The China Governess Read online

‘Did you actually say this to Eckermann?’ he inquired.

  ‘I did and I’ve no doubt he repeated it.’ Toberman was defiant. ‘I may have told one or two other people as well, and I’m telling you now, aren’t I? It probably is a silly thing to do but the whole idea has shaken me. I’ve known it, you understand, I’ve known it without knowing it all my life. Besides,’ he added with an abrupt descent to the practical, ‘I don’t envisage anybody serving me with a writ for slander, do you? It’s true.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you have a lot of difficulty proving it?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ He was quietly obstinate. ‘The fact which misled everybody – the people like my father, for instance – was that the kid had a ration book and an identity card in the name “Timothy Kinnit” long before Eustace adopted him. I remember father commenting on it to Mama, and I remember not being able to understand what the hell they were getting at. It was only when I was talking to Eckermann that I suddenly remembered the incident which explains all that. One day just after the war started I was in the library across the corridor here, sitting on the floor looking at some back numbers of the Sphere I’d found, and Eustace was at the desk filling in what must have been the famous “Householder” form of 1939. It was the first census of its kind and it was on the information gathered by it that the identity cards were issued. Once you were on that form you had a right to live in Britain and it was made pretty clear that the converse applied. You were in the services, no doubt, but I wasn’t. I remember it vividly.’

  Mr. Campion nodded. He seemed afraid of breaking the flow but there was little chance of that.

  ‘Each householder in the entire country had to put down the name of every living soul who slept under his roof on a certain night,’ Toberman said. ‘That was how the census was taken at such tremendous speed. Eustace had the devil of a job because not only was the place crammed with staff from the London office and their families, but also with official and unofficial evacuees from the East End, the residue of three or four hundred of them who’d been hurried out in the first panic – they nearly all went back afterwards but in those first months the countryside was packed with townfolk all camping in other people’s houses. Old Eustace made very heavy weather of the form and insisted that each person should appear before him. They had to come in batches of twelve and he’d stop and explain to each lot how important it all was. It took all day. The evacuee mothers with children came last and when he thought it was all done Mrs. Broome came trotting in with a bundle saying “Don’t forget Baby, sir!” And Eustace didn’t look up but said “What’s its name?” and she said “I don’t know, sir. The young lady has gone back to London to get some of her things and I’m minding him. I just call him Baby.”’

  He paused and laughed. ‘I remember that particularly. It was a catch phrase with me after that. “I just call him ‘Baby’.” Eustace was so wild with her too. He wanted to get the work done. If the child spent the night in the house he’d have to be entered, he said, and “If he hasn’t got a name by tomorrow Mrs. Broome, we’ll have to give him one.”’ Toberman’s voice died away in the strange timeless quiet of the insulated room and he turned away to look out of the window at the dancing leaves.

  ‘That was it, you see,’ he said presently. ‘The mother didn’t return. Knowing that the kid had got to have papers, Eustace gave him a name to go on with and after that I suppose one thing led to another. I don’t remember him after that until he was adopted and going to a prep school. My father was scared of the East coast and packed Mother and me off to Wales.’

  Mr. Campion did not speak at once.

  ‘They were exaggerated times,’ he said at last. ‘Confusing too, especially to a child, but you’ve got no evidence of this little fantasy, you know. It’s not a very. . . . well, a very good story do you think? To tell, I mean.’

  ‘I shall tell it if I feel like it.’ Toberman’s truculence was unabashed. ‘One of the enormous advantages of not being a Kinnit is that I can be as “off-white” as I like. I’ve no code to live up to. I think young Tim is a bore and I think he’s had a good deal more than his share of the gravy, so why shouldn’t I tell the facts about his origin if it gives me any satisfaction? Everything else has come to him gold-lined and free! The father of that girl of his must be worth a million. A million. And she’s the one and only child.’

  ‘But you’ve no proof at all of this tale about him!’

  ‘Ah, but Truth has a way of emerging.’ Toberman was ponderous in a besotted fashion. ‘Eustace probably won’t talk and Alison will back him up, but you can bet your life that Ma Broome would chatter if a newspaper offered her enough money. She must know all about it. There’s a rumour that the girl’s father has stopped Tim’s engagement already. That means that there’s a Press story there, and if I go on telling my little anecdote some gossip writer will arrive at the big idea all by himself and come beetling down here with a cheque book. Then we shall get the human angle. Foundling and Heiress. Who Abandoned Tiny Tim?’ He chuckled at his own joke.

  ‘You’re going to hand me the one about it not mattering to anyone in these enlightened times where in hell he came from or who his parents were,’ he remarked. ‘You may be right, but in my opinion the news is going to shake up the wonderboy himself considerably, and that’s the angle which interests me.’ He met the other man’s eyes and shook his head. ‘He’s had it too easy,’ he added, as if he were passing a fair judgement with reluctance. ‘Far too easy altogether.’

  Mrs. Broome burst into the room so suddenly that there could be no doubt that she had been listening at the door. She was in a highly explosive state. Her cheeks were bright with anger and her eyes were wet. She came forward across the rugs, moving very swifty but taking very short steps, and she glanced round her for the hidden girl with no subterfuge at all so that both men looked about them also. Julia, who could not see her, did not move and the furious woman turned to Toberman.

  ‘Do you want any tea . . . . Sir?’ she said without hoodwinking anybody.

  Toberman stood looking at her. He was giggling slightly and wore the sorry anxious expression of one caught redhanded.

  ‘I did say they’d have to offer a lot of money before you’d talk, Broomie,’ he said feebly.

  Mrs. Broome began to cry and whatever Mr. Campion had envisaged it was not this. Everything he had ever heard about his sex’s terror of feminine tears rushed back into his mind in sudden justification. Mrs. Broome was a woman who wept like a baby, noisily, wetly and with complete abandon. The noise was fantastic.

  ‘Be quiet!’ said Toberman flapping a hand at her idiotically. ‘Be quiet! Be quiet!’

  ‘I wouldn’t sell Timmie!’ Her extraordinary statement was mercifully incoherent. Her handkerchief was already sodden. ‘You ought not to say such things, you ought not to tell such lies, you’re jealous of him, you always were. He was lovely and you were always an ugly little thing, and you had that tiresome weakness and I was thankful when you went to Wales.’ The incredible words came churning out of the wide-open, quivering mouth in a mass of water and misery. Toberman threw up his hands in terror.

  ‘Shut up!’ he shouted at her. ‘Shut up! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it.’

  Mrs. Broome continued to weep but not quite so loudly. As a spectacle she was unnerving, her face and her drowned eyes red as blood. Both men stood before her temporarily helpless.

  ‘You said yourself that Mr. Eustace didn’t look at me.’ The words were clear but incomprehensible.

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Toberman was near panic and his roughness produced another burst of sobbing.

  ‘You said it yourself!’ Mrs. Broome bawled in her rage and grief. ‘Of course I was listening! I had a right to if you were going to tell lies about me. You said it yourself, I heard you. Mr. Eustace didn’t look at me.’

  ‘When, for God’s sake?’

  ‘When I brought Timmy in to him and he asked his name.’

  Toberman stared at h
er stained face. Incredulity and delight were concentrated in his eyes.

  ‘Do you hear that Campion?’ he demanded. ‘Do you hear what she says? It was Timothy! I was right on the bull’s-eye.’ He seemed astounded by his good fortune. ‘She’s admitted it. The mother went off and left him and Eustace gave him the first name that came into his head.’

  ‘Oh no, no! That’s not what I said. You’re putting words in my mouth. Mr. Eustace didn’t look at me. That was how I knew.’ The last word rose to a wail which could not be ignored.

  ‘What did you know?’ Mr. Campion’s soft authoritative voice penetrated the protective blanket of noise with which she had surrounded herself. Her tears vanished like an infant’s and she turned to him with some of her normal gossipiness.

  ‘I knew Baby was either Mr. Eustace’s poor dead brother’s or his own little son, being slipped home quietly under cover of all the other kiddiewinkies in the house,’ she announced, meeting his eyes with a stare of such earnest romanticism that he was set back on his heels by it. ‘It was a very terrible time, sir, and people were frightened. It stands to reason that if he’d got to give a home from the bombs to all those other children, naturally he’d think of his own flesh and blood.’ She sighed, and a shrewder expression appeared upon her tearstained face. ‘I daresay it suited him. He may not have known how his sister was going to take to the idea of a baby. Maiden ladies are maiden ladies, you know, some more than others. They’re not like us married girls. I knew at once, of course, because he didn’t look at me when he asked who Baby was. People never look at you when they’re telling fibs, do they?’

  She delivered the final remark as if it were a statement of scientific fact. Mr. Campion considered her thoughtfully. She believed, it, he saw, literally and obstinately, and always had. Therefore, since she could never have kept completely silent about anything, this version must be the one upon which young Timothy Kinnit had been brought up. He found he was becoming very sorry for the young man.

  Toberman was laughing. ‘So the next day when you told Eustace that the mother hadn’t returned he filled in the name on the form and Timothy got his ration book and identity card. That’s your story, is it?’

  ‘No it isn’t!’ Mrs. Broome began to roar again. ‘I don’t talk, Mr. Basil. I was trained as a children’s nurse and nurses have to learn to keep little secrets. Where would you be if they didn’t? Embarrassed every day of your life! You think you’ve made me say something but you haven’t! Times have changed let me tell you. As long as a boy has a home behind him no one’s going to ask what church his mother and father got married at. Besides, you’re quite wrong about one thing. It wasn’t Timmy’s mummie who brought him down here!’

  ‘How could you possibly tell that?’ said Toberman airily. The man was elated, Campion noted; above himself with gratification.

  ‘A young girl with a new baby. Well of course I could!’ An angry blush added to the conflagration already burning in the tear-wet face and Toberman had the grace to appear disconcerted.

  ‘What was her name, anyway?’

  Mrs. Broome threw up her hands at his obtuseness. ‘If anyone had been able to remember that it would have saved a lot of trouble when we came to getting him adopted properly for Totham School,’ she said with a tartness which hinted at considerable argument at some time in the past. ‘No one who wasn’t there at the start of the war seems to be able to remember what that panic was like before the bombing began. Hundreds of mothers and babies had been crying through the house. They were all supposed to be labelled but half the tickets had been lost and the babies had sucked the writing off the ones that were still fastened. Nine out of ten of the girls wouldn’t give their names in case they were asked to pay something, and we were all frightened out of our wits anyhow.’ She paused and her devastating streak of commonsense reappeared like a flash of sunlight in the rainstorm. ‘If you ask me, it’s a miracle dozens of kiddiwiddies weren’t left all over the place!’ she said. ‘But they weren’t. Mothers love their babies whatever you may think, Mr. Basil, and so do fathers too. Mr. Eustace knew what he was doing all right but I guessed he didn’t want the subject brought up, and nor it was until Miss Alison discovered that the baby I was minding at our cottage wasn’t any relative of mine or Mr. Broome’s. After that there was a lot of talk in the family.’ She dropped her eyes modestly. ‘It wasn’t my place to know what went on but I believe Miss Alison caused a lot of inquiries to be made. But she came round in the end and little Timmy softened her heart. Of course there wasn’t much else she could do,’ she added with the now familiar change of mood. ‘The raids had started by that time and the whole London district had gone completely. Only dust and litter left, they said. Not a wall standing. They never knew how many hundreds were killed.’

  ‘They found the road he came from?’ Toberman pounced on the admission.

  Mrs. Broome gave him a warning glance. ‘They found the district where the buses which brought the evacuees were supposed to start from,’ she said stiffly, ‘but because of the upset at the time some of them went off early from their garages and never went to the street at all. They just picked up Mummies and babies on the way. Of course I never thought Timmy came in a bus at all. He and his nanna came in a car, I expect, and just mingled with the others, as one might say. That’s my idea.’

  ‘It would be! Complete fanciful idiocy! Where was this district? Somewhere in the East End?’

  ‘Hush!’ Mrs. Broome glanced round her involuntarily and Toberman suddenly comprehended the situation.

  ‘What is all this? Who’s here?’ He stepped out into the room and looked about him for a hiding place. ‘Come on,’ he said loudly. ‘Come out whoever you are!’

  ‘No, no! Be quiet Mr. Basil. Mind your own business, do. Come along to the other room and I’ll tell you. . . . I’ll tell you what you want to know.’

  ‘Who is it? This is damn silly! Come out!’ Toberman was advancing towards the long window curtains.

  Mrs. Broome, who suspected the same hiding place, threw in her ace card to delay him.

  ‘It was Turk Street, Ebbfield. . . . but when they came to inquire about Timmy it was all gone.’ She was too late. The man had ceased to listen to her. He had investigated one set of hangings and was advancing upon another.

  On the far side of the room Julia slid quietly to her feet and came out from the fireplace alcove.

  ‘Here I am,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, but I was trying to get away from you. Does it matter? Hello, Mr. Campion.’

  Toberman stopped in his tracks. His smile broadened and his eyes began to dance.

  ‘The little lady herself! You’re very like your photographs, Miss Laurell. Well, this is fascinating! It’s going to be a better Press story than I thought!’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘Above at a Window’

  ‘JULIA? ME.’

  ‘Over the telephone Timothy’s voice sounded older, more male and somehow more rough than when there was the rest of him present to soften the effect. ‘You got the message and you’re quite alone?’

  ‘Quite. Completely by myself. What is it? What’s happened?’ Julia was frightened and the medium did not help her to conceal it. ‘You can say anything you like. As soon as you told Mrs. Broome what you wanted she plugged the phone in up here and I think she’s sitting on the stairs in the hall keeping guard. What is it, Tim? Is it that you won’t be able to get down here tonight?’

  He was silent for a moment before he said abruptly: ‘Where exactly are you? Where has she put you? What room?’

  ‘Oh I’m not in that white bedchamber.’ Laughter flickered briefly through the anxiety in her voice. ‘I’m in the one your Uncle Eustace has when he comes down on business. It’s the little one facing east with the heavenly ceiling and the wall of books behind the couch with eagles’ feet. It’s utterly secret; we can say anything. The light is out and there’s a moon like a new penny pouring in over the fruit trees. I’m on the hearthrug in front of a special fir
e Mrs. Broome made for us. It’s a green wood and it’s burning blue.’

  ‘Oh.’ She thought he laughed. ‘“Ash when’s green is fire for the Queen.” She told you the rest of the rhyme I suppose!’

  ‘“Ash in its pride, Ash for the bride”? Yes, she did. She’s relentless, isn’t she? And very sweet. So gloriously enthusiastic. I think she must have put me in here because of the nightingales. Can you hear them? They’re bellowing. Listen. “Eternal passion, eternal pain”. . . . Oh darling, darling. What has happened? Tim, you haven’t let Daddy talk you out of anything? Tell me. Tell me quickly before I’m sick.’

  ‘I’m trying to.’ He was unnaturally controlled. ‘Listen. I’m not coming down. Listen Julia. Listen to me before you say anything. First of all, and this isn’t the important thing, Fleet Street seems to be on to us. Three papers have telephoned since tea-time. Eustace has had calls too and I’ve just heard from him that somebody turned up at Well House asking questions. They want to know if it’s true that you are at Angevin and if I’m joining you, and if the wedding is on or if we’re eloping.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘At your father’s house, locked in his study. The key’s on my side of course!’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You don’t, you know. It isn’t anywhere near as simple as that.’ He sounded grimly helpless. ‘The newspapers don’t matter much. As long as we’re apart there’s nothing they can say. I don’t know who gave us away and I don’t see why it should be of the faintest interest to anyone, except that everything to do with your father is news. However, that isn’t the real point. I’ve got something more important to say and that’s why I’m making all this hooey about the call.’

  ‘You’re not making a hooey!’ She was fighting with tears. ‘If you hadn’t telephoned I’d be dead. That beastly little man Basil Toberman gave us away. He arrived here this afternoon and found me. He practically told me he was going to tell on us, and the man who was with him, who is a vague, pleasant sort of person called Campion, took him away hastily but I expect he escaped. That’s how the newspapers know. I could kill him.’