

  "And Beatrice?" said Cordelia after a pause. "How much should I tell her?"

  "That is for you to decide."

  "It will only make her dislike me more," said Cordelia despondently.

  "I know," replied Theodore with unusual candour, "but we must do the best we can. I will tell her, if you like, that the administration of the trust that supports us-if you are quite sure about that-"

  "Quite certain."

  "-has passed to you as the eldest. She need know no more than that, until you decide otherwise."

  "Thank you, uncle. Tell me-and please don't pretend-why do you think she dislikes me so?"

  "Envy, I fear-don't tell your aunt I said so-she envies you your good nature, your affectionate disposition, and-to be entirely frank-your having been your father's favourite."

  "I don't think my nature is as good as you make it out to be, uncle. But even if it were… it is not fair of her to blame me for that. I couldn't help being born first…"

  She broke off, hearing again the echo of her complaint-so long ago, it seemed-upon the landing. Uncle Theodore leaned over and caressed her shoulder, but otherwise made no more reply than the portrait, and they sat for a long time in silence, watching the coals pulse and flicker while darkness gathered at the window.

  PART 2

  SOME TWO MONTHS LATER, AT ABOUT three o'clock on a warm spring afternoon, Cordelia was sitting at her accustomed windowsill high above the lane, affecting to read but really watching out for a visitor. Though the lane was already in deep shadow, she herself was bathed in sunlight so dazzling she could scarcely see beyond the forecourt. But, as she was doubtless aware, it also enhanced the creamy whiteness of her dress, and the lustre of her thick fair hair, which she had washed only that morning. She had learned from Mr Weatherburn's clerk that the trust would be represented by young Mr Beauchamp', whom she hoped to charm into letting her bring out more of the pictures. Uncle Theodore had obligingly taken Aunt Una and Beatrice up to London for the day, and so she had the house entirely to herself.

  Beatrice had declined, predictably enough, to hear anything about the business from Cordelia: Uncle Theodore, she declared, had told her all she needed to know. She would not even enter the room in which 'Cordelia's paintings', as she insisted on calling them, were stored. (Aunt Una, too, had declined to view them, but only because of the stairs; she had recently moved her bedroom from the first to the ground floor.) Aside from the familiar pain of rejection, Cordelia had been forced to admit to herself that she was relieved; she could not help feeling proprietorial about the room. Unlocking the door and letting herself in when no one else was around still gave her a childish thrill of pleasure, like rediscovering a secret hiding-place. She felt perfectly at home there, especially in the mornings when the room was bright wi
th sunlight. Indeed the more time she spent in it, the harder it became to think of the contents as the property of the trust. She was eager to set out some of the furniture as it might have been thirty years ago, when her grandmother first visited Henry St Clair's studio, but thought she should at least ask before doing so. In the meantime she had cleaned the windows, and dusted and swept as thoroughly as she could without disturbing anything.

  A figure emerged from the shadows at the end of the lane and crunched across the gravel. A man-a young man-though he did not look in the least like a lawyer, for he wore a blue open-necked shirt and had a small canvas bag slung over his shoulder. But when he caught sight of her, he waved so cheerfully that she could not help waving back, or bounding down the four flights of stairs despite Aunt Una's warnings about loose carpets and broken necks, so that she opened the front door a little out of breath.

  His attire looked even more informal at close quarters. The blue shirt was distinctly faded; he had on brown corduroy trousers and battered brown walking-boots in need of polish. As well as the knapsack, he had a khaki greatcoat, with rows of brass buttons embossed with eagles, draped over his arm. He was slender, not much taller than Cordelia herself, with reddish-brown curly hair, a ruddy complexion, and a long, humorous face which lit up with an irresistible smile at the sight of her. She felt an immediate attraction, and a strange, slightly unnerving sense of familiarity; as if some inner voice was saying, I know you, even though she knew she had never seen him before.

  "Miss de Vere? I'm Harry Beauchamp, from Weatherburn and Hall."