Touch Not The Cat (17 page)

Or rather, the cat had been there. Now there was nothing but the gate with the water cascading down the rocks beside it, and on the stone where the cat had been, the ugly iron staples stuck out, rotten with rust and twisted crooked with the fall of the statue. The cat itself was lying in the basin under the water, with the fish tranquilly shuttling to and fro across it, under the broken paw.

Ashley, 1835

A sound from the door dragged him from the shallows of sleep. Someone was there, on the verandah.

He was alert, instantly up on one elbow. Perhaps Fletcher had come: something was wrong? His uncle had arrived before he was expected? This little world of peace and love had been broken before its time; the too short night was over.

But all was silence. He relaxed again, to see her eyes, darkly shining, watching him.

"What is it, love?"

"Nothing. Something waked me. Look, the moon's almost down. A little while, and it will be getting light. No, don't go yet. I have something to tell you, but it will wait. It will wait a little longer."

Nor what is mine shall never do thee good: Trust to 't. . . .

—Romeo and Juliet,
III, v

As I had promised, I went back to tea with Cathy and her mother, then took myself off to my cottage, to see if Rob had brought my baggage in from Worcester.

He had, and had even carried it upstairs for me and dumped it on the tiny landing.

Before I unpacked I went to the telephone and dialled the number of the secondhand bookshop in Ashbury.

"Is Mr. Oker there, please? Oh, Leslie, it's you. This is Bryony, Bryony Ashley. Yes, I came back a couple of days ago; I'm back at the cottage. . . . How are you? Good. How's everything going . . . ?"

Talking to Leslie had about it something (I imagined) of the ritual of Eastern bargaining; you had to go through the routine of question and answer first, the answer being the shorter exercise of the two.

Mr. Oker loved talking, and there was no hurrying him; one got to business eventually, but by way of health, the weather, trade prospects, the latest news, and any extra juicy items of local gossip that were worth passing on. The routine, I suppose, had originally been evolved as part of a softening-up process, the patter before the hard dealing. In sober fact, Leslie gave very little away, but the impression he fostered, of a genial and impulsive gossip, stood him in very good stead: strangers who were deceived by his effusive and rather camp manner into hoping for an easy bargain would come suddenly, and to their disadvantage, up against a very knowledgeable and wily operator. Leslie Oker was about as impulsive as a two-toed sloth, and rather less effeminate than a tomcat. The kindness, though, was real.

Thanks to it, the preliminaries today were short. After only three minutes, at least two of which were devoted to my welfare, and to praise of my father, Leslie paused, and then said, directly: "But you didn't ring me up just to tell me you were home, dear. What can I do for you?"

"Well, something's come up, and I wonder if you could help me, please. Just a quick query. You remember showing me that limited edition of
Rip Van Winkle
last year, the one illustrated by Arthur Rackham? I wondered what sort of price his work was fetching now? I don't mean the books, I mean the original illustrations?"

"Well, it's not exactly my line, as you know, but I'd say you'd be lucky if you came across one at all. Is this some particular drawing you want to buy?"

I laughed. "You know me better than that. I don't want to sell one, either. I just want to know the sort of value, if you wouldn't mind. Just an idea."

"The last one I saw listed in a catalogue," said Leslie, crisply, "was a watercolour drawing from
Comus,
and it was priced at eight hundred pounds."

"Oh. I see. Thank you. Leslie—"

"Yes?"

"If you should by any chance come across some mention of Rackham drawings for sale, would you not say anything about this, but just phone me straight away?"

"Of course. But how very intriguing." The light voice showed little but a gentle and sympathetic interest. "I gather one is not allowed to ask why?"

"For now, no. But I'll come in as soon as I can, and tell you all about it."

"This
is
exciting," said Leslie comfortably. "Of course, Bryony dear. Count on me. And perhaps I could give the grapevine just a teeny, teeny shake? But tell me soon, won't you, before I
die
with curiosity?"

"That'll be the day," I said, and he laughed, and rang off.

James came down after supper, just as I was finishing the washing up. He hoisted the empty cases into the roof space for me, accepted a cup of coffee, then followed me outside to the seat under the lilac tree facing the Pool. Dusk was falling, and the air was very still. The surface of the Pool lay quiet and shining, ringing into ripples here and there as fish rose for the evening hatch. There was a heron still fishing among the reeds at the far side. The rooks were settling for the night, and making a great to-do about it. Like clouds behind the cottage roof, the orchard trees showed pale and frothy with blossom, and tallest of all, the pear tree, like a central fountain in a water garden, held up its plumes of springtime snow. A thrush was singing in it, alone, as freshly and as passionately as if this was the first song in the world. From somewhere in the middle distance, towards the Court, came the sound of someone hammering.

"Rob puts in long hours," said my cousin.

"I wonder if he's mending the fishing cat."

"Fishing cat?"

"The one at the sluice where the Overflow leaves the moat. It's broken. I saw it this afternoon when Cathy and I were coming back from the maze."

"Oh? That's a pity. It was a pretty thing. Did you ask him to fix it?"

"No, I've not seen him this evening."

"Well," said James, "why should he trouble? More likely he's propping up one of the gates, or mending a roof, or even chopping some bushes down. Wasting his time, whatever he's doing. The whole place is falling to bits, and it would take more than Rob Granger to stop it."

He spoke without bitterness, and quite without intent to hurt, but with some special seriousness in his voice that made me look searchingly at him. He met my look gravely, then took my empty cup from me and set it with his own on the flagstones under the seat.

Then, as before in the schoolroom, his arm came gently round my shoulders, drawing me close. I could feel his heartbeat, perhaps a shade too fast.

"Bryony, love, it's time we had a talk, you and I."

I waited, feeling my own heartbeat quicken imper ceptibly to match his. I was very conscious of the beauty of the evening, the scent of the lilac and the song of the thrush and the lovely long planes of light on the lake in front of us.

My cousin cleared his throat. "You may be angry, and as a matter of fact I think you're bound to be angry, but if you've any sense you'll hear me out, and in the end, I hope you'll help me." His fingers, cupping my shoulder, tightened a fraction. "You have to be on my side. You know that. You have to be. It's the way things are."

The thrush stopped singing, as suddenly as a turned-off tap. The heron, too, had decided to give up for the night. He must have done well, I thought; he was having trouble with his lift-off. I watched him in silence as he lumbered into the air, and flapped away.

"Bryony?"

"Yes, I'm listening. Go on."

There was a short pause, while I felt him looking at me. I heard him take breath. "I'll start at the beginning. And I may as well start by confessing the brutal truth. My father—we, the lot of us, are in a jam. A real jam. We're desperate for ready cash and we have to find it some way, and find it fast."

This was in no way what I had been expecting. I was startled, and showed it. "But surely? I thought Cousin Howard —your family's always seemed to be doing so well. I mean-compared with us . . .

And I thought you were riding really high now, with the Jerez office doing so well, and with the Pereira backing. I know Daddy thought the same. What's happened?"

"The trouble is, everything's happened, and all at once." He stirred. "My God, that's the truest proverb in the language: 'troubles never come singly.' All the demands that we could have met if they'd come separately, and at the right time, well, they all seemed to come at once.

. . . I told you that my father will probably have to retire. If he does, there's not much guarantee that Pereiras will go on backing us. Why should they? And the Bristol offices are hardly an asset; they're mortgaged. If we had time— But the point is, we haven't. This illness of Father's has put a gun to our heads."

And now, I was thinking, this has happened. Because of my father's death, this huge liability, Ashley Court, has fallen on them, too.

"But I thought Juanita had quite a lot of money of her own. Wouldn't she help tide you over with a temporary loan, and give you the time you need?"

"Ironically enough," and his voice held no irony, but only a rather flat distaste at having to talk about the matter at all, "the main part of her money is tied up in a trust, and can't be touched.

These trusts," said James, and left it at that.

I said nothing. The evening was silent and empty. The light had gone from the lake. The lilac's scent had evaporated with the cooling air.

"So," said my cousin, "my father applied to yours to see if he could help us."

This time I really was startled. I sat up. "James, you can't be serious! You must have known we were run into the ground."

"Oh, yes, we knew that. But you had Ashley."

"Ashley?
But what on earth use is Ashley, when it comes to meeting a mortgage? It's the biggest liability this side of the National Debt!"

"As it stands, yes. It just pays for its upkeep and nothing to spare, we know that." His voice went flat. "What I'm talking about is the Ashley Trust."

"I see. You mean that's what you 'applied' to Daddy for? To break the trust?"

"Yes."

"When was this?"

"The first time was in November of last year," he said. "I never saw his answer to my father's letter, but it must have given room for maneuver, since Father still seemed to have hopes he would consent."

"The first time? He asked him more than once?"

He nodded. "He wrote again recently, and he had a couple of telephone talks with your father. This was when Cousin Jonathan was in Bad Tolz, of course. My father didn't want to press it, because he knew Cousin Jon ought to rest, but —well, things were getting desperate. The last time, though, Cousin Jon said he couldn't even consider it." He was silent for a moment, his head bent.

"I've been thinking about the reason for his change of heart, and I can't really understand it. As you know, things have been sold in the past, and no one's ever argued much about it. I think he must have been feeling so much better that he was planning to come back here, so he decided that as long as he could keep the place in some sort of order, he'd do just that. After all, it was your home."

"And his. He loved it. You're not just talking about 'things' this time, James? I take it you're talking about the place itself. The land."

"Yes." He gave me a gentle look. "Didn't you know anything about this?"

"Nothing. Of course if there'd been any question of breaking the trust he'd have had to bring me in as well. I'd have to consent, too, you know that." I thought for a moment. "It didn't occur to anyone to try and break Juanita's trust rather than ours? After all, she's Cousin Howard's wife."

"Well, of course it did. But that trust can't be touched at any price. It goes to her children, or, if there aren't any, it can be broken when she's forty."

"Which is quite some time away."

"Too long by half. If it was only six months, it would still be too long for us."

"So," I said, "now Daddy's dead, you come to me, and ask me to break ours."

He was silent.

"That's what you've been leading up to, isn't it? Isn't that what you want?"

"That is what we want," he said.

A pause. I said abruptly: "Did Daddy give any reason for being so dead set against it?"

"No. He would hardly even discuss it. He really never mentioned it to you at all, even indirectly?"

Even as I shook my head, I realized, in a sudden moment of enlightenment, that he had.
"Trust. Depend. Do what's right."
This was one of the things that had been weighing on his mind. Until I knew the rest, I could take no action.

I took refuge in a half-truth. "I can't say that he did. He may have thought that your money troubles were your own affair, and shouldn't be broadcast, even to me. But of course he spoke about the trust generally, once or twice. I do remember his saying that Cousin Howard seemed to have put down roots in Spain, and didn't seem to have the kind of feeling for Ashley that might bring him back to look after it.

He didn't say it as a criticism, why should he? He said it 'wasn't to be expected, but it was a pity.' That kind of thing. But I know he hoped that Emory or you might feel differently. You'd lived here, after all, with us. Do you?"

"Are you asking me to speak for Emory?"

"If you can. I know you said you couldn't speak for him when I asked if he was serious about Cathy Underhill, but you must know how he feels about Ashley." I gave him an inquiring look. "And I would have thought the two might almost be the same. I mean, if he was thinking along the lines of marrying Cathy—"

"He'd be able to afford to keep Ashley as it should be kept? I suppose so," said James, "but the plain fact is, he doesn't want to keep it at all."

From beyond the lime trees the church clock tolled the half hour. It sounded remote and serene. The distant hooting of an early owl spoke of mystery and the coming night.

"And you?" I asked him. "No, James, it's all right. I do understand. But I've got to know the truth.

You said I had to be on your side, and that's true. I am; you know that. We're not talking about family now, or people, just about bricks and mortar and trees, which might mean a lot to one person, but don't have to to another. So tell me. Do you want Ashley yourself, or even a part of it?"