Cards of Identity (3 page)

*

Crunch,
crunch
– here he was! She jumped out of bed – what a sunny morning! how late she had slept, in her grief! – and hurried to the casement window. But there, below, was not Henry but their joint nephew, a character so undesirable that his uncle and aunt had had to insert special paragraphs into their wills excluding him from all post-mortem benefits. What distinguished him from them most sharply was his absolute disrespect for property and corresponding vacuum of interest in people who possessed it. Industry of any kind he abhorred; yet to say this was to depict his character too vigorously, since he was one for whom the abhorrence of anything would demand more energy than he had to give. Where his uncle and aunt, aided by the turns of two world wars, had raised themselves several notches in the social scale, the nephew, seemingly deliberately, had descended in inverse proportion, finding his friends and his livelihood in strata that made no demands on his lax character. His habitat was the fringe of
the machine-shop and garage; his income came from a string of purely secondary transactions such as re-sales of old motor-cycles, spare parts, tyres, petrol, anything that was rationed or in short supply. And since the garage had now replaced the old market as the point where town and country met, Lolly Paradise’s dealings also included commodities which, in other days, would never have come together – disparate things like lengths of pipe, squares of turves, gravel, old batteries, spirits of salts, roofing-felt, dung, and margarine. In all such deals, Lolly was the go-between, the one who exacted the lowest price from the seller and the highest from the buyer, a method of business that respectable people such as his uncle and aunt believed to be a shameless innovation, unknown to society before the war. Lolly had heard of cheques, and even seen them; he had glimmerings of the great credit system on which usury and society are based, but he himself refused to fiddle with such matters, conducting all his transactions in currency notes and silver. The very thought of writing his name openly on a cheque, where all might read it, struck him as an act of folly that might be all right for some people (though he could hardly say why) but would be, for him, as senseless as leaving a record of all his transactions with the police and the town council.

What also shocked his uncle and aunt was Lolly’s indifference – indeed, absolute ignorance – in matters of social class. Descriptive terms such as ‘gentry’, ‘middle-class’, ‘squire’ were, to him, the equivalent of ‘sith’ and ‘eftsoons’ to the student of purely contemporary literature. Lolly did cash business with anyone, and it no more occurred to him to consider their social status than to open a bank account or make an income-tax return.

He stood, now, on the gravel, with his greasy shoes, his hollow trousers, his imitation leather jacket scored with scratches. ‘Hello, Auntie!’ he called in a high voice, smiling winsomely on one side of his face. ‘Nunky home?’

‘No,’ said Miss Paradise.

‘Thought he could help me.’

‘Why? He has never done so before.’

Many nephews would have winced at this snub, but Lolly was unmarked by what he considered a simple statement of fact. ‘When’ll he be back, Auntie?’ he asked.

‘I have no idea. I am not one to pry.’

‘’Cause if it’s going to be long, I’d just as soon drop the whole deal,’ explained Lolly, his eyes glazing – and he spoke nothing but truth, for if any transaction threatened to be laborious, Lolly just discontinued it, without mentioning his withdrawal either to the prospective seller or the prospective buyer. ‘Where did he go?’ he asked, summing-up a faint revival of interest.

‘He is engaged at the Hall,’ retorted Miss Paradise with lordly triumph, quite forgetting, in her eagerness to give this snub, that Lolly would not understand its social implication at all. Indeed, he now looked curiously interested, as if she had told him that someone had dropped a load of old batteries in the park.

‘Up
there
?’ he asked with some surprise, heaving a wavering thumb in the general direction. ‘People moved in there? What’s it? School, now? Ministry?’

‘I am going out,’ replied Miss Paradise sharply, regretting her folly and withdrawing from her loop-hole to dress. ‘You may as well go too.’

‘You bet,’ he said affably. Then, after a pause, during which she heard his feet shuffling meditatively in the gravel (he always left a cleared circle in any space where he had stood), he called: ‘They got cars an’ things up there, Auntie, or just horses?’

‘I have no idea,’ cried Miss Paradise, pulling on one of Mrs Pugh’s old corsets.

‘Think you could ask Nunk for me?’

‘No.’

‘Well, all right.’ He added in a cheery, friendly tone: ‘Well, I’ll be going now, Auntie. I’ll drop in and see you again, if I have the time. You ain’t worried, are you, Auntie?’

‘Do I sound worried?’ roared Miss Paradise from the back of her bedroom.

‘I thought you did. If you’re going to the village I’ll wait for you if you like. It’s a lovely day.’

Miss Paradise made no answer. At last she heard Lolly move slowly off down the road, not exactly whistling but emitting feebly a tooth-strained string of sibilants. She went to the window and peeped out to make sure he would not hide behind a tree and see which way she went – an act of guile which would never have occurred to Lolly. But, from down the road, he saw her head immediately, gave her a friendly smile,
and waved his hand. ‘Don’t worry, Auntie!’ he cried. ‘Only makes your hair grey.’

A few minutes later Miss Paradise left by the back door and, staring like a Roundhead at any tree that might be harbouring Lolly, took the way across the park that was best hidden from the road. It brought her on to the main drive, and no sooner had she begun to follow this up to the Hall than she heard the roaring of an engine and a large sports car came racing up behind and stopped beside her. At the wheel was a handsome young man, excellently dressed but attractively tousled – all legs, langour, and devil-may-care, as a youth in a sports car should be. He gave Miss Paradise a delightful smile, superior in every way to one of Lolly’s clove-hitches, and cried with boyish eagerness:

‘Are you going up to the house? Can’t I take you the rest of the way? Such a fag.’

‘How very thoughtful of you,’ answered Miss Paradise. ‘Are you by any chance …? I suppose you are …’

‘The new people? Yes. Beaufort Mallet is my name.’

‘How nice to hear that old name again! Well, Mr Mallet, I am Miss Paradise.’

‘Paradise,’ he repeated gravely, turning his blue eyes into the sky and looking more attractive than ever. ‘I seem to recall the name, but I cannot remember in what connexion.’

‘Perhaps the old Miss Mallet who once lived here mentioned it. Or perhaps you saw my brother yesterday.’

‘Oh, that’s not likely, Miss Paradise. Yesterday was our first day here, so nobody would come to call, would they?’

‘Of course, Mr Mallet, I know nothing of my brother’s affairs, but I remember when he went out he said something about just seeing if there really were people at the Hall and not, well …’

‘Not people who had no right to be there?’ cried Beaufort. ‘But how clever of him to know that there was anyone here at all! Do you think the milkman told him?’

‘It would not surprise me.’

‘You don’t mean,’ exclaimed Beaufort, his face becoming worried all of a sudden, ‘that your brother hasn’t come back?’

‘So it seems, Mr Mallet.’

‘But “seems” is surely not the right word, Miss Paradise? After all, if your brother
had
come back, you would be the first to know. He
couldn’t be two persons at once, could he, any more than he could be in two places at once?’

‘I would think not, Mr Mallet.’

‘Then you must be terribly worried, Miss Paradise! And here I stand talking! Do jump in immediately and we’ll rush up and see.’ And he packed Miss Paradise into one of those deep bucket-seats that lower the whole horizon of the world and instantly induce a sense of helplessness in all but the driver. ‘It’s quite possible,’ he went on, churning the engine into a fine roar, ‘that he saw my father, or even my stepmother. Are you very upset? Yes, I can see you are. Let’s go full speed. A minute saved often makes the difference between life and … well, life and great discomfort. Was he your
only
brother?’

‘Yes, and there’s an old bomb-crater in the park,’ cried Miss Paradise, falling to pieces. ‘I fear he’s in it.’

‘You must see Father at once,’ said Beaufort, driving at terrifying speed. ‘Father can do
anything.
’
He took one hand from the glistening wheel and gave her knee a chummy thump.

‘You are really a very kind young man,’ sobbed Miss Paradise at the top of her voice as the rain-puddles rent under the furious wheels like ripped silk. Though pleased to have his hand on her knee, she would have preferred it to be on the steering-wheel. The next second the car made a frightful semi-circular turn and stopped with Miss Paradise’s door exactly at the foot of the stone steps.

‘So you have opened this door?’ asked Miss Paradise, curiosity breaking through her tears like sunlight.

‘Oh, Father would never hear of a
side
door,’ said Beaufort, his voice very grave. ‘Now, Miss Paradise, do come along quickly. I hope to heaven we’ve not missed him.’

He hurried her up into the breakfast-room and instantly left her, shouting breathlessly: ‘Father! Father! An emergency, Father!’

By now Miss Paradise was convinced that Henry’s whereabouts did amount to an emergency; but even as she was trying to find the proper response to loss of something priceless her eyes were roving round the breakfast-room with astonishment: it looked absolutely palatial with its deep carpets, tall curtains, and golden ancestors – had they done all this in one day, or had they been secretly preparing for weeks? She heard Beaufort still shouting excitedly down the passage: ‘Father! Father! Wherever are you?’ and suddenly, from far away, a deep voice
replied slowly and incredulously: ‘Is it
me
you are calling so hysterically, Beaufort?’ The poor boy’s tone became flustered at once: she heard him say, almost pleadingly, ‘Well, Father, it’s an
emergency,
you see; a man has disappeared.’ ‘Then, pray,’ replied the deep voice, drawing closer, ‘compensate for his absence with presence of mind.’

Miss Paradise barely had had time to adjust her look to the awesomeness of the voice when Beaufort threw the door open and his father came in. What an entry; what a man! – a full-length portrait stepping slowly out of an Edwardian picture book, so beautifully dressed and blending so many time-honoured characteristics: the carriage of a duke, the perspicuity of a great surgeon, the courtesy of a sultan, the steel of an imperial governor. And what a sheen on his fine, mature features and on his good boots – real boots, not shoes: the sight of it all struck Miss Paradise as forcefully as if an undertaker had come in. ‘You may go, Beaufort,’ the vision boomed, looking first at and then quickly away from Miss Paradise with princely tact. ‘Yes, sir,’ replied the breathless boy, withdrawing immediately with an ashamed expression. Oh! how quaint! how charming! how different from Lolly! ‘She is Miss Paradise, Father,’ he panted out, as he disappeared.

The father waited to hear the door click. Then, without hesitation, he advanced across the carpet, extended the polished white fingers of his right hand and felt Miss Paradise’s pulse. While he listened, his head slightly cocked, to the beat of that sundered kettle-drum, he expelled from his face all such feeble answers to crisis as worry, doubt, even sorrow: in their place he set placid but inexorable stringency of attention, and his brown eyes, directed full upon Miss Paradise, shone with such a walnut finish that she could see herself reflected in them – thin, concave, a mere petal.

‘Kindly sit down, Miss Paradise,’ he said, gently exchanging her pulse for the sort of chair in which a woman can sit without having to be eternally pulling down the front of her skirt or keeping her knees braced at right angles. ‘Be so good as to tell me the story, as briefly and clearly as your condition will permit.’

Miss Paradise told him what she had told Beaufort.

‘So you are a very, very anxious woman,’ he said when she had finished.

‘Well, shouldn’t I be, don’t you think?’

‘You have telephoned the police, of course?’

‘No, I haven’t. Thinking he was
here
…’

‘I can see what a shock you have received,’ said Captain Mallet. ‘In your normal state you would never for an instant suppose that your brother could pay a formal call on total strangers and stay with them for twenty-four hours. However, since the alternative seemed to be his having stayed in the bomb-crater over a similar period, you decided to come straight to the house. You could not face the crater. You are hoping against hope. Forgive my grimness. I do not blame you.’ He went to a table, raised a speaking-tube and, when a gurgle came from it, said sharply and simply: ‘Drag the crater.’ Then he returned to Miss Paradise, saying: ‘I am deliberately assuming the worst. There is no reason whatever to believe that it has happened.’

‘The police …’ said Miss Paradise.

‘That is the next step, of course. Unfortunately, our telephone is not connected yet. But my son can carry any message in his motor-car with equal speed.’

This made Miss Paradise smile. ‘He
is
a nice boy,’ she said.

The captain started, as if she had irresistibly diverted his train of thought. ‘He is a
likeable
lad,’ he answered slowly, pride and disappointment mixing in his eyes.

‘So thoughtful, so kind.’

‘You find him so?’ asked the captain, bending on her a look of deep interest. ‘One so easily forgets that one’s children’s manners improve in proportion to the distance they are from their homes. I imagine that in our daily life, particularly when we are young, the recurrence of the same problems, the same routine and habits, causes us to show impatience, even rudeness, to those we love. We who are more mature expect, and consequently demur to, the daily frictions of domestic life. Do you not find it so?’