What Happened at Hazelwood? (7 page)

Mervyn was upon this in a flash. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘you’d better go and find your Gerard. For he is the quiet one, I think you said, But if you will just tell us first what you meant by black–’

‘Mervyn, dear, that is rather rude.’ Lucy shook a fondly disapproving head. ‘Grace and I both want to have a quiet chat with Joyleen, and do not at all intend to worry her with mysteries. Perhaps you had better join the other men. They will be missing you – particularly uncle George.’

‘They can have Timmy,’ said Mervyn.

‘Now, dear, don’t be silly. I think you will find that they are all having a cosy chat of their own in your uncle’s study. And Willoughby will be expecting you, because of course he will want to apologize.’

‘I think not.’ Mervyn spoke as sulkily as Joyleen had just done. ‘All that Willoughby is likely to want is an occasion for further violence.’

‘Nonsense, darling.’ And Lucy stroked Mervyn’s beautiful curly hair with a fondness which was part nauseating and part pathetic. Then she turned to Joyleen. ‘You will soon,’ she said, ‘come to understand that we are really a very loving family. And certainly there is never any occasion for violence at Hazelwood.’

But as Lucy spoke there was a sudden angry shout from round the angle of the corridor ahead of us. And it was followed – for the second time that night – by the sound of shattered glass.

But this fracas in George’s study mustn’t raise false hopes. We haven’t yet reached the main action of the piece. There will be no corpse available for your inspection, Gentle Reader, until you have struggled on some way ahead.

Nevertheless it is tolerably certain that without this affair in the study on the night of the Australian cousins’ arrival the sensational event of the night following would not have taken place. The little business now to be related was, in fact, cardinal in the whole affair. So sharpen your perceptions and cease reading with that hurrying eye.

If George was no fool he certainly was no student either, and there seemed small reason why he should have a study any more than a smithy or a laboratory or a consulting room. Tradition of course, decrees something of the sort. A baronet must have a library, a study and a gun-room just as certainly as his wife must have a drawing-room and a boudoir. These necessities are mysterious – a boudoir means, it appears, a room to be sulky in, and why should the over-privileged have particular need of that? – but there seems to be no harm in them. Only there was, a little – in George’s case.

George’s study is not in the least traditional; in fact it is one of his rather offensive jokes. A long, dusky, ill-lit room on the first floor, it is furnished with nothing more than a refectory table accommodating writing materials and scattered magazines, half a dozen hard chairs, and a few statuettes on short marble pillars. This is all the furnishing, that is to say, if one doesn’t count the pictures.

Originally there were only family portraits: to be precise, the ten Simney baronets ending with George himself. I do not know that an inspection of them would have been well calculated to support any simple faith in the blessings of pedigree; from the original Sir Hippias onwards they were, I should have judged, a thoroughly dissipated lot. Still, the effect must have been respectable enough: Sir Hippias (although in fact a superior peddler who had done well out of profit-inflations under James I) was represented by Mytens as a blue-blooded person casting a casual eye over the deeds of his Trojan ancestors in a large folio of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
Historia Britonum
! the first Sir Denzell, who had been a bishop as well as a baronet, had elected to be painted by Kneller in full canonicals, surrounded by his favourite hounds; Sir Bevis, who had not only, like George, married an actress, but strangled her as well, appeared in a canvas of Wilkie’s deeply absorbed in the ground-plan of an orphanage. Perhaps it was the fact that despite the disguisements of art, they nearly all suggest in mouth or eye that loose-fish quality discerned by Grace: perhaps it was this that gave George his notion.

The Simneys have quite a collection of Old Masters, brought together for the most part in the eighteenth century and, despite rising values, obstinately retained since. George had gone round these, picked out the most effective nudes, and dispersed them among his ancestors by way of female companionship. Thus over the fireplace, her lurking quality amid a heavy chiaroscuro emphasized by the elaborately carved Grinling Gibbons pillars between which she is recessed, stands a long-thighed Venus by Caravaggio, her allurements emphasized by the ghost of a lawn smock. And on each side of her stand fully – indeed elaborately – clothed Simney gentlemen, so that the total effect is not unlike that ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ with which the painter Manet contrived to shock Paris in 1863. Opposite this, and on either side of the room’s only window, are a Danae by Tintoretto and a Pasiphae by Bordone respectively. The Danae is flanked by Sir Guy Simney, depicted by Cornelius Janssen in his counting-house amid little piles of golden coin; and the Pasiphae stands next to the second Sir Bevis, a Victorian gentleman who is shown by Stanhope Forbes as leaning over a fence to examine a prize bull. These little jokes (and the ability to contrive them was probably about all that remained to George of a classical education) the reigning baronet had contrived to crown by having himself painted in a pink hunting coat which exactly toned with the flesh of a post-Matisse lady sprawled on a sofa. All this being achieved, George had added two large mirrors at each end of the room, so that from certain angles it was possible to contemplate an infinite regress of Simneys and sirens, baronets and bagnio-ladies. Such a juxtaposing of Venetian prodigality and solid English hypocrisy might be amusing on the pages of an ephemeral magazine. As a permanent set-up in a gentleman’s house it has never struck me – I must confess – as other than displeasing in the extreme. However this may be, it was the setting of the scene which follows. If it hadn’t been for these beastly pictures – or rather for this beastly arrangement of pictures – the affair would have turned out differently. For a long time 1 had known that if ever I was to have a real row with George it would more probably happen in his study than anywhere else.

Lucy had been explaining to Joyleen that we were a loving family, and that at Hazelwood violence was not at all the thing – when there had been that second explosion of shattered glass following hard upon an angry shout.

I don’t doubt that just this sound-sequence at just this after-dinner hour had been heard at Hazelwood often enough, and that the womenfolk of the household had stayed discreetly put until the men chose to present themselves and sober up on tea. But I have never, somehow, grown into these old-world ways, and now I pushed past Owdon – who was looking more disconcerted than just the prospect of further litter could have made him – and made for the study.

Odd factors can colour one’s emotional state at such moments. I was annoyed that more Simneys seem to mean not a decent reticence and lowering of tensions but simply additional rumpus. But I was even more annoyed by something in the mere geography of the thing. All this dropping of trays in corridors and shouting and smashing of lord knew what was taking place hard by any privacy that Hazelwood afforded me. On my right as I went down this corridor were George’s bedroom and bathroom, on my left were my own bedroom, bath-room and sitting-room – and this study of George’s was straight ahead. Old houses are not always rationally arranged, and there was nothing out of the way in all this. Nevertheless – for now there were further shouts and angry voices – it made me feel as if I lived on the fringes of a tap-room. So did the whiskey bottle.

Now, so far as my own part in the ensuing events was concerned that whiskey-bottle was crucial. The image of it – broken in that particular way, standing on that particular refectory table, and between the four walls of that particular room, came back to me later invested with a quite mysterious repulsiveness. But there was more to it than that. Jinn live in bottles and when a bottle is broken a jinnee may escape. From this bottle there was to come an evil spirit indeed – and sudden death was to be the consequence.

And so I would like you to
see
it – although it was, of course, a commonplace object enough, such as it would take a Chardin or a Cezanne to render significant. But there it was on the table, broken off short below the neck in an ugly, jagged line of glass such as one might cut a throat with, and standing round it were five Simneys pale and cursing. Or five Simneys, pale and cursing, in a sort of inner Circle – and beyond that ten more Simneys, immobile and watching from amid the female companionship with which George had provided them.

Something held me momentarily motionless before this scene, and as I stood in the doorway George glanced up and (I suppose) decided that there was something consciously theatrical in my attitude. Anyway, he was quite viciously annoyed. ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘Come right down stage, my dear, take a well-deserved round of applause, and then join our domestic comedy.’

I walked in and the others followed. ‘Or pot-house tragedy,’ I said.

‘Mama,’ said Mervyn, ‘are the gentlemen in their cups?’

Lucy shook her head. ‘Hush, dear – I’m afraid that something upsetting must have occurred.’

‘Hippias has occurred – and Gerard and Joyleen. And the upsetting has taken Owdon in the most literal way. And why, I wonder, in one’s cups?’ Mervyn looked round in the easiest fashion, and I almost believed that he was honestly attempting to relieve the obscure tension in the room with his badinage. ‘Why not in one’s glasses, or one’s bottles? But now that Owdon and Hippias have done their worst there are, of course, no glasses left. And here too’ – he looked at the whiskey-bottle – ‘there appears to have been a clash of mighty opposites. Or has Willoughby merely been performing a parlour trick? Or has Gerard been wolfing a little broken glass by way of demonstrating the feeding habits of the Australian ostrich?’

‘Emu,’ said Gerard. He was looking at the broken bottle as if he saw in it as much as I did.

‘Or has uncle Bevis, perhaps–’

‘Be quiet,’ said George.

I looked at my husband in surprise. Assuredly he was in a vile temper – and yet this rebuke to Mervyn was half-hearted and unconvincing. Mervyn realized the fact and ran happily on. I had a moment to study the situation.

They were all angry – and it seemed to me that they were all bewildered, like men to whom it had suddenly come that they did not at all know where they stood. I decided to ask a question.

‘Is this bottle,’ I said, ‘the result of more quiet family talk about Dismal Swamp?’

There was a moment’s silence. Then Gerard answered.

‘They
were
talking about that.’ He glanced at me with strangely troubled eyes.

The whole group were perplexed. But Gerard, I thought, was more perplexed than the rest, so that I wondered if there had been some crisis or disclosure which he hadn’t tumbled to.

‘Hippias is in liquor,’ said Bevis.

This was obviously true – and it was information offered as if to explain the whole thing.

‘Drank too much of George’s bally port,’ said Hippias. ‘Then felt like a lil’ bit of fun. Shorry about glasses, m’dear. Shorry about bally bottle.’

Extremely clumsily, Hippias was taking his cue. There was no doubt that he had drunk too much; but then neither was there any doubt that what had been going on was more than drunken frolic – or drunken quarrel.

Grace however saw no reason to think so. ‘Horrible!’ she said. ‘A family reunion after many years – and yet all it leads to is a debauch.’ She looked round the study and her eye caught (I imagine) Tintoretto’s Danae waiting for Jove’s shower of gold. ‘Not,’ she continued, ‘that more is to be expected in an apartment embellished with all the allurements of vice.’

‘Or all,’ said Mervyn, also glancing round, ‘except the blacksmith’s fair-haired daughter. And what would aunt Grace’s Mr Deamer think of uncle George’s Paphian shrine? Would he be reassured by the presence of the Honourable and Right Reverend Bishop Denzell?’ And Mervyn affected to consult Kneller’s portrait. ‘I judge not. He would hold it still to be what the poet Keats calls a purple-lined palace of sweet sin. And, indeed, if any improvement could be effected it would surely be a purple wallpaper, with true love-knots heavily embossed in gold.’ Mervyn turned to me. ‘Nicolette, do you not agree?’

I don’t know that I would have answered. But – surprisingly – Gerard answered for me: and with physical action considerably more pronounced than Willoughby’s earlier in the evening. ‘You howling little cad,’ he said. And at that he picked up Mervyn, strode with him to the window, flung up the sash and dropped him through. He closed the window. ‘There is quite thick snow,’ he explained, ‘so I hope no damage will be done to the flower beds.’

‘It isn’t a flower bed,’ I said. ‘It’s a rockery.’

And that got rid of Lucy as well. One may, after all, be pardoned a little maternal agitation on seeing one’s only child pitched through a first-storey window. She hurried off down the corridor calling upon Owdon to follow her.

For a moment George’s large laughter filled the room. But it was not the laughter with which he would normally have greeted an incident so much to his taste. And again I tried to get the hang of how these men were feeling. ‘Who threw the bottle?’ I asked.

What happened at Hazelwood?
My question, as it happened, was really the first attempt at solving that. Or at least it exposed a preliminary mystery. For they didn’t want to answer. Some queer panic or uncertainty was upon them and they were all for concealing whatever they could. But they were quite ineffective. They could, after all, simply have turned Grace (who was very much the chafing-dish again) and myself out of the room; and George ought to have been quite fit for this with no ceremony. But instead they looked at one another like third-form boys caught smoking in a barn. Bevis, although one could see that he had been in the thick of the quarrel, was endeavouring to look dignified and composed; this gave him the air of the unpleasant sort of child who, at such a discovery, edges himself towards the side of law and order.