Chapter 8

I sat there, on the grass by the stream among the water flowers with the little paths and the stepping stones all round us. А good many other people were sitting round about us, but we didn’t notice them or even see they were there, because we were like all the others. Young couples, talking about their future. I stared at her and stared at her. I just couldn’t speak.

‘Mike,’ she said. ‘There’s something, something I’ve got to tell you. Something about me, I mean.’

‘You don’t need to,’ I said, ‘no need to tell me anything.’

‘Yes, but I must. I ought to have told you long ago but I didn’t want to because – because I thought it might drive you away. But it explains in a way, about Gipsy’s Acre.’

‘You bought it?’ I said. ‘But how did you buy it?’

‘Through lawyers,’ she said, ‘the usual way. It’s a perfectly good investment, you know. The land will appreciate. My lawyers were quite happy about it.’

It was odd suddenly to hear Ellie, the gentle and timid Ellie, speaking with such knowledge and confidence of the business world of buying and selling.

‘You bought it for us?’

‘Yes. I went to a lawyer of my own, not the family one. I told him what I wanted to do, I got him to look into it, I got everything set up and in train. There were two other people after it but they were not really desperate and they wouldn’t go very high. The important thing was that the whole thing had to be set up and arranged ready for me to sign as soon as I came of age. It’s signed and finished.’

‘But you must have made some deposit or something beforehand. Had you enough money to do that?’

‘No,’ said Ellie, ‘no, I hadn’t control of much money beforehand, but of course there are people who will advance you money. And if you go to a new firm of legal advisers, they will want you to go on employing them for business deals once you’ve come into what money you’re going to have so they’re willing to take the risk that you might drop down dead before your birthday comes.’

‘You sound so businesslike,’ I said, ‘you take my breath away!’

‘Never mind business,’ said Ellie, ‘I’ve got to get back to what I’m telling you. In a way I’ve told it you already, but I don’t suppose really you realize it.’

‘I don’t want to know,’ I said. My voice rose, I was almost shouting. ‘Don’t tell me anything. I don’t want to know anything about what you’ve done or who you’ve been fond of or what has happened to you.’

‘It’s nothing of that kind,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realize that that was what you were fearing it might be. No, there’s nothing of that kind. No sex secrets. There’s nobody but you. The thing is that I’m – well – I’m rich.’

‘I know that,’ I said, ‘you’ve told me already.’

‘Yes,’ said Ellie with a faint smile, ‘and you said to me, “poor little rich girl”. But in a way it’s more than that. My grandfather, you see, was enormously rich. Oil. Mostly oil. And other things. The wives he paid alimony to are dead, there was only my father and myself left because his two other sons were killed. One in Korea and one in a car accident. And so it was all left in a great big huge trust and when my father died suddenly, it all came to me. My father had made provision for my stepmother before, so she didn’t get anything more. It was all mine. I’m – actually one of the richest women in America, Mike.’

‘Good Lord,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know… Yes, you’re right, I didn’t know it was like that.’

‘I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want to tell you. That was why I was afraid when I said my name – Fenella Goodman. We spell it G-u-t-e-m-a-n, and I thought you might know the name of Guteman so I slurred over it and made it into Goodman.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ve seen the name Guteman vaguely. But I don’t think I’d have recognized it even then. Lots of people are called names rather like that.’

‘That’s why,’ she said, ‘I’ve been so hedged around all the time and fenced in, and imprisoned. I’ve had detectives guarding me and young men being vetted before they’re allowed even to speak to me. Whenever I’ve made a friend they’ve had to be quite sure it wasn’t an unsuitable one. You don’t know what a terrible, terrible prisoner’s life it is! But now that’s all over, and if you don’t mind —’

‘Of course I don’t mind,’ I said, ‘we shall have lots of fun. In fact,’ I said, ‘you couldn’t be too rich a girl for me!’

We both laughed. She said: ‘What I like about you is that you can be natural about things.’

‘Besides,’ I said, ‘I expect you pay a lot of tax on it, don’t you? That’s one of the few nice things about being like me. Any money I make goes into my pocket and nobody can take it away from me.’

‘We’ll have our house,’ said Ellie, ‘our house on Gipsy’s Acre.’ Just for a moment she gave a sudden little shiver.

‘You’re not cold, darling,’ I said. I looked up at the sunshine.

‘No,’ she said.

It was really very hot. We’d been basking. It might almost have been the South of France.

‘No,’ said Ellie, ‘it was just that – that woman, that gipsy that day.’

‘Oh, don’t think of her,’ I said, ‘she was crazy anyway.’

‘Do you think she really thinks there’s a curse on the land?’

‘I think gipsies are like that. You know – always wanting to make a song and dance about some curse or something.’

‘Do you know much about gipsies?’

‘Absolutely nothing,’ I said truthfully. ‘If you don’t want Gipsy’s Acre, Ellie, we’ll buy a house somewhere else. On the top of a mountain in Wales, on the coast of Spain or an Italian hillside, and Santonix can build us a house there just as well.’

‘No,’ said Ellie, ‘that’s how I want it to be. It’s where I first saw you walking up the road, coming round the corner very suddenly, and then you saw me and stopped and stared at me. I’ll never forget that.’

‘Nor will I,’ I said.

‘So that’s where it’s going to be. And your friend Santonix will build it.’

‘I hope he’s still alive,’ I said with an uneasy pang. ‘He was a sick man.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Ellie, ‘he’s alive. I went to see him.’

‘You went to see him?’

‘Yes. When I was in the South of France. He was in a sanatorium there.’

‘Every minute, Ellie, you seem to be more and more amazing. The things you do and manage.’

‘He’s rather a wonderful person I think,’ said Ellie, ‘but rather frightening.’

‘Did he frighten you?’

‘Yes, he frightened me very much for some reason.’

‘Did you talk to him about us?’

‘Yes. Oh yes, I told him all about us and about Gipsy’s Acre and about the house. He told me then that we’d have to take a chance with him. He’s a very ill man. He said he thought he still had the life left in him to go and see the site, to draw the plans, to visualize it and get it all sketched out. He said he wouldn’t mind really if he died before the house was finished, but I told him,’ added Ellie, ‘that he mustn’t die before the house was finished because I wanted him to see us live in it.’

‘What did he say to that?’

‘He asked me if I knew what I was doing marrying you, and I said of course I did.’

‘And then?’

‘He said he wondered if you knew what you were doing.’ ‘I know all right,’ I said.

‘He said “You will always know where you’re going, Miss Guteman.” He said “You’ll be going always where you want to go and because it’s your chosen way.”

‘“But Mike,” he said, “might take the wrong road. He hasn’t grown up enough yet to know where he’s going.”

‘I said,’ said Ellie, ‘“He’ll be quite safe with me.”’

She had superb self-confidence. I was angry though at what Santonix had said. He was like my mother. She always seemed to know more about me than I knew myself.

‘I know where I’m going,’ I said. ‘I’m going the way I want to go and we’re going it together.’

‘They’ve started pulling down the ruins of The Towers already,’ said Ellie.

She began to talk practically.

‘It’s to be a rush-job as soon as the plans are finished. We must hurry. Santonix said so. Shall we be married next Tuesday?’ said Ellie. ‘It’s a nice day of the week.’

‘With nobody else there,’ I said.

‘Except Greta,’ said Ellie.

‘To hell with Greta,’ I said, ‘she’s not coming to our wedding. You and I and nobody else. We can pull the necessary witnesses out of the street.’

I really think, looking back, that that was the happiest day of my life…

Book II

Chapter 9

So that was that, and Ellie and I got married. It sounds abrupt just putting it like that, but you see it was really just the way things happened. We decided to be married and we got married.

It was part of the whole thing – not just an end to a romantic novel or a fairy story. ‘And so they got married and lived happily ever afterwards.’ You can’t, after all, make a big drama out of living happily ever afterwards. We were married and we were both happy and it was really quite a time before anyone got on to us and began to make the usual difficulties and commotions and we’d made up our minds to those.

The whole thing was really extraordinarily simple. In her desire for freedom Ellie had covered her tracks very cleverly up to now. The useful Greta had taken all the necessary steps, and was always on guard behind her. And I had realized fairly soon on that there was nobody really whose business it was to care terribly about Ellie and what she was doing. She had a stepmother who was engrossed in her own social life and love affairs. If Ellie didn’t wish to accompany her to any particular spot on the globe there was no need for Ellie to do so. She’d had all the proper governesses and ladies’ maids and scholastic advantages and if she wanted to go to Europe, why not? If she chose to have her twenty-first birthday in London, again why not? Now that she had come into her vast fortune she had the whip hand of her family in so far as spending her money went. If she’d wanted a villa on the Riviera or a castle on the Costa Brava or a yacht or any of those things, she had only to mention the fact and someone among the retinues that surround millionaires would put everything in hand immediately.

Greta, I gather, was regarded by her family as an admirable stooge. Competent, able to make all arrangements with the utmost efficiency, subservient no doubt and charming to the stepmother, the uncle and a few odd cousins who seemed to be knocking about. Ellie had no fewer than three lawyers at her command, from what she let fall every now and then. She was surrounded by a vast financial network of bankers and lawyers and the administrators of trust funds. It was a world that I just got glimpses of every now and then, mostly from things that Ellie let fall carelessly in the course of conversation. It didn’t occur to her, naturally, that I wouldn’t know about all those things. She had been brought up in the midst of them and she naturally concluded that the whole world knew what they were and how they worked and all the rest of it.

In fact, getting glimpses of the special peculiarities of each other’s lives were unexpectedly what we enjoyed most in our early married life. To put it quite crudely – and I did put things crudely to myself, for that was the only way to get to terms with my new life – the poor don’t really know how the rich live and the rich don’t know how the poor live, and to find out is really enchanting to both of them. Once I said uneasily:

‘Look here, Ellie, is there going to be an awful sche-mozzle over all this, over our marriage, I mean?’

Ellie considered without, I noticed, very much interest.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘they’ll probably be awful.’ And she added, ‘I hope you won’t mind too much.’

‘I won’t mind – why should I?– But you, will they bully you over it?’

‘I expect so,’ said Ellie, ‘but one needn’t listen. The point is that they can’t do anything.’

‘But they’ll try?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Ellie. ‘They’ll try.’ Then she added thoughtfully, ‘They’ll probably try and buy you off.’

‘Buy me off?’

‘Don’t look so shocked,’ said Ellie, and she smiled, a rather happy little girl’s smile. ‘It isn’t put exactly like that.’ Then she added, ‘They bought off Minnie Thompson’s first, you know.’

‘Minnie Thompson? Is that the one they always call the oil heiress?’

‘Yes, that’s right. She ran off and married a life guard off the beach.’

‘Look here, Ellie,’ I said uneasily, ‘I was a life guard at Littlehampton once.’

‘Oh, were you? What fun! Permanently?’

‘No, of course not. Just one summer, that’s all.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t worry,’ said Ellie.

‘What happened about Minnie Thompson?’

‘They had to go up to 200,000 dollars, I think,’ said Ellie, ‘he wouldn’t take less. Minnie was man-mad and really a half-wit,’ she added.

‘You take my breath away, Ellie,’ I said. ‘I’ve not only acquired a wife, I’ve got something I can trade for solid cash at any time.’

‘That’s right,’ said Ellie. ‘Send for a high-powered lawyer and tell him you’re willing to talk turkey. Then he fixes up the divorce and the amount of alimony,’ said Ellie, continui ng my education. ‘My stepmother’s been married four times,’ she added, ‘and she’s made quite a lot out of it.’ And then she said, ‘Oh, Mike, don’t look so shocked.’

The funny thing is that I was shocked. I felt a priggish distaste for the corruption of modern society in its richer phases. There had been something so little-girl-like about Ellie, so simple, almost touching in her attitude that I was astonished to find how well up she was in worldly affairs and how much she took for granted. And yet I knew that I was right about her fundamentally. I knew quite well the kind of creature that Ellie was. Her simplicity, her affection, her natural sweetness. That didn’t mean she had to be ignorant of things. What she did know and took for granted was a fairly limited slice of humanity. She didn’t know much about my world, the world of scrounging for jobs, of racecourse gangs and dope gangs, the rough and tumble dangers of life, the sharp-Aleck flashy type that I knew so well from living amongst them all my life. She didn’t know what it was to be brought up decent and respectable but always hard up for money, with a mother who worked her fingers to the bone in the name of respectability, determining that her son should do well in life. Every penny scrimped for and saved, and the bitterness when your gay carefree son threw away his chances or gambled his all on a good tip for the 3.30.

She enjoyed hearing about my life as much as I enjoyed hearing about hers. Both of us were exploring a foreign country.

Looking back I see what a wonderfully happy life it was, those early days with Ellie. At the time I took them for granted and so did she. We were married in a registry office in Plymouth. Guteman is not an uncommon name. Nobody, reporters or otherwise, knew the Guteman heiress was in England. There had been vague paragraphs in papers occasionally, describing her as in Italy or on someone’s yacht. We were married in the Registrar’s office with his clerk and a middle-aged typist as witnesses. He gave us a serious little harangue on the serious responsibilities of married life, and wished us happiness. Then we went out, free and married. Mr and Mrs Michael Rogers! We spent a week in a seaside hotel and then we went abroad. We had a glorious three weeks travelling about wherever the fancy took us and no expense spared.

We went to Greece and we went to Florence, and to Venice and lay on the Lido, then to the French Riviera and then to the Dolomites. Half the places I forget the names of now. We took planes or chartered a yacht or hired large and handsome cars. And while we enjoyed ourselves, Greta, I gathered from Ellie, was still on the Home Front doing her stuff.

Travelling about in her own way, sending letters and forwarding all the various post-cards and letters that Ellie had left with her.

‘There’ll be a day of reckoning, of course,’ said Ellie. ‘They’ll come down on us like a cloud of vultures. But we might as well enjoy ourselves until that happens.’

‘What about Greta?’ I said. ‘Won’t they be rather angry with her when they find out?’

‘Oh, of course,’ said Ellie, ‘but Greta won’t mind. She’s tough.’

‘Mightn’t it stop her getting another job?’

‘Why should she get another job?’ said Ellie. ‘She’ll come and live with us.’

‘No!’ I said.

‘What do you mean, no, Mike?’

‘We don’t want anyone living with us,’ I said.

‘Greta wouldn’t be in the way,’ said Ellie, ‘and she’d be very useful. Really, I don’t know what I’d do without her. I mean, she manages and arranges everything.’

I frowned. ‘I don’t think I’d like that. Besides, we want our own house – our dream house, after all, Ellie – we want it to ourselves.’

‘Yes,’ said Ellie, ‘I know what you mean. But all the same —’ She hesitated. ‘I mean, it would be very hard on Greta not to have anywhere to live. After all, she’s been with me, done everything for me for four years now. And look how she’s helped me to get married and all that.’

‘I won’t have her butting in between us all the time!’ ‘But she’s not like that at all, Mike. You haven’t even met her yet.’

‘No. No, I know I haven’t but – but it’s nothing to do with, oh with liking her or not. We want to be by ourselves, Ellie.’

‘Darling Mike,’ said Ellie softly.

We left it at that for the moment.

During the course of our travels we had met Santonix. That was in Greece. He had been in a small fisherman’s cottage near the sea. I was startled by how ill he looked, much worse than when I had seen him a year ago. He greeted both Ellie and myself very warmly.

‘So you’ve done it, you two,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Ellie, ‘and now we’re going to have our house built, aren’t we?’

‘I’ve got the drawings for you here, the plans,’ he said to me. ‘She’s told you, hasn’t she, how she came and ferreted me out and gave me her – commands,’ he said, choosing the word thoughtfully.

‘Oh! not commands,’ said Ellie. ‘I just pleaded.’

‘You know we’ve bought the site?’ I said.

‘Ellie wired and told me. She sent me dozens of photographs.’

‘Of course you’ve got to come and see it first,’ said Ellie. ‘You mightn’t like the site.’

‘I do like it.’

‘You can’t really know till you’ve seen it.’

‘But I have seen it, child. I flew over five days ago. I met one of your hatchet-faced lawyers there – the English one.’

‘Mr Crawford?’

‘That’s the man. In fact, operations have already started: clearing the ground, removing the ruins of the old house, foundations – drains – When you get back to England I’ll be there to meet you.’ He got out his plans then and we sat talking and looking at our house to be. There was even a rough water-colour sketch of it as well as the architectural elevations and plans.

‘Do you like it, Mike?’

I drew a deep breath.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s it. That’s absolutely it.’

‘You used to talk about it enough, Mike. When I was in a fanciful mood I used to think that piece of land had laid a spell upon you. You were a man in love with a house that you might never own, that you might never see, that might never even be built.’

‘But it’s going to be built,’ said Ellie. ‘It’s going to be built, isn’t it?’

‘If God or the devil wills it,’ said Santonix. ‘It doesn’t depend on me.’

‘You’re not any – any better?’ I asked doubtfully.

‘Get it into your thick head. I shall never be better. That’s not on the cards.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘People are finding cures for things all the time. Doctors are gloomy brutes. They give people up for dead and then the people laugh and cock a snook at them and live for another fifty years.’

‘I admire your optimism, Mike, but my malady isn’t one of that kind. They take you to hospital and give you a change of blood and back you come again with a little leeway of life, a little span of time gained. And so on, getting weaker each time.’

‘You are very brave,’ said Ellie.

‘Oh no, I’m not brave. When a thing is certain there’s nothing to be brave about. All you can do is find your consolation.’

‘Building houses?’

‘No, not that. You’ve less vitality all the time, you see, and therefore building houses becomes more difficult, not easier. The strength keeps giving out. No. But there are consolations. Sometimes very queer ones.’

‘I don’t understand you,’ I said.

‘No, you wouldn’t, Mike. I don’t know really that Ellie would. She might.’ He went on, speaking not so much to us as to himself. ‘Two things run together, side by side. Weakness and strength. The weakness of fading vitality and the strength of frustrated power. It doesn’t matter, you see, what you do now! You’re going to die anyway. So you can do anything you choose. There’s nothing to deter you, there’s nothing to hold you back. I could walk through the streets of Athens shooting down every man or woman whose face I didn’t like. Think of that.’

‘The police could arrest you just the same,’ I pointed out.

‘Of course they could. But what could they do? At the most take my life. Well my life’s going to be taken by a greater power than the law in a very short time. What else could they do? Send me to prison for twenty – thirty years? That’s rather ironical, isn’t it, there aren’t twenty or thirty years for me to serve. Six months – one year – eighteen months at the utmost. There’s nothing anyone can do to me. So in the span that’s left to me I am king. I can do what I like. Sometimes it’s a very heady thought. Only – only, you see, there’s not much temptation because there’s nothing particularly exotic or lawless that I want to do.’

After we had left him, as we were driving back to Athens, Ellie said to me:

‘He’s an odd person. Sometimes you know, I feel frightened of him.’

‘Frightened, of Rudolf Santonix – why?’

‘Because he isn’t like other people and because he has a – I don’t know – a ruthlessness and an arrogance about him somewhere. And I think that he was trying to tell us, really, that knowing he’s going to die soon has increased his arrogance. Supposing,’ said Ellie, looking at me in an animated way, with almost a rapt and emotional expression on her face, ‘supposing he built us our lovely castle, our lovely house on the cliff’s edge there in the pines, supposing we were coming to live in it. There he was on the doorstep and he welcomed us in and then —’

‘Well, Ellie?’

‘Then supposing he came in after us, he slowly closed the doorway behind us and sacrificed us there on the threshold. Cut our throats or something.’

‘You frighten me, Ellie. The things you think of!’

‘The trouble with you and me, Mike, is that we don’t live in the real world. We dream of fantastic things that may never happen.’

‘Don’t think of sacrifices in connection with Gipsy’s Acre.’

‘It’s the name, I suppose, and the curse upon it.’

‘There isn’t any curse,’ I shouted. ‘It’s all nonsense. Forget it.’

That was in Greece.