Lacocoön was doing quite well; he had one of the serpents firmly by the neck. But his sons, although well-grown lads, were not being much help; they seemed chiefly concerned to achieve a despairing gesture. The little fountain dribbled and prattled inconsequently at their feet. Appleby found the effect irritating, and was rather inclined to lead David Anglebury elsewhere. But the tennis-court had been comfortless, and to retreat in the other direction would be to return to the vicinity of Stride and his assistants. It would be best to stay put, and listen to the young man while – so to speak – the listening was good.
‘I sometimes think that my mother must have brought herself up on bad Victorian novels.’ Anglebury seemed unconscious that this was an odd introduction to what he might have to say. ‘Did you ever read Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Appleby was surprised. ‘But that’s not a bad Victorian novel. It’s a very good one.’
‘I know it is. But, you see, I’ve been reading English at Cambridge, and I found out something odd about it.’
‘About Cambridge?’
‘About Thomas Hardy’s novel. The way one reads it now, the heroine just gets seduced by the villain, Alec d’Urberville. He takes her home from a rustics’ dance one night, and his ardour is a bit too much for her, and he simply manages to have her in a wood. He’s a nasty chap, but the thing is natural enough in itself.’
‘I suppose that is so.’ Appleby saw no reason to hurry young Anglebury. This preamble was a kind of staving off of embarrassing matter to come.
‘But what I discovered was this. When Hardy wanted to start by printing the novel as a serial in a magazine, he wasn’t allowed to arrange Tess’ seduction like that, because it wouldn’t have been respectable, or at all a proper start for a heroine’s career. So he had to take out the bit in the wood – it’s called a chase, actually – and put in something extremely silly about Tess’ having been hoodwinked by a bogus marriage-ceremony. And apparently there were lots of bad novels full of rubbish of that kind, and Hardy was just taking over a standard melodramatic device.’
‘I see.’ Appleby paused. ‘And you think,’ he said gently, ‘that your mother had been a reader of them? They’d have been rather out of date, you know, even when she was a girl.’
‘I expect I’m talking rot, really.’ Anglebury, who was sitting stiffly upright on his bench, had flushed swiftly; and the effect of this was curiously enhanced by the bleakly white marble of the Laocoön Group and their niche. ‘But well, sir, you understand what I’m saying, more or less.’
‘What you know came to you from your mother?’
‘Yes – and when most of her mind was quite sensible. When it was only in bits and pieces that she had taken to imagining things. She was imagining that she had been tricked into going through a false marriage ceremony. I suppose it’s conceivable that a servant-girl might be deceived in that way. But it couldn’t happen to a lady. To an educated woman, I mean.’
‘It does seem improbable.’
‘But the…the thing happened, all right. The seduction or whatever it’s to be called. And I’m afraid I’ve got rather a staggerer for you now, sir. It was Adrian Snodgrass. I’m his illegitimate son.’
‘I see.’ Although without feigning surprise, Appleby gave no indication that this was not altogether a novel idea to him. ‘Would you say that many people know?’
‘Oh, yes – I think so. At least some must. I’m said to be rather like him, as a matter of fact.’
Appleby had got up abruptly and moved over to the fountain. He might have been searching for a tap which should enable him to turn the confounded thing off. He had, in fact, found young David’s last remark curiously touching. A boy has to take some sort of pride in his parentage, and here had been an oblique way of expressing it. There had been a staunchness, a kind of standing up to be counted, in it, as well. And now the lad’s father had met a violent death and his mother had been crazily claiming to have inflicted it. Appleby found himself liking the Ledward affair less and less. But it would at least be a shade less uncomfortable as past history, and that was what he had to make it. He had something like three hours, he reckoned, until that notional breakfast-time.
‘So the story is this,’ he said. ‘Your father got your mother with child, and then deserted her. And you are the child. You may well regard it as unforgivable. There have been sons who have grown up to exact vengeance in such circumstances.’
‘I suppose so.’ For a moment Anglebury’s taut body sagged, so that he suddenly looked very tired. ‘But if I’d killed my father, I think I’d have told you by now.’
‘That is the probability, I agree.’ Appleby was unemotional. ‘But not, of course, a certainty. I suppose, by the way, that what your father did – or what you believe him to have done – does horrify you?’
‘Yes – but not as much as somebody having killed him does. I try to be objective. As a matter of fact, I once got so desperate that I had a talk with the family doctor about it…’
‘You mean Dr Plumridge?’
‘Yes. We’ve known him for a long time.’
‘I see. Go on.’
‘He helped me to see that I must try to hold the balance even. My mother may have been very unstable from the first, and that may be why my father funked honourable marriage.’
‘Yes. But she wasn’t too unstable to get married to someone else quickly enough to avoid open scandal. Or have I got it wrong?’
‘You’ve got it quite right. Charles Anglebury was some sort of lawyer. He had fallen deeply in love with my mother some years before. Or so my mother has told me at times when she was sane enough.’
‘And he knew.’
‘Oh, yes – I’m sure he did. The whole thing. He was some sort of minor saint, I think.’
‘You liked him, and as a boy took it for granted that he was your father?’
‘I remember nothing about him. I was very small when he died.’
‘And were you very small when your mother began confiding this unhappy story to you?’
‘It depends what you mean by small. I suppose I was about eight.’
This information again brought Appleby to something of a halt. But he was committed now to extracting from the boy everything he was willing to tell.
‘About that faked marriage service,’ he said. ‘It turns up, as a matter of fact, in plenty of plays and romances long before the Victorian age. Do you think your mother told this particular part of her story to others as well as yourself?’
‘I know she did.’ David Anglebury shrugged his shoulders awkwardly, so that one could see he wasn’t given to such gestures. ‘It was one of the first things to show the doctors and people she was a little mad. You don’t think they should have believed her, do you?’
‘I am quite sure they oughtn’t to have disbelieved her without investigation. Did she tell the story in any circumstantial detail, so that some sort of check-up could have been made?’
‘I don’t think so. Certainly not to me.’
‘Did she come here, and did you follow her here, a year ago tonight?’
‘Yes – but nobody else knew. She had just wandered into the house, when I arrived and got her away. I didn’t tell Dr Plumridge or anybody. I knew perfectly well, you see, that it was all entirely harmless. Even although she talked rather as she talked this time. The wronged woman business. I’ve got in the way of not creating about all this. What would be the good? It doesn’t seem as if they can do anything. And it would be a bit heart-breaking, really, if I didn’t manage to take it more or less in my stride. It’s lucky we have money – not a great deal, but enough. We have a very capable woman at home. She was a nurse.’
‘That’s something. But the future must take some planning for. I suppose you haven’t come down from Cambridge yet?’
‘Oh, no. I go back for my second year next week.’ The young man hesitated. ‘If this affair doesn’t go on being too awkward, that is.’
‘It won’t.’
‘You are sure of that, sir?’ Anglebury sounded surprised and relieved.
‘Yes. A case of this sort – one has to call it a case – always gets itself cleared up quickly.’ Appleby paused on this; he was now facing the seated boy squarely. ‘Where there is abundance of mystery and confusion in every direction, the truth seldom remains hidden for long. It’s a matter of having plenty of angles to go at it from. Only the utterly simple crimes – the simplex crimes, you might say – have the trick of remaining baffling.’
‘Well, that’s rather good news.’ Anglebury, although puzzled, appeared genuinely cheered up. ‘Is there anything else I can possibly be useful about, sir?’
‘There are several matters I’d like more information on, as a matter of fact. This house, for example. You give me the impression of knowing it pretty well. Do you come here quite a lot?’
‘Not really that.’ A slight return of wariness was observable in Anglebury’s manner.
‘You know your way to that tennis court, for instance, and find it quite natural to knock a ball about there. But Ledward must surely be shut up for most of the time – although of course there has been this bizarre yearly occasion.’
‘Professor Snodgrass works in the house fairly regularly. And his people come and go. Leonidas, for example. It’s with him I’ve played tennis, as a matter of fact. He taught me.’
‘The Professor’s butler – or late butler – taught you to play real tennis! Didn’t you find his ability to do that a bit odd?’
‘Well, no. One mustn’t be snobbish.’
‘My dear young man, that’s about the first inconsequent thing you’ve said.’
‘I’m sorry. Getting tired, I suppose. I’m not used to what they call interrogation. And you have the technique, all right, in a mild way. I notice how you manoeuvre me into facing the light, for one thing.’
For a moment Appleby made no reply to this – which was in fact a perfectly valid observation. He hadn’t, he told himself, really decided about David Anglebury. The boy seemed more honestly communicative by a long way than anybody else he had encountered at Ledward so far. But his very facility seemed worth thinking about. So did the impulse he occasionally betrayed to square up as for combat.
‘I suppose Leonidas may have been in service somewhere where the game is played.’ Appleby appeared to dismiss the matter. ‘Yes, that would be it.’
‘I’ve thought of something else, as a matter of fact.’ Anglebury hesitated. ‘I don’t know quite how to put it. You might call me snobbish again.’
‘But I didn’t call you snobbish! It was you yourself who used the word.’
‘So it was.’ Anglebury made what was only his second gesture during this interview: a passing of a hand across his eyes. ‘I think Leonidas may be what they used to call a fallen gentleman.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that one.’ Appleby regarded the young man soberly. ‘But tell me a little more about your coming to Ledward from time to time. It must have been more or less by way of invitation from Professor Snodgrass?’
‘Yes, of course. He’s always been very decent. Mildly friendly, you know.’
‘I can see him being that. I suppose, by the way, he knows – well, your family history?’
‘My parentage, you mean?’ There had been an upward tilt to Anglebury’s chin as he asked this. ‘I imagine so. I don’t really know. He’s never said anything about it. Of course he’s rather deep, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Deep?’ Simple-minded surprise was what Appleby appeared to register. ‘He strikes me as rather rambling and senile. But perhaps you’re right.’
‘Perhaps he could be both.’ Anglebury had glanced with a swift suspicion at Appleby. He might be tired, Appleby thought. But he remained unobstrusively a very sharp young man indeed.
‘May I ask you one further question, Mr Anglebury?’
‘Yes, of course. But I’m not terribly fond, by the way, of being called Mr Anglebury. I’d rather you called me David – even if you still nurse the darkest thoughts about me.’
‘David, then. And as for the darkest thoughts, it’s my business to nurse these about pretty well everybody, right up to the moment I sign off.’
‘Which is going to be quite soon?’
‘Quite soon.’
‘I begin to believe you,’ David Anglebury said.
Appleby’s reply to this had been to nod absently, and to take a short turn down the corridor and back.
‘I really can’t stand any more of Laocoön,’ he said. ‘Why can’t the creatures finish their job, kids and all? Why look at this horrid frozen thing when you can read Virgil?’
‘Why, indeed, sir? You’re a very sophisticated policeman.’
‘And you, young man, are quite some way from being the best type of English public-school boy – manly but thick. However, that’s by the way. My final question is about your father. As far as I can gather, he hasn’t been seen in these parts for eight or ten years. Not since you were quite a small boy.’
‘Not all that small.’
‘Precisely. So did you meet him? Have you any impression of him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was this after your mother had told you her story?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you were aware that you were meeting your father – who nevertheless was somehow not your father? It was like that?’
‘Just like that. You’ll think I’m cracked about English novels. But Joseph Conrad…’
‘I know, David. In Under Western Eyes the obscure student, Razumov, is introduced into the presence of Prince K—, who is in fact his father. But no reference to this illegitimate paternity is made. You’re saying it was like that?’
‘Yes, except that Razumov wasn’t a child.’
‘And your father would have known who you were?’
‘Of course.’
‘I know it’s a very distant thing to be talking about, or trying to recover. But can you give me any impression of how he – well, carried it off?’
‘Beautifully.’
There was a silence. Perhaps this single word was ambiguous, Appleby thought. It might be used with some derogatory or ironic implication. Yet it hadn’t sounded like that. And this suddenly seemed to Appleby a circumstance stranger than anything that had turned up upon him on this not unremarkable night.
‘Beautifully?’ he repeated.
‘Just that, sir. And it had nothing to do with carrying the thing off – although I suppose he must have been conscious that there was something very much in need of carrying off. There I stood – a gentleman’s son, if we may be snobbish again, and going by the name of Anglebury. And there he was. Well, he was just very nice. If I’d been grown-up, I’d have phrased it that he showed extraordinary delicacy. He didn’t show affection, because that wouldn’t have been delicate.’
‘But the affection was potentially there?’
‘Yes.’
‘David, you say you were quite small – and it’s chronologically self-evident that you were. These were remarkable things for a small boy to feel. May you not be projecting back upon the actual occasion feelings that you came to imagine about it long afterwards?’
‘No.’
This second monosyllable had for a moment the effect of silencing Appleby. He glanced from David to the Laocoön Group and back again.
‘Stop sitting there as if you were stuffed,’ he found himself exclaiming oddly. ‘Get on your feet, and walk with me up this damned hypertrophied corridor.’ He waited until the boy did as he was told. ‘You left that encounter wishing very much that this man who was your father wasn’t your father with some mysterious difference?’
‘Just that.’ David Anglebury, now pacing beside Appleby, turned his head and glanced at him stonily. ‘And I think he may have had a similar feeling. But nothing more happened – not ever again. Incidentally, sir, you spoke of chronology. But you have only an approximate notion of it. I can give it to you exactly. I last saw my father – alive, that is, and not rather unmistakably dead – nine years, three months, and a week from today.’
In a long silence the two men – or the man and the boy – reached the end of the corridor: the damned hypertrophied corridor in this damned hypertrophied house. In front of them, and in turn giving upon the enormous pillared hall, was a nondescript room which Appleby had marked as probably once an office used in connection with the business of the estate. It looked as if they must shortly present themselves once more to Inspector Stride and his men.
‘I implied that I was asking my last question,’ Appleby said. ‘But I have another one, after all. If things had happened differently, you would be inheriting Ledward tonight. As it is, somebody is inheriting it. The property is passing to somebody, man or woman, whom I’ll call X. And the identity of X – which must be the simplest matter in the world – is precisely what nobody has yet condescended to reveal to me. David, can you tell me who X is?’
‘I can tell you.’
The door before them had opened, and the figure of a man stood framed in it.
‘I am X,’ the man said.