The Beckoning Lady (25 page)

“Except that the silly fellow happens to be dead,” murmured Mr. Campion. “That's inescapable.”

Amanda raised her eyebrows enquiringly and he shook his head.

“This wretched marriage business is a nuisance,” he said softly.

“After I have married you,” said Rupert to his mother, to make certain that she should not feel overlooked, “I shall marry the fattest twin.”

“Which one is that?” Mr. Campion was interested. “I thought them both well covered.”

“The fattest
then
, of course.” Rupert seemed to find him stupid. “And I shall shout at her and put her across a bed and smack her until she cries, and then I shall kiss her until she laughs, and we shall go downstairs and pour out drinks for a lot of visitors.” He took a short run round the group, looking under his lids at them, to see if his somewhat oblique method of reporting gossip had gone home. Satisfied by their startled exchange of glances that it had, he returned to Lugg, having nothing more of interest to impart to them at the moment.

“You quit pertending to be young.” The fat man's murmur was a growl. “You think you're so clever, you'll run parst yerself. Shut up, and let persons 'ave a bit o' private life in their own 'ouses. I'm ashamed of you be'aving as if you was an ole woman come to tea.”

Rupert flushed but his eyes were dangerous.

“Dinah's got a bicycle bell,” he said.

“What if she 'as?” Lugg was truculent. “What if she 'as?”

“Well, she wanted one,” said Rupert. “She said so. She's wanted one for a very long time.”

“And so Old 'Arry come along and give 'er a brandnoo second'and one for 'er birthday, which it ain't. Orl right, orl right, we've 'eard it. Now come orf it and shut up.”

“But she was de-lighted,” Rupert insisted wickedly. “De-lighted. She kept saying so until he told her to holdergab.”

“Now then, now then,” Lugg's voice rose in warning cadence, “that's enough. That will do. Bed you. I'll see to it meself.”

He swung the child under one mighty arm and turned to the parents.

“I'm seein' to this,” he said firmly. “A lot of mamby-pamby just another hower will make a little spiv of 'im. You shut up, my lad. I don't orfen put my foot down, but when I do . . .”

“You ring a bicycle bell,” muttered Rupert, half suffocated, and he hung scarlet-faced but silent as he was carried off.

“It's a good thing,” said Amanda, regretful but philosophic. “Lugg is tired too. I fear he's had words with his lady friend. Old Harry won her back with gifts. Old Harry is quite rich, they say,” she added as an afterthought. “He keeps his gold in a tin biscuit box, bound up with barbed wire.”

“
Barbed
wire?” Mr. Campion echoed in astonishment.

“So they say.” Amanda seemed to find the fact interesting but not extraordinary. “He's very much of a country person. I don't know quite where the gold comes from, but he picks things up and sells them, and I should think he makes quite a bit on the side. Odds and ends, you know. He's just given Dinah a bicycle bell which he must have got from somewhere. They were oiling it because it was very wet, but it was quite a good one.”

They wandered into the house together and joined Minnie and Tonker, who were sitting placidly in the drawing-room amid a welter of dirty glasses, talking amicably about the probable reaction of Lady Glebe and The Revver to Prune's affair with Luke.

“The woman may say anything,” declared Tonker. “She's insane. She was a Gallantry. The Revver won't notice it happened for about ten years, and then he'll hope it wasn't true. That dreary man . . .”

“Put up with you jolly well,” finished Minnie. “He wasn't angry for long and even laughed a little in the end.”

Tonker's expression of concentrated villainy was lightened by a gleam as he poured his old friends a nightcap.

“Did you hear about my appearance in the parish magazine?” he enquired.

“I heard in the village that you'd been ‘advertising of yourself',” said Amanda. “You had a row with The Revver actually in church, didn't you?”

“Wasn't it frightful!” Minnie was appalled. “There was no service at the time, of course.”

“There was no real row,” protested Tonker, passing the glasses. “It was simply this. Judge for yourselves. I don't get along to the old boy's dreary services, as you know, because I'm not always here. But I walked up to the church one day, because I wanted to look at some wizzo lettering on the Pontisbright Tomb. I was mucking about very peacefully, admiring things, when I suddenly thought I wasn't being very respectful. I thought ‘God Tonker, you are a stinker, only coming up here when you want something', so I got down very decently and said something—not aloud, of course, but something simple—like ‘O God, make me a good Tonker and let Mr. Guggenheim pass that scheme'. Something perfectly normal and ordinary.” He cocked a wicked eye at them. “And then I noticed the old Revver. He'd been watching me from behind the vestry curtains, the old so-and-so, and presently he came creeping down to me and paused just in front of me where I was kneeling and said, if you please, ‘Are you all right?' I didn't get up but I stared at him and I said—in a whisper, you understand, the whole conversation was conducted in whispers—‘What do you mean? Of course I'm all right.' And he said very nastily ‘Oh I thought you couldn't be. You never come to worship.' And I said, ‘Well, what on earth do you think I'm doing now, you fathead?' And he said ‘Don't be blasphemous, Tonker'. He did, he really did! Well, after I left him, which was pretty smartly, he went round the village telling people I'd gone off my head and got religious mania. I heard it at The Gauntlett half a dozen times, and I resolved to teach the man a lesson.”

Minnie was trying not to laugh but the tears were
creeping out of her eyes and rolling down her long nose.

“It was very naughty,” she protested.

“It was not. It was very dignified. I knew he'd never apologise, the rat. You know what a parish magazine is like, Campion?” Tonker turned to his friend. “It's a solid wodge of family matter which is the same for every parish—syndicated stuff—but the outside double page just under the cover is printed separately for every community. It opens with a letter from the local parson to his flock, and the whole of the rest of the space is taken up with two-inch ads inserted and paid for by local tradespeople. You know: ‘My bread is good bread. B. Bunn, Baker'. ‘Have a good coffin while you're about it. H. Hearse, Undertaker', and so on. Well, I went to my old friend the wheelwright, who has the centre of the back inner page, and came to a deal with him, and the next month in his space there was my announcement. ‘Apology accepted. T. Cassands.' That caught The Revver in a cleft stick. He didn't notice a thing until he'd delivered the whole lot by hand on his bicycle, which he does as an act of humility. I knew he wouldn't.”

“And then he laughed,” said Minnie, “so it's all right. He's forgiven you.”

“He hasn't, you know,” said Tonker. “He doesn't like me, and he thinks I'm veering to Rome, secretly. I can see it in his eye. Anyway, I expect he has a bucketful with the old lady. She believes in all the religions, Polytheism, Sufism, Fire Worship, the Water Cure, Buddhism, and Rosicrucianism—the lot. Come to think of it, that girl must have quite a time between the two of 'em. No wonder she looks a bit blah.”

“I think she's in love now,” ventured Amanda.

“Love!” Tonker spoke with withering contempt and he glared balefully out of the window behind her at the moonlit garden. “Pah! What's love? How much can it stand?”

“That,” said Minnie with some asperity, “is a thing I sometimes wonder.”

Meanwhile, on the landing upstairs Luke was finishing
his interrogation of a frightened but very shrewd-eyed Miss Diane. The Sergeant, whom he had borrowed from South to fulfil regulation requirements, was a dark shadow in the background. But at the end of the hall there was a grandfather clock and on this the Chief Inspector kept his eye. The last train from London was due in at Kepesake station in something under half an hour.

“For the last time, Ma,” he said, dropping into the vernacular of his beloved London manor, “forget it. We do not care two penn'orth of gin if you're married to the King of Siam. Forget the subject of pensions. The only pensions the Sergeant and I are worrying about at the moment are our own, and we shan't live to collect those if you don't get on with it. I only want to know if you and Mrs. Cassands spent the whole of that Thursday afternoon together. We don't care about the morning. We know by the bus when the deceased arrived at Pontisbright. And we don't really care about the late evening. We just want to know about the afternoon.”

“I was with 'er from two o'clock until we got Mr. William settled for the night about eleven, and that's God's truth.”

“All the time?”

“Well, I come in and made the tea, but she was scrubbing the shelves in the boat house then, and she must have stuck to it or she couldn't have done so much. She's a good worker, I'll say that.”

“I see. Very well.” Luke let snap the elastic band which kept his packet of envelopes together. “Go on. I'll see you tomorrow, I expect. But don't worry.”

“Are yer satisfied?” A damp hand clutched at his sleeve in the gesture now so familiar to him from his years of work amongst the women who were so like her. “You're not keeping nothink back from me, dear?”

“No.” He patted her shoulder, which was as solid as a side of bacon. “No. Run along. I'm not laying information. And when I get back I'll look up your husband for you. He's dead, you know. Blimey, he'd be about a
hundred and ten by all accounts, even if he got away from the bombing, which is unlikely.”

“'E'd be seventy-three,” she said softly, “and oh, he was a one, 'e was a one. I'm 'appy 'ere. I ain't ever been 'appy before.”

“Well then, shut up.” Luke was firm. “Come on, Sergeant. You've got your own transport, have you?”

“Ho, I'll see to '
im
,” said Miss Diane.

Luke flung himself out of the house and into his little car. But half an hour later he had driven it into the garage at the Mill, and had walked out on to the silent moon-drenched heath alone.

The stubby train, which was but four coaches long, had waited less than a minute at the single platform before panting off again on its potter through the night. The yellow lamps had flickered palely in the moonlight. The few passengers had bustled away to their waiting cars. Prune had not returned.

Now, on the springing turf of the heath where the wild thyme and the coltsfoot made the air aromatic, Luke felt younger and more alone than at any time since his babyhood. The world he knew so well, and in which he was counted a sophisticated member, was suddenly set apart from himself so that he could look at it from the outside. It was a new and frightful experience and he had a glimpse for the first time of a state in which colours and comforts and warmths and familiar delights had lost their virtue.

He was no Shakespearian, nor was he a countryman, so that he was not concerned with being absent in the spring. Bird song and the deep vermilion of the rose meant little to him at any time. But he was now faced with a vista of grey pavements, little bars bright behind raindrops, traffic, excitement, telephone calls, the chances of taking risks, good-tempered dirty faces, friendly words from doorsteps, the smell of new bread rising from a grating, a radio lovesong trilling in the night adding to a city's enchantments, all of them spoiled, dulled, devitalised for ever.

He was aware of the whole experience in one terrible revelation, swift and awful, like the discovery that the unforeseen accident has broken one's back, a peep into emptiness. He threw himself down among the little flowers and the scented herbs, and thrust his forehead into them in an agony of dismay. He was not thinking at all. The little house, the familiar blue overall his mother wore, the tidy curtains and the spotless yard, their inadequacies were too exquisitely painful to bear contemplation at this juncture. Even Prune herself was a vanished dream. There was only one absorbing picture in his mind, himself, shadowy and alone, in a drab flavourless city for ever.

The night wind blew over him and the earth was kind and he was so tired. He slept like a log. The voices on the road and at the Mill, the cars rustling by, the laughter in the village, they passed without him hearing them at all. He lay there exhausted and out, like a dead man.

When he awoke it was an hour past dawn on Midsummer's Day, the day of Tonker's party. The sky was like a pearl, clear and flawless, the air was thin and cool and breathtaking. His first surprise, even before the black sorrow of the night returned to whisper to him that Prune had found upon inspection that it would never do, was to discover that he was quite warm. He was covered with sacks, and there was a large wild rhubarb leaf over his head. It took him some seconds to grasp the significance of these phenomena, and by that time he had realised that he was not alone.

Old Harry was lying propped up on one elbow some three yards away. His own bed was of pulled thyme and he rested there contentedly, a long grass stalk between his fine new Government teeth. The Chief Inspector sat up slowly, aware again now of his private sorrow but still himself and still game. The rhubarb leaf slid on to the ground in front of him and he took it up.

“What's this for?”

“To shade yer. Let the full moon soak into yer this time
o' year and you won't never be the same man again. Not a half of him.”

Luke stretched his broad shoulders and his dark face was sad.

“Too late, chum,” he said. “You should have told me before.”

He fingered the sacks, which were wet with dew.