The Kindly Ones - Anthony Powell [66]
‘Billson?’
‘The parlourmaid at Stonehurst.’
‘Small girl, was she – always having trouble with her teeth?’
‘No, that was another one.’
I recognised that it was no good attempting to rebuild the red tiles, the elongated façade of the bungalow. If Albert supposed Billson to be short and dark, she must have passed from his mind without leaving a trace of her own passion. That was cruel. All the same, I made a final shot.
‘You don’t remember when she gave the slice of seed-cake to the little boy from Dr Trelawney’s?’
The question struck a spark. This concluding bid to unclog the floods of memory had an immediate, a wholly unexpected effect.
‘I knew there was something else I wanted to tell you, sir,’ said Albert. ‘It just went out of my head till you reminded me. That’s the very gentleman – Dr Trelawney – been staying here quite a long time. Came through a friend of your uncle’s, a lady. I puzzled and puzzled where I’d seen him before. Captain Jenkins said something one day how Dr Trelawney had lived near Stonehurst one time. Then the name came back to me.’
‘Does he still wear a beard and take his people out running?’
‘Still got a beard,’ said Albert, ‘but he lives very quiet now. Not so young as he was, like the rest of us. Has a lot of meals in his room. Quite a bit of trouble, he is. I get worried about him now and then. So does the wife. Not too quick at settling the account. Then he does say some queer things. Not everyone in the hotel likes it. Of course, we have to have all sorts here. Can’t pick and choose. Dr Trelawney’s health ain’t all that good neither. Suffers terrible from asthma. Something awful. I get frightened when he’s got the fit on him.’
It was clear that Albert, too well-behaved to say so explicitly, would have been glad to eject Dr Trelawney from the Bellevue. That was not surprising. I longed to set eyes on the Doctor again. It would be a splendid story to tell Moreland, with whom I had been out of any close contact since we had stayed at the cottage.
‘Used my uncle to see much of Dr Trelawney?’
‘They’d pass the time of day,’ said Albert. ‘The lady knew both of them, of course. They’d sometimes all three go out together on the pier and such like. Captain Jenkins used to get riled with some of the Doctor’s talk about spirits and that. I’ve heard him say as much.’
‘Was the lady called Mrs Erdleigh?’ I asked.
Uncle Giles had once been suspected of being about to marry this fortune-telling friend of his. It was likely that she was the link between himself and Dr Trelawney.
‘That’s the name,’ said Albert. ‘Lives in the town here. Tells fortunes, so they say. Used to come here quite a lot. In fact, she rang up and offered to help after Captain Jenkins died, but I thought I’d better wait instructions. As it was, we just put all the clothing from the drawers tidy on the bed, so the things would be easy to pack. We haven’t touched the Gladstone bag. Captain Jenkins didn’t have much with him at the end. Kept most of his stuff in London, so I believe.’
Albert sniffed. He evidently held a low opinion of the Ufford.
‘I’ll just give you your uncle’s keys, sir,’ he said. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I must see the wife now. She takes on if I don’t keep her informed about veg. Those silly girls never bring her what she wants neither. One of them’s having time off, extra like, old Mrs Telford persuading her to go to an ambulance class or some such. I don’t know what the young women of today are about. Making sheep’s eyes most of the time, that’s what it comes to.’
He moved off laboriously to Mrs Creech’s sick-bed. I thought the best system would be to deal with Uncle Giles’s residue straight away, then dine. The news of Dr Trelawney’s installation at the Bellevue aroused a cloud of memories. That he had not passed into oblivion like so many others Albert had met was a tribute to the Doctor’s personality. Even he would have been forgotten, if Uncle Giles had not recalled him to mind. That was strange because, as a rule, where others were concerned, Uncle