Appleby And Honeybath
Appleby & Honeybath
First published in 1983
© Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1983-2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 0755120752 EAN: 9780755120758
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
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Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.
After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of
Florio’s
translation of
Montaigne’s Essays
and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.
By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel,
Death at the President’s Lodging
. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.
After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen’s University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the
Oxford History of English Literature
.
Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.
His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.
The affair may be said to have started, as Charles Honeybath’s adventures were apt to do, with his engaging to paint a portrait. But more exactly, it started when he found the body in the library. Whose body it was, and how it had come there, and why, and when: these were matters for some time to be much in doubt. But it may be stated at once that the library was the least frequented room in the house, and therefore of obvious convenience for unobtrusively storing a corpse. Honeybath himself had gone into the place only on an impulse so merely whimsical that he found it embarrassing to explain even to John Appleby, although the men were old friends.
The portrait was to be of a certain Terence Grinton, a red-faced man in robust middle age, who described himself in
Who’s Who
as a landed proprietor, and for whom pursuing foxes over the length and breadth of two counties might fairly be described as a variety of religious experience. The portrait was being subscribed for by his fellow Nimrods and Jorrockses in recognition of the fact that for donkeys’ (or hunters’) ages he had sustained the role of MFH at considerable expense to himself.
The subscribers, who had perhaps slightly old-fashioned ideas on what they might dictate to a Royal Academician, had stipulated that there should be no nonsense about the thing: old Terry must be in a pink coat and wearing his topper. Honeybath had agreed at once. The combination of hunting pink and sanguine complexion (which is common enough) was a problem that interested him.
There had been some question of Terry being depicted as sitting, or standing beside, a horse. But Honeybath had made it clear that a horse is very expensive. A horse, in fact, is as expensive as a man, so the commission would have been virtually for two portraits. With a favourite groom thrown in it would be classifiable as a conversation piece, and so cost the earth. The subscribers didn’t feel up to that sort of a bill.
Grinton seldom went to London, so attendance in the artist’s studio wasn’t on. Honeybath had therefore agreed to do most of the work while being put up at Grinton Hall as a guest. His first idea was to give this open air man a
plein air
setting; to have a blowy kind of world around him and the Hall itself in a middle distance. But Grinton felt that this would draw attention to the absence of a horse, and thus asperse the liberality of his friends, who had set up the project in the first place. So it had to be indoors, in one fashion or another.
It was at this point that Honeybath, already staying at Grinton and becoming a shade impatient about the whole arrangement, began to amuse himself with bits of fun. He thought of a window embrasure, flanked by imposing pilasters, and improbably draped with enormous curtains, abundantly tasselled, and in whatever red-inclining-to-orange would be trickiest with that complexion and those togs. He discussed this rather technically with Lady Appleby, who was in some sort of cousinship with the Grintons and had insisted on taking her husband to a long weekend at Grinton. As Judith Appleby was a sculptor (only she still liked to say ‘sculptress’), she was not all that interested in colours and hues. But she liked talking to Honeybath.
Then Honeybath had another idea. His last job had been providing a Cambridge college with a likeness of its Master, who was an eminent theologian. Very properly, Honeybath had posed this scholar in his study and against a background of calf-and-vellum-bound patristic learning rising from floor to ceiling. The books were all outsize folios, and bulky at that. They looked as if they had come into being at the hands of Johann Guttenberg in Mainz round about the middle of the fifteenth century and had been putting on weight ever since. To this towering burden of learning Honeybath had imparted a minute forward tilt, imperceptible in itself to other than a trained eye, but sufficient to create an uneasy impression that the Master was at some considerable risk of erudite entombment as he sat at his desk.
Recalling this episode now, Honeybath also recalled having been told about the Grinton library. He hadn’t been invited to take a look at it, and it was his impression that it existed on the fringes of the Grinton family mind as a slightly uncomfortable joke. According to Judith Appleby, scholarship had raised its incomprehensible head every now and then – perhaps every third or fourth generation – among the normally normal Grintons. There had been Thomas Sackville Grinton who, in the last years of the First Elizabeth, had assisted Philemon Holland in his translation of the
Historia Naturalis
of the Elder Pliny. There had been Jonathan Grinton, author of a book mysteriously entitled
Divers Private Recreations
, which was published in 1715 but of which no copy was known to be extant. Jonathan had both philosophic and literary friends, and was believed to have entertained at Grinton somebody referred to by Terence Grinton as ‘a little chappie called Pope’. And so on.
Thus the library, considered as a collection of books, didn’t come quite to a stop until well into the Victorian period. But the ghost of the library (if the expression isn’t too strange a one) was somehow at large at Grinton. This was perhaps because Mr Grinton wasn’t merely of a philistine temperament and indifferent to books. He hated them, particularly if their authors had names like Pliny or Julius Caesar. He remembered the beaks at his public school, he used to say, trying to beat the bloody things into his backside. And enough had been enough. This may suggest that Terence Grinton must have been accounted disagreeable by civilized or cultivated persons. But it wasn’t so. His wife, Dolly Grinton, who had quite different ideas, often filled the house with acquaintances of lively (and sometimes eccentric) intellectual and artistic interests. And most of these quite took to the squire. (When they referred to their host thus, or even so addressed him, they thought of themselves as being mildly facetious. But this shade of implication never crossed Terence’s own mind.)
No more than Charles Honeybath had any of these visitors, so far as was known, ever been invited to view the library. A housemaid did some dusting in it once a week, and every two or three years Terence Grinton, when the hunting season was over and he had taken his family briefly on holiday, arranged that this and other apartments should have a ‘go through’ at the hands of a firm of contractors. There were servants at Grinton, but nowadays they were intermittently in short supply.
However, the corpse has already been waiting for us too long.
What was prompting Honeybath when he came on it was, as has been said, a mere whim – little more than a velleity, to use a learned word. With that portrait of the Master of a College in his mind, there came to him the amusing idea of posing a Master of Fox Hounds, all dressed up for the chase, similarly before an imposing stack of his own bibliophilic possessions. The Cambridge portrait had yet to be exhibited at the Academy; it might be possible to persuade the hanging committee to find a place for Terence Grinton thus conceived not next to it, indeed, since that would be a trifle crude, but not too far away. A good deal of quiet mirth would be thus occasioned. Needless to say, this was all absolute nonsense. Even if Grinton could be persuaded to such a pose, which was extremely unlikely, one couldn’t make a monkey of the man after such a fashion. Nevertheless the mere idea
was
amusing. And it was what moved Charles Honeybath to take a peep into that library.
