Gloria had died as the result of an illegal operation in the summer of 1932. There had been enquiries. Nothing came of them. Cyril Lyte, newly qualified, was not even questioned, he was abroad during the questioning. He had been one of many lovers during the previous winter. ‘I’m tired. I’m exhausted,’ Gloria had said when the hasty operation was over. He had left her with the two middle-aged women, neither of whom knew his name. The two middle-aged women were lifting Gloria’s feet and shoving pillows, cushions, blankets under them, for he had said she must not lose too much blood; be careful, keep her feet up, up. ‘I’m exhausted’: Gloria had died next day. He was abroad during the questioning. He became a communist for a space, by way of atonement. Within a year he had mostly forgotten the incident and when he remembered it, assured himself he had done his best for her, and what proof had he that the child was his?
Patrick’s message, twenty-seven years later in the dark séance room, nearly led him to a nervous breakdown. Whichever way he looked at it, whether Patrick had spoken in innocence or from hard knowledge, the message was frightening. ‘Gloria sends this message… remembers every detail… is exhausted, is tired, is exhausted.’ It sounds like hard knowledge, Lyte thought.
In the end, Cyril Lyte found it less frightening to believe that Patrick was a common blackmailer, and no medium between this world and the other. Patrick had called at the surgery the day after the séance. When the doctor had tormented himself for a week he gave way and challenged Patrick on the subject. At first he found Patrick vague as to the details of the message, but very soon asserting his power, and this comforted Dr. Lyte. Patrick was no medium, he told himself. There was no danger from the dim spirit of Gloria, the only danger to be reckoned with was Patrick who was tangible and who must have known the truth all through the years that had passed since he himself had been a single man and so different. As he had sometimes, waking at nights in the weeks following Gloria’s death, dreaded, he was convinced, now, she must have written a letter before she died, or told someone. Patrick had recognised him at the séance. And so Dr. Lyte settled down to supply Patrick with cash, and sometimes to supply Patrick with drugs which assisted him in his trances — ‘You’re certainly a great medium!’ Dr. Lyte would permit himself to remark as he handed the drugs into Patrick’s meek hands. He had heard somewhere that even genuine mediums used drugs; but the doctor strengthened his will against the idea and was determined not to believe it. ‘You’re certainly a great medium!’ — and Patrick would sometimes wink with his eyelid which in any case drooped. Dr. Lyte supplied cash and drugs. If he should seem to falter or keep Patrick too long in the waiting room, Patrick would say, ‘When are you coming to another séance? I may have another message for you.’
Cash, drugs, and now professional advice. How long would it take for Alice to die if she were deprived of insulin? How long if she took too much? She may be careless with her injections. She won’t let me give them to her, she won’t let me see her taking them.
‘Patrick,’ Alice had said, ‘always gives me the injections himself, he’s so good.’
‘Your chalet in Austria,’ Patrick had said. ‘We shall be wanting it for a holiday after the unfortunate court case is settled. And I doubt if it will come to court, and if so it will only last half-an-hour; I’m certain of acquittal. How big is the chalet? How high up in the mountain? How far from the nearest town?’
Dr. Lyte looked round his consulting room and saw there was no escape. He tore a page from The Times and folded it into the shape of a cone. He scooped the black frail ash of the burnt letter into the cone, rolled it up tight. He decided to go to his club for a drink before going home, and as he left his surgery he dumped the paper containing the ashes of his letter to Patrick in the dustbin among the stained cotton wool and empty sample medicine packages of the day. He went to his club and was warmed by the immediate greetings of two of his oldest, most likeable friends.
The cheerful thought occurred to him that Patrick Seton might even be convicted of fraud if it came to a trial.
Chapter VIII
RONALD was changing to go to Isobel Billows ‘cocktail party when the housekeeper from the ground-floor flat came up and rang his bell.
‘I let in your secretary this afternoon,’ said the housekeeper. ‘Just thought I’d let you know. I suppose it was all right.’
‘What secretary?’ Ronald said.
‘The girl. The girl that came for your papers.’
‘What girl?’ Ronald said.
When the housekeeper, resentful and dispirited, had gone, Ronald looked mournfully and in vain in the drawer of his desk where he had left the letter which Patrick Seton was suspected of forging in the name of Mrs. Freda Flower.
‘She was, I should say, about twenty-eight, late twenties,’ the housekeeper had said. ‘A fair young woman, well, I should say near to fair-coloured hair, very pale. How was I to know? She said she was your secretary, and you wanted the papers in a hurry and you forgot to give her the key. I said, I suppose it’s all right and I had my niece downstairs so I said, just let yourself out, you know the way. She looked all right. Remember there was that gentleman that came that morning when I was doing your cleaning, that came for your brief-case. Remember you sent him. How was I to know this wasn’t another person that came to save you the trouble, on account of your difficulty?’
‘I can’t think who she can be,’ Ronald said.
‘Well, I don’t take responsibility.’
‘Well, no,’ said Ronald, ‘of course. Don’t worry, ‘and as soon as she was gone he had opened the drawer, knowing the letter would not be there. He opened all the other drawers and looked through the tidy heaps of papers, but simply as a desperate act of diligence.
Ronald was filled with a great melancholy boredom from which he suffered periodically. It was not merely this affair which seemed to suffocate him, but the whole of life — people, small-time criminals, outraged housekeepers, and all his acquaintance from the beginning of time. When this overtook him Ronald was apt to refuse himself comfortable thoughts: on the contrary he used to tell himself: this sensation, this boredom and disgust, may later seem, in retrospect, to have been one of the happier moods of my life, so appalling may be the experiences to come. It is better, he thought, to be a pessimist in life, it makes life endurable. The slightest optimism invites disappointment.
Isobel Billows’ house was in a newly smartened street at World’s End which lies at that other end of Chelsea. The walls and ceiling of her drawing-room were papered in a dull red and black design. She was giving a cocktail party. Isobel had been three years divorced from, her husband and always said to her new friends ‘I was the innocent party,’ which they did not doubt, and the very statement of which proved, to some of her friends, that she was so in a sense.
Marlene Cooper’s earrings swung with animation as she spoke seriously about spiritualism to Francis Eccles who had now got a job on the British Council. Tim, like a bright young manservant of good appearance, sinuously slid among the guests with a silver dish of shrimps; these shrimps were curled up as if in sleep on the top of small biscuits. Isobel Billows herself, large, soft-featured, middle-aged and handsome, had given up trying to introduce everyone and was surveying the standing crowd from a corner while Ewart Thornton talked to her, he having had three martinis, in the course of which he had told Isobel that he had mounds of homework, that a grammar-school master had no status these days, that spiritualism was the meeting ground between science and religion, and that he always bought his shirts and flannel trousers from Marks & Spencer’s. It was at the point of his fourth martini that Ewart’s deepest pride emerged, to enchant Isobel and make her feel she was really in the swing by having him at her party. She listened to him wonderingly as he told her of the real miner’s cottage of his birth in Carmarthenshire where his father still lived, and the real crofter’s cottage in Perthshire where his grandparents had lived till late. ‘Latham Street Council School; Traherne Grammar School; S
heffield Red Brick — only the brick isn’t red,’ boasted Ewart. ‘Three shillings and sixpence a week pocket money all the while I was a student. From the age often to the age of thirteen I was employed by a fishmonger to deliver fish after school hours and on Saturday mornings. My earnings were four shillings a week which, with the similar earnings of my brothers, went into the family funds. I was given a pair of stout boots every year at Easter. Most of my clothes were home-made. We had outdoor sanitation which we shared with two other families—’
‘Were you ever in trouble with the police?’ Isobel said, looking round in the hope that someone was listening.
Ewart looked gravely at a vase of flowers, as if searching his memory, but obviously he had lost ground. At last he said, ‘No, to be quite honest, no. But I recall being chased by a policeman. With some boys in some rough game. Yes, definitely chased down a back street.’ He took out his snuff-box, and looked vexed. ‘I was definitely underprivileged by birth,’ he said, ‘though not delinquent.’
Isobel said encouragingly, ‘What was your accent like?’
‘Southern Welsh. You can still hear the trace of it, mind you.’
‘So you can,’ said Isobel, who could not.
She loved his hairy tweed suit and his middle-aged largeness, his drooping jowl. She wondered why he had never married. She thought, next, that in some way she ought to feel more grateful for her acquaintance with him than she was, and she wondered why this was so, and found the reason in his being now only a grammar-school master after such likely beginnings; a really dramatic rise in life would have been preferable. But still, he was the real thing, and a great asset to a party.
Ewart took a pinch of snuff and said, ‘My father was a real miner, a real one. Half the men that claim to have come from mining stock, when you look into it, turn out to be the sons of mine-managers or clerks in the coal offices.’
Tim came round with his tray of shrimps.
‘Have a shrimp,’ he said.
Isobel said, ‘Tim, stay and talk to Ewart. I must have a word with your aunt over there.’
Tim took her place with his dish beside Ewart and started eating the shrimps off the tops of the biscuits.
‘I daresay,’ Ewart Thornton said, in a definite man-to-man way, as to a senior prefect, ‘your aunt has told you that she is trying to get together a number of people willing to give evidence as to the bona fides of Patrick Seton, in case he is brought to court by that absurd widow.’
‘No, Marlene hasn’t said anything,’ Tim said, eating shrimps.
‘She will no doubt be after you,’ said Ewart. ‘She will want you to give evidence in court for Patrick Seton. I advise you to do no such thing. I advise you rather to come forward as a witness for Mrs. Freda Flower. Not that I care for Mrs. Flower, a silly woman, but I feel Patrick Seton is an undesirable character who does no credit to the Circle. Of course he’s a good medium but—’
‘Have a shrimp,’ Tim said, ‘before I eat the lot.’
‘No, thanks. He’s a competent medium but there are many brilliant mediums by whom he could be replaced. He is not irreplaceable. Your aunt, I’m afraid, is not inclined to listen to reason. I feel we should all do our best to support Mrs. Flower and___’
‘Have a drink,’ Tim said, lifting a small glass of liqueur off a tray as the caterers’ man passed them by with his tray.
‘Thanks. We should all support Mrs. Flower and not Patrick Seton.’
‘I shan’t support either,’ Tim said, cheerfully. ‘I don’t know a thing about either of them.’
‘Oh, come!’ Ewart said. ‘You’ve attended the séances when both have been present.’
‘Only as a novice,’ Tim said. ‘Really, I’d rather not be involved.’
‘Be reasonable, my boy,’ Ewart said.
Tim ate a shrimp. ‘Am being reasonable,’ he said, and licked his finger tips.
‘It’s a matter of principle,’ Ewart said. ‘Surely you’ve got principles.’
‘None whatsoever when you actually look into it,’ Tim said.
‘I thought as much,’ Ewart said. ‘You fellows that have had every advantage in life—’
‘Was brought up rough, me,’ said Tim, eating two of the biscuits which were now deprived of shrimps.
‘Tim!’ shrieked Marlene from not very far away. ‘Come over here a minute, I’ve been wanting to speak to you all evening.’
‘Must see my aunt,’ Tim said, and putting down the dish, took off his glasses, wiped them, put them on, took up a bowl of olives, and joined Marlene.
A serving table had been set up for the caterers in front of the window; it was spread with a white cloth and was laid out with bottles and glittering glasses. Ronald Bridges and Martin Bowles stood out of the way between a corner of this table and the wall.
‘I could go to Switzerland for Christmas,’ Martin said, ‘if I could get in one small fraction of the money that’s owing to me. Dozens of briefs but no pay. Solicitors are crooks, they won’t part with money.’
‘What do you look like in your wig?’ Ronald said.
‘Quite nice.’
Ronald thought this probably true, for Martin was going bald and the impression of an increasingly high forehead had, over the past five years, thrown his good features out of balance.
Martin said, ‘I’ve been invited to Switzerland for Christmas with a party. All married couples except for me, if I go. It makes one feel young being with married couples.’
‘Or insignificant,’ Ronald said.
‘Yes, or insignificant. I always feel a bit less than a married man. Why is that, do you think? Is it because they’ve got more money than us?’
‘No, married men mostly have less. Obviously.’
‘Well, they seem to have more money, in a queer sort of way, to be economically stronger than single chaps.’
‘It’s an illusion. The truth is, a married man is psychologically stronger.’
‘Yes, it’s psychological. They make one feel young, even men one was at school with. How are you getting on with that forged letter in the Seton case?’
‘It’s a question of responsibility, I think — if they have kids,’ Ronald said, to keep Martin off the subject of the letter.
But ‘How’s the forgery work?’ Martin said.
‘The letter has been stolen from my flat,’ Ronald said, ‘I’m sorry to say.’
‘Come along,’ said Isobel Billows, ‘you bachelors in a huddle, over there.’ She slid her white arm through Martin’s and pressed him into a group which included Marlene with her swinging earrings, Tim with his bowl of olives, a girl wearing a pink dress, and Francis Eccles, who, in the confidence of his new job on the British Council, was exuberantly philosophising to the girl and Marlene.
‘You see,’ he was saying, ‘we are all fundamentally looking at each other and talking across the street from windows of different buildings which look similar from the outside. You don’t know what my building is like inside and I don’t know what yours is like. You probably think my house is comfortably furnished with its music-room and libraries, like yours. But it isn’t. My house is a laboratory with test-tubes, capillaries and — what do you call them? — bunsen burners. My house contains a hospital ward, my house—’
‘Do you live in a very splendid house?’ Martin said to the girl, for his ears had selected from Eccie’s speech only the bit about the music-room and libraries.
The girl was mightily irritated. ‘Eccie is talking in metaphor,’ she said. ‘I live in a bedsitter.’
‘I live in a basement flat,’ said Eccie, still dazed from his elaboration. He looked from one to the other.
‘Oh, I see,’ Martin said. ‘Well, you see, I’ve only got a crude legal mind. I—’
‘Carry on,’ said the girl to Eccie.
Isobel slid her white plump arm through the dark blue of Eccie’s sleeve. ‘Eccie, I want you,’ she said, and bore him off somewhere else.
Martin said to the girl, ‘I’m afraid I int
errupted…’ but he was now looking for Ronald, anxious to know whether Ronald could possibly have been serious when he said the letter had been stolen, and if so, to tell Ronald how furious he was.
He smiled formally to the girl and withdrew, first backward a few steps, then sideways, then right about, so that he could join Ronald where he was standing with Marlene Cooper and Tim.
‘___must do something to justify your existence,’ Marlene was saying to Tim, ‘and now is the chance to show your mettle.’
‘Never did have any mettle,’ Tim said. ‘Want an olive, Ronald?’
Ronald looked into his glass at the tiny drop of cocktail left at the bottom of it.
‘Have an olive, Martin,’ Tim said.
‘What we want to do,’ Marlene said, ‘is to present a body of witnesses to the court. We can all testify in our own words. You, Tim, you’ve seen Patrick and you’ve heard him. You know he’s a real medium, that’s all you’ve got to say. There’s no commitment attached. But we must give Patrick a character. He’s being positively framed by Freda Flower and that vile lover of hers. There may be no case, but as I say, on the other hand, there may be a case.’
Tim said, ‘Martin Bowles here is the prosecuting counsel in the case, Marlene.’
Marlene tilted her face to Martin’s. ‘Are you?’ she said, ‘Oh, are you?’
‘Look,’ said Martin, ‘I really can’t discuss—’
‘I should think you couldn’t,’ Marlene said. ‘You wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. Nor will you have if it comes to court, let me tell you that. We are all behind Patrick. I’m behind him. Tim’s behind—’
‘I’d rather not be involved,’ Tim said.
‘But you are involved,’ said his aunt.
‘How did it happen?’ Martin said as he drove Ronald home.
‘A woman came to the house this morning and pretended to be my secretary. The housekeeper let her in. The letter was gone when I looked for it. I think I know who’s got it.’