What Happened at Hazelwood? (2 page)

There seems to be very little sense in that. But even at this one is not done with the bothersomeness of the blow having come from the back. Such an approach – the grey-haired police detectives call it the
a
tergo
approach, so evidently they are learned men – such an approach almost rules out the notion that the assailant struck out hastily upon being surprised. The direction of the stroke powerfully suggests a deliberate assault upon an unsuspecting man. And yet (once more) there is his expression…

It has become clear that the police like the case. It gives them something to chew on. They show no signs of going home. If they were asked to describe what has
happened
their answer – it is possible to suspect – would be
Quite a lot
. And, somehow, nobody relishes this. The notion that operating that single definite impact upon a human skull has been, so to speak, an engine or contrivance in which revolved wheels within wheels proves altogether disagreeable. Of course one knows whether one has, or has not, committed a specific crime of violence. And yet as the investigation becomes complicated – and it has become that – it is difficult for any of those concerned to abide confidently even in this absolute security. The complications are like so many hazards on a pin-table. The ball – obscurely visioned as the future verdict of a judge and jury – comes rattling down. And the Simneys, however their individual knowledge and conscience stand, all feel like so many final goals, holes or pockets which may at any moment feel the fatal
plop
.

I know, because I am one of them. I did not kill George. Indeed – and unlike most members of the family – I don’t believe I ever even wanted to do so. But I feel like one of those pockets, all the same. Perhaps it is to ease a little of the tension that I am writing these notes.

I am glad I have an
alibi.

This is rational enough. But I am also glad that almost nobody else has, and here there is no possibility of defending myself. To harbour such a sentiment is thoroughly base. But then we are the most ghastly people: that had better be got clear at once. If the eminent Victorian who closed Dowden’s
Life of Shelley
murmuring
What a set!
had only lived to make the acquaintance of the Simneys, he would infallibly have exclaimed
What a god-awful crowd!
Whether he would also have thought of any of us as an ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain (which is, I rather fancy, how Mervyn sees himself), I don’t at all know. But anyway Matthew Arnold died in 1888 while chasing a bus, and it was left to the grey-haired police detectives to weigh in with a verdict.

I have no doubt as to what their verdict on us has been, nor that the detectives are thoroughly satisfied to arrive at it. They had only to size us up – the whole lot of us, from Lucy to Owdon – to see that the affair was a sleuth’s dream come true. And not only because of the baronetcy and the snow and the library and the midnight hour – though the coming together of all these (and, of course, of the blunt instrument, which I would have you remember) must have been very pleasing too. Chiefly their satisfaction must have lain in the observation that we were all so patently ghastly.
It might have been any of them
was what they doubtless whispered together. And – once more – they liked it. They could settle in and get down to a nice, thorough job on each of us in turn.

I fancy the life of the higher constabulary is rather nomadic. They are called in; they glance round; and their superior science and intelligence instantly penetrate whatever uncouth mystification has been practised. One thinks of battleships which bear in their bowels machines solving at lightning speed the most intricate problems of gunnery. The calculation is made, the annihilating broadside fired, and the great ship lumbers on. So with these higher elucidators of crime: a single comprehensive deductive operation and the next case calls them forward. But it is different with the show we are putting up. And they quite like settling down for a change to a bit of steady blockade.

I daresay that if you want to get on with the business of Sir George you find all this about Shelley and battleships pretty intolerable. But artistry, I assure you, is at work. Here is simply a bit of the atmosphere of the Simneys being laid on right at the start. Here is one facet – the showing-off facet. Gerard (so recently arrived from Australia) calls it their fondness for showing their grudge. The Simneys are grudgy. A most extraordinary phrase, but not inexpressive: what is implied is showing off not with the simple aim of gratifying one’s own vanity but with some deliberate intention of irritating. And I can think of another epithet that fits. When I was at Oxford carefully spoken undergraduates, I discovered, used the word
bloody
(so omnibus a word with the world at large) in a very precise way. To call a man
bloody
, it seemed, was to ascribe to him a very specific quality of intolerableness – one not easy to define but perfectly well understood in that society. Well, in this sense the Simneys are
bloody
. Are they – or is one of them –
bloody
in another sense?

Now does he feel

His secret murders sticking on his hands…

Is one of them like that? Those grey-haired men propose to find out.

And now I ought to give you first a genealogical account of the Simneys (illustrated by one of those family trees that Galsworthy popularized among novelists) and second a chronological and topographical description of the actual fatality (with a regular crime-story plan:
x
marks the Spot).

Somehow or other all this will have to come, but it seems to me that I had better begin with at least a short scene of greater animation. For I want to gain your interest in this George Simney affair. It interests me.

So consider dinnertime on the Monday. There is a natural starting place there. And if you will unpack your bag, so to speak, for a week’s visit to Hazelwood beginning on that day you will have a reasonable opportunity of getting acquainted with us before the thing actually happens and a chance of receiving the final solution just as the car comes round to take you to the station on the following Sunday evening. I don’t say that you will find this week at Hazelwood wholly edifying or exactly comfortable. Some rather improper things will happen, numerous meals will be completely upset and it is likely that on several mornings the agitated servants will quite neglect to bring you your hot water or your tea. Still, it will be tolerably lively most of the time.

Moreover you won’t be the only visitor. For that was what happened at dinnertime on the Monday. Another couple of Simneys turned up, and one of them brought a wife as well. They turned up without warning from twelve thousand miles away, loudly declaring that George had in some way cheated or defrauded them. This, of course, was likely enough. But we felt that they might well have left these business issues till next morning – particularly as in brief inarticulate intervals they put away so much of that dinner that there was very little left for anybody else. No doubt this was just their rude colonial health. They looked healthy – and Joyleen excessively so: she has the physical perfection that comes of living in sun and surf and idleness. She is also sexy in a thoroughly vulgar way, like the girls in advertisements for swimsuits. She caught George’s eye from the first.

But why start with Joyleen? There’s no logic in that.

Notice to begin with, then, that this dinner would have been quite notable even if those antipodean cousins hadn’t turned up. It would probably have been quite uncomfortable too. George never really got on with his younger brother, Bevis – this, perhaps, because of their long separation in youth – and nothing brought them together except the ritual business of shooting over each other’s land. But now here was Bevis staying at Hazelwood, and with him was his son, Willoughby. George was fifty-four, Bevis is fifty-three, and Willoughby is twenty. I can’t see how to avoid these bald slabs of information in starting a family chronicle like this. And I warn you that you have to remember them – more or less.

These were the visitors. The permanents were George’s widowed sister, Lucy Cockayne, and her son, Mervyn. Lucy is two years younger than Bevis, and Mervyn a year younger than Willoughby – which is symmetrical enough. Then there was George’s younger sister, Grace, who is thirty-eight and unmarried. Or at least she is thought to be unmarried. Once you get among baronets and blunt instruments you can never be quite sure of little matters like that, can you?

Oh – and, of course, there was me.

I seem to have started with the genealogy after all, and let the animated scene wait. Still, it’s coming. And as for the genealogy, there are vital bits missing still. Don’t forget that.

For instance, Timmy. A vital part of his genealogy is notoriously missing. On that evening it didn’t seem greatly to matter. You don’t need a genealogy to hand soup.

‘Timmy,’ said George abruptly, ‘do you like doing this sort of thing?’

And Timmy Owdon glided behind his father and set down a plate quietly. He wasn’t going to let clumsiness express his feelings, as if those feelings came to no more than sulkiness. Timmy Owdon set down a plate and before replying to his master’s question reached for another. Old Owdon stood behind George’s chair, his one eye impassive and unwinking. If Timmy’s insolence penetrated to his torpid mental processes he gave no sign. Timmy set the second plate. Then he said: ‘No, sir.’

‘That so? Pity. Reckoned as promotion, I’m told.’ George, with the frown of a short-sighted but also of a saturnine man, peered up the table. ‘Lucy, Grace, you look quite glum. Have a glass of sherry. Or let Owdon pour the claret now.’

Neither Lucy nor Grace replied. Owdon remained immobile in his place. Timmy glanced slowly round the table, but his gaze passed some eighteen inches too high for empty plates. He was taking a good look at us – and very plainly consigning most of us to the nethermost pit.

Bevis took a glance at the boy, flushed, dropped his eyes. ‘George–’ he began, and stopped.

‘Yes, Bevis?’

Bevis compressed his lips and absorbed himself with the Simney crest on his spoon. There was a silence. George laid his little finger on a glass. Owdon poured sherry.

It pleased George to have Timmy Owdon in the room. In order to achieve this he had contrived (by simple means) to drive one of the parlour-maids from the house. Timmy was to have her place. I believe there was a time when footmen were like game – never provided except in twos or multiples of two. But now here was this solitary youth in a sort of livery, which his father had fished out from somewhere and which by no means fitted him. An uncouth lad would have been a scarecrow. With Timmy you didn’t notice. He would have looked beautiful in anything. And now in his deep smouldering anger at having been taken away from the horses and turned into an indoor servant like his father he looked like a stripling cherub, a fallen angel with all his brightness still about him.

And yet if there had been an artist in that dining-room (and, oddly enough, Bevis’ boy, Willoughby, is shaping that way) Timmy Owdon would not have stood alone in the limelight. For there was Mervyn Cockayne, George’s nephew and Lucy’s son. Mervyn too was like an angel. In fact, he was like the same angel.

In that lay George’s little joke. His butler’s boy and his sister’s were equally Simneys. You had only to look at them to see that there could be no doubt of it.

So already, you see, the plot begins to thicken. To no lady of feasible age and of the Simney blood could this clamant genetic fact be palatable. And few country gentlemen whose butler has thus obscurely distinguished himself among his womenfolk will first continue to employ the man and then, some sixteen years on, bring the natural child to his table as a footman. But George liked that sort of thing. Hitherto Timmy had lived unobtrusively in the stables. This was the first occasion on which George had chosen to show him off as the family scandal. Or as one of the family scandals. There are a good many more, some of which will presently come in.

‘Owdon,’ said George, ‘how old is your boy?’

George’s butler turned abruptly and made a sign to the remaining parlour-maid. He was an unbeautiful creature – in some fray, piratical or otherwise, he had got his face messed up as well as losing that eye – and I used to fancy that an unexpected sensitiveness sometimes made him veer away like this when any general attention was directed on him.

‘Sixteen, sir,’ said Owdon.

‘Is that so?’ And George looked up the table. ‘Only a couple of years younger than Mervyn. But quite a different type. I mean, quite a different psychological type. Although both, I should say, are intelligent. Owdon, you would agree that Mr Mervyn is intelligent?’

‘Certainly, sir.’

And Owdon moved off along the table – rather a silent table. George, of course, could give a wholly adequate rendering of the country gentleman able at any time to converse familiarly with his servants. And somehow this added an extra flavour of nastiness to his atrocious behaviour.

The only person who did not appear upset was young Mervyn Cockayne himself. He looked appraisingly at Timmy, and as if by some instinctive sympathy his angelic features took on momentarily the same sultry look. I think their eyes met – in which case the sensation must have been just that of looking into a mirror. But when he spoke it was altogether sedately.

‘It is very respectable’ – Mervyn has a high-pitched voice which instantly commanded the table – ‘to derive one’s retainers from the same family generation by generation. Owdon is to be congratulated for having forwarded so pleasantly feudal a disposition of things.’ Mervyn looked round the table and affected to be much struck by an array of frozen faces. ‘Mama,’ he cried – and his voice rose to a parody of an anxious squeak – ‘is it possible that I can have said something
gauche?’