A Change of Heir

by Michael Innes

  It is this, my dear Nicholas, that I have determined to call upon you to do. Although hale of Body and – I believe – of Mind, I am yet conscious that my Years require me to give serious Thought no less to Matters temporal than to Matters eternal. If I am to discharge the Duties of the Station to which it has pleased Providence to call me, I must give anxious Consideration to the Future of Bruton – and that alike in the Choice of its Proprietor and the Well-being and proper Control of its labouring Poor. Are you likely to be a just Repository of my Confidence in these Regards? It is in an Endeavour to determine this all-important Issue that I now make the following probationary Proposal.

  First, you shall present yourself to me at Bruton with all convenient Speed. Secondly, being domesticated here, you shall with all due Diligence endeavour to prove yourself worthy of my Trust. Thirdly, and in return, I shall make you an annual Allowance of Money – an Allowance which must be neither improperly lavish nor, on the other hand, improperly exiguous in the Light of our Consequence in the County. Five thousand Pounds suggests itself to me as a reasonable Figure. And fourthly, when your Competence and Probity shall have declared themselves to my Satisfaction, I will execute the requisite Instruments for establishing you as my sole Heir.

  Gadberry stopped reading, and for some moments kept silence. When at length he did speak, it appeared to be out of a sort of desperation.

  ‘But I couldn’t!’ he cried. ‘It’s inconceivable.’

  ‘What’s inconceivable?’

  ‘Living, in this awful abbey-place, with an old woman who talks like that.’

  ‘Perhaps she doesn’t talk quite as she writes. It’s a very formal letter, after all.’

  ‘Her proposal’s utter bosh. There’s no sense in it.’

  ‘On the contrary, it’s thoroughly businesslike. You turn up at Bruton on probation, as she says, and make do for a year on the £5,000. In fact it looks as if you – which means you and I, old chap – go on making do on that modest allowance even when she’s proceeded with what she calls her requisite instruments and has appointed you as her heir. Her doing that is the crucial point. She must be persuaded to sign on the dotted line pretty soon. It must be done before there’s any suspicion of her going gaga and incompetent. On the other hand, it would be hazardous to force the pace. You’ll have to use your discretion.’

  ‘She’ll have to make a new will?’

  ‘Oh, decidedly.’

  ‘Isn’t it an odd way to dispose of a great estate – leaving the bequeathing of it to so late a date? It just asks for enormous death duties, and so on.’

  ‘Perfectly true, George. I see that you already possess a very useful sense of these things. And it’s a pity, I agree. Still, there will be plenty to divide up, all the same. Now, just skim through the rest of the thing to yourself. And I’ll go and look up a train.’

  ‘You’ll do what?’ It was with difficulty that George Gadberry articulated this question. He was feeling suddenly breathless and a little sick.

  ‘Lord, yes. The plunge is the thing. Put it off for a week, and you’d simply funk it. Candidly, I’d do just that myself. But don’t give yourself time to think, and all will be well.’

  ‘What about those memoirs, or whatever they are, by your Great-uncle Magnus?’ Gadberry found himself clutching at this as at a straw. ‘Oughtn’t I to give myself a week or two to get them up?’

  ‘Good Lord, no! Incidentally, I’ve got them with me in one of my suitcases, and they’re yours from this moment. Just read through the first hundred pages or so on your way down, and start talking on the strength of them at once. You can imagine the sort of thing. “Do you remember, Aunt Prudence, how angry you were when I helped the red-haired stable boy to drown the kittens?” There will be lots of that sort. Maintain a pious and dutiful attitude towards the memory of old Magnus, and you’ll have her eating out of your hand.’

  Comberford drained the last drop of brandy in his glass, prudently pushed away the bottle, and got to his feet.

  ‘Nicholas, old boy,’ he said, ‘good luck!’

  PART TWO

  SOME PROBLEMS OF A COUNTRY GENTLEMAN

  7

  George Gadberry (as he had formerly been) climbed out of his bath. He remembered to do so with due care, so that this time he succeeded in not overturning it. It was that sort of bath – like a child’s portable paddling-pool, but with a sloping back at one end against which it was just possible to recline in a gingerly way for purposes of maximum luxury. It was, in fact, a hip-bath. Not many minutes ago, it had been filled, hot-water jug by hot-water jug, by two housemaids. Presently, when George had signified his vacating his dressing-room by ringing a bell, these handmaidens would return and empty it – just how, he had not yet discovered – before shoving it away in a cupboard. If the bath itself was not particularly enjoyable, these ancillary circumstances somehow were. There was something almost Homeric in being thus tended. George had made, indeed, no improper advances to these young persons, since he was still so eminently in the position of feeling that he just couldn’t be too careful. But he did beguile this dressing hour with a little harmless fantasy, vaguely feudal in suggestion. The younger of his two attendants was not ill-favoured. And he was a kind of lord of the manor, after all.

  George whistled as he dried himself – and did so with a cheerfulness not much diminished by the knowledge that he would never in actual fact get very far as a routine seducer of innocence. The excitements of love tended to assail him romantically, intermittently, and upon occasion catastrophically, rather than in a steady and businesslike fashion. Going after these maidens, he suspected, would turn out to be rather a shabby role, carrying an uncomfortable suggestion of a lack of fair play. Reflecting thus, he tossed away his enormous towel, stopped whistling, and frowned instead. These streaks of fastidiousness puzzled him. They certainly didn’t seem to go with his present enterprise, which could only be described as vastly unscrupulous. For he was now well launched on a criminal imposture. And the really odd thing was that he appeared – intermittently at least – to be enjoying it.

  A clean white shirt had been laid out on a chair, with a cuff link already inserted in one side of each cuff. He donned this and buttoned it up. He tied his black tie. Silk socks, dress trousers, pumps: on they all went. Such a ritual, followed seven nights a week, ought to have been extremely boring, but he had to confess to himself that so far he had found it quite fun. It wasn’t, indeed, entirely unvaried. On Sundays – and this was a Sunday – Aunt Prudence liked him to don the red velvet smoking jacket. He put it on now, and admired its silk facings in his looking-glass. Conceivably such things were no longer made. This one had belonged to Uncle Magnus, but it fitted him very well. He was pleasantly aware of something symbolical in his being enjoined to wear it. It was a sort of token that his acceptance at Bruton was already assured.

  Gadberry glanced at his watch, and saw that he had fifteen minutes to spare before going downstairs. So he had better put in a little time with the Memoirs. He still kept these locked in a suitcase, and when he consulted them it was always with an ear cocked for anybody approaching his room. The housemaids would make nothing of them, but it would be different with the butler, Boulter, or with Aunt Prudence’s companion, Miss Bostock. Miss Bostock, indeed, he had come to regard as the danger-point in his whole enterprise, for she was a well-established inmate of the Abbey whom Nicholas Comberford had failed to mention.

  Fortunately it was difficult to be surprised unawares in a building that went in so massively for stone-flagged and uncarpeted corridors. Only a ghost could bring off anything of the sort. There were several ghosts, it seemed, at Bruton Abbey. But none of them had put in an appearance yet. Perhaps their activities took place on a seasonal basis, as with so much else in this part of the world. If the affair really went on indefinitely – Gadberry thought – nothing was going to take more getting used to than the importance the calendar assumes in a rural environment. If you had grown up to regard winter simply a
s so many months in which you have to put shillings rather more frequently into the gas meter, or summer as indicating nothing more than a changed weight of underwear, then you found it quite a business to get on terms with the fact that the earth’s annual wobble on its axis (or whatever it was) really has significance for the life of man. It was having that now. Winter had arrived. The Abbey was very cold.

  Gadberry got out a volume of the Memoirs and went into his office. This was the name he had decided to give to his comfortably appointed, if not very adequately heated, sitting-room. For country gentlemen, it had appeared, always have offices. They keep accounts and things in a safe there. They interview tenants and give them whisky. If the place is very grand (and Bruton was very grand) they hold conferences with a perfect gentleman known as the Agent. Gadberry held such conferences with Mrs Minton’s Agent, a person of vaguely military provenance called Captain Fortescue. Fortescue and he had arrived, Gadberry felt, at a very good understanding. Major matters were settled Fortescue’s way, but with a great air of having been thought up by Gadberry. Minor matters were also settled Fortescue’s way, but this time with Fortescue being given high marks for vigilance and efficiency. It was a discreet and civilised arrangement, reflecting, Gadberry thought, credit on both of them. Certainly it kept Great-aunt Prudence happy, and this was clearly something laudable in itself. The old girl was a benefactor. It was their business to do her proud.

  Not – Gadberry reminded himself, as he settled down for a few minutes relaxation – that he and Fortescue were remotely in a conspiracy. Fortescue was entirely honest, and therefore potentially an enemy. All honest men were that. The thought was a little daunting. It made Gadberry feel lonely.

  He reached for a decanter, and poured himself a glass of sherry. The decanter was a beautiful affair of Waterford glass, and it had been given him by Aunt Prudence. There was a puzzle in this – a puzzle that had several times made him feel distinctly uneasy. Aunt Prudence was certainly not given to swimming in alk, and she appeared never to have heard of cocktails. But wine was served, if sparingly, at meals, and the old girl appeared to have no feelings whatever about one’s private habits in this regard. How could Comberford – the real Nicholas Comberford – have been so ill-informed in the matter? It was actually her fanatical objection to liquor that he had advanced as a principal reason for his inability to face the prospect of domestication at Bruton Abbey himself. Perhaps Aunt Prudence had entirely changed her views over the past few years. But Gadberry had gathered no hint to support this hypothesis, and the little fishing for information which he had ventured upon with Boulter had yielded at least a presumption the other way.

  As Gadberry sipped his sherry now, this small mystery seemed suddenly to assume a sinister significance – as indeed it had done before. He’d have liked to be able to ask Comberford how he had got the thing wrong. But this wasn’t possible, if only because he had no idea where Comberford was. The man had given him no address. He’d made no suggestion of any actual means whereby he might receive his half of the £5,000 a year as it came in; he’d merely murmured that all this would settle itself later. Presumably he had returned to Lulu and his Riviera leisure, and would communicate with Gadberry when he wanted to. But surely this was a crazy state of affairs? Surely, in the event of some unforeseen crisis, Gadberry ought to be able to get hold of the real Comberford at once? Yet it just couldn’t be done. There was no line through Mr Norval Falsetto and his agency. The Chester Court had known only Mr John Smith of the beard and the dark glasses. The second hotel Gadberry had not so much as noticed the name of, and he much doubted whether he could find his way to it if he wanted to. There were scores of such establishments in that part of London.

  Not for the first time, Gadberry found himself wondering about the competence of Nicholas Comberford. Had he fixed up this whole imposture on a hopelessly amateur and ramshackle basis? Or was there something rather deep about him? These were disturbing questions, and no doubt it would be best to push them out of mind now and give this final fifteen minutes before dinner to a few pages of the Memoirs, as planned.

  Gadberry opened the volume he had selected. It dealt with the first summer during which, upon his annual holiday at Bruton, the young Nicholas Comberford had been promoted to his own pony. This was as far back in the Memoirs as Gadberry had researched so far, and it was proving to be rich in valuable anecdotal matter. But Nicholas had been no more than five. How much about one’s five-year-old self does one remember? Gadberry found that he had to review his own authentic childhood in order to get a measure of what might be plausible in the case of his spurious one, and that this process of comparison was not without its dangers. It would never do to try feeding Aunt Prudence with reminiscences actually drawn from Gadberry and not Comberford family history.

  Aunt Prudence… Was it a little odd that he had really come to think of Mrs Minton as that? Gadberry closed the Memoirs. They just weren’t holding his attention. For here was another field of speculation which produced uneasy feelings. Of course it was very convenient that he had fallen so easily into his part. Every now and then, and with alarming unexpectedness, danger did appear. It wasn’t in the nature of the case that Bruton shouldn’t, so to speak, pack dynamite in its every mouldering corner. He might be betrayed, suddenly and irrevocably, in a hundred different ways. Yet his moments of actual panic had been few, and were becoming fewer. He was ceasing to believe that he could be exposed. But why was he ceasing to believe it? Why?

  Gadberry finished his sherry, glanced again at his watch, and for the first time gave himself a straight answer. It was because, all unconsciously, he was ceasing to believe that the imposture was an imposture. To put the matter very moderately, he was ceasing wholly and simply to believe that he was George Gadberry. There was an increasing component in him – one had to use some such word as that – which was quite willing to be Nicholas Comberford. It was this component that said, and thought, ‘Aunt Prudence’ so spontaneously.

  A lay imposter (so to speak) might have judged this all to the good. But Gadberry, being a professional actor, understood the hazard it presented. Cease to be conscious of your part as a part, and in no time you will be playing it damned badly. He had been relying on his professional approach to safeguard him from what he had somewhere read about as the chief risk which imposters run. It was just this risk of losing grip on the fact that one was an imposter. As with actors, in fact, so with this particular form of criminal. Lose the sense of artifice, and the role dies on you. You may even come to believe that you really are what you set out to pretend to be. In other words, the job of being an imposter round the clock can play queer tricks with you, and finally send you off your rocker. Gadberry seemed to remember reading in a history book at school that Perkin Warbeck, or perhaps it was Lambert Simnel, had really believed himself to be one of the Princes in the Tower.

  This was all very uncomfortable. Gadberry had no fancy for finding himself edged into something like a play by Pirandello. Gadberry pretending to be Comberford, however legally reprehensible, was rather fun. Gadberry believing himself to be Comberford was quite a different matter.

  Of course all these fancies were merely morbid. There was no risk of anything of the sort really happening. Only he did find himself wishing he was in contact with just one person who knew he was Gadberry. It would even be a comfort to feel there was at least one person who suspected he was not really –

  Gadberry pulled himself up abruptly. That way, surely, madness did veritably lie. But the thought had brought the true Comberford back into his head. Comberford was the only person in the world who knew who he – George Gadberry, living here at Bruton Abbey – authentically was. Gadberry found himself wishing that, every now and then, he could conduct a secret nocturnal telephone conversation with Comberford – this on the pretext of reporting progress, seeking advice.

  What if he never saw, or heard of, Comberford again?

  This extraordinary question sprang up in Gadberry�
�s mind just as he was getting to his feet for the purpose of making his way to Mrs Minton’s drawing-room. It seemed entirely senseless – but there it was. Suppose that Comberford had been acting in furtherance of some plot quite other than his declared one, and that this entailed his vanishing for ever? And suppose Comberford’s existence – as an entity, so to speak, distinct from George Gadberry – was unprovable? Suppose this to be so, and that Gadberry himself for some reason wanted to stop being Comberford? Suppose his conscience troubled him, so that he tried to confess? Would he be believed? Or would it just be taken for granted that poor Nicholas Comberford had gone mad, and had better be shut up in an asylum where he could scream his head off to the effect that he was really somebody called Gadberry?

  Needless to say, Gadberry hadn’t taken ten paces down the corridor before he was able to assure himself that all this was utter nonsense, and that now he had better pull himself together. If he wanted to go not to an asylum, but to jail tomorrow in his own authentic character there was certainly nothing to stop him. He had only to ring up the local police and tell them the truth. But, of course, he wanted to do nothing of the sort. He was – he assured himself – enjoying the whole thing, and it was only the very fact of his pursuing his imposture so successfully that had perversely started these bizarre ideas in his head. Still, he saw that they were ideas which had, so to speak, a psychological basis. He had been so readily taken for Nicholas Comberford, the mantle was now so securely enfolding him, that he was in danger of succumbing to some primitive and irrational sense that he was being deprived of his own identity. There was insecurity in the very fact of his having – in another sense – achieved security so easily.Yes, that was it. A little steadied by this piece of self-analysis, Gadberry made his way to his dinner.