Читать книгу Suicide Excepted - Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark - Страница 7

“Typical of Leonard to want to be buried at Pendlebury! No consideration for anybody’s convenience. Typical!”

The speaker was George Dickinson, the eldest surviving brother of the deceased; the occasion was, as will have been gathered, the funeral of Leonard, and the remarks were uttered as George was climbing heavily into his car after the ceremony. He had been a stout man when his morning-coat had been made for him, ten years before. In the interval he had added an inch and a quarter to his girth, and the resulting discomfort, accentuated by the heat of the day, had put him into what was for him an unusually bad temper. His temper, it may be added, was normally a bad one. What was for him an unusually bad temper was something quite beyond the range of the average adult. It belonged rather to the type of the ungovernable rages of the three-year-old. Unfortunately, it could not be dealt with in the same way.

“In August, too! It’s really too much!” added George, sitting down heavily in the back seat, and mopping his forehead where the top hat had creased it.

“Yes, George,” said a thin submissive voice at his side.

Lucy Dickinson had been saying, “Yes, George,” for close on thirty years. If she had got tired of saying it during that time, she kept her own counsel on the subject. It was certainly the easiest thing to say, and by confining her observations to those two monosyllables she did, as she had found by experience, contrive to save a good deal of trouble. At the present moment, for example, she would have been justified in pointing out that George himself had stipulated in his will that he too should be buried in the family vault, that at the present moment he was badly crushing her new black silk dress, and that it would have been more becoming, to say the least of it, to wait until they were out of sight of the churchyard gates before lighting one of the cigars which he was now, with immense efforts, fishing out of his tail-pocket. But to have mentioned any of these things would quite certainly have meant trouble. And trouble, after thirty years of marriage to such as George, is a thing that one learns the value of avoiding.

“Well! What are you hanging about for? Drive on, man, can’t you? We don’t want to be here all day!” was George’s next observation, directed to the chauffeur, who was still standing at the door of the car.

The car, unfortunately, was a hired one, and the driver was a young man who showed no particular reverence for his temporary employer. Servants who depended on George for their livelihood soon learned the necessity of an eager obsequiousness which in George’s language was called “knowing their place.” This one merely stared with interest at the empurpled face confronting him, and remarked, “You haven’t told me where to go to yet.”

“Hampstead,” barked George. “Sixty-seven, Plane Street, Hampstead. Go down the High Street till you get to—”

“O.K.,” the chauffeur said. “I know it.” And he cut off further conversation by shutting the door rather louder than was necessary.

“Impertinent young swine,” fumed George. “They’re all like that nowadays. And what on earth made you tell Eleanor that we would go back there after the service?” he went on, rounding on Lucy. “Confound nuisance! God knows when we shall get home.” He lit his cigar as the car moved forward.

Lucy’s voice came faintly through the cloud of tobacco smoke. The smell of a cigar in a confined space always made her feel faint, but that was one of the things that dear George was apt to forget, and this was emphatically not an occasion to remind him of it.

“She asked me if we wouldn’t come, dear,” she said. “It was really rather difficult to say no. She wants all the help she can get just now, you know. I thought it was the least we could do.”

George grunted. The cigar was beginning to have its customary mollifying effect on him, and his rage with the world at large was declining to a merely average crossness.

“Well, I hope she gives us dinner, that’s all,” he said. “It’s the least she could do.”

Lucy said nothing. She had not the smallest expectation that Leonard’s widow would wish them to stay to dinner, but it would be wiser to let George discover this for himself in due course.

“But why did she pick on us?” George grumbled on. “Couldn’t she have asked any of the others?”

If Lucy had been a woman of spirit she would have retorted that the reason that Mrs. Dickinson had asked them was that she happened to be extremely fond of her, Lucy, and that George was included merely as a disagreeable but necessary appendage to her. But the wives of the Georges of this world are not women of spirit, or if they are they do not remain wives for long.

“She has asked some of the others, dear,” she said mildly. “Edward is going back with her—”

“That smarmy parson? Why on earth—”

“Well, after all, George, he is her brother. Then I think some of the nephews wished to come, too, and of course, Martin.”

“Martin?”

“Anne’s fiancé, dear. You remember, you met him at dinner when we—”

“Yes! Yes! Of course I remember perfectly well,” said George testily. “You needn’t treat me as a complete child.”

Lucy, who had done very little else for thirty years, was heroically silent. The mention of Martin presently sent George off on another tack.

“Positively indecent, those children not being at the funeral,” he said.

“Anne and Stephen, you mean?”

“Of course I mean Anne and Stephen. They’re the only children Leonard ever had, so far as I’m aware.”

“But George, they couldn’t be there. They are abroad. Eleanor wrote to us and explained—”

“Then they ought to have been got back again. It’s indecent, I tell you. I can’t see myself, if my father had died—”

But the words had suddenly jerked back to George’s mind a recollection of what had really happened when his father died, and of the nasty, unforgivable scene that he had made with his mother on the very day of the funeral. And with that memory embittering even the flavour of his admirable cigar, he was silent.

“They are in Switzerland, climbing somewhere,” Lucy went on, unaware of the reason for her husband’s abrupt silence. “Stephen only went out to join Anne there just before Leonard died. Eleanor wired and wrote, of course, but she hasn’t had any answer. You know what Stephen is on his holidays. He’ll go off for days at a time, staying in huts and places. They may not even have heard about it yet. I’m sure they would have come back at once if they had.”

“Silly young fools. I shouldn’t wonder if they’d broken their necks.”

After this charitable observation, no more was said upon the subject, and for the rest of the way to London George contented himself with explaining at great length the measures he had taken, in his own words, “to squash the newspaper snoopers” who had approached him for information about his brother’s life and sudden death, and with reviling the Press with the paucity and inadequacy of the obituary notices. That there could be any connexion between the two facts naturally did not occur to him.

Just as they were approaching Hampstead, a thought struck him.

“By the way,” he said, “d’you think Leonard left Eleanor very badly off?”

“I don’t know, George, I’m sure.”

“I was thinking, that will of Arthur’s you know. She may be a bit hard hit. You’re sure she didn’t say anything to you about it?”

“No, I’m quite certain she did not.”

“Um!” said George, turning over in his mind the disagreeable possibility that he was going to be asked for help. He decided that it would probably be best not to stay for dinner, after all.

It was certainly a full-blown family assembly. George, with his new-born fear strong within him, took as little part in it as possible, leaving it to Lucy to say the proper things to the various people who seemed to crowd the little room. These included a number of dim cousins, who had not been able to get to the funeral. Exactly what they were doing there it was difficult to say. They seemed a little uncertain on the point themselves. Martin Johnson, Anne’s fiancé, hung rather miserably about the outskirts of the family group. In the absence of Anne, his position was an awkward one. The engagement had never been made public, and officially even the dimmest of the cousins had a better right to be there than he. Mrs. Dickinson’s parson brother, Edward, on the other hand, seemed to be quite in his element. His guiding principle in life was one which he himself had happily described as “Looking on the Right Side of Things,” and his round red face shone with unction—if that is the proper word for clerical perspiration—as he exploited the situation to the full. His one regret appeared to be the unavoidable absence of his wife, laid low by a recurrence of her chronic asthma. It was a regret shared by none who knew her. Aunt Elizabeth, to her numerous nephews and nieces, was The Holy Terror—a title which was on the whole well deserved.

Mrs. Dickinson, meanwhile, sat, the melancholy queen bee in the centre of the family hive, looking at least every inch a widow. George eyed her with interest. Lucy, he supposed, would look like that some day. After all, she was younger than he was, and a better life. What would she feel like? He averted him mind from the thought and concentrated upon Eleanor. What, in her heart of hearts, did she really think of it all? It could have been no joke being married to Leonard. He felt pretty sure that Lucy would—no, damn it! we are thinking about Eleanor!—he felt morally certain that Eleanor’s widowhood was a relief to her, even if she didn’t know it yet. At the moment, she was everything that one could expect—calm, subdued, and appealingly helpless.

Presently sherry began lugubriously to circulate, accompanied by small, dusty-tasting sandwiches. Little by little conversation began to be more animated. There were even faint approximations to laughter in one corner of the room, where some of the less responsible of the cousins had forgathered. But, on the whole, the decencies were preserved, and talk remained at a low pitch, so that the sound of a taxi being driven up to the door was distinctly heard by every one in the room.

“Now, I wonder who—” said Edward, who happened to be nearest the window, peering out anxiously. “I only hope it’s not—Bless my soul, but it’s the children!”

A moment later Stephen and Anne Dickinson came into the room. They looked very much out of place in that funeral company. Except for the ice-axes and rucksacks which they had presumably just deposited in the hall, they were equipped as though Plane Street, Hampstead, were a glacier and No. 67 an Alpine refuge. Their huge iron-shot boots grated uneasily on the parquet floor, and when Anne bent to kiss her mother it became only too apparent that her breeches had been lavishly patched in the seat with some rock-resisting but alien material. From the cousins’ corner came something very like a titter.

“The children,” as Edward to their extreme annoyance persisted in calling them, were respectively twenty-six and twenty-four, Stephen being the elder. They were both tall, slim, and loose-limbed, but in other respects there was not much likeness between them. Stephen had light brown hair and a skin that was ordinarily pale. At the present moment his whole face was a fiery red, and his rather prominent nose was beginning to peel in a markedly unbecoming fashion. Anne had been more fortunate, or more circumspect, in her encounter with the sun of high altitudes and rarified atmosphere. Her face and throat were burned a deep mahogany which blended pleasingly with her dark hair and brown eyes. It was a striking face, handsome rather than pretty, with a firm, rather too square chin that was at variance with her retroussé, essentially feminine nose. The chin, one felt, would have been better suited to her brother, whose intelligent brow and eyes were betrayed by a jaw that lacked character. Stephen had the carriage and expression of the fluent talker, easily making himself at home in any society in which he might find himself. In comparison, Anne’s quiet and reserved manner seemed almost gauche. At the moment, it was certainly fortunate that he was present to carry off a situation that was sufficiently awkward.

“I must apologize for our clothes,” he said. “We simply came straight away in what we stood up in. I hope they’re sending on our luggage from Klosters.” He looked round at the black-clad group. “I suppose the funeral was today?”

“You should have let us know you were coming,” said his mother gently. “Of course, we should have put it off for you, if we had known where you were.”

“Didn’t you get my telegram? I gave a couple of francs to a porter at Davos to send one for me, but the fellow must have pocketed it and the cash for the wire as well. Too bad! You see, we knew nothing about this till the day before yesterday, and then it was only a pure fluke that I happened to see The Times.”

“It may not be any affair of mine,” put in George, in a tone that made it quite clear that he was satisfied that it was very much his affair, “but do you think it is quite decent to come home in this way, in those clothes, on an occasion like this?”

Stephen very ostentatiously did not answer him.

“You see, Mother,” he explained, “I actually got to Klosters the afternoon of the very day it must all have happened. There were the guides and Anne and everyone waiting, and I made them start out that very night. I suppose if we’d waited we’d have heard next morning. It was all my fault, really, but I couldn’t have told, could I? We were absolutely out of touch with everything for three days until we came down into Guarda, where I picked up an old paper someone had left and saw the announcement. There was just time to get down to the station to catch the train. Stopping at Klosters for clothes and things would have simply wasted a day.”

“Of course dear, I understand. Give yourself some sherry. You must be tired. It is good to have you back again.”

Anne meanwhile had quickly gravitated towards Martin, who from the moment of her arrival had ceased to feel or to appear like an ownerless dog in the family pack. Stephen, watching them together, wondered not for the first time what his sister could see in the squat, sandy, short-sighted young man.

“I have asked Martin to stay to dinner,” said Mrs. Dickinson, thereby tactfully indicating to the company in general that Martin was now to be regarded as one of the family, and to Anne that she would have plenty of opportunity of monopolizing him later.

“This business has been a step-up for Martin, at any rate,” said Stephen to himself. “Mother always had a soft place for that little squirt. I wonder why.”

He was wondering how he could contrive to say a few words to Aunt Lucy without involving himself with Uncle George when he was accosted by the least dim of the cousins, one Robert, who explained that he had been managing what he described as “the solicitor’s end of the affair,” pending his, Stephen’s, arrival. Pinning him firmly in a corner, he produced sheafs of documents and began pouring out a flood of detail concerning matters that would require attention. Stephen was somewhat overcome by the mass of work which had to be done. He had entirely forgotten what a complex legal and financial operation dying is apt to be, particularly when it is carried out at short notice.

He tore himself away from Cousin Robert at last, and began to do his duty as host with the sherry and sandwiches.

“A pity you weren’t back for the funeral,” said his spinster cousin Mabel acidly, as he handed her a glass. Her tone seemed to imply that he had kept away deliberately.

He felt inclined to point out that he could hardly be blamed for it, but contented himself with saying mildly:

“Yes, Cousin Mabel, it was unfortunate.”

“I was in favour of holding it up, but your mother wouldn’t listen to reason. You’ll go and see the grave as soon as you can, I suppose?”

“Oh, yes, Cousin Mabel.”

“You mustn’t let the inquest verdict distress you, my dear boy,” said Uncle Edward, squeezing his arm affectionately as he pushed past him to get at the decanter.

“The verdict? I haven’t heard anything about it. There was nothing in the only paper I saw.”

“Suicide,” said Uncle George with all the relish of the bearer of evil tidings. “While of unsound mind. ’Pon my soul, if I’d ever imagined that poor old Leonard would—”

“No, no!” Uncle Edward corrected him. “While the Balance of his Mind was Disturbed. Not at all the same thing, I assure you, George.”

“Same thing absolutely. Difference in wording, that’s all. Why on earth the silly asses—”

“No,” persisted Uncle Edward. “You must pardon me, George, but it is not the same thing. No Stigma, you follow me, no Stigma for the family. That makes all the difference in the world.”

The argument, once under way, showed no signs of ever coming to an end, but an interjection from Anne stopped it abruptly.

“Suicide!” she exclaimed. “Do you mean to say that they actually think Father killed himself?”

“While the Balance of his Mind—” Uncle Edward began again, in his suavest tones.

“I don’t believe it! Mother, Stephen, you don’t any of you really think that? Why, it’s—it’s too horrible for words!”

“But I assure you there’s no Stigma—”

“You were not at the inquest, Anne,” said her mother quietly.

“No, of course I wasn’t. All I’ve seen was the little obituary in The Times, the one that had the notice on the front page. It said something about an overdose of medicine. We took it for granted there had been some horrible accident, didn’t we, Stephen? Why shouldn’t it have been an accident? Nobody’s going to persuade me that Father—”

She seemed on the brink of tears. Everybody began to talk at once.

“But Anne, dear, your father was always a little—”

“The detective fellow made it perfectly clear—”

“When a man leaves a message behind like that—”

“He couldn’t have opened two bottles by accident—”

“I’ve got a complete record of all the evidence—”

Anne, her eyes swimming, her ears deafened with the sudden babel of noise, turned to her brother for support.

“Stephen,” she said, “you don’t believe this, do you? There’s been a horrible mistake somewhere. You’ve got to put it right.”

For the first time Stephen saw himself as the head of the family, the ultimate Court of Appeal in what concerned himself, his mother and sister, with whose decisions the uncles and cousins might disagree if they pleased, but dared not interfere. He squared his shoulders involuntarily beneath the weight of authority which had descended upon them.

“Obviously it was an accident,” he said. “That is, I don’t actually know anything more about the affair than you do. But I’ll make it my business to find out.” He turned to the dimmest of all the cousins, who had spoken last. “Did you say that you had a record of all the evidence at the inquest?”

“Yes. In the local paper. It’s practically verbatim. They’ve spelled some of the names wrong, but you can check that from the other papers. I’ve got them all. I keep a press-cutting book, you know.”

“All right. Will you let me have all you’ve got? As soon as you can?”

“Oh, rather. I’ll send it round tonight.”

“Thanks.”

“You’ll let me have it back again, won’t you?”

“Certainly, if it’s any use to you.”

“Oh, rather. I mean, there’s not much in my book yet, and—”

“I quite understand.”

“I don’t want to butt in, my boy,” said Uncle George, who spent most of his life butting in, with frequently disastrous results, “but is it going to make a ha’porth of difference to anyone whether it was suicide or accident?”

“Not the smallest, I should say,” remarked Cousin Mabel.

Uncle Edward’s lips were to be seen silently forming the word “stigma.”

“Probably not, I dare say,” said Stephen wearily. “It isn’t a bit what I expected, that’s all.” What did it matter what he said to these people? It was no concern of theirs.

“It makes a lot of difference to us,” said Anne. Her glance included her mother, who sat, her hands in her lap, listening and saying nothing.

As if recalled to her surroundings by the words and the look that accompanied it, Mrs. Dickinson rose from her chair.

“If you will excuse me, I shall go and lie down for a little before dinner,” she said. “Anne, I think you had better do the same. You have had a long journey. Stephen, will you show Martin where to wash his hands?”

The rest of the party took the hint and left the house in a noisy, chattering body, each with a private disappointment that he or she had not also been invited to stay for dinner. Only George, as he climbed once more into the hired car, with the cheerful prospect of soon getting into comfortable clothes again, was relieved that at all events the dreaded question of financial support for his sister-in-law was postponed for that evening.