I had had no breakfast and little supper, so morale was low; but after a very edible lunch—though more to the taste of the surrounding dowagers than mine—and some tentative exploration of the wine list, I was ready for the test. Locking the remainder of my valuables in my suitcase, I took one of the gold jars and went round to a respectable pawnbroker in the Strand—the sort of place which a thief would avoid, and a salaried man, unused to pawnbrokers, would hope to find fatherly and understanding.
I was very manly, gruff and embarrassed. I told the fellow some yarn—which no doubt he had heard many times before—to the effect that I should certainly redeem the pledge in two days’ time, and meanwhile wanted all I could get on it. He spent some time in the back of the shop, telling me he had to satisfy himself that the article was solid gold. Possibly he was looking up the list of missing valuables and telephoning the police and my hotel. I tried to feel patient and look confident. The risk had to be taken. Eventually he came back and offered me forty pounds. I ran him up to fifty-five.
Now came my metamorphosis into a more solid citizen. I had no time for a tailor, so did the best I could with readymades. I was surprised that I could be fitted so well. My experience till then had been only of Cork Street, when I was rich, and slop shops, when I was destitute, with nothing in between. My aim was to appear as Peter Godolphin might—if he had just turned up from foreign parts and bought himself linen, shoes, a discreet tweed suit, bowler hat and umbrella to be going on with.
That was enough for the day, and there was not much left of the fifty-five pounds by the time I had chosen my restaurant and dined. I spent ten well-deserved hours in bed, dreaming of Cornelia so long as I was awake and of nothing at all when I slept.
My temporary borrowing of Peter Godolphin’s name was not wholly due to his retiring nature. When we were both about nineteen, Peter—even then a fanatic—was inspired by Voices to believe that by backing second favourites he could restore the family fortunes. He managed, at any rate, to restore his own by having his grandmother’s rope of pearls perfectly matched in artificial pearls, and selling the original. He had even supplied himself with a letter of authorization into which the buyer did not enquire too closely. That was the shop I needed. It specialized in the disposal of aristocratic valuables. The proprietor was not dishonest—he would have been rightly horrified at the suggestion—but he was so determined to preserve a reputation for extreme discretion that he never asked enough questions.
After refreshing my memory of Peter’s relations from Debrett, I packed in tissue paper the jewel case, the powder box and the remaining jar, and took them round to their new home. I really did not look at all like Peter—except that we were both brown-eyed and dark-haired—and I did not claim to be him. I let the proprietor do all the work.
When I had mysteriously mentioned a certain rope of pearls he fell on my neck, apologizing profusely for not recognizing me under so much sun-tan and such a beard. Sherry was produced in the office, dark-panelled and smelling of silver. Where had I been? South Africa. Was I home for good? For a year to see how I liked it. How was my Aunt Lucy? Moved from Cannes to Bordighera. Six hundred pounds I got from him. He showed some fatherly disapproval when I said I would prefer cash to a cheque, but the request was not unfamiliar to him. I promised to return the following week to allow him to inspect a diamond tiara and necklace which had been left to me by a second cousin.
With all this money in hand and the value of the diamonds to come, winter caused me no more anxiety. I could retire to the country under any name which pleased me and begin cautious negotiations for a false passport—or possibly a genuine one if I could get hold of a likely birth certificate and establish a new identity. But the sooner I was out of London, the better. Though Peter Godolphin enjoyed it, he felt no safer than Faiz Ullah.
There could be no moving, however, until Cornelia’s party was over. I bought the necessary outfit, allowing myself an avuncular and adoring smile at her naïveté. She must, I thought, have been unduly fascinated by society columns in the evening papers and failed to realize that occasions in October for white tie and tails are rare—if, that is, one has no connection with theatre or charity balls or government contractors.
On the Tuesday, our menu chosen and our table booked, I telephoned her. She sounded overjoyed to hear that I had safely disposed of my father’s property and that I was safe. She told me that she would stay at the Westminster Palace Hotel, but that I was not to call for her there. She insisted that she would meet me in the lounge of Claridge’s at eight.
The Westminster Palace would not have been my choice for her; but after all she had only the pay of a scientist, and it was cheap, comfortable and handy—one of those enormous, fairly modern joints where everything was slightly spurious, from the glittering cocktail bar, where there was little gin in the cocktails, to the restaurant, where a full complement of waiters served food of tea-shop standard. My instinct was strongly against it. I suspected that the Westminster Palace was just the place which would appeal to criminals in their brief periods of prosperity between one gaol sentence and the next. However, I had to go there. It was a move which Cornelia might or might not be expecting, but certainly would not resent.
On Wednesday afternoon I moved over to the Westminster Palace. I did not use the name of Peter Bowshot St John Godolphin or carry my gun-case, feeling that one would arouse suspicion, and the other alarm. So I became William Winthrop of Birmingham, by profession Foreign Representative. The hall porter and the reception clerk treated me, after the same searching look, with the same degree of polite contempt. My beard suggested that I had not even a decent wish to win friends and influence people; my choice of the Westminster Palace showed that I had learned nothing abroad.
It was not the right hour to reveal to Cornelia my presence under the same roof so I changed at leisure and went over to Claridge’s. A little after eight she irradiated the entrance to the lounge. That was why she had not wanted me to call for her! That was why she had demanded a white tie! Lady Lockinge’s tiara crowned her dark brown hair. Lady Lockinge’s diamonds hung lightly from her neck and flamed upon—there is no name for that decorative and sexless interval. They covered in barbaric abandon the whole of the space which, in a man, would be occupied by the V of his waistcoat.
Europe stared at her, and whispered that she was of course American. America goggled, and guessed that she was foreign royalty. Her dress was of white lace, matching the roughness of the diamonds and not, I think, outrageously expensive. The sable cape, however, which was slipped slightly back from her shoulders to reveal the necklace, must have made every woman feel that mink was a mere perquisite of film stars. Where she got it from I never knew and could not ask. I suspect, perhaps charitably, that it was a legacy from a wealthy great-aunt, refashioned by the best of furriers in exchange for half the skins.
I rose to meet her. She passed unconcernedly across the lounge with just the right mixture of modesty and of delight in her own appearance. I suddenly realized that my bored and unconventional little scientist had probably attended an excellent finishing school before she disappointed her mother by immuring herself in lecture-rooms and laboratories.
‘I couldn’t resist it,’ she said. ‘It’s unfair to ask a woman to handle such things and not wear them once.’
‘Wear them always,’ I begged her.
She accepted this politeness with a smile which I could translate as I liked.
‘What on earth do you suppose they think we are?’ she asked.
‘The sturdy Englishwoman to your left,’ I told her, ‘the one who has never been the mistress of anything but fox-hounds has just conjectured that we are South American millionaires.’
For myself, it was a good guess. I might well have been a jungly and conservative magnate from a remote mining town, taking his pesos through London on the way to spending them in Paris. Cornelia was an unlikely Latin. She was dark
enough and exquisitely groomed and of the right proportions; but the anemone face was too dreaming for vivacity, and such a texture of skin could never be found below the Tropic of Cancer.
She looked a little alarmed at mention of South America. She certainly could not afford to be caught hobnobbing with a spy, while covered with unaccountable diamonds.
‘My darling,’ I assured her, ‘is it conceivable that the traitor Howard-Wolferstan, whom everyone knows to be on the run, could possibly be in Claridge’s accompanied by such a woman as you?’
I hardly liked to tell her that she was in the same class as a gun-case, a sweep’s brushes and a portable easel, but I explained over our drinks some of the invaluable properties I had used in my escape, and let her draw the parallel.
So on to dinner. I look back, realizing that I was being tested and summed up. Indeed, I realized it at the time. Hadn’t she said that she wanted to know me better? But the laboratory in which she was pouring me from tube to tube was so full of warmth and rapture that food passed unnoticed and wine unsavoured. I am half ashamed, in fact, that the essential quality of the evening should be no different from that which would be felt by any imaginative boy entertaining his girl at a coffee stall.
We went on elsewhere to dance. It was ritual, like the preliminary bowing of birds. The question of where I was staying fitted harmoniously into caress and response. She made no comment upon my choice of the Westminster Palace beyond a liquefaction of white lace.
I had just enough sense left to see that it would be wiser, in case of accidents, not to enter the hotel together; so I dropped her outside the door and myself turned up ten minutes later. Her room was two floors above my own. I put on my dressing-gown and negotiated the stairs and passages with caution, having an instinctive feeling that a hotel with so mixed a complement of guests might be ultra-careful of respectability. I was quite right. The shoes which the occupants of her floor had put out for cleaning were all female. I doubt if any of their owners was ever so sure of her own perfection and her sense of timing as to allow herself to be surprised dressed only in a diamond necklace.
All innocently I asked the dark head on my shoulder:
‘When do I see you again?’
Not that it was time to go—only the intermediate moment when it is again possible to remember that a future exists.
‘My darling, be sensible!’ she answered. ‘It’s you we have to think of—how you are to escape and where you will be.’
I told her that I thanked God for my father, my arrest and my danger because all of them had led me to her. On such occasions it is hard for any man to know how far he is sincere or not. Her response was touching. She was a woman who was overwhelmed by the effect of her own beauty on a lover; it fascinated her as much as surrender itself.
‘Do you really love me, Claudio?’
I answered her incoherently. My beard, which had clumsily learned its part upon the haystack, could now communicate to me her delight like the whiskers of a cat. Again my departure was postponed.
‘Claudio, tell me the truth!’ she asked with a delicious ripple of laughter. ‘Shouldn’t we be fools to marry even if we could?’
The way she put it was perfection. Her voice formed an alliance between us two against a prosaic world which could never know such abandon. I suspect that she was near to a feminine counterpart of myself. It does not disturb me. I like to think that her tempestuous emotions were just as sincere as her self-interest, though she was much more able to disentangle them than I am.
‘Possibly,’ I answered.
‘And would you be miserable if I married Horace?’
Horace! I had never given him a thought. All I knew of him was that he was tactless, stolid and that her door in Moreton Manor had been left open for him to continue some talk or other.
‘You can’t!’ I protested.
‘He’ll make a very good husband for me.’
‘Are you sure?’ I asked.
‘That’s very ungallant, Claudio,’ she murmured and melted herself against me. ‘No, I am not sure.’
‘Then why marry him?’
‘Because he is a brilliant scientist and very lonely and he needs me.’
‘I shall go mad with jealousy,’ I cried, for some dramatic gesture was essential.
‘Darling,’ she answered, lifting the diamonds to my lips as if she wished me to leave a permanent kiss upon them, ‘I shall be with you every time I touch your present to me.’
It was impossible to tell her what I thought of her. And did I in fact think anything of the sort? Was it conceivable that she had not known I was offering a mere civility when I told her to wear the diamonds always? I am sure of nothing except that her intelligence was as exceptional as her beauty and that my whole character was transparent to her. Indeed I cannot avoid a feeling that I myself had created a pattern which compelled her to hand out poetic justice. Yet I do not think I can accuse myself of ever having exploited the opposite sex—with the possible exception of Pearl and Topaz.
I will not pretend I felt all this at the time. I was shocked and shattered, for after all I had built a whole imaginative future on those diamonds. But Cornelia had created for me a world which had paid me six hundred pounds, which could no longer go so far as hanging me if I were caught, which had granted to me, a helpless fugitive at the onset of winter, herself.
That, however, was of no importance one way or the other. For a descendant of Jim Tutty and of Spain there could be but one answer:
‘That’s all I ask of it,’ I said.
I suppose the tone of my reply was more or less what she wanted, and yet she vanished under her hair and showed unaccountable emotion. I held her close. I could not tell what was going on in myself, let alone in her. I asked her, without much hope of any reply, why she was crying.
‘Because I wish that you did love me,’ she said.
I think that was the most profoundly feminine remark that I have ever heard.
When at last I left her, it was just after six o’clock. A stupid hour. It was too late to slip unseen back to my room, and too early to mingle confidently in the comings and goings of a fully awake hotel. However, I managed to get clear of her floor without being spotted. That was essential. In the stuffy, threatening corridors of the hotel I realized more fully the risk she had taken for the sake of—well, whatever it was for the sake of. A dowry for Horace? Our helpless mutual attraction? But it is unprofitable now to speculate.
On the floor below there was more activity. A number of guests must have been catching an early train. Clean shoes were being replaced outside doors. Tea-trays were being delivered. My dislike of early morning tea was reinforced. I have never been able to understand why the English insist that a teapot, depressing symbol of the dullness of the day ahead, should be the first object to meet their waking eyes.
I passed the open door of a pantry and wished the two waiters, who had observed me, a cheerful and unconcerned good morning. Another man in the pantry, not himself a waiter and swilling the tea made for his betters, looked at me sharply and came out.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said. ‘Are you looking for your room?’
I answered that it was No. 117, and showed him the key. He accompanied me, making remarks about the weather. Evidently he was a sort of house detective. I explained that I had gone up a floor because I could not find the lavatory on my own. Weak, of course—but the excuse would have been accepted in a hotel less accustomed to questionable guests.
Outside my door, he asked:
‘You are Mr——?’
‘Winthrop.’
He drew a list from his pocket and checked the name.
‘If I might see your business card?’ he suggested.
‘I don’t think I have one with me.’
‘A letter will do. Anything just to establish that you are Mr Winthrop, sir,’ he s
aid, following me into my room.
The sleek, smooth little Westminster Palace floor-walker! Damn him, I had not a chance of getting away with any bluff at all. If I had polished their hygienic flooring with his detestable nose, he would still have been polite and persistent.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘This was a most unexpected visit, and I don’t believe I have anything whatever.’
‘Any name on your suitcase?’ he asked. ‘Clothes? Pyjamas?’
‘I am afraid I am not accustomed to have them marked.’
He could not resist his triumph. He had some reason. Where all the police of Great Britain had failed, he, the slimy little crook who had probably been eased out of Scotland Yard as unreliable, had succeeded.
‘Make a habit of dressing-gown and pyjamas, don’t you?’ he said.
He stepped smartly outside my room and locked it.
The game was up. He was so sure of my identity that he was ready to risk being sacked by the hotel. I had known all along that as soon as anyone admitted to himself the possibility that I might be Howard-Wolferstan, I was finished; but up to the present the world had been hypnotized by my stage properties. Here in the hotel I hadn’t any. Worse still, ever since the newspaper reports of my arrest in Moreton Manor, Howard-Wolferstan had been associated with dressing-gown and pyjamas. And to any Englishman who, with superior and uplifted eyebrow, coarsely ascribes my downfall to running after women I suggest that a man who cannot worship beauty at the expense of his own liberty is unworthy to enjoy either.
Fellow Passenger Page 22
