It meant nothing to me for a moment. Mr. William R. Pardoe. I turned it over and shook my head. Then I handed it to Greta.
“Do you know by any chance who this is?” I said. “His face seemed familiar but I couldn’t place it. Perhaps it’s one of Ellie’s friends.”
Greta took it from me and looked at it. Then she said:
“Of course.”
“Who is it?”
“Uncle Reuben. You remember. Ellie’s cousin. She’s spoken of him to you, surely?”
I remembered then why the face had seemed familiar to me. Ellie had had several photographs in her sitting room of her various relations carelessly placed about the room. That was why the face had been so familiar. I had seen it so far only in a photograph.
“I’ll come,” I said.
I went out of the room and into the drawing room. Mr. Pardoe rose to his feet, and said:
“Michael Rogers? You may not know my name but your wife was my cousin. She called me Uncle Reuben always, but we haven’t met, I know. This is the first time I’ve been over since your marriage.”
“Of course I know who you are,” I said.
I don’t know quite how to describe Reuben Pardoe. He was a big burly man with a large face, wide and rather absent-looking as though he were thinking of something else. Yet after you had talked to him for a few moments you got the feeling that he was more on the ball than you would have thought.
“I don’t need to tell you how shocked and grieved I was to hear of Ellie’s death,” he said.
“Let’s skip that,” I said. “I’m not up to talking about it.”
“No, no, I can understand that.”
He had a certain sympathetic personality and yet there was something about him that made me vaguely uneasy. I said, as Greta entered:
“You know Miss Andersen?”
“Of course,” he said, “how are you, Greta?”
“Not too bad,” said Greta. “How long have you been over?”
“Just a week or two. Touring around.”
Then it came to me. On an impulse I went in. “I saw you the other day.”
“Really? Where?”
“At an auction sale at a place called Bartington Manor.”
“I remember now,” he said, “yes, yes I think I remember your face. You were with a man about sixty with a brown moustache.”
“Yes,” I said. “A Major Phillpot.”
“You seemed in good spirits,” he said, “both of you.”
“Never better,” I said, and repeated with the strange wonder that I always felt, “Never better.”
“Of course—at that time you didn’t know what had happened. That was the date of the accident, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, we were expecting Ellie to join us for lunch.”
“Tragic,” said Uncle Reuben. “Really tragic….”
“I had no idea,” I said, “that you were in England. I don’t think Ellie had any idea either?” I paused, waiting for what he would tell me.
“No,” he said, “I hadn’t written. In fact, I didn’t know how much time I should have over here, but actually I’d concluded my business earlier than I thought and I was wondering if after the sale I’d have the time to drive over and see you.”
“You came over from the States on business?” I asked.
“Well, partly yes and partly no. Cora wanted some advice from me on one or two matters. One concerning this house she’s thinking of buying.”
It was then that he told me where Cora had been staying in England. Again I said:
“We didn’t know that.”
“She was actually staying not far from here that day,” he said.
“Near here? Was she in a hotel?”
“No, she was staying with a friend.”
“I didn’t know she had any friends in this part of the world.”
“A woman called—now what was her name?—Hard—something. Hardcastle.”
“Claudia Hardcastle?” I was surprised.
“Yes. She was quite a friend of Cora’s. Cora knew her well when she was in the States. Didn’t you know?”
“I know very little,” I said. “Very little about the family.”
I looked at Greta.
“Did you know that Cora knew Claudia Hardcastle?”
“I don’t think I ever heard her speak of her,” said Greta. “So that’s why Claudia didn’t turn up that day.”
“Of course,” I said, “she was going with you to shop in London. You were to meet at Market Chadwell station—”
“Yes—and she wasn’t there. She rang up the house just after I’d left. Said some American visitor had turned up unexpectedly and she couldn’t leave home.”
“I wonder,” I said, “if the American visitor could have been Cora.”
“Obviously,” said Reuben Pardoe. He shook his head. “It all seems so confused,” he said. He went on, “I understand the inquest was adjourned.”
“Yes,” I said.
He drained his cup and got up.
“I won’t stay to worry you any more,” he said. “If there’s anything I can do, I’m staying at the Majestic Hotel in Market Chadwell.”
I said I was afraid there wasn’t anything he could do and thanked him. When he had gone away, Greta said:
“What does he want, I wonder? Why did he come over?” And then sharply: “I wish they’d all go back where they belong.”
“I wonder if it was really Stanford Lloyd I saw at the George—I only got a glimpse.”
“You said he was with someone who looked like Claudia so it probably was him. Perhaps he called to see her and Reuben came to see Cora—what a mix-up!”
“I don’t like it—all of them milling round that day.”
Greta said things often happened that way—as usual she was quite cheerful and reasonable about it.
Twenty-two
I
There was nothing more for me to do at Gipsy’s Acre. I left Greta in charge of the house while I sailed to New York to wind up things there and to take part in what I felt with some dread were going to be the most ghastly gold-plated obsequies for Ellie.
“You’re going into the jungle,” Greta warned me. “Look after yourself. Don’t let them skin you alive.”
She was right about that. It was the jungle. I felt it when I got there. I didn’t know about jungles—not that kind of jungle. I was out of my depth and I knew it. I wasn’t the hunter, I was the hunted. There were people all round me in the undergrowth, gunning for me. Sometimes, I expect, I imagined things. Sometimes my suspicions were justified. I remember going to the lawyer supplied for me by Mr. Lippincott (a most urbane man who treated me rather as a general practitioner might have done in the medical profession). I had been advised to get rid of certain mining properties to which the title deeds were not too clear.
He asked me who had told me so and I said it was Stanford Lloyd.
“Well, we must look into it,” he said. “A man like Mr. Lloyd ought to know.”
He said to me afterwards:
“There’s nothing wrong with your title deeds, and there is certainly no point in your selling the land in a hurry, as he seems to have advised you. Hang on to it.”
I had the feeling then that I’d been right, everybody was gunning for me. They all knew I was a simpleton when it came to finance.
The funeral was splendid and, I thought, quite horrible. Gold-plated, as I had surmised. At the cemetery, masses of flowers, the cemetery itself like a public park and all the trimmings of wealthy mourning expressed in monumental marble. Ellie would have hated it, I was sure of that. But I suppose her family had a certain right to her.
Four days after my arrival in New York I had news from Kingston Bishop.
The body of old Mrs. Lee had been found in the disused quarry on the far side of the hill. She had been dead some days. There had been accidents there before, and it had been said that the place ought to be fenced in—but nothing had been done. A verdict of Accidental Death had been bro
ught in and a further recommendation to the Council to fence the place off. In Mrs. Lee’s cottage a sum of three hundred pounds had been found hidden under the floorboards, all in one-pound notes.
Major Phillpot had added in a postscript, “I’m sure you will be sorry to hear that Claudia Hardcastle was thrown from her horse and killed out hunting yesterday.”
Claudia—killed? I couldn’t believe it! It gave me a very nasty jolt. Two people—within a fortnight, killed in a riding accident. It seemed like an almost impossible coincidence.
II
I don’t want to dwell on that time I spent in New York. I was a stranger in an alien atmosphere. I felt all the time that I had to be wary of what I said and what I did. The Ellie that I had known, the Ellie that had belonged peculiarly to me was not there. I saw her now only as an American girl, heiress to a great fortune, surrounded by friends and connections and distant relatives, one of a family that had lived there for five generations. She had come from there as a comet might have come, visiting my territory.
Now she had gone back to be buried with her own folk, to where her own home was. I was glad to have it that way. I shouldn’t have been easy feeling her there in the prim little cemetery at the foot of the pine woods just outside the village. No, I shouldn’t have been easy.
“Go back where you belong, Ellie,” I said to myself.
Now and again that haunting little tune of the song she used to sing to her guitar came into my mind. I remembered her fingers twanging the strings.
Every Morn and every Night
Some are born to Sweet Delight
and I thought “That was true of you. You were born to Sweet Delight. You had Sweet Delight there at Gipsy’s Acre. Only it didn’t last very long. Now it’s over. You’ve come back to where perhaps there wasn’t much delight, where you weren’t happy. But you’re at home here anyway. You’re among your own folk.”
I wondered suddenly where I should be when the time came for me to die. Gipsy’s Acre? It could be. My mother would come and see me laid in my grave—if she wasn’t dead already. But I couldn’t think of my mother being dead. I could think more easily of death for myself. Yes, she’d come and see me buried. Perhaps the sternness of her face would relax. I took my thoughts away from her. I didn’t want to think of her. I didn’t want to go near her or see her.
That last isn’t quite true. It wasn’t a question of seeing her. It was always with my mother a question of her seeing me, of her eyes looking through me, of an anxiety that swept out like a miasma embracing me. I thought: “Mothers are the devil! Why have they got to brood over their children? Why do they feel they know all about their children? They don’t. They don’t! She ought to be proud of me, happy for me, happy for the wonderful life that I’ve achieved. She ought—” Then I wrenched thoughts away from her again.
How long was I over in the States? I can’t even remember. It seemed an age of walking warily, of being watched by people with false smiles and enmity in their eyes. I said to myself every day, “I’ve got to get through this. I’ve got to get through this—and then.” Those were the two words I used. Used in my own mind, I mean. Used them every day several times. And then—They were the two words of the future. I used them in the same way that I had once used those other two words. I want….
Everyone went out of their way to be nice to me because I was rich! Under the terms of Ellie’s will I was an extremely rich man. I felt very odd. I had investments I didn’t understand, shares, stocks, property. And I didn’t know in the least what to do with them all.
The day before I went back to England I had a long conversation with Mr. Lippincott. I always thought of him like that in my mind—as Mr. Lippincott. He’d never become Uncle Andrew to me. I told him that I thought of withdrawing the charge of my investments from Stanford Lloyd.
“Indeed!” His grizzled eyebrows rose. He looked at me with his shrewd eyes and his poker face and I wondered what exactly his “indeed” meant.
“Do you think it’s all right to do that?” I asked anxiously.
“You have reasons, I presume?”
“No,” I said, “I haven’t got reasons. A feeling, that’s all. I suppose I can say anything to you?”
“The communication will be privileged, naturally.”
“All right,” I said, “I just feel that he’s a crook!”
“Ah.” Mr. Lippincott looked interested. “Yes, I should say your instinct was possibly sound.”
So I knew then that I was right. Stanford Lloyd had been playing hanky-panky with Ellie’s bonds and investments and all the rest of it. I signed a power of attorney and gave it to Andrew Lippincott.
“You’re willing,” I said, “to accept it?”
“As far as financial matters are concerned,” said Mr. Lippincott, “you can trust me absolutely. I will do my best for you in that respect. I don’t think you will have any reason to complain of my stewardship.”
I wondered exactly what he meant by that. He meant something. I think he meant that he didn’t like me, had never liked me, but financially he would do his best for me because I had been Ellie’s husband. I signed all necessary papers. He asked me how I was going back to England. Flying? I said no, I wasn’t flying, I was going by sea. “I’ve got to have a little time to myself,” I said. “I think a sea voyage will do me good.”
“And you are going to take up your residence—where?”
“Gipsy’s Acre,” I said.
“Ah. You propose to live there.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I thought perhaps you might have put it on the market for sale.”
“No,” I said, and the no came out rather stronger than I meant. I wasn’t going to part with Gipsy’s Acre. Gipsy’s Acre had been part of my dream, the dream that I’d cherished since I’d been a callow boy.
“Is anybody looking after it while you have been away in the States?”
I said that I’d left Greta Andersen in charge.
“Ah,” said Mr. Lippincott, “yes. Greta.”
He meant something in the way he said “Greta” but I didn’t take him up on it. If he disliked her, he disliked her. He always had. It left an awkward pause, then I changed my mind. I felt that I’d got to say something.
“She was very good to Ellie,” I said. “She nursed her when she was ill, she came and lived with us and looked after Ellie. I—I can’t be grateful enough to her. I’d like you to understand that. You don’t know what she’s been like. You don’t know how she helped and did everything after Ellie was killed. I don’t know what I’d have done without her.”
“Quite so, quite so,” said Mr. Lippincott. He sounded drier than you could possibly imagine.
“So you see I owe her a lot.”
“A very competent girl,” said Mr. Lippincott.
I got up and said good-bye and I thanked him.
“You have nothing for which to thank me,” said Mr. Lippincott, dry as ever.
He added, “I wrote you a short letter. I have sent it by air mail to Gipsy’s Acre. If you are going by sea you will probably find it waiting there on arrival.” Then he said, “Have a good voyage.”
I asked him, rather hesitantly, if he’d known Stanford Lloyd’s wife—a girl called Claudia Hardcastle.
“Ah, you mean his first wife. No I never met her. The marriage I believe broke up quite soon. After the divorce, he remarried. That too ended in divorce.”
So that was that.
When I got back to my hotel I found a cable. It asked me to come to a hospital in California. It said a friend of mine, Rudolf Santonix, had asked for me, he had not long to live and he wished to see me before he died.
I changed my passage to a later boat and flew to San Francisco. He wasn’t dead yet, but he was sinking very fast. They doubted, they said, if he would recover consciousness before he died, but he had asked for me very urgently. I sat there in that hospital room watching him, watching what looked like a shell of the man I knew. He’d always looke
d ill, he’d always had a kind of queer transparency about him, a delicacy, a frailness. He lay now looking a deadly, waxen figure. I sat there thinking: “I wish he’d speak to me. I wish he’d say something. Just something before he dies.”
I felt so alone, so horribly alone. I’d escaped from enemies now, I’d got to a friend. My only friend, really. He was the only person who knew anything about me, except Mum, but I didn’t want to think of Mum.
Once or twice I spoke to a nurse, asked her if there wasn’t anything they could do, but she shook her head and said noncommittally:
“He might recover consciousness or might not.”
I sat there. And then at last he stirred and sighed. The nurse raised him up very gently. He looked at me but I didn’t know whether he recognized me or not. He was just looking at me as though he looked past me and beyond me. Then suddenly a difference came into his eyes. I thought, “He does know me, he does see me.” He said something very faintly and I bent over the bed so as to catch it. But they didn’t seem words that had any meaning. Then his body had a sudden spasm and twitch, and he threw his head back and shouted out:
“You damned fool…Why didn’t you go the other way?”
Then he just collapsed and died.
I don’t know what he meant—or even if he knew himself what he was saying.
So that was the last I saw of Santonix. I wonder if he’d have heard me if I had said anything to him? I’d like to have told him once more that the house he’d built me was the best thing I had in the world. The thing that mattered most to me. Funny that a house could mean that. I suppose it was a sort of symbolism about it. Something you want. Something you want so much that you don’t quite know what it is. But he’d known what it was and he’d given it to me. And I’d got it. And I was going home to it.
Going home. That’s all I could think about when I got on the boat. That and a deadly tiredness at first…And then a rising tide of happiness oozing up as it were from the depths…I was going home. I was going home….
Home is the sailor, home from the sea
And the hunter home from the hill…