Child’s Play

No! Eden Thackeray assured himself firmly. This was the last time he let a kindly impulse move him off the well-worn rails of legal procedure, not even if he saw one of his own family chained to the line ahead!

‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts …’

Aye, Lord, mebbe thou dost, and if so, nivver hesitate to pass them on to that silly old bat if she happens to drift in thy direction! thought John Huby savagely.

All those years of dancing attendance! All those cups of watery tea, supped with his little finger crooked and his head nodding agreement with her half-baked ideas on Lord’s Day Observance and preserving the Empire! All those Sunday afternoons spent crammed - no matter what the weather - into his blue serge suit, the arse of which always required a good hour’s brushing to remove the thick layer of cat and dog hair it picked up from every seat at Troy House! All that wasted effort!

And worse. All those debts run up in the expectation of plenty. All those foundations already dug and equipment already ordered for the restaurant and function room extensions. His heart fell flat as a slop-tray at the thought of it. Years of confident hope, months of tremulous anticipation, and barely twenty-four hours of joyous attainment before Lexie came home from that bloodsucking bastard’s office and broke the incredible news.

Oh yes, Lord! If like the vicar says, thou knowst what’s going on in my heart, then pass it on to the silly old bat pretty damn quick, and tell her if she hangs around a bit, she’ll likely catch Gruff-of-sodding-Greendale coming up the chimney at the Old Mill after her!

‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear sister here departed …’

The pleasure, dear God, is entirely yours, thought Stephanie Windibanks, née Lomas, first cousin once removed of the dear departed, as she grasped a handful of earth and wondered which of those around the grave would make the best target.

That low publican, Huby? Rod’s suggestion that she should console herself with the thought that she had been dealt with no worse than that creature had only fanned her resentment. To be put on a par with such an uncouth lout! Oh Arthur, Arthur! she apostrophized her dead husband, see what a pass you’ve brought me to, you stupid bastard! At least, dear God, do not let them find out about the villa!

But what was the use of appealing to God? Why should He reward faith when He was so reluctant to reward works? For it had been hard work cultivating the Yorkshire connection all these years. Of course, it might be pointed out that she had long been aware - who better? - of Cousin Gwen’s central dottiness. Indeed, she had to admit that on occasion she had even actively encouraged it. But who would have guessed that when it pleased Almighty and entirely Unreliable God of His great mercy to take Gwen’s soul unto himself, it would also amuse him to leave her dottiness wandering loose and dangerous on the terrestrial plane?

God then her target, rather than Huby? But how to strike the intangible? She wanted a satisfyingly meaty mark. What about God’s accomplice in this, that smug bastard Thackeray? It would be nice, but long experience of the world of affairs had taught her that lawyers loomed large in the ranks of the pricks it was fruitless to kick against.

Keech, then? That downmarket Mrs Danvers, peering with myopic piety at a point a little above the vicar’s head as if hoping to see there and applaud the ascension of her benefactress’s soul …

No. Keech had done well, it was true, but only in relation to her needs. And think of the price. A lifetime of those creatures and that smell …! It required the soul of an ostler to envy Miss Keech!

This then was the worst moment of all, the moment when you realized there was no one to vent your rage on, a nothingness as insubstantial as the spirit of that silly old woman doubtless smiling smugly in her satin blancmange mould six feet below!

She hurled the earth with such force against the coffin lid that a pebble rebounded straight up the vicar’s cassock, producing a little squeal of shock and pain which translated the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection into the sure and certain hype of the Resurrection. No one was surprised. Was not this, after all, the age of the New English Prayer Book?

‘I heard a voice from heaven, saying unto me, Write …’

Dear Auntie Gwen, thought Stephanie Windibanks' son, Rod Lomas, Mummy and I have come up to Yorkshire for your funeral which has been rather Low Church for my taste and rather low company for Mummy’s. You were quite right to keep these Hubys in their place, as dear Keechie puts it. They are the product of very unimaginative casting. Father John looks too like a bad-tempered Yorkshire publican to be true, and Goodwife Ruby (Ruby Huby! no scriptwriter would dare invent that!) is the big, blonde barmaid to the last brassy gleam. Younger daughter Jane is cast in the same jelly-mould and where this superfluity of flesh comes from is easy to see when you look at the elder girl, Lexie. In shape no bigger than an agate stone on the forefinger of an alderman, I swear she could enter an ill-fitting door by the joint. With those great round glasses and that solemn little face, she looks like a barn owl perched on a pogostick!

But all this you know, dear Auntie, and much else besides. What can I, who am here, tell you, who are there? Still, I must not shirk my familial obligations, unlike some I can think of. The weather here is fine, corn-yellow sun in a cornflower sky, just right for early September. Mummy is as well as can be expected in the tragic circumstances. As for me, suffice it to say that after my brilliant but brief run as Mercutio in the Salisbury Spring Festival, I am once more resting, and I will not conceal from you that a generous helping of the chinks would not have gone astray. Well, we must live in hope, mustn’t we? Except for you, Auntie, who, if you do still exist, must now exist in certainty. Don’t be too disappointed in our disappointment, will you? And do have the grace to blush when you find what a silly ass you’ve been making of yourself all these years.

Must sign off now. Almost time for the cold ham. Take care. Sorry you’re not here. Love to Alexander. Your loving cousin a bit removed,

Rod.

‘Come ye blessed children of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you …’

I hope the preparation’s a bit better than yours was, Dad, thought Lexie Huby, sensitive, as she had learned to be from infancy, to the rumbles of volcanic rage emanating from her father’s rigid frame. She had giggled when Mr Thackeray had told her about Gruff-of-Greendale but she had not giggled when she broke the news to her father that night.

‘Two hundred pounds!’ he’d exploded. ‘Two hundred pounds and a stuffed dog!’

‘You did used to make a fuss of it, Dad,’ Jane had piped up. ‘Said it were one of the wonders of nature, it were so lifelike.’

‘Lifelike! I hated that bloody tyke when it were alive, and I hated it even more when it were dead. At least, living, it’d squeal when you kicked it! Gruff-of-sodding-Greendale! You’re not laking with me are you, Lexie?’

‘I’d not do that, Dad,’ she said calmly.

‘Why’d old Thackeray tell you all this and not me direct?’ he demanded suspiciously. ‘Why’d he tell a mere girl when he could’ve picked up the phone and spoken straight to me? Scared, was he?’

‘He were trying to be kind, Dad,’ said Lexie. ‘Besides, I were as entitled to hear it as you. I’m a beneficiary too.’

‘You?’ Huby’s eyes had lit with new hope. ‘What did you get, Lexie?’

‘I got fifty pounds and all her opera records,’ said Lexie. ‘Mam got a hundred pounds and her carriage clock, the brass one in the parlour, not the gold one in her bedroom. And Jane got fifty and the green damask tablecloth.’

‘The old cow! The rotten old cow! Who got it, then? Not that cousin of hers, not old Windypants and her useless son?’

‘No, Dad. She gets two hundred like you, and the silver teapot.’

‘That’s worth a damn sight more than Gruff-of-sodding-Greendale! She always were a crook, that one, like that dead husband of hers. They should’ve both been locked up! But who does get it then? Is it Keech? That scheming old hag?’

‘Miss Keech gets an allowance on condition she stays on at Troy House and looks after the animals,’ said Lexie.

‘That’s a meal ticket for life, isn’t it?’ said John Huby. ‘But hold on. If she stays on, who gets the house? I mean, it has to belong to some bugger, doesn’t it? Lexie, who’s she left it all to? Not to some bloody charity, is it? I couldn’t bear to be passed over for a bloody dogs’ home.’

‘In a sense,’ said Lexie, taking a deep breath. ‘But not directly. In the first place she’s left everything to …’

‘To who?’ thundered John Huby as she hesitated.

And Lexie recalled Eden Thackeray’s quiet, dry voice … ‘the rest residue and remainder of my estate whatsoever whether real or personal I give unto my only son Second Lieutenant Alexander Lomas Huby present address unknown …

‘She’s done what? Nay! I’ll not credit it! She’s done what? It’ll not stand up! It’s that slimy bloody lawyer that’s behind it, I’ll warrant! I’ll not sit down under this! I’ll not!’

It had been an irony unappreciated by John Huby that in the old church of St Wilfrid, what he had sat down under was a brass wall plaque reading In Loving Memory of Second Lieutenant Alexander Lomas Huby, missing in action in Italy, May 1944.

It was Sam Huby, the boy’s father, who had caused the plaque to be erected in 1947. For two years he had tolerated his wife’s refusal to believe her son was dead, but there had to be an end. For him the installation of the plaque marked it. But not for Gwendoline Huby. Her conviction of Alexander’s survival had gone underground for a decade and then re-emerged, bright-eyed and vigorous as ever, on her husband’s death. She made no secret of her belief, and over the years in the eyes of most of her family and close acquaintances, this dottiness had become as unremarkable as, say, a wart on the chin, or a stutter.

To find at last that it was this disregarded eccentricity which had robbed him of his merited inheritance was almost more than John Huby could bear.

Lexie had continued, ‘If he doesn’t claim it by April 4th in the year 2015, which would be his ninetieth birthday, that’s when it goes to charity. There’s three of them, by the way …’

But John Huby was not in the mood for charity.

‘2015?’ he groaned. ‘I’ll be ninety then too, if I’m spared, which doesn’t seem likely. I’ll fight the will! She must’ve been crazy, that’s plain as the nose on your face. All that money … How much is it, Lexie? Did Mr sodding Thackeray tell you that?’

Lexie said, ‘It’s hard to be exact, Dad, what with share prices going up and down and all that …’

‘Don’t try to blind me with science, girl. Just because I let you go and work in that bugger’s office instead of stopping at home and helping your mam in the pub doesn’t make you cleverer than the rest of us, you’d do well to remember that! So none of your airs, you don’t understand all that stuff anyway! Just give us a figure.’

‘All right, Dad,’ said Lexie Huby meekly. ‘Mr Thackeray reckons that all told it should come to the best part of a million and a half pounds.’

And for the first and perhaps the last time in her life, she had the satisfaction of reducing her father to silence.

‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ …’