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  SHORT STORIES

  Sarah Caudwell

  An Acquaintance with Mr. Collins

  The train has reached Reading, and I still have not decided whether to say anything to Selena concerning the late Mr. Collins. It is hardly probable that anything can be proved; it is even possible that there is nothing to prove; and unwarranted investigation might cause undeserved distress. Murder, on the other hand, is a practice not to be encouraged.

  I could almost wish that I had not, finding myself with an hour or so to spare before a dinner engagement in central London, chosen to pass it in the Corkscrew. Had I spent it in some other hostelry, I should now be returning to Oxford with a mind untroubled by any more disquieting burden than my responsibilities as Tutor in Legal History at St. George’s College. It is idle, however, to regret my decision. It was to the Corkscrew that I directed my steps, and indeed in the hope that I might find there one or two of my young friends in Lincoln’s Inn.

  I am well enough known there, it seems, for the barman to remember who I am and in whose company I am most often to be found.

  “If you’re looking for some of your friends, Professor Tamar,” he said as he handed me my glass of Nierstein, “you’ll find Miss Jardine right at the back there.”

  Selena was sitting alone at one of the little oak tables, in an attitude less carefree than one expects of a young barrister in the middle of the summer vacation: her blonde head was bent over a set of papers, which she was examining with the critical expression of a Persian cat having doubts about the freshness of its fish. Reflecting, however, that in the flickering candlelight she could not in fact be attempting to read them, and that in deliberate search of solitude she would hardly have come to the Corkscrew, I did not hesitate to join her.

  She greeted me with every sign of pleasure, and invited me to tell her the latest news from Oxford; but I soon perceived, having accepted the invitation, that her attention was elsewhere.

  “My dear Selena,” I said gently, “the story I have been telling you about the curious personal habits of our new Dean was told to the Bursar, in the strictest confidence, only this morning, and may well not be common knowledge until the middle of next week. It seems a pity to waste it on an unappreciative audience.”

  She looked apologetic.

  “I’m sorry, Hilary. I’m afraid I’m still thinking of something I was dealing with this afternoon. I happened to be the only Junior left in Chambers—the others are all on holiday—and the senior partner in Pitkin and Shoon came in in rather a dither, wanting advice in conference as a matter of urgency. I’m told he’s quite a good commercial lawyer, but he candidly admits to being completely at sea over anything with a Chancery flavour. So whenever a trust or a will or anything like that comes his way, he pops into Lincoln’s Inn to get the advice of Counsel. And since the sums involved are generally enough to justify what might otherwise seem an extravagance, one wouldn’t like to discourage him.”

  I nodded, well understanding that a solicitor such as Mr. Pitkin would be cherished by the Chancery Bar like the most golden of geese.

  “He’s inclined to fuss about things that don’t really present any problem, so I thought I’d be able to put his mind at rest quite easily about whatever it was that was worrying him. The trouble is, I wasn’t, and I can’t help wondering… It might help to clear my mind if I could talk it over with someone. If you’d care to hear about it…?”

  “My dear Selena,” I said, “I should be honored. I must remind you, however, that I am an historian rather than a laywer—on any intricate point of law, I fear that my views will be of but little value.”

  “Oh,” said Selena, “there’s nothing difficult about the law. The law’s quite clear, I can advise on it in two sentences. But the sequence of events, you see, is rather unusual, and in certain circumstances might be thought slightly… sinister.”

  The matter on which Mr. Pitkin had required advice was the estate, amounting in value to something between three and four million pounds sterling, of his late client Mr. Albert Barnsley. Having acted for Mr. Barnsley for many years in connection with various commercial enterprises, he was familiar with the details of his background and private life. He had related these to Selena at greater length than she could at first believe necessary for the purpose of her advising on the devolution of the estate.

  The later Mr. Barnsley (Mr. Pitkin had told her) was what is termed a self-made man. Born in Yorkshire, the son of poor but respectable parents, he had left school at the age of sixteen, and after completing his national service had obtained employment in quite a humble capacity with a local manufacturing company. By the age of forty he had risen to the position of managing director—a sign, as I supposed, that he possessed all those qualities of drive, initiative and enterprise which I am told are required for success in the world of commerce and industry.

  “Yes,” said Selena, thoughtfully sipping her wine. “Yes, I suppose he must have had those qualities. And others, perhaps, which moralists don’t seem to value so highly—the ability to make himself agreeable, for example, in particular to women. His progres was not impeded, at any rate, by the fact that he had married the chairman’s daughter.”

  “Perhaps,” I said, “she was anxious to be married, and he was her only suitor.”

  “Far from it, apparently. According to Mr. Pitkin, Isabel was a strikingly attractive woman who could have married anyone she wanted, but she set her heart on Albert Barnsley. Her father, as you might expect, was something less than delighted. But Isabel talked him round in the end, and he gave the young couple his blessing and a rather elegant house to live in. Mind you, he didn’t take any more chances than he could help—he put the house in trust for Isabel and any children she might have, and when he died he left his estate on the same trusts.”

  “So Barnsley did not in fact benefit from his wife’s wealth?”

  “Not directly, no, apart from living in the house, but that’s not quite the point. I don’t say that being the chairman’s son-in-law would mean he could rise without merit, but it would tend to mean, don’t you think, that there was less danger of his merits going unrecognized? And after her father died, of course, Isabel’s trust fund included quite a substantial holding in the company, and her husband could always rely on the trustees to support his decisions. Quite apart from that, Isabel was very skilful at dealing with the other major shareholders—after all, she’d known most of them since she was a child. She was a woman of considerable charm and personality, wholeheartedly devoted to her husband’s interests, and there doesn’t seem to be much doubt that she contributed very significantly to his success.”

  “Were there any children?”

  “One daughter—Amanda, described by Mr. Pitkin as something of a tomboy. The sort of girl, he says, who’d rather have a bicycle for her birthday than a new dress. Actually it sounds as if she’d probably have got both, being an object of total adoration on the part of her parents. Her father in particular was enormously proud of her. People used to ask him sometimes if he wouldn’t rather have had a son, and he used to say that Amanda was a son as well as a daughter—she could do anything a boy could do, he said, and do it a damn sight better. But I’m talking of five or six years ago, when Amanda was in her mid-teens. After that things changed.”

  Under Mr. Barnsley’s management the company had flourished, expanded and in due course been taken over by a larger company. The takeover was not one which he had any reason to resist: his personal shareholding was by now substantial, and the price offered—as well as increasing the value of the funds held in trust for his wife and daughter—was sufficient to make him, as Selena put it, seriously rich.

  The terms agreed for the takeover included his appointment to a senior position
in the company making the acquisition: he was an active and energetic man, still in his forties, and the prospect of retirement held no charms for him. Though his new responsibilities required his presence in London during the working week, he had no wish to sever his connections with his home town or to uproot his family. He accordingly acquired a small bachelor flat in central London and returned at weekends to the house in Yorkshire.

  “That is to say,” said Selena, “he began by doing so. But after a while the weekends in Yorkshire became less frequent, and eventually ceased altogether. You will not find it difficult, I imagine, to guess the reason.”

  “I suppose,” I said, “that he had formed an attachment to some young woman in London—what is termed, I believe, a popsie.”

  “I think,” said Selena, “that the current expression is bimbo. Though in the present case that perhaps gives a slightly misleading expression. Natalie wasn’t at all the sort of girl who dresses up in mink and mascara and gets her picture in the Sunday newspapers. There wasn’t anything glamorous or sophisticated about her—she was just a typist in Barnsley’s office. She was from the same part of the world that he was, and it was her first job in London—I suppose in a way that gave them something in common, and perhaps made him feel protective towards her. She was young, of course—about twenty-two—and reasonably pretty, but nothing remarkable. That’s Mr. Pitkin’s view, at any rate—he found her rather colourless, especially by comparison with Isabel.”

  It occurred to me that it might have been the contrast with Isabel that Barnsley had found attractive. It was clear that his wife had given him a great deal; but if it is more blessed to give than receive, then plainly Natalie offered him ampler scope for beatitude.

  “No doubt,” said Selena. “But as you will have gathered, she wasn’t the kind of girl who wanted to be given jewellery or dinners at the Savoy or anything like that. It’s rather a pity really, because with a little luck and discretion Barnsley could have had that sort of affair without upsetting anyone, and they would have all lived happily ever after. But Natalie was the domesticated sort, and wanted to be married. And he couldn’t give her that quite so easily.”

  Because Isabel declined to divorce him. Mr. Pitkin, having reluctantly and with embarrassment accepted instructions to negotiate with her on Mr. Barnsley’s behalf, had found her implacable. There was nothing, she said, to negotiate about: she did not want anything from her husband that he was now able to offer her; and she saw no reason to make things easy for him. If she ever found herself in a position, by raising her little finger, to save him from a painful and lingering death, she hoped (she said) that she would still have the common humanity to raise it; but to be candid, she felt some doubt on the matter. Mr. Pitkin had perhaps been slightly shocked at the depth of her bitterness.

  “Though it seems to me,” said Selena, “to be quite understandable. It must be peculiarly disconcerting, don’t you think, to be left for someone entirely different from oneself? Not just like going into one’s bank and being told there’s no money in one’s account when one thought there was, but like going in and being told one’s never had an account there at all. A feeling that all along one must somehow have completely misunderstood the situation.”

  I asked what Amanda’s attitude had been.

  “Extreme hosility towards her father. It was, you may think, very natural and proper that she should take her mother’s side, but I gather it went a good deal further than that. She seems to have felt a sense of personal betrayal.”

  I thought that too was understandable. When a man forms an attachment to a woman young enough to be his daughter, I suppose that his daughter may feel as deeply injured as his wife; and for Amanda, as for Isabel, it must have been peculiarly wounding that he seemed to love his mistress for qualities precisely opposite to those which he had seemed to value in herself.

  “At first,” continued Selena, “she simply refused to see him or speak to him. But eventually she found that an inadequate way of expressing her feelings, and she wrote him a letter. Mr. Pitkin still has a copy of it on his file, but he said rather primly that he couldn’t ask a lady like myself to read it. I don’t actually suppose that Amanda Barnsley at the age of seventeen knew any expressions which are unfamiliar to me after several years in Lincoln’s Inn, but one wouldn’t wish to shatter Mr. Pitkin’s illusions. It was clearly in the crudest and most offensive terms that Amanda could think of, particularly in its references to Natalie, and was evidently designed to enrage her father beyond all endurance.”

  “And did it succeed?”

  “Oh, admirably. Within an hour of receiving it Mr. Barnsley was storming up and down the offices of Pitkin and Shoon demanding a new will, the main purpose of which was to ensure that Amanda could not in any circumstances inherit a penny of his estate. Poor Mr. Pitkin tried to calm him down and persuade him not to act with undue haste, but of course it wasn’t the least bit of use. So Mr. Pitkin, following his usual practice, came along to Lincoln’s Inn to have the will drafted by Counsel, and it was executed by Mr. Barnsley three days later. The effect of it was that the whole estate would go to Natalie, provided that she survived him by a period of twenty-eight days, but if she didn’t then to various charities. Not, of course, because he especially wanted to benefit the charities, but to make sure that there couldn’t in any circumstances be an intestacy, under which Amanda or her mother might benefit as his next-of-kin.”

  “Did Amanda know that she had been disinherited?”

  “Oh yes—her father straightaway wrote a letter to Isabel, telling her in detail exactly what he’d done. His letter, I regret to say, was not in conciliatory terms—it made various disagreeable comments on what he called Isabel’s vindictiveness in preventing him from marrying the woman he loved and referred to Amanda as “your hell-cat of a daughter”. It was written, I need hardly say, without the advice or approval of poor Mr. Pitkin. Isabel didn’t answer it, and there was no further communication between them for a period of some three years. Perhaps, before I go on with the story, you would care for another glass of wine?”

  I wondered, while Selena made her ways toward the bar, how she would justify the epithet “unusual”. The events she had recounted, though no doubt uniquely distressing to the principals, seemed to me thus far to be all too regrettably commonplace. I recalled, however, that she had also used the word “sinister”; and that Mr. Barnsley was dead.

  Returning to our table with replenished glasses, Selena resumed her story.

  “In the spring of this year Mr. Pitkin received a letter from Isabel. She had not written direct to her husband, she said, for fear that he might not open her letter, or that if he did that he might have the embarassment of doing so ‘in the presence of someone else’. But there were matters which she felt they should now discuss, and she did not think that her husband would regret seeing her. She would be most grateful if Mr. Pitkin would arrange a meeting.

  “I have the impression that poor Mr. Pitkin was rather alarmed to hear from her. Though, as I have said, he admired her personality and charm, I think that he was also rather frightened of her, and he was by no means sure that she didn’t mean to make trouble of some kind.

  “Mr. Barnsley evidently shared these misgivings, and was more than half-inclined to refuse to see her. But she seemed to be hinting that she might now be prepare to agree to a divorce, and that was enough to persuade him. It would have been another two years before a divorce could take place without her consent, and Natalie was still very unhappy about what she saw as the insecurity of her position.

  “He seems to have hoped at first that he would be supported by the presence of his solicitor, but Mr. Pitkin very prudently said it was out of the question, since Isabel had asked for a private meeting. Besides, if her husband were accompanied by his legal adviser and she were not, it mght look as though they were trying to browbeat her.

  “So a week later Mr Barnsley summoned up the fortitude and resolve which had made him a captain
of British industry and set forth alone and unprotected to have tea with his wife at the Ritz Hotel. He though, Mr. Pitkin tells me, that the Ritz would be the safest place to meet her—meaning, as I understand it, the least likely place for a woman such as Isabel to make a scene.”

  She wanted, it seemed, to talk to him about their daughter. Amanda was now twenty, reading English at a provincial university and specializing in the nineteenth-century novel—she had formed a great passion for the Brontës. Her academic progress was satisfactory, and she was perfectly well behaved—almost unnaturally so, perhaps, for someone who had been such a lively and exuberant schoolgirl. Of recent months, however, she had seemed to be out of spirits, and during the Easter vacation had shown such signs of depression as to cause her mother serious concern.

  Isabel had questioned her; Amanda had denied that anything was wrong; too anxious to be tactful, Isabel had persisted. Amanda had at last admitted the cause of her dejection: in spite of everything, she still found it unbearable to be estranged from her father. The admission was made with many tears, as evidencing an unforgivable disloyalty to her mother.

  Isabel had been dismayed. The bitterness which she had at first felt towards her husband had faded (she said) into an amiable indifference; it had not occurred to her that her daughter’s feelings towards him were more intense, and that the girl was still tormented by conflicted loyalties.

  It was (said Isabel) a piece of heart-breaking nonsense: when all she minded about was making Amanda happy, she turned out to be making her miserable. If Amanda wanted to be reconciled with her father, then let them be reconciled; if the fact of his still being married to Isabel was in some way an impediment, the let there, by all means, be a divorce.

  “Which meant, as I understand it,” said Selena, “that her consent to a divorce was conditional on Barnsley making friends with Amanda again. This account of Amanda’s feelings is all based, of course, on what Isabel told him—you may perhaps choose to take a more cynical view of her motives.”