‘I take it you don’t think even Steen made it?’
‘I think she died a virgin, in the technical sense.’
(According to literary-clique gossip Dobbs’s own domestic arrangements had been far from simple. He had had a penchant for running off with his publishers’ wives just when his books were in the proof stage. He had told me that he found it difficult to identify with the intuitive element in his subjects’ work, but perhaps he was able to live imaginatively in Steen’s shoes—bedroom slippers—at this point.)
‘In that case, why did he leave her the money?’
‘I wish I knew.’
‘Trying to buy her favours?’
‘If so, my whole conception of the man is mistaken and I might as well scrap my book.’
‘Suppose he did, and she still wouldn’t have him, he might have been too proud or too careless to scrap the arrangement.’
‘It won’t wash. She wasn’t going to get the money till he died. And in any case, why do it like that? Why the secrecy?’
‘Her idea?’
‘You know her better than I do.’
‘Apparently not, to judge by what you’ve just told me. She seems to have rather liked secrets. Your idea is that Smith, the Captain, may have known something?’
‘Pure guesswork. I think he was an adventurer. I think Steen admired his outlook that the world was there for him to explore and exploit. Steen had been like that himself as a young man. I know that Smith left Paris in the early Twenties for the Far East, but there’s no reason why Steen shouldn’t have told him about his dealings with Mary Benison. One of my luckiest finds has been the diary of a young German with whom Steen was living in Trieste before the first war. Steen appears to have revealed his inmost thoughts to him, and to have expected a reciprocal openness, though he was notoriously reserved with the rest of the world.
‘But suppose Smith goes knocking about the world for twenty years and then gets sucked or driven home by the outbreak of war. What is he to do? He appears to have been penniless. How is he to earn or cadge a living? Who does he know that has money? Assume that he has retained some interest in the people he met when he was with Steen. He makes enquires about Benison—no problem, with anyone so notorious. He might go down to Devon to see how the land lay, be told about the school evacuated to Paddery, write and offer his services. It would solve the difficulty of earning a living while he considered how to exploit whatever it was he knew about Benison.’
‘The Man would have wanted references.’
‘I wouldn’t put Smith above forging them. Or he could explain that he had been abroad too long to be able to supply them. Tell me, Rogers, this moustache which so obsesses you—did it look like a recent growth?’
‘It could have been, I suppose. Why?’
‘Prevent Benison from recognising him.’
‘You seem to be doing my work for me.’
‘Not really. My primary interest is in Smith and his relationship with Steen, but as I happen to be working on the Benison papers at the moment and have just stumbled on this curious arrangement about the trust, I cannot but feel that Smith may also hold the clue to that. It is something that needs explanation, if only in a footnote.’
‘Couldn’t it be more straightforward? Suppose something happened between Smith and Steen …’
‘That’s what I think.’
‘Yes. Well, suppose you’re right, and it made Steen take a gloomy view of things all of a sudden. Mightn’t one of the results be that he decided it was time he made a will? He might have been genuinely fond of Molly, felt differently about her than his other women, known how feckless she was, set up this trust so that she’d always have a bit of income …’
‘No. It sounds quite reasonable, apart from the secrecy, but …’
‘That would be Molly’s idea. As I say, she seems to have liked secrets.’
‘What I am trying to tell you is that Steen had an almost mystical view of money as something evil. He was notoriously generous, but he used to say—quite genuinely, I believe—that he gave it away to get rid of it. The arrangements he made for his other mistresses were just enough to see that they didn’t starve. You could say they were wages for bringing up his children. But to allow somebody to live comfortably on unearned income, somebody he loved …’
‘Like old Pound batting on about usuria?’
‘Exactly. Steen had been bitten by that bug. You’ll just have to take it from me …’
‘OK.’
‘I can’t tell you how tantalising all this is. The Benison business is only a minor part. There’s a crucial gap to be filled. Smith, I’ve long believed, held the key, but he was lost beyond recall. And now you’ve brought him back from the dead but you can’t tell me anything about him. Everybody agrees that the gap is there …’
‘I thought Steen got dispirited because so many of his friends had been killed in the war and he came to the conclusion that there’d been no purpose in it.’
‘That was his own line. One theory is that it was the effects of his illness, though the first physical symptoms didn’t show up for another eighteen months. Then there are people like Baston who say that it was the failure of The Fanatics, and his own discovery that he was a phoney all along. And then there are the simple souls who say it was the result of his passion for Benison, though the next moment they’re talking about how notoriously life-enhancing she was for everyone who met her …’
‘I’d go along with that.’
‘You see? Whether or not Smith was the cause, he was the only person likely to have known the answer. If you could remember anything, the smallest hint or clue, to reinforce my hypothesis …’
‘Honestly, nothing I can remember offhand. It might come.’
Dobbs sighed, meaningfully, I thought.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I can see it must be very frustrating for you. But it does genuinely seem to be the case that the only way I can remember the sort of detail you’re after is to try and fetch the whole past back, lock, stock and barrel. That stuff I sent you, about meeting Molly in the chestnut grove—I don’t think I’d have remembered any of that if I hadn’t been writing about the deer. I’d even forgotten how creepy poor Daisy O’Connell seemed. I got quite used to her later on.’
‘I suppose so. How do you distinguish … Oh, forget it.’
‘You sound a bit beat up.’
‘I’m not too well, to be honest. Those tests turned out worse than I’d hoped. It looks like more bloody hospital.’
‘Sorry about that.’
‘I wanted to ask you about O’Connell anyway.’
‘Do you feel up to it now?’
‘How about you?’
‘I’m game, I suppose, but I think it would be a mistake. If you’re not in a positive hurry I’m much more likely to come up with the sort of thing you want by letting it float to the surface than by going dredging for it.’
‘If you say so.’
‘Shall we call it a day?’
‘Oh, one stupid little thing. “Wanted by the police of five countries.” In the Turner letter it’s only three.’
‘It was always five at Paddery. Perhaps he felt he’d had time to acquire a few more.’
‘Fact or fiction, do you think?’
‘We always assumed it was fiction.’
‘Good night.’
‘Good night.’
Inexplicably I had no headache next day, though I had lain awake the rest of the night brooding on the consequences of Dobbs’s call. What he had told me about the Captain had been a jolt, because I had cast the Captain both as chief suspect and detective/unraveller of my plot. The idea that he had already known Molly but did not wish to be recognised by her was highly interesting. Molly’s apparent involvement with my spy could be accounted for by grafting parts of Unity Mitford’s stor
y into her life. Suppose Captain Smith was working for British Intelligence, both before and during the war …
Nonsense, of course, even in the nonsense-world of spy-fiction, but it seemed to keep me happy, by hiding from me the knowledge that my book could no longer be written in that sort of shape at all. Though my plot might appear to be pulling itself together, Dobbs, by telling me what he had in that fatal conversation in the small hours, had introduced a disruptive factor into my imaginative processes, had slid the lens of hindsight between my eye and its object, throwing details into clearer focus but distorting shapes and relationships, and at the same time reflecting from the surface of the lens all sorts of matters which did not concern me, shadowy images of events that had happened on my side of the glass. Why, I actually knew the Dufy picture but hadn’t realised it was a portrait of Molly. It is always called simply ‘Nude on a Fishing-net’. I was able to refresh my memory because Dobbs sent me a postcard of it, saying, ‘Sorry to do that to you. Hope you got back to sleep. I did not. Back to hospital Thursday. Send me some more, if you have it, especially about the O’Connell woman. Wrote French prose poems about dead soldiers. Lived with MB. My interest is that S detested her—I’d like to know why.’
I took this as an excuse to delay immediate back-tracking to weave in missing plot elements and settled down to provide Dobbs with more ‘light hospital reading’.
7
Sundays were looked forward to, but then had to be got through. The apparent liberty of not having any classes or organised games could turn into a prison of boredom, especially on wet days. You got up half an hour later, and there were sausages for breakfast. At Brighton, in peacetime, it had been two sausages each, and if you ate quickly enough you got a third. At Paddery it was one, a blackish shell and porridgy innards scarcely flavoured with meat, but popular with the boys not for flavour or food-content but because of a kind of ritual agreement that sausages were a good thing.
After breakfast nobody (apart from one or two boys who might have a Sunday Drill) had anything compulsory to do till Church Parade, when the whole school assembled in front of the house and marched down East Drive to Paddery Combe Church, which lay just inside the park gates, close by the gardens. When they got back there was another hour of doing the same nothing-much (conkers, Monopoly, ping-pong, draughts or whatever the current craze dictated) until boys’ dinner (shepherd’s pie and cabbage, spotted dick with treacle). Then three-quarters of an hour writing home. School Walk, unless it was raining. Tea. Film show. Juniors to bed. Cocoa and biscuits for Seniors, carried into Big Space and consumed sitting round while The Man read aloud—usually Bulldog Drummond or the Saint, but sometimes Greenmantle or The Island of Sheep.
You were only allowed out on Visiting Days—one a term—and then only with your parents unless you had a letter from them saying you could go out with someone else. Paul had done nothing about Mad Molly’s invitation, despite having it repeated in a note next morning—green ink, huge letters like a child’s but more careless, thick, expensive paper. He had put it out of his mind, apart from the odd five minutes of vague fret, though he could easily have asked a duty master for advice, or gone to see The Man; but there was something about Mad Molly—her attitude, her practically saying that she expected him to break school rules for her sake—which made this seem impossibly difficult. Even by asking, he would have put himself, in the school’s eyes, on her side. So it was a shock, and then an extraordinary relief, when The Man stopped him as he was coming out from Sunday breakfast and said, ‘You haven’t come to me for permission to tea out today, Rogue.’
‘No, sir. I … I didn’t think I could go.’
‘Have you told Miss Benison?’
‘No, sir … I don’t know how, er, where she lives.’
‘You’d better go, Rogue. She tells me she knew your father very well. Write a note and give it to Miss Penoyre before Church Parade.’
In fact Miss Penoyre came and found Paul. She put her head round the door of Schol while Paul was still trying to write his note, having made two boss-shots at it. He jumped to his feet.
‘I’m looking for Rogers,’ she said.
It seemed a peculiar thing to say, as he was the only person in the room; the school ran on the principle that masters were all-seeing, and the idea that after a fortnight Miss Penoyre mightn’t know all the boys by name was difficult to accept for a moment.
‘That’s me,’ he said.
‘Oh, good. It’s my Aunt Molly—Miss Benison, you know. She’s got it into her head you’re coming to tea today.’
‘I’m just writing to say thank you.’
‘I’ll wait.’
She sat sideways into Twogood’s desk on the other side of the aisle, landing with a slight thump. She was rumoured to be rather clumsy, but Freshers, with their own teacher and their own bedtime and dorm and so on, lived rather separate from the rest of the school, so there was little evidence for this apart from her once having fallen flat on her face on her way into prayers. She was so young—no older than some of the boys’ big sisters—that Paul was actually aware of a difference between her and the real adults. And although she was not at all pretty, rather ugly if anything, with her round pale face and close-permed mousy hair, he felt an instinct to like her. She picked up one of Paul’s discarded notes and read it.
‘Oh, no,’ she said, almost whispering. ‘You must never try and impress Aunt Molly. She’ll tease you about it till you wish the floor would open.’
‘I didn’t …’
‘Do it her way, that’s safest. As if you were talking. Just “Thank you very much. I’d love to come.”’
‘She wants to know if I like crumpets.’
‘Do you?’
‘A bit.’
‘You don’t want to start her off on a crumpet-eating competition, you see.’
‘I suppose …’
‘If she does start something like that,’ said Miss Penoyre, frowning as she spoke, as though evolving a rule of life as much for her own use as for his, ‘you mustn’t wriggle out of it. She’ll find a way of punishing you if you don’t let her have her fun. The best thing is to try and win for a bit, and then let her beat you. But you mustn’t let her see you’re doing it on purpose. Get interrupted, or something. She’ll probably cheat anyway. She does that when she has gin-drinking races with the Exmouth men. Hers comes out of a bottle which is mostly water. Just enough gin to make a smell if they’re suspicious.’
Later in his life Paul used to look back on Molly’s Sunday teas as if they were somehow a continuum, a timeless and eventless golden scene belonging to that age in his life. His memory of them was similar to his memory of the deer-stalks, which also blended into each other and became a long, delightful, lonely moment of roaming among the tawny bracken and gold-leafed trees. In the case of the deer-stalks the difficulty of telling one apart from another was understandable, but Molly’s tea-parties must have been much more varied, because of the way Molly herself liked things to happen. She would probably have been bored stiff at Paul’s Ideal Tea, had one actually occurred.
It would be clear dusk, for instance, with the sun going down through a changing range of pinks and golds to the west, the light catching and glinting in the curved glass of the conservatory dome, flooding in from so low an angle that it lit the underside of some of the huge, ribbed palm leaves and made the hairy collars of the palm trunks glow with russet highlights, like the pelts of some rough animal. Perhaps there was only one real evening like that, what with the shortening days, and the abrupt end of summertime, when the clocks went back, but in the mind’s eye that magic light shone Sunday after Sunday on to the cosseted tropic foliage.
There would be people under the trees. The composition and activities of the tea-party must really have varied considerably, but in Paul’s mind-picture there would be four or five men, with Molly, Daisy and Annette, sitting in a rough circle of c
reaking wicker chairs round the big black stove which stood at the centre of the conservatory where the main paths crossed. The doors of the stove would be open, the banked coke glowing like the sunset in the panes overhead, Paul on his stool toasting crumpets for everyone, his cheeks seeming to crackle with the close heat. It gave him a reason for being there, the only child among the adults. Molly never suggested he might bring a friend, nor would he have wanted to. The obvious apparent attraction of those Sunday teas—that they were not like school and more like home, like part of the holidays—did not apply. Home was nothing like this. Home was all right, but different too, because Molly was different. She changed things. She filled the conservatory with a feeling—a whole mixture of feelings—possibilities of wildness and freedom, a sense that there were no rules that mattered except not pretending to be anything but what you were—the glint and sparkle of life like the glitter of sunset in the dome, and like that too the sense of seeing everything strange and sideways—but above all the knowledge that it was just a fluke you were here at all, you couldn’t have got here on purpose, not by asking, and now you had to make the most of it.
In the ideal picture Molly was vivid, but that didn’t mean the other people were complete blurs. Mr Wither, for instance, was quite clearly there, though in fact he stopped coming somewhere about the middle of the term. Annette had originally brought him so that he could walk back with Paul. (The Man had agreed surprisingly easily when Molly had said she wanted Paul there every Sunday, but had insisted that he mustn’t come back through the park alone.) Molly, though she shamelessly made use of Mr Wither’s car and extra petrol to get him to ferry her around, also teased him cruelly about being ordinary, trapping him into revelations about the ordinariness of his family and his past life, and inventing desperately ordinary futures for him. She wasn’t exactly snobbish about this, in any sense that Paul could grasp, but it was as if she had invented her own code of manners—not table-manners, but mind-manners—and poor Mr Wither kept getting it wrong and she wouldn’t tell him why. He grinned and wriggled when she teased him, looking at her with a kind of amazement that anyone could be like she was, until she became suddenly exasperated with him and cried out, ‘Oh, Christopher! You’re too nice to live!’
Hindsight Page 7
