“Then they’d better be the right ones.”
“Help us,” said the child.
Pibble decided that it was only the removal of responsibility that made him sense a faint change in the tinge of terror in the hall.
“Copper come,” said a child by his elbow—Fancy Phillips. She smiled. Mrs. Dixon-Jones was coming down the stairs with the pace of a party-giving marchioness about to obliterate two gate crashers.
“And who is this, Mr. Pibble?” she said.
“Superintendent Callow of Scotland Yard,” said Pibble. The difficulty of keeping a note of self-justification out of his voice made him sound nervous. “He’s in charge of the search for … for the man we’ve been talking about.”
“Indeed?”
“I have a dozen men with me, ma’am,” said Callow. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
His tone was manly, reassuring, but somehow subservient, as though he could recognize a superior officer even in the mufti of femininity.
“Do you seriously believe this creature will come here?” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones.
“I am in charge of the case, ma’am. I wouldn’t be here if I thought he was more likely to go somewhere else.”
“I hope you have better evidence than Mr. Pibble’s imagination.”
“A couple more pointers, ma’am. Pibble could be wrong, but they seem to bear him out.”
(In the eyes of the Yard, Pibble was a sort of ghost; but his shoulders were evidently substantial enough to carry the can once more.) Mrs. Dixon-Jones sighed—as though the presumed gate crashers had turned out to be the bailiffs.
“What do you want me to do?” she said.
“Show me round, then carry on as normal. Who else did you tell, Jimmy?”
“I told Doctor Kelly. Ivan, the man in the porch, worked it out for himself, and I’ll be surprised if no one else has.”
“Right. But we won’t tell anyone we needn’t—I don’t want a lot of hysterical nurses rushing about. They seem to know something’s up, I’d say.”
He gestured at the children.
“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones. Callow blinked.
“I’ll be off, then,” said Pibble, and started up the stairs.
“Hang on if you want to, Jimmy,” said Callow with some urgency. Was he wanting an ally, however irregular, for the skirmish with Mrs. Dixon-Jones? More likely he felt that any friend of Mr. Thanatos had better be a friend of his.
“Thanks, but I’ve got an appointment,” said Pibble, and ran the two flights to the gallery. Only when he was there did he release his breath into whispered curses; he knew that Callow had hit Ivan partly for the fun of it, but partly as a deliberate demonstration in front of Pibble of his own power and authority. Even if Ivan made a complaint, even if Pibble supported his statements, the accusation wouldn’t stick. A wispily bearded youth, a sacked, jealous, unreliable ex-colleague—what weight would they carry against the bluff, open, Sandhurst manner backed by testimonials from several senior officers who would know perfectly well which side was likely to be telling the truth? But Callow had always been an “effective” officer. Pibble now less than ever. He turned the corner.
The honourable Doll, swinging along in an emerald maxi coat, was coming toward him down the corridor. He stopped cursing and waited for her.
“I’ve seen my man and now I’m free,” he said. “Is the offer of tea still open?”
“Super,” she said.
“Is there another way out? The hall is full of people I’ve said good-bye to, and the stairs just behind are covered with paint pots.”
“There are stairs in all the towers, but Posey keeps them locked in case the dormice fall down. My father used to practice climbing the drainpipes during the vacations—it was all he did at Oxford as far as I could make out—and he said they were quite easy.”
“Too athletic for me.”
“We could get onto the roof through the trapdoor in the linen room and climb down the cedar tree. That’s as easy as a staircase, but it’s frightfully dirty. You know what cedars are.
“I’ve never grown one. Don’t let’s get dirty.”
“Thank heavens. This is a new coat. That leaves the fire escape.”
Even the fire escape involved an eight-foot drop from the final stair.
“Yippee!” cried Doll, and leaped. The green coat parachuted round her so that the builders’ night watchman, who was feeding a brazier by the arch into the stable yard, must have had a ravishing view of plump legs. She tottered and nearly fell, but backed against the wall laughing.
“If I can, you can,” she called.
“Old bones are brittle,” grumbled Pibble, and lowered himself until he hung by his hands, then dropped. At once she slipped her arm through his.
“All my life I’ve been cheated out of uncles,” she said. “I don’t mind about the aunts. We can get out at the bottom of the melon ground.”
“I hope you have a warm night,” said Pibble to the night watchman in a jaunty attempt to show that this wasn’t a case of breaking out and exiting.
“And the same to you, cock,” said the night watchman. It was Alfred.
Doll took him out through the arch, loosing another “Yippee” as they passed beneath it. The stone work yippeed back.
“I always do that,” she said. “My father showed me. He always did it, too.”
Behind the house lay a square of blue-purple brick paving, tilted toward a central drain hole, for washing coaches on, and later limousines; and beyond that rose a high wall of pitted brick with one wide door in it. This led to a long but narrow walled garden, sloping along the ridge, with greenhouses along two walls and well-drilled fruit trees on the others. The centre space was dug to a level perfection that pleased the would-be-peasant segment of Pibble’s soul, but nothing grew in it; only careful stacks of cloches showed that it had ever grown one blade of green.
“It’s a change from the rest of the garden,” he said.
“It’s all let to a gentleman called Mr. Sideburn. We don’t have anything to do with him, except if he’s growing freesias he always sends us a bunch for the funerals. Bad taste is more touching than good taste, sometimes.”
“What does he grow in the greenhouses?” asked Pibble, already concerned about the day when his body would have retired as much as his mind. He’d be past digging then, past hoeing, perhaps up to a little pruning on balmy afternoons; hut he might still eke a few years’ pleasure out of tending alpines on shelves that he didn’t have to stoop to.
“Cucumbers,” said Doll. “He keeps them beautifully hot. Before Ram came they were the only place where you could keep warm if you didn’t want to be with the dormice.”
She rubbed her ear purringly against his shoulder and led him down past a long bed of globe artichokes, their last leaves gray as a ghost in the dusk, to a little door in the bottom wall. The key hung by it on a nail; she unlocked it, hung the key hack, and let the door click locked behind them.
They were out in the public road, where the violet lamps of evening were on and the traffic hustled; a street cleaner, busily chivvying nonexistent leaves along an already speckless gutter, leaned for a moment on his broom to peer at them.
“Hello, Mr. Pibble,” he said. “How are you doing?”
“Not too bad, Leventhorp. You seem to have come down in the world, though.”
“Makes a change from hauling high-minded hooligans off cricket pitches. Good night, sir.”
“What on earth was that about?” whispered Doll when they were across the road. Pibble told her. She shivered and snuggled close in against his side as they turned up a long, bleak side road of stuccoed and bow-windowed villas, with the last disheartened blooms of Peace and Queen Elizabeth poking ungainly above the privet hedges.
“Don’t let’s talk about that,” she said. “Do you real
ize that all this used to be our park? With deer in it? Posey’s room was called the Justice Room, because that’s where great-grandfather sentenced poachers. Granny’s house is still called the Dower House, and we’re walking along the private path between the two. It’s ‘The Way Through the Woods’ inside out—you know, steadily cantering through.”
“But there is no road through the woods,” said Pibble. “Why does Rue make such a fuss about quotations? He was furious when I compared his work to Michael Ventris’.”
“Was he? That’s nice, because it means it isn’t only a way of getting at me. He was brought up bilingual, Erse and English, and made to wear clothes of hand-woven Connemara cloth, and little old pansies who’d once known the big guns—Yeats and people like that—were always in and out of the house. He hated them all, he says. Last winter he made up a blue version of Deirdre of the Sorrows, which he spouts for hours when his work’s going badly. He hates me talking about my family and the McNair, too, and you can’t steal that from me because I’m the only one. I expect wife beaters’ wives feel jealous when their man bashes other women.”
“Yes, they do, usually—sometimes it’s the only thing that will make them give evidence. Rue doesn’t just dislike the building because it’s old and non-functional?”
“That’s what he says, but … Uncle Pibble, you’re a beast. Why do you want to meet Granny? She’s an acquired taste, you realize?”
“Well, I am interested in what it was like here fifty years ago, but really I just want to see what she’s like. Idle curiosity. I wouldn’t have had the nerve to ask if I hadn’t still been bit tight on Mr. Thanatos’ champagne.”
“What’s he like?”
Pibble tried to give a brief geography of that vast, intricate and largely unexplored continent, all on the strength of his own brief visit.
“I liked him,” he concluded. “You must have had a big park.”
“Here we are, you poor old man.”
She swung him into a drive. The Dower House had only one spire, but there was still enough light for Pibble to see that the rest of it could serve for a sample of the main building. The gawky intransigence of its convoluted bulls-blood brick gave it an unlikely dignity in the context of the trivial repetitions of the rest of the street.
The hall reeked of damp, hairy dogs. A radio was blaring a dialect account of a shepherd’s life in the thirties, with the volume turned up so far that the cheap loudspeaker jarred on every other syllable. Doll put her palms to her ears and ran at the noise as though it were milk boiling over on the stove. It stopped, and a sharp old voice said, “I wasn’t asleep, darling.”
As Pibble hesitated into the room; terriers foamed snarling round his ankles until Doll took them by the collars, tossed them out, and slammed the door. Then she bent over an armchair and kissed the fungus-coloured cheek. The old lady dragged a tapestry-work reticule from under the rugs on her knees, fumbled in it with impatient fingers, and fished out a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, which she held up to her eyes Without bothering to open the ear pieces. Through-crannies of lens she peered briefly at Pibble, then prodded the spectacles back into her bag.
“He won’t last you long, darling,” she said.
“He doesn’t have to, darling,” said Doll as she drew the curtains and switched on more lights. “I brought him for you. He knows all about murder and rape and things like that, so I thought you could have a nice bloodthirsty talk together. His name is James Pibble.”
Lady Sospice cocked her head.
“Wife dresses in pink?” she said.
“Usually,” said Pibble.
“Got you now,” said Lady Sospice. “I told Posey Jones to have you in to find out why that Armenian was flooding the place with money.”
“Doctor Silver, you mean?”
“My dear man! He’s not got a penny, and whatever he is he isn’t an Armenian.”
“Oh, Mr. Thanatos. I had lunch with him today. I got the impression that he is genuinely interested in the children’s, er, mental powers. He isn’t spending a lot by his standards.”
Lady Sospice threw her head sideways and up, like one of her own terriers, and sniffed. Doll had left the room through another door and was making kitcheny noises beyond.
“He’s up to something,” said the old lady. “No Armenian ever gave a penny away without a reason. You do your duty and find out what, Mr. Pobble.”
“I gather he now, well, almost owns the place”
“It’s a scandal! But he’s not been as clever as he thinks. He can’t touch the house, because it’s a condition of the trust that the children live there, and he can’t touch the children because Posey Jones is their legal guardian.”
“I didn’t realize that,” said Pibble. “It’s not a common arrangement.”
“My husband insisted on it. Do you think, Mr. Pobble, that we gave away that beautiful house—simply gave it away—in order that this Armenian should steal it?”
Pibble thought of the capital that must have been realized on the thousand villas that now obliterated the deer park. “I wonder what he wants it for,” he said.
“He wants it because it is beautiful,” said Lady Sospice with a definitive nod. “That type of person has never known what real beauty is. Naturally he is envious.”
“It must have been, er, even more beautiful before all this building was done.”
Rings sparkled as Lady Sospice threw up her mottled hands.
“My dear man, it was a dream. These lovely hills, all spoilt now. I could look out of my bedroom window and not see it tree my husband didn’t own. But it was a responsibility, a dreadful responsibility. So close to London, you know. People were always breaking in and wandering wherever they wanted as if the land didn’t belong to anyone. It was not so had when I was a gel—I married my cousin, you know, so I knew the house then. The village youths could be a nuisance, but they were all our tenants so we knew what to do with the tiresome families. But when this ghastly disease—it is like a disease, don’t you agree? a friend of mine used to write me long letters from the leper colony where she worked, poor silly thing—when this disease spread over the fields and there were people all round us, people we didn’t know and couldn’t control, though my husband was a magistrate until he died—well, they used to walk right into the garden, to say nothing of letting their mongrels chase the deer, and they could be most rude when one went to turn them off.”
Pibble nodded sympathetically, like a priest hearing a penitent confess to a sin which he didn’t know existed. He thought it curious that the smaller but similar pretensions of Mrs. Dixon-Jones, that good woman, were still almost unbearable, while the Napoleonic snobbery of this old bag had become an acceptable aberration. It didn’t matter any more, it was make-believe, an exercise in the historical imagination. But Posey Jones could still hurt “dear Mary.”
“Why did you choose cathypnics?” he asked.
Again the rings flashed in a gesture of amused amazement.
“Oh, dear, I didn’t choose that or anything else while my husband was alive. His favourite gamekeeper, a man called McNair, had a child with the disease.”
“Shall I tell him, or will you?” said Doll, walking in with a three-tier cake stand populated with little iced fancy cakes.
“I don’t know what you mean, darling,” said Lady Sospice, and effectively gagged herself by snatching a pink cake and stuffing half of it between her gums.
“Mrs. McNair had her baby in l901,” said Doll. “Grandfather had sent McNair away to fight the Boer War two years before, and he was still away. Grandfather took a particular interest in the child, and brought specialists down when it became obvious that there was something wrong with its health. One of them discovered cathypny, as he’d seen another child with it, and so grandfather started a home for cathypnics as a sort of hobby; at first I think he only wanted to be guardian of the
McNair boy, so he made himself secretary and put that in as a condition of the trust, but as the others began to arrive he took just as much interest in them. Anyway, that’s why Posey is their guardian now, and that’s …”
“I expect Mr. Pobble would prefer Indian tea,” said Lady Sospice through crumbs. “Is there any in the cupboard?”
“No. Will you have Granny’s dishwash or my Nescafé Uncle Pibble?”
“Tea, please.”
It came in a silver teapot, as of yore; but alas no spirit lamp burned blue under a silver kettle on bowed legs. Lady Sospice poured thick cream into hers, added five spoons of sugar stirred, and at last sucked at the brew with hissing pleasure.
“I’ve seen Granny take sugar with all five courses of a meal,” said Doll.
“Nonsense!” snapped the old lady.
“Soup, peas, pudding, cream cheese, and coffee.”
“Coffee’s not a course, darling. I don’t think I’ve ever taken sugar with fish. I don’t count kedgeree, because that would be breakfast.”
She was obviously flattered by talk about her sweet tooth, as though it were the last remaining vestige of many prowesses. Pibble looked out of the corner of his eyes at Doll, who was sitting with her legs twisted under her at the back of a large, lopsided armchair. The half-curled position, her plump smile, and the way her whole body seemed tense with the pleasure of its own existence, made her look as if she were about to purr aloud. Her eyes were brown and bright—not, green, and no trace of a ring. But she wore another kind of ring on her ring finger; Rue Kelly could never have afforded that, but the old lady wore several of the same calibre. Doll’s father had evidently been a sad ass, a tragic Wooster; the original illegitimate McNair must have received the cathypnic gene from both his parents—Hey! Doll’s grandfather and Lady Sospice were first cousins! No, that didn’t mean anything—cousins only share one set of grandparents, so he could have got it from the other side, and been one of the males in whom it hadn’t surfaced. But there was a fifty-fifty chance that Doll herself carried the Lord Almighty’s idea of a good joke. So Rue would never marry her, not though she supplied herself with fifty engagement rings. He saw the emeralds blaze as she reached down to finger a little scar on the taut knee, and then sensed the silence in the room. Was it his turn to say something new already?
Sleep and His Brother Page 15
