Death of a Huntsman (20 page)

‘That's another thing. I hardly see a soul from one week's end to another. Except Miss Carfax. She lives in the house next door.'

‘Was that Miss Carfax you were talking to?'

‘That was Miss Carfax.'

Again I started to search his neck for the caterpillar. It was absolutely fascinating to wonder where it could have got to all that time and I must have been so absorbed that I couldn't have realized fully how much my eyes were fixed on him.

‘But let's not talk,' he said, ‘about Miss Carfax.'

Suddenly I got the impression that, with the slightest encouragement from me, he would have become emotional. His bright eyes fairly shimmered, like the heat of the afternoon.

A moment later I saw the caterpillar emerge on the other side of his coat collar.

I started laughing at once and he said:

‘You're a very gay person, aren't you? Are you always so gay?'

‘It doesn't always do to be serious, does it?' I said and because of the caterpillar I was still laughing.

All this, of course, may well have looked like a form of encouragement to him and suddenly he moved along the seat, a little closer to me.

But then, instead of attempting to come any nearer, he merely patted my hand. It was a very brief, avuncular sort of pat, not very serious, but I drew my hand away a little haughtily and with the faintest smile. I was really thinking more of the caterpillar on my own arms and shoulders and I did not grasp, even remotely, that this quick little pat of my hand was really an expression of great shyness on his part.

I suppose youth never thinks of age as being shy. It merely thinks that a person of sixty ought long since to have got over things like that. It is in fact impossible for the young to grasp that the pain of shyness never really leaves some people, however age may seem to give them certainty.

That, anyway, was the one and only attempt he made to pat my hand and presently he said:

‘It must be rather interesting to have two fair people and two dark ones in the family. Your mother and sister on the one side and you and your father on the other.'

‘My father is dead,' I said.

His comment on that was, as I afterwards discovered, quite typical.

‘Do you miss him very much?' he said.

‘Very much,' I said. ‘Naturally.'

That was another thing I had not, at that time, fully grasped. My father had died the previous summer. Shortly afterwards my sister had got engaged to Ewart Mackeson. It did not occur to me that these two events had anything to do with that sulky adolescent sickness of mine.

‘Are you on the telephone?' he suddenly said.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Why?'

‘If I sell the house I might perhaps give a little farewell party before I go away. If I do I would like to ring you up and invite you. Would you care to come?'

‘Thank you,' I said.

In thought he stared at the water, still holding the branch of leaves, and I could not see the caterpillar. I still longed for it to complete the picture of fatuity by crawling up his neck, but a moment later I thought I heard voices from the direction of the mullein-strewn wilderness nearer the house, and soon they were growing louder.

‘I think my mother and sister must be coming this way,' I said.

Suddenly I saw that the caterpillar had appeared again. It was sitting on the far lapel of the shantung coat.

‘You haven't answered my question,' he said.

That is the sort of opening youth likes and I said at once, with what I thought was splendid sarcasm:

‘Since you ask me a new one every five seconds it's rather hard to know which question you mean.'

‘About the house.'

Up to that moment I simply couldn't have cared one way or the other whether he sold the house or not. What on earth had I to do with the wretched house? Then from farther up the bank I distinctly heard my sister say:

‘I think Ewart will rave about it, don't you? All this bit by the river. I must get him over tomorrow.'

I didn't hesitate a moment longer. I simply turned and smiled at him in a calm off-hand sort of way and said:

‘If you mean about selling the house I wouldn't sell it for worlds. Nothing would induce me.'

I thought he seemed relieved at that, almost delighted. He actually gave me a fussy little pat on the shoulder.

‘I hope you will come over to tea with me one day,' he said, ‘while this beautiful weather lasts. I would love to show you the butterflies.'

I simply couldn't think what on earth he was talking about. He murmured something else about not really wanting, in his heart, to part with the house and how glad he was about my turning up that day and helping him to make up his mind, and then my sister and mother arrived.

He went towards them and, still with the caterpillar sitting on his chest, gave a little bow, at the same time raising his panama.

‘I have been talking to your charming daughter without knowing her name or telling her mine,' he said. ‘I'm Frederick Fielding-Brown. Good afternoon.'

‘Mrs George Burnett,' my mother said. ‘Good afternoon,' and I saw her suddenly look with pale startled eyes at the extraordinary spectacle of the shantung jacket and its naked caterpillar.

‘I should like to bring my fiancé over to see the house,' my sister said. ‘I love it.'

My sister, seeing the caterpillar too, looked equally startled.

‘By all means,' he said, ‘though to be perfectly honest I haven't really made up my mind finally whether to sell it or not.'

Back in the car my sister was half-irritated, half-amused.

‘Stupid little man,' she said. ‘First he wants to sell his house and then he can't make up his mind. And did you ever see anything quite so priceless? That revolting caterpillar on his coat—did you see that caterpillar?'

I could only stare out of the taxi window and down the valley to where, on the river, the water-lilies were gleaming as white, entrancing and duck-like as ever in the sun.

‘I didn't see anything,' I said, ‘and if it comes to that I don't think he was stupid. I think he was rather nice. He was very charming to me.'

Two days later my mother was congratulating me on having at last had the good sense, as she put it, to shake myself out of myself.

‘A bicycle ride will do you all the good in the world,' she said. ‘I can't think why you haven't taken to it before. Would you like me to pack you some tea?'

‘No thank you,' I said. ‘I'll stop in a village somewhere and get some.'

An hour later I was sitting in the drawing room at
Orleans
, taking tea with Frederick Fielding-Brown. The afternoon was hot and brilliant. The yellow venetian blinds were drawn half-way down at the windows. There was a strong scent of lilies in the air.

‘I didn't think you would come over so soon after my letter,' he said.

Youth is not always sarcastic and sharp and quick to
see the comic side of things. Sometimes it is splendidly tactless too.

‘I hadn't anything else to do,' I said, ‘so I thought I'd just come over.'

He was very tolerant about that. He smiled and asked me to help myself to tomato sandwiches. They were, I thought, very good tomato sandwiches, with rather a special flavour to them. I remarked on this flavour and felt that I was being clever when I told him I thought they were piquant.

‘That's because I have a tiny touch of mayonnaise and red pepper put on them,' he said. ‘How observant you are.'

He started to pour tea from a conical silver pot, afterwards filling up the pot with hot water from a little silver spirit kettle.

‘I don't suppose you've ever eaten caterpillars of any sort, have you?' he said.

Here we were, I thought, back in the mad-house. It was obviously going to be too screamingly funny for words.

Then he began to explain. He started to remind me of the day I had first found him in the garden, talking to the caterpillar, Miss Carfax and the hedge.

‘That was a caterpillar of the goat-moth,' he said. ‘It seems the Romans ate them. Considered them quite a delicacy. I suppose in the category of frogs and snails. Or grasshoppers perhaps. What they ate them with is another matter.'

‘Perhaps mayonnaise,' I said.

There was nothing, I thought, like playing up on these occasions.

‘Well, and why not?' he said. ‘I suppose if you were brought up on
Cossus ligniperda
and mayonnaise you would think no more of it, in the end, than eating winkles with vinegar and a pin.'

‘What is
Cossus ligniperda
?'

‘That,' he said, ‘is the goat-moth.'

Once or twice before and after this lunatic piece of conversation he remarked on what a charming companion I was and how glad he was that I had been able to come over.

‘You are wearing such a pretty dress,' he said. ‘It goes well with your dark complexion.'

‘Thank you,' I said.

The dress was a bright clear green, lighter and softer than emerald, with short, yellow-trimmed sleeves and a yellow collar. With it I was wearing the yellow shoes that Ewart Mackeson had made for my mother. She didn't like them after all and now, in consequence, I thought they were rather smart on me.

‘What material is it?' he said. He fingered one of the sleeves. His hand brushed my bare upper arm and drew away. ‘A kind of silk?'

I said I thought it was rayon. By this time, however, he was looking at my shoes. He seemed entranced by them too and he peered at them a long time with absorbed brilliant blue eyes.

‘You have wonderful taste,' he said, ‘to get shoes to match like that.'

This was, as best as I can give it, the general tone of the afternoon. It was poised somewhere between lunacy and flattery, with a curious over-tone of charm. The way he poured tea for me, helped me to sandwiches and finally to dish after dish of large dark ruby strawberries completely immersed in cream—all these things were, I suppose, quite enough to counteract, for a young girl with a fairly high opinion of herself and her beauty, a feeling that she was simply the guest of a hopeless eccentric who didn't know what day it was.

I never intended, of course, to pay another visit. That would have been too much. The idea of striking up a friendship with an elderly man who seriously thought that goat-moths and mayonnaise were a solemn gastronomic possibility was altogether too ludicrous for words.

And it is possible, I think, that I never should have paid another visit if it had not been for an incident that occurred after tea was over and I suddenly got up, now rather bored by that stuffy yellow-shaded drawing room and its too oppressive fragrance of maddona lilies, and said that I ought to go.

‘Oh! no, please. I want you to meet Miss Carfax,' he said. ‘Miss Carfax is coming over.'

The life of Frederick Fielding-Brown and that of Miss Carfax were, as I was to discover later, about as ludicrously bound up with each other as he himself was with the business of moths and butterflies.

Every Wednesday afternoon, for example, Frederick Fielding-Brown handed in his card to the house next door and formally went to tea with Miss Carfax; every
Sunday afternoon Miss Carfax handed in her card at his house and took tea with him. During the rest of the week they corresponded with each other by a series of daily notes taken to each house by hand, in his case by the garden-boy, in hers by the chauffeur.

These notes pulsated warmly with urgent and stunning discoveries in the world of entomology. Sometimes they were accompanied, in Miss Carfax's case, by little perforated cardboard boxes.

‘Is it treasure?' she would write. ‘I trust so. I found it in the raspberry canes.'

In a return note he would tell her that her treasure was, after all, no more than a Painted Lady, a Red Admiral, a Tortoiseshell or something of that sort, common to all our counties.

Miss Carfax was, however, never discouraged. Tending her garden, snipping at rambler roses, walking along meadow-paths, by the river, she kept up a great vigilance for things that would interest him, secretly hoping that she would one day come upon something of rare and stupefying importance, such as a Feathered Prominent, a Purple Emperor or a Brixton Beauty.

In turn he wrote notes of discoveries whose detection she apparently found to be nothing short of magical. There would be illuminating occasions like those of the goat-moth, which had made me laugh so much, or the woolly case-bearer, a moth of which, as he explained to me and no doubt also to Miss Carfax, the virgin females sometimes lay fruitful eggs.

The way in which these two elderly people twittered
backwards and forwards to each other's houses, taking tea, writing notes, exchanging
larvae
and so on, prattling passionately through the garden hedge, tremulous with discovery, was of course just the thing that a young girl would find amusing and fatuous. For the life of me I simply couldn't, I'm afraid, see what all the fuss was for.

That was why I thought Miss Carfax looked quite pathetic, almost imbecile with excitement, as she came rushing into the drawing room that afternoon, carrying with trembling care a little cardboard box, saying:

‘I really think I have something, Frederick, I really think I've something for you at last.'

I ought to explain that, just before this happened, he had been trying to persuade me to come to tea another day. We were sitting on a narrow sofa. It was in a kind of French marquetry style and it was too high for comfort. It reminded me very much of the seat by the river and once again he started patting my hands.

‘Come again, will you? While this beautiful weather lasts? Do you like raspberries?'

If you can imagine an elderly man shyly patting your hand, looking intensely into your eyes and saying, ‘Do you like raspberries?' you will know something of what I felt that afternoon just before Miss Carfax burst in.

Then he said: