The Balmaynes suddenly realised that they knew almost nothing about Roland Redpath. He had begun by coming around the place as one of their son Ronnie’s numerous quite casual acquaintances. Ronnie had nothing to say about him, and although Redpath himself appeared to be a frank and conversable young man his talk had never happened to turn upon any personal past. This was entirely in order, or at least the elder Balmaynes contrived to accept it as being that. Neither Ronnie nor his sister Claribel reacted favourably to any question of the investigative sort about contemporaries whom they sometimes introduced to their parents. ‘What does he do?’ and ‘Is she related to the QC?’ and even ‘Are they fond of tennis?’ received answers which, although civil, carried some faint suggestion of tolerance or irritation in their tone. It wasn’t that Ronnie and Claribel took up with any raffish crowd. They were both thoroughly sensible, thoroughly sound. They were merely subscribing, perhaps unconsciously, to one of the minor taboos current in their generation.
On several occasions, however, Redpath, without appearing to have become really intimate with Ronnie, spent a weekend with the Balmaynes in their country cottage. Lady Balmayne wrote the invitations, but Redpath was essentially her son’s guest. That there were written invitations at all showed that the younger Balmaynes accepted certain antique ways unconcernedly enough. But when a young man joins you at tea time and takes his leave of you after breakfast three days later it is usual and natural that you hear a word or two about his people and his school and so on in the interim. This still didn’t happen. And it wasn’t that Roland Redpath was buttoned up all round. He expressed opinions in the most forthright way on all manner of topics. He was incisive without being assertive and well-informed without being overwhelming. His manner with Sir Bernard in particular was just right, combining the deference properly owed to a senior man with the confident freedom of address customary between social equals, regardless of any disparity in age. At one point Sir Bernard inclined to the conjecture that Redpath must have had a spell in the Guards, and resigned his commission to begin a career with some family concern in the City. Sir Bernard didn’t in fact know much about soldiers, or about the City either. He was an architect of some distinction in a specialised field, and his professional connection was mainly with the Church Commissioners.
The weekend occasions had all taken place before the elder Balmaynes became aware of a significant and disturbing switch in the young man’s relations with them. He was now less the friend of their son than the admirer of their daughter. Neither of them could have said clearly why they were bothered about this. It was true that when they took a fully considering look at Roland Redpath they saw that the picture was that of a clever boy and able young man who had arrived from nowhere in particular, and who was of an assimilative temperament which absorbed almost unconsciously at least the superficial habits and obvious assumptions of the people among whom his talents had taken him. It was by no means an unattractive picture. Moreover the Balmaynes regarded themselves as being of a liberal cast of mind, and insured against vulgar snobbery by the security of their own position in society. They immediately told one another that facts of character – integrity and kindness and constancy and so on – were more important than family origins. They were confident that Claribel knew this too.
A little further information would have been agreeable, all the same. And by this time it would have been natural as well. Were Roland Redpath again coming down for one of those weekends at Graziers Lady Balmayne felt the position to be now tacitly such that she could properly seek some enlightenment about the young man’s background, and that equally Bernard could briskly acquaint himself with the broad facts of his present position and prospects. This might be done without any ‘square’ stuff (as the young people would say) about Redpath’s intentions and a natural parental anxiety and so forth. But Redpath declined two invitations running on the score of engagements he couldn’t escape. It was almost as if he were deliberately turning elusive. Yet in the same period he came three or four times to the house and whisked Claribel off to a concert or theatre. It was worrying.
Ronnie didn’t help. It was his attitude that he and Roland had rather lost interest in one another in a perfectly normal manner, and that he had never known much about him anyway. But he was a perfectly respectable chap, with brains enough for two, and he held down a more senior job as a psychologist in some university or other than might be expected of so young a man. If Claribel was taking it into her head to marry Roland Redpath he didn’t see that there would be anything against it.
This was reassuring up to a point, but Sir Bernard continued to feel misgivings and to communicate them to his wife.
‘Not a very regular profession, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘I was lunching the other day with John Ormerod, whom I think you’ve met once or twice. He’s a good deal older than I am, of course, but said to be still the best brain surgeon in London. He happened to say that no patient of his would get into the clutches of those fellows except over his dead body.’
‘But we don’t know, Bernard, that the young man is that sort of psychologist. If he were, I think he would be Dr Redpath.’
‘Claribel says he is a doctor, but sees no occasion to use the title in private life. Perhaps that means that he holds a degree of the outlandish sort which some American colleges peddle for straight cash down.’ Sir Bernard frowned, as he did when not pleased with himself. ‘But, no – that’s unjust and extravagant. Taken all in all, he seems a very decent lad. So I can’t think why he’s being a little less than straightforward now.’
‘I’m not sure, Bernard, of that being altogether just either. I believe he feels some awkwardness about his suit’—Lady Balmayne smiled at her use of this archaic expression—’and is hanging back with us because of it. And I’m not wholly able to acquit Claribel of all blame. She must know more about Roland than we do. But she has almost nothing to say about him. It’s her attitude that it’s no business of ours. Of course, she doesn’t express that in any crude or pert way. But it’s vexatious, all the same.’
‘I don’t myself blame Clarrie at all.’ Having made this firm declaration, Sir Bernard steered his thought in another direction. ‘There are Redpaths in Bedfordshire, you know. Julian Redpath and I were in the same election, and went up to Corpus together later on. An extremely nice fellow, Julian. But – do you know? – he pronounced his name not Redpath but Rippeth. All that family do. Early in our acquaintance with this young man, I actually addressed him in the wrong way. It was mildly embarrassing. I had to say I’d come across his name, but remembered it as slightly different. Something like that. He seemed almost startled for a moment.’
‘Young men can be sensitive in matters of that sort. Particularly if it is suggested that their own Joneses are not the Joneses who alone count.’
‘Good heavens, Mary! You can’t imagine I hinted anything like that.’
‘Of course not, dear.’
‘He’s a nice enough boy, as I say, and may suit Clarrie very well. If he does, I shan’t care twopence if he’s an entirely new man. The career open to talent is one of the great strengths of our society. It’s an immensely stabilising thing. Without it, our sort might all be dangling from lamp-posts by now. And the conception ought undoubtedly to be extended to—well, the domestic sanctities, and matrimonial alliance, and whatever grand name one cares to give the thing.’
‘I am sure that is the wise view, Bernard. And we must just wait and see how the matter develops.’
‘Exactly. And we must make another attempt to get him down to Graziers. Meantime, my mind is quite at ease about it all.’ Sir Bernard, who had taken a second glass of port during this after-dinner colloquy, nodded confidently. He was a little silent, however, during the rest of the evening.
Lady Balmayne was accustomed to this. It was the way her husband often behaved when he had a difficult professional problem on his hands. Usually it was how to make a new church, however designed, look like a church at all. But sometimes, she knew, it was a problem even more difficult than that. An architect nowadays frequently finds himself involved in, or at least on the fringes of, enterprises that strike him as of a morally dubious character. Sir Bernard’s own ethical standards were very strict; there had even been times when this had made things hard for him; ultimately it had contributed to the high regard in which he was held by his colleagues. Here he prized his standing very much – and the more because he saw his instinctive and untroubled honesty as a matter of upbringing. He was proud, indeed, of what might fairly be called ancient lineage – which, paradoxically, was the very circumstance that would have rendered him of an open mind about a prospective son-in-law from among the most simply bred. But at the same time he was more proud of his father than of all his other progenitors put together.
That father, Raymond Balmayne, was a seventh son, and when no more than a boy fate perched him on a high stool in the counting-house of a large mercantile concern. It was the sort of position celebrated by John Davidson in the poem called ‘Thirty Bob a Week’, and if young Raymond didn’t quite have to make do on that he had a lean time of it, all the same. It ought not to be said of him, in the common phrase, that he ‘fought his way up’, since this suggests a tooth-and-claw attitude from which he was constitutionally aloof. But he made his way. It was a way which, but for the stimulus of family tradition, might finally have established him as a much respected head clerk, honourably devoted to an employer’s interests. As it was, he did better. He did better because he took risks – just as earlier Balmaynes, it might be claimed, had taken risks in battle or on the hunting-field. Nobody had ever so much as hinted that they were other than honest risks. For quite a long time, and after he was in the enjoyment of a substantial prosperity, there had been difficult corners to turn: the last of them when his eldest son, Bernard, was already a young man. He had no desire to see Bernard succeed him in what would thus have become a family business; he would much rather have had the boy make a career for himself in the Army or the Church or at the Bar. Nevertheless he was content with the choice Bernard eventually made. Had he insisted otherwise, Bernard would probably have obeyed, even to the extent of getting into a dog-collar. For Bernard had been (as people then said) strictly brought up, and he accepted his father’s wisdom as unhesitatingly as he did his rigid moral code.
On this particular evening, and with the weighty business of Roland Redpath before him, Sir Bernard Balmayne may have been turning over aspects of this past history in his mind. He may have been a little wondering about Ronnie – a good-hearted lad, but one in whom family pieties and the duty of strenuous endeavour were not prominent. But much more he was wondering about Claribel, and what awaited her with an almost unknown young man. Sir Bernard had been lacking in candour when he told his wife that his mind was quite at ease in the matter. What troubled him was not the now patent fact that Redpath’s background was undistinguished; it was simply that this aspirant to his daughter’s hand (as he was certainly going to turn out to be) had disclosed no background at all. A family tradition declaring generations of labour on the soil would have been acceptable in its fashion. A mere taken-for-granted blank was not.
Sir Bernard and Lady. Balmayne went to bed. Sir Bernard was not so preoccupied as to neglect the closing ritual of their day. It consisted in his reading aloud to his wife for an hour before they turned the lights out. They were both fond of biographies and memoirs, but for this nightcap occasion (as Lady Balmayne called it) they generally chose fiction: sometimes recent novels, but more commonly the ‘standard’ sort. In this way they had read, and sometimes re-read, many of the major Victorians, and Trollope had recently become their favourite. On this night, as it happened, a new novel had to be begun. They had decided on The Prime Minister, which Sir Bernard had read long ago but which was unknown to his wife. He collected the volume from his library now, and as he made his way upstairs he opened it and glanced at the table of chapter headings. ‘Chapter I: Ferdinand Lopez,’ he read, and was instantly appalled.
A moment before, he would have said that the story was all about Plantagenet’s difficulties as First Minister of the Crown, and how they were increased by the impulsive and indiscreet behaviour of his wife, now Duchess of Omnium but still known to her intimates as Lady Glen. Nothing of the sort. Ferdinand Lopez (an unpromising name) starts the story. And when the fifth chapter is headed ‘No one knows anything about him’ the reference is to Lopez still. Recalling this and much else, Sir Bernard was prompted to return the book to the shelf and choose another Trollope instead. What about He Knew He was Right? It was doubtful whether the old boy had ever written a better book. But, in a way, He Knew He was Right would be almost as bad. It was about another nice girl landed with an unknown quantity as a husband. He is, indeed, a man of family, but spends the greater part of the book playing Othello to his wife’s Desdemona, and then goes slowly and tediously mad. So Sir Bernard abandoned the idea of a switch, entered his wife’s bedroom, and explained what was in prospect for her with as much lightness of air as he could assume. Lady Balmayne was amused.
‘But, Bernard,’ she said, ‘Trollope abounds in girls who make disastrous marriages and then face up to them quite idiotically and with enormous courage. And I’m sure this Ferdinand Lopez isn’t in the least like Roland Redpath. I expect Trollope thinks of him as a Portuguese Jew.’
‘I’m not certain about the Jew – but Portuguese, certainly. Only the point is that his origins are totally unknown. Listen.’ Sir Bernard opened the book. ‘Here’s page three. “Though a great many men and not a few women knew Ferdinand Lopez very well, none of them knew whence he had come, or what was his family.”’
‘I don’t see it need have mattered in the least.’
‘And this.’ Sir Bernard turned the page, unheeding. ‘”It was known to some few that he occupied rooms in a flat in Westminster, but to very few where the rooms were situated.” And the girl’s father, a widower and a respectable barrister of West-country stock, has to blame himself bitterly for weakly permitting her to marry a totally unknown man. Lopez moves in good society for a time, you see, because the Duchess foolishly takes him up. But he turns out to be a most atrocious scoundrel.’
‘Bernard, dear, we don’t know much about Roland, and I have agreed that it’s rather worrying. But we can be as sure of his not being an atrocious scoundrel as we are that he doesn’t live in a flat in Westminster. So do get into bed and begin the book.’
Sir Bernard did as he was told.
‘”Chapter I: Ferdinand Lopez,”’ he read. ‘”It is certainly of service to a man to know who were his grandfathers and who were his grandmothers if he entertain an ambition to move in the upper circles of society . . .”’ As Sir Bernard read on he began to find Trollope as soothing as he commonly did. But he was conscious that the little fuss he had made betrayed him as obstinately feeling that there was trouble ahead for Claribel – just as there was for Emily Wharton when Lopez made her his bride.
‘I’m bound to say that I’ve been studying your father a little,’ Roland Redpath said.
‘Studying Daddy? You’d do much better to talk to him.’ Claribel had lately become a little disenchanted with Roland’s studious habit. They were in a pub now because he was going to write a paper on people in pubs. He didn’t seem to be getting any fun out of it. Claribel, who (under his escort, it was true) had discovered herself to be quite good at actually conversing with unknown people in public bars, enjoyed these occasions much more. ‘And I don’t see,’ she went on, ‘that lately you’ve been giving yourself much chance of studying him, anyway. He must feel you’re avoiding him.’
‘He has said that?’ Roland asked quickly.
‘Of course not. Daddy wouldn’t say such a thing to me, although of course he might to Mummy. I just have a sense of it.’
‘Does he think I want to seduce you, without being bothered by your family?’
‘There have been one or two young men about whom he did feel that, I know. But you’re not one of them, Roland darling. I suppose it’s humiliating, but you have to face it honestly. You’re rather nice.’
‘All right, all right.’ Being much in love, Roland found all Claribel’s jokes wonderful. ‘But it is dodgy, all the same. You can’t deny it. There’s nothing more natural than that your parents should take it for granted you’ll marry a man of their own class.’
‘You and my father are of precisely the same class. You are both well-regarded professional men.’
‘That’s just an evasion, Claribel dear.’
‘It’s you that’s evasive, Roland. We’ve only to go head on with a simple no-fuss announcement, and there can’t possibly be any trouble at all. I’d agree that I’d be rather upset if Daddy did come down on the thing in a weighty way, and I know that you’re being so cautious because you want to spare me any risk of that. But it’s a misconception of my father’s character. I’m almost inclined to tell you that you haven’t studied him quite enough.’
‘I believe you’re right.’ Staring into his pint pot, Roland said this with the brisk decision of the competent scientist he was. ‘It’s true there’s nothing to be gained by delay. But I rather favour the old-fashioned thing.’
‘What old-fashioned thing, darling? I don’t believe I know her.’
‘Don’t be silly. The modern custom, of course, is just for the girl to tell her parents – probably on the telephone. But I think that, in the circumstances, I ought to have a go at your father first.’
‘And seek his permission to kneel at my feet? Roland, what an old funny you are.’
‘You know perfectly well I shan’t make a stilted fool of myself. But, as I say, in the circumstances—’
‘Jesus, Roland – what circumstances? Have you a dark secret?’
‘I have, in a way.’
‘Is it about your people? You have been rather cagey, you know. Nothing except that joke about being late-risen from the people, like the nobleman in Mr Wopsel’s Hamlet. ‘
‘Your memory’s pretty good. I could make a first-rate research assistant of you, if it came to a pinch.’
‘Stick to the point. Your father was – or is – what used to be called a common working man. Right?’
‘Well, no—I don’t think he’d have seen himself as that. He’d have seen himself – for he’s dead, of course – as a cut above it. Or two cuts above it, for that matter. Unfortunately your father, and this is what really worries me, will instinctively see it precisely the other way round. My father was a menial, Claribel.’
‘A menial? What an absurd word!’
‘It’s not an absurd idea. A ploughboy is of greater dignity than a buttons, and a navvy than a flunkey.’
‘Was your father a flunkey, Roland?’
‘He was a butler – and that’s worse. A young flunkey, or a buttons, can run away, join the army, and become a Field Marshal. A butler is fixed in his little pantry for good, rinsing the decanters and counting the spoons.’
‘Roland, this conversation is completely mad! It simply doesn’t belong to this age at all.’
‘Oh, doesn’t it?’ The butler’s son checked himself, conscious of an unduly sardonic note. ‘Shall I get you another lager and lime?’
‘No thank you, Jeeves.’ This joke came from Claribel a little uncertainly. It was only just dawning on her that Roland saw this nonsense as very serious indeed. ‘Do you have dreams,’ she asked (remembering her lover’s profession) ‘in which you are a butler yourself?’
‘No, I do not. The thing doesn’t haunt me, and I can promise not to bore you with it in future. Still, it’s a legacy aspects of which do irk me from time to time. My name, for instance.’
‘Your Christian name?’
‘Oh, that! Well, no. Roland, I believe, was the name of a hunter belonging to one of my father’s employers and much admired in the servants’ hall. No – it’s my surname. I oughtn’t to be Redpath. I ought to be Hedgepath.’
‘Hedgepath? There’s no such name – or at least there’s no such thing. There are hedgerows and footpaths and bridleways, but—’
‘It’s a rare but genuine rustic surname in Herefordshire and round about. I suppose my father thought it odd, since he made the change, it seems. I’m sensitive about Redpath, as if it was a kind of theft. How bloody irrational we can be.’
‘Yes, can’t we? And even my father, I suppose. I do think it may give him a jolt – but not more than that. Do you know what he’ll profess to be curious about? It will be whether your father was a good butler. “If the fellow was a good butler,” he’ll say, “he was a rare bird. And there’s all the more chance his son will be a good psychologist.” Mark my words, that’s how Daddy will carry it off.’
‘”Carry it off” is about right, no doubt. And he ought to be able to find out easily enough.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Oh, nothing.’ For the first time in Claribel’s experience of him Roland Redpath was suddenly confused. ‘Darling, let’s forget the whole thing for a bit. Are you sure you won’t have another drink?’
Claribel shook her head slowly. But her mind worked quite fast, and it seemed to her that there was a mystery here that ought to be cleared up at once.
‘Roland,’ she said, ‘is there something more to this than you’ve told me? I don’t mean that what you have told me is important at all, or need ever have been mentioned. But is there something else; something a little odder, which produces all this caution about my father – and that you really should, perhaps, have told me about, but haven’t?’
‘Yes, there is.’ Roland was self-possessed again, and his main disposition appeared to be to admire Claribel’s clarity. ‘My father wasn’t just anybody’s butler. He was your grandfather’s butler. It’s as absurd as that.’
If it was an absurdity it yet wasn’t, to Claribel’s mind, an absurdity to keep under one’s hat. She hated the thought of Roland’s concealing it from her during their brief courtship, and equally she hated the thought of his considering it ‘dodgy’ in relation to her parents. Perhaps it was – just a little. But, even so, Roland ought not to have hesitated to present his small piece of family history to them in a perfectly matter-of-fact way. There was something almost servile in an impulse to be prudent and contriving about disclosing such a thing.
But Claribel was her father’s daughter, and alert to the danger of allowing injustices or even petty unfairness to harbour in the mind. The notion that Roland’s circumspection represented a kind of hereditary taint – equating him, in fact, with a groom who awaits a favourable moment before disclosing that he has neglected a horse – would be an aberration more shocking than she had ever fallen into before. Roland was quite blameless in being a little hesitant before the situation in which he found himself. Marrying into the family in which your father has been a servant can’t be at all common, and when it does happen it is probably the consequence of some antecedent sexual misconduct. It was perfectly sensible in Roland to feel that he must mind his step.
Claribel didn’t at all mean, however, to do this herself. She regarded the ball as now being in her court – she had told Roland so at once – and she proposed to bang it straight back over the net. She did so the following morning at breakfast – sitting between her parents and while passing her mother the toast. She had become engaged to Roland Redpath and intended that the marriage should take place quite soon. When he returned to his provincial university in a few days’ time she was going to go with him and they’d look for a house. And a curious fact had turned up. Roland’s father’s original name had been Hedgepath, not Redpath. And he had been Grandad’s butler long ago. Perhaps Daddy remembered him.
This was all a shade bald, and might have produced a silence longer than it did. Lady Balmayne would have spoken at once had she not felt able to rely on her husband’s doing so with only the briefest pause.
‘Clarrie, dear,’ Sir Bernard said, ‘we have been expecting this, so it’s no surprise and we are very happy about it. We have seen enough of Roland to know that he’s an excellent young man, and I don’t doubt that his father was an excellent butler. But my memory of the senior Redpath, or Hedgepath, is quite vague. His being with the family was, as you say, a long time ago. Which is perhaps just as well, on the whole.’
‘Just as well, Daddy?’
‘Come, come, Clarrie – be a wise girl. It would be a little awkward if we were grand enough to have a butler ourselves still, and the senior Mr Hedgepath was standing behind my chair at this moment.’
Claribel felt that this thought, although just, need not have been so soon obtruded. But she had been right to take the bull by the horns. Roland was accepted, and all would be well. It would be unfair – again she was alert to this – to say that her father had capitulated before adroit shock tactics. He meant what he said, or at least he hoped that he did. And although her mother was quietly weeping, that was just one of her generation’s curious forms of behaviour. After a great deal of marriage, Lady Balmayne was really contriving to be overjoyed that her daughter was taking on the same stiff assignment.
So now there were kisses, and some rather random talk about plans, and then Claribel was sent to the telephone to find out whether Roland would come to dinner. It was with a slight trepidation that she picked up the receiver. She had of course told Roland what she was going to do, but now she wondered whether she had been right to jump the gun. Roland, she suspected, had been building up in his mind the pattern of a little confrontation scene with her father, and perhaps his male vanity would be offended that she had done the job herself. She knew about male vanity, having frequently bumped up against it in her brother Ronnie and been aware of its subtler operation in her father from time to time. But Roland reacted very favourably to her news. In fact he sounded uncommonly grateful and relieved. He would certainly come to dinner. But meantime Claribel must join him immediately. They would find the right shop and buy an engagement ring.
‘Why don’t men wear engagement rings?’ Claribel demanded. She was extremely happy, and wanted to talk nonsense to Roland at once.
‘They just don’t. It isn’t the custom.’
‘What a feeble reply from a psychologist! They do wear wedding- rings now, and they didn’t use to.’
‘Quite a lot do. I shall.’
‘But not an engagement ring? One that’s all dainty little diamonds?’
‘If you order me to, I’ll do it without turning a hair. But in all right-thinking minds dark suspicions will be aroused.’
‘You mean it must be a cigarette-lighter, or a barometer, or something like that?’
‘Gold cuff-links, darling. They’re more personal, and just the same as a ring. The bonding symbolism inheres equally in both.’
‘Roland, shall I ever keep up with you? The depth of your thought!’
‘It won’t be necessary. Now, stop chattering, woman, and catch the next bus.’
He had never addressed her as ‘woman’ before. She thought it quite enchanting.
Later that morning, and when they were alone together, Sir Bernard and Lady Balmayne held a less light-hearted colloquy.
‘I’m sure it’s perfectly all right,’ Sir Bernard said. ‘Only we must expect from time to time—well, little things like this. Obscure birth, indifferent breeding: they’re bound to show up now and again, wouldn’t you say? It would be unfair, it would be quite ungenerous, to expect otherwise.’
‘Yes, dear. But just what little thing like this?’
‘The chap’s having left it to Clarrie. He ought to have tackled me himself. Strictly speaking, that is. Instinct of a gentleman, and so forth. I don’t say it’s important. In fact, I’m saying there will be a number of things we shall be well advised to think of as quite trivial.’
‘Yes, Bernard, I’m sure that must be so. But perhaps Roland did fully intend to speak to you himself, only Claribel was a little precipitate.’
‘I very much doubt it. He has had plenty of time.’
‘He would take his time, Bernard. Because he’d think of interviewing you in quite a formal way. A man inclines to be formal if his manners have come to him rather late.’
‘Ah, that’s true! Yes.’ Sir Bernard quite brightened at this sage remark.
‘And we must be glad that Roland has overcome his disadvantages so well. It must partly be a matter of high intelligence. But he must be sensitive to quite little things – social nuances, you know. He always pleases me. And you may count your own blessings, dear.’ Lady Balmayne had judged it time to be firm. ‘He’s not a man you would hesitate to take into your club, is he?’
‘Good heavens, no! Sometimes, Mary, you seem to have the weirdest ideas about me.’
‘Then there you are. And we had better forget all this business about Mr Hedgepath the butler.’
‘Well, now, that brings me to a funny thing. The name rings a faint bell with me, but I simply remember nothing at all about a butler called Hedgepath. I can’t see him in my mind’s eye, or anything of that kind. And it even occurs to me that his son may find that offensive. It won’t be flattering to have to say I can’t recall a confounded thing about his father. A butler is normally quite somebody in a household, after all – and positively a figure of awe to its children. So the chronology of the thing puzzles me. I must get it sorted out.’
‘I don’t think, Bernard, that Roland will very much want to have chats about his father. And I do think he might be offended if he formed the impression that you were poking around in his family’s past.’
‘My dear Mary, am I likely to do that? Of course Mrs Corler is almost sure to know, and I shall be going to see her quite soon, in any case. Yes, I’ll ask Mrs Corler about Hedgepath.’
When Roland came to dinner all went as well as Claribel could have hoped. Ronnie was away from home for a few days, so there was just the old couple and the young. And the young couple were obviously so happy that their elders warmed to them. Sir Bernard had arranged with his wife that, although the occasion was so very domestic, he and Roland should remain for a little at the dinner table after mother and daughter withdrew. The resulting conversation was entirely friendly. Contrary to Lady Balmayne’s expectation, the young man actually introduced the subject of his family history himself. Not much, it was true, emerged, and Sir Bernard was careful to ask few questions. What did become clear was that Roland knew little about Raymond Balmayne or his household, for the simple reason that he had been born several years after his father had left the Balmayne service. In fact Horace Hedgepath could have been at Cray Hall only for a few years all told, and as a man comparatively young for his position there. And this must have been during a period at which the future Sir Bernard had been first in the army and then studying architecture abroad – years, in fact, in which he had seldom been with his parents except in their London house. He must have heard about the young butler down at Cray, and even seen him and talked to him from time to time. But nothing except a vague memory of the man’s name had stuck in his head.
Sir Bernard again felt that there was perhaps something slightly injurious about this blank in his mind. He was, indeed, relieved that his future son-in-law’s connection with the Balmayne family was so tenuous, was in fact non-existent. But he felt that he must offer some explanation of his ignorance.
‘I was studying hard in Munich,’ he said, ‘and for some years was a bit vague about affairs at home. Moreover, and to tell you the truth, Roland, I hadn’t been getting on too well with my father. My respect for him never faltered – but that quite common kind of father-and-son friction must have been there. I dare say you can recall something of the sort yourself.’
‘Well, no—I can’t, as a matter of fact. My father died when I was three. I was never given more than scraps of information about him. The business of his having been your father’s man came to me only by chance from an aunt.’
‘Is that so? Well, well!’ It is possible that this additional piece of information was satisfactory to Sir Bernard in its way. It seemed further to distance what might be called the whole buttling connection. ‘The trouble didn’t last with me, of course. My father and I became great friends again later on, and I shall always account him as the prime agent in forming my character, such as it is. But those German years of mine coincided with a period of considerable strain in his career, and perhaps he became a little distanced from all of us.’
This exchange of confidence, although circumspect and slender, was to the satisfaction of both men, and hard upon it they rose and returned to the drawing-room. They were not, they probably felt, ever going to be very intimately acquainted, but a reasonable basis of understanding had been established between them. It was a point at which Sir Bernard would have done well to take his wife’s advice and leave the long dead Horace Hedgepath in his near oblivion. That he failed to do so may be seen to some extent as a matter of bad luck. Had Mrs Corler passed from his ken long before, it is doubtful whether he would deliberately have sought her out for the somewhat invidious purpose of checking up on the antecedents of a prospective son-in-law. As it was, he owned the entirely laudable habit of paying regular visits to this ancient retainer of the family, treating her much as if she had been his nurse, although her actual position had been for many years that of his parents’ housekeeper. It may be that there was a small element of vanity in Sir Bernard’s thus maintaining contact with a person recalling the consequence and material prosperity which his father had won. But he was doing no more than act as his father would have acted – a decent regard for servants retired after long service having been in Raymond Balmayne’s view among the minor obligations of life.
Mrs Corler was in no degree a financial liability, since Raymond (to whom she had been singularly devoted) had bought her an annuity when she left his employment. So Sir Bernard when he visited her two or three times a year was able simply to take along a suitable present chosen by his wife: a shawl or bed-jacket, perhaps, or alternatively some delicacy judged suitable for degustation in extreme old age. Each Christmas, however, Sir Bernard departed from this rule, sending the old lady a ten-pound note, together with a card saying ‘With gratitude and best wishes from the entire Balmayne family’.
The recipient of these bounties lived in Pimlico, in the attic quarters of a small house owned by an elderly married niece. Although in no sense enjoying anything that could be called this niece’s services, Mrs Corler was felt to be fortunately placed, since were anything to go seriously ‘wrong’ it was probable that the circumstance would be remarked within twenty-four hours or so and some appropriate measure taken. Meanwhile Mrs Corler did for herself and her cat; took an interest in the Royal Family, sensational crime and the Nine o’Clock News; and was as yet free from culpable accident with her gas fire or her electric kettle. Sir Bernard had on several occasions expressed his willingness to make arrangements for her transfer into institutional care. But this had not been well received, and he had come to judge that matters were best left as they were.
On the present occasion he took a taxi to Pimlico, with an unusually bulky present, a quilted dressing-gown, in a box on the seat beside him. He was not at all easy about his mission – about, that is, the particular aspect of this routine visit to which the term could be attached. Perhaps he would do well to drop it out of the programme. Was there not something demeaning in the proposal to extract from one former servant information about another – whose son was going to marry one’s daughter? There quite clamantly was! Sir Bernard actually wondered at himself, and from this wonderment a small and fresh perception grew. To that faint bell which the name ‘Hedgepath’ sounded in his head, some unsatisfactory – or even sinister – timbre attached. Had he then suppressed some actively displeasing memory in the fashion that Roland Redpath’s colleagues were fond of talking about, or had he sensed a withholding from him of some unfavourable, if unimportant, information concerning the man which it would have been natural for him to receive? Something of the sort, although he had no idea what, must be prompting his present behaviour.
He had no idea what. But then suddenly, and as his taxi swung into Lupus Street, he had. Very definitely he had. Lupus . . . Lopez: perhaps the association of these names gave a fresh jolt to his obstinate sense of the inconveniences that may lurk within so untoward a parentage as Roland Redpath’s. Hadn’t some burglary taken place during the period about which he felt himself to be imperfectly informed? He could now remember his father referring to it, although briefly, as having been quite a serious affair. All the silver – and there was a lot of it – had been taken from Cray, and so had a good many other valuables as well. Moreover, unless he had got the story wrong, none of the booty had ever been recovered. His father, characteristically, had made no tragedy out of it; the firm was beginning notably to prosper, and everything was no doubt soon replaced with interest. But wasn’t it possible that the theft had been what the police call an inside job? As he asked himself this question, Sir Bernard admitted to his dismayed consciousness a further possibility that followed upon this one. It could only be for two or three years that the man Hedgepath had been his father’s butler, and for a fairly young man to leave such good service so soon was surely something out of the way. And he had changed his name!
The fellow had changed his name to that which the Balmaynes’ prospective son-in-law now bore. Confronted by this, Sir Bernard experienced a strong revulsion of feeling. He almost rapped on the glass in front of him and instructed the taxi driver to turn back. Wasn’t he in danger of discovering about Hedgepath something criminal that Hedgepath’s own son possibly didn’t know? Indeed, something that he certainly didn’t know. For, consulting his sense of the young man, Sir Bernard saw that just this must be the case. Roland, indeed, had a little hung back about his parentage. But if such a grim fact as had now to be suspected harboured in the situation, Roland would have concealed it neither from Claribel nor from her parents. He was not that sort of man.
So here was a dreadful situation developing – and it wasn’t one to which he could simply call a halt. A dishonest servant was something beyond the pale. It might be irrational and wrong, but he would never himself feel comfortable about his daughter’s husband if this suspicion inspissated the uncomfortableness of his lowly birth. And it might be a suspicion merely. This meant that, having started it, he owed it to both Roland and Claribel to determine the truth.
The taxi had turned towards the river and was approaching the half-derelict little street, ignored by developers, humbly neighbouring Dolphin Square. He had to make up his mind, and it seemed to him that he must persevere with Mrs Corler, distasteful as this seemed. She was his only ready means to acquainting himself with the small obscure domestic event which had assumed such shocking proportions in his mind. But he rather hoped that Mrs Corler would recall nothing material about Hedgepath. It would quite probably be so. Her memory, as often in people of great age, was frequently vivid but as frequently patchy. The period she particularly liked to dwell upon was that of Bernard Balmayne’s boyhood, which coincided with the earlier years of her occupying a station of responsibility and even grandeur at Cray. She hadn’t, of course, been what was later to be termed a ‘working’ housekeeper, but neither had she been at the start ‘superior’ in any very definite way, let alone a member of the tribe of gentlewomen in reduced circumstances. She had worked her way up (as her employer, indeed, had done). Since retiring she had, it could not be denied, a little slithered down again, and you might never have guessed that she had once found no difficulty in controlling flighty housemaids, or even in holding the cook herself at a respectful distance. Sir Bernard had lately learnt, with high indignation, that the niece downstairs was disposed to regard her aunt as ‘common’.
What Mrs Corler remembered, then, was what might be called the period of her apogee, and she had comparatively little to say of the years in which Master Bernard was ‘Master’ no longer, and had become first a ‘varsity’ man and then largely an absentee and a citizen of the world. Moreover she had an odd touchiness at times, and would obstinately refuse to recall matters which were plainly not really eluding her memory. Sir Bernard, as he rang the door-bell to gain admittance from Mrs Corler’s snobbish relative, indicted himself of considerable confusion of mind in face of all this. He seemed to be proposing to conduct a catechism to which he hoped to receive no answer. It wouldn’t do; he must get his purpose clear before entering the old woman’s presence. And to this he was at once assisted, as it turned out, by Mrs Peglin. Mrs Peglin was the niece, and she claimed at one time to have held some connection with the legitimate stage. She had at least carried away from this an extravagantly accented speech and an addiction to what must be thought of as grease-paint rather than mere cosmetic aid. Her figure was flabby and shapeless but her features were cragged and deeply lined; her hair was a dirty chaos and nothing else. Much more, if it were useful, could be said in dispraise of Mrs Peglin’s person, and Sir Bernard disliked it only less than he did her personality. He thought her a horrible old gin-sodden wretch, although in fact she was probably no more than an inadequate and defeated woman perpetually on the verge of cracking up. As on numerous previous occasions, Sir Bernard told himself that Mrs Corler ought not to be even remotely in the charge of such a creature, and that he was much to blame for not having taken some firm action in the matter long ago. Nor ought he to have failed to consider how much Mrs Corler’s annuity from his father had probably been hit by inflation.
His immediate reaction now, however, was rather different and not particularly logical. Here was what used to be called low life, and he would not, when within its miasma, put on a low turn himself. To say that it was only fair to Roland Redpath to discover whether or not his father had been a scoundrel was, if not humbug, at least sheer muddle. Roland’s father was Roland’s business, and he himself ought to keep out of it. During this brief visit to his father’s former housekeeper he would make no reference whatever to his father’s deceased butler.
The sense that this was an oddly belated resolution, and that he had betrayed himself into a marked infirmity of purpose, didn’t improve Sir Bernard’s manner with Mrs Peglin. He even asked her – very absurdly – whether Mrs Corler was at home. But this expression – belonging, as it did, to high rather than low life – didn’t offend a lady who recalled herself as an ornament of the West End stage, and she waved her hand towards her narrow dusty staircase with the air of a court chamberlain according the grande entrée to a person only of lesser consequence than himself.
‘She never goes out,’ she said, ‘despite my utmost endeavours when it’s a nice day. It would do her good. It would freshen her up – a thing needful to my mind, Sir Bernard. She may be nigh losing the use of her feet, for aught I know.’ Mrs Peglin’s idiom had always been a little peculiar, perhaps as bearing traces of ‘period’ parts she had sustained in youth. ‘The shadows lengthen and the scene darkens – which is only the sad legacy of eld, after all.’
‘No doubt it is, Mrs Peglin. But you will recall that I have particularly asked to be informed should there be any marked change in your aunt’s health. Please remember that.’
‘Go up and look for yourself.’ Mrs Peglin did now show some sign of taking umbrage at this stiff note. ‘Her physician has attended her, and at my own behest. On account of her rambling chiefly, although incontinence looms ahead. We end as running brooks, do we not? But it’s her speech at present. She prattles like a shallow stream over the pebbles. “Confabulation” is what the doctor says.’
‘Does he, indeed?’ Sir Bernard was not quite sure of the force of this word when used in a technical sense, but reflected that it must be familiar to Roland. If it indicated, as he conjectured, persistent and pointless fibbing, it was just as well that he had abandoned the thought of putting Mrs Corler in a notional witness-box. ‘I’ll go straight up,’ he added abruptly. And he gave Mrs Peglin a nod more dismissive than was wholly accordant with the fact that he was standing in that lady’s hall.
The staircase was lined with photographs of male and female theatrical celebrities of a former age, each stepped a little above the last, so that one felt one ought to be moving past them on an escalator. All bore the appearance of signatures and even affectionate messages, but these had already been printed on them when they left the shop. Sir Bernard doubted whether there was any longer a lively trade in such naïve deceptions; they were as outmoded as horse-brasses and bogus warming-pans in a pub. Mrs Peglin belonged to a discarded age, and Mrs Corler to an age before that. Mrs Corler must be nearly ninety, and entitled to confabulate if she wanted to. Sir Bernard had probably been insufficiently alert to degenerative processes going on in her during the last few years. It was something that made the idea of interrogating her additionally inapposite. He would simply hand over his gift, make kindly inquiries and remarks, and come away.
Her little living-room (it was both parlour and kitchen, although her dwelling did run to a bedroom as well) was unchanged since his last visit – only perhaps a trifle stuffier, as Mrs Peglin had hinted. The gas fire, economically constructed so as to operate either on two little burners or on four, produced an innocent smell, not to be taken exception of. There was also a fish-like smell which was disturbing until one noticed, strung up across the closed window like gardening gloves put to dry, a couple of kippers that had probably been forgotten about. Before the fire Mrs Corler’s cat sat on the mat, surrounded by the heads, tails and vertebrae of further fish. Sir Bernard had to make no additional inventory, nor recall in detail the starched and chintzy propriety of the housekeeper’s room at Cray, in order to conjure up reflections of the tempus ferox, tempus edax order. He was given little time, however, for this indulgence, since Mrs Corler had instantly risen from her chair to greet him. She had risen and then at once appeared to stumble, so that Sir Bernard started forward to save her, and even the cat was alarmed. But – was it possible? – what Mrs Corler had been minded to contrive was a curtsy. She had always – and even then it had been an antique usage – performed this reverence before either of Sir Bernard’s parents, but certainly not before the younger members of the family. She must be confusing father and son now. So strong was her visitor’s persuasion of this that he involuntarily exclaimed ‘I’m Sir Bernard,’ before realising the mild absurdity of the statement.
‘I’m very much honoured, Master Bernard, I’m sure.’ Mrs Corler invariably produced these words, and invariably accompanied them with a gesture of restrained elegance in the direction of a chair. It was Sir Bernard’s mother’s gesture, and it always touched him on that account.
‘I hope you’re feeling fit, Mrs Corler,’ he said. (Honesty forbad ‘I’m delighted to see you looking so well’.) ‘And I’ve brought you a small present which my wife and I hope you’ll like.’
The quilted dressing-gown was a success. Mrs Corler, although too refined to don such a garment even over day-clothes in the presence of a gentleman, was certain that it was what she had desired for a long time; prompted to an enhanced hospitality by the gift, she turned on the two additional jets on the gas fire and made proposals for brewing tea. But presently the kettle was steaming away disregarded, the old lady having discovered a great deal it was incumbent upon her to say. Sir Bernard couldn’t remember her ever having been so talkative before. Disconnected fragments of Balmayne family history seemed endlessly at her command, and she recounted them with a surprising vividness but in a complete chronological confusion. It was some time before Sir Bernard realised that what he was listening to was matter and impertinency mixed, although the effect was not so apocalyptic as in King Lear’s case. It was quite amiably for the most part, indeed, that Mrs Corler was making things up, and her motive was perhaps a harmless desire – shoved into this shabby corner as she was in disregarded age – to render herself interesting to a distinguished visitor. Probably, Sir Bernard thought, that was what confabulation was. So he listened to the old creature patiently enough, although at times his mind wandered. He felt relaxed and not a little pleased with himself, if the truth be told. He had come to a wise and honourable decision, worthy of his father, in deciding not to pump Mrs Corler about her long-since deceased fellow-servant, Hedgepath later Redpath.
‘My little niece read it to me out of the newspaper,’ he suddenly heard Mrs Corler say.
‘I beg your pardon?’ It was a moment before Sir Bernard realised that ‘my little niece’ must be Mrs Corler’s rather grand way of referring to Mrs Peglin downstairs. But what the woman had read out of the newspaper had escaped him entirely.
‘Miss Claribel’s engagement, Master Bernard. I hope she has found a nice young gentleman, fully worthy of her, and proper to enter into your own family in a manner of speaking, sir. A Mr Redpath, my little niece read out.’
‘Yes, Roland Redpath. An excellent fellow, I am glad to say, Mrs Corler.’ It was astonishing, Sir Bernard thought, how the old soul had suddenly come bang up to date. It was also – but how irrational this was! – a shade alarming.
‘And what is Mr Hedgepath’s profession, sir?’
‘Not Hedgepath – Redpath.’ Sir Bernard’s eyes had rounded on Mrs Corler. It was almost as if she were threatening to reveal herself as endowed with some sinister and sibylline power. ‘He’s a psychologist – a kind of scientist, that is.’
‘The one name must have reminded me of the other,’ Mrs Corler said – so prosaically that she at once seemed no more than a commonplace old woman again. ‘You’ll remember Hedgepath, Master Bernard?’
‘Barely, if at all.’ Sir Bernard got to his feet with some notion of taking his leave at once. Perhaps only his sense of the ludicrous nature of this reversal prevented him. He had resolved not to pursue Mrs Corler with Hedgepath. Now she seemed to be showing every sign of pursuing him.
‘A regular rascal, Mr Hedgepath was.’ Mrs Corler appeared not to have noticed her visitor’s desire to depart. ‘But at least they put him where he deserved.’
‘Do you mean he went to gaol?’ This was an unnecessary question. Sir Bernard knew very well that Mrs Corler meant just that. Out of the blue, his worst fear had been confirmed. His daughter was going to marry the son of a convicted criminal! ‘It was over the burglary?’ he added weakly.
‘Of course it was over the burglary.’ Mrs Corler had been surprised by this question. ‘You were in foreign parts at the time, I remember. But your father must have told you all about it.’
‘Very little, as a matter of fact.’
‘Well, he did say he wanted no great sensation made, and the whole thing soon forgotten about. I believe he was quite glad that Hedgepath got off lightly. It was because they said he was a minor figure – a dupe, they said – who supposed he was only helping with some petty theft. He was out in two or three years, I believe. But I never saw him again.’
‘It may have been just as well.’ This was an almost meaningless remark, and witnessed to the extent of Sir Bernard’s perturbation. There could surely be no question of Mrs Corler romancing now, for her speech was coherent and her manner matter-of-fact.
‘Only I did hear that he had changed his name, and so got into respectable service again. Would you know about that, sir?’
‘No, nothing at all.’ It was with astonishment that Sir Bernard Balmayne heard himself thus utter a blank lie to a faithful old family retainer.’ I am afraid that I must leave you now, Mrs Corler. Unfortunately I have an appointment with a client.’
‘You must be a busy man, I’m sure, Master Bernard. And that’s just as your father was. But it was wonderful how, with all those great concerns on his hands, he could take thought about everything at Cray. Like that time with the silver and all those other valuable things.’
‘What time, Mrs Corler?’ It seemed to Sir Bernard that the old woman must be beginning to ramble again. But he asked this question patiently enough. In fact he sat down again. His agitation was subsiding. He now knew the worst about Roland Redpath’s father, and it was knowledge he must learn to put up with. There seemed no reason why he should ever share it with anyone. ‘Do you mean,’ he added suddenly, ‘the time of the burglary?’
‘There we were, you see, just the master and myself, hard at work all through the small hours.’ Mrs Corler had ignored Sir Bernard’s question as one to which an obvious reply need not be given. ‘The thieves had been surprised or alarmed, you see, and had got away with very little. And, of course, only Hedgepath was ever caught. I can see the master now.’ Mrs Corler paused in order to emit, quite suddenly, a shrill cackle of laughter such as Sir Bernard had never heard from her before. It was so senile in suggestion that he had to return to the view that nothing she said was to be relied upon in the slightest degree. ‘I can see him now,’ she repeated, ‘the most handsome man in England, to my mind—’
‘My father?’ Sir Bernard asked, momentarily surprised as well as bewildered. It had never occurred to him that Mrs Corler’s devotion to her employer might have included a strong romantic component.
‘Of course. There he was, working as hard and carefully with newspaper and straw and the like as if everything had been crystal, and himself from Pickfords or Carter Patterson.’
‘Good heavens, Mrs Corler! Whatever are you talking about?’
‘He didn’t trust the police, he said. Not even to protect Cray from another and more successful burglary straight away.’
‘This—this nocturnal activity you shared with my father was just after Hedgepath and his accomplices had made their attempt? I simply don’t understand you in the least, Mrs Corler.’ Sir Bernard was shocked by the dismay in his own voice. ‘What were the police saying about it all?’
‘I don’t know.’ Mrs Corler was momentarily doubtful. ‘I think they mayn’t have been called in until the morning. We’d got everything out to the barn by then, ready for the master to take to his bank later. Of course we had to keep quiet about it, he said – himself and me. Otherwise there might be a misunderstanding by the insurance company.’
‘I see.’
This was true. Sir Bernard could scarcely believe that he saw. But he did.
‘Mrs Corler,’ he asked, ‘have you ever told this story to anybody else?’
‘No.’
‘Not even to your niece, Mrs Peglin?’
‘Certainly not, sir. But I remember it well enough. The master ended in such high spirits, you see. He even made a joke before sending me off to bed.’
‘A joke?’
‘He said, “Corler helps to turn the corner”. I didn’t understand it, sir. But the master did seem to find it very funny.’
Sir Bernard Balmayne spent a night as sleepless as that which Mrs Corler had called to mind – or had invented. The crux of the matter lay there. She was a dotty old creature and utterly unreliable. A good deal that she had said earlier in that dreadful interview had been demonstrable fabrication – and some of it of a sensational sort. But that purported joke of his father’s carried a horrible suggestion of authenticity, and he doubted whether the decayed mind of Mrs Corler could have made it up. Moreover the story, fantastic though it was, seemed coherent in its way – and to cohere with other things. Raymond Balmayne had always taken risks, and they had sometimes left him with awkward corners to turn quite late in his career. It was conceivable that what the insurance company had paid out, together with some subsequent criminal trafficking in the spoils of Cray, had provided a bridge which, although comparatively slender, had carried him safely over a financial chasm.
But it was all in doubt. That, surely, was the truly terrible thing. He had been telling himself that he couldn’t live comfortably with an uncertainty as to whether his daughter’s husband was the son of a crook. Now here was the same uncertainty about his own heredity!
What could he do about it? What could he do about it without starting a scandal that would be only the more intolerable if it turned out to be wholly unfounded: the mere fantasy of a crazed old servant? His only course, he saw, was to sound Mrs Corler again – and then perhaps, in the most confidential fashion, bring in physicians who could assess her state of mind. As preliminary action, indeed, this was his only feasible course.
He was in Pimlico once more before noon. For some reason there was a little knot of idle persons staring up at the house from the other side of the street. Suddenly full of a wild misgiving, he rang the door-bell violently, and was confronted by Mrs Peglin at once.
‘Can I see Mrs Corler?’ he demanded abruptly.
‘That, Sir Bernard, you cannot.’ A sense of high drama clearly possessed this beastly woman. ‘The final curtain has fallen on that blameless life. My poor aunt has passed away.’
Sir Bernard stared at Mrs Peglin unbelievingly. He felt a little dizzy. Was it possible that the excitement of her yesterday’s disclosure had been too much for the aged housekeeper and that she had failed to survive it?
‘Dead?’ he said.
‘It was that dressing-gown, Sir Bernard. She went too near the gas fire in it. The doctor from the police says it must have been all over within a minute. We must be thankful that no foul play can be suspected.’
So Sir Bernard was never to know. Without danger of publicity impossible to contemplate, there was nothing he could do. He had to live with the doubt, and he lived with it alone – saying not a word even to his wife. Claribel’s wedding took place quite soon. Roland Redpath (who clearly had never heard of his father’s felonious behaviour) had been modestly dissimulating the fact that he was a very up-and-coming young man indeed. In fact he knew that he was about to be appointed to a Chair at Cambridge, and that no house in a provincial wilderness would be required. So quickly did all this happen and transpire that the Balmaynes were still involved with The Prime Minister when the couple returned from their honeymoon. There were several chapters to go before Ferdinand Lopez, that unspeakable son of an unknown Portuguese father, should precipitate himself under a train.