The China Governess Read online

There was a moment of complete silence in the room, broken by Julia’s sharp intake of breath. Mrs. Broome swung round upon her protectively.

  ‘Don’t take it to heart! It’s only because he promised your father faithfully not to see you,’ she said so quickly that no one was convinced. ‘It wasn’t very nice of the old gentleman to ask it but everything’s fair in love and war, isn’t it? You two have got to stand up for yourselves. You and me must get together, young lady!’

  Both Lugg and Campion glanced at the girl curiously to see how she would respond to this somewhat over-direct mothering and they were both surprised. A fleeting curl appeared at one corner of the pale pink mouth and the swimming eyes twinkled.

  ‘Poor Tim,’ said Julia.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Ebbfield Interlude

  THE HIGHWAY TO the East Coast which ran through the borough of Ebbfield had always been a main road and even now, despite the vast garages, the pylons and the gaily painted factory glasshouses which had sprung up beside it, there still remained an occasional trace of past cultures.

  One of these was a fragment of a terrace of early Victorian middle-class houses of a type which had once lined the broad road for two miles on either side. There were three of them left, tall and dark-bricked, with semi-basement kitchens and once-splendid flights of stone steps leading to square porches and fine front doors. The middle one possessed a cast-iron gate with a patch of bald, sour earth just inside it, and a name plate bearing the number 172 and the words Waterloo Lodge welded to its serpentine tracery.

  It was raining and dark when Timothy Kinnit found the address at last. He was hatless and the collar of his light raincoat was turned up. He was at a splendid age and although his self-assurance was already shaken he ran up the stone steps and pulled the brass knob which he found beside the door.

  There was movement inside the house and a light appeared in the transom above his head. The door opened abruptly and a somewhat brusque feminine voice announced: ‘Mrs. Cornish.’

  Timothy became shyly voluble.

  ‘I’m so sorry to trouble you and I’m afraid you don’t know me at all but I was given this address by Tom Tray. He repairs shoes in Carroway Street off the Orient Road. I was hoping that Councillor Cornish could spare me a moment or so?’

  His diffidence and pleasant voice appeared to mollify her, for although she did not give ground she turned on the porch light and emerged as a small but stalwart woman in the late forties, still smart and good-looking with bold eyes and a fashionable hair-do. For a moment she regarded him with surprised approval.

  ‘My God, you’ve spoiled your beauty, haven’t you?’ she said at last. ‘What have you been doing, fighting? I warn you we don’t approve of boxing. Come in and I’ll inquire if Mr. Cornish will see you. What is it? Youth Clubs?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid it’s not.’ He followed her into a long, shabby hall which could have belonged to any careless or overworked professional man at any period during the last hundred years. Mrs. Cornish appeared to become conscious of its shortcomings for she frowned at him and said accusingly: ‘When one works as hard as we do for the public good one doesn’t have time for frills. What did you say you wanted to see the Councillor about? I don’t imagine you’re from a firm, so I assume you’re canvassing. You’re wasting time, you know, because every vote the Councillor has on any committee is well thought out and discussed, so he’s already made up his mind one way or the other and nothing you can do will shift him one iota.’

  Timothy found her trick of answering her own questions to the second stage of argument highly disconcerting but he stuck to his purpose.

  ‘It’s nothing like that. I merely want to ask him something about Turk Street long ago and —’

  ‘Oh, you’re a reporter. Not from one of the local papers, because I know them. Of course! You’re the B.B.C. Well, we shall all try to be as interesting as we can.’

  ‘I’m not!’ He was trying not to shout at her. ‘I’m here on my own account. I’m told that your husband knows more about Ebbfield than anyone else on earth. Some weeks ago a detective—’

  ‘A detective!’ She gave him a long, suspicious look which he found vaguely unpleasant. ‘So you’re a detective! I ought to throw you out at once, but you wait in here and if he wants to see you I shan’t stop him.’

  She thrust him into an airless dining-room in which no one had eaten for a very long time, and left him standing by the large round table which was covered with a faded red serge cloth.

  The mahogany sideboard was spread with out-of-date magazines and the pictures on the walls were all of mountains in shabby gilt frames. It was a depressing room and he was still looking about him gloomily when the door shot open once more and the Councillor appeared, his wife behind him.

  Timothy was nearly as startled by the man as Superintendent Luke had been on an earlier occasion. He recognized the type at once. His university was full of them; all passionate, dedicated, sometimes wrong-headed men, wedded to an assortment of ideas of which a few were practical. The fire behind his eyes, his long bony wrists and impatient gestures were all peculiarly familiar, but the more disconcerting because he had not expected to find them in the Ebbfield High Road. The other surprising thing about the Councillor was his open dislike of his visitor, who was a complete stranger. Timothy was young enough to be hurt by it. Cornish’s nostrils were flexed and when he spoke his tone was contemptuous.

  ‘As I have already told one representative of your firm this morning, the matter is closed,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to hear any more about it. I have the name of your client and that is all I wanted to know when I invited him to call on me.’

  Timothy relaxed. ‘I’m sorry, sir. You’re making a mistake,’ he said cheerfully.

  ‘You were directed here by Stalkey & Sons.’

  ‘No, sir. I got your name from the cobbler in Carroway Street.’

  ‘Have you any connection with the Stalkeys at all? Do you know them? Is the name familiar?’ There was more force in the probing than the subject warranted and the younger man hesitated.

  ‘I got myself beaten up by one of the brothers this morning,’ he said at last.

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘I don’t know. The man set on me out of the air.’

  The Councillor stared at him and presently spoke more mildly. ‘That’s a very dangerous accusation unless you’re perfectly sure what you mean by it, my boy.’ Without his animosity he was revealed as a pleasant person, a little inhuman perhaps but possessing a streak of dry humour.

  ‘I should hardly have thought that man I met would have hung about long enough to beat up anybody,’ he remarked, sniffing a little. ‘His brother, who he assured me was working down here on an inquiry, made the most indecently hasty departure from trouble which I ever witnessed. He was literally jet-propelled and all the way to Canada, I believe. What’s your name?’

  ‘Timothy Kinnit, sir.’

  ‘Kinnit!’ The word was an explosion and the lined aesthetic face grew rigid. ‘What’s this about? Eh?’ He turned to his wife. ‘Marion, leave me with this young man for a minute or two, will you?’

  Mrs. Cornish sat down obstinately.

  ‘I’ll wait,’ she was beginning, but as he turned and looked at her the colour came into her face and she got up sulkily and went over to the door. ‘I shan’t be very far away, anyhow,’ she said as she left, but it was not clear if the words were meant as a threat or a reassurance.

  The Councillor waited until her footsteps had died away before he leaned across the table in an effort, apparently, to be reasonable at all costs.

  ‘Who sent you?’ he demanded.

  Timothy’s irritation began to return. ‘I was given your name by the shoemaker off the Orient Road.’

  ‘And you expect me to believe that?’

  ‘I really can’t imagine why you shouldn’t.’

  The Councillor ignored him.

  ‘I think Miss Alison Kinnit sent you,’ he said.r />
  Timothy stared. ‘Alison? Why should she?’

  ‘You know her then?’ The intelligent eyes were shrewdly inquisitive.

  ‘Of course I do. She and her brother brought me up. I live with them.’

  ‘Oh.’ He seemed astonished, even a little put out. ‘Then perhaps you know a woman called Flavia Aicheson?’ He put contempt and dislike into the name and Timothy frowned.

  ‘Certainly I know her,’ he admitted. ‘She’s been around all my life. She’s a great friend of Aunt Alison’s and a very nice old thing. Has she been making trouble on one of your committees?’ He saw that he had scored a bull’s-eye as soon as the words were out of his mouth. The Councillor was verging towards rage and colour had appeared on his thin cheeks.

  ‘You’re very plausible, very smooth,’ he began with intentional offence. ‘I’m not a fool, you know, even if I have lived a great deal longer than you have. As soon as I heard a private detective had been snooping along certain lines I suspected something of this sort and I was disgusted, I tell you frankly. For a while I washed my hands of the entire affair but on second thoughts I decided to check and I invited the Stalkeys to call on me. One brother came down this morning and was quite ready to talk, but I only wanted one thing from him and that was the name of his client. As soon as he gave me that I knew I was right. Alison Kinnit and Flavia Aicheson, they’re virtually the same woman.’

  ‘Oh but they’re not!’ Timothy was so exasperated that he laughed. ‘They may have the same interests and they’re certainly very close friends but they’re quite different personalities I do assure you.’

  ‘Are they?’ Councillor Cornish conveyed that he was unconvinced. ‘You go back and tell them,’ he said. ‘Tell them they may feel that they’re serving the Arts but that I serve Humanity and I am not going to have my life’s work tampered with. You can also tell them that if they’re hoping to use dirty weapons they should consider their own position very carefully. At least,’ he hesitated ‘at least tell them not to be so damn silly!’

  ‘I do assure you you’re making a great mistake.’ Timothy’s embarrassment was mounting. He had discovered to his dismay that the personal aspect of his quest was becoming more agonizingly personal at every new encounter, while at the same time the Councillor’s accusatory style upset him in an emotional way which he felt to be absurd.

  ‘I came here on my own account because I want to know the things that Stalkey was trying to find out and I thought you might help me,’ he said lamely.

  ‘What things? Go on, young man. Put them into words, what things?’ There was something savage in the force of the older man’s question and his visitor shied away from it.

  ‘Certain – certain aspects of social conditions in Turk Street just before the second war, sir,’ he muttered and sounded stilted even to himself.

  ‘Social conditions!’ The phrase seemed to touch a power centre in the Councillor, who let himself go. ‘Don’t be a pompous ass, boy!’ He used the word in the old-fashioned way with a long vowel, making it even more derogatory. ‘Turk Street was a London slum. Your generation doesn’t know what that means. You call yourselves “sick”, don’t you? So do I. You couldn’t have walked a hundred yards of the Turk Street Mile in the thirties without vomiting. It turned me up myself and I wasn’t a spoon-fed university product.’

  He leant further across the table, shaking in his determination to make his point.

  ‘Children crawled over each other like little grey worms in the gutters,’ he said. ‘The only red things about them were their buttocks and they were raw. Their faces looked as if snails had slimed on them and their mothers were like great sick beasts whose byres had never been cleared. The stink and the noise and the cold and the hatred got into your belly and nothing and no-one has ever got it out again as far as I’m concerned. For God’s sake go back to those maiden ladies and get it into their idiot heads that an anthill is less offensive than a sewer.’

  Timothy hesitated. The man was making an extraordinary mistake, he saw, and he realized that he was probably the best source of information about the vanished Turk Street remaining in London. Yet he also knew that for some inexplicable reason he could not put up with his open animosity any longer.

  The Councillor glanced up. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  ‘Nothing, sir.’ Timothy was very pale and the damage which Ron Stalkey had done to his face stood out in angry colour on his skin. ‘Goodbye.’ He turned on his heel and walked across the room, out through the front door and down the steps to the street without once looking behind him.

  Mrs. Cornish, who was hovering in the passage, saw him go and she went in to her husband.

  ‘Why on earth did you do that?’ she demanded. ‘I could hear you from the kitchen. What did the poor boy say to make you so livid?’

  Now that his rage was spent the Councillor was a little shamefaced. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said frowning. ‘The “holier-than-thou” attitude of that sort of pup always irritates me. A self-satisfied superior approach to matters of taste is infuriating. Those people like the Kinnits and the Aichesons all do the same thing. They look at something which they know nothing whatever about and presume to judge it solely by the effect which the mere sight of it has had on them.’

  ‘Flavia Aicheson,’ said Mrs. Cornish. ‘That’s the mannish old woman who runs the Little Society for the Preservation of the London Skyline isn’t it? So that’s what he came about. Rather a nice type.’

  ‘I didn’t notice it. Those people are up to something. I don’t trust them an inch. They’re the kind of half-baked intellectuals who never know where to stop. They don’t like the look of the new flats. The silhouette is an affront to their blasted eyes, they say. Well, there are alternatives which have offended my eyes . . .’

  ‘Yes dear, not again.’ Mrs. Cornish exerted her own brand of force. ‘You happened to walk down Turk Street one winter afternoon long ago when you first came up from the country to be Dad’s apprentice, and it gave you such a shock that you’ve never got over it. We know. We’ve heard enough about it. You weren’t there quite half an hour and it’s dominated your whole life. It may not have been the utter hell you thought. Anyhow, why take it out on the first presentable youngster who’s been to the house for years?’

  ‘Pompous ass!’ said the Councillor again. ‘He kept calling me “sir” as if I were Methusela. That’s all I noticed about him. A useless, opinionated, over-sensitive ass!’

  ‘Oh rubbish,’ she said. ‘You can’t say that. You didn’t even let him speak. Do you know who he reminded me of? You at that age. No one was more opinionated than you were, or more over-sensitive for that matter.’

  The Councillor stared at her. For an instant he looked positively alarmed. Then he laughed, regretful, even a little flattered.

  ‘You do say the most damn silly things, Marion,’ he said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Well House

  ‘SEEN IT BEFORE, sir?’ The brisk inquiry from the helmeted figure materializing beside Timothy in the half darkness took him by surprise and he blinked. He had been standing perfectly still, gazing across the broad street at the silhouette of the house which had been his home in London ever since he could remember, and it was as new to him as a foreign land.

  He had just walked back from Ebbfield. His interview with the Councillor had had a considerable effect upon him for he was behaving as if a skin had peeled from his eyes. Children first home from boarding school often notice the same phenomenon, very familiar things appearing not different in themselves but as if they were being seen by someone new. He knew of no reason why it should have happened. The front of his mind was satisfied that he had merely had an interview with a difficult old man, but behind it, in the vast, blind, computing machine where the mind and the emotions meet and churn, something very odd indeed seemed to have taken place.

  It was a muggy London night and the road which was an inferno in the daytime was now a deserted river, gleamin
g dully in a dark ravine.

  The constable was a regular and had recognized him. It was a lonely beat and he was prepared to chat.

  ‘It’s an anachronism,’ he remarked unexpectedly, jerking his leather-strapped chin towards the Tudor merchant’s mansion which lay, top-heavy but graceful as a galleon, between two towering warehouses on the opposite side of the road. The overhanging latticed windows, one floor up, were lighted and warmth shone out faintly through reddish curtains. But at street level the low iron-bound doors and small windows were hidden in the shadows. ‘Completely out of place in a modern world, isn’t it?’ he went on. ‘But it’s nice to see it. It’s even better than that row up in Holborn they tell me. Is it comfortable to live in, sir?’

  ‘Not bad. Plumbing was put in very intelligently at the early part of this century but the kitchens are still a bit archaic.’ Timothy spoke as if the facts were fresh to him and the constable laughed. ‘Still, you’re proud of it I dare say?’ he said.

  The younger man turned his head in surprise. ‘I suppose I was’ he said, but the policeman was not listening. The light from one of the old-fashioned street lamps bracketed on the building behind them had fallen on to the speaker’s face and he was startled by the damage.

  ‘Blimey sir! What have you done to yourself? Met with an accident?’

  ‘Not exactly. I had a dustup with a lunatic!’ The words came out with more bitterness than he had intended and he laughed to cover it. ‘Never mind, officer. All’s square now. Good night.’

  ‘Good night, sir.’ The man went off as if he had been dismissed and Timothy crossed the road and let himself into the Well House.

  There was a small wooden draughtbreak just inside the door with a curtained entrance to the main hall, and he heard Basil Toberman’s voice as he stepped through it into the warm, black-panelled room with the moulded plaster ceiling and the square staircase rising up through it. The first thing he saw was a funeral wreath, and the scent of lilies hung in the warm air, suffocating and exotic, and remarkably foreign to the familiar house.