Sea of Glass (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (6 page)

The volatility of Turpin’s talk stopped me from following up the interesting sidetracks which it disclosed. Undistracted, I should certainly have asked him how money came to be a source of rivalry between Varvara and her uncle. And since he was extremely shrewd I should probably have got the correct answer: that the conflict was concerned with Mrs. Ellison’s will. Beyond that I am sure he could not have gone; even the most trusted servant could scarcely have learnt the facts, and if he had he would not have understood their legal implication.

At the present stage of our acquaintance the conversation had reached one of its natural boundaries. (Considering I was a guest and in the second day of my visit, I could hardly complain that it had lacked range and latitude.) We turned to less dramatic topics. They were also less exacting and this began to suit Turpin at a time of the evening when the decanter was running low. For the rest of the time we talked mostly about his pets. Just before I went to bed he did his strange, and somehow pathetic, act of ventriloquism.

3

The fortunes of the Ellisons were based on mining-machinery, particularly pumps. I believe Joseph Ellison liked in later life to pretend that he had set out as a bare-foot boy; in fact he was the son of a prosperous doctor who gave him a good education. But his ascent was still remarkable. In his twenties he went to Mexico where he obtained a position in the silver-mines and persuaded the management that it would pay them to expand with the help of certain machinery from England—on the sale of which he drew a large commission. When he returned to London he went to see the manufacturers who were so impressed by his astuteness that they made the mistake of inviting him to join them. Three years later he was at the head of a completely new Board.

For a long while he continued to travel widely, undeterred by the most frightful hardship. He was nearly frozen to death in the Bolivian Andes; a poisonous snake bit him on the West Coast of Africa. But all the time his empire grew and money, always responsive to personal attention, came pouring in.

Just after the last war I was in a small South Coast hotel. Its battered library of a dozen volumes included the reminiscences of an aristocratic old
flâneur
who had been About Town in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. I read with increasing boredom until I chanced on the name of Joseph Ellison, who seemed to have stung the author into his only gleam of wit.

‘Whenever I met this Napoleon of commerce,’ he said, ‘I was filled with a sense of guilt. Presently I found out why: it was because I had never bought anything from him.’

For me this rings true. Only a missionary sense of the sacredness of gain could reconcile the two sides of the picture; on this the grim old eagle with his fierce independence, on that the super-salesman who would sell a
1
,
000
horse-power pump to a sheik in the middle of the Sahara.

If Ellison had stuck strictly to his own business I suppose he would have ended merely as a very rich engineer. But he graduated into the realms of high finance by the usual means of moving more and more of his interests on to paper. He started, almost accidentally, to accept shares in and mortgages on mines in payment for the equipment which he supplied; and this led, in some instances, to his taking over and running his security. Soon he was going in for such arrangements as a matter of policy.

I have no idea how much he was worth at his peak, which probably occurred in the first decade of the twentieth century. Five or six millions perhaps. But already at that date a flaw in his empire was beginning to show itself. The bulk of his estate—that is, the investments other than his own business—was situated abroad, in the form of immovable property. From the time when Queen Victoria died foreigners were becoming, if not more dishonest, at least braver. They were no longer terrified by a couple of gunboats in the harbour and a few white shell-puffs over the Presidential palace. They pinched the property of the British pioneers, they legalized their thefts in rigged courts, and finally offered a derisory sum of compensation. What with war in Europe and rising costs and the multiplicity of offenders, it became impossible to bring them to heel. Before his death Joseph Ellison had been robbed of a good part of his profits in South America and China; he died just in time to avoid seeing many more thousands vanish in the Russian revolution.

Still, it was only by the standards of Rockefeller and Morgan that his family had anything to complain of.

He had married at a date which now seems incredibly remote—
1873
. An advantageous marriage was needed to lift his social position onto a level with his bank account. Mrs. Ellison was, I believe, the daughter of a baronet. My aunt, who always knew these things, said that she was selected only after Joseph had been turned down by several Honourables.

‘And she wouldn’t have had him either, except that her father was gravely embarrassed. In those days girls were sold like sacks of coal.’

She pulled down the corners of her mouth in an equivocal way which indicated disapproval of such treatment, coupled with regret for the filial spirit which led young women to submit to it.

Whatever the truth about her marital situation, I am sure that Mrs. Ellison met it with good manners and fortitude.

After the evening in Turpin’s company, I did not feel well. I woke up with a headache which I put down to vintage port. But as the morning wore on and the headache was reinforced by fits of shivering, I suspected that I had caught a germ. That summer there was a good deal of mild ’flu about. I should not have been sorry to go to bed, but I did not like to play the invalid in a strange house. So I lay about in chairs for most of the morning, pretending to read, but with my eyes closed.

Fortunately my services as chaperon did not seem to be needed that morning. I saw nothing of Varvara until just before lunch, when I woke up from a doze to find her standing in the doorway watching me with an air which could not be mistaken for affection. When she noticed that I was awake, she said:

‘They tell me you are a lawyer.’

‘A student only. I’m reading Law at Cambridge.’

‘But still, no doubt, you have training to cheat inheritances.’

‘Nobody would be fool enough to allow me near an inheritance,’ I said.

‘You are humorous,’ said Varvara. ‘But I think now I see why you have made your appearance on this scene.’

‘Please go away, or talk sense. I don’t feel very well.’

She appeared to choose the first alternative, but after a moment she put her head back through the door.

‘In Doljuk,’ she said, ‘when the Tungans revolted, they put all the lawyers on sharp stakes. Up their bottoms,’ she said, lest I should miss anything.

I was feeling too muzzy to speculate on the reason for this outburst. It merely struck me as mildly surprising that she should have troubled to ask her grandmother about my future calling. Yet within the same day I had another and stranger example of interest directed to the same quarter.

Soon after lunch Mrs. Ellison came into the morning-room, walking slowly with the aid of a stick. She seemed disconcerted to find me there, and said something about the lovely weather outside. I was too embarrassed to tell her that I did not feel well, but I think she saw that I was in some kind of difficulty, for she immediately took my side, as it were, against herself.

‘When my sister Fanny became so ill that she could no longer move about I remember saying—no doubt in a very silly and sentimental way: “My poor dear, how I pity you for not being able to go out into the sunshine and the fresh air.” But Fanny said: “If you only knew how tired I’ve become in these last twenty years of people forcing me to leave warm fires for wet fields and cool conservatories for scorching lawns, you would not have such an exaggerated idea of the horrors of being crippled.” Myself I always thought it was a very sensible remark.’

‘I think so too,’ I said.

Mrs. Ellison was looking at the mantelshelf, on which stood a faded cabinet photograph of a woman in Victorian dress. She lay propped up on a sofa. She might have been rather pretty but for the emaciation of her face which tightened the skin and gave her eyes an unnatural prominence like those of a Belgian hare.

‘Poor Fanny,’ said Mrs. Ellison, ‘later on it was harder for her.’ She fumbled the next words, then said quite distinctly: ‘We tried to take her mind off, to distract her. We made her a museum and she was very patient about it . . . but it’s not the same thing having a museum as the use of your backbone.’

In Mrs. Ellison’s company I often felt that I was being sprinkled with an incredibly bland and refined irony. It fell as lightly as droplets flicked off the fingers. But to this day I cannot tell whether it was a real attribute or one with which I invested my hostess out of my own mind.

‘Still,’ she said, ‘you might find some of the curiosities amusing. They’re kept in the room above yours.’

In spite of her courtesy I suspected that she was anxious to have the sitting-room to herself. I went upstairs and lay down on my bed. After an hour I felt distinctly better and boredom began to seep in. Since I had neglected to provide myself with a book, I thought I would accept the invitation to look over the museum.

It was rather a pathetic place; the threadbare intention of comfort which was behind it peeped through the assorted muddle. Who really believes that sea-shells can exorcise the loneliness of the bath-chair or snuff-boxes the fear of death? Trays for the smaller objects ran along the walls; whilst in the centre of the room there was a huge cage of glass, with sliding partitions, which contained stuffed humming birds and a stuffed monkey and an armadillo which had undergone some kind of embalmery. On a rack hanging from the roof rested a couple of long Tibetan devil-trumpets.

These were the hard core, the intractables, among the curios. As I have already explained, the specimens judged capable of domestication, including the clocks, had long ago been dispersed for the general beautification of the house. I should have liked to see the museum when it was full: the density of the whole mass must have been roughly that of plum-pudding.

Some of the articles were genuinely interesting. Placed across a corner near the windows stood an enormous screen made out of mother-of-pearl and the feathers of kingfishers. I examined it for several minutes and then was filled with a desire to see how the constructor had dealt with the reverse side. Presumably he could not have left it as a mass of rough matrix and quills.

I slipped behind the panels, where I was concealed but not blinded, since the fabric of shell and feathers, though ostensibly solid, was in fact pierced with numerous tiny peepholes. I had scarcely gone into this accidental retreat when the door opened and there entered a big man with wavy iron-grey hair. He walked slowly down the left-hand row of cases, pausing at intervals to inspect them. Finally he appeared to find the one he wanted, for he opened its lid and took out an object which I could not see.

It suddenly struck me that my situation, originally excusable on grounds of surprise, was quickly becoming that of a spy.

I stepped out from shelter, coughing modestly. At the same time my head again began to ache abominably.

When he saw me the man’s face assumed an expression which is seldom seen except in diluted form. It was concentrated suspicion. And yet in spite of its idiosyncrasy the look was strangely familiar.

‘I was up here glancing at the things,’ I said.

‘You’re that boy,’ he said, as if to himself.

Unless today’s young man of twenty has changed it is no way to his heart to refer to him as ‘that boy’.

‘I’m staying with Mrs. Ellison,’ I said stiffly.

All over his face, he switched on an entirely different sort of stage-lighting. The violence of the change and its blatant artifice made the comparison inevitable. I remember thinking that this trick should be played in the drawing-room to complete the atmosphere of pantomime.

‘My dear chap,’ he said, ‘I’m Cedric Ellison. I’ve heard so much about you. I know we shall see much more of each other.’

Here he made one of the absurd little miscalculations which were typical of him and which, in my later judgment, sprang from some very deep-seated lack of co-ordination. He was always pulling so many strings that he could never remember which of them might have crossed.

On this occasion he held out his right hand, forgetting that it still contained the object which he had removed from the case. Suddenly he realized that he was holding a foreign body. He withdrew his fingers and carelessly transferred a small yellow coin to his pocket. Immediately I remembered and identified it from my previous inspection, which was not hard, seeing that a gold Macedonian
stater
stood out from the general junk in the coin-tray like a diamond among ashes.

Cedric Ellison said: ‘Excuse me, David. When I drop round here I often pick up some little curio to amuse my girl. It’s such an awful magpie’s nest, but one can still find a few things that will stimulate a child’s imagination.’

‘I expect so.’

He looked at me closely. He had eyes of a peculiar light-grey which should have suggested vacillation, yet, in some mysterious fashion, indicated an extraordinary hardness.

‘I feel,’ he said, taking off his gold pince-nez, ‘that you’re a person who has ideas about education. So I don’t mind saying that I believe one of the finest things you can do for a young person is to give him or her a sense of the romance of past ages.’

I felt the gratuitous falsity of his sentiments like a physical slap. And yet, even as an older man, I have been taken in by characters far less intrinsically skilled in deceit than Cedric Ellison. But he had a kind of self-defeating mechanism inside him. Later I began to see how it operated: he was so utterly absorbed in himself and the part he was playing that he forgot he was being observed by an independent human intelligence. All the springs and weights and counterweights in his mind lay bare like the works of a gramophone. You could practically hear him saying (as it might be): ‘Now I am being subtle,’ or ‘Now I will put him off his guard,’ or ‘It’s about time I applied the whip-hand.’

Such signals reduced the amount of damage which he could do; but it would be wrong to suppose that they rendered him harmless. He was not a clever man, but he had cunning and endless pertinacity. Failing to get in by the door or the window, he would turn up weeks later through the chimney, when you thought he had forgotten his objective. I do not think that he could ever have acquired great wealth or power for himself; on the other hand he knew how to keep and use them.

‘Of course,’ he said with a sincerity so highly charged that it would not have deceived an infant, ‘of course, anything that I borrow for Deirdre is returned after a few days. It would never do to let the child get the notion that even odds-and-ends are there to be walked off with.’

I knew then that Cedric was stealing the
stater
. And I was quite right. Later I learnt from Turpin that for years, whenever the acquisitive fit was on him, he would pop round to Aynho Terrace and pinch something out of the museum. It was a kind of intermittent outlet, such as is necessary in many types of mania. Over the years it had, so Turpin told me, visibly diminished the contents of the collection. He also said that Mrs. Ellison was aware of it. Certainly the servants knew. Some time before there had been a head-housemaid who particularly loathed Cedric. She invested several shillings of her wages at Woolworth’s in sixpenny rings out of which she prised the stones. These she placed in an inconspicuous corner of the museum—and had the amusement of observing their steady disappearance during the following months.