Too Many Cousins, page 7
“When was all this?”
“Blanche died on Bank Holiday Sunday, and Raymond about a week before.”
“Why on earth didn’t you let me know, 060116?”
“Because I didn’t know myself, even about Blanche, till somebody sent me a newspaper the day before yesterday. I’ve been trying to telephone to you, but you’re always out. And I only heard about Raymond this morning, from Mrs. Tuke. Mr. Tuke knew somehow. And then later on Mortimer came—I’d Written to him——”
“Do you mean he didn’t tell you about Blanche?”
“No. He said he’d been very overworked r”
Miss Ardmore made a contemptuous sound. She discovered the glass in her hand, and emptied it. Her look travelled from tier cousin’s tense face to Mr. Tuke, from him to his wife, from Mrs. Tuke to Mr. Mainward, and back to Gecile. Except for Yvette, they were all standing.
“Well,” Vivien said. “Poor old Blanche. And Raymond wasn’t a bad sort. At any rate, he could write. I say, it’s a bit wholesale, Cecile. There was Sydney, too, you know.”
“It isn’t all,” said Mile Boulanger grimly. “Three months ago someone tried to push me under a lorry.”
“Cecile, are you serious?”
“Of course I am serious. I tell you I was pushed. I am sure of it now. I was nearly killed too.”
Again Vivien Ardmore’s grey eyes travelled round the quartette. Her wide mouth smiled wryly.
“I could do with a cigarette. And some more punch. For heaven’s sake, Cecile, drink yours up. You look pretty grim.”
Mr. Mainward, with the air of impressement with which he did everything (for women, at any rate) leapt to refill her glass. Cecile, as though her own brusque announcements had indeed shaken’her a little, emptied hers at a draught.
“I wish everyone would sit down,” Vivien said irritably. “We look like a lot of stuck mutes.” She sat down herself, her eyes on Harvey. “Mr, Tuke, where do you come in?”
“Mile Boulanger came to see my wife and told us the story, as far as she knew it. I was able to carry it a stage further. I had heard of your cousin Raymond’s death from another source. It was in some London paper, by the way.”
“I didn’t see it.” Vivien Ardmore looked at Cecile. “I say, I can’t get this. About your being pushed under a lorry.”
“Nearly under,” Cecile corrected her. “Well, it happened, I couldn’t get it, as you say. But I can now.”
“But who? . . . Who, Cecile?”
Cecile’s shoulders lifted in a very French shrug.
“You had better ask ‘why’?” she said.
‘ ‘ Well, why ? ” For a moment her cousin appeared genuinely at a loss. Then the fine grey eyes dilated again. They seemed to darken. “Oh, my hat!” said Miss Ardmore in a small voice. “The money, I suppose you mean? . . . Oh,
but that’s nonsense, Cecile! Who would? . . . I mean
Oh, damn it all, it’s impossible!” Her teeth bit into her red lip, and she looked almost wildly round the little company. “Why, there are only three of us now,” she said.
Her clear, pleasant voice shook a little. There was a faint but perceptible air of tension in the room, as though the impact of brutal facts had tautened nerves and senses. Eyes, Mortimer Shearsby might have said, were opened. Vivien Ardmore’s certainly seemed to be opened with a vengeance.
She was now staring at Cecile Boulanger as though there was nobody else in the room. Cecile stared back. For a moment the two cousins were in a world of their own, searching one another’s face, probing, speculating, on guard and almost inimical.
Suddenly Vivien shook herself. With an exasperated gesture she pulled off her grey hat and flung it on the divan.
“Anyway,” she said, “I don’t know yet what has happened to Blanche and Raymond. For God’s sake, tell me, somebody! ”
She was looking at Mr. Tuke. “Passed to you, mademoiselle,” he said. “I take it that Mr. Mainward knows all about this?”
“Oh, yes, Guy knows.” Cecile’s glance at that young man strangely altered her prim and guarded expression. She paused, frowning, her eyes now on her cousin. “Very well,” she said.
She never took her gaze off Vivien Ardmore as she told the story of her experience in Warwick Way. Vivien’s face was almost expressionless: only her left eyebrow rose as the other described the lorries thundering by and the sudden push in the darkness. Mr. Mainward reappeared at his hostess’s side with a third glass of punch, which she accepted with an abstracted nod. Cecile was now running rapidly and briefly through what she knew of the deaths of Raymond Shearsby and Blanche Porteous—the facts about the writer’s end being a repetition of Mortimer Shearsby’s tale, told to her that morning. At the end, she sat still, breathing rather fast, watching her cousin, her brown eyes narrowed v Vivien, the stump of a forgotten cigarette smouldering in her fingers, was staring in front of her; and for some seconds after Cecile’s voice, with its faint accent, had ceased, she remained motionless. Then, with another shake of her shoulders, she threw her cigarette into the grate and sat up. She looked at Mr. Tuke.
“Well,” she said, with a wry twist of her lips, “I suppose you wouldn’t be interested, Mr. Tuke, if there wasn’t something pretty rum in all this. Pity Mortimer isn’t here.”
“He has been to see me.”
“What ho!” Her brightness appeared a trifle forced.
“You have got the family round your neck, haven’t you? What do you think of us? And what are you going to do?”
“It is not for me to do anything. I seem to have been co-opted as a consultant. In which capacity,” said Harvey, knocking the ash off his cigar, “I have made inquiries in a quarter more likely to be interested—and active. As I told Mr. Mortimer Shearsby, the police are satisfied that your cousin Sydney’s death was accidental. I think you may take that to be that. The other two cases are being reopened.” Vivien Ardmore’s grey eyes were watching him closely. “Oh, lord,” she said, “what a mess! Well, Gecile, we’re all in it together—you, and I, and Mortimer. Where were you on the fifteenth ult., or whatever it is.” She gave a hard little laugh. Then suddenly her expressive eyebrow went up. “I say, there’s still a dark horse. What about Cousin Martin?”
CHAPTER VIII
CECILE BOULANGER looked astonished. “Uncle Martin?” she exclaimed. “What do you mean, Vivien? He has been dead for years.”
“That’s the story,” Miss Ardmore agreed. “But has he? You saw more of Sydney than the rest of us. What did he say about it?”
“He hardly ever mentioned Uncle Martin. And I did not drag in the subject—naturally.” Cecile was still frowning at her cousin in a perplexed way. “I never even knew him. When Sydney did mention him, it was only en passant, perhaps when he was talking of something he did with his parents when he was a boy. That Was all. He never spoke of the later time. And naturally, too. And then Sydney was always reticent. . . . Anyhow, Uncle Martin must be dead,” his niece added with a touch of irritability. “I was always told so. He died in Belgium, when Sydney was quite young.”
“Are you following this, Mr. Tuke?” Vivien asked. “I expect you are well up in our family tree by now.”
“I know it like my own. Your cousin Martin—more correctly your first cousin once removed—was the late Captain Dresser’s father. He was, therefore, Mile Boulanger’s uncle. She told me he was dead, with the rest of his generation. Have you any evidence to the contrary?”
“Not evidence,” Vivien said. “But my mother, who knew him better than any of them, used to hint mysteriously that the report of his death had been greatly exaggerated. She said we only had Sydney’s word for it.”
“I don’t believe it,” Cecile exclaimed sharply. “It is the first time I have ever heard such a thing suggested. Why, Sydney sent mother an obituary notice from a Chelmsford newspaper. And I’m sure he would have told me.”
Miss Ardmore shrugged. She reached for another cigarette, and Mr. Mainward was instantly at her elbow with a lighter.
“It’s the one thing he wouldn’t tell you,” she remarked through a cloud of smoke. “Because if mother was right, there must have been some jolly strong reason for deceiving everybody. And anyway, it wasn’t a story Sydney would want to dwell on.” She turned to Mr. Tuke. “If you’re acting as family adviser, you’d better hear it. It’s the skeleton in our otherwise tolerably respectable family cupboard. Have you broken the news to Mr. Mainward, by the way, Cecile?”
“No,” Cecile said shortly. “And I don’t see——”
“Well, I think Mr. Tuke ought to know. Because mother didn’t invent things. And if Martin is alive somewhere . . .” She left the sentence, with its implications, unfinished. Mr. Mainward began to wrangle politely with Cecile, offering to depart, and being told rather pettishly that as Vivien had let the family skeleton half out of the cupboard he had better stay and hear the whole story. This he was easily persuaded to do, and Vivien took up the tale of Martin Dresser.
It was a very ordinary tale of human folly. When the cousins’ great-uncle, Paul Dresser, of Dresser’s Bank, retired with his ample pension, his son Martin was just entering his twenties. Brought up in comfortable circumstances, with a generous allowance from his father, the young man made no attempt to settle down to steady work. He hated office life, and wanted, said Miss Ardmore vaguely, to be a journalist or something. She believed he had actually tinkered at writing, among other pursuits. In the same amateur fashion, as she put it, he also got himself married. He could not have chosen a worse juncture, for his father, having cast overboard the provident habits of a lifetime, was rapidly losing in speculation the capital sum for which he had commuted his pension. In short, very soon, at the age of twenty-six, Martin had to find a job, and urgently, for he now had a son of his own to support as well as a wife. He was fortunate in obtaining employment in the local branch of the joint stock bank, which had absorbed the old private business.
This was in 1914, when the mental powers of his grandfather, old Rutland Shearsby, were beginning to fail, though he had another twelve years of life before him, and when Paul Dresser’s health and spirits were breaking under financial disaster. It was in the following year that Paul’s wife made her fruitless appeal for aid to her stepmother. Martin, in the meantime, was applying himself with unexpected industry to his career of banking. Family burdens and a weak chest enabled him to escape the army; and by the time he was in the middle thirties he had risen to be a cashier.
And then, in 1925, when he was thirty-seven, the erratic streak in his father’s character blossomed suddenly to full growth in Martin, though in a different way. He went right off the rails. Some girl was involved, and he took’ the bank’s money, and went to prison for twelve months.
His wife took the boy, Sydney, to her parents’ home in Birmingham, and there, at fifteen, Sydney was already working in the office of a firm of house agents when Martin Dresser was released from prison and disappeared. A year later, ignoring his wife, who in fact was instituting proceedings for divorce on the ground of desertion, Martin somehow got in touch with his son. Having travelled abroad as a young man, and possessing a gift for languages, it was to Belgium that the ex-cashier had fled when he vanished. How he supported himself there, Miss Ardmore did not know. Her mother had a story that he had been a waiter.
With determination and self-possession remarkable in one of his years, Sydney defied his mother and went to Belgium during his next holiday. Later in that year, 1927, he went again, to find Martin Dresser on his death-bed. That, at least, was the story Sydney told on his return. With the exception of Euphemia Ardmore, Vivien’s mother, none of the family, not even the exile’s sister Caroline Boulanger, had shown much sympathy for Martin, and the news of his death was received with equanimity. The attitude seemed to be that a regrettable blot of the family record could now be forgotten. No attempt apparently was made to verify Sydney’s story. After all, he ought to know. He had been there.
Euphemia Ardmore, however, was made of different stuff. She had always been fond of her cousin Martin, and attributed his downfall to his wife, whom she detested; and either because she made inquiries, or had other ground for doubts, to the end of her life she never referred to the death-bed scene at Bruges without a smile. Her daughter again was rather vague about all this; she was working out of London at the time, and never really discussed the family mystery (if such it was) with her mother, who herself died within a year or two. Vivien indeed confessed that she had thought so little about it that on the few later occasions when she met Sydney she had not mentioned his father. Anyway, she said, she was not greatly interested in her family: she always thought families were rather a curse, and what was now happening tended to confirm this view.
When Miss Ardmore had finished her narrative, Cecile Boulanger remarked in a curiously resentful tone that to produce this novel theory from up one’s sleeve, as it were, made the present perplexing situation more perplexing still. Cecile, perhaps, resented the suggestion that her mother had not extended to Martin Dresser the affection he might have expected from his sister. She continued to ridicule the notion that he was alive. Mr. Mainward, however, who had listened to the story with becoming gravity, pointed its moral. If Martin were indeed alive, he would be no more than fifty-seven, and should the survivors of the younger generation come under any scrutiny on account of the recent fatalities in the family, it would be in their interests to divert that scrutiny in a fresh direction. Tactfully though this was put, in Mr. Mainward’s most graceful style, the outright reference to the predicament in which the three remaining cousins might find themselves evoked another little interlude of tension. Vivien Ardmore and Cecile Boulanger looked at one another, and then away. Neither spoke. Mr. Mainward hastened to dissipate the slight awkwardness in the atmosphere by bustling about refilling glasses.
Mr. Tuke had made no comments. But when the glasses were full again he turned to his hostess.
“I seem to be getting a picture of most of your family. This Martin, for instance, appears to have been the odd man out in his generation.”
Vivien nodded. “My mother said Martin was quite different from the rest. They were all so beastly smug. I bet some of them tripped up too, only they weren’t found out. If you have seen Mortimer, you’ve seen a throwback to that era,. I wonder, by the way,” she added, with a little twist of her wide mouth, “what Mortimer said about me?”
“He seemed impressed by your connection with Mr. McIvory.”
‘‘ Pharisaical snob,” said Miss Ardmore roundly. ‘ ‘ Anyway, I bet Lilian tried to say something.” She looked shrewdly at Harvey. “Silence gives consent, Mr. Tuke. Well, I’ve no use for either of them.” She sipped her drink, a brooding look in her grey eyes. “I’ll tell you,” she said. “A few years ago I’d been ill, and I couldn’t get another decent job, and I wrote to Mortimer about it. I thought he might find me a hole with Imperial Sansil. I ought to have known better. He wrote back, saying nothing doing, but being Mortimer, that wasn’t enough. He sent three sheets of sermon about improvident habits, with digs at my father, who was worth a hundred of him, though he couldn’t keep money. That made me mad. Of course I’d asked for it, but it was the second slap I’d had from the family, and to get it from a little provincial pip-squeak of a cousin. . . .”
Her wide mouth was bitter as she paused to sip her drink. Then her hard look melted, and she smiled with genuine amusement.
“There’s a sequel,” she said. “My boss, McIvory, is a little tin god to Mortimer, and when he heard somehow I’d got this job he wrote off in a hurry, though we hadn’t corresponded since the sermon. I didn’t bother to answer, and he wrote again, practically imploring me to spend a week-end at Bedford. He went on writing, though I just ignored him. He has a hide like a rhinoceros. In the end, I suddenly thought I’d go. Vanity, Mr. Tuke, not to say common human vindictiveness. I sent a postcard, put on my smartest things, and crashed into Bedford in a very toplofty way. I don’t know about Mortimer and Lilian, but I quite enjoyed my week-end. To be truthful, I know Lilian didn’t. I saw/ to that. Very regrettable,” said Miss Ardmore, with an impenitent grin, “but Lilian’s behind a lot of Mortimer’s futilities, and she wants taking down a peg. I took her down several. No doubt that’s why I haven’t heard from them since, even about Raymond and Blanche.” Vivien’s smile became apologetic. “Sorry to have talked so much about myself, but it may have helped you to fill in your picture of the family—including me.”
“Were you referring to your step-great-grandmother when you spoke of a previous slap?” Harvey asked.
“Yes. I suppose Gecile told you? Because that particular slap has been distributed all round. I got a vile letter. . . .”
The clever irregular features had hardened again. Harvey, gently twirling his glass of Pernod in his fingers—it was some years since he had drunk Pernod—seemed to be savouring nostalgic memories evoked by the sharp tang of aniseed. He looked up over the smoky green liquid at Miss Ardmore.
“May we go back to Captain Dresser and his father? You think the former would connive at the fiction of Martin Dresser’s death?”
“I think he’d have enjoyed it, in his quiet way,” Vivien said. “Cecile won’t agree with me, and she saw more of him than I did. But I always thought there were unsuspected depths in Sydney. And my mother said he was very fond of his father.”
“Then where is Uncle Martin? ” Cecile demanded. “Where has he been all this time?”
But nobody could answer that. Or before anybody could, there was an interruption. A voice was heard calling from the mews outside. With a small grimace at the company, Vivien got up from her chair.
“That’s my young man.” She went to the open window. “Hello, Charles! Oh, good afternoon, Mr. Payne. . . . Oh, yes, come up. . . . This is getting like a Rotary convention,” she remarked as she turned back into the room, to find Mrs. Tuke also rising. “Oh, I say, don’t go! We haven’t decided anything, and Charles is practically one of the family, poor devil. And Rockley Payne looks a good sort. You may know his name, Mr. Tuke. He writes romans policier”
