The Long Divorce (A Gervase Fen Mystery)

by Edmund Crispin

  'Happened? I'll tell you. Damned if she didn't come to me last night and say straight out of my face. "Dad", she said, "you told me not to see this chap again. Well, I've just come from him. So what are you going to do about it?" '

  'And what did you do about it?'

  Rolt shrugged. 'What'd any man do? I took a slipper to her.'

  'You mean' – Helen stared at him incredulously – 'you mean you beat her?'

  He stared back in equal surprise. 'Ay. What else'd I mean?'

  Helen controlled her feelings with an effort. 'And do you make a habit of that?'

  'Habit? Of course I don't,' he said with obvious truth. 'Do you take me for one of these sadists?'

  'I take you for a very great fool,' said Helen angrily. 'An occasional walloping doesn't do a child any harm, but you seem to have forgotten that Penelope isn't a child. She's at an age when girls are terribly shy and self-conscious about their bodies, and anything more indecent than beating the poor kid it's impossible to imagine.'

  Rolt flushed, and his bewilderment was certainly genuine. 'Indecent?' he muttered; and then vehemently: 'As God's my witness, Dr Downing, there was nothing of that about it.'

  'Well, anyway, it's done,' said Helen resignedly. 'And I dare say Penelope's sensible enough not to take it too much to heart. Unless . . . What's happened to her now? This morning, I mean?'

  'God knows. She's gone off somewhere.'

  'Run away?'

  'I hadn't thought o' that,' he said slowly. 'And after what you've just told me . . .'

  'Well, but where did you imagine she's gone?'

  'What I was afraid was, she'd arranged to meet her boyfriend again, and he'd be tumbling her somewhere in the bracken.'

  Coarse but not prurient, Helen reflected; and aloud she said: 'Oh, rubbish. I expect that in actual fact she's simply got up early and gone for a stroll.'

  'Ay. I dare say it's that.' But his voice was expressionless and Helen knew that he did not really believe what he said. Well, serve him right, she thought unsympathetically; fathers who are imbecile enough to spank their sixteen-year-old daughters deserve everything they get . . . 'I was worried, y'see,' he went on after a moment's silence. 'I don't ever have much heart for punishing Pen, so last night I didn't sleep any too well myself. That meant I was up at five, and something made me take a look in her room, to make sure she was all right. That's when I found she'd gone. So I've been out ever since, trying to find her.'

  'If you'd had any sense,' said Helen, 'you'd have employed a woman to take care of her after your wife died. I don't suppose it's ever occurred to you, but Penelope's wretchedly lonely.'

  All at once he was hostile. 'Mind th'own business, lass,' he said insolently, 'and I'll mind mine. Pen and me can manage all right without criticism from outsiders, thanks very much. What I do after my wife dies is my own affair and no one else's. And as to Pen, if you put her on the rack you wouldn't get her to say a word against her father.'

  Helen stood up. 'You certainly wouldn't,' she replied with heat, 'but I can assure you it's no thanks to you. If you had even an ounce of tact in you, you'd realize – Oh, what's the use?'

  She turned to go, but he too had risen and was holding her by the sleeve, 'And for God's sake,' she said in sudden uncontrollable rage, 'take your hands off me, you – you money-grubbing guttersnipe!'

  His arm fell to his side as though paralysed. 'Thanks,' he said quietly, 'thanks very much. So I'm a guttersnipe. All right – granted. But at least I don't pretend to be anything else, like some of your friends I could name.'

  'If you're going to start that again –'

  ' "Again"? I wasn't aware as I'd mentioned it up to now. But since you're so free with your tongue, you might as well know one or two things I know. For instance –'

  'Good morning, Mr Rolt.'

  'Oh no, you don't, lass.' He caught at her sleeve again. 'Fair's fair, and tit for tat. If you're going to talk like that about me –'

  'Let me go, please.' Helen was trembling, but it was with anger and not with fear. 'Whatever it is you're trying to say, I don't want to hear it.'

  'I believe you.' Though his voice remained quiet, monotonous even, he was manifestly as enraged as she, and as indifferent to the consequences of what he said or did. 'And you'll like it even less when you know what it is, I can promise you that. Your Miss Beatrice Keats-Madderly – '

  'Even you couldn't have the revolting bad taste to –'

  'To speak ill of the dead? But I'm only a guttersnipe, remember, and there's no telling what they'll say, particularly about someone as never hesitated to speak ill o' them. Your Miss Keats-Madderly was rare proud of her family, wasn't she? You'd have thought they were kings, the way she talked about them. But the fact is, she didn't legally belong to that family at all. She was illegitimate. She was a bastard.'

  For perhaps half a minute there was complete silence. Two feet below where they stood, the stream flowed on towards Twelford. The morning mist had almost completely gone, and the dew was drying on the rough grass. The clock of Cotten Abbas church, its tower high above the trees and houses, struck the quarter after seven, and a moment later the bell began ringing for early Communion. Flashing green and blue, a kingfisher swooped in a whir of wings. And Helen said:

  'I don't believe a word of it.'

  'Don't you?' Rolt smiled unpleasantly. 'But you'd better, you know, because it happens to be true. When I was a lad I worked in the same part of Yorkshire the Keats-Madderlys lived in. Fine haughty folk, they were. Lots of pride and lots of brass. But no children. So one summer Sir George Keats-Madderly started paying visits to a lass who worked in one of his own mills, and the year after that she pupped. Round there we all knew whose baby it was, and I'll say this for Sir George, he never tried to disown it. Beatrice he called it, and it was sent to Leeds to be brought up in style, no expense spared. Lady Mary Keats-Madderly, she knew all about it. She was a cold, snubbing woman, but when I was a bit older my dad told me she didn't mind what her husband had done – the only thing was, she wouldn't have the brat in their house. Well, in 1929 Sir George and Lady Mary were both killed in a motor smash. By that time, I'd left Yorkshire and set up in business on my own, so I'd no reason to think much about the family till ten years ago, when I came here. But when I found there was a Beatrice Keats-Madderly living here, I started to think a bit, and the next time I was in London I took myself to Somerset House and looked up Sir George's will, and there it was: all his brass left to Miss Beatrice Dodgson, such-and-such an address in Leeds, on conditions she took the name of Keats-Madderly. So if you still don't believe me, you can look it up for yourself – and there's still plenty of folk in Yorkshire'll tell you the same as I have.'

  The recital had quieted him; he no longer spoke as vehemently as at first. And as to Helen, the effect of his story on her was unexpected. The relevation of Beatrice Keats-Madderly's illegitimacy did not, of course, in any way diminish her affection for that brusque, imperious woman; what was surprising was that although Harry Rolt had plainly intended to wound, his narrative had left her with a far greater respect for him that at its outset she would have believed possible. For intolerable though he undoubtedly was, Beatrice had treated him particularly badly; their mutual hatred had been as intense as any hatred that human beings are capable of – and yet in spite of that he had never, as many a better man might have done, used his knowledge of her birth as a weapon against her . . . Helen said abruptly:

  'You're not so bad, you know, as you paint yourself.'

  'Guttersnipe,' he reminded her – sulkily, but at the same time with an air of vague discomfiture, like a man caught out in some venial and preposterous sin. 'That's what you said, and that's what you meant, so don't try to go back on it.' He became suddenly aware that he was still holding her by the sleeve, and took his hand away as if he had been stung. 'Ay. Maybe I shouldn't have said what I have said, but you riled me . . . Well, she's dead now, and you can't expect me to howl my head off about it.'

>   Helen said: 'I'm quite glad you told me.'

  'Are you?' He laughed uneasily. 'That's one shot missed the target, then. Well, I'd better be getting back. If you should see Pen, or hear of her –' He hesitated.

  'Yes, I'll let you know. And at the risk,' Helen added 'of being ticked off again as a critical outsider, I'd still advise you to think a bit about the sort of life she's leading. She's got nothing to occupy her, she won't make friends with people like me because she knows we don't get on with you, and if she runs after foreign schoolmasters it really isn't to be wondered at. In my opinion you ought to send her away from here till she's got over her growing pains and can see things in their right perspective.'

  'See me, you mean?'

  'You among other things,' said Helen coolly.

  He was pensive for a moment, staring across at the osiers on the far side of the stream; then:

  'It mightn't be such a bad idea, at that – though Lord knows I'd miss her. The trouble'd be, getting her to agree to it. How about you having a talk with her?'

  'Me? I see no reason to imagine she'd take any notice of anything I said.'

  'Wouldn't she, though. Pen admires you, Dr Downing, I can tell you that much. Mind you, it may be what they call a pash, but it's real enough for all that. And if you and I both said the same thing – '

  'Oh . . . all right.' And if Helen hesitated before consenting, that was rather because she mistrusted her own capacity than because she was not anxious to help Penelope. 'But it's all a bit vague, you know. What exactly is it that you want me to do?'

  'That's up to you, lass. All I'm after is what's best for Pen, and you'll be able to find that out better than I would.'

  On the whole, Helen doubted this. It was pleasant, of course, to be credited with so much wisdom and discernment – not so pleasant, on the other hand, to be obliged to put those qualities to the test. Moreover, she thought it unlikely, in spite of what she herself had said, that Penelope Rolt was quite so green, and in quite such a complex of spiritual difficulties, as this suggestion of a heart-to-heart talk implied. At the age of sixteen it is of course shaming to be walloped, disturbing to dote on Swiss pedagogues, trying to be lonely, upsetting to be innocently involved in a feud between one's father and one's neighbours. But Helen was aware that the mentality of most human beings possesses a great deal more of stamina and resilience than the solicitude of others will usually allow, and she was conscious of a lurking suspicion that Penelope would see through this whole manoeuvre at a glance, and be considerably amused by it . . . 'I don't,' said Helen, 'quite see how it's going to be arranged.'

  Rolt waved this aside. 'See her professionally, that's the first thing I've an idea she may have been having a bit of ' – quite delicately – 'trouble just recently. You know. Some sort of thing she wouldn't want to tell me about . . .'

  'Yes. Well, if that's so, it certainly ought to be seen to. I think the best thing will be for you to ring me up as soon as you've talked to Penelope, and then we can make some arrangement . . . All this assuming, of course, that she hasn't run away from her home.'

  'Be damned to that for a lot of poppycock,' said Rolt rudely, his earlier uncertainty on this score having apparently vanished in the course of the last few minutes. She'd not run away, not if I know anything about her.'

  'I thought you'd just admitted that you didn't.'

  'All I admitted was that she could do with a woman to advise her. That's fair enough, isn't it? No, if you ask me, she's out with that pansy schoolmaster. And if they're up to mischief, and I get my hands on him –'

  'Yes, all right,' said Helen impatiently. 'I don't care what you do about him, but as far as Penelope's concerned, keep your hands to yourself. Now I must go. You'll ring me up?'

  'Ay.'

  'Good morning, then.'

  'Good morning, Duchess. Behave tha'self.'

  . . . Damned impertinence, thought Helen as she strode towards the coppice; perhaps because she was so tired, the whole interview had had a curious dreamlike quality which inhibited serious resentment and left her vaguely inquisitive rather than decisively annoyed. Picking her way along the narrow path between the birches, however, she found herself reluctant to think seriously about what had been said, and it was only later, when exercise had freshened her mind as well as her body, that her thoughts reverted to the story of Beatrice Keats-Madderly's birth. It was overwhelmingly probable, of course, that that was what the burned anonymous letter had been about: odd, Helen reflected, that anyone should feel so strongly about illegitimacy as to prefer death to exposure – and a death, at that, which must have been agonizing. For Beatrice's heavy body had certainly dangled from the banisters for a full minute or two before consciousness was lost . . . You never quite get used to the sight of any dead person, thought Helen, remembering the revulsion and pity with which she had looked at that cyanosed face; but when it's someone you know and like, that's a thousand times worse – as bad, in fact, as if you'd had no training and no experience of death at all . . . But the whole trouble, Helen now saw, had been Beatrice's incessant boasting about her family. That was why the prospect of the truth's becoming know had so appalled her; if she could only have refrained from that, no one in these tolerant days would have cared twopence whether she was legitimate or not. But she had been unusually sensitive, as many tactless souls are, and unusually proud, so that a motive which most people would have thought trivial had been quite sufficient to drive her to the fatal, conclusive act. The pity of it, though, the pity of it. And all because of an anonymous letter announcing, presumably, that –

  Helen stopped short.

  An anonymous letter anouncing that the writer knew Beatrice to be illegitimate.

  And apparently the only person in Cotten Abbas who knew that was Harry Rolt.

  9

  THE majority of us are permitted to cope with the important events of our lives in a decently leisurely manner – with ample breathing-space, that is to say, in which to assimilate one shock and recuperate before the next. But it does sometimes happen that a series of such events is compressed into a few electrifying weeks, days, or even hours, each one treading so closely on the heels of its predecessor as to create a sort of momentous blur, like a telegraph pole seen from an express train, rather than (after the fashion of mountains viewed from the same standpoint) a slow-moving recession of isolated and significant peaks. So it was with Helen Downing this Sunday. Looking back on it afterwards, what surprised her most was her own unnatural equanimity. It is doubtful if this was quite so unbroken as she subsequently imagined, but there was a certain justification for her surprise in the fact that the day's happenings succeeded one another so rapidly as to give her mind no chance of reacting fully to any of them. The result of this was a slightly misleading air of level-headedness, and the man who three weeks later became her husband has been heard to assert, in amiable mockery, that he was decidedly uncertain that day as to whether the recipient of his proposal was flesh or marble. (But he has not, he adds – to Helen's mild confusion – been in the least uncertain about it since.)

  At breakfast-time, however, destiny's preparations were still not quite complete, and Helen was able to eat the meal undisturbed – undisturbed, that is, except by the suspicion that Harry Rolt might be responsible for the epidemic of anonymous letters. Of course, there was no guarantee that he and he alone knew of Beatrice's origin – no guarantee, even, that a reference to that origin had been what the burned anonymous letter had contained. But the latter qualification was thin to the point of invisibility, and although to some extent the former held, Helen found it difficult to believe that anyone who had not lived in the relevant area of Yorkshire at the relevant time – and Rolt was almost certainly the only person in Cotten Abbas who had – could possibly be aware of so remote and long-buried a scandal. There was a chance that Rolt had told someone else in the village about it; but his manner in bludgeoning Helen with the tale had been the manner of a man driven by extreme provocation to viol
ate a hitherto inviolable confidence, and Helen felt convinced that until this morning he had kept it strictly to himself . . . Well, yes; on the other hand, if he had written the anonymous letter to Beatrice, and if that letter had referred to Beatrice's illegitimacy, then it had been most unwise of him to tell Helen what he knew – so unwise as to seem, in a criminal whose care had up to now kept him invulnerable, almost incredible. To that objection in Rolt's favour there was, however, an answer of sorts: whoever had written the anonymous letter to Beatrice might well have relied on her destroying it so that its contents would never be known – must, indeed, have heard that a burnt letter had been found, and possibly had forgotten that burnt paper, unless reduced to fragments, can be reconstituted and read. In which case . . .

  Oh damn, thought Helen: this drifting round in circles isn't any good. The point is, what motive would Rolt have in writing anonymous letters to start with?

  And there was no difficulty about finding a reply to that. If the anonymous writer was not certifiably insane, and operating without any rational motive at all, then his intention, in which to a disastrous extent he had already succeeded, must almost certainly be to disrupt the contentment of Cotten Abbas as a whole. In the case of the merely obscene letters, accusing people of practices at which, as Colonel Babington had once remarked, Gomorrah would have looked slightly askance, the writer's object was probably nothing more slightly subtle than his own sexual gratification. But that explanation left out of account the other type of letter, the tell-tale sort whose matter and manner were by no means invariably erotic. For those, as far as Helen could see, the only conceivable interpretation was that they were inspired by a generalized malevolence against the entire community – and if you were looking for someone with a grudge against that community, then of course the first person you thought of was Harry Rolt.

  Helen frowned. If anyone had asked her to choose the individual in Cotten Abbas whom she would most like to be found guilty of writing the anonymous letters, and so indirectly of Beatrice Keats-Madderly's death, she would almost certainly have chosen Harry Rolt. But honesty compelled her to admit to herself, after this morning's conversation with him, that in two important respects he didn't at all fit the part. In the first place, she was certain that sex, far from obsessing him in the way that it obviously obsessed the letter-writer, interested him scarcely at all; up to a point, such a preoccupation can of course be concealed – but overtones of it are apt to leak out when the person concerned is talking directly about the matter, and Helen had been particularly struck by the complete absence of these overtones in Rolt's references to Penelope and her schoolmaster. And in the second place, Rolt's whole mentality had seemed to be leagues removed from the sneaking, stab-in-the-back mentality of the letter-writer. He was repulsive, yes; he was malignant, yes; he was dirty and rude and stupid. But despite all that it had been evident to Helen that he did order his life in accordance with some kind of moral code, and what she had sensed of this code convinced her – illogically yet still powerfully – that any such hole-and-corner business as anonymous letters would be completely alien to it. Fair's fair, he had said; and again, That's fair enough, isn't it? As proof of good character, neither of those clichés would carry much weight in a court of law, but they had impressed Helen as being, on Rolt's lips, something more than mere catch-phrases.