He needn’t have worried: Mrs. Singleton was in the kitchen, sitting on the cover of the Aga’s cool plate. Elsa sat bolt upright in a wheel-back chair, her large raw-meat hands clenched so tightly into each other that the skin around the knuckles took on the whiteness of the underlying bone.
“Couldn’t you make the waterworks waterwork?” said Mrs. Singleton. “They make an awful racket in here, don’t they, Elsa?”
“Oh, Lord,” said Pibble, and scuttered out.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” said Mrs. Singleton when he returned. “I’m always forgetting and it makes Harvey absolutely furious. The General’s been reading pop psychology, and he says that’s typical of both of us. Were you hoping to ask Elsa something?”
“Only the recipe of the pheasant we had for lunch.”
“Super, wasn’t it?” said Mrs. Singleton. “Elsa’ll tell you about it while I go and find a gun—you don’t want me to put on my jodhpurs and topee, as I do for the visitors, I hope.”
Pibble made a deprecating cluck, thinking that a gun was about as much masculine gear as he could cope with on this honey woman if he wasn’t to start actually slavering. Mrs. Singleton slid down from her perch and smoothed the back of her skirt with luxurious suppleness.
“I don’t believe it gives you piles,” she said, and left.
“Elizabeth David,” said the cook. “French Provincial Cooking, page four hundred and nineteen. She calls it fezzon à la coshwaz. Your missus can get it out of the liberry, I dessay.”
She spoke without looking at him, but with an astonishing active malevolence.
“Let me just write that down,” said Pibble, getting out his notebook. “Page four hundred and …”
“Nineteen.”
“Thanks. I’m afraid you must be missing Mr. Deakin.”
“’Im.”
“I mean, he must have been useful carrying trays up to the Admiral and things like that.”
“Not ’im,” said the cook. Her hands were now clenched so fiercely into each other that Pibble could see the blue-mauve crescent of skin where the nails bit in among the protruding veins at the back of each hand.
“Fine,” said Pibble. “David, French Provincial Cooking, four one nine. Bet ours isn’t as good as yours.”
The cook didn’t say anything.
“Ready?” said Mrs. Singleton, from the door. “It’s about twelve minutes’ walk.”
She was carrying an ordinary .303 rifle under the crook of her right arm, as one carries a shotgun. She led him around by the front of the Main Block, where the Thetis fountain was once again lifting its ostrich plume of water against the background of yellowing limes—a distillation of the grand life whose pump could, presumably, be switched on and off for the benefit of “visitors,” a horde of whom now frothed around the two coaches whose hunched lines and pop-art paintwork fought with the solemnity of the old stone. Pibble saw that you could tell that these were parting guests because they wore or carried an anachronistic collection of old English headgear, from Cavalier wide-awakes through Georgian three-cornereds up to Victorian stovepipes and deerstalkers.
Singleton was there, arguing with one of the leavers, a squat gentleman in purple whose stance implied a world of frustrated pleading. Singleton’s gestures and manner were those of a very classy headwaiter dealing with a tipsy diner who has imagined some deficiency of service—deference concealing contempt.
“Is that the chap who wants to photograph the Abbey by moonlight?” said Pibble.
“I hadn’t heard about that,” said Mrs. Singleton. “These Americans can be tiresomely persistent, and some of them offer us fabulous wads of lolly to satisfy their whims. But Harvey says it does you no good in the long run if word gets out that you can be bought. He soaks the advertising people for all they’re worth, for instance, but he puts a fantastic penalty clause in the contract so that they can’t mention the name of Clavering or Herryngs in the copy. I suppose I mustn’t ask what you want to see Maureen about.”
Pibble shivered as a little flaw of wind drifted the ostrich plume in their direction, enveloping them in a momentary microclimate of Scotch mist. It made him realize how close winter actually was, how illusory the slant sun’s warmth.
“I heard she might know something about Deakin’s love life,” he said.
“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Singleton. “I’m afraid that’s only too likely. Poor Deakin.”
They walked on in a private two-minute silence for the dead man and his stilled lusts.
On the far side of the ha-ha, which they crossed by a pretty little Gothick bridge at a point where the railway lines had ceased, the parkland tilted away to form a wide hollow. The near slope was dotted with copses and thickets, so placed that though there seemed to be wide reaches of turf between them they completely screened the whole stretch of land that lay in the hollow. The path twisted through a clump of bamboo, and they reached a little gate in an enormously high fence of stout pig wire.
“We don’t often bring visitors this way,” said Mrs. Singleton. “The Rocket takes them all through the Lion Ground on a loop on their way back from Maureen’s stall. It saves all the tiresome business of guides—white hunters they call them at Longleat. I’d better just load this thing.”
She jerked the magazine off, fished half a dozen rounds out of the pocket of her tweed skirt, pressed them expertly in, and slapped the magazine home, working the bolt to send the first round into the breech.
“I won’t offer to carry it,” said Pibble, “because I suppose it would invalidate the insurance. Besides, you look as if you’d do better with it than I would.”
“You’re right about the insurance, anyway,” she said, with her golden-syrup chuckle. “I’m afraid we keep the key under that stone there, and that’s not in the insurance, but we simply couldn’t find a sensible way of making sure it was available when anybody wanted it, because it always seemed to be in Uncle Dick’s pocket on the other side of the park.”
Pibble found the key and opened the gate.
“Hang it up on that little hook,” said Mrs. Singleton, “so we can reach it on the way back. If a lion comes right up to you, stand still. They’re very inquisitive, and if you start jumping about they think it’s a game and I’m afraid they play very rough. Don’t worry—it isn’t likely.”
They saw several lions in the next few hundred yards, but none close except for a sleeping lioness who was draped across two low lime-tree branches beside the path, so floppy with indolence that she looked as if she were composed of some immensely viscous liquid. Two cubs scratched at another tree, leaving deep gouges in the bark, and around a fallen trunk a group of five or six adult lions had posed themselves in greenery-yallery attitudes. Two of them turned their heads to watch the passing humans with an amber, unblinking stare.
The lion enclosure did not seem to be very large, but now that Pibble’s position relative to the screening copses had changed, he began to catch glimpses of chimneys and roofs beyond it. The basin through which they were walking itself sloped southward, and then dipped quite sharply. It was in this dip that the hitherto hidden building stood.
“Is that the old Abbey?” he said.
“It isn’t really an abbey,” said Mrs. Singleton, “except that parts of it came from an abbey they pulled down at Scambling at the dissolution of the monasteries. That’s when my family started to come up in the world, you know—the early ones had a knack of backing the right kings. But have you ever noticed how they all seemed to build their houses in hollows, and it wasn’t really till Queen Anne that people started building in places where you could see something from? The Abbey’s the center of Old England now, with plastic ghosts popping out from behind panels, and tape-recorded clankings and wailings. But it really is old, and not at all phony, so it’s always a wow with visitors.”
“What else do they like?”
“They like everything. Harvey’s very clever about that because he has this craze for authenticity. The duel always goes very well, because two of the visitors actually do the fighting and a couple of our people act as seconds and tell them, very po-faced, about all the etiquette that’s expected of them; we do that on the Bowling Green, which has the most super echoes. Then there’s a highwayman who robs a coach and they catch and hang him—it’s terribly convincing. . .Hello, Maureen seems to be expecting us.”
They had rounded a corner and another wire gate lay before them, but it was already open, held for them by a woman wearing the same mobcap and sprigged apron as Mrs. Chuck and Claire had at the main gate, but wearing them with a difference. Behind her rose four bizarrely foreshortened towers with onion-shaped roofs, as though a section of Brighton Pavilion or the Kremlin or the Taj Mahal had sunk, by some freak convulsion of the terrain, into the ground until only its topmost pinnacles were showing.
“Oh, Miss Anty,” babbled the woman, “your hair appointment. Miss Whatnot, your new secretary, was speaking to me of it on the telephone.”
“Bloody Hades!” said Mrs. Singleton. “When was it supposed to be for?”
“Three-thirty, she did be saying.”
Mrs. Singleton looked at her watch.
“Oh, that’s all right,” she said. “I’ve just got time to talk to you about the inventory, if the Superintendent doesn’t mind waiting, then I’ll hare back. Mr. Pibble, do you mind if I get my job done first, and leave you? A girl comes to friz me up, and it doesn’t seem fair to keep her hanging about. I’ll send someone over to fetch you.”
“Can’t I get back round the outside of the fence?” said Pibble.
“Well, you could, if you don’t mind walking a bit farther. And it’s a bit overgrown, I’m afraid. Actually, it’d be a great help, because we’ll all be busy giving the afternoon lot tea out of tiny little tinkling cups. It’s much more of a nuisance than the sherry the morning ones get. I’ll only keep Maureen for five minutes now, so perhaps it would amuse you to look at the old Tiger Pit—it’s rather your sort of thing, I shouldn’t wonder.”
She waved, a gesture of seductive dismissal, toward the stunted minarets, and walked off with the woman in the mobcap toward a white thatched cottage which lay about thirty yards down the slope, under a superb sycamore.
“Fine,” said Pibble, not even surprised that she hadn’t waited for his assent.
PART II
THE LION GROUND
Once he lay in the mouth of a cave
And sunned his whiskers,
And lashed his tail slowly, slowly
Thinking of voluptuousness
Even of blood.
But later, in the sun of the afternoon,
Having tasted all there was to taste, and having slept his fill
He fell to frowning, as he lay with his head on his paws
And the sun coming in through the narrowest fibril of a slit in his eyes.
—D. H. Lawrence, “The Beast of St. Mark”
3:10 P.M.
Pibble leaned over the parapet, and gasped: his first impression had been right—it was an Oriental building sunk two stories into the ground. He was looking down, as if from the rooftops, into an unpaved courtyard, fuzzy with scrub. The towers assumed their proper proportions now that their bases were visible, and between them ran a double series of cloisters, one above the other; the exaggeratedly ogive arches were frilled with a lacework of stone right down to the ground. The pit looked as if it were used—there were some mounds of what seemed to be dog’s feces at the foot of one of the further towers—but nothing stirred in it. Presumably some of the lions from the enclosure were occasionally quartered here. There was a cage under one of the arches in the left-hand wall, with a gate which slid up and down like a portcullis; it was shut now.
To his left, at ground level, was a wooden notice on a post, of the kind used by local authorities to warn strangers of by-laws. It turned out to display an extract from a letter written in 1765 by Horace Walpole to George Montagu.
I have sworn a vow on the bones of, oh, whatever saint you will (so be it not those of the fat ox of Smithfield, whom I know to be the only saint you and your rustick neighbours acknowledge) that I will speak neither good nor ill of Herryngs until three hundred more of our English summers have been grumbled away. Now ’tis but a pile, a raw new quarry turn’d inside-out. Let it become mossy, and then I will pronounce.
But one part I must tell you of, for it has quite ravished me with its absurdity. Josiah, that is the Nabob twin and not his stay-at-home toad of a brother who slops about still down at the Abbey (which I may tell you is ugly enough, for it is old and mean) is so prodigious rich that he has built a palace for his very animals. Two tygers which he brought from the Indies (being the only friends he made there, I doubt not) he has housed with true Nabobish phantasy in a great pit lined all around with Brahminical cloisters, enough to perambulate a whole templefull of monks, and all sunk below our honest English sward. Four towers squat at the corners which are copied from a ruin’d fort at Calcutta, but (since their foundations spring some fathoms below the horizontal) the effect is finely ridiculous. Mr. Clavering’s first two friends were drowned by one of our little English monsouns, the pit filling with water, but he has undertaken prodigies of drainage and sent for two more. Their roarings will fright Hampshire, but less than it frights me to consider what a treasure house of thievery (for these Nabobs, you know, are nothing but land pirates) has been spent on the mere digging and ornamenting of a hole.
Pibble leaned again over the waist-high parapet and prepared to gaze with enjoyable melancholy at old Josiah’s folly (as Mrs. Singleton had guessed, it was very much his kind of thing—Mrs. Pibble found him a difficult companion on holidays) when his half-arranged pose was stilted by a deep, breathy, thudding bark from enormous lungs. Islands of his skin, phobogenous zones, chilled—the voice was addressed to him. It came from the pit.
There was a lion down there, a large male with a heavy black mane and a tuft of black fur at its tail tip. It was whisking its tail busily from side to side, but the rest of its body was entirely still and it was staring at Pibble—not the tired, dilettante stare with which the lions in the open ground had followed his passage, but an intent and focused gaze. Thus Galileo peered at the moons of Jupiter; thus a cat watches a wren; thus the chrysoberyl eyes looked at Pibble. Still unblinking, the animal raised its head and made its noise again, neither roar nor bark nor cough, so that Pibble could see the yellow teeth, reef-like, widely separated, useless for chewing but ideal for shearing off lumps of flesh to be swallowed whole. The pink tongue, wide but thin, curled up in a beckoning gesture before the jaws clicked shut.
“Scare the hell out of you, that one,” said a voice at Pibble’s elbow. He turned and saw the woman who had opened the gate for them. She bobbed him a curtsy, neither solemn like Mrs. Chuck’s nor inept like Claire’s, but jokey and conspiratorial. Mrs. Singleton was already on the other side of the fence, walking fast with her gun under her arm. Pibble watched her for a few seconds, hoping that she might turn and wave, but she strode on. He looked at this other woman—Maureen Finnick, presumably—and saw that she had understood the meaning of his gaze over her shoulder. She was roundfaced, apple-cheeked, blue-eyed, plum-lipped, buxom, and sly. About twenty-five, perhaps, but watchful as an old hunter.
“You were wishful to talk with me, sir?’ she said. What he had at first taken for a babble of urgency turned out to be her normal mode of speech, as though she had just run up three flights of stairs to impart fatal news.
“Don’t you find that uniform a nuisance?” said Pibble. “I mean for instance making your hair look twentieth-century when you want to go out in the evening.”
“Lor’ love you, sir,” said Miss Finnick, patting a russet ringlet into position, “there’s little enough going out of an evening down in these par
ts, though, to be sure, if you was wishful to take me I would not disgrace you. Shall us go back down to my stall? There’ll be visitors any minute, I do be thinking.”
“You can talk twentieth-century if you prefer,” said Pibble. “I’m afraid I’m only police, and I believe you may be able to help me clear up the problem why Mr. Deakin hanged himself.”
Her watchfulness neither increased nor diminished.
“Ah,” she said, “but even a clever City gentleman like yourself, sir, would find it a terrible thing to go chopping and changing your way of talking from sunup to cattle-calling time. No, sir, I’ll bide by Mr. Harvey’s manual, for the sake of the practice, and ’tis you must tell me if you think I might be overdoing it. Poor Arthur Deakin! And who’d have told you I might be knowing anything about him?”
“Nobody told me. The thing is this, Miss Finnick: I have no doubt at all that Deakin did hang himself, but he didn’t leave a message. Suicides usually do, you know” (You would, my girl, a message calculated to stir up the maximum possible misery; you’re just that type) “and it saves having everybody guessing stupid and embarrassing reasons if one can find out why he actually did it. Did you see much of him?”
“Arthur Deakin was seeing a deal more of me than ever I was of him,” said Miss Finnick, with an exaggerated flounce. “Always hanging about in the shaw behind my stall, and peeking and prying—after you, sir. ’Tis more fitting.”
She held the door of the cottage for him and he went in.
“Crippen,” he said. “Is this another example of Mr. Singleton’s passion for detail?”
“Indeed it is, though I haven’t had time to arrange it proper orderly. They did be moving me down to the Abbey, and all my knickknacks, these three days past.”
Her calling it a stall had misled him into thinking the room would be like a shop, with revolving stands of colored postcards and big polished counters cluttered with coarse pottery souvenirs. Postcards there were, but in a casual-looking line along the shelf above the crackling fire. A clutter of souvenirs there was, too, but so spread out along dressers and corner cupboards and old oak tables that the effect was of a large cottage room, desperately overfurnished. Nor were the souvenirs in the usual gnomeware style. Straight in front of the entrance was a farmhouse dresser whose shelves held a row of kitchen plates, blue and white, with the spotted lion of the Claverings in the center; in front of these stood three model gibbets complete with dangling bodies, a stagecoach about five inches high, and a hay wain to the same scale. Elsewhere in the room were lanthorns and pistols, antique sickles and kitchen implements, and a number of old iron gadgets (of the sort which people write to Country Life about, asking what they are) used in the forgotten techniques of a rustic economy. Apart from the models (another dresser held several sizes of full-rigged ship), everything looked cottagy and serviceable, and everything was stamped or branded with the lion crest. No attempt had been made to fake antiquity; all the ironwork looked as though the blacksmith had been hammering it yesterday. On the other hand it also looked as if there had been a blacksmith who hammered it, instead of some million-copy mold in Birmingham.
The Old English Peep Show Page 8
