Beggar’s Choice

XIX

September 2lst-I’ve just been reading over what I wrote yesterday. The two points that matter are:

Who is employing me?

and

Why?

There are a lot of subsidiary ones. The most important of these seem to be:

1. Anna’s connection with the affair.

2. Bobby Markham.

3. Fay.

I don’t know what to think about Anna. If I hadn’t lost my temper, I might have got something out of her. That’s the worst of a temper-it always lets you down. I don’t think she’s the big noise in this affair.-I think she butted in. If I thought the money came from her, I’d chuck the whole show.

Bobby Markham-I can’t make out whether it was he who interviewed me in the hut. Anna certainly gave me to understand that it was Bobby-but that’s a good enough reason for its being some one else. Then there’s the question of whether Bobby could have been in the hut to meet me after spending the evening with the Tarrants. I don’t think so much of this point as I did, because I hadn’t a watch, and though I think we were at the hut by eleven I may be mistaken. It oughtn’t to take more than an hour from Putney to Linwood, but I was thinking of other things. I didn’t notice how fast we were going, and I suspect the driver went out of the way on purpose. Then Isobel says Bobby didn’t go away till about twenty past, after starting to say good-night at eleven. That’s vague too. I can imagine time hanging a bit heavy whilst a fathead like Bobby was making pretty speeches. I suppose he could have got to the hut in ten minutes if he took the path through the woods.

All the same it sticks in my mind that it wasn’t Bobby. I wonder if it was Arbuthnot. If Anna had never met Arbuthnot before, how did she get to the point of telling him to keep me away from the Tarrants, all in about half an hour? She spoke as if she was accustomed to giving him orders, too-I noticed that. She might have been speaking to the butler, and he took it the same way, as if it was a matter of course that she should fire orders at him out of a taxi. No, I couldn’t believe that it was the first time they’d met. And if it wasn’t, why go through the farce of an introduction, unless they particularly wanted me to think that they were strangers?

Well that’s all I can get out of Bobby for the moment.

Then there’s Fay. All the threads that connect Fay with this affair are as indefinite as the spider’s threads that you get blown across your face on a dewy morning-you can’t see them, and you can’t find them, but you keep on feeling that they’re there. Why should Fay want five hundred pounds just when five hundred pounds is being dangled in front of me? And then why should she afterwards go back on all that and swear she never said she was in a hole at all? And why did Isobel’s letter disappear, and Z.10’s first letter? And why did Fay cut her dance with me, just when cutting it obliged me to dance with Anna? It looks damned silly written down. Gossamer threads.

The post has just come in. Miss Willy has asked me to go down to them next Tuesday. That’s one letter. The other is a registered one with twenty five-pound notes in it and not a line of writing. If any one had told me a week ago that I should have a hundred pounds spread out in front of me on this table, it would have sounded like something out of Grimm’s fairy tales. And if they’d gone on to say that all I wanted to do with it was to send it back, I should have told them that they were talking through the back of their neck. A week ago I didn’t know where my next meal was coming from, or how long my last pair of boots would hold together. Now I’ve got into a kind of twisted fairy story in which bank-notes come tumbling out of letters like the diamonds and pearls which dropped from the mouth of the wretched child with the fairy godmother in Grimm. I remember, even in the nursery, thinking how beastly it must have been, and wondering whether she got any of her teeth broken on the diamonds.

I am writing to Miss Willy to say I won’t come. And this is what I’m going to write to Z.10:

Dear Sir,

I have just received £100 in five-pound notes. I suppose these are the funds spoken of in the note I received last night. [There are too many “received’s” but I want to keep it stiff,] I should be glad to be given some work to do. I want to make it clear that I cannot continue to receive money which I have not earned. I was willing to accept a retaining fee for a reasonable time, but a sum of £100 does not come under that heading. I shall therefore return it, unless in the course of the next week I am satisfied that I have done, or am doing, something to earn such a salary.

Yours faithfully,

Carthew Fairfax.