The Forgotten Story (15 page)

Then there were the men in silk hats and black suits with shiny elbows who came and went furtively with a sort of shop-soiled grief. They spent some time in the lonely room with the blinds drawn in the front of the house and later returned with something bulky which was manoeuvred with difficulty up the crooked stairs.

Joe might have been flattered had he been able to see and appreciate the gap his disappearance left in the lives of his relatives and how much they felt his loss. Patricia went about the house with her face full of tears: they were there impending but would not fall; her eyes were like flowers which had cupped the rain. Uncle Perry was hardly seen at all: he was up in his bedroom and only appeared for an occasional meal, puffy and pale, or when he wanted another bottle. Even little Fanny sniffled about her duties.

As for Aunt Madge, she said she could not sleep, and appearances bore her out. During those first three days of gloom and waiting, when the whole house seemed oppressive with what it contained, she sat nearly the whole time listlessly in the one armchair in the kitchen, dozing before the fire and waking suddenly with a jerk to stare about at the familiar scene as if she did not believe it was still there. She seemed to need company and she seemed particularly fond of the kitchen. Even the closest relatives were never invited upstairs.

It was as if the shadow of mortality had brushed close beside her and she needed the reassurance of all the most familiar things of her everyday life. Anthony wondered how, just from a physical point of view, she could stay in one room for such a long time without moving.

On the day of the funeral there was a marked improvement in her bearing. She came down in an impressive dress of fine black silk with great cascades of lace pouring down the front like the Zambesi Falls and began to busy herself making sandwiches for the mourners when they returned. For the first time she seemed conscious of the full dignity of her position as the Widow of the Deceased. The three-day siege was nearly over. The last night was gone.

One of the black-coated gentlemen arrived early, and this time she went upstairs with him. Later she came down with an expression on her plump face of having triumphed over a weakness.

When she came into the kitchen she put on a pair of big black earrings and said: ‘Do you wish to see him?'

Anthony waited a moment and then realised that he was the only other person in the room.

‘Who?' he said in surprise.

‘Uncle. It's the last chance. Hi thought you might.'

‘Oh, no,' he said. ‘Thank you.' Things moved up and down his spine at the suggestion.

‘His nephew … I thought you might.'

‘No,' he said. ‘ I'd …'

‘It's as you like. Haven't you … black tie?'

‘No, Aunt Madge. This was the nearest.'

‘Go and get one.' She felt in her bag. ‘Due respect. Round the corner and down the hill. Thought you might have liked to see him. Very peaceful …'

He picked up his cap and ran quickly out to buy his tie. The wind and the spattering rain were refreshing to his skin but still more refreshing to his spirit. They seemed to say to him, ‘ You are young; life for you is here outside; not in there; not in there; life is sweet and wholesome.'

He dawdled about in order to prolong his freedom. He watched a cutter slipping gracefully out of St Mawes Creek. He saw a fisherman returning from a morning's sport and tried to count the fish in his bag. He stopped at the street corner to talk to a boy he had come to know. They talked about wholesome interesting things, about a catapult, a dog which hunted rabbits, a farmer and an apple tree. At length he could stay no longer; people would be arriving in another few minutes; he must go back to the hushed voices and the drawn curtains and the smell of moss and chrysanthemums.

Aunt Madge was sitting in her favourite chair. She glanced up at the clock as he slipped in.

‘Been playing,' she said. ‘Not nice to be out and about today. Not seemly. Thought you might have liked to see him for the last night. Nephew and all. I thought you might. But it's too late now.'

There was some expression in her eyes which suggested she begrudged him his escape.

That night he had another unpleasant dream.

He dreamt he had been down feeding the swans at Swanpool, and on his way back who should be waiting for him at the cemetery gates but Uncle Joe. They walked home together, Joe smoking his foreign-looking pipe. As they walked along he was trying to persuade Anthony to do something which Anthony was reluctant to do: the boy could not afterwards remember what, but it seemed a matter of urgency to the old man. While they argued they kept meeting people Anthony had never seen before, thin grey people all going in the opposite direction. Many of them seemed to be moving without walking, like figures in a rifle gallery. Uncle Joe said: ‘These are all my friends; we're all of a family now.' As they passed one woman Anthony peered under the hood of her cloak and saw that her head was shrivelled to the size of a clenched fist.

They reached the restaurant. The Joe Veal sign had been torn down; the shop door hung on one hinge and the place looked empty and dark as if nothing had moved in it for years.

Uncle Joe put something into his hand. It was a chrysanthemum flower.

‘This is where I live,' the boy said. ‘Won't you come in?'

‘No,' said Uncle Joe. ‘I'd best be going Home.'

He left him there and Anthony stood alone with the flower in his hand staring at the dark and empty shop. Then he looked down at the flower and saw that it had crumbled to moss.

He dropped it quickly and put his foot on it, feeling the squelch beneath his heel, then stepped up to the threshold of the ruined shop. He knew that he must go in in order to go to bed; but he knew also that something was waiting there for him among the cobwebs and the darkness.

He entered the shop.

Something moved at the back of it. He turned to flee, but his feet were as if bogged in quicksand and the shop had become enormously big and the door of escape a small oblong of light in the distance. He tried to concentrate his attention on the effort of moving his feet but each step he took carried him no further away.

With his eyes wide open the scene did not change. He sat up in bed and it was still there. He was still in the shop; his bed was in the shop and he had been sleeping there. The thing still moved by the stairs and he could still see the lighter oblong of the door with the hump of the automatic till.

He rubbed his eyes, his mind tearing off the fetters of nightmare even more slowly than it had done four nights earlier. He knew he had been asleep and dreaming, but he was still in the shop, still terrified. He knew that if he went outside he would be able to pick up the piece of moss that Uncle Joe had given him. That had just as much reality as the bedclothes he plucked.

The realisation that the oblong of the shop door was really the oblong of his bedroom window finally brought him to safety. He lay back in bed breathing his relief out slowly from between closed teeth. He should have laughed; anyone as old as he was should have been amused at the perverted vitality of the dream. But you never could see things like that in the dark, however much you might do so in the following day's sunshine. Besides, the stirring and rustling had not stopped.

He raised his head and listened. There it was again. But he was completely mistaken as to its character and direction. This was someone moving about in the office below him.

Determined not to give way to the reasonless fear which had beset him when he heard Aunt Madge coming up the stairs, he listened quietiy for a time while the square of fight at his window grew and spread into the room. Just daybreak. A few mornings ago he had sat with Uncle Perry while a life ebbed slowly away. Daybreak. No reason why somebody should not be moving about in the office, people could get up at what time they pleased. It was just the sort of noise Uncle Joe made: the shutting of drawers, the occasional scrape of feet, the movement of heavy books. Strange to think that Uncle Joe was no longer interested. But was he not? Who was to say that it could not be so? Supposing he was moving about down there, still attending to his affairs.

Anthony climbed cautiously out of bed. As he did so the sounds beneath him ceased. With the hair prickling upon the back of his neck he slid silently under the bed and pulled out the cork spy-hole.

The early light falling through the narrow window lit up the office greyly. Some books were piled on the desk, and papers lay in disorder on the floor. But the room was empty.

As he replaced the cork the unmistakable smell of Uncle Joe's tobacco came to his nostrils.

The old man had kept the threads of his various business undertakings so jealously within his own hands, had so refused to delegate responsibility, that the unravelling of them was like fumbling with a tangle of string to which one cannot find an end. In his time he had had dealings with every solicitor in town, and Mr Cowdray, whom Aunt Madge called in, knew little more of his affairs than anyone else.

But in a sense, too, Joe's one-man business resembled a clock which has been wound and will run of its own accord for a time although the owner is gone and the key lost. Goods were delivered; letters arrived from ships' chandlers and shipping agencies; a cargo appeared for
The Grey Cat
and she proceeded to take it on board and would shortly depart for Hull.
Lavengro
arrived with a cargo of pit-props from Norway and the purchaser was ready waiting for them; bills and receipts arrived and could be filed or settled. Aunt Madge and Uncle Perry – who had recovered his good spirits – and Mr Cowdray worked hard together to keep the clock still ticking.

A few days after me funeral the relatives of Smoky Joe, together with Mr Cowdray, who was plump and untidy and wore a heavy beard to conceal a birthmark under his chin, assembled in the upstairs parlour to hear what there was to hear about the settlement of the estate. The parlour faced north and was therefore hung with dark red wallpaper which took away most of the light that filtered through the thick lace curtains. On the floor was a red carpet with blue flowers and a blue border showing ridges of wear by the door, and the furniture consisted of an upright rosewood piano which no one had ever used, a red plush music stool, and crimson plush furniture which emitted an ineradicable smell of dust. The mantelpiece carried an ornate overmantel with numerous small shelves and a gilt mirror.

Present were the cousin from Percuil and the cousin from Mawnan Smith, the sister from Arwenack Street and the brother from across the landing, who, incidentally, seemed to want to open the proceedings with a joke and a toss of his black hair. Aunt Madge and Patricia sat side by side on the sofa; and Anthony had slipped in almost unnoticed and pricked the backs of his legs on a horse-hair stool.

Mr Cowdray opened with an explanation of the difficulties which confronted him in clearing up the estate. He talked ponderously and leisurely from behind his beard, and no evidences of impatience on the part of the sister from Arwenack Street or the cousin from Mawnan Smith were sufficient to hurry him by so much as a syllable or cause him to miss out a single rusty clearing of the throat. Nor was he influenced by Perry's good-natured desire to make a party of the occasion. As if he were addressing a jury on a clear case of tort, he went on and on, making each point with the maximum of effect and the minimum of brevity. Perry caught Anthony's eye and winked wickedly, then it roved round for fresh eyes to contact. But all the others were too conscious of the solemnity of the occasion to meet such a challenge. If they were aware of it, as it must have been difficult not to be, they avoided it as the good little boy will avoid the bad little boy thumbing his nose on the way to church.

Aunt Madge was a mountain of unrelieved black, installed with closed eyes on the larger end of the couch. A breath moving from time to time among the darker recesses of her bulk was the only evidence that she lived. Beside her Patricia looked slender to the point of frailty, taut like the stem of a daffodil and as easily snapped.

So far as any final settlement of the estate was concerned, Mr Cowdray went on, the work entailed might stretch over many weeks. But it was felt – he personally felt, and he knew Mr Veal's widow felt – that to give at once a broad outline of the disposition of the bequests would be the fairest to all concerned. He did not propose to read the Will, but would just state the facts, and of course anyone could examine the documents afterwards –

‘I think you should read the Will,' said Aunt Louisa sharply. ‘What do you say, Peter?'

There was a faint stir. Louisa's harsh voice had disturbed the reverential dust.

Peter from Percuil looked uncomfortable and pulled at one end of a drooping moustache. ‘Reckon I don't mind one way or th'other.'

Mr Cowdray glanced at the widow but she did not open her eyes. ‘Very well, then, if you wish it – hrrr-hm! – naturally no objection myself.' He opened his bag and took out a sheet of parchment. ‘Actually, quite a short document; Mr Veal was not a man to waste words; that is so far as I knew him; he deposited this Will with me, but I had not previously had business transactions …'

‘When you've been about the world a bit,' said Perry, ‘it teaches you not to waste anything. Words, time or money. Joe was a regular one for seeing nothing went to waste. That's Joe all over.' He chuckled. ‘Well, read it out; I'll bet old Joe's got a surprise or two up his – sleeve.'

‘ “This is the last Will and Testament,” ' read Mr Cowdray stiffly, ‘ “of me, Joseph Killigrew Veal, of Falmouth, in the County of Cornwall. In consideration of me fact that for forty-seven years he has proved unpunctual in all his dealings and appointments, including the day he was born, I give and bequeath unto my brother, Perry Veal, my gold watch and ten pounds for its maintenance. Unto my sister –” '

‘Well, I'll be stung!' exclaimed Perry. He threw back his head and laughed in a sort of unmalicious indignation. ‘If ever there was an old –'