The Old English Peep Show

by Peter Dickinson

  “Do the gallows sell well?” said Pibble.

  “Mortal well, sir. They visitors do be desperate astonished by the hanging down at the Abbey, and they often fancy summat to mind them of it.”

  “Did Deakin ever make models for you?”

  “Him!” said Miss Finnick, in a totally changed voice. “Too bloody concerned with …”

  “Never mind,” said Pibble. “I think you were overdoing it anyway. Are you on the stage, too, like Mr. Waugh?”

  Miss Finnick put up a pretty little hand under her mob-cap and scratched at her scalp in sighing perplexity. The action unsettled both her cap and the russet curls, which slipped downward in a fashion no live hair could possibly achieve. She swore, mid-twentieth-century style, and pulled off cap and wig, revealing a sleek black Eton crop. Then she stood looking calculatingly at Pibble from under her long black lashes while she twiddled the cap around her index finger. At last she sighed again, like a sculptor rejecting a piece of unworkable marble, and turned to a wall mirror. As she adjusted her image back into the non-world of Herryngs, she talked in her other voice, which he’d heard for a moment up by the Tiger Pit and then again when she cursed the dead coxswain. It was quiet, sensible, a little hard.

  “I am a schoolmaster’s daughter, Mr. Pibble—that’s the name, isn’t it? I was all set to go to Sussex University and begin the long drift into matrimony when they came down here to film The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. I don’t suppose you ever saw it—it was just after Tom Jones and they hoped to make the same sort of money by pulling the same sort of gags, but of course people were tired of that by then and they lost a packet. Anyway, I was an extra and the director gave me two or three words to speak, for reasons not wholly concerned with the aesthetics of celluloid. Of course they’d shot far more film than they could use—nine hours’ worth or something ridiculous—and I think my three words must have been the very first things they cut. My director had got bored with me by then, but I went up to London and pestered him for another job—I didn’t want him any more, he was a nasty little twit—and he wangled me another tiny part to get rid of me. We were about quits then, I reckoned—wangling parts isn’t easy with Equity watching every credit line. But they cut that part, too, for the finished film, and a nice old biddy who I’d struck up with who makes a living by playing marchionesses in the background of ballroom scenes took me out to a lunch she couldn’t afford just to tell me to go home, because I wasn’t going to be any good—not even good enough for the background of ballroom scenes. I was always overdoing it, she said. Hetty, that’s old Lady Clavering, the General’s wife, was my godmother, and I was allowed to invite myself to Herryngs when I wanted to, although she had been dead for years, so I came here and gave the Admiral a bad weekend, telling him how harsh life was for someone who hadn’t led his sheltered kind of existence.”

  “What was she like?” said Pibble.

  “Hetty? She died before I had any idea what she was like—children have no idea, you know. Soft, easy, straightforward, beautiful, I think. Anty’s the only one who will talk about her—she doted on her. There isn’t a picture of her anywhere in the House, unless the Admiral’s got one shut away in a drawer. Neither of them ever loved anyone else, I think.”

  She turned from the mirror, wig and cap prettily arranged, but face drawn into tired modern lines, like a debt-harassed mum helping out with charades.

  “She was too good to live, Deakin once said,” she added. “He had a knack of pronouncing some dreary old cliché as though it were all the law and the prophets. Where was I?”

  “Pouring out your sorrows on the Admiral’s shoulder.”

  “Truer than you know. I didn’t realize what a cunning old sod he was. But he made Harvey give me a job—he was just starting up then. I was in the House at first, but Harvey decided I spoilt the atmosphere by hamming my part and moved me out here because I can do sums. He still gets sick at me for hamming, but he can’t get rid of me without employing two other people—one to charm the visitors and one to keep the accounts. He doesn’t have to worry anywhere else in Herryngs, because the rest of it’s inclusive in the entrance fee. But here—well, look at those bloody little gallows, for instance: he bulk-bought the parts, and now he’s decided that we’ve got to unload them by next June, latest, before some liberal busybody in Fleet Street hears about them and whips up a great fuss about their being bad for the image of England. So I’ve got to muck around with prices according to the feel and smell of every batch of tourists who come in clutching their hot little traveler’s checks. I’ll manage O.K., and Harvey knows it, but it drives him up the wall when he hears me ad-libbing his precious dialect. I’d go mad with boredom if I didn’t; as it is, I don’t say I’m miserable, I don’t say I’m happy, and it’s acting of a sort, I suppose, though Harvey swears there isn’t a worse actress in all Who’s Who in the Theatre. Oh, Christ, poor old Deakin. Look, Mr. Pibble, the visitors will be here any second. Twice seventeen is thirty-four, and say fifteen for the last batch, that makes fifty minutes. Could you come back in an hour and I’ll have a chance to collect my wits and tell you what happened to old Deakin?”

  “Fine,” said Pibble, reflecting that that might make it possible for him to miss the four-forty and thus throw the whole dotty plot out of gear. “I only meant I thought you were overdoing the lingo, you know. Everything else works beautifully.”

  “Thankee kindly, zurr,” said Miss Finnick, adding, with dismal relish in her modern voice as she came up from her flouncing curtsy, “I overdo everything.”

  Pibble left her flicking moodily at the doll which dangled from the largest gallows. Already the monstrous purple puffs of the pseudo-Rocket were emerging above the reddening maples to his left, so he dodged around to the back of the cottage and found a little footpath leading under the sycamore and on through rank, tussocky grasses. It looked as if this ought to lead via the back of the Tiger Pit to the path around the outside of the enclosure. The other path ran beside the pit, and would have brought him into view of the visitors, damaging both the fake idyll and Miss Finnick’s reputation. Besides, he was still absurdly unnerved by his interview with the big lion in the pit, by that sense of personal summons, and didn’t feel like facing the creature again. Odd that Miss Finnick felt the same: she had said so, and in her modern accent.

  The path deceived, curling away from the line he wanted toward a little wood. The rough grass was still wet with October dew, enough to discourage him from striking off across it in London shoes; he had nothing special to go back to the House for, and any little path would do for mooching an hour away on a prancing afternoon like this. He strode out, taking dutifully deep lungfuls of the historic oxygen.

  To reward him, a set of crumbling crenelations began to appear behind the wood; when this building was sufficiently revealed to declare itself as a purpose-built folly, he could see a fragment of roof line, warty with crockets, rather nearer the wood. Just as he reached the edge of the trees, the path turned and dipped to an unsuspected ravine with a small stream muttering along the bottom; the folly, a single ivied tower, stood on the far side of the cleft, and a hyper-Gothick chapel on this side, fifty yards farther up. Pibble gazed curiously into the ravine, whose black and fern-hung walls seemed out of place in this chalk country—and quite right, too, he realized, studying the pattern of striations at his feet and discovering that the boulders were a thinnish facing of imported stone which kept the walls precipitous and the water aboveground. In places, he could still see where the blocks fitted together. Perhaps the whole group—folly and ravine and chapel—had been built under the inspiration of Horace Walpole’s visit, but sited, so as not to spoil the landscape with a passing fad, in this unvisitable nook.

  And the chapel seemed still in use; the door was open and a yellow light showed inside—and what are policemen for if not to nose around?

  All he saw in the building was a vast old machine, made of enormou
s moldings of cast iron; hammers seemed to predominate, poised above a sloping trough. There were various meshes of sieve, too, a surprising collection of cogs and cams, and at the far end a big helical auger like the main shaft of a mincing machine; the drive came from an overhead axle. He went outside and walked around the building, to find that up the slope there was no ravine, but instead a fair-sized millpond feeding a lovely undershot wheel in the side of the chapel. He went back to continue his nosing, and found the General standing on the far side of the machine and letting a coarse white powder trickle through his hands.

  “Thought it might be someone else,” said the old man, “someone who wouldn’t know what to make of me with me face hair shaved off, so I ducked down and had a peek at you as you left. Anty’s got her hairdresser to botch me up some false whiskers. Going to find a clue in here, hey?”

  “What on earth is it?” said Pibble.

  “Bone meal. Engine keeps jamming, though. Now I’m getting old, I’m too impatient to leave the bones in the acid long enough or let ’em dry properly.”

  “Acid?”

  “Sulfuric acid, in that tank there. Releases the phosphorus, or something—always hated chemistry. Trouble, is, we don’t get enough bones these days, only what the lions can’t crack up and a few from the House, but I like to keep things working. Hate to see a machine designed to do a job and just standing idle—too like home life, eh?”

  “I suppose it’s always been here,” said Pibble.

  “Since the place was built, nearabouts. Big landowner’s household got through a fantastic lot of meat in those days—eighty or ninety in the House alone, not to mention the estate cottagers and the tigers and the foxhounds. Josiah put it in because he thought the local bone merchant was cheating him. Typical rich man, pouring out money like water and then fretting over a few shillings. Very big industry in those days, bone meal. D’you know, a fellow called Liebig—had a jar named after him, that one—accused England of buying up the bones of soldiers from European battlefields because we couldn’t get enough animals. Didn’t say anything about the Europeans who dug the things up and sold ’em—typical bloody foreigner, never see anyone’s point of view but their own, hell to work with, you ask Harvey about his time with the Frogs after the Raid. Like to see it going?”

  Without waiting for an answer he began to wind at a cast-iron wheel in the wall. Outside the sluices changed their note, and the mill wheel worked groaningly up to a monotone clack. The General flung his weight against what must have been the clutch lever, for the hammers began a slogging rustic dance above the sluice, iron feet rising and falling. The General picked a few bones out of a sack (a shoulder blade of mutton and some longer bones from a taller animal) and threw them into the top of the trough. The feet marked time on the bones, reducing them to splinters, to fragments, to powder. The sieves rattled between the feet with a cam-driven jigging which allowed only reduced particles of bone through to the next series of feet and tossed the unreduced back under the previous series. The trough itself vibrated, teasing the particles down, and at its end the huge screw, geared down to a hypnotically slow rotation, rammed the final produce through a pair of counter-rotating grids. The chapel clanged and boomed until, as the last few splinters were dropping into the auger, the whole contraption jammed and the driving axle started on a terrifying judder. The General, spry as a grasshopper, skipped across to the clutch lever and threw the machine out of gear. Only then did Pibble realize how skull-filling the noise of it had been.

  “My fault,” said the General. “Bones too damp. Be a good fellow and look outside and see if you can see that good-for-nothing Rastus coming.”

  “I’s here, massa,” said a voice at the door.

  “Splendid,” said the General, picking up a big wrench. “We can cope now, Superintendent.”

  “Can you tell me the way to the path round the back of the Lion Ground?” said Pibble.

  “Rastus will show you,” said the General. “It’ll take me about five minutes to get this bloody casing off. Anything else you want to know?”

  “What’s so different about the lion in the pit?” said Pibble. “I mean why isn’t he in with the others?”

  “He’s new,” said the General. “We aren’t insured for him yet.”

  “Oh, of course,” said Pibble. He sensed the black gardener stiffen and relax beside him, and added, “Did you fly him in, like the cuckoos?”

  The General straightened up from measuring the adjustment of the wrench against the big nuts on the top of the casing over the auger. Again Pibble saw the clown mask of old age quiver and dissolve, saw for a second the hero taut for action. But then the General giggled his strange, wild cry and said, “Just like the cuckoos. You’ve been doing your homework, hey?”

  “Yes,” said Pibble. “Incidentally, I didn’t finish talking to Miss Finnick before the visitors came. I’d better get it all done today, so it doesn’t look as if I’ll be able to catch the four-forty.”

  “Stay as long as you like,” said the General offhandedly, bending again to his wrench. “You’ve got a job to do, and Anty enjoys your company.”

  Outside the chapel stood a squat little tractor with a trailer, in which were a couple of shovels, a broom, a soft brush, and a plastic dustpan.

  “You came to collect the bone meal, I suppose,” said Pibble.

  “Yeah,” said the Negro. “He wants it dug into some new rose beds. This track—that leads no place. Funny about these grand old guys: they take a fancy to do something and it has to be done pronto—just like kids.”

  “Which of the grand old guys was that?” said Pibble, jerking his thumb back toward the chapel. They were walking along the footpath he had come by—or, rather, he was, while the Negro loped unconcerned through the rough grasses—but at his words his guide stopped and glowered at him.

  “Massa, you no ask me trick questions. Massa Singleton he tell me you knows who dat be.”

  “All right,” said Pibble, “let’s change the subject. What is wrong about the lion?”

  The Negro glowered at him again from under the absurd hat, grunted, and walked on without answering. The path forked right down an almost invisible track, which Pibble hadn’t even noticed on the way up, and led around the Tiger Pit on the far side from the Horace Walpole letter. Pibble could see a group of visitors leaning over the opposite wall, cameras whining and churning. Suddenly out of the pit came that extraordinary coarse, yearning grunt; the line of visitors quivered like seaweed when the fringe of a wave slops into a rock pool; the Negro stopped again and gazed glumly at the four stunted minarets.

  “They feel it, too,” said Pibble.

  “Yeah,” said the Negro. “Like the boss says, he ain’t insured. We Americans are surely sensitive to any breach of the capitalist system. You believe that?”

  “No,” said Pibble seriously, “and what’s more if you know anything which might conceivably be relevant to Deakin’s death, you have a duty to tell me.”

  “Duty,” said the Negro fiercely. He pulled his beard down and forward, and then allowed the elastic to snap back up into his mouth; with a snort he blew the whole mass of artificial hair outward in staring derision. Then he walked on.

  Pibble trudged behind him, boding, until they came to another fork and the Negro stood aside for him, pointing wordlessly to where the path led into a funnel made by the nearing fence on one side and the wood on the other.

  “Thank you very much,” said Pibble, and walked on without expecting an answer. The path between the fence and the wood turned out to be more overgrown that he had expected, and made possible only by the existence of an untended box hedge under the trees, which had mostly kept back the ranker growth of bramble, old-man’s-beard, woody nightshade, and nameless protruding saplings. Every now and then he had to pick his way gingerly through a gap, lifting the feelers of bramble out of his path carefully between finger and
thumb, as though they had been poisonous. It made him realize by how fine a margin the whole enterprise was kept trundling along: if there had been money to spare, this would have been a handsome walk, full of incidental delights.

  At one point, where a beech tree spread its undergrowth-killing­ boughs wide enough to make the path easier for a moment, he came on such a delight; a fair-sized lion cub—a two-year-old, to judge by the photographs in the Elsa books—was teasing its ear against one of the metal stanchions which supported the fencing. It stopped its rubbing when it saw him and simply stayed leaning, like a drunk against a lamppost, watching him with inquisitive yellow eyes. Pibble walked carefully up to the fence, and, tense for the first movement of snap or clawing, put his hand through the pig wire and began to scratch between the animal’s ears. Hidden in the coarse, crew-cut fur he found a small mound of bone, evidently put there by the Creator so that it would one day be possible for a man to knead it and give the animal pleasure. The cub began to purr, a deep, confident snore, and to try to get nearer the source of pleasure, almost trapping Pibble’s fingers between its own gristly weight and the wire; but soon they reached a compromise position, suiting each as well as circumstances permitted, with Pibble scratching and the lion purring, as though both could have gone on till teatime.