A Dangerous Deceit

by Marjorie Eccles

  Who was my father? Where was he? Was he dead, too?

  But those were questions she would not answer, and the album itself revealed nothing of him. There were stiff, formal pictures of Tant Sophie outside the church in her wedding finery with Oom Cornelis, but none of my mother as a bride, or even of me as a baby.

  ‘Where are her wedding pictures?’ I persisted.

  ‘She wasn’t—’

  She broke off and pressed her lips together. Clearly, she could have bitten off her tongue, but it was too late. Young as I was, I knew then that my mother had been what Tant Sophie and the respectable ladies at her church called a Fallen Woman.

  It did not make my longing to know more about her, and my father, any less. The red leather album became as important to me as it was to my aunt. I pored over the pictures of Bettje, trying to see any resemblance to the face I saw every day in the mirror, but it seemed to me I looked more like Sophie, one of those indefinable family looks that are passed down.

  The next year, when I was fourteen, I entered a competition run by the local paper for its younger readers. The subject was ‘Old Cape Town’ and I won the first prize, which was to have my piece printed in the paper. Greatly impressed by this, my aunt persuaded my stubborn uncle to let me have lessons in shorthand and typing, like my best friend Judy Cash, something I’d been hankering after for some time but which he’d adamantly opposed. I had already decided that was the first step towards something I knew I could do, for which I would need shorthand skills. I had no wish to be a journalist, like Judy, but I fancied the next best thing to being a successful person in business, nearly impossible for a woman, was to become secretary to a highly successful man.

  But though I gained excellent qualifications and was able to command a reasonable salary when I went to work, time went on and I still hadn’t succeeded in getting right where I wanted to be. I was tempted to think that perhaps men might have a point in believing women don’t have the necessary intellectual capacity to compete with them on equal terms. But Judy was shocked to the core when I spoke like this, and lectured me about even allowing myself such backward thoughts, never mind expressing them. We had every right to believe we were the equals of men, she said, possibly their superiors. When it came to men like Wim, I could not but agree.

  Willem. Willem Mauritz, always known as Wim. Who was he really, apart from an adventurer, a chancer, a younger cousin of Sophie’s?

  I had known him always as an occasional visitor to our home. The only time I ever saw Sophie really animated was when he arrived on the doorstep, always unannounced but confident that a bed and three meals a day would be available to him for as long as he chose to stay. Which of course they were. What he did for a living was anyone’s guess – but it must have been a precarious existence; he would turn up at the house and stay there until something else of glorious promise appeared on the horizon and took him off again. But this time he had stayed away so long, without a word to say where he was, or even letting us know if he was alive or dead, that I believe Sophie had almost ceased to believe he would ever come back.

  ‘Where is she?’ he asked when I opened the door to him.

  This time he was too late. Tant Sophie had died a few weeks before, of a perforated stomach ulcer which might have been detected earlier had she ever consulted a doctor about her chronic indigestion. I suppose her death must have affected me because I missed her – even the tearful turning of the pages of the photograph album. She had been a sour and undemonstrative woman, but she had taken me in, motherless and fatherless. In her own way, she had done her best for me – and for my mother, when she’d been left in the lurch.

  He had wicked black eyes, Wim Mauritz. There was nothing else remarkable about his looks, but he was the sort of man who was said to charm birds off trees – and most women into his arms – and he knew it. Even Tant Sophie was not immune, though to her, who had known him since he was born, he was still a delightful, delinquent child who could be forgiven any mischief. I was not one of those who were charmed, however. I knew he was wild and I suspected he was a liar. I did not trust him.

  He took it for granted that he would still be allowed to stay, even though Tant Sophie was not there to kowtow to all his needs, and the weeks went by, and there he still was. We were sitting on the stoep one breathlessly hot evening, watching the sun go down, an ineffable South African sunset in a brandy-coloured sky, when something prompted me to ask him if he had ever known my mother.

  He swung round to stare at me. ‘Of course I knew your mother!’

  ‘I don’t mean Sophie, I mean Bettje.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, well, I knew her too,’ he replied after a moment. Perhaps he had never noticed that I had stopped addressing Sophie as ‘Mama’. In fact, I had avoided calling her anything at all when I could.

  ‘And my father?’

  He shook his head.

  I had this photograph which I had found tucked away in one of Tant Sophie’s drawers when I was clearing out her things after she died. I went to fetch it, a snapshot taken some years ago, obviously at a picnic. A rather sophisticated picnic with an awning in the background and a table laden with food and several young men and women sitting about in various poses. My mother, Bettje, in a straw boater, a leg o’mutton-sleeved striped blouse and a long skirt, was arranged on the grass, and a couple of young men lounged beside her. One was propped on his elbow, raising his glass to her, the other smiling down at her. She would never, I knew without being told, have been short of admirers. I handed the snapshot to Wim. ‘You’re not there, but you might recognize the young men with Bettje.’

  ‘No, I’m not in the photo,’ he agreed, scanning it. ‘I must have been still in the schoolroom, not deemed old enough to join in such jollifications. And I’m sorry, I don’t recognize the chaps with Bettje, or anyone else for that matter.’ He looked at it again. ‘Except maybe that one there.’ He indicated a small, dark-haired girl sitting to one side, her face a little blurred, and peered closer. ‘Yes, I’m sure that’s the English girl, I remember her. She’d been ill and stayed at the de Jager house for some time, but she went back to England. She was a lady.’

  ‘A lady?’ Then I saw what he meant, one of those English titles. ‘Lady what?’

  ‘Lady Maude something or other. I don’t remember her last name.’

  But I knew where I could find out. Later, when he had gone and I was alone, I took out the red photo album and turned the thick card pages and found the picture I wanted. Another old-fashioned wedding group, this time labelled in Sophie’s careful handwriting: ‘Maude’s wedding’. Protruding slightly from behind the formally posed photograph was a yellowed scrap of paper which I hadn’t thought to bother with before. Slits in the page held the photo in place. Easing the friable folded paper out carefully from behind and spreading it open, I saw it was a newspaper cutting of a British society wedding: the marriage of Lady Maude Prynne and Sir Lancelot Scroope of Maxstead Court, Worcestershire.

  When I told my uncle I was quitting my job and going to England for an indefinite period, he put forward none of the objections which he normally made on principle to any plan that didn’t come from him. He actually seemed relieved, and I soon learnt why: I had saved him the trouble of explaining to me that he intended to get rid of the house and what was left of his business and return to his native Natal. I would not now be on his conscience – if such a thing had indeed been troubling him. We could neither of us pretend that we were sorry to be parting; there had never been any spark of understanding between us, not to say love.

  He didn’t ask me why I wanted to go to England and I didn’t tell him, but he did however ask me how I was going to live there without any money.

  ‘I have a bit saved. It won’t last long, but I can get a job over there.’ With my qualifications, I didn’t anticipate having any trouble finding a position. Being one of the new career girls might even be easier in England.

  ‘Well,’ he said awkwardly, ‘there’ll be someth
ing for you when the house is sold. Not much, but it’s what your aunt would have wanted.’

  I was touched, despite my earlier feeling, and for the first and last time in my life, I kissed his cheek, astonishing both of us. He grunted. ‘Take care, then. England’s a long way to go on your own.’

  I told him I shouldn’t be on my own. ‘Wim’s going with me.’

  He did not look reassured, any more than I had been reassured when Wim had suggested it. But in the end, it had made sense. For a start, he had been there before and knew the ropes, he said, not really surprising me that his wanderings had taken him so far. His life when he was away from Cape Town had always been a closed book. For another, I was actually quite nervous of what I proposed to undertake and would be glad of some support, even from Wim. As I expected, I found I should have to lend him the money for his passage. I mentally said goodbye to it, though he swore he would pay me back. Like me, he would find work when we got there.

  It didn’t take Judy more than five minutes, when I told her what I was going to do, to decide she was going to come along with us, too.

  ‘No, I don’t want you in on this.’

  ‘Yes, Plum. I’m going with you.’ Plum is her little joke on my real name, Victoria, which I couldn’t pronounce when I was very small. I called myself Vinnie and it had stuck, until Judy decided she liked Plum better. It’s not something you actually welcome, a silly nickname like that, but the pun amused her and I didn’t mind too much. We’ve known each other since our first day at school, when we were put into adjoining desks and became inseparable.

  Although I love her, I have to admit she’s a very controlling person, and likes to think she can sway me to her way of thinking. I don’t contradict her as a rule – arguing never gets you very far with Judy – but by appearing to agree with her I can sometimes manage to turn the tables and get my own way. She ignored what I’d said about not wanting her with me. ‘You need looking after, Plum. Or you do with Wim in tow,’ she added darkly.

  They didn’t like each other and I could foresee trouble ahead. On the other hand, if Wim became difficult, or suddenly got tired of the whole project and drifted off to something more interesting that beckoned (which I knew was more than possible), I could think of no one better to have with me than Judy. She was alight with enthusiasm and determination for what she saw as a new project, even at the expense of abandoning her hard-won position on The Cape Argus. She wasn’t exactly their star reporter yet, but it was her avowed intention to get there some day, and she was already well on the way.

  She laughed off my objections. ‘Experience, darling Plum, wider experience. It’s all grist to the mill.’ In any case, she went on, she was almost sure she would be able to persuade the editor at The Argus to take a series of articles of her impressions of England and the English. Or even a regular column – ‘Our reporter in England’. Or something like that.

  In the end I gave in, which I suppose was a foregone conclusion. I told myself that in any case, as a journalist she would know better than I how to go about ferreting things out – as Wim would too, for that matter. Admittedly, there are circumstances when a man is useful – even a man like Wim.

  ‘And the rest of it?’ Reardon asked fifteen minutes later as Joe finished reading the last of the pages which had been passed on to him. ‘What else were you going to tell them?’

  ‘What else? Oh, how should I know? I just wrote what came to me and that was as far as I’d got … what does it matter?’

  ‘Like it or not, I’m afraid it matters a great deal, Miss Henderson.’ Her name was in fact unlikely to be Henderson. Was it Joost, the name of her aunt and uncle? Or even her mother’s name, de Jager? Not Mauritz, at any rate. ‘You – and your friend – have had strong connections with a man who has been murdered. And sooner or later you’re going to have to tell us what you know.’

  Throughout this time, Judy had remained where she was, motionless in front of the window, though the street below had grown quiet and held little interest now that the shops had mostly shut, the shoppers gone home and it was dark but for the street lamps. What he said made her at last turn her back on the window. ‘Bullying tactics will get you nowhere,’ she said coldly.

  Reardon was too old a hand to let that sort of thing bother him. ‘Well, Miss Henderson?’

  ‘I don’t know where to begin.’

  She did indeed look confused and upset, but how much of it was play-acting, how much was real? It would be a mistake to underestimate her, though she showed none of Judy Cash’s aggressiveness. Even as he thought this, Judy walked over to where she sat on the sofa and knelt at her feet, whispering something and taking her hand. The nails of her own hands were bitten to the quick. Vinnie submitted passively. He wondered if it was an apology on Judy’s part, though she seemed no less angry. How could the other one not sense the barely controlled emotion, feel the heat of it under the skin of the woman kneeling at her feet?

  His patience was running out. ‘All right, we’ve now established that you came to England in search of your father, and we’ve dispensed with the fiction that you didn’t know Wim Mauritz. Right? So let’s go back to the beginning. You found work here, both of you, when you arrived … There’s a lot would envy you that. Jobs aren’t easy to find in the present climate. You were lucky.’

  ‘Luck had nothing to do with it, in my case,’ Judy retorted, stung. ‘I came with a recommendation from my editor in Cape Town. The Herald happened to have a vacancy and they jumped at me. Vinnie had to wait a bit longer for the job at the school. It paid peanuts for someone with her qualifications but she could live in.’

  ‘And until then you lived with Mauritz at the house on Henrietta Street, whether as his wife or not. Don’t deny it, we have witnesses,’ he reminded her.

  For several moments she was stubbornly silent, then at last she admitted it. ‘He’d heard it was up for rent. At first, it seemed better than the rooms we’d taken when we first came here – well, anything was. Judy already had this place, so I went with Wim … We decided just two of us would arouse less comment than three, especially if we said we were a married couple – and for the same reason we agreed never to meet up with Judy,’ she added, studying her feet, not wanting to admit to what such secrecy implied.

  ‘Presumably he heard of the house through Arthur Aston?’ He expected her to say she didn’t know who Aston was, but she nodded acquiescence. ‘Tell me, how did your friend Mauritz come to know him?’

  ‘Oh … they just happened to meet.’

  ‘Happened? Happened?’

  ‘Well, he said it was luck, but of course it wasn’t, not entirely. He’d been hanging around Alma House watching who came and went for a long time—’

  ‘Just a minute. How did he know that was where Rees-Talbot lived?’

  It took her some time to think of an answer. When she did, it didn’t appear to add much to the facts already on record: Mauritz had called on the Lady Maude of the wedding photo, she had been uncooperative but Mauritz had made a deal with her son, Sir Julian, who had given him a pointer towards Osbert Rees-Talbot and where he lived. But then she went on to say that he had noticed Aston going to the house several times and in the end had followed him to a pub, where they struck up acquaintance … ‘Something Wim was very good at,’ she said, her mouth twisting. He had got Aston talking and heard him refer to Osbert Rees-Talbot as ‘the major’, and it wasn’t long before he knew he’d struck gold. ‘But meeting him,’ she finished bitterly, ‘was just the worst thing that could ever have happened. Together, the two of them ruined everything.’

  ‘I always said it was a mistake to have Wim Mauritz with us,’ Judy intervened sharply. ‘He was no good, only in it for himself.’

  ‘I know now. It was just plain stupid on my part.’

  Considering her opinion of Mauritz, Reardon thought this was very true – at the very least she had been naive, refusing to see he’d accompanied them halfway across the world for nothing except hopes of
his own gain. On the other hand, Reardon didn’t believe Vinnie Henderson, any more than Judy Cash, was naive. ‘Exactly how did they ruin everything?’

  ‘By pairing up and demanding money – which was truly the last thing I wanted.’ Reardon’s mental eyebrows rose: what else had she expected? Their meeting, she went on, might have been a ‘coincidence’ that had been arranged by Mauritz, but luck had certainly entered into it when he’d discovered that Aston had always known, or suspected, the outcome of his former officer’s affair with Bettje de Jager. He had in fact made use of what he’d learnt all those years ago to extract a substantial loan for himself when he was starting up his business. It had been easy. The major, already guilty, was soon convinced that a word or a hint dropped here, a whisper there, could have been enough to turn his family life upside down, not to mention besmirching his reputation as an upstanding citizen. Aston had been canny enough, however, to realize that the Rees-Talbot purse was not bottomless and that his victim might at any time baulk at paying out and decide to face up to the consequences, so he had neglected to repay the heavy loan and put no more pressure on Osbert. Until he needed his agreement on the Hadley Piece business, Reardon reminded himself. And then Mauritz had come on the scene, bringing with him Osbert’s unacknowledged daughter, when the blackmail stakes had been raised regardless.

  ‘Which had never, ever been my intention! I didn’t want money,’ Vinnie repeated, suddenly passionate. ‘I did not! All I wanted was to get some acknowledgement from my father that I existed, to be part of his family. To have some sense of who I really was!’

  Reardon was willing to acknowledge there might be some basic truth in this, yet he was sceptical about the money. And wasn’t there, after all, a certain ruthlessness about the way she had gone about insinuating herself into the good books of the Rees-Talbot family, and even perhaps into the heart of Felix, while knowing any attraction he felt for her was doomed from the start?