Ruth laughed. ‘But that, you see, was the one with me. And it was perfectly natural.’
‘I assure you it doesn’t bear that appearance. Why should you contract a secret marriage with a perfectly respectable and indeed eminent person, and never so much as enter his house?’
She laughed again. ‘The explanation is so obvious that I’d expect you to have thought of it,’ she said. ‘I teach in a women’s college, you see. And the conditions of my employment preclude marriage. If it had been known that I was married, I’d have been obliged to vacate – I believe that’s the word – to vacate my fellowship. And I didn’t want to do that. My work means a great deal to me.’
‘You mean that you’ve been continuing to hold your job under false pretences? Isn’t that going to be rather awkward now?’
‘Not in the least. You haven’t listened to what I said. The words I used were “If it had been known that I was married.” They precisely represent the legal situation. You see, our statutes, or whatever they are called, were drawn up for us by some wicked old judge. And there are several places, it seems, where he amused himself by inserting small absurdities that wouldn’t be noticed by a pack of guileless learned women. This is one of them. The relevant clause begins “Should it come to the cognizance of the College Council.” There’s no onus upon any of us, should she get married, to say a word or do anything. Lewis spotted that.’
‘He would.’ Appleby said this with conviction.
‘And, of course, we didn’t cheat about the money. I was still legally entitled to my salary. But Lewis, who was quite well off, thought it wouldn’t be the thing to take it. So I’ve been paying it into a trust fund to found a scholarship.’
‘The Lewis Packford Shakespeare Scholarship, no doubt.’ Appleby supposed himself to have said this with marked irony.
‘Oh, yes – how clever of you to guess!’ Ruth seemed really pleased. ‘Lewis decided it should be that.’
‘Lewis, if you ask me, decided a great deal. The whole outrageous scheme of concealment was clearly his.’
‘It wasn’t outrageous!’ Ruth was indignant. ‘I’ve explained to you how we played entirely fair.’
‘There was certainly one person who didn’t get fair play – and that is yourself. And it wasn’t long before you had ceased to think it fun, and were acknowledging to yourself that it was very foolish and rather humiliating.’ Appleby had decided to smack out at Ruth. ‘For instance, your husband going off to a bachelor life on Lake Garda – where I happened, by the way, to visit him – while you were doing some learned dreary useless thing at home – lecturing, I shouldn’t be surprised, on the decay of metaphysical poetry to a Summer School for Patagonians.’
‘I’ve never in my life done anything of the kind!’ Ruth was extremely indignant. ‘You are being quite idiotic and – and improperly flippant and familiar.’
‘So I am.’ Appleby smiled at her inoffensively. ‘But I’m old enough to be your father, and I think I’ll put things to you after my own fashion. Packford was a fascinating chap. I liked him very much, or I wouldn’t be here now. But he had a mania for secrets and surprises. And he must have got you right under his thumb.’
‘Lewis didn’t get me under his thumb!’ Ruth’s indignation grew.
‘He must positively have hypnotized you, my dear young lady, or you would never have agreed to so absurd a course of conduct. And you really knew it – although you were repressing the knowledge and persuading yourself that, for a time at least, it was all a great lark. I’m very sorry to speak in this way about your relations with a man you were certainly much in love with, and who is only just dead. It’s not very decent. Unfortunately it’s my business to go ahead – and rather rapidly, because there are a good many calls upon my time. So what I’m saying is this: you were already in a state of some disillusion and some dissatisfaction when you got this incredible news. One secret marriage had so ticked his irresponsible fancy that he’d promptly gone off and contracted a second with someone called Alice. Unless, of course, Alice really came first. I just haven’t heard any evidence bearing on that as yet. But it’s not, perhaps, a point of the first importance. What is significant is that you were in a raging fury.’
Ruth lit a second cigarette from the stub of the first. She did it with difficulty, since her hands trembled and she was holding Appleby in a fixed terrified glance. ‘What are you saying?’ she said. ‘I don’t understand you.’
‘Somebody sent you an anonymous letter, containing what you must have supposed or hoped was a stupid and cruel joke. You hurried to Urchins – and the thing proved to be true. There was this other woman, brought there by a similar message. No doubt she was in a raging fury too. And what happened? Packford couldn’t take it. The situation was beyond him, and he shot himself. There oughtn’t, really, to be much difficulty in believing that. Am I right?’
‘It sounds reasonable.’ She spoke cautiously, doubtingly. It might have been because she was unconvinced, or because she felt obscurely that Appleby was baiting a trap.
‘Have you nothing more to say than that? What was in your mind when you seized the initiative, so to speak, this morning – grabbing this car to come and meet me with? Why did it strike you as advantageous to get in first?’
‘If it’s as a police officer that you are coming to Urchins, I much doubt whether your method of questioning isn’t singularly irregular.’ Ruth offered this with spirit. And she was now quite calm again. ‘It was simply this: if there is to be further investigation, I ought to be heard first. It’s due to my position that it should be so. But if I’d simply let you arrive at Urchins, there might have been a stupid scene, with Alice barging to the front.’
‘A matter of precedence – I see. By the way, what kind of person would you say this Alice was?’
‘Dead vulgar.’ Ruth snapped this out. And then at once she added: ‘I’d say she wasn’t a bad sort.’
‘Lewis Packford’s taste wouldn’t lead him far astray?’
‘As far as poetry and that sort of thing is concerned, Lewis’ taste simply didn’t exist. But I think he’d be not too bad on people.’
Appleby’s interest in Ruth grew. He still didn’t at all know whether she was positively likeable. But certainly she was formidable, which was a quality he rather liked anyway. ‘It would be fair to say,’ he asked, ‘that you really were two angry women, and that neither of you made any bones about showing it?’
‘That’s perhaps fair enough. But you mustn’t suppose that my feelings are bitter now. Indeed, I don’t know that they were ever that. As soon as I’d got control of myself I felt Lewis’ actions had been – well, quite understandable. Indeed, it was some quite good qualities that had got him into his jam.’
‘I see – or rather I don’t.’ Appleby paused, awaiting explanations. He had to ask himself, he was acutely aware, whether he was not in the presence of a clever woman rather over-playing her hand. One could readily decide that all this dispassionateness and magnanimity was a little too good to be true.
‘He was a boundlessly enthusiastic person. And marriage – which was, of course, quite a late adventure with him – took him decidedly that way. And then we made that foolish decision. Don’t think I can’t really see it as a foolish decision. And I must insist that it was very much my fault at the time. If I hadn’t, I mean, showed that I’d much like to keep my job, then that secretive genius of Lewis’ which you seem to know about wouldn’t have had this new sphere to exercise itself in. But there it was. And keeping our marriage dark meant a lot of separation – and at a time when Lewis, a middle-aged man new to the whole thing, was in a thoroughly excited state. Sex had taken an entirely novel role in his life. And being sanguine and generous and careless, he was – well, very vulnerable.’
Ruth paused. She was saying all this in a low steady voice which was far from suggesting an insensitive attitude to her subject. ‘I can see,’ Appleby said cautiously, ‘the kind of thing you mean.’
‘
Before he knew where he was, he was in bed with this girl. It’s not gratifying to reflect on, but I suppose it is natural enough.’
‘Perhaps so. But there was nothing natural in going through a form of marriage with her.’
‘Wasn’t there? I doubt whether you know Lewis really well. The girl was on his hands – quite suddenly. He must have felt rather like a cricketer, fielding close in, who becomes aware he’s made a catch. He’s planned nothing, made no sort of grab, but there the ball is.’
‘Very apt,’ Appleby said. He spoke a shade dryly. Ruth, he thought, was going out of her way in search of charity.
‘There she was, I say. And she wasn’t a person with any less real a claim on him simply because she did a little smell, perhaps, of the public bar.’ Ruth paused on this – so that it was almost possible to suspect that she had divined the fact that verisimilitude would be furthered by at least the hint of an astringent note. ‘And no doubt she revealed herself as artlessly and trustingly inclined to matrimony. In such circumstances, Lewis would certainly judge it a shame not to provide it. So he did.’ Ruth paused again. ‘And now I think we’ll drive on.’
‘Yes, drive on.’ Appleby watched her throw away her second cigarette and start up the engine of the ancient car. ‘But could Packford,’ he asked, ‘do such a fundamentally muddle-headed and irresponsible thing? He was, after all, a highly intelligent man.’
‘It was a canalized sort of intelligence. It all went into a sort of jet propulsion, driving on his work. Outside that, he was capable of any number of ineptitudes.’ Ruth’s voice had changed, and Appleby’s startled ear had to acknowledge that what it now held was tenderness. ‘Don’t you remember how clumsy he was?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘And isn’t bigamy about the clumsiest crime a man can commit?’ she laughed softly. ‘So there you are.’
‘It’s a crime that may be extremely cruel and heartless. On the other hand, it may be committed in such circumstances as to be not much more than silly.’ Appleby paused. ‘If one misses out the theological aspect, that is to say.’
‘Lewis was certainly being merely silly.’ Suddenly, she was almost crying out. ‘And it oughtn’t – oh, it oughtn’t – to have brought him to his death!’
‘If it did.’
There was a long silence, unbroken until Ruth had swung the car between rusty iron gates and up a somewhat neglected drive. ‘Urchins doesn’t exactly flourish,’ she said. ‘A comfortable sort of semi-decay. Plenty of money for food and books and travel. But beyond that – well, I’m beginning to be doubtful.’
‘I see.’
The silence renewed itself. They were in sight of the house before Ruth spoke again. ‘Talking of travel,’ she said, ‘will you tell me something?’
‘Certainly – if I can.’
‘You said you visited Lewis when he had the villa on Lake Garda. What did he talk about?’ She hesitated. ‘For instance, did he have anything to say about–’ She hesitated again.
Appleby smiled. ‘About you – or even about Alice? No, not a word. There were one or two moments when I found myself speculating as to whether he had involved himself in some personal perplexity. But it wasn’t because of anything at all explicit in his conversation.’
‘Then, Sir John, what did he talk about?’
Appleby had to consider only for a moment. ‘Forgery,’ he said.
4
Urchins turned out to be a surprisingly large house. It seemed moreover to be of considerable antiquity. But it had been made a mess of, comparatively late in its history, by some owner with a taste for the Gothic. And this must have been done on the cheap, for the battlements, pointed windows and so forth were now in a crumbling and tumbling condition and what remained solid appeared to be of an altogether earlier date. The whole place could only be described as in shocking disrepair.
And it had something to tell, Appleby supposed, about its late owner. Packford could have taken very little interest in this – presumably – ancestral home. Appleby remembered him as only vaguely and conventionally aware of his surroundings at Garda – just conscious that his villa was modest and his summer-house rather grand; gesturing unseeingly at the grotteschi from which he believed himself to be experiencing pleasure; boundlessly enthusiastic over the idea of giving masterful instructions to Gino, but not really at all possessed of the difference between one shrub and another. All Packford’s real traffic had been with the memorials and signs and traces of things, and not with things in themselves. What was left of things in the library of the British Museum, in the neglected muniment rooms of houses just like this, in the Public Record Office: his real territory had been there. Conceivably the two ladies in the case were the first material objects of which he had ever become aware, so to speak at all vividly in the round.
Yes, Urchins looked decidedly emaciated. Packford, without much noticing the fact, had possibly starved it for years. And so it might well be an inconvenient sort of inheritance now. Probably it went to Edward Packford, and not to whichever of the ladies proved to be the dead man’s authentic spouse. In default of a direct heir, places of this sort were commonly tied up that way.
Appleby knew nothing about Edward Packford. But then there was a lot of information which, despite Cavill’s rapid conscientious survey of what seemed an unmysterious suicide, he didn’t yet possess. And in a way the scent – if there was one – was slightly cold. And yet it appeared that there was one odd – and even perplexing – circumstance that bore the other way. Lewis Packford had been entertaining some kind of house-party at the time of his death. And now, several days later, these people were still at Urchins, presumably as the guests of Edward. It might be a good idea to find out about them at once.
Ruth had drawn up the ancient car before the front door of the house. There was a long shallow porch facing south, and now bathed in warm sunshine. Deck-chairs, tables and a scattering of cushions and books and newspapers struck one note; dandelions sprouting between chinks in the flagstones struck another. Not far away a very old man was rather ineffectively gathering up between two boards a first scattering of the leaves of autumn.
‘Do you mind,’ Appleby asked, ‘if I leave my suitcase in the car, and hope that somebody will give me a lift to a pub afterwards?’
Ruth seemed surprised. ‘But Edward will expect you to stop at Urchins. He’s very hospitable. For instance, he makes no bones whatever about continuing to house at the moment two sisters-in-law by one brother. Many men would think that a bit steep.’
It seemed to Appleby that Ruth was not without a sense of humour. ‘And what about those other people who are continuing to stay on?’ he asked. ‘Who exactly are they?’
‘I think they might be called the members of a sort of club or society – or least of a coterie – to which Lewis belonged. Normally, I gather, they simply dine together three or four times a year. But sometimes Lewis liked to gather them in for a weekend.’
‘And I suppose they too are learned?’
‘Well, some of them. Scholars, collectors, bibliophiles – a mixed lot. And they indulge a life of fantasy.’
‘They do what?’ Appleby was puzzled.
‘It’s a species of literary joke about an imaginary eighteenth-century antiquarian called Bogdown. They read each other papers about him. Transactions of the Bogdown Society. That sort of thing. I expect it’s great fun.’
‘It sounds uproarious.’ Appleby couldn’t be sure whether Ruth’s judgement on this singular diversion was, or was not, ironically intended. ‘But you’ve never been let in on it?’
‘Of course not. It’s entirely for men. And there’s one of them now, coming out of the front door. Professor Prodger.’
‘The old person with the white beard?’
‘Yes. He’s terribly eminent. And he’s tracing Bogdown’s books. They were dispersed, you see, at the Bogdown sale in 1784. At least I think it was 1784.’
‘Is that why Prodger is eminent?’
�
��Of course not. Haven’t I explained that Bogdown is just a game? Prodger’s serious work is on the development of the comic Irishman in English drama.’
‘Oh.’
‘You’d better meet him now, while I go and find Edward.’
They had got out of the car, and Ruth led the way up to Professor Prodger, who had settled down in a deck-chair. She performed a perfunctory introduction, and then vanished. Appleby had an idea that she proposed making some sort of report to their host before confronting him with the new visitor.
The professor had got to his feet in order to shake hands, and this had involved him in dropping his glasses, the case in which he carried them, a newspaper and a couple of books. When Appleby had helped to recover these, the two men sat down. ‘I’m afraid,’ Prodger said mildly and from behind his beard, ‘that I know very little about your kind of thing – very little indeed. But I have a good Eliot and Chapman which I should be delighted to show you one day, and also a Derome that’s quite a pleasure to handle.’
‘Thank you very much.’ Appleby’s professional preoccupations prompted him to suppose for a moment that Prodger was a collector of little-known fire-arms. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Derome.’
This reply plainly prompted thought. ‘Am I not to understand,’ Prodger presently asked with a courteous inclination of his venerable head, ‘that I am addressing Dr Appleby, the distinguished student of bibliopegy?’
Appleby, although hazy about bibliopegy, was quite certain he wasn’t a distinguished student of it. ‘No. I’m afraid you must have taken me for somebody else.’
‘No matter, no matter. In fact I am rather glad to hear it. The history of bookbinding is a trivial sort of lore, after all. An amusement for collectors, sir. And we know what they are like. Eh?’ Prodger had a high faint senile laugh. ‘But no doubt you have come down to Urchins because you have some interest in the mystery? We all have. That is why we are staying on, you know – that is why we are staying on. And I must warn you, Dr Appleby, that we are a mixed lot. Poor Packford was not always very careful about his associations and – um – practices.’
The Long Farewell Page 6