Perfect Gallows Read online

  These sessions sometimes lasted a good three hours, and would have been impossible if her sister had been in the room, sighing and interrupting. Andrew got a glimpse of how Cousin Blue spent her evenings when he found a major on the stairs one morning, standing under the landing window and checking the money in his wallet, a sight that would have been unusual even in a GI. Andrew said good morning and the major looked up, half his mind still calculating.

  “That your auntie who’s been skinning us at bridge?” he said.

  “My cousin, really. Has she been winning?”

  “Has she! A dollar a hundred the General likes to play. Your cousin plays a mean hand.”

  “You mean she’s been cheating?”

  The major took the suggestion seriously for a moment.

  “Don’t think so,” he said. “It takes two to cheat at bridge, you’ve got to work it out between partners, and we cut in. She’s just one sharp little old lady—you bat an eyelid and she’ll know which side of her the king’s sitting. Three nights back she took ninety-eight dollars off the General—looked like he was going to bust a gut.”

  “I’m surprised she hasn’t suggested you play for meat and butter and things.”

  The major’s eyebrows rose towards his crew-cut.

  “She’s been dropping hints,” he said. “We didn’t take her seriously.”

  “I’m sure she’d rather have butter than dollars,” said Andrew.

  “Well, I guess … Anyway, thanks.”

  The effect on the rations in the Schoolroom was immediate. There were often second helpings of meat, and canned pineapple and peaches. There was maple syrup for the breakfast porridge, and other odd luxuries. But Cousin Blue took most of her winnings in butter. Andrew had expected her to keep her loot for herself, but she made a point of sharing it round, much enjoying the predicament in which this placed her sister. Cousin Brown responded in various ways. She made a point of complaining of the canned taste. She insisted that Samuel should continue to use the small moulds he had made—it really wouldn’t do to sit down to one’s meal with more than a week’s ration in front of each place. She shrugged but did not try to rebut Cousin Blue’s arguments that bridge winnings didn’t count as black market—they were really only a sort of present. She pointed out that Andrew was still growing and work at the farm was hard, so he certainly should take what was offered. And that being the case it would be a nuisance to the servants if she herself had to be treated differently.

  In fact the new arrangements caused considerable trouble downstairs. The American cooks were outraged and set about making Lieutenant Sternholz’s life yet more of a misery. The family servants too disapproved strongly. They had welcomed the democracy of rationing, which had even given them a certain power, since it was Mrs Mkele who supervised the details of the share-out. She told Andrew that in the early days of the war Cousin Blue had argued that the whole household’s butter ration should come upstairs and the servants be content with margarine, which they were used to—“as if I’d ever of allowed the muck in my kitchen before that Hitler went and made a nuisance of himself! It’s not that I enjoy sending up scraps and morsels. That’s never what I became a cook for. But some people like to behave as if there wasn’t a war on.”

  Cousin Blue of course paid no attention to these mutterings, though very likely she was aware of them. In fact the discontent probably added to her own purring pleasure over her success. Andrew had quickly become aware of her knack of spotting the weak sections in other people’s defence-lines. What seemed to be hesitant, dreamy, half-irrelevant comments were deliberate probings. In any kind of daylight she wore mauve-tinted spectacles, concealing the sharpness of her glances. Life at The Mimms had for years been a three-cornered struggle, unending because in any contest between two of the players it had been in the third one’s interest to see that neither triumphed, but now Uncle Vole was steadily weakening and an end was in sight, so the conflict between the sisters intensified. It was fought on all fronts, in committees and other charitable works, in orders and counter-orders to the servants, in the regime of Uncle Vole’s sick-room (there was now talk of having a nurse permanently in the house), and so on. Since Cousin Brown had established a salient with her revival of the Mimms Players and the introduction of a new fourth member of the family, Cousin Blue set about weakening both, not of course by direct attack, but, for instance, by her helpful corrections of Andrew’s accent and vocabulary, and references to dear Charles having gone to Eton.

  Probably it was for some such motive that she brought up the idea of the tours. It happened one evening when they were halfway through supper—just the three of them, as Uncle Vole had stayed in bed all day.

  “Andrew dear,” she said, “I’ve been thinking—these poor Americans, so uncultured. Not that it is their fault. They have never had our opportunity to live among lovely things.”

  “Lieutenant Bryce tells me he is writing a doctoral thesis on Cyril Tourneur,” said Cousin Brown.

  “But he is an officer, dear. Those poor men in the camp, almost savages, listening to that frightful music all day. And the dreadful thing is that in eight weeks’ time they will be in France, and most of them will be dead.”

  “Don’t be absurd, May. Nobody knows when the invasion will take place.”

  “General Odway told me. Well, not in so many words, and I’m sure he did not realise. It was just two or three little things he said. Anyway, it is to be the first week in June.”

  “May! You must not tell anyone. You must never mention it again. Not that I believe you can be so sure.”

  “I know my duty quite as well as you do, Elspeth, thank you. Of course I shall have to tell Doctor Spurrier that we must postpone the National Savings committee. The roads will be quite impassable. They are bad enough already, with these dreadful motor-lorries and whatdyecallums.”

  “In that case you must think of a different reason for asking Doctor Spurrier to postpone the committee. I’m sure you will have very little difficulty in thinking of something plausible.”

  “If you insist, dear. What was I saying? I do so hate being interrupted. It muddles my poor old brain. Yes, Andrew, I think we should arrange for you to conduct some tours of the house and garden for those unfortunate men in the camp. General Odway says that we may take them into the Saloon and the Dining Room when his staff is not using them.”

  “Why do you insist on involving Andrew? If you think it a good idea you should undertake it yourself. Andrew knows next to nothing about this house.”

  “My poor chest … And Andrew has such a fine voice. It is beginning to sound almost gentlemanly. And I will tell him all about the house.”

  “I think it a thoroughly tiresome notion. Nor do I see why Andrew …”

  “It is too late to back out now, dear. General Odway has already given the orders and it would place me in a very embarrassing position if we were to change our mind …”

  Of course it turned out that the only orders General Odway had given had been to tell one of his staff to see that the Saloon and Dining Room were unoccupied between two and three on three afternoons next week. The camp was outside his sphere of command. But before they realized that no GIs might be available to come on the tours Cousin Brown had counterattacked against Cousin Blue’s manoeuvre by taking the project over, to the extent of spending an afternoon leading Andrew round and telling him the little there was to be said about the various rooms and objects—books nobody read, pictures by painters no one had heard of, furniture which Cousin Brown herself described as hideous.

  “Of course you will be able to make something of the Sargent,” she said, “although it is not thought to be one of his better works—in fact Rex Whistler described it to me as a pot-boiler. But it will give you a chance to recount the family history, and Father’s adventures in the diamond-­fields. Everybody seems to be fascinated by diamonds.”

 
They were standing by one of the tall Saloon windows, looking back across the room towards the fireplace, above which hung the picture she was talking about. On Andrew’s earlier visit the room had been lit by a few low lamps around the fireplace and the painting had been in shadow. Cousin Blue’s only serious suggestion about the tours she had foisted on him had been that he could use the picture to help the poor Americans understand what they were fighting for, but she had left it to Cousin Brown to tell him about dates and things.

  Pot-boiler or not, Andrew found the picture interesting. It showed the late Lady Wragge sitting on a sofa in that very room, though the furniture had been rearranged and the position of the door altered to make the composition work. She was about forty, with immense dark eyes and gaunt face (ill? dying?). Her red-brown hair was piled high and she was wearing a pink silk tea-gown whose froth of lace was pinned with a focal diamond. May, about nine, already in blue, cuddled against her side staring straight at the artist, while Elspeth in russet velvet sat more stiffly at the opposite end of the sofa, her head twisted to greet her father and brother who seemed just to have arrived from somewhere outside with guns incongruously under their arms. In the shadowy background, barely discernible, a black servant was carrying a tea-tray into the room.

  It was pure stage—a scene from a Pinero comedy. Everything said so, the lighting, the way the artist had moved the walls of the room as easily as if they’d been flats, and the characters displaying their features in one direction, all (except the nearly invisible Samuel) with that controlled exaggeration which actors adopt to make the audience grasp their inwardness. The artist had put that in, of course, not the sitters. He’d decided to paint Lady Wragge’s anxious would-be beauty, May’s self-centred appeal, Elspeth’s earnest but frustrated eagerness, Sir Arnold’s cynicism and aggression, and Charles’s … Charles’s what? The face was firmly enough drawn but was itself weak, with something of the mother’s fret, something of the father’s spite, but no real signposts about what sort of man the boy was going to become, as though the artist had actually guessed he wasn’t going to become anything.

  It was a very clever picture, Andrew thought. In a funny way it reminded him of the Dame’s monologue the night Mum had been killed. The slave’s contempt … the painter’s contempt for his paymaster. The faces were likenesses, prettified or handsomised but not beyond recognition; the glamour of wealth was there, everything Sir Arnold had asked for. The contempt was hidden, for strangers to perceive.

  “I suppose they might be interested to be told that Sargent also painted Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. We are, after all, as nouveau as people like that. If you were to inherit, you would be only the fourth generation.”

  “Sir Arnold told me …”

  “You need pay no attention to that. It is possible that you are already named in his will—he has never told us anything about its provisions, except that we are to have Charles Street. I should be perfectly contented with that, though I doubt if May would. I am sure that there is no question of Father leaving either of us this house. Perhaps it would have been different if one had married, but now, mercifully, we are past that possibility. I must say, Andrew, I most earnestly hope that you will be the beneficiary. It would smooth your path so enormously not to need to worry about money, to be able to take only those parts which are worthy of your talents.”

  “I want to do everything.”

  “Ah, no. There is so little time in life. You must concentrate only on the best. You have so much to give, Andrew. You must not waste it on second-rate things. All my life I have fought and fought not to waste my own small talent, and in spite of the difficulties I might have achieved something. If it had not been for this dreadful war. People were just beginning to take my productions seriously. I had such plans. We were going to run special trains to our 1940 season. Ah, well … I suppose we must get on. You might well conclude by taking them down through the woodland garden and showing them the dovecote.”

  She had turned as she was speaking and was now leaning against the folded shutter of the window with one hand on its sill in a pose of hopeless yearning, and gazing across the young barley of the lower park towards the woods beyond. On the right of the view, further down the slope, rose the curious tower with its primitive drum crowned by its fancy top-knot.

  “Now that is genuinely old,” said Cousin Brown. “The lower part was a working dovecote from the sixteenth century—the mechanism for harvesting the squabs is interesting, but you must try not to let anyone swing on the ladder. Young men find it a great temptation but it disturbs the doves. The owner of the old house added the gazebo in the eighteenth century, for reasons of his own. You can get the key from Samuel.”

  By the time he found there might be nobody coming on the tours Andrew had begun to look forward to them. He wanted to see whether he could hold an audience with the thin material he had to offer, so on impulse he went up to the camp. It was mid-afternoon and raining. The tannoy was playing “Oh what a beautiful morning” for the third time that day. A different soldier was at the gate but reading what looked like the same magazine and chewing as if on the same gum. Sergeant Stephens was in his cave, but now a corporal was working at the second desk and at the third sat a blonde WAC, pretty in a big-featured busty way. The clatter of her typewriter competed with the rattle of rain on the hut roof.

  “Jesus,” said Sergeant Stephens. “Why come to me? I’m Supply.”

  “I thought you might tell me who to ask. I mean, is there an entertainments officer?”

  “Sure. Lieutenant Dooley—Entertainments, Sport and Sanitation.”

  “Thanks. Over at the main camp?”

  “Hold it. You won’t get to first base with Dooley. He’d sooner be fighting you Brits than the Krauts.”

  “He might be interested in the plumbing. It’s, well, lavish.”

  The sergeant took the joke for serious. His thin but mobile lips tilted his cigar back and up, a gesture expressing calculation. Andrew had seen it so often at the flicks that he was amused to find it in real life. He guessed the sergeant was sketching possible moves in the game he played against the officers, looking for small advantages.

  “OK,” he said. “Leave it to me. How many passengers will you want?”

  “Oh … about twenty at a time? Fewer if you like.”

  “Right, three tours of twenty, fourteen hundred hours, Tuesday through Thursday.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  The tours went rather well. Anything was better than the boredom of the camp. The men brought cameras, and photographed everything with each other in front of it. Sergeant Stephens came on all three, thus adding point to the joke Andrew had prepared about the painter of the family portrait. The second time he brought a flash-gadget for his camera, so that he could do interiors, and Andrew was gratified to find himself talking without a blink or stumble through the brief astounding glare. Last of all they trooped down through the woodland garden, where windflowers and primroses were sprinkled under the first bright leaves, and then out along a farm track to the dovecote. Sergeant Stephens marshalled the men into groups of six and sent them up the narrow spiral stair while Andrew held forth.

  It was a drum inside as well as out. The nest-boxes covered the wall from shoulder-level almost to the ceiling. The only light came through two rows of flight-holes which ran all the way round above and below the boxes. The floor was a shallow funnel with a hole in the middle, the idea being that every couple of months somebody would come and shovel the bird droppings down the slope into the space below, where they rotted down to manure for the gardens, but because of the war nobody seemed to have done this for a year or more, and the centre of the floor was several inches deep in muck. The projecting nest-boxes left a narrow strip almost clear of droppings round the edge of the heap, so Andrew got his six hearers to crouch there while he showed them how the dovecote worked.

  The principle w
as that you harvested the young doves just before they learnt to fly. To get at the nest-boxes you climbed a ladder which slanted up close beside them and was fastened top and bottom to a couple of beams which pivoted round a central pole, so that standing on the ladder you could push your way round, reaching into box after box and taking the birds out to see if they were big enough to eat. It still worked, though Cousin Brown said that the dovecote hadn’t been used for meat since the Wragges had been there, even during the wars. Their menus were adjusted to pheasant, partridge, woodcock and quail. Pigeon, she said, was highly indigestible. But Lady Wragge had stocked the dovecote with white ornamental birds and until the war one of the young gardeners had gone regularly through the nests to take out and destroy any young cross-breds of wild birds, so the ladder had been kept in good repair. But it was so covered with droppings—Andrew had scraped the bottom few rungs clean for his demonstration—that there was no danger of the young men—in their best uniform for the tour through a rich folks’ house and in any case a lot more fastidious than Tommies might have been—giving in to the temptation to swing on it and disturb the doves. The doves, in fact, were very little put out by these visits. By no means all the nest-boxes were full, but a few birds would be perching on sills as Andrew appeared out of the stair door and these would either duck out of sight or flip across the gloom to a flight-hole and be gone. Their whiteness made the moment beautiful.