“WELL, WHAT ABOUT Robin, then?” Dot suggested. “After all, he is his son. You can inherit handwriting, can’t you?”
What a futile suggestion. They all knew Robin’s handwriting—cramped and reluctant, and as different from his father’s as it could well be. Robin hated writing, particularly letters, and it showed.
“Well, Cynthia then,” Dot went on, doggedly unhelpful, “She might … Oh no, though. Those airmail letters … all thin and pointed … No.”
Dot, it seemed to Imogen, was being singularly useless in this crisis—indeed, she seemed to lack all sense of it being a crisis, standing there in the doorway, arms resignedly folded, as though helping Imogen with clues in a crossword puzzle. When, immediately after breakfast, Imogen had asked her to come along to the study and give some advice, she had come reluctantly: and once there, had stared at the pages Imogen tremulously held out to her with a sort of wooden incomprehension.
“No,” she had said at last: “No …”—though whether it was the facts in front of her that she was rejecting, or Imogen’s obvious intention of bothering her with them, was not made clear. Pressed for further comment, she had allowed, grudgingly, that the handwriting was “rather like” her father’s: adding, as a rider, that “Millions of people have the same handwriting”.
“Just like they have the same Christian names,” she finished triumphantly, brandishing the false analogy like a rabbit out of a hat. And on Imogen’s suggesting, mildly, that in the case of handwriting, “millions” was surely an overstatement, she had merely shrugged, and pointed out that Well, it must be someone.
A deduction that couldn’t be faulted; and so, her ruffled ego soothed by having thus scored an incontrovertible point in logic, she condescended to join Imogen for a few minutes more of futile speculation. Indeed, after a bit, the thing clearly began to get a hold on her, for the names of Robin and Cynthia proved to be only the first on a list of ever-mounting improbability and randomness.
Indeed, it seemed to Imogen that her step-daughter was treating the whole thing as if it was a game, and not even a game of skill; and so, as tactfully as she knew how, she attempted to narrow the field a little. The forger must, for example, be someone who had at least been acquainted with Ivor; and who had, right now, access to the house by night and by day.
“I suppose you mean I did it,” said Dot, aggrieved; but she could not sulk for long, because almost at once she had an inspiration: a very sudden and intriguing one, to all appearances.
“Myrtle!” she exclaimed. “What about Myrtle? You know, that friend of yours with the earrings. The one who—”
Who was Ivor’s mistress during that summer of ’69. Imogen could understand why Dot’s voice had faltered in embarrassment; but in fact she herself had never felt any great resentment over the affair. Ivor’s mistresses had always been less important to him than his reviews and his television appearances, and Imogen had always understood this perfectly well: it was the mistresses who were put out by it. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy love, he did; but he enjoyed praise even more, and incidentally found that it demanded far less in return. This had been Myrtle’s trouble all along, she hadn’t understood the kind of competition she was up against: and so she had come a cropper, just like the rest of them.
Still, it was all a long time ago now, and there were no hard feelings. Myrtle and Imogen had managed to remain quite good friends—indeed, was it not Myrtle who had been the first of all her acquaintances to summon up the courage to invite her to a party after Ivor’s death? And incidentally, to introduce her to the awful Teri; but you couldn’t in fairness blame her for that.
“Myrtle?—Oh no, not Myrtle,” she said aloud. No need to increase Dot’s embarrassment by labouring the point right now, but in fact Imogen had come to know Myrtle’s handwriting very well indeed during that summer, when letters had arrived for Ivor by every post, full of yearning and passion. He’d loved it, Imogen remembered, except for the bother of answering them.
“Well, then, what about …?” Dot was resuming, tireless as an armoured tank; but at just this moment Robin strolled into the room.
It was unusual to see Robin up and about by nine-forty-five in the morning, but Imogen checked her instinctive reaction of surprise, and began explaining to him, right from the beginning, the mystery she had stumbled upon last night in Ivor’s desk.
Robin listened, apparently with attention, until she had finished. Then he picked up a page of the manuscript and held it alongside the “Please leave my things alone” note. He examined the latter with especial care.
“Why don’t you answer it?” he enquired at last, dropping it back on to the desk: “Dear Spook: With reference to yours of the 16th, we would like to inform you that your request will be receiving our early attention, and in the meantime why the hell can’t you leave us alone?—Signed, Imogen, Robin, Dot, and—”
“Not me! … Don’t include me …!”
Dot clapped her hand over her mouth, as if suddenly conscious of the idiocy of her exclamation. Robin smiled drily.
“Bit slow on the uptake this morning, aren’t we, dear?” he enquired of his sister pityingly.
Imogen did not bother to listen to her retort, or to the boring brother-and-sister wrangling which was bound to follow. They were being useless, both of them: tiresomely and deliberately useless; but suddenly it didn’t matter any more, because she knew, now, what she was going to do. Do entirely by herself, with no need of help or co-operation from either of them.
She should have done it several nights ago, really; but better late than never.
*
It was cold here, behind the floor-length study curtains; colder than she’d imagined it would be, for inside the room the fire still glowed red: in the midnight quiet she could hear, now and then, the soft fall of the coals. But here, in her chosen hiding-place, the heat did not penetrate. The heavy curtains, chosen specially to keep the draught from Ivor as he worked far into the night, and often into the beginnings of dawn, formed now a total barrier between herself and the warmed room; while behind her were the french windows: nothing but a black, icy expanse of glass between herself and the freezing garden.
She’d been standing here, flattened against the glass, for more than an hour now. She’d heard the clock in the hall strike one, and then two; and still no one had come.
She’d made things as easy as she could for them—even tempting. The manuscript open at the right page; pens, pencils, fresh paper all to hand. The front door she’d left unbolted, and slightly ajar, while the study door itself was invitingly half-open, just revealing the faint glow of the dying fire. Never can marauder have encountered so nearly-loving a reception.
Who would it be? Acquaintance? Friend? Close member of the family?
Which was the area of her life which, after tonight’s revelations, would never be the same again?
She could feel her mind revolving now, faster and faster, into some kind of half-dream. She pictured first Teri, mincing into the room, skinny and black as a winter twig against the glow of the dying fire. Then Dot, mountainous, larger than life in some kind of spreading cloak. She was laughing, as in real life Dot hardly ever laughed … and then, suddenly, Imogen was wide awake again: tensely, quiveringly awake.
For someone was coming. Footsteps, soft as dropped plasticine, were moving across the hall … pausing … lapsing into silence as they reached the open doorway.
A sultry, ominous silence. It was like thunder-clouds gathering in your ears.
Perhaps it had been a mistake to leave the door so invitingly open? Perhaps it had put the visitor on his guard: what are they up to?—why haven’t they shut it as usual?—how can I feel right if I don’t start by turning the door-knob gently, gently, in the way at which I have become so skilled …?
Imogen was intensely, piercingly aware of the unseen eye that must be peering now through the crack of the door, just as her own eye was peering through the crack in the curtains: two glances that must never meet and yet shared an intense, unspeakable intimacy as they scanned precisely the same cosy, treacherous scene of firelight and old, well-loved books….
Well, not precisely the same. Ivor’s big leather armchair would be outside the intruder’s field of vision as yet; as also would be the papers, laid out so invitingly, like a flytrap, on the old polished mahogany of the desk. Moreover, the eye at the crack of the door doesn’t know, yet, about its counterpart behind the curtain. It doesn’t know that it is being spied on. All it is doing is seeking for general assurance that the room is empty. Compared with this other eye, behind the curtain, it is innocent.
Dark as a tree, the thing came round the door.
Except that trees don’t. The huge, headless thing had moved half way across the room before Imogen took in that from the base of the trunk peeped human feet, bare, and pinkly gleaming in the firelight. And it wasn’t headless at all … nor even huge … quite ordinary in fact, for what she had taken for chest and shoulders was now flung off—a hood merely, loose and dark—revealing—as in any fairy-story—a beautiful girl. The golden hair swung to her waist, and the shadowed curve of the soft cheek took on an unearthly loveliness as she moved into the ambience of the dying fire.
In fact, what with one thing and another, Piggy was hard to recognise. With her hair loose like this … with her usual sullen, wary expression replaced by this look of rapt, incredulous wonder … with the silly, pretentious burnous in the near-darkness swaying like a magic cloak around her—Imogen stared, incredulous, as the girl moved, with incomparable slow grace, towards the centre of the room: towards the big leather chair which had always been Ivor’s.
*
Imogen did not need to peer through the crack between the curtains any more: did not need actually to see the girl sinking on her knees, burying her face in the old, worn leather, and drinking in its nostalgic scent as if it was oxygen and she on the point of death. Nor did Imogen need to hear—indeed, she stopped her ears in order not to hear—the endearments, the soft, wild pleadings into the empty night:
“Come back, my love! Come back! I’m here, I’m waiting …!”