What Happened at Hazelwood? (11 page)

Bevis’ voice interrupted angrily. ‘Particularly what, damn you?’

For a moment Hippias hesitated. ‘Particularly if his idea of earning a living consists of going after the village wenches with a paintbrush.’ Again the horrid bellow blew over me. ‘A paintbrush, heaven save the mark! When I was a lad–’

‘When you were a lad,’ said Bevis, ‘there were some nasty young fellows about.’

All this was at least spirited, and I had a momentary hope that the two small, florid dragons would actually go for each other’s throats. But Hippias merely tilted himself a little further back on his shooting-stick and raised an admonitory and chronically unsteady finger. ‘Stick to the bally point, Bevis, my boy,’ he said. ‘And just try to consider what the result is going to be. Tick over the family one by one and make sure you know just how it will affect each of us.’

‘A most intolerable scandal!’ Bevis was evidently both alarmed and furious. ‘And in its origins, confound you all, entirely colonial. I heartily wish your beastly continent off the map. It has only been there since the time of Captain Cook and could very easily be spared.’

This stupid rudeness, it occurred to me, was just the sort of thing into which the spuriously decorous Bevis might be expected to decline. But it didn’t worry Hippias. ‘No doubt it’s a new country,’ he said. ‘Place where blood goes blue astonishingly quick. Fellow is no end of a swell if he can produce a great-grandfather in the honourable estate of an apothecary or attorney in Huddersfield or Hull.’ And Hippias guffawed with what appeared to be quite genuine merriment at this witticism. ‘Not that this is at all to the point – not to the point at all.’

‘I was simply saying,’ said Bevis, ‘that in Australia things of that sort have their place, no doubt. But you really can’t bring them over here.’

‘I didn’t.’ Hippias was emphatic. ‘All I brought was the little matter of Dismal Swamp. Do me the justice to see that, my dear fellow-me-lad. But when you ask me to hold my tongue simply to advance your own beastly interests – well, it comes to a matter of a consideration, doesn’t it?’

From where I crouched I could hear Bevis suddenly breathing hard. ‘You little backwoods blackguard,’ he said. ‘Are you asking me to write a cheque?’

Hippias gave his equable chuckle. ‘The things are always dashed useful, I’m bound to admit. But talking of blackguards, my dear Bevis, just where do you stand? Are you really after avoiding scandal? Or are you after wholesale theft? It’s in the blood, you know. Remember your brother and Dismal Swamp.’

There was a longer pause. ‘Look here,’ said Bevis, ‘would you take twenty thousand?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Is your boy in on this – or his trollop of a wife?’

Hippias chuckled, unoffended. ‘Gerard hasn’t tumbled to it so far as I know. And Joyleen would never tumble to anything.’

‘Very well. You won’t have to share out. I call twenty thousand a very reasonable offer.’ Bevis hesitated. ‘We don’t positively know of any marriage, after all. Besides, you must remember that I have to consider Lady Simney – Nicolette.’

I think I almost exclaimed at this. For that Bevis had to consider me in some way when debating paying the unlovely Hippias a tidy sum in what appeared to be blackmail was a notion utterly obscure to me. It ought not to have been so, as I can now clearly see. But squatting there in the snow I could not at all understand the manner in which I was being dragged into the deal. No more had I been able to understand a certain appraising scrutiny to which Lucy had subjected me the night before.

There is matter for the psychologist in this, and it is plain that there were certain areas in my life which I was just not prepared to contemplate… But now – and even as I was peering out at Bevis in blank astonishment – this curious interview at which I had been assisting picked itself up and receded from my ken. For no particular reason that I could discern the two disputants unstuck their shooting sticks and marched off, still arguing hotly.

And it could not be said that I had gained much positive light. I was left, indeed, with a confused mind…crouched like a rabbit in a ditch in my husband Sir George Simney’s park.

Walk on. Tramp over the snow chewing on what has befallen (and very likely you will make more of it than I did) until the next exhibit presents itself.

The next exhibit is a dumb show – rather like the queer old turn the players put on before the play-within-the-play in
Hamlet
. And here, as there, it betokens at least the first part of the catastrophe approaching. Soon Polonius will be behind his arras and the sword thrust home. The police will come with flash-light cameras and lug the guts into the neighbour room. And that will be the end of a bad baronet.

Grace was one figure in the dumb-show and the Reverend Adrian Deamer was the other. Mr Deamer is one of those clergymen who are always diving into their church for minor liturgical purposes. He would have little in common, I imagine, with that Bishop Denzell Simney who was painted by Kneller. It is true that St Francis preached to the fishes and the birds, but Mr Deamer would altogether disapprove of a bishop who conned a prayer-book amid wreaths of foxhounds. Mr Deamer doesn’t approve of any Simneys – except Grace.

And at the moment perhaps he didn’t much approve of her. For she had intercepted him when emerging from some interim devotions and probably proposing to himself a rewarding cup of Oxo in his study. A chilly wind had sprung up; it fluttered the surplice which Mr Deamer clutched in one hand and the unrolled umbrella which depended from the other; it disarranged his thinning hair and reddened his inquiring nose. Grace, in her character as an intelligence officer straight from Sodom and Gomorrah, stood strategically placed in the narrow defile of a lich-gate, and there raised to heaven the supplicating voice. Or to heaven and Mr Deamer – the latter, at least, being obliged to listen, since the lady regularly worked him embroidered slippers. Not that he was in any way reluctant, really, for he is a man who has come to feed on that with which he wrestles, and Hazelwood is inevitably both his principal gymnastic appliance and his principal trough. Presently the two of them had their noses well into it together.

I think I ought to say that, despite this tone into which I have fallen, I don’t object to clergymen and churches and whatever superior verities these stand for. If I were myself by way of embroidering slippers for a revered vicar I should be pleased. But I had never managed to like Mr Deamer, perhaps because he on his side had distrusted me from the first. There had been a plan between Grace and him, I believe, to secure George’s salvation by marrying him to another slipper-embroiderer of superior station in the county. It was a laudable plan if not a very likely one, and if it had matured everything (so far as I am concerned) would have been a great deal better. So I ought to have felt a kind of gratitude for the attempt. And for the man himself and his rather exclusive fanaticism about one sort of sin I ought to have allowed. And I ought not to have minded his having a low view of actresses. In fact I ought to have been able to be Lady Simney to the vicar even if Lady Simney was patently a scarlet woman to him. But somehow I hadn’t managed it. And now here, as I came out of the park and approached the village, were those two communing over the Hazelwood situation in general and the recent affair of my supposed guilty embrace in the orangery in particular. It was a dumb-show – if only because I kept well on the far side of the road. But it was good of its kind. If the villagers felt like joining in and playing charades they would have had no reason to complain on the score of lack of expressiveness and intelligibility.

There was a field-path on the right, and discretion would have taken me up it. But something in me revolted against dodging and I walked straight on. I even moved out a bit on the crown of the road. For, of course, the natural thing to do was to tramp briskly past and speak a civil word while doing so. Cordiality would have been false. But to avoid these two would have been to play their own silly game.

Grace, who had been achieving gestures of repulsion, was now flapping her arms in resignation and despair. Mr Deamer had contrived to dispose of the umbrella and surplice and was thus able to clasp his hands before his chest – which was a way of suggesting that the matters on hand were supportable to him only by virtue of his professional character.

I was less than ten yards away. ‘Good morning, Mr Deamer,’ I said.

Grace turned round and stared at me with a sort of fascinated dread that I didn’t much mind. But I minded Mr Deamer, who compressed his lips and looked straight through me.

One can always be disconcerted by something new, and I don’t think I had ever been cut like that before. The effect on me was out of all proportion to its occasion. For, after all, I knew exactly how those two worthies felt – and why should just this upset me? But the fact is that I wanted to cry and that I had to be careful not to stumble until I was past them and with a clear road in front of me. The man had betrayed his calling – a shepherd being the last person who should look straight through a lost sheep. But that was his business, not mine. Why should I bother? Perhaps a very different sort of clergyman had sustained me in some forgotten passage of my childhood; perhaps it was something like that. Anyway, I was most irrationally humiliated and hurt. And I no longer disliked Mr Deamer. I hated him.

Mind you, I don’t go in for hating. I don’t think I hated George, though I greatly loathed him. And so I walked on, a good deal shattered both by the thing itself and by an emotional response so unexpected and extravagant. But don’t think that all this is thrown in merely by way of canvassing sympathy for a sensitive plant. Don’t condemn my morning’s wanderings as so much beating about the bush; don’t, like mad Hamlet, yell at me to leave my damnable faces, murderer, and begin. All these things have their place.

But I had no idea of what toils this walk was weaving.

And now the morning’s last episode. If I had been indulging myself in too much fuss over the preceding one here was something which might have been sent to point me a fool.

I have forgotten to say that Gerard was abroad in the park at this time; once or twice I had glimpsed him walking moodily about some quarter of a mile away. It was to avoid the chance of meeting him that I took the homeward route I did. When I returned from the high road I took a path which skirted the fringes of the path and led past Sir Basil’s Folly.

Sir Basil Simney hangs in George’s study with the rest of them – Zoffany is the artist – but I haven’t, I think, mentioned him. He is unmentionable, even as Simneys go, and his Folly – which is a retired little classical temple erected to facilitate the pursuits of certain excessively recondite pleasures, is about the most innocent thing recorded of him. Outside this sinister little place two horses were tethered.

Well, as Gerard had remarked, those people were gone, after all. And if George amid the obscure difficulties gathering round him chose to find a little light relief in the high-speed seduction of Joyleen Simney it was just no business of mine, any more than was Mr Deamer’s failure in pastoral care. Nor was it of any
use
to me. A couple of private detectives snooping round this chilly eighteenth-century love nest with cameras would have added very little to what my solicitors already had neatly tied up in pink tape. All that I had to do was to turn away from the Folly, walk back to Hazelwood, change my shoes and eat an undisturbed luncheon. I ought to have done this even when I became aware that there
was
somebody snooping round. But suddenly I was terribly frightened. And with a beating heart I advanced straight towards the little building before me.

To explain this would require a command of atmosphere that I don’t remotely possess. George had told me in some detail about his ancestor Sir Basil and I knew that those elegant Ionic pillars supporting their dome of snow, that those surrounding oaks rising dark above a stainless carpeting, were heavy with old, unexpiated sin. Melodramatics or hysteria is the word for this talk, I suppose – and yet I did truly feel the place to be fit only for some horrible sacrifice, for the appearance, perhaps, of a hooded figure gliding through the druidic trees with a ritual and cleansing knife poised in air. Plainly I hadn’t recovered from the nastiness of my encounter with Mr Deamer and Grace. Nevertheless there was a rational basis too for my alarm. For through these same trees a figure
had
glided. Somebody was lurking behind the Folly now.

I tried to think of harmless explanations. Upon persons retired as George and Joyleen were, snooping may be practised by any casual Peeping-Tom. Possibly it was no more than that. Or, again, Mr Deamer might be on his familiar beat as a one-man anti-vice squad – and this called for no more than a resolute turning of the mind to some less silly and squalid theme. Or it might be Grace – and here the same consideration applied, only rather more compellingly. But might it not be Owdon – a man become so enigmatic and mysterious that one could not calculate upon consequences in regard to him? I tried to persuade myself that the possibility of its being Owdon who was spying on his master represented the worst I could conceive in the matter. But this self-deception was no good – and already I was hurrying forward with that pounding heart. It might be Gerard. It might be Timmy.

Gerard had been in the park. Gerard was the wronged husband. Here were both a practical and a conventional reason for thinking of him. I forgot his matter-of-fact announcement that those people were gone, after all. But this was only because I
wanted
to bring him into the picture. If it was Gerard, it was bad. But if it was Timmy, it was a great deal worse.

For in some way I had taken Timmy Owdon to my heart. By some queer twist of the mind I saw him as very young – much younger than his sixteen years. And I think I saw him as one of that non-existent group of dream-Simneys on the terrace with their ponies. It was, no doubt, something very silly like that. But I just wasn’t going to have Timmy destroyed in the working out of all this beastly and gathering wickedness and mystery. Or not while I was still about. Perhaps the Simneys – even appealing ones like Timmy – must have their disasters and there was no saving them. But
I
was going to be out of it
first.