May, June 1944

ONE

Andrew’s first thought was that it oughtn’t to have happened that way. A chance for a moment of drama had been muffed. He should have been the first to meet the man—wheeling his bike up the drive on a Sunday evening on his way back to Southampton, and there would have been this stranger wandering down, shabby, battered, but with a soldier’s spine, looking about him with wondering vague eyes. The questions, the leap of understanding …

Instead it had all happened while Andrew was off stage.

“My dear boy,

“You will be surprised to receive a letter from me, since we expect to be meeting again in so very few days, but I feel I must warn you that something decidedly startling has happened. As far as you are concerned it seems to me very bad news, though certain things you have said suggest that you may well have mixed feelings on the matter.

“The fact is that a man claiming to be my brother Charles has returned to us, as it were from the dead. He—if it is indeed Charles, but though I have not yet made up my mind it is simplest to write on that assumption—is much altered since we knew him, but then he has lived a very hard life for more than twenty years, having lost his memory in the attack in which he was assumed to have been killed. He still remembers none of that, nor indeed anything much else in his life, either before or for some years after. Until recently his earliest memory was of waking on a park bench in the rain in some northern town and realizing that he did not know who he was. This was some time around 1930, he believes, though he is vague on many matters that are supposedly within his recollection. Since then he has barely survived, doing numerous jobs, obtained one imagines by his being well-spoken and evidently a gentleman, and then lost again.

“So he might have continued, had it not been for this war. He was in Hull in the winter of 1942 when he was caught in an air raid. A bomb landed on the shelter in which he had taken refuge, killing half the occupants and burying the rest alive. By the time he was dug out he was in a poor way and was taken to hospital. While there he began to have a series of what he calls visions. He is unable to explain how these differed from ordinary dreams, except in their vividness, and the way they remained with him after he woke. Nothing happened in the dreams, except that he saw certain objects—a stuffed stag behind a billiard-table, a round tower standing in a green field with a structure like a greenhouse on top, a picture of a negro carrying a silver tray into a room, besides two or three other things less remarkable to those who know this house. Both while having them and afterwards he was convinced of the reality of these ‘visions’, and furthermore he asserts that from the very first time one occurred he became aware of his own real name, Charles Arthur Wragge.

He made some attempt to interest his doctors and others in his ‘visions’ but was unable to get them taken seriously. He simply wandered about, surviving by begging (he seems to have neither ration-book nor identity card). In some ways this is the hardest part of his story to credit—I do not remember seeing a tramp since the beginning of this war. Be that as it may, some two months back he entered a public library to keep warm, and so as not to be ejected pretended to be reading a newspaper. His eye happened to be caught by a name in a company report: Father’s name.

It took him some weeks to discover where we lived and then to make his way here and nerve himself to face us. He came, he says, not for the money but to try to ascertain the truth about himself, and especially whether anything in this house coincided with the details of his “visions”. The American sentry at the door sent him round to the kitchen entrance and Mary Jane came out and talked to him. Quite properly, she sent for me.

“I was not at first much impressed, but having heard him out I took him by way of experiment up to Mother’s Boudoir and stood him at the window. He was silent for some while, though he betrayed signs of considerable agitation. Then he said, speaking like a man in a trance, so low I could barely catch the words, ‘The ladder went round and round’.

Now, when we were small girls Charles used to steal the key of the dovecote and make us climb the ladder, with him at the bottom, and set it spinning, fast as he could drive it, with the doves whirling out around us. I can remember his laughter and May’s screams echoing together. Unfortunately I was not able to test this particular memory further, as May, who was in the room at the time, immediately blurted the story out. She, I may say, appears to have decided that there is no question but that the man is Charles. Father has been poorly and has refused to see him. I myself waver. Certain things that he says and does, such as the moment when he first saw the dovecote, seem utterly convincing, others less so. We have of course sent for the lawyers, but unfortunately the active partners in the Winchester firm are away fighting and our affairs are in the hands of old Mr Oyler, who is somewhat past the responsibility.

“We have also to consider the problem of Charles’s wife, who is now as you know in Australia. Since she has remarried, and that marriage would become bigamous should this man indeed prove to be Charles, we have thought it kindest not to worry her until we stand on firmer ground.

“I tell you all this, of course, so that you may give yourself time (wartime mail services permitting) to consider your own position before you see us on Friday. I need hardly tell you whose side I would be on, should it come to a contest. May I at least advise you not to commit yourself in any way (tho’ as a minor you may not be legally free to do so) until you have yourself consulted solicitors. Mutton and Boot in Bargate are I believe a very good firm, if their office still stands after the bombs.

“Yours affctntly,

“Elspeth Wragge”

Wartime mail services permitted, just. The letter had come by the Friday post and Andrew found it when he went back to his lodgings to change out of his school uniform and leave his books. He read it through twice, and then tried to do as Cousin Brown said and consider his position while he cycled the twenty-four miles out to The Mimms.

It was mid-May now, pasture and plough and woodland all green as salad, and the underwoods smoky or skyey where the sun dappled through on to the bluebells. Cousin Brown had drawn him a map of a route along bye-lanes, safer she thought than the main roads with their thundering convoys of tanks and lorries; but now, as if brought on by the same forces as the uprush of summer growth, the pressure of armies round the ports increased every day until it was more than the main roads could hold and it squeezed itself out into narrower and yet narrower lanes, clogging them with grumbling khaki monsters. The pressure was not just physical. The whole landscape was tense with it, vibrated with it, with the churn of big engines, the rattle of tank-tracks, the scurry of despatch-riders, the clank clank of a mechanic repairing a Bren-gun-carrier in a farm gateway … the busy hammers closing rivets up.

June, the GI at the camp had said. The first week, General Odway had hinted to Cousin Blue. The tensions gathered not just to the focus of the ports but also to a point in time, a few days, less than a month. Their energies seemed to suck everything in to that moment. Andrew, pumping his way up the hills, was a fleck, a straw, a gnat, battling against the whirl of the vortex. He almost felt, as you do in a nightmare, that at any moment the new bike would melt away and he would be plodding hopelessly towards ever-more-distant safety. When Cousin Brown had quoted the bit about the hammers last week-end he had of course pictured himself playing the king, musing alone and noble through his sleeping army. Now, with the real armies jostling round him, he couldn’t get out of his mind the image of Bardolph, rubbed out of the script unnoticed, hanged off-stage.

The nightmare made it impossible to think about Cousin Brown’s letter. He still believed that he didn’t want The Mimms, and its immense fortune, but in spite of what he had always told himself he had found that he would prefer to miss out on the noble poverty too. The comforts of his new existence—the lodgings Cousin Brown had found for him, the allowance she gave him, the good-as-new-bike with its five-speed gear and drop handles—were well worth having, but it wasn’t just that. Money gave you a sort of psychic space around you. You didn’t have to spend your time jostling among the sweaty and anxious. You moved on a larger stage. He would like something out of Uncle Vole’s will. Cousin Brown, though, seemed to be asking him to choose between having nothing and having everything. He couldn’t make up his mind.

About six miles from The Mimms the lane dipped through beech-woods, crossed a main road and began to climb the last long hill before running along an undulating ridge and finally dropping to the valley that held the house. An immense ammunition dump filled the woods by the crossroads, long stacks of shells and ammo-boxes stretching away out of sight between the pale grey tree-trunks. Andrew had come to regard this as a landmark, an almost-there point. Just this one more hill. The main road was busy as anywhere, but beyond it the pressure of armies dwindled and he could think. He pushed both the nightmare and Cousin Brown’s letter out of his mind and thought instead about Jean.

Last Sunday he had kissed her for the first time, leaning yokel-fashion across the stile below the farm, pretending to be old-man-exhausted after the scamper up through the plantation, barring her way without seeming to; then moving on with rehearsed naturalness to complain about having to ride all the way back to Southampton.

“O, most dear mistress, the sun will set before I shall discharge what I must strive to do.”

That had been Adrian/Ferdinand, as he helped her across the stile. A pause, looking into her eyes, still in the part, then Adrian alone—quizzical­, amused, professionally condescending.

“You’ll have to practise a bit, you know.”

She had waited, hypnotized, and let him put his arm round her shoulders and then break the spell by a brief brushing of lips, absolutely unfrightening. He had let go before she could push him away, laughing at the fun of play-acting the lover. She had begun to laugh too—with relief, mainly.

As Cousin Brown had said, he was going to have to be extremely sensitive how he proceeded. Keep the momentum up, but not hurry or scare her. More “practice” this week-end. At the stile again, but a bit longer? See what offered. Saturday after, if it was the right kind of flick, take her to the back rows. Then … Then it would be almost June. Amusing if he could beat the invasion to it. But not essential.

“This is Andrew,” said Cousin Blue. “Andrew, this is your cousin Charles. My brother, you know.”

“How do you do, sir?”

Andrew shook the trembling hand. The man frowned.

“Andrew?” he murmured.

His tweed jacket and grey flannels were slightly too small for him, though he was only a couple of inches taller than Andrew. Out of Uncle Vole’s wardrobe, of course—he’d have sold or lost his clothing coupons, if he ever had any. Andrew had expected him to be bald, like Uncle Vole, but he wore his silvery hair brushed back over the ears. His face was mottled and veined, purple over the bridge of the thin nose, and his mouth stayed slightly open in repose, as though he were about to drag it down in a grimace like poor Brian’s, but he spoke perfectly clearly, though in a tone of bewilderment.

“The other branch,” said Cousin Blue. “Don’t you remember about Father quarrelling with his brother Oswald before he went to South Africa? I told you again last evening. We found dear Andrew only this Christmas. He is here to help Elspeth put on her little play.”

“Ah. The play. Yes. Of course. So we are long-lost cousins, Andrew. Though I have been lost longer, I suppose. What a rum story.”

“Not a relation for a breakfast, sir,” said Andrew.

The man blinked and shook his head. He looked at his sherry glass.

“But it is … ah … almost time for supper, is it not?”

His voice was baffled, as if he was in a waking dream, where without warning a meal can become a different meal. The headshake had been right too. But the involuntary blink before—had that been different, a response to another sort of ambush?

Cousin Blue laughed. Andrew had never seen her so lively.

“I expect it’s a quotation from Tennyson or someone,” she said. “You must not tease poor Charles, Andrew. His memory is coming back, but it is still rather patchy—isn’t it, dear?”

“Comes and goes, comes and goes … ah, Elspeth, allow me to introduce your cousin … tsk …”

“Andrew and I are already well acquainted, thank you, Charles. I trust that the bicycle is still behaving.”

“Going like a bird, thanks. Down hill, anyway. I’d have been earlier, but the lanes are crammed with convoys so you keep having to get off and climb into the hedge to let them past.”

“Father is to have supper with us,” said Cousin Brown.

“No!” said Cousin Blue. “Really he can be most trying. Do you know, Andrew, Father has been pretending to be ill and has refused to meet Charles, and now he is going to spring himself on the poor boy over supper.”

“I … I shall be delighted to … er … see him again,” said Charles. “I suppose he is much changed. Not that I remember him clearly. Just a presence I sometimes think I can recall.”

“Now, Andrew,” said Cousin Brown. “I want to talk to you about the rehearsal arrangements. I have the diary over here. If you will excuse us, Charles.”

Andrew followed her to her desk by the further window of the Boudoir and joined in the pretence of looking at the rehearsal schedule. She kept her back to the room but signalled him round to stand sideways so that he could glance across to where the others were talking in front of the fireplace. Cousin May was whispering, her gestures ones of warning. The man reassured, made calming movements with his fingers. Andrew decided not to give him a private name yet. There could only be one Uncle Vole, but Charles might be one of any number of Charleses. He tried to recall the family portrait in the saloon. The face … hard to tell. It had the weakness, but it had been battered by time and poverty and (to judge by the mottlings) drink. The boy’s soft nose might have hardened into that beakiness. But the pose was spot on, with the right hand in the trouser pocket and the left holding the empty sherry glass in the exact hesitant gesture of the portrait.

“What do you think?” said Cousin Brown.

“Did he stand like that before he saw the picture?”

“You noticed? Yes. In here, when I first brought him up.”

“I don’t see how …”

“No more do I. We are presented with a few very striking details, but because of his loss of memory we have no way of testing them or anything else. I have only one straw to clutch at. I am convinced I have seen him somewhere.”

“On the stage?”

“I have been racking my brains and going through the diaries. It would have been some very minor part. Chekhov? Or is it that he has become a Chekhov character now?”

“He could have acted a bit and still be your brother. I mean, he used to.”

“Charles was an admirable Aguecheek. I have to admit to a bias. I do so much want you to be the one who inherits.”

“Elspeth,” called Cousin Blue. “Charles has just remembered … Hurrah! There’s the gong! I must say all this excitement does wonders for the appetite. Dear Charles! So happy to have you back!”

It looked as if Cousin Blue must have started losing at bridge—at least butter seemed to be back on rations again. Cousin Brown and Uncle Vole each had about two-thirds of a cylinder left, Cousin Blue less than half that. Charles had an ounce-size cube in front of his place, but Andrew had a perfect cylinder, stamped with a small “a” what’s more, to distinguish it from Uncle Vole’s capital. Only the colour told him it was marge—quite fair, since his ration-book stayed in Southampton, but he’d become used to the luxurious crumbs from General Odway’s table.

Cousin Blue did almost all the talking, mainly about the years before the First War, trilling and giggling as she sweetened every scene into panto-fairy prettiness—Christmases in the sun above the spread vineyards of Constantia, Mediterranean dusks viewed from under the awnings of Diamond, tennis parties at The Mimms, Fourths of June at Eton, Goodwood trips in the trio of Silver Ghosts. Cousin Brown’s deep-voiced contradictions added an occasional demon-king note. Charles, between them at the bottom of the table, played a quavering Prince Charming—not a difficult part, but well done. Andrew began to see what Cousin Brown meant about the problem of disproving his story. You couldn’t pin him down in a falsehood or contradiction, ask him about things Cousin May couldn’t prompt him on—Eton, or his regiment, for instance. There were just one or two weak spots. You could go to Hull, find out if a shelter had been bombed that winter, check the hospital records … But here, even when he did admit to a memory, it was in a dreamy way, as if he couldn’t be quite sure. He didn’t make the mistake of remembering too much, either.

“You can’t have forgotten tripping Canon Golightly into the perch-pond!” Cousin Blue cried. “It was one of the funniest things!”

“I’m afraid for the moment … perhaps it will come back.”

“Very likely,” said Cousin Brown.

Charles nodded, smiling, deaf to the tone of doubt. Andrew was not very well placed to watch him. Charles was at the far end of the table and Andrew was along the left-hand side, next to Uncle Vole. The noise of the old man’s scrapings and gobblings drowned most of Charles’s murmurs. Andrew hadn’t seen his great-uncle for nearly three weeks now, and he looked a lot shakier than last time. The Schoolroom was almost too warm for comfort, but the trembling mottled hands seemed hardly able to hold the spoon and fork, and though Samuel only half-filled the glass it seldom reached the blue-lipped mouth without spilling. It took Andrew a little while to realize that though Uncle Vole’s face was bent right down over his plate to eat, his eyes were rolled up under the bristling brows to peer along the table. The big silver ornament that usually stood in the middle was missing too.

About halfway through the meal Uncle Vole spoke for the first time. The wine was white, South African—it had been the cue for Cousin Blue’s Constantia memories—and as Samuel floated silently up to fill Charles’s glass for the third time Cousin Blue made a little ripple of tongue-clicks and shook her index finger urgently, just above table level. Charles put out his hand to cover his glass.

“Fill it up,” snarled Uncle Vole.

The glass was filled, but from then on remained untouched, though once when Charles reached absent-mindedly for it he snatched his hand back, clearly in response to a kick under the table. The glasses, Andrew now noticed were larger than usual. His own had only been filled once and there was a jug of water in his reach, but not in Charles’s. Usually during suppers in the Schoolroom Samuel stood between the sideboard and the door to the lift, but this evening he had chosen a different place, rather awkward because the table was a bit too wide for the room, almost directly behind Cousin Blue’s chair. He could see Charles’s face from there.

Was Charles aware that he was performing to so intent an audience? If so, he gave no sign. When Cousin Elspeth finally pushed her chair back he instantly rose to help Cousin Blue with hers and then almost dashed to the door to open and hold it, courtier-fashion, clearly expecting to follow the Cousins and Andrew out.

There was a snorting bellow from the table.

“Hey! You two! Where you off to?”

“Don’t be too long,” trilled Cousin Blue from the doorway. She hissed a couple of words to Charles, who nodded, closed the door and came back to the chair which Samuel was holding for him on Uncle Vole’s right. Samuel poured the first glasses of port, wheeled the dumb waiter with the used dishes into the lift and squeezed in beside it. The doors hissed shut and the lift whined down. There was nowhere for him to listen from up here, Andrew realized.

They sat in silence, Uncle Vole sucking and sluicing, Charles frowning as he sipped, apparently lost in a puzzling dream, but tense enough to spill when the old man spoke.

“Charles, uh?”

“Yes, sir. Pretty well sure of it now.”

“More ’n I am, I can tell you. Know who this other little bugger is?”

“Er … Andrew … our cousin, May said?”

“Tell yer he hoped I was going to leave him the house till you turned up?”

“Good lord! No, I don’t think she … My memory, you know.”

“Drink up, man. Let’s see what yer made of. I’ve told yer now. What d’yer think about it?”

“About …?”

“Andrew, yer fool! Not leaving the little bugger the house!”

“Oh … I suppose … but my dear Andrew, I can’t say how sorry I am that things should have turned out like this.”

Andrew let Adrian do the shrug and smile—our hero at life’s gaming-table, losing his whole estate with a laugh.

“Not much money in acting, eh?” cackled Uncle Vole.

“It’s a dog’s life,” said Charles.

“What yer know about it?”

“Well, ah …” said Charles, twisting his empty glass by the stem, frowning as though he wasn’t aware of having drunk the wine.

“He’s the one’s going to be an actor,” said Uncle Vole.

“Have you been on the stage, sir?” said Andrew.

“Me? Well … you know, I do seem to remember …”

“Jesus bloody Christ!” said Uncle Vole. “D’yer mean all I’ve got is a choice between a couple of fairies?”

Charles flicked a glance at Andrew, one eyebrow slightly raised. It was natural—Uncle Vole’s line in theatre-criticism would have baffled any stranger—but was there, as well as the appeal for help, a momentary hint of collusion, as if from a colleague? Of course, all Charles might be vaguely remembering was his long-ago performances here at The Mimms, his Aguecheek, his Demetrius.

“Sir Arnold doesn’t care for actors,” said Andrew. “He says we’re all queers. In fact the first time I came here he told me to go away because he said I was a bugger who wouldn’t get drunk and couldn’t talk women.”

He spoke in a clinical voice as if telling a fellow-doctor the symptoms of a madness. The tone must have stung a bit.

“Little pansy runt,” snarled Uncle Vole. “Fill yer glass, man. Not you, boy. You stick to water. Don’t want to make you spew on the table.”

Charles did as he was told and tilted his chair back, cradling his glass in his hand.

“Women,” he murmured.

He took a gulp and nodded, as if having made up his mind.

“They’re all the same,” said Uncle Vole.

“Ah, yes, but all different too,” said Charles. “F’rinstance, I remember a French lass. Said she was French, that is, but she had a Chinese look. What was her name? Mimi? Fifi? Something like that. Did an act with a knife-thrower …”

Uncle Vole grabbed the decanter, sloshed himself some more port and huddled forward to listen. The story was obviously a recitation piece, similar in a much posher way to the Dame’s saga about the siren, but Charles told it teasingly, falling into apparent reveries and having to be snarled awake, or rambling off on diversions about circus life. Though he said he had slept with the girl and described doing so he didn’t claim to have played a part in the main incident, which concerned the anatomical reasons for her preference of a hunchback clown to the circus strong man.

Uncle Vole sat twitching and snuffling.

“Bitches are all the same,” he said. “Seen it time and again, back in the Cape, white women getting on heat for a nigger boy. Why, me own cook here, simple country girl you’d have thought, she got it into her head she wanted to marry my Zulu boy. Everyone else said she was stark raving, not me. I knew what she was after. Provided it doesn’t spoil her cooking, I said, having all that dark meat in her pot. Get it? All that dark meat in her pot.”

Charles produced the guffaw demanded, finished his glass and refilled it. Uncle Vole sat cackling, then swung to Andrew. “Learnt to talk better than milk-sop yet?”

“I could, but I’m not going to.”

“Still not been with a woman?”

“I have.”

“Tell us, then.”

“No.”

“Made a mess of it, of course.”

“No.”

“Don’t want us to watch your maiden blushes?”

Of course Uncle Vole was pretending to set up a sort of competition with The Mimms as the prize, and Andrew could easily have talked about Lily in a way that would warm the old brute’s blood for a minute or two, but he had no intention of doing so, any more than he would have talked to anyone (except Mum, and she was dead) about what he was going to do and be as an actor. Both were gifts, powers he could command thanks to the mysterious daemon inside him, which must not be taken for granted by talking about them. It wasn’t the physical ability to perform that mattered—everybody had that, almost. It was the power that had made Lily say yes, that had made Jean stand still and be kissed—and was also going to make the crammed tiers of a theatre stop their breathing at a gesture, their souls swaying all with one movement, reeds in his wind … There’s a very extraordinary thing about Ariel, Cousin Brown had said. No other character in the play, not Miranda, not even Caliban, knows he exists. If they did then Prospero might lose his power over him. And it is Ariel who makes the whole plot happen. All the characters dance to his tunes, heard or unheard.

“I just don’t talk about them,” said Andrew.

“More’n one, hey?”

Andrew nodded to Charles, returning the flash of collusion, and rose.

“Siddown, you,” said Uncle Vole.

“Thank you for supper, sir,” said Andrew, and left.

Despite what she’d said on leaving the Schoolroom Andrew was surprised to find Cousin Blue in the Boudoir, looking through a leather-bound photograph album. She glanced up at his entrance, saw he was alone, and sighed.

“No bridge tonight, Cousin May?”

“Poor May’s had a squabble with General Odway,” said Cousin Brown.

“These Americans,” said Cousin Blue. “Really, I think the Russians would be more considerate. They are much too fond of winning. If they lose, they seem to think that someone must be cheating them.”

“He didn’t!” said Andrew, all sympathetic shock.

“Let us not talk about it,” said Cousin Blue. “Come and see what I have found. I was going to show them to Charles.”

Cousin Brown was frowning her way through one of her diaries, still apparently hunting for a play in which she might have seen Charles act, so Andrew settled on the bungy sofa beside Cousin Blue. She was wearing a lot of flowery girlish scent, he noticed.

It wasn’t like an ordinary snapshot album. The pictures were brown and not shiny, but very clear. Each of them filled a whole page. The first showed a big white bungalow with a mountain behind it. Spiky and cactusy plants grew in the garden. You could guess how bright the sunlight was from the blackness beneath the heavy verandah. Under the photograph a clear round hand had written the words “South Mimms”. The next picture was of children having tea on a rug in the same garden under the shadow of a leaning tree with deep-fissured bark. A white nursemaid supervised from a canvas chair. “M., C., Nanny Bounce, E.” said the caption.

“That was us,” said Cousin Blue. “I was only a baby, so of course I don’t remember.”

“Who took them?” asked Andrew.

“Mother did. It was her hobby. She was rather clever at it. She did all the messing about afterwards—what’s it called?—too.”

“Developing.”

“Of course.”

They leafed slowly on. Andrew looked at the photographs with interest. You never knew. Just possibly some time he might come across a part which needed a feel for that particular way of life, and the album seemed to hold it trapped in its own time, not just the moustaches and the women’s hats and the glittering carriages and the sporting guns, but the whole feel of a society in its landscape. It was something about the sky, perhaps. You could feel the country going endlessly on and on. Andrew could even imagine, far away up north, a white man who might actually have come to one of the parties, sitting in a native hut and listening to an old blind witch-doctor telling him the story of Nada. In fact there were very few darkies in any of the pictures. Sometimes a servant with a tray of drinks. Once a line of men and women doing something in a vineyard. It was almost a shock when Cousin Blue turned a page and twisted the album round because the photograph was higher than it was wide and had been pasted in sideways.

Two figures stood in the foreground. Their stunted shadows showed it must be almost noon. One was a white boy, about six, the other a black adult. The darkie was wearing the servants’ clothes Andrew had seen in earlier photographs, bare feet, white trousers, a thigh-length white jacket. The white child was wearing nothing except a solar topi. “Master and Man!” said the caption.

The exclamation mark was justified. The picture was startling, only partly because in all the other pictures the children had been rather over-dressed. The standard throughout the album was high (“Mother used to throw hundreds away,” Cousin Blue had said) but this one was special. It had energy, presence. It was a whole play stilled into an instant. The black man stared at the camera with a clear, calm gaze. The white boy’s face was invisible in the shadow of his hat with the result that the focal point of his figure became the little dangling penis. The background was out of focus but the figures were sharp, with every wrinkle of flesh and fold of cloth exact.

“That’s Charlie and Samuel, of course,” said Cousin Blue. “That’s the one I’m longing to show him. Isn’t it quaint? It was a bit naughty of Mother to take him like that—we were never let run around without any clothes, like children used to after the war. But Mother said it was Art, so it didn’t count. I do wish he would come!”

She rose with a sigh and left the room. Cousin Brown at once looked up from her diary.

“Of course,” she said, “what happened was that May decided she would rather be with Charles in the evenings. They are like young lovers, Ferdinand and Miranda, almost, too ridiculous. Be that as may be, she chose to take umbrage at one of General Odway’s jocularities—his style of badinage is decidedly heavy-handed. I have no doubt that May is a better player than he, but she took the opportunity to suggest to him in front of his officers that that was the case, and the upshot, among other things is that she can no longer gorge herself on tinned American butter. The arrangement has caused endless friction below stairs, and everyone but May is delighted that it should cease. She is far from unintelligent, but she has never been able to imagine that an action may have other results, besides the one she is set on. Tell me quickly, what do you make of Charles?”

“He good as let on he’d been an actor.”

“Did he now?”

“But he might have been thinking about your plays here. You said he did a good Aguecheek.”

“And an excellent Lucius O’Trigger Do you know …”

She paused. A mischievous look, a sudden likeness to her sister, came into her face.

“Antonio has dropped out,” she said. “I had guessed she might.”

“It’s quite a big part.”

“Ah, but Alonso—Mrs Ferris, you know—has come along out of all recognition. I was regretting that I had not given her more. Suppose she were to take Sebastian, then I might persuade Charles to attempt Antonio, which is only some thirty lines.”

“And all ‘Prithee, peace’ until that last scene.”

“May will not like it, of course, but … Well, dear, are the gentlemen still enjoying themselves?”

Cousin Blue ignored the sprightly malice of the question, sighed, and put the album away. Andrew had risen as she came in and was waiting for her to sit down, but she did not return to the sofa. Instead she drew a chair up to a three-legged table, cleared the knick-knacks to one side and started to lay out a game of patience. After a couple of minutes she looked up.

“Andrew, dear, I’m afraid I must ask you to help Samuel put my brother to bed. You know, Father can be a brute, a real brute. No, not yet—they are still talking. It is enough to make one weep.”

Charles sat slumped with his head on his arms across the Schoolroom table, snorting.

“I think I can manage the shoulders,” said Andrew. “He can’t weigh much.”

“Easier each take one arm,” said Samuel. “Like this, look. He won’t feel nothing.”

“What about Sir Arnold?”

“I just walked him to bed. Tomorrow he’ll feel pretty bad. Stay in bed, maybe. He’s not been too well. Just made the effort for tonight. Wanted to see the pair of you together.”

“I’m afraid I refused to play.”

“You did right. He’ll respect you better for that.”

Moving as though they had rehearsed the routine for days they eased the inert torso up and twisted the body sideways on the chair. Andrew supported the shoulders while Samuel knelt and removed the shoes. With an elbow under each armpit they hauled the body out into the corridor. The heels slithered, made a ghostly thumping on the half-flight of stairs up to the family bedrooms, then returned to their slither along the soft carpet. In what thirty years ago had been Charles’s bedroom they sat the body on an upright chair.

“If you’ll hold his shoulders again, please,” said. Samuel. He went to the mahogany wash-stand and fetched a face-towel and a large piss pot, decorated with Chinese figures. “Now pull him up, high as you can. Let go when I say.

“Higher …”

Holding the piss-pot in his left hand he swung his clenched fist into the extended diaphragm. Andrew let go as the vomit came, then helped guide the body forward and down until it was on its knees in front of the chair, retching into the pot. Samuel caught the whole mess, put the pot to one side, rolled the body over and wiped the grey and sweating face with the towel.

“Learnt that trick from an English footman way back,” he said. “Saves a lot of mess in the night. Baas Wragge always liked to get ’em drunk—‘See what you’re made of,’ he’d say.”

He did Uncle Vole’s voice spot on.

Florrie had already turned the bed-clothes back, going round the rooms during family supper. They heaved the body on to the mattress and covered it with the blankets. Samuel stood gazing at the life-worn face, strangely blank, emptied of character, like a saint in ecstasy.

“What do you think?” said Andrew.

“Tisn’t him. Baas Charlie could hold his liquor. Weren’t good for much else, but he could do that.”

“He’s had a rough life … What will Sir Arnold do?”

“Let him stay, I reckon.”

“Because he thinks he might be his son?”

“Don’t matter. Provided there’s a fight between Miss May and Miss Elspeth. Course, he’d like it to be Baas Charlie come back. Don’t like to think of himself going off into the dark leaving nothing behind. So I reckon he isn’t going to make up his mind for a while. ’Nother thing—suppose he goes and decides it is Baas Charlie. Always hated doing anything about changing his will, because of it reminding him of dying. Last will he made was after he lost his case to make Master Nicholas—that’s Baas Charlie’s son—a ward of court. He went raging along to the lawyers about it.”

“What does it say?”

“Don’t know. All I know is Mr Oyler didn’t like it—said it wasn’t right law somehow—but Baas Wragge he put his foot down and made ’em say what he wanted. Mr Oyler, he’s been at him time and again to change it, but Baas Wragge he wouldn’t listen, not till he suddenly went and sent for you. I reckon till this fellow turned up, he was still thinking about putting you in …”

He gazed at the figure on the bed, shaking his head slowly from side to side in one of his strange half-trances. His fingers felt in a pocket of his striped waistcoat. He turned and showed Andrew on the palm of his hand a disc of lightish-coloured wood with a knob the size of a hazel nut in the middle. Andrew picked it up and looked at the image of himself.

“I guessed from my bit of marge that you must have finished,” he said. (The tours Cousin Blue had arranged had meant the cancelling of three Nada readings, so he hadn’t got right through the book in the hols. Week-ends were no good: Saturday afternoon was spent at the flicks with Jean, Sunday afternoon most of the servants went out.)

“Third one I made,” said Samuel. “First two not right. Not going to bother making one for this feller.”

The sudden side-slip into nigger-talk was extraordinarily contemptuous.

Andrew peered at the tiny head. It was very odd. Just a knob. Knife-pecks for eyes and mouth, a ridge for a nose. It could have been anyone, but it was him. Not Adrian, Andrew. He was glad to hand it back.

“It’s going to be tricky to prove he isn’t Charles,” he said. “I suppose you could go to Hull and try and find out if a shelter was bombed, see if anyone remembers him at the hospital. Even if you found out what he was calling himself before that it mightn’t help. I mean the real Charles would have had to call himself something. You’d have to find the name and then trace it back to before 1917, wouldn’t you?”

“Just have to do best we can,” said Samuel. “Listen to everything he does and says. Maybe we’ll catch him out. All I know is, if he isn’t Baas Charlie then it isn’t right he should inherit.”

On Saturdays Andrew rose at seven, breakfasted in the kitchen and walked across to the farm to help Jean get through her morning’s work. Mrs Althorp couldn’t object as Cousin Brown had arranged this specifically to release Jean by eleven. Jean would then bicycle round, bringing a packed lunch, while Andrew walked back. They would rehearse for an hour, and after that bicycle off to the flicks at Petersfield.

“You are being admirably patient,” said Cousin Brown, “but I am afraid it is the only way with a child like Jean. I have to drill her and drill her. With only one rehearsal a week and then six days to forget …”

“It’s interesting,” said Andrew. “Specially the love scenes. Like coaxing a bird to eat out of your hand.”

(Before the war there used to be an old one-eyed sailor who did that with sparrows—first the darting snatch and flurry to safety; then, still trembling with the terror of nearness, perching on a finger to peck at crumbs in the palm; fear shading into trust, the spread fingers imperceptibly rising at each visit, upright round the cupped palm, the bird in the middle, got you! Usually the old boy held the sparrow a few seconds, peering with his short-sighted eye at the pattern of head-feathers; but sometimes, if the right child was watching, he would gape with broken orange fangs and pretend to bite the head off.)

That Saturday was sheeting wet. They both had capes, but on their way back from the flicks the rain densened till it was like a waterfall and they were forced to stop for shelter under a railway bridge. The downpour made pearly curtains over both arches. They talked about the film, a silly thriller, and the trailer for next week’s war-film. Jean didn’t care for war-films. The rain drenched on. Chill breathed from the slimy bricks. She shivered.

“Practise a bit?” he suggested.

She blushed—she knew at once what he meant.

“Might warm us up,” he said.

“Oh, all right.”

He undid the buttons of his cape. When he moved to do hers she edged back.

“We don’t want to squelch,” he said. “Now, for Pose A—this is the one right at the end of the flick. You know, sunset, palms, two dozen violins. It’s in profile. I ought to have something to stand on so you can tilt your head up—I’ll have to do it tip-toe and you bend your knees. Fine. Arm there and arm there. Don’t giggle …”

He clowned it lightly, helping her do the same. As soon as he felt her hand moving on his shoulder-blade he broke off, laughing. A train crossed the bridge, filling the cave below with its dull thunder.

“Pose B is your sort of thing—costume, duels, elopements. Let’s say your guardian’s taking you to the brutal viscount he’s making you marry, and I’m the highwayman who’s held you up. Your dowry’s in the coach, but I’ve been a gallant idiot and said I’ll let you go in exchange for a kiss. You’re dead against it, but your guardian says what about the dowry? So down you come from your coach. Long sweeping dress, high heels, utter disdain. This is my cloak, OK? I’ll lead, you follow. Just think about your guardian peering out of the coach, getting more and more pop-eyed. OK, off we go.”

She was heavy enough to make Pose B a strain in its later stages. Beyond the blurred curve of her cheek he could see the crinkled stream of water slithering over the road-surface towards its drain. The guardian’s eyes would be popping all right, he thought. Promising. The slosh of falling water drowned the noise of the approaching motor almost until it reached the arch. He lugged her upright with a second to spare.

“Lorry coming,” he gasped.

A bulging khaki bonnet barged through the curtain. They pressed against the wall to let it pass, but before it reached the further arch it braked. A head, unrecognizable in silhouette, craned out.

“Want a ride, Mr Wragge?” called Sergeant Stephens.

Andrew glanced at Jean. Discontent? Yes. But the bridge was no use for anything beyond clowning, and anyway his strategy demanded that he should override her wishes, the way a parent might a child’s.

“Thanks,” he called.

Sergeant Stephens climbed down, lowered the tailgate and lifted the bikes for Andrew to stow in the lorry, which was empty except for a pile of loose boots in the far right corner.

“Room for the young lady up front,” he said.

“We’ll be OK in the back, thanks,” said Andrew, letting the eyelid Jean couldn’t see droop for an instant.

“You’re welcome,” said the sergeant, and before Jean could move he took her under the arms and heaved her bodily up. She produced a curious sound, between a squeak of surprise and a shriek of outrage. He didn’t even smile. The tailgate banged up.

“It’ll be a bumpy ride,” said Andrew. “You know how Yanks drive.”

They settled next door to the pile of boots with their backs to the cab.

“It smells like a pub,” said Jean.

It did, too, and as the lorry lurched off Andrew put his palm on the floor to steady himself. The floor was wet—not surprising in this weather, but when he sniffed his hand he smelt whisky. Spilt not long back, either. A broken bottle—but no glass splinters. A whole case then, one bottle broken, taken into Southampton hidden under the pile of boots. The rest of the stores unloaded, but the boots brought back for next time. Mr Trinder? He’d been driving out to meet the sergeant back in March …

The Yank driver was true to form—any more “practice” would have meant broken front teeth. They pressed their bodies against each other for support. A pleasant pocket of warmth grew between them. No chance of talk through the drum of the downpour on the canvas roof, and the clatter of the bodywork and the roar of the engine, but on the last smooth swoop down the new tarmac inside the lodge gates Jean put her mouth to his ear.

“Sweet Lord, you play me false,” she whispered.

In the near dark under the canvas he stared into her eyes, letting the tension rise. The growl of gears as the lorry took the turn into the camp entrance drowned his answering line, but she must have heard the sincerity throbbing in his voice. He’d been expecting the lorry to brake and let them down there, but it bounced on across the park, turned left again and stopped by the sergeant’s store-huts. The moment it was still Andrew put his arm round her and kissed her as if he meant it. The rain thundered down.

A hand appeared at the rim of the tailgate. Andrew was on his feet and lifting Jean’s bike to pass it down by the time the tailgate fell, but instead of waiting to receive the bike Sergeant Stephens climbed up into the shelter of the canvas.

“Jesus!” he said. “You call this summer! Been wanting to talk with you, Mr Wragge. It’s my folks back home. I wrote them about you maybe being the heir and all—it ain’t easy to know what to put in a letter—and that’s got them all worked up. They think Britain’s full of barons and duchesses and they can’t see why I ain’t meeting any, so when I tell them about Sir somebody and his long-lost heir they gotta know more. So if you’ll pardon me asking, how’s it going?”

Andrew laughed. He didn’t believe the sergeant’s excuse, and wasn’t even certain the sergeant expected him to. It was a sort of clumsy politeness pretending he wasn’t himself being inquisitive, excited by the notion of all that money … but Andrew owed him for the ride, especially the last few seconds.

“There’s a new chapter in the drama,” he said. “D’you remember the picture in the Saloon, the family one?”

“Sure.”

“There’s a boy in it with a gun under his arm—Charles, Sir Arnold’s only son. He was missing presumed killed in the First War, but now a man’s turned up saying he’s him.”

“Jesus! And is it him?”

“My Cousin May says so. My Cousin Elspeth isn’t sure. Sir Arnold won’t say. Some of the servants knew the real Charles, and they aren’t sure either.”

“Somebody’s on your side?”

“I haven’t got a side—I’m just an interested spectator.”

“Crap. You gotta fight it. You tell me anything you need.”

“Only if you know a good cheap private detective.”

“1 got the man right here in the kitchen. Used to be a private eye in Albuquerque.”

Andrew hesitated. He didn’t want to stand around arguing. He had asked about the detective as a joke, a quick dismissive impossibility to get the conversation over, so that he could go off alone through the rain with Jean.

“I can fix him for furlough,” said the sergeant.

“But …”

“Money? Listen here. I got a proposition for you. You a betting man? What odds’ll you give me against you being the one who inherits?”

“Oh … fifty to one?”

“Hell, I’ll give you better than that. Twenty to one, how’s that sound? So I lay five hundred bucks on you at twenty to one—OK? That’s for Phil’s travel and expenses. If he can’t dig up nothing useful, then that’s my five hundred bucks gone, and you ain’t out a dime. But if your number comes up and you inherit the whole thing, then you pay me ten thousand bucks. What do you say?”

“Can I think about it?”

“Sure. Come up here tomorrow and meet Phil. What time?”

“All right. It’ll have to be about half past nine, because of getting off to church. Can I bring someone with me—one of the servants? He’s very interested. He might be able to help.”

“Sure.”

“What was that about? You never told me,” said Jean as they walked their bikes back across the valley with the rain buffeting down on to their capes and sou’westers. Andrew had kept quiet about the inheritance business. It wasn’t part of his strategy—long-lost heirs are supposed to be young and a bit unreliable—though the hard luck of losing it all to Charles might have come in useful later. Besides, all that concerned Andrew. It was Adrian who was supposed to be playing his game with Jean.

“It’s a bit of a story,” he said.

“Do tell me.”

They squelched on. He was conscious of the dovecote, down to their left, coming and vanishing as the rain-veils parted and closed. Too soon. Besides, he hadn’t got it ready.

“I wish we had somewhere to go,” he said.

“Dolly says it’s going to clear up after milking. She’s usually right.”

“Can you get out?”

“Well …”

“Look. Let your back tyre down before you get home. Say you’ve got a puncture. Put it in a shed Mrs Althorp can’t see from the kitchen. I’ll meet you at the stile.”

“What’ll you say?”

“It’s cleared up and I feel like a walk.”

“Oh, I wish I was a man!”

“No you don’t.”

Her cheeks, freckled, tanned, streaming with rain despite the sou’wester, reddened appetizingly.

It was hard to imagine Phil leaning in a doorway with a fedora tipped back on his head and a smoking automatic in his hand. He was round and rubbery with a high bald brow and doggy eyes, but he took notes on a pad and asked what sounded like the right questions. Samuel answered most of these, usually with a shake of the head. Now that the family was living up in the nursery wing he had fewer opportunities for listening to their talk, and in any case Charles, thanks to his memory-loss, real or phoney, had given very little away. There was only the air-raid on Hull, plus a few laundry-marks on the ragged clothes he had arrived in. Cousin Blue had given Samuel these to burn, but he had kept them. The laundry-marks were all different, probably because the clothes had been begged at doors. Even if Phil found the donors it wouldn’t prove much.

From the moment Andrew had suggested it Samuel had taken the inquiry completely seriously. He wasn’t happy about the bet with Sergeant Stephens, and offered to pay the costs himself—he had a little money saved up, he said—but Andrew had refused, not really believing the inquiry was worth spending money on. Only if a Yank chose to chuck his dollars around, well, that was his look-out. In fact, left to himself Andrew would probably have told the sergeant he’d decided against the idea. His whole instinct was to stay as neutral as possible, to do nothing whatever to make himself Uncle Vole’s heir. Then, if it happened, he would still be free. Anything else, and The Mimms and its fortune would become a huge trailing weed on his smooth hull. So now he let Samuel take the responsibility both of deciding to send Phil off to Hull and of answering his questions while he, Andrew, stood back and watched. While Phil looked shruggingly at the laundry-marks Sergeant Stephens came over and edged Andrew yet further aside.

“You didn’t say he was a nigger,” he muttered.

Andrew had in fact noticed the change in the two Americans’ looks when he had brought Samuel into the hut, but had put it down simply to surprise at seeing a darkie in butler’s uniform in the middle of green England.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Does it matter?”

“Sure does. You wouldn’t understand. Me, I’ll do a deal with any colour. But you just tell your pal not to come wandering into the camp looking for me. Specially after dark. The guys here—they’re bored, they’re frustrated, they’re a long way from home, they don’t care a whole lot about your British laws. Next few weeks some real rough guys’ll be coming through. I tell you, there’s guys homesick for a good lynching. I can see your friend’s got his heart set on proving you’re the real thing, much more’n you do, Mr Wragge. He’ll be after me for news. That’s OK, but you tell him he’s gotta phone me first, and I’ll arrange a place to meet him. Look, I’m taking a risk, fixing Phil’s furlough. I don’t want nobody asking questions. So you tell your pal to lay off, take it easy, phone me first if he wants to talk. OK?”

“We could just forget the whole thing if you like.”

“Jesus, no. I’m interested. Just that it’s gotta be done my way.”

“OK, I’ll tell him.”

The discussion about the laundry-marks seemed to have ended. Phil looked up.

“I’ll need mug shots,” he said.

“I better lend you my camera,” said Sergeant Stephens.

“It may be a bit tricky persuading him, specially if he’s a phoney. I’ll have to get my Cousin May to coax him somehow. I can tell her you want the picture to send to your folks back home, but … Tell you what—she’s quarrelled with General Odway.”

“She and who else?”

“The point is the General used to let her have extra butter and now he’s stopped it. I don’t suppose you could …”

“No problem.”

TWO

Though he was later than he’d said, Andrew climbed the plantation path slowly. His legs were still rubbery tired after the ride from Southampton. No harm in keeping her waiting—and when he got there, still no hurry. She’d had five days to brood since Sunday’s farewells. Things had gone with a rush after the Saturday evening tryst at the stile among the still-dripping beeches. She might easily have become frightened again. So just chat to begin with, perhaps about the rather amusing business of watching Cousin Blue cajole Charles into joining a family photograph—picture to be taken tomorrow morning—to send to Sergeant Stephens’s folks back home. (Equally amusing, though he could not tell Jean this, had been Cousin Blue’s delight at being allowed an entry into the mysterious world of the Black Market. The Sergeant’s butter wasn’t a gift. She was paying for it, at real black-market prices. Thrilling!) Then, perhaps, ask about the farm gossip …

A cry in the still woods—a sort of squawk, cut short. A throaty growl continuing. A mad high cackle. That was Brian. Before that Dave’s snarl. The squawk had been human too—when Sergeant Stephens had hoisted Jean into his lorry she …

Andrew ran up the slanting path. Rage made him stupid, those two repulsive louts barging in and ruining everything—but in a few strides he slowed. The imagined scene cleared in his mind, Jean threshing in Dave’s grasp, Brian standing by with his father’s blackthorn stick, thick as a cudgel, himself rushing into the dell. Dave was far stronger than he was. Brian too.

He slowed to a fast stride, still trembling with fury. Brian’s mad laugh filled the underwoods. Andrew picked up a fallen branch and drew a deep breath.

“This way, men!” he yelled. “Up here!”

“Coming, Sarge!”

He thrashed the branch against a holly as he passed.

“Get moving! Set the dogs on ’em!”

He barked, yaps, mixed in with deeper baying, inarticulate human shouts. He thrashed at the bushes. Brian’s laughter had stopped. Where the path levelled Andrew forked to one side, still yelling and baying and threshing his feet through the leaf-litter. Between the tree-trunks he saw Brian scampering ape-like up the paddock towards the cow-sheds, but the dell with the stile was empty.

A muffled movement under the hedge hazels. He ran into the open shouting in his own voices

“Over here! Sergeant! There they are!”

Dave broke from a hollow under the hedge and scurried away up to the right. Andrew ran a few paces after him shouting in three voices and thrashing his branch around, then, still yelling and barking, turned and made urgent signals to Jean, who was climbing to her feet with her fists clutched at the waistband of her riding-breeches.

“Thataway!” he shouted. “Up by the hedge!”

“You OK, lady?”

She pulled herself together and ran for the path, up over the ridge. He loosed one more flurry of baying and trampled around, calling to himself, losing the trail, then followed her at a wallowing run all the way down to the Amphitheatre, catching her just beyond the Green Room huts. As he touched her shoulder she swung round, snarling, her fingers griped into talons. He caught her wrist before she could claw his face.

“It’s me, darling. Andrew. You’re all right. You’re all right.”

Calm, assurance, power.

Her face went white and her mouth gaped like a hen’s. He thought she was going to faint, but she fell conscious into his arms. He soothed her back with gentle strokes as she sobbed.

“Did he hurt you?”

“No … not really … only …”

He kept his eyes on a slant of path he could see between the tree-trunks, just in case Dave realized what had happened and came after them. At last Jean raised her head and looked dumbly round.

“Where … Where are the others? The dogs?”

“Only me.”

“No. No. The others; the wood was full of them.”

“‘The noise of hunters heard. Enter divers spirits in the shape of dogs. Ariel setting them on.’”

“All … you?”

He nodded. The conceit was real. The power was there. If a dozen yokels had broken from the wood with cudgels and hay-prongs he would have faced and cowed them. Adrian—the secret spirit whom nobody else in the play was aware of—could do it. The whole arena between the sunlit wood and the shadowed slope of derelict lawns was filled with his private magic, so strong that it changed the physical shape of things—she was staring up at him, her green eyes and ginger lashes wet, her lips parted, her whole face trembling. He saw that from now on he could make her do whatever he wanted. He kissed her gently and let go.

“You mustn’t sleep at the farm tonight.”

“No. Oh, no.”

“We’ll go and talk to Cousin Elspeth. She’ll know what to do. She’s a magistrate, anyway. Don’t worry. I’ll do the talking.”

“The difficulty,” said Cousin Brown, “is that Mrs Althorp cannot run the farm without the men. Our local Land Army officials are not really up to the job—in fact they are thoroughly spineless. We have had several cases of this kind, and I am sorry to say my male colleagues on the bench tend not to take them seriously. They regard the war effort as more important than what they see as a minor misfortune for the poor girl. Anyway, clearly Jean will have to transfer …”

“Oh …” said Jean. “But … I mean …”

She managed not to look at Andrew.

“What about the play?” she said.

“My dear Jean, how very considerate of you to think of it. Certainly it would be a great blow should you have to leave us, but I think it very unlikely that we can find you another billet close by.”

“I don’t mind working at the farm. Mrs Althorp will look after me. It’s living there, so I can’t go out in the evenings or anything.”

“What about West Lodge?” said Andrew.

The power was still there. He was in complete control. He need only make the smallest moves, just a nudge or a pause, and the whole flow of events would run along the channel he chose. The idea of West Lodge—a cottage at the top of the drive which seemed to have been built as an excuse to display one monstrous Jacobean chimney—had come to him just at that moment.

“Now, that is a distinct possibility,” said Cousin Brown. “Do you know old Mrs Oliphant, Jean?”

“Only what she looks like.”

“And sounds like, I dare say. Deaf as a post but cannot stop talking. She keeps a room for her grandson, but he is fighting in India. You would have a cycle ride along Abb’s Lane from the farm. Let me see. I will telephone Mrs Althorp and tell her that you will be spending the night here, and that I wish to speak to both Brundells tomorrow morning. I will make arrangements with Mrs Oliphant on the way. Andrew, dear, will you go and ask Florrie to put the Ivory Room in order for Jean?”

Some time after midnight Andrew woke and saw through his open curtains a starry sky and the sheen of a waning moon on the cedar branches close outside. He pictured Jean dreaming in the white four-poster three doors along the passage. The moonlight would seem stronger in there, with the creamy hangings and fairy-tale white furniture. Her hair would be a dark cloud on the pillow. There was nothing to stop him. If anyone heard a footstep they would think it was one of the Americans moving around on the floor above—they did a good deal of that. Almost he could send out his invisible messenger to whisper through Jean’s dream and she would slide from her sheets and come drifting to his summons … No. He needed no effort of will to turn on his side and close his eyes. The Ivory Room was pretty, but it was not the set he had designed. He wanted the eyrie above the dovecote, the sideways light of a summer dusk, so that he could watch the come-and-go of blood beneath the freckled skin. And she must come because she chose, not in the after-shock of Dave’s attack. No tricks, no traps. He would tell her to come, and he would wait there. She would climb the ladder pretending not to know, but knowing all the same, what was going to happen. She must obey—his Art was of such pow’r.

Sergeant Stephens’s camera, like all props and gadgets, refused to function for Andrew.

“Let me try,” said Cousin Brown. “I took the pictures for my plays whenever that was possible. Look, you have forgotten to set the shutter. Charles, please take off that hat and those sun-glasses. They make you look like an Argentinian gambler.”

“Just like!” trilled Cousin Blue. “Oh, don’t you remember that dago who hoped Father might invest in his patent trams? Take them off, Charles. We must keep faith with our allies.”

“But my eyes …” said Charles.

“Nonsense,” said Cousin Brown. “The light is not as strong as all that.”

Since last week-end, Andrew noticed, the relationships had shifted. Cousin Brown’s absurd-seeming idea of involving Charles in the play was now seriously being discussed. Part of her motive, only half-unconscious, may have been to detach him to some extent from Cousin Blue’s influence, but the play itself might become a hostage if she could not afford to have Charles proved a phoney at least till August. Indeed everybody except Samuel seemed to be settling down to a wary and provisional acceptance of the new order, and Cousin Brown was emphasizing this by bossing Charles around. Perhaps the sisters were so used to a three-cornered relationship that with Uncle Vole increasingly withdrawn to his sick-bed they were beginning to build a new triangle, an inversion of the old one, with poor Charles at the bottom point. It was all very interesting to watch, expressing itself hardly at all in words, but in attitudes, gestures, tones.

Cousin Brown did not relinquish the camera.

“Andrew,” she said, “if you were to lean against the sundial that would balance the composition. Less of the Gielgud look, I think. You must be your own man. Capital. Try not to simper, May. Stand still, Charles. And again. One more. There. You may put your disguise back on, Charles.”

She laid the camera on the sundial and nodded to Andrew to move aside with her.

“Did you see Mrs Oliphant?” he asked. He had breakfasted in the kitchen with Jean and walked back with her through the plantation to the farm. They had found Mrs Althorp juddering with exasperation, mainly at Jean for sneaking out in the dusk and letting herself get caught by Dave and Brian. She made it clear too that she thought it no kind of coincidence that Andrew should be coming up through the wood at that moment. No doubt she had said the same to Cousin Brown. At any rate, while Jean had gone to help Dolly finish the milking, Andrew had been sent with Carrie to move a batch of heifers into a fresh field and then to attempt to repair a gap in a hedge through which they had been breaking out into a barley-field—work which would normally have been done by Dave and Brian, but they had to stay up at the farm for Cousin Brown to talk to. Andrew had only got back to The Mimms just in time for the camera session, with no knowledge of what else had been happening, but he was not in the least worried—he knew it was all destined to go as he wanted.

“She is delighted,” said Cousin Brown. “It will be somebody to talk to, she says.”

“Great. I thought I’d help Jean ferry her stuff across this afternoon, instead of going to the flicks.”

Cousin Brown glanced to where her sister and Charles were chatting by the sundial and lowered her voice.

“Andrew, dear, you may think it none of my business, but perhaps we should have a word about Jean. Of course she is some years older than you, but in other ways she is a child by comparison.”

Andrew let Adrian smile, unembarrassed, open, trustworthy.

“It’s all right,” he said. “She just needs a bit of company. It’s not much fun at the farm. You were quite right, about her father—he sounds a pretty good tyrant.”

This was true, though not perhaps in the way Cousin Brown took it. Mr Arthur was not much like Uncle Vole, just the sort of dad who doesn’t want his little girl ever to get beyond twelve. The mum running off must have made it worse.

“You do want a happy Miranda, don’t you?” he said.

She smiled, abandoning the attempt at reproof.

“I suggested she might prefer not to rehearse this morning,” she said. “But she seemed determined to. I never supposed I should find her such a committed actress … you will be careful, Andrew?”

“Yes, of course. What did Dave say?”

“Old Brundell? No sign of shame, but I hope I managed to frighten him sufficiently. I explained the maximum sentences for crimes of this nature. Of course, there is nothing one can say to his poor wretched son … Charles! Put that camera down! Really, if you have let the light in …”

Like Dave, Mrs Oliphant had her recitation-piece, an account of her husband’s slow and agonizing death, told in identical detail to every fresh face and now having become by repetition a one-woman folk-drama, giving her deep satisfaction no longer connected with her loss, or anything except the performance itself. While Jean unpacked upstairs Andrew listened and watched, mouthing the ritual replies for her to lip-read. Her deafness, he discovered, was absolute. The lodge had been built to the same standards as the main house—nothing would quiver at a footstep. There was a latch to the parlour window Jean could sneak down and undo.

“How can you bear it?” said Jean, as they walked down the drive. “It was all so dreadful.”

“She’s made it not-dreadful by the way she tells it. Purging pity and terror, you know. Anyway, I had to listen. I want her to think of me as a nice young chap, so that she doesn’t sling me out when I come calling on her lodger.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I’ve begged a picnic off Mrs Mkele. We’ll find a nice flat private place somewhere … and do another run-through.”

“Oh.”

“Remember you’ve got your real Ferdinand coming out next week-end.”

“What’s he like?”

“All right, except that he’s under the impression he can act. His name’s Pete Boller. He’s five foot eleven, so you won’t have to bend your knees.”

“I’m not going to kiss him!”

“You’re going to kiss anyone the producer tells you to, including my new Cousin Charles who looks like becoming your father-in-law.”

“My … oh, in the play, you mean.”

“If it’s any comfort I don’t think my Cousin Elspeth is the kissing kind of producer. She hasn’t suggested it so far.”

“But we’ve only been saying the words. Anyway, you said …”

“I had to break the ice somehow.”

She looked at him sideways for several paces.

“You were right in Sergeant Stephens’s lorry,” he said. “I played you false. Do you want to go back and pretend none of it happened?”

They were passing the camp entrance as he spoke. A couple of lorries came swinging out, their canvas covers down, crammed with GIs. Jean tossed her head and blushed, trying to look as though she thought the whistles meaningless as bird-song. Just what you would have expected, but different somehow. She had changed. You couldn’t even say she was prettier, but there was something new there. Not exactly new, but hidden before, a liveliness, energies of her own, sensed behind her defences at their first meeting, an interestingness as a person … Watch it, he thought. You don’t want to get too involved with her.

As the lorries climbed out of sight she felt for his hand. He let her fingers twine into his for a moment but then eased them free.

“Let’s go on play-acting,” he said. “When anyone might be watching.”

“Mrs Althorp suspects the worst.”

“Yes. And she told my Cousin Elspeth.”

“What did you say?”

“You’re a bit lonely. I wanted her to have a happy Miranda.”

“Really?”

“I want that too. But in public we’re not serious. OK?”

“What about in private?”

“You’ll have to work it out for yourself.”

THREE

“I forget,” read Peter. “But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labours, most busiest when idlest.”

“Oh, dear, you have a different text,” said Cousin Brown. “Never mind, since you have not learnt it it will be simple to change. Now, enter Miranda. Prospero at a distance, unseen.”

Standing to one side, wrapped in his cloak of invisibility, Andrew watched the lovers rehearse. Peter had of course promised to be word-perfect when Cousin Brown had come to audition him in Southampton three weeks back, though Andrew had warned her he wouldn’t be. It was a pity there was no one else. On the other hand it was part of the whole experience, performing with somebody you detested. Andrew knew Peter only too well. He had been Rosalind to Peter’s Orlando, Viola to his Duke, Titania to his Oberon. He had the looks for Ferdinand, the hidalgo stance and the passionate glance under strong black brows, but working with him was going to be hell. Though Cousin Brown was actually treating him as a pro, and paying him—not much, but something—he would somehow not manage to make half the handful of rehearsals he’d agreed on; he would barely know his lines by the opening night; he would treat the rest of the cast as though they were privileged to be on stage with him; and regard the scenes when he wasn’t on as a boring waste of time. Years ago Andrew had realized that he couldn’t afford love or hate. Mild liking, slight antipathy had got to be his limits—anything more would be an involvement—but somehow he couldn’t help it with Peter. Others, however repellent—Uncle Vole, Dave Brundell, playground thugs long ago—were outside the castle. He could send Adrian out to fight or parley. Peter, by his pretensions to be an actor, his announcement that that was going to be his career, had a spy in the keep. They were almost twins. They had been born two days apart, lived in the same town, been taught in the same classes, acted in the same plays under Mr Dingle’s frenzied direction. Their call-up papers were due the same week. Suppose they both survived (suppose, suppose …) a vista of twin careers stretched ahead—Peter would get a start on his looks and self-confidence. But one day, one day, Andrew thought, I am going to boot you off the stage in such a way that you won’t ever come back. And you won’t ever know why, either. I shall look forward to that.

At Ferdinand’s first entrance Jean had frozen into a mumble and glanced in despair at Andrew. He had replied with an Uncle-Vole glare, and she had pulled herself together enough to make Cousin Brown clap her hands at the finish of the log-carrying scene.

“Capital, really capital! Jean, you have come on, Now, Peter, there are just two or three little things …”

Jean sidled over to Andrew.

“You said he was nice!” she whispered.

“I said he was all right.”

“I think he’s perfectly horrible!”

“Good.”

“What do you mean good? It isn’t good at all!”

“I mean that when you’re saying you think he’s the tops I’ll know you’re acting, which is what you’re supposed to be doing.”

“Why can’t you be Ferdinand and him Prospero?”

“Because then you wouldn’t have to act.”

“Big-head.”

“Now, listen. I thought he was going home this afternoon, but when he saw how posh the place was he decided to stay on. Cousin Elspeth’s going to ask you if you can do another rehearsal tomorrow, after luncheon.”

“But that means we’re stuck with him all week-end!”

“’Fraid so. You’ll have to go to the flicks alone.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Make him help me clean out the dovecote.”

“I’ll come too.”

“Not if you want a change from mucking-out.”

“I want to be with you.”

Peter, as Andrew had foreseen, was not much interested in the dovecote. For a while he sat on the ladder watching the other two shovel and sweep the encrusted bird-droppings down the central chute, but then decided that the smell was bringing on his asthma and left. When they’d finished clearing the floor Andrew made Jean climb the ladder, unbolted it and swung it round its circle. The effect was disappointing. Only a couple of doves came and went, instead of the storm of blurred white flutterings he’d imagined. The light was wrong, too—you needed horizontal bars through the flight-holes—and Jean should have been wearing a long cotton skirt, not breeches. He bolted the ladder firm.

“Go on up,” he said. “There’s a trap-door at the top. It isn’t fastened.”

As soon as she was off the ladder he followed her up into the empty whiteness of the eyrie. She was standing at a window, looking towards the camp. Over her shoulder he saw Peter chatting with a GI by the fence. Peter was enthralled by anything American—he’d probably end up in Hollywood playing smooth British cads in B movies. Something was happening in the camp. A line of lorries waited, right across the park, crammed with soldiers. The head of the line crawled into the trees and the rest moved up.

“Hello,” he said. “The camp’s filling up. That’s a sentry Pete’s talking to. Look, there’s another one. You know what that means?”

She wasn’t interested, but turned and put her arms round his waist.

“Can’t you get rid of him?” she said.

He kissed her for a little and broke off.

“I’ve had an idea,” he said. “What time does Mrs O go to bed?”

“I listen to the nine o’clock news and yell at her what’s happening and then she goes off.”

“Right. Tomorrow evening I’ll start off back with Pete but I’ll fix my gears to pack in, something I can’t mend, I’ll say—he won’t bother to check—and I’ll tell him to go on alone. I’ll ask him to take a message to my digs. I’ll come back. Soon as Mrs O’s gone off you sneak down and climb out of her parlour window. I’ll wait for you under the copper beech just down the drive. We’ll go and count the stars coming out.”

“All right. Lovely. But what about you—after, I mean?”

“I can bike in to school early next morning.”

“You’ll have to sleep somewhere.”

“Here. This is my magic tower. I can make it pretty cosy.”

“Cosy!”

“It’ll be fine.”

As you will find out, the Sunday after, he thought.

FOUR

On Friday morning Andrew found Mr Trinder leaning against the static-water tank ten yards beyond the school gate, seeming even more out of place in the blustery morning than he had done in the spring sunlight at the roadside six weeks ago. There he’d had a role—broken-down motorist—to account for his presence. Here he was a character strayed in from the wrong play, a beast of the adult night beside the morning tide of boys. He must have been watching them though his hat was tipped forward over his eyes and he seemed absorbed in yesterday’s racing results, because as soon as Andrew freewheeled round the corner he raised his hand and flicked a forefinger. Andrew scooted the bike across.

“Morning, Mr Trinder.”

“Not much of one, if you ask me. Going to have to put off this invasion of theirs.”

“When’s it supposed to be?”

“Monday, they’re saying, only not if the sea’s bad. Stupid little landing-­craft won’t take the waves. Catch me in one of them contraptions.”

“Can’t they put it off?”

“Not beyond Tuesday—after then it’s bleeding weeks. Something about the tides. How’ve you been keeping? Nice bike—present from someone?”

“It’s so I can bike out and help one of my cousins put on a play.”

“Nine to four it’ll be the old bard.”

“The Tempest.”

“Juvenile lead? Course you’d need platforms for that.”

No, thought Andrew. I would make them see me those inches taller. He didn’t mind Mr Trinder’s remark, the way he resented it when Peter Boiler patronized him about his missing inches. Mr Trinder was objective, but interested. Interested in anything, knowing a bit about everything—the invasion, the theatre. It must have been how he worked. He was a sort of sea anemone, floating out soft tentacles of inquiry all round him, dragging back the scraps with money in them.

“Character,” said Andrew. “The heroine’s dad, but it’s the lead role.”

“Good for you. How’s everything else out there? Didn’t I hear as some chappie turned up saying as he was the old bugger’s son, one went missing?”

“That’s right. Charles.”

“And is he?”

“Nobody knows. He’s lost his memory, but from the start he got a few things right which it looks as if only one of the family could’ve known. One of my cousins is sure he’s Charles and the other can’t make up her mind.”

“It’s all down to the old bugger, innit?”

“He’s been pretty feeble. I haven’t seen him for a while. He stays in his room and they’ve got a nurse in.”

“Sounds like he better make up his mind bloody soon. And what about you, young feller? What’s your line?”

Andrew shrugged.

“Come off it,” said Mr Trinder. “Money’s money. Don’t tell me you ain’t changed your tune, now you’ve had a smell of it. Nice bike, that. Nice shoes—pair of Sir Arnold’s? You don’t see leather like that, not wartime, and they’d’ve set you back eighteen guineas before.”

The bell had started to clank as he spoke.

“I’ve got to go,” said Andrew.

“Hang on—something you can do for me. Going out to visit your cousins soon?”

“This evening.”

Mr Trinder had moved slightly away from the tank and half turned towards it. In the angle between his body and the grey metal he slid a brown octavo envelope out of his newspaper, folded it and slipped it into the side pocket of Andrew’s blazer. “That’s for Abe Stephens,” he said. “Urgent. I’d run it out myself, but this bleeding invasion’s made that a bit dicey. I’m not in a position where I want to answer a lot of silly-bugger questions every half-mile. Shove it in among your books, eh? Lad on a bike won’t notice.”

“OK. I’ve got a pass to let me into The Mimms. It seems to work at the road-blocks too.”

“Just the job. Tell you what—I wouldn’t mind the loan of that one day for a couple of hours.”

“Well …”

“Make it worth your while.”

“I’ve got to go. If we’re late they keep us at school, and then I don’t get out to The Mimms by supper.”

“Feeding you OK?”

“Mrs Mkele’s a terrific cook.”

“Lashings of butter, that sort’s used to. Be good.”

Now there were road-blocks in the smallest lanes, manned by stodgy bobbies or eager-beaver Home Guards. It was a dour evening for June, grey, with gusty showers and the odd glimmer of sun. You could tell the Channel would be rough. By now Andrew was used to biking out through a landscape crammed with armies, but this Friday he felt that the nature of the pressure had changed. The vessel was pumped full. It was ready, waiting. It couldn’t hold like that it must either subside or burst. There wasn’t a cranny that didn’t conceal troops or weapons. A few last bluebells still glimmered in the hedgerows but under the woods and copses they had all been mashed fiat. The gusts reeked not of green summer, but of frying from field kitchens, urine from latrines, exhaust fumes, hot metal, the oil of weapons, the acid of charging batteries, war.

At the second road-block a corporal flipped briefly through Andrew’s satchel, but the envelope was clipped to his handlebar with his route sketched on the back. As an exercise in not thinking about Jean (he was determined not to stale the performance by over-rehearsal—Sunday had to be a real first night, the risks essential to the triumph) he considered while he biked on what it might hold.

It was too thin to contain money. Mr Trinder wouldn’t put anything on paper—not if he could help it—so it wasn’t anything like a cheque or a receipt or an order for more whisky. He’d order by phone and pay in old notes. So it was something which had to be on paper. Something forged? The ration-books in the tea-pot might have been forged, not stolen—Andrew should have checked whether their numbers were different. And that’s why Mr Trinder had wanted the pass—to copy. He must have a tame printer somewhere. Anyway, he’d kept in touch with Sergeant Stephens. He knew what was happening in the house. You could tell, from the way he’d asked his questions—just that shade too off-hand. Same as last time, in the café on the docks. He knew the answers already. Couldn’t help hinting. That last pointless remark about the butter. Yes, it had to be Sergeant Stephens who’d told him. No one else knew that. But about Uncle Vole being worse? Well, Samuel might have said something to the sergeant—had Phil found anything out? It was getting urgent anyway, what was in the envelope wouldn’t have anything to do with that. A forged US Army form the sergeant wasn’t supposed to use, but needed to order more black-market supplies? In that case, was it a risk even to carry it out? Was that why Mr Trinder hadn’t wanted to take it himself? Wouldn’t it be best to stop and stuff it down a rabbit-hole? Or at least open it and see—he could tell the sergeant someone had done that at a road-block? No. Either of those would get him deeper involved. Ignorant messenger was least worst, though it was bad enough. It certainly cleared all debts to Mr Trinder. No question of lending the pass.

There was a brass band on the tannoy, a Sousa march or something. At the camp gate, instead of the usual gum-chewing sentry, there was now a smart MP. Andrew explained his business.

“Hey! Corp!” called the MP.

A group of MPs stood just beyond the gate. An officer was looking at his wrist-watch. A line of lorries, their engines running, stretched all the way to the far wood. A corporal came striding over at the MP’s call. Andrew explained again. Sergeant Stephens’s name worked no magic.

“Forget it, son,” said the corporal. “This is a military establishment. We have four thousand troops in here. We can’t allow citizens come assing around among then. You give it me, and I’ll despatch it up to Supply. OK, out of the gate, now.”

A whistle blew and the first lorry crashed its gears and came churning on. The MP had waved Andrew to the wrong side of the entrance, so he was trapped and had to wait. The lorries had the sides of their canvas covers rolled up, so that the troops in them could look out, thirty or so GIs in full battle gear, steel helmets, rifles, huge back-packs. It could have been another exercise, but it wasn’t. You could tell from the men’s behaviour—some whooped, some chattered, some sat silent, but they all had a tension about them. The major at the gate saluted each truck as it passed. They were heroes, so he saluted them as he sent them off to die. How many? Which ones? You and you and you there, tugging at your chin-strap. The individual faces became blanks, pale oval targets propped there jiggling to the lurch of the lorry as they waited to be splattered into blood and bone and brain. Wasn’t that Phil? Andrew stared. The man stared back, the lorry swung out of sight and the dreadful anonymous parade continued, hypnotic, seeming to carry a magic beyond anything Andrew could command or control. It was as though his own soul sat invisible in every truck and was roared away, naked and helpless to the battle, leaving behind only a dissolving wrack of might-have-beens.

A whistle blew again. The next truck halted at the gate, leaving a gap. Andrew shook himself out of his horror, rushed through, and escaped. As he went jolting down the pocked gravel of the unmended drive he realized that the man couldn’t have been Phil. The GIs in the lorries were assault troops who’d only come in the week before. Phil was one of the permanent camp staff, a cook, not an infantryman. Anyway, he was in Hull.

“Wretched weather for their invasion, poor things,” said Cousin Blue, smearing a thick layer of butter into her open roll.

“It is no more than a rumour,” said Cousin Brown. She always cut her roll into precise halves, whereas Cousin Blue grappled hers apart, but it was noticeable that she too had a full round of butter in front of her place and though less lavish than her sister was not expecting it to have to last a full week.

“Nonsense,” said Cousin Blue. “They stopped all leave in the camp since Monday. General Odway has sent that frightful dog to kennels. The Library is full of packing cases. They are playing nice war-music up in the wood. I heard a lot of motor-lorries start up while I was dressing—oh, it’s all too exciting! Don’t you wish, Andrew, you were old enough to be going?”

Like the men in the lorries? A crammed ship churning the dark sea? Dawn, and a landing-craft wallowing towards the shingle. Lines of shell-bursts whipping into the waves, nearer, nearer? A scream beside you?

He forced Adrian into existence to speak and smile for him. “I’d be too sea-sick to enjoy it properly.”

“Of course, dear Charles has been through … Samuel, is that the telephone?”

“Going, miss.”

Silence fell. Andrew was aware of something new, different from other week-ends, a tension, a sense of nervy waiting. The invasion? No. Anywhere else in England it might have been, but for all Cousin Blue’s excited prattle it wasn’t here. Here they lived on their dream island, with the war just something to talk about, a storm beyond their shores. It must be something else.

Thanks to the road-blocks and the convoy at the camp gate Andrew had been only just in time to clean himself up for supper after his ride, so had had no chance to talk to Cousin Brown alone. He had to guess. Charles had perhaps changed a little, was surer of himself in certain ways, not so ready to play lovey-dovey with Cousin Blue the whole time. But he was very jumpy still. He looked a bit pinker in his cheeks, and that made the mottling of his nose less obvious. Uncle Vole had stayed in his room, so there was only one decanter of wine, not even full, just one glass each and after that water. Heavy drinkers get the jumps if they’re taken off, of course. It was hard to tell.

Cousin Blue had talked more than usual, sighed less, tried to drag Charles in to every little bit of talk. Cousin Brown was very silent, almost morose, emitting little clicks of exasperation sometimes at her sister’s remarks. But now nobody spoke while Samuel was out of the room, and as he came back all four heads turned towards him.

For an instant as he stood in the doorway he seemed to share the tension, to embody it, but then he spread his hands and smiled.

“Just a wrong number,” he said.

Silence again, and the ebb of let-down.

“Charles is going to help in your play,” said Cousin Blue. “Isn’t that fun? He’s going to be the King of … of somewhere in Italy.”

“Naples,” said Andrew. Cousin Brown had made no effort to help.

“Yes, of course. It will be quite like old times—it was the dressing up I liked best. Do you have a good leg, Charles? Hose can be so revealing. I almost wish there were a part still for me, only I fear I should forget my lines.”

“Which would make it even more like old times,” said Cousin Brown.

“Try not to be catty, dear.”

Silence again. The tension beginning to return. Andrew almost missed Uncle Vole’s slurpings and suckings.

“How is Sir Arnold?” he asked.

Instantly he knew that this was it.

“Not very well,” said Cousin Brown.

“It is too dreadful,” said Cousin Blue. “And he has been so good to us over the years. Samuel, is there any more of that sauce?”

“Coming, Miss May.”

Now Andrew could hear the news even in Samuel’s voice. Uncle Vole must be definitely dying. Any day now. No wonder they were all so jumpy, Charles especially. If Uncle Vole died without acknowledging him, that mightn’t be too bad. But if he were to repudiate him in these last few days.

“It is such bad luck,” said Cousin May. “I do wish he had had a little longer to get to know dear Charles again.”

“Will you be making your usual jaunt to the cinema, Andrew?” said Cousin Brown.

“As far as I know. There’s not much on, though.”

“I wonder whether that is wise in the circumstances. Perhaps if you were to …”

“Oh, it hardly affects dear Andrew, does it, Charles?” said Cousin Blue.

“Of course it does,” said Cousin Brown.

“Perhaps we had better talk about something else,” said Charles, very firmly, for him.

No, thought Andrew, it doesn’t affect me at all. I will not lift a finger or breathe a breath, one way or the, other. All that matters is that Uncle Vole shouldn’t go and muck up Sunday night for me by dying at the wrong moment.

After supper, by a further exercise of her remarkably strong will, Cousin May made them all play cards, a nursery game called Dunces. Apparently the three Wragge children had been taught it by their mother, almost fifty years ago, and Cousin Blue said it might help bring things back to dear Charles, and besides, if Andrew was a proper Wragge he had to know how to play Dunces. Surprisingly Cousin Brown made only a token resistance to the idea, and then played the game with serious attention. Andrew was the dunce in all three games; cards meant nothing to him. Charles made more sense of the game than you’d have expected and had the odd small triumph. The battle for scholar was very close. Cousin Blue won the first game by a few marks. She started with a rush on the second, but Cousin Brown grimly whittled her lead away until they were level on the last hand.

“There!” said Cousin Blue, laying down three nines. “Done you again!”

“But I have honours,” said Cousin Brown, and showed her hand, which was all court cards.

“You can’t do that,” said Cousin Blue. “I had already claimed.”

“Of course I can, if it is honours,” said Cousin Brown.

“No you can’t. Where are the rules?”

“They are in the bottom right-hand drawer of the long-boy in the Library, of course,” said Cousin Brown. “I doubt if we can find them now, with all the Americans’ equipment in there.”

“Really, I will be so happy when they have gone,” said Cousin Blue. “One cannot lay one’s hand on anything. Mother’s photograph album—do you remember, Andrew, I was showing you only the other day, with all those lovely pictures of South Africa—that has simply vanished. Colonel Ganz has taken it as a souvenir, no doubt. He is always picking up little things. He boasts about them quite openly, but I had supposed that at least he paid for them.”

“Nonsense, May,” said Cousin Brown. “Mabel has simply tidied it. It will turn up.”

“I have already asked Mabel.”

“You know,” said Charles, “I think you can declare honours after someone’s claimed. Elspeth is right.”

Cousin Blue stared, her mouth half open.

“Thank you, Charles,” said Cousin Brown, and gathered up the cards.

Perhaps it was his intervention on the wrong side that made the final game so tense. It was close enough, anyway, level-pegging all the way between the sisters, with the other two miles behind. Even Andrew became involved. He couldn’t share the interest in the cards, but the behaviour of the players was absorbing—you’d never get through a career without playing the occasional poker-shark or gambling dandy. Cousin Brown played her cards slowly and kept her voice even, but a muscle to the left of her jaw began to twitch as the finish neared. Cousin Blue sighed and giggled, double and triple bluffing, but it was actually harder to guess what sort of hand she might hold. Each accused the other of cheating several times. There were frequent squabbles about the rules, with appeals to Charles, but his memory appeared to have clouded again.

Andrew picked up the last card, the five of clubs. He had two other fives, so he took the two of hearts out and put it on the dump. They’d said something about the two of hearts, but he couldn’t remember what. There was an instant of shock, then a slap as the sisters grabbed together. The dump scattered across the table.

“Mine!” shrieked Cousin Blue, but Cousin Brown kept her grip.

The card tore in half.

You’d have to tear the card first and paste it, Andrew thought, and rehearse and rehearse to get the timing right, and even then you mightn’t achieve the sudden tiny intensity. Both Cousins stared at their half cards.

“It was mine,” said Cousin Blue.

“Now we’ll have to throw the pack away,” said Cousin Brown, and tore her section in half again.

“We have missed the news,” she said.

“They won’t have said anything about the invasion,” said Cousin Blue. “Isn’t it fun, only us knowing? I won, didn’t I?”

“Let’s go to bed,” said Charles.

“I shall go and talk to Nurse first,” said Cousin Brown.

“Oh, listen to the bombers!” said Cousin Blue. “Do you know what they remind me of? Lying in bed and listening to the sea on the rocks at Plettenburg Bay Hotel.”

The dusk was still throbbing with engines as Andrew slid up the window of the linen-room, but then a gust of wind whipped through the woodland and drowned them.

He was a bit later than he’d meant. He’d been lying on his bed, getting his homework done while he waited for the movements in the corridor to cease, when Cousin Brown had tapped on his door.

“May has been deliberately attempting to prevent me from talking to you alone,” she said. “Father, you realize, is dying.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I wish I could say I was, but unlike May I cannot act the part. My chief wish is that before he dies he should be persuaded to make some provision for you in his will.”

“What about Charles?”

“Father has said nothing to me about Charles, but I would not expect him to. As far as I know he has seen him only once.”

“At supper three weeks ago?”

“He should not have made the effort. It was that, I believe, that gave him this final push, though his decline in the past week has been rather rapid. He may even have forgotten that Charles is in the house.”

“Won’t Cousin May …”

“I think not. I have still not been able to make up my mind whether Charles is who he claims to be, but in any case the longer he stays without challenge the more May will be able to remind him about past events, and hence the more convincingly he will be able to play his part. It needs only one small thing to tip the balance either way.”

“Would you mind?”

“Should Charles inherit? No, I think not. As a man I rather like him. He has manners and style, and but for his unfortunate addiction … but oh, Andrew, it is you and your future that truly concern me!”

“You needn’t worry.”

“The stage is such a chancy career. What I have come to say is that whether or no Father makes provision for you, he will not leave me penniless, and I shall make it my business to look after you.”

“Oh … I don’t know what to say … er … I hope I won’t need it, but thank you very much.”

“Not at all, my dear boy. I am being thoroughly selfish. You, I believe, are going to have the stage career I should have had, so naturally I wish it to be a success. For me it will be my career too.”

Adrian had continued to stammer gratitude, but inside him Andrew had sat cold and angry. A lot of people were going to try this, he thought. None of them was going to succeed, ever. If they looked like being useful he would use them. When they had ceased to be useful he would let them drop. If that was what Cousin Brown wanted, he owed her nothing at all. It was better that way. No entanglements.

He changed the subject.

“If … I mean if Sir Arnold …”

“Dies?”

“Yes. What about the play?”

“Oh, I shall continue with that, unless I am somehow prevented. We will have to cancel a few rehearsals, for decency’s sake, but I see no reason why we should not pick up the strands again in a week or two. My mind has been greatly eased by the improvement you have managed to effect in Jean’s performance …”

He had had to let her talk on. She was, he realized, far more tense than she was trying to make out. An age was ending for her, a god dying. The muscle in her cheek still twitched when she fell silent. It had been another half-hour before she’d left.

He climbed carefully down, reminding fingers and toes of the route. They knew it well already, but he was going to have to climb back up in the dark, which he’d never tried before. The mess on the pantry drainpipe was worse than ever. If General Odway was really leaving there’d soon be no guards on the front and back doors and he could take a key off Samuel’s board and go in and out the easy way—but he probably wouldn’t, he thought. Burgling made the whole adventure more private, more interesting.

Not being sure where other GI sentries might be posted he started on the long way round below the terraces, moving casually as if out for an evening stroll, but as he crossed the path leading down into the woodland garden he stopped. A movement had caught his eye under the trees, an echo of his own, not furtive, not particularly wishing to be seen. He stood, half-hidden by a shrub, pretending to look at his watch, but peering sidelong down the slope.

The man beckoned. The energy and clarity of the gesture told him at once who it was—Samuel, but not the gentle quiet-moving old man who served the Wragges. No, it was that other Samuel, the embodiment of earth, Prospero’s slave. Hell, thought Andrew. He’s het up about something. Can’t be helped. She’ll just have to wait a bit longer. He strolled down the woodland path as though his check on his watch had told him he had time for a detour. As he approached Samuel darted towards him and with another Caliban gesture thrust a piece of paper under his nose.

“You read this for me.”

It was a sheet torn from a note-book with a short newspaper cutting pinned to the top left corner. Beneath the cutting, in a slant American script, was written “Hull Advertiser, Jan 12, 1943.”

“Do you know this man?” Andrew read. “The authorities are attempting to trace the identity of a man currently in the Royal Infirmary. He is aged about sixty, 5ft 4in, slim build, grey hair, blue eyes, clean shaven. He appears to have lost his memory following recent enemy action, and does not know his own name. At times he believes he may be called Charles Arnold Wragge. If you can help identify him, please contact Hull Royal Infirmary.”

Andrew folded the cutting back. There was a bit of photograph on the other side, typical local-paper stuff, part of a man’s leg, a silver trophy-­cup, the blimp-like end of a monster marrow.

“Well,” he said. “That looks as if it’s that.”

Samuel shook his head, dazed with disappointment.

“Where did you get it?”

“Phil just sent it. Sergeant Stephens, he rung during supper.”

“When you said it was a wrong number?”

“Didn’t want to tell anyone till I seen it. Any case, I got to show Baas Wragge first. Just been to fetch it off of the sergeant.”

“Is that all right? I mean, you remember what the sergeant said about …”

“Sure I remember. Bit after you told me that, I was going up the drive—sergeant had got me some butter for Miss May—when I run into a couple of Yanks. Started asking me questions—where was I going?—and then calling me names. I didn’t say nothing, and it looked like they might get to knocking me around when the sergeant happened down and they run off.”

“You didn’t tell anyone?”

“Didn’t want Mary Jane worriting. Sergeant said me being a nigger he’d not get the officers to take it serious. After that we fixed a place—that old fell tree top of Five-acre—so he can leave Miss May’s butter when it’s easy for him to get down there, and I fetch it and leave the money in the morning, when they’re all busy soldiering. I only come out now cause he rung me, saying he’d got something from Phil. I’d asked him, couple of days back, telling him it’s getting urgent—can’t tell him why. Thought he might’ve found something the other way.”

He took the cutting back and stared at it, shaking his head.

“He still isn’t Baas Charlie,” he said.

“I suppose it doesn’t absolutely prove it. But it does show he’s telling the truth about losing his memory and so on. He can’t have started making his story up that long ago and not done anything about it till now.”

Samuel shook his head again and gave a grunting sigh. “Better be getting long back in,” he said.

“I’m going to wander round a bit longer.”

“Guards don’t like it, not if you’re after dark.”

“They don’t know I’m out.”

Samuel nodded and grinned, though his brow stayed frowning.

“Baas Charlie, he used to climb all over the house, your age,” he said.

“Must run in the family. Good-night.”

“Good-night.”

Mrs Oliphant was snoring, louder than the bombers or the wind. Jean was waiting by the window, anxious and cross, and expecting to snuggle on the parlour settee, but he made her put on an extra jersey and walk with him in the roaring woods for an hour while he talked about roles he would one day play, and how he would tackle them. Her lips were rubbery cold when he kissed her good-night.

The climb back up went easily. The linen-room window was still open. It was just before midnight when he got to his room. On his pillow he found a note in Mrs Mkele’s handwriting. “Please to see Sir Arnold 10 o’clock a.m. Respectfully, S.M.”

FIVE

There was no answer to his tap, but as he took hold of the handle it turned from the inside and the door opened. Uncle Vole’s nurse blinked at him with an outraged look, as though someone had just pinched her bum.

“Sir Arnold asked to see me,” he explained.

She put a hand to her ear and pulled out a plug of cotton-wool. He explained again. She stood aside to let him through.

“Try not to tire him,” she snapped as she left.

Uncle Vole looked younger. Perhaps the angle of the head on the pillow smoothed out some of the wrinkles, or perhaps what he had been saying to the nurse had brought a flicker of blood into the parchment cheeks, but somehow his whole face spoke of what it might have been in years gone by, all the way back into the obscurities of childhood. The room was summer-warm. Arms and hands lay inert on the counterpane, framing the body, which was so slight that without them it would have been hard to know where it lay beneath the bedclothes. A finger fluttered, summoning Andrew closer. The rheumy eyes glared up, then closed.

“Stupid cow,” said Uncle Vole. “Stuffs muck in her ears so she can’t hear what I’m telling her. Must have a good-looker, I told them. If that’s the best they can do …”

“I suppose the young ones have been called up.”

“If I was Adolf Hitler I’d have all that sort put down. Waste of money keeping them alive. Watcher want?”

“You sent for me, sir.”

The eyes opened again, not glaring but peering, seeking for something in Andrew’s eyes.

“I’m dying.”

“Bad luck, sir.”

“That all you can say?”

“If I said anything else you wouldn’t believe me.” A long pause.

“Right. The bugger calls himself Charles. He’s not my son. Spotted that soon as I saw him. Might’ve booted him out that very night. Thought I’d have a bit more fun with the pair of you. Wanted to see May’s face when the coppers came for him.”

“Did Samuel show you …?”

“Bit from that paper? Don’t prove a thing.”

“I thought …”

“Fuck that. I say he ain’t my son, and Samuel says he ain’t neither. None of the others is worth a bugger. That’s why I’ve hung on to Samuel. There’s a nigger-trick he can do—they can’t all, but he can. I’ve seen him stare at a heap of lumps like a sick goose and say ‘Big stone in there, baas,’ and I’d hammer the lump apart and half the time he’d be right. More’n once I had him tell me the Company Police were coming on a surprise visit and I’ve had time to get things straight for them. If he says the bugger’s not Charlie, you can take it as read.”

“What are you going to do, sir?”

The eyes closed as the old man rested. Andrew studied the line of the blue lips, the nose pointed like a sail. You’d never be able to afford a pause this long, he thought. You’d have to make it seem like one.

“Brandy,” said Uncle Vole. “On the table here. Use the dropper.”

There was a bottle, a glass and a glass tube with a rubber bulb at the top. Andrew poured out some brandy, sucked a little into the tube and fed it in between the lips. Another immense pause.

“I’m going to tell you a story,” said Uncle Vole, still with his eyes closed. “I don’t like you. Why should I? Nobody’s ever liked me. But you’re my sort—look out for Number One and bugger the universe. Might have told you anyway, one day. Want someone in the family to know. You’re the one. Goes like this. When I was eleven I decided I was fed up. Fed up with my fool of a mother and my mouse of a brother and my God-spouting greasy father and everything else. Most of all fed up with Chapel. Came to me one morning, like Paul on the way to whatsit, that I was buggered if I was going to sit through that one more Sunday.”

“Yes, sir. You told me.”

“Shut up and listen. My brother held me down while my father laid into me with his belt on my bare arse and I swore at them the foulest I knew. My father must’ve gone off his rocker—he kept at it till I passed out, and I was five days in bed after, lying on my belly. Got the marks still. Feel ’em each time I go to the shit-house. But it didn’t change my mind—all it did was make me promise myself by every oath I knew I’d get the best of ’em in the end, and I’d do it in a way so they’d think about it every day they lived, all the rest of their lives. Brandy.”

Andrew dribbled another dose between the lips and waited.

“It wasn’t my father I swore I’d do for so much as my swine of a brother. I knew I’d have to wait my time. Four years I sat through Chapel, foul-mouthing under my breath, thinking about it. First I knew I’d need money. When I was twelve my father put me into a ship-chandler’s. I worked at that job like a good ’un. Stole what I could, but only when I knew it was safe. Spent a bit on whores—balls dropped afore I was thirteen—saved the rest …”

His voice was a scrape, barely loud enough to hear, with in-dragged wheezing every few words. When he rested Andrew gave him more brandy, imagining in his own throat the voice that would sound like that and yet be heard in the furthest seats.

“Didn’t tell yer. Brother seven years older than me. Been others between, but they’d died. Got engaged. Older than he was. Chapel, of course. Plain as a boot. Father put him up to it. She’d a part share in a coal-yard coming to her. Father wouldn’t let ’em marry till my brother was twenty-five. Three more years. I was fifteen.”

Now the voice strengthened slightly, as if with remembered energies.

“Summer Sundays they’d go for a row on the river. Not alone, of course. Chapel. If her cow of a mother was stuck they’d take me. Only a kid, so that counted. He never touched her. I can see us now, him with his oily pink neck and his little bowler and his stiff white collar and his waistcoat with the watch-chain like Father wore, sweating at the oars, and her lolling under her sun-brolly at the tiller and looking at him and thinking how she was stuck with him cause it was her last chance, and me hunkered up in the bows, watching her past his head, thinking too. Brandy.”

Revenge, Andrew thought. You get it a lot as a motive. Reading the lines you wonder what the point is. But here is this old man, dying, sending for me so he can have his revenge on my family one more time … The blue lips moved again.

“August nineteenth was her birthday. Tuesday, with a big party. Her Mum had to bake all Sunday, Sabbath or no Sabbath. A week before, on the Saturday, I took the twelve quid I’d saved and put it on a horse called Breaker. Came in at six to one. Then I knew it was my hour. There ain’t no God up among the stars, that’s all horse shit, but there’s a little god inside you and when he tells you Go you must go, or he’ll be sour on you the rest of your days. I bought myself a passage to the Cape, ship sailing Monday. Not my own name. Booked another for Boston, sailing Liverpool, Tuesday, just the deposit. Used my own name for that. Bought a padlock, bottle of bubbly, pie, peaches, glasses, napkins, all the trimmings. Made sure of my boat.”

A long pause, different somehow in nature. He wasn’t simply resting but remembering, savouring.

“Sunday. Chapel in the morning, then dinner. Amy used to have dinner with her lot, then we’d go by and pick her up and on down to the boat-house. Between us and her we went close by the chandler’s where I worked. Told Ozzie I’d a present for Amy’s birthday I wanted him to have a look at. I’d a key to the shop, cause of being first in to sweep out. The old man had a store-room at the back, kept it padlocked, but I’d made myself a key. Saturday night I’d been down and changed the padlocks. Took him into the shop, opened the store-room. After you, Ozzie, booted his back and shut the door. Locked it, picked up my basket I’d hid under the counter, on down to Amy’s, told ’em Ozzie’d be meeting us at the boat-house. Soon as we were out of the house I told Amy fact was Ozzie’d come over queer at dinner, but if I’d let on to her Mum she’d have been kept home to help with the baking. Sin to waste an afternoon like that, and the boat all booked. She didn’t like baking. I was only a kid, wasn’t I?’

More brandy and another rest, the lips pursing and falling back.

“Oh, it was perfect weather. It had to be—my little god was working. Bloody stiff pull in a boat that size, but I needed the room in the bottom. Ran in among some reeds I’d spotted earlier trips. ‘What are you doing?’ Got the bubbly out. Winked. ‘Going to America Tuesday, so you’ve got to drink my health. Sorry old Ozzie ain’t here too.’ She was a stupid cow. Catch Ozzie drinking bubbly, on a Sunday too, even with the reeds to hide him. He’d have rowed straight home to tell Father. She didn’t think about any of that, only the romance of me going to America and her being in the secret, and trying her first champagne. She might be Chapel, but I’d been watching her, Sunday by Sunday. She said it tasted like lemonade. Never knew you were supposed to get it chilled, so we drank it warm while I told her about America and how I was going to make my fortune and bring her back a necklace of real pearls. Best afternoon of my life. Brandy.”

The rest was shorter this time.

“We had some pie and more bubbly. ‘Now I want you to kiss me good-bye. I’ve never kissed a woman before and I want to know what it’s like. Least you can do for a brother-in-law.’ Didn’t give her a chance to say no, just slid my arm round her waist and started in. ‘That was nice, let’s do it again.’ She was waiting-ripe. Didn’t take long to work her up. We tried drinking out of the same glass, and then we ate a peach together, juice running over our faces, down on to our clothes. Gave me an excuse to start taking ’em off—I’d paid a whore to show me how everything fastened—clothes women wore those days. Don’t, she kept telling me, but I’d kiss her quiet while I undid the stupid little hooks and she never moved a finger to stop me. She was clay in my hands. I could’ve done anything I wanted with her, anything at all. Clay in my hands.”

Rest.

“Didn’t let her go till it was getting on dark. Four times I did her, each go better ’n the last, and each time I went in I put up a prayer. ‘Give us a kid, little god. Make it a son.’ Nobody came by. There was only us, and the reeds, and the boat-cushions in the bottom of the boat. Then I told her to get herself dressed and I pulled back to the boat-house, whistling under the stars, and her sighing and blubbing in the stern. You’ll be all right, my girl, I thought. First you’ll think you can get away not telling anyone, and then you’ll find what’s happening inside you and you’ll think you’re shamed for ever, but Ozzie’ll marry you all the same, cause of the coal-yard. Father will see he does. Nothing to blub about. Walking up from the river I kept my arm round her waist and talked lovey-dovey about her coming out with me to Boston. Took her up past her house till we came to the chandler’s. ‘Got a present for you.’ Pulled out the keys and told her where to look. There was a street lamp shone in through the shop window, so she could see. She was a stupid cow—she still didn’t twig. Soon as she was in the shop I went whistling off to where I’d stowed my gear. Slept on a bench that night. Next afternoon I was leaning on the stern rail, looking back up the river where we’d been.”

He stopped, exhausted, but a flutter of his fingers showed he had something more to say. Andrew waited, interested but still disappointed. It was too obvious. A scene like this should have something jarring in it, something almost wrong but still dead right … The story, he knew, had been told before, often. It had the same feel of being shaped by performance as Mrs Oliphant’s account of her husband’s death. Uncle Vole had brooded it into that shape over the years, told it round diggers’ fires on the veldt, in the pauses of poker sessions on Diamond, and then only in the private theatre of his skull. Now, for the last time, aloud. When he started to speak again rhythm and tone were different. This time he was telling Andrew something new.

“Soon as I started to make my pile I wrote and hired a nark back home, find out what had happened. Answer, Father hadn’t made ’em wait after all. They’d married that November and they’d had a kid in May. A boy. My son.”

The eyes shot open, glaring up with all their old malice. “Your grandad.”

Andrew simply nodded to show he’d understood. The eyes closed.

“Never had another and I know why. Amy expected Ozzie to do for her same as I’d done in the reeds, and Ozzie wasn’t up to it. In the end she scared him, so he couldn’t do it at all. Still wasn’t enough for me. I’d got to rub it in, so that they woke up mornings thinking about it and went to bed nights with it still buzzing in their brains. Took me a while to think how. Then it came to me. Something Samuel said, if you want to know. I decided when I’d made my pile I’d come back to England and build myself a house, no expense spared, close as I could get to Southampton, make a splash in all the papers so they’d know it was there, go on doing things, charities, all that, so my name would always be in front of ’em. Sir Arnold Wragge of The Mimms. Then on they’d never walk into their grubby little two up two down without their guts twisting inside them, thinking of me. That’s why I built this home. That’s what it means. That’s why I’ve sent for the lawyer, to change my will. I’m leaving it to you.”

Nunc Dimittis.

“Well, watcher got to say?”

“It’s been very interesting, sir.”

The eyes opened, furious.

“Watcher mean, interesting? That all you got to say?”

Andrew paused, mastering the rage inside him, keeping his face marble. The rage was intense, a focused blaze, far stronger than what he’d felt running up through the plantation when he’d heard Jean’s scream and Brian’s laugh. This old wretch, this useless left-over, trying to sucker himself on to Andrew, to attach the long loathsome trail of his own life, all the way back to that afternoon in the Itchen reeds, for Andrew to drag on through the years. It was not going to happen. Mum was dead. There was going to be no past. He let the pause stretch while the clock tocked in the corridor outside and the painful breath wheezed to and fro. At the twanging instant he spoke, icy but amused.

“It has been useful to me as an actor to listen to an old man on his death-bed.”

Instantly, with no pause at all, the body beneath the bedclothes convulsed. That spasm jerked the shoulders up and sideways, with the head seeming to lunge snarling for Andrew’s wrist. The movement stopped. In fact it had been only a twitch of a few inches, but its suddenness and speed had given it that sense of violence, the last spurt of life’s energies exploding out of an ember. The right arm scrabbled to support the body, failed. The body flopped back. The lungs dragged at air, choked on the indrawn breath. The face suffused blue-purple and lay staring at the ceiling.

After a couple of seconds Andrew took the right wrist and tried to find the pulse. None. With his index finger he pulled an eyelid down. It came at his touch and stayed. He closed the other eye and stood staring down.

We did that, he thought. Adrian and Andrew. We spoke the word, and it was done. A clean cut. No past. Gone.

He waited half a minute more, filled with the wonder of it, then turned and ran to the door. The nurse was standing along by a window into the courtyard, frowning at the crossword she was doing on the sill.

“Quick!” he blurted (worried, scared, only-a-boy). “Something’s happened!”

She scuttered to the room, saw the still-purple face on the pillow, paused and went quietly over. She felt for the pulse, raised an eyelid and closed it, and stood back.

“He was telling me a story,” he said. “Then suddenly he sort of choked.”

“Now don’t you go fretting—it was none of your fault. Could’ve happened any instant. A wonder he’d lasted that long.”

“Shall … shall I go and tell my cousins?”

“And if somebody could phone up the doctor …”

“All right.”

Cousin Blue sobbed gustily. Cousin Brown went to her desk and began a list of things to be done. Charles, after a few grave murmurs, stared out of the window. Andrew had found the three of them in the Boudoir, apparently in the pause of an argument. Now all he could do was wait. Jean would be coming along for a rehearsal in ten minutes, and he could slip out and explain …

Cousin Brown rose and left the room with the list in her hand. Cousin Blue dabbed her eyes, blew her nose and crossed to the window where Charles was standing. She put her hand on his shoulder, a gesture implying ownership as much as affection, and looked at the familiar view in silence. Cousin Brown came back into the room.

“How very peculiar,” she said. “Please ring that bell, Andrew—two pushes. I telephoned Oyler to tell him of Father’s death and to ask him to come out as soon as he was able, but it appears that he had already arranged to do so this very afternoon.”

“On a Saturday?” said Cousin Blue.

“Samuel apparently telephoned him on Thursday, saying that he was speaking with Father’s authority. He would have preferred to come yesterday, naturally, but was told that was too soon. Furthermore, he was not to let any of us know that he was coming.”

“Really!” said Cousin Blue. “It seems to me that Samuel is becoming a thorough …”

She stopped as the door opened and Samuel came quietly in.

“You rung, miss.”

“Yes,” said Cousin Brown. “I’m afraid I have some sad news. My father has died.”

“We are all very sorry, miss.”

“Thank you. And you have known him a long time and been a very faithful friend and servant. Would you please see that the others are told?”

Samuel nodded and turned as if to leave.

“One moment,” said Cousin Brown. “I gather you spoke to Mr Oyler on Thursday and made arrangements for him to come and see Father this afternoon.”

“Yes, miss.”

“And you asked him not to let any of us know he was coming?”

“Only what Baas Wragge told me to say,” said Samuel, not at all defensive.

“But why? It seems very peculiar.”

Samuel hesitated, looking gravely at the four of them in turn. “He said to tell Mr Oyler to bring out the old will,” he said. “He was planning to change it.”

“Oh, nonsense!” said Cousin Blue.

“I do not agree,” said Cousin Brown. “All we know about the old will is that he made it when he was in a rage with Clarice …”

“Your silly little wife, Charlie,” said Cousin May.

“Ah,” said Charles.

“It would be entirely sensible for Father to make a new will,” said Cousin Brown. “He would no doubt leave instructions for the clarification of Charles’s position, and also make some provision for Andrew. Did he say anything to you about any of this, Andrew?”

“Andrew is hardly a reliable …”

“May!”

“Dear Andrew, I am not talking personally, of course. But anyone who thought he might inherit rather a lot of money would be bound to be a bit influenced …”

“It’s all right,” said Andrew. “I mean, well, actually he spent most of the time telling me about the row he had with the rest of the family. I sort of got the impression that he knew he was, well, dying, and he just wanted to rub it in he’d been in the right.”

“Of course he was,” said Cousin Blue. “That goes without saying. Samuel, I have to tell you that in my opinion you are grossly exceeding your duties and we are far from pleased with you. You are not to tell anyone else this ridiculous tale. You agree, Charles?”

“Er, well … isn’t it all a bit late? I mean, er …”

“It is clear,” said Cousin Brown, “that Father intended to do something for Andrew. That is no doubt why it wouldn’t do for Oyler to come out until this afternoon. Father wanted to speak to Andrew first. Samuel, did he tell you anything about how he proposed to change his will?”

“Yes, miss.”

“Well?”

“He said for me not to tell anyone.”

There was a long silence while they looked at him. Cousin Blue was about to break it when Samuel held up his hand.

“Baas Wragge is dead,” he said. “No good me saying anything now.”

“You know, I seem to think that’s right,” said Charles. “Let’s see what’s in the will, eh? Then we’ll know where we are.”

“Very well,” said Cousin Brown. “Andrew, I think you had better stay here this afternoon. Mr Oyler will no doubt wish to speak with you. And Samuel, I think you would be well advised to tell Mr Oyler what you know, too.”

“I must think, miss.”

“I’d better go and rescue Jean,” said Andrew. “She hasn’t got a pass.”

“Oh yes, of course,” said Cousin Brown. “Now, Samuel, what time …”

Andrew slipped away. He had to wriggle through a sort of traffic jam on the stairs, where the GIs carrying the officers’ personal belongings down from the upper floors had become enmeshed with others ferrying cases of equipment out of the lower rooms. There were still the same furious outbursts but their tone had changed. The frustration was now of hustle. I’ll make her go alone, he thought. The trailers had looked like rubbish, back-row stuff. No harm in reminding her what it used to be like without me.

SIX

Old Mr Oyler was a surprise—not all that old, for a start. Andrew had been expecting someone ancient, parchment-dry, with a reedy voice and gold-rimmed spectacles. He turned out to be around sixty, a large man with jutting bones, like a starved cart-horse. Certainly he appeared exhausted, with deep-sunk eyes and wet purplish lips. When he spoke the air in front of him was filled with spray. To Andrew he had the look of a visiting preacher, the sort about whom the chapel-goers murmur afterwards that he used to be a very fine man.

Altogether the scene was a bit like Chapel. The furniture in the Boudoir had been rearranged with Mr Oyler facing his congregation across Cousin Brown’s desk. His clerk, a nut-coloured little woman, sat at his elbow. The family were in the front seats and the servants behind. Flies tapped and buzzed on the window-panes. Orders and music—Cousin Blue’s nice war-music—came faintly from the camp tannoy. Brief spells of sunshine shafted between speeding clouds. It was difficult to stay awake.

“Bit premature to read this,” said Mr Oyler, “but since I’m here, and it’s here, and you’re all here, and we don’t want a lot of unnecessary speculation at a time of great uncertainty for us all, and there’s the difficulty of getting everyone together …”

He drew a wheezing breath. The clerk took her chance to whisper in his ear.

“Yes, yes, of course,” he said. “I’d best explain before I start that there are provisions in this will—my father drew it up … when was it? Oh, yes, 1922—provisions about which my father was dubious from the first … whether they would stand the test of the courts, you understand … supposing it came to litigation, that is. Sir Arnold was absolutely insistent, it seems. Be that as it may … ahem … in view of recent events, let us hope …”

He glanced at Charles who was staring at his own shoes and did not stir. As the lawyer began to read, Andrew withdrew himself into his inner cave. The will was nothing to do with him. He would not move a muscle, breathe a breath, for the sake of a single penny of the estate. He would not even take an interest in the outcome. He let the words bumble against his mind like the flies against the window.

“To Samuel Mkele, so long as he shall remain in service at The Mimms … To Mary Mkele … service at The Mimms … To Florence Lavender Franklin … The Mimms … The Mimms … The Mimms …”

Endless commaless sentences. Jean would be at the cinema by now—he’d bike out and meet her on her way back. No rehearsal tomorrow. Church, of course. Black arm-bands? Uncle Vole’s death was not part of the plan but it was perfectly timed, heightening the drama, the feeling of world-change, of time rushing away, of a moment to be seized and clung to—she would feel that. He would see that she did. And at a tactical level the domestic upheavals meant that he could see just as much of her as he needed, judging his point each time at which to sigh and say he’d better be getting back to the house, so that by the time she cycled off to milking tomorrow afternoon … He must find an hour somewhere to get the eyrie ready. It looked like being a colder evening than he’d hoped for. They’d need something to cover themselves …

“… my son Charles Arnold Bellamy Wragge … using their utmost diligence in such inquiry … failing such proof … my grandson John Nicholas Wragge … conditional upon his residence at The Mimms …”

As Mr Oyler tired, his voice became hollow and dragging, a voice from the grave, muttering instructions—well said, old Vole, canst work i’ th’ ground so fast.

“… predecease me, leaving no male issue … my house The Mimms … and all other structures whatsoever to be utterly demolished …”

“No!”

Cousin Blue’s shriek of protest shook Andrew from his trance and allowed his aural memory to reconstruct the rhythm of the preceding phrase and then to understand it. Mr Oyler looked up.

“This is the provision about which my father was dubious,” he said. “Rightly, in my opinion. It could certainly be contested in the courts by any interested party, though the litigation might prove lengthy and costly, so let us hope …”

His voice trailed away. He glanced towards Charles, as if expecting him to come to his rescue, but it was Cousin Brown who spoke.

“May we have this quite clear? My father left instructions that a search was to be made for my brother Charles, and if he was found then the estate was to be his …”

“After certain bequests and the settlements upon yourself and Miss May, yes, yes.”

“If he was not found, then Nicholas was to be heir. And if Nicholas died before my father, leaving no children …”

“No male issue …”

“… then May and I and the servants would still get our share and after that something called the Wragge Foundation was to be set up, and everything left would be sold and put into it, except that this house and all its outbuildings had to be pulled down …”

“Ridiculous!” said Cousin Blue. “He must have been of unsound mind.”

“Nonsense,” said Cousin Brown. “It was absolutely typical of Father. He hated women.”

Yes, thought Andrew. The old poison-spitter, in his prime of malice, twenty-five years ago, just after he’d lost his law case to get his hands on Nicholas, standing on his terraces one evening, looking at his view, hearing a daughter’s voice from behind his rose walk—May’s simper to some shiny fortune-hunter, perhaps, or had it been Elspeth hallooing to her actors—women, stupid cows, only good for a couple of functions. No harm in daughters, rounded the family out, wore the stones, gave the artist-Johnny something to paint. But it was the house that mattered, and a man in it, a man with your own name, living on for you when you were a goner and his sons doing the same after. You’d have thought Charles had the right ideas about women, way he treated his sisters—what did he want to go marrying that Aussie cow for? Couldn’t he have had her without? Had all the women he wanted on his allowance? Now there was only this brat, other side of the world. He’d come back for the money though, and boot his cow of a mother out for the money too. Must remember to put that in the bloody will. But suppose he went and died like Charlie … (May’s simper beyond the roses. Elspeth’s bray.) No! Nobody! Hang on as long as you can, squeeze the utmost relish from your pile, then when you’ve got to go wipe the slate clean. Finish.

“… all so dreadfully complicated,” Cousin Blue was saying. “Such a good thing dear Charles came back to us in time, and we needn’t worry any more.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Mr Oyler. “It appears to have saved a great deal of trouble. Of course it would have saved yet more if Sir Arnold had lived long enough to clarify his wishes to me, but I have little doubt that it was to that end he sent for me at this juncture … Well, I think I have no need to read you the rest of this document, which concerns the detailed instructions for the establishment and running of the Wragge Foundation …”

He began to push back his chair, closing the meeting, but as he did so his face changed. A quick look of surprise, replaced at once by wariness, came over it. At the same instant there was a muttering from the servants. Andrew turned his head and saw Samuel standing and holding up his hand, palm forward, fingers spread, not asking for attention but commanding it.

Once in Chapel Miss Dandy, a quiet little spinster, had stood up just as the sermon was about to start and accused Mr Ruggles, the Minister, of breach of promise. Now in this other congregation Andrew felt much the same tangle of responses—embarrassment, shock, pity, inquisitiveness, relief from tedium and so on. You were aware of them before anything was said. It was the speaking-out-of-turn that aroused them—Miss Dandy, a woman, unmarried at that, and plain and poor too—Samuel, despite his long connection with the family still only a servant. Though he had been remembered in the will, the will wasn’t for him. Andrew could sense that the other servants, Mrs Mkele included, felt the same social shock.

Ignoring them, Samuel spoke quietly but with complete confidence, in the Hampshire accent he normally used only below stairs.

“You haven’t told us, sir, what and if this Mr Charles turns out to be not our Mr Charles after all.”

“Really! Samuel!” said Cousin Blue.

Mrs Mkele whispered and tugged at the hem of Samuel’s jacket. He put down his hand and eased her fingers loose, then stood waiting.

“Ahem,” said Mr Oyler, waiting too and looking towards Charles, who simply shrugged his shoulders and half-spread his hands.

“I think it would be as well to clear the point up,” said Cousin Brown.

“Quite unnecessary,” said Cousin Blue. “We must offer Mr Oyler some tea before he goes.”

Mr Oyler turned helplessly to his clerk, who took the will from him, turned a couple of pages, pointed and whispered. Mr Oyler sighed and whispered back. Andrew cursed. If this was going to drag on he wouldn’t have biked out far enough by the time he met Jean coming back. He wanted her to feel his eagerness, to be sure of him, trusting … At last the clerk prodded Mr Oyler back to his duty.

“The contingency in question,” he said, “… of course Miss Elspeth is right … I shall have to look into it … naturally it is not covered in the will itself … I may have to take further advice, but my impression—please note that it is only an impression—is that the only parties who could bring a case disputing the authenticity of a claimant are those whose interest is affected, and since the other provisions of the will would stand the only such parties are the Trustees of the proposed Wragge Foundation. Most unfortunately the original appointees have all deceased, and, ahem, for some reason fresh Trustees seem not to have been appointed …”

“You mean that I, or Andrew here, or even Samuel, could not bring such a case?” said Cousin Brown.

“I think not, Miss Elspeth. That is to say you would have to contest the whole will, not merely Mr Charles’s right to inherit. Any such move would involve extremely protracted and costly litigation. Let us most sincerely hope it can be avoided.”

Again he pushed back his chair and half rose, but again he was stopped by a gesture from Samuel.

“It’d be something for the police, too, wouldn’t it, sir?” he said.

This time Mr Oyler completed his movement and rose. He passed the will to the clerk, who folded it and tied its pink ribbon round it.

“I doubt if the police would be interested,” he said. “If the family recognize Mr Charles, which they appear to do, that would satisfy them. They are extremely busy these days. There is a war on, you know.”

The clerk tucked the will at last into Mr Oyler’s briefcase and snapped and locked the clasp. Nothing for me, thought Andrew. Not a mention. Be free and fare thou well.

The mood stayed with him as he pumped up the drive, past the camp gate. A convoy of empty lorries was jolting across towards the wood. He could see men waiting in paraded lines beneath the trees. Some smaller trucks, closed and not canvas-topped, were parked near Sergeant Stephens’s store shed, having their camouflage touched up it looked like, but then something on one of them slipped and a whole square of cloth flopped down, revealing a large white circle with a red cross on it. Of course, you don’t let the heroes notice the ambulances, not on their way to the war. For once the notion didn’t fill him with dread. The confidence, the sense of power and invulnerability that had welled up in him as he gazed down on Uncle Vole’s dead body was strong enough to make him feel that when the time came somehow the same power would be there to rescue him from between the closing talons. And meanwhile there was Jean.

Twenty minutes later he crossed a crest and saw her already started down the opposite slope. He put on a spurt till the wind whined round his ears, and when he had made up ground he freewheeled, timing his descent so that they came swooping effortlessly down to meet in the valley bottom.

“Now you’ve got to climb the whole way back up,” she said. “You should’ve waited for me at the top.”

“Couldn’t.”

SEVEN

She had begun to sob, a gentle watery sound that blended with all the other noises of the evening, the bubbling call of a dove below, the crackle of the camp tannoy, and the drumming of lorry after lorry crossing the park loaded with soldiers. There had been thousands of them in the camp two nights back. Tonight all but a hundred or two would be gone. Tomorrow they would be across the Channel, fighting their way on to the beaches, and you and you and you would be dead.

Andrew lay on his back listening, with his hands beneath his head and the peeling dome above him. The canvas of the old cart-cover rasped on his naked shoulder-blades. Under the eiderdown, borrowed from Florrie’s linen-room, Jean’s fingers drifted over his rib-cage.

“You shouldn’t’ve. You shouldn’t’ve,” she whispered.

All his choice then? No will of her own? So wholly in his power? Anyway, her fingers said she was lying.

The painted fingers on the ceiling were saying something too as they reached for the dove. There were yellowish lines to their left, loose curves. Hair. And the foot—that thing it was standing on was a scallop shell. Instantly all the other fragments of paint came into their context, spoke. There were three fingers of the other hand, covering a breast. An edge of floating gauze. A wave-crest. Venus, landing from the sea, new-naked. And there would have been satyrs in the niches, or nymphs. A bed, here, where the cart-cover was, against the blanked-off window—no wonder you weren’t meant to see in from the house! The old goat!

He almost laughed aloud, but stopped himself. Mustn’t spoil the mood. Her sobs were satisfying to both of them in different ways. And it wasn’t the sort of joke she’d enjoy.

Perhaps it had been a young goat, though. Long before Uncle Vole, two hundred years ago, living in the house Uncle Vole had pulled down to build his new one, plonking this extravagant top-knot on to the squat old dovecote so that he’d have somewhere to bring his milkmaids to. No, not milkmaids, actresses lured down from London. They’d know what the room was—a private theatre, a wooden O, for a play by a cast of two who were their own and only audience. Now Andrew had staged it again, after all these years.

The discovery was immensely exhilarating. It wasn’t a fluke. He had felt it the moment he’d first climbed through the hatch, had understood the essence of it in his bones, had refused other chances—the night she had slept in the Ivory Room, or last Sunday night, kissing good-bye at midnight through Mrs Oliphant’s window—because he had recognized what this place was and known that the play must be staged here. The room was sacred to the act, built for this ritual, this triumph, wrought by his sole power, his Art. To savour the moment more he let Adrian slip free, turn and look down, cool and benign, on the tableau, the yellow satin eiderdown, Andrew full face and smiling at the ceiling, Jean’s ginger head in profile on his bare left arm.

“My brave spirit!”

The murmur set Jean off again.

“Oh, you shouldn’t’ve!”

Rot. She had bought her own ticket for the performance. She had stood at the bottom of the ladder on the floor they had swept together, softly calling his name. He had raised the trapdoor.

“Come down.”

He had shaken his head. She had climbed slowly up the ladder, looking into his face, seeing in his eyes what was going to happen, knowing it must because she wanted it too. That was important. It always would be. The triumph didn’t lie in persuading them to pay for their tickets, but in causing them to experience all the exhilaration of the event, to be swept up, rapt, made into something more than themselves for as long as the performance lasted, and then to go home changed. All that he had done for her.

He slid his arm from under her head, rose on his elbow and eased her on to her back so that he could gaze down at her. The only undesigned element was the lighting, not the gold summer dusk he had asked for but almost better, a storm buffeting the dirty panes, a heavy, drab light but still enough to let him see the tender-to-the-touch look under the freckled skin, and the wet half-open lips and the greenish eyes blurred with tears. He bent his head to lick as much as kiss the salty lashes, but she nuzzled her mouth upward, looking for his. The wind thumped against the glass. Further off, but still part of its roar, the lorries trundled another load of Americans away to the tempest on the beaches.