Sleep and His Brother (16 page)

“Yes, they do, usually—sometimes it's the only thing that will make them give evidence. Rue doesn't just dislike the building because it's old and non-functional?”

“That's what he
says
, but … Uncle Pibble, you're a beast. Why do you want to meet Granny? She's an acquired taste, you realize?”

“Well, I
am
interested in what it was like here fifty years ago, but really I just want to see what she's
like
. Idle curiosity. I wouldn't have had the nerve to ask if I hadn't still been bit tight on Mr. Thanatos' champagne.”

“What's
he
like?”

Pibble tried to give a brief geography of that vast, intricate and largely unexplored continent, all on the strength of his own brief visit.

“I liked him,” he concluded. “You must have had a big park.”

“Here we are, you poor old man.”

She swung him into a drive. The Dower House had only one spire, but there was still enough light for Pibble to see that the rest of it could serve for a sample of the main building. The gawky intransigence of its convoluted bulls-blood brick gave it an unlikely dignity in the context of the trivial repetitions of the rest of the street.

The hall reeked of damp, hairy dogs. A radio was blaring a dialect account of a shepherd's life in the thirties, with the volume turned up so far that the cheap loudspeaker jarred on every other syllable. Doll put her palms to her ears and ran at the noise as though it were milk boiling over on the stove. It stopped, and a sharp old voice said, “I wasn't asleep, darling.”

As Pibble hesitated into the room; terriers foamed snarling round his ankles until Doll took them by the collars, tossed them out, and slammed the door. Then she bent over an armchair and kissed the fungus-coloured cheek. The old lady dragged a tapestry-work reticule from under the rugs on her knees, fumbled in it with impatient fingers, and fished out a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, which she held up to her eyes Without bothering to open the ear pieces. Through-crannies of lens she peered briefly at Pibble, then prodded the spectacles back into her bag.

“He won't last you long, darling,” she said.

“He doesn't have to, darling,” said Doll as she drew the curtains and switched on more lights. “I brought him for you. He knows all about murder and rape and things like that, so I thought you could have a nice bloodthirsty talk together. His name is James Pibble.”

Lady Sospice cocked her head.

“Wife dresses in pink?” she said.

“Usually,” said Pibble.

“Got you now,” said Lady Sospice. “I told Posey Jones to have you in to find out why that Armenian was flooding the place with money.”

“Doctor Silver, you mean?”

“My dear man! He's not got a penny, and whatever he is he isn't an Armenian.”

“Oh, Mr. Thanatos. I had lunch with him today. I got the impression that he is genuinely interested in the children's, er, mental powers. He isn't spending a lot by his standards.”

Lady Sospice threw her head sideways and up, like one of her own terriers, and sniffed. Doll had left the room through another door and was making kitcheny noises beyond.

“He's up to something,” said the old lady. “No Armenian ever gave a penny away without a reason. You do your duty and find out what, Mr. Pobble.”

“I gather he now, well, almost owns the place”

“It's a scandal! But he's not been as clever as he thinks. He can't touch the house, because it's a condition of the trust that the children live there, and he can't touch the children because Posey Jones is their legal guardian.”

“I didn't realize that,” said Pibble. “It's not a common arrangement.”

“My husband insisted on it. Do you think, Mr. Pobble, that we gave away that
beautiful
house—simply gave it away—in order that this Armenian should steal it?”

Pibble thought of the capital that must have been realized on the thousand villas that now obliterated the deer park. “I wonder what he wants it for,” he said.

“He wants it because it is beautiful,” said Lady Sospice with a definitive nod. “That type of person has never known what real beauty is. Naturally he is envious.”

“It must have been, er, even more beautiful before all this building was done.”

Rings sparkled as Lady Sospice threw up her mottled hands.

“My dear man, it was a dream. These lovely hills, all spoilt now. I could look out of my bedroom window and not see it tree my husband didn't own. But it was a responsibility, a dreadful responsibility. So close to London, you know. People were always breaking in and wandering wherever they wanted as if the land didn't belong to anyone. It was not so had when I was a gel—I married my cousin, you know, so I knew the house then. The village youths could be a nuisance, but they were all our tenants so we knew what to do with the tiresome families. But when this ghastly disease—it is like a disease, don't you agree? a friend of mine used to write me long letters from the leper colony where she worked, poor silly thing—when this disease spread over the fields and there were
people
all round us, people we didn't know and couldn't control, though my husband­ was a magistrate until he died—well, they used to walk right into the garden, to say nothing of letting their mongrels chase the deer, and they could be most rude when one went to turn them off.”

Pibble nodded sympathetically, like a priest hearing a penitent confess to a sin which he didn't know existed. He thought it curious that the smaller but similar pretensions of Mrs. Dixon-Jones, that good woman, were still almost unbearable, while the Napoleonic snobbery of this old bag had become an acceptable aberration. It didn't matter any more, it was make-believe, an exercise in the historical imagination. But Posey Jones could still hurt “dear Mary.”

“Why did you choose cathypnics?” he asked.

Again the rings flashed in a gesture of amused amazement.

“Oh, dear,
I
didn't choose that or anything else while my husband was alive. His favourite gamekeeper, a man called McNair, had a child with the disease.”

“Shall I tell him, or will you?” said Doll, walking in with a three-tier cake stand populated with little iced fancy cakes.

“I don't know what you mean, darling,” said Lady Sospice, and effectively gagged herself by snatching a pink cake and stuffing half of it between her gums.

“Mrs. McNair had her baby in l901,” said Doll. “Grandfather had sent McNair away to fight the Boer War two years before, and he was still away. Grandfather took a particular interest in the child, and brought specialists down when it became obvious that there was something wrong with its health. One of them discovered cathypny, as he'd seen another child with it, and so grandfather started a home for cathypnics as a sort of hobby; at first I think he only wanted to be guardian of the McNair boy, so he made himself secretary and put that in as a condition of the trust, but as the others began to arrive he took just as much interest in them. Anyway, that's why Posey is their guardian now, and that's …”

“I expect Mr. Pobble would prefer
Indian
tea,” said Lady Sospice through crumbs. “Is there any in the cupboard?”

“No. Will you have Granny's dishwash or my Nescafé Uncle Pibble?”

“Tea, please.”

It came in a silver teapot, as of yore; but alas no spirit lamp burned blue under a silver kettle on bowed legs. Lady Sospice poured thick cream into hers, added five spoons of sugar stirred, and at last sucked at the brew with hissing pleasure.

“I've seen Granny take sugar with all five courses of a meal,” said Doll.

“Nonsense!” snapped the old lady.

“Soup, peas, pudding, cream cheese, and coffee.”

“Coffee's not a course, darling. I don't think I've ever taken sugar with fish. I don't count kedgeree, because that would be breakfast.”

She was obviously flattered by talk about her sweet tooth, as though it were the last remaining vestige of many prowesses. Pibble­ looked out of the corner of his eyes at Doll, who was sitting­ with her legs twisted under her at the back of a large, lopsided armchair. The half-curled position, her plump smile, and the way her whole body seemed tense with the pleasure of its own existence­, made her look as if she were about to purr aloud. Her eyes were brown and bright—not, green, and no trace of a ring. But she wore another kind of ring on her ring finger; Rue Kelly could never have afforded that, but the old lady wore several of the same calibre. Doll's father had evidently been a sad ass, a tragic Wooster; the original illegitimate McNair must have received the cathypnic gene from both his parents—Hey! Doll's grandfather and Lady Sospice were first cousins! No, that didn't mean anything­—cousins­ only share one set of grandparents, so he could have got it from the other side, and been one of the males in whom it hadn't surfaced. But there was a fifty-fifty chance that Doll herself carried­ the Lord Almighty's idea of a good joke. So Rue would never marry her, not though she supplied herself with fifty engagement rings. He saw the emeralds blaze as she reached down to finger a little scar on the taut knee, and then sensed the silence in the room. Was it his turn to say something new already?

“I met Mr. Costain this morning,” he said. “He was photographing the mausoleum in the wood. He was very enthusiastic about its brickwork.”

“I don't think I've met the gentleman,” said Lady Sospice.

“He's secretary of the South London Preservation Society. He's been helping the local preservation people—the ones who you said could look through the Sospice papers.”

“Ah, those little people. I meant to tell you, Dorothy darling, that I do not wish to see them any more. They are becoming a nuisance.”

She gnawed at a green cake with some emphasis, but Doll leaned forward in her chair and plucked it from the old hand and held it just out of her reach. It was a game Pibble watched with fascination over the rim of his piping cup. Lady Sospice was a wicked troublemaker—trouble being excitement, the last sea wall against the rising boredoms of great age—and Doll was expert at playing her around so that she did no harm. The relationship was strangely like marriage; in fact Pibble wondered whether the one had been, or the other would be, so happily mated ever.

“You're stuck with them now, darling,” said Doll, “and you know it. You brought them in to tease poor Posey, and …”

“I cannot understand why they refused to make you secretary,” said Lady Sospice, driving suddenly crosscourt.

“Because I was eight when the job was last vacant.”

“They ought to have kept it for you.”

Doll handed the cake back.

“No, thanks,” she said. “I have more to do with my life than becoming obsessed with dormice.”

“Your grandfather wouldn't have liked to hear you call them that, darling.”

“It suits them so well—don't you think so, Uncle Pibble?”

“In a way. But it's a symbol for not having to think of them as people, individuals. I'd have thought that might be dangerous.”

“Just what my husband used to say,” said Lady Sospice. “‘They are not pets,' he was always saying. But then he was always much too clever for me, and much, much too good.”

She lifted a tiny lace handkerchief as if to wipe away a tear that had quivered into her eye at the memory of the dead baron's brains and virtue, but used it to brush a large blob of green icing from the corner of her chin. The blob fell to the carpet, and Pibble bent for it.

“Don't bother,” said Doll. She bounced up and opened the door through which they had first come, and the terriers streamed in. The blob vanished on a thin pink tongue, and Lady Sospice began to cut three more cakes into smaller cubes, her old, blotched, mauve-veined hand quivering wildly before each stroke and then forcing the knife down with sudden precision. Pibble was surprised to find, when the dogs had lined up for their sugary orgy, that there were only three of them. Lady Sospice fed them in turn, brusquely, as if she were giving them medicine.

It was a soothing scene, a break from the scurryings of the day. Pibble sipped carefully at his sherry-coloured smoke-and-hay brew and thought how elusive even the immediate past could be. It had been a day like a battle scene in a low-budget film whose director has tried to conceal the smallness of his armies and the paperiness of his stockades behind billowing cannon smoke and close-ups of horses' hoofs. Gorton was no more than a loom of darkness in the mist, if he was there at all. Mr. Thanatos was a huge figure, certainly, but if you could see him from the side perhaps you would find that he was an inch thick, flat, propped by rough balks. And the most impressive experience of all, the bush telegraph between the children's minds, was also the most airy-fairy. Again, he found, he was half sure that he must have kidded himself into showing Marilyn coin and knife, button and nut, before she had made her choice. And if Thanassi was insubstantial, Ram Silver was more so. The
real
ones were the ones like Mrs.Dixon-Jones, and Rue Kelly, and this titled harridan. You couldn't imagine a flicker of thought passing between mind and mind in this room, not though Gorton himself stalked in.

“Tell us about something nasty,” said Doll. “Not you-know-who, but something that happened ages ago, with all the characters dead.”

“High life or low life?” said Pibble.

“Gran?”

“High life, please,” said Lady Sospice primly, as if she were asking for another plate of cakes. “And I hope you will speak charitably of anybody I might know. I remember the dear archdeacon once …”

She launched into an uncappable story about the dear archdeacon's sister and the precentor, which, she claimed, had caused a considerable rearrangement of the promotion ladder to the see of Canterbury “because, of course, that's why he went out to Sumatra and that other man became archbishop. And I believe that he would have been considerably more understanding of that poor weak boy's difficulties than Archbishop Thing was, and then there would have been no abdication and this tiresome war would not have happened at all.”