And it could not be said that I had gained much positive light. I was left, indeed, with a confused mind…crouched like a rabbit in a ditch in my husband Sir George Simney’s park.
10
Walk on. Tramp over the snow chewing on what has befallen (and very likely you will make more of it than I did) until the next exhibit presents itself.
The next exhibit is a dumb show – rather like the queer old turn the players put on before the play-within-the-play in Hamlet. And here, as there, it betokens at least the first part of the catastrophe approaching. Soon Polonius will be behind his arras and the sword thrust home. The police will come with flash-light cameras and lug the guts into the neighbour room. And that will be the end of a bad baronet.
Grace was one figure in the dumb-show and the Reverend Adrian Deamer was the other. Mr Deamer is one of those clergymen who are always diving into their church for minor liturgical purposes. He would have little in common, I imagine, with that Bishop Denzell Simney who was painted by Kneller. It is true that St Francis preached to the fishes and the birds, but Mr Deamer would altogether disapprove of a bishop who conned a prayer-book amid wreaths of foxhounds. Mr Deamer doesn’t approve of any Simneys – except Grace.
And at the moment perhaps he didn’t much approve of her. For she had intercepted him when emerging from some interim devotions and probably proposing to himself a rewarding cup of Oxo in his study. A chilly wind had sprung up; it fluttered the surplice which Mr Deamer clutched in one hand and the unrolled umbrella which depended from the other; it disarranged his thinning hair and reddened his inquiring nose. Grace, in her character as an intelligence officer straight from Sodom and Gomorrah, stood strategically placed in the narrow defile of a lich-gate, and there raised to heaven the supplicating voice. Or to heaven and Mr Deamer – the latter, at least, being obliged to listen, since the lady regularly worked him embroidered slippers. Not that he was in any way reluctant, really, for he is a man who has come to feed on that with which he wrestles, and Hazelwood is inevitably both his principal gymnastic appliance and his principal trough. Presently the two of them had their noses well into it together.
I think I ought to say that, despite this tone into which I have fallen, I don’t object to clergymen and churches and whatever superior verities these stand for. If I were myself by way of embroidering slippers for a revered vicar I should be pleased. But I had never managed to like Mr Deamer, perhaps because he on his side had distrusted me from the first. There had been a plan between Grace and him, I believe, to secure George’s salvation by marrying him to another slipper-embroiderer of superior station in the county. It was a laudable plan if not a very likely one, and if it had matured everything (so far as I am concerned) would have been a great deal better. So I ought to have felt a kind of gratitude for the attempt. And for the man himself and his rather exclusive fanaticism about one sort of sin I ought to have allowed. And I ought not to have minded his having a low view of actresses. In fact I ought to have been able to be Lady Simney to the vicar even if Lady Simney was patently a scarlet woman to him. But somehow I hadn’t managed it. And now here, as I came out of the park and approached the village, were those two communing over the Hazelwood situation in general and the recent affair of my supposed guilty embrace in the orangery in particular. It was a dumb-show – if only because I kept well on the far side of the road. But it was good of its kind. If the villagers felt like joining in and playing charades they would have had no reason to complain on the score of lack of expressiveness and intelligibility.
There was a field-path on the right, and discretion would have taken me up it. But something in me revolted against dodging and I walked straight on. I even moved out a bit on the crown of the road. For, of course, the natural thing to do was to tramp briskly past and speak a civil word while doing so. Cordiality would have been false. But to avoid these two would have been to play their own silly game.
Grace, who had been achieving gestures of repulsion, was now flapping her arms in resignation and despair. Mr Deamer had contrived to dispose of the umbrella and surplice and was thus able to clasp his hands before his chest – which was a way of suggesting that the matters on hand were supportable to him only by virtue of his professional character.
I was less than ten yards away. ‘Good morning, Mr Deamer,’ I said.
Grace turned round and stared at me with a sort of fascinated dread that I didn’t much mind. But I minded Mr Deamer, who compressed his lips and looked straight through me.
One can always be disconcerted by something new, and I don’t think I had ever been cut like that before. The effect on me was out of all proportion to its occasion. For, after all, I knew exactly how those two worthies felt – and why should just this upset me? But the fact is that I wanted to cry and that I had to be careful not to stumble until I was past them and with a clear road in front of me. The man had betrayed his calling – a shepherd being the last person who should look straight through a lost sheep. But that was his business, not mine. Why should I bother? Perhaps a very different sort of clergyman had sustained me in some forgotten passage of my childhood; perhaps it was something like that. Anyway, I was most irrationally humiliated and hurt. And I no longer disliked Mr Deamer. I hated him.
Mind you, I don’t go in for hating. I don’t think I hated George, though I greatly loathed him. And so I walked on, a good deal shattered both by the thing itself and by an emotional response so unexpected and extravagant. But don’t think that all this is thrown in merely by way of canvassing sympathy for a sensitive plant. Don’t condemn my morning’s wanderings as so much beating about the bush; don’t, like mad Hamlet, yell at me to leave my damnable faces, murderer, and begin. All these things have their place.
But I had no idea of what toils this walk was weaving.
And now the morning’s last episode. If I had been indulging myself in too much fuss over the preceding one here was something which might have been sent to point me a fool.
I have forgotten to say that Gerard was abroad in the park at this time; once or twice I had glimpsed him walking moodily about some quarter of a mile away. It was to avoid the chance of meeting him that I took the homeward route I did. When I returned from the high road I took a path which skirted the fringes of the path and led past Sir Basil’s Folly.
Sir Basil Simney hangs in George’s study with the rest of them – Zoffany is the artist – but I haven’t, I think, mentioned him. He is unmentionable, even as Simneys go, and his Folly – which is a retired little classical temple erected to facilitate the pursuits of certain excessively recondite pleasures, is about the most innocent thing recorded of him. Outside this sinister little place two horses were tethered.
Well, as Gerard had remarked, those people were gone, after all. And if George amid the obscure difficulties gathering round him chose to find a little light relief in the high-speed seduction of Joyleen Simney it was just no business of mine, any more than was Mr Deamer’s failure in pastoral care. Nor was it of any use to me. A couple of private detectives snooping round this chilly eighteenth-century love nest with cameras would have added very little to what my solicitors already had neatly tied up in pink tape. All that I had to do was to turn away from the Folly, walk back to Hazelwood, change my shoes and eat an undisturbed luncheon. I ought to have done this even when I became aware that there was somebody snooping round. But suddenly I was terribly frightened. And with a beating heart I advanced straight towards the little building before me.
To explain this would require a command of atmosphere that I don’t remotely possess. George had told me in some detail about his ancestor Sir Basil and I knew that those elegant Ionic pillars supporting their dome of snow, that those surrounding oaks rising dark above a stainless carpeting, were heavy with old, unexpiated sin. Melodramatics or hysteria is the word for this talk, I suppose – and yet I did truly feel the place to be fit only for some horrible sacrifi
ce, for the appearance, perhaps, of a hooded figure gliding through the druidic trees with a ritual and cleansing knife poised in air. Plainly I hadn’t recovered from the nastiness of my encounter with Mr Deamer and Grace. Nevertheless there was a rational basis too for my alarm. For through these same trees a figure had glided. Somebody was lurking behind the Folly now.
I tried to think of harmless explanations. Upon persons retired as George and Joyleen were, snooping may be practised by any casual Peeping-Tom. Possibly it was no more than that. Or, again, Mr Deamer might be on his familiar beat as a one-man anti-vice squad – and this called for no more than a resolute turning of the mind to some less silly and squalid theme. Or it might be Grace – and here the same consideration applied, only rather more compellingly. But might it not be Owdon – a man become so enigmatic and mysterious that one could not calculate upon consequences in regard to him? I tried to persuade myself that the possibility of its being Owdon who was spying on his master represented the worst I could conceive in the matter. But this self-deception was no good – and already I was hurrying forward with that pounding heart. It might be Gerard. It might be Timmy.
Gerard had been in the park. Gerard was the wronged husband. Here were both a practical and a conventional reason for thinking of him. I forgot his matter-of-fact announcement that those people were gone, after all. But this was only because I wanted to bring him into the picture. If it was Gerard, it was bad. But if it was Timmy, it was a great deal worse.
For in some way I had taken Timmy Owdon to my heart. By some queer twist of the mind I saw him as very young – much younger than his sixteen years. And I think I saw him as one of that non-existent group of dream-Simneys on the terrace with their ponies. It was, no doubt, something very silly like that. But I just wasn’t going to have Timmy destroyed in the working out of all this beastly and gathering wickedness and mystery. Or not while I was still about. Perhaps the Simneys – even appealing ones like Timmy – must have their disasters and there was no saving them. But I was going to be out of it first.
There was nothing very beautiful about this. Still, that’s how I felt. Violence was part of the Simneys’ story, and more or less imminent family violence I had intuitively come to expect. Perhaps it was the jagged line of that broken whiskey bottle and the rent canvas of George’s pink-coated portrait cheek by jowl with his nasty pink-fleshed lady. Certainly if I shut my eyes I could see, with almost hallucinatory vividness, each of these pinks splashed with a ghastly scarlet.
So it looked as if, rather suddenly, I was going a little mad. From feeling that all this family quarrelling and mystery-mongering left me cold I had swung round to panic about it. I wanted if possible to get Timmy out, and was quite resolved to get myself out, before the intolerableness of Hazelwood was increased by some nasty newspaper tragedy. Moreover I was quite prepared to take risks – which was why I was hurrying towards Sir Basil’s Folly now. There before me were the horses, and there must be George and the little wanton who had last night arrived on us. And there, too, was someone skulking behind the building.
Both in simple location here in its secluded corner of the park and in atmosphere and traditional association the place could scarcely have been better suited to some rash act of jealousy or rage. Or – for that matter – to some calculated crime, and if I had ever sat down to plan the liquidating of George Simney it was here that I would have set the scene.
But all this is idle talk endeavouring to explain away what was doubtless a flustered and altogether injudicious reaction to the sight of those horses – one of them my own – and to the sense of that lurking figure behind. I was going to call a halt to violence. And forward I ran.
Recognizing me, the horse whinnied; then, as if disturbed by my pace, it neighed and reared. I realized how still everything was. The little temple – erected to I don’t know what murky god or goddess – was silent and shrouded; it was no place upon which to break. Nor could I, after all, bring myself to run up its short flight of steps and enter. I stood before them, panting, and took breath to give a shout. Short of the blindest passion, no utterly sinister purpose was likely to accomplish itself after that.
But it was the horses who sounded an alarm. They took fright and sent up a flurry of snow and gravel – and at that there was an exclamation from within and George came striding out with Joyleen, flushed and doubtful, behind him. He took one look at me and strode down the steps, calling to her to follow. And follow she did, like a bitch at heel.
The lurker behind the Folly stirred and I heard a twig snap dully beneath its covering of snow. But of this George was oblivious – and the situation was such that he saw me only as a lurker myself. Clearly my apprehensions were needless now. Perhaps they had been groundless all the time. And certainly they had landed me in a position from which there seemed no possible retreat to any form of social pretence. It was best just to stand still, keep silent, and let them go.
And George, I thought, was for that. He strode unheeding to the horses, unhitched, and mounted. He paused a moment to let the girl do the same. They rode forward as if to pass me, and all I could see at first was Joyleen’s face in a shapeless flabby grin. Embarrassment and sheer funk had made her lose control of the muscles round her mouth – and the result was so nasty that I turned my eyes on George instead.
George was in a flare of passion – a resounding bestial Simney rage. He reined in and leant down over me. ‘I’ve seen your lover,’ he said.
It was an unexpected remark. I looked at him blankly.
‘I’ve seen your lover,’ he repeated. And then he slapped my face.
Joyleen gave something between a hysterical giggle and a cry of protest. George turned and cut her mount hard on the croup. Seconds later they were both cantering across the park.
I stood quite still. And then, behind me, I heard the sound of somebody – the lurker who had led to this scene – coming rapidly round the Folly. But I felt no curiosity and sought no interview. Straight before me was the façade of Hazelwood – half-a-hundred crouching windows regarding me over the park, Argus-eyed. And I marched straight forward. It was where I lived, after all.
11
George died at midnight.
Persons of what is called irregular life often have regular habits, and George was one of these. Whatever he had been doing during the day, and whatever happened at dinner or immediately thereafter, the evening ended with an unvarying ritual. It involved George’s keeping late hours, and Owdon’s perforce doing the same.
And on Tuesday night I was keeping late hours myself. When Owdon came stumbling out of the study calling murder I was in my bath. Or rather I was under it – for I think I have mentioned that George brought back from Australia the conviction that only shower-baths are properly healthy and cleansing. I rather dislike shower-baths. Still, there I was, trying (you may say) to wash Hazelwood off myself at midnight – when I heard Owdon’s voice raised in a ghastly yammering. Nobody could have mistaken the gravity of what such an uncontrolled hullabaloo must portend. I didn’t stop to dry but grabbed what was no more than a towel and was out in that corridor in a flash. And there the man was – a bulk of a fellow in a tremble – and looking as if the grave gaped for him. I don’t think my head was very clear. But I know that I was at once struck by the immensity of our butler’s dismay.
Somebody had to be controlled, more or less; and I pulled myself together. The first consequence of this was the reflection that even if the whole of Hazelwood was dissolving in chaos that was no real reason for looking like an advertisement for bath salts. I dodged back and got rather damply into my wrap. And then I came out again. ‘Come, come, Owdon,’ I said. ‘What’s all this?’
On such occasions one says and does the most conventional things. Here I was piping up with what is supposed to be the superior calm of the educated. Owdon peered at me, moving his head in an odd way as if trying to discern me through
a mist. ‘He’s dead,’ he said.
I think that what I chiefly felt was a kind of breathlessness. But I still played the controlled gentlewoman. ‘Dead, Owdon! Who is dead?’
His mouth opened – and abruptly shut again. He was rather like a fish in a tank. He passed a hand over his forehead. ‘Your ladyship,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid this is bad news. Sir George has had an accident – in his study. He’s dead. But Dr Humberstone must be called.’
‘Then call him. I will go in and do what I can.’
‘Very good, your ladyship.’
But Owdon didn’t budge. He stood barring the way – or virtually that. And on his face I seemed to read both suspicion and fear.
‘If your ladyship will allow me, I will remain with you until some other member of the family arrives. It – it is very unpleasant. You must be prepared for a shock.’
Owdon, once recovered, could take a conventional line too. And I was not sorry at the idea of some support. The news that George was dead came to me with the quality chiefly of something merely bewildering. This must have been because of the diversity of emotions which, when digested, it was bound to arouse in me – incompatible emotions one of which my conscious mind would presently have to assert as dominant. But now I was in a mere confusion. Owdon made way for me and we were about to enter the study.
‘I say – did I hear a row?’
We turned and saw Willoughby coming rapidly up the corridor behind us. He was in dressing-gown and pyjamas.
‘Owdon says that George has had an accident – that he is dead.’
I heard my own voice as if it were speaking rather far away. And Owdon appeared to be under the weather again too; fleetingly I noticed that his arms were dangling in the same helpless way as when some approach of Hippias’ had made him drop his tray the night before.
What Happened at Hazelwood? Page 9
