The rivals of Sherlock Holmes : early detective stories (28 page)

“This has always been a peaceful village. People mind their own business and life goes on very much as it must have done for generations. The locals are proud, and they find the city ways of outsiders sometimes abrasive. But they’re very easy to live with once you get to know them. I count myself lucky to have been accepted by them—they respect me.”

“That’s another way of saying they keep their distance,” said Munday. “But I don’t blame you for wanting that.”

“I have many dear friends here.”

“Then you are lucky,” said Munday. ‘Tm still learning the language, as it were. To tell the truth, I’m not sure where I stand.”

“I can answer that,” said Awdry. “From the first, you were regarded with suspicion—a suspicion your lecture at the church hall did nothing to dispel. Every outsider is suspect here. But if I may say so, the outsider who antagonizes locals is a liability to the rest of us. One is expected to come to terms with the village. This hasn’t happened in your case.”

“You’re absolutely sure.”

“It is a fact.”

Munday said, “It is a bloody impertinence.”

Awdry took a sip of his drink, but his eyes stayed on Munday. He said, “I’m sorry you feel that way.” “Evidently, it’s of little account how I feel,” said Munday. “A dagger was stolen from me months ago. So one of your proud villagers is a thief. The dagger was not recovered until just the other day. So the police force is not up to scratch either. A dog was killed on my property—that’s vandalism as well as trespass. Facts!”

“Perhaps,” said Awdry. “But you might say they’re open to interpretation.”

“My foot,” said Munday, losing his temper. “Don’t play the D.C. with me. I don’t know who you’re trying to protect, but I can tell you that unless I get a satisfactory explanation I shall raise a stink.”

“I could say the same to you.”

“Go ahead!”

“Very well then, who are you trying to protect?”

“Not a soul,” said Munday. “Emma and I are too busy for intrigues.”

“You’re busy?”

“Yes, I am.”

“And yet you say you’re not writing a book?”

“That is no concern of yours.”

“This is a tightly-knit community. The people here are naturally interested in what goes on in the village. It’s not prying, though it may look that way to a complete stranger—”

“I have lived in villages before,” said Munday.

“If a person has a hobby or a sport, it’s usual for him to share it. If someone has visitors they’re frequently taken to the pub and introduced.”

“I have no hobbies,” said Munday.

“But you have visitors.”

“Visitors?” said Munday. “And how do you know that?”

“Shall I tell you something?” said Awdry. “There is very little about your life in Four Ashes that we don’t know.”

“That ‘we’ again.” “Does it alarm you?”

“Not at all,” said Munday. “Should it?”

Awdry smiled. “That depends on whether you intend to stay down here for much longer. If you leave, of course it doesn’t matter—we’ll just write you off as another inexplicable foreigner.”

“What if I decide to stay?”

“You’ll be most welcome, though I can’t help feeling you’d be much happier elsewhere,” said Awdry. “If you stay you might have some explaining to do.” “Explaining!” Munday laughed derisively.

“And if I were you I’d watch my step.”

Munday stood up and walked to the fireplace; he considered the fire for a moment, then spat into it. “I am here,” he said. “I pay my rent and go about my own business. I owe nothing to this village—least of all an explanation. The village owes me privacy. For all practical purposes this is my home, and whether I stay or go is no one’s concern but mine.”

“You say you’ve lived in villages before?” Awdry shook his head. “I’m surprised. Astonished. It’s not as simple as you say.”

“It is that simple,” Munday said.

“There are certain courtesies here, a certain standard of behavior—”

“Stop lecturing me.”

Awdry rose from his chair, but he didn’t follow Munday to the fireplace. He said, “I like your wife.”

“I’ll tell her you said so.”

Awdry caught Munday’s eye and addressed it: “I’m equally fond of Caroline.” Munday said nothing, and Awdry added, “We all are, no matter what people might say.”

“You’re not a very subtle man,” said Munday.

“I don’t want you to misunderstand me,” said Awdry, and his voice was somber with caution when he said, “Take care.”

“I thought we were discussing a dead dog.”

“Perhaps we are,” said Awdry. “That African— was he one of your students?”

“I have no students,” said Munday. He looked at his watch. “It’s time I left.”

“Don’t you see I’m trying to do you a favor?” Awdry spoke with a kind of bullying sincerity that was the nearest he had come to pleading with Munday.

“Do me another one,” said Munday. “Leave me in peace.”

“I shall be happy to. I only hope the others do the same.”

“What ‘others’?” said Munday, reacting as if the mere uttering of the word gave him an unpleasant taste in his mouth.

“I think you know better than I.”

“Thank you for the drink.” Munday started to go. “Wait.” Awdry went to a table. “Your dagger.” Munday took the dagger. “I thought they needed it for fingerprints.”

“There were no fingerprints,” said Awdry. “Open verdict.”

Munday said, “How very odd that in a village where everyone knows everyone else’s business they should not be able to get to the bottom of a simple thing like this. Isn’t that a contradiction?”

“Well, as you say, it’s an odd village,” said Awdry. He walked past Munday to the door and held it open.

“Then we must go,” said Emma.

Munday had told her what happened at the manor. But it was an abbreviated version. He said there had been objections in the village to Silvano—“Our fair-minded friends here are beside themselves at the thought of a black man in their midst”—and that he had defended him. Emma was shocked. Munday kicked the logs in the fireplace and showers of sparks dropped frpm them. He said, “It’s just an excuse to run us out of the village.”

“We shouldn’t stay where we’re not wanted,” said Emma.

“Because the old fool says so?” Munday poked at the

logs. “I won’t let them drive me out of my own house.” “We have no friends here.”

“You haven’t tried to make any,” said Munday. “Give a dinner party.”

“The Awdrys won’t come.”

“There are other people in the village,” said Munday. “What about those children we met on New Year’s Eve? ‘Rachel’s nappy smells like mangoes’— her, and the others.”

“You don’t want them.”

“No,” said Munday. “But we can get some people down from London. We can put them up. This is a big enough house, Emma.”

“Silvano, Alec, Margaret—”

“Use your initiative,” he said. “Make an effort!”

“My heart,” she said, and he wondered if he had sounded so feeble when he had said it.

“Not them, necessarily. There are lots more people who’d love to come down.”

“All those poor souls from Africa—they’re the only people we know now.”

“This is England.” Munday warmed his hands at the fire.

“For us this is an outpost of Africa,” she said. “I didn’t think it would ever come to this.”

“I’m staying,” said Munday. “I won’t be chased away. I’m not a poacher.”

“I wish you hadn’t seen Mr. Awdry.”

“I’m glad I did.”

“You’re awful when you’re challenged.”

“You can go if you want,” he said.

“I won’t leave without you.”

“So we’ll both stay,” he said.

“And mop the floors.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Mrs. Branch has given notice,” she said.

“What reason did she give?”

“She’s so hard to understand. That local dialect she uses when she’s sulking. She said something about our personalities.”

“Bitch,” he said.

Emma started to smile. She said, “She must have been talking about yours, because as you’ve often pointed out, I don’t have one.”

The next evening after his walk he went back to the Black House and saw Emma brighter than she had been for months. She was taking a casserole out of the oven, humming to a song coming over the radio, one that Munday had heard nearly every day since his arrival back in England, “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves.”

“You’re certainly cheerful,” said Munday. “Are you feeling better?”

“I’ve decided to take your advice.”

“Oh?”

“You said I never see anyone,” said Emma.

Munday switched off the radio. “Have you invited Margaret down?”

“No, not Margaret,” said Emma. “That Summers woman rang up while you were out.”

“What did she want?” asked Munday, and he turned away from Emma to hide his face.

“Nothing in particular—it was just a friendly call,” said Emma. “But I’ve asked her over to dinner on Friday. So you see I do have the occasional inspiration.”

Munday sat between his wife and his lover, in the high-backed chair, trying to hide a discomfort that was intermittently woe by concentrating on his meal. His head was down and he was cutting his roast beef into neat cubes. He had said nothing, it was the women who did all the talking, and they spoke across the table with the good humor and husky agreement of strangers eager to know each other better.

“I know exactly what you mean,” Caroline said. She was seated sideways on her chair, the elegant listening posture of a woman with long legs.

“And not only that,” Emma went on. She was confiding her disappointment with the village, but stressing her hardship in such a genial way she made it a lively story. It was her version of those dark months, a kind of farce: “We were absolutely baffled—well, you can imagine!” In it she maintained the fiction of Munday’s bad heart; she was patient, standing by while Munday pored over his notes in his study. Self-important, calling out for coffee, he was too absorbed to notice her. She gave it all the flavor of an adventure, cherishing each mishap with uncritical comedy, in the tone of a head prefect reporting a disastrous outing. Caroline laughed appreciatively and urged her to go on.

Munday did not contradict Emma. He was glad to be relieved of the burden of conversation and he was pleased Caroline was responding with such kindness. He said, “Tell Caroline about the mysterious Mrs. Seaton.”

They ate in the kitchen, because Emma’s hours of cooking had made it the warmest room. But they might have been anywhere in the house: there was a rightness in their gathering there, and Munday passed beyond his superficial guilt to the feeling he had experienced on New Year’s, when he had made love to Caroline before the gasping fire, while Emma slept on upstairs. He saw that the three of them belonged to the Black House, they were its first tenants, and all those rooms, the low ceilings, the protecting shadows, the unusable and makeshift modernity, the sweating windows in the thick walls made an appropriate shelter for a love that had to be conspiratorial. What else could it be? Love was exclusive, a lucky couple making a meal amid famine. It had to be hidden, dragged into the dark; and the Black House, the object of his return, which was for him the whole of England, as the Bwamba village had been the whole of Africa, was the perfect place for this feast. Dining together, it was as if they had now acknowledged what he had always suspected, the November impression he had called a fear, that it was a house so veiled you imagined a victim in one of its darkened rooms. He had thought it was himself; for a while—but without knowing her name—he believed it was Caroline; now he knew it was Emma.

Emma said, “You don’t expect the countryside to be so oppressive.” She wrinkled her nose. “Alfred says it’s my own fault—he’s a great one for holding people responsible. He blamed that poor Mrs. Branch for the noisy tractors that go by the window with the bales of hay. And he’s so wrapped up in his work. It was the same in Africa.”

“Africa,” said Caroline. “Everyone has an uncle who’s been there. Or am I thinking of India?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Emma. “My uncle never set foot out of Roehampton.”

“But what made you go to Africa in the first place?” Caroline asked.

“I went with Alfred.”

Caroline turned to Munday and said, “Well?”

“For my research,” said Munday. “But I never wondered why. At the time I would have been more surprised by someone who said he didn’t want to go. The name was always magic to me. Africa, Africa— and the Mountains of the Moon. I thought of lions and craters and people whom no one had set eyes on before. It’s infantile, I suppose, but there it is. If a chap told me he wanted to go to Istanbul or Java, I wouldn’t ask why.”

“I’ve been to Istanbul,” said Caroline. “On that vastly overrated train. I’d never do it again.”

“It’s a bewitching name,” said Munday.

“That’s why my first husband went to Dubrovnik,” said Caroline. “He hated it, and a Jug picked his pocket.”

“I found Africa disappointing,” said Emma. “Such sad people.”

“The Africans,” said Caroline.

“Well, I was thinking of the expatriates,” said Emma. “But the Africans as well. There was nothing one could do.”

“You had your painting,” said Munday.

“Humped Cattle, Tea Harvesting,” said Emma. “I’ve tried that here. It doesn’t work. I’m afraid I’ve become a television bug. Alfred hates it. I watch the news and those awful discussions. The Irish business, the miners. It’s like one of those third-rate serials with a complicated plot, in endless installments. You have to keep up with it, all the new developments and characters.” She reached for a dish. “Will you have some more meat? And there’s lots more Yorkshire pudding.”

“I’m doing fine with this,” said Caroline. “It’s delicious.”

“I’m not much of a cook,” said Emma. “I never got any practice in Africa. We always had help, fetching and carrying, cooking, anything you can name.”

“It sounds idyllic.”

“It was beastly,” said Emma. “Have you read Eliot? The Cocktail Party? ‘When these people have done

with a European, he is, as a rule, no longer fit to eat.’ ” “Tripe,” said Munday.

“But you must have loved it to have stayed so long there,” said Caroline to Munday.

“It began to wear a bit thin,” said Munday. “I sometimes feel I could have discovered all I needed to know about isolation and perhaps even tribalism right here in Four Ashes.”