Echo of Barbara

by John Burke

  ‘Funny,’ said Adam Collier. ‘Roger chose well. She was like you in so many ways. The pride was there. But’ — his voice softened — ‘there was such a difference, too.’

  She sensed the criticism, and resented it, coming from a man who had only just met her. ‘What difference?’

  He braked for a crossing, growled at a lorry that vacillated on the corner, and swung past it.

  ‘She was different, that’s all,’ he said.

  ‘You sound as though you think very highly of her,’ snapped Barbara.

  ‘I liked her.’

  ‘Although she was nothing more or less than a confidence trickster?’

  ‘We don’t know —’

  ‘Whatever you know or don’t know,’ she flung at him, ‘one thing is certain: she was a trickster. What else could she have been? What else was she doing in the house, with my mother’s and brother’s connivance?’

  He did not reply. His inability to answer those questions, even to himself, sat on his shoulders like some evil crouching spirit. It was some minutes later, as though it were a fresh idea, unconnected with what had gone before, that he said:

  ‘She was beginning to make her . . . your father happy. They were beginning to relax together, to rebuild his life together.’

  ‘How charming!’ said Barbara frostily. She was not upset — merely impatient with people who could have been so blind, people who had involved themselves in such a shabby game.

  ‘I knew him before she came back. While she was away — that is, I mean, while you were away — he wasn’t facing up to the world. I knew there was something wrong, and knew your absence had most to do with it. But he never said why you were away; never gave himself away. And then . . . well, then his daughter came back. Or so it seemed. And he began to reach out, very carefully . . . very warily . . . for the reins of life.’

  ‘You seem to take the affairs of the Westwoods very seriously,’ she said. ‘Where do you come into all this?’

  Again he was silent.

  After a pause she said: ‘You think I had no business to walk out, don’t you? If I hadn’t gone away in the first place —’

  ‘I’ve got no right to make any judgements,’ he said tersely.

  ‘I’m glad you realize it. I’m not ashamed of what I did. It was right. It was the only thing any self-respecting person could have done.’

  He glanced very quickly at her, then back at the road. ‘You’re Sam Westwood’s daughter all right,’ he said. ‘It’s in your face and your voice, and the stubborn way you push your chin out.’

  He might have been trying deliberately to insult her. To be told that she was her father’s daughter as coldly and distantly as that . . . But she sensed that he was adding things up, doing inconclusive sums, trying to fit pieces of a pattern together.

  She said: ‘I stopped being Sam Westwood’s daughter a long time ago. And I’ve no intention of going back to being it.’

  A long time ago. Long before she had actually left her mother and brother so that she should not see her father again. The knowledge that she would never forgive him had been there all through those later years when she should have been at school with her old friends — the friends she had once had. Through those years when there had been enough money yet not quite enough, she had grown steadily and conscientiously to hate her father. He was a thief. He had robbed her of all the things he had led her to believe she would have. She had tried so hard, had learned how to get her way with him, had become the sort of daughter he wanted — the sort of daughter a man with his money and position ought to have — and then she had found out what sort of a man he was and what sort of position he had held. She had found it out first through whispers, sidelong glances and the mystery of averted eyes. It had seeped through her mother’s hysterical tears and through snatches of half-heard conversations between adults. Gradually it had grown clearer; and as it became clearer, her hatred grew firmer.

  When she left school she stayed with her mother. As a matter of principle — she could truthfully say it was that. Her mother could not be left with Roger. Barbara formed herself, consciously and calculatingly, into a new person. She adjusted to the new life — adjusted better than did Mrs. Westwood or Roger — and was dispassionately aware of the fact that she was doing so. Her astringent pride strengthened her. The things she gave up, the rich ambitions she abandoned, were still with her in the form of a nourishing contempt: contempt for her father.

  She proposed to make herself everything that her father had not been. She embraced her new life with a puritanism that satisfied some natural hardness inside her.

  It was Barbara rather than Mrs. Westwood who looked after the household, even when she was still in her teens. A remark from Barbara, pungent and often cruel, was enough to bring about a reorganization, large or small. Her mother found it easier to obey instructions; her brother found it easier to keep well away.

  Barbara did not deny her own pleasure in watching Roger dabbling in petty crime — or, rather, dabbling in the puddles around the fringe of the underworld. Somehow it proved something to her. He was weak and effeminate, and all his father’s bad points were coming out in him.

  As for her father’s good points . . .

  But there were none. She rejected the idea that he had had any. She hated him.

  And when it was time for Sam Westwood to return, Barbara decided it was time for her to leave. He could take the responsibility of the household now. She had done her duty — a self-imposed duty, and therefore all the finer.

  This was the right time for making the break. They were planning to move to a new house: it would not be possible to go on living in the same district and to try to explain the appearance of a husband and father who had been missing for ten years. In new surroundings they would all feel easier — that had been the argument. Barbara shared the view. She wanted new surroundings: she wanted them to be utterly new, with nothing and nobody left from her previous life.

  ‘I’m not going to be there,’ she had told Roger, ‘when he gets out.’

  She had explained, and he had laughed. She remembered his laugh. It was unsteady and derisive, and did not hurt her at all.

  ‘It’s all going to start all over again,’ she said with disgust, ‘and I want no more of it.’

  She did not know what her father had done with the things he had stolen. She did not want to know. There had been a silence, a lull, of ten years; and the thought of his starting in to re-create that lost world — as he would surely do — was intolerable.

  ‘The same old rackets,’ she said. Or, with ten years of prison experience behind him, perhaps they would be worse than before. And there was Roger waiting for him, longing to be part of that shabby, crooked organization.

  It was not for her. She would not knowingly live on that sort of money, owing allegiance to that sort of man. She would go away. And she would go before her father reappeared. The thought of his face — so dimly recollected now, hardening to a grimace in her memory — filled her with a sick dread. There was no room for the two of them in the same house.

  London accepted her. She became a part of it as she could never have done before, when they had lived richly but as strangers up the Thames, drawing their livelihood from the city but not belonging to it. Now she lived and worked in London. Her room was quiet, her life was well ordered. She joined a cinema club, changed her library books every Saturday morning, and was on the Festival Hall mailing list. Her shorthand and typing got her a job, and the man who had taken her on considered himself fortunate to have found her. She was methodical and unobtrusive. She dressed plainly but well; it helped the firm for her to look so expensive and efficient. Anything she did was well done, and she knew it.

  ‘It’s like having a man like myself as my own secretary,’ her employer said once. Then he apologized profusely. But he did not need to apologize.

  Three men in the building made passes at her, at one time and another. Barbara repulsed them all. She lived a
lone and spent most of her time alone. A young man called Richard, whom she had met at a meeting of the cinema club during a programme of Central European cartoon films, took her out sometimes. She felt she ought to go out sometimes, and his company was pleasant enough. At the end of each evening they spent together he kissed her; she felt it was right to be kissed at not too frequent intervals, and she enjoyed the shy respect he showed towards her.

  She had never intended to visit Easterdyke even once. She would not have been able to imagine any circumstances that would take her there.

  But the circumstances had arisen. At first she had thought this Adam Collier was mad; then that her father was up to some cunning scheme. In the end she had realized that the scheme, whatever it was, was certainly not her father’s. She must go to see him: in spite of all her resolves, she had to visit him in order to clear this business up.

  It was all a matter of principle.

  However much she might wish to cut herself off from her past, she had some responsibilities. She could not allow impostors to deceive other human beings. A girl who claimed to be Barbara Westwood must be shown up. And whoever had devised this fantastic masquerade must be exposed.

  Nothing else would have brought her. Only the necessity of showing the members of her family to one another as they really were; of stopping her father making more of a fool of himself than he had already done.

  ‘Nearly there,’ said Adam Collier.

  She looked down at the raw wintry coastline and wondered why her father had come here. It was surely not his kind of country. There were no rackets here.

  No doubt he was planning to start one, if he had not already done so.

  They stopped at last outside an isolated house streaked on one side with faint streamers of green from the sea wind. Adam Collier got out and jerked the door open for her.

  He said: ‘Let’s go and get it over with.’

  She found that she was smiling, that she could not help herself smiling. He looked at her with distaste. That made her smile even more. Her lips were drawn back by impatience and excitement.

  Adam knocked at the front door. From the speed with which it was opened, it was obvious that Mrs. Westwood had been on her way towards it.

  ‘Barbara,’ she said.

  Barbara said: ‘Are you sure you’ve got it right this time?’

  Her mother flinched and stood aside.

  They passed her. She closed the door behind them. Roger appeared at the head of the stairs and came apprehensively down. He attempted a sly grin. Barbara ignored him.

  ‘In the sitting-room,’ he said as nonchalantly as possible.

  Adam Collier said: ‘Have you told him?’

  Roger licked his lips. ‘Yes. A bit of it, anyway. He . . . doesn’t grasp it all.’

  Barbara felt a moment of kinship with the large, indignant young man beside her as he snorted incredulously.

  Then she saw her father.

  He was standing in the doorway of the sitting-room, and at first glance she thought her sense of proportion had gone wrong. It was impossible that he should have shrivelled up in this way. It was not just that she was a woman now instead of a girl, looking up at him: he had shrunk, and his face was not the face she had remembered and tried not to remember.

  ‘You’re Barbara?’ he said flatly.

  She took a step forward. He peered searchingly into her face.

  She said: ‘I’m Barbara. I’m here to find out what this story means — this tale of someone pretending to be me.’

  He nodded with a heavy sadness, and looked past her.

  ‘Your brother can continue his explanation,’ he said. ‘We were waiting for you. I . . . didn’t know what to believe. Now I can see. You’re Barbara, all right.’

  He jerked his head towards the room from which he had just come. Adam went in, and Barbara followed him. She turned to see Roger hesitating, unwilling to pass his father. It was as though there had been a violent scene just before they arrived, and Roger, like a cringeing little boy, had been whipped.

  Abruptly he scuttled in, and his mother came after him. Sam Westwood came in and closed the door. He looked at Adam Collier and said:

  ‘I’ve only been back half an hour. They gave me your telephone message.’

  ‘I drove back as fast as I could. With . . . with your daughter.’

  Barbara summed up the room in a quick, penetrating glance. Some of the furniture was familiar, but it looked out of place here. Everything was sharpened — vivid and as unconvincing as stage props. The features of the people in the room, too, were over-emphasized. They stood waiting for a cue.

  She sat down, took off her gloves, and said: ‘I think it’s obvious that Roger was after your money. That’s all there is to it.’

  ‘I had deduced that,’ said her father.

  Roger moved into the centre of the room, lifting both hands appealingly. ‘Now, look —’

  ‘You’d better tell me the whole story,’ said Barbara. ‘Let’s clear it up, so that I can get back to town. I didn’t want to come down here. I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t feel you needed someone to clear up the mess.’

  Her gaze crossed her father’s. His wonderment brought the smile back to her face; she felt it twitching at her mouth. If he was hurt, so much the better.

  He said: ‘You’d better tell her, Roger. I wouldn’t mind hearing it again, myself. Maybe it will make more sense this time.’

  ‘Well, now . . .’

  Roger tried to sound expansive. He forced a grin, flicked it pleadingly around his audience, and then sat down on the arm of a chair.

  ‘Look, Babs,’ he said in a sudden rush, ‘it’s all very well for you. You went and left us to it. You didn’t give a damn about Dad’s feelings — about what it would be like for him when he came home.’

  ‘No,’ she said very precisely, ‘I did not.’

  ‘Well, somebody had to do something for him.’

  ‘Did that include providing a substitute for me?’

  Already, in so few words, she had brought tiny tears into Roger’s eyes. It was an old accomplishment: she took quiet pleasure in the fact that she was still proficient in it.

  He cried: ‘If you’re going to use that detestable tone of voice —’

  ‘Go on,’ she said calmly. ‘Finish the story.’

  ‘You’re beastly. You always were. If you think I wanted you back, you’re very much mistaken. But Dad wanted you — it meant a lot to him — so I looked everywhere for you. Everywhere. All I wanted to do was to make him happy and . . .’

  ‘Finish the story,’ said his father.

  Roger gulped. He glanced furtively around at the watching eyes. This time he could not summon the vestige of a grin.

  In a voice almost as hoarse as his father’s, he went on: ‘I found somebody else. Mother and I’ — he quickened his pace, hurrying on over her whimper of protest and denial — ‘thought that if Dad could only settle down, feel really at home, everything would sort itself out. Then maybe we could tell him the truth. And it wouldn’t matter then.’

  Adam Collier leaned forward, shaking his head.

  ‘This is the craziest —’

  ‘When you talk of everything sorting itself out,’ said Barbara, ‘what do you mean?’ She knew. She was sure she knew. Coming down in the car, she had worked this out as being the only possible explanation. She flashed the direct question at him: ‘Have you had any money from the Mannerlaw diamonds? Has our clever father shared out the loot yet? Has he?’

  ‘You weren’t here,’ cried Roger. ‘It’s nothing to do with you. You didn’t want a share. You said you didn’t want any part in it. Over and over again you said that.’

  ‘Did he share it out?’ she demanded inexorably. ‘Or was he waiting until he could get me home again? Was that what he told you?’

  ‘No,’ said her father. ‘I didn’t tell him any such thing. But he had ideas of his own. He felt that if you were here — and a substitute you was better, even, th
an the real thing — I would melt. That’s it, isn’t it?’

  Roger did not reply.

  ‘A brilliant scheme,’ said Barbara. ‘Worthy of his father.’

  Adam Collier’s head came round. He stared at her. She turned abruptly to confront him. ‘We’re a wonderful family, aren’t we?’ she said.

  Roger tried to struggle on. ‘Just because something went wrong —’

  ‘Wrong?’ she echoed. ‘You seem to have made a splendid mess of the whole thing. And who was this girl who was supposed to be an adequate substitute for me? What’s happened to her?’

  ‘What the hell does it matter?’ said Roger.

  Adam Collier got up. He towered over the younger man.

  ‘You little bastard —’

  ‘They’ve got her,’ said Sam. ‘Ten to one they were telling the truth, and they’ve got her.’

  ‘You spoke to them?’

  ‘I went to the Red Lion. They told me they had a car ready, and I said I wasn’t coming. It was Legat. He started to threaten. I told him I wanted proof that they’d got Barbara.’ He looked at his daughter, bemused. ‘Got her,’ he said. ‘And Legat got mad. He said he’d give me proof all right, if I didn’t play along with them there and then. I . . . I nearly went.’

  ‘It’s a good job you didn’t,’ said Roger eagerly. Too eagerly. He was flushed, looking away from Adam and towards his father. ‘You don’t have to worry about her,’ he shouted in a great burst of relief, as though here he was at last on safe ground. ‘All right, I made a mistake. It looks pretty stupid from here. But it seemed good at the time. I hired the girl — all right — and if she wants to, she can prove she’s not Babs.’

  ‘Can she?’ said Adam Collier.

  ‘Well, if she can’t, what the hell? She was a tart. I know all about her. She worked for me and then went on to Lew Morrison.’ He was throwing words at his father. ‘You know Lew Morrison. You know what sort of girl he gets his hands on. She’s a slut, and we don’t owe her anything. She’s unlucky, but that’s nothing to do with us. Leave her to it. It’s a good job you stopped in time, and didn’t get mixed up with those roughnecks. Everything’s fine. There’s been no harm done. None. Has there, really?’