The China Governess (15 page)

‘Certain – certain aspects of social conditions in Turk Street just before the second war, sir,' he muttered and sounded stilted even to himself.

‘
Social conditions!
' The phrase seemed to touch a power centre in the Councillor, who let himself go. ‘Don't be a pompous ass, boy!' He used the word in the old-fashioned way with a long vowel, making it even more derogatory. ‘Turk Street was a London slum. Your generation doesn't know what that means. You call yourselves “sick”, don't you? So do I. You couldn't have walked a hundred yards of the Turk Street Mile in the thirties without vomiting. It turned me up myself and I wasn't a spoon-fed university product.'

He leant further across the table, shaking in his determination to make his point.

‘Children crawled over each other like little grey worms in the gutters,' he said. ‘The only red things about them were their buttocks and they were raw. Their faces looked as if snails had slimed on them and their mothers were like great sick beasts whose byres had never been cleared. The stink and the noise and the cold and the hatred got into your belly and nothing and no-one has ever got it out again as far as I'm concerned. For God's sake go back to those maiden ladies and get it into their idiot heads that an anthill is less offensive than a sewer.'

Timothy hesitated. The man was making an extraordinary mistake, he saw, and he realized that he was probably the best source of information about the vanished Turk Street remaining in London. Yet he also knew that for some inexplicable reason he could not put up with his open animosity any longer.

The Councillor glanced up. ‘What are you waiting for?'

‘Nothing, sir.' Timothy was very pale and the damage which Ron Stalkey had done to his face stood out in angry colour on his skin. ‘Goodbye.' He turned on his heel and walked across the room, out through the front door and down the steps to the street without once looking behind him.

Mrs. Cornish, who was hovering in the passage, saw him go and she went in to her husband.

‘Why on earth did you do that?' she demanded. ‘I could hear you from the kitchen. What did the poor boy say to make you so livid?'

Now that his rage was spent the Councillor was a little shamefaced. ‘Oh, I don't know,' he said frowning. ‘The “holier-than-thou” attitude of that sort of pup always irritates me. A self-satisfied superior approach to matters of taste is infuriating. Those people like the Kinnits and the Aichesons all do the same thing. They look at something which they know nothing whatever about and presume to judge it solely by the effect which the mere sight of it has had on them.'

‘Flavia Aicheson,' said Mrs. Cornish. ‘That's the mannish old woman who runs the Little Society for the Preservation of the London Skyline isn't it? So that's what he came about. Rather a nice type.'

‘I didn't notice it. Those people are up to something. I don't trust them an inch. They're the kind of half-baked intellectuals who never know where to stop. They don't like the look of the new flats. The silhouette is an affront to their blasted eyes, they say. Well, there are alternatives which have offended my eyes . . .'

‘Yes dear, not again.' Mrs. Cornish exerted her own brand of force. ‘You happened to walk down Turk Street one winter afternoon long ago when you first came up from the country to be Dad's apprentice, and it gave you such a shock that you've never got over it. We know. We've heard enough about it. You weren't there quite half an hour and it's dominated your whole life. It may not have been the utter hell you thought. Anyhow, why take it out on the first presentable youngster who's been to the house for years?'

‘Pompous ass!' said the Councillor again. ‘He kept calling me “sir” as if I were Methusela. That's all I noticed about him. A useless, opinionated, over-sensitive ass!'

‘Oh rubbish,' she said. ‘You can't say that. You didn't even let him speak. Do you know who he reminded me of? You at that
age. No one was more opinionated than you were, or more over-sensitive for that matter.'

The Councillor stared at her. For an instant he looked positively alarmed. Then he laughed, regretful, even a little flattered.

‘You do say the most damn silly things, Marion,' he said.

‘
SEEN IT BEFORE,
sir?' The brisk inquiry from the helmeted figure materializing beside Timothy in the half darkness took him by surprise and he blinked. He had been standing perfectly still, gazing across the broad street at the silhouette of the house which had been his home in London ever since he could remember, and it was as new to him as a foreign land.

He had just walked back from Ebbfield. His interview with the Councillor had had a considerable effect upon him for he was behaving as if a skin had peeled from his eyes. Children first home from boarding school often notice the same phenomenon, very familiar things appearing not different in themselves but as if they were being seen by someone new. He knew of no reason why it should have happened. The front of his mind was satisfied that he had merely had an interview with a difficult old man, but behind it, in the vast, blind, computing machine where the mind and the emotions meet and churn, something very odd indeed seemed to have taken place.

It was a muggy London night and the road which was an inferno in the daytime was now a deserted river, gleaming dully in a dark ravine.

The constable was a regular and had recognized him. It was a lonely beat and he was prepared to chat.

‘It's an anachronism,' he remarked unexpectedly, jerking his leather-strapped chin towards the Tudor merchant's mansion which lay, top-heavy but graceful as a galleon, between two towering warehouses on the opposite side of the road. The overhanging latticed windows, one floor up, were lighted and warmth shone out faintly through reddish curtains. But at street level the low iron-bound doors and small windows were hidden in the shadows. ‘Completely out of place in a modern world, isn't it?' he went on. ‘But it's nice to see it. It's even better
than that row up in Holborn they tell me. Is it comfortable to live in, sir?'

‘Not bad. Plumbing was put in very intelligently at the early part of this century but the kitchens are still a bit archaic.' Timothy spoke as if the facts were fresh to him and the constable laughed. ‘Still, you're proud of it I dare say?' he said.

The younger man turned his head in surprise. ‘I suppose I was' he said, but the policeman was not listening. The light from one of the old-fashioned street lamps bracketed on the building behind them had fallen on to the speaker's face and he was startled by the damage.

‘Blimey sir! What have you done to yourself? Met with an accident?'

‘Not exactly. I had a dustup with a lunatic!' The words came out with more bitterness than he had intended and he laughed to cover it. ‘Never mind, officer. All's square now. Good night.'

‘Good night, sir.' The man went off as if he had been dismissed and Timothy crossed the road and let himself into the Well House.

There was a small wooden draughtbreak just inside the door with a curtained entrance to the main hall, and he heard Basil Toberman's voice as he stepped through it into the warm, black-panelled room with the moulded plaster ceiling and the square staircase rising up through it. The first thing he saw was a funeral wreath, and the scent of lilies hung in the warm air, suffocating and exotic, and remarkably foreign to the familiar house.

The tribute was very big, nearly four feet across, a great cushion of white hothouse flowers, diapered with gold, and made all the more extravagant by the shining plastic wrappings which made it look as if it was under glass. It lay on the oak table which flanked the staircase and at the moment Toberman was bending over it, fiddling with a card half hidden among the blossom. Mrs. Broome was hovering beside him in a flurry of protest.

‘Oh don't,' she was objecting. ‘Mr. Basil, don't. It isn't as though it's yours. Don't be so inquisitive, don't!'

‘Shut up,' he said without turning round. ‘I'm only having a look. The order must have come from South Africa through one of the
flower services, I suppose. That's the flaw in these things. There's no way of telling what you're getting for your money.'

‘What are you talking about?' she demanded. ‘It's beautiful. It must have cost I don't know what!'

‘I know. That's what I'm saying. Out there – wherever it is – flowers are probably dear at this time of year. Over here in late spring they cost nothing. I don't suppose anyone, however stinking rich, intended to send to a servant's funeral the sort of wreath which one expects to see the Monarch parking on a War Memorial.'

Nanny Broom sniffed. ‘No wonder no one could do anything
with
you,' she observed without animosity. ‘Your naughtiness is right in you. Miss Saxon wasn't a servant, and if she had been all the more reason that she should have a nice wreath, even if it did come so late it missed the hearse. I wish I'd had you as a little boy. I'd have scared some of the commoness out of you, my lad. Miss Saxon was a governess and a very intelligent woman with a great sense of humour.'

‘How do you know?'

Mrs. Broome silenced him. ‘Well, she used to laugh at
me
,' she said and seemed so pleased about it that there was nothing to say.

Toberman swung round on his heel and saw Timothy standing in the doorway. He stood for an instant contemplating the scarred face, his eyes wonderfully shrewd and amused, but he made no direct comment.

Instead he returned to the flowers: ‘Wonderfully wealthy guests we have,' he remarked. ‘This is how the staff is seen off. How does this appeal to the young master?'

It was a casual sneer, obviously one of a long line. There was hatred behind it but of a quiet, chronic type, nothing new or unduly virulent, and he was taken aback by the flicker of amazed incredulity which passed over the younger man's ravaged face. Toberman was disconcerted. ‘What's the matter?' he demanded truculently.

‘Nothing.' Timothy's eyes wavered and met Mrs. Broome's. She was watching him like a mother cat, noting the signs of shock
without altogether understanding them. She opened her mouth to speak but he shook his head at her warningly and she closed it again without a sound.

‘You look like a lost soul,' Toberman said. ‘Where have you been?'

Tim turned away. ‘I walked home,' he said briefly. ‘I'm tired.'

Nanny Broome could bear it no longer.

‘Come down to the kitchen, Mr. Tim,' she said. ‘I want to talk to you,' and as her glance met his own she formed the word “Julia” with her lips, giving him a clue as she used to do long ago when there was a secret to be told in company and he was a little boy.

Despair passed over the young face and he turned away abruptly.

‘Not now, Nan,' he said, looking at Toberman who had found the card he had been seeking amid the lilies and was now transcribing its details into a notebook. He was doing it with that off-hand effrontery which so often passes unnoticed because people cannot bring themselves to credit their own eyes. When a step on the landing above surprised, him, he slid the book into his pocket and patted the covering back into place.

‘We were saying how beautiful it is,' he remarked blandly as he glanced up the stairwell. Mrs. Geraldine Telpher, the Kinnit's visiting niece, was coming down, moving quietly and smoothly as she did everything else. She was a distinguished-looking woman in the late thirties, pleasantly pale with faded old-gold hair and light blue eyes, who radiated authority and that particular brand of faint austerity which is so often associated with money. She was wearing a grey jersey suit with considerable elegance, and the way her jacket sat on her shoulders and the trick she had of settling her cuff straight confirmed her kinship with Eustace and Alison so vividly that the others were made a little uncomfortable. Her method of handling Toberman was also startingly familiar. She laughed at his antics with a mixture of ruefulness and tolerance as if he were a slightly offensive household pet.

‘The smell of the lilies is rather powerful,' she said. ‘The house is full of it upstairs. Is there somewhere where the wreath could go,
Mrs. Broome? It's a pity it came so late. Perhaps it could be sent to the grave in the morning?'

‘I was going to take it myself, first thing,' In her determination to keep in the limelight Mrs. Broome spoke on the spur of the moment and it was evident to everybody that the idea had never entered her head before that instant. ‘In a taxi,' she added after the briefest possible pause.

‘Perhaps so,' Mrs. Telpher agreed gravely. ‘They might not let you take it on a bus but you could try. Anyway it's very good of you and I'm sure she would have appreciated it. She had taken a great fancy to you, hadn't she?'

‘Well I should think so, she talked enough to me!' Nanny Broome was “giving back as good as she had got” in an instinctive self-preservative fashion which had nothing to do with reason. The Kinnit trick of making people feel slightly inferior without intending to or noticing that it had been done had never been more clearly demonstrated.

Toberman went on chatting in a determined yet deferential way.

‘We were thinking that the flowers must have been ordered from abroad by wire,' he was saying with a little inquisitive laugh. ‘The whole wreath is very lush – very grand. The card only says “Love dear from Elsa” but there's a box number which suggests either a P.O. box address, as in South Africa, or a florist's reference.

Geraldine Telpher favoured him with a wide-eyed stare which might have been one of Alison Kinnit's own and shook her head, smiling.

‘I imagine it must have come from the family she was with before she came to me,' he said, making it clear that she was humouring him. ‘I notified her home and they must have told them. It was the Van der Graffs, I remember. How nice of them. They're good people. You find its size a little ostentatious, do you Basil?'