Cards of Identity

by Nigel Dennis

  ‘Frankly,’ croaked Mr Paradise, missing the top step and all but falling on his face, ‘I have temporarily no horse.’

  ‘Only the crop is permanent,’ suggested the lady, smiling.

  ‘Exactly, madam,’ said Mr Paradise, ‘by force of habit, I suppose.’ Suddenly recovering his wits, he made a grimace and added: ‘With taxes what they are, my few poor steeds have had to seek other pastures.’

  ‘Doubtless you miss them dreadfully?’ she asked sympathetically.

  Their language, he felt, was becoming rather old-fashioned, so he replied more lightly: ‘Oh, I still manage to pick one up here and there,’ and proceeded to do as much for his legs.

  ‘You must tell us your name, sir,’ said the older man, examining Mr Paradise from head to foot.

  ‘Henry Paradise is my name. My sister and I have lived in the South Lodge here for many years.’

  ‘Ah! Then you knew my old aunt, old Miss Mallet?’

  ‘Very well indeed, sir. And her father before her.’

  ‘Well, well! You are virtually a member of the family, it seems. Are you also familiar with this house?’

  ‘I know it from top to bottom,’ said Mr Paradise, feeling jaunty again and giving his knee a slap with his crop. ‘I might say there is hardly a draught in it that has not played on my neck.’

  The man seemed gratified. He gave Mr Paradise another close examination, actually stepping aside, at one point, to see how Mr Paradise looked in silhouette. Then, he asked abruptly: ‘Do you always have a moustache?’

  ‘Really, Father!’ said the young man. ‘What a very rude question!’

  ‘Much too personal,’ said the lady; ‘you have not even introduced us.’

  Mr Paradise, delighted by their support, smiled tolerantly and said: ‘I really don’t mind the question. As to the moustache, I have had it for years, though, like most people with moustaches, I have shaved it off from time to time to see what’s underlying, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘I know exactly,’ said the gentleman: ‘that was just the reply I expected.’ Giving Mr Paradise a final glance over, he said to his companions: ‘Exactly the man we want, no?’

  They both nodded.

  ‘Would you by any chance,’ the gentleman continued, ‘have an hour or two to spare this morning?’

  ‘Is it quite fair to ask that?’ said the lady. ‘Mr Paradise probably has many things to do.’

  ‘Most inconsiderate, Father,’ said the young man, giving a sigh which suggested that he and the lady had suffered from this selfishness for many years. Mr Paradise suspected a not unpleasant pattern for his behaviour in the future: he would serve his new patron with smiling amiability and the other two would marvel at his unselfishness. ‘Whatever my business,’ he said, ‘I find it hard to refuse my help when it is asked.’

  At this all three of them nodded with such enthusiasm that Mr Paradise was very puzzled.

  ‘Well, that is admirable!’ said the gentleman in a loud voice, as if suddenly everything had been settled. ‘Now let me introduce us. I am Captain Mallet, nephew, as I mentioned, of the old Miss Mallet who was so dear a friend of yours. This is my son, Beaufort; and this is his wicked stepmother, my present wife. Where his real mother is, it would be safer not to inquire. Parenthood presents many complications nowadays and most of them are not fit for public discussion, even with an old friend of the family.’

  Mr Paradise thought this introduction had been very late in coming and very improperly performed – exactly what one expected, in fact, from a very rich person. ‘It is most courageous of you, Captain,’ he said, ‘to open up this fine old place again, with taxation what it is.’

  ‘Oh, you think so?’ said the captain, with surprise. ‘Personally, I cannot think of it as much of a place to live in – rather a den, I would call it, compared with some of our other places. We just happen to need it, at the moment. As to taxation, I never have anything to do with it at all. I prefer, in fact, never to have the subject mentioned by anyone in my hearing.’

  ‘Very rude, Father,’ said Beaufort with another exasperated sigh. ‘Can you never tell when people are trying to say a friendly thing?’

  ‘Mr Paradise has already been kind enough,’ said Mrs Mallet, ‘to ignore my husband’s recurrent rudeness.’

  Mr Paradise responded with a smile of ineffable servility. He saw it all so clearly now and knew he could slip into place like a king-pin.

  ‘Shall we go in?’ said the captain, crossly. He opened the big door, and then turned abruptly on Mr Paradise. ‘You have not become another person suddenly, have you?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps you would rather not come in at all? After all, you haven’t the slightest idea what sort of people we are or what you are in for.’

  Again Mr Paradise gave the gracious, accommodating smile which, though he had only used it twice before, seemed already to be an established part of his life. ‘I am at your service, Captain,’ he said.

  *

  Miss Paradise’s cuckoo-clock, gift of Alfred Truter, cuckooed one o’clock. As the jaded bird popped in again, Miss Paradise gave a groan of joy. Sitting down to the kitchen-table, which she had already furnished for the worst, she looked at her brother’s empty place and gratefully murmured: ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant’ – adding, as she returned his sausages to the larder: ‘I was an-hungered and ye took me in.’ He was splendid, really splendid, her brother was: who but he, with his sharp eyes, his trim moustache, his stiff little breeches, his robin-like brain and look could poke his nose in on people just rising from their first breakfast and be asked to lunch? When she imagined how furious she would be if someone’s brother tried to play such a trick on her; when she pictured the speed and hostility with which she would bundle the wretch out of doors again, she was thrilled by her Henry’s audacity and thanked Heaven for having given her such a brother. His absence would give her a chance to give the whole lodge a tremendous sweeping and dusting: it would delight him to see everything spick and span when he returned, probably a little tired. First meetings were always tiring for Henry: there were the words to be chosen with such tact, the visage to be torn from the shape it had kept from the last patron and rearranged to fit the new one, the whole self to be adapted to unfamiliar usage in the space of a mere morning. But he would manage it: when she next saw him he would be quite another person, and it would be her duty still to recognize as her brother a man who would in fact be someone quite different. She would know it was Henry because he would know her and would sit in his favourite chair unconscious of having changed, expecting the same things in the same order in the same surroundings.

  So she threw herself into the housework, faintly singing and talking to herself and trying to anticipate the story he would tell when he returned – always such a thrilling return, the first one, with the new yet always familiar tale issuing from the new face, accompanied by mannerisms and little gestures new-born that very day like lambs. At last, like any other housewife, she happened to glance at the bedroom clock – and lo and behold, it said five o’clock, and the evening fog was closing in again on the latticed windows. ‘Why, the naughty boy!’ she exclaimed with a gasp, ‘he has managed to stay for tea as well. Surely that’s a little risky on the first day?’

  She unwrapped her head and made tea. When the cuckoo sang six, she began to listen for her brother’s step, confident that she would know it no matter how much it might have altered since breakfast-time: some patrons were halt. But when it was eight o’clock and pitch dark, she began to worry. Surely no man in his right mind, she asked with a burst of practicalness, would keep Henry for dinner as well? On the other hand, one must never forget the extraordinarily temperamental behaviour of the rich, to say nothing of Henry’s amazing talent for distorting time to such a degree that one hardly knew whether it was past, present, or future – in particular, how he could prolong a conversation that was slipping away by hitching its tail to the head of a new topic and starting out afresh as if no change of subje
ct had occurred. And then there were his countless anecdotes, some of them quite technical and of real interest to men of affairs – terrifying, almost morbid tales of fortunes imperilled by inefficiency, taxation, wastage, recklessness. ‘I am sure,’ Henry had once confessed to her, ‘that they often have the feeling, once I have gone, that I stayed much too long; but I am equally sure that they feel that this was because they selfishly refused to let me go.’

  But when eleven p.m. came, and still no Henry, Miss Paradise’s feelings began slowly to change. She didn’t dare put on her coat and go up to the big house: she had done so once on a similar occasion and disturbed her brother at a crucial moment of the budding friendship: his rage had been terrible and he had said that her impatience had cost him weeks of effort. So now she went slowly to bed, sulky, but trying hard to remind herself that she had spent many a night alone when Henry was sitting up with a sick cow of Sir Malcolm’s or resolutely sticking at the bridge-table of the gayer General Pugh.

  But when she was half asleep her thoughts began to wander. Say something had happened to Henry; say he had been drowned in that flooded bomb crater in the middle of the park? I would never get over the shock, Miss Paradise said to herself, starting to cry; with Henry gone I would be another person, a sort of ghost. She cried until her grief had been eased, after which, like any bereaved person, she half-shelved the dead and half-opened his bank-account. Even for the best of legatees this is a painful moment of emotional readjustment: woe must still be conscientiously sounded with the left hand, while the right is shaping a melody quite out of keeping with moral harmony. But at least the moment of reading out the will is one of the few occasions when capital drops its striped trousers and reveals itself as none other than naked cash. Yet only for a few exciting minutes – for Miss Paradise found, marvellously enough, that no sooner had she transferred the dead Henry’s hard cash to her own account than it instantly resumed its trousers and became capital once more – godlike, interest-bearing capital of far greater stature than it had been prior to Henry’s death; exactly twice the size, in fact, since theirs had been a joint-account and death had thus no option but to be a tidy carver. Indeed, Miss Paradise, suddenly possessed of exactly twice the capital and exactly half the dependents on it, now began to take over the sole share of worrying about it – was it happy as it was; could it not be made happier by being shifted to more interesting quarters? She at last decided that she would take this question up with Henry, having quite forgotten by now that he was no longer the other half of the joint. When, abruptly, she realized what shocking tricks her mind had been playing, she was more than horrified, she was also confused and exhausted. For, in those exciting moments of put-and-take, she had so rearranged her world that not only had Henry’s identity been allowed to dwindle, but her own had proportionately doubled. Now, back in reality, she found it painful to divide her new self, swollen by its new capital, in two, and restore Henry to his rightful half. In consequence, though she struggled for many more minutes to listen for his dear, returning steps, she was harried by the suspicion that the ears with which she was listening were attached to a person who no longer existed, and that the sound for which they were listening had long since ceased to be.

  *

  Crunch, crunch – here he was! She jumped out of bed – what a sunny morning! how late she had slept, in her grief! – and hurried to the casement window. But there, below, was not Henry but their joint nephew, a character so undesirable that his uncle and aunt had had to insert special paragraphs into their wills excluding him from all post-mortem benefits. What distinguished him from them most sharply was his absolute disrespect for property and corresponding vacuum of interest in people who possessed it. Industry of any kind he abhorred; yet to say this was to depict his character too vigorously, since he was one for whom the abhorrence of anything would demand more energy than he had to give. Where his uncle and aunt, aided by the turns of two world wars, had raised themselves several notches in the social scale, the nephew, seemingly deliberately, had descended in inverse proportion, finding his friends and his livelihood in strata that made no demands on his lax character. His habitat was the fringe of the machine-shop and garage; his income came from a string of purely secondary transactions such as re-sales of old motor-cycles, spare parts, tyres, petrol, anything that was rationed or in short supply. And since the garage had now replaced the old market as the point where town and country met, Lolly Paradise’s dealings also included commodities which, in other days, would never have come together – disparate things like lengths of pipe, squares of turves, gravel, old batteries, spirits of salts, roofing-felt, dung, and margarine. In all such deals, Lolly was the go-between, the one who exacted the lowest price from the seller and the highest from the buyer, a method of business that respectable people such as his uncle and aunt believed to be a shameless innovation, unknown to society before the war. Lolly had heard of cheques, and even seen them; he had glimmerings of the great credit system on which usury and society are based, but he himself refused to fiddle with such matters, conducting all his transactions in currency notes and silver. The very thought of writing his name openly on a cheque, where all might read it, struck him as an act of folly that might be all right for some people (though he could hardly say why) but would be, for him, as senseless as leaving a record of all his transactions with the police and the town council.

  What also shocked his uncle and aunt was Lolly’s indifference – indeed, absolute ignorance – in matters of social class. Descriptive terms such as ‘gentry’, ‘middle-class’, ‘squire’ were, to him, the equivalent of ‘sith’ and ‘eftsoons’ to the student of purely contemporary literature. Lolly did cash business with anyone, and it no more occurred to him to consider their social status than to open a bank account or make an income-tax return.

  He stood, now, on the gravel, with his greasy shoes, his hollow trousers, his imitation leather jacket scored with scratches. ‘Hello, Auntie!’ he called in a high voice, smiling winsomely on one side of his face. ‘Nunky home?’

  ‘No,’ said Miss Paradise.

  ‘Thought he could help me.’

  ‘Why? He has never done so before.’

  Many nephews would have winced at this snub, but Lolly was unmarked by what he considered a simple statement of fact. ‘When’ll he be back, Auntie?’ he asked.

  ‘I have no idea. I am not one to pry.’

  ‘’Cause if it’s going to be long, I’d just as soon drop the whole deal,’ explained Lolly, his eyes glazing – and he spoke nothing but truth, for if any transaction threatened to be laborious, Lolly just discontinued it, without mentioning his withdrawal either to the prospective seller or the prospective buyer. ‘Where did he go?’ he asked, summing-up a faint revival of interest.

  ‘He is engaged at the Hall,’ retorted Miss Paradise with lordly triumph, quite forgetting, in her eagerness to give this snub, that Lolly would not understand its social implication at all. Indeed, he now looked curiously interested, as if she had told him that someone had dropped a load of old batteries in the park.

  ‘Up there?’ he asked with some surprise, heaving a wavering thumb in the general direction. ‘People moved in there? What’s it? School, now? Ministry?’

  ‘I am going out,’ replied Miss Paradise sharply, regretting her folly and withdrawing from her loop-hole to dress. ‘You may as well go too.’

  ‘You bet,’ he said affably. Then, after a pause, during which she heard his feet shuffling meditatively in the gravel (he always left a cleared circle in any space where he had stood), he called: ‘They got cars an’ things up there, Auntie, or just horses?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ cried Miss Paradise, pulling on one of Mrs Pugh’s old corsets.

  ‘Think you could ask Nunk for me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, all right.’ He added in a cheery, friendly tone: ‘Well, I’ll be going now, Auntie. I’ll drop in and see you again, if I have the time. You ain’t worried, are you, Aunt
ie?’

  ‘Do I sound worried?’ roared Miss Paradise from the back of her bedroom.

  ‘I thought you did. If you’re going to the village I’ll wait for you if you like. It’s a lovely day.’

  Miss Paradise made no answer. At last she heard Lolly move slowly off down the road, not exactly whistling but emitting feebly a tooth-strained string of sibilants. She went to the window and peeped out to make sure he would not hide behind a tree and see which way she went – an act of guile which would never have occurred to Lolly. But, from down the road, he saw her head immediately, gave her a friendly smile, and waved his hand. ‘Don’t worry, Auntie!’ he cried. ‘Only makes your hair grey.’

  A few minutes later Miss Paradise left by the back door and, staring like a Roundhead at any tree that might be harbouring Lolly, took the way across the park that was best hidden from the road. It brought her on to the main drive, and no sooner had she begun to follow this up to the Hall than she heard the roaring of an engine and a large sports car came racing up behind and stopped beside her. At the wheel was a handsome young man, excellently dressed but attractively tousled – all legs, langour, and devil-may-care, as a youth in a sports car should be. He gave Miss Paradise a delightful smile, superior in every way to one of Lolly’s clove-hitches, and cried with boyish eagerness:

  ‘Are you going up to the house? Can’t I take you the rest of the way? Such a fag.’

  ‘How very thoughtful of you,’ answered Miss Paradise. ‘Are you by any chance …? I suppose you are …’

  ‘The new people? Yes. Beaufort Mallet is my name.’

  ‘How nice to hear that old name again! Well, Mr Mallet, I am Miss Paradise.’

  ‘Paradise,’ he repeated gravely, turning his blue eyes into the sky and looking more attractive than ever. ‘I seem to recall the name, but I cannot remember in what connexion.’

  ‘Perhaps the old Miss Mallet who once lived here mentioned it. Or perhaps you saw my brother yesterday.’