The Last Best Friend

by George Sims

  Balfour nodded.

  ‘It sounds very like Victor Maddox. I’ve sometimes seen him in the Glib Club in Dean Street.’

  ‘Does he own this place, the Glib Club?’

  ‘No, he doesn’t own anything apart from a smart-looking blonde bird, and a big baby-blue American car. He has a kind of debt-collecting agency. Well, that’s his usual work. Look, you’re a half-wide mug collecting rents and you decide it would be nice not to hand the loot over to the landlord, or you lose a packet at blackjack and give a club a kite, then Mr Victor Maddox calls round and you pay up quick.’

  Squibb looked straight at Balfour, saying, ‘Now you know me, I’m no jam-puff,’ and waited for Balfour to nod agreement. ‘But I wouldn’t want a call from old Vic. He’s a bit short of breath and getting a fat gut but don’t let that fool you. He’s a really hard case—done two stretches for GBH. And he’s always got some real young tearaways in tow. If you put the police on to him he’d just call round again later and you would really find out what “grievous bodily harm” means.’ Squibb looked quite concerned.

  Balfour said, ‘No. It’s all right. I think that my curiosity has been satisfied. I hope I shall manage to keep clear of Mr Victor Maddox and the Glib Club.’

  Squibb rubbed his hands together. ‘That’s more like it.’ He wheeled round to the bar and tapped himself on the chest, signifying that he wanted another Guinness. ‘And a double Cutty Sark here for my friend. You come round again one evening,’ he said to Balfour, ‘and we’ll have another knees-up. My girl Doreen, she likes those old songs you know.’ He looked faintly surprised. ‘You know a few even I don’t. That one “You can see a lot of things at the seaside”, and what’s that one “You could see as far as Wimbley if it wasn’t for the houses in between”. And you do the best Harry Champion imitation I know. No boy, we can’t afford to lose you.’

  Chapter XIV

  Wood smoke was the ambience of the Malise Estate. There was a rambling area of rhododendron and laurel bushes that formed a nearly impenetrable barrier round it and Olivia Malise Phelips’ gardeners fought a running battle with the laurel, appearing to be perpetually engaged in making bonfires. The smell of wood burning was one that Balfour particularly liked—more than anything else it evoked the atmosphere of autumn for him, and so it often seemed to be that peaceful, enjoyably melancholy season once he had passed the heavy iron gates and white stone piers surmounted by an eighteenth-century stonemason’s conception of rampant lions. He looked round at a spider’s web outlined by the sun and saw a missel-thrush fastidiously hunting for grubs on the gravel drive, flicking over the large laurel leaves with its beak. The London streets were like an alien, neurotic world.

  There was a trace of the honey-like perfume of buddleia in the air, and the damp smell of leaf-mould as well as wood smoke, but Balfour could tell that on this occasion apple branches were being burnt. Olivia had a passion for birds and trees, which was not shared by her gardeners. One of the old men had explained the position to Balfour—how all the trees ‘with their great roots, some as thick as your thigh, are ruining the garden, but Miss Phelips she won’t see it’.

  The Malise estate was of considerable size and was still marked in capital letters on large scale maps, though Olivia had given nearly half of it away when she had built a school. The gardeners could remember when the gardens had been ‘double the size, fully staffed, and kept up proper’. On the other hand Balfour could foresee the time, not far off, when the garden might not be kept up at all. He was feeling obsessed with a sense of change. After traversing a large section of London in the morning he had spent the early part of the afternoon slowly walking round Richmond and Petersham, where he had lived for a year as a child. With buildings springing up everywhere and the complicated preparations for new roads, the whole of London and its suburbs seemed to be writhing like a gigantic ugly chrysalis, threatening to break out into a new concept of life in which large private estates would have no part. If it had a future, if it was not to be torn down fulfilling some planner’s dream of the future, then Olivia’s house, with a much reduced stretch of garden, would probably become the headquarters for some business organization. The prospect for the ilex tree, the ancient mulberries, and the great pink magnolia was uncertain at best. Soon the thin lawn, in which parterres of flowers now glittered in the sun like metallic objects, might be the site for a municipal building or support a motorway. Balfour had no vested interest in great estates and was not a reactionary regarding many changes, but he did not like to think of those that would take place where he was walking.

  Brooding on these things, he was halfway up the horseshoe steps that led to the old house before he remembered that this visit was unlikely to be as pleasant as former occasions. He looked at the cut and moulded bricks which appeared an apricot colour in the sun. It was a Commonwealth house constructed in 1650 by some unknown artisan builder to the order of William Malise, a merchant who had supported Cromwell. The Netherlands influence was apparent in the simple but pleasing design, striking in its regularity, the absence of gables, and the handling of the brick-work with bold cornices running across the façade like those on the Dutch House at Kew. The front door was open, and Balfour walked into the hall darkened by the massive oak staircase which had military trophies in the pierced balustrades and carved figures of ‘New Model Army’ soldiers on the newel posts.

  His approach had apparently been noticed upstairs as Patricia Leighton came down halfway and called: ‘Olivia won’t be long. She’s been gardening. Would you care to go in there? I know you can amuse yourself.’

  The room she indicated was a large one with very high french windows along one side overlooking the biggest lawn, and it contained a number of things which Balfour liked to look at. It was sparsely furnished but the carpet was a spinach-green Gobelin and there were Cromwellian chairs and a seaweed marquetry desk. The Phelips and Malise families before Olivia had not been collectors but the house contained their random acquisitions over four centuries, including things salvaged from Crabbe’s Park. On a Regency card-table there was a ‘Doctor Wall’ Worcester plate, with nectarines on a mottled blue background, which would have quickened ‘Chas.’ Squibb’s pulse.

  Balfour’s eyes were taken first by a Hollyer photograph of Olivia’s mother and then the Sargent portrait of her, rather regal in yellow satin. It contrasted sharply with a photograph of Olivia, the only one that Balfour had ever seen, in which she was shown with another girl, both in their early teens, standing with linked arms on the terrace at Crabbe’s Park. They wore white dresses, and fish-handled tennis racquets were propped by a cane chair. A click of the camera had magically caught the atmosphere of a long-ago summer evening. They looked as if they might have stopped there to exchange romantic confidences. With rather dreamy expressions they stared out into the parkland and the future.

  Balfour picked up the Visitors’ Book which had been started at Crabbe’s Park in the year before Olivia’s birth and finally petered out half a century afterwards at the outbreak of war in 1939. He flicked through the pages between 1905 and 1910, wondering which signature might belong to the other girl in the photograph. The book was full of minor divertissement. Bold aristocratic signatures which over the years became feeble, or shaky, and then disappeared—single appearances of composers—autographs of Press Barons which seemed to proclaim their fame and self-importance before they too went into the dark. As a postscript, made after the book, water-stained by firemen’s hoses, had been retrieved from the ruined house, there was a quotation in Olivia’s writing: ‘Remembrances embellish life; forgetfulness alone makes it endurable.’

  Another heavy volume lay by the Visitors’ Book, an album bound in padded green morocco, badly scuffed and worn at the corners. Compiled by Olivia’s mother, it consisted largely of photographs of ‘Social Occasions’ at Cliveden, Greystoke Castle, Crabbe’s Park, Hagley Hall and Hatfield. With set smiles and in curiously unchang
ing attitudes the same people looked out from dozens of different backgrounds. There were snapshots of the famous hostesses Lady Desborough at Taplow Court and Mrs Arthur James at West Dean. A signed photograph of Queen Alexandra. ‘Ships in Malta Harbour: Renown, Victorious, Ophir, Caesar…’ Olivia was the sole surviving member of the Phelips and Malise families. When she died it was unlikely that anyone would want to preserve this relic of Edwardian and Imperial grandeur.

  ‘Oh Ned!’ The greeting seemed to have been carefully chosen to exclude warmth. Balfour turned to see Olivia standing in the doorway. She wore a dark blue brocaded silk suit and a white blouse with a high ruffed neck. Her skirt was a good deal longer than the present mode dictated, but otherwise her clothes seemed to be neither in nor out of fashion and impossible to date. She was only an inch or two shorter than Balfour and her face was thin, saved from severity by big grey eyes and a sensitive, sharply defined mouth. She had a high forehead and comely, simply dressed white hair. She waved a pamphlet at him as if she was irritated. ‘I was surprised when you phoned yesterday. I thought Miss Bowyer said you would not return from Corsica till the end of the week?’

  ‘That’s what I planned. But I had to come back early as a friend of mine died, tragically. He fell from a building. Killed himself, I think. Mr Weiss—I’m sure I introduced him to you at that charity auction. The “Save the Children” fund evening.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said vaguely. ‘I think I remember him. How terrible. I’m so sorry to hear that.’

  He could see that she was disconcerted by this news but he could also tell that she did not want to hear of anything that would take her sympathy. Nevertheless her attitude relaxed a little. She put her hand on the handle of one of the french windows and said, ‘Shall we go outside? I hate to waste even an hour of an afternoon like this. But perhaps you are sated with sun? I thought we might have tea out there.’

  Balfour smiled and silently opened the window, struck by the briefness and poignancy of human relationships. There had been a hint of a quaver in Olivia’s voice, an involuntary tremble of the larynx muscles, and in profile her face had a fragile quality that he had not noticed before. As he had been invited to tea it appeared that whatever he, or the firm of T. Edward Balfour, had done, the damage was not irreparable. But the trembling voice reminded him in an unpleasant nagging way that Olivia had a heart weakened by rheumatic fever. In a moment they would be standing outside the house as Olivia had stood with her friend outside Crabbe’s Park, perhaps sixty years ago. Then that instant would be gone, as irrecoverable as the one shown in the photograph.

  Olivia stopped on the miniature terrace, her thin hand resting on the low stone balustrade: ‘I had a bad cold and was mewed-up in the house for nearly two weeks with only an occasional Pisgah-view. Since then I’ve had an absolute passion for being outside.’

  As they went down the steps she tapped Balfour on the arm with the pamphlet she was carrying. ‘For once that celebrated dealer T. Edward Balfour nodded.’ There was humour not annoyance in the way she said this, so he was certain that this was not the cause for her coolness towards him. ‘There was a Swinburne manuscript in a local sale. A draft of Ave Atque Vale, no less.’

  ‘Really? I thought that was in the Eton College Library.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right, but this one is an earlier version with many of his alterations. Apparently in its travels it somehow reached a German collector who put it into a sumptuous black morocco case with his arms in gilt. While you were away it turned up for sale in Clapham!’

  She handed Balfour the pamphlet. It was a catalogue issued by a firm of Estate Agents. A fairly typical production with too much information in small print crowded on to the front page: ‘Messrs Haley & Coote Ltd will offer for Sale by Auction on Monday, 18th July, at 2.15 p.m. the Contents of Eagle House, Cedars Road, Clapham Common, SW4. being Furniture & Effects, the property of the late Colonel F. K. Green, DSO, including Victorian, Modern & General Furniture, Oil Paintings, Antique flintlock guns, Pewter Percussion Cap guns…’

  Balfour shook his head: ‘A Swinburne manuscript among this lot?’

  ‘Yes. And it wasn’t even listed. Just included in some miscellaneous lots at the end. The whole thing is rather a mystery. A friend of mine who lives in Clapham Common North Side knew Colonel Green so she went along on the day the sale was advertised. Great confusion it seems, as there were crowds of dealers. The house was crammed with them…’

  Balfour waved the catalogue. ‘Crowds of dealers for this?’ He had looked through it with an expert’s eye, noting the inadequacy of the descriptions. It seemed to be a rather pedestrian collection and there was no mention of any autograph material. He subscribed to an agency which contracted to supply him with every auction catalogue mentioning letters or manuscripts, but they were not to blame in this case. ‘I shouldn’t have thought they would have turned out in strength.’

  ‘Ah! That’s where the mystery deepens. Apparently there were quite a number of interesting things. Some good pictures, silver, porcelain, mostly Continental, but all very badly described. By some means, however, the dealers congregated. And then the sale was postponed, on the Monday at 2.15 just when it was supposed to start. The auctioneer appeared on the dais and made a short statement to the effect that there was doubt about legal title to some of the items and the sale would have to be held after that had been cleared up. My friend says there was quite a shindig. Many dealers had come a long way…Still it was fortunate from our point of view. The sale is now to be held tomorrow, 2.15 as before. Will you be able to go?’

  ‘Of course. Delighted. How much do you want me to bid?’

  ‘I shall leave it to you, but I should particularly like to have that fine poem for the collection.’

  Balfour admired her attitude to collecting—she gave the impression of holding all her possessions lightly with open hands, and was detached even when being enthusiastic about some acquisition. She had once compared life and death to the playing of children on the sands. ‘When you are very young the tide is so far out it seems that it will not come in again, and the children busy themselves with their sand-castles and walls of sand, but gradually they realize that it is returning and then it reaches them, remorselessly erasing every sign of their play. We are all just like children…’

  They made a slow and thoughtful progress through the garden to the south side of the house. Balfour was sure that Olivia was formulating her approach to a difficult subject. They came to the walled court-yard where she grew peaches and sat by the goldfish pool. In the centre of the pool there were eighteenth-century figures of Cupid and Psyche, and the water gurgled in through the wide mouth of a leering satyr, a bronze effigy of a river-god which the copper carbonates of time had turned greenish-blue.

  Olivia had an abstracted air and her face was slightly darkened by melancholy. When she swivelled round to face him Balfour knew that the climactic moment had come. ‘Before I was imprisoned here by that cold I met Barbara and Toby by chance one day in London. What an adorable little boy! I was walking in Kensington Gardens and saw them by the Round Pond. Barbara asked me back for nursery tea. She told me that they had just come back from a holiday in the Scilly Isles, on Tresco…’ Olivia shook her head unbelievingly, moved by some far away emotion. ‘I went there fifty-two years ago, on the 3rd August, 1914. How unreal it all seems now! That fateful date, the old steamer Lyonesse which took us there, the completely carefree mood we were in just a matter of hours before the holocaust was to begin. Even the clothes we wore then.’ She turned to point at the house: ‘My ancestor William Malise who built this house helped to provision Admiral Blake who captured Tresco from Sir John Granville for Cromwell. Our visit to that beautiful island seems just as far off and improbable somehow as Blake’s. All phantoms…’

  Balfour heard her with growing unease. He knew that Olivia’s fiancé had been killed at Mons and in other circumstances would have been interested to hea
r more of this trip to the Scillies which had never been mentioned before, but as soon as she had said Barbara’s name he knew that it was his leaving Orme Square that lay beneath Olivia’s changed attitude. He cursed himself for not having told her before—the telling would be no easier now and he had placed her in an embarrassing situation. But his reason for leaving Barbara, that after twenty years of marriage their relationship had become just a matter of indifference which Barbara did not seem to mind overmuch while he still needed the excitement and pleasure of being in love, was impossible to explain. When he had tried to talk about it to Sammy it had sounded absurd. The only difference was that now he saw his quest for love as a delusion.

  Olivia said: ‘Toby took me into his room to see his toys. And all his particular treasures laid out on the window ledge. You remember that marvellous Patmore poem, “My little son, who look’d from thoughtful eyes”? That serious little face as he talked to me then. Quite irresistible!’ She put a frail-looking hand on Balfour’s wrist: ‘It’s many years since I pried into anyone else’s affairs and I didn’t think I ever would again, but what is going to happen, Ned? Barbara was not explicit but I gathered you had moved to a flat in Bury Street. I remember so well you telling me you had lost your own parents when you were only five. Must the same kind of thing happen to Prudence and Toby?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Balfour spoke without thinking his reply through to a definite conclusion, but he was not just producing a bromide to glide over the awkward question. It was an involuntary expression of what he had been feeling recently. Sammy had been right in saying that in a marriage the children did matter most, even from a selfish point of view. The words of the song, ‘I want to be happy/ But I can’t be happy/Till I’ve made you happy too,’ went round and round in his head—that summed up the position. Life with Barbara would never satisfy him but, as Sammy said, he would have to lump it. He had wanted a perfect woman companion but now he knew it was an illusion: marriage with Bunty would turn out in the end like marriage with Barbara. In pursuing the illusion he had found the reality to consist of trying, with dwindling success, to keep girls like Bunty amused or assuaging purely sexual desire with women like Mrs Alec Connolly. If Barbara would take him back it was a compromise at best, but it was one he wanted to make. Only that afternoon he had come a step closer to understanding himself: looking from Petersham Meadow down to Eel Pie Island he had recognized that curve of the Thames as being the mysterious river scene which figured in his recurring halcyon dream. Revisiting that scene had induced a strange, varying emotion in him, it had been as if some previously unknown chord in his heart had been struck by accident, so that for a moment he had felt outside life and in the presence of the source of peace which the dream brought back to him. Now he knew that all his life the memory of an afternoon he had spent with his parents when he was three or four had been stored in his memory and formed a kind of sanctuary for him.