A Change of Heir

by Michael Innes

  8

  There had been a certain exaggeration in Comberford’s statement that Bruton Abbey was a Cistercian monastery in a very nice state of preservation. It was true, however, that it incorporated substantial parts of the actual fabric of such a place, and that this had certain curious architectural consequences. Gadberry’s quarters, having been in fact the Abbot’s lodging, were connected with the main building only by a long corridor of excessive gloom. Off this there opened on one side a series of cells. And they really were cells. Recalcitrant monks had been accommodated in them – presumably so that they could be suitably disciplined at any time under the personal supervision of their superior. The whole place, Gadberry thought, must have been like a nightmarish sort of public school. That was certainly why nineteenth-century Mintons had preserved it so carefully; it was an ideal setting for the virtuous discomfort which that era judged good for the soul. There was, no doubt, a certain amusement in having a drawing-room in which the stone benches of the original chapter house were still incorporated – as there was, too, in keeping guns and fishing rods in a particularly chilly calefactory. But what used to be called the Gothic Taste had surely had its day. If he ever really had to take Bruton in hand – which of course he wouldn’t have to do – he would begin operations by simply knocking it down. If, that was to say, it could be knocked down. For the whole place seemed as massive as the British Museum or St Paul’s Cathedral.

  Boulter was lurking in the murkily glassed-in cloister. He considered it part of his duties to apprise Gadberry of any company to be encountered in the drawing-room.

  ‘Good evening, sir,’ he said. ‘You will find that the old Sunday custom obtains.’

  This was a new one; Gadberry hadn’t heard it before. Nevertheless the Memoirs enabled him to get on top of it in a moment.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he replied easily. ‘The locals, eh?’

  ‘Precisely, sir. It was Mr Minton’s habit to set aside Sunday evenings for local society. The County would be entertained during the week.’

  ‘We don’t do much of that nowadays, do we?’

  ‘No, sir. I am afraid it must be a little quiet for you. Mrs Minton no longer feels an obligation to move much in her own circles. But there is an obligation, of course, in regard to the local people.’

  ‘The vicar, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes, sir – Mr Grimble. And Dr and Mrs Pollock.’

  ‘Well, that’s very pleasant.’ Gadberry moved towards the drawing-room door with an expression of mild good cheer. He didn’t in fact expect much entertainment from the society of either an elderly clergyman or an elderly sawbones and his wife. But unruffled good humour was his line at Bruton. Besides, such occasions did have what he supposed was a certain period charm.

  He entered the drawing-room, said the right thing to Aunt Prudence, went round shaking hands with the three guests, and then said the right things to Miss Bostock. Miss Bostock, being only a superior employee, came last – but, by the same token, had to be accorded particular courtesy. Some minutes of suitably constrained general conversation followed. And then Boulter announced that dinner was served.

  The dining-room at Bruton had been the refectory of the conversi or lay brethren. Although no longer three hundred feet long (much of it had disappeared) it would still have afforded a reasonably spacious setting for a City banquet. The six people now sitting down, therefore, would have presented to a dispassionate eye something of the effect of a small scurry of mice in a cathedral. It wasn’t warm; it wasn’t, in fact, other than exceedingly cold; but as snow was beginning to fall outside, this wasn’t altogether surprising. Gadberry found himself speculating a little apprehensively as to what the Abbey would be like when winter – a robust Yorkshire winter – really set in.

  Mrs Minton had motioned Dr Pollock to the place on her right, so Gadberry did the same by the doctor’s wife. That meant having Miss Bostock on his left. She could do most of her talking with Pollock, Gadberry decided, and that would leave Mrs Pollock for him. The Pollocks were very low down on his danger list; although fairly long-established in the district, they hadn’t been around back in the days when the young Nicholas Comberford used to visit Bruton. Grimble was another matter. The tenth son, or thereabout, of some deceased Yorkshire bigwig, he had held the living of Bruton since the first day it had been at all decent to induct him into it. Fortunately that was incredibly long ago, and Grimble was so far sunk in senile confusion that people seldom attended to what he said.

  ‘Mr Grimble,’ Mrs Minton was saying in what Gadberry thought of as her grand manner, ‘will you please say–’

  ‘ Benedictus benedicat.’ Grimble, who had a beard like an untidy bird’s nest, tumbled out the words, slumped into his chair, and grasped his soup spoon in a trembling hand. Nobody was surprised by this unbecoming conduct, since all had observed it in him before. Perhaps, Gadberry thought, he was systematically deprived of adequate nourishment by an unscrupulous housekeeper. More probably he was merely reverting to the first and uncorrected manners of his nursery. But now, not yet having been provided with anything upon which to begin blunting his appetite, Grimble was glancing impatiently up and down the table. His gaze fell on Gadberry – and stayed there.

  ‘Young man,’ Grimble said, ‘who are you? Who are you, I say?’

  Nobody attended to this except Gadberry. He told himself instantly that it meant nothing at all, but this didn’t prevent his feeling a nasty shock, all the same. For one thing, although it was polite for the others to appear not to have heard, it was polite in him to make a friendly and unperturbed reply. ‘I’m Nicholas,’ he ought to explain. Or (remembering the Memoirs) perhaps he ought to expand to ‘I’m Nicholas, who brought the white mice into Sunday school’. Or would that be the wrong note? Would it be more courteous to concur (so to speak) in the assumption that something like a formal introduction was needed, and say with a bow ‘I am Mrs Minton’s great-nephew, sir. My name is Nicholas Comberford’?

  ‘Fellow hasn’t a tongue in his head.’

  Gadberry realised that when he ought to have been saying something he had been thinking what to say. It didn’t, of course, really matter in this instance, but it did represent his breaking a rule. It was always better to trust to the spur of the moment than to give any appearance of a pause for calculation.

  ‘He has a look of young Nicholas, you know, of young Nicholas.’ Grimble had turned to his hostess and, between gulps of soup, offered this informatively. ‘Only young Nicholas would always speak up. Well do I remember the occasion upon which I caught him stealing my strawberries. He was under the net, you know, under the net. So he couldn’t get away. And I was carrying a switch, I was carrying a switch, I say.’ Grimble produced a high-pitched cackle of laughter, and then slid more soup with surprising dexterity through a slit in the bird’s nest. ‘So he spoke up, you know, he spoke up loudly.’

  ‘Mr Grimble’s memory isn’t quite right.’ Gadberry addressed the table at large, and to the accompaniment of his sunniest smile. ‘It was the coachman’s boy who was under the net. I was astride the wall, with my strawberries already picked. And I was treacherously cheering on the vicar at his good work.’

  ‘That is certainly correct.’ Mrs Minton nodded her head emphatically. ‘My dear husband made a note of it at the time. A Comberford, he justly remarked, would not readily let himself be caught in the net.’ Mrs Minton looked down the table. Although the story didn’t really appear to represent her great-nephew in a wholly amiable light, she took evident satisfaction in it. Indeed, she expatiated on this now. ‘I am glad, my dear Nicholas, that you hold so much of that early period in your memory. It is a very proper sort of piety. Boulter, we will take wine.’

  The company took wine – and with reasonable elegance at this stage of the meal, since Boulter was instantly able to produce a suitable Madeira. Had Mrs Minton (as she was quite capable of doing) not uttered these words until her guests had munched their way to the other end of the feast, Boulter would hav
e been equally dextrous in the production of Sauterne. Gadberry had a high regard for Boulter’s professional accomplishment. When he became master of Bruton – he found himself thinking – he would probably keep Boulter on.

  ‘One branch of the Comberfords, indeed,’ Mrs Minton was proceeding, ‘have a motto that is apposite here. It is Cave Retiola. Just what is meant by the little nets is obscure. But, in general, wariness is being enjoined. The injunction is at least a politic one.’

  Gadberry agreed. To be wary of the little nets, he reflected, was precisely his business.

  ‘I speak only of a cadet branch of my family. The motto of our own line, Nicholas, you know very well.’

  This was awkward, and there was a slight pause. It was a piece of homework that Gadberry ought to have done long ago. Only he hadn’t. That armigerous families have mottoes, coats of arms and the like just hadn’t occurred to him.

  ‘Hold everything!’

  It was Dr Pollock who had enunciated this loudly and emphatically, so that for a moment Gadberry had a confused impression that the company was being summoned to confront some sudden crisis. But Mrs Minton was again nodding approvingly.

  ‘Precisely,’ she said. ‘It is an excellent motto, and particularly to be regarded in the present age of legalised expropriation and robbery. One ought to give nothing away. Except, of course, in moderation, and to the good poor. At Bruton, however, it is very doubtful whether we any longer have good poor. People are either not poor, or not good. So the question does not arise. Nicholas, pray mark this.’

  Gadberry did his best to look like one who marks this. In point of fact, he wasn’t at all sure that he would much care to live up to this particular family motto. If he came into enormous wealth – enormous wealth even after the real Nicholas Comberford had received his whack – he would probably find it rather fun to give away quite a lot of money in various odd ways. The Bruton fortune was already coming to strike him as oppressive. Perhaps it was some sense of this that had motivated the real Nicholas to initiate his extraordinary deception; he wanted money without the feeling of being bludgeoned by it.

  There was something alarming, Gadberry told himself, in his own intermittent tendency to go motive-hunting in this way on the real Nicholas’ behalf; it touched off in him an obscure sense that the play in which he had been given so prominent a role was one that he didn’t really have the hang of. But that way panic lay, and to avoid it he plunged abruptly into conversation with Miss Bostock on his left. In any case it was time that he had put up a little civil conversation to Aunt Prudence’s companion.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Would you agree that we have no good poor on the landscape?’

  ‘I regard myself as most definitely in that category. I have no fortune. A settled amiability is my sole balance in the bank, and sometimes I feel I shall overdraw on it.’ Miss Bostock, who went in for this astringent note in her conversation with Gadberry, gave him a steady look. ‘Perhaps you have some fellow feeling for me in this?’

  ‘I don’t know that I have much amiability,’ Gadberry said. ‘But what I have I don’t feel any drain upon. It’s been wonderful coming back to Bruton, you know. I have always loved it.’ He had decided long ago that ingenuousness of this sort was the safest line with Miss Bostock. ‘Particularly in winter,’ he added rather at random.

  ‘You surprise me. It has been my impression that when you ceased to be of an age to be despatched here involuntarily your visits became infrequent. Is that inaccurate?’

  ‘No, I think you are quite right.’ Gadberry inwardly cursed the woman. She was coming to trail her coat quite a lot in this fashion. She realised, no doubt, that there wasn’t much future for her at Bruton now. ‘Young men are often shockingly undutiful. And, of course, I had all sorts of irons in the fire.’

  ‘You still have one or two, I imagine.’

  Gadberry made no reply. He simply smiled, as if Miss Bostock’s last remark had been a particularly pleasant one. In fact she was clearly telling him that she judged him to be a schemer and a parasite. And this, when one thought of it, was odd. It was true in a way. But it wasn’t a truth that Miss Bostock could have any real glimmer of.

  At least he could, for the moment, stop talking to the woman. So he turned to Mrs Pollock on his right, and prepared to say something to her. But Mrs Pollock, as it happened, spoke to him first.

  ‘Mr Comberford,’ Mrs Pollock asked, ‘do you often see the Master now?’

  9

  Gadberry was so taken aback by this question that for a moment he supposed Mrs Pollock to have addressed him under the influence of religious enthusiasm, and to be directing her curiosity upon the privacies of his devotional life. Then he realised that this wasn’t the state of the case at all; that the conversation had remained decently secular; and that the person thus alarmingly imported into it simply enjoyed, for one reason or another, the right to the designation Mrs Pollock had applied to him. And Gadberry’s alarm had two occasions. He had been addressed during a lull in the not particularly lively talk that Mrs Minton’s dinner-table produced, so that attention was now focused on him and everybody appeared to await his answer. And he had no answer. He had only – but this was something – a rapidly achieved grasp of what the problem was.

  The Pollocks, he had told himself, were not dangerous. Their memories of Bruton didn’t go back far enough. They had never set eyes on him until a few weeks ago. But in forming this opinion, he now saw, he had simply missed out, so to speak, a whole dimension of possibilities. Nicholas Comberford had scarcely been at Bruton since he was a boy. But he had, after all, been elsewhere. In one place or another, and named with his own name, he had lived in some sort of normal contact with his fellows. For a good many years, indeed, his residence seemed to have been mainly abroad. But there was always a possibility of running up against people who had known him, or at least against people who could dredge up some common acquaintance. This was almost certainly what was happening now.

  But who was the Master? There was quite a range of possibilities. He might be an MFH. But Aunt Prudence had turned out not to approve of hunting, and was on somewhat chilly terms with its supporters in the neighbourhood. This reference, therefore, was unlikely. The heir apparent to a Scottish peerage, Gadberry knew, is frequently designated as the Master of This or That. Since Mintons and Comberfords were alike supposed to be persons of aristocratic pretention perhaps this was the territory involved. Mrs Pollock might for some reason know, for instance, that Nicholas Comberford had been at school with a Master in this sense, and be proposing to strike an agreeable social note with the topic. But then again, the thought of schools introduced another possibility. Some public schools – Wellington, for example – call their Headmaster plain Master. So there was that possibility too. Again, the heads of certain Oxford and Cambridge colleges are styled Master. But the real Nicholas Comberford was not a university man, any more than the false one was. So that didn’t seem to help. Meanwhile, the silence was (to Gadberry’s sense) painfully prolonging itself.

  ‘Well, no,’ he said. ‘You see, I’ve been living abroad a good deal.’

  ‘But that, of course, is why I ask.’ Mrs Pollock’s tone expressed surprise. ‘Naturally,’ she added.

  Gadberry experienced an unpleasant sensation down his spine. Mrs Pollock struck him as an obstinate and tactless woman; she would press on with a piece of senseless chit-chat even when it had become evident that something had gone wrong with it. And it was just through the chink of some such small and peripheral occasion as this, Gadberry knew, that the waters of disaster might first trickle and then swell to a sudden flood. What was the answer?

  ‘Mr Comberford,’ Miss Bostock said suddenly, ‘tell Mrs Pollock about the donkeys.’

  ‘The donkeys?’ Gadberry was bewildered. For one thing, although Aunt Prudence’s companion did, through long association, occasionally fall into something like her employer’s manner of speech, she had spoken in an oddly abrupt and commandi
ng fashion.

  ‘Your mention of residence abroad has put it in my mind. Your struggle against the mortadella factory.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Seizing on this as upon a straw, Gadberry plunged into elaborate improvisation. Considering the degree of his perturbation, he was conscious of doing it rather well. He found it hard to believe that Miss Bostock had not performed a deliberate rescue operation. But why on earth should she do so? She had never suggested herself to him as one alert to obviate minor social embarrassments. Yet any other motive than this opened up possibilities too dire to contemplate. Desperately, Gadberry talked on. Every now and then he stole a glance at Mrs Pollock in the endeavour to decide whether she was simply biding her time, determined to bob up again with her enigma as soon as opportunity offered. Fortunately, however, everybody was now following his recital with close attention. The Reverend Mr Grimble (although a little preoccupied with removing fish bones from his beard) was producing intermittent cackling noises evidently designed to betoken appreciation. And Mrs Minton herself was listening with the approval which she was always prepared to bestow upon this episode during her great-nephew’s otherwise censurable expatriation.

  But Gadberry couldn’t continue to hold forth indefinitely, and eventually he stopped.

  ‘Mr Comberford,’ Mrs Pollock asked, ‘do you often see the Master now?’

  This time no succour came from Miss Bostock, whose attention had been demanded by Grimble across the table. Various counsels of desperation flashed through Gadberry’s mind. He might say ‘Certainly not: don’t I hate the man’s guts?’ or ‘Don’t you know he was drowned at sea?’ or even ‘Not since they put him inside’. But although such shock tactics might stupefy this hideous woman into silence for the moment they could only lead to trouble later on. In any case, Gadberry was preserved from such rashness by Mrs Pollock’s husband, who suddenly addressed her with marital brusqueness from Miss Bostock’s other hand.