Giant's Bread

by Christie, writing as Mary Westmacott, Agatha

  ‘Now, your father wasn’t a rich man. When his father died, and he came into this place, he had so little money that he thought he’d have to sell it.’

  ‘Sell it?’ burst out Vernon incredulously.

  ‘Yes, it’s not entailed.’

  ‘What’s entailed?’

  Mr Flemming explained carefully and clearly.

  ‘But – but – you aren’t going to sell it now?’

  Vernon gazed at him with agonizing, imploring eyes.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Mr Flemming. ‘The estate is left to you, and nothing can be done until you are of age – that means twenty-one, you know.’

  Vernon breathed a sigh of relief.

  ‘But, you see,’ continued Uncle Sydney, ‘there isn’t enough money to go on living here. As I say, your father would have had to sell it. But he met your mother and married her, and fortunately she had enough money to – to keep things going. But your father’s death has made a lot of difference – for one thing he has left certain – er – debts which your mother insists on paying.’

  There was a sniff from Myra. Uncle Sydney’s tone was embarrassed and he hurried on.

  ‘The common-sense thing to do is to let Abbots Puissants for a term of years – till you are twenty-one, in fact. By then, who knows? Things may – er – change for the better. Naturally your mother will be happier living near her own relations. You must think of your mother, you know, my boy.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vernon. ‘Father told me to.’

  ‘So that’s settled – eh?’

  How cruel they were, thought Vernon. Asking him – when he could see that there was nothing to ask him about. They could do as they liked. They meant to. Why call him in here and pretend!

  Strangers would come and live in Abbots Puissants.

  Never mind! Some day he would be twenty-one.

  ‘Darling,’ said Myra, ‘I’m doing it all for you. It would be so sad here without Daddy, wouldn’t it?’

  She held out her arms, but Vernon pretended not to notice. He walked out of the room, saying, with difficulty:

  ‘Thank you, Uncle Sydney, so much, for telling me …’

  4

  He went out into the garden and wandered on till he came to the old Abbey. He sat down with his chin in his hands.

  ‘Mother could!’ he said to himself. ‘If she liked, she could! She wants to go and live in a horrid red brick house with pipes on it like Uncle Sydney’s. She doesn’t like Abbots Puissants – she never has. But she needn’t pretend it’s all for me. That’s not true. She says things that aren’t true. She always has –’

  He sat there smouldering with indignation.

  ‘Vernon – Vernon – I’ve been looking for you everywhere. I couldn’t think what had become of you. What’s the matter?’

  It was Joe. He told her. Here was someone who would understand and sympathize. But Joe startled him.

  ‘Well, why not? Why shouldn’t Aunt Myra go and live in Birmingham if she wants to? I think you’re beastly. Why should she go on living here just so that you should be here in the holidays? It’s her money. Why shouldn’t she spend it on doing as she likes?’

  ‘But Joe, Abbots Puissants –’

  ‘Well, what’s Abbots Puissants to Aunt Myra? In her heart of hearts she feels about it just like you feel about Uncle Sydney’s house in Birmingham. Why should she pinch and scrape to live here if she doesn’t want to? If your father had made her happier here, perhaps she would want to – but he didn’t. Mother said so once. I don’t like Aunt Myra terribly – I know she’s good and all that, but I don’t love her – but I can be fair. It’s her money. You can’t get away from that!’

  Vernon looked at her. They were antagonists. Each had their point of view and neither could see the other’s. They were both ablaze with indignation.

  ‘I think women have a rotten time,’ said Joe. ‘And I’m on Aunt Myra’s side.’

  ‘All right,’ said Vernon, ‘be on her side! I don’t care.’

  Joe went away. He stayed there, sitting on the ruined wall of the old Abbey.

  For the first time he questioned life … Things weren’t sure. How could you tell what was going to happen?

  When he was twenty-one.

  Yes, but you couldn’t be sure! You couldn’t be safe!

  Look at the time when he was a baby. Nurse, God, Mr Green! How absolutely fixed they had seemed. And now they had all gone.

  At least, God was still there, he supposed. But it wasn’t the same God – not the same God at all.

  What would have happened to everything by the time he was twenty-one? What, strangest thought of all, would have happened to himself?

  He felt terribly alone. Father, Aunt Nina – both dead. Only Uncle Sydney and Mummy – and they weren’t – didn’t – belong. He paused, confused. There was Joe! Joe understood. But Joe was queer about some things.

  He clenched his hands. No, everything would be all right.

  When he was twenty-one …

  Book Two

  Nell

  Chapter One

  1

  The room was full of cigarette smoke. It eddied and drifted about, forming a thin blue haze. Through it came the sound of three voices occupied with the betterment of the human race and the encouragement of art – especially art that defied all known conventions.

  Sebastian Levinne, leaning back against the ornate marble mantelpiece of his mother’s town house, spoke didactically, gesticulating with the long yellow hand that held his cigarette. The tendency to lisp was still there, but very faint. His yellow Mongolian face, his surprised looking ears, were much the same as they had been at eleven years old. At twenty-two he was the same Sebastian, sure of himself, perceptive, with the same love of beauty and the same unemotional and unerring sense of values.

  In front of him, reclining in two immense leather covered arm-chairs, were Vernon and Joe. Very much alike these two, cast in the same sharply accentuated black and white mould. But, as of old, Joe’s was the more aggressive personality, energetic, rebellious, vehement. Vernon, an immense length, lay back slothfully in his chair. His long legs rested on the back of another chair. He was blowing smoke rings and smiling thoughtfully to himself. He occasionally contributed grunts to the conversation, or a short lazy sentence.

  ‘That wouldn’t pay,’ Sebastian had just said decisively.

  As he had half expected, Joe was roused at once to the point of virulence.

  ‘Who wants a thing to pay? It’s so – so rotten – that point of view! Treating everything from a commercial standpoint. I hate it.’

  Sebastian said calmly: ‘That’s because you’ve got such an incurably romantic view of life. You like poets to starve in garrets, and artists to toil unrecognized, and sculptors to be applauded after they are dead.’

  ‘Well – that’s what happens. Always!’

  ‘No, not always. Very often, perhaps. But it needn’t be as often as it is. That’s my point. The world never likes anything new – but I say it could be made to. Taken the right way, it could be made to. But you’ve got to know just what will go down and what won’t.’

  ‘That’s compromise,’ murmured Vernon indistinctly.

  ‘It’s common sense! Why should I lose money by backing my judgment?’

  ‘Oh, Sebastian,’ cried Joe. ‘You – you –’

  ‘Jew!’ said Sebastian calmly. ‘That’s what you mean. Well, we Jews have got taste – we know when a thing is fine and when it isn’t. We don’t go by the fashion – we back our own judgment, and we’re right! People always see the money side of it, but the other’s there too.’

  Vernon grunted. Sebastian went on.

  ‘There are two sides to what we’re talking about – there are people who are thinking of new things, new ways of doing old things, new thoughts altogether – and who can’t get their chance because people are afraid of anything new. And there are the other people – the people who know what the public have always wanted, and who go
on giving it to them, because it’s safe and there’s a sure profit. But there’s a third way – to find things that are new and beautiful, and take a chance on them. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to run a picture gallery in Bond Street – I signed the deeds yesterday – and a couple of theatres – and later I want to run a weekly of some kind on entirely different lines from anything that has been done before. And what’s more, I’m going to make the whole thing pay. There are all sorts of things that I admire, that a cultivated few would admire – but I’m not going out for those. Anything I run’s going to be a popular success. Dash it all, Joe, don’t you see that half the fun of the thing is making it pay? It’s justifying yourself by success.’

  Joe shook her head, unconvinced.

  ‘Are you really going to have all those things?’ said Vernon.

  Both the cousins looked at Sebastian with a tinge of envy. Queer, and rather wonderful, to be in old Sebastian’s position. His father had died some years before. Sebastian, at twenty-two, was master of so many millions that it took one’s breath away to think about them.

  The friendship with Sebastian, begun all those years ago at Abbots Puissants, had endured and strengthened. He and Vernon had been friends at Eton, they were at the same college at Cambridge. In the holidays, the three had always managed to spend a good deal of time together.

  ‘What about sculpture?’ asked Joe suddenly. ‘Is that included?’

  ‘Of course. Are you still keen about taking up modelling?’

  ‘Rather. It’s the only thing I really care about.’

  A derisive hoot of laughter came from Vernon.

  ‘Yes, and what will it be this time next year? You’ll be a frenzied poet or something.’

  ‘It takes one some time to find one’s true vocation,’ said Joe with dignity. ‘But I’m really in earnest this time.’

  ‘You always are,’ said Vernon. ‘However, thank heaven you’ve given up that damned violin.’

  ‘Why do you hate music so, Vernon?’

  ‘Dunno – I always have.’

  Joe turned back to Sebastian. Unconsciously her voice took on a different note. It sounded ever so faintly constrained.

  ‘What do you think of Paul La Marre’s work? Vernon and I went to his studio last Sunday.’

  ‘No guts,’ said Sebastian succinctly.

  A slight flush rose in Joe’s cheek.

  ‘That’s simply because you don’t understand what he’s aiming at. I think he’s wonderful.’

  ‘Anaemic,’ said Sebastian, unperturbed.

  ‘Sebastian, I think you’re perfectly hateful sometimes. Just because La Marre has the courage to break away from tradition –’

  ‘That’s not it at all,’ said Sebastian. ‘A man can break away from tradition by modelling a Stilton cheese and calling it his idea of a nymph bathing. But if he can’t convince you and impress you by doing so, he’s failed. Just doing things differently to anyone else isn’t genius. Nine times out of ten it’s aiming at getting cheap notoriety.’

  The door opened and Mrs Levinne looked in.

  ‘Teath ready, dearths,’ she said, and beamed on them.

  Jet dangled and twinkled on her immense bust. A large black hat with feathers sat on top of her elaborately arranged coiffure. She looked the complete symbol of material prosperity. Her eyes dwelt with adoration on Sebastian.

  They got up, and prepared to follow her. Sebastian said in a low voice to Joe:

  ‘Joe – you’re not angry, are you?’

  There was suddenly something young and pathetic about his voice – a pleading in it that exposed him as immature and vulnerable. A moment ago he had been the master spirit laying down the law in complete self-confidence.

  ‘Why should I be angry?’ said Joe coldly.

  She moved towards the door without looking at him. Sebastian’s eyes rested on her wistfully. She had that dark magnetic beauty that matures early. Her skin was dead white, and her eyelashes so thick and dark that they looked like jet against the even colour of her cheeks. There was magic in her way of moving, something languorous and passionate that was wholly unconscious as yet of its own appeal. Although she was the youngest of the three, just past her twentieth birthday, she was at the same time the oldest. To her Vernon and Sebastian were boys, and she despised boys. That queer dog-like devotion of Sebastian’s irritated her. She liked men of experience, men who could say exciting, half understood things. She lowered her white eyelids for a moment, remembering Paul La Marre.

  2

  Mrs Levinne’s drawing-room was a curious mixture of sheer blatant opulence, and an almost austere good taste. The opulence was due to her – she liked velvet hangings and rich cushions and marble, and gilding – the taste was Sebastian’s. It was he who had torn down a medley of pictures from the wall and substituted two of his own choosing. His mother was reconciled to their plainness (as she called it) by the immense price that had been paid for them. The old Spanish leather screen was one of her son’s presents to her – so was the exquisite cloisonne vase.

  Seated behind an unusually massive silver tea-tray, Mrs Levinne raised the teapot with two hands, and made conversational inquiries, lisping slightly.

  ‘And how’s your dear mother? She never comes to town nowadays. You tell her from me she’ll be getting rusty.’

  She laughed, a good-natured fat wheezy chuckle.

  ‘I’ve never regretted having this town house as well as a country one. Deerfields is all very well, but one wants a bit of life. And of course Sebastian will be home soon for good – and that full of schemes as he is! Well, well, his father was much the same. Went into deals against everybody’s advice, and instead of losing his money he doubled and trebled it every time. A smart fellow, my poor Yakob.’

  Sebastian thought to himself:

  ‘I wish she wouldn’t. That’s just the sort of remark Joe always hates. Joe’s always against me nowadays.’

  Mrs Levinne went on.

  ‘I’ve got a box for Kings in Arcady on Wednesday night. What about it, my dears? Will you come?’

  ‘I’m awfully sorry, Mrs Levinne,’ said Vernon. ‘I wish we could. But we’re going down to Birmingham tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh! you’re going home.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Why hadn’t he said ‘going home’? Why did it sound so fantastic in his ears? There was only one home, of course, Abbots Puissants. Home! A queer word, so many meanings to it. It reminded him of the ridiculous words of a song that one of Joe’s young men used to bray out (what a damnable thing music was!) while he fingered his collar and looked at her sentimentally. ‘Home, love, is where the heart is, where’er the heart may be …’

  But in that case his home ought to be in Birmingham where his mother was.

  He experienced that faint feeling of disquietude that always came over him when he thought of his mother. He was very fond of her, naturally. Mothers, of course, were hopeless people to explain things to, they never understood. But he was very fond of her – it would be unnatural if he wasn’t. As she so often said, he was all she had.

  Suddenly a little imp seemed to jump in Vernon’s brain. The imp said suddenly and unexpectedly: ‘What rot you are talking! She’s got the house, and the servants to talk to and bully, and friends to gossip with, and her own people all round her. She’d miss all that far more than she’d miss you. She loves you, but she’s relieved when you go back to Cambridge – and even then she’s not as relieved as you are!’

  ‘Vernon!’ It was Joe’s voice, sharp with annoyance. ‘What are you thinking of? Mrs Levinne was asking about Abbots Puissants – if it’s still let?’

  How fortunate that when people said, ‘What are you thinking about?’ they didn’t in the least mean that they wanted to know! Still, you could always say ‘Nothing much’, just as when you were small you had said ‘Nothing’.

  He answered Mrs Levinne’s questions, promised to deliver her various messages to his mother.

  Sebas
tian saw them to the door, they said a final goodbye and walked out into the London streets. Joe sniffed the air ecstatically.

  ‘How I love London! You know, Vernon, my mind’s made up. I’m coming up to London to study. I’m going to tackle Aunt Myra about it this time. And I won’t live with Aunt Ethel, either, I’m going to be on my own.’

  ‘You can’t do that, Joe. Girls don’t.’

  ‘They do. I could share rooms with another girl or girls. But to live with Aunt Ethel, always asking me where I’m going, and who with – I just can’t stand it. And anyway she hates me being a suffragette.’

  The Aunt Ethel they referred to was Aunt Carrie’s sister, an aunt by courtesy only. They were staying with her at the present moment.

  ‘Oh, and that reminds me,’ went on Joe. ‘You’ve got to do something for me, Vernon.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tomorrow afternoon Mrs Cartwright’s taking me to that Titanic Concert as a special treat.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to go – that’s all.’

  ‘You can make some excuse or other, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s not so easy as that. You see, Aunt Ethel’s got to think I’ve gone to the concert. I don’t want her ferreting out where I am going.’

  Vernon gave a whistle.

  ‘Oh! so that’s it? What are you really up to, Joe? Who is it this time?’

  ‘It’s La Marre, if you really want to know.’

  ‘That bounder.’

  ‘He’s not a bounder. He’s wonderful – you don’t know how wonderful he is.’

  Vernon grinned.

  ‘No, indeed I don’t. I don’t like Frenchmen.’

  ‘You’re so horribly insular. But it doesn’t matter whether you like him or not. He’s going to motor me down to the country to a friend’s house where his chef d’œuvre is. I do so want to go, and you know perfectly that Aunt Ethel would never let me.’

  ‘You oughtn’t to go racketing about the country with a fellow like that.’