Honeybath's Haven (6 page)

So much for 1702. Slightly later generations had built on, in the same classical taste, sundry wings, pavilion, and the like, some of them free-standing except for sweeping connective colonnades, designed for the better conduct of balls and banquets or the large-scale cultivation of exotic plants. What the whole effect didn't at all suggest was the possibility of tucking away in the interior adequately congruous but necessarily miniaturized accommodation for some two score of affluent persons resolved to carry gracious living along with them to the grave. Much of the original set-up must have been gutted and rebuilt in the interest of this intrepid proposal.

Honeybath drove up, still accompanied by the inmate Gaunt, in a conveyance which had been waiting for them in the station yard. He wondered whether he would be charged for this trip in a Rolls-Royce, or whether it would prove to be on the house. They had, after all, a good deal of his money already, and it must be earning interest for somebody. It was even possible that, in an indirect way, he had contributed to the cost of Lady Munden's saline pool and Colonel Dacre's rifle-range. These were doubtless unworthy thoughts, such as well-affected inmates would scorn to entertain. Not for the first time, he felt that he had perhaps made a mistake about Hanwell Court. Had he been corrupted by the assumptions of that class of society many of whose choicest ornaments he had for some years been contributing generously-interpreted likenesses of to the walls of Burlington House? It was a sombre thought.

It was also a thought prompting Honeybath to defer for a little longer his renewed encounter with the management of the place. So on descending from the Rolls he murmured to Mr Gaunt that he was a little early for the appointment he had made, and that he proposed to fill in the time by taking a short stroll in the grounds. Whereupon Mr Gaunt, having expressed the hope of seeing his new acquaintance in permanent residence very soon, departed into the house, followed by the chauffeur lugging the weighty suitcase.

Perhaps because it was a remarkably fine spring day, the precincts and policies of Hanwell were less dispeopled than on the occasion of Honeybath's previous visit. In the first of the formal gardens immediately below the terrace a lady in the soft and flowing garments held to become old age was snipping expertly at some sort of small flowering shrub. She was kind enough to pause in this occupation and bow to Honeybath as he went past. Honeybath swept off his hat in proper form. It was probably the convention that the inmates acknowledged one another's existence upon every fleeting encounter, and the lady had at once observed that he was not the sort of man who comes in to wind the clocks. At the corner of the terrace itself another elderly lady was seated in a comfortable chair, engaged in making a watercolour sketch of a spray of early roses trained against the mellow masonry of the house. Salutations were again exchanged, and Honeybath wondered whether it would be proper for him to pause and offer some quasi-professional comment on the work of art in hand. He decided that this would be a liberty, and might even involve him in having to explain that the lady's impromptu interlocutor was nothing less than a Royal Academician. So he walked on. It seemed to be worth noting, he told himself, that both these appropriately occupied females seemed entirely sane. But as neither of them had uttered, there could be no positive certainty on the point.

He descended to a lawn which had been laid out as that sort of putting green which has a dozen holes scattered over it, each marked by a little tin flag. It was the kind of recreational resource which one frequently remarks in public parks. A spare, grey-haired man of military bearing was involved with it. Honeybath wondered whether this might be Colonel Dacre, more pacifically employed than was his wont. His bearing was conventional but his behaviour was a little out-of-the-way; he was moving from hole to hole, removing each little flag in turn, kneeling down, and peering into the small cavity thus revealed. From this mysterious activity he abruptly desisted on marking Honeybath's approach.

‘Good morning to you,' he said commandingly. ‘Are you the man from the Patent Office?'

‘No, sir, I am not.' Honeybath was considerably surprised by this unexpected question. ‘I have no connection whatever with such an institution.'

‘Ah! Well, I wrote to the Patent Office more than a week ago, and have been expecting them to send a fellow down.'

‘Indeed, sir. I fear the only sort of fellow I am is an Honorary Fellow of my old Cambridge college.' Honeybath made this slightly unsuitable communication with some asperity. To be classed as a fellow was much the same thing as being expected to wind clocks. ‘I regret,' he added, ‘cheating your expectation in the matter.'

‘It may be just as well. I am not sure that an application to the Patent Office hasn't been a mistake at this stage. I understand them to guarantee confidentiality, but one can never be certain of these things nowadays. There is a lot one can never be certain of. The increased use of plastics, for example. You know how these holes are constructed?'

‘I can't say that I do.'

‘The hole is punched out with the kind of affair one uses to plant daffodils and so forth. Then a small receptacle is inserted, the lip of which lies just below the level of the turf. It has to be fairly heavy, in order that a socket in its base may be capable of supporting the flag. You follow me?'

‘Perfectly, sir.'

‘I have taken it for granted, therefore, that these receptacles are invariably made of iron or steel. But the horrid thought has occurred to me that plastics may be coming in. I am relieved to find that it is not so. If, that is to say, one may go by the layout here. Plastic, you must understand, would entirely defeat my design. Observe this ball.' The military man suddenly held up a golf-ball. ‘It is nothing less, sir, than a guided missile. It embodies a homing device. Or rather, it will shortly do so. There are one or two technical hitches, so far. The space available being so small, I am coming to think the mechanism will have to be transistorized. But the principle will be clear to you. Once you have reached the green, you may strike the ball with your putter pretty well in any direction you like. It will home on the hole, attracted by the only metallic object within its range, and simply drop into place.'

‘I see.' Honeybath felt that he saw a good deal. He was in the presence of the Mad Scientist of popular fiction. ‘Might it not be possible so to refine upon your device that success could infallibly beachieved straight from the tee? Golf has always seemed to me rather a slow affair. You are to be congratulated, sir, on an invention that will so notably speed up the game.'

‘Precisely. But, of course, there are other possibilities.' The features of the inventor of the transistorized golf-ball suddenly transformed themselves into an expression of extreme cunning. ‘Employed with restraint and discretion, my device would pretty well put the Open Championship within the grasp of any moderately competent player. It is conceivable that I may myself be that personage. The idea has attracted me since boyhood.'

Honeybath thought that this was probably true. He also thought that he had handled a potentially difficult situation with tolerable address. But this didn't mean that he wanted to spend his declining years humouring lunatics. If one was prepared to do that one could get paid for it as some sort of keeper or attendant in a madhouse. He wasn't yet clear that Hanwell Court was entirely, or even preponderantly, such a receptacle. It certainly sheltered a number of persons of markedly idiosyncratic tastes. But there was nothing very wrong with that. In the present age, when nearly everybody was being dismally pulped into a replica of everybody else, an institution standing up for oddity had much to commend it. Honeybath (who believed himself to be a stoutly unconventional type) wasn't going to come to premature conclusions. He bade the talented inventor of the homing golf-ball a cordial farewell, and walked on.

There was much that had to be judged entirely agreeable. The gardens were maintained in admirable order, and were so extensive and at the same time so variously secluded that any number of strollers could suppose themselves to be in solitary possession of the entire terrain. One could imagine the park to be one's own as well – and the house itself, for that matter, which every now and then appeared in one stately aspect or another as the various vistas on it opened up. This fictitious sense of ownership, although patently absurd, was surely innocent, and if one could pay for it among other amenities – well, why not? One can't extract such a feel from a ‘luxury' hotel, and here it was on tap for approximately the same money.

Honeybath, although certain that he wouldn't care to live permanently in this childish state of mind, found it amusing to luxuriate in for a few moments now. He was moving down the central path in an area somewhat formally conceived in the Italian taste, with high, square-clipped hedges on either hand, and here and there niches carved out of the foliage and framing miscellaneous stone urns, coffers, and blurred and eroded pieces of garden statuary. The vista, which was comparatively short, was closed by a well-proportioned little structure consisting of a circle of Ionic columns and a low domed roof. This frankly useless object, which would scarcely have afforded shade for a single garden chair, struck Honeybath as wholly pleasing, and he determined to walk on and round it before returning to the house. He had moved on a few yards, and was reflecting again on the ease with which solitude could be gained here, when he became aware that he wasn't in solitude after all. A figure had emerged from the scant shelter of the temple (or whatever it was conceived to be) and was now moving towards him. It was a man who could be distinguished as in middle age; and that he was attired with a somewhat obtrusive appropriateness to his rural situation could be inferred from his wearing (prematurely, as the season went) an immaculate Panama hat. Honeybath noted this, was conscious of the man hesitating for a moment, and then saw that he was again contemplating nothing but the natural scene – or the natural scene as straightened out, lopped, and elegantly adorned by human agency. The man in the Panama hat had vanished.

Since there appeared to be only unbroken and impenetrable walls of greenery on either hand between the temple and the spot where Honeybath stood, this was distinctly perplexing. The explanation appeared, however, when he had moved on a further dozen yards and discovered a narrow aperture in the hedge, undetectable until one was hard upon it. The man with the hat must have dodged quite rapidly through this. It wasn't Honeybath's business to follow and investigate. Nevertheless, he did so – merely because there lurked in him an impulse of juvenile curiosity which was always liable to bob up on sudden challenge. He walked through the gap, and confronted another hedge. He turned to his right, and yet a further hedge was before him; he turned again, and immediately realized what he had stumbled upon; he was in a cunningly designed and planted maze of a kind the best-known example of which in England is to be found at Hampton Court.

To seem to pursue a perfect stranger into the heart of such a contraption was highly unbecoming, and Honeybath at once endeavoured to beat a retreat. Unfortunately he moved in too rapid and unconsidered a fashion, with the result that he lost his bearings at the start, and was instantly as disorientated as if he were already halfway through the labyrinth. He took yet another turn, and found himself directly at gaze with the man in the Panama.

The situation was perhaps a little awkward, but ought not to have been actually embarrassing. Yet it was just that. For the man's attitude and expression rendered an impression of apprehensiveness and indeed alarm. And Honeybath had just registered this disconcerting fact when the man dodged aside – it was the only word for it – and once more vanished.

Honeybath wondered if the situation would be improved were he to call out a polite good morning. He had to judge that it would not. That he had actually pursued this inoffensive person into the maze was a fact impossible to disguise. He must simply continue his effort to emerge from the wretched thing, and trust that chance would not in the process produce a renewal of the rencounter.

But it may be called the general principle of a maze that it is easier to get in than to get out. Honeybath turned hither and thither, but to no avail. It was a curiously upsetting experience. He began to feel a little like a rat under the invisible dispassionate gaze of some member of the investigating classes – or if not this, at least a lobster in a pot. He had to repress an irrational impulse to tear or claw himself out of the place in a fashion that would have been destructive to the whole device, ruinous to his attire, and even scarifying to his person. He had just broken into a blundering run, as if persuaded that mere impetus would solve his problem, when a voice addressed him as from the heavens above. He halted, looked upwards, and became aware of a species of gazebo erected just beyond the perimeter of the maze. Only its upper platform was visible, and on this the head and shoulders of the man addressing him.

‘Easy, sir!' this person said soothingly and indulgently. As he spoke he respectfully removed a cloth cap, a gesture from which Honeybath inferred that this Ariadne-figure, coming to the rescue, as it were, of her beloved Theseus, was in fact a gardener. ‘Would you be wanting still to get to the centre?' this person went on, when apparently persuaded that Honeybath was again reasonably composed. ‘There's a cage with some very pretty parakeets – very pretty indeed, and well worth a visit.'

‘Confound your parakeets!' Honeybath said, not very civilly. ‘I want to get out.'

‘Then just turn round, sir, and do as I say.' The man on the gazebo sounded a shade hurt in his mind. ‘You're no distance from the entrance, no distance at all. Straight on until you can turn right, sir. That's it. Go on until you can turn left. A nice morning for a stroll, wouldn't you say? That's it! Left again now, and you might say freedom is before you.'