Farthing (24 page)

“I don’t suppose Normanby did drive him to it, but just the suicide would work that way.”

Carmichael stared out of the car. They were leaving the country at last, and entering a small town. The road would run through civilization now until it came to London. A cloud passed
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over the sun.

“And the Bolsheviks could have managed that part of it, if it wasn’t suicide.”

“No, we mustn’t forget the Bolsheviks.”

“Or anyone else for that matter,” added Royston. “Anyone could have killed him, or it could have been suicide, and Normanby arranged the body with the star, which he probably picked up in France as a souvenir, and Thirkie’s own dagger.”

“Lipstick,” Carmichael said.

Royston drove on in silence. A heavier cloud was covering the sun now, and showing no signs of passing.

“Have I foiled you, sergeant?” Carmichael asked after a moment.

“It was definitely stolen on Friday, when all the suspects were in the house,” Royston said.

“Maybe

Normanby stole it for some other reason and used it because he had it to hand.”

“If Normanby wants lipstick he can steal his wife’s, which would be much better quality than Woolworth’s Carmine,” Carmichael said. “Leaving aside entirely the question of why a respectable male member of Parliament might want lipstick at all.”

“Maybe he wanted cheap lipstick,” Royston said. “Remember that man with the stockings? He only stole nylons—silk was no good to him. Maybe it’s like that.”

“I think the resemblance this theory has to a nylon is that it’s getting a little stretched,”

Carmichael said.

They drove on. As they came to the outskirts of London proper, the skies opened and Royston was obliged to put on his windscreen wipers.

“We had beautiful weather all the time we were in the country,” Carmichael couldn’t resist saying.

“Just as well. It doesn’t really matter if it rains in town,” replied Royston, irrepressibly.

21

I could see the moment we were on our own in the house how uncomfortable it was likely to be.

The servants wouldn’t mind, but David was sure they would. We’d be tiptoeing around the place afraid to do anything or cause any trouble, and with nothing to do ourselves. So I scuppered that right away. As soon as Hatchard and all the other grand servants had gone off to the train I rang for Jeffrey. We were still sitting in the drawing room, David rather sunk in gloom beside me.

“Mrs. Smollett wanted to know if you and Mr. Kahn would be wanting lunch, madam,” Jeffrey said,

before I could say anything.

“We’ll be wanting something,” I said, “but I don’t think it will be a formal lunch. What we’d like would be sandwiches—is there any of that salmon left? And we’d like it in the garden.” David looked at me and made a tiny noise of protest. I put my hand on his but went sailing on. “Also, please tell her we don’t want dinner, not a huge family dinner with courses. We appreciate the difficulty we’re putting her to, and what we’d really like today is a nursery tea.”

David laughed, and Jeffrey smiled. “Really, madam?” Jeffrey asked.

“Yes, really, a nursery tea with bread and butter and boiled eggs and cold meat, and perhaps a kipper, and cake.” Hugh and I used to call nursery teas “broken meats,” which was a term he’d found in some story, because the meat would be the end of what had been served for some other meal, and the cakes were never whole. “And we’ll want something like that every day we’re here—sandwiches or a light snack at lunchtime, and a nursery tea with perhaps one hot dish, in the early evening. We won’t eat in the dining room, either, so you can close it up as you normally would. We’ll take all our meals in the breakfast room.”

“Very good, madam,” Jeffrey said, and he was grinning quite broadly now.

“It’ll be less trouble for you and much more what Mr. David and I enjoy,” I said.

“It’ll be just like when you were here with Miss Abbott after you’d been ill,” Jeffrey said. “Do you ever hear from Miss Abbott now, madam?”

“Yes, I do. She’s given up governessing. She’s married and she helps her husband to run a school,” I

said.

“I’m very glad she’s happy, miss—madam, I mean.” Jeffrey caught his slip at once. “I’ll tell Mrs.

Smollett and Mrs. Simons what you’ve said, and perhaps you could have a word with Mrs.

Simons tomorrow morning before she goes in to Winchester to do the marketing.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to say I’d go in with her. Market day in Winchester had been a Wednesday as long as I could remember, and going along with Sukey, or Abby, or Mrs. Collins, the housekeeper we had before Mrs. Simons, had been one of the pleasures of my early life.

Winchester has very narrow medieval streets for the most part, except down by the Cathedral Close where they’re all splendidly eighteenth century. The market stalls make the streets even narrower. They all have striped awnings and are manned by cheerful country people. The wares vary tremendously—vegetables and fruit, fish, meat, cloth, hardwares, all in enormous quantities and piled up in heaps. A stall that’s absolutely all gleaming red apples might be next to one that’s all shears and duct tape and little screws.

Anything you can buy anywhere, you can buy in Winchester market. There’s a man there who carves.

He used to be a shepherd, and he carved his own crock so well that the other shepherds asked him to carve ones for them, and then people seeing them asked him to carve other things, and now he’d employed full time making beautiful carvings, and he sits there behind the stall with his big white beard tucked into his belt and his knife in one hand and the wood in the other. He just keeps on carving away while his wife sells the spoons and sticks and children’s toys he’s turning out. But fortunately, I managed to catch the train that time, and not say it. Because what David had agreed with Inspector Carmichael was house arrest, and going in to Winchester market would be breaking it just as much as going home would be.

“I’ll speak to her in the morning,” I said.

“Would you like tea with your sandwiches?” Jeffrey asked. “Or there’s a bottle of Montrachet that was

opened this morning for Lord Manningham to take his tablets. He has to take them in Montrachet, doctor’s orders, he says. But there’s only one glass gone out of it, and it seems a shame to waste it.”

“You could drink it yourself, Jeffrey,” I said.

“Montrachet? Filthy stuff,” he said.

David laughed. “You need to educate your palate, Jeffrey,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Jeffrey said. “Shall I bring it out with the sandwiches, then?”

“You may as well,” I said.

He went out, smiling, and when I turned to David he was smiling too. This was just what I’d hoped for in suggesting a nursery tea, to make David understand that for years my relationship with the older servants at Farthing was one of conspiracy—a conspiracy in which they and I were on the same side, and

Mummy and Daddy were on the other. I wanted to establish to them that David was firmly on my side, and to David that the servants understood.

It’s a funny thing, really, having servants. They’re employees, they’re paid to serve you, to live in your house and take care of you—picking up your mess, cooking your meals. It can’t possibly be an equal relationship, and it’s not surprising that some servants come to absolutely despise their employers, and others come to be terribly snobbish about the most absurd things. I once heard Uncle Dudley’s valet telling another valet that he wouldn’t dream of lowering himself to work
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for anyone less than a Marquis, now that he’d worked for an Earl. I’m quite sure he meant it, that he’d have happily accepted a job with a Duke for less pay than he got from Uncle Dudley, but never one from Daddy, for more pay, because

Daddy is only a Viscount. Yet what does it matter, really? His employer’s rank wouldn’t objectively make the slightest bit of difference to the man, whereas the things that would matter, how much he was paid, how comfortable the situation was, whether his employer was a nice person, wouldn’t count with him.

Abby taught me long ago to see servants as people. She was in an ambiguous position herself, as a governess, not quite a servant, but never a member of the family either. She’d been governess at several houses, and at some had a terrible time, even being raped by the elder brother of her charges once, when the little girls were in the next room and she could not cry out. She taught me not to take servants for granted, to see that we live very intimately with them and that they know our secrets, that we cannot purchase loyalty with pay. She said servants sometimes took out their resentment on people like her, in-between people, giving her bad service, not cleaning her shoes or returning her laundry, refusing to answer her bell. She made me see how privileged I was, and how I might unthinkingly make a servant’s day worse, simply because I was bored or lazy.

It’s a commonplace that old servants become almost family, and that well-treated servants will stay with you, but it’s also true in a way that the commonplace doesn’t touch. Abby was my governess between the ages of six and thirteen, and she looked after me in the holidays until I was seventeen. She taught me to appreciate poetry and do simple arithmetic, but her accomplishments didn’t extend much beyond that—I found out when I went to school that my French was the worst they’d ever heard. But she loved me, she taught me right from wrong, she taught me how to live, and she was far more of a mother to me than Mummy ever was.

David and I went out into the garden. The whole estate is garden in one way, but what we call

“the garden” was a little sunken garden at the back of the house. There are wooden chairs and tables out there, and we keep cushions for the chairs inside so they don’t get wet. We sat out there in the sunshine, though there were clouds coming in from the north and I could tell the bright weather wasn’t going to last.

We ate our salmon sandwiches and finished up the Montrachet and sat and read our books until the clouds came over quite heavily, when we went in to the library, taking our cushions in with us.

I don’t know if it was the Montrachet, or the disappointment, or the baby starting to change my body, but I felt quite tired, although it was hardly two o’clock. I kicked my shoes off and put my feet up on the leather couch in the library and settled down to read The Treasure Seekers for about the thirtieth time.

David sat on the chair where Mummy had been sitting the other day, under Portia, and took up Three

Men in a Boat, which he said he’d never read and always meant to. Before long he was completely engrossed.

I felt like dozing off, and yet I didn’t. I just lay there, half-reading the very familiar episodes, and looking over at David now and again, feeling quite content really, because I didn’t mind being at Farthing at all now. It was Mummy who made me feel claustrophobic. I started thinking about the murder, and about the Bolshevik, and what could really have happened, and about Inspector Carmichael thinking he’d been led by the nose. I was sort of facing up to things I’d only thought about before in between thinking of other things and wanting to get away. Someone had killed Sir James. Someone had shot at me and

Daddy and Daddy had killed him.

I thought about the murder of Sir James. Daphne had found him, and gone into a state of shock;
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then she’d got Mark to lie and say he’d found him. Daphne couldn’t have killed him, she loved him. She was probably the only one who did, if it was true what Eddie said about Angela’s baby not being Sir James’s.

Could Angela have killed him? She certainly had a motive. She could do what she liked now—even if

Mummy and Mark were trying to bully her. What had Mummy said to her, doing little enough for all the benefit you’re getting. What benefit? But Angela was too silly and feminine to have stabbed Sir James, too irresolute to have carried through a course of action like that, and much too silly to have thought of trying to frame it as a political assassination.

Wondering who else benefited, I could see why Inspector Carmichael wanted us to stay here. I could see his case against David very clearly. It frightened me. The only thing that would really clear David would be finding the real murderer.

I don’t suppose you’ve ever considered what it would mean to know that someone close to you had done something unspeakable— and by that I don’t mean shooting a fox or putting lemonade into a single malt, the way Daddy would. I knew David hadn’t done it, but just for a moment I considered it as if he had. He’d have had to have got out of bed without my noticing it. He’d have had to have made certain preparations in advance without my knowing, getting the star and so forth, and probably getting a dagger as well, as I’d never seen him with one. He had a revolver, an ordinary military revolver, which he kept at the bottom of his underwear drawer. So he’d have had to have prepared, and then got out of bed and got the things, and gone down the hall to Sir James’s room—it was between our room and the bathroom, nothing would have been easier—and gone in and stabbed him in his sleep. Then he’d have to have washed off any blood that got onto him—Daphne had said there was blood all over the body—and come back into bed with me.

I couldn’t imagine it. I could imagine him killing someone, even killing Sir James, but that wouldn’t have been the way he did it. Of course, he had killed people, lots of people, during the war, but they’d all been Luftwaffe pilots.

Just then David chuckled at something in the book and looked up and saw me looking at him.

He read a passage out to me, it was the bit about the tin opener, and as he read I knew it was absurd to think he could have done it. If he’d decided to assassinate Sir James for the Jewish cause, though how it could advance it one jot was beyond my understanding, David would have at the very least woken him and shot him, and probably taken him out somewhere a long way from the house. He wouldn’t have left his

body there for Angela or Daphne to walk in and find. David’s a very thoughtful person. He’d never have done it that way. To do that he’d have to be someone else, someone entirely different. Maybe Inspector