me, and of course I never thought of her as being the same generation. Dolly had got married rather late in life, you see. To a man called Palmer, who died and didn’t leave her any money — that’s all I ever knew about him. That’s when she and Izzie started the fortune-telling business. Cousin Dolly had always claimed to have some kind of psychic powers and done fortune-telling as a sort of hobby, Tarot readings for friends and so on, so she decided to try doing it professionally.”
“I thought,” said Julia, “that it was Isabella who claimed to be clairvoyant.”
“Well, not in those days. What Aunt Izzie did was collect information. If you’re going to be convincing as a fortune-teller you have to know things people don’t expect you to know — Aunt Izzie was very good at finding out things like that. She’d kept all the contacts she’d made when she was working at the nightclub and she knew an awful lot of things about an awful lot of people. She was quite systematic and organised about it — she had a huge filing cabinet, which she used to call her little box of secrets, with files on all their clients and everyone who might be useful when they wanted to know something. And she always read the newspapers very carefully, especially the financial pages — they had a lot of clients who were stockbrokers and that sort of thing.”
“In short,” said Ragwort, “the whole business was based on a confidence trick?”
“Well, no, not exactly — I mean, I’m quite sure Cousin Dolly really believed in her psychic powers. What Aunt Izzie was doing, as far as Dolly was concerned, was help her to interpret what she read in the Book. There was an old book she’d got from somewhere, very large and bound in leather, which was what she used for the most important prophecies. Readings from the Book were incredibly expensive, but its predictions were always right — if they seemed to be wrong, you’d either asked the wrong question or misunderstood the answer.
“I tried to have a peep at it once, when Cousin Dolly had been doing a reading and seemed to have forgotten to lock it away afterwards. But she came back and caught me and asked if I’d read any of it. I said I hadn’t, and she said she was glad about that, because one of the things it predicted was that any little boy who read it would be locked in the cellar and left there until the rats ate him, and wouldn’t that be a pity for a pretty little boy like me? And she pinched my arm until my eyes watered.”
Julia, much distressed, refilled Terry’s wineglass and was rewarded with a Leonardo smile.
“I’d stayed with them several times and was beginning to think of it as a regular feature of my school holidays, when there was a terrible row between my mother and Aunt Izzie — I’ve no idea what it was about. But they never spoke to each other again and of course I didn’t go and stay anymore. Even when I grew up and came to live in London, I didn’t try to get in touch again — I’d have felt I was being disloyal to my mother. Aunt Izzie sent us a card when Cousin Dolly died, and another with her new address when she moved down to Sussex, but my mother never answered. Then my mother died and I thought I ought to write and tell Aunt Izzie, but she didn’t write back.”
“And so,” said Ragwort, “you never saw her again?”
“Well, only once, and I’m afraid I wished I hadn’t. I suppose it was mostly curiosity, but — well, after a while it occurred to me that Aunt Izzie was the only close relative I had left and she’d been quite nice to me and I ought to find out if she were starving or anything. So I rang her up and suggested I might come and see her. She seemed quite keen on the idea, and down I went to Parsons Haver.
“She’d sent Daphne out for the evening and not told her I was coming — she seemed to think that Daphne would be jealous if she knew. So there were just the two of us, plus a rather disagreeable vulture, drinking champagne and trying to pretend this was just like the old days. Which of course it wasn’t. She’d put on a lot of weight and her clothes were rather dirty and her stories were all about people who didn’t matter anymore. The horrible thing was that she seemed to have got so much more like Cousin Dolly — not just the way she looked but the way she talked. She’d decided that she had psychic powers as well and she obviously took it all seriously. It was as if, when Dolly died, Izzie had somehow inherited her personality.”
“Still,” said Julia, “at least you didn’t think she was going to eat you?”
“Well, no, I didn’t exactly think that, but — well, you see, she’d always sort of flirted with me a bit — it didn’t mean anything, it was a kind of game. And she was still doing it, but somehow I felt it wasn’t quite a game anymore — she seemed to keep wanting to touch me. And I didn’t want her to.
“Still, I did my best to be amusing and she evidently enjoyed the evening and expected me to come back again. I was still wondering how long I could leave it without hurting her feelings when I saw that she’d died — Daphne didn’t write to me, I saw it in the newspaper. Poor Aunt Izzie, I’m afraid I felt rather relieved. So I thought the least I could do was go to her funeral.
“I didn’t particularly think about what I’d say to Daphne — I suppose I meant to go up to her at some point and say, ‘Hello, I’m your cousin Terry’ But for some reason she seemed to take an instant dislike to me — she was simply radiating hostility all through the service. I don’t know why — it can’t have been that she recognised me, I’d changed far too much. So I thought the best thing would be to slip away quietly. But then there was this clergyman, you see, with a face like an eagle and the most beautiful voice I’d ever heard, and I—” He sighed. “Silly, isn’t it?
“When it was all over, he came over to talk to me and asked who I was. I’d just begun to tell him when I realised that Daphne was only a few feet away, still oozing hostility from every pore, and if I said ‘Terry Carver’ she’d know I was her cousin and everything would be spoilt. So I said my name was Arkwright — I’d seen it on one of the tombstones. As I say, it was just an impulse — I’m sorry if it makes things difficult.”
“We can all understand,” said Ragwort magnanimously, “that sometimes on the spur of the moment one does things one afterwards regrets. But surely, once you and the Reverend Maurice were on terms of friendship, you could have explained the position?”
“You’re perfectly right, Desmond, as of course you always are — that’s what I ought to have done. But you see, I rather enjoyed being Derek Arkwright. I somehow thought of him as someone slightly different from me — someone travelling light, with no past, no responsibilities, no bookcases to make, no VAT forms to fill in. It was rather delicious. And I felt that it was part of my — what was that discreet phrase of yours? — my being on terms of friendship with Maurice. I felt that as long as I was Derek I could keep it as something secret and special, but if I turned back into Terry I’d somehow be breaking the spell. And as it turned out, I was absolutely right.
“Poor Maurice, I didn’t really mean to mislead him about the kind of person I was. I never told him anything about myself that wasn’t true — I just didn’t tell him very much at all. But he must have built up some extraordinary fantasy about me as someone terribly glamorous and interesting — God knows exactly what. And when he found out that I was just an ordinary, boring sort of chap doing an ordinary boring sort of job, he felt terribly hurt and disillusioned.”
“My dear Terry,” said Julia, “no one could conceivably think you either ordinary or boring.”
“Your profession is one,” said Ragwort, “which a clergyman should hold in particular esteem. And Benjamin thinks you one of the finest craftsmen in London.”
The young man shrugged his shoulders and smiled his satirical smile.
“It was my impression,” I said, “that the Reverend Maurice never knew any more about you than you had told him yourself. How did his disillusionment come about?”
“I don’t know — I just know that it happened. I mean, I don’t know who told him about me or what they said exactly. We’d been away on holiday together and everything was marvellous — at least I thought it was. I did have a few anxious moments, because it turned out that Selena was staying at the house opposite. I was afraid we might run into her in one of the cafes or somewhere and she’d say, ‘Hello, Terry, why aren’t you working on bookcases?’ before I had a chance to ask her not to.”
“Yes,” said Ragwort. “Yes, I dare say she would have said that.”
“But she wasn’t there very long and she seemed to be working the whole time, so it didn’t happen. And the weekend after we got back to England I went and stayed with Maurice again and everything was still marvellous, or at least I still thought it was. I was beginning to feel quite serious and long-term about things. And then two days later I had a letter from him — it was the only one he ever sent me. It was a terrible letter, all about me deceiving him and not being the person he thought I was — he practically made it sound as if I’d done something criminal.”
“But he didn’t make any specific accusation?”
“No, I suppose not — but he made it clear enough that he didn’t want to see me again.”
“He made no mention of the Virgil frontispiece?”
“No,” said the young man, with every appearance of bewilderment. “Why should he mention that?”
As frequently happens when the heart’s affections are engaged, there seemed to have been a
