The Beckoning Lady (3 page)

Mr. Campion shook his head as he turned in to the path which led to the wooden water-mill and the house beside it. He thought he had never been more dismayed in all his life than on the night before, when he had seen Luke return. Yet the situation had arisen innocently. Charlie Luke's release from Guy's Hospital had coincided with Aunt Hatt's departure for Connecticut, and since Amanda
and the family could not get down to Pontisbright immediately it had seemed only reasonable for Luke and Mr. Lugg, Campion's friend and knave, to come on ahead for a week or so. Luke was to convalesce and Lugg to nurse himself over the first revolting paroxysms of the sentimental nostalgia to be expected on his rediscovery of his favourite place. Campion had thought it impossible that anything irremediable could happen to the two of them in the interval, but the moment he had stepped out of his own car and was experiencing once again the first shock of surprised delight which the sight of the old house always gave him, he had been aware of trouble. Luke had lost his unnatural fragility and was obviously mending fast, but there was something not at all right with him.

In the normal way the D.D.C.I. was a considerable personality. He looked like a gangster and was a tough. He was six-foot-two and appeared shorter because of the width of his chest and shoulders, and his dark face with the narrow eyes under brows which were like circumflex accents was alive and exciting. He possessed the Londoner's good temper, which is also ferocious, and a quality of suppressed force was apparent in everything he did. Mr. Campion liked him enormously.

On that first evening of their joint holiday ten days ago Luke had done his best to appear much as usual when he had welcomed his host on the banks of the mill-race, but Campion was not deceived. He knew panic when he saw it. For some hours afterwards there had seemed to be no conceivable explanation. The village of Pontisbright, straggling round the little green, had appeared as blandly vegetable as ever and a good deal more innocent than Mr. Campion had known it in his time. But on the following morning the mystery had solved itself bluntly. At eleven o'clock the Hon. Victoria Prunella Editha Scroop-Dory had wandered down from the new rectory, where she lived with her mother, widow of the final Baron Glebe, and her mother's cousin, the Reverend Sam Jones-Jones, who was called ‘The Rewer' by everybody, and had sat
down by the porch. A few minutes later, after a struggle which was very nearly visible, the wretched Luke had taken the chair opposite her. There had been no conversation.

Campion had been so startled by this unforeseen misfortune that he had not even brought himself to mention the matter to Amanda, who affected to be ignorant of it, and so a whole uncomfortable week had passed with Luke in misery, Campion feeling for him but thoroughly alarmed, and the young woman strolling in each day.

The sudden death of Uncle William over at The Beckoning Lady, which had saddened them all, had seemed to give Luke sudden resolution. On the day before the funeral he had announced his intention of intruding on their kindness no more, had fetched out his tidy little sports car, and without making any more bones about it bolted for his life. Campion had seen him go with heartfelt relief.

But on the evening of the day after the funeral, while he was still congratulating himself on a serious danger past, without warning Luke returned. In the soft yellow light, while the sound of the mill-race and the songs of the birds were making the ancient conception of paradise appear both likely and sensible, the familiar car had swung on to the flags before the house and a grim yet hangdog figure had stepped out of it to face him. Luke had, he said woodenly, a few more days' leave.

So today, taking it all in all, it was quite understandable that as Mr. Campion strode homewards he was almost afraid to turn the corner. For a blessed moment he thought she was not there. He could see the back of Luke's close-cropped head above a deck-chair in the covey of them set out on the ancient paving-stones. It was a civilised scene. There were morning papers on the ground and the gleam of hospitable pewter in the dark doorway, and behind, the low half-timbered façade windowed like a galleon and graceful as if it were at sea. Mr. Campion took a step forward and paused. Prune was present after all. She was sitting quietly in the shadows on one of the settles
in the porch, and as the wind stirred the limes beside the house a shaft of sunlight flickered over her.

To modern eyes she was, he thought, as odd a looking girl as one could wish to see. She was very tall, with narrow bones, a white skin, yellow-brown hair, and her family's distinctive features. Throughout the centuries the Glebe face has had its ups and downs. The young Queen Victoria is said to have observed somewhat brutally that it was ‘particularly becoming in effigy', but since that time it has not been in fashion. Mr. Campion found it sad.

Prune's beauty, he thought, had been bred to express an ideal which was literally medieval. Piety, docility, quiet, might have suited it well enough, but any attempt to invest it with the modern
gamin
touch was ruinous. The girl was not a brilliant brain but she had grasped that much and at twenty-six had given up trying, only to fall back on precepts which had come down to her with, as it were, the outfit. She kept the nails on her narrow hands short, avoided ornament, and dabbed herself half-heartedly with the kind of lipstick which does not really show.

This morning Mr. Campion regarded her with helpless irritation. It seemed to him that anyone who had ever had time to think about her must have despaired. The wars had wiped out the Glebe line and the attendant revolutions the last of their fortune. Somewhere in the middle, all the great purposes for which they had bred themselves so carefully appeared to have gone too. Poor wretched girl, she had been born too late, and had arrived, meticulously turned out, for a party which had been over for some time. He understood from The Revver that as a somewhat desperate measure she had been given five years in the W.R.N.S. but had emerged from the experience just exactly the same as when she had enlisted. Looking at her, Mr. Campion was no more surprised than if he had heard that two seasons with the Pytchley foxhounds had left an Afghan practically unchanged. He did not like the present situation at all. Its futility exasperated and
alarmed him. In his view, Luke was a fine and useful man, far too valuable to have his progress hindered and his emotional balance endangered by any hopelessly unhappy experience of this sort. He joined them and sat down a little more firmly than was his custom.

Luke glanced at him but did not speak. He looked quiet and watchful and a good deal less than his age, and Mr. Campion reflected with wry satisfaction that at least he was retaining his capacity to do everything in the most thoroughgoing way possible. Campion hated it. He had seen Luke with young women before, teasing them, patronising them, showing off like a whole pigeon-loft. This was an entirely new departure. This might do a man harm for life. He regarded Prune with cold anger.

She met his gaze with a clear blue stare and returned to Luke. She was sitting on a little stool, her long arms round her knees, waiting. She had no coquetry, no subterfuge, no skill; she just thought he was wonderful. Mr. Campion was left to thank his stars that she could be relied on not to say so outright.

He had no doubt at all that it would pass and that in a week or a month or a year that clear-eyed stare would be directed elsewhere, equally hopelessly. The fact had got to be faced. Prune as a present-day product was uneconomic. In present circumstances she was a menace. At last he cleared his throat.

“Did you—er—bring any message . . . or anything?” he demanded.

She blinked thoughtfully, considering him apparently for the first time.

“Oh yes, I did, as a matter of fact.” Her languid voice, which was a caricature of all such voices and belonged to a much slower world, came softly through the summer air. “Minnie and Tonker are dropping in to see you on their way to Kepesake station this morning. Tonker is having a second-class white burgundy week and will bring some with him. He may be late so will you please have some glasses at the ready?”

“Oh yes.” Mr. Campion brightened despite his apprehension. “Tonker is still here, is he? I thought he'd gone up. Where did you hear all this?”

“Minnie phoned The Revver this morning.” Prune seemed disposed to answer questions if she could still look at Charlie Luke. “Just to thank him for getting the funeral safely over, you know.” The remark trailed into silence and Campion grunted.

“No loose ends?” he suggested helpfully.

“Well, some parsons are frightfully inefficient. The Revver does get things reasonably tied up. He's not mental, even if he is my uncle.” The Glebe mouth, which Vandyke captured so well and Gainsborough muffed so badly, drooped with faint self-disparagement. “He was tremendously relieved. He thought they were still quarrelling when she didn't turn up at the service. The postman told him that it was because she'd got a black eye, but he didn't believe that, naturally. But he is pleased she phoned because they haven't spoken for weeks.”

“Why?” Mr. Campion found himself determined to divert her attention, if he had to shout at her.

Prune raised brows which were high enough already. “Oh, just one of their things. The Revver is terrified that she might go religious. It's all those pictures her father painted, I think, lions and lambs and saints and rather nice interiors. But that's only in his subconscious. He says she's all alone down there except for the menagerie and that women often go a bit peculiar about that sort of thing at her age.”

“Does he say this to her?” enquired Mr. Campion with interest.

“Of course he does.” The drawl went on lazily but her eyes scarcely stirred from the dark brooding face opposite. “He's always begging people not to be religious. The Bip had to warn him to use caution lest by sheer inadvertence he emptied the church. The Revver says you can be as pi as you like privately, but you mustn't think too much about it or you may forget yourself and mention it. He was
explaining this to Minnie one day in the winter, when she was rather miserable and he'd ploughed down there through the snow to take her the parish magazine, and she said that what he meant, she supposed, was that a Christian gentleman must never run the risk of degenerating into a vulgar Christian. He said that was exactly what he did mean. And she said he was a damned old British humbug.”

“British?”

“Yes, that's what hurt him. He's Welsh. But she was having one of her American days. Sometimes she's one and sometimes the other; you never know. And so she went on to mention that in her opinion, speaking as at least half a good American, one had only got to consider the tenets laid down for the English gent to realise exactly what sort of raging brute the animal must be by nature to make such a fuss about conforming to them. Not trampling on old women, and not being cruel to children, and so on. That was the quarrel.”

She paused and turned slowly to look at him at last.

“It's a good thing it's over,” she droned on seriously, “because Minnie's really getting more and more peculiar. The village says it's not religion, it's blackmail. They know most things but they get it a bit wrong usually.”

Mr. Campion grinned at her. “You just hear it on the drums, I suppose?”

“No.” Prune was undisturbed. “I listen. I can't make friends with the village and I'm no good at bossing them, but I stick around and after a while they just forget I'm there and talk. Are you going to get the glasses for Tonker, or do you want me to do it?”

Before he could reply there was a crisp rustle behind them and a utility brake, driven with distinction, came to a silent halt on the exact edge of the gravel. Instantly the landscape became full of excitement.

A somewhat dishevelled Amanda, who looked so like herself at seventeen that Mr. Campion discovered that he was thinking absentmindedly what a silly young fool he was
himself, slid out, waved to them briefly to stay where they were, and released a fine mixed bag from the body of the van. A small boy shot out first, followed by a fat, Victorian-looking collie, and finally, amid a shower of lemons, Mr. Magersfontein Lugg himself, garbed tastefully
pour le sport.

Both Amanda and her son wore well-washed boiler-suits whose original rust colour had faded to a pinkish tan. The Pontisbright hair, which can be mistaken for fire when seen under Suffolk skies, flamed on them both, Amanda's a thought darker now but the boy's a true ruby shouting in the sun. At that distance they looked absurdly alike, two skinny figures superintending the descent of the others. Apart from the fact that the dog dismounted head foremost and Mr. Lugg did not, the two performances were curiously alike, each operation involving much hesitation and man??uvre.

The animal belonged to Aunt Hatt and was a black and white long-haired shepherd dog. He was marked like a Panda and now in middle age was of enormous size and almost indistinguishable from one. The crofter from Inverness-shire who had sold him as a puppy to the New England lady had told her distinctly that his name was “Choc”, and, disliking diminutives, she had had it engraved in full upon his collar—“Choc-ice”. He was frighteningly intelligent and assumed he was the party's sole host. On the other hand, from the way he was dressed Mr. Lugg appeared to infer that he considered himself the sole guest. Taking each garment in order of its first appearance, he wore tennis shoes, a pair of black dress trousers which he was using up, a white linen coat as a badge of office, an open-neck shirt to show his independence, and a hard black hat to make it clear to the natives that he came from a civilised city.

As soon as he reached the ground, he stretched himself gingerly, hitched his trousers, and began to shout at the boy Rupert. His rich voice, thick as the lubricant of his latter years, mingled with the chatter of the mill-race.

“Leave them lemons and come 'ere. Bottle o' beer's
gone over in the back. Save the fags or they'll be as wet as a Brewer's Calamity. Buck up. Waste not want not. Where d'you think you are? In the Army? We've got to do more than
sign
for this lot.”