The Burry Man's Day (10 page)

Chapter Four

Daisy, judicial tasks accomplished the evening before and desperate to escape the castle, where Cad still continued very sombre, was all enthusiasm the next morning at breakfast. This was taken in the Great Hall at the Great Table on the newly arrived Great Chairs, since amongst all the other matters they had neglected in their childlike embracing of castle life, Buttercup and Cadwallader did not seem to have thought of a breakfast room. It was not too bad just yet; for one thing we were all good friends and a powerful note of new plaster and varnish still hung around, but I could imagine that as time went by and the Great Hall became redolent of rich dinners and cigar smoke as all dining rooms do in the end it would become insupportable to trail in to breakfast to sit at the same table with all the same bores who had driven one off to early bed the evening before.

‘We must do our very best today, Freddy,’ said Cadwallader, through a huge, choking mouthful of sausage – he always loaded his fork as though pitching hay with a rainstorm threatening – ‘to strike the right note. We’ve got to keep things perky enough to stop the whole jamboree feeling like a funeral, but at the same time we should take care not to be . . .’

‘Unseemly in our merry-making?’ I suggested. Cad brandished his knife at me.

‘Exactly! We must respond to the mood of the crowd for one thing. We don’t want to seem more morose than these good people who had known him for years. Freddy, are you listening?’ Buttercup – patently not listening – nodded hastily and assumed a rapt expression. ‘But at the same time we must not for one minute look as though we’re careless of the fact that he died, in case some near relation or bosom pal happens to notice.’

I felt suddenly rather sorry for Cadwallader. He was in a ticklish kind of a spot and his attempts to plan a route through it only made it the more obvious how hopeless it was to have him swan in and fill the role he was filling. Hugh, I am sure, would have done more or less exactly what Cad was now outlining but he would have done it without a moment’s thought and certainly without a syllable being uttered.

‘At least by the end of today we should know what happened,’ Cadwallader continued. ‘I’ve asked Inspector Cruickshank and Dr Rennick to track me down at the Fair as soon as the autopsy’s over and tell me the results.’

Daisy rolled her eyes. ‘Mightn’t that inject a bit of a note, Cad darling?’ she said. ‘Mightn’t that tip the scales just a shade towards ghoulish?’

Cadwallader’s eyes clouded with doubt, but I could not face any more strategizing and so I broke in, rather rudely, to ask Buttercup: ‘What happens when? And where is it all? Please tell me the babies are first, because I won’t enjoy a thing until I’ve got that horror out of the way.’

‘Oh, I’m declaring it open at ten, I think,’ said Buttercup. ‘I was going to ask you what I should say in my speech, Dan.’

‘Frederica, you’re not even trying!’ said Cadwallader, with the note of wounded exasperation I remembered hearing from mistresses and house matrons (for a while until they all gave up).

‘It’ll be fine, Cad darling, stop fussing,’ said Buttercup, and of course, because Daisy and I spent the next hour and a half fretting over the speech for her and making notes on little cards, it was. As she delivered it, tears were wiped but there was laughter too and when she had finished, the townspeople quite seemed to regard their coconut-shying and sack-racing as marks of respect for Robert Dudgeon, so purposefully did they make their ways to the various sideshows or the table where officials were taking entrants’ names. The fairmen started up their hurdy-gurdies, and a fiddler struck up a tune to which people immediately began to dance one of those terrifically complicated Scottish country dances.

By twelve a queue of children had begun to form at the town hall steps.

‘Such a good idea,’ said Mrs Meiklejohn, the Provost’s wife. ‘They queue to get a ticket, and then they take their ticket all the way along to McIver’s Brae and queue again to get a bag of picnic goodies and a balloon so by the time they plump down on the grass to eat it they’re nicely calmed down and well exercised to boot.’

‘Do I detect Mr Turnbull’s hand?’ I said. ‘He seems very keen on lungfuls of good fresh air and the rest of it.’

‘Lord, no,’ said Mrs Meiklejohn, with a laugh. ‘Mr Turnbull might well have them chasing around the town to get their hands on their lunch bag, but he wouldn’t approve at all of what’s inside it. Mind you, Mrs Gilver, he’s doing marvellous things up at the school. Drafting in lecturers from a college in Edinburgh, was the latest I heard, and the children are taking to it like so many ducks to water. In fact our doctor’s wife – terribly set in her ways although a wonderful friend and neighbour really – told me almost in spite of herself that she thought Mr Turnbull’s techniques were showing results already.’

The gods were smiling upon us, for it was at this fortuitous juncture that Mr Turnbull himself appeared suddenly behind Mrs Meiklejohn, with a bashful grin. Had he been half a minute earlier, it might have been awkward.

‘Spare my blushes, Mrs Meiklejohn, please,’ he said in self-satisfied tones. Mrs Meiklejohn looked at me with dancing eyes but managed not to giggle. ‘I do my best.’

We said nothing, Mrs Meiklejohn and I, gave him no encouragement, but he was clearly one of those who did not need any.

‘If I can see to it that even one child of mine stays away from the bottling hall, out of the mines and off the fishing boats,’ he said, ‘I shall count myself a success. Horticulture, Mrs Gilver. Horticulture, agriculture, arboriculture and husbandry. There is good wholesome work on the land for as many as want it.’ He waited, preening, for some response.

‘I can see why the bottling hall mightn’t be to everyone’s taste,’ I said carefully, thinking that I for one could not spend a working day amongst whisky fumes without sickening. ‘And coal mining is filthy and dangerous work to be sure. But whatever is your objection to the fishing boats? I’d have thought bobbing around on the ocean wave . . .’

‘Shale mining,’ Mrs Meiklejohn corrected me mildly. ‘It’s shale mining round here, Mrs Gilver. Not so heavy but just as beset with –’ At this Mr Turnbull interrupted her.

‘Coal mining or shale mining, there’s very little difference in the essentials. It all encourages superstition and morbidity. And fishing is worse than either. Tall tales and talismans filling their heads with nonsense.’

‘Ah,’ I said, understanding him at last. ‘Certainly, yes. If one puts one’s life at risk every day one would naturally try to be lucky.’

‘There’s nothing natural about it,’ said Mr Turnbull.

‘And the problem with the bottling hall is . . .?’ I said, although I could easily guess.

‘The demon drink,’ Mr Turnbull confirmed. Beside me, Mrs Meiklejohn was breathing heavily, trying to control her laughter. ‘But I’ll save them, Mrs Gilver. The children will pass out of my sphere as bonny and pure as they enter yours today.’

‘My
sphere?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘That’s what I came to tell you,’ said Mr Turnbull. ‘Your infants await.’

‘Oh golly!’ I said and followed him. Ahead of us at the Bellstane I could see a gathering crowd of women, each with an armful of frilled and beribboned baby. Most of these seemed to be bawling and some of the women, dressed in black, looked so near tears themselves that one could not imagine why they had not withdrawn their entry.

‘Oh well, it’s only a bit of fun, Mr Turnbull, isn’t it?’ I said in an attempt to rally myself.

‘Not really,’ he said, showing no tact whatsoever, I thought. ‘There is the prize.’ He pointed towards a handsome wooden high chair, newly painted in a cheerful pale blue and with a motif of little ducklings across it. ‘Such good practical prizes,’ he went on, with immense satisfaction, nodding towards the town crier who had been parading around all the morning with a pair of boots hanging from the top of his staff.

‘I had been wondering about those boots,’ I said.

‘They’re the prize for the borough race,’ said Mr Turnbull. ‘The race around the town boundary. A new pair of good boots is not to be sniffed at.’ I had never known a man like him for pushing wholesomeness down one’s throat until it made one choke and by this time I was ready to bet that Mr Turnbull had cold shower baths every day, he and his wife taking it in turns to pour buckets of water over each other in the garden and beat themselves with eucalyptus branches. I pictured this briefly. Perhaps not.

When we arrived at the Bellstane, what looked like a couple of hundred young women stood before us, industriously primping the curls and buffing the cheeks of babies ranging from a few months old – the lolling, useless stage – to bruising great beasts of almost two who tore at their bonnets and struggled to escape the restraining grasp. These were fearsome creatures, and I quickly decided that although I should have to show some enthusiasm for each of the brats, I was determined to make the final selection from amongst the smaller, gentler specimens. The winner, I was determined, was to be one which would not bite me as I held it up for its moment of glory.

I inquired about names and ages and trotted out a little snippet of praise or appreciation for each: ‘What a darling,’ ‘A fine strong boy,’ or, when confronted by a particularly nasty one, ‘Here’s a character, then!’ and it was easy enough to whittle out the absolutely hopeless, whose presence could only be explained by the blindness of mother-love. After that I was at a loss. I should have to shut my eyes and, so to speak, stick a pin in one, for no other option presented itself. Still, I was almost at the end of the line, my early estimate of two hundred having been panic-induced, of course: there were thirty. And only four to go. The next was quite a little one, wrapped in a gauzy shawl and held by a rather tired-looking woman in her forties.

‘Who is this?’ I asked, smiling sweetly towards the bundle. I had hit upon this phrasing after coming a cropper with the more obvious, when ‘What’s his name?’ had brought the answer ‘Susan’ and a scowl.

‘Doreen,’ said the woman, and opened the shawl a little. I peered in. Two shrewd, round blue eyes looked back at me from under a wisp of dark hair with just a glint of red in it. The baby could not have been more than six weeks old, still with the elfish look of the newborn, the look which I am sure is responsible for all those fairy tales about changelings. As her mother loosened the shawl further, a tiny fist sprang out and spread like a starfish in front of me. I bent closer and put my finger to her palm, expecting her to grasp it – my fingers had been grasped and sucked and even nibbled all along the line – but Doreen, looking past my face, sank her fingers deep into my fox fur. She was too tiny to chuckle, but she gave a small purr like a nursing cat and smiled faintly.

‘A taste for the finer things in life,’ I said to her mother, who gave a weary echo of the same faint smile, but said nothing. I had a cursory look at the rest of the creatures in the line, but my mind was made up.

‘The prize for the bonniest baby of all these very bonny babies,’ I said, ‘goes to little Doreen. Congratulations.’ Doreen’s mother beamed and nodded but all around were rumblings.

‘Wee Doreen Urquhart?’

‘She’s a poor wee scrap of a thing.’

‘She wouldnae make half of my Andrew here.’

Too late I remembered what Daisy had said about picking the fattest one or at least the one with the rosiest cheeks.

‘Yes,’ I went on, rather defensively. ‘Doreen Urquhart. There’s an enormous personality inside that little frame and, mark my words, she will grow up to be a great beauty.’ And I clapped my hands decisively, ignoring the glares.

This minor blunder of mine aside, the day seemed to be going off quite well. Cadwallader and Buttercup were circulating assiduously like a pair of diplomats at the very top of their game and from what I could tell they were managing to strike the right note. For one thing, Buttercup is such a darling close up, so chummy and unaffected, that people can’t help but take to her one-to-one; it is only when she is given a large arena that she causes affront. As for Cadwallader, he shied balls at coconuts with the best of them, but when he missed he gave a rueful shrug as though respect for the Dudgeons might have put him off his stroke. Similarly, Buttercup clapped and hurrahed at the races but handed over the prizes with a pat on the arm and a smiling sigh. The townspeople themselves, too, had that natural impulse to respect the dead which meant that some of the bawdy raucousness of the previous evening was missing; this even though the precise
manner
of respecting the dead in a Scottish village meant that any man sufficiently affected to be wearing a black tie and armband was likely to be quite seriously drunk.

So, it was not exactly decorous but it was far from the Bacchanalia that Mr Turnbull feared and I stuck it out for some considerable time. By two o’clock, however, Daisy and I began to wonder when we could decently make our way back to the motor car and retire for the day. I had purchased more cheap hatpins and sewing cases than I had housemaids to give them to, and Daisy wanted only to find a suitable small child to honour with the garish teddy bear she had won by lobbing coloured balls into goldfish bowls, and she too would be ready to go.

I craned around for Cad or Buttercup, preparing my excuses, but when I finally spotted the golden head – Cad’s real gold, not Buttercup’s April Sunrise – my heart rolled over. Inspector Cruickshank and a dapper little man I took to be Dr Rennick had drawn Cad aside in the doorway of a hairdresser’s shop under the terrace – shut up for Fair day – and the three were talking with bowed heads and solemn faces. Daisy and I made our way over.

‘Mrs Gilver, Mrs Esslemont,’ said Inspector Cruickshank. ‘Good news. Or rather as good news as possible under the circumstances. Death by natural causes and no need for an inquiry. We’ll be able to return Dudgeon’s body to Mrs Dudgeon this evening.’ Cadwallader’s expression was very hard to read.

‘What did he die of?’ I asked.

‘Heart failure,’ said the little doctor. There was something just slightly off about his manner. He held his head back and looked down his nose through his half-spectacles, rather ridiculously since even Daisy and I were taller than him by inches and Cad and the inspector positively loomed.