if I registered a will with the probate office, and then changed my mind and wrote a new one, it wouldn’t be any good?’
‘You’d have to retrieve the old will and re-register the new one. Otherwise the old will would be the one adhered to.’
‘Good God. I didn’t know any of this.’
‘Joyce says not enough people know. She says if people would only register their wills, they couldn’t be pressured into changing them when they’re gaga or frightened or on their deathbeds. Or at least, wills made like that would be useless.’
‘I used to laugh, rather, at Joyce’s voluntary work. Felt indulgent.’ He sighed. ‘Seems it had its uses.’
The Citizens Advice Bureau, staffed by knowledgeable armies of Joyces, could steer one from the cradle to the grave, from marriage to divorce to probate, from child allowance to old age supplements. I’d not always listened attentively to Joyce’s tales, but I’d been taken several times to the Bureau, and I seemed to have absorbed more than I’d realised.
‘I kept a copy of my new will,’ Malcolm said. ‘I’ll show it to you when we go in.’
‘You don’t need to.’
‘You’d better see it,’ he said.
I didn’t argue. He whistled to the dogs who left the stream reluctantly, and we made our way back to the gate into the garden.
‘Just wait out here while I check the house,’ I said.
He was astonished. ‘We’ve only been out for half an hour. And we locked the doors.’
‘You regularly go out for half an hour at this time. And how many of the family still have keys to the house?’
He was silent. All of the people who had ever lived there could have kept their keys to the house, and there had never been any need, before now, to change the locks.
‘Stay here, then?’ I asked, and he nodded sadly.
The kitchen door was still locked. I let myself in and went all through the house again, but it was quiet and undisturbed, and doors that I’d set open at certain angles were still as I’d left them.
I called Malcolm and he came into the kitchen and began getting the food for the dogs.
‘Are you going through this checking rigmarole every single time we leave the house?’ he said, sounding as if he didn’t like it.
‘Yes, until we get the locks changed.’
He didn’t like that either, but expressed his disapproval only in a frown and a rather too vigorous scraping of dog food out of a tin.
‘Fill the water bowls,’ he said rather crossly, and I did that and set them down again on the floor.
‘It isn’t so easy to change the locks,’ he said. ‘They’re all mortice locks, as you know, set into the doors. The one on the front door is antique.’
The front door keys were six inches long and ornate, and there had never been more than three of them, as far as I knew.
‘All right,’ I said, if we keep the front door bolted and the keys in your safe, we won’t change that one.’
A little pacified, he put the filled dinner bowls on the floor, wiped his fingers and said it was time for a noggin. I bolted the kitchen door on the inside and then followed him through the hall to the office, where he poured scotch into two glasses and asked if I wanted to desecrate mine with ice. I said yes and went back to the kitchen to fetch some. When I returned, he had taken some sheets of paper from his open briefcase and was reading them.
‘Here you are. Here’s my will,’ he said, and passed the papers over.
He had made the will, I reflected, before he had telephoned me to put an end to our quarrel, and I expected not to figure in it in consequence, but I’d done him an injustice. Sitting in an armchair and sipping the whisky, I read through all the minor bequests to people like Arthur Bellbrook, and all the lawyerly gobbledegook ‘upon trust’ and without commas, and came finally to the plain language.
‘To each of my three divorced wives Vivien Joyce and Alicia I bequeath the sum of five hundred thousand pounds.
‘My son Robin being provided for I direct that the residue of my estate shall be divided equally among my children Donald Lucy Thomas Gervase Ian Ferdinand and Serena.’
A long clause followed with provisions for ‘if any of my children shall pre-decease me’, leaving ‘his or her share’ to the grandchildren.