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  I always enjoy my encounters with Arthur Holroyd. So I was both surprised and delighted to be greeted by him under the main portico at Vailes only some ten days after Lord Lucius Senderhill’s death.

  2

  ‘Ho-Ho!’ Holroyd said. ‘Ho-ho, ho-ho! So you are to be on the rummage too.’

  ‘My dear Holroyd, this is a great surprise. I had no idea you were to be at Vailes.’ I stood beside my suitcase, and watched the cab by which I had been transported from a fairly remote railway station retreating down the drive. ‘How very pleasant.’

  ‘No idea, you say? I hope that doesn’t make my position irregular, eh? Are you our late friend’s executor, or anything of that kind? The Society got me here because there was a letter from a local solicitor, transmitting some expressed wish of Senderhill’s recorded a long time ago. But don’t let us stand around.’ Holroyd dived with surprising speed for my suitcase, getting his hand on it triumphantly before me. ‘You’ll want to wash, my dear chap – and then we can perhaps get some tea.’

  ‘I never acted for Lucius Senderhill in my life.’ It seemed best to get my position clear. ‘But Lord Melchester is a client of ours, and he’s rather anxious about some of Senderhill’s papers. He fixed up my coming down, I imagine, with the same local man who contacted your Society.’

  ‘Ho-ho! A joint rummage, as I said. Now come along. I’ve been here only since this morning. But I’m beginning to know the ropes. Mind these steps. They’re a bit slimy. Some kind of lichen, I’d say. Mixed up with last autumn’s beech-leaves.’

  ‘I see one has to be careful.’ It had already become apparent that this main entrance to the solidities, indeed the splendours, of Vailes was not precisely swept and garnished. I made an unsuccessful attempt to take over my suitcase. ‘Aren’t there any servants?’ I asked.

  ‘All departed.’

  ‘What an extraordinary thing!’

  ‘Well, all except a Mrs Uff. She may be called a housekeeper in the Victorian taste. And I believe she has a daughter, although the child has not yet manifested herself. How many other servants there were – whether within or without this sizeable mansion – I don’t know. Probably not many. And they’ve all been packed off. Quick work. One supposes there isn’t too much money to spare.’

  ‘I see.’ We were now standing in a hall, delicately oval and massively marble, within the confines of which it would have been possible to mark out something like a tennis court. In sundry niches sundry Senderhills, dressed in togas, stood like ball-boys attentive to an invisible game. ‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘that it will be made into some sort of reformatory. It was a grave folly in the third Marquess, turning Vailes into a mere bolt-hole for younger sons. Une folie des grandeurs. No good could come of it.’

  ‘No doubt, no doubt. A responsible family solicitor’s view. But the immediate problem is, where are you to be put up? Mrs Uff hasn’t mentioned expecting you, but she is a reticent woman, so you must not lose hope.’ Holroyd showed signs of saying ‘Ho-ho!’ again, but thought better of it. ‘If we walk on into the saloon, it may be possible to ring a bell.’

  At this moment, however, Mrs Uff appeared unsummoned, and proved to be a competent if commonplace woman in middle life. Moreover she had been properly apprised of my arrival, and presently led me up an imposing staircase to the chamber prepared for me. It was an enormous room, and was fitted with proportionately enormous radiators of the sort to be found in houses which pioneered the luxury of steam heating at some time during the earlier reign of Queen Victoria. A glance told me that I had no hope of them, and I was glad that we were enjoying a mild spring. With a certain restrained showmanship, Mrs Uff opened the door upon my bathroom. This was excessively lofty, was sheathed in what might have been massive bits and pieces of marble left over from the hall below, and contained a tub which struck me as adequate for the ablutions of a small elephant. The various shower and douche mechanisms were particularly elaborate. I wondered whether any hot water conceivably ran to them.

  ‘My daughter will bring up some hot water,’ Mrs Uff said, resolving this question. ‘And tea will be at five. It was his late lordship’s hour.’ Mrs Uff appeared in no doubt that, in the persons of Holroyd and myself, it was a species of half-gentry that had begun to descend on Vailes. ‘And the vicar,’ she added somewhat unexpectedly, ‘is coming to dinner at eight. It will be in the steward’s room.’ Mrs Uff paused, as if some faint dubiety had after all assailed her. ‘Because I can light a fire there, sir,’ she added, and with well-trained noiselessness withdrew.

  The room being of a sort tolerably familiar to me, I glanced round it only absently. It contained no less than three telephones, all of them standing on the floor, and all looking as if they had been purveyed to some long-deceased Senderhill by an emissary of Mr Thomas Edison or Mr Graham Bell (as indeed they probably had). On a table beside the bed lay a bible, an excellently preserved copy of The Wonder Book of Trains, and a slim pink volume which might have been the Thoughts of Chairman Mao, but which proved to be the Golden Sayings of Marcus Aurelius. Only the wallpaper was Chinese, and enriching it were a few faded water-colour sketches by departed Senderhill ladies. It was evident that the intellectual interests of the late Lord Lucius had not extended to impressing themselves upon this apartment.

  The thought of Lord Lucius made me reflect on the nature of my own mission to Vailes, and I decided that there was no reason why I should not communicate this quite fully to Holroyd. It was simple enough. Although he lived and died a bachelor, Lucius Senderhill had been normal in his sexual tastes, and in a discreet way by no means a stranger to women. But not, perhaps, quite always discreetly. There had been a couple of entanglements, known within the family, the publicising of which would be distinctly mortifying. Lord Melchester, as the family’s head, was fearful that some record of these might be extant in his kinsman’s papers, and had formed the somewhat irrational notion that a search should be made for them. In order to have this carried out, he needed (or believed he needed) nothing but the permission of the Trustees of the Senderhill Settled Estates. (I need not explain this. The trend of social legislation being as it is, people like the Senderhills have to protect their property through all sorts of curious inventions.) Having gained his point, he promptly called on me and asked me to undertake the job. It was, of course, very much employment for a responsible confidential clerk. But Lord Melchester was pressing; there seemed nothing particularly objectionable in what Holroyd was now cheerfully terming a rummage; and I had agreed to spend a short time at Vailes. I was not uninfluenced by the recollection that the place was supposed to shelter historical records going back far beyond Lord Lucius’s time, and that it might therefore be possible to gratify certain mild antiquarian interests of my own.

  There was a knock, or rather a bang, on the door, and a young girl who I knew must be Mrs Uff’s daughter entered the bedroom. It was a singularly gauche entrance, for she was a lumpish and awkward creature, and apparently proud of the fact. I am not certain, indeed, that this was my sole first impression of her. Knowing what I now know, it is easy to persuade myself that the child (for she was little more than that) carried some other and indefinable suggestion about with her. But certainly she was largely unattractive. Although somebody, presumably her mother, had endeavoured to dress her neatly, she herself had managed – I suppose by a toss of her hair, a twist to her dress, a wrinkle in a stocking, the flopping carpet slippers on her feet – to express a kind of slovenly and sullen discontent. She was carrying a copper hot-water can of the old-fashioned sort, and as she crossed the room without glancing at me or speaking she contrived the further manifesto of slopping a good saucerful of water on the carpet.

  Rather oddly, it was this girl’s appearance in my room that gave me my first and only vivid sense that Lucius Senderhill was indeed dead. (I hadn’t, after all, known him at all well.) During his lifetime, even in his last years, it would have been impossible that so graceless an apology for trained service should have ma
de itself visible to a guest at Vailes. This child – whom Senderhill’s mother, if not Senderhill himself, would have described technically as an ‘encumbrance’ – would never have ventured beyond some baize door in the inferior regions of the mansion.

  Naturally enough, I at once reproached myself for this uncharitable judgement upon a child who was only helping out her mother as well as she could. It certainly wasn’t her fault that whatever footmen or housemaids there may have been had departed. Probably she would have further unaccustomed tasks when it came to that dinner in the steward’s room. In any case, I ought to try to be pleasant to her.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said, when she had put the hot water in the cavernous bathroom and appeared again. ‘You are Mrs Uff’s daughter? What is your name?’

  ‘Martha, sir.’ The girl’s expression, as she glanced at me fleetingly for the first time, was suspicious and perhaps hostile. But there was something not unattractive about her voice – and it wasn’t at all that her mother had been working at her articulation in the fond hope of preparing her for good service. Her mere accent was hideous. Apart from this, she didn’t improve on further scrutiny. And she certainly didn’t want to cultivate my acquaintance, for she was edging in an ungainly fashion towards the door. ‘Will that be all, sir?’ she asked. This time, the phrase was certainly something she had been taught.

  ‘Thank you, yes, Martha. I shall be quite comfortable.’ As I uttered these words, the curious persuasion came to me that this child was frightened – more frightened than was to be accounted for by her having been promoted to perform unwonted services for a stranger. It was as if she suffered a dull but burdensome apprehension that I was dangerous. So I made a further effort to get on terms with her. ‘Have you and your mother been long at Vailes?’

  ‘I never see’d nothing, nor I never done nothing!’ This inconsequent reply came from Martha Uff with explosive force. Following it, she stood silent and gaping, as if shattered by her own outburst.

  ‘My dear child,’ I said, ‘I think you must misunderstand me. Why—’

  ‘Yer the police, aren’t yer?’

  ‘I’m certainly nothing of the kind!’

  ‘But my mum says yer ‘im as puts the law on people.’

  ‘I am what is called a lawyer, Martha.’ I saw that either Mrs Uff’s expository power was singularly defective or that her daughter was what is euphemistically termed mentally retarded. ‘But that doesn’t mean I have anything to do with the police.’

  ‘’E’d take me into the dark to show me something.’ Miss Uff again spoke with panic inconsequence. ‘But ‘e never managed it, ‘e didn’t. I never see’d nothing. I never done nothing, I say.’

  I should have been a poor lawyer had I not felt at this point cogent reasons for bringing my conversation with Martha Uff to an end. On the other hand, I was not very clear that I had not a duty to proceed. The latter view – or perhaps mere curiosity – prevailed. I asked her who had been by way of taking her into the dark.

  ‘’Im. ‘Is lordship, ‘e’d took something into ‘is ‘ead, ‘e ‘ad. But I never—’

  ‘All right, Martha. Perhaps we shall talk about this again. But I don’t think you should speak of it too much – except, of course, to your mother. I suppose she knows about it?’

  But to this I got no reply. Martha Uff had exhausted either her will or her ability to communicate. She gave me one brief look – which this time seemed less alarmed than abruptly apathetic – and slip-slopped out of the room.

  Ten minutes later I quitted it myself, and as I made my way downstairs I wondered whether I ought to recount this odd episode to Holroyd. I decided to get a clearer notion of his own business at Vailes first. It seemed unlikely that some senile impropriety on Lucius Senderhill’s part (for this was presumably what I had been hearing about) would be relevant to my friend’s enquiries.

  The steward’s room proved to be rather like my own office – only somewhat larger and better appointed. Mrs Uff brought in the tea. The china and appurtenances were of a very modest sort, and it amused me to notice that Holroyd found this circumstance irritating. I was chiefly concerned, however, to take a better look at Martha’s mother. She had been a good-looking woman in her day, I thought, and she was well-spoken in an upper servant’s fashion. The uncouth articulations which overlay that indefinably attractive quality in her daughter’s voice probably represented the child’s only substantial acquirement at the village school. I had failed to discover whether Mrs Uff had been made acquainted with Martha’s adventures with her employer. If she had, she must be congratulating herself that Lord Lucius was safely dead without any positive scandal having transpired. That kind of thing can be disadvantageous to one in superior domestic employment.

  Over my first cup, and between unenthusiastic nibbles at a piece of cake which seemed to be composed mainly of caraway seeds, I gave Holroyd a brief account of my mission. It was greeted with a very pardonable ‘Ho-ho!’

  ‘You think,’ I said laughing, ‘that I have taken on a ludicrous assignment out of an odious obsequiousness before the higher nobility.’

  ‘No, no – nothing of the kind. Or ludicrous, yes. But your acquiescence is a matter of courtesy, my dear fellow – or, at the most, a proper deference to a former Minister of the Crown.’

  ‘I don’t think Melchester was ever anything of the sort.’

  ‘Well, well – you know what I mean. But of course you won’t find anything. Compromising outpourings in a diary? Threatening letters from outraged husbands? Senderhill would have destroyed anything of the sort.’

  ‘I rather agree. And even if there was anything lying around, it would be discreetly dealt with by whoever comes to do the routine tidy-up. But, on a larger view, some of the Senderhill papers may be interesting. It’s said that Vailes still shelters some of them from centuries back.’

  ‘Ho-ho! So that’s it.’ Holroyd was delighted. ‘Then you’re likely to be one up on me. Mine is going to be a wild goose chase pure and simple. It’s those damned, old-fashioned cross-correspondences, you know. And similar hoary dodges. They’re all more or less invalidated anyway, now that we realise the alarming range of precognitive telepathy. Nothing to prevent the living Lucius Senderhill in 1940 dropping something into the mind of somebody in 1960 or 1980.’

  ‘Even if that person wasn’t born until 1950?’

  ‘A good question.’ Holroyd was now perfectly serious. ‘But let me tell you one of the things that I’m supposed to find here, and that the Society is supposed to judge significant.’

  ‘Significant of what?’

  ‘Of Lucius Senderhill’s continued personal existence in a hereafter. He has undertaken to demonstrate it if he possibly can. And there’s a notion he’s picked on Mrs Gladwish. You understand me? The deceased Lucius has picked on the living Mrs Gladwish.’

  ‘He seems not to have lost much time. But who the devil is Mrs Gladwish?’

  ‘A highly reputable non-physical medium. Just the person to be nobbled by a Lord. And she’s said to have picked up some of the bits and pieces. I’m supposed to find the others – impressively under seal – in this house. It’s very simple. Heroic couplets.’

  ‘Holroyd – I think I’m right in believing that you don’t believe in all this?’

  ‘Not in—well let’s say not in the heroic couplets. If we survive, then presumably we also pre-exist – and I’m blessed if I’ve ever been able to swallow that one. But let me tell you about the heroic couplets. Here at Vailes, in the solitude of his august library, Senderhill composed a sizeable run of them. Or he may have done, for it’s by no means certain that the project ever realised itself. But say he did. He then memorised his poem—’

  ‘It was to be a coherent poem?’

  ‘Certainly, but of a not too simple sort. He memorised the thing, and then he copied out either the first or second line of each couplet. He sealed up that copy, stowed it somewhere or other round this house—’

  ‘Why on earth d
idn’t he deposit it with your Society?’

  ‘Some notion of minimising the operation of clairvoyance. It’s all bien vieux jeu, as I say. And then, of course, he burnt the original poem. You can see what is meant to happen.’

  ‘Mrs Gladwish falls into a trance, and produces sundry disconnected lines of decasyllabic verse. After that has taken place, whatever you find here at Vailes is opened, and what is found is more lines of decasyllabic verse. Somebody does a little piecing together, and the result is the reconstruction of Senderhill’s original rhyming poem. And half of it can only have come, via Mrs Gladwish, from beyond the grave.’

  ‘That is certainly the idea, and I won’t say it isn’t a clever one. Whether there are not some soft spots in the logic – well, that’s another matter.’

  ‘Does Mrs Gladwish realise that verse is required of her?’

  ‘She’s not supposed to. In fact, and to be fair, I think it highly probable that none of the few people who know about the project has told her. What may have seeped around in a commonplace extra-sensory way it’s quite impossible to tell. Anyway, Mrs Gladwish has been producing verse.’