Farthing (8 page)

7

Sukey came by at last and tapped hesitantly on her own door. The afternoon had been an interminable drag. The sisters had spent it alternately sniping at and ignoring each other. We’d had a visit from the rather nice, though probably Athenian, Inspector from Scotland Yard.

Angela had shown almost as much distress that Sir James had been killed in the dressing room as that he was dead at all, though she didn’t quite faint. I opened the door to Sukey with a great sense of relief. If nothing else, I was hungry enough to eat a horse, without even cooking and skinning it. I’d even have eaten the saddle.

Sukey stood there in one of her dresses that Hugh had once unkindly dubbed “pincushion frocks,” velvet with lace trim. “It’s nearly time to dress for dinner,” she said, in an apologetic whisper. “I was wondering if I could tiptoe in and get a few things. I won’t disturb you.”

I stepped out into the corridor and closed the door. “I want my dinner too,” I said.

“I had thought trays,” Sukey said. “Angela can’t possibly appear.”

“No, she can’t, but I can’t stay in there with her. I don’t think Daphne should either. Honestly, Sukey, trust me. Daphne is absolutely the wrong person to be with her sister now.”

Sukey frowned and stroked the velvet of her sleeve—I’m sure she does it without knowing she’s doing it, because I once heard her complain about the nap being gone there and saying it was inexplicable.

Sukey’s rather like a cat in some ways, a slightly fussy cat like a Burmese or a Siamese, and that stroking always reminds me of a cat licking its fur. She likes to have everything in its place, she likes lace and velvet and bobbles, but she’s a superb manager. She’s absolutely devoted to Mummy, they’re cousins, and they’ve been together since they were girls, and while Sukey’s title is “secretary-companion,” the

“companion” added to show she’s a lady and not a hireling, she actually organizes a tremendous amount for Mummy, the house, and political things as well. She keeps Mummy pointed in the right direction.

Sukey stays on top of everything that’s going on and kind of briefs Mummy so Mummy can just
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sail through. They’re like a swan: Mummy’s the part on top of the water gliding along effortlessly and

Sukey’s the part below the water kicking frantically. I know Mummy couldn’t do without her, and what’s more, Mummy knows it too. She doesn’t pay her a tenth of what she’s worth, and she couldn’t, no matter how much she paid. You can’t buy devotion.

“Then who is there?” Sukey asked. “I’d do it myself, but there’s so much else that needs doing.

Can’t you stay?” This last she said imploringly, but I shook my head.

“I’ve been there all day, and I’m at screaming point,” I said. “How about Lady Manningham?”

Sukey put her head on one side, just exactly like a cat. “I could ask her,” she said. “Are you sure Daphne wouldn’t…”

“They’re tormenting each other about who Sir James loved better,” I said. There was no sense in keeping anything from Sukey at this point, even though that meant it would go straight to Mummy. “It seems Daphne walked into his dressing room and found the body, which looks like a spot of Bognor to me.”

“Oh dear,” Sukey said, distressed. “You’re quite right. Run along and get dressed. I’ll ask Kitty Manningham to sit with her. Perhaps we should call Doctor Graham to come and take a look at her.”

“That might be a good idea,” I said. “She says she’s going to have a baby in December and that Sir

James knew.”

“My goodness,” Sukey murmured. “The poor thing!” I knew at once that she meant the baby and almost laughed because that was so much my own reaction.

Sukey patted my arm and scuttled off in search of Lady Manningham. I walked as fast as I could to my room to change, knowing full well that not even a murder would be sufficient to get Mummy to consider sitting down to dinner in day clothes acceptable behavior.

David was in the room, dressed and waiting for me. I kissed him, almost threw off what I was wearing, scattering garments heedlessly about the floor, and dragged on the dress someone had taken the trouble to lay out for me. It happened to be the purple thing from the Worth collection. It’s not really purple, it’s lavender with a purple creeping-leaf design all over it, and I remembered after I had it on that it was floor-length, which meant my hair had to go up. I fixed it up just anyhow, sticking about ninety pins in it because I’d just washed it and it didn’t want to lie quiet. When I was looking at it in the mirror I

remembered about the day before, and looked at David over my shoulder again. He was watching me, and smiling, but under the smile I could tell he wasn’t one bit happy.

I picked my amethyst chain out of my casket. It’s a single amethyst on a gold chain, with amethyst ear-drops to match, and I love them because they’re the first thing David gave me after we were engaged. It wasn’t my birthday or anything, just an ordinary day in Grosvenor Square, with Mummy being bloody; and rain, hard London rain that’s so much dirtier and wetter than rain in the country. I

hadn’t been expecting David, he just dropped by, and seeing him was like the sun coming out, and he gave me this little box, and I opened it not knowing what, and there they were. Every time I see them or touch them I remember that. I bought the Worth dress to go with them, if you really want to know.

“Will you do my clasp up?” I asked, and then when David had done the clasp and still had his hand on my neck I turned and hugged him.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. I had no idea, because I hadn’t seen him since early breakfast, having spent all day since church stuck in Sukey’s room trying to deal with Angela and Daphne.

“Just the usual,” David said. “Well, except that your mother and several of the guests seem to think I’m guilty of this murder.” He said it quite casually and as if the whole thing was absurd,
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which of course it was, but he didn’t really take it as lightly as just the words sound written down. He’s actually super-sensitive to slights and so on, but he manages to hide it from most people most of the time by seeming to be very thick-skinned. Few people will be really blatant; although some will, of course, like

Mummy, only too often. When this sort of thing happened, David cared enormously but he’d never say, because in some ways David always has to be more English than the English just because he’s

Jewish—he feels he has to be more stiff-upper-lipped and keep the side up better than anyone.

I did react, I know I did. It was fury, at Mummy, and at the rest of them, whoever they were, for being so stupid, so prejudiced, so unthinkingly vile as to think that just because David was Jewish he was likely to be a murderer. If I’d never known David I might have carried on thinking all these people were basically good people, with odd little quirks perhaps, but I’d never have understood how foul they were.

David took the blinkers off for me, and I’ve never been sorry, because who would want to go around in a world that’s like a very thin strip of pretty flower garden surrounded by fields and fields of stinking manure that stretch out as far as the eye can see?

And it’s not as if those people are the only people in the world, though they may imagine they are.

It might surprise you that I’d spent all day with Angela and Daphne, talking almost entirely about the murder, with excursions to Bognor and Athens, excuse me, adultery and homosexuality, without really once wondering myself who had done it. I’d even heard Angela ask the Inspector in her histrionic way, without stopping to connect up the fact that if there had been a murder at Farthing then there must also be a murderer here. Everyone else was ahead of me, and I suppose it was in fact frightfully dim of me, but I’d thought about Sir James alive and Sir James dead, and Angela and Daphne, but not at all about who might have killed him or why.

“Did they come right out and say so?” I asked.

“They hinted around the edges of it in a terribly well-bred way,” David said. “I could pretend to ignore it.” (“English hypocrisy,” David said once, after three bottles of wine, “can be a wonderful thing. People who hate and despise you, and who in the Reich would put you in a slave labor camp or kill you, in

England bother to pretend that they’re not really sneering.” And he meant it, too— meant that it was wonderful, I mean.)

“Let’s go home straight after dinner,” I said. We could, because we’d driven down, and we could just pop straight into our little two-seater Hilton and drive back to London without anybody or anything getting in our way. We could be home in our flat by midnight at the latest.

The thought of it was a tremendous relief; not just the thought of being at home, but getting away from Farthing, from all of this.

We didn’t have to stay. I’d already done whatever duty to Mummy I needed to. I wouldn’t have come at all, if it had been up to me. I’d have thrown her insistence back in her face. It was David who felt that if it was so tremendously important to Mummy that we be here, we’d do better to oblige her. I still didn’t

know why she wanted us. I think David had felt that it was in some way a peace offering, that she had invited us both so insistently, but I know Mummy better than that. In any case, if it was intended as an olive branch, then it was a very thin one with ragged leaves and no fruit at all.

“There’s nothing I’d like better,” David said, with an extremely kissable wistful expression. “But the police have asked that nobody leave for the time being. To ensure that nobody does, they’ve locked the gates and put a bobby on them.”

I kissed him quickly, then went to the window and stuck my head out. I couldn’t see the gates, of
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course;

that wasn’t why I did it. It was just that I needed to get my head into the fresh air because all at once I

felt totally trapped. I always felt that a little at Farthing. It isn’t claustrophobia, not in the usual way anyway. It’s partly Mummy, and the sort of bashes she organizes—feeling as if I’m back in her power.

It’s also partly the physical fact that Farthing is so deep in the country that it’s hard to get away from, even though it’s only two hours from London. That’s why I’d insisted on driving down, when we could easily have gone by train to Farthing Junction and been picked up from there, the way most people did.

Now, despite taking precautions, despite having the Hilton with us, we really were imprisoned here, unable to get away. I felt that terrible crushing feeling in my chest, as if I were fourteen again, with Hugh newly dead and Mummy and Daddy leaning everything on me as if it were all a huge stone that was going to grind me under it. I took deep breaths out the window for all I was worth, but even the sweet May air with the scent of bluebells and lilies of the valley didn’t help very much.

The gong rang then, for dinner, and it’s just as well that it did. It broke my mood. I gave David my arm and let him take me down, which made me feel much better. As long as my hand was on his arm I felt we were together, there were two of us, even if we were for the time being trapped and surrounded by the enemy.

Mummy and Sukey were standing in the hall. Sukey had somehow found time to get dressed for dinner;

she was wearing one of her typical lace-edged dresses, and a cap. Sukey must be the last woman in

England to wear a cap. What I thought was she must have got Daphne and Angela out of her room in time. “I understand he’s a gentleman,” Sukey was saying as we came down.

“Policemen are never gentlemen,” Mummy said, decisively.

“He’s a police Inspector,” Sukey said. “I’d have thought he’d be just the kind of man it would be useful to know.”

“Expedient, perhaps, in some ways, but I wouldn’t want to sit down to dinner even with a Chief Constable,” Mummy said, with a slight shudder.

“His father is a squire in Lancashire,” Sukey said. “I looked him up in Who’s Who.”

From the “Lancashire” I guessed they were talking about Inspector Carmichael, who had just the faintest touch of a Northern accent in his voice every now and then. It would seem ordinary and smooth, like a mouthful of pebbles rounded in a stream, and then it would catch on something and roughen, and you could hear a pebble that hadn’t been fully rounded down to conformity. I liked it, but I was quite sure

Mummy would hate it.

I didn’t say anything except “Good evening,” and left them to their little conflab. Mummy must have won, as usual, because neither Carmichael nor any other policeman appeared at dinner. In fact, company was quite thin—there were only the overnight guests. Goodness knows what the other invited guests had been told, or whether they’d simply been turned away at the gates by the police.

It was a funny group of people. Sukey must have had nightmares seating us. No wonder she wanted to

bring in the policeman. There were four married couples—the Normanbys, the Francises, Mummy and

Daddy, David and me; then there was Uncle Dud, and Tibs, and Eddie, who were a widower,
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his son, and daughter; and there was Sir Thomas Manningham, without his wife, who was off with Angela. Sukey sat with us herself, which she didn’t always do, only when it helped to even up the numbers, but even so the arrangements worked out very awkwardly.

I was between Tibs and Mark, and David was almost at the other end of the table between Sukey and

Eddie.

Of course nobody talked about anything but the murder, and the servants didn’t even pretend not to listen. Daphne, on the other side of Tibs, was drinking hard but she didn’t do anything to disgrace herself.

The first course was watercress soup, absolutely exquisite, with little hot malted brown rolls. I should have been talking to Tibs, but I didn’t do more than grin at him and tuck in. He covered up for me though, or maybe he really wanted to talk. He seemed genuinely shocked at the loss of a man he’d regarded as one of the saviors of his country, and looked up to, politically at any rate. Tibs wasn’t political really, any more than Uncle Dud was. I sometimes thought the two of them just let Mummy feed them their views. I could imagine Uncle Dud saying that she was the daughter of a Duke and the wife of a