“You’ve become very determined.”
“I have indeed.”
[FOUR]
“If you’re absolutely stuck for somebody to squander your Mum’s money on, why don’t you have a look at Monny Gall?” said Cobbler to Solly. It would be wrong to say that Solly had confided the growing embarrassment of the Trustees to his friend; Cobbler had been insatiably curious about everything connected with the Bridgetower Trust since he heard of it on Christmas Day, and he wormed information out of Solly and Veronica at every opportunity. It fascinated him, he explained, to think of so much lovely money looking for somebody to spend it.
“Who’s Monny Gall?”
“If you ever listened to your local radio station you would know. She is the soprano of the Heart and Hope Gospel Quartet, who broadcast on behalf of the Thirteenth Apostle Tabernacle five mornings of the week, from nine-thirty to nine forty-five. I breakfast a bit later than you proletarians, and I never miss the H. & H.”
“Do you mean that it is good?”
“It is very good in its way. That’s to say, it primes the pump of sweet self-pity, mingled with tremulous self-reproach and a strong sense of never having had a square deal from life, which passes for religion with a lot of people — housewives mostly. It is run by an unctuous gorilla who calls himself Pastor Sidney Beamis; he dishes out the Hope in a short, moderately disgusting prayer in which he tells God that we’re all pretty awful but that the Thirteenth Apostles are having a bash at sainthood. The Heart is supplied by the Quartet, which is composed of his own family and Monny Gall. Pastor Beamis supplies a hollow, gutty bass; his son Wesley weighs in with a capon tenor — all headvoice and tremolo; Ma Beamis has a contralto tone like a cow mooing in a railway tunnel; and Monny Gall has a very nice soprano indeed – sweet, pure, and very naturally produced. You should hear them in Eden Must Have Been Like Granny’s Garden, or Ten Baby Fingers and Ten Baby Toes, That Was My Mother’s Rosary.”
“It sounds perfectly filthy.”
“It is. It fills me with perverse glee. But Monny is worth redeeming from this musical hell. She has positively the most promising voice I have ever heard in an untrained singer.”
“Then what is she doing with the H. & H.?”
“Why shouldn’t she be with it? Her Ma, who is an extremely formidable old party, is a pillar of the Thirteenth Apostle Tabernacle. She tells Monny to sing for Beamis, and Monny sings. For nothing, what’s more. For the greater glory of Beamis.”
“But if she’s musical, why does she sing Granny’s Toes, and so forth?”
“I didn’t say she was musical; I said she had a lovely voice. You make the common error of assuming that singers are necessarily musicians. There are people, my dear Bridgetower, who sing because God has made them singers; very often they have no taste at all; they will sing anything, so long as they can open their mouths and give. That’s Monny. Caught young, and taught well, I don’t know what she mightn’t rise to.”
“You appear to be greatly interested in her.”
“I am.”
“Is she pretty, as well as stupid?”
“Bridgetower, you wound me! She isn’t pretty and she isn’t plain; she’s just a girl. But she has an unusual voice, which Beamis is wrecking. You ought to remember her; she’s the girl who sang My Task at your Mum’s funeral.”
“I don’t remember anything about her.”
“I do,” said Veronica, who usually kept silent while Solly and Cobbler carried on their long, wandering, often quarrelsome conversations. “I thought it was a lovely voice. Sweet and pure and rather remote.”
“Exactly. Monny can take a lot of the sting out of My Task. It’s sheer gift; she hasn’t any ideas about it. But something in her voice suggests beauty, and calm, and even reason, when what she is singing is unalloyed boloney.”
“She hasn’t put in an application for the Trust.”
“Don’t suppose the notion ever occurred to her. She’s no climber. Her Ma keeps her down.”
“Are you suggesting that we should write her to consider it? Snelgrove would have a fit!”
“Yes, and if it were thought that I had brought her name up, old Puss would have a fit. She hates me with the one pure passion of her life; she’s always trying to get my job away from me. I’m not her notion of a Cathedral organist. But I could get hold of Monny and ask her to put in a bid, if you like.”
“We’ve got to find somebody, and I don’t give a damn who it is.”
“Oh come, Bridgetower; you are speaking of money; don’t be bitter.”
“Why shouldn’t I be bitter? I’m not greedy, God knows, but I’m human. The income on more than a million dollars, that might have been mine, is to be spent on a stranger. If my mother had left no money at all, I wouldn’t have cared. If she had left the bulk of it to a charity, I wouldn’t have cared. But she left it as she did to hurt me, and to register a final protest against my marriage. God, you’d think Veronica was a leper, and not just the daughter of a man she and Father quarrelled with twenty years ago. She has done everything that a will can do to humiliate and hurt me. I’m convinced she left me that hundred dollars simply to make the will hard to break. It would serve her right if her money did go to some wretched gospel-howler. If it outraged her cankered old soul in its smug Anglican heaven I’d be glad of it!”
“Oh Solly darling, you’ll only make yourself ill,” said Veronica.
“Let him have it out,” said Cobbler. “Choking back hatred and hurt feelings causes ulcers, high blood-pressure and arthritis. Fact. All the medical books say so. Better get it out in words. It’s the inarticulate people, who can’t rail against fate, who get nasty diseases. Have a good rage, Bridgetower. Would you care to hit somebody? You may hit me one moderate blow if it would really help. Pretend I’m your late Mum.”
“Don’t joke about it,” said Solly. “Don’t you realize we’ve got to maintain this bloody great house on my cottage salary? That old Ethel hangs over us and pities us and bullies us because we’re poor, and makes a favour of staying here when we’d a thousand times rather she went somewhere else. Just try to teach an extravagant old cook something about economy, if you want to break your heart! And people keep writing to us for money; they think this damned Bridgetower Trust is a grab-bag for every kind of good cause. If we say the Trust can’t give, they ask us for something personally. What have we got to give? The estate pays the taxes on this house, but apparently the estate has no obligation to pay its running expenses without a special meeting of trustees. So last week I had to beg the Dean and old Puss for enough money to get the downstairs drain unplugged, and it took an hour and a half of humming and hawing, and suggestions about trying Draino, to get it. I face a future of that kind of thing. A happy prospect, isn’t it?”
“As Molly said, it’s the Dead Hand,” said Cobbler.
“Dead Hand!” Solly thumped the table. “It’s the live hand, too. This house is part of a trust. During the summer Veronica put away some trinkets and odds and bobs that used to clutter up the mantelpieces. Last week old Puss came in, missed them at once, and insisted that they be put back. And when we boggled at it, she got Snelgrove to phone and say that, legally, we must maintain the house precisely as the Trust received it. Isn’t that a sweet situation? She hinted that we ought to put away the Rockingham, but I’m going to use it every day, to spite her. I’ll feed the cat off it; that’s my right, and I’ll do it.”
“Your late Mum was really a corker,” said Cobbler. “Most people want to ensure that everything they leave will remain untouched, but she has actually found a way to do it. Of course she was singularly fortunate in having an old poison-pot like Puss for a best friend.”
“Well, you see how it is,” said Solly. “I’m completely tied, and Veronica is put in a most humiliating position. What can we do? The only possible thing is to maintain what dignity we can, and insist that the terms of the will be kept as strictly for everyone else as they are for us. Therefore I insist that somebody be chosen and sent abroad by the Trust within the allotted time, and I do not give a damn who it is or what they are studying, or what rage, despair and misery comes of it. What Mother began, I shall finish, and nothing will come in my way.”