He Who Whispers (3 page)

‘The tower – observe! – cannot be seen from this villa where the Brooke family live. But the prospect is pretty, pretty, pretty!

‘You walk northwards, through thick grass, past the willows, along the river-bank where it curves
here
. First there is the stone bridge, mirrored in a glitter of water. Farther on is the tower, overhanging the moss-green bank, round and grey-black with vertical window-slits, perhaps forty feet high, and framed against a distant line of poplars. It is used by the Brooke family as a kind of bathing-hut, to change clothes when they go for a swim.

‘So this English family – Mr Howard the father, Mrs Georgina the mother, Mr Harry the son – live in their comfortable villa, happily and perhaps a little stodgily. Until …'

‘Until?' prompted Miles, as Professor Rigaud paused.

‘Until a certain woman arrives.'

Professor Rigaud was silent for a moment.

Then, exhaling his breath, he shrugged the thick shoulders as though disclaiming any responsibility.

‘Myself,' he went on, ‘I arrive in Chartres in May of thirty-nine. I have just finished my
Life of Cagliostro
, and I wish for peace and quiet. My good friend Coco Legrand, the photographer, introduces me to Mr Howard Brooke one day on the steps of the
hôtel de ville
. We are different types, but we like each other. He smiles at my Frenchness, I smile at his Englishness; and so everybody is happy.

‘Mr Brooke is grey-haired, upright, reserved but friendly, a hardworking executive at his leather business. He wears plus-fours, which seem as strange in Chartres as a curé's skirts in Newcastle. He is hospitable, he has a twinkle in the eye, but he is so conventional you can bet your shilling on exactly what he will do or say at any time. His wife, a plump, pretty, red-faced woman, is much the same.

‘But the son Harry …

‘Ah! There is a different person!

‘This Harry interested me. He has sensitiveness, he has imagination. In height and weight and way of carrying himself he is much like his father. But under that correct outside of his, he is all wires and all nerves.

‘He is a good-looking young fellow, too: square jaw, straight nose, good wide-spaced brown eyes, and fair hair that (I think to myself) will be grey like his father's if he does not control his nerves. Harry is the idol of both his parents. I tell you I have seen doting fathers and mothers, but never any like those two!

‘Because Harry can swipe a golf-ball two hundred yards, or two hundred miles, or whatever is the asinine distance, Mr Brooke is purple with pride. Because Harry plays tennis like a maniac in the hot sun, and has a row of silver cups, his father is in the seventh heaven. He does not mention this to Harry. He only says, “Not bad, not bad.” But he brags about it interminably to anybody who will listen.

‘Harry is being trained in the leather business. He will inherit the factory one day; he will be a very rich man like his father. He is sensible; he knows his duty. And yet this boy wants to go to Paris and study painting.

‘My God, how he wants it! He wants it so much he is inarticulate. Mr Brooke is gently firm with this nonsense about becoming a painter. He is broad-minded, he says; painting is all very well as a hobby; but as a serious occupation – really, now! As for Mrs Brooke, she is almost hysterical on the subject, since the impression in her mind is that Harry will live in an attic among beautiful girls without any clothes on.

‘ “My boy,” says the father, “I understand exactly how you feel. I went through a similar phase at your age. But in ten years' time you will laugh at this.”

‘ “After all,” says the mother, “couldn't you always stay at home and paint animals?”

‘After which Harry goes out blindly and hits a tennis-ball so hard he blows his opponent off the court, or sits on the lawn with a white-faced, brooding, swearing look. These people are all so honest, so well-meaning, so thoroughly sincere!

‘I never learned, I tell you now, whether Harry was serious about his life's work. I never had the opportunity to learn. For, in late May of that year, Mr Brooke's personal secretary – a hard-faced, middle-aged woman named Mrs McShane – grows alarmed at the international situation and returns to England.

‘Now that was serious. Mr Brooke's private correspondence – his personal secretary has no connexion with the work at the office – is enormous. Ouf! Often it made my head swim, how that man wrote letters! His investments, his charities, his friends, his letters to the newspapers in England: he would pace up and down as he dictated, his hands behind his back, grey-haired and bony-faced, with a look of stern moral indignation about his mouth.

‘As a personal secretary he must have the very best. He wrote to England for the best. And there arrived at Beauregard – that is what the Brookes called their house – there arrived at Beauregard, Miss Fay Seton.

‘Miss Fay Seton …

‘It was on the afternoon of the thirtieth of May, I remember. I was taking tea with the Brookes. Here was Beauregard, a grey stone house of the early eighteenth century, with stone faces carved on the walls and white-painted window-frames, built round three sides of a front courtyard. We were sitting in the court, which is paved with smooth grass, having tea in the shadow of the house.

‘In front of us was the fourth wall, pierced by big iron-grilled gates that stood open. Beyond these gates lay the road that ran past, and beyond this a long grassy bank sloping down to the river fringed with willows.

‘Papa Brooke sits in a wicker chair, his shell-rimmed spectacles on his nose, grinning as he holds out a piece of biscuit for the dog. In English households there is always a dog. To the English it is a source of perpetual astonishment and delight that a dog has sense enough to sit up and ask for food.

‘However!

‘There is Papa Brooke, and the dog is a dark-grey Scotch terrier like an animated wire brush. On the other side of the tea-table sits Mama Brooke – with brown bobbed hair, pleasant and ruddy of face, not very smartly dressed – pouring out a fifth cup of tea. At one side stands Harry, in a sports-coat and flannels, practising golf-strokes with a driver against an imaginary ball.

‘The tops of the trees faintly moving – a French summer! – and the noise of the leaves rippling and rustling, and the sun that winks on them, and fragrance of grass and flowers, and all the drowsy peacefulness – it makes you close your eyes even to think of …

‘That was when a Citroën taxi rolled up outside the front gates.

‘A young woman got out of the taxi, and paid the driver so generously that he followed her in with her luggage. She walked up the path towards us, diffidently. She said her name was Miss Fay Seton, and that she was the new secretary.

‘Attractive?
Grand ciel
!

‘Please to remember – you will excuse my admonitory fore-finger – please to remember, however, that I was not conscious of this full attractiveness at first, or all at once. No. For she had the quality, then and always, of being unobtrusive.

‘I remember her standing in the path on that first day, while Papa Brooke punctiliously introduced her to everybody including the dog, and Mama Brooke asked her whether she wanted to go upstairs and wash. She was rather tall, and soft and slender, wearing some tailored costume that was unobtrusive too. Her neck was slender; she had heavy, smooth, dark-red hair; her eyes were long and blue and dreaming, with a smile in them, though they seldom seemed to look at you directly.

‘Harry Brooke did not say anything. But he took another swing at an imaginary golf-ball, so that there was a swish and a
whick
as the clubhead flicked cropped grass.

‘So I smoked my cigar – being always, always, always violently curious about human behaviour – and I said to myself, “Aha!”

‘For this young woman grew on you. It was odd and perhaps a bit weird. Her spiritual good looks, her soft movements, above all her extraordinary aloofness …

‘Fay Seton was, in every sense of your term, a lady: though she seemed rather to conceal this and be frightened of it. She came of a very good family, old impoverished stock in Scotland, and Mr Brooke discovered this and it impressed him powerfully. She had not been trained as a secretary; no, she had been trained as something else.' Professor Rigaud chuckled and eyed his auditors keenly. ‘But she was quick and efficient, and deft and cool-looking. If they wanted a fourth at bridge, or someone to sing and play at the piano when the lamps were lighted in the evening, Fay Seton would oblige. In her way she was friendly, though shy and somewhat prudish, and she would often sit looking into the distance, far away. And you thought to yourself, in exasperation: what
is
this girl thinking about?

‘That blazing hot summer …!

‘When the very water of the river seemed thick and turgid under the sun, and there was a wiry hum of crickets after nightfall: I am never likely to forget it, now.

‘Like a sensible person Fay Seton did not indulge much in athletics, but this was really because she had a weak heart. I told you of the stone bridge, and of the ruined tower they used as a bathing-hut when they went for a swim. Once or twice only she went for a swim – tall and slender, her red hair done up under a rubber cap; exquisite! – with Harry Brooke encouraging her. He rowed her on the river, he took her to the cinema to hear MM. Laurel and Hardy speaking perfect French, he walked with her in those dangerous romantic groves of Eure-et-Loir.

‘It was obvious to me that Harry would fall in love with her. It was not, you understand, quite so quick as in the delicious description of Anatole France's story: “I love you! What is your name?” But it was quick enough.

‘One night in June Harry came to me in my room at the Hotel of the Grand Monarch. He would never speak to his parents. But he poured out confessions to me: perhaps because, as I smoke my cigar and say little, I am sympathetic. I had been teaching him to read our great romantic writers, moulding his mind towards sophistication, and it may be in a sense playing the devil's advocate. His parents would not have been pleased.

‘On this night, at first, he would only stand by the window and fiddle with an ink-bottle until he upset it. But at last he blurted out what he had come to say.

‘ “I'm mad about her,” he said. “I've asked her to marry me.”

‘ “Well?” said I.

‘ “She won't have me,” cried Harry – and for a second I thought, quite seriously, he was going to dive out of the open window.

‘Now this astonished me: the statement, I mean, and not any suggestion of love-sick despair. For I could have sworn that Fay Seton was moved and drawn towards this young man. That is, I could have sworn it as far as one could read that enigmatic expression of hers: the long-lidded blue eyes that would not look directly at you, the elusive and spiritual quality of remoteness.

‘ “Your technique, perhaps it is clumsy.”

‘ “I don't know anything about that,” said Harry, hitting his fist on the table where he had upset the ink-bottle. “But last night I went walking with her, on the river bank. It was moonlight …”

‘ “I know.”

‘ “And I told Fay I loved her. I kissed her mouth and her throat” – hah! that is significant – “until I nearly went out of my mind. Then I asked her to marry me. She went as white as a ghost in the moonlight, and said, ‘No, no, no!' as though I'd said something that horrified her. A second later she ran away from me, over into the shadow of that broken tower.

‘ “All the time I'd been kissing her, Professor Rigaud, Fay had stood there as rigid as a statue. It made me feel pretty sick, I can tell you. Even though I knew I wasn't worthy of her. So I followed her over to the tower, through the weeds, and asked whether she was in love with anybody else. She gave a kind of gasp and said no, of course not. I asked her whether she didn't like me, and she admitted she did. So I said I wouldn't give up hoping. And I
won't
give up hoping.”

‘
Enfin
!

‘That was what Harry Brooke told me, standing by the window of my hotel room. It puzzled me still more, since this young woman Fay Seton was obviously a woman in every sense of the word. I spoke consolingly to Harry. I said to him that he must have courage; and that doubtless, if he used tact, he could get round her.

‘He did get round her. It was not three weeks later when Harry triumphantly announced – to me, and to his parents – that he was engaged to be married to Fay Seton.

‘Privately, I do not think Papa Brooke and Mama Brooke were too well pleased.

‘Mark you, it was not that a word could be said against this girl. Or against her family, or her antecedents, or her reputation. No! To any eye she was suitable. She might be three or four years older than Harry; but what of that? Papa Brooke might feel, in a vague British way, that it was somehow undignified for his son to marry a girl who had first come there in their employ. And this marriage was sudden. It took them aback. But they would not really have been satisfied unless Harry had married a millionairess with a title, and even then only if he had waited until he was thirty-five or forty before leaving home.

‘So what could they say except, “God bless you”?

‘Mama Brooke kept a stiff upper lip, with the tears running down her face. Towards his son Papa Brooke became very bluff and hearty and man-to-man, as though Harry had suddenly grown up overnight. At intervals papa and mama would murmur to each other in hushed tones, “I'm sure it'll be all right!” – as one might speculate, at a funeral, about the destination of the deceased's soul.

‘But please to note: both parents were now enjoying themselves very much. Once used to the idea, they began to take pleasure in it. That is the way of families everywhere, and the Brookes were nothing if not conventional. Papa Brooke was looking forward to his son working harder in the leather business, building up an even sounder name for Pelletier et Cie. After all, the newly wedded pair would live at home or at least reasonably close to home. It was ideal. It was lyrical. It was Arcadian.