Carson's Conspiracy Read online

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ Lady Appleby said this with a rapid decisiveness which entirely masked her finding her host’s phraseology mildly funny.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Sir John Appleby echoed loyally. He may have been judging that nothing but boredom was going to result from association with these newish and rather unattractive neighbours. But if this was his thought, Appleby was wrong.

  ‘Oh, very well,’ Carl Carson said somewhat pettishly to his wife that evening. ‘Fix it up as you please. But that little dauber must come here. I won’t go traipsing off to a studio.’

  ‘But of course Mr Lely will be only too pleased, I’m sure, dear. Such a chance for him! After that obscure provincial mayor, you know.’

  ‘I suppose that’s so.’ Although Carson knew perfectly well that it wasn’t so, this tactful speech had its effect. ‘By the way, those Applebys from Dream. What about them? Before they put him out to grass, was the chap some tin-pot mandarin in Whitehall?’

  ‘Whitehall? I don’t think so. I don’t think Scotland Yard is in Whitehall.’

  ‘Scotland Yard?’

  ‘Sir John ran it, dear. He was called the Commissionaire, or something like that.’

  ‘Was he, indeed?’ Not for the first time, Carl Carson reflected that the woman wasn’t merely mad. She was pretty well an idiot too.

  2

  Carl Carson, who was so clearly not all that keen on his wife, had no particular fondness for his country either. At least until we reflect, we may judge this ungrateful in him. England had done him pretty well. As with John Bunyan’s Mr By-Ends, his great-grandfather was but a waterman, and although his grandfather had risen to the ownership of a wherry, his father, while continuing to follow aquatic pursuits, had achieved his share in the family betterment through some years of loyal service to persons seeing to it that a reasonable number of crates of whisky and gin had fallen off the back of lorries serving London’s docks. The devotion thus exhibited by Carl Carson’s father had enabled him to put a little by. It hadn’t, however, been nearly enough to preserve him from eventually being put by himself, and he had in fact been for some six months in gaol when his son Carl was born.

  Although there are plenty of self-made men around, few have in fact made themselves from an initial station so strikingly disadvantageous as this of Carl Carson’s. How had he managed it? Anybody asking himself this question (but perhaps nobody ever did) would have reflected that the man was seemingly devoid of any sort of intellectual distinction; was equally lacking in personal charm; and – unlike his dream-son – hadn’t even the advantage of having passed through a slap-up Business School. What he did possess was nerve, and a certain reach and boldness of imagination. His path was littered with fallen rivals of whom it might be said that he had simply taken the breath away. And to these endowments there was undoubtedly something in the English social structure that gave abundant scope. Yet of that social structure Carl Carson was far from enamoured. This was because England, as everyone knows, is a terribly class-bound place.

  Carson would have told himself that he simply hadn’t bothered with the lingoes as he moved up the income brackets. He had learnt to play golf, and could have assessed very accurately the financial standing of the loud-voiced, confident men with the showy cars whom he met in the clubhouses. But he hadn’t much listened to them, since they were insignificant people whom he was overtaking and leaving in his glittering wake. The habit of inattention had stuck, so that he was still liable to call a magazine a book, and had quite recently had a similar spot of linguistic trouble over Garford House, the country retreat in which we have been present at his entertaining the Lelys and Applebys. Garford House had some quite ancient bits and pieces, so he had managed to signalise his having acquired it by means of a small illustrated article in a society journal. Having gathered, however, that only rather low-class estate agents apply the word ‘home’ to houses they are seeking to sell to anyone that comes along, he had taken exception to the appearance, in a caption, of the phrase ‘the country home of Mr and Mrs Carl Carson’. Unfortunately, instead of insisting on ‘residence’, which would have passed muster on a slightly formal note, he had insisted on ‘seat’. ‘The Berkshire seat,’ he had made the thing read, ‘of Carl Carson Esquire’. This, being distinctly on the pretentious side, occasioned mild amusement among his associates. In low company (which he still at times frequented in a quiet way) he even had to listen to coarse jokes about stately piles. Small misadventures of this kind could irritate him for days. He even told himself occasionally that he would be quite glad to pack up and quit his stuffy native land for good.

  And the business of the portrait was proving curiously unsettling. It was going ahead at what he supposed was a brisk pace, since Humphry Lely came over to Garford almost every day to get on with it. (Probably anxious to get his money, Carson thought.) To see a large white canvas brought into your house, virgin except for certain faint pencillings suggestive of a gigantic piece of graph paper; to submit to a good deal of photography (meaning, surely, that the fellow is going to cheat); and then to watch, day by day, the coming into being of something that is another you, and yet isn’t: this can be a disconcerting experience to run into. Carson had been told that artists are often cagey about a work in progress, and don’t care for its being stared at. But Lely seemed quite indifferent about this. There the thing was, in a big empty room at the top of the house, and quite often when the painter had gone home Carson went back upstairs and peered at it. He didn’t get quite the same effect as when studying (and admiring) himself in the shaving mirror. He even felt he was looking at something it might be wholesome to get away from. He wondered about what were one’s rights if a commission of this sort wasn’t to one’s satisfaction. Could one tell the chap to clear out with it, and decline to pay him tuppence? Probably not. And, anyway, that sort of high-handedness was no longer greatly admired.

  Then one evening his wife joined him in studying the portrait, now nearing completion. She looked at it in silence for some time, and when at length she turned to him saw with horror that there were tears in her eyes. How Robin, the crazed woman said, took after his father! The likeness was unmistakable, was it not?

  This was perhaps the first occasion upon which Carson was really frightened by Cynthia. A woman subject to that degree of delusion simply wasn’t safe. She oughtn’t to be trusted with a carving-knife, a knitting-needle, or even a hair-pin. He wondered whether, if he took professional advice and went about it in the right way, he could get her put in a discreetly run private asylum.

  But at this time Carson’s trepidations were only marginally on any domestic front. In the city there were storm clouds looming, rocks ahead. Although normally not much given to metaphorical expression, he did find himself, in interior monologue, employing these and similar poetical locutions. They gave a kind of hitch up, or vague dignity, to what threatened to be a far from elevated turn in his fortunes. If difficulty turned into disaster, it wouldn’t, needless to say, be in any way his own fault. So long as financial and industrial conditions were reasonably ‘normal’, he was amply buffered against any occasional awkward inquiry into this enterprise or that. But when everybody you met prated of recession or depression or slumps, and hitherto cosy concerns were fussing about their cash-flow, and others actually folding all over the place, there was far too much peering and prying going on in banking and accounting and even legal circles. It wasn’t in the least, of course, that he expected to be cast into gaol next week. Mountains of confused and conflicting documentation would have to be sifted before anything of that kind could be on the carpet. Still, it would perhaps be only prudent to take time by the forelock now. The wise man strikes while the iron is hot.

  These thoughts, which had less of the pitch of poetry than of that proverbial wisdom of the folk available to the long-deceased waterman and his lorry-liberating son, were much in Carl Carson’s mind when he was visited at Garford, prom
ptly upon summons, by a useful and spirited young henchman called Pluckworthy.

  ‘You know, I rather like this place,’ Peter Pluckworthy said. He had been admitted to what Carson called his library, and was comfortably settled in a large chair. ‘It seems my great-grandfather Hubert had very much the same sort of outfit. Long before my time, of course. He had to sell it because he drank so much champagne out of the slippers of actresses. Odd addiction – at least when carried to that excess. If you have to sell up Garford, Carl, it won’t be for quite that sort of reason.’

  ‘I’m determined to get a damned good price for it.’

  ‘Hold hard!’ Pluckworthy sat up in alarm. ‘You’re not really thinking of anything of the sort, are you? Why, you’ve been here no time at all.’

  ‘Things are pretty bad, Peter my boy. Isn’t that what you’ve come to tell me?’

  ‘Perhaps so. Or, rather, quite decidedly. And there’s just precisely one thing you must not do. Be seen to be drawing in your horns. Carson Universal Credit would be down the drain within a week. And all the other concerns would follow – like the bloody rats of Hamelin town in Brunswick.’

  ‘Brunswick?’ Carl Carson was perplexed.

  ‘Where the river Weser, deep and wide, washes its walls on the southern side.’

  ‘Oh, poetry! Still spouting it, are you?’ Carson had relaxed. He quite liked the young man. This was partly because of the rather anomalous kind of hey-you condition (by no means ill-paid) to which he had reduced him. Pluckworthy was, in effect, his creature, licensed to move here and there among the Carson enterprises and report on the understrappers as he thought fit. Carson – oddly, perhaps – also liked Pluckworthy because of his old school tie. Not that the lad wore the thing; it was just that you knew at once that he had it in a drawer. But the chief reason for his regard was his discerning in Peter a man who would come clean in a crisis. Or dirty. No nonsense about not touching pitch. If anything, Peter had an instinctive wish for things to grow ever shadier around him. You might put it that he had a fund of recklessness that he’d be only too delighted to draw on. It hadn’t been an asset, so far. Once or twice, it had been almost a threat. But it made him a useful man to hold en disponsibilité. Or, in Carson’s own idiom, to have in the bag.

  ‘How’s the missis?’ Pluckworthy asked. Setting store by the independence he didn’t really possess, he took care to come to business, or veer away from it, as he pleased.

  ‘So-so. Imagines things a bit.’ Carson glanced warily at his assistant. ‘Trivial things, of course. And takes fancies for this and that. She has insisted on my having my portrait painted, for example. It’s going ahead upstairs most days of the week. Fellow called Lely.’

  ‘How very amusing! What’s he going after: a likeness – or a board-room icon?’

  ‘You talk a great deal of rubbish, Peter.’ Carson frequently said this when he hadn’t caught on to something, and the conception of a boardroom icon eluded him. ‘Tell me about those people in Birmingham.’

  So they talked shop, and as they did so Carson’s uneasiness grew. He saw connections and implications, for one thing, that had eluded the young man, sharp as he was. He even came to doubt his persuasion that the worst could happen only after that slow scrutiny by cautious accountants and their kind of balance sheets and prospectuses and tax returns and what-have-you. Weren’t we living, he asked himself, in a stagnant economy in which reasonable business enterprise was not only discouraged but positively persecuted? It wasn’t even as if he was hearing faint footsteps advancing from afar – implacably, perhaps, but at a pace affording opportunity for evasive action. It might be a knock on the door in the small hours the night after next.

  Eventually Pluckworthy rose to go, but as he did so Carson’s wife came into the room. Cynthia Carson liked Carl’s young assistant. She never mentioned his name to anybody without adding the thought that he was so very much the gentleman. This irked Carson. He didn’t care a damn whether a fellow was what they called a gentleman or not, but he felt that in Cynthia’s reiterated assertion there lurked the implication that most of the people who bobbed up on them did so straight from the gutter. And this was patently untrue. For instance, Cynthia could have made just the same remark about the young dauber, Lely, paint-pots and all. And, no time ago, hadn’t there been those Applebys, who had come to lunch in a perfectly friendly if slightly non-committal way? There was a confused strain of feeling in Carson here. We have seen that his own mild regard for Peter Pluckworthy proceeded partly from his perception that the boy wasn’t the first of the Pluckworthys to wear boots.

  ‘Hallo, Cynthia – how goes?’ Although much the Carsons’ junior, and clearly a mere hireling or client as well, Pluckworthy used their Christian names in the most casual way. Cynthia accepted this; she would have declared that it made her feel young again. Carson, if he reflected on the matter at all, probably judged that a young chap who had to carry about with him a surname as outlandish as his assistant’s would naturally prefer Billys and Betsys all the time.

  ‘Everything goes quite nicely, Peter, thank you. The cows are in milk, and the sheep are in very good fleece.’ It was one of Cynthia’s odd intermittent persuasions that, having moved into the country, she was much involved with problems of rural economy. ‘But I hope you are going to stay to lunch? The painter, Mr Lely, will be coming this afternoon, and you might enjoy meeting him.’

  ‘I’m sure I should. Unfortunately, I have to hurry away.’ Pluckworthy was well aware that his employer, having heard what he wanted to hear (or, rather, what he didn’t), was disposed to be rid of him. ‘But may I have a peep at the portrait before I go? Carl has told me about it, and I’d like to see it.’

  ‘But of course! I think it’s going to be terribly good. We’ll go straight upstairs now.’

  Carson had to acquiesce in this, although he wasn’t sure he wanted the portrait to be seen by anybody. But the thing was, after all, manufactured for purposes of display (whether in a board room or elsewhere) and Pluckworthy seemed a reasonable person to try it out on. So he followed upstairs contentedly enough.

  ‘Have you been hearing anything of Robin lately?’ he heard Pluckworthy ask.

  ‘Yes, indeed!’ Cynthia was delighted by this interest in her family. ‘We think he may be intending to visit us quite soon, after all. He seems to be rather keen on the idea of England. We begin to wonder whether there may not be a lady in the case. A romance! He may have met some nice English girl, you know, who was visiting at the Embassy in Washington.’

  Quite frequently nowadays Cynthia added to her basic delusion this further delusion of grandeur. It was an additional exacerbation so far as Carson’s nervous system went. Groton and Harvard had been bad enough. This further imbecility was really intolerable. Carson took two steps at a time, in order to come abreast of Pluckworthy and give him a sharp glance. He had once or twice suspected that the young man – unlike all the rest of the world, apparently – had penetrated to the fact of Robin Carson’s non-existence. But if this was so, the knowledge wasn’t betraying him into a glimmer of amusement now. He merely paused in his ascent for a moment to address his employer a shade more abruptly than usual.

  ‘If your son arrives,’ he asked, ‘what will you do with him? Suggest taking him into one of your concerns?’

  ‘I’ll decide that when I see him.’

  Carson was rather pleased at contriving this reply, which held a certain ambiguity relevant to the underlying situation. If Pluckworthy did know, it could be construed as exhibiting a decent regard for Cynthia’s unhappy mental aberration. If Pluckworthy didn’t, it was sufficiently crisp to suggest that he regarded the young man’s question as having been on the impertinent side.

  But now they were in the big, low room that Humphry Lely had turned into a studio. It was under the leads, and it was necessary to transfer to the service staircase to reach it. No doubt it had been t
he abode of housemaids in an earlier time; light and air entered only through a skylight; among its absent luxuries, therefore, was any sort of view. Presumably the skylight stood in for the ‘northern exposure’ which Carson had heard of as favoured by painters. He didn’t much care for it himself. During the hours in which he had ‘sat’ he would have been grateful for a window, and even for a distant prospect of Cynthia’s imaginary sheep and cows. It was a bleak, bare apartment – and the more oppressively so since every faintest film of dust had been rigorously scoured out of it in the interest of the mystery now going forward. Apart from a nondescript swivel chair, which Lely had explained would not form part of the final effect, the only piece of furniture – also imported by the painter – was an excessively opulent object somewhat verbosely called a Regence ormolu-mounted ebonised bureau plat. This gilded monstrosity Carson was to be supposed to have appropriated as a desk; he was to be seated at it holding a gold stylographic pen; and Lely explained that he would later supply a congruous background out of his own head.

  Carl Carson, who was quite shrewd enough to suspect a hinted satirical intention in all this, advanced on Lely’s easel without cordiality and removed a cloth.

  ‘There it is,’ he said. ‘As far as it goes, that’s to say.’

  ‘And it goes jolly well,’ Pluckworthy exclaimed cheerfully. He was studying the unfinished portrait with proper attention. ‘It’s going to be you, Carl, right down to the ground.’

  ‘We’ll hope so,’ Carson said. He didn’t, as a matter of fact, know whether he did hope so. And, obscurely, he hadn’t quite liked his assistant’s form of words. ‘For it’s due to cost a packet,’ he added with gloom.