‘I see.’ In point of fact, Gadberry’s mind was beginning to grope in a great darkness. ‘But Aunt Prudence’s physical condition – well, isn’t that relevant?’
‘Extremely so, my dear Comberford. It’s precisely what I’m saying. You must be aware, I suppose, that Mrs Minton has the typical physical constitution of a likely centenarian – the very type whose mind is bound to go long before her body. But I assure you this need occasion you no distress. Long-drawn-out terminal illness associated with physical pain and decay is far the more harrowing thing all round.’
‘You mean that Aunt Prudence hasn’t hurried on all this because she knows she’s in a bad way – with a heart, or something like that?’
As he asked this question, Gadberry was aware that he had admitted into his voice inflections of the largest perturbation and dismay. It was scarcely surprising, therefore, that Dr Pollock was now looking at him very curiously indeed.
‘A heart? Whatever should put that in your head? The old lady hasn’t been telling you anything of the sort, surely? She doesn’t strike me as likely to start imagining things about herself. She’s simply not a hypochondriac type. Not that phobia about heart disease is all that rare.’ Pollock was silent for a moment – perhaps, Gadberry thought, through embarrassment at finding himself in the presence of a young man who had demonstrably been nourishing baseless hopes about the speedy demise of a near relative. And now he spoke a trifle shortly. ‘I’m your great-aunt’s doctor,’ he said, ‘or what she would probably call her medical adviser. It wouldn’t be proper for me to discuss her health in any detail. But what I’ve said, my dear man, I’ve said. She’s as sound as a bell. Your anxieties – and you seem to go in for them in what is no doubt a very creditable way – are entirely beside the mark.’
‘I’m very glad to hear it.’ Gadberry, strangely enough, was able to say this with some sense of conviction. Long years with Aunt Prudence, it was true, constituted a vision he knew he simply couldn’t dig. On the other hand, the fact that she could scarcely be said to possess an amiable personality hadn’t resulted in his wishing her other than well. At least he found that he didn’t in the least wish her ill. ‘Shall we find Grimble,’ he heard himself say, ‘and think about joining the ladies?’
Gadberry licked a finger and thumb, and with a reasonably steady hand extinguished the half-dozen candles on the dinner-table. It occurred to him that Pollock’s profession had probably given him a sufficiently disenchanted view of human nature to cause him to think little of what had occurred. But with Gadberry himself it was a different matter. It wasn’t simply as one cheated of the speedy expectation of an inheritance that he was disconcerted. In fact it wasn’t as that at all. He was experiencing, once more, that nasty feeling of being a prominent actor in an increasingly unintelligible play. And it was a play, he suspected, now rapidly approaching its denouement.
11
There was nothing modish about the general decor of Bruton Abbey. The fabric was mediaeval, with bits and pieces added by eminent eighteenth-century architects in the Picturesque Taste. The furniture, for some mysterious reason to which Gadberry had not yet succeeded in penetrating, was almost exclusively Victorian. The pictures, of which there were a great many, ran to nothing – Gadberry had sometimes reflected – which would have appeared out of the way to his former landlady Mrs Lapin herself. Apart from a startlingly indecent nude by Etty which hung bang over the drawing-room chimney piece, most appeared to be by Landseer in his vein as a celebrant of the indigenous fauna of Great Britain. The Abbey being, moreover, in some disrepair, and thus affording easy ingress to the actual brute creation, these mute representations were sometimes oddly reinforced from without. It was quite common to come upon an owl perched above a Monarch of the Glen, or a couple of bats depending from the frame of some murkily evoked rural scene. In places, indeed, it might have been possible to suppose that Mrs Minton had gone in for certain decorative notions of a modern and ephemeral sort, as when interior walls were discovered to be clothed in matted growths of ivy. These irruptions of wild nature were the odder when one reflected that they couldn’t conceivably be a consequence of penury. They must simply be part of Mrs Minton’s conception of a feudal order of things to which she subscribed.
In the cloisters now there was an eerie light reflected from the snow beginning to silt up outside, and through some open or broken casement flakes were floating in with sufficient freedom to be falling damply on one’s face as one walked. And everywhere there was a sufficient effect of moaning, rattling and creaking to suggest that quite a gale was blowing up.
Conducting Dr Pollock through these dismal effects, the spurious Nicholas Comberford recalled gloomily his authentic counterpart’s having remarked that Bruton Abbey enjoyed a somewhat remote situation. It was certainly true. The tiny village of Bruton was a mile away, and apart from this there was nothing within walking distance except monotonous stretches of moor. Gadberry, for long a dweller in cities, had only to think of it to feel very lonesome indeed.
But at present he had a different preoccupation. It had been strange enough that Comberford had proved totally misinformed in the matter of his great-aunt’s attitude to alcohol. It was very much stranger that he had been equally astray as to her state of health. He had declared categorically that she was in an advanced stage of heart disease – and now here was Dr Pollock, who must know, laughing such an idea out of court. But must Pollock know? Was it possible that the old lady was really very ill, and had for some reason successfully concealed the fact from the local doctor?
Gadberry, as he made a detour in search of the missing Grimble, considered this supposition on its merits. But of course it had no merits. For one thing, as soon as you really thought of the matter, you realised that a mortally sick woman was about the last thing that Aunt Prudence corresponded to. For another thing –
Here Gadberry broke off, for a consideration of the utmost simplicity had suddenly occurred to him. The real Comberford had been in no position to entertain any confident knowledge about his great-aunt’s state of health. Until the receipt of her letter proposing that he should domesticate himself at Bruton there had been no suggestion that he had held any recent communication with her. So how could he have the intimate information he had claimed?
The Abbey was not, at this time of year, a place in which it was at all easy to feel suddenly cold. But Gadberry felt just this now. For he realised – and he acknowledged to himself that it was a realisation pitifully belated – that Comberford was a shocking liar, and that the whole business of Mrs Minton’s brief expectation of life had been fed to him simply to make her relative’s extraordinary proposal appear a little more attractive than it would otherwise have been. Big money from the conspiracy, and big money in reasonable time, would have appeared to Comberford his strongest card, and he had led with it straightaway. Really and truly, big money had been only an uncertain prospect a long way ahead.
This was what it was now, despite Gadberry’s spectacular promotion of only an hour ago. A half-share in £5,000 a year might still be what his efforts were pulling in when Mrs Minton was celebrating her hundredth birthday. What was more, it would be all that Comberford in his Riviera seclusion was pulling in too. There was something puzzling about the whole thing.
The suspicion that he had been cheated – that his own imposture was conducting itself, so to speak, inside another one in which he himself was the dupe – didn’t, Gadberry found, very much annoy him in itself. He didn’t feel morally outraged by his discovery; indeed, there would have been a certain unreasonableness in a reaction of that sort, since any such situation placed him, after all, in the role of the biter bit, and one mustn’t expect honour among thieves. There was a sense in which he was even relieved, since Mrs Minton’s death – or so he had been coming to think – must finally and fatally involve him in permanent deception on an intimidating scale. In this feeling he was again, perhaps, up against a magical sense of the thing. His present situatio
n could be viewed as a fantastic lark. But there was a kind of death in the notion that never in life could plain George Gadberry – but also talented George Gadberry, for had he not enjoyed that big success in The Rubbish Dump? – bob up again.
Of course Gadberry could, he supposed, bob up again now. All that was necessary was the resolution to make a clean break. He had only to pack a small bag, stuff his pockets with as much cash as his own sporadically operative conscience would permit, and hasten away from Bruton through its rising winds and falling snows. Out, out into the storm: such a departure would have a certain theatrical quality that made an appeal to him. He might even accomplish the initial stage of his flight here and now by commandeering Mr Grimble’s fly.
At this moment Mr Grimble made his appearance again. He seemed to have been straying around the imperfectly enclosed cloisters for some time. Snow was sprinkled on his shoulders and the rime sparkled in his beard. He would have looked like Father Christmas if there hadn’t been something about him more suggestive of an imp or troll. He greeted Gadberry with a cackle of laughter, and with a gleeful rubbing together of his hands which, although no doubt no more than a precautionary measure against frostbite, somehow conveyed an impression of cunning which Gadberry didn’t like. Quite unreasonably, Gadberry found himself rather frightened of this disagreeable but presumably harmless old creature.
‘Did you get through, sir?’ he asked solicitously. He had a notion that it especially became the heir of Bruton to adopt a deferential attitude towards a dependant so venerably advanced as Grimble within the vale of years.
‘Everything is in train, Comberford, everything is in train.’ Something sinister about the manner in which Grimble said this was enhanced – or perhaps it was merely suggested – by a particularly desperate hooting-act put on at this moment by one of the Abbey’s resident owls. For all its feathers – Gadberry supposed – the creature was a-cold. ‘In train, I say, in train,’ Grimble repeated. His frosted breath hung around like a miasma. The temperature must be dropping like a stone. Grimble seemed aware of the phenomenon himself. ‘This place is too cold for hell,’ he said, and walked on.
Boulter, who had a commendable instinct to achieve some effect of sanity in those spheres of Bruton life that lay within his province, had contrived in the drawing-room a fire before which it would have been perfectly feasible to roast an ox. Unfortunately most of the heat that didn’t go straight up the chimney made its way into the dim vaulting that hung overhead. Had it been possible for the company to levitate to this region and conduct their post-prandial civilities while hovering thirty feet above the floor, it was conceivable that quite a cosy hour might have been the result. As it was, Mrs Minton’s household and her guests became progressively numb and dumb. Perhaps, Gadberry thought, a certain amount of conversation was actually being produced, only to be congealed at the point of utterance. Perhaps, as in Baron Münchausen’s narrative, a thaw would one day release it, and there would be a babble of inane chatter in the empty room.
Meantime, he had leisure to continue to picture himself as fled into the storm. There appeared to be no reason why he could not make a quick end of the whole business. If he simply vanished, he supposed, it might be assumed that he had met with some misadventure or accident, and a vexatious pursuit might ensue. But why shouldn’t he, in his character as Nicholas Comberford, leave a note saying that he couldn’t stand the place, and that if Mrs Minton wanted an heir she must try again? If he’d really had as much as he could take, or if he was prompted to act decisively in terms of that obscure recurrent alarm occasioned in him by a sense of unknown factors in his situation, then giving mortal offence in this fashion was undoubtedly the easiest way out. Mrs Minton, one could be sure, far from attempting to recall him, would never mention the name of her great-nephew Nicholas again.
But the trouble about this was that it really wouldn’t be a nice thing to do. Aunt Prudence was in various ways an intolerable old person, but as far as he himself was concerned there was no denying that she deserved well of him. If she liked anybody in the world, it was clearly the young man who was in fact sheltering beneath her roof (if sheltering, indeed, it could be called in this temple of the winds or palace of ice) as a consequence of gross imposture. To bolt – certainly to bolt after having left some nasty message as a parting shot – would be to do rather more than simply let Aunt Prudence down. It would be to bite the hand that fed him, and that had just made the gesture of proposing to feed him a great deal more.
Confronted with this paradox of his situation, Gadberry felt a good deal discouraged. His chronic sense of the perplexing character of the moral universe descended upon him heavily. Moreover there was the awkward fact that, just as he had only a vaguely massive notion of the threat he wanted to bolt from, so he had no clear idea of any prospect he could now bolt to. He could, indeed, take money with him, so that he would be all right for a time. But what about after that? He would once more be George Gadberry, but he wasn’t very sure that he could live as George Gadberry had lived. He was like a wild creature which, after even a short period of captivity, has no clear memory of what wild nature feels like.
The party dragged on for a further gloomy half-hour, after which the Pollocks got up to go away. So thick was the snow outside, however, that their actual departure was delayed while one of the outdoor servants fitted certain clanking mediaeval contraptions, known as the chains, to the back wheels of their car. The operation was unfamiliar to Gadberry, who nevertheless felt that he must superintend it with an air of rural expertise, so that in the result he was blue and shivering by the time the doctor and his wife departed into the blizzard. Then Grimble had to be fed into the fly, the fly’s driver dug out of the kitchens to which he had repaired, and the fly’s motive power to be lashed and cajoled into a sufficient state of equine animation to trundle the conveyance down the drive. By the time these evolutions were concluded Gadberry felt fit for nothing but bed.
He returned to the drawing-room, however, if only with the idea of making sure that the place wasn’t going to be burnt down – or even, perhaps, out of a kind of dumb sense that a deft kick or two at Boulter’s enormous embers might really produce in the small hours a conflagration in which Bruton Abbey, hitherto more or less inviolate through the centuries, would disappear for ever. As it turned out, this wouldn’t have been possible. Mrs Minton was still in the room, seated in a chair on one side of the fireplace. As Miss Bostock was arranging her footstool, it was to be presumed that she had just taken her place there. And there was an empty chair opposite her. Gadberry, who didn’t like the look of this, spoke a shade hastily.
‘My dear aunt, I’m sure you must be very tired. Perhaps you should–’
‘Pray do not speculate, Nicholas, on what I ought, or ought not, to do. Nor need you to be so irrational as to claim assurance in regard to the subjective sensations of another. And now sit down. I have something to communicate to you. But, first, place a chair for Miss Bostock. Bostock, I wish you to hear what I have to say.’
12
‘In the course of tomorrow morning,’ Mrs Minton began, ‘Mr Middleweek will call. He is, as you know, my solicitor, and it is my intention that a number of documents shall be executed in the course of our interview. It is not, I need hardly say, merely a matter of a will – as it doubtless would be were Miss Bostock, say, desirous of settling her affairs. It is only for the poor that matters are as simple as that. Nicholas – you follow me?’
‘Well, yes – I suppose I do.’
‘If certain iniquities in the present laws governing death duties and the like are to be defeated, it is requisite that various dispositions of property should be made at a date which shall subsequently prove to have been not less than seven years before my own demise. This does not mean, Nicholas, that you will assume control of anything more than the modest allowance at present made to you. There will be trustees, and so forth. I ought to add, moreover, that I have no intention of dying within the next seve
n years. Nothing of the sort is in my mind. So there is not, in fact, any hurry. I wish, however, that these dispositions should be made now. The reason for this I shall presently communicate to you. Once more, you follow me?’
‘Yes, I think I do.’ Gadberry, who ought to have been all agog at this point, found himself feeling merely uncomfortable. ‘But need you tell me all this just at – ?’
‘Nicholas, you are developing a bad habit of offering me what you appear to regard as your own better wisdom on the manner of my conducting my affairs. Pray allow me to continue. I wish these matters to be understood clearly. Bostock, if I am not clear, you are to say so.’
‘Then I think you ought to be a little more specific now.’ Miss Bostock, although existing in a depressed station of life, commonly addressed her employer with some briskness. ‘Is Mr Comberford to understand that, in the event of your being quite mistaken as to your expectation of life, trustees would take over where you left off?’
‘Certainly not. As I understand these rather intricate matters, the trustees are created merely as the formal custodians of various properties during my lifetime. Were I to die next week – which I repeat I do not intend to do – their functions would lapse at once. There would be disastrous estate duties and so forth. But Nicholas would come immediately into his inheritance.’
‘That is clear,’ Miss Bostock said. She gave Gadberry one of her steady looks. ‘I am sure that Mr Comberford takes the point very well.’
Gadberry found this disagreeable, although he wasn’t quite sure why. He ought at least to be making a careful mental note of it all, if only to report to the authentic Comberford when he chose to make contact again. But he still just wanted to go to bed. He tried, therefore, to speed up this nocturnal conference.
A Change of Heir Page 8
