A Night of Errors (6 page)

‘Very good, Mr Geoffrey.’

‘But first, just find Thomas and ask him to make sure that there is plenty of petrol in my car.’

It was nearly ten minutes before Martin returned. The bureau was closed. Geoffrey Gollifer was standing by the window, looking out into the gathering dusk. His passport was in his hand. ‘I found it,’ he said.

‘I’m glad to hear it, sir.’ Martin, as he set down his tray, glanced at his employer’s son in some surprise. Mr Geoffrey, it seemed to him, had spoken with altogether disproportionate emphasis.

‘Yes, I found it. I had a notion it was there – quite dimly. And – by Jove! – it was… You say Sir Oliver is probably at Sherris?’

‘I believe he may be, sir.’

‘Well, I suppose I had better be off.’ And Geoffrey Gollifer drained his glass. ‘By the way, Martin, where have they put those army things of mine?’

‘In your old dressing-room, sir. I put them carefully away myself.’

‘Good. I’ll just run up and get something.’

Geoffrey strode to the door. Martin followed. ‘Can I be of any help to you, sir?’

‘No, thank you, Martin. I’m pretty sure I don’t need any help.’

And Geoffrey Gollifer went off upstairs. In the old way, Martin thought – with a sort of jump at the bottom and then two steps at a time. And Martin shook his head doubtfully. He was getting on, he knew, and the mistress was already hinting at a pension. But was it so bad that he had come to fancy things? For he thought he had seen a young and handsome face suddenly transformed – pale, strained, and the forehead showing beads of sweat.

Smoothly the car slid away from the little inn. The hands of the clock on the dashboard were at nine-fifteen. It was growing dusk.

The two men drove silently for some time. ‘Not a bad idea,’ said the first, ‘turning off the main road to dine. The bigger places are most of them a bit spoilt nowadays. It was a quiet spot, that.’

‘Yes,’ said the second, ‘quite out of the way.’

The first glanced at a sign-post. ‘Getting near,’ he said, and paused. ‘You know, I just don’t see how I can face it.’

‘Oh, come, my dear chap. That’s quite morbid, surely.’

‘I suppose it is. But I’ve always been a bit like that. And you just don’t know what it–’

‘Say!’ The second man, who was driving, braked sharply and drew into the side of the road. ‘Did you see that? Looked as if it might have been a hit-and-run accident. Fellow knocked into the ditch.’

‘Good lord! I didn’t notice.’ The first man spoke not altogether attentively, as if his thoughts were far away. ‘Better get out and look.’

‘Don’t you bother. I’ll just run back.’

And the second man climbed out of the car. He was absent a couple of minutes. ‘Nothing at all,’ he said casually when he returned. ‘Just a tramp dead drunk and fast asleep. He’ll come to no harm. We’ll drive on.’

And the first man nodded. ‘Right-ho,’ he said. ‘Better face it. And the fellow will come to no harm, as you say.’

Oliver’s Gollifer. It rankled, Mrs Gollifer found as she bent down to admire Lady Dromio’s embroidery. That she should be supposed at her age to be any man’s mistress was – or ought to be – merely comical. Doubtless there were such horrible old women, and what did it matter if she were taken for one of them by a horrible old man? And Sebastian Dromio was certainly that. It had become clear during dinner that he was worried, but he had seemed to take this as licence for being as disagreeable as he pleased – except to Lucy, for whom he seemed to have some slight affection. A horrible old man spreading a horrible slander… But it was not the slander itself that really stung. It was – Mrs Gollifer discovered with some surprise – the disgusting collocation of gobbling sounds with which Lucy Dromio had ridiculed it. Oliver’s Gollifer.

She had greatly disrelished wedding herself to a Gollifer. The outlandish name had been one of two considerations which had weighed almost decisively against her going to the altar with the very wealthy man who bore it… But she had gone, all the same. And Samuel Gollifer had proved a very decent fellow. They had teamed up well. She had been very sorry when he died.

It was not all that man desires (thought Mrs Gollifer, looking thoughtfully at Lucy laying out a card-table, and at the same time letting her mind stray back across the years). But it was all that man requires – or approximately so. And, for good measure, there had been Geoffrey, her only son. Mrs Gollifer was sometimes puzzled to know where her love for Geoffrey came from. But it was there… Mrs Gollifer’s finger made a little arabesque in air, tactfully picking out some special elegance in Lady Dromio’s needlecraft. If only, after all, Geoffrey and Lucy –

Mrs Gollifer sighed. Unfortunately there was no possibility of that.

The little silver clock on the mantelpiece struck half past nine. Lady Dromio looked at it and then at the empty hearth beneath. ‘I had rather hoped,’ she said, ‘that we might have a fire. But Swindle advised against it. And no doubt it is rather warm.’

Kate Dromio, Mrs Gollifer thought, increasingly liked conversation of a comfortable inanity. She liked the convention that life was comfortable and unexacting – not merely on its surfaces, but basically as well. That woman in Jane Austen – or was it the Brontës? Mrs Gollifer wondered – who just sat on a sofa with a pug: Kate liked to suggest that for her life was like that. But it was not, nor probably would Kate have found it tolerable if it were so. For in her old friend there was something lurking and unassuaged, something that Mrs Gollifer by no means understood.

‘Then for once Swindle was right in his notion of what would be comfortable.’ Lucy had opened a pack of patience cards and now came to sit down beside Mrs Gollifer. ‘It’s one of those close nights that seem to go on getting warmer until midnight. And I’m sure there is only one fire in the house, Swindle’s own. He sits before it, you know, all the year round, drinking port. If we ever see the end of Swindle, which I doubt, it will surely be as the result of spontaneous combustion. He is much too wary just to tumble into the fire–’

‘Good gracious!’ Lady Dromio was alarmed. ‘Swindle is getting rather old. And they say he walks about in his sleep. It would be dreadful if–’

‘No,’ Lucy shook her head. ‘It will be spontaneous combustion like the man who drank too much gin.’

‘I don’t think I heard of him. No doubt it comes of not reading the newspapers carefully. Such odd things, Mary dear, Lucy knows about, clever girl. Not that I don’t do a great deal of reading myself, particularly when Oliver is away and we hardly entertain at all. Or only as we are doing tonight, which is the nicest way, I think. Mary, I wonder if you have read a novel, a most unusual novel, about a big–’ Lady Dromio paused, frowned and looked about her. Apparently the book itself was necessary if she was to be quite sure of what it was that was big in it. ‘Lucy, can I possibly have mislaid that absorbing story? The one old Mrs Rundle recommended to Mr Greengrave’s niece on that dreadful ship. They had storms all the way, you know. And although Mr Greengrave himself – not that he was on board – is an excellent sailor – indeed, he was in the navy as a chaplain, I believe, when he was a young man…or was that old Canon Newton at Sherris Magna?’ Lady Dromio paused, herself rather at sea. ‘Well, Mr Greengrave has a niece–’

‘Talking of ships,’ said Mrs Gollifer, ‘is there any news of Oliver returning? When I drove up and saw Sebastian on the terrace, I thought for a moment that it was he. I was quite disappointed.’

‘Were you?’ Lady Dromio was surprised and vague. ‘But of course. Oliver has really been away for quite a long time.’

Mrs Gollifer was silent. This was surely a company far too intimate for such ghastly insincerities. Or it ought to be that. Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive. Indeed the web can eventually become a noose. Or an ulcer. Or a secret wound through which one may be bled to death… There were only the three of them in the room and Sebastian was unlikely for some time to abandon such port as Swindle resigned to him. Mrs Gollifer stubbed out her cigarette, and knew as she did so that a resolve had formed in her mind like a suddenly precipitated crystal. ‘Lucy–’ she began.

Lady Dromio dropped her embroidery.

Down below, Swindle stoked his own fire. He had locked the door – a very definite indication that the household was to expect no further directions or services from him that night. He poured himself out a glass of port and put on his carpet slippers. But his expression held no suggestion of a desire for slumber. Perhaps he was by nature nocturnal; certainly his complexion suggested a creature habituated to emerge from a hole after dark.

And yet Swindle in his solitude was looking rather more human than usual. Signs of doubt, of uneasiness, of an obscure internal debate were apparent in him. He sat down at his table and brought out a sheaf of papers from a drawer. These he fell to studying with concentration, occasionally making a pencil jotting in a notebook at his side. He shook his head peevishly, dolefully; at the same time the gesture suggested resolution. He made more jottings, sifted the papers with care into three piles, produced a column of figures relating to each. They represented (an observer might have guessed) bills of various degrees of urgency. Swindle turned to the drawer again and brought out three rubber bands. Whatever were the affairs in hand it was evident that he had no power to achieve more than a preliminary ordering of them now.

Again Swindle looked uneasy. He pushed away the papers, hesitated and looked round his room as if to make quite sure that he was unobserved. He drew from the pocket of his ancient tail-coat an orange-coloured envelope and with fumbling fingers drew out the telegram inside. He read this through, frowned in indignation or protest, thrust it away again, eased himself into his armchair and drew the glass of port to his side. The fire was blazing, the little room stifling, everything invited to sleep. But Swindle sat wide-eyed, staring at the toes of his slippers. The house was silent. The only sound was the ticking of a watch and this watch Swindle presently produced and eyed with hostility – a handsome half-hunter on a gold chain, such as elderly and valued retainers sometimes receive from their employers. He shook his head once more, muttered some protest and rose painfully from his chair. He reached for shoes, thought better of this, and in his old slippers shuffled noiselessly to the door. Softly, he turned the lock, cautiously he put his head out and looked to right and left. Reassured, he stepped into the corridor and made his way silently, like a burglar, to the service stairs.

The time by the half-hunter had been ten minutes to ten.

Mr Greengrave had dined with old Canon Newton at Sherris Magna and now he was on his way home. If he had excused himself a little earlier than his host would have wished – perhaps, a shade earlier than was civil, indeed – it was the innate caution of his nature that was responsible. The Canon was a lover of good talk, and in an age in which it is unusual to be able to converse at all this accomplishment had made his society much prized throughout the diocese. But the Canon was also a lover of good wine, and he was equally esteemed because of this. The Bishop and he, it was averred by the irreverent, bartered spiritual for spirituous advice; there were few considerable cellars in the county in the replenishing of which Canon Newton did not have a say; he even enjoyed the unstinted confidence and regard of Mr Swindle of Sherris Hall.

It would be cruel to boil this down to the statement that Canon Newton drank. Nevertheless this was how Mr Greengrave secretly regarded the matter. Mr Greengrave had no head for liquor. It quickly made him argumentative rather than merely talkative, and this was an embarrassment when one’s host expected – as Canon Newton did – an unfaltering standard of polished Landorian prose. And if wine made Mr Greengrave argumentative (so that he was uneasily aware, as he talked, of the image of some rather quarrelsome and quite unrefined person emerging volubly from a pub) it by no means left him there. The painful fact was that even Canon Newton’s good wine rapidly produced the sort of consequences exploited in comic papers – in those less seemly comic papers that do not ban drunkenness as a staple of humour. Upon Mr Greengrave after a party the tangible and visible surfaces of life were liable alarmingly to advance and recede, tilt and rock. And although rats, mice and dogs invariably, so far as he could remember, retained the hues with which Providence had endowed them, their number was liable to become variable and uncertain, much as if they had ceased to be the creatures of God’s hand and become symbols of the higher physics. All this Mr Greengrave disliked, and particularly when he had to drive himself through the little watering-place of Sherris Magna on the way home to his country rectory.

So he had left early and Canon Newton, after amiable farewells, had returned to the golden cadences with which he was entertaining his other guests.

The night was pleasant, although a shade close and surprisingly warm. Mr Greengrave let down the hood of his lumbering old car and decided that fifteen miles an hour represented what it would be judicious to attempt. He also decided that although much attention must be given to the road it would be advantageous to choose some substantial but not too difficult theme for meditation. This, he felt, would assist him to maintain the higher brain centres in operation and minimize the risk of an untimely nap. He might, for instance, plan out the heads of a sermon for the Sunday after next. There had been some heavy drinking at the cricket club; he might well choose a text which would enable him to take glancing notice of that. But then again an orchard had been robbed and, even more serious, a good deal of poultry had been disappearing in Sherris Parva. Only two days ago Mrs Marple had missed two Khaki Campbells. And although it was likely enough that toughs from Sherris Magna were responsible Mr Greengrave had by no means liked the look of young Ted Morrow when the matter bad been mentioned in his presence that very morning…

Communing thus with himself, Mr Greengrave drove sedately on his way. The landscape, he noted with satisfaction, was behaving tolerably well. He looked up at the moon – a trifle apprehensively, recalling Shakespeare’s words: