Gone West Page 3

  Daisy laughed. “I don’t expect to produce anything of literary value. Something more on the lines of detective fiction.”

  “Oh, that rub—” Simon caught his mother’s admonishing eye and coughed. “That kind of stuff. Carey has written a brilliant play that was put on in Dublin.”

  “For the one night, before the censor was after closing it down,” the Irishman drawled, grinning. “Sure our government have set up what they call the Committee on Evil Literature.”

  “You’re all too clever for me,” said Ilkton. “I don’t pretend to be able to put together more than a bread-and-butter letter.”

  “But you dance divinely, darling,” Myra assured him. “Simon has two left feet, when he can be persuaded to take to the floor. He can’t hit a ball, either, unlike Walter.”

  “You play cricket, Mr. Ilkton?” Daisy asked, more than willing to abandon the subject of writing, which seemed to be making Sybil uncomfortable.

  “I got my Blue,” he said modestly. If he really could barely string two words together, it said a good deal about the admission standards at Oxford and Cambridge colleges, which were ruled as much by family connections as by academic brilliance. “And I played a couple of years for Warwickshire after the War. Not professionally, of course. It’s just the occasional village green match for me nowadays, though. Tennis is more my game these days.”

  “Walter and I were partnered at tennis. That’s how we met.”

  Daisy could picture him being athletic on the cricket pitch or tennis court; impossible, though, to imagine him getting filthy and bruised playing Rugby, like Lucy’s husband, Lord Gerald Bincombe, let alone galloping across muddy fields after a fox, or tramping the moors with a gun on his shoulder. He was the man-about-town type, who expected urban amenities on his forays into the country. He probably had an elder brother who had inherited or would inherit the hunting and shooting. Ilkton? No, she didn’t know any Ilktons.

  “We can’t all be intellectuals,” Simon pronounced indulgently. “Carey has already nearly finished another play. It’s historical and sure to be banned by the Lord Chamberlain.” He spoke with as much pride as if this was admirable and he’d written it himself.

  “And by the Committee on Evil Literature? Dare I ask what it’s about, Mr. Carey?”

  “Queen Anne and the Duchess of Marlborough.” His blue eyes glinted.

  Daisy couldn’t remember anything about Queen Anne except that she was dead, which seemed too obvious to be notable. Queen Anne’s lace, she thought, but that was a type of cow parsley and hardly relevant. And there was a favourite mnemonic of her history teacher: Britain Relied On Marlborough, the initials of which were the initials of battles won by the Duke of Marlborough, but the names of the battles, what the war was about, and whom Britain was fighting escaped her. Probably the French; it usually was. Or the Irish?

  “Something to do with Ireland? Oh, William of Orange was her brother-in-law, wasn’t he? Orangemen!”

  “William of Orange put the Irish—” Ilkton stopped as Mrs. Birtwhistle held up her hand.

  “Not now, if you please. Irish politics has its place, no doubt, but this is not it. Milk and sugar, Mrs. Fletcher?”

  The dog, in response to something apparent only to him, plodded to the door to the west wing and stood there till Simon opened it for him. “Uncle Norman must have come in,” he said with a laugh. “Scurry always knows.”

  Tea proceeded on its customary course. After an unsatisfactory lunch in a tea-shop somewhere south of Derby, Daisy was glad to see there was plenty to eat, from bread and butter and watercress sandwiches to Mrs. Birtwhistle’s sponge cake, which turned out to be excellent. If she was the sole mistress of the kitchen, there was no danger of starvation.

  Of Sybil’s “troubled atmosphere” Daisy detected little, apart from occasional sniping between Simon, representing the intellectual party, and his cousin Myra, whose outlook on life was frivolous. These potshots were firmly repressed by Mrs. Birtwhistle before they could escalate into a squabble. She was less successful in quashing Carey and Ilkton, but they were more successful at concealing animosity with banter—Ilkton urbane, Carey volubly Irish.

  Carey was Ilkton’s rival for Myra’s favour, Daisy suspected. Myra flirted happily with both.

  Miss Birtwhistle trudged into the hall at some point and accepted a cup of tea, though she ate nothing. Mr. Birtwhistle in his sickbed was not mentioned, except for a brief reference to the doctor’s expected visit later that evening. Sybil was taciturn. Daisy had every intention of cornering her after tea and finding out just what she had been so hot and bothered about.

  Refusing a third cup of tea and a second slice of cake, Daisy gave Sybil a Look with a capital L.

  Sybil got the message. “If you’ll excuse us, Ruby,” she said, “I’ll drag Daisy away for a chat. We’ll go to my office, Daisy. I have a sitting room upstairs—Monica and I occupy the old nurseries, over this hall—but the office is more convenient, and warmer, because I’ve had a fire all day. One can’t type with frozen fingers.”

  Following her towards the right-hand passage, Daisy glanced back at the group by the fire. Mrs. Birtwhistle was gazing after them with a decidedly anxious expression. Odd! Perhaps, after all, there was something in Sybil’s forebodings.

  FOUR

  Sybil’s office was very like Daisy’s at home in Hampstead. A couple of easy chairs stood by the fireplace, but the room’s main feature was naturally a desk with a typewriter and all the expected accoutrements. Three piles of neatly aligned papers must be the original manuscript, for the editor; the first carbon for the author’s files; and the second, almost unreadable carbon for emergencies.

  On each side of the window were bookshelves, one side holding reference books, many of which Daisy recognised from the spines: the Pocket Oxford Dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, an encyclopaedia, and so on. The other was almost filled with piles of magazines, rows of cheap paperbound books, and a set of more substantial books in colourful dustcovers. Daisy went straight to the second bookcase and started reading titles.

  “The Stranger from Dead Man’s Gulch, Six-Shooter for Hire, Queen of the Prairie,… Westerns! All by Eli Hawke. Alias Humphrey Birtwhistle, I assume.”

  “Yes, of course.” Sybil added coal to the fire, poked at it, and invited Daisy to come and sit down. “He spent ten years in the Wild West as a young man,” she continued, “so he really knows his stuff.”

  “Has this anything to do with your problem? With the troubled atmosphere you were talking about? I’ve crossed the Wild West by train and seen a couple of Western films, but I wouldn’t claim it’s a subject I’m familiar with.”

  “It’s all rather complicated…”

  “He hasn’t taken to wandering round the house wielding six-shooters and threatening to shoot ‘them thar dad-burned rustlers,’ or anything like that?”

  “Heavens no!”

  “Myra said he’s ill. Depressed.”

  “Sort of. Perhaps I’d better start at the beginning.”

  “It’s usually a help. You’ve been working for ‘Eli Hawke’ for seven or eight years?”

  “Yes, we’ve been here since late in 1919.”

  “That’s right, you brought your daughter with you. She must be … What, nine or so? She’s at school, I take it.”

  “Monica just started this month as a weekly boarder at the Lady Manners School in Bakewell. The Birtwhistles offered to pay the fees. They’ve been very kind.”

  “Then— Sorry! I won’t keep interrupting, promise. You came in 1919…”

  “I was hired as a stenographer, mostly just to type out what Mr. Birtwhistle had written in longhand, occasionally to take dictation, mostly letters. He preferred to write down the stories himself. He says he thinks on paper, not aloud. You’re a writer, I expect you understand?”

  “I’ve never dictated, but I can imagine losing my place very easily if I didn’t have my own words right in front of me.”

  “That’
s what he said. His handwriting is pretty bad, so sometimes I’d be guessing at a word, and, though he went to a good school, his spelling is atrocious.”

  “So you’d correct it.”

  “I couldn’t let it pass, could I? His publisher was very pleased with the first manuscript I turned in. They’d been having the books typed in London, and they always had a lot of errors to contend with, either because the typist didn’t correct misspellings, or because she overcorrected, making the cowhands speak the King’s English.”

  Daisy laughed. “I can imagine. You must have been a real godsend to both Mr. Birtwhistle and his publisher.”

  “So they told me. Very gratifying. The publisher paid Humphrey more, because they didn’t have the expense of the typing, and he raised my salary.”

  “I should hope so!”

  “After a couple of books—he was putting out three a year, believe it or not—I really started to get the hang of things. Then I started to notice inconsistencies, just odd little things like someone having blue eyes in one place and steely grey in another. At first I used to draw them to Humphrey’s attention. He didn’t really care. He told me to put that sort of slip right without bothering him. I began to do more and more editing. It sort of crept up on me, until I was rearranging paragraphs to make them more effective or more logical.”

  “Mr. Birtwhistle didn’t mind?”

  “He didn’t even notice. By the time the galleys came, he’d be halfway through the next book. He left checking them to me.”

  “Then he found out how much rewriting you were doing,” Daisy guessed, “and your troubles started.”

  Sybil shook her head. “If he ever noticed, he didn’t say a word. Everything went on smoothly in the same track until, about three years ago, he came down with bronchitis that turned into a bad case of pneumonia. He was horribly ill and took a long time to recover. He had written about two thirds of Double Cross at the Circle C. The date the publisher expected it was creeping up on us. In the end, Humphrey told me how he wanted the story to continue and the final scene he’d planned, and asked me to do my best with it.”

  “Good heavens! Weren’t you scared out of your wits? Actually writing a book is a very different kettle of fish from editing someone else’s work, even if you were already doing a fair bit of rewriting.”

  “I was nervous, of course, but it wasn’t as if I had a choice.”

  “You had your living to earn.”

  “And Monica’s. And I owed Ruby and Humphrey a great deal. They pretty much depend on the income from the books to make life up here tolerable.”

  “I assumed he must have family money.”

  “He inherited this place. The Birtwhistles were just yeoman farmers, sheep farmers, until coal was found on their land, in the early 1800s. They sold that bit of land at a good price but spent most of the money on buying and adding the wings to this house. They wanted to be far away from the mine works. They bought a couple of small-holdings up here to rent out, tenant farms, as well.”

  “Adding up to a small estate.”

  “Yes, raising them towards, though never quite attaining, the status of gentry. Humphrey was the eldest son of the eldest son, in spite of which he was the one to go off adventuring in America. He did a bit of silver-mining while he was there and came back with money and a wife.”

  “I thought Ruby sounded American!”

  “He met her in the Wild West—she was a teacher in some practically invisible town—what we’d call a village. They put in the running water here when he brought her home, but his funds didn’t stretch to gas or electricity.”

  “I should think it would cost a fortune to bring either up here, so far from anywhere. A generator would be more practical.”

  “I suppose so,” Sybil said vaguely. “They did bring in the telephone, just a few years ago. Anyway, until Humphrey’s books started to sell, they managed on what was left plus the rent from the farms, which is shared with Norman and Lorna. I believe Norman is paid a salary out of that, for managing the place.”

  “And Myra Olney? How does she fit in?”

  “Myra has an income of her own, enough for her school fees at first, and now for expensive frivolities. Enough to live on in reasonable comfort, really, but not in the style she’d prefer. It’s in some sort of trust, so she can’t get at the capital, fortunately.”

  “I presume Simon isn’t pulling his own weight yet, if he ever will. I wouldn’t have thought the sort of stuff he writes sells well enough to live on the proceeds.”

  “If he ever finished anything and sold it! You see the situation. That’s why— Well, it could have been very awkward if they weren’t such nice people.”

  “You mean, your finishing the book for him?”

  “That was only the beginning. When I read over the entire, completed manuscript, from start to finish, it seemed … unbalanced is the best word I can find. I’d tried to write in Humphrey’s style. I ought to have gone back and worked harder on the part I’d written, to bring it into line with his. Instead, I edited the rest to conform to mine. I didn’t rewrite the whole thing, just made a few alterations and additions.”

  “Not much more than you’d already been doing,” Daisy commented.

  “Exactly!” Sybil said eagerly. “I honestly didn’t think I’d changed it noticeably. And as I said, Humphrey never looked at a book again once it was sent off.”

  “Even when he had never seen the completed manuscript? He didn’t want to read it over before you sent it?”

  “He was still debilitated, not feeling at all well.”

  “So someone at the publisher’s noticed the difference.”

  “The editor Humphrey’s been working with for years. He wasn’t happy about it. He said the books had been selling well to an audience who liked them the way they were, and he didn’t see why Eli Hawke wanted to go mucking about with a popular formula.”

  “Oh dear!”

  “You can imagine how I felt. But it was too late to do anything about it. I’d turned in the book late, as it was, and they stick to a pretty strict schedule for that sort of thing. Apparently readers had come to expect a new one three times a year. In fact, when Humphrey started writing them, they were published as serials in magazines, so he had to turn in an episode a week. Or was it monthly? It was when they started to put them out as complete books—cheap, paperbound—that he needed a secretary.”

  “Who reads them? Do you know? I mean, I know my articles are mostly read by middle-class women with time on their hands.”

  “Lift-boys and hotel porters, I should think.” Sybil shrugged. “Thrills, and a little romance thrown in for good measure. No one’s claiming they’re aimed at intellectuals. All the same, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be as good as one can make them, given the limits. At any rate, I couldn’t show that letter to Humphrey, could I? Not just because it revealed that I’d been ‘mucking about’ with his work, but because, essentially, it brutally described his work as formulaic.”

  “No, not the sort of thing you want to show to an invalid. So, at this point, the publisher was expecting another book in four months’ time? And Humphrey was still too ill to write?”

  “He was weak and lethargic. It was a really nasty bout of pneumonia, and it left him unable to exert himself. He just doesn’t have any energy.”

  “How miserable!”

  “It is. He used to go for long walks across the hills. The Dales are quite different from Western America, but the countryside inspired him. Nowadays he doesn’t leave his room for days at a time, let alone striding up hill and down dale. Sitting down and writing for hours at a time is too much for him. But while I was finishing off Double Cross, he’d been thinking up a plot for the next book. It took his mind off his woes and—” A knock on the door interrupted her. “Come in!”

  The man who entered was big and fair. Fortyish, ruddy-faced, and dressed in comfortably worn tweeds, he could have been a farmer. He brought with him a breath of crisp, fresh ai
r.

  “I hope I’m not intruding, Sybil. I just want a quick word with you before I see Birtwhistle.”

  “Yes, of course. Daisy, Dr. Knox. Roger, this is Mrs. Fletcher. We were at school together.”

  How do you do’s were exchanged. Daisy tactfully offered to leave, though dying to stay. Not by a word, a gesture, or an intimate smile did these two betray themselves, but something undefinable in their demeanour, something beyond the use of given names, suggested that they were more than a little fond of one another.

  “No, stay, Daisy. I don’t suppose Roger intends to go into confidential details of Humphrey’s health, and you already know the history of his illness.”

  Dr. Knox exploded. “If he’d only take it easy when he’s feeling better! Just let him have a spark of energy after breakfast and he’s up and wandering round the gardens—”

  “That’s unfair. He takes it slowly and doesn’t go outside unless the weather is good. Ruby’s terrified that he might catch cold and develop pneumonia again.”

  “As he well may.”

  “Come off it, Roger, not just from going outdoors, well wrapped, on a fine day. Everyone stays away from him if they have the slightest sniffle.”

  “I should hope so.”

  “And you’re always telling me I should get more fresh air and exercise.”

  “You’re young and healthy. He’s sixty and in ill health, though I’ll be bothered if I know what’s wrong with him.”

  “It’s as if he’s gone into a decline, like a Victorian young lady when her hopes were disappointed.”

  “Nonsense. He doesn’t appear to be getting worse, except insofar as inactivity is taking its toll.”

  “There you are then,” said Sybil. “What he needs is more activity, not less.”

  “I’d agree, if it weren’t that his little outings invariably bring on a relapse. If he’d just be patient for a few days, build up his strength gradually, instead of rushing into things! He has no sense of his own limitations, that’s what it amounts to, even though he knows perfectly well what the consequence will be. How can I be expected to treat him when he refuses to follow directions?”