Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (26 page)

‘Come on,’ said Isobel. ‘Tell us.’

‘Chips Lovell.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘This afternoon.’

‘How did you find out?’

‘Chips had just been accepted when I arrived back at the house.’

‘He was almost a relation before,’ said Frederica.

On the whole she sounded well disposed, at least looking on the bright side; because there must have been much about Chips Lovell which did not recommend itself to Frederica. She may have feared worse. Moreland’s name was unlikely to have reached her, but she could have heard vague, unsubstantiated gossip stemming ultimately from the same source.

‘I guessed something must be in the air when Priscilla told me she was leaving that opera job of hers,’ said Robert. ‘At one moment she thought of nothing else.’

We talked about Chips Lovell for a time.

‘Now,’ said Frederica, ‘after that bit of news, I shall get back to my own story.’

‘What is your story?’ asked Robert. ‘I arrived in the middle.’

‘I was talking about St John Clarke.’

‘What about him?’

‘Whom do you think St John Clarke would leave his money to?’ said Frederica.

‘That is a big question, Frederica,’ I said.

Revelation coming from Frederica on the subject of St John Clarke’s last will and testament would be utterly unexpected. I had certainly wondered, at the time of St John Clarke’s death, who would get his money. Then the matter had gone out of my head. The beneficiary was unlikely to be anyone I knew. Now, at Frederica’s words, I began to speculate again about what surprising bequest, or bequests, might have been made. St John Clarke was known to possess no close relations. Members and Quiggin had often remarked on that fact after they left his employment, when it was clear that neither of them could hope for anything but a small legacy for old times’ sake; and even that was to the greatest degree improbable. There was the German secretary, Guggenbühl. He had moved on from St John Clarke without a quarrel, although with some encouragement, so Quiggin said, because of St John Clarke’s growing nervousness about the orthodoxy of Guggenbühl’s Marxism. The choice was on this account unlikely to have fallen on Guggenbühl. There remained the possibility of some forgotten soul from that earlier dynasty of secretaries – back before the days of Members and Quiggin – who might have been remembered in St John Clarke’s last months; a line whose names, like those of prehistoric kings, had not survived, or at best were to be met with only in the garbled forms of popular legend, in this case emanating from the accumulated conflux of St John Clarke myth propagated by Members and Quiggin. Again, the Communist Party was a possible legatee; St John Clarke seeking amends for his days of bourgeois licence, like a robber baron endowing the Church with his lands.

Even if St John Clarke had left his worldly goods to ‘the Party’, Frederica would scarcely bother about that, finally though such a bequest might confirm her distrust for men of letters. I was at a loss to know what had happened. Frederica saw she had said enough to command attention. To hold the key to information belonging by its essential nature to a sphere quite other than one’s own gives peculiar satisfaction. Frederica was well aware of that. She paused for a second or two. The ransoming of our curiosity was gratifying to her.

‘Who?’ I asked.

‘Whom do you think?’

‘We can’t spend the afternoon guessing things,’ said Isobel. ‘Our invention has been exhausted by Priscilla’s possible fiancés.’

Robert, who probably saw no reason to concern himself with St John Clarke’s affairs, and was no doubt more interested in speculating on the prospect of Chips Lovell as a brother-in-law, began to show loss of interest. He strolled across the room to examine a picture. Frederica saw that to hold her audience, she must come to the point.

‘Erridge,’ she said.

That was certainly an eye-opener.

‘How did you discover this?’

‘Erry told me himself.’

‘When?’

‘I stayed a night at Thrubworth. There were some legal papers of mine Erry had to sign. Taking them there seemed the only way of running him to earth. He just let out this piece of information quite casually as he put his pen down.’

‘How much is it?’ asked Robert, brought to heel by the nature of this disclosure.

‘That wasn’t so easy to find out.’

‘Roughly?’

‘St John Clarke seems to have bought an annuity of some sort that no one knew about,’ said Frederica. ‘So far as I can gather, there is about sixteen or seventeen thousand above that. It will be in the papers, of course, when the will is proved.’

‘Which Erry will get?’

‘Yes.’

‘He will hand it over to his Spanish friends,’ said Robert tranquilly.

‘Oh, no, he won’t,’ said Frederica, with some show of bravado.

‘Don’t be too sure.’

‘One can’t be sure,’ said Frederica, speaking this time more soberly. ‘But it sounded as if Erry were not going to do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘He didn’t leave Spain on very good terms with anyone.’

‘The money would pay off the overdraft on the estate account,’ said Isobel.

‘Exactly.’

‘And the woods would not have to be sold.’

‘In fact,’ said Robert, ‘this windfall might turn out to be most opportune.’

‘I don’t want to speak too soon,’ said Frederica, ‘especially where Erry is concerned. All the same, so far as I could see, there seemed hope of his showing some sense for once.’

‘But will his conscience allow him to show sense?’ said Robert.

I understood now why Quiggin had been so irritable when we had last met. He must already have known of St John Clarke’s legacy to Erridge. By that time Quiggin could scarcely have hoped himself for anything from St John Clarke, but that this golden apple should have fallen at Erridge’s feet was another matter. To feel complete unconcern towards the fact of an already rich friend unexpectedly inheriting so comparatively large a capital sum would require an indifference to money that Quiggin never claimed to possess. Apart from that was the patron-protégé relationship existing between Erridge and Quiggin, complicated by the memory of Mona’s elopement. Quiggin’s ill humour was not surprising in the circumstances. It was, indeed, pretty reasonable. If St John Clarke had been often provoked by Members and Quiggin during his life, the last laugh had to some extent fallen to St John Clarke after death. At the same time, it was not easy to see what motives had led St John Clarke to appoint Erridge his heir. He may have felt that Erridge was the most likely among the people he knew to use the money in some manner sympathetic to his own final fancies. On the other hand, he may have reverted on his death-bed to a simpler, more old-world snobbery of his early years, or to that deep-rooted, time honoured tradition that money should go to money. It was impossible to say. These, and many other theories, were laid open to speculation by this piece of news, absurd in its way; if anything to do with money can, in truth, be said to be absurd.

‘Did Chips mention when he and Priscilla are going to be married?’ asked Isobel.

The question reminded me that Moreland, at least in a negative manner, had taken another decisive step. I thought of his recent remark about the Ghost Railway. He loved these almost as much as he loved mechanical pianos. Once, at least, we had been on a Ghost Railway together at some fun fair or on a seaside pier; slowly climbing sheer gradients, sweeping with frenzied speed into inky depths, turning blind corners from which black, gibbering bogeys leapt to attack, rushing headlong towards iron-studded doors, threatened by imminent collision, fingered by spectral hands, moving at last with dreadful, ever increasing momentum towards a shape that lay across the line.