For twenty-four hours Mungo fought a losing battle with himself over Leonard Sedley’s challenge. To use the telephone to check up on Ian as one might do on a faithless marriage-partner seemed wholly horrid; seemed the sort of treachery one would never redeem. For hours he sat in front of his typewriter and the beastly half-baked concoction he was calling a novel, without the ability to tap so much as a single key. It was a paralysis not remotely of the common inspiration-seeking, pen-chewing order. It was something outside his experience. So much was it this that it frightened him.
He went doggedly up to Mallachie to dine. What Sedley had been sent to him to say – as distinct from what Sedley had gone on to say off his own bat – would, he supposed, have to be referred to by Lord Brightmony. Uncle and illegitimate nephew (if that was the way such a relationship was expressed) would surely be obliged, even if reticently and without fuss, to join in some acknowledgement of what was now the admitted kinship.
But Lord Brightmony said nothing to the point. He was even more reserved than usual, and of this Mungo could think of only one explanation. Sedley’s second shot (for it had come to feel very much like that) had now been fired at Lord Brightmony too. Sedley had owned up to having kept a secret of Douglas Cardower’s that he ought not to have kept; that it was immoral to keep now that this young man calling himself Mungo Lockhart had been established as being who he was. Lord Brightmony, in fact, had before him the same facer that Ian had.
It was a situation that contrived to be at once hateful and absurd. Mungo’s impulse was to speak out about it himself, and perhaps all that prevented him was the constant presence of Father Balietti. Mungo imagined – but he was getting into a state in which imagining things was easy – that Balietti’s manner towards himself had modulated through deference into obsequiousness. Perhaps the big news had been broken to him too, and he was casting a provident eye ahead. As for Sedley, he was no help at all. Sedley was in a queer sort of abstraction which reminded Mungo, most bizarrely, of Mungo Lockhart when ‘stuck’ before his typewriter – confronting a story which just wasn’t going to come out. Perhaps this regularly happened to Sedley. He had, after all, intimated to Mungo that he was engaged in labours of literary composition still.
So Mungo sat at table with these three elderly men and felt very alien to them indeed. With Ian gone, the world to which they all in one way or another belonged was no longer the world he had entered quite naturally and acclimatised himself in. It was a remote world, a long, long way from Forres and Easter Fintry.
But what if it was all true? What if improbability piled upon improbability was true? It would mean that absurdity piled upon absurdity was equally true: that he was the Hon. Mungo Cardower; that he would become Mungo Cardower, Viscount Brightmony; that he would become the Marquis of Auldearn, and end his days prowling around Bamberton Court in carpet slippers. These concepts had no reality. They were as absurd as dreams. It would take more than parliament, it would take more than the Lord Lyon King of Arms and the Scottish Court of Chivalry to chivvy him out of his own honest identity.
This last jingle cheered up Mungo’s word-mongering soul for perhaps as much as thirty seconds. Then he became so gloomy that there was nothing for it but to excuse himself immediately after dinner, and get back to the cottage. Making his way there through the deepening dusk, it occurred to him that it was a gloom very like Ian’s sudden glooms. First cousins, he supposed, might well share some temperamental affinities. But he now very much didn’t want to be Ian’s cousin – whether first, second, third, or several times removed. Not on either one side of a blanket or the other.
He could ring up Ian, he told himself next day, not to find out whether Ian was where he had said he was going to be, but simply to contact him and let him know there was something they must talk about. This was sophistry. It eventually took Mungo to the telephone all the same.
He spoke to a manservant, who judged that Mr Cardower was not among the guests. But perhaps he was expected. Mr D’Arcy-Drelincourt would know. Mr D’Arcy-Drelincourt (who, to Mungo’s present mood, sounded irksomely upper-class) said No, Ian Cardower wasn’t with them at present. No, he hadn’t been expected, nor, alas, was he expected in any immediate future. It would, of course, be extremely jolly if he turned up. Mr D’Arcy- Drelincourt, who by this time perhaps scented a little more in the enquiry than appeared, offered one or two further tactful remarks, and rang off.
Mungo, putting down the receiver on his own part, sought relief in uttering obscene words aloud. They weren’t of the slightest help. He had spied on Ian. He had spied on Ian and had, in a sense, found him out. It was an action belonging to a wholly hideous world. It was like opening a man’s letters and getting some disreputable hold on him.
But these were extravagant thoughts, and Mungo detected them as such. He wasn’t doing too well, his mind wasn’t doing too well, let alone his sense of what was honourable between friends. He needed help. Only a few hours before, he’d have said that in almost any conceivable exigency the help he’d want would be Ian’s. Perhaps – he felt dimly – that was the true answer now. But it wasn’t a practicable answer, and he’d better think again. At this point sanity abruptly returned to Mungo. He passed from a state of extreme bewilderment and confusion to one dominated by a single clear conviction. He ought to go and see Lord Auldearn.
Lord Auldearn was the head of the family. It was a family, indeed, that Mungo had not the slightest intention of allowing himself to be publicly declared to belong to. But that, somehow, made no difference. It was to Lord Auldearn he ought to go.
He had done his telephoning from the Castle; he went in search of the Castle’s owner now. It was an hour at which Lord Brightmony was liable to have withdrawn for the purpose of private devotion in the chapel, but in fact he was pacing up and down a verandah in the late afternoon sun, with some work of edification open in his hands. Leonard Sedley was sitting nearby, indulging himself in the worldly distraction of a game of patience. Mungo didn’t waste words.
‘Sir, I’ve been thinking over something very strange which
Mr Sedley has talked to me about – I believe with your approval.’
‘Ah, yes.’ Lord Brightmony closed his book, and he and Sedley exchanged a swift glance which seemed to Mungo, in his keyed-up state, like that of two crooks in a crime-film. ‘I have been corresponding both with my father and my brother Robert – and consulting Leonard, who is my very old friend. It was Robert who first had a groping perception of the truth. It is a truth which we have all come to feel should be acknowledged, although of course no breath of it would pass beyond the family except with your own express consent. I don’t think I can say more, Mungo, except that we have all formed an affectionate regard for you.’
‘Thank you very much.’ Having said this, Mungo wasted no words. ‘I’ve decided to go and see Lord Auldearn. Can you tell me, please, if he is at Bamberton?’
‘My father is almost certainly at Bamberton. He never moves from the place.’ If Mungo’s announcement had taken Lord Brightmony a little aback, he was now indicating by his manner that he acknowledged its propriety.
‘Then I shall go this evening – if I can be in Inverness in time for the night train. Is that possible, do you think?’
‘If no time is wasted, I imagine it is,’ Sedley said. He had given Mungo a curiously speculative glance, but seemed neither surprised nor perturbed. ‘I tell you what, Mungo. I’ll drive you there myself. And we’ll stop at the cottage for anything you may want for a night or two. That way, we’ll have plenty of time.’
Mungo found himself not too keen on this, but he couldn’t refuse. He very much wanted to get clear of Mallachie with speed. It was even possible that the attraction of Bamberton was in part a matter of its being six hundred miles away.
‘Then so it had better be.’ Lord Brightmony nodded composedly. ‘But you must have a sleeper, Mungo. Have you enough money? I can find you plenty in a few moments.’
‘Thank you, I’ll manage.’ Mungo spoke stiffly, remembering that he still had time to collect cash from a post office. Then he realised that Lord Brightmony had spoken precisely with the unconsidered helpfulness of an uncle to a nephew. ‘But thank you very much, indeed,’ he added. ‘It’s awfully kind of you, and I hope I’m not being uncivil, rushing away like this.’
To this Lord Brightmony returned no more than a gentle shake of the head. It was almost as if what Mungo had said – or the tone in which he had said it – had afforded this sombre person pleasure. Sedley, it confusedly came to Mungo, could surely not after all have communicated to him the startling suggestion that the harmless illegitimate boy might not be illegitimate at all. The elder Cardowers might have been so attached to the reprehensible Douglas that they were prepared to be benevolently disposed to what the eighteenth century would have called one of his by-blows. But it was inconceivable that even Lord Brightmony, although he was bound, in any event, to become Lord Auldearn if he survived his father, could view with kindness a youth who might occasion a scandalous and sensational overthrow of the settled expectations of the family.
‘You will come back to us,’ Lord Brightmony said with sudden authority. ‘You and Ian will come back to us, I hope, until Oxford requires your presence.’ And Lord Brightmony shook hands.
‘Well, well,’ Sedley said to Mungo as he opened the door of his car. ‘So you didn’t run Ian to earth?’
‘At those D’Arcy-Drelincourts? No, he hasn’t been there, and they don’t expect him.’ Mungo spoke shortly. He was hoping for not too much conversation with Sedley between Mallachie and Inverness. But he clearly couldn’t be too abrupt with somebody who was taking a good deal of trouble on his behalf. ‘I don’t understand about Lord Brightmony. I mean, about what he knows, or thinks he knows.’
‘It won’t take us five minutes to reach the cottage and collect your things.’ Sedley put the car in gear. ‘You mean about the possibility of there having been a legally valid marriage? I believe it hasn’t entered David’s head. David wasn’t present when Ian and I talked about it.’
‘Ian talked about it – to you?’ Mungo’s incredulity was scarcely civil.
‘Oh, yes. I hope I haven’t been disingenuous, my dear Mungo. It was the other day, when we had straightened out our small misunderstanding, and I was strolling back with him towards the cottage. He wanted to know about Scottish marriage laws. I said simply that I knew they have their peculiarities, and that he’d have to consult a solicitor, and perhaps take counsel’s opinion, if he was to be sure of his ground.’
‘To be sure—?’ Mungo checked himself in the act of repeating this phrase. He hadn’t liked it at all. ‘Are you saying that’s what Ian’s doing now: enquiring about the law?’
‘I suppose it well may be – and about the whole business of checking records, and so forth. By the way, have you thought of taking legal advice yourself?’
‘Of course not!’ Mungo felt really angry. ‘You talk as if I might be thinking of planning and plotting against the Cardowers—’
‘The other Cardowers, it’s conceivable you ought to say.’
‘—as if I were a kind of Tichborne Claimant.’ Mungo had ignored the interruption. ‘I haven’t the slightest intention of seeing lawyers.’
‘Not even Mr Mackellar, as I think he is – the solicitor through whom money comes to you?’
‘No. Or not until I’ve seen Ian’s grandfather.’
‘Was it Mr Mackellar who let you know about the date of your mother’s wedding – her wedding, I mean, to somebody called Lockhart – not many months, as I think you implied, before you were born?’
‘No, it wasn’t.’ Mungo found that he furiously resented Sedley’s ‘somebody called Lockhart’. ‘It was a friend called Roderick McLeod. I don’t count him as a lawyer, because he’s still just a solicitor’s clerk in Elgin. As a matter of fact, he’s the only person I’ve let know about this. I wrote to him at the beginning of the week – the day we had our talk by the river.’
‘And Mr McLeod hasn’t yet replied to your confidence?’
‘No, but he will. Roddy will take his time. He’s sensible.’
‘And what do you suppose his sensible advice will be?’
‘I don’t know.’ Mungo was glad that Sedley’s car had now drawn up at the cottage, for he resented the catechism he was being subjected to. ‘He’ll probably tell me to mind out.’
‘To mind out? Yes – I think you must certainly do that.’
Mungo made no reply to this, but jumped from the car, and hurried into the cottage. He had to decide whether to gather all his possessions together as if he were leaving for good, or just to take what he needed for a day or two. Were I from Mallachie away and clear – he muttered to himself – profit again should hardly draw me here. But it wasn’t quite true. In fact, before this ghastly mess blew up, he had been becoming rather fond of the place. In any event, it would be cavalier to do anything that would suggest he was shaking its dust from his shoes. So he simply shoved a few things in a rucksack and went out again. Sedley had turned the car and was looking at his watch. They drove off, this time in silence. Sedley had perhaps sensed Mungo’s restiveness.
But just what had his talk been in aid of? Mungo felt that Sedley had been trying to get something across to him – but for some reason obliquely rather than forthrightly. Did he know something that he feared Mungo simply wouldn’t take if it was pitched at him straight? Had he been making a wary progress towards some further stiff disillusionment about Ian’s attitude? Mungo remained a good deal under the spell of Sedley – or at least of the author of An Autumn in Umbria. So for some minutes, as they ran through Mallachie Park, he brooded uneasily over what seemed enigmatical in Sedley’s attitude. What Sedley was saying, he decided, was that he, Mungo, was involved in a situation which he simply didn’t grasp the brute worldly dimensions of, and which he had no chance of keeping control of in terms of his own impulses or standards. And he was perhaps saying that circumstances had made Ian an enemy, and that Mungo must acknowledge that cold fact, and plan in terms of it.
Mungo was bracing himself to have this out with Sedley, when he was suddenly called upon to brace himself in a wholly different sense. Sedley, who seemed not a very practised driver, had turned the car a little too fast and sharply through the lodge gates giving on the main road. And towards these gates another car, a large car, was turning from the opposite direction. There was a collision and a nasty jolt. Mungo found himself looking across a crumpled wing at the other – and not very obviously damaged – vehicle. It was a Rolls-Royce. In the front, impressively immobile in face of this futile assault, was a disdainful chauffeur. And in the back were Ian and his grandfather.
‘So where do we go from here?’ Sedley murmured. He lifted his hands from the steering-wheel in a gesture Mungo had noticed before; they might have been poised above a piano or a typewriter. ‘Wohin der Weg?’