He was on the point of rising to go when Stephen Protheroe remarked, ‘Oh, by the way, what was that you were saying about Rockingham this morning? Something to do with the autobiography, I gathered.’
‘Yes. I happened to notice the name in an early chapter. Miss Miles gives some of the people in her book pseudonyms. She seems to have known this “Rockingham” pretty well. I just thought, if I could find out who he was, I might get a line on her young days from him—you never know what may come in useful.’
Arthur Geraldine’s thin lips were stretched so tightly, Nigel observed, that they almost disappeared into his face.
Chapter 11
Bring Back
TO NIGEL, WHOSE type-figure of the public woman had been Dr. Edith Summerskill, Mrs. Blayne came as something of a surprise. Her voice was soft and melodious, her presence unformidable: she resembled some neat, shy, energetic bird—a dipper, perhaps—as she sat at the restaurant table, her black suit edged with white piqué at collar and cuffs, her head bobbing over the menu. It was the day after the dinner-party, and Nigel had invited Clare Massinger to lunch as well.
When they had chosen their food—a lengthy undertaking with Clare, who was always thrown into a paralysis of indecision by a well-stocked menu—Nigel told Mrs. Blayne a little about the case in which he was involved.
‘So, you see,’ he ended, ‘it’s a matter of getting a line back into her early days. Clare told me you’d known her then.’
‘Oh yes, we were at school together. Wimblesham High School. I knew her quite well as a girl. Then I got a scholarship to Somerville, and we rather drifted apart. But I still used to see her from time to time in the vacations.’
‘When she was working in the bookshop?’
‘Yes.’ Mrs. Blayne’s neat head bobbed at him, and she came out with a charming little cascade of laughter.
‘Funny, the things one remembers. Have you ever seen an assistant in a bookshop actually reading?’
‘No, I can’t say I have.’
‘Well, she used to. Whenever I went in, she had her head in a book. Always a novel. I was rather priggish about the trash she read. Poor Millie! And I think she was jealous of me being at the university. It was an uneasy sort of friendship.’
‘Women’s friendships always are,’ remarked Clare. ‘We’re perpetually trying to interfere with one another’s lives, and resenting one another for it.’
‘But she had men friends too?’ Nigel asked.
‘Dozens, if you could believe her. But she was a wonderful romancer, even at school: she at least made you suspend your disbelief. The English mistress said once that Millie’s flair for fiction was worthy of a better cause. Which could be her epitaph, I suppose, poor woman.’ Mrs. Blayne paused to sip her martini. ‘On the Bench, you know, I get girls of that sort up before me every week. For petty theft, shoplifting, and so on. They simply can’t distinguish between reality and their own fantasies. And they’ll always put the blame for their misdemeanours somewhere else—on their own bad luck, on parents who don’t “understand” them, on society which won’t give them a break. I’m talking too much.’
‘Not a bit. It’s helping to fill in the picture. You’d say Millicent Miles, as a girl, was a potential delinquent?’
‘I hate that word. But, yes, I suppose she was. The difference was that she had an uncanny knack for staying out of trouble, for evading the results of actions for which she had been responsible.’
‘You mean, she threw the blame on other people?’ asked Clare.
‘It isn’t as simple as that. She was a strong personality, of course: full of vitality and magnetism: what used to be called a tomboy. At school she was always the centre of a group. But there was this other side to her—a streak of slyness—no, of incorrigible self-deception, so that, when she did something wrong, she could dissociate herself from it—pretend to herself it had never happened, and take herself in so successfully that sometimes other people were taken in too.’
Mrs. Blayne paused, while they were helped to the first course. Then the reminiscent look returned to her eyes.
‘Her father was a totally impossible creature. I suppose she caught it from him. Always living beyond his means—I remember my parents talking about it when he went bankrupt. Oh yes, that reminds me, it was just about then—the bankruptcy time—when I got a curious insight into Millie. It must have been our last year at school. She confided in me one day that a man had made a pass at her: we didn’t call it that then, but Millie spared no detail. I heard later that she had confided it to quite a few other girls as well, and the story grew more lurid by repetition. I was a senior prefect then, and full of public spirit—a horrible little prig, in fact. I told her she must denounce this man to her parents. She said she did not dare—he’d threatened terrible things if she tried to expose him. So I said I’d report it to the headmistress. Millie begged me not to, but off I trotted. Fortunately, the headmistress was a sensible woman. She sent for Millie at once and confronted her with my evidence. And Millie got away with it, you know. She said she’d done it to pull my leg—it was all a joke—it just showed what an unhealthy mind I had, that I could take the absurd story seriously. But she had such an open, wholesome, antiseptic sort of air when she confessed to the leg-pull, it really made me feel a complete fool—as if I had a foul imagination. She was reprimanded, of course; but the H.M. clearly accepted it all as a bit of not-so-clean fun on Millie’s part, and of over-zealousness on mine.’
Clare asked, ‘Had she in fact made it all up?’
‘I’ll never know. She was quite capable of it; anything to dramatise herself. On the other hand’—Mrs. Blayne gave a little grimace—‘she was a physically mature girl at that age.’
‘Did she tell you the man’s name?’ said Nigel.
‘No. She said he’d come to the house when her parents were out. He was a commercial traveller—no, I remember now—a representative of the Daily Sun; you know the circulation schemes newspapers ran in the Twenties: take out a year’s subscription to the Daily Sun, and we give you absolutely free a set of Charles Dickens’s novels.’
‘She didn’t describe his appearance?’
‘I don’t think so. Just one thing stuck in my mind, though—Millie saying to me, with bated breath and a quite devastating sexual precocity, “Julia, never trust a man who has thin lips.”’
‘Indeed?’ said Nigel, poker-faced. ‘Well, well. It’s a small world. But not so small that there aren’t thousands of thin-lipped men in it.’
‘You mustn’t mind him, Julia. He has a bad habit of talking aloud to himself. And don’t let your food get cold.’
As Mrs. Blayne caught up with her eating, Nigel pondered upon one of the entries in Who’s Who, which he had consulted with the forward Susan leaning against his shoulder. Arthur Geraldine’s entry gave no information for the period between ‘Educated at … and ‘Joined staff of Wenham & Geraldine, 1925.’
‘What year did this happen—the Daily Sun representative making a pass at Millicent Miles?’ he presently asked.
‘It was our last year at school: the summer term of 1924.’
‘Yes, it would fit.’
‘Mysterious old cuss, aren’t you?’ said Clare affectionately.
‘Did you go to the Miles’s house much?’
‘Not a great deal. Millie was a bit ashamed of her parents, I think. Too coarse-grained for the sensitive soul she made herself out to be—oh dear, that’s rather uncharitable. It was the usual hideous little semi-detached. Mrs. Miles was terribly house-proud, though. The scouring and dusting type. And oh so respectable. One took tea in the front parlour, I remember—cold as a morgue, and all cluttered up with atrocious objects. About half the room was taken up by a huge glass-fronted cabinet filled with plates, which I’ve no doubt were never used.’
‘Would they have been, by any chance,’ inquired Nigel, gazing non-committally down his nose, ‘plates of a delicate apricot colour?’
Mrs. Blayne looked
prodigiously startled. ‘Yes, they were. But how on earth—?’
‘I should have warned you,’ said Clare. ‘Nigel has strange powers. He is a species of warlock.’
‘You were visualising the plates, weren’t you, Mrs. Blayne? Extra-sensory perception is much less rare than one supposes,’ Nigel equivocally remarked. ‘They were sold up, presumably, when Mr. Miles went bankrupt.’
‘That I can’t tell you. I never actually visited the house after that scene with the headmistress. I felt pretty sore with Millie over it, and chucked her for a bit.’
‘But later you came together again.’
‘Yes, I was sorry for her about the bankruptcy. Not that I really needed to be—she made an enthralling drama out of it for herself.’
‘How long did she work in the book shop?’
‘About two years, I think. Then she got ill—yes, that must have been in 1926, my second year at Oxford. She told me she’d got T.B. and was going to a sanatorium—in Switzerland, was it?—I’m very vague about it all now. Soon after that, my own parents moved away from Wimblesham and I lost touch with her completely.’
‘What about men friends during the bookshop period?’
Julia Blayne did not think she could help much here. Millicent, she suspected, would have been as secretive about any real affaire as she was communicative about imaginary ones. Besides, in the circles where Millicent moved at that time, bankruptcy was a disgrace; and the local youth fought shy of her for a while—Mrs. Blayne remembered her friend’s resentment over this.
‘Did she talk to you about her literary ambitions at all?’
‘Oh yes. In fact she inflicted quite a number of her compositions on me,’ Mrs. Blayne dryly answered.
‘She never mentioned striking up a friendship with a young writer, a man who helped her with her writing?’
‘No. But, as I say, she could be very secretive.’
Clare, who had been digging into a zabaglione, looked up dreamily. ‘There was no National Health Service in the Twenties, was there?’
‘Quite correct, love. I’m glad to hear you’re studying social history.’
‘So how could she afford a sanatorium?’
‘I have an idea she told me some relation was stumping up for it,’ said Mrs. Blayne. ‘She said she’d send me the address of the sanatorium, but she never did.’
‘It’s a leading question, I’m afraid,’ said Nigel slowly, ‘but did it ever occur to you, or anyone who knew her at the time, that she was really going off to have a baby or to get rid of one?’
The J.P. in Julia Blayne came uppermost. ‘It certainly didn’t at the time,’ she briskly replied. ‘Not to me, at any rate. And if there was any gossip, I didn’t hear it. But of course it’s quite possible. Millie was looking very pale. And I remember her being sick the last time I took her out for a picnic lunch on the common. I put it all down to T.B. then, knowing nothing about it.’
‘She never mentioned the name “Protheroe” to you? Or “Rockingham”? Or “Geraldine”?’
‘Not that I remember.’
Nigel had expected nothing else. If Millicent Miles had had an affair with a man at the age of eighteen or nineteen, she would have kept it a clandestine one.
‘She used people,’ Julia Blayne was saying. ‘That’s the basic impression of her that remains in my mind after all these years. She used people, absolutely shamelessly and ruthlessly, like a clever child uses grown-ups.’
‘She seems to have used up three husbands,’ Clare remarked. ‘And I suppose she used people she knew for characters in her absurd novels.’
‘Oh God!’ groaned Nigel. ‘Don’t tell me I’ve got to read them now!’
‘You don’t. I have.’
‘What?’
‘Well, the first one. I found a copy yesterday. Published in 1928. All about an innocent young typist who has an illy-jitty by a plausible gentleman of too much leisure and is deserted and ostracised and generally has a rough time till she marries the boss’s hard-working son who has always loved her in a solid, silent, respectful sort of way.’
‘Well, bless my soul! And first novels are usually reckoned to be autobiographical.’
Shortly after this, the busy Mrs. Blayne said she must go. Nigel got one or two names from her: but the one he wanted most was useless; Mrs. Blayne, returning to Wimblesham after the war for a School Reunion, had heard that the book shop and its owner had been destroyed by a bomb in 1940.
The whole damned case is a cat’s-cradle of dead ends, Nigel said to himself as he made his way to Fleet Street. In the offices of the Daily Sun, however, one of his long shots was proved successful. The managing editor, with whom he had fixed an appointment by telephone, had the records searched. The Daily Sun’s representative in the Wimblesham area, for the big circulation drive of 1924, had been a certain Arthur Geraldine.
‘Well, what do you know? He’s a top publisher now, isn’t he? Got a honey of a libel case coming up—that the man? Never realised he’d worked for us. Before my time, of course.’
‘Would there be anyone still on the paper who knew him then?’
‘Doubt it. We all get fired after a few years, if we don’t curl up and die of the horrors first. Wait a minute, though. Old Jackson survived. Was our advertising manager. Retired to a life of ill-earned leisure last year. Eunice, get Mr. Jackson’s address, will you?’
So much depends, thought Nigel, as he made his way out to Putney to interview the retired Mr. Jackson—so much depends on Millicent Miles’s autobiography. How far can it be trusted? How can one discern the objective facts beneath all the subjective, protective colouring she so freely splashed over them? Does that erased ‘G’ stand for Arthur Geraldine? Does she call him ‘Rockingham’ through an association with the Rockingham ware in the cabinet in that terrible little front parlour? If so, was it a chance association or a more deliberate one? Back in the Twenties, Stephen Protheroe had rather maliciously remarked, ‘people didn’t always know the value of their own possessions.’ Suppose Arthur Geraldine, the Daily Sun representative, the fanatical collector, had seen the Rockingham set when first he visited the Miles’s house, and offered Millicent’s father a fiver for it? Mr. Miles was already nearly on the rocks in that summer of 1924: he might well jump at the offer, not knowing that the real value of the set was many times greater. Certainly a Rockingham dinner set, of the same delicate apricot colour, now graced the Geraldines’ table and had been ‘acquired’ some time before their marriage in 1930.
But, though it would have been a sufficiently mean act—a bit of flagrant near-robbery, one could hardly suppose it a strong card for Millicent Miles to play, thirty years later, in a blackmail game: certainly not strong enough to compel Geraldine to kill her rather than be exposed. On the other hand, the purchase of the set might have brought Geraldine into closer contact with the Miles family. He would have been in his early twenties then, and Millicent was a sexually mature girl: if, a little later, he became her lover, one could understand her referring to him as ‘Rockingham’ in her memoirs. Geraldine had certainly become ‘a power in the world of letters’. It was difficult, perhaps, to think of him as ever having been a ‘shy, gangling young man’; but here, Miss Miles’s cliché-ridden style must be reckoned with: for her, all young men might be shy and gangling.
The main snag in this theory was that, according to her autobiography, she first met ‘Rockingham’ a few weeks after her eighteenth birthday. Her birthday was 3rd August. The episode of the man (‘Never trust a man with thin lips’) who, she alleged, had made a pass at her, occurred in the summer term, when she was still seventeen. Of course, her memory for dates might well have been defective; or some obscure mental process might have caused her deliberately to post-date the first meeting; or, yet again, if the story of his making a pass at her was a fabrication (wish fulfilment?), she might only have seen him when he visited her parents’ house as the Daily Sun representative, and not met him till he came into the bookshop a month later.
Mr. Jackson, a rubicund, white-haired man, received Nigel hospitably.
‘Tea or whisky? We always had something in the office at 3.30, and I like to keep up old customs.’
Opting for tea, Nigel presently explained, with some caution, the object of his visit.
‘Geraldine? Geraldine? Yes, I remember him,’ said Mr. Jackson, bouncing vivaciously in his chair. ‘He’s come up in the world, hasn’t he? When was it now?—middle Twenties. Yes. His Lordship, our proprietor’—Mr. Jackson piously crossed himself—‘had one of his farcical notions for raising the tone of the paper. Signed on a number of University men. No, not me, I came from the gutter. Geraldine was one of them. Next thing, his Lordship had yet another bright idea—he swarms with ideas, you know, like lice—why not use these highly-educated types to push our circulation campaign? We were offering a complete set of the World’s Great Novels, with knobs on, if you took out a year’s subscription to the rag, see? Well then, his Lordship conceives this truly Napoleonic notion—send out the University boys to tout for subscriptions. For why?—as we say in our editorials. Because they can unload their book-learning on to the prospective customers—tell them exactly why they’ll never be really human till they’ve read the World’s Great Novels, complete set bound in elegant linoleum, absolutely free gift in return for one year’s subscription. You get the beauty of it?’
Nigel admitted that he did.
‘The Oxford and Cambridge chums were properly riled, I can tell you. All they wanted was to write beautiful prose and get by-lines. Instead, the poor sods had to go padding round the outer purlieus giving private lectures on Dustyeffski and who have you to a lot of morons who only wanted to curl up with a nice sizzler by Elinor Glyn. Took the bloom off the Blues in no time, believe you me.’
‘How did Geraldine get on at the racket?’
‘He lived to tell the tale. Only with us about a year, I think. Then he retired gracefully into publishing.’