Cards of Identity

by Nigel Dennis

  The tourists study Doctor Shubunkin for some time. A few of them make notes, but as the duke has not given the object a definite name, they just put ‘Lord X?’ ‘Hon. Blank?’

  ‘As for the rest of the furniture,’ says the duke, ‘all the things on the left are Chippendale, all the things on the right Sheraton. The books are pretty much the usual books. That brass thing is for weighing letters – popular, long ago. I think that’s about all.

  ‘We now pass down the corridor and enter the dining-room. The table is laid for dinner: I am sorry you cannot see the family actually eating their food; it is a human spectacle. Each has his or her butter-ration in the little thing like an ash-tray in front of his place. The sugar is pooled. You will observe that the table is laid precisely as it always was through the centuries: the family take pride in cleaning the silver themselves, despite the fact that they have little use for it. At the other end of the room is the hatch. When the meal is over, one member of the family shoves the broken meats on this side of it and another member goes round behind and drags them through. We take turns with the washing-up. The ceiling of this room was painted by Pagannini in 1882 and has been the finest extant example of a Pagannini ceiling since 1947 – the date of the collapse of a rather better one in the next county. The Adam fireplace is blocked-up with newspaper: we prefer the Valor stove which you see standing in the grate. The tapestry on the left was chopped up and used for polishing for many years before we were told it was a work of art and had it sewn together again. It is known as “The Last Judgement of Paris by the Bordeaux Etalier”, and was presented to the family by a close friend of William Morris.’

  At this, two or three of the tourists look meaningfully at each other, consult their watches, and sniff. They have been, probably, to hundreds of other decrepit mansions and feel bilked if the antiquities are not up to the highest romantic standards. The duke, who is clearly a proud man and is doing all this only in order to make money, flushes slightly and leads the way out. One of the sniffing tourists is deaf and has to cup his ear when his companion whispers at the top of his voice: ‘I’m – saying – that – it – looks – mostly – junk – to – me … No – junk – jay – you – en – kay…. Herbert – asks – do – you – want – to – go – on? We – could – catch – the – five-fifteen.’ The other answers: ‘What are we doing this for, anyway? I thought we were leaving the house. It’s all quite over my head.’

  The duke does not seem to notice, as he leads the way up the grand stair, that there are now three less in the party. The footmen, too, have fallen behind: no doubt they are thoroughly disinfecting the dining-room. A car is heard starting-up in the drive.

  The duke is explaining the series of hunting paintings that climb the stairs. ‘The first shows the squire receiving an intimation from his keeper – the stocky, cringing one on the right – that there is game abroad. The second shows him having his boots pulled on, while his little son looks enviously at his father’s flint-lock and the spaniels leap with joy. The third shows him leaving the house, fully accoutred, while his wife waves a sympathetic lace hanky from the terrace. Now comes the fun! Picture Four shows the squire aiming at ahare, propped from behind by the faithful keeper. The hare is falling dead, as if in anticipation of the fatal shot. Actually, the poacher, whom you see behind that bush, has fired the shot in question, and Picture Five shows him scurrying off with his booty, pursued by the spaniels. Pictures Six, Seven, and Eight show the hunting of the poacher through various types of lovely countryside, with the squire on horseback and the keeper running beside. Picture Eight, entitled “Cornered At Last”, shows the poacher surrounded by spaniels in a gravel-pit; Nine, Ten, Eleven, and Twelve are the usual concluding ones, showing the felon brought before the magistrate, who is a friend of the squire’s, and being deported to Australia, while the squire reads a passage from the Bible to his children. That brings us to the top of the stairs.’

  Some of the tourists have weak hearts. They are still making a panting study of Pictures Six, Seven, and Eight when the duke mounts the last step and breezes off down the nearest corridor. It is doubtful if the stragglers will ever catch up.

  ‘One of the problems of mansion-showing,’ says the duke, pausing outside a room, ‘is to keep people like yourselves interested. Our habit here is to try and give you the past atmosphere of the house by the arrangement of descriptive tableaux. Here is one that will interest you. It is entitled “Discovered!”’

  He throws open the door and they crowd in withcuriosity. They see a huge four-poster bed with crimson velvet curtains: a man has parted these curtains and stands staring with a look of horror at the occupants of the bed. These are a very handsome young man, looking up in angry surprise, and a woman, her mouth open in a scream, who is about to duck under the bedclothes.

  ‘This,’ says the duke in a low voice, ‘represents the son of the house caught in commerce with a drab. He has picked her up at a tavern, pressed gold into her hand, and inveigled her up the back stairs. His uncle, who entered the room to ask the young man a question about lithography, has found himself faced by something of another stamp. This is the sort of thing that was always happening in old houses. As the estate is entailed, this objectionable young man is bound to inherit it. He will cut down all the trees to pay his debts and eventually will have to sell the whole place to a nouveau-riche – or, worse, marry the daughter of one. As his morals sink lower, income tax rises higher, reaching the standard nine-and-six just as he is reaching the sink of iniquity. You know the rest.’

  The tourists are impressed. It is clear – or seems to be clear – that the actors in the tableau are alive. One can see them breathing, and sometimes their muscles twitch. The uncle holding back the curtain has fits of trembling. On the other hand, these are precisely the signs of life that one would expect to see in a well-conducted hoax. On looking closer one begins to question the naturalness of the figures: the uncle’s skin is too deftly pock-marked and tinted to be real and a hip-flask is sticking out of his rear-pocket. The woman’s hair is not the colour that goes with her skin; the young man’s beauty is a bit put-on. Even the policeman, who took for granted that the figures were alive, now peers more closely, unwilling to look like a fool. After a while, the tourists begin to smile admiringly, and they nod, more or less agreed, when one of the party murmurs: ‘You can tell by the eyes. That blank look. And the eyelids and the mouth. Too mechanical. I’d guess it’s plastics, wax, and a few small air-pumps.’

  The duke smiles and says: ‘We have another for you in the next room.’ He goes out, but most of the tourists are too fascinated to follow. They seem to have forgotten that they are viewing a bequest to the National Trust and are obsessed with the more fundamental matter of distinguishing between appearance and reality. ‘Please do not touch the figures!’ the duke calls back.

  The next room is not so romantic. The curtains are drawn, everything is half-dark. Four tall candles burn at the corners of a high stately bed on which lies the well-dressed corpse of an old man with a white goatee. Artistically arranged on his breast are the contents of his pockets: a snuff box, a much-worn gold chain with an old gold watch at the end of it, a lucky iron nail, a card of membership in some club, a thin wallet smoothed by years of use, etc., etc.

  ‘Here,’ says the duke, ‘lies the old squire, his heart broken by the vices of the young heir. The old man asked only one thing of the boy – that he keep his whores where they belonged and not bring them into the house. This reasonable injunction was not, as we have seen, obeyed. What has killed the old man is not, really, grief, but his knowledge that a whore in the home is like a horse in Troy. Once friends of that sort get into the better bedrooms, the so-called vertical structure of society begins to teeter. Any ass can get a woman into a house; to get her out is a labour of Hercules. There is no surer sign of the degeneration and collapse of an imperial class than the need to bring the vice into the home instead of going out for it.’

  The tourists
are not very interested in the duke’s words because this tableau is rather a let-down, compared with the previous one. Any fool can see that the corpse on the bed is a dummy. A few, just to make sure, slip out of the room to take a comparative glance at the other figures. But the two or three who remain, and who are all that are left of the party, do not hide their contempt: they point to the false beard, made of an old whitewash brush, the pink ears of moulded wax, the clumsily-managed nose, the unnatural straightness and flatness of the legs, the tracery of small veins made by a feather dipped in blue ink. This is not what death looks like, nor is it what an undertaker’s job looks like. As the policeman says (to himself): ‘Some amateur done that.’

  Another car is heard in the drive. The duke says ‘Ts-ts!’, looks at his watch, and shoots down the corridor again. His voice is heard in the next room talking about gold-leaf mouldings. ‘I don’t think I’ll go on,’ says one of the three tourists sourly: ‘I expected aristocracy, not Madame Tussauds.’ ‘My little nipper could mould a better corpse,’ says a second. ‘When I pay good money,’ says the third, ‘I expect a natural response.’

  The policeman catches up with the duke, who has only just discovered that he has lost his audience. Rather angrily, he questions the policeman, who says frankly that the gentlemen, as far as he could tell, semeed to have lost interest in going on. With an incredulous look, the duke rushes back down the corridor and peers into the corpse’s room. Then he tries various doors and even looks behind a curtain. Just at that moment another car is heard starting and the duke lets out a howl of rage. Bellowing: ‘They haven’t paid!’ he runs to the grand stair like a madman.

  The policeman, left alone, throws an observant eye over the corridor. The carpeting is so frayed and dirty that his wife wouldn’t allow it even in an outhouse. The ceiling is filthy. Sympathetic as he is where rank, antiquity, and beauty are concerned, he does feel a certain contempt for the duke. Tableaux are all very well, but they are unable to disguise poverty.

  A few minutes pass, and the duke has not returned. The policeman begins to pace the corridor. He thinks he will have a private peep at the couple in the big bed; they will have a more fundamental interest without the duke present to insist on their social significance. But the coverings of the bed have been flung aside; the bending uncle is gone; the room is empty. The policeman is rather impressed: they were real, after all. He goes into the corpse’s room to look at the dummy again. But it has gone too. This means that it, too, was alive, or that it was a dummy which is taken away and cleaned after each exhibition. The former is the more likely theory.

  He does a little more pacing and then begins to feel uneasy. Something is wrong somewhere: what is it? He is a methodical man and has been well-trained in the art of asking the right question. He decides that his uneasiness is caused by the whole set-up of this place: it is not in step with life. It does not belong to the jet-age nor to antiquity; it falls short both of the National Trust and of the export drive. But it is not his business to question the structure of society in working-hours: he has questions to ask the duke and he sets off to find him.

  On the grand stair he sees an ancient countess complete with wimple. She is madly dusting the banister. He asks her where the duke is, and she answers: ‘In the kitchen.’ He does not press her because she seems a bit daft: she looks at him as if he were disguised for a tableau.

  He tries the library, but the intellectual ‘Hon. Blank’ has gone. He roams through various rooms, some of which seem not to have been occupied for years and years. He opens one or two doors and raises his eyebrows at what he sees. He opens the front door and stands on the balustraded terrace, but there are no visitors and all the cars have gone. So he goes down to the servants’ quarters and opens the kitchen door.

  The words on his lips are: ‘Where is the duke?’ He doesn’t speak to them because he sees that the two men in the kitchen are disguised as real dukes and the two women as duchesses. Apparently, they are a part of one of the ordinary duke’s tableaux. It all seems rather hopeless: too confused. He smiles and decides to break the ice with a little joke. ‘I suppose you’re the ones who take away the dummy,’ he says. ‘May I ask where the governor has got to?’

  The older of the two duchesses bursts into tears. One of the dukes pats her shoulder comfortingly. The younger duchess pays absolutely no attention. She is grasping the hand of the other duke, whose beard is all tangled in his ruff and whose eyes are horribly bloodshot. ‘Try, darling,’ she says, ‘try just once more.’

  He rolls his red eyes and his voice comes in a croak. He says at last. ‘It was a red football. Our team was called “The Merry Dodgers”.’

  ‘Try not to go backwards, darling,’ she says, pressing his hand more tightly, ‘that was before you went to school. Aren’t there any pictures in your mind?’

  He says, panting: ‘I can see knives and a huge building full of white people.’

  The other duke becomes very alert and says: ‘That sounds like a colonial memory, Miss Tray. Ask him if he was brought up in Africa.’

  ‘Were you born in India, darling?’ she asks.

  He shakes his head. The other duchess has a fresh flood of tears. ‘I think it’s too cruel!’ she cries. ‘It’s hurting his poor head. Why can’t he be a gardener?’

  ‘Is something wrong?’ asks the policeman, stepping up and looking closely at the bearded duke.

  ‘Not really,’ says the other duke. ‘We’re just trying to find out who he is.’

  ‘Who do you think he is?’ asks the policeman, becoming vexed. ‘Under his costume, d’you mean?’

  ‘Oh! that’s nothing!’ says the younger duchess. ‘We want to know who he was before he was a gardener.’

  Now, the policeman is vexed. He says sharply: ‘Is there a telephone in this house?’

  His words have an alarming effect. The bearded duke lets out a shriek and puts both hands to his ears. ‘Telephone!’ he screams: ‘day and night – ring – ring – ring! No peace, never, never!’

  ‘Darling, you’re getting warm!’ screams the younger duchess.

  ‘He needs a doctor,’ growls the policeman.

  At this, all four of them throw up their hands and shriek in unison: ‘A doctor!’ The younger duchess, beside herself, shakes the bearded duke and screams: ‘Darling, darling, say it, say it! Were you a doctor?’

  He goes limp and says with a terrible groan: ‘Yes. I was a doctor. I cannot deny it. Oh, my God!’

  The other three sink back with white faces. Then, all at once, an astonishing thing happens. The older duchess raises both fists in the air and screams: ‘Where’s my money? It was a joint account!’ She pauses an instant and screams: ‘My brother! Thief! Thief!’

  ‘I think, dear,’ says the non-bearded duke, ‘that your habit of blaming everything on me has gone too far this time.’

  She turns on him furiously. ‘Didn’t you go to the house?’ she demands. ‘Did you come back? If not, where did you go?’

  He replies slowly in a trembling voice: ‘I seem to think I went to sea.’

  The younger duchess corrects him. ‘You were at sea before you came to this house, Mr Jellicoe.’

  ‘I think not,’ he answers. ‘My sister forbade it. So this was my first chance.’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ says his sister. ‘We’ll go straight to the bank.’

  ‘What is all this about a bank?’ he asks.

  She looks at him with rage. But there is something innocent about his face. Despite his ridiculous costume and make-up, his appearance seems so tidy, so prim, so respectable. One can imagine him a parasite, but not a thief. He looks at his sister with eyes which seem to represent utterly his inmost self. She cannot resist them. Suddenly she throws both arms round his neck and sobs: ‘Oh, Henry, Henry! They told me you were dead.’

  ‘You are wetting my clothes, dear,’ he answers. ‘Why do you always believe what you are told? Why do you always think I have changed?’

  The younger duche
ss makes for the door; the policeman politely stops her. ‘Let me go, officer!’ she exclaims, ‘I must tell the doctor at once. I mean, the head doctor.’

  ‘She means the captain,’ says the man Henry, giving the policeman a significant wink.

  He cannot accept the wink. ‘Will you kindly keep your seats,’ he says: ‘I must ask you a few questions. First, are you the staff of this establishment?’

  It is a tactless beginning. Henry’s sister puffs up like a pigeon and says sharply: ‘Certainly not. I am a woman of independent means. So is my brother.’

  The bearded man rises and assumes a certain shaky dignity. ‘I think you know me, officer,’ he says, ‘I am a local doctor.’

  ‘I think not, sir,’ replies the policeman firmly.

  ‘Perhaps not in this beard,’ says the doctor: ‘permit me to remove it.’ He pulls, but the beard remains. It is not a false one at all. Irritated, he pulls at his ducal robe. This is certainly false; when it comes away, he is revealed in combinations and a dirty shirt.

  ‘And you’re a doctor, are you?’ asks the policeman scornfully. ‘Do you have an identity card?’

  ‘It is in my car, officer.’