All living things need love. Even plants reach up for the caresses of the sun’s rays. Children and young people need it more than others, so that affection and a sense of security, though important, are no substitute for the real thing. I think that Bartels craved love in later days because, unlike myself, he was starved of it in an early age.
I first met him when we were ten years old and day boys at a little school in York. Then, as later, he was no beauty. He was a little frog-faced chap, with gold-rimmed spectacles, and then, as later, he was of only medium height, and weedily built. During his first two terms he was badly bullied, and I took part in the bullying, and thought it rather fun.
We used to roll him up in the matting in the gymnasium and bounce on him. There was a piano in the gymnasium, too, and singing lessons took place there, and sometimes, for a change, we would poke him under the vaulting horse and keep him there the entire lesson.
Some psychologists say that if you know the cause of irrational fears you are as good as cured. Bartels suffered in afterlife from claustrophobia, which he ascribed to the vaulting horse incidents: but the knowledge didn’t cure him.
When school was over, we would lie in wait for him outside the premises, but after a while he grew to expect this, and would lurk about in the comparative safety of a classroom until time compelled us to go home. I remember to this day the sight of his pale little face pressed against the classroom window as he waited hopefully for us to leave. Poor little Bartels!
After a couple of terms we gave up bullying him, principally because he was a good-humoured fellow, and he and I became firm friends.
At that time my parents had rented a house at Dringhouses, on the outskirts of York. There was a field next door in which black pigs were kept and a stagnant pond. After I had stopped bullying Bartels, we united to bully the pigs by throwing mud balls at them, and occasionally, since this was soon after the First World War, we would play at naval battles with bits of wood on the pond.
During our last term at the school a play was produced in which I had the role of Julius Caesar and Bartels played Cassius. It used to amuse us greatly when I had to speak the famous words:
Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
It never occurred to me then that Bartels could ever be a dangerous man. Even in those days he was such a kind-hearted and gentle chap.
For instance, we used to play a ludicrous card game called “Lams and Biffs,” in which we gambled, not for money but for our personal comfort or discomfort. At the end of the game, various winners inflicted upon various losers a number of whacks with a ruler to equal the points they had gained. Nobody much minded losing to Bartels, because you always got off with a few soft, perfunctory pats.
When we left the little school in York, we went to different preparatory schools, and later, to different public schools, but I still saw a tremendous lot of him in London during the school holidays.
My parents had a modernized flat in Kensington, and because they were gay and interested in everybody, and content with their lot, there was always a joke or two in the evenings, and a friend popping in for a talk and a cup of coffee.
But for Bartels it was different.
He was just thirteen when both his parents were killed in a train crash in France, and he was compelled to go and live with his aunt Emily, her sister, aunt Rose, and his uncle James, a retired colonel of the Somerset regiment, who, in addition to other acts of bravery, had married Bartels’ aunt Rose.
I have come across some quaint households in my time, but nothing that could beat the extraordinary set-up into which Philip Bartels, a lonely and sensitive child, was pitchforked at the impressionable age of thirteen.
There was laughter enough in my home, but the only jokes which amused me when I visited Bartels were quite unintentional and entirely due to the farcical goings-on in that incredible place.
As for friends popping in for a chat, any acquaintances who called, for one reason or another, took their departure as soon as decency permitted, and I don’t blame them.
Yet they were not wicked people. All the people in this record were fundamentally good people, apart from myself, perhaps; which possibly makes the tale of some slight interest, for crime involving wicked people is common enough.
Bartels’ relations were kind and generous. They were very fond of each other, too, and would have given their last stick of furniture to help each other in case of dire emergency. But they were so occupied with the affairs of this world-and indeed of the next world, too-that they had little time to lavish upon Bartels the love which a child needs.
I got to know them well over the years, for I was an only child and glad enough to go round there two or three times a week in the holidays. In the end, I even called them aunt Rose, and uncle James, and aunt Emily, as though they were my own relations.
The house in which Bartels lived was situated off Bayswater Road, its exact address being No. 257 Melville Avenue.
The word conjures up a double row of trees, but if there had ever been any trees in Melville Avenue they must have been long since chopped down, or, more likely, have died of blight. In either case it must have been a merciful release for them.
There was no real colour in Melville Avenue. The houses, each hugging its neighbour, each with its two stucco pillars on either side of a flight of steps, were painted in tones which appeared to have been primarily chosen for their drabness. Some were fawn, some grey, and some had their pillars painted a curiously depressing shade of chocolate brown, or even black. The house owned by aunt Emily had once been painted the shade of weak mustard.
Behind each house was a small garden, bordered by a grimy brick wall, and here lurked various dark-leaved shrubs and trees. Some house-owners tried to grow a patch of lawn-Bartels’ uncle had tried to do so-but the earth was black and sour and full of broken bricks and stones, and the grass grew only thinly and coarsely.
At No. 257 the square of rank grass, with its bald patches and ragged edges, had been surrounded by Bartels’ aunt Rose with a border of large seashells, which made it particularly repulsive. Along the wall at the end of the garden an endless procession of cats passed by day and by night. Some were tabby, some black, some tortoiseshell or white, and a few displayed such a variety of colour and design as to make the imagination boggle at the broad-mindedness of their ancestors.
No. 257 Melville Avenue, like all the neighbouring houses, had a ground floor and basement, and two other stories. Bartels’ aunt Rose, and her husband James, aunt Emily, Cook, and Bartels himself occupied the ground floor and basement.
The first floor was let to a retired district commissioner from East Africa, whose name I have forgotten. I would sometimes see him and his wife passing down the stairs, a spare, yellow-faced, unhappy-looking couple. He had obtained a job as secretary in some minor West End club, and rarely returned until late at night.
Now and again, when my parents went away, I would spend a night at Bartels’ house; and I would hear the wife’s footsteps, as I lay in bed, pacing backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, above my head. Once I heard sobbing. I think she was being driven mad by loneliness.
The top floor was let to an artist in his early thirties, and the woman whom he called his wife, though sometimes carelessly read-dressed letters led aunt Rose to remark good-humouredly that if Mrs Martin were asked to produce her marriage lines she might be hard put to it to find them. The Martins were a gay and happy couple, who kept much to themselves.
Sometimes they gave noisy parties which went on late into the night, and afterwards the guests would make their way on tiptoe, giggling and whispering, down the linoleum-covered stairs. I have sometimes wondered how the district commissioner’s wife felt, as she listened to the sounds of gaiety, so near and yet so far removed from her.
Aunt Rose and uncle James, as from force of habit I still think of them, lived on the ground floor with Bartels; aunt Emily and Cook lived in the basement. It is typical of the remarkable salesmanship of aunt Rose that although aunt Emily owned the house, aunt Rose and her husband occupied the best rooms, though they paid no rent, while aunt Emily lived in the basement.
The reason was clear enough, at least to aunt Rose, and lay in the fact that one day aunt Rose was going to be a millionairess, and was going to keep all the rest of the family in luxury for the remainder of their lives.
All that stood between her and untold riches-computed at compounded interest, the figure ran into hundreds of millions-was the little matter of winning a lawsuit against her husband’s cousin. It was known as Aunt Rose’s Case, and was a subject of incessant discussion.
It was a case with such tortuous ramifications that though I heard it explained a dozen times, though talk of it interrupted on countless occasions my evening games with Bartels, I never really got the hang of it.
I only know it was full of legitimate and illegitimate births, of stolen birth certificates, pages torn out of church registers, wicked sisters, old family nurses who remembered this, and old chief clerks who remembered that; all of whom were prepared to go into the witness box and swear that this or that did or did not happen.
True, one lawyer after another had turned the case down, or quarrelled with aunt Rose. This one had apparently been too weak; that one bribed by the opposition; a third intimidated; a fourth had had the audacity to demand some interim payment.
Invariably, when I returned for the holidays, she had at last found the right man, a real fighter, honest and unafraid of anybody. By Jove, he was going to make them sit up! The writs were going out next week, if Counsel’s opinion were favourable! But it never was.
Bartels’ aunt Rose was a short woman with fair hair, grey eyes, and a belligerent disposition, and prone to emphasize her words by pounding the table with her fist; in contrast, aunt Emily was tall, with a pale oval face, wide, dark, credulous eyes, and an earnest, anxious expression; she wore old-fashioned inexpensive jewellery, odd bits of lace and fur, and in her ears a pair of long black earrings.
There was one snag about aunt Rose’s lawsuit: there was always a bit of money which had to be paid out for something or other.
Uncle James had long since commuted his Army pension and had only a small family allowance left. So aunt Rose used to fall back upon aunt Emily for financial assistance.
I have often wondered whether aunt Rose was a rogue or a misguided woman, and have come to the conclusion that if she twisted aunt Emily out of every penny she could get out of her, which she did, she probably thought that she was really acting in the true interests of everybody. (Even I myself, though no blood relation, was going to benefit financially in some obscure way no longer clear to me, once the great case was won.)
Had she not a case which was just on the point of coming to court, which when won-and who could doubt it would be won! — would enable her to repay aunt Emily every penny she had had from her, including the years of unpaid rent, and enable everybody to buy rich estates in the country and live happily ever after?
The links in the chain were complete, except for one or two paltry bits of evidence which would come to hand at any moment. Who, then, should more properly finance her for a further few months than aunt Emily, who stood to gain so much?
Sometimes aunt Emily was a bit sticky about paying up. You could scarcely blame her. On such occasions the glass and the letters of the alphabet would come out at aunt Rose’s suggestion.
Everybody knew Bartels’ aunt Rose was psychic, because she said so herself, over and over again. Aunt Emily thought that she, too, was psychic, but she would admit in an awed tone that she was not nearly as psychic as aunt Rose.
So in due course, if her sister was being difficult about money, aunt Rose would arrange the letters in a circle around the little, highly polished mahogany table, and place the glass in the middle, and they would both place the tips of their fingers lightly on the upturned glass.
Thus they would sit in silence for a few moments; aunt Rose, untidily dressed, but intense and forceful; and aunt Emily dressed in her eternal bits and pieces, and black earrings, her cow-like eyes, utterly credulous, fixed watchfully on the glass.
Fortunately the spirits never kept them waiting long, largely because they knew, no doubt, that aunt Rose had so much work to do on her case.
I remember the last time I ever saw aunt Rose at work. It was a remarkably fine exhibition.
Aunt Emily had said she had not a penny more to spare for the moment. Not a penny. So after a tactful interval aunt Rose suggested having a turn with the glass. Aunt Emily could never resist it, though she ought to have known by bitter experience exactly what was going to be the end of it.
After the usual short wait, aunt Emily said, in her nervous way:
“Is anybody there? Who is there?”
For a second or two the glass remained immobile while aunt Emily stared raptly into space, her face twisted into the sort of welcoming smile which she imagined a spirit on a short visit to Bayswater might find reassuring. Then the tumbler began to move hesitatingly from letter to letter and spelt out: F-A-T-H-E-R.
“It’s Father!” cried aunt Rose triumphantly. He was, I may add, a frequent astral caller at the Bayswater house.
“Well, well,” said aunt Emily, trying to keep her voice normal, “what do you want, Father? Are you and Mother happy?”
The glass, gaining confidence, moved quickly.
“Y-U-S,” spelt out aunt Emily in a puzzled tone.
“He means ‘Yes,’ ” whispered aunt Rose, quickly separating the U and the E a little more, and replacing her fingers on the glass.
“B-U-T,” said Father, “I A-M,” and paused to think.
“What are you, Father?” asked aunt Emily.
“W-A-R-R-I-E-D.”
“Warried?” Aunt Emily looked at aunt Rose.
“Worried,” said aunt Rose. “Father’s worried. Why are you worried, Father?”
At this stage, aunt Emily should have been the one to be worried, but she never was. She just rushed blindly on to her fate. The answer was always the same:
“R-O-S-E’S C-A-S-E.”
“Rose’s Case,” said aunt Rose, and gave her sister a significant look. It was too late for aunt Emily to back out now without gross disrespect to the dead.
“H-E-L-P,” said Father succinctly, and added: “C-A-S-E W-I–L-L B-E W-O-N S-O-O-N.”
“Isn’t that wonderful!” whispered aunt Rose. But that was not the end; the sting was in the tail, and the glass now moved quickly and surely.
“M-O-N-E-Y N-E-E-D-E-D F-A-M-I–L-Y M-U-
S-T S-T-A-N-D F-O-U-R S-Q-U-A-R-E T-O-G-E- T-H-E-R.”
“How shall we get the money, Father?” asked aunt Emily though she ought to have known. Father seemed to try tactfully to side-step this for a moment, as though to break it gently. He just said: “F-I-G-H-T S-H-O-U-L-D-E-R T-O S-H-O-U-L-
D-E-R,” and was silent. It was as though he were brooding deeply over the whole problem.
Then, apparently having made up his mind, he added starkly: “E-M-I–L-Y M-U-S-T S-E-L–L S-O-M-E S-H-A-R-E-S.” Perhaps because he saw the blank look on aunt Emily’s face he added: “I-F N-E-C-E-S-S-A-R-Y.”
Just occasionally, my parents visited the house, and, once, a rather half-hearted attempt was even made to bounce some money out of my father, but being cynical he remained deaf to astral instructions and no further efforts were made.
Although I never felt sorry for Bartels’ aunt Rose, with her buoyant optimism and continual preoccupation with her great case, I did feel a certain pity for uncle James, her husband, the man around whom the whole case revolved.
He never struck me as having the air of a man who seriously considered himself to have been gravely wronged; indeed, he seemed to regard both the case and the astral messages with a certain good-humoured tolerance. But he was always very cagey when questioned as to his views on both subjects, probably because he held aunt Rose in some awe.
He was a short, well-proportioned man dressed invariably in the style of a country gentleman who had come up to spend an hour or two at Tattersall’s.
He wore loud check suits, usually grey, made of heavy cloth of such superb quality that though they had been made in the late Edwardian period, they still looked new; and on him, somehow, the style still looked smart. He always wore white socks, and, outside the house, grey spats, a brown bowler hat, and carried yellow gloves; his shoes shone like a well-polished Sheraton table. He had fair, thinning hair, a square jaw and straight nose, and keen, merry blue eyes.
One evening I saw uncle James’s car in front of the house; he was polishing the coachwork, whistling and hissing through his teeth like an ostler does when rubbing a horse down after a gallop. It was a very old car, but Bartels’ uncle kept it shining like a new pin.
“Hello, uncle James,” I said. He looked up.
“Hello, Peter!” He roared with laughter. He had the social habit common to his generation of going off into peals of loud laughter if he met somebody unexpectedly.
“How are you?” he said in his loud, cheerful voice. “Phil’s out at the moment, but he’ll be back soon.”
We chatted for a while and then made our way to the dreary expanse of coarse grass and dark green foliage behind the house, and walked up and down, discussing the sort of garden he would like to have, the vagaries of his car, and the scarcity of money, while a grimy-looking tabby cat sat on the wall dreaming of the infinite.
“How’s the case?” I asked at length.
“I believe Rose is up to some new dodge or other. This new lawyer fella was no good after all. Ah, well, it’s a poor heart that never rejoices,” he added.
“It certainly is.”
“I’d like to have a day out hunting before I die, I must say. I get tired of being the poor relation, Pete.”
He paused to light his pipe, sucking in the smoke with short, vigorous puffs, so that in a few seconds there was a thick cloud of acrid blue smoke around him.
It seemed odd that a man who had had charge of the destinies of a great regiment, who had been a local god to a thousand men, should be pacing up and down a seedy garden in Bayswater, dreaming of one last day out with the hounds before he died. He longed for a job, and it seemed to him bewildering that though he was over sixty, and untrained in anything except war, nobody would offer him one.
To the end of his days he never gave up hope, either of a job or of a last day’s hunting. He got neither, of course.
Uncle James helped daily with the housework, tended the garden, carried the coals, chopped wood, cleaned the shoes, and pressed his own clothes; he was always as immaculately clean as in the days when a batman had looked after him.
When she occasionally grew fretful about handing out money in accordance with Father’s wishes from Beyond, aunt Emily would sometimes suggest that her sister’s one spare room could be used to house a rich lodger. Doubtless she envisaged some old recluse, full of years and money, who would eventually die and leave them his fortune. But aunt Rose said it would be “bad for James’s nerves,” not that he was ever known to suffer from any.
Looking back now over the years, I see they were a cheerful, feckless couple who wasted their substance chasing a mirage; who fed well, and were never without a bottle of whisky in the house; who ran up bills which they could not pay, and believed that the world owed them a living.
But they were sweethearts from the day they met until the day when death came to aunt Rose, and the dustman eventually carted away the vast accumulation of papers in the case that aunt Rose never won, and never could have won, had she lived to be a hundred.
I smile when I think of them, Bartels’ aunt Rose, aunt Emily and uncle James; time has erased from the memory such blemishes of character as they may have had, and wiped out the recollections of the inevitable little acrimonious squabbles which arose between them.
They were kind to Philip Bartels, they were genuinely fond of him, but that is as far as it went. Aunt Emily was too occupied with her stocks and shares and her tenants, and aunt Rose was too occupied fighting the legal scoundrel, and rogues who declined to work for her without payments to develop any real love of him.
Even uncle James never really took to him, for Bartels had never hunted, never showed much interest in the Army as a career, and at that time did not know one end of a shotgun from another.
That, then, was the boyhood background of the man the cool-brained Beatrice married, the girl whose arrival at the chateau was followed, appropriately, as it now seems, by one of the most violent thunderstorms in the history of the Sologne area.
Few lives are completely tragic or even sombre. Bartels’ boyhood had its amusing side, even its ludicrous moments, but he was too young fully to appreciate them.
In retrospect his youth seems, on the whole, not unpleasant. There have been many worse. But it did him no good, no good at all. Bartels needed more emotional warmth than he could ever find at 257 Melville Avenue; more, too, than Beatrice Wilson could ever give him, either before or after they were married.