The Belting Inheritance (13 page)

It was called the Blue Room because the walls were painted a most unattractive shade of peacock blue, and it was generally reserved for guests. A school friend of mine who had stayed in it had said that it looked as if it contained an assortment of things unsold at a country auction. I had been annoyed by the remark at the time, but later saw that it was apposite. There was the huge wardrobe, an equally monstrous tallboy, one of the biggest chests of drawers I have ever seen, and a gigantic cheval glass. The bed was a curious and in its way rather handsome affair, a true Victorian folly with a rosewood bedhead into which was let fragments of mother-of-pearl. They were pretty to look at but must, I reflected, have been uncomfortable for anybody given to reading or breakfasting in bed. There was a revolving bookcase beside the bed on one side, and on the other an ornate cupboard with a circular front, of the kind that contains a chamberpot. I poked about the room in an aimless way, looking for something that would give me a clue to the identity and character of the man who had stayed in it, searching for a secret drawer in the tallboy, for something left in the chest of drawers. I had no luck until I came to the chamberpot cupboard, and then I did not at first understand the meaning of the eye-dropper, needle and bent spoon that I found. Since the inveterate reader of thrillers is likely to be more perceptive than I was then and would be bored by a detailed account of my thought processes, let me say at once that these are the tools of the drug addict, and not simply of the addict but of the mainliner who obtains an extra kick by injecting heroin directly into the vein. When I had understood this I saw why total self-assurance, in the presence of Betty Urquhart for instance, had alternated with hysterical nervousness in David, as I shall continue to call him. I guessed also that part of the reason for Foster’s reserve after examining him was discovery of the tiny tell-tale punctures on arms or buttocks that reveal the addict. This, no doubt, was something which he had told Arbuthnot but which Arbuthnot had not told me.

I am running ahead of myself, for I worked out the meaning of the spoon, needle and eye-dropper later after much thought, whereas the meaning of my other discovery was plain within half a minute. After looking at the chamber-pot cupboard I investigated the revolving bookcase, which contained historical novels by Maurice Hewlett, Stanley Weyman and Conan Doyle. As I turned the bookcase, however, I saw that a book in a brown paper cover had been stuffed behind the Weymans. I took it out and looked at the title:
Prisoners of the Soviets.
True Tales of the Labour Camps. Collected by E G Clapham. The book was divided into chapters, each referring to one case, and they had such headings as “The Real Face of Socialism” by R Zinkowski, and “Tragedy of a Polish Resistance Fighter” by Camp Inmate No. R813724. A piece of paper was inserted in the book at a chapter called “An Englishman’s Disillusionment in the Promised Land,” by Gerald Flame. Certain passages were marked heavily in pencil. The first of them read:

The routine of the camp varied little. We were woken each day at six, and at half past had the first of our two meals, which generally consisted either of a watery soup with bits of gristle from some unidentifiable animal floating about in it, or a thick one absolutely stiff with a very coarse and tasteless kind of lentil. Cherno, the wit of our hut, called the thick soup wallpaper paste and the thin one rainwater flavoured with bird droppings. This was followed by a hunk of stale bread, with a bit of tough sausage sometimes as a treat. One day somebody broke a tooth on a piece of bone in the sausage and we adopted Cherno’s name for it, rock sausage.

I turned to the other marked passages. They all resembled bits of David’s story. I will transcribe one more:

The conduct of the guards varied, but on the whole they were less brutal than the Nazis. I shall always remember one of them, a boy with an almost completely shaven head whose name was unpronounceable, so that like everybody else I called him Ivan. He was always slipping us little things like cigarettes or fragments of chocolate, which must have come out of his own allowance. One day, when we were working in the fields after one of our nightly discussions about escape, I decided to test out Cherno’s theory that anybody could get away easily without being noticed. I began to work farther and farther away from my companions, and from Ivan, who was our guard in my section. Eventually I was out of sight of everybody, and I began to think that Cherno was right, when Ivan suddenly appeared from nowhere. He shook his head, said
“Niet,”
and pointed to the illimitable expanse of plain that extended in every direction. Then, as if fearing that I still might not understand, he said with a great effort, “Nix,” and after a pause, “No good.”

As I read on it became clear that David had learned parts of this chapter almost by heart. Only parts, for Flame’s story did not really much resemble the one David had given himself. He was a British civilian, in Germany when the war began, who was arrested as a spy, sent to a concentration camp and then in 1941 handed over by the Germans to the Russians, who put him into a labour camp from which he was released in 1948. David had taken what was useful in Flame’s story and supplemented it with other material, like the account of how a guard stamped on his fingers and broke the bones.

I read this chapter sitting on the bed. When I had finished I realised that I held in my hand the positive proof that everybody had been looking for, the proof that David was an impostor. What should I do with it? Show Stephen and Miles? I had no sympathy for David, yet I felt that I could not endure the mean delight of Stephen and Clarissa’s doggy comments, nor could I bear the way in which they would conspire to make sure that Lady W changed her will again, without making themselves too conspicuous in arranging it. I should in any case have to show it to Arbuthnot, but I rebelled even against this in my mind, saying to myself that Arbuthnot had kept things from me so that I was under no obligation to him, but really feeling a sense of disappointment that the chase was over and understanding Stevenson’s maxim that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.

While I was thinking about this I noticed that the bit of paper had dropped out of the book and lay on the carpet. It was a sheet of hotel writing paper, with an address at the top: Hôtel Oeil d’Or, 18 rue Mallarmé, Paris, VIIe. I knew then what I was going to do. I was not going to tell anybody about the book. I was going to Paris.

Paris

In the forty-eight hours after the discovery I made in
Prisoners of the Soviets
I must have been suffering from a severe attack of the detective fever, running the highest possible temperature. That is the only way in which I can account for my actions. I ought to make clear, what you have perhaps understood already, that I am not adventurous by nature although I have as much curiosity as most people. I see that I have not described my appearance and perhaps, even at this late point, I ought to do so. Looking the other day at a snapshot Elaine took of me a few weeks after the whole affair was over, I saw a solemn young man with an egg-shaped face topped by long lank hair, wearing rather consciously æsthetic clothes and not quite knowing what to do with his hands, the kind of young man you would expect to be perfectly at home looking up footnotes to Nietzsche for his Ph.D. And in fact that is very much what it was like, so how could it possibly have happened that on Saturday I was on the Channel boat from Folkestone to Calais standing in the bows beside a young woman, the two of us dedicated to solving the Sullivan Mystery or the problem of the Claimant? It was the detective fever, no doubt about it.

I made my preparations in the early hours of Saturday. I had enough money for the fare, and also for a couple of days in Paris. I caught the first bus into Folkestone before anybody else was up. After some hesitation I left a note in my room, addressed to Uncle Miles, saying that David had gone and that I knew he was an impostor. I added a PS which seemed to me impressively casual: “Gone to France for a couple of days, back on Monday.” In Folkestone I had breakfast and telephoned the
Record.
The office boy assistant gave me Elaine’s address, after telling me that she was not on duty this Saturday. She lived in a two-roomed flat over a shop, and when I told her what had happened she was almost as excited as I was.

“You’re going over there.” She looked at me with new respect. “But what are you going to do?”

“Look for Stiver. First in that hotel he wrote from, and then at the one on the bit of paper he left in the book.”

She had been eating breakfast in her dressing-gown. Now she poured another cup of coffee and put on her spectacles. “Not much to go on,” she said severely.

I shrugged. After my discoveries I really felt that I needed nothing to go on, I had such a brilliant intuitive capacity to perceive the truth. She asked whether I knew Paris, and I reluctantly admitted that I didn’t. She remarked that she knew it, and conveyed an intimacy which was far from the reality of her two visits there in a school party. There was silence. Then she said, “Would there be another place on that boat?”

I knew then that I had hoped she would say something like that, although I would not have suggested it for the world. She added, with a casualness equal to my own, that she happened to be doing nothing that weekend. At half past ten we were on the boat, and by mid-afternoon we were in Paris. For the first time I was abroad.

Abroad: it is a word that holds little magic for me now – How can I convey what it meant then? The ridiculous ritual of going through customs, the clothes of the porters at Calais, the strange cushioning of the railway carriages, the posters which advertised unknown products, all seemed to me inexpressibly romantic. I felt – I suppose in a way it was part of the detective fever – as if I were living in a fairy tale, and this feeling was not changed by the dreary blankness of much of the French countryside and the sameness of the small towns. I simply sat and stared out of the carriage window most of the way to Paris, wrapped in a daze of pleasure that had no logical basis. Elaine said afterwards that I behaved as though I were drunk, and that when she spoke to me she received no rational reply, so that in the end she gave up conversation and practised her French on the other people in the carriage, telling them that I was not very well.

Luckily for both of us I had more or less recovered my reason by the time we reached the Gare du Nord. The first shock of
abroad
had worn off, and although I do not think I was fully responsible for my actions during any of this time in Paris I was able to talk sensibly and to make coherent plans in spite of the fact that one part of me, and the part I felt to be most acutely sensitive, was aching with the experience of abroad, and was trying to tell me that our reason for being here was a triviality.

We had neither of us eaten since breakfast. We went to a little café near the station, one of several that advertised lunch for 35 francs including wine. We could hardly have made a worse choice, for the food was very much what we might have got for a little less money in England, watery soup, tough fried chicken and chips and a small piece of cheese. The wine was a tiny carafe of rough, red stuff that provided a glass for each of us. Elaine made a face as she drank, but to me it tasted like nectar.

We had bought a map of Paris at the airport, and studied it over coffee, or rather Elaine studied it and made practical comments which I took in as well as I could, although they did not fully penetrate my dream of abroad. The rue Bavaine was in the 6th arrondissement, and she decided that we should go by Métro. I suggested that we ought first to find a hotel and deposit the cases, or at least check them somewhere, but she was all for going straight away to the Hôtel les deux Pigeons. Perhaps we might stay there, she suggested.

So we went out again into the Paris sunlight, and I remembered some lines of T S Eliot:

Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall

My buried life, and Paris in the Spring,

I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world

To be wonderful and youthful, after all.

It does not need to be April, I thought, it can just as well be a sunny day in July, and my pleasure was enhanced rather than diminished when we went down into the darkness of the Métro, dingy and noisy but still exciting. We came out at St Germain des Prés, walked along the Boulevard St Germain and into the network of narrow streets that lead off it in the direction of the Quai des Grandes Augustines. I exclaimed as we passed the Deux Magots and would have liked to go in there, it looked so much like home to a member of the Æsthetes’ Group, but Elaine pulled me past it. She must at this point have wondered what use I should be in our quest, combining as I did the qualities of a tourist and a sleep-walker.

The rue Bavaine was a narrow cul-de-sac and the Hôtel les deux Pigeons, a slit of doorway between two shops, was not prepossessing. Elaine strode in ahead of me, to a small, dark hall illuminated by an electric lamp of the lowest possible wattage – its miserable light brought back to me thoughts of the daylight lamps at Belting. “Hallo,” she shouted, and I echoed her, adopting without positive intention what I imagined to be a French accent, the aitch dropped: “’Allo.” A door ahead of us opened and a collarless man with a three-day growth of beard came out, glared at us, and let loose a volley of French.

At this point, with the mention of my accent and that volley of French, I approach a similar problem to that confronting film makers who set their stories in foreign countries. Are the natives to speak their own language most of the time and so be unintelligible to the audience, or is everybody after a token
“Bonjour”
or
“Buenas dias”
or
“Bom dia”
to settle into good sound English or American? French had been one of my poorest subjects at school, a fact I regretted chiefly because I found so much difficulty in reading Baudelaire, and Elaine’s fluent French was, as we discovered, largely incomprehensible to Frenchmen. If I were to describe in accurate detail our encounters in Paris, a large part of them would consist of our attempts to make ourselves understood, a procedure that is all very well in a stage farce but is liable to become boring when repeated in a book. I have settled, after some thought, for cutting out our lengthy confusions in French and pidgin-French, and for setting them down in English.

Our most serious troubles came, in fact, with the collarless gentleman. I couldn’t grasp a word he said, although Elaine answered him at equal speed it was obvious that they were making as little contact as ships moving on parallel courses. At sight of our cases he assumed that we wanted to stay, and it was with great difficulty that we stopped him from seizing them and taking them upstairs. Elaine went on talking, he produced with an air of triumph a filthy old register and a pen, it was all very French farcical. Then the name “Stiver” got through to him. He gave a jump as though he had been pricked by a needle, and began to shoo us towards the entrance. At a moment when our defeat looked inevitable this door opened, and a handsome young man appeared. Further volleys of French were exchanged between him and the collarless man, and then the young man said in English: “What is it you wish?”

It seemed time for me to say something. “We are friends of Monsieur Stiver. We are trying to find him.”

“Gone to England.”

“Ah, but he has left England and come back to Paris.” I found it difficult not to emulate the young man by speaking English with a French accent, and I saw Elaine stifle a smile, but the young man himself seemed to find nothing strange about it. He gave a nod to the collarless man, who shrugged and retreated behind the door from which he had emerged. The young man thrust out his hand. “Durcet,” he said, and jerked a thumb backwards. “My father. You want to stay ’ere? Want a room?”

“We are not quite sure yet,” Elaine said. “And we should want two rooms.”

He gave her one glance and turned back to me. “Why do you want Jean?”

“Jean?”

“Jean Stiver.” I ought to say that whereas I pronounced the name with a long “i” he of course pronounced it as a Frenchman, “Steevay.” He went on, “We have had trouble already.”

“With the police, I know. But we are not the police.”

“You are his friends, you want something, eh? We don’t talk ’ere.” Now he was smiling. He led the way outside. In the street he looked much less handsome. His complexion was bad and his teeth discoloured. We followed him into a café three doors down the street. Here it was even darker than it had been in the hotel. There was a little bar and some sort of canned music. The place was empty except for the man behind the bar and an old man half-asleep at a table. Durcet took us to the back of the café where it was darkest, went to the bar and came back with three glasses of beer. He set them down and said again, “You want something?”

“We want to know about Jean. He may be in trouble.”

“Yes?” He took out a packet of Gaulloises, offered them to us, lighted one himself. “You too?”

“No. We want to help him. How long did he stay with you?”

“A few weeks, five, six.”

“Did you know him before that?”

“I never saw him before. Somebody told him to come to us, you understand, we could get what he wants. You want that too?”

Elaine answered. “If the price is right.”

He turned to her, as if in relief at having things out in the open. “Price is okay.”

She said slowly, “Jean told us that when he was cut off he tried to kill himself.”

He stared at her, “Ah, shit, that was nothing. He had no money, so he gets – credit.” He searched for the word, came out with it proudly. “But still he’s got no money, so – ”

“You cut off supplies.”

“It was nothing. Just an accident, nothing. Then this friend came, everything was okay. Perhaps Jean is with him now.”

“What friend?”

“A fat man, smiling, he has a gold tooth. He paid for everything.” He opened his mouth and tapped one of his own decaying teeth. Elaine and I looked at each other. Ulfheim. Durcet saw the look, and realised that he had made a mistake. He stood up, between us and the door. “You don’t want the stuff, what the hell is it you want, eh?”

I said to Elaine, “I think we should go.” I hope I looked more composed than I felt. Durcet put his hand to his narrow hip. I could not positively say that I saw the glint of steel in the dark little room, but I felt sickeningly sure that he had a knife.

Elaine put on her spectacles. She said in a voice not loud but firm, “Sit down.” Durcet stood for a moment, hand upon hip as though posing. Then, surprisingly, he sat down. “You had better know the facts. I am a journalist, he is working with me. Jean Stiver came to England and has disappeared. My paper has sent me here to find him. We are not interested in anything except the story, nothing at all, you understand.”

“A
journalist.
” Durcet relaxed and smiled. “That’s okay.”

She clicked her fingers at me, I got three more beers and the crisis was over. We got a little more from Durcet, just about enough to justify buying him a beer. I was surprised that he was ready to talk. I did not understand then, although Elaine already knew from experience, that for many people a journalist’s is a glamorous occupation. People say things to journalists that they would not say to their friends, because they catch a whiff of immortality, which for them means their name in the paper. Of course there are a lot of people whose feelings in the presence of journalists are quite the reverse of this, but Durcet was not one of them. Once assured that we were not interested in his drug-pushing, he was delighted by the idea that Stiver had done something sufficiently sinister to bring us to France.

He told us that Stiver had come to the hotel one day and taken a room. He had had no visitors except the man with the gold tooth, whose name Durcet did not know. Nor did he know what they had talked about. Why had Stiver chosen the Hotel les deux Pigeons? Durcet strongly hinted, without positively committing himself, that Stiver had known it was a place where he could easily get a fix when he wanted it. He had gone off most days in the mornings and come back in the late afternoon, but Durcet did not know whether he had gone to a job. As far as he knew, Stiver had received no letters, but the two had talked together occasionally. On the last occasion Stiver had said he was going back to England, where he came from, and that he was going to be rich.