Hamish Macbeth 02 (1987) - Death of a Cad

Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,

Land of the mountain and the flood.

 

—Sir Walter Scott.

H
enry Withering, playwright, slumped down in the passenger seat of the station wagon after another bleak look out at the forbidding landscape.

“Have we much farther to go, darling?” he asked plaintively.

“Oh, yes,” said his fiancee, Priscilla Halburton-Smythe, cheerfully. “But we should be home before dark.”

Henry wondered whether to point out that, as they seemed to be surely approaching the land of the midnight sun after all those weary hours of travel, there was therefore very little hope of reaching their destination at all. He suddenly found himself too overpowered by the landscape and too depressed by the change it seemed to be creating in Priscilla to say anything, and so he decided to go to sleep instead. But although he determinedly closed his eyes and listened to the hypnotic swish of the windscreen wipers, sleep would not come. Scotland had murdered sleep.

It was not that he, an Englishman born and bred, had never visited Scotland, it was just that he had never journeyed so far north before.

“It’s clearing up,” came Priscilla’s cool, amused voice. “Do look. The scenery is magnificent.”

Henry reluctantly opened his eyes.

A watery sunlight was bathing the steep barren flanks of the towering mountains on either side. As the clouds rolled back, he found himself staring up at the awesome peaks and then around at the immediate prospect of damp sheep and bleak moorland.

The sun grew stronger and a wind arose. A river meandered beside the road, shining and glittering with red and gold lights. Then the scenery was blotted from view as they drove into a cutting. A waterfall hurtled down by the side of the road on Henry’s side of the car, a relentless torrent that roared in his ear as they sped past.

He glanced out of the corner of his eyes at Priscilla. There was something rather frightening about a woman who could drive so well. They had left London at dawn, and she had driven the 640 miles north, sitting back, her hands resting easily on the wheel. She was wearing beige corduroy trousers and a cream silk blouse. Her fair hair was tied back behind her ears by a tightly rolled Hermes scarf. She looked sophisticated and elegant. But it seemed to him that there was a certain buoyancy in her manner as she neared her Scottish home, an excited anticipation that had nothing to do with him. In London, he had been used to a graceful and pliant Priscilla. After they were married, he decided, he would insist he did all the driving and that she should never wear trousers again. For the first time, he wondered if she would turn out in later years to be one of those terrible county ladies who managed everyone in the neighbourhood and opened fetes. He sulkily closed his eyes. She was not even thinking of him, of that he was sure.

In this, he was wrong.

During the journey, a great deal of Priscilla’s triumph at having secured a celebrity for a future husband had begun to ebb. She had told him to wear casual clothes, but he had turned up, impeccably dressed as usual, in white collar, striped shirt, old school tie, Savile Row suit, and shoes handmade by Lobb of St James’s. She wondered uneasily what he had packed in his suitcase, whether he planned to startle the Highlands of Scotland by parading the countryside attired like a tailor’s dummy.

When he had asked her to marry him, all she had felt was a giddy elation at having done the right thing at last; at having finally found someone who would please her parents. Colonel and Mrs Halburton-Smythe had complained for a year because she had become a journalist, although Priscilla had tried, without success, to tell them that a job as a fashion editor’s assistant hardly qualified her for the title. They had come on flying visits, always dragging some ‘suitable’ young man in tow. Priscilla realized uneasily she did not really know very much about Henry.

He was thirty-eight years of age, small, neat-featured, with smooth black hair and brown eyes that were almost black. His skin was sallow, and his legs were rather thin, but he had great charm and appeared to be universally popular.

Over the years, he had had various plays produced at experimental theatres, usually savage satires against the church and state. He was beloved by the Communists, Trotskyites, Marxists, and liberals. To them, he was what they wanted most, a genuine ex-Eton schoolboy, son of a landed family who had opted to join the class war. He wore faded jeans and black sweaters and rather dirty sneakers.

And then his play
Duchess Darling
had opened in London. No-one could understand what on earth had happened to Henry Withering. For it was a drawing-room comedy of the type that opens with the butler and the cockney housemaid discussing their betters. It had every cliche. Infidelity among the aristocracy, a silly-ass guardee, a gorgeous debutante, a stately duchess, and a bumbling duke. But the clothes were haute couture and it had a star-studded cast.

A clever impresario had decided that a London weary of inner-city riots, rape, and politics might be in the mood for nostalgia. The left-wing papers stoutly gave it good reviews, convinced that Henry had written a very clever satire that they could not quite understand but were afraid to say so. The right-wing press were hesitant to damn it when the cast contained so many famous names who had been brought out of moth-balls. The public loved it. It was frivolous, silly, trite, and beautifully presented. They flocked in droves. After all, it was like going to a royal wedding. No-one expected the stars to be clever, only to look very grand and rich.

Henry’s success was sealed when the left wing at last found out their darling had betrayed them and the Young Communists staged a protest outside the theatre during which five policemen were sent to hospital and a member of the Royal family was seen to frown. Henry’s name appeared on the front page of every major newspaper the next day. Priscilla’s work as a fashion editor’s assistant had mostly been arranging fashion photographs, sitting around studios, shoving models in and out of fashions that were a cross between those of medieval page and a Japanese labourer, and wondering whether the blue-rinsed lady she worked for was ever going to allow her a chance to write. She had finally been sent to write a report on the fashions in the play. She had gone backstage and had been introduced to Henry, who had promptly invited her out for dinner. One week later he had proposed. Now, one week after that, they were on the road to Priscilla’s Scottish home at the express invitation of Priscilla’s rapturously delighted parents, who were organizing a house party in honour of the new fiance. Priscilla, at the age of twenty-three, was still a virgin. Henry had kissed her five times, and that had been the sum total of his lovemaking to date. She knew what he looked like in shorts because he had been photographed in tennis whites for a society magazine. But she had never seen him in person dressed other than he was at that moment. It was odd that a man of his background should always look as if he were dressed for church, thought Priscilla, not knowing that Henry’s clothes were a sort of costume to enhance his new darling-of-society image.

Beside her, Henry sat moodily listening to the rumbling of his stomach. They had stopped for a horrible lunch hours ago at a motorway cafe. He wanted his dinner. He wanted this nightmare journey to end.

Priscilla slowed to a stop and he looked up impatiently.

A shepherd was driving a flock of sheep down the centre of the road. He moved with an easy slow pace and did not look at the car. With an impatient grunt, Henry leaned across and honked the horn loudly. The sheep panicked and scattered.

“You awful fool,” snapped Priscilla. She rolled down the window. “I’m very sorry, Mr Mackay,” she called. “An accident.”

The shepherd came up and leaned in the car window. “It’s yerself, Miss Halburton-Smythe,” he said. “Now, you should know better than to startle a man’s sheep.”

“Sorry,” said Priscilla again. “How’s Mrs Mackay’s leg?”

“Better, she says. We got a new doctor, Dr Brodie. He’s given her the green bottle. She says it’s awf’y good.”

“Are we going to sit here all day?” growled Henry.

The shepherd looked at him with mild surprise.

“My friend is tired,” said Priscilla. “Must get on. Tell Mrs Mackay I shall call on her in a few days.”

“You mustn’t hurry things in the country,” said Priscilla severely as they moved on. “Mr Mackay was most offended.”

“Does it matter what the peasantry think?”

“They’re not peasants,” said Priscilla. “Really, Henry. I’m surprised at you.”

“Well, since you have promised to visit Mrs Mackay of the green bottle and the bad leg, I assume we must be nearly at our journey’s end.”

“About another thirty miles to go.”

Henry groaned.

Lord and Lady Helmsdale sat in the back of their antique Rolls-Royce and shouted at each other, which was the way they normally conversed.

“If it weren’t for this playwright-chappie, I would have turned down Mary’s invitation,” said Lord Helmsdale. Mary was Mrs Halburton-Smythe.

Lord Helmsdale was small and round with thin grey hair combed carefully in strips over his bald patch. His wife was a huge woman, well over six feet tall, with a slab of a face. She was wearing an old tweed jacket and skirt and a shirt with a hard collar. On her head she sported an off-the-face blue-and-white-spotted hat. It looked remarkably like one Her Majesty had worn during her last American visit, and Lord Helmsdale had delayed their leaving by asking whether she had been ferreting around the garbage cans at Buckingham Palace again. The resultant row had been frightful. But there is nothing more cosy than a shared marital resentment, and the Helmsdales were once more drawn together by their hatred of one of the Halburton-Smythes’s guests.

The target of their hatred was Captain Peter Bartlett of the Highland Dragoons.

“Why on earth did Mary ask him?” demanded Lord Helmsdale querulously.

“If you mean Bartlett, then God knows,” snapped his wife. “But I know
why
Bartlett’s going to be there. He wants to bag the first brace.” She had long chats on the phone to Mrs Halburton-Smythe and never guessed for a moment how much that lady dreaded her calls.

“Didn’t think there would be any grouse shooting,” observed his lordship. “Grouse population’s declining fast, and Halburton-Smythe told me not to bring my guns.”

The previous grouse season—which begins in Britain on August 12, known as the Glorious Twelfth, and ends on December 10—had confirmed Scottish landowners’ worst fears: The grouse were dying off fast, and that could soon mean an end to Scotland’s £150 million-a-year grouse ‘industry.”

“My birds are disappearing as well,” grumbled Lord Helmsdale. “Think those Animal Rights people must be poisoning them to spite me.”

“Everyone’s birds are dying off,” said his wife reasonably. “The Game Conservancy has launched a three-hundred-thousand-pound appeal to finance research. They’re appealing to all landowners for cash. Didn’t you get their letter?”

“Can’t remember,” said Lord Helmsdale.

“Sheikh Hamdan Al Maktoum has already given them a hundred thousand.”

“Mac who?”

“He’s a United Arab Emirates Cabinet Minister who has a large estate in Scotland, and you ask me the same thing every time I mention his name.”

“Well, they won’t need my money if they’ve got that much from him,” said her husband comfortably. “Still, we needn’t let Bartlett bother us. This playwright-chappie Withering’s damned clever. Best play I’ve seen in ages.”

“I shall enjoy being rude to Bartlett,” remarked his wife. “I shall enjoy that very much.”

“The man’s an utter cad.”

Jessica Villiers and Diana Bryce were best friends—the sort of odd friendship that springs up between a pretty girl and a plain one. Diana was secretly contemptuous of the mannish, gawky, horsy Jessica, and Jessica was bitterly jealous of Diana’s stunning good looks.

Both girls’ parents had estates over in Caithness in the north-east. Diana and Jessica had made their come-out at the London Season at the same time. Both worked in London and had taken their holidays at the same time, not out of friendship but because August was the fashionable time to holiday in Scotland.

The Highland grapevine works for the landed gentry in the same way as it does for everyone else there, and it seemed that no sooner had Mary Halburton-Smythe hit upon the idea of a small house party to welcome the playwright Henry Withering than she was besieged by pleading phone calls from all over. Everyone wanted to come, but she had kept the guest list down, and Jessica and Diana were two of that fortunate number. As Jessica competently managed her draughty old Land-Rover along the one-lane Highland roads, Diana dreamt of snatching this famous playwright from under Priscilla’s nose. Everyone knew Priscilla had about as much sex appeal as a fish. Diana had glossy black hair and a flawless complexion. The fact that the men hadn’t exactly all fallen at her feet during her London Season still rankled. She had not yet learned the hard lesson that women who love themselves too much are rarely loved by anyone else. She had been engaged twice and on each occasion it had been the man who had called it off.

She would have been amazed had she known that Jessica was nourishing the same dream of wooing the playwright away from Priscilla. Jessica was convinced that the fellows, in the end, preferred a girl who was ‘a good chap’ rather than a posturing little miss…like Diana, she thought, casting a brief and evil look at her best friend. Of course, there had been that distressing business two years ago, she thought, when Diana had become engaged to her, Jessica’s, boyfriend. Of course,
that
engagement hadn’t lasted—for how could any man enjoy the pleasures of Diana after having tasted those of Jessica?