The Night of Wenceslas (3 page)

All in all, such a course might have saved me a great deal of trouble. No night for me then on the Vaclavske Namesti; no dalliance by the terraces of Barrandov; no knowledge of the poor morals of Vlasta Simenova, the girl with the bomb-shaped breasts.

Some current of pre-knowledge must have vibrated through my frame. But I suppressed the urge to run to Mrs Nolan’s boiler. I opened the envelope and read the letter and watched my hands begin to tremble.

It was a short letter and I read it four times. It said:

‘Two for you ’cos you sound hungry,’ Mrs Nolan said, coming in with the eggs at this moment. She gazed at me and began shuffling about with her wig in some confusion. ‘Something the matter with me?’

I must have been gaping at her with rigid eyes, and now hastily averted them.

‘Bad news?’ Mrs Nolan asked.

I licked my lips.

‘Is it your mother?’

‘No, no.’

‘Lost your job?’

‘It’s my late uncle. He’s dead.’

Mrs Nolan pulled out a chair and sat down beside me. To prevent her embarrassing condolences I quickly handed her the letter, which she read at a distance.

‘I’m very sorry indeed, Mr Whistler. This’ll be from the solicitor, I suppose?’

I looked at the letter again. The stationery was severely plain with the name Cunliffe & Co. in small black type in the left hand corner. ‘I suppose so.’

‘Did you know him very well?’

‘I hardly knew him at all. He lived in Canada.’

‘Well,’ said Mrs Nolan sensibly, after a pause, ‘it’s a bit upsetting all the same, I suppose. I’ll get you a cup of strong tea.’

She did so and I took the scalding draught down in one enormous mouthful that brought tears streaming down my cheeks. Mrs Nolan blew her nose and asked the others who had been gazing at me with religious respect to leave the room. They trooped out with embarrassed alacrity muttering furtive condolences.

The moment they had gone, unable to contain myself, I sprang up and executed a brief, lunatic dance of joy around the table. Bad news?
Bad
news? Even Mrs Nolan, that splendid creature, who could read between the lines of a lawyer’s letter like anybody, had felt compelled to treat it with sad respect.

I dropped into a chair and read the letter again, very soberly. There was something so exactly right about the ‘late Mr Bela Janda’ that I was surprised I had not thought of him in this way before. The late Mr Bela Janda was all right; he had spent the long years well and prudendy, consolidating his assets and preparing to be late, and I told him so now, in a low mutter, nodding to his name on the letter.

Mrs Nolan popped her head in as I sat muttering to the letter and quickly popped out again, and presently I ate my two eggs, taking only the yolks and leaving the whites with luxurious abandon.

This state of controlled hysteria lasted till I was up in my room again. There I could only bounce up and down on the divan, smoking one cigarette after another and waiting until it was time to phone this Stephen Cunliffe.

It was an address in Francis Street, Victoria, and I went bounding up the steep and narrow stairs like the long-lost heir coming to claim his inheritance, a proper way to bound in the circumstances.

I had spoken to Cunliffe’s secretary on the phone and had learnt he would not be in till half past eleven. Mrs Nolan had lent me another bottle of British port to while away the time and had seemed to find my request perfectly in order.

There had been some difficulty in starting the car, for in addition to its other ills, the battery had gone flat; but by almost kicking it to pieces in my excitement I had found a spark of life.

Cunliffe’s secretary, a rather severe-sounding female with a slight foreign accent, had asked me to bring along the letter and my birth certificate, passport and any other documents to establish identity, and I had these in my hand as I knocked on the frosted glass door marked Inquiries and went in.

It was a small, very tidy room with a big ticking clock on the mantelpiece, a desk and a few files. Nobody was in the room. I closed the door behind me and shuffled my feet. An inner door opened a few inches and a woman whose middle-parting gave her face the appearance of a hot cross bun said severely, ‘In just one moment.’ She left the door open and I heard a mutter of voices for half a minute before she came out.

‘My name is Nicolas Whistler. Mr Cunliffe –’

‘Yes, yes. I spoke to you on the telephone. You have the letter and other papers?’

I handed them over and she glanced at the letter before disappearing in the other room again. ‘Please sit down one moment, Mr Whistler,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Mr Cunliffe will see you right away.’

If not a damned sight quicker, I thought, somewhat irritated by this middle-parting popping in and out, and suppressing a gust of gaseous British port. Bunface, it seemed to me, was treating the young master in far too officious a manner. A little servile bowing and scraping would have been perfectly in order here.

I was still brooding over this when a chair scraped in the next room and Bunface came out, her face now wearing something like a smile. ‘It was necessary to establish…’ she murmured before I was in the room and facing Cunliffe.

I had to look twice to see if he was not hiding himself somewhere, for the Cunliffe I had imagined was a huge, lantern-jawed, gimlet-eyed character who might or might not have worn his hanging-judge wig during our interview. This one was practically a midget, a little dolly of a man who walked forward with quick, perfect miniature steps to take my hand in his two.

‘Mr Whistler?’ he said, in a voice so deep and gravelly that I looked down at him in astonishment. ‘I am pleased to make your acquaintance. Take a seat.’

I sat down, still unable to take my eyes off him.

‘Cigarette?’

I took one from his full-sized gold case and watched with fascination as he lit one for himself and blew out a stream of smoke. There was an extra-large emphatic quality in every gesture and for a moment I had the uncanny feeling I was watching a performance by some master ventriloquist who would shortly reveal himself.

‘I should like to express my condolences on your bereavement,’ he said. ‘You didn’t know your uncle very well, I understand?’

‘No. I only met him once, actually.’ I was suddenly aware of his foreign accent; the shock of his appearance and voice hadn’t made it register.

‘I knew him very well indeed. A fine man. He had a heart attack on Wednesday afternoon and died the same evening.’

‘I never knew.’

‘No,’ he said dryly, and blinked. ‘You couldn’t have.’ The eyes when you looked at them were exceptionally grey and large and intelligent. ‘You are the first member of the family I have informed. I believe he was very close to your mother? Perhaps there is some older person you would wish to break the news to her…’

‘Yes, there’s a Mr Gabriel who lives in the same hotel in Bournemouth. He’s a great friend That’s a good idea,’ I said, ashamed that I had not thought of this aspect.

‘Yes,’ Cunliffe said, and fiddled with some papers on his desk, and in the pause I could hear my heart going. ‘You know, I suppose,’ he said at length, ‘that you figure prominently in Mr Janda’s will?’

I licked my lips. ‘I’d heard he was thinking of leaving me something.’

‘He has. The lot,’ said Cunliffe, the skin crinkling round his eyes.

He sat smiling at me, the little mannikin, in a rather worldly wise, sardonic manner, while the British port rose gaseously in my throat.

‘Apparently he has made no alterations to the will in the possession of my Canadian associates which is the one I drew up for him in 1938. I am not able to give you a complete figure, of course, but I can give you a general idea of the size of the estate if you would like?’

Correctly interpreting my semi-paralytic jerk as an affirmative, he went on, ‘In cash and securities – the lesser part of the estate, it is thought that he left something in the region of fifty thousand dollars – about seventeen or eighteen thousand pounds. The greater part of the estate consists of the cannery, transport and so forth, together with a fair-sized fruit farm which he bought in 1952 and which is, I understand, quite a valuable property.’

‘Supposing – supposing I wanted to dispose of it. Is that possible?’

‘Certainly. You are the absolute legatee.’ He looked down at his papers again. ‘The last valuation was taken in 1951 before he bought the fruit farm. It is surmise only but I would say the whole estate now would realize roughly four hundred thousand dollars. Of course it is subject to death duties –’

‘Four hundred thousand –’

‘About a hundred and forty thousand pounds,’ he said. He blew his nose and began sniffing quickly.

He nipped off his chair. He seemed to be picking up a cigarette that was burning a hole in the carpet. I was staring rather closely at the back of his neck. I remember only leaning over with a sense of gratitude to kiss this little neck, and then I was in his chair sipping a glass of water and a woman was whispering, ‘He has had too much to drink. I smelt the brandy on his breath. Perhaps you should not have told him just now –’

‘Better now?’ Cunliffe asked, smiling. ‘The news was too much for you.’

‘I’m afraid it was. What was that figure again?’

‘A hundred and forty thousand pounds. Thank you, Miss Vogler,’ he said to Bunface who was hovering, and waited till she had gone.

In the next few minutes he gave me a brief, smiling lecture on the best way to hang on to a legacy, and himself proposed that I might like a little on account. I had been wondering how to frame this question and accepted eagerly.

‘A hundred or two, perhaps?’

‘Two hundred would do fine.’

‘I expect you would like to take cash now,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘I had better ask Miss Vogler to slip out for you. The banks will be shut in just five minutes. Five-pound notes?’

Bunface returned at length with the money and Cunliffe produced two documents which he folded over for me to sign. ‘I had a suspicion you might like something on account,’ he said, smiling wryly. ‘They are already prepared. Just sign your name here and here. You see, I have filled in the exact amount – it is intuition.’

I signed jerkily, moved by the impressive words ‘two hundred pounds’ spelt on each form and slightly hypnotized by the fivers fluttering around me as he counted. The efficient Bunface whipped away the papers with two sheets of blotting paper and I watched as Cunliffe came to his final ‘Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty.’

‘There. Are you satisfied with my count?’

‘Perfectly.’ I could hardly keep my hands off them.

A couple of minutes later he was telling me that he would communicate with me as soon as he had more news, and was taking my hand in his two again.

‘Think,’ he said, his large, intelligent eyes twinkling. ‘Mr Janda left certain funds with me. But think before you spend. A little splash would be understandable, but don’t throw it all away.’

I don’t remember going down the stairs. I found myself in the M.G. wondering what I should do first. For some reason, despite the British port, I felt wonderfully clear-headed for the first time that day, perhaps for the first time that week, possibly for the first time in my life.

There was a clear necessity to take myself swiftly off to some place of solitude with this miraculous two hundred quid and work out a few first principles. With this thought in mind I pressed the starter, and at once fell to swearing with great power and obscenity and leapt out like a madman with the starting handle. There was something that would have to come even before first principles and I drove round to the squalid enterprise of Ratface Rickett, pulling up in the forecourt with a scream of brakes.

Ratface was not about his usual task of gloating over his petrol pumps, and I walked round to the back to find him at work in a pit inspecting the underside of a lorry with a wandering lamp.

‘Mr Rickett.’

From his crouched position he looked round quickly and turned away without speaking. This familiar and expected action filled me with such pleasurable fury that I crouched like a frog, inserted my head carefully between the two front wheels and, inflating my lungs, roared: ‘Rickett! Rickett! Rickett!’ like some maniac baritone on a cracked record. Ratface straightened up as though shot, catching his head a stupefying blow, and began a sub-human, wordless moaning as he clutched his head. One word of apology would have had him swarming at me with a six-inch spanner and so, suppressing a desire to run and pretending not to notice what had happened, I called urgently,
‘Come on, Rickett, surely you can finish that later – I’m in a hurry, man!’

This attitude so surprised him that he actually crawled out after a moment or two, but his eyes were still so bloodshot and murderous that I said loudly, ‘Damn it, I’ve been yelling my head off. Didn’t you hear me down there? I’m in a hell of a hurry and I want a new battery and to settle my bill.’

I had meant to play with him a little over the question of payment, but since the encounter had provided such reasonable value and there was, anyway, the matter of getting off the premises without his savaging me, I reluctantly paid up and took off in triumph at the first touch on the starter.

I drove to Henley, and by a quarter past one was sitting slowly sipping a pint of beer and watching the swans.

The young master had come into his own with a vengeance. I could almost feel the gigantic sack of loot on my shoulder like some unimaginably heavy piece of nuclear material darkly awaiting conversion into other and more useful forms. Millions of miles of dappled roads, a big house for Maminka to queen it in, an island, a pub, a boat, a small group of harlots. Or one could acquire and slowly pulverize the entire affairs of the Little Swine, selling Miss Vosper into white slavery.

The swelling wonder of these reflections occupied the first pint, and it was as I was sipping the second that I approached cautiously the problem of Maura. I had been aware all morning of a strong resistance to the idea of reasoned thinking on this subject. I hadn’t wanted to tell her about the letter. I didn’t want to tell her just yet about the money. There was bound to be a reason for this, I thought, nodding sagely to a swan who had come to stare at me.

It was not a difficult one to find. The presence of the money meant (a) that it was time for positive action with regard to our relationship, and (b) that Maura would have ideas on what should be done with the money. Take a certain line with regard to (a) and (b) as a personal problem would cease to exist. And yet it went deeper than this. So long as I hadn’t been in a position to marry the girl she had seemed, no doubt about it, a very
desirable one. Desiring her had indeed been a major preoccupation for these past months. But there had been many months before Maura, and there would be many months after her. Was this, in short, the girl for me?