He entered the drawing-room with Paul behind him, and they found Martin lying in a chair convulsed with laughter, while Richard stood by the hearth, his back to the fire, looking very much at home.
“So you’re Paul,” he said, laughter in his deep-set eyes. “I should have recognised you, of course, though you’ve put a bit of weight on, like Basil. Don’t wonder, considering the rotten sedentary sort of life you chaps lead. I hear you’re going out Cast, doing a Cook’s tour, so to speak. You ought to have engaged me as courier. I could show you a thing or two that would surprise you.”
Martin scrambled to his feet and nodded to his older brother, and then laughed, a sort of nervous cackle which made Paul scowl.
“Glad I amuse you,” he said.
It was Richard who replied.
“If you hadn’t lost the capacity to laugh, you’d see there’s cause for it in the sight of us,” he retorted. “Four Mallowoods in one room. Lord! Can’t you see we’re funny?” He looked round at his three brothers with his bright mocking eyes. “I doubt if this queer old ant-heap of a world holds anything funnier than the four of us, all glaring at one another, all thinking we’re better than the others. We were born funny. Something odd in our make-up. We shall die funny. Take a seat, Paul, but be careful how you treat the furniture. It’s not really up to your weight.”
Paul disregarded his brother’s remarks and went to the window, where he stood looking out at the lawns, and lighted a cigarette.
“That turf’s in rotten bad condition,” he observed. “It’ll never be fit for anything if you don’t deal with those daisies – and plantains, too. Good Lord! It’s in a shocking state.”
“We like it like that,” said Martin. “Veronica and I make daisy chains when we’ve nothing else to do. Where are you going on your tour, Paul? Is it to be a pleasure cruise, or are you buying concessions, whatever concessions are, or going to settle the Indian problem for the government?”
“Neither. He’s going to find a suitable wife to continue the house of Mallowood,” said Basil, seating himself by the fire, and Martin went on:
“Funny to think we’re all unmarried. I suppose nobody’d look at us. We’re not exactly a beauty chorus when you see us en masse.”
“Speak for yourself, young ‘un, so far as matrimony’s concerned,” replied Richard. “I wondered which of my wives Veronica might prefer as week-end guest… but failed to make a decision.”
The door opened as he spoke, and Cynthia Lorne came in with Veronica.
“I don’t think you’ve met Richard, Cynthia. Mrs. Lorne, Richard.”
“It’s interesting to see you all together, sirs,” laughed Cynthia. “You’re uncannily alike – even Martin, although he’s fair.” She turned to Richard as Veronica seated herself at the tea table. “I know you’re a famous traveller,” she said. “What have you been doing this time, climbing impossible peaks?”
“Figuratively, I’m always doing that,” he replied, his bold eyes smiling down at her. “Actually I’ve been on the most prosaic of jobs in the most surprising places. Trading. Earning the wherewithal. In short, discovering things that the stay-at-homes want, and don’t know how to get.”
“He’s one of those plant-hunting wallahs, Cynthia,” put in Martin. “Brings back unknown primulas and new Tibetan poppies for wealthy gardeners to cherish.”
“That sounds a good scheme,” said Paul, his deep voice quite genial for once, his eyes on Cynthia. “You might try some experimental work in this garden, Richard. Naturalise the stuff here and market the offspring.”
Richard laughed. “I can see myself,” he said. “Try risking your own life to get a pinch of some unknown seed, and then you’d be likely to plant it in a flower pot when you get home. It isn’t only plants I collect,” he added to Cynthia. “I come across odds and ends of craftsmanship in out of the way places. Carvings, embroideries, gems – the latter not generally of the precious variety, but pretty enough – like this for instance.” He drew a piece of carved jade out of his pocket and handed it to Cynthia. “I got that from a villainous old Chink running one of the tea caravans to Tibet,” he said. “Some chap must once have spent half a lifetime carving it – all for it to be put up at Christie’s or Sotheby’s a few centuries later. Queer old world.”
“It’s lovely, one of the loveliest things I’ve ever seen,” said Cynthia, her fair face flushed in the firelight as she bent to examine the exquisite thing Richard had produced, and he replied:
“Yes; perhaps it is. The Chinese are connoisseurs of the tiny: they love detail, but they never lose sight of the whole. That piece got me completely: it’s as near perfection as this imperfect world can produce.”
“If you’re interested in jade, I’ll keep my eyes open for you while I’m abroad,” said Paul, leaning forward towards Cynthia and the carved jade she held.
“Try the bazaars at Port Said, old man,” jeered Richard. “Marvellous what you can pick up!”
Cynthia Lorne turnned towards Paul as she handed the jade back to his brother.
“Do tell me, just where are you going on this trip?” she asked, her eyes smiling at him, and he replied expansively:
“Oh, I haven’t settled a route, not in any detail. I’ve been working in the city for nearly thirty years, and I consider I owe myself a holiday – something worth calling a holiday. I’m going to Tunis for a step off, then doing a desert wander, then on to Kenya for some shooting. I shall probably work along to Dar-es-Salaam or Mombasa, and then cross to India, with Japan in view later. I’ve got the time now – the first occasion in my life when I felt I could leave everything and go away, and forget markets and tape-machines and cables and all the rest.”
“Call of the wild,” put in Basil flippantly, but Cynthia said with enthusiasm:
“Oh, I do think you’re lucky! I can’t imagine anything more satisfying than to pack up and leave all one’s everyday worries and boredoms behind. Aren’t you excited a bit? Isn’t it a marvellous feeling?”
Paul nodded, his hard-featured handsomeness lightened to something almost gentle and attractive as he smiled back at her.
“Honestly, it is,” he agreed. “I’ve been the creature of routine too long, and although Basil may jibe there is a longing in every man who has an ounce of virility to leave this complex mess which we call civilisation, and pit his strength against something elemental. Not that I want to stay away indefinitely. I’ve too much I value at home. I shall come back – all the better for having experienced a different set of values than those I’ve always lived with.”
Basil got to his feet, and Richard guessed that the sight of his brother talking thus to Cynthia Lorne was more than Basil could stomach. That phrase about “coming back,” – it was clear enough what Paul meant. He would come back when Cynthia’s decree was made absolute, and he seemed in no doubt concerning his eventual welcome.
“She could take her choice. Not much in it, so far as I can see,” said Richard to himself, considering his two brothers. Both big men, both handsome, in that harsh uncompromising manner of the Mallowoods. ‘“Townees” Richard would have called them, despite their tweed-clothes and country shoes. Paul was wearing a plus-four suit of tawny Harris tweed, much too new and colourful to please Richard’s taste, with its elaborate leather buttons, knitted stockings to match with turnovers of black and orange, and aggressive brogued shoes, also new and immaculate. Paul looked large, opulent and well tailored in his country clothes but definitely no countryman. Basil’s heather mixture was much less noticeable: it was “decently worn” as Richard put it, meaning old and comfortable, and his shoes and leggings showed contact with the earth and the woods: only his sallow face gave away that he was a town dweller.
“Aren’t you afraid of offering a challenge to fate, Paul? Or do you feel that you’ve subsidised fate?” It was Veronica’s voice this time, cool, slightly bored, and yet with an undercurrent of meaning in it which Richard strained his wits to comprehend.
“Fa
te? She’s like one of the Fates herself. The damned queerest thing in the way of a woman I’ve ever met, and I’ve seen some,” meditated Richard, as Paul replied:
“What on earth do you mean, Veronica? ‘Challenge to fate.’ Since when have you taken to dealing in clichés?”
“You said ‘I shall come back,’ as though it was within your power to command the future,” she said. “You meant ‘I intend to come back, and to continue my successful career successfully.’ I’ve no doubt you’ll achieve your intention, but your assurance seemed rather – challenging.”
Basil laughed from his place at the window. “Cheering, isn’t she? One of those plane crashes… a charging rhino, a jammed gun… a knife in the dark at an Eastern port. Life’s full of these little hazards.”
“He won’t come back.” Martin put in the statement in a dreamy voice which made them all turn and stare at him. He was gazing into the fire, his eyes dreamy, his face frowning, and Paul burst out:
“What the devil…”
Martin gave a jump, his long limbs twitching.
“Sorry,” he said, “Idiotic thing to say. I was half asleep.”
“That what you call remembering the future, Martin?” asked Richard. “If so, I’d leave the memories unspoken.”
“Well, I knew we’d a vein of oddness in our make-up, but I never knew to what lengths the family lunacy could go,” said Paul, and Martin jumped up clumsily and walked to the door.
Paul turned to Cynthia. “Really, we owe you an apology. Fatal prophecies from Veronica and remembering the future from Martin. Most peculiar!”
“Fortunately Cynthia knows us well enough not to be put off by our eccentricities, Paul,” said Veronica, and he gave a forced laugh.
“I’m sure you’re the most loyal of friends, Cynthia,” he said, and Basil came back to the fire and stood there looking down at the others.
“That’s a damned queer phrase of Martin’s,” he said. “Remembering the future… Has he been reading some of this new philosophic twaddle about the unreality of time?”
“If you ask me, the phrase is just one of these wish-fulfilment phantasies,” said Richard. “Ask Paul here to remember the future. He’ll see himself as Squire of Wulfstane, complete with a butler, two footmen and etceteras. Ask me. I am lord of an Eastern harem, with a foolproof holding on the rubber market, and western plumbing in an eastern palace. Ask Basil”
“Leave me out of it, thanks,” said Basil. “Never mind Martin’s odd remarks, Paul. He’s always been a queer chap. Never got over that illness of his, but don’t mention the word lunatic in this house. It has something sinister about it.”
“Well, of all the queer families I’ve ever known, you are the queerest,” put in Cynthia Lorne. “You’ve got a vein of the sinister in all of you. Why shouldn’t Paul say ‘I shall come back’?”
“It seemed to me an eminently reasonable statement of intention,” said Paul. “Of course you could improve on it, Cynthia, by saying ‘I hope you will come back.’ ”
She jumped up from her place by the fire, laughing, but Richard thought it a forced laugh.
“You must get out of this habit of tense earnestness, sirs!” she exclaimed. “Perhaps there’s something in the atmosphere of this house – it’s so old and so eerie – but everything you say seems fraught with a double meaning, and I’m not going to play at Delphic oracles, or sybils, or whatever they were. Come and have a cigarette on the terrace, everybody, before it gets too cold.”
Paul and Basil went out with her into the garden. Richard stayed in his chair, and Veronica sat on, gazing into the fire.
“A penny,” said Richard at last.
She looked across at him, her face sombre now.
“Your thoughts for my thoughts – a fairer exchange,” she replied, and Richard answered:
“If there were any assurance of fair play on both sides the exchange would be an interesting one, Ronnie. The only thing I know about you is that you are the last person in the world to reveal your thoughts.”
“Yes. I have that much common sense,” she replied abruptly.
Richard went on, speaking more slowly and seriously:
“About Martin, Ronnie. He seems in a damn queer nervy state, as though he’s only half aware of what’s going on round about him. Does he still have those queer wandering fits he had as a kid?”
Veronica’s face contracted. “He’s all right when he’s left in peace, Richard. He’s been worrying over all this money business, and he’s always loathed Paul.”
Richard nodded. “Yes. I remember. Paul was the hell of a bully. He still is for that matter.”
“He’s not going to bully Martin and me, and that’s that,” replied Veronica.
Richard chuckled, and then went on, “I can’t help being amused over your friend, Mrs. Lorne, Ronnie. She looks at Paul and Basil with such childlike eyes, and asks them naive little questions. What’s the betting she knows more about them both than either you or I do?”
Veronica shrugged her shoulders. “She probably does, but the whole point about having her here this evening was to make Paul behave himself, and prevent any of those ghastly family discussions which always terminate in rows.”
“From which may the good Lord deliver us,” said Richard.
CHAPTER THREE
“THANKING heaven for small mercies?”
Richard’s voice broke in on Veronica’s train of thought as she smoked an after-breakfast cigarette on the morning after the Mallowood’s family gathering. Breakfast was a variable meal with Veronica and Martin. The former often omitted it altogether, the latter liked to seize a hunk of bread and butter from the pantry and eat it out of doors. This morning breakfast had been rather a strain on the haphazard Wulfstane staff. Paul had had coffee and toast taken to his room at seven, to enable him to make an early start on his drive to Croydon aerodrome. Cynthia Lorne, who never appeared at breakfast, had had a tray in her room at eight, and had left the house at nine. Martin had gone out without having breakfast at all, and Richard had had breakfast of a sort in the dining-room at eight-thirty. Veronica had come into the same room and breakfasted off an apple and an orange after seeing Cynthia off. She turned and considered Richard.
“Such small mercies as?” she inquired.
Richard chuckled. “Paul’s departure, for one. I saw him off in his swell outfit at quarter to eight. He was feeling positively genial. Thank God he decided to get the farewells over last night. The sight of all of us waving to Paul from the doorstep would have been too much for me on an empty stomach.”
Veronica laughed outright this time – a thing she rarely did. With her head thrown back and her white teeth gleaming, she looked much more human and normal.
“If you call Paul’s departure a small mercy you’re achieving a marvel of under-statement,” she replied. “The fact that he has been and gone, and that we haven’t had a full-dress row during his visit, seems to me a major miracle! Cynthia’s gone, too. She seemed as anxious to avoid touching farewells as Paul did.”
Richard sat down in the window seat and started filling his pipe meditatively.
“It wasn’t too easy a situation for her,” he chuckled. “How happy could she be with either, were ‘t’other dear charmer away!’ It was a bit thick to land her in it like that, Ronnie. She’s been playing a nice little game of enjoying Paul’s and Basil’s society separately, and to be confronted with them both must have been a bit of a facer. I admired the way she trimmed her sails and steered a fair course without fouling any snags.”
“Oh, Cynthia has plenty of horse sense,” replied Veronica. “The reason that I asked her was that I thought rows might be more easily avoided if an outsider were present, particularly a woman. Paul has ideas on behaving prettily in the presence of ‘lady.’ ”
“Hm… quite. Noblesse oblige… Personally I think Basil could cut him out in that quarter pretty easily. Paul’s got the money bags, admittedly, but he’s a dull dog. If Basil gave his mind t
o it, he could leave him standing.”
“It struck me that Basil was preoccupied all the time. He’s got something on his mind,” said Veronica, and Richard nodded.
“You’re right there. He has. My God! I wouldn’t be one of these City wallahs for any money. Always worrying about the exchange and the stock market. If you ask me, Basil’s on the verge of a crash.”
“Basil? Rubbish! He’s always been the world’s cleverest over money.”
“That’s just it. It’s the clever ones who take the risks. Balancing on a tight-rope. If a deal comes off, well and good. A fortune for nothing. If it doesn’t, an almighty crash. You ought to take Paul’s offer, Ronnie. Basil may be a broken reed.”
She turned and faced him, scorn in her eyes.
“Take Paul’s offer? Sell him this house, and clear out, leaving him to gloat? Would you?”
“No, by God, I wouldn’t! But then, I’m independent of property. I travel light,” he replied. “By the way, has the post come? Basil wants his mail. He yelled at me from the landing.”
“The post doesn’t come till ten. Old Biggs still brings it up, and he’s as punctual as a clock. He’ll take back any letters you want posted. I’m going across to Willow Farm now. See you at lunch?”
“Right oh. Will you tell the maid to take Basil his letters when they come – pronto, or he’ll be kicking up hell’s own racket – oh, and send him up some coffee. He likes to read his letters in bed. I’m going out for a stroll. Martin’s around somewhere. I’ll pick him up.”
“Do, and don’t badger him about his break yesterday. You know, when he said Paul wouldn’t come back. He says these queer things sometimes. I just disregard them. He’s all right, really.”
“He’s jolly lucky to have got you, Ronnie. I realise what you’ve done for him. At one time he was nearly off his rocker. Queer kid, but he’s the best of the bunch in some ways.”
Rope's End, Rogue's End Page 3