Half a Crown (12 page)

“But you don’t like him any better?” I asked.

“I do, actually, though not at all in a marrying way. He seemed much more human, fussing with doctors and trying to get hold of Mummy and all of that. He was really concerned about the x-ray. He didn’t leave until after I’d come round from the anesthetic. I still
don’t find him the slightest bit attractive, that beard, ugh, but he made a marvelous buffer with Mummy during all the hospital stuff.” She sighed. “It would be a terrible reason to marry someone, wouldn’t it, because I liked them better than Mummy?”

“Do you think he likes you?”

“I don’t think he has the slightest idea who I am,” Betsy said, and bit her lip the way she does when she’s afraid she might cry.

“Look, I have to go,” I said. “Uncle Carmichael’s downstairs talking to your mother. He’s taking me to Kent to see primroses and give the clock to my aunt. I’ll be back tonight, and we can have a proper chin-wag then.”

She smiled a little at the old-fashioned word. “I’m so glad you’re coming back. I was afraid your uncle would say we hadn’t taken proper care of you.”

“He did say that, but I said I wanted to come back anyway,” I said. “Don’t worry, Elizabeth, it’ll all come out all right. Just don’t let your mother know about the pearls.”

“Never mind piglets, she’d have a whole pig,” Betsy said. “But she won’t know. Have you got the cuckoo clock there?”

“Over by the door. Even though it’s silly, she’ll love it. It’s just the sort of thing that would appeal to her.”

Betsy smiled, and I picked the clock up. “See you later,” she said.

I wanted to reassure her again that everything would be all right, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to it, so I just smiled and said good-bye and went off to find Uncle Carmichael.

As the car swept along the raised autobahn past Maidstone there was a moment when all Kent spread out before them like a banquet. Carmichael always looked out for that first glimpse, when the patchwork of fields, the hedges, the round stone towers of the oasthouses, and the incredible green of the English countryside in spring came together to make a vista. He remembered the first time he saw it like that, the year the autobahn was finished. Elvira had been twelve, and she’d said if it had been an ordinary sort of road they’d have put up signs and a stopping place for people to take photographs and a little stall selling whelks and ice cream. The autobahn permitted no such lingering; it forced you on at speed in a straight line from London to Folkestone and Dover, where boats left regularly for the Continent. They were talking about building a tunnel from Folkestone to Dieppe, but Carmichael didn’t think anything would come of it. Besides, when he thought about his own escape from Dunkirk, it struck him as like digging a tunnel under the moat. Britain might be best friends with the Continent these days, but plenty of people hadn’t forgotten 1940, or 1914, or 1810 for that matter.

They needed to leave the elevated road at the next exit, and Carmichael signaled to change lanes. “I’ll be glad to be in the country
rather than just looking down at it,” Elvira said. “I saw it from on top when we came back from Paris last week. The oasthouses look like toys from the observation deck.”

“I’ll be relieved to drive a little slower,” Carmichael admitted. He didn’t often drive himself, and had found both the London traffic and the high speeds of the autobahn trying. “They didn’t even have this kind of road when I learned to drive.”

Elvira laughed. “You talk as if you’re a hundred years old, Uncle Carmichael, and you’re not even forty.”

“How do you know how old I am?”

“I asked Jack.” She giggled. “Servants always know everything.”

Carmichael couldn’t smile. Keeping his love for Jack hidden from Elvira had been a constant heartache since he took over responsibility for her. He dreaded her finding out and her affection for him turning to disgust.

They turned off the old Maidstone road down a country lane, between hedgerows of hazel and hawthorn. “Might be some primroses soon,” Carmichael said. He stole a glance at Elvira. She was eighteen; not a child any longer but nor was she quite grown up. She looked summery and fresh in her pretty straw hat. She had come to mean a lot to him, the child he would never have, the last of Royston, and her own self, so clever, so pretty, so brave—and so young and innocent. It tugged at his heart that she had needed pearls and he had not provided them, and it distressed him past endurance that she had been thrown into a cell with Ironsides and could have ended up in a slave camp in Germany. He had established the Inner Watch out of his belief that it shouldn’t happen to any innocent, but ten times, a hundred times more it shouldn’t happen to Elvira. Elvira should have sunlight and pearls and primroses and a presentation to the Queen, and he would do everything in his power to see that she had them.

He looked at her again. She was smiling out of the window at a
village with a little inn and a duck pond. How little he knew her, after all, how little he could trust her. She had grown up in Normanby’s Britain. She took fascism so much for granted that she went to a rally for a pleasant evening out. He had wanted to unburden himself to her the night before. He had started to ask why she thought he had chosen Switzerland for her finishing school and not Germany or France. But her look of complete puzzlement when he asked her stopped him. He couldn’t tell her about the Inner Watch any more than he could tell her the truth about Jack. Her world didn’t have room for such things.

“Primroses!” she cried triumphantly, as she spotted the first of the little yellow flowers in the bank of the hedge.

“Shall we pick some here?” Carmichael asked.

“No, let’s go on to Aunt Katherine’s and then pick some later, deeper in the countryside. They’ll have more chance of lasting to get home. But let’s stop here and smell them!” She was almost bouncing in her seat as Carmichael indulgently drew the car to a halt where the road widened at a white three-barred gate. As soon as the engine was off, the country quiet swelled to fill their ears. There was no sound but thrush song and the distant sound of running water.

Elvira got out of the car, disturbing the thrush for a moment with the metallic clack. She knelt beside the car and thrust her nose into the little clump of primroses growing where the hedge began again after the interruption of the gate. Carmichael followed her out but stood for a moment looking over the gate at the neat little paddock in front of them. Two white horses were munching the grass contentedly. There was a little spinney on the other side of it, oak and beech from what he could see. He wondered if there might be a fox. It looked like good hunting country. A crow in a nearby beech tree let out a series of caws, puffing itself up like a bellows for each one.

“Do smell,” Elvira said.

Obediently he bent down to the tiny yellow flowers. The light sweet scent, indistinguishable from any distance, became intoxicating once he came within a few inches.

“I kissed my love and I made him mine, the taste of his lips was honey and honey and wine,” Elvira sang, picking a little bunch of primroses.

“Honey and honey and wine?” Carmichael asked, teasingly, as he straightened up again. “Is that what they’re singing these days? Honey once isn’t enough for your generation?” It wouldn’t be long now before she’d be singing songs like that in earnest; marrying and having children. What sort of a world would it be for them to grow up in? One with camps and fear, but also with primroses and pretty girls singing in the April sunshine.

“Choruses are supposed to repeat things. Honey and wine always makes me think of the scent of primroses,” she said, turning the little bunch in her hand. “Isn’t it glorious here? I think I’d almost forgotten how beautiful England could be. The Alps were splendid, of course, breathtaking in a way that this isn’t. But this is special, even though it’s just ordinary, maybe because it is, just a field and the green of newly unfolded beech leaves, and primroses, and a stream somewhere away down in that little wood.”

“Your father felt the same about it,” Carmichael said, remembering Royston. “I always thought he was a London man, and he was, London born and bred, but he surprised me one day talking about his Kentish aunt and the primroses.” He stopped. “I don’t want to bore you. I’ve told you all this before.”

“You have,” she said, smiling. “It’s good to remember him happy.”

“He’d have been so proud of you,” Carmichael said. “If only he could see you now.”

“I’d have been a very different person if Dad had lived,” Elvira
said, leaning on the top bar of the gate and staring off into the distance, frowning a little. “I wouldn’t have had the advantages I’ve had. I wouldn’t be going to Oxford. I’d be a Cockney girl, out at work by now.”

“I’ve tried my best,” Carmichael said, awkwardly. “Your father would have known what to do, and yes, done different things for you. I did the best I could do in his absence.”

“You’ve told me how he was killed, but I’ve never been there, to Coltham. Do you think we could go there today?”

Carmichael hesitated, surprised. “The present Lord Scott, the son of old Lord Scott, lives there now. I don’t think we could just turn up in his drive. If I send an official request we could go another day. I’m sure he’d understand. But there isn’t anything to see, beyond the house, and the drive.” He hadn’t been back since the day Royston was killed. He could picture it now; the house, the roses, Royston’s body splayed out and Ogilvie bleating on about dents in the car. He shook his head a little and deliberately looked up into the blue sky where a few tiny clouds seemed to be gathering.

“No, it doesn’t matter,” Elvira said, and opened her car door again. “Let’s get on to Aunt Katherine’s.”

She was quiet for a while as they wound their way through the lanes, then as they came nearer to her aunt’s house she began to exclaim at the silly names of the villages: Monk’s Horton, Wormshill, Frinsted, Eltham.

Katherine Pendill, Royston’s mother’s sister, lived in an old stone farm cottage on the Coltham estate. It was picturesque; a single story, stone and thatch. The pump outside had seemed a quaint touch until Carmichael had realized it was all the plumbing the place had. The old lady was expecting them and flung the door open as the car drove up. “It’s like a witch’s cottage in a fairy tale,” Elvira said. “I always think that when I get here.” She jumped out of the car. “Aunt Katherine, how are you?”

“All the better for seeing you,” her aunt replied. She was in her seventies, long-widowed, white-haired, and with a long nose and chin. “My, what a big girl you are. You have a look of your father now, though you have your mother’s coloring, of course. And how are you, Inspector Carmichael?”

“I’m very well, thank you,” Carmichael said, stretching as he clambered out of the car. He did not try to correct her use of his title. He had been an inspector the first time she had met him, and he would remain an inspector forever in her mind. He rather liked it, as he had liked being an inspector.

“Come in, come in,” the old lady said. “I’ve scones ready, and I’ve saved the last pot of last year’s elderberry jam because I know how much you like it.”

Inside, the cottage was dark. There was a strong smell of baking in the air. A huge ginger cat was curled up on the best chair, and Mrs. Pendill scolded him until he jumped off and walked with offended dignity to curl up again next to the fireplace. On previous visits Elvira had rushed around examining everything; now she sat down and took a scone and jam and a cup of strong tea. Carmichael accepted the scone but couldn’t bring himself to drink the tea.

After the scone, Elvira presented the cuckoo clock, to her aunt’s delight and astonishment. It was hideous, Carmichael thought. It looked like a little wooden chalet, covered in fretwork, and the bird came out through the central door. The hands and numbers were scrolled brass, as was the key. Mrs. Pendill hung it in the pride of place over the mantelpiece, wound it, then they all waited for the cuckoo to tell them it was noon.

“Now what are you going to make of her?” Mrs. Pendill unexpectedly asked Carmichael as they waited.

“I’m sorry?” he asked.

“My great-niece. Elvira. She’s well grown now, it’s time she started a job of work, or settled down and got married. You’re not
planning to marry her yourself?” The old woman’s blue gaze was penetrating.

Elvira blushed, and Carmichael felt his own cheeks heat. “Certainly not. I think of Elvira as my adopted niece,” he said, stiffly.

“Good. I wouldn’t really hold with that. But I did wonder if that’s what you were raising her up for, the way I’ve sometimes heard about men doing. You’re not an old man, and you never have married.”

Carmichael had no idea how to answer this, so he said nothing. The cuckoo began to chime in the silence, startling them all. The ginger cat leapt up and ran outside, tail bristling. They all laughed.

“I’m coming out this summer, being presented to the Queen, Auntie,” Elvira said.

“You’ll meet the young Queen?” her aunt asked. “Well, that’s an honor.”

“Yes….” Elvira looked tentatively at Carmichael, as if for help. He shrugged. “Then afterwards I’m going to Oxford in the autumn.”

“And what will you do there?” her aunt asked.

Elvira looked surprised to be asked, as if to her Oxford was only a university and not a town. “I’ll go to college, and learn, of course.”

Mrs. Pendill sniffed. “Always a one for your books. But I thought you were finished with school? How can you go to the college? Isn’t that for men, and for people of good family?”

“Women have been going to Oxford since the last century,” Elvira said. “And you are supposed to be the child of someone who went, but Uncle Carmichael fixed that for me.”

“And how long will it take? You’re eighteen now; time to think about settling down. Switzerland and cuckoo clocks are all very well, but where’s it going to leave you when you get old?”

“If I have my degree, I can always teach. Or I might go into journalism,” Elvira said, raising her chin emphatically. “In any case, a degree is four years, and after that I intend to have a career.”