“He means ‘Yes,’ ” whispered aunt Rose, quickly separating the U and the E a little more, and replacing her fingers on the glass.
“B-U-T,” said Father, “I A-M,” and paused to think.
“What are you, Father?” asked aunt Emily.
“W-A-R-R-I-E-D.”
“Warried?” Aunt Emily looked at aunt Rose.
“Worried,” said aunt Rose. “Father’s worried. Why are you worried, Father?”
At this stage, aunt Emily should have been the one to be worried, but she never was. She just rushed blindly on to her fate. The answer was always the same:
“R-O-S-E’S C-A-S-E.”
“Rose’s Case,” said aunt Rose, and gave her sister a significant look. It was too late for aunt Emily to back out now without gross disrespect to the dead.
“H-E-L-P,” said Father succinctly, and added: “C-A-S-E W-I–L-L B-E W-O-N S-O-O-N.”
“Isn’t that wonderful!” whispered aunt Rose. But that was not the end; the sting was in the tail, and the glass now moved quickly and surely.
“M-O-N-E-Y N-E-E-D-E-D F-A-M-I–L-Y M-U-
S-T S-T-A-N-D F-O-U-R S-Q-U-A-R-E T-O-G-E- T-H-E-R.”
“How shall we get the money, Father?” asked aunt Emily though she ought to have known. Father seemed to try tactfully to side-step this for a moment, as though to break it gently. He just said: “F-I-G-H-T S-H-O-U-L-D-E-R T-O S-H-O-U-L-
D-E-R,” and was silent. It was as though he were brooding deeply over the whole problem.
Then, apparently having made up his mind, he added starkly: “E-M-I–L-Y M-U-S-T S-E-L–L S-O-M-E S-H-A-R- E-S.” Perhaps because he saw the blank look on aunt Emily’s face he added: “I-F N-E-C-E-S-S-A-R-Y.”
Just occasionally, my parents visited the house, and, once, a rather half-hearted attempt was even made to bounce some money out of my father, but being cynical he remained deaf to astral instructions and no further efforts were made.
Although I never felt sorry for Bartels’ aunt Rose, with her buoyant optimism and continual preoccupation with her great case, I did feel a certain pity for uncle James, her husband, the man around whom the whole case revolved.
He never struck me as having the air of a man who seriously considered himself to have been gravely wronged; indeed, he seemed to regard both the case and the astral messages with a certain good-humoured tolerance. But he was always very cagey when questioned as to his views on both subjects, probably because he held aunt Rose in some awe.
He was a short, well-proportioned man dressed invariably in the style of a country gentleman who had come up to spend an hour or two at Tattersall’s.
He wore loud check suits, usually grey, made of heavy cloth of such superb quality that though they had been made in the late Edwardian period, they still looked new; and on him, somehow, the style still looked smart. He always wore white socks, and, outside the house, grey spats, a brown bowler hat, and carried yellow gloves; his shoes shone like a well-polished Sheraton table. He had fair, thinning hair, a square jaw and straight nose, and keen, merry blue eyes.
One evening I saw uncle James’s car in front of the house; he was polishing the coachwork, whistling and hissing through his teeth like an ostler does when rubbing a horse down after a gallop. It was a very old car, but Bartels’ uncle kept it shining like a new pin.
“Hello, uncle James,” I said. He looked up.
“Hello, Peter!” He roared with laughter. He had the social habit common to his generation of going off into peals of loud laughter if he met somebody unexpectedly.
“How are you?” he said in his loud, cheerful voice. “Phil’s out at the moment, but he’ll be back soon.”
We chatted for a while and then made our way to the dreary expanse of coarse grass and dark green foliage behind the house, and walked up and down, discussing the sort of garden he would like to have, the vagaries of his car, and the scarcity of money, while a grimy-looking tabby cat sat on the wall dreaming of the infinite.
“How’s the case?” I asked at length.
“I believe Rose is up to some new dodge or other. This new lawyer fella was no good after all. Ah, well, it’s a poor heart that never rejoices,” he added.
“It certainly is.”
“I’d like to have a day out hunting before I die, I must say. I get tired of being the poor relation, Pete.”
He paused to light his pipe, sucking in the smoke with short, vigorous puffs, so that in a few seconds there was a thick cloud of acrid blue smoke around him.
It seemed odd that a man who had had charge of the destinies of a great regiment, who had been a local god to a thousand men, should be pacing up and down a seedy garden in Bayswater, dreaming of one last day out with the hounds before he died. He longed for a job, and it seemed to him bewildering that though he was over sixty, and untrained in anything except war, nobody would offer him one.
To the end of his days he never gave up hope, either of a job or of a last day’s hunting. He got neither, of course.
Uncle James helped daily with the housework, tended the garden, carried the coals, chopped wood, cleaned the shoes, and pressed his own clothes; he was always as immaculately clean as in the days when a batman had looked after him.
When she occasionally grew fretful about handing out money in accordance with Father’s wishes from Beyond, aunt Emily would sometimes suggest that her sister’s one spare room could be used to house a rich lodger. Doubtless she envisaged some old recluse, full of years and money, who would eventually die and leave them his fortune. But aunt Rose said it would be “bad for James’s nerves,” not that he was ever known to suffer from any.
Looking back now over the years, I see they were a cheerful, feckless couple who wasted their substance chasing a mirage; who fed well, and were never without a bottle of whisky in the house; who ran up bills which they could not pay, and believed that the world owed them a living.
But they were sweethearts from the day they met until the day when death came to aunt Rose, and the dustman eventually carted away the vast accumulation of papers in the case that aunt Rose never won, and never could have won, had she lived to be a hundred.
I smile when I think of them, Bartels’ aunt Rose, aunt Emily and uncle James; time has erased from the memory such blemishes of character as they may have had, and wiped out the recollections of the inevitable little acrimonious squabbles which arose between them.
They were kind to Philip Bartels, they were genuinely fond of him, but that is as far as it went. Aunt Emily was too occupied with her stocks and shares and her tenants, and aunt Rose was too occupied fighting the legal scoundrel, and rogues who declined to work for her without payments to develop any real love of him.
Even uncle James never really took to him, for Bartels had never hunted, never showed much interest in the Army as a career, and at that time did not know one end of a shotgun from another.
That, then, was the boyhood background of the man the cool-brained Beatrice married, the girl whose arrival at the chateau was followed, appropriately, as it now seems, by one of the most violent thunderstorms in the history of the Sologne area.
Few lives are completely tragic or even sombre. Bartels’ boyhood had its amusing side, even its ludicrous moments, but he was too young fully to appreciate them.
In retrospect his youth seems, on the whole, not unpleasant. There have been many worse. But it did him no good, no good at all. Bartels needed more emotional warmth than he could ever find at 257 Melville Avenue; more, too, than Beatrice Wilson could ever give him, either before or after they were married.
Chapter 4
