Farthing (19 page)

The steak was good, overcooked by Carmichael’s standards, but he knew from experience that he might as well take the well-done steak the kitchen knew how to prepare rather than try to educate them into the mysteries of what was meant by medium-rare.

“If he killed himself,” Carmichael said, speaking quietly once more, “if he’d gone out in the night to his car and killed himself, who would be the most likely choices to find the body, any time between one and—let’s say eight, when the Catholic servants set off for church?”

“Hold on, sir, what about rigor? Wouldn’t that make him hard to move, for someone who found him at the wrong time?”

“Good thought, sergeant. Pity rigor’s such a tricky thing to time. Let’s say right after he died then, before it set in, or in the morning, after it had passed off. Who might stumble across him?”

“Most likely would mean in the morning rather than late at night,” Royston said. “I mean, anyone could have been up just after one, but the house was locked up.”

“He got out to kill himself.” Carmichael speared a mushroom. “He could have left the doors open behind himself.”

“Then our joker would have had to lock them up afterwards, because Hatchard found them locked as usual in the morning.”

“What time was that?” Carmichael asked.

Royston pulled his notebook out of his pocket and turned pages, pausing to take another bite of steak, then turning more. Carmichael ate without tasting his food while he waited. “Six-fifteen,”

Royston said, at last.

“So after the door was opened at six-fifteen, who might have gone out and strolled among the cars?”

Royston looked dubious. “Anyone might have, but it wouldn’t have been a very natural thing for someone to do.”

“We have a record of everyone’s movements for that time?”

“Yes, but most of them were in bed until much later.” Royston turned pages again. “Lord Timothy

Cheriton was up early, Mr. and Mrs. Kahn, and practically all the servants got up sometime between six and seven.”

“How about Normanby?”

“He got up just before he found the body,” Royston said. “His testimony and his wife’s corroboration.”

“They share a bedroom?” Carmichael asked, surprised.

“They say they do,” Royston said. “They have two connecting rooms, much the same as the Thirkies.”

“I think I want to talk to Mrs. Normanby tomorrow,” Carmichael said, taking another draught of his beer. “Do you think she’d cover up for her husband?”

“I don’t think there’s all that much love lost there, sir, but I don’t doubt she’d do that if she thought it necessary.” Royston swallowed. “They probably all would—they’d stick together, like, cover up for

each other. Not the servants; the nobs. That’s very much the feeling I’ve got—not so much that they are covering up anything, but that they would if they felt they needed to. The way they look at me— none of them cooperate the way you’d expect. They treat me as if I’m their servant—not the public’s servant, answering to the people, but their own personal servant doing a job under their own personal orders.”

“Lord Eversley was certainly like that this afternoon,” Carmichael said.

“Lord Eversley, Lord Hampshire, Mr. Normanby, Lady Eversley, the whole pack of them.

Even Lady

Thirkie.”

“And Kahn?”

“Not quite in the same way, but I don’t think he’s telling me everything.”

“I like Mrs. Kahn,” Carmichael said. Royston looked inquiring, but Carmichael shook his head.

“I don’t know. Do you think they’re all covering something up? Something we ought to know?”

“I don’t know,” Royston said, unhappily. “I can’t tell. I suppose it’s a hunch, really, just that they would if they wanted to.”

“Well that’s very interesting, sergeant, and thank you very much for telling me,” Carmichael said.

“I know how difficult it can be to pin down that sort of impression, and yet it’s something that might be very useful indeed.”

“But now any scenario we make has to include the Bolshevik, doesn’t it, sir, and I can’t imagine any of them having anything to do with a Bolshevik.”

“I know very little about the Bolsheviks myself,” Carmichael said. “They’ll send a report down from the

Yard tomorrow. Until then, we’re probably best enjoying our dinner and sleeping on what facts we have.”

17

Dinner that night, the Monday, was even more bloody than it had been the night before. I’d hardly been able to look at myself in the mirror beforehand. It wasn’t the scrape, it was my body. I’d always been able to say before that I had the usual debby kind of looks, and it was true
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enough of my face, which looked just like the portrait of our Eversley ancestor who got out of being burned at the stake under

Queen Elizabeth because it rained that day. The rest of the family gave up Catholicism when it went out of fashion, but she stuck it out in the Tower. There’s a portrait of her in the gun room, and the top part of her face is really extraordinarily like mine. Hugh used to call me Heretic sometimes, and Mummy, once, when she was very cross with me about wanting to marry David, said that I was just following her terrible example. But my body isn’t like hers at all, as far as one can tell—she’s wearing one of those Elizabethan dresses that don’t show the figure very much.

My body went straight from puppy fat to middle-aged spread, and my life is a constant struggle not to become a hippopotamus, like my Grandmother Dorset.

It’s most unfair that those genes skipped Mummy, who is as thin as a stick, and went directly to me. My hips are a constant trial to me.

That day, dressing for dinner, without the consolation of being able to say that my face was all right at least, I had to wrestle with my hair and my body, and I knew I looked awful. David usually said I was delightfully curved and as thin as any healthy woman could hope to be, and when he said it that cheered me up even if I was having a fit of despairing over my bottom, but that night he was sunk in gloom himself and didn’t even notice. He was sure the police suspected him of being in league with the assassin, and he felt guilty for not having somehow magically protected me from the bullet. He seemed to think that had he not been Jewish and therefore under suspicion and talking to the police, he’d have been with me and able to throw himself between me and it. It was completely pointless to tell him that he’d have got himself killed to save me from a flesh wound. He wanted to make that kind of gesture, or at least the poor dear felt he did.

I put on my beige Chanel sack again, which I’d worn to the party on Saturday, but I didn’t have anything with me I hadn’t worn; we’d expected to go home on Sunday. I’d had to give some underclothes to

Molly to have washed for us or we wouldn’t have had them either. We went down to dinner with David looking very smart and elegant, but unmistakably Jewish, as he always did, and me looking awful. There had been a picture of us like that in the Herald once, without the wound, of course, but me looking beastly and him looking wonderful, and they had titled the article with it: “Is he marrying her for her position?” I’m quite sure that nobody looking at it who didn’t know David could have doubted it for a moment. I swore then I’d eat less and lose weight, and I do manage to lose a pound or two from time to time, and David swears I’m as flat as a board and as thin as Mummy. Then the pounds creep back on somehow when I’m not looking. It seems beastly unfair, but there isn’t any way around it.

It struck me as we sat around the dining table, all dressed for dinner, jewels glinting in the candlelight, how simply absurd the whole thing was. Here we were gathered to eat, but not just to eat, to eat specific courses in a prescribed order. Mummy would probably have been more horrified to have meat before fish, or a savory before the soup in the French way, than she was by a terrorist shooting at Daddy and me. We sat in a prescribed order, we ate and talked as the conventions dictated, and the whole thing was as artificial as one of those elaborate plaster wedding cakes confectioners keep in their windows. I’d have much rather had a big bowl of soup and half a loaf of bread in my room.

I was seated between Uncle Dud and Sir Thomas, neither of them the world’s greatest conversationalists. Sir Thomas tried to tell me about the economics of copper production. I sat in silence much of the time, or eavesdropped on the general conversation.

Angela had come down to dinner, with that very smug and serene look women sometimes get early in pregnancy. She was wearing a black dress she must have had with her, though black wasn’t usually her color, and she wore with it the famous Thirkie Fall, a Victorian diamond
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necklace. It was a family heirloom, of course. I remembered seeing Olivia wearing it years ago but which I didn’t think I’d ever seen on Angela before. It was the first time most people had seen her since the morning before, and she accepted condolences quite gracefully. She was sitting across from me, between David and Daddy, so I

could hear it all quite well.

Daddy’s arm was in a sling, the only evidence that the shooting had happened, apart from the piece of fresh gauze the doctor had stuck across my cheek. He looked a little tired, which might have been from pain or it might have been from something the doctor gave him for the pain. He wasn’t drinking his

Moselle—I noticed the glass was still almost full when Jeffrey took it away to replace it with claret.

Looking across the table at him, I found myself wondering exactly how old he was. He’d fought in the

Great War, and then again in the Second War, so he had to be nearly sixty. He had always seemed younger.

Daphne was on the other side of Daddy. She looked terrible, as if she’d been crying all day, which she might have been—I hadn’t seen her since breakfast. It struck me, as people were telling Angela how sorry they were and how much they’d miss Sir James, that Daphne was the only one who would really miss him, and probably the only one who was really sorry too.

Angela would have the baby, and she’d probably remarry; she was young, and pretty. Besides, I wasn’t sure she’d ever really liked her husband.

Daphne had definitely been in love with him. I saw Mark looking at Daphne, too, and smiling to himself, as if he was enjoying her being upset, which was beastly of him, even if she was his wife and Sir James

her lover.

“It’s not that I don’t enjoy your hospitality,” Uncle Dud said, across the table to Daddy. “But I really would like to get home to my roses.”

“To London,” Mummy put in, from his other side. “There’s the important vote coming up tomorrow.”

“The arrangement was that I was going to go to London with you today, vote tomorrow, and be back at home tomorrow night.” Uncle Dud looked peevish.

“We can all go up to London tomorrow and vote, and if you don’t mind the long journey you can be back among your roses before bedtime,” Daddy said. “I’ve spoken to the Chief Constable in

Winchester, and to Penn-Barkis at Scotland Yard. No matter what Inspector Carmichael says, we’re all free to go after ten o’clock tomorrow. It’s possible that Carmichael will want to have a last word with some of us immediately after breakfast, but then we can get away.”

The atmosphere around the table lifted immediately. Only Daphne remained sunk in gloom. I looked at

David, who smiled across at me. I could tell he was thinking just the same as I was, how glorious it would be to be home! To be back in our own dear little flat with our own things and our own servants!

To be out of gloom-sunk Farthing and away from Mummy!

“Well done, Charles,” Uncle Dud said.

“And you’ll come up to London to vote?” Mummy inquired.

“Of course I will,” Uncle Dud said. “And Tibs will too.”

Tibs, on the far side of Daphne, and trying valiantly to engage her in conversation, looked up when his name was mentioned. “I will what?” he asked.

“You’ll come up to London to vote in the House tomorrow,” Mummy said.

“Oh, rather,” Tibs said. “It’s the important vote, isn’t it, the new leader of the party thing? I wouldn’t miss it for the world, Aunt Margaret, even if I didn’t hope for a better job in the reshuffle, because I know you’d never forgive me if I didn’t.”

Mummy merely smiled one of her glacier smiles.

I was so pleased that we were going home that I forgot all about my new resolution to lose weight and ate up every bite of Mrs. Richardson’s wonderful jam roly-poly and custard.

After dinner, people started doing the usual country weekend thing of making up fours for bridge in the drawing room. Tibs and David disappeared to the billiard room. I refused to admit to any interest in bridge and said I was going to bed, but Eddie Cheriton buttonholed me.

“I need something to read,” she said. “Billy always said you know about books; come on, find me something.” She almost dragged me into the library.

It isn’t true that I know about books, though I know more than Billy Cheriton. What Billy probably meant was that he’d seen me reading on occasion. Even Georgette Heyer and Dorothy Sayers would count as high literature to Billy. Anyway, I’ve always loved the library at Farthing. I learned to read there.

Hugh taught me, from a huge old leather volume with pictures of fairies. It’s a wonderful place, what with the smell of the books and the look of their leather bindings, the way the matched sets and the classics are mixed up with things Daddy picked up in Waterloo to read on the train, so you might find absolutely anything next to anything else. David once found James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution

between Machiavelli’s

The Prince and the collected poems of Lord Byron! “What sort of thing are you looking for?” I asked Eddie. As far as I knew she’d never read anything before but cello music.

“I don’t really want a book, silly,” she said, lighting a cigarette and putting it into her holder. “I wanted to ask you if you have any idea whose baby it is that Angela Thirkie’s having.”

“She told me and Daphne that it was Sir James’s,” I said, absolutely shocked in a terribly Victorian way.