Sheiks and Adders (6 page)

‘It is something that he had heard of it, I suppose.’

‘Perfectly true. It is to be accounted to him for virtue, no doubt. And I rather took to young Mark. We have maintained our acquaintance – and hence my turning up here this afternoon.’

‘I’d rather like to meet Mark.’

‘My dear Sir John, you are about to do so.’ McIlwraith was glancing over Appleby’s shoulder. ‘For here he is.’

Appleby turned round, and found himself confronting a spectacle of the most horrendous and revolting sort. The crippled creature bent nearly double before him was dressed mainly in dirt and rags – and more, seemingly, in the former than the latter. At a casual glance he appeared to have only one tooth, one ear, and an eye that had been knocked sideways in his head. It was a head, however, that wore a battered crown; his rotting clothes were here and there slashed and patched with silk and ermine; two burdensome leather bags chained to his waist were dragging behind him; at his side hung a broken sword.

‘Good afternoon,’ this appearance said urbanely, and without waiting for Professor McIlwraith to speak. ‘May I introduce myself? I am one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Just which, I haven’t yet determined. It must attend upon the event. Lust attracts me, I am bound to say. But I also have a fancy for Ire.’

‘This is Mark Chitfield,’ McIlwraith said with surprising composure – and even, it seemed, with approval. ‘Mark, this is Sir John Appleby, a neighbour of mine.’

‘How do you do?’ Mark put out a hand that was disconcertingly clean and well tended. ‘These assumed identities do give scope to the confessional impulse, wouldn’t you say? I suggested to my father that he might appropriately appear as Avarice, in which case I’d myself plump for Sloth. Have you brought Maid Marian with you, sir?’

‘I’m afraid not.’ Appleby gave Cherry Chitfield’s brother an appraising look. ‘I suspect,’ he said, ‘that your garb at least makes a nice change.’

‘Just that.’ Mark’s begrimed face brightened unexpectedly with a not unattractive grin. ‘Most of them got up a bit above themselves, wouldn’t you say? Walked into Drool straight out of
le
grand siècle
or
la belle époque
. My own idea has been to afford a juster representation of the human condition.’

‘Quite so,’ Appleby said. The attraction of this young man for Professor McIlwraith, he supposed, consisted in his command of a certain linguistic sophistication. As to whether Mark was at all likeable, he reserved his judgement. Cherry had called her brother ‘horrid’, but by this she might have meant only that he was too clever for her. Perhaps the elder Miss Chitfield was more his match. She had certainly given tokens of having enjoyed the same blessings of higher education. What all three children had in common was a tendency to evince a disenchanted view of things.

‘But you’ve taken a different line yourself,’ Mark said to Appleby on a concessive note. ‘Robbing the rich and giving to the poor, and all that. Incidentally, there’s another chap around in Lincoln green. I caught a glimpse of him a few minutes ago. Is he your second-in-command, sir? He doesn’t look exactly like Friar Tuck.’

‘He’s Colonel Pride,’ Appleby said. ‘And your Chief Constable.’

‘Good Lord! You lot do seem to be keeping tabs on us. We’re a shady crowd, you see.’ Mark had offered this last remark to McIlwraith, who had appeared to be a good deal startled to learn that top policemen were so thick on the ground. ‘And I’ve warned my father often enough. It must all catch up with him one day.’

‘I’m here simply because your sister Cherry invited me.’ Appleby had thought poorly of Mark’s last joke. ‘And I’ve been looking out for her.’

‘I’m looking out for her myself, as a matter of fact. I’m afraid she’s up to some mischief. Along with that juvenile admirer of hers.’

‘The young man called Tibby?’

‘That’s right – Tibby Fancroft. Has Cherry been chattering about him?’

‘His name cropped up during our short conversation yesterday.’

‘Cherry imagines our parents have a down on Tibby – simply because he isn’t an infant stockbroker. It’s quite untrue. My father’s rather soft on Tibby, really. He probably thinks the child is just about right for his younger daughter, and that Tibby could be fixed up in some harmless niche easily enough. I forget whether you’ve met our Tibby, Prof?’

‘I have not had that pleasure, so far.’ McIlwraith seemed unoffended by this facetiously familiar mode of address.

‘Tibby’s also lying low at the moment. My father won’t be at all pleased if they fly in the face of parental command.’

‘In the matter of the rescued or ravished maiden?’ Appleby asked.

‘Just that. Cherry seems to have been uncommonly communicative.’

‘It was much on her mind. Does your father go in for taking a stern line with his children, Mr Chitfield?’

‘Not in the least. He didn’t even disapprove of phonemic analysis – about which the Prof has no doubt told you. It’s just that about this particular thing he appears to have a bee in his bonnet. It puzzles me, as a matter of fact. And now I think I’ll take a look at the archery. It was a fashionable sport with the gentry until superseded by lawn tennis about a hundred years ago.’

‘It is a curious fact,’ Professor McIlwraith said, ‘that lawn tennis was originally introduced into these islands under the name of “sphairistike”. As you will recall, Sir John,
sphairisticos
was the classical Greek term for any sort of ball-game. Its adoption affords a striking instance of the continued vitality of that ancient tongue as an instrument of education in the latter part of the nineteenth century.’

‘“Striking” is just the word,’ Mark said, ‘although “pit-pat” might have been more accurate. As for archery, the gentlemen liked it, since it constrained the ladies to exhibit what was called their figures – and before the invention of the
brassière
, I imagine. But it was a long time before even lawn tennis permitted them to exhibit their legs.’

‘It is a remarkable circumstance,’ McIlwraith said, ‘that, in French,
brassières
were originally leading-strings for infants.’

‘I must look round for my friends the Birch-Blackies,’ Appleby said disingenuously.

‘I’ll come a bit of the way with you,’ Mark said promptly. ‘We’ll see you later, Prof.’ And with this he led Appleby away without ceremony. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he then went on, ‘I’m going to slip into the house and get rid of these togs. The joke’s rather boring.’

‘Well, yes – enough is enough.’

‘And that’s true of the Prof as well, wouldn’t you say? In your time, I believe, one talked about a sleeping dictionary as a nice means of picking up a foreign language. The Prof might be called a peripatetic one, it seems to me. And nobody would want to go to bed with him.’

‘Demonstrably not.’

‘You ought to have a go at the archery yourself. You and the Chief Constable can compete at hitting the gold. I believe that’s the expression.’

‘I believe it is.’

It was with no great reluctance that Appleby parted from young Mark Chitfield a couple of minutes later. He was a clever young man, and his determined flippancy was not to be accounted seriously against him. But for the time being, Appleby felt, enough was enough, not only of the eminent retired lexicographer but of his late abortive pupil as well.

Appleby made his own way to the archery field a little later, having discovered that nothing was going to happen in the theatre for some time. It was during this walk that he saw his first sheik. Sheiks were in those days very thick on the ground – or were so if the word be taken to mean any adequately prosperous person self-evidently from the Middle East. Appleby saw a score of such visitors whenever he went to London, which it was apparent they thought of as an emporium rather than a city of historic interest. Being thus commanded by a laudable and single-minded impulse to spend money, they didn’t often stray beyond the capital. But here was at least a fancy-dress sheik attending the fête at Drool Court.

Appleby, rather oddly, had got all this way in his thinking before Tibby Fancroft returned to his head. When this did happen he concluded that the figure he had just glimpsed in a crowd must be Tibby, defiantly attired in his forbidden costume. Then he realized that this was not necessarily so. Because of the very abundance of authentic sheiks on the metropolitan scene – not to speak of television – it was likely that dressing up in such a character might come into anybody’s head. This mightn’t be Tibby at all. Tibby might be quite elsewhere in the crush, blamelessly attired as a mediaeval knight. And there was yet a further possibility. The man mightn’t be pretending to be a real sheik. He might be pretending to be Lawrence of Arabia pretending to be a real sheik. And here a kind of infinite regress became theoretically possible. Appleby had glimpsed a real sheik who, for some deep purpose of his own, was pretending to be Lawrence of Arabia pretending to be a real sheik. Come to think of it, an aristocratic Arab of a satirical turn of mind might hit upon this little joke readily enough.

And now Appleby saw his second sheik. The first had been a specimen of the portly kind, vaguely suggesting a sack of flour mysteriously endowed with a power of waddling locomotion. This one was of the tall, spare and stately sort, whose progress was as smooth as that of some proud galleon moving over a calm sea. He was featured like a hawk, a fact scarcely obscured by the large dark glasses through which he surveyed the vulgar herd around him. Could
this
be Tibby? If it was, then Tibby was wasting his time and talent upon any theatricals of a merely amateur order. There were possibly half-a-dozen men, not more, on the London stage who could put on this commanding turn.

The second sheik, like the first, disappeared in the crowd, and Appleby found himself looking around for a third. He had a brief vision of an
embarras
of sheikdom fortuitously irruptive upon Mr Chitfield’s party; even of rival business men from the neighbourhood of Lombard Street or Cheapside, thus disguised and indignantly confronting one another, like two ladies who have chanced to buy the same clever little frock from the same clever little woman in Hampstead.

But for the moment nothing disconcerting of this order happened, and Appleby was able to take a look at the archery. Some of those taking part in it were congruously dressed, so that they might have been limbering up for an engagement at Senlac Hill or Agincourt. Others were less in any such established picture, since they were drawing their bows with difficulty while habited as Teddy bears, golliwogs, Daleks, witches and deep-sea divers. Nevertheless the contests were being more or less expertly conducted, and it was to be conjectured that some local archery club had consented to turn up to lend colour to the occasion. Gentlemen were instructing ladies in the command of this former glory of England’s yeomen at arms. Some of them were doing so in the spirit touched upon by Mark Chitfield when reflecting on the charms of the female form. There is a certain hazard to life in archery when conducted in too light-hearted and casual a fashion, since a long-bow is quite as lethal a weapon as a revolver. But the present exercises appeared to be prudently regulated in that regard. Appleby watched the proceedings until he remembered that he was carrying a bow himself – whereupon he was prompted to withdraw. A bow without a bow-string is a useless affair. He felt that he would in a sense be letting down the side if suddenly summoned by an officious marshal to the mark.

Walking back towards the house, he wondered about its owner. Where was Mr Richard Chitfield? Where, for that matter, was Mrs Chitfield,
née
Parker-Perkins? Having thrown open their grounds and clearly put up a good deal of money in the interest of this charitable effort, they might have been expected to be moving around in a modestly welcoming way that would distinguish them from their guests. But Appleby could see nobody exhibiting that kind of comportment, whether in everyday clothing or in fancy dress. Then he remembered that Mr Chitfield’s leisure, when not given over to fly-fishing, was devoted to private theatricals. The forthcoming pageant in the open-air theatre was probably his particular concern, and he might well be there now, supervising the final arrangements. Having some curiosity about Cherry’s heavy father, Appleby moved in that direction again.

The lawns in front of the mansion were crowded – so crowded that any individual was liable to vanish from view seconds after one sighted him. Prudent persons were already entering a large marquee in the hope, if not of champagne, at least of strawberries and cream. There was a prematurely expectant crowd round the hot-air balloon: at present a floppy pear-shaped affair in a variety of brilliant colours, the preliminary inflating of which was being supervised by a man attired – uncomfortably and surely needlessly – as if his destination was going to be the moon. His actual project, whatever it was, appeared to be mixed up with an obscure competition involving the setting adrift of less ambitious gas-filled balloons of the children’s party sort. The military band, perched at the end of a terrace, laboured valiantly at its instruments without much hope of arresting either an ear or an eye.

At a short distance beyond the large marquee there were two smaller ones, and these at present were unfrequented. Or so Appleby thought until, as he was about to pass them by, a figure emerged from between them. It was the figure of a man. Indeed, it was Appleby’s third sheik.

This sheik, unlike the earlier sheiks, didn’t at once disappear again from view. In fact he approached Appleby in a wholly affable manner, and then paused to address him with confidence.

‘If it’s the bar you’re looking for,’ he said, ‘these are n-b-g, old boy.’ He paused as if to assure himself that his hearer was one to whom this demotic expression was intelligible. ‘They’re only the damned toilets.’

‘The bar should no doubt be one’s earlier port of call.’ Appleby saw that this sheik also wore dark glasses, but wasn’t otherwise made up so as to pass for any sort of authentic Arab. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t seen it myself.’