Busman’s Honeymoon (29 page)

  ‘But every Englishman loves a lord. That’s the idea.’

  ‘My wife,’ said Peter mournfully, ‘would cheerfully throw me to the lions, if required.
Moriturus
—very well, we’ll try.’ He advanced resolutely on the group. Mr Puncheon, seeing this noble prey at his mercy, unprotected by fat bulls of Basan, flung himself upon him with a gleeful cry. The other hounds closed in about them.

  ‘I say,’ said a grumbling voice close by, ‘I ought to ’ave given evidence. The law ought to know about them forty quid. Trying to ’ush it up, that’s what they are.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it seems so important to them, Frank.’

  ‘It’s important to me. ’Sides, didn’t ’e tell me as ’e was goin’ to pay me on Wednesday? I reckon the coroner ought to a-been told about it.’

  Salcombe Hardy, having had his chance with Peter, had not abandoned his hold on Mrs Ruddle. Mischievously, Harriet determined to pry him loose. ‘Mr Hardy—if you want an inside story, you’d better get hold of the gardener, Frank Crutchley. There he is, over there, talking to Miss Twitterton. He wasn’t called at the inquest, so the others may not realise he’s got anything to tell them.’

  Sally bubbled over with gratitude.

  ‘If you make it worth his while,’ said Harriet, with serpent malice, ‘he
might
keep it exclusive.’

  ‘Thanks very much,’ said Sally, ‘for the tip.’

  ‘That’s part of our bargain,’ said Harriet, beaming upon him.

  Mr Hardy was rapidly coming to the conclusion that Peter had married a most fascinating woman. He made a rapid dart at Crutchley and in a few moments was seen to depart with him in the direction of the Four-Ale bar. Mrs Ruddle, suddenly deserted, gazed indignantly about her.

  ‘Oh,
there
you are, Mrs Ruddle! Where’s Bunter? We’d better let him drive us home and come back for his lordship, or we shall get no lunch. I’m simply starving. What an impertinent, tiresome lot these newspaper men are!’

  ‘That’s right, m’lady,’ said Mrs Ruddle. ‘I wouldn’t talk to the likes of them!’

  She tossed her head, setting some curious jet ornaments on her bonnet jingling, and followed her mistress to the car. Sitting up in all that grandeur she would feel just like a film-star herself. Reporters, indeed! As they drove away, six cameras clicked.

  ‘There now,’ said Harriet. ‘You’ll be in all the papers.’

  ‘Well, to be sure!’ said Mrs Ruddle.

  ‘Peter.’

  ‘Madam?’

  ‘Funny, after what we said, that suggestion cropping up about Mrs Sellon.’

  ‘Village matron instead of village maiden. Yes; very odd.’

  ‘There can’t be anything in it?’

  ‘You never know.’

  ‘You didn’t think so when you said it?’

  ‘I am always trying to say something too silly to be believed; but I never manage it. Have another cutlet?’

  ‘Thanks, I will. Bunter cooks like an angel in the house. I thought Sellon got through his examination surprisingly well.’

  ‘Nothing like telling the exact official truth and no more. Kirk must have coached him pretty thoroughly. I wonder if Kirk—No, dash it! I won’t wonder. I won’t be bothered with all these people. We seem curiously unable to get any time to ourselves this honeymoon. And that reminds me, the vicar wants us to go round to his place this evening for a sherry-party.’

  ‘A sherry-party? Good heavens!’

  ‘We provide the party and he provides the sherry. His wife will be set delighted to see us, and will we excuse her not calling first, as she has a Women’s Institute this afternoon.’

  ‘Must we?’

  ‘I think we must. Our example has encouraged him to start a sherry-fashion in these parts, and he has sent for a bottle on purpose.’

  Harriet gazed at him in dismay.

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘From the best hotel in Pagford.... I accepted with pleasure for both of us. Was that wrong?’

  ‘Peter, you’re not
normal.
You have a social conscience far in advance of your sex. Public-house sherry at the vicarage! Ordinary, decent men shuffle and lie till their wives drag them out by the ears. There must be
something
you’ll jib at. Will you refuse to put on a boiled shirt?’

  ‘Do you think a boiled shirt would please them? I suppose it would. Besides, you’ve got a new frock you want to show me.’

  ‘You’re definitely too good to live.... Of course we’ll go and drink their sherry, if we die of it. But couldn’t we just be selfish and naughty this afternoon?’

  ‘As how?’

  ‘Go off somewhere by ourselves.’

  ‘By god we will! ... Is that really your notion of happiness?’

  ‘To that depth have I fallen. I admit it. Don’t dance on a woman when she’s down. Have some of this—I don’t know what it is—this thing Bunter’s made. It looks absolutely marvellous.’

  ‘Just how naughty and selfish may I be? ... May I drive fast? ... I mean, really fast?’

  Harriet repressed a shudder. She liked to drive, and even liked being driven, but anything over seventy miles an hour made her feel hollow inside. Still, married people cannot have everything their own way.

  ‘Yes, really fast, if you feel like that.’

  ‘Definitely too good to live!’

  ‘I should say, definitely too good to die.... But really fast means the main road.’

  ‘So it does. Well, we’ll do the main road really fast and get rid of it.’

  The ordeal lasted only as far as Great Pagford. Happily they encountered none of Superintendent Kirk’s black sheep parked on bends, though, just outside, they shot past Frank Crutchley driving a taxi and were rewarded by his astonished and admiring stare. Passing the police-station at a demure legal thirty, they turned out westward and took to the side roads. Harriet, who could not distinctly recollect having breathed at all since they left Paggleham, filled her lungs and observed in resolutely steady tones that it was a lovely day for a run.

  ‘Isn’t it? Do you approve of this road?’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ said Harriet, fervently. ‘
All
corners!’

  He laughed. ‘
Prière de ne pas brutaliser la machine.
I ought to know better—God knows I’m frightened of enough things myself. I must have a streak of my father in me. He was one of the old school—you either faced a fence of your own accord or were walloped over and no nonsense. It worked—after a fashion. One learnt to pretend one wasn’t a coward, and take out the change in bad dreams.’

  ‘You certainly don’t show any signs of it.’

  ‘One of these days you’ll find me out, I expect. I don’t happen to be afraid of speed—that’s why I like to show off. But I give you my word I won’t do it again, this trip.’

  He let the needle drop back to twenty-five and they dawdled on through the lanes in silence, with no particular direction. About the mid-afternoon, they found themselves in a village some thirty miles from home—an old village with a new church and a pond flanking a trim central green, all clustered at the base of a little rise. On the side opposite the church, a narrow and rather ill-made lane appeared to rise towards the brow of the hill.

  ‘Let’s go up there,’ said Harriet, appealed to for instructions. ‘It looks as though we should get a good view.’

  The car swung into the lane and wound its way up with lazy ease between low hedges already touched with autumn.

  Below and to their left was spread the pleasant English country, green and russet with well-wooded fields sloping to a stream that twinkled placidly in the October sunshine. Here and there the pale glint of stubble showed amid the pasture; or the blue smoke drifted above the trees from the red chimneys of a farm. On their right, at a bend of the road, they came upon a ruined church, only the porch and a portion of the chancel arch left standing. The other stonework had doubtless been carried away to build the new church in the centre of the village; but the abandoned graves with their ancient headstones had been trimly kept, and just within the open gate a space had been levelled and made into a kind of garden-plot with flower-beds and a sun-dial and a wooden seat on which visitors could rest to view the distant prospect. Peter gave an exclamation, and let the car slide to a standstill on the grass verge.

  ‘May I lose my last dollar,’ he said, ‘if that isn’t one of our chimney-pots!’

  ‘I believe you’re right,’ said Harriet, staring at the sundial, whose column did indeed bear a remarkable resemblance to a ‘Tooder pot’. She followed Peter out of the car and through the gate. Seen close to, the sun-dial revealed itself as a miscellany; the dial and gnomon were ancient; the base was a mill-stone; the column, when sharply tapped, sounded hollow.

  ‘I will have my pot back,’ said Peter in determined tones, ‘if I die for it. We will present the village with a handsome stone pillar in its place. Jack shall have Jill. Naught shall go ill. The man shall have his mare again and all go well. This suggests a new variation of the time-honoured sport of pot-hunting. We will track down our bartered chimneys from end to end of the county, as the Roman legions sought the lost eagles of Varus. I think the luck went out of the house with the chimney-pots, and it’s our job to bring it back.’

  ‘That will be fun. I counted this morning: there are only four of them missing. This looks exactly like the three that are left.’

  ‘I’m positive it is ours. Something tells me so. Let us register our claim to it by a trifling act of vandalism which the first rain will blot out.’ He solemnly took out a pencil and inscribed upon the pot: ‘Talboys,
Suam quisque homo rem meminit.
Peter Wimsey.’ He handed the pencil to his wife, who added, ‘Harriet Wimsey,’ with the date below.

  ‘First time of writing it?’

  ‘Yes. It looks a little drunk, but that’s because I had to squat down to it.’

  ‘No matter—it’s an occasion. Let’s occupy this handsome seat and contemplate the landscape. The car’s well off the road if anybody wants to get up the lane.’

  The seat was solid and comfortable. Harriet pulled off her hat and sat down, pleased to feel the soft wind stir her hair. Her gaze wandered idly over the sunlit valley.

  Peter hung his hat on the extended hand of a stout eighteenth-century cherub engaged in perusing a lichenous book on an adjacent tombstone, sat down on the other end of the seat and stared reflectively at his companion.

  His spirits were in a state of confusion, into which the discovery of the murder and the problem of Joe Sellon and the clock had introduced only a subsidiary set of disturbing factors. These he dismissed from his mind, and set himself to reduce the chaos of his personal emotions to some sort of order.

  He had got what he wanted. For nearly six years he directed his resolution stubbornly to a single end. Up to the very moment of achievement he had not paused to consider what might be the results of his victory. The last two days had given him little time for thought. He only knew that he was faced with an entirely strange situation, which was doing something quite extraordinary to his feelings.

  He forced himself to examine his wife with detachment. Her face had character, but no one would ever think of calling it beautiful, and he had always—carelessly and condescendingly—demanded beauty as a pre-requisite. She was long-limbed and sturdily made, with a kind of loosely-knit freedom of movement that might, with a more controlled assurance, grow into grace; yet he could have named—and if he had chosen might have had—a score of women far lovelier in form and motion. Her speaking voice was deep and attractive; yet, after all, he had once owned the finest lyric soprano in Europe. Otherwise, what?—A skin like pale honey and a mind of a curious, tough quality that stimulated his own. Yet no woman had ever so stirred his blood; she had only to look or speak to make the very bones shake in his body.

  He knew now that she could render back passion for passion with an eagerness beyond all expectation—and also with a kind of astonished gratitude that told him more than she knew. While a mannerly reticence forbade that the name of her dead lover should ever be mentioned between them, Peter, interpreting phenomena in the light of expert knowledge, found himself mentally applying to that unhappy young man quite a number of epithets, among which ‘clumsy lout’ and ‘egotistical puppy’ were the kindest. But the passionate exchange of felicity was no new experience: what was new was the enormous importance of the whole relationship. It was not merely that the present bond could not be sundered without scandal and expense and the troublesome interference of lawyers. It was that, for the first time in his experience, it really mattered to him what his relations with a lover were. He had somehow vaguely imagined that, the end of desire attained, soul and sense would lie down together like the lion and the lamb; but they did nothing of the sort. With orb and sceptre thrust into his hands, he was afraid to take hold on power and call his empire his own.

  He remembered having said to his uncle (with a solemn dogmatism better befitting a much younger man): ‘Surely it is possible to love with the head as well as the heart.’ Mr Delagardie had replied, somewhat drily: ‘No doubt; so long as you do not end by thinking with your entrails instead of your brain.’ This, he felt, was precisely what was happening to him. As soon as he tried to think, a soft, inexorable clutch seemed to fasten itself upon his bowels. He had become vulnerable in the very point where always, until now, he had been most triumphantly sure of himself. His wife’s serene face told him that she had somehow gained all the confidence he had lost. Before their marriage, he had never seen her look like that.

  ‘Harriet,’ he said, suddenly, ‘what do you think about life? I mean, do you find it good on the whole? Worth living?’

  (He could, at any rate. trust her not to protest, archly: ‘That’s a nice thing to ask on one’s honeymoon!’)