Gay Phoenix Read online

  ‘And did Colin Buzfuz depart as he came?’ he asked. ‘Simply board the Jabberwock and sail away?’

  ‘Not quite that. He told me frankly that if he sailed in her again, his memories of poor Adam’s end might be too much for him. So he simply sold her for what she’d fetch. When we discharged him he spent a couple of weeks convalescing at Government House. The Governor – who, as I’ve mentioned, was interested in him from the first, took rather a fancy to him. When he did leave Adelaide it wasn’t to go direct to England, but to look up some distant relations in New Zealand. I believe he stayed with the Governor-General there – no doubt with a letter of introduction from our own worthy representative of the Crown. Colin Buzfuz was very presentable, you know – very presentable, indeed. I did a certain amount of fixing things up for him myself. Small legal matters arising from his brother’s death, and so forth. Generally ironed things out.’

  ‘A very odd affair, my dear Tim. We’re grateful to you for entertaining us with it.’ The judge said this as he got to his feet. ‘What’s the fellow doing now?’

  ‘Colin Buzfuz – as I’ve persevered in calling him? I haven’t the slightest idea.’

  ‘You never heard from him again?’

  ‘Never.’ As he gave this reply, Professor Budgery seemed rather struck by it.

  ‘Not even a Christmas card from somewhere? Or a crate of whisky or champagne?’

  ‘Definitely not. A little ungracious, perhaps – but, of course, the whole episode had been uncomfortable and even a shade humiliating. He just forgot about us, I suppose.’

  ‘Pathologically, perhaps?’ This suggestion came from Appleby – who was also on his feet – on a casual and tentative note. ‘I mean, his illness may have recurred in a severe form, and he may remember nothing about Adelaide whatever. I’d hate that to happen to me. It has been a most delightful evening.’

  And Appleby and the judge drove down to the city together. Despite the cool change, it was a progressively warmer air that blew gently through the car.

  ‘Curious yarn,’ the judge said. ‘Curious thing to choose to tell us about. Did you have that feeling, at all?’

  ‘Yes, I think I did.’

  ‘Incomplete, somehow. A final turn or twist or éclaircissement missing. Tim Budgery’s a very old friend of mine. Self-confident type, as you must have noticed. Doesn’t like to feel he hasn’t got the full hang of anything. Do you know what I thought? That this blessed Buzfuz affair still puzzles him. So it nags at him, and that was why he was prompted to come out with it.’

  ‘I haven’t your sense of his character. But I’d judge something of the sort not improbable.’

  ‘One gets chronically suspicious, of course – sitting all day on the bench. But do you know what, at one point, came into my head? That there was some monkey business behind the whole affair.’

  ‘I’m in agreement with you there, too.’

  ‘Listen! What if–’ The judge checked himself. He was plainly sleepy. ‘No, no, my dear fellow,’ he said. ‘No affair of ours. Let sleeping monkeys lie.’

  PART ONE

  Vacillations of Arthur Povey

  3

  It was in the nature of the case that when Arthur Povey decided to assume the identity of his deceased elder brother Charles he had very little notion of what he was letting himself in for. He was relying, in the first instance, on something he was shrewd enough to realize as being unlikely in itself to take him very far: the fact of a strong physical resemblance between the dead man and himself. They were not, of course, twins, but their constitutional near-identity was of the sort that ‘identical’ twins alone are much on record as exhibiting. This extended to tricks of posture and, more significantly, to the finer inflexions of speech. In their boyhood their father, although he was an amateur musician and therefore presumably possessed of a good ear, had been unable to distinguish between their voices coming to him over the telephone or even from the next room.

  But a man’s identity – his quidditas, as the learned might say – consists largely in what has happened to him in both a recent and a distant past; in this and in the multiplicity of his relationships with adjacent persons and things. These facts make successful impersonation very difficult indeed. Arthur Povey, estimating his chances, had to admit to himself that he faced, moreover, exceptionally formidable problems here. Since growing to manhood, he and Charles had been by no means intimates – or had been so only intermittently and under the special circumstances of their nautical expeditions. At times on the high seas Charles had talked about himself and his affairs a great deal. But the exercises had been plainly in the interest of relieving his own tedium rather than of entertaining his brother; he had seldom troubled to elucidate anything not immediately comprehensible; and as a consequence Arthur had frequently paid very little attention to what was being said. Just how much he did know about Charles’ life as a result of these confidences he found it not easy to estimate. What had chiefly made a mark on him was any expatiation upon those of Charles’ circumstances and opportunities which it was impossible not to envy him. Charles was wealthy, and many of his recitals had this basic fact as their background. When cuisine on board the Gay Phoenix grew monotonous Charles would recall elaborate meals in the great restaurants of Europe. When very justly bored by the stupid erotic novels he would talk in alluring detail about his women.

  There were times when this got Arthur hopping mad. If Charles was a bit of an amateur at sea, he was certainly nothing of the sort in bed. But – just as with the restaurants – his expertness was unashamedly built on money. Although the women he had slept with, or even briefly kept, were surprisingly numerous, they were also, it appeared, almost without exception celebrities. Celebrities, that is to say, in their own line. For the civilized world – so far as Arthur Povey could make it out – was likely to harbour at any one time a hundred or so courtesans of absolutely top quality, learned in their mystery to what the poet calls the red heart’s core. They lived, perhaps, rather a monotonous life – somewhat like that of top tennis players circulating from tournament to tournament. Still, they made a good thing out of it. When you took it into your head to want one you had to be prepared to pay up.

  These Paphians, like the restaurants, had their spécialités, and in these Charles appeared to have acquired a connoisseurship, or at least a knowingness, just as he had in the world of racehorses and sports cars and executive jets. Arthur Povey was quite sure he didn’t want an executive jet. He was less certain about most of the abundant other things that money could buy.

  Charles, if expansive on the theme of purchasable pleasures, had become of recent years somewhat reticent upon the subject of money itself. Arthur had no idea of what his brother was worth, and he felt (very mistakenly, as it was to turn out) that the degree, or even order, of Charles’ wealth didn’t greatly signify. It was by many times greater than anything he was ever likely to command himself. The point of the matter lay there.

  But there was another important fact about Charles as a man of property. It hadn’t rooted him in any way. Without surviving parents, or wife, or siblings other than Arthur himself, he rendered an effect of keeping all his associations on an impermanent and casual-seeming level. All those mistresses he boasted of, for example. They appeared to have been acquired, without exception, on a hire-and-fire basis. A score of times – Charles had brutally said – was as often as any rational man could want to have any individual woman. And, after that, the last thing you proposed was ever to see her again. Business affairs, of course, had to be different. A high degree of continuity in their direction was presumably a sine qua non of successful tycoonship. But, even here, Arthur had derived a strong impression that Charles was remote and elusive; that he had adopted the role of a mystery figure behind the scenes such as it isn’t too difficult to create in a world of sprawling and gargantuan enterprises. There was a kind of modern folklore or
mythology that made such behaviour possible. Of course the new Charles Povey must continue to employ a small nucleus of henchmen and servants in some sort of regular contact with him. Beyond that, was there any reason why he should be more than an occasional signature at the foot of a document? And the signature presented no difficulty at all. Arthur had enjoyed several weeks’ leisure on the bosom of the Pacific for the perfecting of it.

  Behind the signature – Arthur had begun by reckoning – it should be possible, with luck and cunning, to live for quite some time – or at least for long enough to convert into highly negotiable form some sizable fraction of Charles’ fortune. Shortly before leaving England with his brother on the last and fateful voyage of the Gay Phoenix Arthur had come upon an article about Charles Povey in the ‘business and finance’ section of a weekly paper. There had been a lot in it about Charles’ activities which Arthur hadn’t much understood or bothered about. But there had also been a certain amount of stuff written from the personal angle which was much more interesting. Charles wasn’t exactly a recluse or an eccentric, but there was at least a suggestion that he was veering that way. It was clearly a persona that had, paradoxically, the seed of popularity about it. Aristocratic eccentrics – of whom the English have always been inordinately fond – are nowadays in short supply. Millionaire eccentrics are an agreeable second best. If Charles Povey, having been at least intermittently elusive for a long time, took a sudden steep dive into greater seclusion, nobody would be particularly surprised, let alone offended. Moreover, Charles was self-evidently so revolting a character (his brother piously reflected) that a great many people would be enormously relieved if he was no longer seen around.

  Calculations of this sort had been much in Arthur’s mind when he made his great decision. If he could have believed that he would be in any degree his brother’s heir – and, as Charles’ only living relative, he had surely been entitled to such an expectation – his plan would never, of course, have entered his head. If he had even felt there was any possibility of receiving a paltry legacy of twenty or thirty thousand pounds, he would probably have held his hand. But Charles had made it perfectly clear that nothing of the sort was going to happen. He had actually once declared – absurdly, and when in his cups – that he wouldn’t be a bit surprised if, after his death, it proved that there wasn’t a bloody penny for anybody – not even so much as would endow a cat and dog home. He had also said, more soberly if even less amiably, that money would demonstrably not be good for Arthur, and that he wasn’t going to burden himself with the grave responsibility of letting him have any. Sometimes, and when thinking over these exchanges, Arthur found himself wholly surprised that his brother had suffered mere death by misadventure. It seemed unbelievable that he hadn’t himself despatched Charles with a marline-spike.

  Luck and cunning. He had enjoyed the first and exercised the second – he frequently told himself – in the highest degree among those idiotic Australians. Professor Budgery’s character and persuasions (particularly his distaste for qualified alienists) had been an enormous piece of luck which he himself had exploited (he modestly reflected) with something like genius. For could anything short of genius, he asked himself, have hit upon that brilliant technique of double bluff? Not that ‘double bluff’ was anything like an adequate term for characterizing a stratagem of such absolute felicitousness as had come to him. Determined to steal the shoes of his elder brother Charles, he had contrived the effect of having those shoes forced, as it were, on his reluctant feet. Budgery and his assistants had been manoeuvred into believing he was the brother he was not, and that only in his own disordered imagination was he the brother he was. They had taken a great deal of credit for handing him back what they thought to be his true identity when in fact they had been furthering him in usurping a false one. It had been exceedingly funny, but it had been exceedingly useful as well. Had he turned up in Australia simply claiming to be the wealthy Charles Povey, and with a story of having buried his younger brother Arthur at sea, he might almost at once have found himself confronting immigration officials or lawyers or bankers prompted to inconveniently stringent demands for proofs of his identity. As it was, that batch of doctors had – all-unconsciously – generated a kind of vested interest in there being no doubt about the matter. And through Budgery, and when convalescent, he had been wafted into circles too exalted to admit of any suspicion blowing about at all. He was not merely the wealthy and probably influential Charles Povey; he was in some small degree a public hero – as well as enjoying, in a more restricted circle, the interest attaching to a most unusual medical history. He had been surrounded, in fact, by a benevolent regard, and everybody had taken him for granted throughout the subsequent protracted period of foreign wanderings during which he had cautiously felt his way into his new identity.

  All this was very satisfactory to remember. It was, in fact, so satisfactory that Arthur Povey sometimes experienced a certain annoyance at not being able to remember it more clearly. Since those first dreadful moments in which he had stood staring down at his dead brother on the deck of the Gay Phoenix, the course of his life had been crowded, eventful, and often extremely alarming. It had also been a triumphant success, and in the light of all this it didn’t surprise him, let alone disconcert him, that his memory commanded much of it in vivid and almost hallucinatory detail. There was something patchy about the effect, all the same. For example, he didn’t really remember with any certainty how he had come to think up the turn he had so successfully put on in the Adelaide hospital. It must have started up in his mind like a creation, he supposed. But the moment of its inception eluded his recollection. So did much in the stages of its development. But then he had been in a pretty bad way – physically, of course – by the time he brought the Gay Phoenix to port. No doubt he had a little piled it on – his exhaustion and all that. But he had been through experiences – totally unplanned experiences – which hadn’t been funny in the least. So his memory was a trifle shaky as a result.

  ‘Bless me, if it isn’t Master Arthur!’

  These words – which were all too plainly potentially disastrous in themselves – were the more alarming because of something quite unaccountable in the circumstances of their delivery. Arthur Povey, although now, as it were, fairly well established at the wicket, was still subject at least to an intermittent feeling that he must continue very carefully to play himself in. At these times an inconveniently strong sense of nervous strain might result, and to cope with this he had developed what proved to be a tolerably sufficient, and certainly very simple, resource. Just as batsmen at the crease are rather oddly permitted to do, he would declare himself unwell and retire for an interval to the pavilion. In Povey’s case, when he was in England, the pavilion would be some vast and expensive (although gastronom-ically primitive) seaside hotel. England is a free country; you don’t have to carry papers and identify yourself wherever you go; you simply choose any name you fancy, don a pair of large dark glasses, stuff some convenient receptacle with ten-pound notes, and find yourself as free as the wind. The wind, of course, is sometimes displeasingly chilly even in Eastbourne or Torquay. But unless you happen to be experiencing at the time a period of such extreme celebrity or notoriety that the press is after you hotfoot, you are as safe as houses for as long as you please. And the sort of people who frequent such hotels, although necessarily in the enjoyment of a substantial prosperity, were remote in their social contacts from those circles which Arthur as Charles was beginning at other times confidently to frequent.

  So here he was – sitting in sunshine on a broad terrace, with his monstrous hostelry behind him, and nothing except a small table, a balustrade, and the English Channel in front. Yet these shocking words had been more or less breathed in his ear. Bless me, if it isn’t Master Arthur!

  He turned his head, and found himself at gaze with Butter. His memory was at least good enough to recall Butter at once. He did so even although he certai
nly hadn’t set eyes on the man for a very long time indeed. Butter had been a junior and somewhat anomalous manservant in the ancestral Povey home, hovering between house and garden according to the varying needs of the establishment. It didn’t look as if Butter had much flourished since. Although now so plainly middle-aged, he occupied – Povey saw at a glance – a lowly station in the hierarchy of this hotel. He wasn’t even a fully accredited waiter. He was one of the unassuming characters who go around emptying ashtrays, and whom nobody thinks to tip. This was surprising in itself. Povey had a distinct recollection of Butter as rather an astute and quick-witted young man, who had more than once proved uncommonly useful in getting him out of a scrape. Probably he had taken to drink. Members of the lower classes who were a little too clever for their station but could find no way out of it often sought to resolve their sense of frustration that way.

  The present moment, however, was plainly inappropriate forgeneral reflections of this sort. Here was a crisis – not of a whollyunprecedented kind. Arthur Povey, accustomed to living dangerously, took it in his stride.

  ‘No, no,’ he said, easily and pleasantly. ‘My name isn’t Arthur. You’ve mistaken me for somebody else. And rather impulsively, I’d say, since you could see nothing but the back of my head.’

  ‘But that’s just it, Master Arthur!’ Unexpectedly, yet with an odd effect of the rolling back of the years, this depressed menial person flashed at his former employer’s younger son a momentary wicked grin. ‘It’s the way the hair grows on the crown of your head. Up and forward-like – and I remembered it at once. I could always tell you from Mr Charles at a glance, that way on. Very rare it is – hair growing that way. At least among the gentry. Almost a plebeian note, it might be called.’

  ‘My good man, you are talking nonsense.’ This time, Arthur Povey spoke with a justified frigidity. ‘I advise you to go about your business. Do so, and think no more of the matter. I should be most reluctant to lodge a complaint.’