The Belting Inheritance (3 page)

My job in the Pam Moor, which was what I called it to myself and to Uncle Miles, was to help Lady W collate the material gathered by her husband in several large boxes, and added to by her. If only she had somebody to organise the thousands of notes in those boxes and put them into proper card index form, she told me, she would be able to finish the book. When I came to work on them, however, I found that the notes were for the most part no more than casual jottings, and that she had not done any work on them for years. What she really wanted was to pour out her feelings about her two dead sons, and she did so to me in that cold, ghostly room, her face alight with eagerness, her dark eyes burning, and the white hair piled like a pyramid above her head. It was David who had helped his father make the Tel-el-Kebir panorama, and David who had made the great battle map that half covered one wall, a map which General Wainwright had said was the best thing of its kind that he had ever seen. Hugh, I gathered, had been more active, he had set up the shooting range I had found at the back of the stables, and had also made an obstacle course I discovered, a course of which the only remaining relics were bits of old pipe for crawling through and a few broken hurdles. David, it seemed to me, had been the arty one, Hugh the sportsman. When I put this idea to Lady W, however – she sat perched on a sort of dais in the Pam Moor and listened to my questions as I sorted out papers and notes – she received it with a frown.

“They were both artists. We are an artistic family. David was a poet, Hugh was a playwright. Are you interested in books, would you like to write?” I said that I would, although I had no idea about it, because I sensed that this was the proper answer. I asked whether Hugh’s plays had been successful, and she said sharply that they had not been performed. “Producers are very difficult. But they were both wonderful boys, they would have made their mark upon the world. It is true, Christopher, never forget it, that those whom the gods love die young. I have only one consolation. They both died like Wainwrights.”

She told me to go to her room and fetch a black box from her wardrobe. When I brought it in she took a small gold key from her bag and unlocked the box. She did this in a ceremonious way she had, as though the rite was important, and drew out a letter which she read to me in her sharp, clear voice. It was from Hugh’s commanding officer, and said that Sergeant Hugh Wainwright had been involved in one of the engagements round Caen on the 14th June, 1944. The fighting had been severe, he had become separated from his men, and the Colonel had with deepest regret to inform her that Sergeant Wainwright was posted missing, and must be presumed to be dead. The Colonel added that Hugh Wainwright had been a born leader of men, and that he had three times refused a commission. She put down the letter and went on speaking, without obvious emotion.

“Five weeks, five weeks to the day after I had that letter, Christopher, I received another.” And she read this second letter to me. It was from a Squadron-Leader, and said that Flight-Lieutenant David Wainwright had not returned from a mission over Germany. His Lancaster plane was known to have been shot down, and it was thought unlikely that there were any survivors. In his own hand the Squadron-Leader had added a postcript, “He was a very fine officer.”

“Even after those letters I hoped, though I knew it was stupid. Can you understand that? No, you are too young.”

I touched a faded photograph. “What’s this?”

“David, with the rest of the crew of his plane. The last picture I have of him.”

David, with hands on knees, sat in the middle of a group. All of them were smiling. I read the names Flt.-Sgt. M Billings, Sgt. V J Copp, Flt.-Lieut. D Wainwright, Sgt. R H T Williams, Cpl. J H Crump, Cpl. R Shalson, Flt.-Sgt. P Blakeney. I said, “He looks happy.”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you have it framed and put with the other photographs?”

“I don’t know. Yes, I do. It’s the last one. I couldn’t bear to have it looking at me.”

More out of embarrassment than for any other reason,
I said, “What about Uncle Stephen and Uncle Miles?”

“Stephen was doing what was supposed to be war work. In an office. Miles was an actor.”

“An actor,” I repeated in surprise. That seemed to me a glamorous occupation.

“He spent his time with something called ENSA. It was supposed to provide entertainment.”

Lady W’s code of judgement in artistic matters was peculiar. The idea of being an artistic creator, a poet, a dramatist or a novelist, met with her approval, but to be an executant, an actor, seemed to her vulgar. Or so she said, although I have thought since that her opinions probably reflected her love for her elder children, her contempt for the younger ones. I used afterwards often to look at the photographs of Hugh and David on the piano, and wonder about them. Hugh was wearing a sports jacket, and he was laughing. It seemed to me that there was something in his expression that conveyed a sort of reckless daring. David was in uniform, and looked serious, even solemn. He was very handsome, but I found it hard to imagine him as Lady W assured me he had been, gay and pleasure-loving.

It must not be supposed that I spent all my time with Lady W, or indeed at Belting. I went to the public school where the boys had received their education. The school was in Dorset, in several acres of grounds, a fact which would have impressed me when I first left Woking, but which I took for granted after my first couple of weeks at Belting. I don’t want to describe my schooldays in detail because they have nothing to do with this story, but I suppose I should say that I found no difficulty in adjusting myself to public school life. At first I was surprised that the equipment we used and the desks we sat in were no better than those I had been accustomed to in the state school at Woking. The school was not particularly progressive, to use a current word, but after the first eighteen months I found no pressure exerted to force me into a pattern of conformity. Indeed, six years of this school had turned me into a slightly old-fashioned aesthete. I idolised Oscar Wilde, Beerbohm and Rossetti, and admired Appollinaire, Cocteau and Alfred Jarry. I had read a great deal of poetry but very few novels, I knew a lot about some specialised periods of history and had won a History scholarship to the right college (that is, the family college) at Oxford. I had half a dozen friends at school who joined me in forming a society which we called the Æsthetes’ Group, but I need mention only one of them, and even he does not come into the story. His name was Sullivan. Looking back on myself at the age of eighteen, I should say that I was intelligent, romantic, and unusually self-contained in my approach to life and people. When I left school and came back to Belting, I did not ask friends to come and stay. I had done so once, and the friend thought that the Pam Moor and Lady W were both like something out of
Great Expectations.
The experiment was not repeated.

When I went back this July, at the end of my schooldays, one thing was different. I had had a letter from Uncle Miles during my last week, and he told me that Lady W was dying. She had cancer of the stomach, and it was likely that she would live for weeks rather than months. Typically, she had insisted that I should not be told until my exams were over. “The old thing’s
delighted
about the schol,” Uncle Miles had written in his emphatic but erratic hand.
“Nothing
could have pleased her more.”

So coming home to Belting this time was different. When I went to see Lady W I was shocked by the change in her appearance, even though Uncle Miles had prepared me for it. She was in the big four-poster bed that she always occupied, with her face at first in shadow, but when she turned on the bedside light I saw her white hair lying on the pillow like strands of dingy wool. There were other things to shock me, the way the flesh round her great dark eyes seemed to have been eaten away, the isolation of the nose that was now like a bit of carved wood sticking up out of her face, the smell that pervaded the room, but the thing that touched me most was the change in her hair. Just for a moment then I understood, as it is difficult for young people to understand, the life she had lived these last few years, a life that must have been devastating in its disappointments for a proud woman like her. I had always been grateful, although at times my gratitude had been tempered by a feeling that I was no more than a surrogate for her lost sons, but at that moment I think I loved her.

She leaned out of bed and grasped my hand with her own, that was thin as good china.

“Have they told you, Christopher? Has that fool Miles told you?”

I could not think what she was talking about, except her illness. I stammered something.

“You came straight up to see me?”

“Of course.”

“Then you don’t know. I’ve heard from him, Christopher.” I gaped at her. She said impatiently, “From David.”

For a moment I thought that illness had affected her mind. Then she groped behind her pillow and brought out a letter written on thin blue paper, in a thin blue envelope. I looked at the envelope. It was addressed to her, and the postmark was Paris.

“Read it, read it.” She closed her eyes.

The letter was a single sheet with writing on both sides. I looked for the signature and found it, “Rikki Tikki” with three crosses for kisses beneath it. The handwriting was thin and straggly, sloping down from left to right on the page. I read the letter.

Ma chère maman,

Read the signature first, I’m afraid you won’t recognise the writing on the envelope.

I don’t know how to begin telling you why I haven’t written, but I must try. Everyone else in the plane was killed, but I only hurt my leg. I was lucky enough to find some Germans who looked after me, got me German papers. Then when I tried to get away across Germany to France my luck ran out, the Russians got hold of me. I had German papers, and they sent me to a labour camp at a place called Novoruba. Don’t know how long I was there, seven or eight years, or how I lived through it. I think for a time I went a bit crazy.

Damn it, I didn’t mean to write about all this, but I’ll finish now. They let me out eventually, dumped me in West Germany. I got a job there, then worked my way to Paris, been there for a year doing all sorts of dirty jobs, wondering why I didn’t write to you.

Now I have, Dearest Mamma, I know about Hugh and I thought it might be better if I stayed dead too. Stupid. It’s a long time, I’m not what I was, but I’d like to come over, see you again. Can I, will you have me? I’m not rich, but you needn’t send fare.

This is the comic name I’m known by.

Best to Stephen and Miles.

Rikki Tikki

I looked at the name on the envelope. It was J Stiver, and the address was the Hôtel les deux Pigeons in Paris. I knew what the signature meant, because Lady W had told me during one of our talks. “Tavvi” had been the nearest David could get to pronouncing his name when he was a small child, and his father, who was a devotee of the
Jungle Book,
had called him Rikki Tikki. I put the letter down and looked at Lady W. Squeezed out of her eyes came two large tears. She used the cliché that was I suppose inevitable for the occasion.

“It’s like a miracle.”

“You’ve written to him?”

“Of course. I told him to hurry over, that he must come – come and live here. I haven’t had a reply yet, no doubt he has things to settle. Then he will come.” She stopped talking, moved her hand aimlessly over the coverlet and said with the faintest of smiles, “There’s not much time.”

Nonsense, I said, nonsense or ridiculous or something like that. I did not know what to say.

“We shall never finish the history now. But you and David – ”

“Of course. But don’t think about it”

“I want you to understand one thing. David coming back will make no difference, no difference at all, to you.”

She was talking about the provision she had made for me in her will, which she had insisted on telling me in detail a few months earlier. When she died I was to receive £20,000 from the estate, and was to make my home at Belting for as long as I wished. It was a handsome provision for the boy from Woking, although by this time I really thought of myself as somebody who belonged here in Belting, in the world where I had been placed.

I left her room a minute or two later, walked along the corridor and met Peterson on the galleried landing that looked down to the entrance hall below. She was carrying, as she so often was, a bundle of washing or laundry. Peterson had never been positively hostile to me, but had made no secret of her belief that it was not possible to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. She greeted me now, however, almost as if I were a fellow conspirator.

“You’ve seen her, she’s shown you the letter?” I nodded. “Isn’t it a cruel trick?”

“A trick?”

“Of course it’s a trick. Who would have the heart to play such a hoax on an old lady, and one in her condition. You saw the letter came from France?” Peterson was a Scot, and in her mind nothing but wickedness was to be found on the other side of the Channel. “He said he’d been there for a year, why couldn’t he have come over before, will you tell me that?”

It was something I could not tell her, for I had not even considered it. When I read the letter I had not questioned its authenticity. Peterson went on, her moustache trembling with indignation. “It’s a heartless practical joke, and whoever did it needs whipping. Using the name he used to be called.”

“How would he know the name?”

But Peterson was not to be deflected from her position into answering such questions. “He’ll not come over,” she said. “Mr Stephen’s written a letter that will keep him in Paris for good.”

That seemed to me a comparatively enviable fate. At the same time Peterson seemed aware that she had perhaps said too much to me, for now she clasped me by the arms and spoke urgently, with her face close to mine. Under the dim daylight lamps she looked like one of the witches in Macbeth.

“You’ll say nothing of this to my lady.” It was an order, not a request, and she was not saying My Lady, but asserting proprietorial rights over Lady W. “He is to send a letter saying it will be impossible for him to come.”