The Ivy Tree Read online

  She said calmly: ‘It’s been done.’

  ‘Oh, yes, in stories. It’s an old favourite, we know that, from the Comedy of Errors on. And that’s a point, too: it may be all right in books, but on the stage, where one can see, and still one’s supposed to be deceived, it’s absurd. Unless you do really have identical twins . . . or one person plays both parts.’

  ‘That,’ said Miss Dermott, ‘is the whole point, isn’t it? We have got identical twins. It could be done.’

  ‘Look at it this way,’ I said. ‘It’s something, you say, that has been done. But, surely, in much simpler times than these? I mean, think of the lawyers, handwriting, written records, photographs, and, if it came to the point, police . . . oh, no they’re all too efficient nowadays. The risks are too great. No, it belongs in stories, and I doubt if it’s even readily acceptable there any more. Too many coincidences required, too much luck . . . That vein was worked out with The Prisoner of Zenda and The Great Impersonation. Pure romance, Miss Dermott.’

  ‘Not quite worked out,’ she said, on that note of soft, unshaken obstinacy. ‘Haven’t you read Brat Farrar, by Josephine Tey? You couldn’t say that was “pure romance”. It could have happened.’

  ‘I have read it, yes, and it probably is the best of them all. I forget the details, but doesn’t Brat Farrar, who’s the double of a boy that’s dead, go to the family home to claim a fortune and an estate? I agree, it was wonderfully convincing, but damn it, Miss Dermott, it was a story. You can’t really do that sort of thing and get away with it! Real life is – well, it’s not Brat Farrar, it’s the Tichborne Case, and Perkin Warbeck. I forget just what the Tichborne Claimant got, but poor Perkin – who in fact may have been just what he claimed to be – got chopped.’

  ‘The Tichborne Case? What was that?’

  ‘It was a cause célèbre of the eighties. A certain Roger Tichborne had been presumed drowned; he was heir to a baronetcy and a fortune. Well, years later a man turned up from Australia claiming to be Roger Tichborne – so convincingly that to this day there are people who still think he was. Even Roger Tichborne’s mother, who was still alive, accepted him.’

  ‘But he didn’t get the estate?’

  ‘No. The case went on literally for years, and cost thousands, and pretty well split the country into two camps, but in the end he lost it. He got a prison sentence. That’s the real thing, Miss Dermott. You see what I mean?’

  She nodded. Arguing with her was like battering a feather pillow. You got tired, and the pillow stayed just the same. ‘Yes, of course. There has to be luck, certainly, and there has to be careful planning. But it’s like murder, isn’t it?’

  I stared at her. ‘Murder?’

  ‘Yes. You only know about the ones that are found out. Nobody ever hears about the ones that get away with it. All the counting’s on the negative side.’

  ‘I suppose so. But—’

  ‘You say that Brat Farrar’s only a story, and that in real life anyone who walks into a family claiming to be a – well, a long-lost heir, would merely land in trouble, like this Tichborne man.’

  ‘Yes. Certainly. The lawyers—’

  ‘That’s the whole point. That’s not what you’d be doing. The lawyers wouldn’t come into it, I’m sure of that. The point is that you’d not be claiming anything from anybody; there’d be nobody to fight you. The only person who’d lose by your reappearance is Julie, and she has enough of her own. Besides, she adored Annabel; she’ll be so pleased to see you, that she’ll hardly stop to think what it’ll mean in terms of money . . .’

  ‘Julie?’

  ‘Annabel’s young cousin. She’s not at Whitescar now, but she’ll be coming some time this summer. You needn’t worry about her, she was only ten or eleven when Annabel went away, and she’ll hardly remember enough about her to suspect you. Besides, why should she? I tell you, it’s not a risk, it’s a certainty. Take it from me, Con and I wouldn’t dare take risks, either! We’ve everything to lose. You wouldn’t even find it nerve-racking. Apart from the daily help, and the farm-hands you need hardly see, you’ll be mostly with Con and myself, and we’ll help you all we can.’

  ‘I don’t understand. If Julie isn’t there, who are you trying to—?’

  ‘And the point about the old man is that he’s never believed Annabel was dead. He simply won’t have it. He’ll never even question you, believe me. You can just walk in.’

  I was staring at her, my cigarette arrested half way to my mouth. ‘The old man? Who? Who are you talking about?’

  ‘Old Mr Winslow, her grandfather. I spoke of him before. He thought the world of her. He kept half a dozen pictures of her in his room—’

  ‘But surely . . . I understood he was dead.’

  She looked up in surprise. ‘Where did you get that idea? No, he’s very much alive.’ Her mouth twisted suddenly, incongruously, into a likeness of that not-so-pleasant smile of Con’s. ‘You might say that’s the whole cause of this – situation. What made you think he was dead?’

  ‘I didn’t think. But I somehow got the impression . . . When you spoke of “the old man” before, you used the past tense. You said “he was Annabel’s grandfather”.’

  ‘Did I? Possibly. But, of course, the past tense,’ she said softly, ‘would be for Annabel.’

  ‘I see that now. Yes. But it was added somehow to an impression I got on Sunday . . . your brother said something, I forget what . . . Yes, of course, he said – implied, I suppose, would be more accurate – that he owned the farm. No, he stated it flatly. I’m sure he did.’

  She smiled then, genuinely, and for the first time I saw the warmth of real feeling in her face. She looked amused, indulgent, affectionate, as a mother might look when watching the pranks of a naughty but attractive child. ‘Yes, he would. Poor Con.’ She didn’t take it further, merely adding: ‘No, he doesn’t own Whitescar. He’s old Mr Winslow’s manager. He’s . . . not even Mr Winslow’s heir.’

  ‘I see. Oh, lord, yes, I see it now.’

  I got up abruptly, and went over again to the window. Opposite, in one of the tall, drab houses, someone came into a bedroom and switched on the light. I caught a too-familiar glimpse of yellow wall-paper with a writhing pattern of green and brown, a pink plastic lampshade, the gleam of a highly polished radio, before the curtains were twitched across the window. The radio was switched on, and some comedian clacked into the night. Somewhere a child wailed, drearily. In the street below, a woman was shouting a child’s name in a wailing northern cadence.

  ‘What do you see?’

  I said, slowly, still staring out at the dark: ‘Not much, really. Just that Mr Winslow – Con – wants Whitescar, and that somehow he thinks he can fix it, if I go back there as Annabel. I take it that Julie must be the heir now, if he isn’t. But how on earth it’s going to help Con to bring back Annabel, and put two people in the way instead of one . . .’ I finished heavily: ‘Oh, lord, the whole thing’s fantastic anyway. I can’t think why I’ve bothered to listen.’

  ‘Extraordinary, perhaps, but not fantastic.’ The colourless voice behind me might have been discussing a knitting pattern. I didn’t turn. I leaned my forehead against the glass and watched, without seeing them, the moving lights of the traffic in the street below. ‘But then, families are extraordinary, don’t you think? And with all their faults, the Winslows have never been exactly dull . . . Listen for a little while longer, and you’ll understand what Con and I are getting at.’

  I let her talk. I just leaned my head against the glass and watched the traffic, and let the soft, unemphatic voice flow on and on. I felt, suddenly, too tired even to try to stop her.

  She told me the recent family history very briefly. Old Matthew Winslow (she said) had had two sons: the elder had one daughter, Annabel, who had lived with her parents at Whitescar. When the girl was fourteen, her father was killed in an accident with a tractor, and her mother died soon afterwards, within the year, of pneumonia, leaving her as an orphan in her grandf
ather’s care. The latter was then only in his early sixties, but had been for some time handicapped by arthritis, and found it heavy work to manage the place on his own. His younger son had been killed some years previously in the Battle of Britain, leaving a widow, and a month-old daughter, Julie. Matthew Winslow had immediately invited his daughter-in-law to Whitescar, but she had chosen to remain in London. She had eventually re-married, and gone out, with her small daughter, to live in Kenya. Later, when Julie was some seven years old, she had been sent back to England to school; she spent the winter vacations with her parents in Africa, but her spring and summer holidays had been passed with her grandfather at Whitescar, which she regarded as her English home.

  It had not been for some time after his elder son’s death that Mr Winslow thought of offering a home and a job to Connor Winslow, his only surviving male relative. Matthew Winslow had had a nephew, the son of a younger brother, who had worked at the Forrest stud as trainer in old Mr Forrest’s time, but who had eventually left Whitescar and gone to Ireland to a big training stable in Galway. There he had married a young widow, a Mrs Dermott, who had a five-year-old daughter, Lisa. A year later, Connor was born, to become the spoiled darling of his parents, and also, surprisingly, of his half-sister, who had adored him, and had never dreamed of resenting her mother’s preference for the good-looking only son. But this apparently safe and happy circle had been rudely shattered when Connor was thirteen. His father broke his neck one day over a big Irish in-and-out, and exactly ten months later the inconsolable widow cheerfully married for the third time.

  The young Connor found himself all at once relegated to the background of his mother’s life, and kept there by an unsympathetic stepfather and (very soon) by the even stronger claims of a new young family, consisting of twin boys and, later, another daughter. Con’s father had left no money, and it became increasingly obvious that his stepfather, and now his mother, were not prepared to spare either time, or material help, on the son of the earlier marriage. There was only Lisa, and she was as badly off as he. But at least she could feel herself needed. There is plenty for a plain unmarried daughter to do in a house with three small children.

  So when Matthew Winslow, the great-uncle whose existence he had half forgotten, wrote out of the blue to ask Connor, then aged nineteen, to make his home at Whitescar and be trained for farm management, the boy had gone like an arrow from a bow, and with very little in the nature of a by-your-leave. If Lisa wept after he had gone, nobody knew; there was plenty for Lisa to do at home, anyway . . .

  Small wonder that Con arrived at Whitescar with the determination to make a place for himself, and stay; a determination that, very soon, hardened into a definite ambition. Security. The Winslow property. Whitescar itself. There was only Annabel in the way, and Con came very quickly to think that she had no business to be in the way at all. It didn’t take him long to find out that the place, backed by Matthew Winslow’s not inconsiderable private income, could be willed any way that the old man wished.

  So Connor Winslow had set to work. He had learned his job, he made himself very quickly indispensable, he had worked like a navvy at anything and everything that came along, earning the respect and even the admiration of the slow, conservative local farmers, who at first had been rather inclined to regard the good-looking lad from Ireland as an extravagant whim of Matthew’s, showy, perhaps, but bound to be a poor stayer. He had proved them wrong.

  Matthew himself, though he had never publicly admitted it, had had the same doubts, but Con defeated his prejudices first, then proceeded to charm his great-uncle ‘like a bird off a tree’, (so Lisa, surprisingly). But charm he never so wisely, he couldn’t quite charm Whitescar from him, away from Annabel. ‘Because Con tried, he admits it,’ says Lisa. ‘The old man thought the world of him, and still does, but he’s like the rest of the English Winslows, as stubborn as the devil and as sticky as a limpet. What he has, he hangs on to. He wanted her to have it after him, and what he wants, goes. The fact that she’s dead’, added Lisa bitterly, ‘doesn’t make a bit of difference. If the old man said black was white, he’d believe it was true. He can’t be wrong, you see; he once said she’d come back, and he won’t change. He’ll die sooner. Literally. And he’ll leave everything to Annabel in his Will, and the mess’ll take years to clear up, and the odds are that Julie’s the residuary beneficiary. The point is, we just don’t know. He won’t say a word. But it does seem unfair.’

  She paused for a moment. I had half turned back from the window, and was standing leaning against the shutter. But I still didn’t look at her, or make any comment on the story. I felt her eyes on me for a few moments, then she went on.

  There wasn’t much more. Con’s next move had been the obvious one. If Annabel and Whitescar were to go together, then he would try to take both. Indeed, he was genuinely (so Lisa told me) in love with her, and an understanding between them was such an obvious and satisfactory thing to happen that the old man, who was fond of them both, was delighted.

  ‘But,’ said Lisa, hesitating now and appearing to choose her words, ‘it went wrong, somehow. I won’t go into details now – in any case, I don’t know a great deal, because I wasn’t there, and Con hasn’t said much – but they quarrelled terribly, and she used to try and make him jealous, he says, and, well, that’s only too easy with Con, and he has a terrible temper. They had a dreadful quarrel one night. I don’t know what happened, but I think Con may have said something to frighten her, and she threw him over once and for all, said she couldn’t stay at Whitescar while he was there, and all that sort of thing. Then she ran off to see her grandfather. Con doesn’t know what happened between them, or if he does, he won’t tell me. But of course the old man was bound to be furious, and disappointed, and he never was one to mince his words, either. The result was another dreadful row, and she left that night, without a word to anyone. There was a note for her grandfather, that was all. Nothing for Con. She just said she wasn’t coming back. Of course the old man was too stubborn and furious even to try and find her, and persuade her, and he forbade Con to try either. Con did what he could, quietly, but there was no trace. Then, a month later, her grandfather got a note, post-marked New York. It just said she was quite safe, had got a job with friends, and she wasn’t ever coming back to England again. After that there was nothing until three years later someone sent Mr Winslow a cutting from a Los Angeles paper describing an accident in which an express had run into a bus at some country crossing, and a lot of people had been killed. One of them was a “Miss Anna Winslow” of no given address, who’d been staying at some boarding-house in the city, and who was thought to be English. We made enquiries, and they were all negative. It could have been Annabel. It would certainly be enough, with the long absence, to allow us to presume her dead. After all this time, she must be; or else she really isn’t ever coming back, which amounts to the same thing, in the end.’ She paused. ‘That’s all.’

  I turned my head. ‘And you? Where do you come in?’

  ‘After she’d gone,’ said Lisa Dermott, ‘Con remembered me.’

  She said it quite simply. There was no hint of self-pity or complaint in the soft, flattened voice. I looked down at her, sitting stolid and unattractive in the old basket chair, and said gently: ‘He got Mr Winslow to send for you?’

  She nodded. ‘Someone had to run the house, and it seemed too good a chance to miss. But even with the two of us there, doing all that we do, it’s not the slightest use.’

  The impulse of pity that had stirred in me, died without a pang. I had a sudden vivid picture of the two of them, camped there at Whitescar, hammering home their claims, Con with his charm and industry, Lisa with her polish and her apple pies . . . She had called it ‘unfair’, and perhaps it was; certainly one must admit they had a right to a point of view. But then so had Matthew Winslow.

  ‘You see,’ she said, ‘how unjust it all is? You do see that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I see. But I still don’t
see what you think I can do about it! You want me to go to Whitescar, and somehow or other that is going to help Con to become the heir, and owner. How?’

  I had left the window as I spoke, and come forward to the table again. I saw that fugitive look of excitement touch her face once more as she leaned towards me, looking up under the brim of the brown hat.

  ‘You’re interested now, aren’t you? I thought you would be, when you heard a bit more.’

  ‘I’m not. You’ve got me wrong. I was interested in your story, I admit, but that was because I think your brother may be right when he says I must come originally from some branch of the same family. But I never said I was interested in your proposition! I’m not! I told you what I thought about it! It’s a crazy idea straight out of nineteenth-century romance, long-lost heirs and missing wills and – and all that drivel!’ I found that I was speaking roughly, almost angrily, and made myself smile at her, adding, mildly enough: ‘You’ll be telling me next that Annabel had a strawberry-mark—’

  I stopped. Her hand had moved, quickly, to the telephone directory on the table beside her. I saw, then, that I had shut it over a pencil which still lay between the leaves.

  The book fell open under her hand, at the page headed ‘Wilson – Winthorpe’. She looked at it without expression. Then her blunt, well-kept finger moved down towards the foot of the second column, and stopped there.

  ‘Winslow, Matthew. Frmr. Whitescar . . . Bellingham 248.’

  The entry was marked, faintly, in pencil.

  I said, trying to keep my voice flat, and only succeeding in making it sound sulky: ‘Yes, I looked it up. It puzzled me, because your brother had said he owned the farm. It isn’t an old directory, so when you first spoke of “the old man”, I assumed he must have died quite recently.’

  She didn’t answer. She shut the book, then leaned back in her chair and looked up at me, with that calm, appraising look. I met it almost defiantly.