Sheiks and Adders (7 page)

‘It mayn’t be open yet, come to think of it,’ the third sheik said unhappily. ‘They probably have to keep pub hours.’

‘I don’t think so.’ Appleby was glad to have an encouraging consideration to advance to this wanderer in a thirsty desert. ‘I believe one gets a special sort of licence for an affair like this, and can keep open all the time.’

‘Well, I’ll just take a walk round and see,’ the third sheik said, brightening a little. ‘The name is Pring,’ he added, as if recalling a necessary courtesy.

‘How do you do, Mr Pring? My name is Appleby. I hope you won’t feel awkward when you do find the bar. Arabs, you know, are not supposed to drink alcohol.’

‘That’s right!’ Mr Pring seemed both impressed and depressed by this consideration. ‘Something to do with their religion, it must be. And I wouldn’t like not to show respect, Mr Appleby.’

‘I don’t think there’s any danger of that.’ Appleby was favourably struck by this honourable if confused feeling on Mr Pring’s part. ‘By the way, have you noticed that several other people have come in Arab costume?’

‘Is that so? I haven’t seen them. And it’s not what you might call very original, is it? I’d have thought of something better, I think I may say, if it hadn’t been for Mr Chitfield.’

‘You discussed the matter with Mr Chitfield?’ Although not hitherto really very interested in the parched Mr Pring, Appleby was suddenly alert.

‘Chitfield asked me to come and support his fête. And, business associations being as they are, Mr Appleby, it seemed to me I oughtn’t to refuse. Chitfield and me, that’s to say, having been partners in this and that.’ Mr Pring paused, and perhaps felt that this suggested an implausible degree of commercial elevation. ‘Not, mark you, that I put myself in Richard Chitfield’s bracket – not by a long way. Chitfield is one of the biggest men we have. But I’m substantial, Mr Appleby, I can fairly say. It’s twelve years now since Mrs Pring and I had our first executive-type home, and we haven’t stood still since then by no means.’

‘I am delighted to hear it. Is Mrs Pring with you today – as an Arab lady, perhaps?’

‘Mrs Pring, sir, is here as Joan of Arc. It was entirely her own idea, that was, and I’m bound to say she looks uncommonly well.’

‘I don’t doubt it, and I hope I may have the pleasure of meeting her. So you consulted Mr Chitfield and asked him whether he thought it would be a good idea if you turned up as a sheik or emir or person of that sort?’

‘Well, no, Mr Appleby. That wasn’t the way of it at all. Chitfield brought the idea forward, and was really quite pressing about it.’

‘I see. Do you happen to know whether he made similar specific suggestions to any other of his – um – colleagues and associates?’

‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure.’ Mr Pring was a little surprised by this question. ‘He’s often very fertile with his suggestions, Chitfield is. But in the business way, I mean. Throws out this and that, like he was Napoleon giving tips to his generals.’

‘He sounds most impressive. A dominating character, no doubt. Would you say that he was fond of his joke, Mr Pring?’

‘He can tell the right sort of story in the right place, Chitfield can. Never before the ladies, you know, and not even to a barmaid. It’s a touchstone, that, Mr Appleby, I think you’ll agree. Never a dirty word to the girl drawing the beer, and you can tell yourself you’re a perfect gentleman.’

‘It’s something we ought all to remember, Mr Pring. So Mr Chitfield likes a laugh in the right place. Would you say he was any sort of practical joker? It’s not quite the same thing.’

‘Definitely not.’ Mr Pring was again surprised. ‘He just wouldn’t give time to such a notion. Always plenty on his plate. A true man of affairs is Richard Chitfield.’

But were they, Appleby asked himself as he walked away, conceivably shady affairs? Tommy Pride had referred to Richard Chitfield as ‘just the ordinary City scum’, but that had been a matter of the routine and more or less harmless intolerance of a man contemptuous of all money-making other than that of earning an honest day’s pay. Nothing whatever could be founded on it. Mark Chitfield made a joke – also with a touch of routine to it – to the effect that one day the entire Chitfield family was bound to end up in jail. Of such a freakish pleasantry there was nothing to be made either. Cherry’s quarrel with her father might be so much petulant nonsense, blown up out of some passing irritation on his part. Chitfield’s telling his humble associate Pring to dress up as an Arab might hitch on to this in some obscure and trivial way. What really needed chewing over was the extraordinary circumstance of Pride’s having been asked (and with what looked like typical Secret Service hush-hush flummery) to place this overblown garden fête under surveillance – something he had in fact done in a singularly sparing way. But the fête was Chitfield’s creation. It was Chitfield who deserved a long straight look-over. Appleby decided he was hunting for the elusive host of the afternoon.

So he moved on to the theatre, and presently found that a good many people were doing the same thing. It occurred to him to glance a little more attentively than he had done so far at the programme which the elder Miss Chitfield had given him on his arrival. It seemed that the theatrical part of the entertainment was due to start in ten minutes – which probably meant that it would start in half an hour. It didn’t sound too promising in terms of powerful dramatic experience. Various local groups, societies and coteries, it seemed, had undertaken to present a series of scenes or sketches linked together on the grand theme of English History. There were to be some Ancient Britons hunting bears and other equally Ancient Britons putting up a tough fight against Julius Caesar and his legions. There was to be (what ought to interest Appleby) a scene of outlawry in Sherwood Forest, with appropriate speeches from
As You Like It
thrown in. Several troops of Boy Scouts were combining to enact the relief of Mafeking, in which the part of Colonel R S S Baden Powell was to be sustained by Master William Birch-Blackie. And there was to be much else. It would all be great fun, clearly, for the senior Birch-Blackies and such other spectators as had loved ones cavorting on the stage. On others it might a little pall.

And not everybody was making for the theatre. Appleby was amused to see several men actually moving with a certain unobtrusiveness against the stream. And some of these recalcitrant persons appeared to be among the more exuberant of Mr Chitfield’s guests, at least if they were to be judged by their attire. As Mark Chitfield had observed, the majority of fancy costumes on view betrayed a certain yearning after exalted station, or at least an enhanced social consequence, on the part of their wearers: hence all the gentlemen in powder and knee-breeches and ladies in eighteenth century
grande tenue
. Any note of the broadly comical or grotesque (as with Mark’s own Deadly Sin) was confined to a scattering of males, and it was among these that the prospect of the theatrical entertainment didn’t seem to be much fun. One of the deep-sea divers, a couple of fantastically painted circus clowns, a Chinaman, a man in an ass’s head presumably to be thought of as Shakespeare’s transmogrified Bottom were among the defectors to be remarked. Perhaps like Mr Pring, these more enterprising persons were sloping off in quest of the bar.

It was while Appleby was taking note of this that Mark appeared again, and this time he was accompanied by the hitherto absent Cherry. The young man had carried out his intention of changing into what might be called mufti; it was mufti of considerable elegance; he had moreover found time for a drastic scrub-up as well. These changes had turned him very definitely into the son of the house, in which role he was carrying out those duties of an amiable host to be expected of his still invisible father. The effect however was not without a hint of indulgence or even disdain for all the childishness round about him which those who detected it couldn’t have been too pleased with. Appleby didn’t make much of his sister’s attire. Cherry was wearing a sola topi and a trouser-suit of white drill which may have been designed to establish her either as a tropical explorer or as a Mem-sahib tagging along behind a tiger hunt. She would have looked quite well on the elephant upon which Appleby had earlier fancied himself in the character of a rajah. She was certainly remote from being any sort of mediaeval princess.

‘Hullo, Sir John!’ she said. ‘Patty told me you’d turned up. Good on you!’

‘It’s all being most enjoyable, Miss Chitfield.’ And Appleby added – perhaps as judging this response to be on the conventional side – ‘Has Patty gone to bed?’

‘Why ever should she do that? Is she feeling ill?’

‘No – but she said she was longing for bedtime.’

‘Our parents oughtn’t to have named her Patience,’ Mark said. ‘It’s a shockingly rustic name, for one thing. And, for another, it was tempting providence. Patty has turned out to be without an atom of the quality in her composition. Not like me. I’m cascading it over this whole idiotic revel.’

‘No doubt you’re doing your best,’ Appleby said. ‘I hope, by the way, that one of you is going to introduce me to your parents. I’d like to pay them my respects.’

‘It would have to be right-about-turn for my mother.’ Mark jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘She’ll be in that enormous tent, presiding over the people who are dishing out the refreshments.’

‘She’s a sensible woman at times,’ Cherry said concessively, ‘and can put first things first. But my father is bound to be in the theatre, so come along. It’s very much his thing.’

‘So I supposed. I’ve just met, incidentally, one of his business associates. At least he claimed to be that. A drouthy character called Pring.’

‘Good Lord!’ Mark said. ‘Is Pring out already? It must be the work of the Parole Board. They’ve been suborned.’

This was presumably Mark Chitfield’s percurrent bad joke. His sister ignored it, and took Appleby rather engagingly by the arm.

‘I suppose they’ll be beginning with the Ancient Britons,’ she said. ‘All skin-tights and woad. When it gets to Sherwood, Sir John, you’ll be able to join in. Daddy is very hot on audience participation. Perhaps we’ll have quite a lot of it.’

Cherry Chitfield was far from being the woebegone maiden of the day before. She was in good spirits. In fact she was distinctly excited. Appleby took another glance at her attire, and found himself wondering about Tibby Fancroft, that other elusive character on the fringes of the scene. He had formed a hypothetical picture of Tibby as not among the most dominant of males, and he suspected that whatever Tibby was doing at that moment it was something Cherry had put him up to. But this was guesswork such as competent policemen never indulge in. Appleby told himself that he wasn’t at Drool Court as a competent policeman. Tommy Pride was that. He himself had come along simply as an elderly gentleman with time on his hands. But this didn’t mean that he wasn’t to ask questions when they came into his head.

‘A fête on this scale,’ he said to Mark, ‘and one with such a variety of goings-on, must take a good deal of trouble to mount. And, of course, a good deal of time as well. I suppose it’s all planned well in advance?’

‘Very definitely. My father has been devoting much of his hard-won leisure to it over the past six months. Or when he isn’t catching fish. Not that we’re sure he does
catch
fish. He probably employs somebody to do just that. It’s called delegating responsibility.’

‘He believes in getting everything cut and dried?’ Appleby was not to be diverted by this rather tired joke on Mark’s part.

‘Oh, yes. It all goes down on paper at the start, and everybody has to stick to it.’

‘The fancy-dress element in this present affair, for instance: it wouldn’t have been a recent afterthought?’

‘Distinctly not. I think we began to hear about it before Christmas. Wouldn’t that be right, Cherry?’

‘Yes – and then off and on ever since. It’s all rather boring, really – organizing like mad for a stupid party. Let’s put Sir John in the front row, Mark, and then see if we can find Daddy. He’ll be hearing somebody their lines at the eleventh hour, or gumming on their whiskers.’

It was with reluctance that Appleby thus found himself dumped in a position of some prominence and then left to his own devices. The auditorium, which lay in bright sunshine, was filling up. In front of it, and before the stage, a curtain hung incongruously against the sky, supported on cables slung between two beech trees. There was a buzz of talk and a smell of trodden grass. Within further curtained-off areas it was clear that numerous preparatory activities were going on, although it was improbable that they could conceal whole hordes of Ancient Britons and centuries of Romans.

‘Excuse me,’ a woman’s voice said behind Appleby’s ear, ‘but can you tell me what a romantic rescue is?’

‘A romantic rescue? I’m afraid I don’t understand you, madam.’ Appleby had turned round, and saw a middle-aged woman poring over her programme.

‘That’s what it says. “A Romantic Rescue”. Do you think it might mean Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett? I’d have thought that a little too literary – wouldn’t you? For this sort of audience, I mean.’

‘Possibly so.’

‘And not really a very central incident in English History.’

‘Certainly not that.’ This gratuitously talkative person, Appleby thought, was of a somewhat captious disposition. ‘But it’s clear that they’ve strung a very miscellaneous collection of turns together, isn’t it? People must have come along offering to put on this and that, and they’ve just imposed some vague pattern on the result. How fortunate that it is so fine an afternoon.’

Thus bringing this conversation to a decorous close, Appleby squared himself on his chair again and turned to his own reflections. It seemed to him that ‘A Romantic Rescue’, although probably meant to refer to the mediaeval Cherry preserved from an enchanter by her knight, might by a little stretch of meaning cover the modern Cherry carried off by her desert lover. Perhaps the title had been arrived at in a spirit of compromise when the admissibility of Cherry’s own wishes in the matter had still been in debate within her family.