Sea of Glass (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (10 page)

‘Sometimes with men my mother was not married,’ she said. ‘Christ, how she repented! But with my father—yes.’

‘You could prove it?’

‘I know it in my heart.’

‘I suppose,’ I said hesitantly, ‘that facilities existed in Doljuk—for getting married, I mean?’

‘There was Harold,’ she replied after a pause.

‘Was he the English Chaplain?’ I asked, as if Doljuk had been Montreux or Rapallo.

‘Harold was an American missionary of the Church of the Unleavened Baptists. For ten years he went up and down the Gobi, preaching. But he preached always in the Chinese which he had learnt at the Missionary College.’

‘Ah,’ I said, pleased to be able to show my memory. ‘I suppose that annoyed the other chaps you were telling me about—the Turkis?’

But Varvara shook her head. ‘Nobody knew what language he was speaking.’

‘Didn’t he get discouraged?’

‘He had great faith. Besides it was once fortunate. Some of the Tungans came to kill him because they thought he was a spy for the government. Harold remained on his knees in prayer and saying, as he thought, “Peace be unto you”. But the thing he said was, “Enjoyable fish”, over and over again. The men consulted and decided that it was an oracle. So they went away.’

I would gladly have let her continue her reminiscences of Harold who seemed to have been an evangelist well suited to his field. But a sense of practical urgency dragged me back to our original topic.

‘You do grasp what your uncle is up to? If he succeeds in convincing Mrs. Ellison that she must leave you out of her exercise of this Power and then she dies . . . well, you won’t have any remedy.’

‘Then what must I do?’

It was the first time that she had appealed to me directly for any aid or advice, and it was a gratifying sensation. After all, what did the latest fashions count against an inheritance which might run into myriads of pounds?

I produced the answer which I had been meditating during dinner.

‘We can’t tell where we stand without seeing your grandfather’s will.’

‘If my grandmother has it I will make her show it to me.’

She had never shocked me before. But now, catching the steely note in her voice, I was forced to see that hereditary characteristics are seldom entirely absent in any member of a family.

‘There is no need for that,’ I said rather coldly. ‘In England all wills are public. There’s a registry at Somerset House where we can look it up.’

Varvara was silent for several seconds, then she began to mutter too low for me to catch the words or even distinguish the language. At length she stopped, and seeing the look of inquiry on my face, she explained: ‘I was praying to God to damn the soul of my uncle . . . for the sake of my dear mother!’

In the failing light the tears glistened on her cheeks. I could understand how the sense of her own isolation must from time to time sweep over her, smothering the joy of battle, and how the very meanness of the tactics being used against her would produce fits of enervated disgust.

When she recovered, I said: ‘If it comes to some sort of legal showdown, you may be asked a lot of questions about your mother and father, so you might start putting your memories in order.’

The very unprofessional thought behind this suggestion was that she had better weed out anything which did not support her legitimacy: after all, we were dealing with a completely unscrupulous opponent. But Varvara understood my remark differently, as an invitation to rehearse what she knew of her parents’ story.

First she ran up to her room and brought down an old photograph set in a box of hard wood. It showed a woman with black hair reclining at full length on a couch. Against the dark wood and the yellowed musty background, her face stood out clear in its mixture of energy and sloth, its sensuality tinged with asceticism, and its melodramatic expression which seemed to be half-mocking itself. She looked a silly, intelligent woman. Her prettiness was the only quality which she had without contradiction. She was not as strictly handsome as Varvara, but I think that most men would have preferred her owing to the softer quality of her looks and her more manageable size.

‘She was a holy saint of God,’ said Varvara, kissing the photograph; and went on to prove in detail that it needed either another saint or a strong partisan to hold so charitable a view.

I have forgotten the maiden name of Serafina Filipovna; also the one which she took from her first (and perhaps her only) husband. She was the daughter of a government official who seems to have been rather like Dostoievski’s Marmeladoff, drunken, verbose, tearful, and shameless.

When she was sixteen and a half she raised the family fortunes by marrying the proprietor of a successful restaurant in St. Petersburg. He was an upright man but cold and excessively absorbed in his business. He could cope with Serafina Filipovna when she was virtually a child, but by the time she had matured she was too much for him.

‘It was like throwing shrimps to a seal,’ said Varvara with her usual frankness, quoting, I think, from the person who should have known best.

The customers, who included some of the best society in Tsarist Russia, soon began to notice her. Though she did not work about the restaurant, she was expected to make the gracious appearances of a patronne. She had an ascending scale of lovers, ending with a millionaire and two princes. Nevertheless she cannot have been a mercenary woman. When she ran away it was with a simple army colonel and not even one who carried much military glamour. Igor Igorovitch Prespykin was the head of a branch of the Military Survey. Although he was married, the elopement did not finish his career; it merely caused him to be sent to Vyernyi near the borders of Siberia and Sinkiang. There in the heart of Asia he and his mistress led a life of comfortable idleness unbroken by any serious surveying . . . until the Russian War Department decided to lend his services so that the Khan of Doljuk might have a map of his domains.

At that time Russia was showing one of those fits of interest in Sinkiang which recurred whenever she herself was free from embarrassment and the Chinese hold on the province appeared to be more than usually weak. Colonel Prespykin no doubt had orders which went far beyond map-making. But he never carried them out, for when he had been in Doljuk about a fortnight he caught one of the mysterious fevers which infested the place, and he died.

Serafina Filipovna had accompanied him on his mission. She even carried faithfulness so far as to catch the same disease. She did not die, but she was very ill. For three weeks she lay semi-conscious. When she recovered she found that Prespykin’s second-in-command, a dour Puritan who loathed her, had marched off with the rest of the survey party. It was a truly awful situation to be penniless, homeless, speechless in a city where infidel women were on the same level as stray dogs. She did the only possible thing in seeking out the single other European who was at that time in the city. This happened to be Fulk Ellison.

That strange union, whether sanctified or not, was a roaring success. Roaring is the word. Neither was a person backward in expressing his or her feelings. The high windowless room, lit by mutton fat burning in a silver bowl, would echo simultaneously with Fulk’s curses and Serafina’s analyses of her own spiritual condition—two occupations to which they were respectively much given. As soon as she was old enough, the little Varvara would make her voice heard. Nobody specifically listened to anyone else, but out of the tumult and the confusion and the violence were forged bonds whose strength put to shame many relationships between husband and wife, parent and child that had grown up in an easier climate.

The one thing about which Serafina and Fulk seriously disagreed was religion. The latter was an aggressive atheist; whereas she cherished an excitable, slightly erotic devotion to the two First Persons of the Trinity. At a later stage I shall have more to say about her daughter’s inheritance in this respect. There was a time when I thought that Varvara’s religion was a pure emotional luxury. This view did not prove altogether tenable, but I am still sufficient of an unspiritual pragmatist to distrust a faith which seldom has the slightest effect on conduct. Indeed, it would have needed very little to persuade her to adopt that distinctively Russian heresy which taught that the more the sins, the merrier, on account of the increased opportunities for repentance.

Presently, alas, it was evident that the story must bring us again to that horrible death by the venom of spiders. In her overstrung state, it would do Varvara no good to dwell on her mother’s end. I therefore interrupted her at the first opportunity.

‘I’m going to bed.’

We climbed the stairs together.

Outside her room I was seized by a curious mixture of desires: to have pleasure, to assert myself, not to miss my opportunities.

I put my arms suddenly round her and kissed her on the lips. At first her mouth was hard, but rather, I felt, from inexperience than insensitivity. Probably she had never before received a passionate kiss. At least she did not seem to resent it.

‘You don’t mind?’ I murmured—the standard cry of the undergraduate.

‘My father said that I should stay chaste until it seemed worse than death.’

She stood back at arm’s length examining me amiably, but also with a certain detachment; as if she were trying to calculate whether I should ever be able to make her feel so badly about continence. I would have said from her expression that she did not rate the chances very high, but suddenly she pulled me against her and renewed our embrace. In the interval some subterranean process had been going on—as it were, the conversion of a glacier pool into a geyser. Her body was heavy and soft against me and her lips were wide open.

It was some while before we parted; when we did so it was once more at her abrupt dictation. She simply pushed me aside without warning and ran into her room, shutting the door.

From that close encounter I took away two impressions, one pleasant, the other less so, but both mildly embarrassing. First, though she used no scent, Varvara smelt nicer than any woman I had known; second, she was probably physically stronger than I.

5

‘Straight!’ said Turpin. ‘As true as I’m here! Back into the bottle it went, every drop.’

He was telling me an anecdote about old Mr. Ellison, the money-spinner. In his later years he had some sort of minor eye trouble for which the doctor prescribed a lotion. Three times a day he bathed his eyes. Other people who earned hundreds where he earned scores of thousands would unhesitatingly have thrown away the contents of the used eye-bath. Mr. Ellison did not see why the same liquid, costing all of half-a-crown a bottle, should not serve him over and over again. So he poured it back into the bottle. The pleasing end to this story was that the stuff finally became polluted and set up inflammation, which made necessary a long and expensive course of treatment.

Cedric had inherited the same fantastic meanness.

‘I reckon his poor bloody wife stopped the worst of it,’ said Turpin. ‘Once when they was staying here she said to me: “I’d stay in Hell to get away from those ’ouse’old accounts!” . . . I don’t reckon they ’ad to carry ’er kicking and screaming to ’er eternal rest!’

‘I didn’t know Cedric was a widower.’

‘ ’Bout six years. Miss Deirdre ’as to stand the racket now, God ’elp ’er!’

‘Is that the daughter—the one he borrows things for from the museum?’

Turpin permitted himself a queer smile.

‘If there’s any others, they don’t come round ’ere,’ he said enigmatically.

‘How old is this Deirdre?’

‘Seventeen or so.’

‘What’s she like?’

Turpin reflected. ‘Might be worse . . . considering. Not a patch on our Blasting Bud, though.’

Cedric continued to make fairly regular appearances in the afternoon. But I was not again called into conclave. From external evidence it seemed that he had relaxed the pressure on his mother: for Mrs. Ellison went through a phase of improved health during which she not only came down to dinner but also sat up in the morning-room for a couple of hours after it. On these evenings I got to know her much better; like most old people, she was very lonely and she liked to have somebody by her to whom she could talk about the past. Listening was no charity on my part; I have always genuinely enjoyed the re-creation of a dead era.

Varvara was not much help. She was always ready with fervid love or hatred, but she could not understand the cool, reserved affection—in her eyes so little distinguishable from an equal degree of dislike—which was Mrs. Ellison’s norm of civilized behaviour. At times she grew impatient and almost rude; and then trying to make amends she would come up against those impregnable emotional defences, which were like a moat of China tea. Varvara admired her grandmother, she longed to love her, but she never found out how.

The feeling in the opposite direction was, I think, even more complex. Mrs. Ellison wanted to cherish the child of her son and to make amends for the injustice done to him by his family. But when it came to the point she quailed before Varvara’s size and violence and harsh, flamboyant beauty. Besides, by one of those processes which her generation would never have admitted, she may subconsciously have resented the girl as a usurper of her father’s place. If there had not been some buried feeling of this kind, I doubt whether Cedric’s machinations would have had any effect.

My next sight of that villain was accidental. I was sitting out on the roof-garden and I had moved two or three of the potted shrubs to form a barrier between my neck and the sun. They also incidentally concealed me from the french windows. Presently I heard voices which I recognized as belonging to Cedric and Nurse Fillis. I had no wish to eavesdrop—at any rate at first—but I also wanted to spare myself five minutes of insincere and laboured small-talk. I therefore sat still.

He was saying: ‘Now, we’re not going to be silly, are we? We’re not going to start having imaginary attacks of conscience? Because it doesn’t suit us. We stop being rather a specially nice person . . . and our friends don’t feel the same at all.’

It was a pretty odd speech, but for a moment I could not understand why it jarred me so sharply. Then I realized that the speaker had usurped the idiom of the person he was addressing; that jollying tone, those facetious plurals, teetering on the verge of baby-language, were Nurse Fillis’s own coin. On her lips they might be irritating; from those of Cedric Ellison they came with an oily, sinister roll.

Without shame I turned quietly in my chair so that I was looking through the branches.

The other two were standing just inside the window, by a big writing-desk. Their bodies had assumed an attitude which was in keeping with the subtle perversity of the whole atmosphere. She was leaning back against the desk, her hands resting behind her on its edge, so that her shoulders were pulled back and the lower part of her trunk was pushed forward. Cedric loomed over her bending in an opposite and complementary curve which made it appear that he was about to fit his body to hers. But in fact, by a considerable feat of muscular discipline, he kept a clear six inches between them at every point.

Nurse Fillis said in a quick breathy voice: ‘I don’t like it, Mr. Cedric. It wouldn’t be ethics. Where’d I be if I was found out?’

‘In another job, perhaps,’ said Cedric in a teasing voice.

‘I’d be struck off the register.’

‘Then,’ he said, ‘I suppose the people who’d got you into this wicked mess would have to look after you. Would you mind being looked after?’

Cedric suddenly lowered his face towards hers. An intervening branch stopped me from seeing whether he had completed a kiss, or was merely tantalizing her. The second I think; he was a prudent man and he cared no more for Fillis than for a bag of hay.

They moved further back into the room, still arguing. I could no longer distinguish the words, but soon one side or the other appeared to have prevailed, for the door opened and the voices faded away into the interior of the house.

I did not mention this scene to anyone, chiefly because it revolted me too much. I felt that my spying had brought me into contact with the nadir of human servitude.

A day or two afterwards we made our expedition to Somerset House. I had previously found out from Turpin the year and month of Joseph Ellison’s death—June
1916
—and as I knew that he had been residing in Aynho Terrace at the time, I did not expect much difficulty in picking up the trail. We were shown into the main index-room where the probates are listed by the dates of grant. When I had looked up the file number of Ellison’s will, a clerk went to fetch a copy, for the Registry does not allow the public loose among its shelves.

Varvara was rather subdued by the atmosphere of venerable dustiness.

‘Afterwards,’ I said graciously, ‘we’ll go out and have lunch.’

I had spent little money of late and I meant to stand her a first-class meal at Simpson’s. It was the sort of place which should suit her appetite.

‘I am sorry,’ she replied, ‘but I am already lunching. And then I have a fitting.’

‘With Chief Couturier Callingham in attendance, I suppose,’ I said viciously.

Varvara looked at me with reproach. She obviously felt that I was taking an unfair advantage of the temporary increase in her dependence on me.

The clerk came back. I received the copy of Joseph Ellison’s will with some misgivings. If you have studied law academically you will know why. The student performs a sort of minuet with hard realities like mortgages and executor’s accounts, but contact is seldom established. He can, if he is sufficiently industrious, write reams about them—and particularly about various interesting decisions delivered between
1250
and
1780
. But the whole performance takes place
in vacuo.
He has never mortgaged anything, except unconsciously to the pawnbroker, his practical knowledge of the marshalling of assets is confined to a bland confidence that, if his aunt leaves him money, he will get it. In other words Law only achieves a real meaning in relation to one’s own affairs. The university catches young lawyers too early. I always notice how many people who become successful barristers and solicitors embarked on their careers only after they had a grasp of the raw material of their profession.

Fortunately Joseph Ellison’s will happened to be simple. He had made a few smallish legacies to servants etc., and a single large one whereby all his shares in Ellison, Dyer Ltd. were to go to his son Cedric Walter Ellison absolutely. As to the residue, he gave one-quarter to the said Cedric Walter Ellison absolutely and the other three-quarters to his dear wife, Eleanor Louise Ellison for the duration of her life.

The crux was in the gift-over after Mrs. Ellison’s death. That was where the famous Power of Appointment raised its head.

Cedric had been perfectly correct. In non-legal language, the will gave Mrs. Ellison absolute authority to dispose of the capital in which she had a life-interest in such shares as she thought fit among the children of her own marriage or their children by any
wife.
Even to my inexperienced eye it was clear that no illegitimate child would have the shadow of a claim.

It was a curious will for a man of Joseph Ellison’s acumen to have made. For one thing it ran the risk of attracting unnecessarily heavy death duties; for another it left the burden of distributing the bulk of his vast estate to an elderly woman with only a limited knowledge of affairs.

I think that the explanation may lie in the testator’s ambivalent attitude towards his exiled son. Perhaps he was never happy about his treatment of Fulk. On the other hand it was foreign to his nature to admit himself in the wrong; and in his eyes the good old Victorian disinheriting act was an essential part of any family row. So Fulk could not be given a halfpenny directly. But if his mother, who made no secret of her affection for him, was given the last word, it was unlikely that he would go empty-handed.

Though she stated it too frequently and with too little tact, there was a lot of moral justification for Varvara’s claim that she was entitled to a fair slice of her grandfather’s estate.

The clause ended with a gift in default of appointment. If Mrs. Ellison did not exercise her Power, the money would go to the children of the marriage in equal shares, the offspring of a deceased child taking the parent’s share. This was awkward for Cedric.
Prima facie
Varvara would share in the distribution. If he wanted to exclude her he would have to adopt the not-very-savoury procedure of instigating an action to bastardize his own niece. No, from Cedric’s viewpoint there was everything to be said for keeping up the pressure on his mother.

As we went out into the Strand, Varvara said: ‘I have thought. Why should you not come to lunch as well?’

‘I don’t want to disturb your tender
tête-à-tête.
’

‘Do not be bestial,’ said Varvara. ‘Otherwise I shall be compelled to withdraw my favours.’

I could not help laughing.

‘You filthy little blackmailer! All right, where are you meeting Andrew?’

‘Near here. At a place called Simpson’s.’

I ground my teeth quietly.

Andrew was waiting in the cocktail-lounge on the first floor. When I was in crowded hotels or restaurants I always had to signal wildly for five minutes in order to attract a waiter, but he simply lifted one finger in a fatigued way and instantly a man was at our table.

‘I hope you don’t mind me tacking myself on,’ I said.

‘I’m always delighted to see you, David.’

To my inflamed ears there was a tinge of sarcasm in his voice. But obviously it was lost on Varvara; I could see her mentally contrasting my churlishness with Andrew’s sunny charity.

‘And what have you two been doing with yourselves?’

If it had been left to me I should have made some evasive answer; assuming that Varvara would not want to publicize her family feuds. But she jumped in ahead of me without a trace of inhibition.

‘We have been looking at my grandfather’s will. Under it there is a great fortune owing to me, but my uncle wishes to cheat me out of it.’

‘Nothing is owing to you,’ I said, not from pedantry, but because I thought it was important to get the fact straight in her mind.

After that, of course, we had to tell Andrew the whole story. On reflection I was not sorry, for I had begun to feel my responsibility as Varvara’s only adviser. Besides, Andrew was extremely shrewd for his years.

In another mistaken effort to spare her feelings, I tried to skate lightly over the issue of legitimacy. But I need not have been so delicate.

‘Have I the air of a bastard?’ she demanded, glaring at the waiter who was bringing our soup.

As I expected, Andrew’s comments were to the point.

‘I don’t see that there’s much to be done, except pray that Mrs. Ellison holds out.’

‘Do you think it would be wise for Varvara to try to force some kind of a showdown?’

He shook his head.

‘If you once enter a shouting-match you have to accept that the prize will be given for the loudest shouting and not for any of your other merits. She should avoid putting herself on a par with her uncle.’

I agreed; but at the same time I foresaw that it was going to be very difficult to restrain Varvara if Cedric’s campaign continued much longer.

‘This Cedric chap has a pretty queer name,’ said Andrew unexpectedly.

‘I didn’t realize you knew anything about him.’

‘Of course he does,’ said Varvara. ‘Andrew will know about your family too, and whether any of them has some money and good lineage.’

It was one of the few occasions when I saw Andrew blush. He went back hastily to the main topic.

‘My father’s had a few dealings with him. Not more than he can help.’

‘I suppose he’s pretty crooked in business.’

‘The old man can look after himself,’ said Andrew. ‘What he complained of was that Ellison made him feel so damned uncomfortable. Besides he’s a terrific nagger and worrier. He’ll ring up twenty times a day about some footling detail.’

‘Is that all?’ I asked, disappointed.

‘Not quite,’ said Andrew. I saw him glance at Varvara and hesitate. ‘Well . . . I suppose we may as well broaden the little snowdrop’s mind. It’s the only thing about her that needs it.’ (This was obviously revenge for the remark about his habits of social inquiry.) ‘Seven or eight years ago Ellison nearly landed himself in bad trouble. A girl died after an illegal operation, and the evidence pointed pretty clearly at him as the person who’d procured and paid for it. At the inquest the coroner threatened him with a prosecution for perjury.’

‘Did anything happen to him?’ asked Varvara.

‘No. They couldn’t pin the charge. But something will happen one day. I don’t go in for gipsy-gipsy stuff, but there’s one way I’m psychic: I know a natural-born happenee.’

‘Andrew,’ said Varvara, ‘you please me very much.’

Without any rudeness it was made quite clear that my invitation did not extend beyond the door of Simpson’s. I went back to Aynho Terrace by bus, teasing myself the whole way with images of Varvara, statuesque and desirable, being fitted and suavely leered at by Andrew.

Before I had even rung the bell I knew that something was wrong inside. The sound of angry voices percolated through the closed door. It was opened, too, with unusual promptitude, the reason being that Turpin was just inside and was probably glad of anything which might divert the storm of abuse which had broken about his head. Cedric marched up and down snarling out the threats.

‘You’re going to have quite a lot to explain, my man. I shall be surprised if you can get the police to believe that solid objects dissolve into thin air.’