Appleby at Allington (9 page)

‘My dear Sir John, I quite failed to say how kindly I take your supporting our small annual occasion. Lady Appleby, I hope you are not too fatigued, and that you have not overburdened yourself with our good friends’ jellies and jams. My own little contribution is now half-made, but presently I must return to the marquee for one further session. A beautiful afternoon, but almost oppressively warm. Might we take a stroll, perhaps, by the side of the lake – and towards the castle? Mr Allington very kindly allows the older village boys to swim there, and I think it may be wise just to survey the scene. One does not want Mr Allington’s hospitality abused by anything rowdy. Innocent skylarking is in order, of course. They may not, by the way, all have bathing-slips, Lady Appleby.’

‘I don’t think I’ll feel myself disturbed.’

‘Quite so, quite so. How fortunate we are that there is so little unwholesome prudery nowadays! And the human body is a temple, after all. Lady Appleby, pray remark the step.’

Judith remarked the step. It seemed cooler by the lake, and a little breeze appeared to be moving with the slow current from its farther end. There were one or two small groups of people among the castle ruins; no doubt they were recuperating from the excitement of the fête. From somewhere ahead came sounds of shouting and splashing, and behind them they could still hear the unwearying efforts of Mr Goodcoal’s Public Address System.

‘How good it is of Mr Allington to let us intrude upon his privacy in this way!’ Mr Scrape said. He seemed given to pious ejaculation of this sort. ‘A man with a high sense of public duty, and always willing to give time and thought to his neighbours. It is a sign of true greatness, surely, when one of strong intellectual endowment has a care for trivial and humble things.’ Mr Scrape paused to assist Judith courteously over a low stile. ‘And so delightful a family! For nephews and nieces may be held to constitute a family, I think, when they are so closely attached to an uncle as in this instance. Sir John, pray avoid the cow-pat.’

Appleby avoided the cow-pat. He hoped that Judith’s sense of the ridiculous was not going to prompt her to some unsuitable response to the small-talk of this terrible clerical toady. For that seemed to be what the Reverend Mr Scrape was. Indeed, it was almost possible to say that it was what Mr Scrape gave himself out to be. Appleby found himself wondering fleetingly whether there might not be something rather deep about the Vicar of Allington. But however that might be, Judith was fortunately behaving herself.

‘I’ve heard of Martin Allington,’ she said. ‘But it seems he hasn’t come.’

‘Mr Martin Allington is expected hourly.’ Mr Scrape gave a great effect of weight to this announcement. ‘Hourly,’ he repeated. ‘And I greatly hope it may be before our small festivities close. It is well known that he is to be Mr Allington’s heir. And this renders him doubly welcome among us.’

‘But some other relations have arrived? John and I haven’t met them yet.’

‘You will.’ Mr Scrape produced this with confidence and quiet fervour, rather as if he were offering ghostly assurance to a dying parishioner. ‘Miss Hope Allington, and also the Lethbridges and the Barfords with their delightful children, are already here. They are mingling with us in their customary unassuming way. And, as you know, Mr Allington invites us to meet his household over a glass of wine when all these good people have gone away. Not that one must think of hastening their departure. Only I shall be glad, I own, when there is an end to the musical entertainment provided by the worthy Goodcoal. You know Goodcoal, Sir John?’

‘Yes, I’ve been talking to him.’ A thought struck Appleby. ‘By the way, Mr Scrape, I don’t know how the bounds of your parish run. But would a man with the odd name of Leofranc Knockdown, living somewhere on the Potton side of Linger, be one of your flock?’

‘Ah, no. That is in a neighbouring parish. Potton-cum-Outreach. Nevertheless, I know the man. A simple fellow – scarcely with all his wits, indeed. But willing and reliable, entirely reliable. He has trimmed my hedges before now.’

‘I am sorry to say it was he who was found dead here last night.’

‘God rest his soul. I have, of course, heard about an accident. I believe it was yourself, Sir John, and Mr Allington – ?’

‘Yes, it was.’

‘Sad, very sad. And a great shock for Mr Allington.’

‘Not more than for my husband,’ Judith said. ‘Mr Allington didn’t know this dead man from Adam.’

‘Ah, I see.’ Mr Scrape had come to a sudden halt. The bathers were now visible, and he might have been assuring himself that no impropriety of demeanour or posture was to be obtruded by them on Lady Appleby’s refined regard. ‘I don’t know whether the unfortunate event has yet been made generally known. Will it be necessary, Sir John, to hold an inquest over the poor fellow?’

‘Most certainly it will.’

‘And there will be what is called an open verdict?’

‘I hardly suppose so.’ Appleby was surprised. ‘Death by misadventure will be the obvious conclusion.’

‘But surely it was very strange that this poor man–’

‘Not when one knows about certain of his interests. Perfectly innocent interests, I may say.’ Appleby spoke a shade impatiently. He felt that he had had enough of the Knockdown affair. ‘A very nice bathing-place, I see. I wish I could jump in myself.’

‘It wouldn’t do,’ Judith said. ‘These small boys, yes. But an elderly gentleman, no. It might bring a blush to the cheek of the young persons.’

There were perhaps as many as a dozen boys, all told, swimming, and fooling around in the grass. Several of them, as Mr Scrape had forecast, were quite naked. The young persons, two little girls of perhaps eight and nine, had sat down on a bank hard by. They were in what could only be called party frocks, but these were of a plain and expensive sort which at once distinguished their wearers from the exuberantly befrilled and beribboned juveniles on the other side of the lake. Here – a discerning eye could at once determine – were either the Misses Barford or the Misses Lethbridge. They sat round-eyed before the unholy spectacle presented to them.

The small boys were far from unaware of their audience – being prompted by it, indeed, to sudden guffaws and random apostrophes, weird caperings, irresolute advances and panic-stricken retreats.

‘Dear me!’ There was perplexity and even dismay in Mr Scrape’s voice. ‘Sandra and Stephanie, the Barfords’ delightful daughters. I wonder how they can have got here? I hardly think their mother–’

‘Pee,’ said a small boy’s voice from somewhere in Mr Scrape’s rear.

‘Po,’ said another voice.

‘Bum,’ said a third voice. This time the speaker was planted most impudently straight in front of Mr Scrape’s nose.

‘Bum!’ yelled several of the children together. ‘Pee, po, BUM!’

‘Belly, bottom,
drawers
!’ It was from some child safely up to his neck in the lake that this contribution to the amenities of the occasion came. Complete pandemonium had broken out. Sandra and Stephanie (surely well brought up girls, whom one might have expected to be much displeased) listened entranced.

‘Drawers!’ repeated a new voice. ‘Take yer drawers off!’

There was a sudden awed silence. This was going a little too far. Mr Scrape saw his chance, and grabbed the offender.

‘Richard Cyphus,’ he said sternly, ‘be sure that Mr Pinn shall be told of this. And I shall recommend that you be visited with condign chastisement.’

‘You leggo of me.’ Richard Cyphus, although at least the spirit of this threat must have been intelligible to him, was undaunted. He squirmed out of Mr Scrape’s grasp – not a difficult feat, since he was naked and slippery. ‘I’ll tell my dad on you. You’re nothing to him, you aren’t. The ol’ blackbeetle, ’e calls you.’ Master Cyphus paused, apparently seeking for some ultimate insult. ‘’Ow’s yer mother orf for dripping?’ he asked.

This brilliant defeat of authority would certainly have produced anarchy once more had there not been a diversion at the edge of the lake. A slithering and panting body had appeared there, and was now scrambling out with difficulty. It was another boy, perhaps slightly older than the rest. Although winded, he was contriving to exhibit a precocious command of words much more improper to be heard on childish lips than any that had been uttered so far.

For a moment something about this apparition was wholly perplexing. At a first glance Appleby had taken him for a young Negro – which would be a slightly unexpected but by no means impossible phenomenon in a remote English countryside. At the same time he bore a curiously mottled appearance – to be accounted for, in terms of this conjecture, only by supposing him the victim of some atrocious tropical disease. Moreover his pigmentation seemed to be dripping from him as he moved. So Appleby’s next conjecture was less dramatic. Here was simply a boy who had dived rashly into water of undetermined depth, and been fortunate to succeed in extricating himself from several feet of mud.

But this conjecture was wrong too. What the boy was coated in was oil. And this fact demonstrated itself in a simple and disastrous way. For the boy who stumbled up the bank was in a panic. He didn’t like what had happened, and he didn’t like the sensation of what was still sticking to his skin. Much as the sagacious Rasselas might have done in a similar situation, he violently shook himself. Appleby and Judith – both rather alert persons, swift in evasive action – escaped the consequence. But both the Reverend Mr Scrape and the delightful Misses Barford were bespattered all over. Mr Scrape – who appeared to be a man capable of considerable self-control in a crisis – produced no more than a vexed exclamation, perfectly congruous with his cloth. But Sandra and Stephanie, seeing the ruin that had befallen their pretty frocks (which they had been convinced the common little boys – who couldn’t even afford clothes at all – must have been admiring greatly), set up a concerted howling. And what the wrath of Mr Scrape had failed to effect, this unnerving display brought about at once. The bathers, including the oil-covered one, snatched up any possessions they had, and ran away as fast as they could.

‘Just what does one require,’ Appleby asked, ‘to conduct simple diving operations?’ He and Judith had shed Mr Scrape (who had hurried off to the vicarage in search of unsullied garments before repairing to his final Bingo session) and were continuing their walk round the lake. ‘And I wonder what they keep in that boat-house? Something with an outboard motor, do you suppose?’

‘I’d hardly think so. People do keep such things on stretches of water no larger than this. But I don’t believe Allington would. Of course, he has a mile or two of river as well, and perhaps he employs a lazy water-bailiff. Let’s go and peer in.’

They peered into the boat-house. It sheltered a dinghy and two light canoes.

‘Nothing to spew out oil here,’ Appleby said. ‘You notice that they don’t keep punts. A lot of the lake must be quite deep.’

‘It’s certainly odd about the oil. What can that unfortunate boy have done?’

‘He was trying a little under-water swimming, I’d say, and had the bad luck to surface through a substantial slick of it. The stuff may have travelled some distance. There’s a perceptible flow of water through the lake.’

‘I don’t see that diving operations can have anything to do with it.’

‘Quite probably not. It just came into my head that some divers have air pumped down to them. And a pump requires an engine. You’d agree that a substantial appearance of oil-pollution in a well-ordered place like this requires accounting for? Let’s walk on. The stream flows into the lake beneath the bridge on the high road, doesn’t it? We can probably get down there, and back on the other side, before making our final appearance up at the house.’

‘Very well. But I can’t see why anybody should want to start diving in so unlikely–’ Judith broke off. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘Mr Allington and I were having some rather futile chatter about that supposed Royalist treasure. And I started the notion that it hadn’t been buried at all, but just sunk in the lake.’

‘Possibly somebody else has been visited by the same deep thought.’ Appleby walked for a minute in silence. ‘I can’t think why this is bothering me,’ he said suddenly. ‘Perhaps it’s because of last night’s affair having turned out a kind of mare’s nest. And here is what you might call a mini-mystery.’

‘I think I know who would be likely to leave a nasty mess in a gentleman’s ornamental water.’ Judith had announced this after some thought. ‘Nothing to do with treasure-seekers, or anything romantic of that kind. The
son et lumière
people.’

‘Why them?’

‘Well, there must have been quite a crowd of them, for a start. Think of the scaffolding. That’s it! You know the kind of young men who scramble about on such things – long-haired weirdies, who run dreadful old cars and lethal motorbikes? They’d be just the sort to empty a sump or something – isn’t that the word? – into a decent lake.’

‘What ghastly class-prejudice! As a matter of fact, the cowboys – which is what these young men are called – are a kind of élite. An aristocracy, indeed, with a terrific sense of style.’

‘I don’t like their style.’

‘Perhaps not, but it’s there. And they’d make plenty of row, but they wouldn’t make a mess. Spend your working life on a few bits of metal tubing two-hundred feet up, and it will become second nature to you not to dump anything in the wrong place. Bad psychology, Judith. Try again.’

‘It’s not me who’s bothered by a patch of oil. So try yourself.’

Appleby didn’t try. When Judith took on her air of having emerged triumphantly from an argument he frequently had recourse to meditative silence. Moreover they had come to quite a stiff climb, for the path they were following had left the margin of the lake and was ascending to a cliff-like promontory set boldly above it. They paused on the summit, and within the shade of a small ruined tower. It was a tower which had never been other than a ruin, and Judith laughed as she walked round it.

‘Repton again, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Or perhaps an earlier practitioner of the same sort. Think of bothering to put up a fake like this when you had a genuine medieval castle half-a-mile away.’