Perfect Gallows Page 23

  “Awkward, I dare say,” said Charles. “Can’t make the fellow out. I wasn’t sorry when he brought that business up when old Oyler read us the will. He might have done it a bit more tactfully, but as Elspeth said it was best to have it in the open, and cleared up. But since then … Not that he isn’t perfectly respectful, does what he’s told and so on. But he’s still brooding on it. What’s more he wants me to know he is. He’s never said a syllable, but I can tell.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Let me put it to you man to man, what I’m driving at is this. The important thing is to get Father’s will cleared up. I can’t hang around waiting for young Oyler to come back, so I’m getting a lawyer of my own and I’m going to tell him to take things out of old Oyler’s hands. May will back me, and I dare say we can bring Elspeth round. The one thing we can’t afford is to have somebody go spreading it around that I’m a fake. I can quite see that when I first turned up some of you must’ve thought that was a possibility, but I’d think it ought to be clear by now. Of course old Mkele’s getting on a bit. Father’s death must have been a great shock to him. I’m not saying the courts would give a deal of weight to what a fellow like that says, if that’s the particular bug that’s biting him. But none of us wants the matter to come to court in the first place. Once the whole pack of lawyers get their hands on it it’ll take years to clear up and cost the earth. Why, I can’t even guarantee what I just said, that there’d be enough to go round to spare a bit for you. It’d be a damned shame, but there. You follow?”

  “All right. I’ll do my best.”

  “Good lad. Let’s not beat about the bush. You try and get it into his head that if he goes on the way he’s been doing he’ll have to go.”

  They had reached the point where the winding path up the slope joined the Top Walk. Charles halted and turned, with the Africa statue towering above him. His head was craned slightly forward and he stared at Andrew with a faint version of Uncle Vole’s furious glare—over the last few weeks he seemed to have picked up or fallen into a number of the old boy’s mannerisms. Only the malice was missing. The look said, “Well? Is it a deal?”

  Andrew gazed back. It was a perfectly fair offer. It didn’t even prove that Charles was a fake, that he should make it—the real Charles would have been just as anxious not to get the estate enmeshed in an endless law-suit. From Andrew’s point of view it was almost ideal—far better than inheriting the whole estate and all that it meant, trailing that with him—rooms, statues, servants, memories—through his career; better too than Cousin Brown’s offer of support, which would have been better than nothing, but carried the bargain that she should somehow have her own long-thwarted career inside him. This way he would owe no one anything.

  The sky darkened. Raindrops streaked the stone of the statue. “Let’s get in,” said Charles. “You don’t want it to look as if I’ve put you on to him.”

  “That’s all right. There’s a book I was reading to him but we never got through. I’ll finish it off this afternoon—there won’t be any harvesting—and we’ll just get talking.”

  “Good lad.”

  FOUR

  Mrs Mkele was alone in her parlour listening to Variety Bandbox while her fingers knitted without help from her mind. She was clearly in no mood to be interrupted.

  “Sambo?” she said. “He’ll be in the wine-cellar.” She turned the volume up.

  Andrew went back along the corridor. Now that the Americans were gone these lower regions of the house seemed echoingly empty, but subterranean voices reached him from one of the inner doorways. He went in, through the narrow vaulted chamber where he had once found Samuel doling out the family butter ration. The voices, Samuel’s and Hazel’s, came from the larger space beyond. They were not speaking English. He paused to listen. It was a language lesson, Samuel saying a few words in the form of a question, and Hazel repeating them, slightly altered to give the answer—Is this the old lady’s cooking-pot? No, that is not the old lady’s cooking-pot. That sort of thing. He coughed, and the voices stopped.

  When he went through into the main cellar he found Samuel stretched on a camp bed. A paraffin lamp glowed on the shelf of the wine-bin above him. Hazel had retreated and become a shadow at the edge of its sphere of light. Beyond her, and far into the dark, row upon row of faint crescents gleamed where the beams of the lamp were reflected from the bottom of Uncle Vole’s hoarded wine-bottles, his buried treasure, no use to him now. The air was dry but chill, and Samuel was wearing a dark overcoat of heavy serge, which made him look somehow a bit like a POW. He had swung himself up on to his elbow at Andrew’s entrance.

  “Don’t get up,” said Andrew. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. Was that Zulu?”

  “Something to do on a wet day,” said Samuel apologetically.

  “Pity there aren’t any scenes for you to rehearse together.”

  Andrew had long got over his initial dismay at the casting of a child as Ariel. Hazel was intensely shy, but a naturally graceful mover, and Cousin Brown had drilled her all summer, teaching her dance-like movements and a strange, metallic, bloodless voice, all in extreme contrast to Caliban’s violent earthy gesticulations and bellowings but despite that echoing them at times, attempting to imply that the pair were spirits of the same inhuman creation.

  “She learns pretty quick, don’t you, lovey?” said Samuel. “No harm in her knowing a bit about where I come from. After all, she comes from there too, some of her.”

  “Pretty difficult for her to imagine. I mean, it’s so different from this.”

  Samuel grunted and lay back, staring at the ceiling.

  “There was a morning,” he said. “Listen to this, lovey. You’d better know. There was a morning at the diggings. I’d been there eight months, working for Baas Wragge, and I’d made me enough money to buy a good rifle, which is what I’d come for in the first place. So when we lined up for our pay that morning I told Baas Wragge I was leaving. He said to stand to one side while he settled with the others. We were outside his tent. It was just before winter, cold, with a thick mist. I stood shivering in my blanket and waited. Then he beckoned me over and I went and stood in front of his table.”

  He sat up and began to act the characters in the remembered episode. He hunched his shoulders, poked his head forward and glared up.

  “‘You’re not going,’ says the baas. ‘You’re staying with me.’”

  Now he straightened his back and looked down, puzzled, hesitant.

  “Remember I seen plenties of Baas Wragge’s doings. I know him for a liar and a cheat.

  “’Gainst that, he’s a white baas and I’m a black boy, so I stood there trying for to make my neck shake my head to tell him no, but the neck it was gone all stiff.

  “‘What for do you want to leave?’ he says.

  “I tell him I’m going to buy a gun and go back to my kraal and be a big man there with a good wife and a fine hut. What else for am I a man?

  “‘Me too,’ he says. ‘Me too.’

  “He sits there for a bit, like he’s gone into a dream, and then he starts to talk. He tells me that when he has got enough money from the diggings he’s going back home, and he’s going to build himself a palace bigger than a hundred huts and be chief of his tribe, and I must go with him and stand behind his stool and be his counsellor.”

  Samuel stopped acting and became a tired old black man sitting in a cave under a Hampshire hill. He smiled up at Andrew and shook his head, still helplessly puzzled by his long ago decision.

  “Often I think of that morning,” he said. “Why did I answer yes? It was like a voice inside me, speaking for me, before I could tell Baas Wragge no. I see pictures of myself, sitting in front of my door with my rifle across my knees while my wives pound the mealies behind the hut. But ’stead of that I tell him yes. I give him my whole life.

  “‘You won’t regret i
t,’ he says. ‘I’ll see you’re all right.’

  “Kept his promise too. Not many promises of his you can say that of. Hazel, lovey, you understand what I been saying?”

  The child murmured in the shadows.

  “My whole life I gave him that morning,” said Samuel dreamily. “Plenties of times after that I might’ve stopped off, but somehow it never came to it, and after a bit, what’d I have done for myself, supposing I had? Gone back to my kraal? My kraal was burnt by the Boers. The boy who wanted the rifle, he was dead too. My whole life. That’s what your Granny can’t understand, lovey.”

  He shook himself and spoke directly to Andrew.

  “Mary Jane and the rest, they’re at me to stop bothering about this man says he’s Master Charlie. You remember, night before Baas Wragge died, that cutting Phil sent?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Samuel reached into the breast pocket of his coat, took out a battered black notecase and drew from it the piece of paper with the cutting pinned to it, both now becoming flimsy with handling. He stared for half a minute at the to him meaningless print.

  “Took it in and showed the Baas,” he said. “He weren’t interested. Day before that he’d got me to send for Mr Oyler and tell him to bring the will, but he hadn’t said what he was planning. Now he made me tell him again what I’d arranged, and he asked if you was in the house, and he says to tell you to come and see him ten o’clock next morning. And then he says to me, ‘I’m changing my will, Samuel. I’m leaving the house to that actor brat. This other fellow’s not my son.’ He’d asked me what I thought pretty well soon as the man showed up—you remember, you helped me put him to bed? Morning after that—and I’d said, but he’d never told me what he thought himself. Only I knew he knew—it was just he couldn’t bring himself to do anything, ’cause that’d have meant admitting he was dying. Now he goes and admits it.

  “‘I’ll be gone soon,’ he says. ‘Three more days is all I’m good for. I’m not having that fellow take over. He’s not my son. I’m not having May getting her hands on everything.’ Never knew why he hated women the way he did.

  “‘When’s Oyler coming?’ he asks. I told him again. He didn’t say anything a long while and I thought he’d fell asleep, but then he says, ‘I should last that long. I should last that long. If I don’t, then it’s up to you. Now get out.’

  “So I went and looked for you and when I couldn’t find you I got Mary Jane to write a note and I put it on your pillow. When I saw Baas Wragge next morning he didn’t say much about any of that, only asked if you was coming. I reckoned he sounded stronger and I thought he’d last out till the afternoon, and more, but he didn’t.”

  “Did you tell Mr Oyler or anyone about this?”

  “No good, not unless I can prove something. Who’s going to listen to an old black boy? That’s why Mary Jane and the rest are so against me. ‘You’ll never prove it,’ she says, ‘and in any case it’s better all round if you don’t. What does it matter if he isn’t the real Master Charlie, provided he’s keeping us on?’ That’s what they say.”

  “The same applies to you, doesn’t it? I mean, whatever you think in private, if you accept this man as Charles then you can go on living here. And if you managed to prove it wasn’t him it wouldn’t do you any good. Mr Oyler seemed to think that bit of the will wasn’t legal, but if it is then everybody would have to leave. And if you don’t prove it, but just go on hoping to find something against him …”

  “He’ll kick me out.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Mary Jane, she won’t come with me, neither.”

  “Hadn’t you better give up?”

  “Can’t do that.”

  “Look, if it’s for my sake …”

  The old man shook his head.

  “My whole life I gave him. I’m the only one he ever did trust.”

  Samuel reached out with his left arm and with wavering fingers beckoned into the dark. Obediently, but reluctantly, Hazel came and settled against his side. The arm closed round her for comfort, his, not hers. Aware of her role the child put her hand in his and let his fingers clasp it, but at the same time, as if trying to withdraw herself from his pain into some distraction she eased the cutting from his other hand and started to read it through. Andrew shared her feelings but found he couldn’t withdraw. He hadn’t realized this would ever happen to him again, not after Mum’s death and his deliberate choice that night, with Mr Trinder’s help, of heartlessness, of not becoming entangled in anyone else’s needs or emotions, not ever again, from then on. Now he remembered the first rehearsal in the Institute, how when he had called Caliban from his cave—‘Thou earth, thou, speak’—more than a voice had answered, choices had been made, everything that had happened since then had been changed by that moment. It wasn’t just a sense of fellowship between two performers, though Samuel, given a white skin, other chances, might have become an actor, world-known, somebody you were privileged to have met. The power was there. It was that which mattered, that which must not be denied or betrayed. It might be different from the power Andrew knew he would one day command—Samuel needed no Adrian, no second self, to make himself wholly Caliban, or the Othello or Lear he had never in fact been allowed to portray—but it was the same in one way. It was the only thing that mattered, the only thing to which you must stay true. Here, in this real cave, Andrew was forced to accept the bond.

  “What do you think, lovey?” sighed Samuel.

  “Look,” she said. “It’s a flower show. Like at the Institute, when Nanna won all the baking.”

  She had folded the cutting back and showed him the photograph. He stared at it vaguely. She cocked her head and frowned at the paper it was pinned to.

  “Funny …” she said.

  “What do you think, lovey? Did I better give in?”

  “Can’t you be friends with Nanna again? I don’t really like it in here. I feel all shut under.”

  Samuel sighed again, shaking his head to and fro and gazing up at Andrew for help.

  “Did Sir Arnold tell you why he wanted to leave me the house?” said Andrew.

  “Just he was going to. That’s all.”

  “Well, what he told me was that I was his great-grandson. He had a grudge against his elder brother, so he seduced his fiancée on purpose and got her pregnant and then went off to Africa. The brother married her and pretended the baby was his own. Sir Arnold told me he’d built this house to rub his revenge in. He said he’d got the idea from something you’d said to him—that morning you were just talking about, I think it might have been. He wanted to leave me the house so that I could go on living here and keep his revenge alive for him after he was dead. He told me the story so that I’d know all about it. I told him—well, I told him I didn’t want it. I was going to be an actor. In fact, I told him in a way which made him so angry that he tried to sit up and choked and died. I did it on purpose—not making him die, I mean, but making him angry. It came to the same thing. Do you understand?”

  Samuel nodded slowly. Hazel beside him gazed up at Andrew, her wide clear eyes glistening with the sideways glow of the lamp.

  “I think the story’s over,” said Andrew. “It’s come round on itself and it’s time to stop. I don’t know if it’s any use, but when Sir Arnold said he was making me his heir he didn’t really mean heir to his money and all that—he meant heir to his life, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Well, in that case I can let you off your promise to him, can’t I?”

  It seemed, now he’d said it, a pretty feeble argument, but Samuel sat grunting faintly to himself, a quiet but still painful noise, like a tree groaning in the wind as the gusts wrench at its innards, gradually tearing it in two. Hazel reached up and stroked his cheek.

  “Can’t you be friends with Nanna again?” she said. “Can’t you? Soon?”
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  “Look,” said Andrew. “I’m being called up in a fortnight. I’m not looking forward to it, and you can say that again. At least I’d like to feel I’d got this part of things settled. Couldn’t we say that if nothing new’s come up by then, then you call it a day? I release you from your promise and you accept that Charles is who he says he is. Whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter. He’s acted himself into the part OK. You can too.”

  Samuel sat shaking his head, but then somehow the movement converted itself into a questioning tilt of the neck, as though he were trying to get rid of a stiffness in the vertebrae.

  “And if, before you go …?” he muttered.

  “You find something? I can’t think what, but if you do, and it really proves he isn’t Charles …”

  “You are the heir to the life. You just said it.”

  “I suppose so. Well, in that case I’ll back you up.”

  Once again Samuel sat silent, thinking, then nodded decisively.

  “Then I still got a chance,” he said. “All right.”

  “OK, it’s a deal. I really came down to ask you if you’d like me to finish reading you Nada. There’s about a couple of chapters to go.”

  “Hazel done that for me. She’s beginning to read pretty good, aren’t you, lovey?”

  The tone told Andrew that Samuel had made his decision and would stick to it. Things were going to be all right. The discomfort and awkwardness caused by the rift between the Mkeles would go away. Samuel could stop sleeping alone in the cellar. The wound would heal. Andrew felt an unusual sort of pleasure at what had happened—this was something he had brought off by himself, being himself, without any help from Adrian. With anyone except Samuel it wouldn’t have mattered, but it did.

  It was almost as though Adrian had been waiting for him in the corridor, unable for some reason to enter Samuel’s cave. He shook his head in mock self-disapproval. Mustn’t get involved like that. Can’t risk it, though it had worked out OK this time. More than OK. He’d done exactly what he said he would. He’d delivered his side of the deal with Charles.