It was just after twelve-thirty- when I reached the old flint farmhouse nestled into a hollow of the downs not far from the Long Man. Being the weekend, there was no one about and the place had a sleepy look, cows grazing in a paddock of lush grass and everything very still in the leaf} shadow of Bull’s Wood. Miriam opened the door to me herself, her face pale and set. ‘Philip!’ She didn’t smile. She just fell into my arms, clutching me tight for a moment. ‘God! I thought you were another reporter. I’ve had two this morning and the phone … You’ve seen that paper, have you?’
‘That’s why I came.’
‘They must have got it from the police. I notified the police the day after I saw you — Saturday.’ She shook herself free. ‘I didn’t realize you could cause such a stir just by walking away from everything. That’s what he’s done, isn’t it? Just walked out and left other people to pick up the pieces. Unless he’s killed himself. D’you think he’s killed himself?’
‘No, of course not.’
But she didn’t seem to hear me. ‘I should have got it out of him,’ she went on quickly. ‘I knew there was something … But to go off like that — without a word. Why?’ And she repeated it, her voice breaking and a little wild. ‘Why, for God’s sake why?’
‘Would you like to have lunch somewhere?’ I thought it might relax her a little to be away from the house.
She nodded, and when she was in the car and we were out on the Lewes road, she said, ‘We had a row. No, not a row. That needs two. He just exploded, a nervous, end-of-his-tether son of eruption. I thought he was going to have a heart attack, his face all suffused, his hands trembling. He was quite overwrought, so I didn’t press him.’ And she added slowly, ‘Perhaps I should have, but at the time…’ She left it at that. ‘Did you come straight from your boat? I heard it was finished. You never asked us to the launching.’
‘We just dumped it in the water.’
I took her to the Tiger Inn, and because I knew she wanted to be taken out of herself I talked to her about the boat, all my plans. It wasn’t until we had sat down to eat that we got back to the subject of Tom Halliday, and it was she who insisted on talking about him — not about what had happened, but about the man himself. Quite why she decided to tell me about him I’m not sure. Perhaps it was an attempt to explain, even justify, his action to herself. Whatever the reason, once she had started the words seemed to pour out of her, so that I had the feeling she couldn’t help herself, and at the end of it I was just thankful I hadn’t been born with a gold mine round my neck.
He had had everything, the whole world handed to him on a plate. I could see him now, sitting at the end of the table, the little brushed-up moustache picked out in the candle light, his high cheekbones flushed pink as the port made its vintage ruby way round the table, telling the story once again of how his father had gone out to the Klondike as a young man, up the White Pass from Skagway all the way to Dawson, then along something called the Dalton Trail where the wild man who had hacked it out of the bush rode shotgun to keep out intruders who hadn’t paid his toll fee. Somewhere along that trail, or else in Dawson, Josh Halliday, who was the son of an insurance man in San Francisco, was sold that mine. ‘Lucky’ Carlos Despera. That was the name of the man who sold it to him, and the name of the mine was Ice Cold Creek. I remembered the names because of the way Tom had rolled them off his tongue, laughing as he did so — the Noisy Range, too. Then he was telling how his father had packed in to that mine and found it high up near a great mountain mass that roared with the sound of glaciers on the move.
‘Tom was like a little boy.’ Miriam was leaning forward then, her elbows on the table, her chin resting on her hands, which were closed fists, the knuckles white, her eyes staring at nothing. ‘A brash show-off. It was part of the attraction, that extraordinary charisma of his, all his energy — and he was tireless, quite tireless, bubbling over with vitality — all of it with no outlet. No positive, real, constructive outlet.’
I could see him, so full of himself — and that picture of his father. The mine was a dud, of course. ‘Josh knew that as soon as he’d packed in to the white glacial heart of the mountain. There were men working claims lower down the creek, just managing to pan enough to give them hope, and they all said the upper end of Ice Cold Creek was worked out, gone, finished.’ And still, in desperation, the poor devil had gone on shovelling rock, working his guts out while the food lasted and he still had a few dollars left. Then, the day he decided to pull out — that was probably apocryphal, but when his money was just about gone — suddenly he struck lucky. ‘Not just ordinary pay dirt, but small nuggets of gold.’ And the way Tom said it, you could see the stuff there in the calloused hand, the mouth open in a great cry, the feet pounding to the excited, boisterous jig of joy.
‘Cars, speedboats, Le Mans, the RAC — aircraft, too. He flew his own plane. And women. I didn’t understand that at first. His need of women. I think he’d have liked to bed every one of them that took his fancy. Just to prove something. That he was a man, I suppose.’ She gave a quick shake of her head, smiling. ‘He wasn’t homosexual — I don’t mean that. But when you’ve got a pot of gold up there in the Yukon, where nobody can see it… It’s different for you, Philip. You can take people along to your office and say, Look, this is what I’ve done with my life. I’ve built a practice. You are possessed of an expertise that brings people to you, for your advice, for your help. But Tom had nothing like that.’
‘The factory,’ I said.
She shrugged. ‘It wasn’t his. It was Martin’s. Martin ran it. The thing was his idea. Tom paid for it, that’s all. Just as he paid for his cars, his plane, a speedboat that could flash him around the Royal Yacht at Cowes and into an occasional picture in one of the glamour mags. But nothing of his own, nothing he had created himself. It all came from the mine, everything he possessed. Periodically he’d go out there. I don’t know why. He had an excellent manager. Jonny Epinard. Absolutely straight. But every so often he’d take off for the Yukon. Sometimes I thought it was just to make sure it was still there, that it was real.’
She shook her head slowly. ‘I wondered myself sometimes. All those years — through his father’s lifetime, and now his — all that time and steadily yielding its golden harvest, keeping the Hallidays in the manner to which …’ She laughed, a mocking sound. ‘But, oh, the damage a thing like that can do to an insecure youngster! He went out to South America once, did he tell you?’
I shook my head and she smiled. ‘Peru. He bought a silver mine ten thousand feet up in the Andes, just above Cajamarca where Pizarro murdered the Inca King’s helpless retinue. But he didn’t have Pizarro’s luck. He was there several years, the mine steadily yielding less and less, and when it finally petered out he came home. That was the only time he ever made a serious attempt to build an empire of his own. It was just toys after that, playthings. All he got out of Peru was a sense of failure that increased his already well-developed inferiority complex — and a bitch of a wife to make sure he never forgot it. A termagant. That’s Brian’s view of her, not mine. I never met the woman, thank God. She was a mestizo. Mixed Spanish and native Indian blood. She claimed descent from an Inca chieftain slaughtered by the Conquistadors. That’s why Brian is the way he is, why he looks a little strange — those ears, the nose, those broad cheekbones. And his temperament, his hot aggressive, solemn manner, the lightning changes of mood…’ She shrugged. ‘A little of his father — the machismo, the panache, the determination to project himself as an image, a figment of his own imagination if you like.’ She sighed, a deep breath. ‘But Tom was still a wonderful person to be with. All that vitality, and now and then the stars in my lap like a gift from heaven. He plucked them out of the night in the early hours, made me feel I was riding the world — a whirlwind. Sometimes. At others …’ The corners of her lips flickered, a glint of amusement at her own ingenuousness. ‘At other times …’ She turned, her face to the window, her eyes towards the downs humped above the houses and the sea. ‘I could have killed him for his brazen stupidity, his insensitivity, his total involvement in himself — his bloody-minded selfishness. His egotism. Christ! what a bastard!’