The Ghost Writer (20 page)

"If we hadn't needed the money so badly," said Theodore, "your father would certainly have refused it. He loathed the idea of gratifying his own father, even in death, and insisted on having the entire income paid direct to me until you should reach the age of twenty-one; it is what we have lived on for the past seven years. I comforted myself with the thought that we were, in effect, recovering money that should have been Imogen's. But now that you are twenty-one, the income, and the responsibility, are yours alone."

"I should, like things to go on just as they are," said Cordelia without hesitation. "Only ... you haven't said why you brought out the portrait, and left all the other pictures shut away,"

"Simply because I could not bear to think of her—her picture—locked away in the dark. As for the rest, it was your fathers preference."

"And, did you do as the lawyer suggested, look to see if he—I suppose I must call him my grandfather—had hidden something dangerous in the room?"

"Well, I watched while St Clair's belongings were brought up from the cart—your papa had taken you and your sister out for the day—and saw nothing sinister. But it was not my place to examine things closely."

Cordelia stirred the fire reflectively.

"I think I should like to bring some of the other pictures out," she said after a while. "Am I allowed to do that? Would the trust stop me? How would they know?"

"The trust is three elderly gentlemen in the City, Mr Ridley's successor, a Mr Weatherburn, acts on their behalf; Mr Ridley retired soon after I met him. You are supposed to write to Mr Weatherburn once a year and assure him that the conditions have not been breached. He or his representative may appear at any time and demand to see that everything is in order. In fact we have been visited only twice: once soon after everything had arrived here, and again after I wrote to tell them of your father's death. Once you have made your own decision, I imagine they will send someone down: there are papers you will have to sign. You could ask whoever they send."

"I have already decided, uncle; I will accept. But—just supposing I said I didn't want the money, what would happen to the pictures?"

"Everything would be taken away, and stored by the trust until your eldest child reached the age of twenty-one; then the same offer would be made to him. If he declined, the entire contents of the room would be burnt to ashes—that's the actual phrase—under the supervision of the trust. As will happen in any case, when the line dies out or upon the death of your eldest child."

"How horrible! That makes me even more determined to bring them—well, perhaps not the exorcisms, but all the others—into the light where people can admire them. And—what if Henry St Clair is still alive? How old would he be now?"

"About sixty, I suppose."

"Then—shouldn't we try to find out? I mean, they are his things, really; my grandfather stole them, just as he stole Imogen's money. Though of course, if we gave them back, we would lose the income, wouldn't we?"

"Not only that, my dear. In law, those pictures are the property of the trust; supposing we found St Clair and returned them to him, we should all be charged with theft."

"What an evil old man! I hate to think of him as my grandfather. I suppose that's how Papa felt, only worse ... So there is nothing we can do, in the long run, to save the pictures from being burned."

"I fear not, my dear."

"And Beatrice?" said Cordelia after a pause. "How much should I tell her?"

"That is for you to decide."

"It will only make her dislike me more," said Cordelia despondently.

"I know," replied Theodore with unusual candour, "but we must do the best we can. I will tell her, if you like, that the administration of the trust that supports us—if you are quite sure about that—"

"Quite certain."

"—has passed to you as the eldest. She need know no more than that, until you decide otherwise."

"Thank you, uncle. Tell me—and please don't pretend—why do
you
think she dislikes me so?"

"Envy, I fear—don't tell your aunt I said so—she envies you your good nature, your affectionate disposition, and—to be entirely frank—your having been your father's favourite."

"I don't think my nature is as good as you make it out to be, uncle. But even if it were ... it is not fair of her to blame me for that. I couldn't help being born first..."

She broke off, hearing again the echo of her complaint—so long ago, it seemed—upon the landing. Uncle Theodore leaned over and caressed her shoulder, but otherwise made no more reply than the portrait, and they sat for a long time in silence, watching the coals pulse and flicker while darkness gathered at the window.

S
OME TWO MONTHS LATER, AT ABOUT
three o'clock on a warm spring afternoon, Cordelia was sitting at her accustomed windowsill high above the lane, affecting to read but really watching out for a visitor. Though the lane was already in deep shadow, she herself was bathed in sunlight so dazzling she could scarcely see beyond the forecourt. But, as she was doubtless aware, it also enhanced the creamy whiteness of her dress, and the lustre of her thick fair hair, which she had washed only that morning. She had learned from Mr Weatherburn's clerk that the trust would be represented by young Mr Beauchamp', whom she hoped to charm into letting her bring out more of the pictures. Uncle Theodore had obligingly taken Aunt Una and Beatrice up to London for the day, and so she had the house entirely to herself.

Beatrice had declined, predictably enough, to hear anything about the business from Cordelia: Uncle Theodore, she declared, had told her all she needed to know. She would not even enter the room in which 'Cordelia's paintings', as she insisted on calling them, were stored. (Aunt Una, too, had declined to view them, but only because of the stairs; she had recently moved her bedroom from the first to the ground floor.) Aside from the familiar pain of rejection, Cordelia had been forced to admit to herself that she was relieved; she could not help feeling proprietorial about the room. Unlocking the door and letting herself in when no one else was around still gave her a childish thrill of pleasure, like rediscovering a secret hiding-place. She felt perfectly at home there, especially in the mornings when the room was bright with sunlight. Indeed the more time she spent in it, the harder it became to think of the contents as the property of the trust. She was eager to set out some of the furniture as it might have been thirty years ago, when her grandmother first visited Henry St Clair's studio, but thought she should at least ask before doing so. In the meantime she had cleaned the windows, and dusted and swept as thoroughly as she could without disturbing anything.

A figure emerged from the shadows at the end of the lane and crunched across the gravel. A man—a young man—though he did not look in the least like a lawyer, for he wore a blue open-necked shirt and had a small canvas bag slung over his shoulder. But when he caught sight of her, he waved so cheerfully that she could not help waving back, or bounding down the four flights of stairs despite Aunt Una's warnings about loose carpets and broken necks, so that she opened the front door a little out of breath.

His attire looked even more informal at close quarters. The blue shirt was distinctly faded; he had on brown corduroy trousers and battered brown walking-boots in need of polish. As well as the knapsack, he had a khaki greatcoat, with rows of brass buttons embossed with eagles, draped over his arm. He was slender, not much taller than Cordelia herself, with reddish-brown curly hair, a ruddy complexion, and a long, humorous face which lit up with an irresistible smile at the sight of her. She felt an immediate attraction, and a strange, slightly unnerving sense of familiarity; as if some inner voice was saying,
I know you
, even though she knew she had never seen him before.

"Miss de Vere? I'm Harry Beauchamp, from Weatherburn and Hall."

"Oh yes, do come in. But you must call me Cordelia."

"Then you must call me Harry. You are—this is a delightful house. You would never guess it was here. I thought I must have got your directions wrong, until I came out of the wood and there you were in your window, waving down at me."

"You waved first, I think. Will you have some tea?"

"I should love some, but might we look at the pictures and things first? If you've time, that is. Then I'll feel I've earned it."

"Oh yes, I've lots of time," said Cordelia, blushing slightly at her own eagerness. "Come this way. I must say, you don't look at all like a lawyer."

"So my uncle—he's Hall, you see—is always complaining. You told our clerk it was a bit of a muddy walk from the station, so I thought it would be all right—I say, I hope you don't mind."

"Oh no, not at all, I was hoping you wouldn't be someone stuffy"

"To tell the truth," he continued as they set off down the hall—he moved, she noticed, with a slightly uneven gait, rolling a little to the right—"I'm much more interested in pictures than I am in the law. That's another reason Uncle Timothy despairs of me. I wish I could say I'm here because I know something about pictures, but to be honest it's because he thought even I couldn't make a mess of checking things off against an inventory and asking you to sign a few papers."

"Well I'm glad," she replied, "because I care for the pictures, and I hope you will too."

As they started up the stairs, she saw that his left knee did not bend properly, so that he had to check himself momentarily at every second step in order to swing his leg up to the next.

"Legacy of the war," he said, as if in reply to her unspoken question. "Entirely ignominious, I'm afraid. I was late getting back to barracks one night, and took a spill on my motorcycle. Spent the rest of the war on crutches, doing staff work in London. Otherwise I probably wouldn't be here. None of my friends are. From before, I mean."

"Yes. I lost—we lost our father, a month before it ended."

"How awful. Makes it worse, somehow, to have come so close ... sorry, tactless thing to say,"

"No, not tactless, it's true. I don't think truth ever hurts—well it shouldn't, anyway" she added, thinking of Beatrice.

"I say, who's this?" he exclaimed as they reached the landing and stopped in front of the portrait.

"Imogen de Vere, my grandmother."

"It's very fine. Very fine indeed. Who was the artist?"

"Henry St Clair—don't you know the story?"

"You mean this belongs to the
trust?
Good God. No; all I've read is the deed. A very odd bequest ... quite mad, if you don't mind my saying so. Why on earth...?"

"Yes, I think he was mad. And bad." Repressing a temptation to pour out the whole story, she said almost nothing about Imogen, confining herself to Ruthven de Vere bankrupting St Clair "in a fit of madness" and hiding away the pictures. Harry Beauchamp listened attentively while studying the portrait. Once or twice he glanced at Cordelia, as if comparing faces.

"So really," she concluded, "morally, I mean, they belong to Henry St Clair, though I know the law doesn't agree."

"No, unfortunately—but I see what you mean. The more I look at this, the more I feel I
should
have heard of him. Extraordinary eyes ... may we see the others?"

Though the room was now familiar, she still could not cross the threshold without a shiver of anticipation. Ushering her first visitor through the door—especially one as personable as Harry Beauchamp—prompted an additional
frisson,
and she was not disappointed in his reaction. He began by making a slow circuit of the room, moving from picture to picture, while she watched from the doorway, remembering her own progress that first wintry afternoon. So absorbed was he, by the time he passed her and began a second circuit, that he might have been walking in his sleep. At last he stopped before the first of the "exorcisms"—the solitary figure hastening through the moonlit wood—and turned to face her.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I had no idea ... until I saw that portrait, I was expecting a roomful of amateur watercolours or something of the sort. But these are quite remarkable. This, for example, reminds me a lot of Grimshaw—do you know him?—No, he's not much thought of these days. Went in for moonlight in a big way. Fine painter. But there's a menace about your man here..."

"He called them exorcisms," said Cordelia, coming over to join him. "For his melancholia."

"I see ... Now this—" moving on to another moonlit scene—"why, it's a sort of joke!"

To the untutored eye, there was nothing comical about it. The upper half of the canvas showed a tall, gaunt house framed by a tracery of bare branches. Orange light shone from an upstairs window, accentuating the dark outlines of the casements in a way that gave an unnerving impression of bared, grinning teeth. Leaves and twigs were strewn thickly over a flagged path: the place had an overgrown, desolate air. The path led down, by way of a series of steps, to a gateway between stone pillars. But there the semblance of normality ended, for just beyond the pillars, the ground ended in a sheer, vertical fall of rock, plunging to infinite depths. Flagstones hung precariously over the lip of the precipice, which ran like a jagged tear right along the front wall of the house. Torn earth and foliage gleamed in the moonlight.

At first, the precipice that dominated the lower half seemed almost featureless. Cordelia had gazed at it before, without discerning anything more than vague outlines. But now impressions began to form, as if her eyes were growing accustomed to the dark. She was looking into the mouth of a great cavern, thronged with dim figures which might or might not have been human, their eyes materialising into tiny points of reddish light, as if reflecting the fiery glow in the window far above.

"Extraordinary, isn't it?" said Harry. "You know, that house is pure Grimshaw, and yet—look at this." He indicated something that Cordelia had taken for a hairline crack in the canvas: a thin, forked line of pure white darting across the mouth of the cavern.

"Lightning, wouldn't you say?" he continued. "Mad Martin to the life."