Dear Trustee Read online

  Both policemen had a smile for her as she passed them again, and the one at the street exit asked, “Did you hear Mr. Picton?”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “Pretty good, isn’t he?” The policeman spoke as though he were an actor. And perhaps, thought Cecile, in a way he was.

  “Very good,” she agreed sedately. And then she went on her way to have lunch.

  But she was excited, and even faintly apprehensive now, about her interview with the solicitor, so she ate little, and presented herself in excellent time at the offices of Carisbrooke, Carisbrooke and Hayter.

  Here a grave and respectful senior clerk received her, conducted her to the office of Mr. Carisbrooke, and introduced her into the presence with a discreetly uttered, “Miss Bernardine to see you, sir.”

  “Ah, come in, Miss Bernardine, come in.”

  Mr. Carisbrooke, an austere, dignified, elderly gentleman, received her courteously, installed her in a large leather-upholstered armchair and then sat down again behind his desk and moved some papers about as though, thought Cecile in some astonishment, he were a trifle ill at ease.

  “I was indeed sorry to hear of your father’s death, Miss Bernardine,” he said sincerely. “An old client and a valued one, I might say. But now—” he cleared his throat—“we have to consider your present position, which is, I am bound to tell you, a somewhat complicated one.”

  “Is it?” Cecile was surprised, and looked it.

  “Yes. There is, first, the question of your mother—”

  “My mother?” Cecile was more than ever astonished. “But she died years ago, didn’t she?”

  “Well—no. That isn’t quite correct,” said Mr. Carisbrooke, as though there might be degrees of being dead. “Not correct at all,” he amended. Then he sighed. “I am sorry your father never saw fit to explain the situation to you himself. But, in point of fact, your mother is alive.”

  “She is—alive? And no one ever told me? But why not?” In the intensity of her feeling Cecile flushed and then paled.

  Again Mr. Carisbrooke sighed.

  “I am afraid your parents were deeply estranged for most of their married life. It is an old story, of course, and no useful purpose is ever served by reviving these melancholy disputes. I can only tell you that your father and mother were temperamentally quite unsuited, and that when you were only a few years old, your mother left home to—ah—pursue a stage career.”

  “You mean she was—is—an actress? Here? In London?”

  Mr. Carisbrooke inclined his head.

  “In what are, I believe, called secondary roles,” he added somewhat austerely.

  “But then—” suddenly a great lump came into Cecile’s throat and she had to swallow hard, “There is nothing to prevent my—my going to see her—making myself known to her?”

  “Except the fact that your father very strongly believed you were better apart. He disapproved of her and her way of life.”

  “Do you mean she was not—not respectable?”

  “Oh, Miss Bernardine!” Mr. Carisbrooke was evidently horrified at being invited to make what he regarded as a slanderous statement. “I was not suggesting such a thing for one moment.”

  “It sounded very much like it,” Cecile told him. “But, whatever my father’s reasons, he thought it better I should regard her as dead. How unfair!” And again, she flushed and paled.

  “That was not how your father saw it.”

  “But now—” she continued to pursue her own line of thought—“now I can make my own decisions, can’t I?”

  “To a limited extent, yes.”

  “Why only to a limited extent?” she asked quickly. “Am I not my own mistress now?”

  “No, Miss Bernardine. Not entirely. Your father, foreseeing that on his death you would be very much alone, except for a mother he preferred to have kept at a distance, appointed three trustees to look after your affairs. And yourself,” he added as an afterthought.

  “Three trustees?” Cecile, appalled, saw her new, attractive independence beginning to fade. “You mean—people who have a right to tell me what I must do and not do?”

  “No, no.” Mr. Carisbrooke rejected this inaccurate reading of a trustee’s duties somewhat testily. “They have power to administer your financial affairs, possibly to decide on your place of residence and—”

  “It’s more or less as I said,” Cecile interrupted resignedly. “Three of them! How dreadful. Who are they?”

  “One is your aunt, Mrs. Coulter.”

  “Oh,” Cecile became more cheerful, “that isn’t too bad.”

  “Then there is Mr. Algernon Deeping, who—”

  “Deeping;?” Cecile smiled and coloured suddenly. “I know someone of that name. Maurice Deeping. He knew my father.”

  “I believe this is his uncle,” Mr. Carisbrooke said. “But I must tell you that Mr. Algernon Deeping is elderly and in poor health. I doubt if he will take a very active part in your affairs.”

  “Nor will Aunt Josephine, to tell the truth.” Cecile smiled, for she was beginning to feel that the trustees were not going to be such a hindrance to her as she had at first imagined. “I suppose, Mr. Carisbrooke, that you are the third trustee?”

  “No, no.” Mr. Carisbrooke disclaimed the honour firmly. “Your father rightly chose someone well able to deal with any difficulty which might arise. The third trustee is Mr. Gregory Picton, the well-known Q.C.”

  “Gregory Picton?” Cecile stared at Mr. Carisbrooke, absolutely aghast. “You can’t mean it! But how perfectly awful. Can’t we upset the trust or something?”

  “Miss Bernardine, indeed we cannot!” Mr. Carisbrooke was almost equally aghast, in his turn. “And why should we? Mr. Picton is a most highly respected and admirable person.”

  “He may be. But he’s a sarcastic sort of beast as well,” declared Cecile, who was in no mood to choose her words. “I’ve just been watching him tear strips off some poor wretch in Court.”

  “Tear strips—” Mr. Carisbrooke’s eyes positively bulged. “You must be completely mistaken, I assure you!”

  “Oh, no, I’m not. He was counsel for the prosecution or something. And he was perfectly frightful, in a quiet way, to the wretched accused. The man was left without a leg to stand on.”

  “But, my dear Miss Bernardine,” Mr. Carisbrooke had found his way back out of the maze of modern metaphor, “it is not the business of the prosecution to make the defendant feel comfortable and at ease.”

  “No, I daresay not. But there are ways and ways, aren’t there?”

  Mr. Carisbrooke did not seem to think there were. He smiled drily. But he said, in a pacific tone of voice:

  “Remember, you will not be in the same position as the defendant, Miss Bernardine. You are allowing your prejudices to run away with you. Your father knew and respected Mr. Picton highly. He felt that your interests would be safe in Mr. Picton’s hands.”

  “But do you think my father was always right, Mr. Carisbrooke?” Cecile suddenly looked the solicitor full in the face.

  “No one is always right, my dear,” Mr. Carisbrooke smiled.

  “About my mother, for instance—do you think he was right to keep us apart all these years?”

  “It isn’t really for me to say,” declared Mr. Carisbrooke, not sorry, Cecile thought, to get out of it that way.

  “I suppose what I really meant was—will Mr. Picton think the situation right and try to maintain it?”

  “In consultation with the other trustees—” began the solicitor. But Cecile shook her head and interrupted.

  “No, no, Mr. Carisbrooke. You know as well as I do that neither my Aunt Josephine nor this elderly Mr. Deeping will be specially emphatic either way. It will be Mr. Picton who will become virtually my guardian.”

  “Trustee,” Mr. Carisbrooke corrected, and he winced slightly at this slipshod use of what he regarded as very exact terms.

  “Trustee,” Cecile accepted the correction. “But I suppose that amounts
to much the same thing in the end, doesn’t it? If he holds the purse strings, he can dictate more or less what I do.”

  “Miss Bernardine, you have a most extraordinary idea both of a trustee’s powers and Mr. Picton’s attitude to a clearly defined legal position,” protested Mr. Carisbrooke severely. “What he, I mean the trustees,” he looked annoyed at his own slip, “will chiefly concern themselves with will be—”

  He broke off as there was a tap on the door and the discreet elderly clerk insinuated himself into the room.

  “Mr. Picton to see you sir,” he murmured respectfully. “And he asked me to say that as he has another appointment, he would appreciate it if you could see him right away.”

  “Well,” Mr. Carisbrooke glanced doubtfully at his young client and away again, “all right. Ask Mr. Picton to come in.” Then, turning once more to Cecile, as the clerk withdrew, he said,

  “I hadn’t quite covered all I wanted to say to you before Mr. Picton’s arrival, but I think we can finish the discussion with him here.”

  Before Cecile could give her views on this, the door opened and the clerk ushered in Gregory Picton.

  “Ah, Picton, good afternoon.” Mr. Carisbrooke rose and shook his visitor by the hand, with a nice mixture of elderly condescension and professional respect. “Miss Bernardine, this is Mr. Picton, one of your trustees.”

  “How do you do,” said Cecile as formally as she could.

  “Hello,” said Mr. Picton. “What did you think of the case this morning?”

  “D-did you know that I was there?”

  “Certainly. It is my business to know what is going on in Court when I am acting in a case.”

  “But—in the public gallery?”

  “In the public gallery too.” he assured her. “You’d be surprised how much one can learn from the occupants of the public gallery, eh, Carisbrooke?” He exchanged a smile with the solicitor. “The friends of the defendant often gather there, for instance.”

  “I wasn’t a friend of the defendant!” Cecile declared hastily.

  “No, no. You came to hear me, naturally. Wanted to inspect your new trustee at close quarters. Quite understandable.”

  “I didn’t even know you were my trustee then,” Cecile retorted crisply, pleased to show Mr. Gregory Picton he could be wrong.

  “You didn’t?” He seemed amused and interested. “Well, anyway, what did you think of the case?”

  She looked at that handsome, imperturbable face, with its faintly amused smile, and some resentful instinct she could not have accounted for made her say, quite deliberately,

  “I thought you were horrible.”

  "You did?” He laughed. While Mr. Carisbrooke uttered the sound which is usually indicated by, “Tch, tch!”

  “It seems the defendant did have a friend in the public gallery, after all,” observed Mr. Picton amusedly. “And that friend no less than my own new charge. Did you think there was a miscarriage of justice, then, Cecile?”

  “I—No, I don’t think that,” she admitted.

  “You feel morally certain the libel was false and malicious?”

  “Ye-es.”

  “But you think I was horrible—” he savoured the word with an amused appreciation which secretly infuriated her—“to make the libeller give himself away? You would have preferred kindness and good manners to have been maintained, even at the expense of justice?”

  “No, of course not.” She flushed again, at being pushed into a corner thus. “But since you insisted on asking me and quite obviously expected a compliment, I felt entitled to tell you that your methods were odious.”

  “But effective?”

  “Well—yes.” She was fair about that.

  “Perhaps,” Mr. Carisbrooke cleared his throat, “since Mr. Picton’s time is short, we should revert to more personal matters.”

  Privately, Cecile thought they could hardly have been more personal. But Gregory Picton immediately sat down—a little as though the place belonged to him, Cecile reflected resentfully—and, glancing at Mr. Carisbrooke, asked:

  “Has Cecile been told of the situation?”

  “I know about my mother,” Cecile interrupted quickly, and she looked her trustee in the eye with what she hoped was self-confidence. “And I intend to see her as soon as possible.”

  “You have seen her, my dear,” was the unexpected reply. “In the play last night. She was the slightly raffish friend of the heroine’s mother. In Act Two.”

  “The—the tall woman in green?” Cecile went pale.

  “Yes. You didn’t notice a marked likeness to yourself?”

  “Why, no. Is there one?”

  “Yes, certainly. That was how I guessed who you were when I saw you sitting in the row behind me. I thought you had found out about your mother somehow, and had come on purpose to see her.”

  “Oh, no. Not at all.” Agitatedly Cecile tried to recall everything about the minor stage character who now had such personal interest for her, and rather defensively she exclaimed, “I thought she was wonderful in the part.”

  “It was right up her street,” agreed Mr. Picton drily.

  And, while Cecile was wondering just what he meant by that, Mr. Carisbrooke went on firmly:

  “I have explained to Miss Bernardine the position with regard to you and your co-trustees. I have not, however, explained the—er—financial position.”

  “Is there much to explain?” Cecile looked enquiring.

  Mr. Carisbrooke did not reply at once. And, after a moment, it was Gregory Picton who said, not unkindly,

  “In the literal sense, Cecile, there is not much to discuss. Although your father was a wealthy man when he made his will and appointed the trustees, in the last year or two he used a great deal of capital in order to make some unlucky investments.”

  “Then you mean there is nothing much for the trustees to administer?” Cecile seized on that eagerly.

  “Not much,” he agreed.

  “So that you haven’t got much hold—I mean control—over me?”

  “I don’t know that we should ever have had much hold—or even control—over you.” Gregory Picton looked amused again. “We are not your legal guardians. But—I can’t answer for my fellow trustees—I myself feel I have some sort of moral responsibility with regard to your welfare, whatever the size of the estate.”

  “Very proper,” murmured Mr. Carisbrooke approvingly.

  But Cecile merely said flatly and rather rudely, "Why?”

  “Because, my dear, your father was very good to me when I was a very young man and needed an older friend,” Gregory Picton told her. “If he thought me a trustworthy person to look after his daughter when he was gone, I have no intention of rejecting that obligation, either because the estate turns out to be a modest affair, after all, or because I seem rather an unpopular choice with the daughter concerned.”

  There was silence for a moment, while Cecile considered whether or not this were intended as an olive branch. But she decided that, even if it were, it had been waved altogether too casually under her nose. And so she simply asked, somewhat coldly, “How long does this trust last?”

  “Until you are twenty-three.”

  “Why not twenty-one? Isn’t that more usual?”

  “I suppose your father thought twenty-three a safer age for you to be on your own,” Gregory Picton said, while Mr. Carisbrooke observed that these matters were at the discretion of the deceased.

  Then Gregory Picton rose and said he must go.

  “Where are you staying, Cecile?”

  “At the Stirling House Hotel.”

  “Will you have dinner with me tomorrow evening? We can discuss things in more detail then. And perhaps—” he smiled again—“get to know each other better.”

  She would have liked to refuse. But, as this was impossible, she thanked him formally and accepted. And, having arranged to fetch her at seven the following evening, he bade Mr. Carisbrooke goodbye. He was actually at the door before he tu
rned and said: “Oh, Cecile, I don’t want to act the heavy guardian, but I would rather you did not attempt to meet your mother until after we have had a talk together.”

  Then he went off, apparently under the impression that it was enough for him to make his wishes known. Cecile looked after him and her eyes sparkled dangerously. But she said nothing, for the simple reason that he had not waited long enough for her to do so.

  Mr. Carisbrooke then recalled himself to her notice by clearing his throat once more, and then informed her that he would be applying for probate of her father’s will, after which it would be easier to clarify the financial position.

  “When Mr. Picton says there isn’t much money left,” said Cecile thoughtfully, “does that mean that I had better set about earning my own living as quickly as possible?”

  To this Mr. Carisbrooke gave it as his opinion that there was no immediate urgency, “—though there will certainly not be sufficient for you to live on without augmenting your income,” he hastened to add, before Cecile should get any exaggerated ideas.

  “Well, that’s all right.” Cecile was philosophical. “Most people have to do at least that. And it will be more interesting than living in a mouldy old house in Yorkshire. I shall sell the house, of course,” she added with authority.

  Mr. Carisbrooke forbore to point out that she would have to consult the trustees, and contented himself with adding, somewhat pessimistically, “If you can find a buyer.”

  “Yes. And. if there is enough money, I should like our two maids to have a small pension each,” Cecile continued firmly. At which Mr. Carisbrooke looked rather alarmed.

  "Miss Bernadine, there won’t be enough money to throw about.”

  “I shan't throw it about,” Cecile assured him. “But they are old and can’t work, while I am young and can.”

  “I see.” Mr. Carisbrooke’s expression softened. “It’s as simple as that, is it?”

  Cecile thought it was. And presently, having assured Mr. Carisbrooke that she would be staying in London for some while longer and be available for consultation, she bade him a friendly goodbye and went out once more into the quiet and peaceful atmosphere of the tree-shaded square in which his office was situated.