Sheiks and Adders (8 page)

‘I thought you might know because I saw you with the young Chitfields.’ Appleby had not, after all, shaken off the woman behind him. ‘How delightful they are.’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘Or my husband might know, since he is intimate with Richard Chitfield, and Richard is so much the moving spirit in this sort of thing. I wonder whether you know my husband?’

‘I don’t think I have that pleasure, madam.’ Appleby had been obliged to turn round again. His interlocutor wore a pair of wings – obviously wings of the most expensive sort – and a dress seemingly designed to suggest the firmament on a starry night. She also carried a wand with a further twinkling star at the end of it. She might have been the Good Fairy in a pantomime, but was probably intended to be of a superior order to that. A Fairy Queen, in fact – and not Spenser’s but Shakespeare’s. Here, in other words, was Titania – or this was an assumption so substantial that Appleby judged it possible to proceed on it. ‘Is it your husband,’ he asked, ‘who is sustaining the part of Bottom?’

‘Yes, it is.’ Titania was delighted by this feat of ratiocination. ‘Rupert has very considerable textile interests in the Far East. So I thought nothing could be more appropriate for him than Nick Bottom the weaver. I had the ass’s head specially made for him so that he has no need to take it off. He can’t eat or drink, of course. But it has a cunning little window set inside the mouth.’

‘Most ingenious. I congratulate you.’ Appleby reflected that poor Bottom couldn’t have been making for the bar, after all. ‘And have you brought along a friend,’ he asked, ‘in the character of Oberon?’

‘Well, no. But how delightful that you are a lover of Shakespeare! Rupert is a great lover of Shakespeare. You really must meet him.’

‘I shall hope for an opportunity.’ Appleby, a hardened proponent of what used to be called the forms, produced this response unflinchingly. He didn’t know this confounded woman from Adam’s Eve, but it was necessary to be civil to her.

‘Of course I know who you are, Sir John. Ambrose Birch-Blackie pointed you out to me earlier in the afternoon. He had just spotted you, and was hoping to have a chat with you later. I am Cynthia Plenderleith.’

‘How do you do? I think the curtain is about to go up.’

‘I don’t think so. They are merely testing it. I do hope Rupert will be back by the time the pageant really begins. He had to slip away, he said. I can’t think why.’

Appleby might have said, ‘I suppose he wants a bit of hush.’ Or even, ‘Perhaps he’s looking for the loo.’ But as neither of these conjectures was admissible in polite conversation with a Queen of the Fairies he held his peace.

‘He said he might be away for half an hour. So meanwhile, Sir John, I feel quite unattended.’

‘I’m sure you need never, in fact, be that.’ Appleby produced this slightly laboured compliment while wondering whether it was requisite that he should move back a row and himself squire the lady. He decided to change the subject.

‘Is Richard Chitfield in fancy dress?’ he asked. ‘I suppose he ought to be Theseus, Duke of Athens. For here we are at a Court of sorts, and with a wood hard by.’

‘What an exciting thought, Sir John!’ Mrs Plenderleith, like her husband, was evidently a profound Shakespearian. ‘Do you think we shall soon fall into all sorts of confusion?’

‘I think it unlikely. This entertainment will no doubt have its muddled moments. But I doubt whether we shall fall into any mystifications ourselves.’

But in this opinion – if, indeed, he held it – Sir John Appleby was to turn out wrong.

There was nothing particularly surprising in the fact that neither Mark nor Cherry Chitfield had reappeared before the curtain went up on the Ancient Britons and their bear. They had dumped Appleby with a vague suggestion that their father was to be located and introduced to him. But they had plenty of other things in their heads. And so, certainly, had Richard Chitfield himself.

The Britons and their bear were quite funny in a knockabout way. Mrs Plenderleith, with her mind running on Shakespeare, might have remarked that the creature had been borrowed from
The Winter’s Tale
– with the difference that whereas in the play the bear chases Antigonus, here the high-spirited young people in woad chased the bear. Shakespeare moreover is said to have borrowed an authentic quadruped from the neighbouring bear garden, while this one would prove in real life to have only two feet. In fact he was first cousin to the Teddy bears that had been engaging in archery, and might even be described as second cousin to the missing textile tycoon
alias
Nick Bottom the weaver.

When the curtain came down on the bear-hunt a good many of the spectators got up and moved around. Experienced in such amateur entertainments, they knew that some little time would elapse before anything further happened. Appleby followed their example – cautiously, since his prime object was to distance himself unobtrusively from the loquacious Mrs Plenderleith.
Ill met
– he might have been murmuring –
by moonlight, proud Titania
. Only it was, of course, by sunlight still – although for that matter it did look as if night might fall before this over-abundant theatrical banquet was over. So Appleby discreetly faded away. He may have been not wholly without thought of that licensed bar, since a mild depression had settled upon him. It was the consequence of a sense that he had set himself a fool’s errand. Even if the Chitfield fête did harbour some sort of conundrum, it was no business of his. But now something incipiently enlivening happened. Appleby ran into his fourth sheik.

Not that this was exactly the way of it, for on the present occasion it was definitely a matter of the sheik seeking him out. The sheik, in fact, came up in a hurry, and addressed him without ceremony.

‘I say,’ the sheik said, ‘are you the right Robin Hood?’

‘That’s hard to know.’ Appleby saw instantly that here at last was Tibby Fancroft: an agitated English boy whose pink-and-white complexion was absurdly emphasized by a little black beard stuck slightly aslant on his chin. ‘There’s certainly another one around, and there may be several. There are undoubtedly a surprising number of sheiks.’

‘Yes, it’s very puzzling. But what I mean is, are you the Robin Hood who knows Cherry Chitfield? Sir John Somebody.’

‘Appleby. Yes, I am. How do you do, Mr Fancroft?’

‘Bloody badly. We’re fearfully bothered. Or rather Cherry is. So of course I am too.’

‘Of course.’

‘She told me to find you, and I hope it isn’t cheek. You see, Mr Chitfield has disappeared. He’s nowhere around the theatre at all.’

‘Is that so very alarming? He may simply have been called away about something. I’m told he’s very much a man of affairs.’

‘Yes, I know. But it’s – well, it’s unexampled. Cherry says just nothing – or nothing at all normal – would drag him away from this show. Not once it had started, that is. It’s so absolutely his thing.’

‘So I gather.’

‘What I myself think is that he’s terribly offended. With Cherry and me, I mean. He has seen me in this beastly tablecloth and table napkin, and gone off in a huff. I thought that, after all, he’d accept the thing as a joke when we actually went through with it. Because, you see, he’s jolly decent usually. If I’d known he’d really be cut up I wouldn’t have gone ahead. Not even if Cherry–’

‘Quite so. But I really don’t think that your explanation of Mr Chitfield’s absence from the scene is at all a plausible one. He might have done something rather drastic about your silly if harmless desert-lover affair. He might have ordered you out of the place, Mr Fancroft. But he wouldn’t withdraw in a sulk. I think you’re reading into him – well, a somewhat juvenile attitude of mind. Are you sure, by the way, that he
has
seen you in this get-up?’

‘Well, no. I’ve been lying pretty low, as a matter of fact. But somebody says they saw him go off towards the house. So I want to go and apologize to him. I think it would be the right thing. Don’t you, sir?’

‘Certainly I do.’ Appleby spoke as a senior man who has no doubts. ‘If you have acted contrary to his expressed wish – however unreasonable it may have seemed to you – here on his own ground and in concert with his own daughter, then you should tell him it was a mistake, and that you are sorry about it. My guess is that it will then all blow over at once.’

‘That’s what I’m going to do now, Sir John. But I want you to come with me. Or Cherry does.’

‘My dear young man, nothing could be more uncalled for or less suitable. I don’t know Mr Chitfield. I didn’t know
any
Chitfield until yesterday afternoon.’ Appleby paused, and remembered how imperiously Cherry had then bidden him to this cluttered-up garden-party-cum-fête. ‘Look!’ he said abruptly. ‘Do you think that Cherry has anything else – perhaps something quite different – in her head?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Nor do I, I’m afraid. Does she seem at all worried over something she hasn’t told you about? To speak frankly, Cherry seems to me to have her childish side. But she strikes me as a rather sensitive and observant young woman as well.’

‘I suppose that’s right.’ Tibby Fancroft received this by no means unqualified encomium upon his beloved without offence. ‘And I have thought her a bit worried about how things are here. I can’t think why. Everything seems very nice, to my mind, at Drool Court. And everybody’s very nice to
me
. Mrs Chitfield – of course she’s of a romantic turn of mind – seems almost to be hearing the wedding bells ringing out merrily already.’

‘I’m glad to hear it, Mr Fancroft. And, on second thoughts, I’ll come with you to the house.’

There were still plenty of people in the gardens, on the lawns, and besieging the tea-tent. At one end of the terrace the military band still played; it was now dispensing random selections from the treasure-house of Gilbert and Sullivan opera, but at a subdued volume designed not to carry too disturbingly to the theatre at the other end of the grounds. It seemed to be regarded as quite admissible to cut the theatre and amuse oneself in other ways. Appleby had a glimpse of Mr Pring. This particular sheik, no doubt adequately refreshed, was walking composedly up and down between flowerbeds with his wife. Mrs Pring was taking her part sufficiently seriously to be carrying a somewhat cumbersome banner emblazoned with the Cross of Lorraine. She was a massive woman and – as was to be expected – of maturer years than the Maid of Orleans had been fated to attain.

Appleby wasn’t given much time for this further survey. Tibby hurried him on. It appeared that, having been made aware of the impropriety of his conduct in proposing to carry off the younger Miss Chitfield to the tents of the Arabs, he was genuinely anxious to express his regrets to the girl’s offended father with as little delay as possible. It was a highly absurd business, and Tibby Fancroft was demonstrably a wholly ingenuous young man. Appleby, who was still quite clear that he himself had no business to be in on the act, accompanied the boy with increasing misgiving.

They entered the house through open doors and an untenanted lobby. Beyond this there was a large hall, in various ways exhibiting signs of affluence. If the Chitfields were really all to be bundled into jail they would be aware of a painful contrast with their customary surroundings. Nearly everything was in very good taste. Or at least the individual objects deserved that commendation. But in sum they were rather too thick on the ground (or on shelves or in niches and cabinets) for their setting in what was not to be regarded as a formal apartment. Appleby, having cast an appraising eye over various costly trifles, easily to be slipped into a pocket, was surprised by the absence of any sort of guarding presence on such a day as this. Indeed, the whole house had an oddly deserted feel. It was, of course, in no sense open to the public; it was to be expected that the Chitfields would all be out of doors, busy with one or another aspect of the fête; such servants as there might be could well be similarly employed. It was disconcerting, all the same.

‘He’ll probably be in the library,’ Tibby said. ‘Come on.’

Appleby failed to see why there should be any probability that Richard Chitfield would be so located, and for a moment he hesitated to come on as required. Indeed, he procrastinated by the first means that occurred to him.

‘Has it struck you,’ he asked, ‘that you ought not perhaps to present yourself to Mr Chitfield in that Arab rig? Your apology might come more gracefully if you got out of it.’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’ Tibby had at least come to a halt. ‘It’s not much more than a bloody white sheet, is it? And that’s just right for a penitent.’

This remark, although to be judged unsuitably facetious, at least revealed a glimmer of unexpected intellectual ingenuity on Tibby’s part. But Appleby was firm.

‘I don’t think, Mr Fancroft, that it’s at all likely to strike Mr Chitfield in that way.’

‘Well, then, it’s soon mended. Here goes.’ So saying, Tibby plucked the fillet from his brow, raised his arms, ducked his head, and in a moment had wriggled clear of the haik, burnous, or whatever it was that had established him as a desert lover. With a brief yelp of pain, he ripped off his little black beard, and as a result stood revealed as an English youth scarcely out of his teens, dressed in a very commonplace sports-shirt and dark trousers. ‘At least it’s not at all elaborate,’ he said. And he bundled up the whole outfit and tossed it carelessly to the floor. ‘Dark glasses, too,’ he said; fished a pair out of a pocket, and chucked them on top of the pile. ‘I can’t think why those wogs think they carry the burning sun of Arabia around with them. And now off we go. The library’s the room at the end of the corridor, and quite impressive in its way. I think the books came with the house.’

Appleby was now resigned to what might prove a most unmannerly irruption upon the house’s proprietor. But Tibby was behaving with the confidence of one who felt he had the freedom of the place, and with an equal confidence that Richard Chitfield would be found where he supposed him to be. So they marched down the corridor, and halted again at the library door. Quite unmistakably, there came a murmur of voices from within.