Appleby's Answer (10 page)

But this was not to be.

‘Hullo! Can I be of any help?' It was the rector of Gibber Porcorum (and Long Canings) who spoke – and from over the hedge in the shade of which Miss Pringle's car reposed. It was the rectory hedge, and Dr Howard was trimming it in what was no doubt a perfectly proper employment for a clergyman on a Sunday afternoon.

‘Thank you,' Miss Pringle said, and was about to add: ‘I can perfectly easily change a wheel myself'. But this is something which a lady may not roundly say to a gentleman without the imputation of an aggressive feminism. This is unfair, but it remains a social fact. It can be said, of course, to a husband, brother, or nephew, but not to any other male (except, perhaps, to an officious tramp). ‘Thank you,' Miss Pringle repeated, ‘but I really mustn't trouble you. I am sure there is a garage close by.'

‘There is nothing of the kind.' Dr Howard dropped his shears, strode to his garden gate, and vaulted it. The ease of this performance made it perfectly clear that pushing a diminutive car around was something that would afford him no trouble at all. ‘Have you got a jack,' he asked briskly, ‘or shall I fetch mine?'

‘It's in the boot.' Miss Pringle was constrained to accept the role of helpless female with a good grace. ‘The spare is properly blown up. I always see to that.'

‘Wise virgin,' Dr Howard said.

Miss Pringle discerned that her rescuer was disposed to prize the natural authority which enabled him to say anything that came into his head. His was an unassuming station within the Anglican Church. But he was, in the metaphorical sense of the term, a large man – and he genuinely possessed that aristocratic quality which she had once, in a railway compartment, so mistakenly attributed to Captain A G de P Bulkington. This didn't make her any the more willing to have much conversation with him now.

‘I thought you were lunching with Bulkington,' Dr Howard said.

‘That was a misunderstanding. I had other plans.'

‘You must be uncommonly hungry by this time. Or have you had something to eat?'

‘Thank you. I had a substantial sandwich at the Jolly Chairman.' Miss Pringle made this awkward admission only because she had been in fear of being led into the rectory, regaled on cold roast beef and pickles, and peremptorily questioned the while.

‘Just pull on the hand-brake now, will you?' There could be no doubt of Dr Howard's expertness as a mechanic. ‘No damage to the wall of the tyre, I think. You pulled up pretty quick. Smart girl.'

The rector was much too young thus to address Miss Pringle with any propriety. But since it was a long time since anybody had so addressed her she accepted this venturesomeness with a laugh.

‘By the way,' Dr Howard said, ‘I know who you are, and I've enjoyed some of your stories. But they're busman's holidays, rather, so far as I'm concerned. Why not get away from all those parsons for a time? Write a story about somebody like Bulkington. There's plenty of scope there.' Dr Howard tapped the spare wheel firmly on its studs. ‘There, and in Long Canings in general. Or any English village, for that matter. Homicidal feeling in every hall and hovel, court and cottage, manor and–'

‘I make it a rule,' Miss Pringle interrupted with some severity, ‘in no circumstances to take as a starting-point for fiction anyone who has come within the range of my own acquaintance.'

‘That can't be other than nonsense, you know. You can't begin from the moon. But perhaps you just take your characters from other people's books?'

‘I do nothing of the kind.' Miss Pringle was intelligent enough to see a weak argumentative position in front of her. ‘Of course one writes from one's own experiences. But the imagination, Dr Howard, is always at work. It is a deep, transforming power. Of course actual people – people one has known – play their part. But they sink down, you must understand, into the deep well of unconscious cerebration, to come up transformed. One begins to write on the basis of this transformed material. So there can be no question of actual portraiture.'

‘That is very reassuring. I've always thought, incidentally, that real portraits must be much more difficult than fancy ones. That was certainly true of drawing and painting when one was a child, and tried to do Daddy or Mummy, and not just a pirate or a highwayman. So perhaps it's a factor in work like yours.'

‘It may be so.' Miss Pringle again spoke a little stiffly, since she was uncertain that she wasn't being laughed at. ‘Ought I to get out the pump?'

‘Quite unnecessary. The spare is fully inflated, as you said. I just have to tighten the nuts. Did you encounter anybody interesting in the Jolly Chairman?'

‘It was far from busy.' Miss Pringle hesitated. Was this a trap? That we weave for ourselves a tangled web when first we practise to deceive was something which she suddenly had an ominous premonition as possibly to be proved on her own pulse. But she was (it must be reiterated) a courageous woman, and she would not lightly turn back. ‘The two young men I met after matins were there. I think they are among Captain Bulkington's pupils? I didn't catch their names.'

‘Among his pupils? Well, not exactly. As far as I know, they're the only two he's got. Money in them, though. Wealthy families. Adrian Waterbird is a Shropshire Waterbird.' Dr Howard paused to chuckle at what might have been an odd piece of ornithological information. ‘And Ralph Jenkins' father manufactures something or other in a really big way.'

‘Indeed? I didn't much attend to them.' Miss Pringle hesitated, and then proceeded against her own better sense of caution. ‘You seem to believe in knowing about your parishioners.'

‘I shouldn't be much of a country parson if I didn't. Even the casuals, Miss Pringle. I like to get to know a little about them.'

‘I see you are referring to me as in that odd category.' Miss Pringle laughed a laugh rather in Miss Vanderpump's silvery manner. ‘And you know a little about me already.'

‘The jack can come out now. When I saw you in my congregation – and recognised you from those photographs – I told myself you must be doing field work.'

‘Field work, Dr Howard?'

‘Collecting copy, as they say. Not that you mustn't have done enough of that long ago. For I take it you are a daughter of the vicarage?'

‘My dear father was an Archdeacon,' Miss Pringle said with dignity. ‘And as for my purpose in attending–'

‘Yes, of course.' Dr Howard glanced at Miss Pringle with a horridly justified scepticism. ‘But what about those two lads? Mightn't you make something of them? After they'd been down in that deep well of unconscious cerebration, of course. Did they get talking about the Bulgar?'

‘The Bulgar?' There was a convincing blank bewilderment in Miss Pringle's voice.

‘Their name for Bulkington. Talking of deep wells, by the way, my predecessor at Long Canings abruptly ended his days in one. It occurred to me during the
Benedicite
that you might have heard about that.'

‘Nothing of the kind. And I should have supposed that your mind–'

‘Perfectly true. But my thoughts do culpably stray at times during a service. I'm sure it's not something that ever happens in one's congregation. There! You're fit for the road again. Shall you be home in time for evensong?'

He
was
laughing at her – and in a manner, surely, that ill befitted his cloth. But Miss Pringle found that, though perturbed, she was not indignant. There was something rather exciting about Dr Howard. She wondered why so masculine and handsome a man wasn't married. He had a vocation for celibacy, perhaps. If so, it seemed a pity.

‘Thank you very much, indeed,' she said, as she climbed into the driving seat of her car. ‘It has been most kind of you. And I hope I haven't too much delayed your work on that beautiful hedge. Gibber Porcorum is a delightful place. I shall always remember it.'

‘Either here or at Long Canings' – Dr Howard was suddenly decorously conventional – ‘we are always glad to welcome visitors.'

‘That is something very nice to know.' And Miss Pringle extended a gracious hand, let in the clutch, and drove away.

 

 

In fact our heroine stood not upon the order of her going, but went at once. And this proved to be a mistake, since her more haste ended in the less speed. The road out of Gibber Porcorum was less a road than a lane; it wound; it ran between high banks. Rounding a bend with her foot a little too confidently on the accelerator, Miss Pringle received a confused impression of imminent collision with a large brown mass, and pulled up with her bonnet sited alarmingly and grotesquely beneath the hind quarters of a horse.

The horse had pulled up too. Miss Pringle, calling out words of apology (for the horse had a rider), put her car abruptly into reverse. The horse screamed in agony. The rider swore. Miss Pringle, who hadn't even known that horses
could
scream, or even that a lady (for the rider was a lady) could swear quite like
that
, managed to arrest her retrograde progress just before the brute would have been brought sprawling to the ground. The disastrous truth was evident. Incredibly, the greater part of its tail had got itself tangled in her radiator.

Lady Pinkerton, who had looked at Miss Pringle stonily in church, was looking at her stonily now. That she was doing this from the saddle made the effect the more intimidating. But at least she had stopped uttering those quite shocking imprecations. She seemed, indeed, to be going through the process known as choosing one's words.

‘Who are you?' Lady Pinkerton asked.

This is a question, inoffensive in many tones and contexts, into which much arrogance can be stuffed. Lady Pinkerton had stuffed it. And Miss Pringle instantly reflected – for she was a woman of swift-moving mind – that if Sir Ambrose Pinkerton's diffident air so much belied him that he was at all like his wife, then the lethal feelings and intentions of Captain Bulkington had a good deal to be said for them. She decided, however, to ignore the unmannerly question flung at her.

‘I am afraid,' she said politely, ‘that you will be obliged to dismount. Your horse has thrust its tail into my engine. If it has caught in the fan-belt we shall need a pair of scissors. Do you happen to carry one?'

‘Don't be a fool, woman.' Lady Pinkerton, nevertheless, climbed from her horse. ‘And I know you perfectly well. You are the gardener's aunt.'

‘And this, I suppose, is the car of the gardener's aunt?' The indignation of Miss Pringle was mounting rapidly, and had produced this sarcasm.

‘Impertinence will not be of service to you. I expressly forbade Lurch to have you visit him, or come near the village. Your husband is a shop steward in Swindon, and you are both notorious agitators.' Lady Pinkerton paused, and regarded Miss Pringle fixedly. ‘Good God!' she exclaimed. She was evidently very much shocked. ‘You even had the insolence to come to church.'

‘Your assertions are merely absurd.' Miss Pringle was now very angry. Although a person of sound democratic principles she resented the charge of living in Swindon. ‘My business in Long Canings' – she added rashly – ‘has been with Captain Bulkington.'

‘So much the worse. The man's a scoundrel. And he takes in Borstal boys on parole. He has two of them now.'

‘You are again most laughably mistaken. Mr Jenkins and Mr Waterbird are being prepared for entrance to Balliol College – my nephew Timothy's college, as it happens to be. And Mr Waterbird is a Shropshire Waterbird.'

‘There is no such family. So stop talking rubbish, my good woman, and raise the bonnet of your wretched little car.'

Although this speech could scarcely be called persuasive, or even pardonable, Miss Pringle acknowledged that it held a kernel of sense. Keeping a wary eye on the hind legs of the horse, she edged round a front mudguard, pressed a spring, and swung up the bonnet. The two gentlewomen surveyed the situation. There could be no doubt about the fan-belt. It was so tangled with horsehair that the little engine had the appearance of an upholstered object disgorging its inward parts.

The horse made an impatient noise (as it well might), causing Miss Pringle to skip hastily to the side of the road.

‘Haven't you even got a pocket-knife?' Lady Pinkerton demanded.

‘No – but haven't you? Isn't there usually a knife in one of those things that get stones out of horses' hooves?'

‘I am foolishly without anything of the kind.' For a moment Lady Pinkerton was almost reasonable. ‘Won't that fan-affair revolve? The tail might then come away from under the belt.'

‘I believe if we were to push the car–' Miss Pringle hesitated. ‘I am not quite sure. But I believe that
that
' – she pointed – ‘would then go round, so that possibly–'

‘Then we'll try. So don't stand gaping, woman.' Lady Pinkerton was recovering tone. ‘The horse will have to be led forward while the car is pushed. You shall push. I will lead.'

Miss Pringle, being fair-minded, saw that this was a just and proper proposal. She therefore retreated to the tail of her car. Lady Pinkerton advanced to the head of her aggrieved mount, and urged it forward. Miss Pringle, having given a warning call, pushed. The vehicle's initial inertia almost defeated her, but she gave an extra heave, and it moved. For a moment it was hard work – and then not so hard work. She heard the clop of the horse's hooves from in front. At first they were slow and deliberate. Then they turned surprisingly brisk. There was a shout of rage from Lady Pinkerton; Miss Pringle found herself running with her hands resting only lightly on the boot of the car; she had a sudden and perplexing view of Lady Pinkerton in a ditch. And then car and horse simply vanished from her view. The sagacious quadruped had solved the ladies' dilemma (in the most well-intentioned way) by converting itself into the dynamic component or a horse-drawn conveyance.