The Tumbled House Page 3

  Don laughed. “Roger’s paragraphs never do satisfy you.… Did you see much of him while I was away?”

  She didn’t look up but weighed his casual question in the micro-scales of her own mind. “ I saw him once in February. Then I had a meal with him a couple of times last month.”

  A distant dog was barking in the quiet square. She picked up a picture paper.

  Presently Don said: “ D’you know, last night I was trying to think of the word that precisely described my feelings for you then—vaguely Old Testament and distinctly old-fashioned in these disillusioned days.”

  She looked at him and past him, then at him again.

  “Uxorious,” he said. “That was the word.”

  “I don’t think you needed the word.”

  “Last night you were—different, Joanna. High strung—almost as if there’d never been anything between us before.”

  Disconcerted at his perception, she put down her paper. “ Do you mind?”

  “It’s not for me to mind, darling. I like you all ways.”

  “Dangerous indulgence.”

  He smiled and began to turn over The Sunday Times. She picked up a brush and tidied her copper hair. She suddenly said: “ Don, don’t ever expect consistency, will you? If I’m in any way … different from when you went away, don’t expect me to explain the difference, and I don’t want you to try. Love’s a part of personality: it doesn’t go back, it goes on, it’s organic. If I’m different, be patient.”

  He frowned at the paper. “Since we married you’ve been all women to me. If that’s indulgence, then it’s indulgence. I recognise a dicey score and ad lib as I go along. I like, and want, the good and the non-good, virtues and faults, the lot. The one thing you must never change is being changeable.”

  She said: “Next time you go away——”

  The telephone began to ring.

  He said: “ Brompton 4040. Yes. Oh, hullo, Wolseley. Good morning to you.… Very well, thanks, I hope you did.… I hope you’re not coming round to lunch yet; we’re still in bed.… Well, you know how it is. What? What paper? The Gazette? We do take it, but I don’t think we’ve looked at it yet. A what? My father?.… What on earth for? Oh, Moonraker. I don’t often read him, it’s pretty lousy stuff.…”

  “What is it, Don?” Joanna said.

  “… Well, if it’s as offensive as that.… Well, yes, I’m glad you did.… Thanks, yes. No, not a bit.… Joking aside, we’re expecting you in a couple of hours. Any time after twelve, in fact. Right. See you then. Good-bye.”

  Joanna had opened the newspaper, but when Don put back the receiver she didn’t go on looking but handed the paper to him.

  Don said: “ Some sort of gossip about us. I expect it’s nothing important.”

  He found the page and began to read. Joanna sat at the kidney-shaped dressing-table watching him through the mirror.

  It wasn’t usually hard to tell what he was thinking; but he went through the article with scarcely a change of expression. Then she saw his eyes move to begin it again. She stopped brushing her hair.

  “Well?”

  He got out of bed and passed it to her and began to dress.

  Moonraker’s weekly feature on the centre page had amused her when she first bought The Sunday Gazette. There was a knowing, forthright malice in it that tickled the palate before staling it.

  The article was headed “ The Great Marlowe Imposture”.

  “Arrival back in England this week of Don Marlowe twenty-nine-year-old British conductor and darling of the high-brow teen-agers, has caused this writer to examine afresh the Great Marlowe Legend which has sprung up around his father, the late Sir John Marlowe—remember Crossroads?— and is still growing.

  “Don Marlowe we all know. A Beecham touch on the platform; boundless go (and, let it be whispered, boundless go with an e in front of it); youth on his side. When to these you add a famous name, can you wonder that he is on the up-and-up, stepping briskly over rivals ten and twenty years his senior? What we are inquiring into is how the name became famous? Do any of us really know?

  “Let us examine the legend. John Marlowe, Queen’s Counsel, Recorder of Cheltenham, legal big name of the late forties and middle fifties, knighted for his war services, resigns his career in mid-stream. A future Lord Chief Justice hurries off to his country cottage at the age of fifty.

  “He has been called, he explains, to Higher Things. So he retires to his cottage and writes a book called Crossroads.

  “We have all read it. (Or if we haven’t we pretend we have.) It is practical philosophy for the man in the street, all neatly signposted to tell the individual what he should do, and society what it should not do, in the moral dilemmas of today. It’s clever. You can’t fault it on that score. The trained legal brain knows just how to put over knotty problems with the knots untied.

  “It is an instant best seller. Twenty editions in England alone, his publishers told me yesterday. Fourteen translations.

  “In January of this year Sir John died, laden with honour and royalties. Sadly mourned by all, not least by his handsome son and pretty air-hostess daughter.

  “Well, well, speak no ill of the dead, say I.

  “But Sir John lives on, through his book and through the legend which his retirement created. And sometimes legends blow themselves up into great over-inflated balloons. Then it is the duty of the journalist to harden his heart and investigate the facts. Recently I have been doing just this, and I am sorry to have to tell you that the balloon has burst.

  “Why did Sir John resign? Could he no longer stand the strain of expensively rewarded advocacy? Not at all. He was quietly elbowed out to avoid a scandal.

  “Perhaps no one will ever know the full facts—or no one will tell them. But it is whispered in the shadowy corridors of the Law Courts that Sir John was partial to pretty women clients. He dined and wined them expensively when the solicitors concerned were far away. He even made offers of marriage to them—which were gratefully accepted—and then withdrew. What simple, gullible creatures women are!

  “Also the Powers-that-Be were not happy about his behaviour as a Recorder. Sir John knew how to turn a blind eye in court if it helped a lady friend.

  “Now the English Bar has a reputation unequalled in the world. It is quick to protect itself. To save a scandal, Sir John was given the opportunity of leaving by the back door. Wisely he took it. Can you blame him?

  “Of course it was all done very quietly. On the records he has a clean slate. But records don’t tell everything. And truth will out.

  “But the book? The famous book which is still making its impression on the thinkers of three continents. Could such a man have written such a book?

  “The answer is simple. In the West Country town of Blakiston there lived an elderly and infirm clergyman named Chislehurst. Mr Chislehurst had a German mother and a degree of Philosophy in the University of Leipzig. Mr Chislehurst published in 1951 a booklet entitled ‘ Man and the Future’.

  “It was published privately and very few people saw it. But Sir John Marlowe saw it. Sir John read it, marked it, learned it and inwardly digested it. He went to see the Reverend George Chislehurst. Sir John was jovial and kindly. He helped George to clear off one or two trifling debts. A friendship sprang up between John and George. They became buddies.

  “In 1954 George consented to part with all the rights in his material for £100, on the understanding that John made due acknowledgement of his debt to the old man when the book was published. In June 1957 John published his magnum opus without any acknowledgement to George at all.

  “George blew his top. He showered letters of protest upon Sir John, who bore his burden as he bore his new-found fame with becoming modesty. The Rev. George fell ill, stricken with anger and grief. He had a stroke and lost his speech and the use of his right hand. His friend went down to visit him but was refused admittance. In October of that year the Reverend I George Chislehurst died and was buried unhonoured and u
nsung.

  “Sir John went to the funeral, deeply distressed at his loss. After it was over he hurried home to Midhurst to put the finishing touches on the eighth and amended edition of Crossroads.

  “The last part of his book is sub-titled ‘Man in the Dock’. We wonder why. Was he thinking of the elderly clergyman whose grave is now untended in the churchyard of St Anne’s, Blakiston? Or was he thinking of himself?”

  Wolseley Dorrit said: “Well, I’m real sorry I was the one to pass on the poison, as you might say; but I thought if I didn’t tell you someone else would, and sometimes it’s better to be forearmed.”

  Don said: “Wait a minute, I think that’s Bennie now. I wonder if she will have seen it.”

  “I’ll let her in,” said Joanna.

  Bennie, accustomed to restricting her personality most days of the week, bloomed today in a wide-skirted frock of flowered grosgrain, and came into the room a young, light and amiable presence, her colour freshened by her walk. She saw at once that something was wrong and thought at first that her brother and Joanna had been having words. When the situation was explained to her she read the article in silence, and from various points in the room they watched her reaction.

  She said: “ What a foul and stinking piece of.… I—I don’t know what to say!”

  “We’ve all said it,” murmured Don, picking some music off the piano stool and sitting down.

  Joanna carried a sherry to her. Bennie smiled her thanks, then looked at her brother. “What are you going to do?”

  “At the moment I’m too hopping mad to think straight.”

  Bennie sipped her drink and went across to the writing-table on which was her favourite photograph of her father. “Do you know who Moonraker is?”

  “No. Sometimes these columns are farmed out. But I don’t think this one is. The venom is too consistent from month to month. Anyway I shall find out.”

  “And when you do?”

  “I shall kick him twice round St Paul’s Cathedral.”

  “Warn me to be there,” said Bennie.

  “There is a law of libel in England?” said Wolseley.

  “I’ll go into that tomorrow. But a little personal violence would help too.”

  Joanna was Stan ding by the window. The light fell without comment on her tawny hair, her elegant complex beauty.

  “Who is this man they mention—the Reverend George Chislehurst? Have you heard of him before?”

  Don threw the music he held on to the top of the Blüthner grand. “I’ve a vague idea. But probably you remember better, Bennie?”

  “Oh yes, I knew him. He was there during a couple of the holidays—not all the time, but visiting.” She frowned at her drink. “They used to talk on and on into the night. Nothing I can tell you about him will help to unscramble this mess.”

  Joanna excused herself to see to the lunch but refused Bennie’s offer of help. She seemed glad to be able to go.

  Bennie picked up the paper again. “It’s like a dirty anonymous letter, isn’t it? You want to put it in the fire but must read it again first.”

  “You can’t burn this,” said Don. “ There are three million copies of it.”

  “I’m awfully ignorant,” said Wolseley Dorrit “ but what exactly is a Recorder? We don’t have them in Canada.”

  “Certain cities and towns in England have the right to hold separate courts of quarter sessions and the Recorder is the legal officer who sits as the judge there. It’s usually, given to a distinguished barrister who hasn’t yet become a full judge. There’s very little money in it, unless you’re Recorder of London, but it’s usually accepted for the honour and prestige. Dad used to say that in principle it shouldn’t work: a barrister in the hurly burly of the courts who four times a year becomes a judge and then afterwards goes back to his own job again—but in fact it seems to work pretty well.”

  “The charge about his resigning from practice …” said Dorrit.

  “That’s where I think we can catch this louse. But oddly it doesn’t rile me as much as the second charge. It won’t be so easy to disprove plagiarism as it will the other, with Chislehurst dead. I wonder if the old boy’s sister is still alive.”

  “Moonraker may have been down to see her,” said Bennie.

  “I thought of that. These old women get queer ideas. If she thinks Father pinched the stuff from her brother’s book.… I suppose Chislehurst did write a pamphlet; if so we must get hold of it.”

  Wolseley took off his glasses to polish them. “Usually newspapers do things only if they have a purpose. At least that’s the way back home. What I can’t see is any purpose in this.”

  “A man like Moonraker,” said Don, “probably has two spurs and sits permanently on them both. One is to keep his own name in front of the public, the other is to get rid of his poison by spitting it anywhere he can. A man like that, deep in his guts hates himself and the whole world.”

  Joanna had come back and was standing in the doorway listening to this last sentence. There was a hint of tautness about her. For a second or two it was as if a stranger was among them, to whom they could turn for a new and detached and subtler opinion of the case. Then her eyes moved to her husband.

  “Let’s go down now before the potatoes burn to cinders, darling. And let’s talk about something else while we eat, otherwise no one will appreciate my casserole.”

  Chapter Four

  Mr Vincent Doutelle, Q. C., took up the clipping from The Sunday Gazette and folded it carefully once or twice.

  He was a tall shiny man who looked as if he had just come from a facial. His fair greying hair was slicked back, his jaws moved slightly. Don sat with his elbows on the arms of the chair so that his head seemed sunken into his shoulders. Paul Whitehouse, of Tranter, Page and Whitehouse the solicitors, who had brought him for counsel’s opinion, was tapping a pencil into the palm of his other hand.

  “My advice, Mr Marlowe,” said the barrister, selecting his words, picking them over delicately like crumbs, “ is that you have no remedy at law.”

  Don turned his head to look at him with a long considering stare, but he didn’t speak. Mr Doutelle went on:

  “It’s an infamous article. I didn’t have the privilege of knowing your father, but I know his repute. I’ve no doubt that there’s not a word of truth in any of this; but the law takes the view that a dead man can suffer no material damage. I’m bound to tell you that you have no case.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, briefly the position is this. Let’s deal first with civil libel. A civil action for libel on a dead man may be brought by his posterity if the libel can be shown to injure their reputation—in this case yours and Miss Marlowe’s. The most obvious example would be to say that your father was never legally married. This would imply that his children were illegitimate, and you could no doubt still sue on that. There can also be an action of a rather different kind if a publication can be shown to have injured a dead man’s estate. This article might eventually affect the sales of Sir John’s book; but in that case the action would have to be brought by the charitable organisations which benefit. I very much question whether they could be persuaded to embark on a costly lawsuit whose outcome to say the least would be in doubt.” Mr Doutelle unfolded the cutting and tried folding it another way. “ In principle, of course, any man may issue a writ against another; but I am bound to tell you that in the circumstances of this case your writ would be dismissed in interlocutory proceedings on the grounds that it disclosed no cause of action.”

  Don moved only to cross his legs. Mr Doutelle said: “Now as to criminal libel. The writer of an article on a dead man can be charged with criminal libel if the article is written with intent to vilify a dead man’s family so as probably to cause a breach of the peace—for instance an assault by the son of the injured man on the writer of the libel. That exists as a possibility in law. But again I have to tell you that it is to say the least a doubtful proposition today. No prosecution for criminal
libel on a dead man has been successful for upwards of a hundred and twenty years. A case that comes to my mind as most narrowly approaching this occurred in about 1887 when a most scurrilous article was written about a dead man when a statue was about to be erected to his memory. A breach of the peace did in fact occur when the writer of the article was assaulted by the dead man’s sons; yet the judge—and a very distinguished one—directed his acquittal in the trial which followed. I will quote you part of his judgement if you would like me to, but the substance is that to libel the dead is not in itself an offence known to our law.”

  “As a matter of interest,” Don said, “ I have every intention of assaulting the writer of this article.”

  Mr Doutelle coughed and looked at Mr Whitehouse. “Well, that is not a proposition I can discuss with you, except to say that if it were undertaken for the purpose of creating a situation in which an indictment could be preferred, you would fail.”

  “Tell me why,” said Don.

  “I’ve tried to tell you, Mr Marlowe. It would be an impossible task in this case to prove an intent to vilify you or Miss Marlowe.… The most probable circumstances I can conceive in which the present criminal law might operate would be if I were to write an article about, say, the late Earl Lloyd George so scurrilous that it created riots in the Rhondda Valley; then there would be a considerable chance of my finding myself committed for trial. In other words, it must to some extent be a public issue. A brawl in a street between two or three persons would hardly be sufficient.”

  Don looked round at the leaded-paned bookcases with their pale brown Law Reports. He uncrossed his legs.

  “So that means that according to the law twenty men may write twenty articles saying that my father was a thief and my mother brought home men at ten shillings a time and died in an inebriates’ home. Correct?”

  Mr Doutelle tried precise corner to corner folding of his news-cutting. “ No, not exactly,” he said after some hesitation. “But the strongest force against any such occurrence in England today is public opinion. I am surprised that even The Gazette permitted this to appear unless there were some strong supposition of proof.”