Appleby's End (11 page)

The Old Stone Age Man – whose gaze passed, most improbably, just wide of the She-Bear's left ear – squinnied at Appleby with all the cunning suspicion of the primeval forest. Dirce, on his right hand, looked as if she might at any moment perform a further somersault on her bull and land him a well-directed whirret on the ear. The Mongolians in the hall, mildly disconcerting though they were, had nothing of the restlessness of Theodore's marmorean creations. Nor, in their multiplicity of faded barbaric garment, did they look anything like so chilly…

Heyhoe. Only the graceless young Mark, so far, had really faced up to the nastiness of that icy end.

 

 

There existed, Appleby reflected, a highly esteemed school of prose fiction which represented the rural inhabitants of the British Isles as possessed by a ferocity and general nastiness to which the Kurd and the Tartar of the late Bishop Adolphus could scarcely hope to measure up. Was this, then, a regular winter sport, unsuspected in the Metropolis? At stated seasons did the simple peasantry delight in stamping their senior brethren into compacted snow? The effect as of some horrid decapitation had certainly been striking; was it an example of the lingering art of the folk? Or – since this macabre fantasy was surely baseless – what rational purpose could be served by such a deed? Was it within the bounds of possibility that–? Appleby, here beginning to frame some professional question, found that his thoughts on the whole matter led nowhere. Just nowhere – unless conceivably to the late Ranulph Raven?

Why had Judith told him all that rigmarole, ending with the story of the preposterous harnessing of Spot? Probably just because she had felt that way, and with no ulterior motive whatever. Appleby shifted his gaze from the Old Stone Age Man to a rapturous Sabine lady, and suddenly quite a new idea started into his head. He turned to Everard. “I suppose,” he said, “that Heyhoe was a fairly elderly man – older than any of you?”

Perhaps because they had been talking of something quite different, perhaps because the question had an odd turn to it, all the Ravens looked mildly surprised. “Heyhoe?” said Everard. “Dear me, yes. Old as the hills, poor chap. Must have been a stable lad about the place when I was a baby in arms. About a contemporary of Rainbird's, I should say. Wouldn't you, Robert?”

“Rainbird and Heyhoe,” said Robert carefully, “were both born some years before any of us.”

Which brings us back, thought Appleby, to Ranulph. Judith has already built up Ranulph as such a legendary figure in my mind that it is hard to realise that three of his sons are here in the room with me. And a fourth has been dug out of the snow. And a fifth – it now almost appears – is pottering round arranging a breakfast table across the hall. In fact the Dream Manor household is eminently a family affair. But if Heyhoe –

“Heyhoe,” said Everard. “How right Mr Appleby is to recur to him. You know, we must get all that clear. What happened to each of us after our – em – dispersal at the ford? The jotting down of a note or two would not, to my mind, be by any means amiss.”

“Ask Mr Appleby,” said Mark. “It's just his line. Judith tells us he's a policeman.”

Everard frowned. “I certainly heard Judith make some obscure joke. But I hardly suppose–”

“It's quite true.” Appleby, who was becoming very sleepy, endeavoured to give his features an adequate expression of mild apology. “I am a detective inspector from Scotland Yard, and on my way to inquire into some troublesome affair at a place called Snarl. As I explained to Mr Raven when he was good enough to bring me along, I hope to get over there tomorrow morning. The death of your coachman is, of course, no business of mine whatever, and I haven't the remotest intention of taking down notes about it.”

Mark Raven jerked up his chin with a movement that sent the yellow hair tossing above his forehead. “Then why did you ask whether Heyhoe was older–”

“If I may say so, these are uncommonly good cigars.”

Everard beamed. “As I think I remarked, the
New Millennium
people are most enlightened in matters of that sort. It comes of one or two of their directors being of decent family, no doubt. I'm sorry to say the
Enlarged Resurrection
folk don't sound nearly so promising.” Everard shook his head and looked gloomy again – almost as gloomy as Luke. “And, of course, we must not worry Mr Appleby with Heyhoe. His profession is purely – um – fortuitous and coincidental. Any further reference to it, my dear Mark, will be uncivil. We shall piece the matter out as best we can tomorrow morning and give an account of it to our own local police. Robert, I think Mr Appleby might be interested in the group at the far end of the room. It is called Nausicaa and her Maidens Washing, and is estimated to weigh seventeen tons.”

Appleby doubted if he had any substantial interest left except bed. It would, of course, be satisfactory to know whether among the voluminous writings of Ranulph Raven there was anything prophetic of Heyhoe's displeasing end. But on that Judith was the authority, and he would himself, no doubt, be off to Snarl on quite a different matter before Judith was up and about again. Everard too must know a good deal about the body of his father's writing; had he also the impression that the ghost of Ranulph haunted Dream? On this a little fishing might be done while consuming the last third of the
New Millennium
people's cigar.

But at the moment Robert Raven held the field. Standing before Nausicaa and her Maidens Washing, and eyeing their nicely rounded contours much as if disposed to bite out great collops of gleaming marble flesh, he was discoursing mildly on the harmless if expensive nature of his late uncle's pursuit. “Of course, he did very little actual carving himself. Nineteenth-century sculptors didn't. At least one
scarpellino
was employed chipping away full-time. Among the benefits of the growth of science, you know, is this: that it gives the Theodores – talented, second-rate men – something more or less useful to do. His sort of fair-to-medium intellectual energy is drained off elsewhere. Science and pseudo-science. Today Theodore would be a professor of economics in some hole in Wales.”

“Science?” said Everard. “Well, I don't know. But certainly there's a terrible lot of
it
. I ought to be getting on with Science. Devilish near, by the time one's got to Religion.”

Luke too had placed himself in front of Nausicaa – whose innocent exhibition of
les tétons et les fesses
he seemed to view without even the faint carnal curiosity which the art of Theodore seemed alone calculated to arouse. “Science?'' said Luke. “Consider the rocket gun and the time bomb. Science has done nothing but sharpen the fangs of the sabre-toothed tiger.” And Luke, who appeared to vary quotation with epigram, walked gloomily away.

“But,” said Appleby, “there is such a thing as specific inclination or talent, after all. Your Uncle Theodore might have been a professor of economics, in Wales or elsewhere. But your father, surely, would never have been other than the kind of writer he was.”

“The kind of writer he was?” Everard was amiably discursive. “Now what kind was he, would you say? I don't know that we've ever as a family got that fixed. You see, Ravens have never done anything in what you could call a popular way – or not as a rule. I suppose the
New Millennium
might be called popular” – and Everard looked momentarily rueful, as was proper in a scholar who yearned to labour on the frontiers of knowledge – “but anything of the sort has always been the exception with us. Even this stuff of Theodore's was regarded as utterly refined in its day. Chaste was, I believe, the word commonly applied to it.”

“Do you hear that?” Mark Raven interrogated the most nubile of Nausicaa's Maidens, and enforced the question with a resounding spank. “
Le mot juste
, if ever there was one.” He shook a finger warningly. “No, no, my girl – it won't do.”

“I do not say” – Everard eyed his young cousin meditatively – “that there is not a marked strain of coarseness which sometimes appears in our family. But almost without exception we have been earnest. Our dear father, therefore, was always something of a puzzle. Was he earnest? Did he endeavour to impart real literary quality to his work, or did he consciously write down? We just don't know. Although I myself edited a collected edition of his work for publication shortly after his death – and it cannot be described as a success, I am sorry to say – I really formed no very clear idea on the matter. Now, Roger was an interesting man. A first cousin of Papa's, and a most distinguished Latinist. A little collection of translations from Horace and Martial which he put out was extremely well received. Jowett of Balliol was delighted with it.”

“Is that so?” said Appleby. Disinterest in the highly coloured writings of Papa was quite clearly the ruling attitude at Dream. Roger, Theodore and Adolphus had been earnest, and were preferred. Were the present generations earnest too? Everard plainly worked like a nigger. Judith with a mallet in her hand was no doubt as earnest as Theodore had ever been. It was Luke's line to be burdened with a melancholy temperament – which was presumably a way of being earnest without the necessity of buckling to. Mark was somewhat enigmatic; Robert wholly so; and Clarissa was seriously resolved that Rainbird at least should remain unburied in the snow. This was about the sum total of Appleby's knowledge of the Ravens so far – and as he grew sleepier he became increasingly prone to the delusion that he had known them through uncounted years. He decided to have another shot. “I gathered from Miss Judith,” he said, “that she was very well up in Ranulph Raven's works. Indeed, I almost felt that they were on her mind.”

“Judith's mind?” said Mark. “You would maintain Judith has a mind? She certainly has a temper, and sometimes she has wit, and occasionally she has designs. Beware of Judith, Mr Appleby, when she's by way of having designs. But a mind? Cousin Robert has the family mind and rather resents it. That's why he looks so
farouche
. Pray observe the ferocious countenance of the Kurd.”

But Appleby was not going to be beaten so easily. “Miss Judith,” he repeated, “seems to have Ranulph Raven's books on her mind. Thinks them uncanny. Something of that sort. Something about that horse. Spot, isn't he? And one of Ranulph Raven's stories. I didn't quite understand it. But she seemed to think there was something queer.”

“Spot?” said Mark. “Oh, that! Well, I suppose she felt the necessity of entertaining you with something. Did she tell you about the blind man when we were kids?”

“Yes; she told me about that.”

Everard took the cigar from his mouth and looked at Appleby in mild surprise. “That old family story! I haven't heard it mentioned for years. And yet it was an uncommonly strange affair which we never got to the bottom of. There was, of course, an element of what they now call
rapportage
in Papa's work. He picked up material from the country folk round about in rather odd ways, and as a result he seems to have gained something of a preternatural character in their regard. But whether the blind man had really committed some crime and believed Papa to have wormed it out of him and put it in a book we shall clearly never know. If I remember aright, it was some little time before the children came out with the story, and we judged it best to take no action. I trust we were right. Robert, would you say that we were right?”

“Probably not.” Robert Raven had retreated a few paces and was now approaching Dirce's bull with the finely controlled bellicosity of a figure in a Hemingway tauromachy. “But it's an old story, as you say. What Judith must have on her mind is the business of
The Coach of Cacus
, and the other affairs of that sort. Luke's tombstone, for instance.”

This was bewildering. “Your brother,” Appleby asked politely, “has a tombstone?”

“A Christmas present.” It was Mark who broke in. “Somebody sent Luke a tombstone – and what could better hit his taste? Did you ever read Richardson's
Clarissa
? The lady takes several volumes to die. And she keeps a coffin in her bedroom and calls it the ‘dread receptacle'.” Mark gave his sudden, harsh whoop of laughter. “Well, Luke has a tombstone just like that – thanks to an unknown donor. My notion is that he always longed for one, and so he sent it to himself – like Gub-Gub.”

“Gub-Gub?” said Appleby.

“Gub-Gub was Doctor Dolittle's pig.”

“Really, Mark” – Everard Raven held up a protesting hand – “if Mr Appleby must be told these grotesque and confusing things, is it sensible to mix them up with
Clarissa
and Doctor Dolittle's pig – particularly when Luke's tombstone is mixed up with a book already?” He turned apologetically to Appleby. “I don't suppose you happen ever to have read my father's
Paxton's Destined Hour
? It's about somebody called Paxton who is strolling past the sort of place where they make tombstones when his eye is suddenly caught by his own name. He finds he is reading his own tombstone, complete with the date of his death–”

Appleby frowned. “But I've read a story like that. And certainly not by your father.”

“Quite so, quite so.” Everard looked embarrassed. “But these things do happen. You will find, for instance, that Conrad's
Inn of the Witches
is very much the same story as Wilkie Collins'
A Terribly Strange Bed.
”

“Everard,” Mark said, “if Mr Appleby must be told these grotesque and confusing things–”

“The short of it is this.” Robert pitched his cigar end into the fire and turned round with an air of firmly winding up matters for the night. “There's this story of my father's in which Paxton, having seen the date of his own death inscribed on a tombstone – a mystery never accounted for, if I remember aright – waits in mounting apprehension for that particular date to come along. He shuts himself up in an attic. He won't see anyone, just in case he's a homicidal maniac. He won't eat anything, just in case the food has been accidentally or purposely poisoned. Then at last, at the end of twenty-four hours of agonised apprehension, he hears the hall clock chime out midnight below. He rushes triumphantly from his attic, trips in the dark, tumbles downstairs and breaks his neck. The clock was just two minutes fast. What d'you think of that?”