Five Roundabouts to Heaven

by John Bingham

  All that stood between her and untold riches-computed at compounded interest, the figure ran into hundreds of millions-was the little matter of winning a lawsuit against her husband’s cousin. It was known as Aunt Rose’s Case, and was a subject of incessant discussion.

  It was a case with such tortuous ramifications that though I heard it explained a dozen times, though talk of it interrupted on countless occasions my evening games with Bartels, I never really got the hang of it.

  I only know it was full of legitimate and illegitimate births, of stolen birth certificates, pages torn out of church registers, wicked sisters, old family nurses who remembered this, and old chief clerks who remembered that; all of whom were prepared to go into the witness box and swear that this or that did or did not happen.

  True, one lawyer after another had turned the case down, or quarrelled with aunt Rose. This one had apparently been too weak; that one bribed by the opposition; a third intimidated; a fourth had had the audacity to demand some interim payment.

  Invariably, when I returned for the holidays, she had at last found the right man, a real fighter, honest and unafraid of anybody. By Jove, he was going to make them sit up! The writs were going out next week, if Counsel’s opinion were favourable! But it never was.

  Bartels’ aunt Rose was a short woman with fair hair, grey eyes, and a belligerent disposition, and prone to emphasize her words by pounding the table with her fist; in contrast, aunt Emily was tall, with a pale oval face, wide, dark, credulous eyes, and an earnest, anxious expression; she wore old-fashioned inexpensive jewellery, odd bits of lace and fur, and in her ears a pair of long black earrings.

  There was one snag about aunt Rose’s lawsuit: there was always a bit of money which had to be paid out for something or other.

  Uncle James had long since commuted his Army pension and had only a small family allowance left. So aunt Rose used to fall back upon aunt Emily for financial assistance.

  I have often wondered whether aunt Rose was a rogue or a misguided woman, and have come to the conclusion that if she twisted aunt Emily out of every penny she could get out of her, which she did, she probably thought that she was really acting in the true interests of everybody. (Even I myself, though no blood relation, was going to benefit financially in some obscure way no longer clear to me, once the great case was won.)

  Had she not a case which was just on the point of coming to court, which when won-and who could doubt it would be won! — would enable her to repay aunt Emily every penny she had had from her, including the years of unpaid rent, and enable everybody to buy rich estates in the country and live happily ever after?

  The links in the chain were complete, except for one or two paltry bits of evidence which would come to hand at any moment. Who, then, should more properly finance her for a further few months than aunt Emily, who stood to gain so much?

  Sometimes aunt Emily was a bit sticky about paying up. You could scarcely blame her. On such occasions the glass and the letters of the alphabet would come out at aunt Rose’s suggestion.

  Everybody knew Bartels’ aunt Rose was psychic, because she said so herself, over and over again. Aunt Emily thought that she, too, was psychic, but she would admit in an awed tone that she was not nearly as psychic as aunt Rose.

  So in due course, if her sister was being difficult about money, aunt Rose would arrange the letters in a circle around the little, highly polished mahogany table, and place the glass in the middle, and they would both place the tips of their fingers lightly on the upturned glass.

  Thus they would sit in silence for a few moments; aunt Rose, untidily dressed, but intense and forceful; and aunt Emily dressed in her eternal bits and pieces, and black earrings, her cow-like eyes, utterly credulous, fixed watchfully on the glass.

  Fortunately the spirits never kept them waiting long, largely because they knew, no doubt, that aunt Rose had so much work to do on her case.

  I remember the last time I ever saw aunt Rose at work. It was a remarkably fine exhibition.

  Aunt Emily had said she had not a penny more to spare for the moment. Not a penny. So after a tactful interval aunt Rose suggested having a turn with the glass. Aunt Emily could never resist it, though she ought to have known by bitter experience exactly what was going to be the end of it.

  After the usual short wait, aunt Emily said, in her nervous way:

  “Is anybody there? Who is there?”

  For a second or two the glass remained immobile while aunt Emily stared raptly into space, her face twisted into the sort of welcoming smile which she imagined a spirit on a short visit to Bayswater might find reassuring. Then the tumbler began to move hesitatingly from letter to letter and spelt out: F-A-T-H-E-R.

  “It’s Father!” cried aunt Rose triumphantly. He was, I may add, a frequent astral caller at the Bayswater house.

  “Well, well,” said aunt Emily, trying to keep her voice normal, “what do you want, Father? Are you and Mother happy?”

  The glass, gaining confidence, moved quickly.

  “Y-U-S,” spelt out aunt Emily in a puzzled tone.

  “He means ‘Yes,’ ” whispered aunt Rose, quickly separating the U and the E a little more, and replacing her fingers on the glass.

  “B-U-T,” said Father, “I A-M,” and paused to think.

  “What are you, Father?” asked aunt Emily.

  “W-A-R-R-I-E-D.”

  “Warried?” Aunt Emily looked at aunt Rose.

  “Worried,” said aunt Rose. “Father’s worried. Why are you worried, Father?”

  At this stage, aunt Emily should have been the one to be worried, but she never was. She just rushed blindly on to her fate. The answer was always the same:

  “R-O-S-E’S C-A-S-E.”

  “Rose’s Case,” said aunt Rose, and gave her sister a significant look. It was too late for aunt Emily to back out now without gross disrespect to the dead.

  “H-E-L-P,” said Father succinctly, and added: “C-A-S-E W-I–L-L B-E W-O-N S-O-O-N.”

  “Isn’t that wonderful!” whispered aunt Rose. But that was not the end; the sting was in the tail, and the glass now moved quickly and surely.

  “M-O-N-E-Y N-E-E-D-E-D F-A-M-I–L-Y M-U-

  S-T S-T-A-N-D F-O-U-R S-Q-U-A-R-E T-O-G-E- T-H-E-R.”

  “How shall we get the money, Father?” asked aunt Emily though she ought to have known. Father seemed to try tactfully to side-step this for a moment, as though to break it gently. He just said: “F-I-G-H-T S-H-O-U-L-D-E-R T-O S-H-O-U-L-

  D-E-R,” and was silent. It was as though he were brooding deeply over the whole problem.

  Then, apparently having made up his mind, he added starkly: “E-M-I–L-Y M-U-S-T S-E-L–L S-O-M-E S-H-A-R-E-S.” Perhaps because he saw the blank look on aunt Emily’s face he added: “I-F N-E-C-E-S-S-A-R-Y.”

  Just occasionally, my parents visited the house, and, once, a rather half-hearted attempt was even made to bounce some money out of my father, but being cynical he remained deaf to astral instructions and no further efforts were made.

  Although I never felt sorry for Bartels’ aunt Rose, with her buoyant optimism and continual preoccupation with her great case, I did feel a certain pity for uncle James, her husband, the man around whom the whole case revolved.

  He never struck me as having the air of a man who seriously considered himself to have been gravely wronged; indeed, he seemed to regard both the case and the astral messages with a certain good-humoured tolerance. But he was always very cagey when questioned as to his views on both subjects, probably because he held aunt Rose in some awe.

  He was a short, well-proportioned man dressed invariably in the style of a country gentleman who had come up to spend an hour or two at Tattersall’s.

  He wore loud check suits, usually grey, made of heavy cloth of such superb quality that though they had been made in the late Edwardian period, they still looked new; and on him, somehow, the style still looked smart. He always wore white socks, and, outside the house, grey sp
ats, a brown bowler hat, and carried yellow gloves; his shoes shone like a well-polished Sheraton table. He had fair, thinning hair, a square jaw and straight nose, and keen, merry blue eyes.

  One evening I saw uncle James’s car in front of the house; he was polishing the coachwork, whistling and hissing through his teeth like an ostler does when rubbing a horse down after a gallop. It was a very old car, but Bartels’ uncle kept it shining like a new pin.

  “Hello, uncle James,” I said. He looked up.

  “Hello, Peter!” He roared with laughter. He had the social habit common to his generation of going off into peals of loud laughter if he met somebody unexpectedly.

  “How are you?” he said in his loud, cheerful voice. “Phil’s out at the moment, but he’ll be back soon.”

  We chatted for a while and then made our way to the dreary expanse of coarse grass and dark green foliage behind the house, and walked up and down, discussing the sort of garden he would like to have, the vagaries of his car, and the scarcity of money, while a grimy-looking tabby cat sat on the wall dreaming of the infinite.

  “How’s the case?” I asked at length.

  “I believe Rose is up to some new dodge or other. This new lawyer fella was no good after all. Ah, well, it’s a poor heart that never rejoices,” he added.

  “It certainly is.”

  “I’d like to have a day out hunting before I die, I must say. I get tired of being the poor relation, Pete.”

  He paused to light his pipe, sucking in the smoke with short, vigorous puffs, so that in a few seconds there was a thick cloud of acrid blue smoke around him.

  It seemed odd that a man who had had charge of the destinies of a great regiment, who had been a local god to a thousand men, should be pacing up and down a seedy garden in Bayswater, dreaming of one last day out with the hounds before he died. He longed for a job, and it seemed to him bewildering that though he was over sixty, and untrained in anything except war, nobody would offer him one.

  To the end of his days he never gave up hope, either of a job or of a last day’s hunting. He got neither, of course.

  Uncle James helped daily with the housework, tended the garden, carried the coals, chopped wood, cleaned the shoes, and pressed his own clothes; he was always as immaculately clean as in the days when a batman had looked after him.

  When she occasionally grew fretful about handing out money in accordance with Father’s wishes from Beyond, aunt Emily would sometimes suggest that her sister’s one spare room could be used to house a rich lodger. Doubtless she envisaged some old recluse, full of years and money, who would eventually die and leave them his fortune. But aunt Rose said it would be “bad for James’s nerves,” not that he was ever known to suffer from any.

  Looking back now over the years, I see they were a cheerful, feckless couple who wasted their substance chasing a mirage; who fed well, and were never without a bottle of whisky in the house; who ran up bills which they could not pay, and believed that the world owed them a living.

  But they were sweethearts from the day they met until the day when death came to aunt Rose, and the dustman eventually carted away the vast accumulation of papers in the case that aunt Rose never won, and never could have won, had she lived to be a hundred.

  I smile when I think of them, Bartels’ aunt Rose, aunt Emily and uncle James; time has erased from the memory such blemishes of character as they may have had, and wiped out the recollections of the inevitable little acrimonious squabbles which arose between them.

  They were kind to Philip Bartels, they were genuinely fond of him, but that is as far as it went. Aunt Emily was too occupied with her stocks and shares and her tenants, and aunt Rose was too occupied fighting the legal scoundrel, and rogues who declined to work for her without payments to develop any real love of him.

  Even uncle James never really took to him, for Bartels had never hunted, never showed much interest in the Army as a career, and at that time did not know one end of a shotgun from another.

  That, then, was the boyhood background of the man the cool-brained Beatrice married, the girl whose arrival at the chateau was followed, appropriately, as it now seems, by one of the most violent thunderstorms in the history of the Sologne area.

  Few lives are completely tragic or even sombre. Bartels’ boyhood had its amusing side, even its ludicrous moments, but he was too young fully to appreciate them.

  In retrospect his youth seems, on the whole, not unpleasant. There have been many worse. But it did him no good, no good at all. Bartels needed more emotional warmth than he could ever find at 257 Melville Avenue; more, too, than Beatrice Wilson could ever give him, either before or after they were married.

  Chapter 4

  Brooding in the woods above the chateau where Bartels and I had been so happy, I was compelled to admit to myself that I had played my cards cleverly in the events which occurred all those years later.

  I concealed my part in the Bartels’ affair so well that I know for certain that on the February night when, for him, the world burst into flames and fell in ruins, the thoughts which he entertained for me were still those of a friend.

  His actions proved it.

  So much the better. I am glad to think that to the burden of his fear there was not added the bitterness of one who thinks he has been betrayed.

  I don’t say that the role I played was a noble one. It was not. Where things of the heart are concerned men mostly become selfish. But although my actions had been dictated by my own interests, I had for long been in doubt as to whether I need entirely reproach myself for the course which I took.

  I had argued that I had acted, at first, perfectly legitimately, and that by the time the moment for sacrifice had arrived, only a saint could have found the strength to make it.

  If you lead a normal life in a town such as London, if you can call town life normal, which I doubt, you can get away from your conscience to some extent. I could, anyway. There are plenty of distractions.

  But it was different when I was back there that evening.

  When you go back, as I did, and see the ghosts, and one ghost in particular, and see him as he was, and remember all that happened in later years, you come face to face with yourself.

  Arguments which have formerly held good begin to fall away. Doubts creep in, slimily, from behind, and you’ve got to round on them and grab them by the throat and throttle them, if you can, or they trample you down.

  So the truth begins to emerge.

  Chapter 5

  After I had left the chateau I went to Germany and Italy, to learn the languages of those countries. I worked in hotels at home and abroad, on the Continent and in America, for although my father had a comfortable position in mind for me when I knew the hotel business, he was determined that I should go through the mill first.

  I worked in every department which you can find in a big hotel, doing both manual work and office work, for my father, who had built his business the hard way, had no mind to have it wrecked some day by a dilettante.

  It was hard, but I enjoyed it, meeting many types of men, and almost as many different types of women. But I rarely stayed more than a few months in each place, and, since there is safety in numbers, the attractions of one girl had hardly begun to impress me before I left; and the charms of her successor, I must own, proved scarcely less acceptable.

  I had lost Ingrid, for reasons which it is unnecessary to outline, and thereafter I remained comparatively free.

  It was not so with Bartels.

  We wrote to each other fairly often, and in due course I learnt that he had gone into the wine trade, as envisaged, that after a period in a London office he had toured the well-known vineyards, and finally he had gone out on the road to sell his wares.

  It is not fair to mention here the name of the firm for which he worked, but it had a reasonable reputation, and with the small income he inherited from his parents, and what he made by way of commission, he had an adequate income, at the age of twenty
-six, upon which to marry.

  So he married. He married Beatrice Wilson, and invited me formally to the wedding, though I was at that time in America. And when I heard the news I wondered why Beatrice Wilson, that attractive, witty, and intelligent girl, should have married little frog-faced Bartels; even though he did have a certain charm, and a slow and melodious voice.

  I spent most of the war in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, but I was lucky, and returned to London in comparatively good health, in 1946. As my parents were at that time living in Bucking-hamshire, I sought and was fortunate enough to find a small modern furnished flat in Kensington High Street, and soon after my return, I telephoned Bartels at his office, not knowing whether he was dead or alive.

  There was no mistaking the slow, deep voice which answered the phone, and which contrasted so curiously with his slender frame. He sounded genuinely delighted to hear from me. I agreed to go to dinner with him and Beatrice the following night, and when we learnt that we were living within a few minutes’ walk of each other we were as pleased as Punch.

  It seemed that our old boyhood friendship would be renewed, and indeed for three years and more this proved to be the case. It was a happy time for me. I had work, friends, my darkroom in my flat, where I carried out photographic experiments.

  I was delighted to see that, despite certain misgivings I had had, to all outward appearances the marriage was a success.

  Beatrice was a splendid housewife. She was still extremely good-looking and seemed contented and happy. Her parents had bought for her a small cottage near Balcombe, in Sussex, and in the summer months they would go down there for long weekends. I often went with them.

  They had a pleasant circle of friends, both in London and in Sussex, and if I sometimes thought that Bartels was quieter than he used to be, I formed the opinion that this was because he had not been very well treated by his firm.

  It was, of course, the old story of the man who goes to the war-in his case, the African campaign, Italy, and Germany-and who returns to find that others have been promoted in his absence. They gave him his job back-on the road-but they pointed out, with a regret which might have been genuine, that in the present state of the wine trade they could do no more.