Only last May she had made a special journey from Devonshire for the purpose. There was a linen-chest. There were stacks and stacks and stacks of books. There were pictures – portraits of grandparents and great-great-grandparents. He remembered an enchanting Regency lady in clinging muslin with a blue riband in her hair. What was he to do with her – what was he to do with any of them? Leave them to the dust of Ella Harrison’s attic? He had a feeling that they would prefer it to her company downstairs.
He lifted the lid of yet another box and discovered photograph albums jammed down upon a mass of letters and papers. They would have to be gone through – but how and where? The idea of remaining with the Harrisons for more than the very briefest of visits filled him with horror. A dreadful woman and poor old Jack the completely trodden worm. Yet where if not here could he deal with such a mass of stuff? He couldn’t drag it to an hotel, he couldn’t cart it down to Devonshire, where Emmy would think him impious if he destroyed so much as a second-cousin’s photograph. So what was he to do except stick it out here and get on with the job as fast as he could? He supposed that quite three-quarters of the letters and papers would be for the scrap-heap. He thought he had better get going on them.
There was an empty clothes-basket in the corner which would do nicely to hold the discards. He had it about a third full, when he picked up a battered book on engineering. He couldn’t remember having ever possessed such a thing, but when he turned to the fly-leaf it had his grandfather’s name in it. As he tossed it into the basket, half-a-dozen unmounted photographs fell out from between the pages and fluttered down upon the attic floor. They were at least seventy years younger than the book. They were, in fact, no more than six years old, and he had taken them himself. They were all photographs of Althea Graham, some of them taken in the garden here, and some of them in the Grahams’ garden. There was a very bad one of her with Emmy’s cat Ptolemy on her lap. Ptolemy was hating every moment of it, and when Ptolemy hated anything he made himself felt. The scene came flashing back. The photograph was a bad one, because Althea was trying not to laugh, Emmy kept saying ‘Don’t!’, and just as he touched the camera off Ptolemy scratched and fled. The whole thing came back with extraordinary vividness – Emmy in her gardening clothes with earth on her hands and her hat falling over one ear, Allie in a green linen dress. Her eyes were a sort of mixture of brown and grey, but the dress and the garden setting had made them look almost as green as Ptolemy’s. It was a very bad photograph, but it didn’t go into the discard. None of the photographs were really good. Besides, what did a photograph ever do except set memory and imagination to conjure up a lost image?
He went on looking at the pictures for a long time. He had an impulse to tear them across. The conjuration of the dead is an unhallowed rite – he would have no part in it. But in the end he put them away in his pocket-book and tore up a number of letters from an uncle who had been his guardian and whom he had most particularly disliked. An irreverent satisfaction in being able to think of him as a scapegoat touched his mood and lightened it.
He went back to his sorting with a growing wonder as to why on earth one ever cluttered oneself up with all these lendings and leavings. After five years of being foot-loose it seemed to him to be pure insanity.
It was next day that he discovered he was expected to attend a cocktail party given by Mrs Justice. The Harrisons were not only going to it but had already told her that they were bringing him along, added to which she had rung him up, talked exuberantly about old times, about Sophy and Sophy’s husband and children, with a special mention of the recent twins – about Emmy, and about how nice it would be to see him again. He had always liked Mrs Justice, one of those large rolling women who went her way like a benevolent juggernaut, flattening people with kindness, enthusiasm and good advice. The red-haired Sophy had been a friend of Allie’s – a rollicking creature who always managed to keep one young man ahead of the gossip about her, and was now, he gathered, bringing up a family in the West Indies. Sophy and a tribe of children! It made him feel elderly.
FIVE
EVERY RETURNED WANDERER is not greeted with enthusiasm. When you haven’t seen a ne’er-do-well stepbrother for several years you are not always disposed to order in even a portion of a fatted calf. Mr Martin had a rueful expression when Fred Worple walked into his office and shook him by the hand. He was fond of his stepmother – always had been. A good wife to his father and a good mother to himself and Louisa. But as to young Fred, the son of her first husband, well the less said about him the better. Up to every kind of trick at home and always in trouble at school. He was sharp enough, but you couldn’t rely on him. Old Mr Martin took him into the office, but he wasn’t any good there. He was invalided out after six months of his military service and went off into the blue. His mother worried herself sick about him, wanting to know where he was and why he didn’t write, but Mr Martin had always had the feeling that the fewer inquiries you made about Fred the better. And now here he was, quite prosperous-looking, in one of those suits with a fancy cut and a handkerchief and tie which he wouldn’t put up with in one of his clerks. He said, ‘Well, Fred?’ and then, ‘Have you seen your mother?’
Mr Worple nodded.
‘Staying with her. Come on Bert – aren’t you going to say you’re pleased to see me?’
Mr Martin said, ‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On whether you’ve come back to worry her.’
Fred laughed.
‘You are pleased, aren’t you! Well, I can tell you one thing, she is. Cried over me and kissed me as if I’d brought her the Crown jewels. And you needn’t worry – I haven’t come back to sponge on her or on you.’
‘That is a good thing.’
Mr Worple altered his tone.
‘Now, now, no need to be disagreeable. As a matter of fact I’ve done pretty well – been abroad and made a bit of a pile. Thought I’d like to come back to the old place and see my dear relations. You don’t want to go on knocking about for ever, so I thought about settling down – buying a house, getting myself a wife, all that sort of thing. I suppose you wouldn’t have anything to suit me?’
Mr Martin had a moment’s indecision. He didn’t know that he wanted to have anything to do with a business deal that had got Fred mixed up with it. He might have made money – though it would probably be better not to ask how – and he might have a fancy to settle down and get married and it would make his mother very happy if he did, but he didn’t know that he wanted anything to do with it. He said in a noncommittal manner,
‘Oh, well, you could look about a bit. But those small houses are fetching big prices nowadays, and the smaller they are the more they fetch, so to speak.’
Fred Worple laughed.
‘Oh, I’m not set on anything as small as all that. Four or five bedrooms and a couple of sitting-rooms and a nice piece of garden – that’s about the ticket. Used to be plenty of them knocking about in Grove Hill. Mum tells me you’ve moved right up on the top yourself – Hillcrest Road, isn’t it? Nice and breezy up there. How would you like to have me for a neighbour?’
Mr Martin wouldn’t like it at all. He kept his tongue quiet, but his face spoke plainly enough. There was nothing he would like less than to have a shady stepbrother round the corner.
Mr Worple had a hearty laugh at his expression.
‘Not respectable enough for you? You just wait and see! Now what about one of those houses in Belview Road – nice gardens at the back they had. I’m a whale at gardening – you’d be surprised! Someone told me the corner house was going.’