Kiss Kiss (7 page)

      
From now on, every Sunday, he was going to be a nice old
parson spending his holiday travelling around on a labour of
love for the “Society,” compiling an inventory of the treasures
that lay hidden in the country homes of England. And who in
the world was going to kick him out when they heard that one?
      
Nobody.
      
And then, once he was inside, if he happened to spot something
he really wanted, well—he knew a hundred different
ways of dealing with that.
      
Rather to Mr Boggis’s surprise, the scheme worked. In fact,
the friendliness with which he was received in one house after
another through the countryside was, in the beginning, quite
embarrassing, even to him. A slice of cold pie, a glass of port,
a cup of tea, a basket of plums, even a full sit-down Sunday
dinner with the family, such things were constantly being
pressed upon him. Sooner or later, of course, there had been
some bad moments and a number of unpleasant incidents, but
then nine years is more than four hundred Sundays, and that
adds up to a great quantity of houses visited. All in all, it had
been an interesting, exciting, and lucrative business.
      
And now it was another Sunday and Mr Boggis was operating
in the county of Buckinghamshire, in one of the most
northerly squares on his map, about ten miles from Oxford,
and as he drove down the hill and headed for his first house,
the dilapidated Queen Anne, he began to get the feeling that
this was going to be one of his lucky days.
      
He parked the car about a hundred yards from the gates
and got out to walk the rest of the way. He never liked people
to see his car until after a deal was completed. A dear old
clergyman and a large station-wagon somehow never seemed
quite right together. Also the short walk gave him time to
examine the property closely from the outside and to assume
the mood most likely to be suitable for the occasion.
      
Mr Boggis strode briskly up the drive. He was a small fat-legged
man with a belly. The face was round and rosy, quite
perfect for the part, and the two large brown eyes that bulged
out at you from this rosy face gave an impression of gentle
imbecility. He was dressed in a black suit with the usual
parson’s dog-collar round his neck, and on his head a soft
black hat. He carried an old oak walking-stick which lent him,
in his opinion, a rather rustic easy-going air.
      
He approached the front door and rang the bell. He heard
the sound of footsteps in the hall and the door opened and
suddenly there stood before him, or rather above him, a
gigantic woman dressed in riding-breeches. Even through the
smoke of her cigarette he could smell the powerful odour of
stables and horse manure that clung about her.
      
“Yes?” she asked, looking at him suspiciously. “What is it
you want?”
      
Mr Boggis, who half expected her to whinny any moment,
raised his hat, made a little bow, and handed her his card. “I
do apologise for bothering you,” he said, and then he waited,
watching her face as she read the message.
      
“I don’t understand,” she said, handing back the card. “What
is it you want?”
      
Mr Boggis explained about the Society for the Preservation
of Rare Furniture.
      
“This wouldn’t by any chance be something to do with the
Socialist Party?” she asked, staring at him fiercely from under
a pair of pale bushy brows.
      
From then on, it was easy. A Tory in riding-breeches, male
or female, was always a sitting duck for Mr Boggis. He spent
two minutes delivering an impassioned eulogy on the extreme
Right Wing of the Conservative Party, then two more
denouncing the Socialists. As a clincher, he made particular
reference to the Bill that the Socialists had once introduced
for the abolition of bloodsports in the country, and went on
to inform his listener that his idea of heaven—“though you
better not tell the bishop, my dear”—was a place where one
could hunt the fox, the stag, and the hare with large packs of
tireless hounds from morn till night every day of the week,
including Sundays.
      
Watching her as he spoke, he could see the magic beginning
to do its work. The woman was grinning now, showing Mr
Boggis a set of enormous, slightly yellow teeth. “Madam,” he
cried, “I beg of you, please don’t get me started on Socialism.”
At that point, she let out a great guffaw of laughter, raised an
enormous red hand, and slapped him so hard on the shoulder
that he nearly went over.
      
“Come in!” she shouted. “I don’t know what the hell you
want, but come on in!”
      
Unfortunately, and rather surprisingly, there was nothing
of any value in the whole house, and Mr Boggis, who never
wasted time on barren territory, soon made his excuses and
took his leave. The whole visit had taken less than fifteen
minutes, and that, he told himself as he climbed back into his
car and started off for the next place, was exactly as it should be.
      
From now on, it was all farmhouses, and the nearest was
about half a mile up the road. It was a large half-timbered
brick building of considerable age, and there was a magnificent
pear tree still in blossom covering almost the whole of the
south wall.
      
Mr Boggis knocked on the door. He waited, but no one
came. He knocked again, but still there was no answer, so he
wandered around the back to look for the farmer among the
cowsheds. There was no one there either. He guessed that
they must all still be in church, so he began peering in the
windows to see if he could spot anything interesting. There
was nothing in the dining-room. Nothing in the library either.
He tried the next window, the living-room, and there, right
under his nose, in the little alcove that the window made, he
saw a beautiful thing, a semicircular card-table in mahogany,
richly veneered, and in the style of Hepplewhite, built around
1780.
      
“Ah-ha,” he said aloud, pressing his face hard against glass.
“Well done, Boggis.”
      
But that was not all. There was a chair there as well, a
single chair, and if he were not mistaken it was of an even
finer quality than the table. Another Hepplewhite, wasn’t it?
And oh, what a beauty! The lattices on the back were finely
carved with the honeysuckle, the husk, and the paterae, the
caning on the seat was original, the legs were very gracefully
turned and the two back ones had that peculiar outward splay
that meant so much. It was an exquisite chair. “Before this day
is done,” Mr Boggis said softly, “I shall have the pleasure of
sitting down upon that lovely seat.” He never bought a chair
without doing this. It was a favourite test of his, and it was
always an intriguing sight to see him lowering himself delicately
into the seat, waiting for the “give,” expertly gauging
the precise but infinitesimal degree of shrinkage that the years
had caused in the mortice and dovetail joints.
      
But there was no hurry, he told himself. He would return
here later. He had the whole afternoon before him.
      
The next farm was situated some way back in the fields,
and in order to keep his car out of sight, Mr Boggis had to
leave it on the road and walk about six hundred yards along a
straight track that led directly into the back yard of the
farmhouse. This place, he noticed as he approached, was a good
deal smaller than the last, and he didn’t hold out much hope
for it. It looked rambling and dirty, and some of the sheds
were clearly in bad repair.
      
There were three men standing in a close group in a corner
of the yard, and one of them had two large black greyhounds
with him, on leashes. When the men caught sight of Mr
Boggis walking forward in his black suit and parson’s collar,
they stopped talking and seemed suddenly to stiffen and freeze,
becoming absolutely still, motionless, three faces turned
towards him, watching him suspiciously as he approached.
      
The oldest of the three was a stumpy man with a wide frog
mouth and small shifty eyes, and although Mr Boggis didn’t
know it, his name was Rummins and he was the owner of the
farm.
      
The tall youth beside him, who appeared to have something
wrong with one eye, was Bert, the son of Rummins.
      
The shortish flat-faced man with a narrow corrugated brow
and immensely broad shoulders was Claud. Claud had dropped
in on Rummins in the hope of getting a piece of pork or ham
out of him from the pig that had been killed the day before.
Claud knew about the killing—the noise of it had carried far
across the fields—and he also knew that a man should have a
government permit to do that sort of thing, and that Rummins
didn’t have one.
      
“Good afternoon,” Mr Boggis said. “Isn’t it a lovely day?”
      
None of the three men moved. At that moment they were
all thinking precisely the same thing—that somehow or other
this clergyman, who was certainly not the local fellow, had
been sent to poke his nose into their business and to report
what he found to the government.
      
“What beautiful dogs,” Mr Boggis said. “I must say I’ve never
been greyhound-racing myself, but they tell me it’s a fascinating
sport.”
      
Again the silence, and Mr Boggis glanced quickly from
Rummins to Bert, then to Claud, then back again to Rummins,
and he noticed that each of them had the same peculiar
expression on his face, something between a jeer and a challenge,
with a contemptuous curl to the mouth and a sneer around
the nose.
      
“Might I enquire if you are the owner?” Mr Boggis asked,
undaunted, addressing himself to Rummins.
      
“What is it you want?”
      
“I do apologise for troubling you, especially on a Sunday.”
      
Mr Boggis offered his card and Rummins took it and held
it up close to his face. The other two didn’t move, but their
eyes swivelled over to one side, trying to see.
      
“And what exactly might you be wanting?” Rummins asked.
      
For the second time that morning, Mr Boggis explained at
some length the aims and ideals of the Society for the Preservation
of Rare Furniture.
      
“We don’t have any,” Rummins told him when it was over.
“You’re wasting your time.”
      
“Now, just a minute, sir,” Mr Boggis said, raising a finger.
“The last man who said that to me was an old farmer down in
Sussex, and when he finally let me into his house, d’you know
what I found? A dirty-looking old chair in the corner of the
kitchen, and it turned out to be worth
four hundred pounds
!.
I showed him how to sell it, and he bought himself a new
tractor with the money.”
      
“What on earth are you talking about?” Claud said. “There
ain’t no chair in the world worth four hundred pound.”
      
“Excuse me,” Mr Boggis answered primly, “but there are
plenty of chairs in England worth more than twice that figure.
And you know where they are? They’re tucked away in the
farms and cottages all over the country, with the owners
using them as steps and ladders and standing on them with
hobnailed boots to reach a pot of jam out of the top cupboard
or to hang a picture. This is the truth I’m telling you, my
friends.”
      
Rummins shifted uneasily on his feet. “You mean to say all
you want to do is go inside and stand there in the middle of
the room and look around?”
      
“Exactly,” Mr Boggis said. He was at last beginning to sense
what the trouble might be. “I don’t want to pry into your
cupboards or into your larder. I just want to look at the
furniture to see if you happen to have any treasures here, and
then I can write about them in our Society magazine.”
      
“You know what I think?” Rummins said, fixing him with
his small wicked eyes. “I think you’re after buying the
stuff yourself. Why else would you be going to all this
trouble?”
      
“Oh, dear me. I only wish I had the money. Of course, if I
saw something that I took a great fancy to, and it wasn’t
beyond my means, I might be tempted to make an offer. But
alas, that rarely happens.”
      
“Well,” Rummins said, “I don’t suppose there’s any harm in
your taking a look around if that’s all you want.” He led the
way across the yard to the back door of the farmhouse, and
Mr Boggis followed him; so did the son, Bert, and Claud with
his two dogs. They went through the kitchen, where the only
furniture was a cheap deal table with a dead chicken lying on
it, and they emerged into a fairly large, exceedingly filthy
living-room.
      
And there it was! Mr Boggis saw it at once, and he stopped
dead in his tracks and gave a little shrill gasp of shock. Then
he stood there for five, ten, fifteen seconds at least, staring
like an idiot, unable to believe, not daring to believe what he
saw before him. It
couldn’t
be true, not possibly! But the
longer he stared, the more true it began to seem. After all,
there it was standing against the wall right in front of him,
as real and as solid as the house itself. And who in the world
could possibly make a mistake about a thing like that?
Admittedly it was painted white, but that made not the
slightest difference. Some idiot had done that. The paint could
easily be stripped off. But good God! Just look at it! And in
a place like this!
      
At this point, Mr Boggis became aware of the three men,
Rummins, Bert, and Claud, standing together in a group over
by the fireplace, watching him intently. They had seen him
stop and gasp and stare, and they must have seen his face
turning red, or maybe it was white, but in any event they had seen
enough to spoil the whole goddamn business if he didn’t do
something about it quick. In a flash, Mr Boggis clapped one
hand over his heart, staggered to the nearest chair, and
collapsed into it, breathing heavily.
      
“What’s the matter with you?” Claud asked.
      
“It’s nothing,” he gasped. “I’ll be all right in a minute. Please—a
glass of water. It’s my heart.”
      
Bert fetched him the water, handed it to him, and stayed
close beside him, staring down at him with a fatuous leer on
his face.