A Family Affair (13 page)

So much Bobby Appleby had gathered from his father on the occasion of being given his present odd commission. And it really
was
rather odd. He had gone home for the weekend with some notion of running his father over to Keynes Court – and had promptly been handed this minor reconnaissance all on his own. Sir Thomas Carrington was the man who – quite some time ago – might or might not have been defrauded of a genuine Stubbs. Bobby was to beard Sir Thomas and learn all about it.

Bobby’s views on a career were as yet of a somewhat negative order. He was quite clear that he did not propose to become a policeman. Unlike the Church or the Army or the Law (he obscurely felt), it was not a thing that ought to run in families. One Appleby at the top of that tree was enough; he himself was going to find another one. Perhaps not a tree at all. Just a shrub. For the fact that one wasn’t at all thick – was quite a long way from that, it seemed – didn’t at all guarantee that one was going to shoot up in the world But at least he wasn’t taking what might be called a vocational test now. It must simply be that his father had thought it would amuse him.

He stopped his car, and surveyed the countryside, map in hand. The church on the horizon was Aldwinkle All Saints, and the poet Dryden had been born in its rectory. Dryden’s grandfather had been a baronet, and his next-door neighbour in the baronetcy had no doubt been a Carrington. Perhaps Sir Thomas could be chatted up with a little literary stuff of that kind. But it didn’t seem likely. The fine arts might be more promising. But then Sir Thomas was probably a bit touchy on that ground, on account of having lost his Stubbs. Shooting would probably be better. Or Bobby could even try Dryden, and then nip on to shooting if Dryden proved no go. There was a natural transition, come to think of it. One of Dryden’s successors as Poet Laureate had been a harmless country gentleman called Thomas Pye. Pye had written a poem called
The Progress of Refinement
, but hadn’t made an awful lot of the theme. So he had fallen back on more native interests. His second poem had been called just
Shooting
– which had been splendidly simple, if nothing else. Perhaps Sir Thomas Carrington would relish a little talk about Pye… Bobby frowned gloomily. If that was the sort of notion Oxford put into his head, then Oxford was doing little more than make him addle-pated. Nobody would suffer a total stranger to walk in on him and start an instructive harangue on the English Poets Laureate. There was nothing for it, Bobby saw, but to drive up to Monks Amble and trust to the spur of the moment. And there the house was: an uncompromisingly square Georgian box in the middle distance. It seemed very much exposed to the elements. It would have been less intimidating, somehow, if decently screened by a few plantations. Bobby shoved into gear, and drove on.

There was a drive, with elaborate wrought-iron gates and a lodge. The gates were locked, but the lodge appeared to be inhabited. Bobby rather supposed that, in this situation, one simply sat back and sounded one’s horn. Or was that wrong? Did one get out of one’s car, knock at a door, and make affable noises to anybody who chose to appear? Bobby didn’t know. They didn’t run to anything of the sort at Dream, and although Bobby had a reasonable acquaintance among dwellers in country houses they none of them had any notion of living behind locked gates. Being, however, a resourceful youth, he presently hit on a plan for avoiding plain solecism, either way. He got out of his car and found a door. It proved to have a bell, and on this he contrived to ring a moderate but not ineffectively diffident peal. The door opened almost at once, and an old woman peered out at him.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Bobby said engagingly, ‘but I seem to have lost my way. Can you by any chance tell me how to get to Monks Amble – Sir Thomas Carrington’s house?’

‘You have got. It’s here.’

‘I say, what luck!’ Bobby registered gratified astonishment. ‘Would you mind opening the gates?’

‘Be you the lad that’s to clean out cesspool?’

‘I’m afraid I’m not.’ Bobby was rather gratified, if anything, at having this lowly status suggested for him, since he shared with a whole generation of privileged English youth a vague aspiration after classlessness.

‘Then you mun go away again. It’s only the lad for the cesspool that’s to be let in.’

‘But I want to call on Sir Thomas.’

‘Then you mun keep on wanting. Sir Thomas don’t want to see ’ee.’

‘But that’s absurd! Surely, my dear lady’ – Bobby found that he had almost said ‘my good woman’, but his principles had prevailed in time – ‘you can’t
know
that Sir Thomas doesn’t want to see me? You know nothing about me.’

‘No more do Sir Thomas, like enough. Not that it would help if he did.’ The old woman began to close the door, as if the business that had called her to it had been satisfactorily concluded. Bobby felt that some emergency procedure was called for, and he had an idea that ruthless prevarication was probably the right thing in an efficient detective.

‘As it happens,’ he said shamelessly, ‘I am a relation of Sir Thomas’. You’ve probably heard him speak of me – his nephew, Robert.’ Bobby felt that this would sound more convincing with a little superadded detail. ‘Back from Canada,’ he said, ‘on a short and unexpected visit.’

‘A relation?’ The old woman opened the door a little wider, but this didn’t prove to be for the purpose of any warmer welcome. ‘So much the worse. Sir Thomas, he don’t receive the county. And Sir Thomas, he don’t receive the local gentry either. But when it comes to relations, be they his own or be they her late ladyship’s, Sir Thomas, he gets out his gun.’ The door shut with a bang in Bobby’s startled face. Then, unexpectedly, it momentarily opened again. ‘Except,’ the old woman said, ‘that sometimes he do prefer a dog-whip.’

This time, the door closed for good.

So Bobby Appleby climbed back into his car. He wondered darkly how much his father had gathered about the domestic life of Sir Thomas Carrington, and whether he had himself been sent on this mission as a species of poor family joke. But he certainly wasn’t going to go home now, leaving Sir Thomas uninterviewed – not even if the alternative meant risking atrocious assault. Bobby had never been peppered with pellets, and a dog-whip was not among the fairly numerous instruments with which he had been corrected at one or another school. He could only live and learn.

He might, of course, simply climb over a wall or fence, or push through a hedge. But he was going to drive up to Monks Amble in proper style if he could. Probably there would be less imposing entrances, designed for one or another sort of rural traffic with the great house, which nobody bothered to lock. Behind the mansion, indeed, and at no more than a modest remove from it, was a small huddle of buildings which might be a home farm. He consulted his map again. It said, sure enough,
Monks Amble Manor Farm
. Bobby started the engine and skirted the small park. Within a couple of minutes he was among stables. And from these there was no difficulty in driving round to the front of the house.

It occurred to him to hope that the old woman in the lodge wasn’t equipped with a telephone; that she hadn’t, repenting her uncivil behaviour, rung up Sir Thomas to say how reluctantly she had turned away a wandering nephew from Canada. But that was absurd, and so had the whole notion of false pretences been. He would simply have a go under his own colours. The house, now that he was close up to it, seemed rather reassuring; it had a respectable and well-cared-for look that didn’t suggest habitation by a ferocious eccentric. Only the scene did a little lack animation. Bobby would have liked to see a housemaid circumspectly gossiping with a gardener’s boy through an open window, or even just a couple of contented spaniels lazing by the front door. But nothing of the sort was visible. He got out of his car and rang a bell. It was answered by a manservant who didn’t look too promising. He might have been younger brother, indeed, to the old woman in the lodge.

‘Good morning,’ Bobby said. ‘Is Sir Thomas–’

‘Not at home.’

There is always a daunting absoluteness about these conventional words. Very little can be achieved in face of them. One can leave a visiting card (supposing one to have so archaic an object about one’s person). One can claim the right to sit down in a man’s hall and scribble him a note. One can’t – or not on any purely social assumption – say firmly, ‘I’ll wait’. Bobby felt at an impasse. Unlike the old woman, Sir Thomas’ butler was too well-trained positively to close the door before the caller had turned away. On the other hand, he appeared to acknowledge no obligation to further utterance. Bobby felt that a decisive move on his own part was required, even if it meant breaking his recent resolution to avoid prevarication.

‘But I’ve come about the cesspool,’ Bobby said.

‘Then get into it.’

‘But I have to see Sir Thomas first.’ Bobby, although inwardly aghast at having plunged into this further piece of nonsense, spoke confidently. ‘I have to take his instructions, you see, before preparing an estimate.’ He looked past the butler and into the recesses of a large and murky hall as he thus piled fib on fib. For a moment he thought he glimpsed a moving figure – and even what might have been a human face behind an enormous moustache. Then he heard a noise. It was a very familiar noise indeed. He made it himself whenever he slipped a couple of cartridges into the old 12-bore he had inherited from an uncle. In his present circumstances, he didn’t like the sound at all. He would willingly have swopped it even for a sinister preliminary crack of a whip. Still, he wasn’t going to be intimidated. ‘So will you please,’ he said, ‘tell your master I am here?’

The butler had been disconcerted – which was something. But at this his eyes narrowed suspiciously. Perhaps, Bobby thought, ‘your master’ had been a false note. It was probably not a locution employed by persons in the cesspool business. And it was this point that the butler now took up. He comprehended Bobby’s clothes and his haircut, his complexion and his fingernails, in a single professional and sombrely sceptical glance.

‘You don’t look like a young man who has come about the drains,’ the butler said. ‘You look more like a college lad, if you ask me.’

‘But I
am
a college lad. I mean, I’ve
been
a college lad. An honours degree in sanitation is essential for the cesspool business now. I got mine at Oxford. Please take Sir Thomas my name. It’s Appleby.’

At this, rather surprisingly, Sir Thomas Carrington’s butler took half a step into the open air. This appeared to be for the purpose of scrutinizing Bobby in a better light.

‘You wait here.’ Something had emerged, Bobby felt, to shake the butler into this wholly irregular formula – one permissible at the portals only of altogether humbler domiciles. Bobby, left standing on the doorstep, did his best to use his ears. It might be vital to manage a timely skip behind one of the bleak Doric pillars which flanked Sir Thomas’ front door. But neither shotgun nor dog-whip gave any further indication of its existence. Instead, a muttered colloquy made itself heard. Bobby fancied he distinguished – very perplexingly – the word ‘Twickenham’. Even more strangely, the same voice said something about ‘injury time’, and the butler distinctly enunciated the phrase, ‘far out on the twenty-five’. And then the butler was back again. He was carrying what was instantly identifiable as a not very recent copy of the
Illustrated London News
. He halted in the doorway; he looked at this organ of the press; he looked at Bobby. ‘It would be Mr
Robert
Appleby?’ he asked.

‘That’s right. My father–’ Bobby broke off. His mind (although lately coming to be reported upon so agreeably by his tutors) was susceptible to moments of confusion. This was one of them. That his name was known at Monks Amble could only be the consequence, he supposed, of some further deplorable family joke.

‘It’s him, all right!’ The butler – most confoundingly – had turned and pitched this information, with every appearance of excitement, into the recesses of the hall. ‘You come in,’ he said, turning back to Bobby. ‘And I ’ope you’ll permit me to shake you by the ’and.’

That Sir Thomas’ butler should be so emotionally disturbed as to have lost command of his aspirates struck Bobby as something portentous in itself. But he had no leisure to reflect on it, since he now found himself in the presence of Sir Thomas. The squire of Monks Amble did have an enormous moustache. But if this was alarming, his posture was reassuring. He was in the act of replacing a shotgun in a rack on the wall. Having accomplished this, he turned round, snatched the
Illustrated London News
from his henchman, gave it a brief confirmatory glance, and advanced upon Bobby with the largest cordiality.

‘Absolutely delighted,’ Sir Thomas Carrington said. ‘Deuced good of you to call. Compare notes, eh? Changed times, of course. Plenty to talk about. Take off your coat. Billington – brandy and cigars.’

Billington vanished. Bobby’s wits were still not working quite properly.

‘It’s awfully kind of you, sir,’ he said. ‘Decent of you to see me, I mean. I don’t think you’ve actually met my father. He’s Sir John Appleby.’

‘Never heard of him. Plain K, eh? Not in the baronetage. Don’t know him from Adam, I’m afraid. But come into my den, my dear boy. I’ve one or two things that ought to interest you.’

Bobby found himself led into a small apartment of informal character. It appeared to have been excavated beneath rather an imposing staircase. And its most prominent feature revealed the truth at once. Perched alone on a peg above the chimney piece was a faded blue velvet cap with a silver tassel. The walls, too, told their story. They were hung with group photographs of innumerable Rugger Fifteens of the past. It was a reasonable conjecture that Sir Thomas Carrington figured in several of them.

‘A capital game,’ Sir Thomas was saying. ‘Billington and I don’t go out much, you know. Haven’t actually been to Twickenham these half dozen years, I’d say. But, of course, we have it on the box.’ Sir Thomas gestured towards a television set in a corner of the room. ‘And we don’t forget that drop goal of yours, Appleby. We often talk about it. Magnificent effort. In the last thirty seconds, eh? And from pretty well on the touchline, and back on the twenty-five. Saved the match. I can tell you something rather similar about the game in twenty-seven. But my own Varsity Match was back in twenty-two. Tell you about it after lunch.’