Captain Biggar broke off. It had suddenly come to him that he was monopolising the conversation. After all, of what interest could these daydreams of his be to this woman?
‘But let’s not talk about me any more,’ he said. ‘Dull subject. How have you been all these years, dear lady? Pretty fit, I hope? You look right in the pink. And how’s your husband? Oh, sorry!’
‘Not at all. You mean, have I married again? No, I have not married again, though Clifton and Alexis keep advising me to. They are sweet about it. So broad-minded and considerate.’
‘Clifton? Alexis?’
‘Mr Bessemer and Mr Spottsworth, my two previous husbands. I get them on the ouija board from time to time. I suppose,’ said Mrs Spottsworth, laughing a little self-consciously, ‘you think it’s odd of me to believe in things like the ouija board?’
‘Odd?’
‘So many of my friends in America call all that sort of thing poppycock.’
Captain Biggar snorted militantly.
‘I’d like to be there to talk to them! I’d astonish their weak intellects. No, dear lady, I’ve seen too many strange things in my time, living as I have done in the shadow-lands of mystery, to think anything odd. I have seen barefooted pilgrims treading the path of Ahura-Mazda over burning coals. I’ve seen ropes tossed in the air and small boys shinning up them in swarms. I’ve met fakirs who slept on beds of spikes.’
‘Really?’
‘I assure you. And think of it, insomnia practically unknown. So you don’t catch me laughing at people because they believe in ouija boards.’
Mrs Spottsworth gazed at him tenderly. She was thinking how sympathetic and understanding he was.
‘I am intensely interested in psychical research. I am proud to be one of the little band of devoted seekers who are striving to pierce the veil. I am hoping to be vouchsafed some enthralling spiritual manifestation at this Rowcester Abbey where I’m going. It is one of the oldest houses in England, they tell me.’
‘Then you ought to flush a spectre or two,’ agreed Captain Biggar. ‘They collect in gangs in these old English country houses. How about another gin and tonic?’
‘No, I must be getting along. Pomona’s in the car, and she hates being left alone.’
‘You couldn’t stay and have one more quick one?’
‘I fear not. I must be on my way.’
I can’t tell you how delightful it has been, meeting you again, Captain.’
‘Just made my day, meeting you, dear lady,’ said Captain Biggar, speaking hoarsely, for he was deeply moved. They were out in the open now, and he was able to get a clearer view of her as she stood beside her car bathed in the sunset glow. How lovely she was, he felt, how wonderful, how… Come, come, Biggar, he said to himself gruffly, this won’t do, old chap. Play the game, Biggar, play the game, old boy!
‘Won’t you come and see me when I get back to London, Captain? I shall be at the Savoy.’
‘Charmed, dear lady, charmed,’ said Captain Biggar. But he did not mean it.
For what would be the use? What would it profit him to renew their acquaintance? Just twisting the knife in the wound, that’s what he would be doing. Better, far better, to bite the bullet and wash the whole thing out here and now. A humble hunter with scarcely a bob to his name couldn’t go mixing with wealthy widows. It was the kind of thing he had so often heard Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar denouncing in the old Anglo-Malay Club at Kuala Lumpur. ‘Chap’s nothing but a bally fortune-hunter, old boy,’ they would say, discussing over the gin pahits some acquaintance who had made a rich marriage. ‘Simply a blighted gigolo, old boy, nothing more. Can’t do that sort of thing, old chap, what? Not cricket, old boy.’
And they were right. It couldn’t be done. Damn it all, a feller had his code. ‘Meh nee pan kong bahn rotfai’ about summed it up.
Stiffening his upper lip, Captain Biggar went down the road to see how his car was getting on.
Chapter 2
Rowcester Abbey—pronounced Roaster—was about ten miles from the Goose and Gherkin. It stood—such portions of it as had not fallen down—just beyond Southmolton in the midst of smiling country. Though if you had asked William Egerton Bamfylde Ossingham Belfry, ninth Earl of Rowcester, its proprietor, what the English countryside had to smile about these days, he would have been unable to tell you. Its architecture was thirteenth century, fifteenth century and Tudor, its dilapidation twentieth century post-World War Two.
To reach the Abbey you turned off the main road and approached by a mile-long drive thickly encrusted with picturesque weeds and made your way up stone steps, chipped in spots, to a massive front door which badly needed a lick of paint. And this was what Bill Rowcester’s sister Monica and her husband, Sir Roderick (‘Rory’) Carmoyle, had done at just about the hour when Mrs Spottsworth and Captain Biggar were starting to pick up the threads at their recent reunion.
Monica, usually addressed as Moke, was small and vivacious, her husband large and stolid. There was something about his aspect and deportment that suggested a more than ordinarily placid buffalo chewing a cud and taking in its surroundings very slowly and methodically, refusing to be hurried. It was thus that, as they stood on the front steps, he took in Rowcester Abbey.
‘Moke,’ he said at length, having completed his scrutiny, ‘I’ll tell you something which you may or may not see fit to release to the press. This bally place looks mouldier every time I see it.’
Monica was quick to defend her childhood home.
‘It might be a lot worse.’
Rory considered this, chewing his cud for a while in silence.
‘How?’ he asked.
‘I know it needs doing up, but where’s the money to come from? Poor old Bill can’t afford to run a castle on a cottage income.’
‘Why doesn’t he get a job like the rest of us?’
‘You needn’t stick on side just because you’re in trade, you old counterjumper.’
‘Everybody’s doing it, I mean to say. Nowadays the House of Lords is practically empty except on evenings and bank holidays.’
‘We Rowcesters aren’t easy to place. The Rowcester men have all been lilies of the field. Why, Uncle George didn’t even put on his own boots.’
‘Whose boots did he put on?’ asked Rory, interested.
‘Ah, that’s what we’d all like to know. Of course, Bill’s big mistake was letting that American woman get away from him.’
‘What American woman would that be?’
‘It was just after you and I got married. A Mrs Bessemer. A widow. He met her in Cannes one summer. Fabulously rich and, according to Bill, unimaginably beautiful. It seemed promising for a time, but it didn’t come to anything. I suppose someone cut him out. Of course, he was plain Mr Belfry then, not my lord Rowcester, which may have made a difference.’
Rory shook his head.
‘It wouldn’t be that. I was plain Mr Carmoyle when I met you and look at the way I snaffled you in the teeth of the pick of the County.’
‘But then think what you were like in those days. A flick of the finger, a broken heart. And you’re not so bad now, either,’ added Monica fondly. ‘Something of the old magic remains.’
‘True,’ said Rory placidly. ‘In a dim light I still cast a spell. But the trouble with Bill was, I imagine, that he lacked drive… the sort of drive you see so much of at Harrige’s. The will to win, I suppose you might call it. Napoleon had it. I have it, Bill hasn’t. Oh, well, there it is,’ said Rory philosophically. He resumed his study of Rowcester Abbey. ‘You know what this house wants?’ he proceeded. ‘An atom bomb, dropped carefully on the roof of the main banqueting hall.’
‘It would help, wouldn’t it?’
‘It would be the making of the old place. Put it right in no time. Still, atom bombs cost money, so I suppose that’s out of the question. What you ought to do is use your influence with Bill to persuade him to buy a lot of paraffin and some shavings and save the morning papers and lay in plenty
of matches and wait till some moonless night and give the joint the works. He’d feel a different man, once the old ruin was nicely ablaze.’
Monica looked mysterious.
‘I can do better than that.’
Rory shook his head.
‘No. Arson. It’s the only way. You can’t beat good old arson. Those fellows down in the east end go in for it a lot. They touch a match to the shop, and it’s like a week at the seaside to them.’
‘What would you say if I told you I was hoping to sell the house?’
Rory stared, amazed. He had a high opinion of his wife’s resourcefulness, but he felt that she was attempting the impossible.
‘Sell it? I don’t believe you could give it away. I happen to know Bill offered it for a song to one of these charitable societies as a Home for Reclaimed Juvenile Delinquents, and they simply sneered at him. Probably thought it would give the Delinquents rheumatism. Very damp house, this.’
‘It is a bit moist.’
‘Water comes through the walls in heaping handfuls. I suppose because it’s so close to the river. I remember saying to Bill once: “Bill,” I said, “I’ll tell you something about your home surroundings. In the summer the river is at the bottom of your garden, and in the winter your garden is at the bottom of the river.” Amused the old boy quite a bit. He thought it clever.’
Monica regarded her husband with that cold, wifely eye which married men learn to dread.
‘Very clever,’ she said frostily. ‘Extremely droll. And I suppose the first thing you’ll do is make a crack like that to Mrs Spottsworth.’
‘Eh?’ It stole slowly into Rory’s mind that a name had been mentioned that was strange to him. ‘Who’s Mrs Spottsworth?’
‘The woman I’m hoping to sell the house to. American. Very rich. I met her when I was passing through New York on my way home. She owns dozens of houses in America, but she’s got a craving to have something old and picturesque in England.’
‘Romantic, eh?’
‘Dripping with romance. Well, when she told me that—we were sitting next to each other at a women’s lunch—I immediately thought of Bill and the Abbey, of course, and started giving her a sales talk. She seemed interested. After all, the Abbey is chock full of historical associations.’
‘And mice.’
‘She was flying to England next day, so I told her when I would be arriving and we arranged that she was to come here and have a look at the place. She should be turning up at any moment.’
‘Does Bill know she’s coming?’
‘No. I ought to have sent him a cable, but I forgot. Still, what does it matter? He’ll be only too delighted. The important thing is to keep you from putting her off with your mordant witticisms. “I often say in my amusing way, Mrs Spottsworth, that whereas in the summer months the river is at the bottom of the garden, in the winter months—ha, ha—the garden—this is going to slay you—is at the bottom of the river, ho, ho, ho.” That would just clinch the sale.’
‘Now would I be likely to drop a brick of that sort, old egg?’
‘Extremely likely, old crumpet. The trouble with you is that, though a king among men, you have no tact.’
Rory smiled. The charge tickled him.
‘No tact? The boys at Harrige’s would laugh if they heard that.’
‘Do remember that it’s vital to put this deal through.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind. I’m all for giving poor old Bill a leg-up. It’s a damn shame,’ said Rory, who often thought rather deeply on these subjects. ‘Bill starts at the bottom of the ladder as a mere heir to an Earldom, and by pluck and perseverance works his way up till he becomes the Earl himself. And no sooner has he settled the coronet on his head and said to himself, “Now to whoop it up!” than they pull a social revolution out of their hats like a rabbit and snitch practically every penny he’s got. Ah, well!’ said Rory with a sigh. ‘I say,’ he went on, changing the subject, ‘have you noticed, Moke, old girl, that throughout this little chat of ours—which I for one have thoroughly enjoyed—I have been pressing the bell at frequent intervals and not a damn thing has happened? What is this joint, the palace of the sleeping beauty? Or do you think the entire strength of the company has been wiped out by some plague or pestilence?’
‘Good heavens!’ said Monica, ‘bells at Rowcester Abbey don’t ring. I don’t suppose they’ve worked since Edward the Seventh’s days. If Uncle George wished to summon the domestic staff, he just shoved his head back and howled like a prairie wolf.’
‘That would have been, I take it, when he wanted somebody else’s boots to put on?’
‘You just open the door and walk in. Which is what I am about to do now. You bring the bags in from the car.’
‘Depositing them where?’
‘In the hall for the moment,’ said Monica. ‘You can take them upstairs later.’
She went in, and made her way to that familiar haunt, the living-room off the hall where in her childhood days most of the life of Rowcester Abbey had centred. Like other English houses of its size, the Abbey had a number of vast state apartments which were never used, a library which was used occasionally, and this living-room, the popular meeting-place. It was here that in Earlier days she had sat and read the Girl’s Own Paper and, until the veto had been placed on her activities by her Uncle George, whose sense of smell was acute, had kept white rabbits. A big, comfortable, shabby room with french windows opening into the garden, at the bottom of which—in the summer months—the river ran.
As she stood looking about her, sniffing the old familiar smell of tobacco and leather and experiencing, as always, a nostalgic thrill and a vague wish that it were possible to put the clock back, there came through the french window a girl in overalls, who, having stared for a moment in astonishment, uttered a delighted squeal.
‘Moke… darling!’
Monica turned.
‘Jill, my angel!’
They flung themselves into each other’s arms.
Chapter 3
Jill Wyvern was young, very pretty, slightly freckled and obviously extremely practical and competent. She wore her overalls as if they had been a uniform. Like Monica, she was small, and an admirer of hers, from Bloomsbury, had once compared her, in an unpublished poem, to a Tanagra statuette. It was not a very apt comparison, for Tanagra statuettes, whatever their merits, are on the static side and Jill was intensely alert and alive. She moved with a springy step and in her time had been a flashy outside-right on the hockey field.
‘My precious Moke,’ she said. ‘Is it really you? I thought you were in Jamaica.’
‘I got back this morning. I picked up Rory in London, and we motored down here. Rory’s outside, looking after the bags.’
‘How brown you are!’
‘That’s Montego Bay. I worked on this sunburn for three months.’
‘It suits you. But Bill didn’t say anything about expecting you. Aren’t you appearing rather suddenly?’
‘Yes, I cut my travels short rather suddenly. My allowance met those New York prices and gave up the ghost with a low moan. Ah, here’s the merchant prince.’
Rory came in, mopping his forehead.
‘What have you got in those bags of yours, old girl? Lead?’ He saw Jill, and stopped, gazing at her with wrinkled brow. ‘Oh, hullo,’ he said uncertainly.
‘You remember Jill Wyvern, Rory.’
‘Of course, yes. Jill Wyvern, to be sure. As you so sensibly observe, Jill Wyvern. You been telling her about your sunburn?’
‘She noticed it for herself.’
‘It does catch the eye. She says she’s that colour all over,’ said Rory confidentially to Jill. ‘Might raise a question or two from an old-fashioned husband, what? Still, I suppose it all makes for variety. So you’re Jill Wyvern, are you? How you’ve grown!’
‘Since when?’
‘Since… since you started growing.’
‘You haven’t a notion who I am, have you?’
‘I
wouldn’t say that…’
‘I’ll help you out. I was at your wedding.’
‘You don’t look old enough.’
‘I was fifteen. They gave me the job of keeping the dogs from jumping on the guests. It was pouring, you may remember, and they all had muddy paws.’
‘Good God! Now I have you placed. So you were that little squirt. I noticed you bobbing about and thought what a frightful young excrescence you looked.’
‘My husband is noted for the polish of his manners,’ said Monica. ‘He is often called the modern Chesterfield.’
‘What I was about to add,’ said Rory with dignity, ‘was that she’s come on a lot since those days, showing that we should never despair. But didn’t we meet again some time?’
‘Yes, a year or two later when you stayed here one summer. I was just coming out then, and I expect I looked more of an excrescence than ever.’
Monica sighed.
‘Coming out! The dear old getting-ready-for-market stage! How it takes one back. Off with the glasses and the teeth-braces.’
‘On with things that push you in or push you out, whichever you needed.’
This was Rory’s contribution, and Monica looked at him austerely.
‘What do you know about it?’
‘Oh, I get around in our Ladies’ Foundation department,’ said Rory.
Jill laughed.
‘What I remember best are those agonised family conferences about my hockey-player’s hands. I used to walk about for hours holding them in the air.’
‘And how did you make out? Has it paid off yet?’
Ring For Jeeves Page 2
