In that moment Keate was beside him, the pair of them crowding the narrow door frame as Keate said, quietly, "Leave him, sir. I'll see to him. Go down, sir, I'll not be a moment." Adam turned and groped his way down the stairs to the front door, standing there with his back to the hall gulping the river breeze and telling himself that he was past this kind of thing, long done with meddling in other men's affairs, and yearned only to be safely back at Tryst, with Henrietta, his trees, and his flowers.
He was still standing there when Keate came down, saying, in the same steady voice, "Take the cab and get along home, sir. Leave everything to me. I'll inform the police and do what has to be done." When Adam made a gesture of protest, Keate insisted, "He was my friend, sir! The best a man ever had," and practically propelled Adam to the cab, calling to the driver, "Back to the hotel, but take it steady this time. The gentleman is in no hurry now."
But later, an hour or so later, Adam decided that Keate was wrong. He was in a hurry, a tearing desperate hurry to call George to account, and he only waited long enough to down a couple of stiff brandies before searching through his notebook for the number that butler had given him earlier in the day, a day that seemed to have stretched itself into a month and a month in which disaster piled on disaster in a way that was somehow new to him, and that after a lifetime of adventure. He went down to reception and saw the night manager, asking if he might use the inner office for a private telephone call, and when the young man had ushered him inside and offered, as was usual he supposed, to get the callee for him, he waved his hand, saying impatiently, "No… I'll get it. I know how to work the damned thing. Mr. Irons showed me this morning."
It took longer than he thought, a matter of ten minutes or so, and he was close to giving up when a woman's voice said over the wire, "Who is it? Who is calling?"
"Is that Lady Lockerbie, ma'am?"
"Yes it is." The voice was snappish and decisive, the voice of a woman who did not suffer fools gladly. "Who is it calling?"
He said, very meekly, "You won't know me, Your Ladyship, but I'm calling on very urgent business. This is Mr. Wesley Tybalt, yard manager of Swann-onWheels. I was given this number by Mr. George Swann and told to use it in emergencies. There has been an emergency, Your Ladyship. I'd be very obliged indeed if you could put me in touch with Mr. Swann."
He waited, counting the seconds and perhaps ten elapsed before she said, carefully, "What kind of emergency, Mr. Tybalt?" He said, eagerly, "A fire, Your Ladyship. I'm afraid I have some bad news for Mr. Swann. Half the yard has been burned down. The brigades are still there."
That rattled her a little. He heard the swift intake of breath but the voice was casual when she said, "I think I might be able to locate Mr. Swann for you. He is one of my house guests."
"You could reach him soon, Your Ladyship?"
"Possibly. I'll pass your message to him."
"I'm sorry, ma'am… at the risk of sounding impertinent it is essential I locate him as quickly as possible. I could wait while you enquired for him."
There was a longish pause. Finally she said, "Very well, Mr. Who-is-it?"
"Tybalt, ma'am."
"Tybalt."
She went away and he settled himself as comfortably as possible in a cane chair that was too deep and too small for his bulk and customary sitting posture. Minutes passed and he yawned, trying to keep awake by equating the faraway voice with that lovely imperious face of the horsewoman Gisela had shown him. Presently a polite male voice enquired, "Did you get your subscriber, sir?" and he said, "Yes, I'm waiting." Slowly, as minutes passed, the exhilaration the success of his ruse had injected into him waned, the mild glee insufficient to hold at bay the memory of Tybalt's baffled eyes and short legs dangling six inches from the closet floor. His head nodded and the confines of the uncomfortable chair enfolded him in a way that made him yearn for release. And presently, against all probability, he dozed.
Six
Return of Atlas
The garden-house, a pretty, timber-constructed building, set in a secluded part of the grounds of Sir James Lockerbie's country home, was his wife's favourite resort when she was temporarily disenchanted with cities. It was comfortably furnished and out of sight and sound of the big house, an ideal place to re-enact a kind of Marie Antoinette Arcadian fantasy, and Barbara Lockerbie was given to fantasies. Indeed, she would have argued that fantasy (judicially translated into fact whenever the opportunity offered) had been responsible for her spectacular climb from the daughter of an Irish emigrant, to the late Victorian equivalent of a Regency courtesan. George himself would have acknowledged this. In fact, every young spark and kept doxy in London's second-grade society acknowledged it, and it was generally assumed that even Sir James Lockerbie must have adjusted to it, for there were certain commercial advantages accruing to the husband of one of the most talked-of women in London. It kept the name of Lockerbie in the eye of men with money to burn, especially in a society where, despite so many impressive technical achievements, the earth-closet and the close stool were still much in use, where few country houses boasted a bathroom and the habit of daily bathing was still regarded as a mark of eccentricity.
Thus Sir James, who spent a great deal of his time travelling, and whose ambition it was to die the wealthiest man in Scotland, gave his wife a notoriously long leash and appeared to pay little heed to gossip concerning her virtue. She was gay, undeniably pretty, an excellent hostess when he had need of her services as such, and wore a romantic halo that went some way to encourage tolerance regarding her alleged shortcomings in other respects.
Her father, it was rumoured, was a Kerry landowner whose gambling debts had obliged him to live abroad where he subsequently married a Portuguese heiress. Her mother, some claimed, was a Polish ballet dancer, and had been a mistress of Czar Nicholas II, who had married her off to a British embassy official. She had, according to other random tongues, been born in Trieste, in an Indian garrison town, in the American West during the '49 gold rush, in Bergen, in Egypt, and in any number of places with exotic connotations, like Samarkand, Baghdad, and a village high in the Caucasus.
Not one word of these colourful stories was true, but this was no loss to romance. Real romance resided in her survival and promotion to a position where she could pick and choose wealthy lovers and receive them, more or less openly, at the Garden House, on a Hertfordshire estate of four hundred acres, or in her apartment in the Avenue Wagram, in Paris. Promiscuous she undeniably was, but she was not a fool, and London had never been the setting for a single indiscretion. She had more than enough common sense to realise that nobody moving in her circle credited the fact that anything important, including an act of infidelity, could occur outside London. Incidents rumoured to have taken place across the Channel, or in the British provinces, could therefore be dismissed as fiction.
As to the truth concerning her origin, perhaps she herself had never known it and had been obliged to invent a pedigree. In fact, she was the illegitimate daughter of a scullery-maid, employed on an absentee landlord's estate in County Mayo at the time of the Irish potato famine, and Bab Casey, as she began life, was the deferred price paid by a starving girl for one square meal a day. Her mother must have had a certain shrewdness, however, for she at least prevailed upon her lover to give her enough money to emigrate to Canada on one of the Cork coffin ships, and the scullery-maid must have been hardy, too, for she and her child survived when three-fifths of her fellow passengers died on voyage, or during the quarantine period in the St. Lawrence River, where they were buried in mass graves on an island before the survivors were set ashore at Montreal.
It was here, in the shantytown, that Barbara spent her brief childhood until she followed her mother's example and ensured her own survival by sailing away as the fifteen-year-old mistress of a German sea captain, later drowned off the Newfoundland Banks. She next turned up in Liverpool, as part of the travelling equipment of an animal trainer, who exhibited at one-night circus stands in the c
otton towns of the northwest. It was here, while assisting her employer in his alligator act, that she attracted the attention of a professional gambler, who took her to Glasgow, graveyard of many a gambler, and his too after Barbara moved from half-world into broad daylight by leaving him and marrying a Paisley architect of respectable family.
From then on her career was at least on record. She divorced her husband when she was twenty-three and married Sir James Lockerbie a few months after his wife had died of jaundice. Few women could have come this far without learning the basic rules of survival in a world shaped by men for men, and Barbara learned more than most. Her philosophy was simple, and based on the assumption that a busy man, obsessed with the business of coaxing a good living from a gullible public, may prattle a lot about domestic felicity but invariably ventures beyond the range of his own hearth in search of it during his brief intervals between stints of hard grind. Another thing she learned about men was that few of them ever matured, as a woman matures. From adolescence until senility the simple gratification of their senses was more important to them than all their wealth and status, and almost any man, however thrustful and ambitious, was a slave to his carnal appetites. It was therefore in this direction, and no other, that a personable woman should look for advancement. Had she been asked to summarise her conclusions in this field she would have said that a helpmate, however dutiful and accomplished, invariably lost the battle to a bedmate, providing, of course, that the bedmate knew her business as well as Barbara Lockerbie, alias Mrs. Creighton, alias Barbara Tracy, Barbara Villeneuve, Barbara Schmitt, and so on, all the way back to little Babs Casey, fighting to stay alive in a Canadian shantytown.
* * *
She had tested this theory on a string of lovers, some chosen for gain and lustre, others, as she passed the thirty mark, for diversion, and her involvement with George Swann, head of a national transport network, was proof that her theory was sound. George attracted her for a variety of reasons, chief among them being his indifference to competition. It was as though his headstart over every other haulier in the country equipped him with an ability to discount her other admirers, past and present, and this added up to a kind of amiable arrogance that she found very agreeable. George took what she had to offer boisterously and gratefully, but he left it at that, using her, she suspected, much as she had used a succession of men in her rise from the gutter. He never probed her past, or speculated on their future as lovers, seeing her, no doubt, as a prolonged holiday treat, and, God knows, the poor man badly needed a holiday when she ran across him at his ship launching last April. As far as she could decide he hadn't had one for years and was not even aware that he had earned one, and it might have been the memory of this that prompted her to lie about the telephone bell that broke in upon their idyll towards midnight the day of the regatta.
He was shaving now in the tiny dressing-room adjoining the bedroom and from the bed she could hear the rasp of razor on stiff bristles that required him, so he said, to shave night and morning. She felt very much at peace with the world after a tiring and somewhat boring day on the river, for the regatta and the sunshine had brought everybody out, and she had had her fill of chitter-chatter with local sportsmen and their frumpish wives. George, thank God, was not a sportsman, and had no interest in fashionable games and pastimes. He evidently enjoyed his work and manifold responsibilities. He must have done, in order to keep his nose to the grindstone ever since he took his father's place as head of the network, but he had no social ambition and this in itself was refreshing. He was, she would have said, a man who preferred to save his vitality for his network and her, and she was not disposed to let him go until she had exhausted all his possibilities.
She now lay spreadeagled on the silk coverlet of the bed, speculating whether the long day by the river had exhausted him as much as it had her, and how this was likely to affect his performance as a lover. She was clinically interested in such performances, and his, a little storming and clumsy at first, was improving rapidly under her tuition. She even thought he was aware of this and gave her the credit for it, and this was very exceptional in the male animal. She called, lazily, "Do you know why I'm always pleased to see you, George?"
He called back, "Because you don't have to flatter me."
"No," she said, "although that's a point. It's because you're the only man I know who doesn't decorate his face with a lot of bristly undergrowth."
He said, laughing, "Got it from the Gov'nor. Never seen him with a beard or whiskers."
He often mentioned his father, usually in terms that implied they got along much better than most reigning monarchs and their heirs apparent. "You're very fond of him, aren't you, George?"
"I've got a hell of a lot of respect for him."
"Does he keep a mistress somewhere?"
"He's turned seventy, woman."
"Did he ever keep one?"
"Not to my knowledge. Personally I doubt it. All his energy went into the network. He started from scratch."
He drifted in, dabbing his tanned, good-natured face with a towel, and contemplated her a moment before lowering himself on the edge of the bed. He was in no hurry. He never was nowadays, and this was something else she found rewarding about him.
"What's your mother like, George?"
"You're not interested in my mother."
"I'm interested in any woman whose husband reaches seventy without him getting goatish."
He said, thoughtfully, "Come to think of it, I daresay you're right. She probably had a good deal to do with it."
"How, George?"
"I always got the impression she wilts every time he comes into the room. She still does."
"That wouldn't account for it, would it?"
"It would in her case. She never troubled to conceal the fact and that has a steadying effect on a man."
"Tell me."
"It enlarges his domestic conscience. Makes him feel shabby when he does cut loose."
"Your wife thinks a deal of you. Do I bother your conscience?"
He said, quite seriously, "Yes, from time to time. But then I tell myself that a man must have fun sometimes. I had a good deal up to the age of twenty-one, but not much since."
"Where did you find your fun, George?"
"In Munich."
"Tell me about Munich."
He told her something of his time in Munich, where a statuesque German widow, almost old enough to be his mother, had seduced him before he was twenty. He still remembered Rosa Ledermann with great affection. It was she who had shaped his tastes in women. He had a preference for well-covered women, with generous hips and busts, and now that he looked at Barbara Lockerbie he realised that it was her figure that had attracted him, even though she had delicate features and a beautiful skin. He said, voicing his thoughts, "If I had met you a few years ago, I wouldn't be here dancing to your tune. You were skinnier then, or so I've heard. Is that so?"
"Yes, it is so," and she subjected him to a long, careful scrutiny, noting his jauntiness and the half-smile about his clean-shaven lips. She thought: He could keep me quiet for a year or more, I daresay. Maybe even longer, providing he didn't begin taking me for granted. Aloud she said, "Kiss me, George."
"I'll do more than that. Move over."
Her arms arched over his strong neck, pulling him down and pressing his mouth to hers with a kind of playful determination, as though willing him to take the initiative. And when her mouth opened he did, losing his jauntiness and letting his hand run as far as her thighs, but it was never her habit to yield to the first overtures. As his head came up she turned hers sideways, and he saw that she was laughing.
"What's the joke, Babs? Is it us? Saying good night all round and slipping away here?"
"No, not that."
"Something that came to mind unexpectedly?"
"That's very sharp of you, George. Sometimes you're a little too sharp. I was thinking of that poor little man on the other end of the telephone."
&nbs
p; "What little man? You said it was your town butler, ringing about tomorrow's enquiries."
"Well, it wasn't. That was a wicked lie."
"Why?"
"To keep you here. It was someone who works in your yard. A man called Tybalt."
He sat up, instantly attentive. "Wesley Tybalt? My yard manager?"
"Yes, and it was very naughty of you to give him this number to use in emergencies."
His face clouded now as he said, "Tybalt's had that number ever since our first time up here but he's never used it. What was the emergency?"
"I'll not tell you."
"You damned well will tell me!"
It was a long time since Barbara Lockerbie had felt menaced, and the experience was rare enough to excite her. She said, "Now listen here, Mr. Waggonmaster, you might be God Almighty in your network but here…" but he cut in, taking her by the shoulders in a grip that would leave bruises.
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