Gay Phoenix (11 page)

‘Always well insulated, a fireman’s axe,’ Butter was saying. ‘A damned close thing, all the same. Not an eyelash left.’

‘Good God, man! Did you put the bloody thing through the power supply?’

‘Just that. So universal darkness buries all.’ Butter allowed only a second to this exhibition of Butter the reading man, and Povey felt himself being propelled to what he knew must be the edge of the pier. There Butter paused a moment. ‘Thanks a lot, mate,’ he said. ‘Gawd! Won’t you and I go places now?’ His grip on Povey’s arm momentarily tightened. ‘Can you swim?’ he asked.

‘Of course I can swim.’

‘Then jump. Like this.’

And Butter jumped and Povey followed. It was a symbolic moment. They were in deep water, and had a long way to go.

‘Whenever I am aware of a red-letter day,’ Dr Dunton said, ‘I celebrate it by coming to tea with Lady Appleby.’ Dr Dunton paused to accept a hunk of cherry cake. ‘A red-letter day in the history of the parish, that is to say.’

‘It’s a very good habit,’ Judith Appleby commented, and reached for her visitor’s cup.

‘But, of course, you mustn’t confine yourself to them,’ Appleby said. He had long ago got quite used to backing up his wife’s polite remarks, particularly to the clergy. ‘Parochial red-letter days can’t, in the nature of the thing, happen all that often.’

‘Not in the popular acceptation of the term. In the strict sense, they tumble on top of one another. Consider Trinity Sunday. That’s St Alban. And the Tuesday is St Barnabas, and the Thursday is Corpus Christi. In between these two, for that matter, comes the Translation of Edward, King of the West Saxons.’

‘Who translated him?’ Judith asked innocently.

‘I imagine that the answer must be the Holy Ghost, Lady Appleby.’ The Vicar of Long Dream had the cultivated clergyman’s fondness for decorous professional frivolity. ‘Originally the term was applicable only to removal from earth to heaven without death, as in the case of the translation of Enoch. At a later date it came to be used figuratively simply to describe the death of the righteous. It is curious, by the way, that the Romans spoke of a notable day as white. Marked as by a white pebble.
Candidissimo calculo notare diem
is an expression in Catullus, if I remember rightly. But Sir John may correct me. Bentley in rather a notable sermon speaks of a candid and joyful day.’

‘Most interesting,’ Appleby said without irony. Dunton was a conscientious and resolute caller upon every cottage in his parish, and must have to manage a good deal of conversation upon restricted themes; he was entitled occasionally to expatiate among the educated. ‘But just what red-letter day is this?’

‘I have a new parishioner. The man who has bought Brockholes has moved in.’

‘So I suppose the badgers themselves have had to move out, poor things.’ Judith produced this suitable etymological joke neatly. ‘The place has been deserted for ages.’

‘Quite so. Savage howlings – as Pope has it – filled the sacred quires. I imagine an abbey may be called a sacred quire.’

‘The place has certainly been empty and in rather a poor way for a long time,’ Appleby said. ‘And it will take quite a lot to keep up.’

‘Yes, indeed. But already a great deal has been done. I understand there’s money. A great deal of money, they say.’ The Vicar gave this information casually, but it was clear he was far from displeased at the prospect of a wealthy parishioner in the person of the new owner of Brockholes.

‘What’s the fellow’s name?’ Appleby asked.

‘Povey. Somebody called Charles Povey.’

‘How very odd!’ Judith Appleby was now genuinely interested. ‘That was the name of the people there quite a long time ago.’

‘Exactly. It appears that this Mr Povey has repossessed himself of his ancestral territories. Like Warren Hastings at Daylesford, the returned nabob has resumed his own. One always recalls Macaulay’s splendid essay, does one not? An unfashionable writer, I believe. But I remain firmly attached to him.’

‘Is Mr Povey really a nabob?’ Judith asked.

‘I understand him to be the modern equivalent of such a person. Tycoon is now perhaps the word. An interesting Americanism, that. The word is understood to come from the Japanese and signify a great lord.’

‘I don’t think the Poveys were ever great lords.’

‘Dear me no, Lady Appleby. I spoke of ancestral territories facetiously, I fear. Mr Povey’s father, it seems, was a man of some cultivation – or at least musically inclined. But the family is clearly not of any antiquity. Victorian industrialists, no doubt.’

‘Are there to be any other members of the family around?’ Appleby asked.

‘I haven’t heard, but rather imagine not. Mr Povey is said to have had a younger brother, who was unhappily drowned. I haven’t heard anything of other relations.’

‘And you haven’t yet met the chap himself?’

‘Not yet. In my position, you know, one must not be precipitate. Newcomers may resent the suggestion that their spiritual needs are at all urgent. Such matters, they are apt to feel, will keep. The shooting, the plumbing, the establishing themselves in the best available society: these are commonly felt to have priority. So I bide my time. If, as I greatly hope, this Mr Povey is an active churchman, he will no doubt take an early opportunity to intimate the fact. In that event, we might get things going with a little dinner party, to which I should beg Lady Appleby and yourself to come. There would be the Bishop and the Archdeacon, naturally, since the man must be regarded as a considerable landowner. But I can promise you no positively overpowering preponderance of the cloth.’

‘That would be delightful,’ Judith said firmly, and Appleby remembered to produce a vigorous confirmatory nod. But then he recalled something else.

‘Charles Povey!’ he said. ‘But of course. The name rings a bell. One reads about him from time to time. And if what the journalists say is true, Vicar, the chances of your dinner party mayn’t be too good. He’s a tycoon, sure enough, but he goes in for managing things by remote control. One hears of extreme instances of that, doesn’t one? Millionaires who haven’t been glimpsed for years, and so on. Rather fashionable form of plutocratic arrogance or diffidence or guilt-feeling or Lord knows what. I’ve an idea your chap has been drifting that way. So perhaps he has come to Brockholes to go to earth, as it were. The name of the place sounds just right for a recluse.’

‘Nonsense!’ Judith said briskly. A certain note of hope in her husband’s voice hadn’t escaped her. ‘Badgers are sociable creatures. They live in communities. Perhaps this Mr Povey is going to set up a community. Brockholes is certainly large enough for it.’

‘Transcendental Meditation – or something of that sort?’ The Vicar, who knew that Appleby, despite much faithful reading of the lessons at matins, was as unregenerate as anybody in his parish, was quick to get in a little frivolity first. ‘A rival concern just over the hill, would you say? Prayer wheels and joss sticks going like mad all day. However, we must welcome wholesome competition. Interesting word,
Joss
. Means a Chinese idol, and comes to us from Portugal. But it’s good Latin before that – and nothing more or less than
Deus
, my dear Appleby. So one might say – from another point of view, you know – that the Blessed Rood is a joss stick. A curious thought.’

Appleby agreed that it was a curious thought. Dr Dunton’s line as a learned Peacockian clergyman, although a familiar turn during these tea-drinkings at Dream, always pleased him. He signified this by offering the Vicar another slice of cake.

‘We must put this chap Povey’s temperament to the test,’ Appleby continued. ‘He may be thoroughly genial and clubbable and convivial and all the rest of it, after all. If you feel that you can’t yourself at the moment call and leave a little tract–’

‘Really, John!’ Lady Appleby said.

‘Sir John is only quoting rather a striking poem,’ Dr Dunton said comfortably. ‘The shivering Chaplain robed in white, the Sheriff stern with gloom. But do you mean, my dear Appleby, that you’re game to call on him yourself?’

‘Why not? I ought to, come to think of it. Presumably there’s no Mrs Povey, so I can’t send Judith. And a stray patch of our ground – Judith’s ground – runs along with his. It will be a proper civility.’

‘But not while the man’s still unpacking his furniture,’ Judith said. She distrusted her husband when seeming to propose punctilious social courses.

‘Lord, yes – if it’s in a sufficiently casual way. I’ll go and shoot one of his badgers – rabbits, I mean – and then drift in to apologize. Round about eleven tomorrow morning. He can’t well do less than offer me a glass of Madeira. And then we’ll send the aged Hoobin – our sole but respectable retainer, Dunton – over with a brace of our own pheasants.’

‘We haven’t any pheasants,’ Judith said. ‘And this, as it happens, is the month of June. St Alban, St Barnabas, and Edward King and Martyr. The sad fact is, Dr Dunton, that John has too little to do. Hoobin grows more and more tyrannical, and drives him from the garden as with a fiery sword. So he must propose to go and badger Warren Hastings.’

‘Just right to badger at Brockholes,’ Appleby said brilliantly, and was gratified by a responsive chuckle from his guest. ‘And do you know what I’ll do, Dunton? I’ll say, as I leave, “By the way, we have a very good Vicar here.” That’s a perfectly proper remark. And it may set the ball rolling.’

Judith Appleby sighed, and replenished the teapot from the hot-water jug. She knew that here was a lost cause.

On the following day Appleby came home just before lunch. Whether he had in fact shot a rabbit was obscure. But he had to admit failing to meet Mr Charles Povey.

‘They told me he’d gone to town,’ he explained to Judith. ‘I wasn’t surprised. Brockholes is a place to escape from, just at the moment. The chap seems to have moved in there in a hurry, and there are still workmen doing everything under the sun. And furniture being unpacked, just as you said.’

‘What kind of furniture?’

‘What kind? Why, just the usual sort of stuff.’

‘Don’t be absurd, John. Nothing is more diagnostic than people’s furniture. And you can describe it if you want to.’

‘Perfectly true – so I can. There was a Hepplewhite tambour writing table, and an Adam sofa with absurd sphinxes, and some knife cases pretending to be funerary urns, and rather an attractive gouty stool–’

‘Being moved in? I wonder where they came from.’

‘Oh, Sotheby’s, I expect.’

‘I don’t see how you could know that.’

‘Neither do I, quite. But they had an aura of the saleroom, you might say. I’ve a feeling that this Povey is setting himself up in a new way of life. And, of course, Brockholes has been a mere barn. It would have to be furnished again from dot. Do you think it had remained untenanted in the possession of this family of Poveys?’

‘I’ve no idea. Did you manage to talk to anybody?’

‘Of course I did.’

Judith, who had finished lunch, got up, walked to a window, and surveyed the modest garden, orchard and paddock of Long Dream Manor. Everything was in admirable order. And it wasn’t really true that Hoobin declined the assistance of his employer – or of anybody else whom he could get to work for him. His nephew Solo – who must have been the son of a brother’s extreme old age – had been cunningly insinuated into something like full-time employment with the Applebys, and was at this moment to be observed, as he commonly was, resting between one labour and another. It might be calculated that Hoobin and Solo did one half of the work, and that John – assisted by sundry young Applebys when they happened to turn up – did the other. It didn’t prevent John from being sporadically restless in these years of his retirement. Nothing but time on his hands, clearly, had taken him pottering over to Brockholes Abbey.

‘Who was it?’ Judith asked.

‘That I talked to? Oh, a factotum. I can’t think of a better description. A fellow of the name of Bread.’

‘An unassuming name.’

‘He seemed aware of it. “Bread’s my name but cake’s my nature,” he said. Quite a wag.’

‘Did you feel cake
was
his nature?’

‘It’s an interesting question.’ Appleby appeared to take this problem quite seriously. ‘Nothing rich about him. But just a hint of something unexplored inside. No, more than just a hint. He described himself as Povey’s secretary. I thought it odd that a secretary called Bread should make a joke about cake. And one felt he must have made it before. Rather stale cake.’

‘Jokes all round,’ Judith said – and felt that all this endeavour to extract interest from a man called Bread was another sign that John was still restive at having been put out to grass. Not that he had been, really. He’d asked for his cards before he need have, declaring that running the Metropolitan Police had bored him – even at £14,000 a year. And now here he was, preparing to talk nonsense about some newcomers at Brockholes. ‘Was anything else odd about him?’ Judith asked patiently.

‘Well, you know, it’s part of the job of a tycoon’s secretary to get rid of people. It’s his instinct, you may say. And here was an elderly gentleman patently shoving in out of the most idle curiosity. He must have felt that – just as you do.’

‘So I do. But go on.’

‘He chatted me up. Walked me round the place, and was extremely communicative. Incidentally, he offered me that glass of Madeira.’

‘Which you politely declined.’

‘So I did.’ Appleby seemed surprised. ‘But how did you know?’

‘My dear John, all those years as a policeman have endowed you with a strong hierarchical sense. There isn’t a more orthodox Establishment character in England. You must have felt that a tycoon’s pukka secretary is perfectly entitled to offer you a drink. But you declined one.
Ergo
, you felt he was assuming the role without the proper credentials, however he was representing them. That he
wasn’t
a secretary – or not of the sort he was claiming to be. The wrong tie. Or the wrong accent.’