The Sibyl in Her Grave

“Ragwort,” said Julia at last, “without doubting the depth of your learning on all matters of a Chancery nature, may I ask how you come to be so particularly well informed on this subject?”

“As it happens,” said Ragwort, “I was looking up the authorities on it only this afternoon. Terry Carver rang me up this morning to ask if he could come and talk to me about a legal problem, so I said that if he cared to have lunch with me here tomorrow I’d see if I could help. I’m rather hoping it’ll give me a chance to remind him about our bookcases.”

“And Terry’s problem also involves a question of undue influence?”

“Yes, it seems to. A friend of his has died and left him some money, and now some mischief-making harpy is trying to say the will is invalid. She’s written to the executors making the most outrageous accusations and saying that she’s taking Counsel’s Opinion.”

“Oh dear,” said Julia. “Not the friend he was telling you about in Cannes? The one he was so badly treated by but went back to all the same?”

“Yes, it’s all rather sad. It was because he was ill, you see, that Terry went back, and he died soon afterwards. I’m afraid poor Terry sounded very down about it all. And this unpleasantness about the will is obviously making it worse.”

“Poor Terry, what a shame,” said Julia. “If there’s anything I can do to help—?”

With that warm camaraderie which is such an attractive quality of the Chancery Bar, my young friends agreed to combine their resources and in effect advise jointly on both problems: thus Terry would enjoy the benefit of Julia’s thoughts on his case and Daphne of Ragwort’s on hers. With this in mind, it was arranged that Julia should join Ragwort for his lunch with Terry on the following day.

Thinking that the lunch might prove to be an occasion of some interest, I enquired whether they would object to my being present.

“As long as Terry doesn’t mind,” said Ragwort, “we shall naturally be delighted. And I can’t see why he should.”

“We can tell him,” said Julia, “that you’re a distinguished academic lawyer whose advice we have sometimes found helpful. After all,” she added, in a tone of some surprise, “there is a sense in which one could say that’s actually true.”

From a woman who but for my own investigations might still have been languishing in a dungeon on the wrong side of the Bridge of Sighs, my readers may think it a not unduly fulsome tribute.

Arriving in the Corkscrew on the following day a little after the appointed hour, I found Julia and Ragwort already installed there. Julia looked anxious; Ragwort looked severe. Between them sat the young man whom I had seen some months before on the floor of the Clerks’ Room at 62 New Square, uncomfortably entangled with a merchant banker and a ladder. On that occasion, however, I had failed to appreciate the full charm of his appearance: the topaz-coloured eyes under long, dark lashes; the golden smoothness of the throat; the singular beauty of the mouth, putting one in mind of Leonardo’s celebrated painting of John the Baptist.

“Hilary,” said Ragwort, “allow me to introduce Terry Carver. Who has just told us, however,” he added with the awe-inspiring severity of a judge about to pass the maximum sentence, “that he sometimes prefers, for reasons best known to himself, to be known as Derek Arkwright.”

I was unable to show the degree of astonishment that Ragwort had apparently expected: it had for some time been as clear to me as it has doubtless been to my readers that Terry Carver and Derek Arkwright were the same person.

“How do you do, Professor Tamar?” said the young man. His smile, though of great sweetness, had also a certain satirical quality, attractive and slightly disturbing — one might almost have said dangerous. “It’s very kind of you to take the time to talk to me. I must tell you straightaway that I’ve behaved extremely badly and made myself an embarrassment to my legal advisers. I’ve been trying to explain—”

“It’s no use trying to make light of it,” said Ragwort sternly. “What sort of impression do you think it’s going to make on a judge? There we shall be, putting you forward as a person of unquestionable respectability, and the first thing we have to tell him is that you’ve been using a false name. You must see—”

“Yes, Desmond, I do, truly I do, but when I told Maurice that my name was Derek Arkwright I wasn’t actually thinking about what would happen if he died six months later and left me some money and there were legal proceedings and I had to make a good impression on the judge — I simply did it on impulse.”

“But why? You talk as if it were a perfectly natural and reasonable thing to do on impulse — like eating a bar of chocolate or punching someone on the nose. Giving a false name isn’t like that at all — I’ve never felt the slightest urge suddenly to tell someone that my name was Marmaduke Hackingbush, and neither has anyone else I know. I simply don’t understand—”

“If you’d just let me explain, Desmond, it’s really perfectly simple. I didn’t want Daphne to know who I was.”

“Daphne? What’s Daphne got to do with it? Why should it matter to Daphne whether your name was Terry Carver or Derek Arkwright?”

“Because she’s my cousin. My second cousin, I suppose — her mother and mine were first cousins.”

I suggested that we should order lunch and that Terry should thereafter be permitted to tell his story without interruption.

“My mother came from a small town in Lincolnshire and all her family were very respectable and very boring. All except for wicked Cousin Dolly, who ran away to London and worked in a nightclub and was never spoken of again. At least theoretically she was never spoken of again — it all happened more than forty years ago, long before I was born, and I can’t remember a time when I hadn’t heard of wicked Cousin Dolly, so actually, I suppose, she must have been spoken of a good deal.

“And my mother and her sister Isabel must have heard a good deal about her too, while they were still children, because as soon as she was old enough my aunt Izzie ran away as well and joined forces with her. So she was never spoken of either and my mother wasn’t allowed to have anything more to do with her. My mother, poor dear, grew up to be respectable and married my father and in due course — well, became my mother. After their parents died, though, she and Aunt Izzie started writing to each other. They didn’t see each other often — my mother didn’t like coming to London — but they got on well enough for me to be allowed to come and stay with Aunt Izzie sometimes.”

“And did you,” asked Julia, “enjoy your visits?”

“Well, I think I enjoyed them more when they were over and I was safely home, if you see what I mean. Aunt Izzie was still living with Cousin Dolly, you see, and Cousin Dolly scared me out of my wits — I thought she was going to eat me. Literally, I mean, once she’d got me nicely fattened up and while I was still young enough to be tender.

“I don’t quite know why I thought so — I’d probably heard of wicked Cousin Dolly at about the same time as I heard of the wicked witch in Hansel and Gretel and I thought they did the same sort of things.

“But she was very fond of her food, and whenever I went there she used to pinch me, quite hard, as if she were wondering — well, that’s what it seemed like. The grown-up half of me knew this was all nonsense, but the other half believed it absolutely — I always made sure to take plenty of exercise before I went there, so that I’d be too thin and stringy for her. I think she knew she frightened me, and was pleased about it.

“On the other hand, I got on rather well with Aunt Izzie. She was well into her forties by that time, but she’d taken much better care of her looks than Dolly had, and I thought she was tremendously glamorous and sophisticated. She told me all sorts of scandalous stories about people, quite famous people that I’d seen on television, and she took me to places that my parents would have been as shocked as anything about if they’d known — bars and nightclubs and so on.”

“Places,” said Ragwort sternly, “where it was quite illegal for you to be at that age.”

“Yes, I suppose so, but some of the places Aunt Izzie went to didn’t seem to mind much about things being illegal. And if she thought there was going to be a problem, she just dressed me up as a girl — like that I could pass for quite a fetching little eighteen-year-old.” The young man smiled demurely at Ragwort, who looked more severe than ever.

“I take it,” I said, “that Daphne was also part of this menage? As I understand it, she was Dolly’s daughter.”

“Yes, that’s right, but I’m afraid I didn’t take much notice of her — she was about five years younger than