Honeybath's Haven (17 page)

 

 

 

 

It was a beauteous evening, calm and free. Or thus did Charles Honeybath, who was fond of the English poets, reflect as he left the house and set off down the drive. The broad sun was sinking down in its tranquillity, and a hush had fallen upon the feathered songsters of the grove. There was a solemn stillness broken only by the distant sound of Hondas and Suzukis on which weary ploughmen were speeding homewards along unfrequented bypaths and minor roads surrounding the estate. The effect of all this was composing, and also more agreeable than the immediate prospect of the Hanwell Arms. In that unassuming hostelry there would be a considerable interval before Honeybath could hope to dine. It might even be an interval enlivened by the arrival of a further gang of desperadoes. The pub was conceivably a well-known rendezvous of such persons, and he had failed to observe in it the sort of inner sanctum labelled ‘Residents Only' to which such places occasionally run.

Honeybath, who had formed the perhaps extravagant notion that Hanwell Court itself had become a haunt of the criminal classes, was anxious to avoid any further contact with people of that kidney. He decided to procrastinate any such possibility by taking an hour's stroll in the park and its environs. Pausing only for a further brief inspection of Poseidon the Earthshaker (who was casting a particularly minatory shadow in the low raking light), he set off in adirection hitherto unexplored. It led him to an area in which the boundary of the park appeared indefinite; he crossed a stile and found himself in rough pasture; crossed a second stile and was on a narrow path threading an untended coppice. Clumps of hazel alternated with crowded and stunted grey poplar saplings; there were forests of nettles and mare's tails head-high; on either hand the ground rose in broken undulations to a near horizon marked here and there by dead elms; it rose, too, more gently as Honeybath moved ahead. He saw that he was in a coombe descending from the downs to the vale on the edge of which Hanwell Court lay. It was, he told himself, good Boy Scout territory.

But the only human being presently to come into view was far from juvenile. Honeybath heard the clop-clop of an axe or hatchet, rounded a thicket, and was looking at a patriarchal figure seated on a log in a small clearing. He had a pile of hazel branches beside him, and was shaping them into gads. Honeybath (who had enjoyed the inestimable benefit of a country childhood) knew that the rural pursuit here exhibited was that of the thatcher.

It seemed reasonable to pass the time of day (or evening) with this industrious character, and Honeybath advanced so as to come within earshot. He was halted, however, and to an effect of considerable alarm, by a sudden and extraordinary manifestation at the farther side of the glade. On a fallen poplar there certain twigs had gently parted, and a gleaming metallic object had been protruded between them. There could be not the slightest doubt as to what the object was. It was the barrel of a rifle. And it was trained upon the aged rustic bowed unconsciously over his humble task.

Honeybath uttered a warning shout. It seemed the only thing to do. On the thatcher it had no effect; he simply went on clop-clopping. But the rifle vanished instantly; there was a sound of snapping twigs; a momentary glimpse of a human form, bent and running; and then the incident was as if it had never been.

Honeybath was much too horrified to be afraid. What hideous vendetta, what unspeakable act of bucolic vengeance, had his timely arrival on the scene providentially averted? He hurried forward and with urgent words implored the thatcher to seek safety in instant flight. In vain! The thatcher was gratified by his interest but indisposed to communication. He turned out, in fact, to be deaf and dumb.

What on earth was to be done? Simply to leave this unfortunate exposed to the danger of a second attack was a course of conduct quite unthinkable. It was true that the assailant had scarcely showed himself a determined adversary. The appearance, in the person of Honeybath, of an elderly man as defenceless as his proposed victim had scared him off – or had done so at least for a time. But was it not only too likely that he would continue to lurk around, and would renew his purpose as soon as Honeybath departed from the scene? There appeared to be no solution to this dilemma.

But fortunately it was not so. Honeybath's appearance had at least occasioned an interruption in this devoted peasant's labours. Honeybath's urgency, it may be, he had interpreted simply as a vigorous injunction to call it a day. The thatcher grinned, nodded, produced a large watch from a pocket, studied its findings with care – and then stood up, shouldered his axe, produced a gobbling sound plainly cordial in tone, and walked away. And by good luck he walked away in the direction diametrically opposite to that by which his would-be assassin had effected his retreat.

As for Honeybath, he turned back on his own tracks and hoped for the best. If he were senselessly made away with by a total stranger, it couldn't be helped. He must simply try to get out of the coombe and gain the nearest habitation from which he could report the shocking incident he had witnessed to the police. And this for a time remained his sole preoccupation. It would be almost true to say that Hanwell Court and all its mystery had been incontinently banished from his head.

And soon, indeed, he had something new to worry about. He was being followed. Or rather, at one moment he was being followed, and at another (and incredibly quickly) he had been overtaken, slipped past, and made the object of an ambush threatening from the front. Or were there two of these people – or even a whole platoon of them? If so, they constituted some sort of uniformed guerrilla group. For several times he caught a glimpse of a human figure – usually the backside of a human figure on all fours or on its belly – identically habited. It is probable that all this didn't go on for as long as he imagined. And it came to an end quite suddenly. The man with the rifle (for there was only he) must have been at fault in some way, and had imagined Honeybath to be where he was not. And Honeybath (who confessedly was standing not upon the order of his going but going at once) simply stumbled over his prone form and came to the ground beside him. He scrambled to his feet, prepared to fight for his life, dimly feeling that to grab the rifle was his only chance of survival. His pursuer scrambled up too, and the two men faced one another. For Honeybath one glance was enough. The man's bearing, his mere attire, flashed the truth upon him. This was Colonel Dacre, decidedly strayed from his rifle range. And he himself had very nearly been Admiral Emery.

‘One point down,' Colonel Dacre said. ‘One can't always win.'

‘I suppose not.' Honeybath found that extreme embarrassment had now taken the place of his alarm. For the colonel was quite clearly not a homicidal maniac. He was a merely ludicrous eccentric who had been enacting a grotesque juvenile fantasy. So the situation had become simply uncomfortable. To have come upon, to have been involved with such puerility was somehow demeaning in itself. It was as if – Honeybath thought – one had been obliged to watch ‘performing' elephants or bears in a wretched little circus, or a respectable citizen reduced to infantile behaviour by a stage hypnotist. One wanted to walk out.

But this delicacy of feeling, although it was such as an artist might be expected to exhibit, Honeybath knew to be exaggerated and to demand control. His best course would be to take his cue from what Dacre had just said, and regard himself as having been joined in a very ordinary sort of game.

‘Most interesting, sir,' he said. ‘You must tell me about the rules. Perhaps while we retrace our steps through the coombe.' It would be only a reasonable precaution, he felt, to hasten back to the haunts of men. For his new interpretation of the affair might be at fault, after all.

‘Love and war, sir,' the colonel said. ‘No rules in either of them. And sharpshooters need initiative, vigilance, constant training if they are to come out on top.'

‘Very true.' Honeybath, relieved to find Dacre falling peaceably into step beside him, accepted this mild rebuke. ‘And you are in training yourself?'

‘Precisely so. Of course I put in much time on my range. But one must constantly habituate oneself to the conditions of the field. The time is coming, you know! We may have to take to the woods for an indefinite period, but in the end we shall win the day. And the sharpshooters will be crucial. It was a French sharpshooter who got Nelson, you know – and that was almost a decisive thing. And Wellington in the Peninsula found that he had to train sharpshooters to match the enemy's. “Learn to drop your man, and be damned,” he said. A good motto for the troops.'

‘An admirable one, I am sure.' Honeybath found that it was possible to receive these fragments of military and naval history with decent respect. Colonel Dacre was a kind of Boy Scout after all. He was resolved to Be Prepared.

‘May I introduce myself? My name is Rupert Dacre, and I live at Hanwell Court. May I inquire whether you have recently come to live there yourself? If so, I apologize for not having made your acquaintance earlier.'

‘My name is Charles Honeybath, and I am a painter.' Honeybath found this shift to polite exchanges comforting. ‘The palette and not the sword, Colonel Dacre, is what I live by. I had thought of coming to Hanwell for a time, but changed my plans. I had a close friend there, Edwin Lightfoot, about whose sad death you will have heard.'

‘Yes, indeed. I am very, very sorry. I condole with you on the loss of your friend. A delightful man. And now they are talking scandal about him. He drowned because he was drunk. Or he made away with himself. Twaddle – and twaddle of a disgusting sort. He was plainly the victim of foul play. I much wish that I had been able to stand guard over him. Or had merely been within a couple of hundred yards. I could have picked his assailant off, you know. Yes, picked him off.'

‘I am sure you could.' Honeybath was warming to Colonel Dacre. It looked as if he had found an ally in him. ‘And for my own part, I am determined to get at the truth.'

‘Capital! I am delighted to hear you say so, Mr Honeybath. Are you returning to the house now?'

‘No – I am putting up for the night at the inn.'

‘Then let me accompany you so far. It will afford me opportunity to thank you more adequately for having joined in the exercise.'

Although this was perhaps an odd way of describing Honeybath's recent experience, it could reasonably be received as an
amende honorable
agreeably consonant with Colonel Dacre's military character. And the colonel followed it up as they walked with some courteous expressions of his regard for Edwin.

‘I think I may claim,' he said, ‘to have got to know him fairly well. I liked his imaginative side.'

‘He certainly possessed that.'

‘He had a fancy at times for being somebody else. It sounds peculiar, but I found it attractive. We would go out together, and he would become a Red Indian. A Cherokee, say, or a Cheyenne.'

‘Edwin would be quite good at that.'

‘Yes, indeed. And he would challenge me to track him down. That sort of thing. It could be quite instructive. But chiefly, of course, I admired him as a painter. Do you know that he made some amusing portrait-sketches at Hanwell?'

‘Yes, I do.'

‘Powerful caricatures, some of them. I recall one in particular, a group of several of us round a card table, which reminded me of Leonardo's
Five Grotesque Heads
in the Royal Library at Windsor. No doubt you recall that small masterpiece.'

‘I certainly do.' Honeybath had to restrain himself from glancing at Colonel Dacre in some astonishment.

‘But I was very glad that Lightfoot continued his serious painting. He was rather reticent about it. But I saw one of his more recent paintings just after he had completed it. It brought back to me much of his earlier work as I remember it.
A Visionary Townscape
was the title I gave it in my own mind. Quite equal to Kokoschka. Magnificent.'

‘I'd like to see that.' Honeybath was so surprised by this revelation of a quite unsuspected side to the sharpshooter of Hanwell Court that for some moments he said no more. The quality of Dacre's taste and judgement remained an unknown quantity, but it was clear that he was not uninformed in artistic matters. A question occurred to him. ‘Was Lightfoot pleased with it?' he asked.

‘Curiously enough, I would say that he was not. But then he was not, I fear, in general a happy man. Am I right, Mr Honeybath?'

‘Quite right.'

‘I sometimes suspected him of feeling that his career had in some way gone wrong; that he had failed to fulfil himself. It is something that we all in one degree or another are liable to, would you not say? But here, I see, is your inn, and I must take my leave of you.'

Honeybath entered the Hanwell Arms without the need to look out for desperadoes so much as occurring to him. Colonel Dacre had given him something quite different to think about. But just what that something was he didn't yet see.

 

 

 

Half an hour later, and in quest of an
apéritif
the digestive virtues of which might soon be urgently called upon in face of the Hanwell Arm's cuisine, Honeybath went into the bar. This time, there were no gangsters present. There was, however, Melissa – a circumstance almost equally disconcerting. Melissa had, of course, every right to be in the vicinity; indeed, it would have been unbecoming were she not. To have remained undisturbed in whatever sort of Deep Meditation she was at present going in for would have been, so to speak, too meditative by far. But it was tiresome of her – Honeybath most unreasonably thought – to have found her way to this pub. How was he to think matters out with the confounded woman latching on to him? And she would certainly do that. She was the latching-on sort.