‘I think that may well be true.’ It was becoming one of General Alford’s pleasures to be able at times to treat his daughter as a grown-up. ‘And if an end were put to his activities, all this village interest in fire-raising would fade away, and the boy would be all right again.’
‘He certainly isn’t all right now,’ Anne said with decision. ‘I saw him yesterday, and it quite shook me.’
‘Ah.’ General Alford, too, had been shaken – chiefly by the disagreeable allegation preferred by old Ritchings: something that couldn’t possibly be mentioned to Anne. At the moment he was a little struck by his daughter’s enlarging vocabulary. ‘The boy looks under the weather, would you say?’
‘I think he may be beginning to wonder whether he ought to give people a run for their money.’
‘Live up to his reputation, you mean?’
Anne Alford did take a moment to grasp this expression.
‘Yes,’ she then said vigorously. ‘That might be it.’
The greater part of Thorley Park was destroyed by fire that night. The blaze had started in, and been detected while still confined to, the cluster of miscellaneous offices contiguous with the mansion. These included much disused stabling at ground level, with numerous equally disused small chambers, once the quarters of grooms and stable-boys and other humble persons, ranged in two stories above. A good deal of this was tinder-dry, and the construction of the roof-spaces was such that the flames were quickly funnelled into the upper ranges of the house itself. The local fire brigade, although not a professional and full-time organisation, was mustered with commendable speed, and yet more remarkable was the rapidity with which enormous mechanical monsters appeared from Great Treby. Not much could be done, all the same.
Something – perhaps a falling tile or the splintering of glass – had awakened General Alford almost before anybody else was alerted to the disaster. He at once set about checking his domestic staff out of the house, with strict orders not to attempt to enter it again on any account at all. By the time he had done this the entire village had assembled, and he made it his next business to get the children out of the way. So Mrs Alford, who knew all about being a commanding officer’s wife and setting an example to married quarters, firmly led off the protesting Anne to Chesney Lodge, and then returned (accompanied by Sir Charles) to add her authority to the carrying out of similarly prudent action by the other Thorley mothers.
So at least there was going to be no loss of life – unless, indeed, on the part of a fireman – and firemen were at risk by their own choice, after all. Assured of this, and with Charles Apperley beside him, the General was able to take a reasonably dispassionate view of the destruction of his ancestral home. Or he would have been, could he have been assured that confronting him was what the lawyers – rather oddly – call an Act of God. He very much wanted it to be an Act of God, since the notion of some individual malignity at work, even if it had been directed against him quite at random, disturbed him greatly. When the village constable, a stupid and good-natured man called Curley, came up to him with some muttered remark about collaring the bastard this time, he shut the man up with a sharpness that surprised himself.
It was a very cold winter night, and the fire was very hot. The flames were a lurid red and now seemed to stain the sky and the smoke rising up to it; but at play upon the mansion at the same time were arc lights from the monsters which somehow seemed as chilly as the north wind fanning the flames.
‘It looks as if they may save the west wing,’ Apperley said to the General. His voice was carefully matter-of-fact rather than designed to be heartening. ‘Did they manage to get much out?’
‘The silver is in what’s supposed to be a fire-proof safe. Bullion by now, I expect. Burford’—this was the General’s butler—’seems to have managed to pitch out a good many paintings. Competent chap, Burford. There will be things of my wife’s that I’ll be sorry about. And the books. Something nasty about the idea of books burning. Good show by the fire brigade, wouldn’t you say? Fellows well on their toes.’
Thus were these two gentlemen sparely conversing according to their order when they were disturbed by a woman’s scream from close behind them.
‘Dicky—it’s Dicky!’ the woman screamed. She was Mrs Howland.
Other people were now yelling too, and it was certainly Dicky they were excited about. Even as a diminutive and blackened figure now vanishing behind a pall of smoke and now luridly lit by a flicker of flame, there was no mistaking his identity as, high overhead, he scrambled frantically to and fro on the very ridge of the fast-collapsing stable block. And, now that he could be seen, his own faint cries, terrified and despairing, could be heard above the roar and crackle of the conflagration.
‘My God!’ Apperley exclaimed. ‘It was that boy, Arthur. And now he’s done for – the poor crazy kid.’
Dicky, however, was not done for – although he too undoubtedly believed he was. Miraculously, a great red ladder with a helmeted man at the tip of it extended itself in air, swung, dipped, hung for a moment over a sea of flame, and then rose again with Dicky in the fireman’s arms. It had been like the sort of legend in which an eagle swoops down and carries off an infant exposed on a rock.
A minute later Dicky Howland stood in the centre of a circle of hostile or merely curious and gaping villagers. Suddenly there were murmurs, angry shouts, and Constable Curley thrust hastily forward.
‘Quiet, there!’ Curley called out with all the majesty of the law. ‘Hold hard! Hold hard, I say – I have my eye on you!’ He had been only just in time to stop an ugly rush at Dicky. And it was upon Dicky that he himself advanced now. He put out an arm as if to grasp the boy. Then he paused and glanced towards General Alford. The General was a magistrate, which meant a good deal. For miles around the General owned every acre not owned by Sir Charles Apperley, and this meant a good deal more.
Dicky too looked at General Alford. The boy was cowering, trembling all over, as black as a sweep. He was not, it seemed, burnt – or at least not badly – but he smelt as if some demon barber had been singeing him all over. For a moment he looked fixedly at the General. The General looked fixedly back – but how sternly, with how condemnatory a regard, he perhaps didn’t know. Suddenly young Richard Howland appeared to brace himself, square himself, plant himself less insecurely on the ground. He had stopped trembling – yet his whole body seemed to vibrate, all the same. His voice, which during this horrible episode had been the vehicle of nothing except the howling of a frightened child, now rose up in abrupt command of articulate speech.
‘All right, then!’ Dicky shouted at General Alford. ‘It was me, just like you all thought it was. Do you hear – all of you?’ And he glared wildly and defiantly round the assembled villagers. ‘It was me, I tell you, me!’
There was a moment’s utter silence – or what would have been that but for the continued roar of the flames. Again Constable Curley glanced uncertainly at General Alford. For a bare second the General hesitated. Then he gave a curt nod. Constable Curley led Richard Howland away.
More than a couple of days went by before the searchers – firemen still, but now also the insurance people as well – found the charred body of the fire-bug in the ruins of Thorley Park. There could be no doubt about his identity. The police at Great Treby had already guessed who was the man they were looking for. Intermittently insane or near it, he had served a term of imprisonment for arson ten years before.
While this strange dawn of knowledge had been heaving up slowly towards the horizon things had been happening at a different pace to Dicky. Mrs Curley had given him hot milk and biscuits while her husband had made rather agitated telephone calls. Just occasionally, Constable Curley had to lock up a drunk in a little place at the bottom of his garden, but he was unaccustomed to juvenile offenders guilty of such heinous crime that they must clearly be held in custodial care from the start. He didn’t like it at all. So he contrived to get Dicky into the presence of the chairman of th
e local children’s court shortly after breakfast next morning – remembering to take Dicky’s father the publican along with him. Within twenty minutes of this formality Dicky was on his way to something at that time called a juvenile remand centre, there to await due processes of law.
Although the county was proud of its remand centre Dicky didn’t find it a nice place at all. He believed it, indeed, to be what his schoolfellows called bad school: an institution in which he was liable to be confined for years, and get the stick every day. What he got straight away was a certain amount of unwelcome attention from some rather bigger boys who had settled in, grasped the hang of the institution, and perfected numerous varieties of instant torture to be deployed whenever the screws (as they precociously expressed it) relaxed their surveillance. Dicky was soon wishing very much that he hadn’t, in his moment of extremity, told that rash and boastful lie. He was also frightened by his own complete lack of knowledge as to why he had done so. And he didn’t, of course, have Anne Alford to enlighten him.
General Alford, on learning the truth, was appalled by his own behaviour. With a single nod he had in fact denied his own intuitive conviction about the pub-keeper’s unfortunate son. Being thus furious with himself, he quickly became furious with other people, even ringing up the remand centre and demanding Richard Howland’s instant release in a very high-handed manner. Being politely informed that these things took a little time, he drove up to London accompanied by Sir Charles Apperley, organised perhaps excessive legal assistance around him, and by that afternoon arrived before the portals of Dicky’s prison accompanied by the elder Howland and armed with a brief but sufficient document obtained from a judge in chambers. So there was no fuss at all, and he drove the liberated child and his father straight home.
Dicky gave an account of himself on the way. It wasn’t very coherent, but it certainly began with owls. There was a species of owl pre-eminently likely to be discovered in abandoned stabling, and he had gone in search of that. What he had found was a maniac busily engaged in burning the place down. With some rashness in the circumstances, Dicky had expostulated with this person, who had promptly pursued him through the building – this in nearly pitch darkness – with murder plainly in his mind. Dicky had fled to its upper regions, and there the maniac, taking a rash leap at him in the murk, had gone clean through a gap in the decayed flooring and fallen into what was already a lake of flame below. Dicky had then managed to find and climb down a loft ladder, and had done his best to haul the man clear – partly from a confused notion that, not himself having been murdered after all, he might be accused of murder on his own part if his adversary perished, and partly because he understood that a Boy Scout (he still aspired to be a Scout) was expected to behave in a heroic manner on occasions of the kind. But the fire had defeated him, and he had been obliged to retreat to the roof.
Such was Dicky’s entire story. General Alford listened to it in silence, and ended by accepting its substantial veracity. He had of course other things to think of besides this unfortunate boy’s strange history. He would have to find time for the whole business of getting the insurance settled and building himself a new house, and he would have to do this without docking ten minutes from his labours on the Imperial General Staff. But of course the boy was a decent boy, just as he had always supposed, and something would have to be done for him. Preferably, it ought to be on the estate, so that in an unobtrusive way secure employment could be ensured for him as he grew older.
Yes, that was it. Whatever was appropriate to his abilities and ambitions it must be put within Richard Howland’s power to achieve.
A READING IN TROLLOPE
The Balmaynes suddenly realised that they knew almost nothing about Roland Redpath. He had begun by coming around the place as one of their son Ronnie’s numerous quite casual acquaintances. Ronnie had nothing to say about him, and although Redpath himself appeared to be a frank and conversable young man his talk had never happened to turn upon any personal past. This was entirely in order, or at least the elder Balmaynes contrived to accept it as being that. Neither Ronnie nor his sister Claribel reacted favourably to any question of the investigative sort about contemporaries whom they sometimes introduced to their parents. ‘What does he do?’ and ‘Is she related to the QC?’ and even ‘Are they fond of tennis?’ received answers which, although civil, carried some faint suggestion of tolerance or irritation in their tone. It wasn’t that Ronnie and Claribel took up with any raffish crowd. They were both thoroughly sensible, thoroughly sound. They were merely subscribing, perhaps unconsciously, to one of the minor taboos current in their generation.
On several occasions, however, Redpath, without appearing to have become really intimate with Ronnie, spent a weekend with the Balmaynes in their country cottage. Lady Balmayne wrote the invitations, but Redpath was essentially her son’s guest. That there were written invitations at all showed that the younger Balmaynes accepted certain antique ways unconcernedly enough. But when a young man joins you at tea time and takes his leave of you after breakfast three days later it is usual and natural that you hear a word or two about his people and his school and so on in the interim. This still didn’t happen. And it wasn’t that Roland Redpath was buttoned up all round. He expressed opinions in the most forthright way on all manner of topics. He was incisive without being assertive and well-informed without being overwhelming. His manner with Sir Bernard in particular was just right, combining the deference properly owed to a senior man with the confident freedom of address customary between social equals, regardless of any disparity in age. At one point Sir Bernard inclined to the conjecture that Redpath must have had a spell in the Guards, and resigned his commission to begin a career with some family concern in the City. Sir Bernard didn’t in fact know much about soldiers, or about the City either. He was an architect of some distinction in a specialised field, and his professional connection was mainly with the Church Commissioners.
The weekend occasions had all taken place before the elder Balmaynes became aware of a significant and disturbing switch in the young man’s relations with them. He was now less the friend of their son than the admirer of their daughter. Neither of them could have said clearly why they were bothered about this. It was true that when they took a fully considering look at Roland Redpath they saw that the picture was that of a clever boy and able young man who had arrived from nowhere in particular, and who was of an assimilative temperament which absorbed almost unconsciously at least the superficial habits and obvious assumptions of the people among whom his talents had taken him. It was by no means an unattractive picture. Moreover the Balmaynes regarded themselves as being of a liberal cast of mind, and insured against vulgar snobbery by the security of their own position in society. They immediately told one another that facts of character – integrity and kindness and constancy and so on – were more important than family origins. They were confident that Claribel knew this too.
A little further information would have been agreeable, all the same. And by this time it would have been natural as well. Were Roland Redpath again coming down for one of those weekends at Graziers Lady Balmayne felt the position to be now tacitly such that she could properly seek some enlightenment about the young man’s background, and that equally Bernard could briskly acquaint himself with the broad facts of his present position and prospects. This might be done without any ‘square’ stuff (as the young people would say) about Redpath’s intentions and a natural parental anxiety and so forth. But Redpath declined two invitations running on the score of engagements he couldn’t escape. It was almost as if he were deliberately turning elusive. Yet in the same period he came three or four times to the house and whisked Claribel off to a concert or theatre. It was worrying.
Ronnie didn’t help. It was his attitude that he and Roland had rather lost interest in one another in a perfectly normal manner, and that he had never known much about him anyway. But he was a perfectly respectable chap, with brains enough for two, and
he held down a more senior job as a psychologist in some university or other than might be expected of so young a man. If Claribel was taking it into her head to marry Roland Redpath he didn’t see that there would be anything against it.
This was reassuring up to a point, but Sir Bernard continued to feel misgivings and to communicate them to his wife.
‘Not a very regular profession, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘I was lunching the other day with John Ormerod, whom I think you’ve met once or twice. He’s a good deal older than I am, of course, but said to be still the best brain surgeon in London. He happened to say that no patient of his would get into the clutches of those fellows except over his dead body.’
‘But we don’t know, Bernard, that the young man is that sort of psychologist. If he were, I think he would be Dr Redpath.’
‘Claribel says he is a doctor, but sees no occasion to use the title in private life. Perhaps that means that he holds a degree of the outlandish sort which some American colleges peddle for straight cash down.’ Sir Bernard frowned, as he did when not pleased with himself. ‘But, no – that’s unjust and extravagant. Taken all in all, he seems a very decent lad. So I can’t think why he’s being a little less than straightforward now.’
‘I’m not sure, Bernard, of that being altogether just either. I believe he feels some awkwardness about his suit’—Lady Balmayne smiled at her use of this archaic expression—’and is hanging back with us because of it. And I’m not wholly able to acquit Claribel of all blame. She must know more about Roland than we do. But she has almost nothing to say about him. It’s her attitude that it’s no business of ours. Of course, she doesn’t express that in any crude or pert way. But it’s vexatious, all the same.’
‘I don’t myself blame Clarrie at all.’ Having made this firm declaration, Sir Bernard steered his thought in another direction. ‘There are Redpaths in Bedfordshire, you know. Julian Redpath and I were in the same election, and went up to Corpus together later on. An extremely nice fellow, Julian. But – do you know? – he pronounced his name not Redpath but Rippeth. All that family do. Early in our acquaintance with this young man, I actually addressed him in the wrong way. It was mildly embarrassing. I had to say I’d come across his name, but remembered it as slightly different. Something like that. He seemed almost startled for a moment.’
The Bridge at Arta Page 13
