The Blackmailer, page 4
‘I don’t get much,’ she said. ‘I certainly haven’t got £500 just like that.’
Baldwin shook his head sympathetically. ‘Indeed, who has these days?’ he said, sadly. ‘Still, no doubt you’ll be able to raise it.’
‘Well, wait a minute,’ she said. ‘I may not want to. I may not think it worth it. I don’t think I do, from my own point of view. My feelings for my late husband were not based on the fact that the public at large believed him to be a hero—their thinking him a traitor won’t distress me.’
‘His family?’ asked Baldwin.
‘How d’you know that I care at all what they feel?’ she said.
‘I don’t,’ he replied. ‘If you tell me you don’t I shall with a clear conscience take my story to the News tomorrow.’
‘May I have some time to think it over?’ she asked.
‘Certainly,’ he said, standing up. ‘Let’s say you’ll ring me up tomorrow evening.’
‘The next day,’ she said.
‘All right, we’ll make it Wednesday,’ he said generously. ‘Here’s my number.’ He pulled a card from his pocket. ‘Of course if you decide to go away without getting in touch with me, or anything like that, I shall have to sell the story—purely to pay my rent.’
‘I’ll ring you up on Wednesday evening about six,’ she said.
‘Right,’ he moved to the door. ‘I’m sorry about this but I’m sure you understand my position.’
‘Oh yes, I understand it,’ she said. She watched him without expression as he went out of the room. At the door, he looked back and would have said ‘Good-bye’, but after a moment’s pause he left without saying anything more.
He thought, going down the stairs and out into Park Lane, ‘I am a blackmailer’. He had not known, when he had followed Fisher and Miss Vanderbank into the office a short time ago, or at least had not known for certain, that it was in such a capacity that he would emerge. He was not yet quite sure how he liked it, but after all he had wanted to be ruthless and he had wanted to make money, and it looked as though he was going to be able to do both.
Judith went to the office early the next morning, and found Feliks in her room, looking through her letters.
‘My own are so boring,’ he said.
‘Supposing,’ Judith said, taking off her coat. ‘Supposing, by any chance, Love Is Not Skin Deep—I mean the book really did sell—supposing——’
‘Hang your coat up nicely,’ said Feliks, picking it up from the chair where she had thrown it. ‘How you do let down the tone of this office.’ And he carried the coat out to the cupboard in the next room.
When he had come back and shut the door, Judith said: ‘I want to borrow some money from the firm.’
‘You’ve been gambling,’ he said, sitting on the edge of her desk.
‘No, I haven’t,’ she answered.
‘But you, so frugal, need money?’ he asked. ‘I thought you were all right—you were saying so only the other day.’
‘I know, Feliks,’ she said. ‘But this is something unexpected that I’ve suddenly got to pay.’
‘If it’s an abortion,’ said Feliks, ‘I’d much rather adopt it.’
‘I don’t know how much an abortion costs,’ said Judith. ‘But I should think this is more, I don’t know.’
‘How much?’
‘£500,’ she said.
‘Oh God yes,’ he said. ‘Much more. Well, all right.’
‘£500 is what I’ve got to pay,’ she said. ‘I can manage about £150 myself. That leaves £350.’
‘Take £200 from the firm and I’ll lend you the rest,’ said Feliks. ‘Only don’t tell anyone and pay me back before the firm.’
‘Thank you very much,’ she said. ‘I’ll pay you back quite soon, really, and the firm. I’ll give banker’s orders.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry at all. I hate you to be worried. It makes you snappish in the office and then you humiliate me in front of Miss Vanderbank. You’re all right, aren’t you?’
‘Oh yes, I’m all right,’ she answered, looking down.
‘And don’t let anyone know about that £150,’ he went on. ‘Heaven knows what would become of my reputation if that got out.’ It was one of his affectations to pretend to be pathologically mean: some of the stories about this supposed failing were very funny, whether told by his friends, his enemies, or himself.
‘I’d better give it you now.’ He got out his cheque book, made a few minute indecipherable marks on a cheque and gave it her.
When he went through the other room he said to Fisher and Miss Vanderbank: ‘I’ve just given Mrs. Lane a cheque for £150.’
The pale face and the pink looked up at the same time and laughed obediently.
3
He said he had to have it in cash. She thought at first this might be merely a pretext for forcing her to hand it over in person, so that he could extract the fullest pleasure from the exercise of his power over her; but later it occurred to her that it must be to avoid leaving any record of his having received the money.
She had already considered carefully whether there could be any hope of catching him out, had imagined policemen concealed behind the curtains and springing out to arrest him at the moment the money changed hands, but these ideas struck her as so melodramatic and unreal that it seemed impossible they should ever become fact. Besides she had the money now, and she had come to think that perhaps she did somehow owe it to someone for her husband’s having failed as he had.
She was in this fatalistic frame of mind when she went with £500 to meet him at a coffee bar in the King’s Road. She had asked for an extra week’s grace in which to collect the money, and by the end of the week she was feeling depressed and rather ill.
It was not that she consciously thought about it so very much—the having to pay £500 and the reason for it—as that all the time it was at the back of her mind, or, as it rather seemed, on the top of her mind, weighing down on everything beneath it, ready to slip into her conscious thoughts the moment there should be room. She had not yet much questioned it, had so far more or less calmly accepted it as simply something else which Anthony had imposed on her, for there had in the past been other lesser situations not altogether dissimilar. In fact the chief emotion aroused by this talk about him, apart from a vague and dreadful sense of brooding doom, of an imminent outburst of either events or emotions, had been one of renewed longing that he might have been alive, anyhow, however disgracefully.
It was six o’clock and the place was not crowded. Baldwin Reeves was sitting in a corner beneath a rather dusty orange tree (it was all Spanish) and looked, particularly in contrast to the group of grubby students who were sitting at the next table, surprisingly proper and pleasant. She had remembered him as fat, untidy and overbearing, and now he looked neat, intelligent and friendly.
When he saw her he got up, folding his evening paper, smiling—they might have been new friends about to spend a delightful evening together.
He, too, was surprised, because she was looking far more sophisticated than when he had last seen her. In a short fur coat which Anthony had given her, a fashionably tweedy dress and high heels, and with her pretty dog, she looked much more interesting than he could have hoped—people turned to look at her.
As he had thought it would, it made a difference. Perhaps this needn’t be the brisk formal encounter he had envisaged, after all.
She, however, seemed to expect that sort of meeting, for she had no sooner sat down than she pulled a bulky envelope from her bag and slapping it down on the table in front of him said: ‘D’you want to count it?’
‘What will you have?’ he asked as if she had not spoken.
‘To drink? Oh, nothing thank you.’
‘Please do,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d be late, so I ordered this huge mug of chocolate which is already making me feel sick. Do have something.’
‘No, really, I won’t, thank you,’ she said. ‘I must go.’
‘Have some fruit juice, do,’ he said. ‘It’s really quite good. Melon or something?’
‘Oh, well, some lemon then,’ she said, feeling that she had conceded something much more important and leaning back gloomily.
‘Thank you,’ he said, and ordered it. ‘Yes, I thought women were always late,’ he went on.
‘Oh, are they?’ she said, indifferently.
There were women, in his experience, who liked to be constantly reminded of their sex, others who pretended to find that insulting: she seemed to belong to the latter category. It made no difference, in his experience, they were all much the same fundamentally; but one might as well observe their whims. He did not then follow up his last remark, but said instead: ‘Tell me how you acquired your dwarf.’
‘He’s not a dwarf, he’s a midget,’ she said. ‘They’re different.’
‘Oh, are they?’ he said. ‘And he’s a French midget?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s got a horrid accent in French too.’
‘Is that some regional dialect?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I found him in Paris.’
‘Found him?’ asked Baldwin.
She smiled. ‘In a way,’ she said.
As she remained silent, he said, ‘Do tell me about it.’
‘Oh, well,’ she said, looking away. ‘I can’t be bothered somehow.’
Perhaps the midget was her lover after all. Baldwin wanted to know; but looking at her blank profile he decided to drop the subject and make inquiries elsewhere.
‘Have a bun or something,’ he said.
She refused, but he, with evident interest, selected for himself two creamy pâtisseries and brought them to the table.
‘You’ll get fatter,’ she said coldly.
‘I am rather fat, aren’t I?’ he said. ‘But I don’t mind being a little fat as long as it’s not too much. I don’t think it really detracts from a man’s appearance, do you, as long as he’s healthy? Do I look very fat at first sight, I mean would people describe me to each other, d’you suppose, as “that fat man”? It’s hard to tell how one strikes people. Did you think me fat when you first saw me?’
‘Fattish,’ she said.
‘But d’you think I ought to try to get thinner?’ he asked. ‘Should I diet, d’you think?’
She looked at him in surprise as he waited with apparent eagerness for her answer. Then she said: ‘I asked you if you wanted to count the money.’
He looked disappointed. ‘You’re right, of course,’ he said. ‘What does it matter how fat I am? No, I don’t want to count it. Let’s have dinner together. I’ll take you somewhere—we’ll see how much we can spend.’
‘I think you’re very odd,’ she said. ‘I must go now.’ She stood up, attracted the attention of Bertie, whose lead she had let go and who was being fed on lumps of sugar by an enraptured old lady, and began to walk away.
‘I hope you have a good dinner,’ she said.
A rough wind whipped her as she strode along the King’s Road, but even so she thought, approaching her house, that she could not yet go back there, speak to Jean-Claude, eat, read, think. She turned left down Smith Street, finding the wind less violent once she was round the corner, saying to the dog: ‘Come on, Bertie, we’re going for a walk. You’re so lazy,’ for he knew where they were and was straining at his lead in the direction of their house, remembering the cats that lurked behind it and his duty as he conceived it endlessly to bark at them.
She had forgotten, however, that Burton Court would be shut. She had thought they might have run in there, thrown sticks and shouted, to relieve the oppression of her mood. She walked instead on and on, quite quickly now, and down Swan Walk and to the river.
There, still bossed about by the wind, she paused and leant on the wall of the deserted Embankment, seeing through the dark night the vague river swirling and saying at last with furious feeling: ‘I hate him, I hate him.’
She spoke not of Baldwin Reeves but of her dead husband, and the familiarity of all her sensations, stronger though they were than most she had felt before, made her sob as she said it.
It was a pattern she had been used to—the outrageous demand, the meek obedience to it, the ensuing useless rage. Life had always been like that with Anthony.
After a few incidents, a few of his own particular betrayals, she had thought: ‘This must be the end of everything—how can I feel the same afterwards?’ but each time it had been anything but the end and each time she had felt exactly the same afterwards. Later she had come to believe what had at first seemed to her odd and rather degrading, that love was not always based on a similarity of principles, and that it was possible genuinely to love and even at times to admire someone whom one could seldom, if ever, respect. She had also occasionally recognised in herself an emotion approaching a sort of enjoyment in quietly submitting herself to the distresses, inconveniences and humiliations which his behaviour from time to time caused her.
She knew then this evening above the dark winter river that her fury would soon fade, but it made her for the moment more rather than less resentful. It was little comfort to know that an hour or two later love would have changed her mind.
4
When Judith announced her engagement to Anthony Lane, her paternal aunt, who was rather common, congratulated her on being about to marry ‘into a place’.
‘I always knew you were meant for something special,’ she wrote. ‘In spite of your poor mother.’
There was land, there were tenants, employees, villagers, dogs, portraits, plantations. To that extent Aunt Edith Fortune would have been satisfied; but the house itself might have surprised her. It looked more like a church than anything else, a dilapidated, deconsecrated, church with large haphazard windows later added. It had started as a pele tower, embattled, crenellated, and machicolated by licence granted in 1280 to Humphry Lane, a Wensleydale farmer. Subsequent generations had added to it until in about 1690, the family prospering, a grander house was begun a mile away, and with its beauty as their setting the Lanes went on from strength to strength. In 1863 the house caught fire, no one knew how, and was burnt to the ground.
The old couple of the time moved into the tower, which was then a farm, and the shell of the other house was left crumbling gently, and not without a bizarre beauty, in the middle of its grand abandoned gardens.
There had never been quite the money or the time or the energy to rebuild it; and now there doubtless never would be, not only because of the turning away of the times from that sort of building but because there were no young Lanes.
The tower house would have looked less bleak had there been a lovely garden, but though the deserted garden of the ruined house a mile away flourished, this one had never been a success, and the Wensleydale moors were everywhere the eye could see.
Judith from the first had accorded the house—Harris was its name—her unswerving loyalty. There was no particular reason for this; the house seemed to her simply to demand it, the house and the old man and his stern feared daughter-in-law.
The real church was in fact two miles away, and they drove to it every Sunday, Sir Ralph Lane, Mrs. Lane, and when she was there—which, the winter Sunday after she had given Baldwin Reeves £500, she was—Judith. They used to walk but then the old man got beyond it.
Mr. Wardle, the vicar, had been there now for twenty years, and the excesses of his youth were far behind him. There had been excesses, of a sort, or so Mrs. Lane would have called them. They had included incense, and bells, and acolytes, and very odd ideas about transubstantiation.
Mrs. Lane had been in Moscow when Mr. Wardle, the former incumbent having died, had been inducted at All Saints, Ribblethwaite. She had returned with her young son after her husband’s death in 1936 to find that what she called ‘decent English Morning Prayer’ had been superseded under the new regime by something called ‘Sung Eucharist’. This frankly Popish ceremony involved the co-operation of little Willie Judd and even littler Johnny Wilson as incense swingers, bell ringers and general antic-performers (this at least was how Mrs. Lane saw it) and necessitated the presence of a much enlarged choir (and therefore much worse, for how could more than six little boys be expected to sing in tune in a village of only seven hundred?) which was kept breathlessly busy throughout the service, alternately chanting, genuflecting and nudging one another—sometimes to prompt, sometimes to snigger.
It must be admitted that quite a large proportion of the congregation enjoyed it. There was more to watch, and though the services were inclined to be rather long it made a nice break when Mr. Wardle changed his vestments in the middle, helped by Willie and Johnny, and all that chanting, though a bit doleful, made a change, and of course the new service did include the Communion, killing as it were two birds with one stone.
On the other hand, a great many people were shocked. It was not at all what they were used to, and they doubted, most of them, with a good deal of head-shaking and mouth-pursing, whether it were right. One or two in fact almost considered going over to the Baptists and taking the bus ten miles to Thorpedale every Sunday, but fortunately Mrs. Lane came back in time to render this drastic course unnecessary.
Her first reaction was that the man must be a Socialist. This was not as illogical as it might seem because for Mrs. Lane religion and class were very closely connected. The Church of England, the Conservative Party and the Landed Gentry were the articles of her faith. Anathema to her were atheists, socialists and, equally, common people with no idea of their places and fast people. That is to say, respectful villagers were on one’s side, factory workers and the urban lower middle classes were not; good County families were, worldly dukes and people who spent too long in the south of France were not. She had retained this creed unshaken through several years of more or less cosmopolitan life.
Mr. Wardle, therefore, this brash newcomer (probably an atheist too since he was making such a mockery of religion) must be taught his place. It was not a short struggle, for Mr. Wardle, though weak and sentimental, was also obstinate, nor did he at first realise the strength of his opponent; but in the end, and after some sensible advice from the Rural Dean, he capitulated. Decent English Morning Prayer had come back. The only remaining difference of opinion was over the Creed, which Mr. Wardle sang: on this as on every other Sunday Mrs. Lane’s deep voice could be heard through the slightly ragged chanting of the rest of the congregation, firmly speaking out her faith.
