The Deadly Joker

by Nicholas Blake

  “Some don’t need to be.”

  “Silver spoons.”

  “Not much of them left, they do say.”

  “You’d not think it, to look at the way some live.”

  “Easy enough, if they live off others. And a packet of Daz.”

  “Packet of Daz … But the day of reckoning has to come, don’t en? Shan’t be long now, Mr. er …”

  “Ah, well, ’tis the root of all evil, look so.”

  “Some have it who don’t need it.”

  “Wish I did. And a pound of Cheddar.”

  “Pound of Cheddar … Us knows where it comes from, don’t us?”

  “Ar. And we know where it’s going.”

  “The other one—can’t ’e do nothing about it?”

  “That rambling old geezer! Not but what he isn’t a real gentleman.”

  “The old school, like they do say. Not many of them left.”

  “Families go up, and families go down. ’Tis the way of nature.”

  “Stands to reason. The blood gets thin like. That’ll be—let’s see now—one pound, three and twopence, missus.”

  “Here you are, then. No chalking it up for me.”

  “Unlike some. Thank you, missus.”

  “I’ll be getting along now. Where’s me other basket? Tom keeping well?”

  “Nicely, thanks. Good pay there, and a good feed midday. ’E can’t grumble. But ’tis a come-down for the place, when you think of the old days. City folk—they can’t fit in like with we.”

  “Don’t spend much hereabouts, ’tis said.”

  “Some don’t like that.”

  “Well, we none of us do, I reckon, but we have to get on with it.”

  “What on earth were they talking about?” asked Corinna when at last we got out of the shop.

  “Our neighbours. Bertie Card and—”

  “Horrible old gossips!”

  “Now, Corinna, you were absolutely drinking it in.”

  “But I didn’t realise it was Mr. Card they—” She broke off, flushing.

  It seemed so short a time ago that Corinna was a child. I find it hard to adjust myself—all fathers do, no doubt—to the fact that she is now almost a young woman, nubile; and I shall view all her suitors with suspicion or distaste. None of them will seem good enough for her.

  “He’s old enough to be your father,” I said unpremeditatedly.

  “Fussydrawers”—that was the deplorable nickname of Corinna’s extremely chic and imperturbable headmistress—” Fussydrawers says that all girls really want a father-figure to marry—I mean, if they have a good relationship with their own fathers.”

  “Does she indeed?”

  “When I was young, Papa, I wanted to marry you.”

  “But now you’re an elderly party—?”

  Corinna clutched my arm, giggling delightfully. A Bentley tore up the village street, and stopped on its haunches beside us.

  “’Morning. Want a lift?” said Bertie Card.

  “I’ve got my own car here, thank you.”

  “What about you, Corinna? Ever had a twirl in one of these motor cars?”

  “No. I’d love to one day: but I’ll go back with Papa, thanks.”

  “When are you coming riding?”

  “But I can’t—I haven’t—”

  “Soon learn. If your dad can run to twelve and six a lesson.”

  “Oh, Papa! May I?”

  “Of course, my dear.”

  “Just get yourself fitted out with jodhpurs, and a steel helmet in case you fall on your head. Eleven o’clock on Friday suit you?”

  The riding school was on the eastern edge of Tollerton. White-painted gate and palings: a three-acre field, its grass turned brown and brittle after the weeks of rainless weather. Jumps were set up on either side of the field, and at its far end stood a huddle of wooden buildings which I took to be the stables.

  In the centre of the field ten riders were drawn up in line, motionless, their horses’ noses pointing at Bertie Card, who appeared to be giving a lecture. Jenny, Corinna and I sat down on a fallen tree-trunk by the hedge. Four small girls moved solemnly past us on ponies, in charge of a young woman I recognised as the meaty deb. who had sat next to Sam at the Pastons’ dinner party. She wore a riding habit. As she passed, she said:

  “You will keep that dog under control, won’t you?”

  Corinna had brought Buster, wearing his first collar, on a lead: at the moment, he was sniffing dubiously at a wood-louse which had crawled out of the tree trunk. The four small girls glanced at us incuriously, then resumed their expressions of rapt hippomania and rode on.

  Bertie’s mounted lecture audience now began to move round him in a wide circle, first walking, then trotting and breaking into a canter at his commands. We could hear him barking at his pupils in a ruthless, regimental way.

  “Hands low, heels in! … Keep distance, Ann, you’re not queuing up for the sales! … Trot! … Knees, Susan—ride him with your knees! … Sit her, Caroline—you’re bouncing like a bloody ball! That’s better … Don’t slouch, Jane!—this isn’t a school for hunchbacks … Walk! … Halt! I said ’halt.’ Mary, you don’t have to pull his head off to stop him … Stop fidgeting, Angela!—how can you expect that animal to stand still if you’re twitching like a case of shell-shock? All right. Dismount! … No, no, no, that’ll never do, I didn’t ask you to climb off. You’re all half asleep this morning. Mount! … D’you want a step-ladder, Priscilla? … Let’s get a bit of action into this. Off! … On! … Off! … On!”

  He had them mounting and dismounting a dozen times, in rapid order, before he was satisfied. Poor Corinna was looking a bit apprehensive. Bertie Card didn’t need a whip, with a cracking lash of a voice like that. He stood in the centre of the wide circle, turning slowly on his own axis to watch the riders, who were in movement again, their black velvet jockey caps and yellow or green sweaters making a gay show in the sunlight.

  “Why do riding instructors always wear those flat-brimmed bowlers?” Jenny inquired. “They look hard enough for the end of a battering ram.”

  “He’s awfully tough, isn’t he?” said Corinna in admiring tones. “I suppose he gets a kick out of bawling at delicate females.”

  “They don’t look all that delicate to me.”

  The string of riders were circling again—girls of from twelve to seventeen, I judged, each as she passed us showing the calm, absorbed, other-worldly, almost trancelike expression of one taking part in a religious mystery.

  “Sam ought to see this. I can imagine him writing a feature article—Does Hippomania Produce Good Housewives?”

  “Well, they’ll get the hippopause sooner or later,” said Jenny.

  Presently Bertie Card dismissed his pupils and came straddling over to us, leading a pony.

  “’Morning. Sorry to have kept you, Corinna, let me introduce Kitty—she’s very quiet, no vice in her. Be eating out of your hand in no time.” He turned his bold stare upon Jenny. “Not nervous, Mrs. Waterson?”

  “I’ve no reason to be. I’m not riding the brute.”

  “Oh, we’ll have you up one day. Splendid exercise. Nothing like it.”

  Bertie detached his eyes slowly from her, and turned to Corinna.

  “Well, off we go. Left hand holds the reins, so, and lightly grips the saddle bow. Left foot in stirrup, then swing right leg over and bob’s your uncle … Not bad, try it again—don’t haul yourself up, just sort of fly up … Splendid! Thistledown couldn’t do it better. We’ll make a real rider of you. Now the reins. Very important to hold them right, from the start. Look, space out your fingers like this.”

  Corinna’s face was flushed, her eyes sparkled with excitement. Ah well, I thought, a riding instructor has to touch his pupil’s hands a lot, in teaching her how to hold the reins.

  “Now press your knees firmly into her. Remember, you ride with your knees, Corinna. Knees and thighs. Not so tense, though. Sit upright, but relaxed. I’ll walk you round a bit on
the leading rein, to get the feel of it.”

  They made a circle of the field. As they were returning, the meaty deb., who had taken her small pupils off to the stables, rode back on a sleek, nervously stepping bay. Bertie introduced her as Miss Helen Antrobus.

  “She’s jumping the bay at the Bridport Show,” he said. “Let’s see how he’s going, Helen.”

  Miss Antrobus lined up the horse, tapped him with her heels, and put him over the jumps. At the far end, she turned round and came back down the course. As she neared us, I saw Buster legging it away with excited whimpers. Before I could do anything, he had passed the nearest jump and was running diagonally towards the approaching bay. The horse swerved away, pecked at this jump, and sent its rider flying over its head. She fell with a hideous thump on the sun-baked ground, and lay still.

  “Where the hell did that bloody dog come from?” Bertie shouted, his face dark with rage.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” said Jenny, “he must have slipped his collar.”

  “Well, for Christ’s sake!”

  “I’ll get him,” Corinna ran off up the field.

  Jenny was on her feet too. “Look. Miss Antrobus—I’m afraid she’s—”

  “Stay where you are!” Bertie ordered. “She’s got to learn to take a fall. D’you realise the bay could have broken a leg, with that damned dog of yours chivvying him?”

  “I am desperately sorry. He’s only a puppy,” Jenny began; but Bertie Card was striding towards the recumbent figure of Miss Antrobus. He passed her, and went to the bay’s head. As he led the horse back, Miss Antrobus levered herself on to hands and knees, her head dangling. Bertie stood over her.

  “Anything broken? … No, just winded. You’ll be all right, Helen … You were going to take off too far from that jump anyway. How often have I told you?—he’s a natural jumper, let him judge his own distance, all you’ve got to do is stay on him.”

  “I’m sorry, Major Card,” the girl gasped.

  “All right. Upsy Daisy.” He hauled her to her feet and led her aside. She sat down on the grass near us, shaking her head to clear it, while Bertie adjusted the stirrup leathers and mounted the bay. His face was stiff with anger still, and I feared he might take it out on the horse.

  I need not have feared. Mounting lightly as a bubble, Bertie calmed the shivering animal in a moment. It was as if he became the horse, or the horse an extension of himself. He walked it back, lined it up for the jump it had just pecked at—a double gate—and touched the bay’s flanks with his heels. It shot forward, as if released from a bow, clearing the gate with a foot to spare; the rider might have been gummed to the saddle. I heard him say to the horse, as he passed us, “Don’t be so eager, mate. Calm down. Take your time now.”

  Bertie then treated us to a display of what even I could see was superlative jumping. He took the bay the length of the course twice, timing every jump perfectly, seeming to lift the horse over the two severest ones, controlling its occasional over-eagerness to rush the obstacles. I could almost feel his velvet touch on the animal’s mouth. The beauty of the whole thing, the rhythm and severe economy of movement, enchanted like a poem of Bacchylides.

  He dismounted, handed over the horse to Miss Antrobus. “You’ve got something here, Helen. No more to-day. Go and rub him down now.” The girl led it away to the stables. “I always make my pupils attend to the animal they’ve been riding. You’ve got to look after your horse, not just use it to get about on and then hand it over to a stable-boy. Like chaps who drive a car and don’t know a carburettor from a big end. A real winner, that bay.”

  “But why aren’t you riding it at the Bridport Show?” asked Jenny.

  “Riding Patsy? No such luck. Couldn’t afford him—he belongs to Helen. Anyway, I’ve no use for all that pot-hunting lark. Takes all the pleasure out of a ride, if you’re competing with a lot of desperately keen characters all panting to have another rosette pinned on them. Well, now I’ve done a bit of showing off, what about this expensive lesson of yours, Corinna?”

  She handed Buster to Jenny and remounted. We watched them moving away to the middle of the field. Presently Bertie took off the leading rein and let Corinna walk Kitty by herself.

  “Pretty impressive, that display.”

  “Yes,” said Jenny. “But he needn’t have bawled us out about poor little Buster.”

  “Nothing to what he said to some of his pupils.”

  “Oh, one look from his bedroom eyes, and their wounds would soon heal.”

  “You do dislike him, don’t you?”

  “I distrust him, John. All that manly, military charm. And underneath it, unscrupulous as hell.”

  “Oh, come, Jenny, we’ve no evidence for saying that.”

  “I don’t need evidence. And anyway, what was he cashiered for?”

  “Asked to resign, or so Tom Barnard told me. I should guess, either for insubordination or for debt.”

  “More likely getting the colonel’s wife in pod, if you ask me.”

  Jenny is not a coarse-grained woman. The remark perturbed me, as I had been perturbed by her reaction to Bertie when first we met him, because it suggested a too violent reaction—one which might swing to the opposite pole. Odi et amo. Old Catullus said it once for all.

  When Corinna’s lesson was finished, we all walked to the stables. Bertie showed her how to unharness Kitty and rub her down. He had a stable-boy and a few hacks and ponies: most of his pupils brought their own mounts.

  He showed us the stalls and then the harness room, in one corner of which I noticed an electric forge. Bertie had taken over the establishment lock stock and barrel, he told us, from its previous owner, who had gone bust. It was a dicey business, running a show like this—depended so much on local goodwill.

  “Of course,” he added, “I do have a bit of a pull there—family name and so forth.”

  As he talked, he was mending a broken girth with remarkable deftness. Jenny, rather subdued, sat on a bench beside the cobwebbed window, looking out into the yard where Corinna was chatting with the stable-boy as he brought bales of hay on a pitchfork into the stalls.

  “Must be a change for you after Oxford—all this rural way of life,” said Bertie.

  “I like it. I’d always counted on retiring to the West Country.”

  “Don’t find it dull?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “Wish I could say the same. Did you know Miss—at Oxford?” Bertie asked, naming a woman don with a notoriously venomous tongue.

  “Well, I’ve met her, yes.”

  “Not enthusiastic? She’s some sort of cousin of Alwyn’s. Stayed with us once. Poisonous female, I thought.”

  “Is he in touch with her?”

  “I believe they correspond occasionally.”

  I glanced covertly at Jenny. She knew what was in my mind, and gave me a slight nod. Grip the nettle. I said:

  “Jenny and I have been wondering how the person who sent her the anonymous letter knew she’d had a nervous breakdown. At Oxford.”

  Bertie looked up from the girth he was repairing. “Sorry, I’m not with you.”

  Jenny’s voice was clear, though it shook a little. “The letter said, ‘You sick bitch no wonder you’re sick married to an impotent old stick.’“

  I was watching Bertie like a lynx. He looked quite painfully embarrassed, but underneath the embarrassment I seemed to detect some other feeling.

  “Good Christ!” he said at last. “That’s pretty nasty. But I don’t quite see—”

  “The point is,” Jenny put in, “that I’ve been perfectly well for a long time.”

  “Oh, that. Yes.”

  “Both statements in the letter are incorrect,” I said dryly.

  Bertie looked more embarrassed than ever. “Look here,” he mumbled, “don’t rush me. I’m not so quick off the mark.”

  “When we first met your brother,” said Jenny, “he rather harped on my health. Then I got this letter calling me a sick bitch. Your brother ha
s a cousin in Oxford who knew about my breakdown. Do I have to complete the diagram?”

  Bertie stood up, a bewildered look on his face. “What you’re suggesting, if my tiny brain has taken it in, is that Alwyn has been writing these letters?”

  “Nobody else in Netherplash could have known about Jenny’s breakdown.”

  “But—no, it’s not on. I simply can’t believe—I mean, Alwyn’s a bit odd, perhaps, but there’s no real vice in him. Anyway, he’s a fearful old gossip, you know.”

  “You think he may have passed on what his cousin told him about me?” asked Jenny.

  “I don’t think, I know.” He gave Jenny one of his challenging stares. “For instance, he told me. Look, Mrs. Waterson, in a dead-alive place like Netherplash, any newcomers get talked about as if they were something from Mars. It’s curiosity, not wicked gossip. I should think Alwyn scattered around every bit of information he had about you and your husband, weeks before you moved in.”

  “So you could have written that letter?” said Jenny, with a direct look at him.

  “I could have, yes. And so could any of Alwyn’s acquaintance.”

  “Including the Pastons?”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t realise you were intimate with Mr. Paston.”

  Whether Jenny intended it or not, there was a faint emphasis on the “Mr.,” which made this sound a deeply barbed remark. Bertie slid past it.

  “Alwyn isn’t intimate with either of them. But we meet occasionally, as you know. There’d be nothing peculiar about his mentioning to them, in passing, about your—your—”

  “About my having gone off my head?”

  The effect of this plain speaking was to make Bertie look for a moment positively stupid. “Oh, now, Mrs. Waterson, you mustn’t pick on me like this. I’m not my brother’s keeper; but I’m not having him accused of a foul thing like these letters.”

  “Your loyalty does you credit, Mr. Card—Major Card, I mean.”

  “Drop the rank, Mrs. Waterson. It’s for snobs like young Helen, not for you. Bertie and Jenny is much cosier—and John. Eh?”

  It had become like a duel in the dim harness-room, myself not even a second now.

  “Here’s the picture, Jenny,” he went on. “A number of people have had these letters. A number of people, in Netherplash and Tollerton, could have written them. It’s not a campaign against you alone, so you must try not to be too distressed about it. It’ll blow over. We’ll find it’s some addle-headed old spinster, I expect. Lies can’t hurt anyone.”