Gay Phoenix by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online

Charles’ only living relative, he had surely been entitled to such an expectation – his plan would never, of course, have entered his head. If he had even felt there was any possibility of receiving a paltry legacy of twenty or thirty thousand pounds, he would probably have held his hand. But Charles had made it perfectly clear that nothing of the sort was going to happen. He had actually once declared – absurdly, and when in his cups – that he wouldn’t be a bit surprised if, after his death, it proved that there wasn’t a bloody penny for anybody – not even so much as would endow a cat and dog home. He had also said, more soberly if even less amiably, that money would demonstrably not be good for Arthur, and that he wasn’t going to burden himself with the grave responsibility of letting him have any. Sometimes, and when thinking over these exchanges, Arthur found himself wholly surprised that his brother had suffered mere death by misadventure. It seemed unbelievable that he hadn’t himself despatched Charles with a marline-spike.
    Luck and cunning. He had enjoyed the first and exercised the second – he frequently told himself – in the highest degree among those idiotic Australians. Professor Budgery’s character and persuasions (particularly his distaste for qualified alienists) had been an enormous piece of luck which he himself had exploited (he modestly reflected) with something like genius. For could anything short of genius, he asked himself, have hit upon that brilliant technique of double bluff? Not that ‘double bluff’ was anything like an adequate term for characterizing a stratagem of such absolute felicitousness as had come to him. Determined to steal the shoes of his elder brother Charles, he had contrived the effect of having those shoes forced, as it were, on his reluctant feet. Budgery and his assistants had been manoeuvred into believing he was the brother he was not, and that only in his own disordered imagination was he the brother he was. They had taken a great deal of credit for handing him back what they thought to be his true identity when in fact they had been furthering him in usurping a false one. It had been exceedingly funny, but it had been exceedingly useful as well. Had he turned up in Australia simply claiming to be the wealthy Charles Povey, and with a story of having buried his younger brother Arthur at sea, he might almost at once have found himself confronting immigration officials or lawyers or bankers prompted to inconveniently stringent demands for proofs of his identity. As it was, that batch of doctors had – all-unconsciously – generated a kind of vested interest in there being no doubt about the matter. And through Budgery, and when convalescent, he had been wafted into circles too exalted to admit of any suspicion blowing about at all. He was not merely the wealthy and probably influential Charles Povey; he was in some small degree a public hero – as well as enjoying, in a more restricted circle, the interest attaching to a most unusual medical history. He had been surrounded, in fact, by a benevolent regard, and everybody had taken him for granted throughout the subsequent protracted period of foreign wanderings during which he had cautiously felt his way into his new identity.
    All this was very satisfactory to remember. It was, in fact, so satisfactory that Arthur Povey sometimes experienced a certain annoyance at not being able to remember it more clearly. Since those first dreadful moments in which he had stood staring down at his dead brother on the deck of the Gay Phoenix , the course of his life had been crowded, eventful, and often extremely alarming. It had also been a triumphant success, and in the light of all this it didn’t surprise him, let alone disconcert him, that his memory commanded much of it in vivid and almost hallucinatory detail. There was something patchy about the effect, all the same. For example, he didn’t really remember