The Ivy Tree (6 page)

‘No. Oh, no.'

‘Very well. Then you have to admit that this “interest” of yours does go far beyond mere curiosity, Miss Dermott. He might have sent you to take a look at me, Annabel's double, once, but not more than' – I caught myself in time – ‘not more than that. I mean, you'd have hardly followed me home. No, you're “interested” in quite another sense, aren't you?' I paused, tapped ash into the waste-basket, and added: ‘“Interested parties”, shall we say? In other words, you've something at stake.'

She sounded as calm as ever. ‘I suppose it's natural for you to be so hostile.' There was the faintest glimmer of a smile on her face: perhaps not so much a smile, as a lightening of the stolidity of her expression. ‘I don't imagine that Con was exactly, well, tactful, to start with . . . He upset you, didn't he?'

‘He frightened me out of my wits,' I said frankly. I got up from the table, and moved restlessly to the window. The curtains were undrawn. Outside, the lights and clamour of the street made a pattern two storeys below, as remote as that of a coastal town seen from a passing ship. I turned my back on it.

‘Look, Miss Dermott, let me be plain, please. Certain things are obvious to me, and I don't see any advantage in playing stupid about them. For one thing, I don't want to prolong this interview. As you see, I'm busy. Now, your brother was interested in me because I look like this Annabel Winslow. He told you about me. All right. That's natural enough. But it isn't just pure coincidence that brought you to the Kasbah, and I know darned well I never told him where I worked. It sticks out a mile that he followed me home on Sunday, and either he came here and asked someone where I worked, or he saw me go on for the late Sunday shift at the café, and then went back and told you. And you came next day to have a look at me . . . Yes, I admit I did see you before today. How could I help noticing you, the way you stared? Well, no doubt he and you had a talk about it, and today you've followed me home. Am I right?'

‘More or less.'

‘I told you I was being frank, Miss Dermott. I don't like it. I didn't like the way your brother talked to me on Sunday, and I don't like being watched, and I'm damned if I like being followed.'

She nodded calmly, as if I had said something a little pettish, but fairly reasonable. ‘Of course you don't. But if you'll just be a little patient with me, I'll explain. And I'm sure you'll be interested then . . .'

All this time she had been watching me, and there was some quality about her steady gaze that I associated with something I couldn't place. It made me feel uncomfortable, and I wanted to look away from her. Con Winslow had had the same look, only his had held a frankly male appraisal that made it more understandable, and easier to face.

She looked away at last. Her gaze shifted from me to the appointments of the shabby little room; the iron bedstead, the garish linoleum, the varnished fireplace with its elaborately ugly overmantel, the gas ring on the cracked tiles of the hearth. She looked further, as if wondering, now, whether something of me, personally, was anywhere superimposed on the room's characterless ugliness. But there were no photographs, and what books I had had with me were packed. The questing look came to rest, defeated, on the clothes untidily hanging from the drawer I had been emptying, on the handbag I had pulled open to get my cigarettes, from which had spilled a lipstick, a pocket-comb, and a small gold cigarette lighter whose convoluted initials caught the light quite clearly:
M.G
.

Her eyes came back to my face. I suppressed a desire to say tartly: ‘Satisfied?' and said instead: ‘Are you sure you won't smoke?' I was already lighting another for myself.

‘I think I might, after all.' She took cigarette and light with the slight awkwardness that betrayed it as an unaccustomed action.

I sat down on the table again and said, uncompromisingly: ‘Well?'

She hesitated, looking for the first time not quite at ease, but it wasn't discomfort that touched the heavy face; it looked, incongruously, like excitement. It was gone immediately. She took a rapid puff at the cigarette, looked down at it as if she wondered what it was there for, then said in that flat voice of hers:

‘I'll come to the main point first, and explain afterwards. You were right in saying that our interest in you was more than the normal curiosity you'd expect the likeness to arouse. You were even right – terribly right – when you said we had “something at stake”.'

She paused. She seemed to be waiting for comment.

I moved again, restlessly. ‘Fair enough. You want something from me. Your brother hinted as much. Well, what? I'm listening.'

She laid her cigarette carefully down in the ashtray I had placed near her on the table. She put her hands flat down on her thighs and leaned forward slightly. ‘What we want,' she said, ‘is Annabel, back at Whitescar. It's important. I can't tell you how important. She must come back.'

The voice was undramatic: the words, in their impact, absurdly sensational. I felt my heart give a little painful twist of nervous excitement. Though I had suspected some nonsense of this kind – and of course it
was
nonsense – all along, the knowledge did nothing to prevent my blood jerking unevenly through my veins as if driven by a faulty pump. I said nothing.

The brown eyes held mine. She seemed to think everything had been said. I wondered, with a spasm of genuine anger, why people with some obsessive trouble of their own always thought that others should be nerve-end conscious of it, too. A cruel impulse made me say, obtusely: ‘But Annabel's dead.'

Something flickered behind the woman's eyes. ‘Yes, she's dead. She can't come back, Miss Grey, she can't come back . . . to spoil anything for you . . . or for us.'

I watched the ash from my cigarette float and fall towards the waste-basket. I didn't look at her. I said at length, with no expression at all: ‘You want me to go to Whitescar. As Annabel Winslow.'

She leaned back. The basket chair gave a long, gasping creak like a gigantic breath of relief. It was obvious that she had taken my apparent calmness for compliance.

‘Yes,' she said, ‘that's it. We want you to come to Whitescar . . . Annabel.'

I laughed then. I couldn't help it. Possibly the laughter was as much the result of taut nerves as of the obvious absurdity of her proposal, but if there was a suggestion of hysteria in it, she took no notice. She sat quite still, watching me with that expression which, suddenly, I recognised. It was the look of someone who, themselves uninvolved, coolly assesses a theatrical performance. She had all this time been weighing my looks, my voice, my movements, my reactions, against those of the Annabel Winslow of whom she knew so much, and whom she and her brother must have spent the greater part of the last three days in discussing.

I felt some nerve tighten somewhere inside me again, and deliberately relaxed it. My laughter died. I said: ‘Forgive me, but it sounded so absurd when it finally got put into words. It – it's so theatrical and romantic and impossible. Impersonation – that old stuff? Look, Miss Dermott, I'm sorry, but it's crazy! You can't be serious!'

She said calmly: ‘It's been done.'

‘Oh, yes, in stories. It's an old favourite, we know that, from the
Comedy of Errors
on. And that's a point, too: it may be all right in books, but on the stage, where one can
see
, and still one's supposed to be deceived, it's absurd. Unless you do really have identical twins . . . or one person plays both parts.'

‘That,' said Miss Dermott, ‘is the whole point, isn't it? We
have
got identical twins. It could be done.'

‘Look at it this way,' I said. ‘It's something, you say, that has been done. But, surely, in much simpler times than these? I mean, think of the lawyers, handwriting, written records, photographs, and, if it came to the point, police . . . oh, no they're all too efficient nowadays. The risks are too great. No, it belongs in stories, and I doubt if it's even readily acceptable there any more. Too many coincidences required, too much luck . . . That vein was worked out with
The Prisoner of Zenda
and
The Great Impersonation
. Pure romance, Miss Dermott.'

‘Not quite worked out,' she said, on that note of soft, unshaken obstinacy. ‘Haven't you read
Brat Farrar
, by Josephine Tey? You couldn't say
that
was “pure romance”. It could have happened.'

‘I have read it, yes, and it probably is the best of them all. I forget the details, but doesn't Brat Farrar, who's the double of a boy that's dead, go to the family home to claim a fortune and an estate? I agree, it was wonderfully convincing, but damn it, Miss Dermott, it was a
story
. You can't
really
do that sort of thing and get away with it! Real life is – well, it's not Brat Farrar, it's the Tichborne Case, and Perkin Warbeck. I forget just what the Tichborne Claimant got, but poor Perkin – who in fact may have been just what he claimed to be – got chopped.'

‘The Tichborne Case? What was that?'

‘It was
a cause célèbre
of the eighties. A certain Roger Tichborne had been presumed drowned; he was heir to a baronetcy and a fortune. Well, years later a man turned up from Australia claiming to be Roger Tichborne – so convincingly that to this day there are people who still think he was. Even Roger Tichborne's mother, who was still alive, accepted him.'

‘But he didn't get the estate?'

‘No. The case went on literally for years, and cost thousands, and pretty well split the country into two camps, but in the end he lost it. He got a prison sentence.
That's
the real thing, Miss Dermott. You see what I mean?'

She nodded. Arguing with her was like battering a feather pillow. You got tired, and the pillow stayed just the same. ‘Yes, of course. There has to be luck, certainly, and there has to be careful planning. But it's like murder, isn't it?'

I stared at her. ‘Murder?'

‘Yes. You only know about the ones that are found out. Nobody ever hears about the ones that get away with it. All the counting's on the negative side.'

‘I suppose so. But—'

‘You say that
Brat Farrar
's only a story, and that in real life anyone who walks into a family claiming to be a – well, a long-lost heir, would merely land in trouble, like this Tichborne man.'

‘Yes. Certainly. The lawyers—'

‘That's the whole point. That's not what you'd be doing. The lawyers wouldn't come into it, I'm sure of that. The point is that you'd not be
claiming
anything from anybody; there'd be nobody to fight you. The only person who'd lose by your reappearance is Julie, and she has enough of her own. Besides, she adored Annabel; she'll be so pleased to see you, that she'll hardly stop to think what it'll mean in terms of money . . .'

‘Julie?'

‘Annabel's young cousin. She's not at Whitescar now, but she'll be coming some time this summer. You needn't worry about her, she was only ten or eleven when Annabel went away, and she'll hardly remember enough about her to suspect you. Besides, why should she? I tell you, it's not a risk, it's a certainty. Take it from me, Con and I wouldn't dare take risks, either! We've everything to lose. You wouldn't even find it nerve-racking. Apart from the daily help, and the farm-hands you need hardly see, you'll be mostly with Con and myself, and we'll help you all we can.'

‘I don't understand. If Julie isn't there, who are you trying to—?'

‘And the point about the old man is that he's never believed Annabel was dead. He simply won't have it. He'll never even question you, believe me. You can just walk in.'

I was staring at her, my cigarette arrested half way to my mouth. ‘The old man? Who? Who are you talking about?'

‘Old Mr Winslow, her grandfather. I spoke of him before. He thought the world of her. He kept half a dozen pictures of her in his room—'

‘But surely . . . I understood he was dead.'

She looked up in surprise. ‘Where did you get that idea? No, he's very much alive.' Her mouth twisted suddenly, incongruously, into a likeness of that not-so-pleasant smile of Con's. ‘You might say that's the whole cause of this – situation. What made you think he was dead?'

‘I didn't think. But I somehow got the impression . . . When you spoke of “the old man” before, you used the past tense. You said “he
was
Annabel's grandfather”.'

‘Did I? Possibly. But, of course, the past tense,' she said softly, ‘would be for Annabel.'

‘I see that now. Yes. But it was added somehow to an impression I got on Sunday . . . your brother said something, I forget what . . . Yes, of course, he said – implied, I suppose, would be more accurate – that he owned the farm. No, he stated it flatly. I'm sure he did.'

She smiled then, genuinely, and for the first time I saw the warmth of real feeling in her face. She looked amused, indulgent, affectionate, as a mother might look when watching the pranks of a naughty but attractive child. ‘Yes, he would. Poor Con.' She didn't take it further, merely adding: ‘No, he doesn't own Whitescar. He's old Mr Winslow's manager. He's . . . not even Mr Winslow's heir.'

‘
I see
. Oh, lord, yes, I see it now.'

I got up abruptly, and went over again to the window. Opposite, in one of the tall, drab houses, someone came into a bedroom and switched on the light. I caught a too-familiar glimpse of yellow wall-paper with a writhing pattern of green and brown, a pink plastic lampshade, the gleam of a highly polished radio, before the curtains were twitched across the window. The radio was switched on, and some comedian clacked into the night. Somewhere a child wailed, drearily. In the street below, a woman was shouting a child's name in a wailing northern cadence.