A Family Affair (16 page)

‘I scarcely think,’ she said, ‘that you will wish to climb to the third pool. It is really something of a scramble. There was even a time when it was considered quite unsuitable for ladies.’

‘How very amusing. But I don’t at all feel that I want to decline the challenge. I’m sure the last of these ponds will contain something quite beautiful.’

‘It used to be supposed to do so.’ Lady Canadine looked almost startled as she said this. She no doubt felt it to have been indiscreet. ‘But the path is really
quite
steep. It used to be known as the Gentlemen’s Steps.’ She paused, but seemed to realize that her newly-discovered relation was not to be deflected. ‘I shall lead the way,’ she said with resignation.

The difficulty of the Gentlemen’s Steps was exaggerated. It could hardly be otherwise in such a situation. And the third pool turned out to be much like those below – except that in the middle of it was an empty stone pedestal, raised some inches above the surface of the water. Judith took one look at it, and felt that the crucial moment had come. It was true that the pool was surrounded by Corkscrew Rush, which it is quite improper not to greet with amused delight. But Judith ignored it. She pointed to the pedestal.

‘That must be for a statue or a fountain,’ she said firmly. ‘What has happened to it?’

There was a moment’s silence – for Lady Canadine was simply looking at her in dumb dismay. Then, from close behind Judith, a man’s voice spoke.

‘What, indeed?’ the voice said. ‘I’m afraid we shall never know.’

When Judith turned round, it was to see a grey bowler hat held courteously in air. The speaker – who must have ascended the Gentlemen’s Steps behind them – was Lord Canadine himself. His manner of announcing his presence, although it had been a shade abrupt, failed to disturb his wife’s social manner.

‘Humphrey, dear,’ Lady Canadine said, ‘Such a pleasant thing. A visit from a kinswoman of mine, Judith Appleby. I don’t think you knew her father. But you must have met her uncle, Everard Raven.’

‘Yes, indeed.’ Lord Canadine said this with the polite
aplomb
of one who doesn’t in the least mean what he says. ‘How very nice.’ He shook hands briskly, and with a glance that set Judith wondering. Lady Canadine, learned in alpines and aquatics but notably unoppressed by any other intellectual concern, was unlikely to perplex a child. But her husband could not be placed so readily. The proprietor of ever so many superannuated puff-puffs, and of one that actually chugged along a real railway line, ought not to have outlived the innocence of his prep school days. But it was possible that he was eccentric rather than retarded. He might even be a little mad. Perhaps Lady Canadine’s air of having closed her account with anything apart from vegetable nature was not unconnected with certain lurking facets of her husband’s character. Now he was glancing round the verges of the pool. ‘Julia showing you the duckweed, Lady Appleby?’ he said with easy jocularity. ‘No idea of what that yellow stuff is, I’m afraid.’

‘
Jussieua repens
.’ Lady Canadine’s tone hinted faint reproach. ‘So useful because of its creeping habit. And on the other side is False Loosestrife.’

‘Doesn’t sound as if it should be trusted for a moment. Creeping habit too, I suppose. Like all those confounded trippers. It was they who made away with the statue, you know. Or so I supposed until I was told that it was much more valuable than I’d ever tumbled to. After that, I began to wonder. There’s a great deal of professional thieving from places of our sort nowadays, I’m told. A friend of mine lost an elephant that way.’

‘How very odd!’ It struck Judith that Lord Canadine was at least more entertaining than his wife. ‘Do you mean from an estate in Africa?’

‘Lord, no. Wiltshire. Old Tommy Cunningham. I expect you know him – Sly Bacon is what we used to call him. He bought this elephant along with a couple of giraffes to give rides to the trippers’ kids. Up and down the terrace in front of Waterbath, which is an uncommonly fine Palladian mansion, as I think you’ll agree. So it was really a very jolly idea. One likes the picture of it, I must say. But they weren’t giraffes, by the way. They were camels. One
can
ride giraffes, but the effect is rather slithery. I’d have liked to think up the elephant and camels myself. But of course I take people for rides on my railway.’

‘Did somebody simply lead away the elephant in the night?’

‘That was what the police thought at first. They had a theory it had been lured into a pantechnicon affair with a bunch of bananas.’ Lord Canadine considered. ‘Or perhaps of yams. I’ve no doubt you can buy yams at Fortnum’s. But then they decided it had been a helicopter.’

‘Might your statue have been removed by helicopter?’

‘It’s perfectly possible. On the other hand, a couple of strong men could have lugged it down the Gentlemen’s Steps. Has Julia told you they’re called that? Julia doesn’t much care for this statue business. She had no great fancy for my poor father, you know, and I don’t altogether blame her. He was very much what you might call a smoking-room type. Wouldn’t you say, Julia my dear?’

Lady Canadine’s response to this was merely to give her distant kinswoman the ghost of a resigned glance. It seemed to combine an acknowledgement of the impropriety of her husband’s talk with an indication that she herself was much too well bred to take any open issue with it at the moment.

‘Of course, when we opened up the house and gardens on a straight commercial basis, with no nonsense about local charities and so forth, we ought to have got this confounded indecent statue out of the way. I see that clearly enough now. But the fact is, it was a bit of a draw.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
, you might say. My father would stroll up here with two or three cronies after dinner, and the stupid thing would amuse them. And so with the trippers. Just the men, you know, as with those smutty little wall paintings at Pompeii. I blame myself for not having put a stop to it. After all, it was Julia’s duckweed that surrounded it, so permitting it wasn’t really at all the thing.’ Lord Canadine produced this sudden turn as a simple English gentleman without evincing any sign of self-consciousness. ‘So that’s the story of the statue, more or less. I think we ought to be getting back to the house for tea.’

There was nothing for it but her best behaviour, Judith told herself as, fifteen minutes later, she accepted a sandwich from her attentive host. Her visit hadn’t been precisely an imposition, but she certainly wasn’t entitled to assume the slightest degree of familiarity with the Canadines. She couldn’t herself recur to the subject of the stolen statue in Lady Canadine’s presence – not after having been told it was a theme Lady Canadine didn’t care for. But Lord Canadine had seemed quite willing to be communicative, and this gave Judith an idea. Having continued to talk gardening over her first sandwich, she turned firmly to railways over her second. After all, it was no more than civil to show some awareness of this master interest of her host’s. The subject was not one to which Judith had addressed her mind for some time. Indeed, her only intimate acquaintance with it had been made in the schoolroom, or even the nursery, through the medium of a prized possession of her brother Mark called
The Wonder Book of Trains
. Her information, therefore, couldn’t remotely be called up-to-date. But then a glimpse of the park at Netherway told one that its owner’s interest in steam locomotion was organized on historical principles. Could Lord Canadine have possessed himself of George Stephenson’s celebrated ‘Rocket’ – or still better of that steam road-carriage in which Nicholas Cugnot achieved, in the year 1770, a speed of three miles an hour – he would undoubtedly have given it pride of place in his collection. Judith, whose memory harboured such normally useless pieces of information as that the Trans-Siberian Railway was completed in the same year that the Panama Canal was begun, felt that it was ground upon which, at least for a brief period, she could put up a reasonable show. And Lord Canadine, suitably impressed, would offer to conduct her round his collection before she departed. Just this happened. Lord Canadine produced for Lady Appleby’s acceptance a pictorial plan of his model railway system, and traced for her, with a well-manicured finger, the sundry gradients, embankments, and tunnels which he had constructed for it. Judith was so enchanted that, half an hour later, and after parting from Lady Canadine with sundry reciprocal undertakings as to the exchange of interesting roots and tubers, she found herself strolling through the park under convoy of her host. Scrambling in and out of the cabs of this vintage locomotive and that, she continued to keep her end up as well as she could. She ended by feeling far from certain that Lord Canadine wasn’t amused. And this prompted her to a change of plan.

‘How did you know,’ she asked suddenly, ‘that I was Lady Appleby?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ The tone of Lord Canadine’s voice was politely uncomprehending.

‘Your wife was speaking of a kinswoman, and introduced me simply as Judith Appleby. But you said “Lady Appleby” almost at once.’

‘By Jove, so I did! I remember it perfectly. Julia must have mentioned you on some previous occasion.’

‘That isn’t possible, I’m afraid. Lady Canadine had never heard of me.’

‘You dropped in out of the blue?’ This time, Canadine was more frankly amused. ‘People do, of course. Men who are interested in locomotives, and women with a passion for duckweed. Perfectly natural. And one always welcomes a kinsman, of course.’

‘You still haven’t found an explanation.’

‘My dear Lady Appleby, it’s perfectly simple. As simple as my dear old friend, Archie Lyward. Lord Cockayne, that is. He tells me he’s been trying to interest Sir John Appleby in a vanished picture. Clearly you were Lady Appleby, and interested in a vanished statue. There you were, questioning my wife about it.’ Judith climbed out of what she had been assured was a four-coupled express passenger engine designed by J Holden for the Great Eastern Railway Company in 1904 (that inexhaustibly significant year: Trans-Siberian Railway, Panama Canal – and, for that matter, the publication by Mr Henry James of
The Golden Bowl
). At least she needn’t climb into another of the things. For with Lord Canadine the moment of truth had arrived – a very fleeting moment of very minor truth, no doubt; but something, all the same.

‘Yes,’ Judith said. ‘It’s perfectly true. We’re hot on a scent.’

‘For a long time I’ve suspected it, in my dim and rural way.’ Lord Canadine – who
was
a little mad, Judith fleetingly thought – laughed unaffectedly. ‘I mean that, in this statue affair, there was a shade more than met the eye. That, incidentally, went for the beastly thing itself. More met the eye than was decent. Or – shall we say? – than was grown-up. What’s called a lavatory or prep-school humour, but done in stone. We needn’t labour that.’

‘Certainly we needn’t, Lord Canadine. I know about it.’

‘Well, I’ve wondered – or since I gathered the thing was valuable, I’ve wondered – whether that wasn’t the nub of the matter. Pinch something its owner is reluctant to make a song about. Or pinch something in circumstances its owner doesn’t feel quite free to ventilate. That’s what applies to Archie’s picture – although it was ever so long ago.’

‘Archie?’

‘Lord Cockayne.’

‘Yes, of course. I forgot.’ Judith was developing a considerable respect for the intelligence of Lord Cockayne’s friend Lord Canadine. ‘You mean you’ve wondered whether there may have been a series of such affairs?’

‘Just that. And with Sir John and Lady Appleby both taking an interest in the matter, it does rather look as if my conjecture was confirmed. Would you care to look at any more of these toys of mine?’

‘Not really.’

‘I thought not. Has it occurred to you, by the way, that I must be very much my father’s son? Boilers and bladders – the same sort of infantile interest in–’

‘Quite. It’s not a theme you need elaborate. Would you be upset, Lord Canadine, if the affair of your statue had to be publicized in the course of clearing up a series of such frauds and thefts?’

‘Not in the least.’ Canadine paused, as if surprised by what he had said. ‘Odd, really – but one’s feelings do change with the years, wouldn’t you say? Perhaps it’s simply that I feel Julia wouldn’t be much upset now. Her mind is very much with the duckweed, just as mine is with these wretched steam contraptions.’ Lord Canadine, whose speech normally contrived a certain lightness of air, seemed for the moment to have struck a sombre note. ‘We’ve both missed out on life, rather – Julia and I. No children, you know. And my business ought to have been with the public life of the country. What else is one a peer for – educated at those privileged places, and connected with all sorts of people more powerful than oneself? But I’ve done damn all, and it’s too late now.’

Judith said nothing. Perhaps Lord Canadine was hard up for rational society – but he still ought not to have embarked on this sort of talk with a total stranger. He was a percipient character, all the same. And this emerged strikingly in what he said next.

‘Lady Appleby – may I say that I greatly admire your work as a sculptor? And of course that’s the real reason why I knew who you were! But doesn’t it put you in a special relationship to what we’re concerned with?’

‘It certainly does. Your father’s prank revolts me. But I didn’t think I’d ever confess so much to anybody.’

‘So we are friends, are we not?’ Canadine’s gaiety – for it was almost that – had returned. ‘Can we be allies, too? Is there any way in which I can help this hunt?’

‘You can tell me whether you have any idea how a thief came to know that the statue was valuable. You speak of the people who come to look at Netherway as trippers. Even if some of them got around to wandering up to that pool, it seems unlikely that among them would be somebody with an eye for valuable works of art in unexpected places.’

‘Perfectly true. Or perfectly true, so far as the half a crown crowd is concerned.’