‘No, the lawyers are taking their time.’
Eric thought: I’ll bet they are taking their time. He had taken the first train to London on receiving that letter from Olive. His first action had been to call on the solicitor. His next was to get in touch with Mrs Pettigrew.
Mrs Pettigrew filled Eric’s glass. She noticed, as she had done earlier in the day, his little hands, and she felt quite frightened.
Eric was a stocky man, rather resembling his mother in appearance except that the feminine features and build looked odd in him. His hips were broad, his head was large. He had Charmian’s wide-spaced eyes, pointed chin and small neat nose. His mouth was large like that of Dame Lettie whose battered body was later that evening to be discovered.
But Mrs Pettigrew told herself, she was experienced with men like Eric. Not that she had ever encountered quite the same details of behaviour in any other man. But she was familiar with the general pattern; she knew he was not normal, for though he greatly desired money he yet seemed willing to sacrifice quantities of it to gain some more intense and sinuous satisfaction. She had in her life before met men prepared to sacrifice the prospect of money in order to gain, for instance, a social ambition.
To that extent she felt she knew her man. She felt it was not surprising that such a man would sacrifice anything for revenge. And yet, could she trust him?
‘I am doing this,’ he had told her, ‘for moral reasons. I believe — I firmly believe, it will do the old man good. Teach him a lesson.’
Oh, but Eric was a mess! She looked at his little hands and the feminine setting of the eyes like Charmian’s and felt perhaps she was foolish to trust him.
Eric was a mess. Olive’s letter had told him his father was being blackmailed by ‘a certain Mrs Pettigrew’ into bequeathing a large portion of his fortune to her. Eric had acted promptly and without a moment’s thought. Even in the train up from Cornwall he had not taken thought but had flirted all the way with delicious ideas — the discomfiture of Godfrey; the undermining of Charmian; the possible sympathetic-bosomed qualities of this Mrs Pettigrew under her possibly tough exterior; the thrill of being able to expose everyone to everyone if it proved expedient to do so; and the thrill of obtaining sufficient immediate cash to enable him to go and tell his Aunt Lettie what he really thought of her.
Not that he knew what he thought of her. He retained in his mind an axiom from his youth: the family had let him down badly. Everyone, even the family, had agreed upon that in the years when Eric was between twenty-two and twenty-eight, and the century was between twenty-three and twenty-nine years old. He had rejected every idea his family had ever held except this one idea, ‘Somehow or other we have let Eric down. How did it happen? Poor Eric, Charmian has mothered him too much. Charmian has not been a mother enough to him. Godfrey has been too occupied, has never taken any notice of the boy. Godfrey has been too lenient, too strict, too mean, has given him too much money.’ The elders had grown out of these sayings when the fashion changed, but by then Eric had taken them for his creed. Lettie bore him off on consoling holidays. He robbed her, and the hotel staff got the blame. She tried to get him interested in prison-visiting. He started smuggling letters and tobacco into Wormwood Scrubs. ‘Poor Eric, he hasn’t had a chance. He should never have been sent to that crank school. How could he ever be expected to pass an exam? I blame Charmian … I blame Lettie … Godfrey has never cared …’ He went to an art school and was caught stealing six tubes of paint. They sent him to a Freudian analyst whom he did not like. They sent him to an Adlerian, and subsequently to an individualist. Meanwhile, there was an incident with a junior porter of a club, in the light of which he was sent to another psychiatrist of sympathetic persuasion. He was so far cured that he got one of the maids into trouble. Charmian was received into the Church.
‘Eric will grow out of this phase,’ said Charmian. ‘My grandfather was wild as a youth.’
But Eric was amazed when his elders eventually stopped blaming themselves for his condition. He thought them hypocritical and callous to go back on their words. He longed for them to start discussing him again in the old vein; but by the time he was thirty-seven they had said quite bitter things to him. He had bought a cottage in Cornwall, where he drank their money. He was in a home for inebriates when the war broke out. He emerged to be called up by the military, but was turned down on account of his psychological history. He loathed Charmian, Godfrey, and Lettie. He loathed his cousin Alan who was doing so well as an engineer and who, as a child, had always been considered dull in comparison with Eric. He married a negress and got divorced six months later, a settlement being made on her by Godfrey. From time to time he wrote to Charmian, Godfrey, and Lettie, to tell them that he loathed them. When, in 1947, Godfrey refused him any more money, he made it up with Lettie and obtained small revenues and larger promises from her. But Lettie, when she saw so little return for her cash by way of his company, reduced her bounty to mere talk about her will. Eric wrote a novel, and got it published on the strength of Charmian’s name. It bore a similarity to Charmian’s writing. ‘Poor Eric,’ said Charmian, ‘has not much originality. But I do think, Godfrey, now that he is really doing some work, we ought to assist him.’ She sent him, over a period of two years, all she possessed. Eric thought her mean, he thought her envious of his novel, and said so. Godfrey refused to write to him. Charmian had confided to Guy Leet, ‘I suspect that Godfrey has a secret horror of another novelist in the family.’ And she added, what was not strictly true, but was a neat conclusion, ‘Of course, Godfrey always wanted Eric to join that dreary firm.’
By the time he was fifty Eric began to display what looked like a mind of his own. That is, instead of sending wild vituperative accusations to his family, he now sent cold reasoned denunciations. He proved, point by point, that they had let him down badly from the time of his first opening his eyes.
‘In his middle-age Eric is becoming so like Godfrey,’ said Charmian, ‘though of course Godfrey does not see it.’
Eric no longer called Charmian’s novels lousy muck. He analysed them piece by piece, he ridiculed the spare parts, he demolished the lot. He had some friends who applauded his efforts.
‘But he takes my work so seriously,’ said Charmian. ‘Nobody ever wrote of it like that.’
Charmian’s health had failed by the mid-fifties. The revival of her novels astonished Eric, for he had by some fractional oversight misjudged an element in the temper of his age. He canvassed his friends and was angered and bewildered to find so many had fallen for the Charmian Piper period-cult.
Charmian’s remittances, smuggled through Mrs Anthony, were received with silence. His second book had secretly appealed to Dame Lettie. It had been described as ‘realistic and brutally frank’, but the energy which he might have put into developing his realistic and brutally frank talents was now dispersed in resentment against Charmian. The revival of her novels finished him off and he found he could no longer write.
Even the reports in the papers that Godfrey, Charmian, and Lettie had been recipients of threatening telephone calls failed to stimulate him.
Throughout the war, and since, he had been mainly living on women of means, the chief of whom had been Lisa Brooke. He had found it hard, after Lisa’s death, to replace her. Everyone was hard up, and Eric put on weight with the worry of it all, which did not help. His difficulties were approaching a climax at the moment he had received Olive’s letter. ‘Your father is being cruelly blackmailed by a certain Mrs Pettigrew, the housekeeper. I think he would
