“Not today,” he said. “Giving the little devils a rest, so that when they see my new fly, they’ll wag their little tails for joy, and leap at it!”
“I shouldn’t have thought you could buy any new flies in this place,” said the girl.
“Buy ’em?” barked the Major. “Who said anything about buying ’em? Never bought a fly in my life. No, I make ’em, my dear young lady. Have done since I was a boy. Don’t know what I should do in the winter if I didn’t spend my time making flies. No fishing from November to February in these islands. A fellow might as well be dead!”
Mrs. Partridge drew a careful silk thread through the linen she was embroidering, and joined in the conversation.
“Why don’t you go abroad in the winter?” she asked. “You’d get fishing all the year round then. There’s nothing to stop you. You’re a bachelor with no family to consider.”
“Can’t help that,” he returned brusquely, as if he resented the interruption. “I do go sometimes, but when I don’t, I make flies. I’ve got all my paraphernalia with me. I never travel without it, in case of a rainy day. Would you like to look at it?” He addressed Pussy, and ignored her mother.
“I’d love to,” she replied, while her thoughts said, Silly old fool! I do believe he’s making up to me. I wonder why, he’s never taken any notice of me before – seemed to dislike me, in fact. Perhaps he knows that we’re making inquiries about old Mrs. Mumsby’s death. So what?
“I can’t bring it down here very well,” went on the Major, playing with his fringed moustache. “There’s so much of it, and it’s all little bits and pieces. Would you mind coming up to my room?” He glanced quickly at Mrs. Partridge and added, “It will be quite –”
“Oh quite,” laughed Pussy. “It won’t be the first time that I’ve been in a man’s bedroom!”
Major Jeans regarded her with a curious look.
“No,” he said slowly, “I don’t suppose it will,” and led the way upstairs.
The Major’s bedroom combined the untidiness which seems characteristic of most bachelor rooms, with the careful neatness of the old campaigner’s. Combs, brushes, shaving tackle, and all the paraphernalia of his toilet were packed tidily away in zipped leather cases. Old newspapers and sixpenny detective novels were scattered on the bed. An amazingly long line of boots and shoes were taut on their trees. Empty tobacco tins littered the mantelpiece. A kitbag bulged in one corner and, behind the door, layer after layer of old coats, cardigans, and mackintoshes covered a single hook.
On the table in the window was screwed a small iron vice. Mrs. Evans, luckily, had a good memory for the idiosyncrasies of her regular guests, and always had a table brought up from the scullery for the Major’s room.
He made his way across the room to this scrubbed deal table, and unscrewed a fly which was held in the teeth of the vice.
“There! Isn’t it a beauty?” he exclaimed. “If that doesn’t make their little mouths water and their teeth chatter tomorrow, I’ll kill myself with one of my own hooks! Silver body, red hackle, Junglecock wing, you see. That’ll fetch them. Isn’t it a beauty, eh? Do you know what I call it? ‘The Blinkin’ Bastard.’ Good name, eh?” He rubbed his hands together and chuckled in delight, then suddenly recollected himself. “Oh!” His face assumed a more serious expression. “Shouldn’t have mentioned it. Lady present. Apologize.”
Pussy restrained her laughter with difficulty.
She could cap it with a few fancier names than that, she thought, but you had to be so damned careful with the older generation; they were so touchy. And parents were the touchiest of the lot. Queer, really, because by all accounts their morals and language hadn’t been by any means blameless during the war, when she’d been born. As for the generation before that, well, she’d heard her grandfather tell tales of Boat Race Night at the Empire which surpassed the escapades of any modern youth. It was curious how people who were really good fun seemed to change completely as soon as they became parents. Perhaps she’d be the same. Still it was stupid of them not to realize that language which had shocked the first audiences of Pygmalion was considered quite innocuous by the younger generation today.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand in the least what the hackle of a fly is.” she said, to assist the Major over his distressed silence. “I always thought that a hackle was the hair on the back of a hound that shows when he’s in a bad temper. These artificial flies have no shape, to my eyes.”
“It’s all a question of getting accustomed to them,” said the Major. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll make one for you. Live and learn, you know.”
He took a clean white linen handkerchief from a drawer, put a selection of fur and dyed feathers on to it, and opened a box containing eyed hooks of assorted sizes.
“I think I’ll make a salmon fly,” he went on. “It’s larger, and you’ll see it more clearly.”
He poked his forefinger amongst the hooks.
“Aren’t you afraid of getting one of those stuck in your finger?” asked Pussy.
“What? Oh no, no,” replied the Major. “It wouldn’t hurt much if I did, though if the barb gets under your skin it takes a bit of juggling to work it out again. Reminds me of a thing that occurred on the lake one day. This very lake, too. Some tyro of a fellow came here one year, all dolled up in the latest outfit, with every contraption for fishing that you could think of. He fairly made me sick with all his talk about what a fine fisherman he was, and how many trout he’d caught on Lady X’s beat on the Test. The Test! Any child could fish on the Test. Why, the trout queue up to be caught because they enjoy the exhilarating rush through the air, like the man on the Flying Trapeze. Well, he didn’t know how to cast on this lake, with a stiff wind blowing in squalls round his head, and he couldn’t get his line out, however he cast. At last he did whip it out, felt a tug, and struck. D’you know what he’d done?” Major Jeans let out a hearty bellow of laughter. “He’d hooked his ghillie through the nostril, and they had to row ashore and find a doctor to cut the hook out!”
“Oh!” exclaimed Pussy, more interested in this incident than in the rest of the story.
“Yes. And do you know what that ghillie did? He just turned to the fellow and said, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t give you better sport, sir.’ Stout fellow, eh? Quite true. Now look...”
He inserted a salmon hook in the vice, so that its jaws held the vicious-looking barb from view, and screwed it until it was rigid. He looped a strand of coloured silk round the body of the hook behind the eye, and twisted it once or twice, then rubbed it gently with cobbler’s wax. He stripped the fibres from the extreme end of an orange-dyed feather, and attached it by means of the silk, then took up a pair of hackle-pliers, and wound the feather tightly round and round, again securing it with the same strand of gossamer-like silk. He whipped the silk evenly along the hook, and secured in it some rabbit’s whiskers for the tail. He added a wisp of the fur to the body, which he twisted in an open spiral with wide gold wire. Then he added wings of a freckled snipe’s feather, and finished it off with little dabs of varnish.
Pussy watched, fascinated to see the delicately wound fly take shape under the Major’s service-hardened, spatulate fingers. At length he took it out of the vice, and handed it to her.
“See!” he said, not a little proud of his achievement. “When this you see, remember me. Wear it in your hat.” Pussy held out her hand and the Major dropped it lightly into her palm. She scarcely restrained a shudder as she renumbered that other, blood-stained fly which had so recently lain embedded in Mrs. Mumsby’s hand.
“Thank you,” she said, “it’s very interesting. What do you call this fly? Or is it unprintable?”
“Lord bless you, no!” he replied, gathering together the little pieces of feather from partridge, corncrake, blackbird, tomtit, and jay, and fur from mole, fox cub, hare, and otter, and placing them in the drawer. “I call it ‘The Avenging Murderer’. It isn’t much like one, perhaps, but by Jove, does it w
ork!”
“Yes,” shivered Pussy, “I’m sure it does. I think it’s awfully clever of you to make them so neatly.”
Major Jeans rubbed his big hands together to express his pleasure at this compliment.
“Oh, good Lord, no,” he said. “Any of the ghillies can tie a better fly than that, with far worse materials. Why, that ghillie of mine can make a fly out of a few cuttings from a pullover and a few of his own grey hairs, and he has no vice, either.”
“Oh, I’m sure he hasn’t,” said Pussy. “He looks a very decent, sober sort of man. What’s that windmill arrangement for?”
She indicated a wheel with four wooden spokes which stood on the table.
“Oh, that!” replied the Major, in the truculent tones of a man whose enthusiasm has been damped by lack of understanding. “That’s a wheel for drying my line after fishing. It rots if it’s left wet on the reel, you know.”
“It’s a very thick line,” remarked Pussy.
“Usual salmon size.”
“Salmon!” she exclaimed in surprise. “I thought you only fished for trout at this time of the year. Why, I’ve heard you making dreadful fun of poor General Haddox for fishing for salmon instead of trout.”
Major Jeans looked uncomfortable.
“I thought I’d like a change yesterday.” he explained. “The General has a pet fish that rises off one of those big rocks in the western bay – I call it Cuthbert. I thought I’d like to wipe his eye by bringing it in, that’s all.”
Pussy was unconvinced.
Cuthbert indeed! she thought. I don’t believe it!
“The western bay,” she repeated. “Isn’t that the place where Mrs. Mumsby – died? Don’t you think it was awfully sad for her to die alone like that?”
“Everyone has to face death alone when he or she is old,” said the Major sententiously.
Pussy thought him callous.
“Oh, she wasn’t old,” she protested.
“Awful woman,” said the Major. “Mutton dressed as lamb. ‘Fat ewes per live hundredweight’ –”
“But it is pretty rotten to think that she had no one to help her, when so many people were near at hand,” persisted the girl. “I suppose you weren’t so far away yourself. You would have heard if she’d called for help, wouldn’t you?”
“I might have done,” was the reluctant reply. “The Westons were nearest to her, then the Pandas” – his nickname for Mr. and Mrs. Pindar – “doing a little canoodling, and old Fish-eyes and her brother farther over to the left. I was near the road, but I might have heard if the cry was loud enough.”
“Did you stay there the whole time?”
“Yes, of course. I don’t usually go for a ten-mile walk when I’m out fishing.”
“You didn’t go away for a teeny weeny minute?”
“No. Yes. Well...” The Major stared at her. “What’s the idea of all these questions, young lady?” he asked. “What business is it of yours what I was doing, eh? What are you getting at? The trouble with you is that your mother spoils you. You’re nothing but a – a –”
“Blinkin’ Bastard,” suggested Pussy.
Major Jeans took in a deep breath, looked as if he might suddenly explode, decided that he would not, and screwed up his eyes into a smile.
“It’s a good name, isn’t it? A good name, eh?” he chortled. “You know, you’re a girl after my own heart. No nonsense about you.”
He sidled up to her, and before she could move away, he had slipped his arm round her, above her waist, and had brushed her cheek with his moustache.
“Your mother said we ought to get on well together. Do you like me at all? Do you think you could get fond of me, eh?”
He punctuated each question with a squeeze.
A look of the utmost loathing passed over Pussy’s face. With a quick twist of her slight figure she freed herself, and landed a stinging slap across his face.
“Sugar-daddy!” she hissed, and ran out of the room.
Chapter 14
Pussy swung down the wide stairs into the hall and found that Miss Haddox and Mrs. Pindar had joined her mother and were engaged in desultory holiday chat. At least, Miss Haddox was.
“...of course I said to him when I saw the laundry, ‘My dear dhobi, do you really take me for an American tourist?’ You should have seen his face, he was dreadfully ashamed, but you have to be very smart out East, or you’d pay through the nose for everything, and what I always say is –”
Mrs. Partridge looked up, and smiled at her daughter.
“Well, dear, did you enjoy your little chat with the Major?” she asked.
“And how!” scowled Pussy. “I think he’s a rotten, low hound.”
Mrs. Partridge looked surprised.
“Oh dear! I thought you’d get on so well together,” she said. “You’re both very unconventional, but, of course, if you don’t like him –”
“I do not,” said Pussy in very decided tones, “and if he’s the best you can find for me, I must say that I don’t admire your taste.”
Mrs. Partridge flushed. She folded her embroidery, and zipped it into her workbag, then, with a glance at her wrist-watch, and a vague smile to the others, she rose from her chair, and walked along the corridor leading to the lounge.
“Oh Lord!” sighed Pussy, sinking into the vacated chair. “Now she’s doing her injured cricketer stunt. I can’t cope with parents!” She met Mrs. Pindar’s inquiring gaze and explained: “Retired hurt, you know. Oh well, I’ll give her time to cool off, and then I’ll go and smooth her down again. She soon gets over it, that’s one blessing.”
Miss Haddox regarded her disapprovingly.
“I don’t wonder that your mother feels hurt,” she said. “You’re always so rude to her, but I suppose you modern girls think it sounds clever. I wish my niece, Marigold, were here, then you’d realize that it’s possible to be both modern and polite. Marigold’s a charming girl, and so pretty. Some people say she’s the image of Greta Garbo, but I can’t say that I agree with them because I’ve never met the woman, but you can tell that she must be quite up to date, and her manners, I’m glad to say, are very old-fashioned.”
Mrs. Pindar saw the glint in Pussy’s eyes, and hastened to change the subject.
“Are you going to take up fishing at last, Miss Partridge?” she asked.
“Me! Rather not! Whatever put that idea into your head? Oh, this.” She held up the fly which Major Jeans had given to her. “No, I shall never take up that kind of fishing, thank you! It’s too boring by half. This is just an ornament for my beret.”
Miss Haddox leaned forward.
“It’s just like the fly that killed Mrs. Mumsby,” she remarked. “At least,” she added hastily, “it’s a salmon fly, isn’t it? – they all look alike to me because I don’t fish, but I’m sure I’ve seen one like that before, if you see what I mean –”
“I suppose we shall all have to go to the funeral tomorrow,” said Mrs. Pindar. “I haven’t a thing suitable to wear for it.”
“We’ll all go in black fisherman’s coats and hats, and carry reversed fishing rods,” suggested Pussy, glancing slyly at Miss Haddox, who ignored the challenge.
“I shall certainly not attend Mrs. Mumsby’s funeral,” she said coldly. “I’m no hypocrite, if everyone else in this hotel is. I didn’t like the woman, and I never could see the sense in changing your opinion of a person just because she dies. Dying can’t reform anyone, and, if I’ve said it once I’ve said it a hundred times, she was a bad lot, and I’m not sorry she’s dead. If she’d lived, she would have led that stupid Weston boy into trouble, and if it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else, and perhaps someone else in this hotel. She was a dangerous woman.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Pussy. “She was a go-getter, of course, and maybe a gold-digger as well, but she was kind-hearted. Perhaps she wasn’t a lady –”
“She was definitely not a lady,” interjected Miss Haddox.
“�
�� but she was a good sort, and all that. However much you hated her, you couldn’t wish her to die all alone in that way. I must say that I can’t understand how it was that none of you heard anything at the time. I suppose that you and Sir Courtney were some distance away from her.”
“We were nothing of the kind,” replied Miss Haddox. “There’s only a narrow strip of land round that part of the lake where the boats can be beached, and though it goes right back to the road, you know what these anglers are like – they always sit where they can look at the water. You think they’d get tired of it after sitting for hours on a hard piece of wood, looking at the lake all the time, and would be glad to look at the mountains, or even at a stone wall for a change. But fishing is a disease with all of them. No doubt it’s very soothing, if you can stand it, and no one knows better than I what it has done for my brother, but I’m quite a different temperament altogether, as any of you can see, and it would bore me to tears. I suppose it must be because I have a particularly active brain, or at least that’s what my doctor thinks. ‘Miss Haddox,’ he always says, ‘you have a particularly active brain.’”
“Well, I haven’t.” admitted Pussy, “and it bores me, too. I must say that I hand the laurel to Mrs. Mumsby for the way she went out day after day in any weather, fair or foul. I couldn’t enjoy that.”
Miss Haddox sniffed.
“She didn’t enjoy it, either,” she said. “She only went fishing so that she could talk about it afterwards with the men. She was really angling for a two-legged fish, and thought that it gave her a pull over all the other women in the hotel. She only stayed here because the majority of the visitors are men. She’d been a widow too long, that’s what was wrong with her. She was man-mad.”
“Aren’t we all?” murmured Pussy, winking at Mrs. Pindar. “So you were within earshot of Mrs. Mumsby,” she went on. “Was your brother with you all the time after you’d joined him for lunch?”
Bleeding Hooks Page 8
