The Decayed Gentlewoman

by E. X. Ferrars

  “Of course not. But at least it’s green now and catches the eye.”

  “What do you do when you aren’t here?” he asked.

  “Oh—various things.” Her gaze moved away from his and attached itself to a corner of the ceiling. “This and that. I’m really just like Mother—I drift from one thing to another— except that I’ll never be as sweet as she is. There’s something very sour in my nature. Now let me tell you about how I saw that picture—”

  “Tell me something else first,” Colin interrupted. “Tell me why you and your mother stopped coming to Ardachoil.”

  “We stopped being asked, that was all,” she said.

  “But why?”

  “Ask your aunts.”

  “No, Ginny, tell me.”

  She gave a shrug of her shoulders and looked at him again, her big grey eyes sardonic.

  “I suppose your aunts found out Mother wasn’t a widow at all. You see, when Mother and your aunt Dolly made friends during the war, when they were both in the A.T.S., Mother was making herself out to be a widow. Naturally, since she had me to explain. I don’t imagine anyone but your aunt Dolly believed her for a moment. But Aunt Dolly apparently did, and she was so sorry for us both and realized I was about the same age as the little boy whom she and her sisters had to look after in the holidays and that I’d make such a nice companion for him. Which, let me say, I did my best to be, even if you don’t remember it. But Mother must have let the cat out of the bag somehow and so the invitations stopped.”

  “And then?”

  “And then!” she said, suddenly fierce. “Is this some sort of examination? What happened then, or a bit later, was that Mother married Harry Winter, who was a traveller in electrical gadgets and a darling, but he was dying already of lung cancer, so she only got a genuine widowhood out of it—apart from his life’s savings, which may have been what she really married him for. I don’t know about that. I just know what happened and that he was a darling.”

  Colin reached for the loaf of bread and began to cut it. “You’re quite right, something in your nature has got a bit soured,” he said. “I don’t understand about my aunts. They aren’t usually so narrow-minded.”

  “Aren’t they?” she said. “They used always to make me feel I spent my time stumbling from one deadly sin to the next. Yet I was really a very quiet, harmless child.”

  “Is that what you think?” She might, he considered, have given the aunts some credit for being as good to her as they had been at first, whatever had happened later. “About the picture…”

  “Yes,” she said quickly, as if she were relieved that he was at last ready to talk of it. “Well?”

  “I don’t understand how you knew it had been stolen.”

  “I think I must have read it in the papers,” she said.

  “I don’t think it got into the papers.”

  “Oh, it did. I’m sure it did. I can remember Mother reading it out to me and saying, ‘That must be that fat little boy you used to play with at Ardachoil—d’you remember him, Ginny?’” She took a slice of bread and began to butter it. “You aren’t so fat now, but you’re fairly enormous.”

  “I don’t believe I ever was fat,” he said, smiling, “it was sheer bone and muscle—incipient, anyway. And you see, there never was anything in the papers about the picture disappearing.”

  “I’m sure there was.”

  “Not about the picture. Only about the hold-up and the car. Nothing was said about the picture—any more than about my suitcase and my Thermos and sandwiches. Nobody thought it was important.”

  “But now you think perhaps it was?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know yet if it’s really the same picture. But I do know there was nothing about it in the papers.”

  “I tell you there was. I remember Mother reading it out. Or anyway…” She wrinkled her forehead uncertainly. “I remember her telling me about it. It doesn’t matter, does it? I know I heard about it somehow and as soon as I saw it in Joe’s saleroom on Wednesday afternoon—we shut on Wednesday afternoons, so I was prowling around, seeing if I could perhaps pick up some nicer sort of plates to go in the window upstairs. Actually it’s the cakes that need changing, more than the plates, but the Heavens sisters mightn’t like that… Well, as I was saying, I was poking around and suddenly I saw the picture. I knew it at once and I remembered about its being stolen. So in spite of the fact that my feeling for your aunts borders on the indifferent, I thought I really ought to try to get in touch with you, in case you’d like me to get it back. A pure piece of sentiment. Old times, and so on. And, as you know, I thought I’d get it easily for a few pounds and it was the shock of my life when someone else started bidding for it.”

  “How did you know how to get in touch with me?”

  She dropped her piece of bread and cheese on to her plate and pushed her chair back sharply from the table. Its feet made a screeching sound on the stone floor.

  “Is this what you’re always like, Colin? How many more questions are you going to ask me? Because I think I’ve had nearly enough of them. I happened to know you were a lecturer at Edinburgh University because—because a friend of mine went to a job there a couple of years ago and one day he happened to mention you.”

  “Who is he?” Colin asked.

  “His name’s John Clitheroe. He’s in History, I think, or perhaps it’s Economics. Something like that. Well, so of course I rang up the University on Wednesday, and somebody told me to try another number, and somebody there told me to try another, and so on, until at last I got on to a nice man who said his name was Fordyce and he knew you were going to London that night and he said he’d see if your landlady knew which train you were going on and then he’d ring me back. Which he did.”

  “Forsythe,” Colin said. “Bob Forsythe.”

  Bob Forsythe was a research student whose work Colin had been directing for the last year. But John Clitheroe was a name that meant nothing to him.

  Restraining the urge to ask further questions about him, he said, “It sounds as if you had an expensive afternoon, with all that telephoning.”

  “Never mind.” She hitched her chair back to the table and picked up her bread and cheese. “I’ll make some coffee in a moment,” she said, “then we’ll go and see the Lakes. But there’s no hurry, because they won’t get back from the pub for some time. They always have a pretty long, pretty alcoholic lunch-hour.”

  “Does ‘they’ mean Lake and his wife?” Colin asked.

  “Yes, Joe and Beryl. But before we go round there’s something I want to tell you about them.” She put her head a little on one side, looking into Colin’s face with a certain doubtfulness, as if she were not sure of being able to find the right words to tell him what she wanted. “I’m a bit afraid you may not take to Joe very much at first. He’s a rather loud sort of person, whom I think it would be absolutely natural for someone like you to distrust at sight.”

  “What do you mean by someone like me?” Colin asked. He didn’t much like the tone in which she had said it.

  She did not answer directly.

  “What I’m trying to tell you,” she said, “is that you aren’t going to like Joe’s face, or his tie, or his waistcoat. But still he’s completely honest and awfully kind. And,”—she emphasized it—“he isn’t a receiver of stolen property.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER THREE

  « ^ »

  Joe Lake’s tie was of cream satin with foxhounds leaping up it. His waistcoat was of tartan, bound with leather. Ginny was right, Colin liked neither of them. At the same time, he found it very difficult to believe that any remarkable degree of honesty and kindness lurked behind the man’s animated but furtive grin and the cautious probing of his red-veined eyes.

  When Ginny and Colin went round together to the saleroom, they found Joe, red in the face and puffing, pushing at the corner of an enormous wardrobe, which his wife was telling him was in everybody’s way and ought to be moved into a
corner. He was a fairly big man, but not, it was plain, a strong one. There was a soft layer of fat all over him, his wide shoulders sagged and his chest was hollow. He had very little of his fair hair left and deep lines ringed the thick flesh round his neck. Yet there were very few lines on his flat-nosed, padded-looking face and the smile that he gave when he saw Ginny and Colin at the door merely drew his cheeks into pleats which then vanished completely, as if they had only been pressed for a moment into a sponge.

  Coming across the room, he wiped his hands on a silk handkerchief, then held one out to Colin. It felt hot and damp. His breath was a warm blast of whisky fumes.

  “Glad to see you,” he said. “Glad to tell you anything I can about this rum do. But I can’t promise it’ll help. I’ll tell you straight, in my opinion Ginny here got her wires crossed.”

  He put a hand on Ginny’s shoulder. “No offence, darling. We all make mistakes.”

  “Joe,” his wife said, still from the far end of the room, “that wardrobe…”

  “Oh,” said Joe. “Yes. Well, in just a minute.”

  “I was merely thinking,” Beryl Lake said in a cool, sharp voice, smiling at Colin as she spoke, “that if Mr. Lockie would be so very kind as to lend you a hand for just a moment, you could get the thing out of the way and then I could get on with stacking this china where people can look at it.”

  She was a small, slender woman of about forty, very upright, dressed in a tweed suit of a rather staring shade of green. She had some heavy gold chains round her neck and topaz ear-rings. Her hair was dark red and wound smoothly round her head. It was very beautiful hair. Her dark eyes gave Colin a look as long and direct as her husband’s had been sidelong and evasive.

  “I know you don’t mind my suggesting it,” she said.

  As he went towards the wardrobe, Colin thought that it would not trouble her in the least if he did. Beryl Lake was a woman who would let no opportunities slip of making use of anyone who happened to be around. What they felt would not concern her.

  “Well now,” Joe said, “I really don’t like to trouble you like that. I can attend to it later.”

  “Joe,” she said.

  “Oh well.”

  He gave a quick, sly grin, as if really he were pleased that she had arranged things so adroitly. He went to grasp the other end of the wardrobe and between them he and Colin pushed it, a few inches at a time, into a corner of the room.

  “There, that’s wonderful,” Beryl Lake said. “Thank you so much, Mr. Lockie. Now I’ll leave you in peace to talk over whatever it is you want to with Joe.”

  “Here, hadn’t you better listen in on it?” Joe said. “You know as much about it all as I do.”

  “Well, I’m here if there’s anything special you want to ask me, but somebody’s got to get ahead with unpacking all this stuff.” She gestured at some packing cases with their lids off and straw bulging out of them. “I’d take Mr. Lockie into the office, if I were you, Joe, then you won’t be disturbed if people come looking around.”

  “Well, all right—come along, Mr. Lockie,” said Joe. “You coming too, Ginny?” He led the way into a small, untidy office, plumped down in the revolving chair at the desk and left Ginny and Colin to find seats for themselves. “I can tell you where we got that picture, if that’s any good to you, but if it was stolen property, there’s something bloody queer been going on, because you couldn’t find a more harmless old lady than Mrs. Sibbald. And I can give you the name and address of the man who bought it and that’s just about all. I can’t tell you a damned thing about the picture itself. I never noticed anything special about it.”

  “That sounds quite a lot to be going on with,” Colin said. “Who was this Mrs. Sibbald?”

  “She was an old lady who lived here in Oldersfield for as long as I’ve known the place, and that’s going on ten years.” Joe picked up a packet of cigarettes from the dusty top of the desk and offered them round. “From what I’ve heard too, she lived here much longer than that. Most of her life, I dare say. She was a widow without any children and she lived in a house out near the golf course. Medium-size house, built around the turn of the century—you know the sort of place. Fifty years ago it’d have been just right for a lone widow living on a small pension with a cook, a housemaid, and fulltime gardener. These days you couldn’t think why she didn’t sell up and move into a nice little bungalow.”

  “Why didn’t she?” Colin asked.

  “God knows. When Beryl and me were called in after she died to see what we’d give for the stuff in the house, it was all in a terrible state. She’d been living in about two rooms of the place for years and not caring what happened to the rest of it. Chunks of plaster had come down from the ceilings, drains had got blocked up and left like that and you could stick a penknife into the dry rot in the attics like into a piece of butter. And the whole place was full of junk, stuff you couldn’t do anything with but burn. Believe it or not, in one room there was a set of false teeth grinning up at us from the middle of the floor. Couldn’t say how long ago she’d got fed up with them and thrown them away there. Gave me the creeps. But I suppose she was used to it and felt at home there, poor old soul.”

  “Were there a lot of pictures in the house?”

  “Heaps of ’em. Most of them we wouldn’t even touch. Advised the nephew to take them into the garden and make a big bonfire. But this one you’re steamed up about and a few others had fairly decent frames and some of the furniture was good solid stuff, though not what you can get much of a price on these days.”

  “Was the nephew her heir?” Colin asked.

  “That’s right. Not very pleased with the situation, either. Said she ought at least to have kept the house in repair, then it’d have been worth converting into flats and fetched a good price. I couldn’t see myself why she should have bothered, when she’d only a cold fish like him to leave it to. But he didn’t see that.”

  “Where was the picture, when you found it?”

  “Far as I remember, up in the attic. But there was such a lot of stuff jammed in cupboards, under the beds, and every damned where, I may have got mixed up. Beryl may remember.” He raised his voice, “Hi, Beryl!”

  She appeared in the doorway, a large blue and gold plant pot in one hand, a duster in the other. She had put on a pair of spectacles with brightly jewelled frames. Behind them her eyes had the opaque gleam of damp pebbles.

  “Most of this lot’s terrible,” she muttered, looking down at the plant pot. “We were fools to take it on. We’ll never shift it.”

  “Beryl, d’you remember whereabouts in Mrs. Sibbald’s house we found that picture?” Joe asked.

  “In the attic,” she answered.

  “That’s right, that’s where I thought,” said Joe.

  She disappeared again.

  Ginny just then caught Colin’s eye. She frowned at him slightly, as if she were telling him to press on with his questioning, even if it seemed to be getting him nowhere. She did not want him to lose faith yet, however improbable it might sound, that the picture found in Mrs. Sibbald’s attic was the same one that had been stolen with his car.

  “I suppose there’s no one who can tell us how and when Mrs. Sibbald got hold of the picture,” he said.

  “Not unless the nephew can,” said Joe. “I can give you his address—it’s in North London somewhere, I remember—if that’s any good to you.” He opened a notebook and copied something out of it on to a slip of paper.

  “Here you are,” he said. “That’s where he lives. But it looked to me as if he hadn’t been near the old lady for years. Like I told you, he was pretty disappointed with the state of things.”

  “Thanks—and there’s the address of the man who bought the picture, if you don’t mind letting me have it too,” Colin reminded him.

  “Greer,” Joe said. “I remember that was his name. Wait a minute.” He turned the pages of another notebook. “Here we are. Edmund Greer, Hopewood House, Hopewood. That’s a village abou
t twenty miles from here, over towards East Grinstead.”

  “Is he someone you’ve known for some time?” Colin askea. “I mean, has he often bought things from you here?”

  “Well, he was nosing around the saleroom for a week or two before that particular sale. We have a sale here every Thursday and he came to the one last week and bought a few things. The best things too. A nice Sheraton tea-caddy we had and a Queen Anne soup-ladle. He’s got a good eye all right.”

  “And a green face and a nasty voice,” Ginny said. “A mincing, arrogant, sinister voice.”

  Joe burst out laughing. Swivelling his chair so that it brought him closer to Ginny, he slid an arm round her waist and gently patted her hip.

  “Darling, you’ve got it in for him because he beat you to it, that’s all. God, I was glad when you stopped pushing him up, though it was all money in my pocket. But there I was, thinking to myself, the poor girl’s going bonkers, where are she and Harriet going to put their hands on money like that? Didn’t occur to me, naturally, you’d got a backer.”

  “So you think he did know what he was doing,” Çolin said. “That’s one of the things I wanted to find out.”

  He realized that his tone had suddenly become much harsher than it had any reason to be. It had something to do with the sight of that encircling arm and patting hand.

  Joe snatched one of his swift glances at Colin’s face. Then he stared hard at the toe of his own shoe and began to jog it nervily up and down.

  “Well now,” he said, after giving himself time to think, and the fact that he needed it seemed to Colin the most interesting thing that had happened so far. “I can’t really say anything about that. Matter of fact, I hadn’t thought about it. But I see what you mean. If he knew what he was at, perhaps the picture was worth something after all. And we missed it. Threw it away, probably. Ah well, all in the day’s work. You can’t fool all the people all the time. Get fooled yourself once in a while.” He let his arm fall from Ginny’s waist and used the hand to make the gesture of smoothing back some nonexistent hair from his forehead.