Wicked Uncle

Chapter XII

Mr. and Mrs. Tote and Moira Lane arrived in time for tea, Miss Lane very tall and elegant, with brilliant eyes, a flashing smile, and considerable charm.

Mrs. Tote presented as great a contrast as it was possible to imagine. A very expensive fur coat having been shed, there appeared a wispy little woman rather like a mouse, with scant grey hair twisted up into a straggly knot behind. Do her hair any other way than she had done it ever since she grew up, Mrs. Tote would not. She brushed it neatly, and she put in plenty of pins. It wasn’t her fault if the fur turban which went with the coat was so heavy that it dragged the hair down. She hadn’t wanted the fur turban. She would have liked a nice neat matron’s hat in one of those light felts like she used to get when they had their business in Clapham, before Albert made all that money. The turban made her head ache, like a lot of the things that had happened since they got rich. She would have been glad to take it off like that Miss Lane had done with hers, pulling it off careless, and her hair all shining waves underneath. She liked to see a girl with a nice head of hair, and fair hair paid for dressing. Nice to be able just to pull off your hat like that and feel sure that you were all right underneath. But of course not suitable at her age, and the hairpins dropping out like they always did all the way down in the car.

Moira Lane ’s clear, light voice broke into Mrs. Tote’s reflections. Gregory Porlock had just said, “Where’s your young man?” and Moira was saying, “He won’t be a moment-he’s just putting the car away. Really angel of you to let me bring him, Greg, because if you hadn’t, I’d have had to come by train, and if there’s one thing that brings my sordid stony-broke state home to me more than another, it is having to travel third-class on this revolting line and grapple with my luggage at the change, whereas if I can float from door to door in somebody’s car I get the heavenly illusion of being not only solvent but more or less in the class of the idle rich. So when I ran into Justin last night and found he was positively dying to meet you-well, it all did seem too good to be wasted, didn’t it?”

Gregory Porlock put a friendly hand on her shoulder.

“That’s all right, my dear. But-dying to meet me-why?”

Moira laughed.

“Well, to be quite accurate, it’s the Martin Oakleys he’s dying to meet. Sorry if it’s a disappointment, but it’s all the same thing, isn’t it-Martin and you being the world’s buddies and all that.”

“Why does he want to meet Martin Oakley?”

She gave a slight impatient frown.

“Oh, some schoolgirl cousin umpteen times removed has just taken a job there-secretary to his wife or something. Justin says he’s practically her guardian, so he wants to meet them. Amusing when you know Justin. I’m just wondering how ravishingly pretty she would have to be to make him come over responsible.”

Gregory Porlock laughed.

“Well, you’ll be able to see for yourself in an hour or two, because the Oakleys are dining here and I told them to bring her along.”

He moved away from her to make himself charming to Mrs. Tote.

Miss Masterman poured out tea with an exhausted air. There were very good scones and home-made cakes, but the only one who did any justice to them was Mrs. Tote. One of the things she didn’t like about being fashionable was the miserable sort of tea people gave you in London -little wafery curls of bread and butter, and the sort of sandwich that wouldn’t keep a butterfly alive. She didn’t care whether she ever had another late dinner, but she did like a good sit-down tea. And here was Mr. Porlock giving her a little table to herself and helping her to honey with her buttered scone.

When Justin Leigh came in he kept her company. Having missed lunch, he was hungry enough to deal appreciatively with the excellent tea provided by his host.

“Your cousin’s coming to dinner,” said Moira Lane. “No-I don’t eat tea. It’s no use waving buns at me as if I was something in a zoo. What’s her name?”

“Dorinda Brown.”

Moira’s elegant eyebrows rose.

“Bread-and-butter miss?”

Justin looked vague.

“I don’t know that you would call her that.”

She laughed.

“Why haven’t I ever met her? You’ve been keeping her up your sleeve. I’m no good at shocks. You’d better break it to me- what is she really like?”

Justin smiled suddenly.

“Nice,” he said, and reached for another bun.

When tea was over the party melted. The Mastermans disappeared. Moira took Justin off to play snooker. Mrs. Tote went up to her room.

It was perhaps half an hour later that her husband joined her there, and the first minute she set eyes on him she knew that there was something wrong. A regular state-that’s what he had put himself into, and now she would have to soothe him down, and as likely as not he’d be upset the whole evening and not get his sleep at night. He was getting stouter, Albert was, and it didn’t do him any good getting worked up, not with his short neck and getting so red in the face. He quite banged the door behind him as he came in, and began right away, saying he wouldn’t stand it, not for nobody nor nothing.

“Now, Albert-”

“Don’t you ‘Now, Albert’ me, Mother, for I’m not in the mood to stand it! I’ve had all I’m going to stand from anyone, and don’t you forget it! And there’s others that had better not forget it neither!”

Dear, dear, Albert was put about and no mistake! Mrs. Tote really couldn’t remember to have seen him so upset about anything since Allie ran off to marry Jimmy Wilson whose father had the next-door shop to theirs in the old Clapham days. And of course Allie could have looked a good deal higher, with all the money Albert had made in the war. But there it was-you’re only young once, and when you’re young money doesn’t seem to matter the way it does when you haven’t got anything else. She remembered Allie standing up and saying all that to her father.

“Jimmy’s good and he’s steady. He’s got a job, and I’m going to marry him. We don’t want your money-we can make enough to keep ourselves. We’d like to be friends, but if you won’t you won’t, and we’re getting married anyhow.”

Well, of course, Albert was terribly put about. And obstinate -more like a mule than a man. Allie and Jimmy thought he’d come round, but she never really thought so herself. Not even when the baby was born-though how he could go on calling her Mother the way he did and never think that if it hadn’t been for Allie he’d never have had any call to start doing it.

She came back to Albert fairly shouting out that he wouldn’t stand it, and prepared to be firm.

“Now then, what’s it all about?”

She didn’t say “Father,” because she never said it now-not since Allie went and he wouldn’t have her name mentioned. You can’t be a father if you haven’t got a child. She said,

“You’d better tell me what’s the matter, and not go walking up and down like that-there’s no sense in it.”

Red in the face and breathing short, Albert began to use language. He was still walking up and down, with an angry flounce when he had to turn where the washstand brought him up on one side of the room and the wardrobe on the other. Mrs. Tote put up with it for as long as she felt she could. She didn’t approve of language, but if you didn’t let a man swear when he was angry he might do worse. So she waited until she thought he must have got rid of the worst of it before she said with surprising firmness,

“Now, Albert, that’s quite enough. You come here and tell me what it’s all about. Carrying on like that-you ought to be ashamed.”

He came, angry and glaring, to drop down on the couch beside her. The rage wasn’t out of him, but he had a foreboding of what he would feel like when it had gone-cold-empty- afraid. He had to talk to someone. Emily was his wife. A good wife, but too fond of her own way. Obstinate. But she didn’t talk-not about his affairs. It wasn’t every man that could say that about his wife. He stared at her and said in a choked sort of way,

“It’s blackmail. That’s what it is-blackmail-”

Mrs. Tote came straight to the point.

“Who’s blackmailing you?”

“That damned fellow Porlock.”

“And what have you been doing to get yourself blackmailed?”

His eyes avoided her-looked at the pink and purple flowers on the chintz cover of the couch.

“Women don’t understand business-it’s a business matter.”

Emily Tote went on looking at him. He’d got himself into a mess-that’s what he’d done. You can’t get rich all that quick and keep honest-she’d known that all along. Terribly easy to go over the edge in business when your mind was taken up with getting rich. She looked steadily at Albert, and thanked God that Allie was out of it. She said,

“You’d better tell me.”

“He’s blackmailing me. Oh, it’s all wrapped up as clever as you please, but it doesn’t take me in. Come to him by a side wind-that’s what he says. Him saying he’ll fix it up for me- as if I didn’t know what that meant! I may have been a fool, but I’m not such a fool as not to be able to see right through Mr. Gregory Porlock. General agent, my foot! Blackmail-that’s his business, I tell you-blackmail! But I’ll be even with him!” Mr. Tote had recourse to language again. “I’ll show him whether he can blackmail me! If he gets a knife in him some dark night he’ll only have himself to blame!”

He had been shouting. Mrs. Tote leaned forward and tapped him on the knee.

“Be quiet,” she said. “That’s foolish talk. Do you want everyone in the house to hear you? You get a hold of yourself, Albert, and tell me what it’s all about. What have you done?”

He said in a sullen voice,

“No more than hundreds of others.”

“What was it?”

He threw her a fleeting look, sitting up there in the sofa corner with her skinny hands held together in her lap and her eyes looking at him. A little bit of a thing, Emily, but set in her ways. You could put her into a fur coat that cost a thousand, but you couldn’t make her look like a rich man’s wife. But she wouldn’t talk-Emily wouldn’t talk. He’d got to tell someone. He said,

“It wasn’t anything to start with, only the use of the yard so a lorry could be run in and be handy when it was wanted.”

“Wanted for what?”

“What had that got to do with me? Then they wanted the hire of my lorry as well, and I said I wasn’t letting it out for any Tom, Dick or Harry to drive. And they said I’d be paid for what it was worth three or four times over.”

Emily Tote said, “Who is they?”

“Sam Black, if you want to know. Well, by that time I was in it enough to get into trouble, but not enough for it to be worth while. I said to Sam, ‘I’m not playing about with this any more. It’s not worth my while.’ And he said, ‘It might be.’ And to cut a long story short, it was.”

“Black market?” said Emily Tote.

He threw himself back in his corner.

“Money going begging-that’s what it was.”

She sat up very straight in the blue flannel dressing-gown which it was no use trying to make her change for a silk one. That was Emily all over. She sat there, and she said as cool as a cucumber.

“Five pounds to a lorry-driver to get out and have a cup of cocoa or a glass of beer, and a dozen barrels of sugar, or it may be butter, gone before he comes back. Was that the game?”

His jaw dropped.

“Why, Mother!”

“Do you think I don’t read the papers? It’s all been there in black and white for anyone to see. And some of the ones they caught got stiff sentences, didn’t they?”

Mr. Tote’s ruddy colour had faded.

“That was in the war,” he said.

“And what you did-wasn’t that in the war?”

“Don’t talk like that! It isn’t going to come out, I tell you. Who’s going to bother about what happened three or four years ago? If I pay up, it will be only because I don’t want any unpleasantness.”

Mrs. Tote was still looking at him.

“You didn’t make all that money out of a few odd barrels.”

He actually laughed.

“Of course I didn’t! That was only the beginning. I got into it in a big way. Why, if I was to tell you some of the hauls we made, you wouldn’t believe me. Organizing ability-that’s what they said I had. One of the planners-that was me. There’s a funny thing about money, you know-once you start making it, it fair runs away with you and makes itself. When we started with that twopenny-halfpenny business in Clapham, I lay you never thought you’d be a rich man’s wife.”

Deep inside herself Emily Tote answered with the words which she would never allow to pass her lips-“I never thought I’d be married to a thief.”

She said aloud, “I wouldn’t say too much about that. You’ve only told me half. What does Mr. Porlock know, and what is he going to do?”

The blood rushed back into his face, swelling the veins, purpling the skin.

“He’s got dates and places, curse him! There was a lot of petrol from an aerodrome-he’s got that. And a biggish haul of butter from the docks. Two or three other big jobs. Says there are witnesses that can swear to me. But I don’t believe him. It’s three years ago-who’s going to take any notice of people swearing to where you were, and to what you said and did as long ago as that? If I pay, it will be because it doesn’t do you any good in business to have things said. And if I pay, I know damn well whose pocket the money’ll go into! Mr. Blackmailer Porlock- that’s who! And when I think about it, I tell you straight it makes me feel I’d rather swing for him!”

He was shouting again. Emily Tote said,

“Don’t talk so foolish, Albert.”