“Would he ever have relented?” asked George.
“Mr. Armiger? No, never. Crossing his will was an unforgivable blasphemy. I can imagine him as a senile old man in the nineties, perhaps, turning sentimental and wanting a reconciliation, but never while he had all his faculties.”
“Did anyone try to reason with him at the time?” She smiled at that, rightly interpreting it as meaning in effect: did you?
“Yes, Ray Shelley broke his head against it for weeks, and Kitty did her best, too. She was very upset, she felt almost responsible. As for me, I know a rock when I see one. I didn’t say a word. First because I knew it would be no good, and secondly because if by any chance he did have a sneaking wish to undo what he’d done, arguing with him would only have made him more mulish than ever.”
“Did you by any chance see the letter Leslie wrote to his father two months ago?” asked George.
The level dark eyes searched his face. “Did Leslie tell you about that?”
“No, his wife did. I haven’t yet seen Leslie.”
Quietly she said: “Yes, I saw it. It wasn’t at all an abject letter, in case you don’t know what was in it. Rather stiff-necked, if anything, though of course it was a kind of capitulation to write at all. They’d obviously only just settled for certain that Jean was going to have a baby, and the poor boy was feeling his responsibilities badly, and I suspect feeling very inadequate. He told his father the child was coming, and appealed to him to help them at least to a roof of their own, since he’d robbed them of the one they’d hoped to have. I don’t know if you know about that?”
“I know,” said George. “Go on.”
“Mr. Armiger made a very spiteful reply, acknowledging his son’s appeal like a business letter, and repeating that their relationship was at an end, and Leslie’s family responsibilities were now entirely his own affair. It was deliberately worded to leave no hope of a reconciliation, ever. He pretended he’d had no idea Leslie ever wanted the barn, but then he ended by saying that since he was interested in the place he was sending him a souvenir of its purchase, and it was the last present they need ever expect from him. As a would-be painter, he said, Leslie might find it an appropriate gift. It was the old sign, from the earlier days when the house used to be an inn.”
“The Joyful Woman,” said George.
“Was that its name? I didn’t know, but that accounts for it. I saw it when Mr. Armiger brought it in for the people downstairs to pack. It was a rather crude painting of a woman laughing, a half-length. They found it in the attics when the builders moved in on the house. It was on a thick wooden panel, very dirty and damaged, the usual kind of daub. One of the firm’s cars took it and dumped it at Leslie’s landlady’s house the day after the letter was written.”
Jean had said nothing about the gift, only about the curt and final letter. But there might be nothing particular in that omission, since the gift was merely meant to be insulting and to underline what the letter had to say. This is all you need expect from me, living or dead, and this is all you’ll ever own of The Joyful Woman. Make the best of it!
“Leslie didn’t write or telephone again?”
“Never again as far as I know. But I should know if he had.”
And all day, thought George, I’ve been writing off a certain possibility because I felt so sure that, firstly, if Leslie did go and ask for an interview Armiger wouldn’t grant it, and secondly, if by any chance he did choose to see him it certainly wouldn’t be to greet him with backslapping heartiness, champagne and a preview of his appalling ballroom. But maybe, after all, that was exactly the way he might receive him, rubbing salt into the wounds, goading him with the shoddy miracles money could perform. On a night when triumph and success were in the air maybe this was much more his mark, not direct anger but this oblique and barbaric cruelty. “He’ll be interested to see what can be done with a place like that, given plenty of money and enterprise, , , ” “He was fair hugging himself.”
“Miss Hamilton, have you got a reasonably recent photograph of Leslie?”
She gave him a long, thoughtful look, as though she was considering whether he could need such a thing for any good purpose, and whether, in any case, denial could serve to do anything but delay the inevitable. Then she got up without a word, and went behind the desk, and brought out from one of the drawers a half-plate portrait, which she held out to him with a slight, grim smile shadowing the corners of her mouth. It had at some time been framed, for George saw how the light had darkened the pale ground slightly, and left untouched a half-inch border round the edges. More recently it had been torn across into two ragged pieces, and then carefully mended again with gum and Sellotape. The torn edges had been matched as tenderly as possible, but the slash still made a savage scar across the young, alert, fastidious face.
George looked from the photograph to the woman behind the desk.
“Yes,” she said. “I fished it out of his wastepaper basket and mended it and kept it. I don’t quite know why. Leslie has never been particularly close to me, but I did see him grow up, and I didn’t like to see the last traces of him just wiped out, like that. That may help you to understand what had happened between them.” She added: “It’s two years old, but it’s the only one he happened to have here in the office. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be any use looking for any of those he had at home.”
George could imagine it. A much-photographed boy, too, most likely. He saw bonfires of cherubic babies, big-eyed toddlers, serious schoolboys, earnest athletes, self-conscious young men-about-town, Armiger’s furnace fed for hours, like a Moloch, on images of his son.
“Thank you, Miss Hamilton. I’ll see that you have it back,” was all he said.
The face was still before his eyes as he went out to his car. Leslie Armiger was not visibly his father’s son. Taller, with long, fine bones and not much flesh. Brown hair lighter than his father’s curled pleasantly above a large forehead, and the eyes were straight and bright, with that slight wary wildness of young and high-mettled creatures. The same wonder and insecurity was in the long curves of his mouth, not so much irresolute as hypersensitive. No match for his father, you’d say on sight, if it came to a head-on clash either of wills or heads. But in spite of the ceremonial destruction of his image, young Leslie was still alive; the bull had pawed the ground and charged for the last time.
It was just four o’clock, and Dominic was walking up Hill Street on his way to the bus stop. Since he had to pass the main police station it was his habit to call in, on days when he hadn’t biked to school, on the offchance that George might be there with the car, and ready to go off duty; and sometimes he was lucky. To-day George picked him up at the corner and took him to the office with him while he filed his latest report; then they drove home together.
“One little call to make,” said George, “and then we’ll head for our tea. You won’t mind waiting a minute for me? It won’t take long.”
“And then you’ve finished for the day?” Dominic’s anxious eyes were searching his face surreptitiously, and trying to read the mind behind it. He would have liked to ask right out if anything positive had turned up, if Kitty was safely and irrevocably out of the affair; but how could he? They had had a family code for years in connection with George’s work, governed by rules none the less sacred for being unformulated; and once already to-day he’d been warned off from infringing them. One did not ask. One was allowed to listen if information was volunteered, and to suggest if participation was invited, but never to ask; and a silence as inviolable as the confessional sealed in all that was said within the framework of a case. He contained the ache within him, and waited faithfully, but it hurt.