Bland Beginning (10 page)

She paused. Anthony grunted a query.

“I suppose we should have to accept it. Though it still wouldn’t explain about the publisher’s name being wrong.”

Looking straight ahead, Anthony said, “Let’s go and see him tomorrow.”

She laughed. “Easier said than done. He’s incredibly old, supposed to have been at death’s door for years. And he lives in complete isolation. Won’t be interviewed by the Press or anybody else. Besides, I thought you were convinced about the booklet. Hullo, what’s this?”

A man was standing in the middle of the road, waving his hands. Anthony came to a stop. The man was youngish, and a dark moustache made a thin line across his upper lip. His eyes flickered quickly over Anthony, Ruth and the Bentley. He said in a Cockney voice, “Could yer lend a hand, chum? Sorry to bother yer, but we’ve just ditched our car up a lane.”

“Right-oh,” Anthony said. He got out of the car. The lane was a few yards up the road. By the side of a large car three men were lounging. They straightened up when Anthony and the man with the dark moustache turned the corner. The face of one man seemed vaguely familiar to Anthony. The car was a grey tourer, and it was not in the ditch. Anthony turned to the man by his side and said, “I don’t –” Then he saw the raised blackjack in the man’s hand and threw himself to one side so that the blow landed on his shoulder and not on his head. Even so it forced him to his knees. He caught the man’s leg, jerked him to the ground, and put a fist in his stomach. The other men were running up. A voice – and again it had a familiar sound – said “I’ll take ’im.” Anthony moved up and away, but he was too late. A vivid flash of lightning seemed to split his skull, and then there was blankness.

When he regained consciousness his head was aching, and an electric hammer seemed to be at work in his skull. He was lying on the grass by the side of the road, and Ruth was shaking his shoulders gently. “Do you feel all right?” she asked. “You’ve got a great lump on the back of your head.”

Anthony stood up and the electric hammer in his head began to work faster. “I think I can walk to the car,” he said faintly.

She was triumphant. “There isn’t a car. They’ve taken it. But that’s not what they were after. They’ve got the booklet. Now perhaps you’ll believe me when I say there’s something fishy about – oh, you poor darling.” Anthony, overborne by this news, and by the electric hammers, had sunk down again on to the grass, and was holding his head in his hands. He was conscious that he did not present a positively heroic figure.

“Just sit there. I’ll stop a car,” she said, and within five minutes she had done so. She seemed to have told the driver, a facetious commercial traveller, a tale about a lover’s quarrel, for he kept casting glances at them in the back and roaring with laughter. When they had been driving for half a mile Ruth suddenly said, “Stop.” There, driven just off the road, was the Bentley. “There’s our car.”

The commercial traveller looked bewildered. “But you didn’t say you had a car.”

“Didn’t I? Well, we have. I hope it’s in working order.” She got in, sat in the driving seat and let out the clutch. The Bentley moved. “Splendid. Come along, Anthony.” Slowly and painfully, Anthony made his way over to the Bentley. “We just left our car here,” Ruth said airily.

“You did?” The commercial traveller looked at her with his mouth open. “But then why did he – I mean why did you ask for a lift?”

“You wouldn’t ask a sick man to walk all that way, would you?” Ruth asked indignantly, and he was abashed. “But thanks very much, anyway,” she said as she moved past him in the Bentley.

“How far are we from Barnsfield?” she asked. “You’ll have to guide me.”

“About ten miles. Straight road. Right turn at crossroads.”

“Do you want to call in and see a doctor?”

The electric hammer, which had quietened down, started up again fiercely as Anthony thought of his head being probed by Edward Rawlings’ unsympathetic hands. “No.”

“Right. We’ll talk when we get to your place.” Anthony grunted.

Sitting in an easy chair from which her feet hardly touched the ground, Ruth told her story while Anthony reclined on a sofa with a wet towel round his head. The man with the dark moustache had come back to the car with another man. He had shown her a blackjack, and the other man had shown her a revolver. They had told her to get out of the car, and she had done so. The dark man had seen the briefcase, looked inside it, and said, “Let’s go.” They had got in the Bentley and driven it away. She had run round the corner into the side lane, and had found Anthony.

“There can’t be any doubt about it. They were after the book.”

Anthony raised his hand to his aching head. “Why should they want it if it’s a forgery?”

She shook her head. “There’s something funny about it all. You don’t knock people out to steal a book worth a hundred guineas.” She continued with excitement, “And how did they know you had the book? They must have been trailing you. Did you recognise them?”

“I thought I knew one of them, but I’m not sure. My head aches,” he said peevishly, and looked at his watch. “It’s a quarter-past seven. Where on earth can Vicky and that awful chap have got to?”

“He’s worth two of you, Anthony Shelton.” Anthony made a movement of the towel, intended to signify dissent. “He couldn’t have made a much worse show at stopping those toughs.”

“At least I was knocked on the head. I didn’t just get out of the car because a man pointed a gun at me. Probably an unloaded gun. He wouldn’t have dared to use it in a place like that.”

“Next time I’ll watch you take the gun away from him by ju-jitsu,” she said placidly. “In the meantime, what are you going to do? Sit holding your head in your hands?”

The telephone bell rang. Anthony crossed the room and took off the receiver. “Anthony?” It was Vicky’s voice. The line was faint, and she sounded breathless. “We’ve had such an afternoon, darling. So exciting.”

“Where are you? I thought you were coming to dinner.”

“We’re at Peaceful Alley.”

“Peaceful Alley?” Anthony repeated, and remembered. “Oh, that bookseller. What on earth are you doing there?”

“Detective work. I haven’t enjoyed myself so much for ages. John’s been wonderful.”

“
Who
?”

She sounded surprised. “You know, John Basingstoke.”

“Now, look here, Vicky–”

“You sound awfully peevish. I’m sorry we’re late, but we’re coming back straight away. In Edward’s car.”

“I’ve been hit on the head.”

“What?”

“By thieves,” he said in a martyred voice. “They stole your present.”

“I can’t hear you. This line’s awfully bad. I thought you said you’d been hit on the head. Just a minute.” There were clicking noises.

Anthony suddenly felt furiously angry. “Look,” he bellowed into the telephone, “I
did
say I’d been hit on the head.” He heard Ruth Cleverly laugh behind him.

Vicky’s voice was cold. “Can I help it if you’ve had an accident? There’s no need to shout.”

“It wasn’t an accident. It –”

“John’s found out something much more important than that. He’s found out that the first edition
was
forged, along with lots and lots of others, and he’s found out the name of the forger.”

A desire to throw the telephone across the room warred with an insistent curiosity in Anthony’s mind, and curiosity won. “Who?”

“John says he’s extremely well known – in literary circles, of course.” Vicky’s tone was one of unctuous superiority.

“
What’s his name
?” Anthony yelled, and was quite surprised when he received a clear and cool reply: “It’s a man named Cobb.”

When Vicky and Basingstoke left their companion investigators they returned to Barnsfield by train. There were no other passengers in the carriage, and on the way down Basingstoke told Vicky the story of his life, as Ruth Cleverly had told hers to Anthony, but at much greater length. They sat facing each other, and he looked out of the window occasionally, when he thought she was staring at his scar.

His father, he told her, had been an Irishman and a professional boxer, a huge man with enormous physical strength; his mother a pretty variety singer with the brain of a mouse, who had run away from her respectable middle-class home to go on the stage. The family severed relations with her, with the single exception of her brother, Gilbert Stone, who had retained an affection for his pretty, silly sister, and sent her small presents of money from time to time. Behind Colonel Stone’s bluff exterior, Basingstoke remarked parenthetically, was hidden a romantic heart.

His father first met his mother at one of the second-class halls where she sang her sentimental songs – her voice, although pleasant, was never good enough to take her into the best halls, or even to the top of the bill at lesser ones. Their attraction was that of opposites; his mother had told him how much she admired the great, brutish strength of the handsome Irishman who seemed always to be bursting out of his suits, and the boxer must have been drawn to all that was clinging, gentle and mouse-like about her.

They were happy together for two or three years, although they did not live with each other more than a small part of that time. She had her engagements, and he had his fights, and although he wanted her to give up singing she would never do so. She felt, in some obscure way, that she was justified when he came home drunk one day after losing a fight – “They were both essentially second-rate, I fear,” said Basingstoke, again in parenthesis, looking out of the window – hit her in the jaw and knocked out two of her teeth. From that day she was terrified of his occasional drunkenness, not on her own account, but because she feared that in a violent mood he might harm the baby, John.

The relations between them worsened whenever they lived with each other for more than a couple of days. His own memories of childhood were of a succession of shabby lodgings in provincial towns, and he was vividly impressed by the terror his mother showed whenever his father was coming to stay the night. When his father was sober he was generally friendly, but when he was drunk (and he was drunk increasingly often, for he lost many fights through careless training and easy living) he would strike her, and he would always threaten on such occasions to do something to the boy, saying that this thin, puking child was none of his. At last one night he knocked her down and branded the boy’s face with a hot poker. Rather dramatically, Basingstoke turned towards her. “As you see, the mark has remained.”

Green fields and toy houses flashed by. Vicky stared at him with horror and fascination. His scar was rapidly assuming the beauty of Byron’s lame foot in her imagination. “What happened then?”

“She got a separation from him. Then he met her one day in the street, threatened her with a knife and attacked her. He was arrested, and although she didn’t want to give evidence against him, her family persuaded her to do so – she was always easily persuaded. He got twelve months, and she never saw him again. He couldn’t get any more fights, and became a chucker-out at a public house. He was knocked over by a taxi and killed when I was ten years old.” Basingstoke paused. “My mother was very sorry. I think she always loved him. She died two years later from TB”

“How awful,” Vicky said. She meditated. “Nothing like that has ever happened to me,” she said regretfully and then: “What happened afterwards?”

“Afterwards?”

“I mean – who brought you up – all that kind of thing.”

“Oh yes. Thanks chiefly to Uncle Gilbert, the family stepped in. They sent me to boarding school, and paid for my education. I came out of school into the Artists’ Rifles, and I was training when the war ended. Since then I’ve done all sorts of jobs – librarian, tutor, journalist – anything to avoid asking them for money. Just at present” – he rattled coins in his pocket and gave her the sidelong smile that appeared sinister or romantic according to taste – “you find me at an exceptionally low ebb until my novel is published or something else turns up.”

“I see,” said Vicky. She gazed in a kind of trance out of the carriage window.

“I tell you all this,” Basingstoke said, “because I was so atrociously rude to you yesterday.” She waved a hand, a great lady deprecating mention of an occasion so trivial. “My background is, I think, partly responsible. I feel a disinterested curiosity to see how people will react to the unexpected and embarrassing. When you laid yourself open to attack, I couldn’t resist probing like a surgeon. Curiosity, I often think, is the most debased of man’s instincts. What is it, for instance, that moves us to delve into the secret of this small literary scandal?” Dumbly, Vicky shook her head. “The most ignoble and beastly curiosity. Or at least, that is at work in my own case. What will your oafish lover do when he finds out that he has paid a hundred guineas for a forgery? What effect will it have on your own relations with him? What human secret is hidden behind that modest discovery of mine about the falsification of a name or a date? Something mean, you may be sure, something shameful or terrible. For there is always something shameful behind the façade of respectability and routine. Move a stone, and the worm of deceit emerges. I am fascinated by the shape it takes.” Looking out of the window again, he said, “Such fascination is unhealthy.”

What extraordinary – and what romantic – things to say! What a lot there would be to note down in her diary. She occupied herself in building up a situation round the secret of old Martin’s book, in which she would play a romantic and heroic part. Perhaps there was something astonishing hidden among those dusty papers in the attic. Dimly she thought of an unopened box and a great worm coming out of it…

The train stopped. “B-a-a-rnsfield,” the porter mooed like a cow. Vicky sprang to her feet. “Come along. Let’s go to the attic.”

Just inside the front door they met Edward, who looked at Basingstoke with surprise. “You’re back from London quickly,” he said, and added with a kind of gloomy glee. “All a washout, I suppose?”

“Not at all.” Vicky’s cheeks were glowing with pleasure and anticipatory excitement. “Anthony is making investigations there. We have come back to look at the attic.”