Element of Doubt, page 4
Joe looked at the silver-grey carpet, the juxtaposition of deep modern armchairs with Sheraton by-tables, frail and flaring; chrome-yellow curtains and a fireplace which would have stalled an ox; a Bechstein grand piano and an Ormolu clock, rich, fragile, absurd.
Hardly a boy’s room – and yet, in a way, it was. The room of a boy beginning precociously to know what he liked in the mature world of the connoisseur.
There were other connoisseurs in whose mature worlds Romney had been interested. A sheaf of racing papers lay on a table, the top one doubled over to the three o’clock runners for Thursday, October 14th, 1948. Joe twitched it aside. Underneath were two paperbacks, puce and magenta-covered – The Valley of Virgins and What Price the Lady? Spine upwards between them and the race sheets was a slim scarlet leather volume laconically lettered in gold – ‘Poems’. The pages were uncut, the quality of the paper promised a privately-printed edition. Joe turned it flat to shut it and caught a flash of green ink on the flyleaf – ‘To Romney, lovelier than life’. He closed the bent and unwilling pages and put it down with the Sandown Selections.
‘Nothing’s been touched,’ said Mrs. Brewer, and indeed the furniture stood raggedly about as if still askew from the shock of a year ago. Joe’s gaze moved from one grained and tarnished mirror to another. There were five in all.
‘Narcissus.’
Old Mrs. Brewer’s fingers twitched with nausea; the dominion of the dust was a disgusting and debasing thing.
‘I was forbidden to touch it,’ she said. ‘But I came the day after and set it straight. He was very untidy. He’d had his own valet for a year or more and I hadn’t had to do with him. But I remembered the way he stepped out of his clothes, left them lying – ’ Disorder or dirt she was not likely to forget. ‘He’d been playing tennis and his white flannels would have been there now, on the floor of his dressing-room.’
At this outset of his connoisseurship, Romney had been clever enough to prefer the grotesque. It could be appreciated how beautifully the ugly monsters from China, the pot-bellied deities from the Solomons and one huge Hogarth print, rich and dropsical, had set off his own perfection.
A poseur. Where was Miss Barbary’s ‘warm-hearted and generous boy’ in all this? Was there accommodation, between the five mirrors and the racing fixtures, for a ‘heart of gold’? Joe wondered and as he wondered, came across something at odds with them all.
He picked it up, a small wooden picture-frame, home and painstakingly made. Each corner had been mitred off by a shaky hand, at one join there had welled up a yellow bead of glue. A bulky ivy-scroll was stencilled across the top. The sort of thing an unskilled lad would make with a fretwork set. Joe blew the film off it and took it to Mrs. Brewer.
‘What about this?’
In her stout fingers it was more than ever gimcrack and frail.
‘This was under one of the settee cushions. I found it when I tidied.’
‘Why under the cushion?’
She didn’t know. He’d been going to hang it up, perhaps, and it had slipped down there. He was very untidy.
Joe could not imagine Romney putting such a thing on his wall.
‘Perhaps he’d been trying his hand at carpentry. It’s very rough, but if he’d never done any before – ’
Old Mrs. Brewer turned on Joe her direct stony look. ‘He? That’s Master Harry’s work.’
‘Then what’s it doing here?’
‘I don’t know. The child was at it on and off for days. He went to no end of trouble but he wouldn’t say who it was for. It was one of his secrets. Master Harry’s a great one for secrets. This was the first thing he made with his carpenter’s set.’ She smiled faintly. ‘I never knew him so proud of anything before.’
He’d made it for Romney and Romney jibbed at putting it on view among his ebony and jade.
So Harry had been fond of his brother, fond enough to labour at making a present for him. What had so suddenly provoked his hatred that it could outlast death? The reception of his gift? The scorn of it? Joe did not think so. It would be Romney’s shortcoming which would have died for Harry.
‘He was very popular, wasn’t he?’
‘He was.’
Joe, having asked the wrong question, had got the wrong answer.
‘I mean – everyone loved him?’
Old Mrs. Brewer looked as if she would have liked to sit down on one of the dusty chairs. As her back stooped, the hatchet lines of her face grew harsher with what, in another woman, would have been tears. ‘Young people don’t know their power to harm.’
Joe recognised that she spoke to the outsider. But he was as sure as she was that her generalisation did not fit Romney. Romney had known his power to harm, his enormous exaggerated power, multiplied by his beauty, invincible because of it. Romney knew and relished and wielded it with artistry.
‘We’d best be going. Is there anything here you want, sir?’
Joe picked up the picture-frame. ‘I think I’ll take this. It may help.’
She nodded but she was not thinking of Joe, she was not even thinking of Harry. She waited before switching off the lights, shrinkingly but deliberately laid her fingertips across the gritty panel of the door. ‘It isn’t possible he’s gone.’
And in a fair way to being like this, perhaps she was thinking as she watched her fingers among the dust.
For the past ten minutes Joe had been watching Harry with his history primer. It was a new book with smooth strong paper, pleasantly printed and bound. Harry had been pleased with the look and feel of it even before he became acquainted with its contents. Now he had the corners of the pages in his fingers, bending, teasing and chafing them. He sat in his chair, aware neither of Joe nor the book. His restless hand was on the other side of the world from him.
‘Harry?’
He gave no sign. Between his finger and thumb the corner of the page rolled into a tight cylinder.
‘Harry!’
He looked up, but from such a depth that Joe shut his mouth on what he had been going to say. What was on the boy’s mind was corrosive, as grief in a child could never be. His solitary air had more of the damned than the different about it. Like the pages of his primer, Harry Steen was being shredded away.
‘Harry,’ said Joe, ‘these days when you don’t like to learn, what is it you’d rather be doing?’
Harry wondered for a moment before enquiry changed to that blackness which was his infallible defence.
‘I always like to learn.’
‘I wonder what’s stopping you.’ Joe made it a statement to himself, not a question to Harry. ‘You can’t learn with half a mind and in your case it’s no mind at all.’ He opened the drawer in his table. ‘I thought you might be wanting to get on with something else.’ He took out the picture-frame and laid it in front of him. ‘Carpentry, for instance.’
Harry’s recognition took no time. It seemed to Joe that he had hardly lifted the thing out of the drawer before Harry knew what it was. One brief shock of fear as if, out of the blue, Joe had cracked a whip, and then Harry had his terrors in abeyance. Checked they were not; Joe could see what a prey he would be later. He saw something else which completed his mystification. Harry was relieved. In a joyless tired way, he welcomed what was obviously far more momentous than the mere reappearance of his handiwork.
‘Where did you find that?’
‘Never mind where I found it,’ said Joe. ‘You made it, didn’t you?’
Harry folded his thumbs with one of his old-maidish gestures. ‘I suspected you, you know. I suspected everyone. It seemed the best way because I didn’t want it to come in the middle of anything. I might look as if I’d been caught. And I can’t be caught because I haven’t run away. I’ve been waiting for you.’
Joe braced himself. He was in the ticklish position of being supposed to know more than he did. If he could not uncover this obscurely sinister bee in Harry’s bonnet now, he never would.
‘Harry, I want you to tell me about you and Romney.’
The boy had been well-schooled in suspicion. His brows came sharply down. ‘Why should I tell you if you know? You do know, don’t you?’
‘Of course,’ lied Joe. He tapped the picture-frame. ‘I knew when I found this. What I want is for you to tell me in your own words.’
Harry smiled, an ironic little smile. ‘They always ask you to do that. I read a book about it, I wanted to know what to expect.’
Joe nodded, hopelessly out of his depth.
For Harry it seemed to be more than a solemn moment. He stood up and as he faced his tutor his fear, the abject monstrous fear of a child, threatened to overwhelm him. Standing there in the sunlight he was ready to drown. Joe’s heart contracted with pity but he dared make no move to comfort the boy. It was the stern, almost punitive role Harry had assigned him which was prompting his confession.
‘I’m waiting,’ said Joe inexorably.
And Harry disciplined himself, once again put aside what he could not quell. His dignity would have looked comic to anyone who had not seen how hard it was to come by.
‘Begin at the beginning, please.’
Harry began.
‘I was making a present for my father. He was going away and I wouldn’t see him for months.’ Joe had never suspected that Harry selflessly, without return, loved his father. ‘It was that picture-frame. I thought he could put a picture he liked in it and have it on his mantelpiece in the hotel where he stayed. It took me a long time to do because it was the first thing I’d ever made in wood. And of course it had to be properly done to go on his mantelpiece. My father,’ said Harry, ‘likes beautiful things. I was painting on the ivy when Romney found what I was doing. He said it was very nice. He said – ’ Harry looked at Joe as if for reassurance on this point – ‘that my father would like it better than a silver one from Asprey’s. Then he took it away.’
‘He took it? Did you want him to?’
‘No. I tried to get it back but he said I wasn’t to make a scene.’ Unfamiliar colour crept into his cheek. ‘He held it up and made me jump for it. I couldn’t reach and then he said he’d get a nice picture put in it and would give it back to me ready to give to my father. He said he knew my father’s taste in pictures.’
‘And he never gave it back?’
‘No. I tried to steal it back but he’d hidden it, and told Tass, his valet, to keep me out of his rooms. Every time I asked for it he said there was plenty of time. But there wasn’t.’ Some of the worry and desperation was still with Harry. ‘The day before my father was to go away he still hadn’t given it back. I asked him – he said he’d just got the right picture for the frame and would give it to father with my love. I said I wanted to give it but he said he could do it more gracefully.’ For the first time Harry bent his head. ‘I asked him what the picture was.’
‘And what was it?’
His throat was so dry that Joe heard him swallow. ‘He said it was – the backside of an elephant.’
Joe sat back with a sigh. So this was it. The teasing, ill-natured perhaps but thoughtless anyway, of an earnest homely child by his brilliant elder brother. It had made its mark, was bound to, and as the culmination of years of outstripping and unkindness, had confirmed an unforgiving hatred. It was a pity, but understandable in a boy of Harry’s warmth. Precise and elderly though he sometimes seemed, he was still a child and had a child’s difficulty in letting bygones be bygones. As to his fear, what was more likely than that all he hated and dreaded in his brother should in death seem doubly potent, almost almighty? ‘A twig of a child’ was not the only one to be shredded away by hauntings, real or imagined.
Thank God, thought Joe, at last I know what it’s all about. I can deal with it, I can deal with Harry. I can even deal with Romney.
‘Why, Harry, he was teasing you. He wouldn’t have done such a thing – ’
‘Oh yes he would. He always did what he said. I knew he would and he knew I knew. He was playing tennis all the afternoon and I couldn’t speak to him, but just before tea he went in and changed. I got past Tass and tried to look for my frame.’
‘Did you find it?’
‘No. They – he and Tass – both laughed at me. In the middle of it some wild ducks came flying across from the reservoir. He ran out with his gun. He ran into the wood to shoot them.’
‘And then?’
‘I followed and I killed him.’
The tall story, in the brief second of its impact, is always believed. Faced with Harry’s hard matter-of-factness, it took Joe a further second to emerge from his shock.
‘Harry, that’s absurd – ’
Harry wasn’t listening.
‘What I should have done was to have given myself up. If you hadn’t come, of course I would have. But I wasn’t really ready.’ He looked down at his history primer and his fingers began to roll the corner of the page. ‘I expect you’ve seen. I had to prepare myself. And waiting’s been punishment.’ So it has, thought Joe, remembering his aimlessness, the unhappy air of being no more than a bird of passage. ‘I know it won’t be very quick even though you’ve started. I can manage the day. If they shut me up I can count, but I have nightmares at night.’
‘About Romney?’
‘Oh no. About crying in front of the court and being chased by the hangman. It’s not being chased that’s the nightmare, it’s the running away. I’m not sure of myself, you see.’
What Joe saw, looking into that small flinty face, was the irony of it. With something near despair he asked himself, how did it help that Harry’s story was so patently absurd? Harry believed it beyond the power of ridicule or horse-sense to dissuade.
‘You won’t make a fuss, will you?’ said the boy anxiously. ‘When we go? My father will want everything as quiet as possible.’
So he will, thought Joe, and that’s why you must be sure not to break down in front of the hangman.
Harry went to the window. He stood with his back to Joe and his voice was stifled as he pressed his nose against the glass. ‘It’s different already and it’s only just begun. You’re not what I thought the police would be like.’
‘I’m not the police, Harry.’
He turned and looked. ‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘You’re not. You’re – the Prosecutor, aren’t you?’
Joe picked up the wretched picture-frame and shut it away in his table-drawer.
‘Harry, you’d better go and get your lunch. There’ll be no lessons this afternoon but I don’t want you to be far away. Stay in the garden, will you?’
‘You’ll be taking me today?’
‘Not today.’
Harry sighed, that same faint sorrowful breath Joe had heard before – of someone unutterably tired. ‘I’m better when things happen quickly.’
Joe went to him, put both hands on his shoulders. ‘Soon, I promise you, very soon, it will all be straightened out. I shan’t let it take one moment longer than I can help.’
Harry moved from under his hands. ‘I’ll be by the mulberries till teatime. After tea I’ll be in my room.’
Tutors are not provided with a supply of whisky for their own use or Joe would have poured himself a stiff drink. Of course he would have been justified in taking some of Mr. Steen’s to help meet this emergency, but he disliked being lumped, if only in his own mind, with the butler who had been at the port.
It was as well he didn’t take a drink because in half an hour he was needing another. During that time several unwelcome facts had presented themselves, making an absurd and horrible possibility a shade less absurd than it should have been.
The facts, as far as Joe had gone – which was farther, indeed, than he cared to go – could be set out like a row of beans. Joe’s trouble was that they amounted to more than that.
First, Harry believed what he said and he had no reason for lying. Second, Romney was vaguely said to have slipped and fallen on his gun. More than that was needed to disprove Harry’s story. Third, there was Mr. Steen’s attitude towards his younger son. It could be explained, of course, by the poor showing the child made in comparison with Romney. But that argued indifference and the impression Joe had was not of indifference but of violent mental suffering. There was a split in Mr. Steen which was unaccounted for by grief. Could it be attributed to some reason, however slight, for suspecting Harry?
Harry might have spoken the truth.
‘Nightmare at night?’ said Joe. ‘He’s given it me by day.’
He tried ridicule. Eight-year-old fratricides keep to the Sunday papers. The mark of Cain is not a nursery rash. Harry may be a twig of a child but if I believe this I shall be green as grass.
He tried reason. How does a child murder a lad of seventeen? How does he do it so that it shall look as if the lad shot himself – by accident? How, for that matter, does anyone arrange a murder by misadventure?
He tried retrospect. When young Robert Moxey told me his father was a Zulu chief, did I believe that? When the Blackstone boys blamed their booby-traps on poltergeists, did I give them the benefit of the doubt? And there had been another child who confessed to murder. Little Charley Scoe, taking the wish for the deed, declared he had killed his baby sister.
Why didn’t I believe them? Why, because they didn’t live in a monument; they had homes, not an inheritance.
Joe frowned at the bosses of thumbed stone. There was nothing of this to condition me, no architecture, no history, no weighty ghosts. From the beginning I’ve been fanciful about the place, acting like a tourist, reading the stones, gilding the lily – the Gothic lily – laying on more tragedy and mystery and violence than a hack scribbler would dare. I was ready for anything. Is it to be wondered at that I was ready for this?
