‘Four sausages on the floor, two and a half pigs, a bullock and a sheep,’ Sir Matthew corrected him.
‘To a butcher all sheep are lambs.’
‘No, they are not, sir, begging your pardon,’ said Mr Ing, ‘not when a customer asks for mutton.’
After a long walk up the lane which once had been a Roman highway, Sir Matthew and Charles Kinsale regained a Roman dignity. When they returned home in the cool of the evening, the house smelled delectably of the famous sausages. They carried a martini for Muriel into the kitchen. She did not seem to be responding correctly to their compliments and attention.
‘My dears,’ she said, ‘Miss Mallaby has been here.’
‘Oh, ginger cake—good!’ Sir Matthew exclaimed.
‘I am afraid you have upset her rather badly. You have been staring at her shop and bothering Ing and Bunn.’
‘What’s the matter with the woman? There’s nothing alarming in archaeology. Even Kurds and Yezidis …’
‘But not an English village, dear. And you never know how loud your voice is.’
‘I didn’t say anything. I never went near Miss Mallaby. Charles looked at her through the window.’
‘You were measuring it, Matthew,’ said Charles promptly.
‘Well, what about it?’
‘Don’t boom at me, dear. Are you sure you were both quite …’
‘Muriel!’ exclaimed Charles Kinsale, much shocked. ‘The pubs were not open, and the vicar didn’t offer us anything.’
‘Yes, of course. Perhaps I misunderstood Miss Mallaby. She was so very agitated. But if you have to excavate the only shops in the village who ever have anything fit to eat, Matthew, do let me handle it for you!’
‘Excavation,’ said Kinsale, using the full prestige of learning to divert the conversation to a higher level. ‘I always feel it is a tragedy. A hundred years hence they will do it so much better.’
He continued to lecture, changing the subject when the bronze mound of sausages was on the table, from archaeology to analysis of flavour.
‘Sage and pork of course,’ he murmured after his fifth, ‘and there is a suggestion that somewhere along the line of ancestry was a black pudding. But am I a medieval schoolman that I should discourse upon the ingredients of heaven? For the moment they are supplied by Muriel and James Ing—whose efforts you, my dear Matthew, like an amiable and attendant angel, have underlined by this admirable claret.’
When Muriel had left them alone with it, Sir Matthew refilled the glasses. ‘Very nicely to the rescue, Charles! Damn Miss Mallaby! But have you seriously been thinking of excavation?’
‘Not for a moment! You have made your usual find with your usual luck. But excavation wouldn’t produce any more sherry.’
‘Sherry? The sherry, my good man, is a clue not a discovery! Mr Bunn was distracting our attention from his cellar to its contents. That was obvious to me when Muriel mentioned Miss Mallaby’s visit. Why should she be driven to hysterics by my balancing feats upon the curb-stone?’
‘I suggest she was subconsciously devastated by your physical attractions.’
‘Nonsense! Miss Mallaby is grim, but sane. No, they are all hiding something, and it’s behind the back wall which Bunn was so anxious to prove solid. In a remote spot like this the worship of Mithras might still be carried on.’
‘With James Ing sacrificing the bull?’
‘Pah! That’s all forgotten. What I mean is a mild little centre of vague superstition with Miss Mallaby as presiding witch—except that she’s a pillar of the church and runs the Women’s Institute.’
‘They generally do, Matthew. But covens are very rare. An illicit distillery would be more likely.’
‘Then you agree they are hiding something?’
‘The evidence is more convincing than for Vagliodunum.’
‘Five minutes in Ing’s cellar without Ing is all we need. Look here! Muriel will make a fuss that she wants mutton not lamb. James Ing will go down to the cold store to fetch the carcase.’
‘This comes under the head of upsetting the housekeeping.’
‘Hm, yes. I suppose it might. We’ll leave Muriel out of it. Then I myself will order a leg of mutton. When Ing goes down, you tip-toe after him.’
‘Damn it, Matthew, I draw the line at burglary.’
‘It’s only trespassing. While he is inside the cold store you hide under the stairs. Ing comes up with the carcass. When he has served me, he’ll hang it up in the store again. I follow him down and join you under the stairs.’
‘How and when do we get out?’
‘Easy as pie. Whenever Ing comes down for meat and is safely inside the cold store again. Then we tip-toe up the stairs and walk boldly past the customers, if any, with our parcels.’
Next morning after breakfast Kinsale flatly refused to play his part; but Sir Matthew, aware from long experience that men of books invariably felt inferior to men of action, shamed him into it, and explained to Muriel that they intended to spend an hour or two at the excavation in the main street.
The butcher’s was empty, for Prior’s Norton did not do its shopping before eleven. All went well. Kinsale, started by a merciless push, vanished downstairs behind James Ing and did not reappear. After cutting and wrapping the leg of mutton, Ing returned to the cold store with the carcass. Sir Matthew prepared to follow him, but was interrupted by the vicar who wanted sausages, and two housewives in need only of conversation. It was no good hanging around the shop. He went over the road to talk to the foreman at the excavation.
At last Mr Ing got rid of his customers and took the opportunity to deliver a loin of pork to the Dog and Lobster. Sir Matthew strolled back across the road, entered the butcher’s, looked out through the window to ensure that he was not observed and an instant later was in the cellar.
‘You’ve been the devil of a time!’ whispered Kinsale.
‘Couldn’t help it. Found anything?’
‘Yes. There’s a sliding door at the back of the cold store.’
‘Where does it go?’
‘Really, Matthew, I don’t know,’ replied Kinsale testily. ‘We are responsible persons, not little boys on a treasure hunt. And any way the door was locked.’
‘Oh, my God!’ Matthew Fowlsey suddenly exclaimed, creeping up to the curve of the stair and listening.
‘But I saw him go in, Mr Ing,’ insisted Muriel’s voice, ‘when I was down the road, and I am sure he has not come out.’
‘Indeed, madam?’ James Ing answered politely.
The probable explanation appeared to dawn on him. He repeated with indignation: ‘Indeed, madam!’
Determined steps sounded overhead. Sir Matthew dragged Kinsale into the cold store and shut the door.
‘You don’t know what it is,’ he whispered frantically. ‘You’re not married. I’ve been told not to monkey, and I’ve monkeyed. I tell you, this could mean she’d go on strike and make me live in a flat in London!’
The sliding door at the back, partly hidden by the two halves of the bullock, was not noticeable at a glance, but not particularly secret. Mr Ing could well have bought a double-doored refrigerating unit cheap.
‘I don’t believe it goes anywhere,’ Sir Matthew hissed. ‘He got it off a bankrupt butcher and installed it as it was. Hell! It doesn’t open. Hell!’
The handle on their side had been removed. He thrust the small blade of his pocket-knife into the socket and turned. The blade snapped, but a second operation with the stump did the trick. The steps of Muriel and James Ing were already audible in the cellar. He pushed Kinsale through the door and slid it shut again, breathing heavily.
Sir Matthew switched on his torch. They were in a long, narrow cellar under the hillside. To their left was a stone stair evidently leading into the back of Miss Mallaby’s shop. The flags of the floor were spotlessly clean.
At one end of the cellar were various tubs and buckets; at the other was an immense butcher’s slab of solid oak, scored and hollowed by l
ong use. Knives and choppers were neatly laid out on the scrubbed surface. The delectable, spicy smell alone was enough to tell them that this was where Ing’s sausages were made.
They stared at each other, completely puzzled. There was the click of a switch above the staircase. The cellar was lit up. Miss Mallaby, a formidable figure in black, stood upon the third step looking down on them.
‘Sir Matthew,’ she pronounced with dignity, ‘I am quite prepared to be reported to the police. But I must request you to leave my premises immediately.’
She stood a little to one side, pointing to the way past her. Fowlsey and Kinsale were hypnotized into a slow march before the power of speech returned.
‘B-b-but why should I report you to the police, Miss Mallaby?’ Sir Matthew asked.
‘I presume that now you are in possession of the evidence you will consider it your duty.’
‘I still don’t see …’
‘Inspectors! I do!’ Kinsale exclaimed. ‘Making sausages of unknown ingredients upon unlicensed premises! Hygiene! Modernity! Stainless steel! If the beaks knew Miss Mallaby was making sausages down here, they’d slap a fifty-pound fine on her. Good Lord, we ought to be hanged! May I assure you, madam, that you are a public benefactor and that nothing would induce either of us ever to open our mouths?’
‘Then what are you gentlemen doing here?’
‘Miss Mallaby, that arch over your head is very probably Roman. Your cellar was—I mean, may have been—cut out of the hillside some seventeen hundred years ago. That accounts for our curiosity, our perhaps discourteous curiosity. I am an authority upon the period. Sir Matthew is—er—a more general authority.’
‘When you come to my age, madam,’ said Sir Matthew pathetically, ‘you will realize that it is most difficult to pace distances while preserving balance.’
‘Oh, sir!’ Miss Mallaby exclaimed, joining them on the floor. ‘But you will understand my agitation. Only Mr Bunn and Mr Ing are in the secret.’
‘But why run the risk, dear Miss Mallaby? Why not go into partnership with Ing?’
‘My grandfather wished the dispensary to remain in the family,’ Miss Mallaby explained stubbornly. ‘The Mallabys, Sir Matthew, always took a pride in the preparation of comestibles. Everything which they sold or served in the inn was home-made on the premises. You will no doubt be surprised to learn that there is a reference to Mallaby’s Faggots in the kitchen account of Queen Elizabeth.’
‘These sausages did seem to me somehow out of Ing’s character,’ said Kinsale. ‘An excellent fellow—but not the type to have a magic touch. How do you make them, Miss Mallaby?’
‘Like everything else, it’s a matter of care and exact measurements, Mr Kinsale.’
‘Scholarship. Precisely! You hear that, Matthew? Unsound methods can only lead to the sort of blundering which Miss Mallaby has been good enough to overlook.’
‘Yes, Charles. What does the Dog and Lobster remind you of?’
‘Are you thinking of Dr Johnson’s cat which ate oysters?’
‘No, I’m not! There’s a good reason for the name of every pub in England—usually the arms of some great family. But no arms have as supporters a dog and a lobster. Then some actual occurrence? A lobster, for example, which delighted the peasantry by catching hold of a dog’s tail? But Prior’s Norton is too far from the sea. I suggest that if the villagers, centuries ago, were familiar with the reliefs upon an altar of Mithras, they would have noticed his hound and scorpion.’
‘Of all the wild, preposterous …’ Kinsale began.
‘Nonsense! The names of pubs are historical documents. It’s the soundest piece of evidence I have produced yet. Miss Mallaby’s ancestors had no idea of the origin of the altar. They couldn’t move it. They were tired of the pictures. So they covered it up and put it to use. That faint suggestion of black pudding in the sausages—isn’t one of the ingredients a little bullock’s blood, Miss Mallaby?’
‘I don’t see how you guessed it wasn’t pig’s, Sir Matthew. But you are quite right.’
‘And that is all which remains of a great religion after sixty generations,’ Fowlsey declared. ‘That, and a little of the power of the god, would you say, Charles? It was you who mentioned magic in the sausages.’
‘I’d say—to use an Americanism—that you’ve gone nuts.’
‘No. You are looking at the altar of Mithras.’
‘Where?’
‘There!’ Sir Matthew shouted, pointing to the butcher’s slab. ‘There, where the bull died and gave life to the people!’
‘Assuming that is the altar, the niches are in the right place,’ said Charles as if he disbelieved his own voice.
‘Miss Mallaby, may we?’ begged Sir Matthew. ‘Without letting another soul into the secret I can lift the casing off the altar with a block and tackle and do no damage to either.’
‘I am afraid you would, for the dowel pins have shrunk. I think perhaps the front of the slab would come away if you were to extract them. No, not with that knife, if you please, Sir Matthew! I will fetch you a gimlet.’
‘Madam, you must be the only woman in the world to realize that a gimlet can be used like a corkscrew to extract a wooden peg!’
‘I have been compelled by circumstance,’ said Miss Mallaby primly, ‘to do all repairs to the cellar myself.’
Sir Matthew removed the dowels without much difficulty.
‘If you will now lift the top slightly, Charles, the whole front will be free.’
The noble slab of oak fell down. There, cut in the marble of the altar, was the god Mithras slaying the bull. The reliefs, except to eyes familiar with the composition, were not immediately obvious. In the upper half, the knife, the bull’s head and the face of the god were worn faint. But at the bottom the scorpion and the waiting hound were clear and vivid as if they had been chiselled the week before.
‘There is only one other to be compared with it in all Europe,’ said Charles reverently. ‘Miss Mallaby, Miss Mallaby, what are we to do? Your cellar will become a place of pilgrimage.’
‘The sooner the better, Mr Kinsale. No doubt Mr Ing and I will be able to come to some mutually profitable arrangement. Whatever my ancestors may have thought, I should not wish to continue making sausages upon a heathen altar, and I am sure the dear vicar would agree.’
THE GREEKS HAD
NO WORD FOR IT
‘May I say ten pounds?’ the auctioneer asked. ‘Five? Thank you, madam … Six … Six, ten … Seven … Seven, ten … At seven pounds, ten. Going at seven pounds, ten. An ancient Greek drinking bowl of the best period. Going at …’
Sergeant Torbin had at last wandered into the auction because there was nothing else to do. It was early closing day at Falkstead, and the shops were shut. There was nowhere to sit but the edge of the quay, and nothing to watch but the brown tide beginning to race down to the North Sea between grey mud-banks. The only sign of animation in the little town was around the open front door of a small box-like eighteenth-century house, the contents of which were being sold.
‘Eight!’ said the sergeant nervously, and immediately realized that nothing could give a man such a sense of inferiority as a foreign auction.
But the atmosphere was quiet and decorous. The auctioneer acknowledged Bill Torbin’s bid with a smile which managed to express both surprise and appreciation at seeing the United States Air Force uniform in so rural a setting. He might have been welcoming him to the local Church Hall.
‘May I say eight, ten?’
A military-looking man, overwhelming in size and manner, nodded sharply.
Bill could hardly hope that the bowl was genuine. He liked it for itself. Angular black figures chased one another round the red terracotta curve. He recognized Perseus, holding up that final and appalling weapon, the Gorgon’s head. Very appropriate. A benevolent goddess, who reminded Bill of his tall, straight mother, looked on approvingly.
He ran the bowl up to ten pounds. When the auctioneer’s hammer was alr
eady in the air, he heard someone say: ‘Guinness!’
There was a snap of triumph in the word, a suggestion that the whole sale had now come to a full stop. It was the military man again. To Sergeant Torbin he was the most terrifying type of native—a bulky chunk of brown tweed suit, with a pattern of orange and grey as pronounced as the Union Jack, and a red face and ginger moustache on top of it.
‘It’s against you, sir,’ the auctioneer told him hopefully.
Bill knew that much already. But the mysterious word ‘Guinness’ sounded as if it had raised the ante to the moon. He panicked. He decided that he had no business in auctions. After all, he had only been in England a week and had come to Falkstead on his first free afternoon because it looked such a quiet little heaven from the train.
‘Going at ten guineas … At ten guineas … Sold at ten guineas!’
Hell, he ought to have guessed that! But who would think that guineas would pop up at auctions when they belonged in the time of George III? Bill Torbin walked out and sat on the low wall which separated the garden from the road, conducting a furious auction with himself while he waited for the 6.30 train back to his bleak East Anglian airfield.
He had just reached the magnificent and imaginary bid of One Hundred Goddam Guineas when the tweed suit rolled down the garden path with the drinking bowl under its arm.
‘Nice work, colonel!’ Bill said, for at last he had an excuse to talk to somebody.
‘Oh, it’s you, is it? I say, you didn’t want it, did you?’
The sergeant thought that was the damn silliest question he had ever heard. He realized, however, that it was meant as a kind of apology.
‘British Museum stiff with ’em!’
Again he got the sense. The Englishman was disclaiming any special value for his purchase. Bill asked if the bowl were genuine.
‘Good Lord, yes! A fifth-century Athenian cylix! The old vicar had it vetted. His father picked it up in Istanbul during the Crimean War. That was the late vicar’s late niece’s stuff they were selling. Have a look for yourself!’
The Europe That Was Page 17
