The fresh outbreak of sun had not brought back the warmth of noon; Pibble felt chilly as he plodded along the path, wondering where the lions had got to. Slowly the chill deepened into unease, into near panic. He swung around. About fifteen lions, heads lowered, were following him along the path.
They stopped when he stopped, and three more came out of a thicket on his left to join the gang. They looked solemn, but not really menacing, and while he watched them they did not move. Pibble swallowed, turned around, and walked on; now he could hear the silken swish-swish of their passage through the grass—it seemed to be getting nearer, so he swung around again. They would have made world-class players at Grandmother’s Footsteps, those lions; only one abstracted animal at the rear was not still by the time he could see them, causing a tiny flurry of growling and cuffing among the lions it had bumped into.
They were nearer.
“Off you go,” he said. “Good boys. Home.”
They stared at him, three-dozen yellow eyes, with quiet surprise. Then one of them—it looked very like the cub he had made friends with half an hour ago—pranced forward with a happy, half-sideways movement, as if it were slightly shy, and put its nose eagerly into the bucket. Pibble had just time to snatch the thing into the air above his head; the fire shovel teetered and fell, but with a fluky snatch he caught it left-handed. The cub, more pleased than ever with this excellent game, sat back on its haunches for a spring at the bucket, but Pibble banged it sharply on the nose with his shovel just in time to unsettle its leap, so that it bounced straight up like a firecracker, clawing at air, and then ran whimpering around to the back of the pack.
He frowned at the other lions like a schoolmaster quelling an outbreak of pellet-flicking, turned and walked on, glad to know that cold chicken was the equivalent of lobworm when it came to choosing lion bait. Swish-swish went the grasses behind him. His right arm tired in less than a minute, so he changed hands, shovel flailing. His left arm tired even quicker. He lowered the bucket onto his head, merely steadying it with his hand, and walked on in the attitude of one of those bearers cartoonists used to portray following Blimpish explorers through imaginary Africas. The lions, perhaps appreciative of this more familiar posture, closed in again until he could feel (in imagination, anyway) their hot and heavy and carnivorous breath thick on the backs of his knees. But he strode on austere (no hope could have no fear) until a black-and-tawny patch on the very edge of his peripheral vision moved farther forward and became the maned head of a lion at less than arm’s length. Then the thought came to him that really he must look, with his pompous escort, much less like the cartoonists’ figure of fun than a minor character on the fringe of a school-of-Rubens “Bacchus and Ariadne,” a nymph bearing a spare amphora for Silenus unperturbed by the welter of gamboling fauna. Carried away by the conceit, he reached out his right hand to place it on the lion’s shoulder, but forgot that he was still brandishing the fire shovel. The lion, apparently impressed by the way Pibble had dispatched the too attentive lion cub, shied away, barging into what looked like the senior lion present. Pibble had turned his head for his abortive maneuver, and saw the enormous yellow fangs bare as the old lion snarled at his clumsy subordinate, which quite removed the savor from his joke. He returned to striding on austere.
When he reached the far gate, he was confronted with a hitch in the hitherto smooth logistics. He could see the stone under which the key must be kept, reachable from both sides of the fence, but he couldn’t go and grovel for it without leaving his precious chicken prey to the lions. After a moment’s thought he decided to tie it to the fence above the gate while he got the key out; he put the shovel in his mouth, reached into the bucket with his free hand for the ball of string, found the loose end, and, on tiptoe, knotted the handle clumsily to the wire at the extreme limit of his stretch. Just as he had made the knot fast, an enormous weight caught him between the shoulder blades, slamming him into the gate, accompanied by hideous pain; he stayed still and endured, unable even to drop the shovel from his mouth because it was jammed between his cheek and the wire. Something began to clatter above his head; he worked his neck backward until he could see the bucket bouncing to and ho under the blows of a fulvous paw—one of the lions had become bored with waking, and was using him as a convenient leaning post which might help it to get at the chicken.
There came a slight relaxation of the pressure and he squirmed sideways, unsettling the lion so that it dropped and he was able to back himself against the gate, snatching the shovel as he turned. He raised it like a householder stalking a bluebottle with a fly swatter, and the lions eyed it speculatively, as if they were working out the potentialities of the weapon. They backed away. He lowered the shovel and began to edge toward the stone. They closed in toward the bucket. He raised the shovel and returned to guard the chicken. They backed away. Impasse. His shovel arm ached through its whole length and his back sang with pain.
“Be you all right, zurr?” said a soft voice over his shoulder.
“Do I look it?” he snapped. “Unlock the gate but don’t unlatch it and then go back to your stall and shut the door, in case I make a mess of getting out of here.”
“I do be carrying a mortal gert firearm, zurr,” said the voice. There was a pause and a click; then the gate began to move behind him. He hadn’t realized how hard he’d been pressing against it.
“For God’s sake, keep it shut until I’ve got this bloody thing untied,” he said, and began to fumble above his head with the string, one-handed. But the knot now seemed higher than he could reach, and he had to get his penknife out, put the shovel between his teeth, and slash at the string. Then the gate gave and he tumbled through while Miss Finnick slapped it shut behind him. The lions had not stirred from their circle, but one of them now roared a mild protest at the brevity and inconclusiveness of his performance. It was answered by that hoarse bellow from the pit, and several of the lions looked inquisitively toward the minarets. Pibble found that he was shaking violently.
“Are you O.K.?” said Miss Finnick, in her modern voice. “Your back doesn’t look too good. That was a silly damn trick to try.” She was still wearing her Herryngs uniform, but carried a Thompson submachine gun crooked under her right arm.
“Where’ve you left your brown Bess?” said Pibble. His voice came out shrill. He picked up the bucket.
“What the hell have you got there?” said Miss Finnick.
“You tell me about Deakin and I’ll tell you about this,” said Pibble. The firm step he took toward the stall melted in mid-stride and he staggered. Miss Finnick switched the gun to her other hand and put her right arm around him.
“You put yours over my shoulders,” she said. “Go on. It’s all right. I’m as strong as a horse. I keep a first-aid kit there—it’s in the insurance, like the gun—I’ll dress your back while we gossip. Ah, come on. Just think, if this was a film we’d have to do it forty or fifty times before they even turned the cameras on us, and then they’d cut it. Wounded scout staggers home to stockade. Take it easy—I don’t believe in heroes any more—any heroes.”
Two of the model gallows had gone; the whole room seemed a few degrees less cluttered; Pibble, as he bent forward on his milking stool to allow Miss Finnick to swab his back with antiseptic and cotton wool, could read the label attached to its leg, addressed in elegant script to Mrs. Ruth Boleno, c/o Brown’s Hotel, Dover St., W.I.
“Bean’t wholly mortal, zurr,” said Miss Finnick, “nobbut her must hurt ’ee considerable. And thy poor jerkin be most fearsome tattered.”
“Oh, hell,” said Pibble and reached to pick it up. There were four half-inch tears in the blue cloth, two of them stained with blood; they didn’t look as though they would mend very well. He hadn’t calculated on buying a new suit for another eighteen months.
“Tell me about Deakin,” he said.
“O.K.,” said Miss Finnick, “but you do understand that if I�
��m asked about it in court I shall say something else. I can’t afford not to. There isn’t honestly much to say about him. He was a secret little man, and I didn’t see much of him except that I did have a row with him once when I tried to get him to make models for the stall, which he could easily have done. I didn’t even want him to turn the same thing out over and over again; I wanted things which I could tell visitors were unique and handcrafted—they’d have fetched an absolute packet. But all he was interested in was making models for his great panorama of the Raid, which Harvey’s got his eye on. Anyway we had this rather chilly shindy, him very civil and me very grande dame, and neither of us enjoyed it a bit. It isn’t fun being a bitch, you know, at least not in that sort of way to that sort of person. Am I hurting you?”
“No.”
“Well, after that we were even more formal with each other than need be—not that we saw much of each other. In fact I didn’t know he was dead until Harvey rang me up this morning and told me what he wanted. That’s the best I can do. Your jacket’s a bit damp where I’ve sponged it, but you might as well put your vest and shirt back on.”
“And what was that?”
“Oh, that Deakin had been hanging around me and I’d let him think he was going to get somewhere and then let him fall flat on his face.”
Pibble stood up and worked himself wincingly into his shirt.
“Why did Mr. Singleton choose you,” he said, “if he was so scornful of your acting abilities?”
Miss Finnick sidled up to him and put her arm around his waist. Though she was barely shorter than he was, she managed to achieve a posture in which her head lay on his shoulder and she gazed up through long nylon lashes into his eyes.
“I be the type of poor ninny of a lass as heroes come home to,” she said. “Menfolk, they reckon if they can trust ’ee for one thing they can trust ’ee for the rest. Thou bean’t that mortal foolish, be ’ee, Mr. Pibble? Besides,” she added, flitting irritatingly back into the present, “he knows I like money.”
Pibble tucked his shirt in, thinking he might be that mortal foolish given the chance.
“Did he have any suggestions about your motives for behaving like that?” he said. “Or for letting me know that you had?”
“Christ! You don’t think they believe that ordinary common people have motives. We are the stars’ tennis balls, struck and bandied, except that they do the bandying.”
“You may be right,” said Pibble, “but perhaps they don’t have what we’d understand as motives themselves. I don’t know them well, but they give me a feeling of not really relating to each other at all, but each whirling on along his own chosen path, alone.”
“They have been rather like that since Hetty died. They all related to each other through her—except Harvey, of course. He hardly knew her.”
“It seems a rather unlikely marriage,” said Pibble.
“Um. Harvey’s … Ah, well … and it was a way of tying him to Herryngs, I expect.”
“Anyway,” said Pibble, “this isn’t the kind of thing you’re going to be asked about. We’re much more likely to want to know the exact dates on which you had to move your stall down to the Abbey, and what reason was given you.”
There was a long silence. Miss Finnick walked around the room rearranging knickknacks on the shelves to fill the gaps left by the marauding Americans. Finally she picked a bundle of tissue paper out of a dresser drawer, unwrapped some bits of wood and string and a little doll figure, and sat down at her table.
“Your turn,” she said.
“The Admiral has disappeared,” said Pibble, “and the General tried to impersonate him.”
“I know.” She took a tube of glue out of her apron pocket and fixed an upright into a little platform.
“When did you learn?”
“Harvey rang up after lunch.”
“He didn’t tell you when he rang up this morning about faking a motive?”
“No. But the second time he explained that this was why it was necessary to fake a motive.”
“He told Rastus after lunch, too,” said Pibble. “Elsa didn’t know during lunch.”
“Go on.”
“Can you imagine a motive for Deakin hanging himself in the middle of painting a finished model for his panorama of the Raid?”
“You still seem to be asking all the questions,” said Miss Finnick sulkily. She had assembled another bit of stick into an inverted L.
“All right. The Admiral hadn’t sent any typing down to Judith Scoplow for four days. She heard some shots last week. None of his shoes are missing.”
“La Scoplow hasn’t been here long,” said Miss Finnick. “They do that about once a month.”
“Do what?”
“Go down to the Bowling Green and fight a duel. They use the pistols the tourists use, but they load them with proper ball to give themselves a bit of a thrill. The pistols are fixed to fire crooked, so it’s not as terrifying as it sounds, but I bet you they were fighting over Scoplow, which is why they couldn’t tell her.”
“The General and the Admiral, you mean?”
“Who else? They still think of themselves as wild boys.” She knotted a fine cord around the protruding arm of her structure.
“All right,” said Pibble. “Who told you not to tell me that the lion in the pit was a man-eater?”
“Anty, this afternoon, and even so I damn near did before I’d even started. She said they’d broken the law and you’d have to report it, which would be a bore. It still sounds reasonable.”
“Yes. How often do they use the bone-meal machine?”
“The what?”
“The machine for grinding bones up in the fake chapel up by the folly.”
“Oh, that’s what it is—I’ve often wondered. You’ve a nasty mind for such a mild-looking man, Mr. Pibble. You really believe this, don’t you?”
“I think it’s sufficiently possible for me to have to try and look into it.”
“Stern daughter of the voice of God,” said Miss Finnick, settling the noose of her gallows around the doll’s neck. “I never got further than that line—it didn’t sound as if it was going to be my sort of poem. I think the odds are about twenty to one against your being right.”
“You’ve forgotten about the shoes,” said Pibble. “And Deakin’s suicide—the motive for it, I mean. He had to have one, and you aren’t it.”
“Lawk-a-mussy, I do be main disrememberful. That brings it down to about two to one against.”
“I’d back it at those odds,” said Pibble.
“So would I,” said Miss Finnick. “Oh, Mr. Pibble, don’t ’ee go setting thyself up as a hero. I do be that mortal fixed against heroes, and I was just about beginning to fancy ’ee.”
“I’m not going down unless I can shut it into its cage. That’s what the chicken’s for.”
Miss Finnick went over to her mirror and straightened her cap and curls; then she read the label which was now tied to the mirror.
“Mrs. Rupert K. Grott, 2028 Main Street, Waxahachie, Texas. I’ve hung on to this for seven months, seen myself in it every day, and now it’s going to Mrs. Grott, a squawking goose of a woman with a skin like raw veal. Give me five minutes to lock up, Mr. Pibble, and I’ll just go clean away and pretend I never saw your bloody bucket. I keep the gun in the grandfather clock, whose key is in that snuffbox. That window’s catch is the easiest one to force.”
“Thank you,” said Pibble.
“Don’t mention it,” said Miss Finnick. “Just tell me what you think about her. Tell me I’m not going off my rocker.”
“Mrs. Singleton?”
“Scoplow.”
“I think it’s the context,” he said judiciously. “People wouldn’t pay much attention to her anywhere else, or at least not that much. But here, where everything’s so rich, so spoilt—beaut
iful but mummified—old or phony or both—the most admirable the most corrupt—ah, they must find her like one of those dreams you have about being a child again, before anything went wrong, but with all your adult mind.”
“Yes,” said Miss Finnick, “that’s probably it. Harvey, too, that’s what shook me. So to think I’m becoming mummified. I must go away before I turn into another Mrs. Chuck—but if you’re right I suppose the whole caboodle will come tumbling down before morning.”
“You don’t think it’d be an additional attraction?”
“The lion that ate the hero?”
“They wouldn’t let you keep him, but you could double the pull of the Dueling Ground.”
“Harvey could have him stuffed. Lord knows he could do with something like that—this place eats money, and the old boys still think they’re rich as Croesus. And he’d be able to do all the things they won’t let him. I’m off. Good luck, I suppose. You go, and I’ll count fifty, then I shan’t have seen which way you went. Don’t start anything till you’ve heard my car, though.”
“Goodbye,” said Pibble. “I hope we meet again.”
“Ah, what would a fine Lunnon gentleman be wanting with the likes of me? God go with ’ee, zurr, howsomever.”
Pibble picked up his anachronistic bucket and left, wondering whether a slight wooziness, a sense that even the sycamore trunk was not as solid as it looked in the gloaming, was caused by delayed shock from his encounter with the lions or by the hallucinating effect of Miss Finnick’s personality switches. Presumably one would tire of it, find oneself agreeing with Harvey that it was overdone, but for a while her joke Wardour Street English could serve most pleasantly as the language of love. Poor thing. Pibble remembered his earlier notion about her suicide note; not so remote a contingency, after all.
The Old English Peep Show Page 11
