Watcher in the Shadows

by Geoffrey Household

  I put no limit at all to his daring, but I could safely put a limit to his endurance since he was my own age. So when Jim at last left me at the Warren, I locked the door, relaxed, and cheerfully damned the consequences. I had not been in the cottage for nearly thirty-six hours. The letter from Admiral Cunobel, to which Aunt Georgina had referred, was there waiting for me; it was a warm and genial invitation to come over and stay whenever I liked and for as long as I could.

  I felt free to do so, at any rate for a week. I was determined not to involve Georgina and a stranger – even if he had rocked my cradle – in my affairs, but it seemed improbable that my follower could soon begin again to pad along my trail. I had to be found. His careful reconnaissance had to be made.

  3

  Hide and Seek

  Next morning I telephoned to the admiral and embarked on one of those very English cross-country journeys which delight me. There is no silence which sings so noticeably in the ears as that of a remote railway junction in the middle of meadows with no village in sight when the noise of the departing train has died away.

  Admiral Cunobel had chosen for his retirement a grey-stone Jacobean farmhouse on the southern tip of the Cotswolds, where he seemed entirely contented with village affairs and his garden. Chipping Marton struck me as a livelier spot than Hernsholt. It was linked with the world whereas the Midland village, though not far from London, was lost in pastures. Its first inhabitants had not merely collected together into a Saxon lump; they had built their solid, stone houses in full consciousness of geography. Go downhill on one side and you came to the Severn Estuary. Go downhill on the other and you hit the road from London to Bristol.

  The admiral ran the place. He considered it his duty. Chipping Marton, on the other hand, had no use whatever for naval discipline, though it respected energy. Cunobel and his village seemed to live in a state of mutual and exasperated affection.

  He drove me home from the station, gave me a drink and then took me round to the vicarage. Georgina was shelling peas in the kitchen. Nur Jehan was also in the kitchen – all fourteen hands of him, coloured much as a Siamese cat except that his magnificent tail was deep cream. He breathed down the back of Georgina’s neck with heavy sentimentality.

  Georgina pushed his head aside and kissed me on both cheeks, putting an unexpected warmth into her usual formal salutation.

  ‘My dear Charles!’ she exclaimed. ‘I do hope I didn’t alarm you.’

  ‘Not in the least. But if you were in front of the stove instead of the sink and he butted you …’

  ‘What I said on the telephone, I mean. I felt afterwards I might have exaggerated the situation.’

  ‘Georgi, it could not be exaggerated,’ said the admiral indignantly.

  Nur Jehan, observing that our attention was engaged, took a hearty mouthful from the bowl of peas and blew the rest on the floor.

  ‘In some ways it certainly could not,’ Georgina replied. ‘I draw the line at that damned horse in the kitchen, and I shall have the back-door latch replaced by a mortice lock.’

  ‘Do it myself!’ said the admiral. ‘I’ll come down with a screwdriver tonight. But you can cope, Georgi – always could! It’s that girl I’m sorry for.’

  ‘Which girl?’ I asked.

  ‘Benita, his daughter. She shouldn’t have to chuck everything and come down here to the rescue every three months.’

  ‘I have noticed, Peregrine,’ said my aunt, ‘that long service behind the mast or whatever it is produces an unnatural view of women.’

  ‘Well, my dear, you must admit that she does come down to the rescue.’

  ‘A mere refusal to face her duty to herself, which is to make a career. Miss Gillon, Charles, very sensibly decided on a profession instead of resigning herself to becoming a mamby pamby old maid in the country. She has a gift for vulgar drawing and is employed by advertising agencies.’

  ‘You mean a vulgar gift for drawing, Georgi.’

  ‘I mean just what I say, Peregrine. I consider some of her drawings extremely vulgar and not at all funny. She is obsessed by desert islands. And I do wish you would not interrupt. Benita does not like London. And I am forced to the conclusion that she frequently comes down to rescue her father when he does not need rescuing at all.’

  I was faintly suspicious. My aunt had never said a word about the vicar’s daughter or perhaps she had passed so lightly over the name that I assumed it belonged to some loyal parishioner. I had been somewhat too occupied to remember the admiral’s staunch feeling for the proprieties. Since he wouldn’t put Georgina up himself because of the absence of any female relative, it stood to reason that the vicar – whom I knew to be a widower – must have the essential woman in residence.

  The admiral’s vicar came in from the garden, bringing with him a lot of mud and some vague and hearty apologies. I liked him at once. He had merry eyes and an air of almost Bohemian preoccupation. I mean that his disregard for the things of this world was casual rather than saintly.

  He was full of praise of my aunt, who, he said, was an excellent influence on all of them – all of them. Nur Jehan appeared to resent being included or, more probably, felt that the vicar’s pat on entering the kitchen had been insufficient. He gently nipped his owner’s shoulder.

  ‘Pure Persian Arab,’ Matthew Gillon explained to me proudly. ‘A parishioner of mine brought him home from Kerman where he had been vice-consul. Nur Jehan comes from the Kerman desert and as a foal he was brought up in the family tent, which I believe is very usual. So when my friend settled here he had not the heart to keep him out of the house. I do not think he wished to. Both his boys had been killed in the war, and the stallion, I’m afraid, was all he had left to love. A lonely man. After only a year in our midst he passed away, leaving me this superb young three-year-old. So I did not like to change Nur Jehan’s habits too suddenly. Poor fellow, he deeply felt the loss of his father – his owner, I mean.’

  ‘He is completely untrained,’ Georgina said severely. ‘He gets out of the Glebe meadow and terrifies the village children, let alone passing motorists.’

  ‘I’m getting on with the fences as fast as I possibly can single-handed, Mrs Dennim,’ the vicar protested weakly. ‘And you yourself advised me to remember the – ah – stud fees.’

  ‘Georgi, don’t tell me you’re encouraging him in this folly!’ the admiral accused her. ‘And when you know very well that this wretched stallion …’

  ‘I don’t agree at all,’ Aunt Georgina interrupted. ‘Nur Jehan is merely a late developer whose interest has not yet been correctly aroused. As a life-long bachelor you should sympathize.’

  ‘But, dammit, I …’

  ‘Valparaiso does not count, Peregrine.’

  ‘Hell!’ said the admiral, turning a deeper shade of tortoise.

  ‘And if Mr Gillon will only feed himself properly as well as Nur Jehan,’ Georgina went on unruffled, ‘I see no reason why they should not be a great credit to the village. Nur Jehan is a more dignified investment than tomatoes under glass.’

  ‘What sort of mount is he?’ I asked, for everyone seemed to be hypnotized into treating the Arab as if he were a prize buck rabbit.

  ‘Being ridden,’ Georgina explained, ‘is one of the many duties, Charles, which Nur Jehan does not greatly enjoy. And he refuses to be ridden by a woman at all.’

  I thought that most improbable – the sort of romantic nonsense which appeals to the unscientific. But who was I to argue with Aunt Georgina on a matter of horses? I had been a horse-man at the age of seventeen. The Hungarian branch of the family had seen to that. Since then I had merely used horses whenever they were available and the most convenient method of transport.

  ‘His former owner found no difficulty,’ said the vicar mildly, ‘nor have I.’

  ‘Because you let him go where he likes at the pace he wants to,’ Georgina answered.
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  I could see that nothing, not even living on porridge – if that were true – was going to separate Matthew Gillon from Nur Jehan. He not only adored the stallion, but had a reasonable and innocent hope of future profit.

  ‘And eventually, Peregrine,’ Georgina went on, ‘the vicar will have to employ a groom. Benita cannot be expected to come down here just to muck out the stable for him.’

  ‘There’s profit in that, too,’ I said, remembering Jim Melton and the ’earse.

  Cunobel glared at me; but before he had time to point out that, dammit, it wouldn’t pay for the straw, Benita Gillon joined us in the kitchen. I had been prepared for my own idea of a female commercial artist and I expected, I think, that she would either muck out the stable in garments altogether too colourful for the job, or else would consider that the rescue of father justified a deal of unnecessary dirt. But I could see no London at all about her, except the fashionably lank fair hair which framed her delicately tanned face. She belonged where she was. I could well understand that she took every excuse to return to her village.

  We had barely time for a few words before Aunt Georgina called the admiral and myself to attention and dismissed us. She had intended, I suspect, to parade Benita a couple of hours later when all three of them were coming over to dine, and she was not pleased at the girl’s arrival direct from the stable. She was quite wrong there. Benita grew deliciously out of her heavy Wellington boots like a graceful young tree from a pot.

  The comfort of the admiral and his guests was assured by Frank – naturally a naval production too. He was cook, butler, valet, and intelligence staff. Women were permitted aboard for laundry and floor-scrubbing, for the making of pies, jams, pickles, and larder-stocking in general, which Frank insisted was their work. What he really wanted from them was more intimate village gossip than could be obtained in the pub.

  When we came back I saw Frank whispering confidentially to his employer.

  ‘Of course he hasn’t, boy!’ Cunobel shouted – it was his habit to address anyone under sixty as ‘boy’ – ‘What would he have a dinner jacket for? Wouldn’t want a boiled shirt for watching squirrels, eh?’

  ‘Badgers,’ I corrected him, not being sure whether he knew that the Hernsholt country was a most improbable haunt of the red squirrel.

  ‘Badgers or rats,’ he said oddly, ‘all one! He’s an old fool, that boy! When we’re alone I have to dress for dinner like one of those blazing idiots in the jungle whom Benita draws for the sherry people. And lousy sherry it is! Pah! Knows very well I don’t dress when there are guests! Thinks I can’t move with the times!’

  The dinner went very well, Georgina being on her Court-of-Franz-Joseph behaviour and the admiral and I having primed ourselves to a point of reasonable geniality before the arrival of the guests. Benita was extremely civil, insisting that she had heard so much about me from my aunt and had read my book on the squirrel. She had, too – for she told me that my description of the use of the tail in the gliding jump from branch to branch was misleading.

  ‘Benita, my dear, Mr Dennim is an authority,’ said her father.

  Her glance at me was delightful. It suggested, while preserving a proper demureness, that we were two professionals and must be patient with the unseemly interruptions of amateurs.

  ‘This is what happens …’ she said.

  She borrowed a pencil from the admiral and an envelope from me. With a dozen swift strokes she caught the feathering of the hair and the angle of tail to body. I agreed at once that she was right and that I had very badly described what I had seen.

  To describe Benita herself is even harder. Her true interest, so far as I can explain it, was a sort of sensual geography. She adored her own countryside, upland and valley, whatever the weather. If one imagines a tall fairy or wood nymph – not her appearance, but what would go on in her mind if she existed – then one comes somewhere near Benita.

  I do not mean that she was a sort of Rima. Far from it. She was not at all a child of nature. She would have been pretty quickly bored watching squirrels. But if squirrel-watching had been a traditional hobby in the Cotswolds, she would have known all about the people who did it, why they did it, and where.

  Another example. One might almost call her a trained observer of grass. This undoubtedly started from the pleasure of a young and rather lonely child in feeling the soft Cotswold turf under foot, in watching the life of the valleys through the thin, waving stems on the edge of the escarpment. But it led her on to know the whole range of the grasses and the tastes of sheep and cattle.

  And now I find myself describing a collector of scraps of useless information. That isn’t right either. And so I return to my romantic conception of her as a nymph – an entity carrying the collective soul of four square miles of country. I am told that this is all very pretty but that I do not understand parsons’ daughters. All the same, I cannot imagine what induced her to become a commercial artist in London. There was never the slightest chance of her becoming, as Georgina said, a mamby pamby old maid.

  During the days which I spent cossetted by the admiral and his Frank I naturally saw a good deal of Benita, and recovered other memories of youth in the amateur schooling of Nur Jehan. I refused to consider the future at all. If the tiger had trusted to that speed of attack which had been so nearly successful at the cottage, he would have got me.

  I do not say that I would have welcomed such an end; but I was very well aware that the loneliness of death would make less difference to me than to most of my fellows. The little world into which I had fallen was so superficially pleasant, so real to its inhabitants and yet so very unattainable by me. The remoteness which I felt was not wholly due to the twenty years between myself and Benita. I saw them all as beloved actors upon a stage which I, the single spectator in the vast, lonely auditorium, could never approach. I might have been a cripple. I suppose that in a way I was.

  Aunt Georgina seemed in no hurry to return to our suburb. She was just as exasperated as Cunobel by the incompetence of the Gillons in dealing with so valuable and unexpected a legacy as Nur Jehan. On the other hand, she flatly refused to persuade the vicar to get rid of him. Dear Peregrine had appealed to her to come and make sense of the situation, and sense she was going to make even if it meant that she was housekeeper and head groom.

  Sitting one evening with the admiral and myself at the companionable hour of the aperitif, she firmly pointed out that the Church in ampler days had expected the Vicar of Chipping Marton to keep a horse and carriage and had provided him with a stable and a five-acre meadow. It was absurd to be content with using one as a hen house and with raising and selling a single crop of hay from the other.

  ‘But the wretched animal won’t stay in the stable except at night, Georgi!’ Cunobel protested.

  ‘Naturally he will not. The place still smells of chickens. We shall all take our meals there for a week, Peregrine, if we can attract him back in no other way. Nur Jehan is worth a little trouble. He is becoming known.’

  ‘Great Blood and Bones, he’s a joke from Badminton to Banbury!’

  ‘I have a very good mind to show him at the Bath and West.’

  I ascribed this astonishing assertion to the influence of the admiral’s old Madeira. It was his insidious habit to compliment her on her palate. The old dear tried to surround her with an illusion that time had stood still since 1912. And he could do it. Although his means were limited, his possessions, accumulated during so many years of high command, were luxurious. The study in which we were sitting could have been that of a Governor-General.

  ‘He’ll make you ridiculous, Georgi! He’ll slide you off over his tail and then go and sit in the President’s box!’

  ‘But they want to see him.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘One of the patrons of the Bath and West, Peregrine.’

  ‘Which of ’em? I’ll get h
im handed such a rocket!’

  ‘He didn’t tell me his name, now I come to think of it. A big, dark man. Not out of his forties, I’d say, but very grey and rides all of fourteen stone. He asked me if I was Mrs von Dennim. God knows where he got the von! Charles has never used it since he settled in England, and my husband never did. Most delightful easy manners he had! I must have met him somewhere before.’

  ‘Can you remember where?’ I asked.

  ‘Funny you should say that, Charles! I’ve been racking my brains. I’ve seen his face somewhere. Or a brother, perhaps.’

  ‘Shopping? Or the riding school? Or in our street?’

  ‘Somewhere like that. But it’s just a resemblance. I’m sure it wasn’t really him.’

  ‘I think I know the chap you mean, Aunt Georgie,’ I went on, for I had to. ‘He must have gone white. Didn’t he have dark hair and prominent eyebrows?’

  ‘At home?’ she replied, rather puzzled. ‘Yes. Perhaps. But you know how one person reminds you of another.’

  ‘Where was it that he came up to you and started talking?’

  ‘Up above Didmarton, Charles, when I was leading Nur Jehan.’

  The admiral had put down his glass and was simmering in his chair. He had even fiercer eyebrows than the false ones worn on occasion by this delightful patron of the Bath and West. My aunt, who had gone a little pale, for once looked at him more in appeal than command.

  ‘I won’t!’ Cunobel shouted. ‘It’s obvious why the boy is asking questions. Damn silly this silence, I call it! Blast!’

  ‘My dear Charles,’ said my aunt, recovering her usual composure, ‘the Dennims have always had an exasperating habit of protecting their womenfolk, and we all know very well that when you choose to carry on like a lot of knight errants polishing their boots in a heavy silence there is nothing whatever we can do about it. I will leave it at that, merely saying that I have not for one moment believed in your squirrels.’