by John Fowles
‘Young?’
She shrugged. ‘Quite.’
‘Could you tell me more about him?’
She looked down. ‘Gambellino, Gambardello … something like that. Gambardello?’ She said the name as if it was still a joke.
‘His first name?’
She couldn’t possibly remember.
‘Why Mr Rat?’
‘Because he had such staring brown eyes. We used to tease him terribly.’ She pulled an ashamed face at her son, who had come back, and now pushed her, as if he was the one being teased. She missed the sudden leap of excitement in my own eyes; the certainty that Conchis had used more than a pin.
‘Was he shortish? Shorter than me?’
She clasped her headscarf, trying to remember; then looking up, puzzled. ‘Do you know … but this can’t be … ?’
‘Would you be very kind indeed and let me question you for ten minutes or so?’
She hesitated. I was politely adamant; just ten minutes. She turned to her son. ‘Benjie, run and ask Gunhild to make us some coffee. And bring it out in the garden.’
He looked at the stable. ‘But Lazy.’
‘We’ll do for Lazy in a minute.’
Benjie ran up the gravel and I followed Mrs de Seitas, as she peeled off her gloves, flicked off her headscarf, a willowy walk, down beside a brick wall and through a doorway into a fine old garden; a lake of autumn flowers; on the far side of the house a lawn and a cedar. She led the way round to a sun-loggia. There was a canopied swing seat, some elegant cast-iron seats painted white. I deduced that Sir Charles Penn Montgomery had had a golden scalpel. She sat in the swing seat and indicated a chair for me. I murmured something about the garden.
‘It is rather jolly, isn’t it? My husband does almost all this by himself and now, poor man, he hardly ever sees it.’ She smiled. ‘He’s an economist. Stuck in Strasbourg.’ She swung her feet up; she was a little too girlish, too aware of her good figure; reacting from a rural boredom. ‘But come on. Tell me about your famous writer I’ve never heard of. You’ve met him?’
‘He died in the Occupation.’
‘Poor man. What of?’
‘Cancer.’ I hurried on. ‘He was, well, very secretive about his past, so one has to deduce things from his work. We know that he was Greek, but he may have pretended to be Italian.’ I jumped up and gave her a light for her cigarette.
‘I can’t believe it was Mr Rat. He was such a funny little man.’
‘Can you remember one thing – his playing the harpsichord as well as the piano?’
‘The harpsichord is the plonkety-plonk one?’ I nodded, but she shook her head. ‘You did say a writer?’
‘He turned from music to literature. You see, there are countless references in his early poems – and in, well, a novel he wrote – to an unhappy but very significant love affair he had when he was still in England. Of course we just don’t know – or didn’t – to what extent he was recalling reality and to what extent embroidering on it.’
‘But – am I mentioned?’
‘There are all sorts of clues that suggest the girl’s name was a flower name. And that he lived near her. And that the common bond was music
She sat up, fascinated.
‘How on earth did you trace this to us?’
‘Oh – various clues. From literary references. I knew it was very near Lord’s cricket ground. In one … passage he talks of this girl with her ancient British family name. Oh, and her famous doctor father. Then I started looking at street directories.’
‘How absolutely extraordinary.’
‘It’s just one of those things. You meet hundreds of dead ends. But one day you really hit a way through.’
Smiling, she glanced towards the house. ‘Here’s Gunhild.’ For two or three minutes we had to go through the business of getting coffee poured; polite exchanges about Norway – Gunhild had never been farther north than Trondheim, I discovered. Benjie was ordered to disappear; and the ur-Lily and I were left alone again.
For effect, I produced a notebook.
‘If I could just ask you a few questions
‘I say-glory at last.’ She laughed rather stupidly; horsily; she was enjoying herself.
‘I believed he lived next to you. He didn’t. Where did he live?’
‘Oh, I haven’t the faintest idea. You know. At that age.’
‘You knew nothing about his parents?’ She shook her head. ‘Would your sisters perhaps know more?’
Her face gravened.
‘My eldest sister lives in Chile. She was ten years older than me. And my sister Rose – ‘
‘Rose!’
She smiled. ‘Rose.’
‘God, this is extraordinary. It clinches it. There’s a sort of… well, a sort of mystery poem that belongs to the group about you. It’s very obscure, but now we know you have a sister
‘Had a sister. Rose died just about that time. In 1916.’
‘Of typhoid?’
I said it so eagerly that she was taken aback; then smiled. ‘No. Of some terribly rare complication following jaundice.’ She stared out over the garden for a moment. ‘It was the great tragedy of my childhood.’
‘Did you feel that he had any special affection for you – or for your sisters?’
She smiled again, remembering. ‘We always thought he secretly admired May – my eldest sister – she was engaged, of course, but she used to come and sit with us. And yes … oh goodness, it’s strange, it does come back, I remember he always used to show off, what we called showing off, if she was in the room. Play frightfully difficult bits. And she was fond of that Beethoven thing – “For Elise”? We used to hum it when we wanted to amioy him.’
‘Your sister Rose was older than you?’
‘Two years older.’
‘So the picture is really of two little girls teasing a foreign music-teacher?’
She began to swing on the seat. ‘Do you know, it’s frightful, but I can’t remember. I mean, yes, we teased him, I’m jolly sure we were perfect little pests. But then the war started and he disappeared.’
‘Where?’
‘Oh. I couldn’t tell you. No idea. But I remember we had a dreadful old battle-axe in his place. And we hated her. I’m sure we missed him. I suppose we were frightful little snobs. One was in those days.’
‘How long did he teach you?’
‘Two years?’ She “was almost asking me.
‘Can you remember any sign at all of strong personal liking – for you – on his side?’
She thought for a long moment, then shook her head. ‘You don’t mean … something nasty?’
‘No, no. But were you, say, ever alone with him?’
She put on an expression of mock shock. ‘Never. There was always our governess, or my sister. My mother.’
‘You couldn’t describe his character at all?’
‘I’m sure if I could meet him now, I’d think, a sweet little man. You know.’
‘You or your sister never played the flute or the recorder?’
‘Goodness no.’ She grinned at the absurdity.
‘A very personal question. Would you say you were a strikingly pretty little girl… I’m sure you were – but were you conscious that there was something rather special about you?’
She looked down at her cigarette. ‘In the interests, oh dear, how shall I say it, in the interests of your research, and speaking as a poor raddled mother, the answer is … yes, I believe there was. Actually I was painted. It became quite famous. All the rage of the 1913 Academy. It’s in the house – I’ll show you in a minute.’
I consulted my notebook. ‘And you just really can’t remember what happened to him when the war came?’
She pressed her fine hands against her eyes. ‘Heavens, doesn’t this make you realize – I think he was interned … but honestly for the life of me I … ‘
‘Would your sister in Chile remember better? Might I write to her?’
‘Of course. Wou
ld you like her address?’ She gave it to me and I wrote it down.
Benjie came and stood about twenty yards away, by an astrolabe on a stone column, looking plainer than words that his patience was exhausted. She beckoned to him; caressed back his forelock.
‘Your poor old mum’s just had a shock, darling. She’s discovered she’s a muse.’ She turned to me. ‘Is that the word?’
‘What’s a muse?’
‘A lady who makes a gentleman write poems.’
‘Does he write poems?’
She laughed and turned back to me. ‘And he’s really quite famous?’
‘I think he will be one day.’
‘Can I read him?’
‘He’s not been translated. But he will be.’
‘By you?’
‘Well … ‘ I let her think I had hopes.
She said, ‘I honestly don’t think I can tell you any more.’ Benjie whispered something. She laughed and stood up in the sunlight and took his hand. ‘We’re just going to show Mr Orfe a picture, then it’s back to work.’
‘It’s Urfe, actually.’
She put her hand to her face, in shame. ‘Oh dear. There I go again.’ The boy jerked her other hand; he too was ashamed of her silliness.
We all walked up to the house, through a drawing-room into a wide hall and then into a room at the side. I saw a long dining-table, silver candlesticks. On the panelling between two windows was a painting. Benjie ran and switched on a picture-light above it. It showed a little Alice-like girl with long hair, in a sailor-dress, looking round a door, as if she was hiding and could see whoever was looking for her searching in vain. Her face was very alive, tense, excited, yet still innocent. In gilt on a small black plaque beneath I read: Mischief, by Sir William Blunt, r.a.
‘Charming.’
Benjie made his mother bend down and whispered something.
‘He wants to tell you what the family calls it.’
She nodded at him and he shouted, ‘ “How Soppy Can You Get.” ‘She pulled his hair as he grinned.
Another charming picture.
She apologized for not being able to invite me to lunch, but she had ‘a Women’s Institute do’ in Hertford; and I promised that as soon as a translation of the Conchis poems was ready I would send a copy.
Listening to her, I had realized I was still the old man’s victim; had till then still half believed that last version of his rich cosmopolitan past he had foisted on me and then confirmed through ‘June’. Now I remembered the repeated echo in his stories of some vital change of life, or fortune, in the 1920s. I began to erect a new hypothesis. He would have been the gifted son of some poor Greek immigrant family, perhaps from Corfu or the Ionian Islands, ashamed of his Greek name, taking an Italian one; trying to rise in the alien Edwardian world of London, to shake off his past and background, already living a kind of double life … all of us who had been through the ‘system’ at Bourani must have been scapegoats for all the humiliations and unhappiness he had suffered in the Montgomery household, and no doubt others like it, during those distant years. I smiled as I drove, half at the thought of this very human rancour lying behind the intellectual theorizing, half at the prospect of this promising new lead to follow.
I came out into the main street of Much Hadham. It was half past twelve and I decided to get a bite to eat before I did the drive back to London. So I stopped at a small half-timbered pub. I had the lounge bar all to myself.
‘Passing through?’ asked the landlord, as he drew me a pint.
‘No. Been to see someone. Dinsford House.’
‘Nice place she’s got there.’
‘You know them?’
He wore a bow-tie; had a queasy in between accent.
‘Know of them. I’ll take the sandwiches separate.’ He rang up the till. ‘Used to see the children round the village.’
‘I’ve just been out there on business.’
‘Oh yes.’
A peroxided woman’s head appeared round the door. She held out a plate of sandwiches. As he handed me back my change, he said, ‘Singer in opera, wasn’t she?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘That’s what they say round here.’
I waited for him to go on, but he evidently wasn’t very interested. I finished half a sandwich. Thought.
‘What’s her husband do?’
‘Isn’t a husband.’ He caught my quick look. ‘Well, we been here two years now and I never heard of one. There’re … gentlemen friends, I’m told.’ He gave me a minute wink.
‘Ah. I see.’
‘Course they’re like me. London people.’ There was a silence. He picked up a glass. ‘Good-looking woman. Never seen her daughters?’ I shook my head. He polished the glass. ‘Real corkers.’ Silence.
‘How old are they?’
‘Don’t ask me. I can’t tell twenty from thirty these days. The eldest are twins, you know.’ If he hadn’t been so busy polishing the glass in the old buy-me-a-drink ploy he would have seen my face freeze into stone. ‘What they call identicals. Some are normals. And others are identicals.’ He held the glass up high to the light. ‘They say the only way their own mother can tell ‘em apart one’s got a scar or something on her
I was out of the bar so fast that he didn’t even have time to shout.
72
I didn’t feel angry at first; I drove very fast, and nearly killed a man on a bicycle, but I was grinning most of the way. This time I didn’t park my car discreetly by the gate. I skidded it on the gravel in front of the black door; and I gave the lion’s-head knocker the hardest using it can have had in its two centuries of existence.
Mrs de Seitas herself answered the door; she had changed, but only from her jodhpurs into a pair of trousers. She looked past me at my car, as if that might explain why I had returned. I smiled.
‘I see you’re not going out for lunch after all.’
‘Yes, I made a stupid mistake over the day.’ She gathered her shirt collar together. ‘Did you forget something?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh.’ I said nothing and she went on brightly, but a fraction too late, ‘What?’
‘Your twin daughters.’
Her expression changed; she didn’t appear in the least guilty, but she gave me a look of concession and then the faintest smile. I wondered how I had not seen the similarity; the eyes, the long mouth. I had let that spurious snapshot Lily had shown me linger in my mind. A silly woman with fluffed-up hair. She stepped back for me to enter.
‘Yes. You did.’
Benjie appeared at a door at the end of the hall. She spoke calmly to him as she closed the door behind me.
‘It’s all right. Go and have your lunch.’
I went quickly and bent a little in front of him. ‘Benjie, could you tell me something? The names of your twin sisters?’
He stared at me, still suspicious, but now I detected a trace of fear as well, a child caught hiding. He looked at his mother. She must have nodded.
‘Lil’ and Rose.’
‘Thank you.’
He have me one last doubtful look, and disappeared. I turned to Lily de Seitas.
She said, as she moved self-possessedly towards the drawing-room, ‘We called them that to placate my mother. She was a hungry goddess.’ Her manner had changed with her clothes; and a vague former disparity between her vocabulary and her looks was accounted for. It was suddenly credible that she was fifty; and incredible that I had thought her rather unintelligent. I followed her into the room.
‘I’m interrupting your lunch.’
She have me a dry backwards look. ‘I’ve been expecting an interruption for several weeks now.’
She sat in an armchair and gestured for me to sit on the huge sofa in the centre of the room, but I shook my head. She was not nervous; even smiled.
‘Well?’
‘We start from the fact that you have two enterprising daughters. Let me hear you re-invent from there.’
‘I’m afraid my invention’s at an end. I can only fall back on the truth now.’ But she was still smiling as she said it; smiling at my not smiling. ‘Maurice is the twins’ godfather.’
‘You do know who I am?’ It was her calmness; I could not believe she knew what they had done at Bourani.
‘Yes, Mr Urfe. I know exactly who you are.’ Her eyes warned me; and annoyed me. ‘And what happened?’
She looked down at her hands, then back at me. ‘My husband was killed in 1943. In the Far East. He never saw Benjie.’ She saw the impatience on my face and checked it. ‘He was also the first English master at the Lord Byron School.’
‘Oh no he wasn’t. I’ve looked up all the old prospectuses.’
‘Then you remember the name Hughes.’
‘Yes.’