Appleby And Honeybath (11 page)

‘Yes, of course. But now a sacred person has done this here at Grinton, Mrs Mustard?’

‘Not exactly that. And, unfortunately, the higher bilocation appears not to be in question.’

‘I fear I am terribly ignorant. There are two sorts of bilocation?’

‘Certainly – but in a subtle relationship the one with the other. Common bilocation is a matter of being, say, in London at one moment and removed to New York the next. In the higher bilocation a person is in two distinct places – Paris and Pekin, it may be – simultaneously.’

‘And at Grinton we have been favoured only with the lower variety, which is quite a humdrum affair?’

‘Well, yes – but with one
very
important difference. Surely you have been told about it?’ For an instant Mrs Mustard glanced almost suspiciously at Appleby.

‘Well, yes. I have heard a rumour. But do tell.’

‘The person in this instance is said to have been
dead
.’ Mrs Mustard paused impressively. ‘I don’t think I ever heard of such a thing before. It is of the highest theoretical significance, since there can be no volition on the part of a corpse. It must have been acted upon by some exterior agency. You do agree?’

‘Oh, I don’t see that, Mrs Mustard. We know devilish little about that sort of thing, after all. That’s where the fun lies, wouldn’t you say? And a corpse may have a trick or two left to it in a surprising way. Take a chicken now. It’s said you can chop its head off and it will still run clean round the fowl yard. And there are all those ghosts – veridical phantasms of the dead, I ought to say – strayed from the scaffold with their own heads under their arms. Prima facie, I don’t see that the dead must be denied the pleasures of bilocation. But about this current affair. Does it mean that at Grinton we now have two identical dead bodies instead of just one? The police must feel anything of the sort as decidedly an
embarras de richesse
. But I’m being stupid, of course. You must forgive me. It’s an unfamiliar terrain to me, you know. Two identical bodies could result only from the higher bilocation, and this is just the bread-and-butter lower one. A dead body found in one place is later discovered mysteriously transported to another place.’

‘Mysteriously
– yes.’

‘Then we are in perfect agreement, after all,’ Appleby said, and applied himself to what – rather disconcertingly – bore a distinct relationship to Welsh rabbit.

Charles Honeybath had found himself between Judith Appleby and Terence Grinton’s married daughter, Magda Tancock. He began by taking a cautious look at the younger woman. Although she had two children in their early teens, she was far from consenting to look matronly. That bandbox look (Honeybath told himself) belonged to the kind of young woman who gives much thought to the figure she is going to cut at her next party. It is not a disposition or preoccupation to be regarded in a particularly unsympathetic light – or not by a painter. Transferring that sort of high finish to a canvas without turning chocolate box artist or society photographer presented problems of considerable interest in themselves. At the same time, Honeybath was quite glad that it was to Magda’s father and not to Magda herself that he was soon to be devoting his professional energies.

Or was he? Might it not be possible that the afternoon’s obscure events would develop in some fashion so macabre or sinister as to preclude for a time his going forward with his commission in that sort of decent calm it required? This was a self-centred and even slightly morbid thought, and the immediate remedy was to start talking to Judith, and defer encounter with the less familiar lady. This he now managed to do. What he didn’t manage was to advance a topic unconnected with the sensational events of the day.

‘Judith,’ he asked, ‘have you heard that the police have cleared out? I ran into that fellow Denver in the hall, and he actually shook hands with me a valedictory fashion. He might have been a specialist who had been peering into my inside, and was just off to do the same thing by another patient. But he’d think about my case, and send his opinion to my GP. It positively made me feel on a danger list – that in no time I’d be in intensive care in the local police station.’

‘My dear Charles, what a fantastic idea! Or are you merely being good fun?’

‘Well, one must try, you know, to make a moment merry. But there really is something slightly unnerving in not being quite believed. John, God bless him, is a believer. He believes not only that I came on a man in the library, but that I came on a dead man. Denver credits me with coming on
something
– or I rather think he does. But I seem to sense a general persuasion that poor old Honeybath was simply seeing things. His job, of course. Even portrait painters make their living ninety per cent out of portraying what isn’t there. Every year the walls of Burlington House proclaim it.’

‘Thank goodness, Charles, you keep so entirely cheerful.’

‘I’m not cheerful.’

‘Gamesome, then, and willing to entertain. And I can see the situation is vexatious. But not that there’s anything to complain about in the police having taken themselves off.’

‘It’s tantamount to saying that
nothing
has happened.’

‘I can’t see that. They probably have a rule about an eight-hour day, and getting home to the wife and kiddies. They’ll turn up again in the morning, and fall to with a will, arresting us left and right. This company will never sit down to dinner together again.’

‘It’s a mixed lot, isn’t it? Fourteen all told, if I’ve counted right, and several of them I still don’t know from Adam. Who’s that extraordinary woman on John’s left?’

‘A Mrs Mustard. She was talking to me before dinner, and it seems she’s entirely ready to take over from Mr Denver.’

‘Good Lord! A kind of Miss Marple – female sleuth?’

‘No, nothing so prosaic. She thinks we ought to call spirits from the vasty deep. Discover the truth by holding some sort of séance, in fact. It seems that she herself possesses quite outstanding mediumistic powers.’

‘Heaven save us!’ Honeybath sounded quite genuinely alarmed. ‘But at least the woman on John’s other side isn’t off her head. A Miss or Doctor or Professor Arne. I had some talk with her this morning. Agreeable and well-informed – in the right proportions, too.’

Judith took a moment to consider this last discriminating remark.

‘One can certainly have too much,’ she then said, ‘either of the quality on the one hand or of the acquirement on the other. I hope you’re not going to find my remote kinsman Terence extremely boring. He comes more short on the second than on the first, and even his agreeableness is a bit chancy.’

‘He seems to have the power of being absolutely intolerable without occasioning much resentment. I have to come to understand him, you know, and I’m not going to find it easy. Do you think that he’s perhaps one of the celebrated Grinton odd bods heavily disguised?’

‘Whether he is or isn’t, Charles, you ought to paint him as just that. It would be a stimulating exercise.’

‘No doubt I need stimulating badly, Judith. But if I do paint him – which I begin to doubt – I’ll paint him straight.’

‘Portrait of a gentleman thinking about the chicken fund.’

‘Whatever’s that?’

‘Something to do with the hunt. Terence spends a lot of time brooding over it. He thinks he ought to have control of the chicken fund. But it seems not to have been the customary thing with the Nether Barset. Do you know that there are seventeenth-century poems with titles like
Instructions to a Painter
, and beginning, “Paint me this” or “Paint me that”? Paint me Terence as a Napoleon of high finance. Get it all into the furrow on his brow.’ Judith glanced briefly at Honeybath and judged that this chatter had sufficiently relieved his mind. ‘And now you’d better talk to Magda,’ she said.

So Honeybath prepared to address himself to this task. He had a few moments’ leisure to do so, since Magda was engaged with her other neighbour, an elderly red-faced man very much in the Terence tradition. Apart from Miss Arne’s commendation of Magda as a capable pupil, Honeybath knew very little about the Tancocks. Was Magda the Grintons’ only child? If so – and Honeybath had heard nothing of a son – the young gentleman who, with his parents and sister, had gone in pursuit of rabbits that afternoon was presumably heir to the Grinton estate and fortune, such as it was. Perhaps he would be required to take on a hyphenated life as Mr Tancock-Grinton or Grinton-Tancock. His mother could scarcely be asked about this, but it would be in order to express civil interest in the children. Then there was Giles Tancock’s profession. Apparently it involved standing on a rostrum and banging some convenient surface with a gavel. What thereupon changed hands was commonly no doubt an object of refined interest in one or another field of art or bibliopoly. Nevertheless it was hard (at least for Charles Honeybath, many of whose notions came out of Noah’s ark) to view the activity as quite properly that of a gentleman. Certainly to say to Magda, ‘I gather your husband’s an auctioneer?’ would probably be regarded as a little lacking in the felicitous. ‘Are you a Londoner, as I am?’ might be a bit better. But in rural society (from which Magda herself sprang) ‘Londoner’ was often much the same in implication as ‘townee’ or even ‘weekender’. Semantically – Honeybath reflected – ‘weekender’ was interesting. A couple of generations ago, most persons of consequence were weekenders more weekends than not: moving augustly round one another’s country residences. No doubt that activity continued, if on a diminished scale. But more commonly a weekender was now a citizen who had bought a village hovel, gentrified it, and when in residence knew nothing of his neighbours or even of their dogs and cats.

‘Did the children enjoy their afternoon with the rabbits?’ Honeybath asked. The red-faced man had fallen silent.

‘Not in the least. It’s a ritual activity insisted upon by my father when we pay one of these family visits to Grinton. Demetrius and Florinda aren’t in the least enchanted by it.’

‘Children are not always very receptive of the pleasures prepared for them.’ Honeybath, who knew little about children, supposed this to have a reasonable chance of being true. Give your progeny affected names like Demetrius and Florinda, he was reflecting, and you can’t expect them to be keen on the simpler country pleasures.

‘My husband sets them a very bad example – simply slinking away and going after his own affairs. Of course it
is
rather disgusting. There is a nasty old man with two or three ferrets in a bag – and the poor things haven’t even the chance of a square meal, since their snouts are tied up before the fun begins. Otherwise, it seems, they would simply settle down to a long guzzle and a quiet snooze inside the warren. As it is, out come the rabbits, and Demetrius is supposed to shoot them dead. Of course all he has is a little airgun, and he hasn’t bagged a rabbit yet. But I am always afraid he may bag Florinda.’

‘That must be a considerable anxiety.’

‘It’s not as if it’s the poor boy’s duty to instruct himself in such rusticities. He isn’t going to have Grinton, you know.’

Honeybath felt that ‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ would be an excessive response to this information, which was both mildly surprising as being volunteered in this way and such as entirely to confound his own idle speculations of only a few minutes before. So he only said, ‘Is that so?’ much as if he had been given information on the present state of the Grinton tennis court.

‘I have an elder brother who does some sort of farming in South Africa because he doesn’t get on with my father, but who will arrive and take over when the time comes. It’s not something we at all resent, Giles and I. Florinda is going to do ballet – though I say it she’s a most talented child – and it would be marvellous if Demetrius did too. We’ve been assured by somebody who really knows that he has just the right legs. There’s a lot of silly prejudice about male dancers, don’t you think? About their sexual habits, and the idea that their job is simply to take a deep breath and hold the women up in the air with a palm of the hand to their bottom. So I’d
adore
Demetrius, as I say, to become a ballet dancer too. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he turned out like Nureyev, or even Nijinsky himself, and Florinda were as good as the Fonteyn? A
prima ballerina assoluta
! A stunning
pas de deux
by a brother and sister would be quite something at Covent Garden.’

‘I shall hope to see their debut,’ Honeybath said dishonestly. Mrs Tancock’s speech had depressed him a good deal – the lady not being all that might be expected of an approved Somerville girl privileged to have been taught by Miss Kate Arne. Silly metropolitan ways, he said to himself, and society is turning wholly rubbishing. Aloud, he asked a relevant question. ‘When does a dancer’s full-time education begin, Mrs Tancock? At humbler levels of the same sort of thing – for circuses, and so forth – the infant puts in most of his time being taught to tumble right from the start.’ It was perhaps not quite innocently that Honeybath produced this demeaning comparison. ‘Will Demetrius have to go to a special sort of school almost straight away?’

‘Dear me, no. Naturally, he must go through Eton first. And Florinda will at least begin at a proper girl’s public school – although certainly one at which a great deal of attention is given to dancing. It’s all going to be dreadfully expensive. Of course we hope – or at least Giles hopes – that my father will put his hand in his pocket. Giles says he wouldn’t come within a mile of Grinton if it wasn’t for that. I have doubts about it myself. For one thing, I’m not sure my father has a pocket to put a hand in. And I suspect that, really and truly, Giles thinks the same. I’ve heard him say you can tell by the claret.’

Honeybath found himself putting down his own claret glass abruptly, as if to avoid the enormity of appearing to be checking up on this last aspersion. He had listened in deepening dumbfounderment to Magda Tancock’s entire performance, and could only suppose that devastating candour had become the ‘in’ entertainment at such social gatherings as she normally frequented. Or perhaps it was a turn her set put on when constrained to converse with boring old persons such as Royal Academicians and emeritus professors and the higher clergy. And suddenly Magda Tancock said a surprising thing.