‘Why, of course you did,’ Mrs. Cromwell’s voice rose until it became almost a squeak. ‘Now, I knew we had met before. And was not Captain Hudson there too, brought by Mr. Lipfield? I thought he was. Now isn’t that a coincidence? And how is Mr. Judkins and that sweet girl his fiancée?’

  ‘His fiancée?’

  ‘Maybe she isn’t his fiancée. The one he used to come with to the sittings. Why, she is the sweetest, prettiest young thing.’

  ‘Roberta Payne?’

  ‘That is her name.’

  ‘She is very well as far as I know. But I had no idea there was any question of their getting married.’

  ‘I dare say there is not,’ Mrs. Cromwell said. ‘But these things happen so quickly. One never can tell.’

  ‘So you two know each other?’ said Eustace, coming to a standstill between Mrs. Cromwell’s chair and the bar.

  ‘We met,’ said Mrs. Cromwell, ‘soon after a turning-point in my life. I married Alec secretly. He had insisted that I should come back to England for a short time while he cleared up certain matters in France.’

  ‘How soon did you get married after I introduced you to each other?’

  ‘It was not long,’ Mrs. Cromwell said. ‘Alec certainly spoke up at once. Do you know, Captain Bromwich, I had such a strange feeling the moment I set eyes on him.’

  ‘There’s something about him,’ Eustace said. ‘Isn’t there?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Mrs. Cromwell, ‘I should say there is. Anyway, we got married. And then there were these business affairs that Alec had to put straight. He said they would just worry me if I was on the spot, so back I went to London. To tell the truth, there were a lot of things I had to get done myself. You can’t ever enjoy yourself without having to pay for it. In trouble, I mean.’

  She sighed. It was to be presumed that she was thinking of the camp-followers in the world of psychical research whom she had had to pay off. These, no doubt, were the rows Lipfield had spoken of when we had met in the City.

  ‘Then we bought the yacht,’ she said, ‘and I came out and met Alec in Corsica. Now that he’s married he says he’s gotten a distaste for the French coast. We only looked in here at St. Etienne because I wanted to see some old friends who were staying in the hotel for a day or two. Alec was all against it. But I insisted.’

  ‘So Alec left Toulon as soon as he got married?’

  ‘He said he just could not stand that place one moment longer. He gets like that. I never know where I am with him. Now tonight he says that we have got to dine early. But why we have to dine early I have no idea.’

  ‘When do you sail for Greece?’ said Eustace.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Mrs. Cromwell said; ‘but it must be put off. We must meet again. I shall call you up at your hotel. Where is it?’

  ‘The Mer et Amiraux, Toulon. Look here, may I see over your yacht? I’m mad about boats of all sorts.’

  ‘Why, certainly, Captain Bromwich.’

  ‘We ought to be getting back soon,’ I said, ‘oughtn’t we?’

  Anything might have happened in the café. I did not know whether Eustace realised the state that Hudson must be in by this time. He might let himself in for the guillotine or Devil’s Island. Since Eustace had insisted on seeing the yacht in the face of such discouragement from Alec Pimley, it looked as if he had deliberately intended to give Hudson an opportunity to have it out with Alec about the T. T. Waring question. If so, he appeared to think they had still not had enough time together.

  ‘We will see over the Amphitrite first,’ he said.

  Mrs. Cromwell took us round. She seemed to regret that all chance of persuading Eustace to marry her must now be at an end; but as this was impossible she could congratulate herself on having made a satisfactory compromise. Eustace tapped and tested everything. There was no doubt that the boat must have cost a lot of money.

  ‘Do you ever hold sittings here?’ I asked.

  ‘Now that I am married I shall have to give up my psychical research. Alec does not approve of it.’

  ‘On what grounds?’

  ‘He did not tell me just what the grounds were,’ said Mrs. Cromwell. ‘But when I began to tell him about some of the very interesting experiences we had had with Mimi, he let me get to where she gave us that wonderful warning about T. T. Waring and then he took my hand and said: “Darling, I want you to give all this up. I don’t think it is right.”’

  ‘And so you are not letting Lipfield and Miss M’Kechnie and the others foregather in your house again?’

  ‘I am afraid I shall not be able to,’ Mrs. Cromwell said. ‘And besides, some of the people you meet are very disappointing. You would not believe how I have been disappointed by mediums.’

  ‘Will you be coming back to London soon?’ Eustace said.

  ‘Alec doesn’t like London so very well either.’

  ‘But you won’t be staying here?’

  ‘We’ll be cruising around,’ said Mrs. Cromwell, ‘cruising around. Maybe we shall stay at Corfu for a spell. But should we be getting back to Alec now, or he will be sore because he wants to dine early? Though what he wants to do it for I can’t say at all.’

  Hudson and Alec Pimley were still sitting at the cafe table. They could be seen from the top of the gangway. Mrs. Cromwell waved to them. Alec Pimley waved in return. I saw him get up from his chair and hold out his hand to Hudson. It looked as if he took both of Hudson’s hands in his when he said good-bye. The distance was too far to see for certain whether or not this was so. Then he came slowly in the direction of the yacht.

  ‘I shall call you up tomorrow morning at your hotel,’ Mrs. Cromwell said. ‘I shall have to talk over the change of plans with Alec first. Then we will arrange when you can come and have supper.’

  We said good-bye to her and went down the gangway. As Alec Pimley came nearer, his face showed that nothing fatal had happened so far as he was concerned. He looked flustered, but pleased with himself.

  ‘I hope my wife has arranged when we are to meet again,’ he said. ‘I want to have a chin-wag with old Eustace again.’

  ‘She’s going to ring us up to-morrow,’ Eustace said. ‘I say, old boy, you’ve hit it pretty rich, haven’t you?’

  Alec Pimley gave his melancholy smile.

  ‘Fortune’s wheel,’ he said. ‘Good-night.’

  He walked up the gangway.

  ‘The bastard,’ Eustace said.

  We went on to the cafe. Hudson was sitting with his legs stretched out in front of him. Eustace said:

  ‘The question is: where are we going to have dinner? Here or at Toulon?’

  ‘Let’s go back to Toulon,’ Hudson said. ‘I’ve had enough of this town.’

  ‘What did you say to him?’ I said.

  ‘I’ll tell you some other time,’ Hudson said. ‘What could one say to that sort of creature?’

  We found the car and began to drive west. Eustace said:

  When I knew that fellow he hadn’t got a sausage. Not a sausage. And now he owns a boat the size of the Titanic.

  Hudson, who was sitting in front, did not answer.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ Eustace said. ‘Could either of you two do that? Marry a woman for her money and own a boat that size. I don’t believe I could do it.’

  We were going at about fifty. Suddenly Eustace slowed up to thirty-five.

  ‘My God,’ he said.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I never got my two hundred francs.’

  ‘But we’re going to see him again.’

  ‘I’m not taking any risks this time,’ Eustace said. ‘I’ve learnt wisdom.’

  He drew in at the side of the road. Then he turned the car. We set off again in the direction of St. Etienne.

  ‘You can’t do this, Eustace.’

  ‘Can’t I?’

  Hudson did not seem to care what happened. He sat looking straight ahead of him on the seat beside Eustace. I was hungry. It looked as if we should have a late dinner by the time Eustace recovered his money and we got back to Toulon. The heat had abated now. The wind was getting up a bit and was blowing the sand across the pavé of the quayside as we arrived back in the town. Eustace stopped the car and switched off the engine. He looked up towards the sky.

  ‘There will be a storm tonight,’ he said. ‘I know just how they blow up on this coast. It’s not the sort of night to be on the water.’

  He turned towards the sea. A white yacht, flying the red ensign, was sailing towards the mouth of the little harbour.

  ‘Look!’

  As he watched, a large drop of rain fell on the windscreen. It splashed smaller drops in a circle over the front of the glass. Eustace said:

  ‘You’re quite right. It certainly is. Master Robinson is a quick mover. I wonder what he told Mrs. Cromwell we had done that persuaded her to slip her moorings so smartly.’

  We sat there until we saw the yacht disappear round the bend of the mole.

  ‘I’m sorry to have brought you back for nothing,’ Eustace said. ‘It is going to be pretty wet on the road to Toulon. But if you take my advice we shall do it at once rather than later.’

  Rain was now falling heavily. We put the hood up as quickly as possible, but not before the inside of the car was fairly wet.

  ‘That’s good-bye for ever to my two hundred francs,’ Eustace said. ‘I shall enter it tonight in that fat little volume, the Book of Bad Debts.’

  The sea looked like a stretch of worn tarpaulin. Jagged black clouds were blowing up from the other side of the town. Hudson’s face was the colour of whitewash. He hardly spoke on the notably unpleasant drive back to Toulon.

  That night there was a storm. The rain, blown by the wind first in one direction and then another, swept across the harbour. The awnings of the cafes on the port flapped and crackled. Some masonry crashed down from the direction of the Naval Barracks. It was impossible to go out in this tornado. We had a late meal in the hotel. After dinner we played cut-throat in Eustace’s room with the jalousies creaking and rattling all the time as if the building was going to collapse. At last Hudson, who had been silent all the evening although he had won consistently, said that he was going to bed. Eustace, who always liked sitting up late, suggested a game of piquet. I was tired and refused.

  ‘Very well,’ Eustace said. ‘It is no good for me to try and get to sleep yet. I shall hang about until this din subsides.’

  ‘If you wait till then you’ll wait all night,’ Hudson said.

  ‘Good-night, you cheerful devil,’ said Eustace. ‘I shall read my Claud Farrère.’

  He put the cards back into their box and picked up L’Homme qui assassina. Hudson followed me upstairs. When we arrived on the top landing he came into my room.

  ‘Incredible, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘Pretty odd.’

  ‘Alec of all people.’

  ‘What did you say to him?’

  Hudson took a deep breath.

  ‘I simply taxed him with being T. T. Waring,’ he said. ‘He didn’t attempt to deny it. Of course he was surprised that I had been commissioned to write the life.’

  ‘Did you tell him how much you liked the books?’

  ‘Yes. He seemed pleased about that.’

  ‘He offered no explanation of his conduct?’

  ‘Only the need to earn a living.’

  ‘But why did he kill off T. T. Waring?’

  ‘When he married there was no more need for him to make money that way. Mrs. Cromwell has settled some on him.’

  ‘It would have been easier just to fade out.’

  ‘He thought that if he established as a known fact that T. T. Waring no longer existed there would be less likelihood of a fuss if the truth ever came out.’

  ‘How did he rig it?’

  ‘He sent a cable in the name of an American journalist he knew, announcing the death to a New York paper. That started the ball rolling.’

  ‘And all the books are cribbed from one source or another?’

  ‘Yes. As Judkins said that night we dined with him, there is nothing in the world the public like so much as reading the same book over and over again.’

  ‘You didn’t threaten to expose him?’

  ‘I began blustering. He just asked why I should want to break up his life now that he was happily married. And added that if I did anything of the sort I was going to look a pretty good fool myself.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I suppose he is right.’

  ‘So he will get away with it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He didn’t say why he took the name of Waring?’

  ‘He did, as a matter of fact. He got it from a poem by Browning. Apparently it had always made a great impression on him as a child.’

  ‘What a boy!’

  ‘I’m not going to stay here after this,’ Hudson said. ‘I can’t stick it.’

  ‘But there are only a few days longer anyway. Why go before I do?’

  A flash of lightning shot across the room. The thunder clattered immediately after. The electric light went out; and then on again. Hudson said:

  ‘I’ll sleep on it and see how I feel in the morning.’

  He went out and into his own room. Instead of going to bed he must have sat down and tried to think things over, because it was an hour or an hour and a half later that I heard him bumping about angrily while he undressed.

  The next morning the air was cooler than it had been since we had arrived in the south. The weather had cleared up. The awning was ripped away from the cafe where I found Eustace having breakfast. The waiter said that a lot of damage had been done at the Arsenal. Water still dripped from walls and broken gutters. Eustace said:

  That was a God Almighty storm last night.’

  ‘It certainly was.’

  ‘Did Tiger give you the works about this T. T. Waring business before he went to bed?’

  ‘I heard some of his views on it.’

  ‘I thought you would,’ Eustace said. ‘I didn’t discuss it. After all, it doesn’t involve me at all. I thought he wouldn’t want to dish it all up with two other people.’

  ‘He is rather upset.’

  ‘I can’t see any point myself in kicking up a lot of fuss about a beachcomber who has made good.’

  ‘He talked about going back to England at once.’

  ‘What I can’t understand,’ said Eustace, ‘is why, having discovered a good way of getting a steady income, Robinson, or Pimley, or whatever his name was, thought it necessary to marry old Cromwell. He must be a very luxury-loving young man.’

  ‘He did not make as much money as all that.’

  ‘What do you suppose he used to knock up?’

  ‘I don’t expect it averaged much more than four or five hundred a year. He had to produce pretty well a book a year for that.’

  ‘But the books were all written by other people.’

  ‘Even so, he had to adapt them and write in the uplift.’

  ‘But I thought he was a best-seller?’

  ‘He sold very well. But he wasn’t making a fortune.’

  ‘You disappoint me,’ Eustace said. ‘I was thinking of writing my recollections. Now I shan’t.’

  There was still no sign of Hudson. We walked back to the hotel. I went up to his room and knocked on the door.

  ‘Entrez.’ He sounded gloomy.

  Hudson was sitting on the bed. He was resting apparently from packing, which was in full swing.

  ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I’m going back. Do you mind?’

  ‘Of course not, if you want to. But why not stay the few remaining days?’

  ‘I want to be alone,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d have a look at Aries and Avignon on the way back. You don’t think it’s letting you down, do you? There’s Bromwich. Anyway, it is only the matter of the inside of a week.’

  ‘Not if that’s how you feel.’

  ‘I suppose I was a fool ever to get mixed up with the whole affair from the start,’ he said. ‘It really isn’t my line.’

  ‘No one could possibly have guessed how it would turn out. You can hardly have been more surprised than I was.’

  ‘It’s different for you. You never thought the books were any good. I did.’

  ‘It was a very ingenious fraud.’

  ‘What the hell does that matter?’

  ‘It matters a lot to me. I admire Alec Pimley far more than I ever did T. T. Waring.’

  ‘I can’t understand you at all,’ Hudson said, beginning to fold up the dinner-jacket which he had insisted on bringing with him. ‘The thing is a fake, and there is an end of it.’

  ‘Well, we are going over to Sablettes. Are you catching the evening train?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We will be back in time to see you off.’

  ‘It’s not only the book,’ he said; ‘there is my mucking things up with Beryl. It is all part of the same business.’

  ‘Why don’t you try and patch it up with her?’

  He stood in the middle of the room, folding the evening trousers into a small compact parcel. When he had done this he put them in the suitcase before he answered. At first I thought he was going to agree that a reconciliation would be the best thing for both of them. He said:

  ‘It’s not much of a story to have to tell a girl about her brother.’

  ‘I don’t expect she has many illusions about Alec by this time.’

  ‘And then she would see what a fool I was to be taken in.’

  ‘She wouldn’t mind that.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he said; ‘I simply can’t. Not after what has gone before.’

  ‘Why not try?’

  ‘It just couldn’t be done.’

  ‘I think you’re a fool to say that.’

  ‘That is your business.’

  There was just time to catch the boat for Sablettes. Eustace was already on board.

  When we returned, Hudson was waiting in the Cafe de Sevastopol. He seemed more collected than he had been earlier in the day. He was apologetic about leaving.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to see the Papal Palace,’ he said; ‘and those Roman remains. I’ve read about them, you know, but it is nice to see things for yourself.’

  ‘When do you want me to bring the car round for your baggage?’ Eustace said.

  ‘I’ve taken it round to the station already,’ Hudson said. ‘I thought I might as well do that when I bought my ticket.’

 

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