The Bloody Wood (7 page)

‘Almost that. I did have a slight impulse to busy-body.’

‘So had I, just a little earlier. Have you a feeling she has done something foolish?’

‘Well, either that she has done, or that she may be about to.’

‘I thought her quite lively at first.’ Appleby broke off. ‘That car, by the way, is the Pendletons’. I’ve just recognized it.’

‘Of course. Top surgeons have to parade such things. What an odd hour to turn up.’ Judith stopped in her tracks. ‘John – Edward Pendleton wouldn’t be here professionally?’

‘It hadn’t occurred to me, but I suppose he might. Or semi-professionally. One makes desperate, groping gestures in Charles’ position. He may have told Fell he’d just like his very old friend Edward Pendleton around. But I imagine that surgery is a thing of the past with Grace.’

‘Yes,’ Judith said, and for a few moments they walked in silence. ‘Why did you think Diana lively?’ she asked.

‘Well, she sometimes teases Bobby Angrave quite effectively, if in rather a childish way. Bobby says she’s thick, and I suppose he’s right.’

‘Dangerously thick, almost. She would be terribly easy to take in.’

‘Do you know anything about her people? Are they wealthy?’

‘I’ve hardly heard anything about them. Diana tags around with Martine, and nobody else seems much to bother about her.’ Judith considered for a moment. ‘I had a notion last night that, if we hadn’t just been in a corner of the music room before bed-time, and with people drifting around, Diana might have come out with something. My guess about her is a broken home, divorces, wardships, trustees and so on – all against a background of considerable affluence.’

‘Her conversation suggests assumptions that go with that, poor child. By the way, Fell’s car is down there too. He’s tucked it away rather discreetly, but I can just see it in a corner of the stable yard. Let’s go round that way. We may meet him coming out.’

‘You want to meet him?’

‘Well, yes. I was inept with him, you know, last night. He looked oddly under the weather, and I said something stupid about what it takes to be a GP. So I’d like to be civil now.’

‘Very well.’ Judith sounded resigned. ‘But what you really mean is that the man has stirred your curiosity.’

‘Perhaps so,’ Appleby said.

Sure enough, Dr Fell emerged from the west door just as he had done the evening before. Daylight was doing nothing to improve his appearance. There was something haggard about him, and almost hunted. Nor did he seem conversable, for although he now stopped to talk it was with a detectable air of doing so only because the Applebys were planted squarely in his path.

‘Good morning,’ Appleby said. ‘I don’t know that you have met my wife? Judith, this is Dr Fell.’

Dr Fell responded to this introduction correctly but without enthusiasm, so that there was an awkward moment in which conversation failed to happen.

‘Do you know,’ Judith said, ‘that there are still violets in Charne Wood? We found a great clump on the top of the Chinese grotto, and I have brought these for Mrs Martineau.’

‘But she still walks there from time to time, doesn’t she?’ It was not very felicitously that Dr Fell produced this; he might have been suggesting that Judith’s proposal was a tactless one.

‘She would hardly scramble to the top of the grotto.’

‘Of course not.’ Dr Fell now seemed to be producing an equally clumsy retraction. ‘It’s remarkable that she gets around at all.’ For a moment he studied the bunch of flowers in Judith’s hand with gravity. They might have been something under a microscope that spoke sharply of mortality. ‘I know that you are old friends of the family,’ he said suddenly. ‘I suppose you realize that these are the last violets my patient is likely to see.’

‘Yes, I think we realize that.’

‘They are very lovely.’ Unexpectedly, Dr Fell put out a hand in what – although it revealed a gross tremor – was an oddly sensitive gesture. He touched one of the leaves in which the violets were cradled. ‘Somebody speaks of them as, “uttering the earth in magical expression”. But I suppose it is what we all do, flesh and grass alike, for a time.’

This – being what the eighteenth century would have called a Serious Thought – produced a moment’s silence. Fell had spoken quite unaffectedly. He wasn’t, Appleby found himself thinking, at all a commonplace person.

‘Will you allow me to say something that may sound uncivil?’ Fell turned from Judith to Appleby to say this. ‘The sooner you all go away, the less unhappy I shall be.’

Whether this was uncivil or not, it was notably inoffensive. Although he had his curiously awkward moments, Dr Fell decidedly understood the conversation of gentlemen. At least, Appleby thought, that was how Judith’s uncles – inveterately old-world characters – would have expressed the point. A less antique judgement might say simply that there was nothing provincial about Dr Fell. He carried around with him a certain ease and authority which seemed to come from a larger world.

‘What you say doesn’t surprise me,’ Appleby said. ‘My wife and I have talked about the thing. But we are all here, you know, by Grace’s wish. It’s something that – more than ever at the moment – she has a right to.’

‘The point isn’t at all likely to escape me.’ Fell was impatient. ‘But there are limits, it seems to me. Mrs Martineau tells me that later today there will be turning up some woman who has scarcely ever been to Charne before. And only half an hour ago there were arrivals in an affair like a battleship. Martineau should have more sense. The strain on his wife is quite untimely.’

‘And here,’ Judith said, ‘the crew of the battleship come. Like a boarding party, one might say.’

This was true. Round the corner of the house came the new arrivals. They were unaccompanied by their host. The Pendletons, it was to be conjectured, having arrived at Charne at a somewhat early hour, had murmured their wish to wander round without fuss. And here they were.

It was believed by the dramatist Strindberg that professional cooks are invariably persons sanguine, fleshy and bloated through a mysterious battening upon the life-blood of those whom they are employed to nourish. A similar mechanism is sometimes asserted to operate in the case of surgeons. But Edward Pendleton was far from bearing this out. From his exquisite silver-grey hair to his wholly appropriate weekend-in-the-country brown shoes he was eminently the man who has kept his form through all the severities of an arduous calling. His figure was that of a young athlete – and a fencer’s or a wing three-quarter’s, one told oneself, rather than a forward’s or a rowing tough’s. And to this his wife Irene very adequately matched up. If she a little too clearly suggested what her own portrait would be like when encountered on the walls of the Royal Academy – for she seemed very much a product of delicately applied glazes – she was yet so nice a specimen of her particular world that one would have felt wholly churlish in thinking to scratch a lacquer so elaborately contrived for one’s delectation. The Pendletons were cordial and perhaps even kindly people; they possessed and exercised every art for putting you at your ease; it wasn’t at all their fault – you had guiltily to feel – if the total effect they projected fell a little short of the wholly sympathetic.

The Pendletons approached the Applebys with appropriate expressions of pleasurable expectation now gratified. The Applebys, bracing themselves, responded with actual gestures of a decorous joy. Dr Fell stayed quite still – but as these ritual approaches did not concern him there was nothing out of the way in that. Dr Fell, however, had to be introduced, since it would hardly have been proper to let a professional colleague of the eminent Edward Pendleton simply fade into the background. Appleby was about to perform this office when he became aware that the two men were already known to each other.

It wasn’t that they had broken into speech, or given each other so much as a nod. Dr Fell remained immobile, looking at Pendleton. His posture held the rigidity to which there is conventionally applied the rather violent term ‘transfixed’. Pendleton, although his own relaxed stance didn’t change, was looking straight at Fell with an expression of dispassionate scrutiny which didn’t suggest itself as a stranger’s. And then Appleby had said something, and Pendleton was stepping forward with an extended hand.

‘How do you do,’ he said, with brisk cordiality. He had, if ever so faintly, the air of a man making a gesture. ‘May I introduce you to my wife? Irene, this is Dr–’ Pendleton paused in the kind of polite apology of a man who has failed to pick up an unfamiliar name.

‘Fell,’ Fell said.

‘I am so sorry. Dr Fell.’

Mrs Pendleton broke into gracious speech. She had, one felt, scores of obscure medical practitioners presented to her every week. Fell listened with a near approach to silence. When Mrs Pendleton eventually made a flicker of a pause, he bowed and walked away.

‘What an interesting man!’ Mrs Pendleton said. She didn’t look pleased. Interesting men, one was constrained to feel, represented a category she judged it unnecessary to approve of. ‘Judith, dear, how delightful you should be at Charne! We must have a tremendous gossip.’ The emphasis with which she said this failed, somehow, to suggest that there was much substance in the proposition. But she took Judith by the arm, and walked her away.

‘How splendid the place looks!’ Edward Pendleton said to Appleby. ‘I always enjoy coming to rusticate at Charne.’

‘It’s ceasing to be all that rustic. The town will be lapping round it in no time.’

‘I know, I know! Terrible, isn’t it? It was Hitler’s war that did it, wouldn’t you say? Producing, I mean, as a kind of undesigned by-product, the first true dawn of scientific medicine. And that – my own trade, and all those wretched moulds and antibiotics – ensuring the survival and proliferation of millions of totally unnecessary little people. Sad, sad!’

Edward Pendleton, in fact, had his own kind of chat. Appleby listened to it for some time, and then asked a question.

‘That chap Fell,’ he said. ‘I rather got the impression you’d met him before?’

‘Fell?’ Pendleton looked blank.

‘The Martineaus’ GP – whom we met a minute ago.’

‘Ah, yes. I’m not aware of ever having spoken to him. What a splendid oak that is, straight ahead! I envy Charles his timber. It’s something one can’t summon round oneself in a hurry. Now, tell me about the family, my dear fellow.’

Appleby told Edward Pendleton about the family. But he wondered why he had been so firmly shut up.

Grace Martineau now no longer appeared at lunch time, but when she was well enough she liked one or another member of the household to join her for this meal in her room. On the present occasion this distinction fell to Mrs Gillingham, who had arrived just after noon. It was impossible not to be impressed by Mrs Gillingham, or even to impugn her entire suitability for the difficult role which her hostess was conjectured as being minded to assign her. She had driven herself up in a car which, although less splendid than the Pendleton battleship, seemed to speak of rather more than modest competence. It was not to be conjectured, therefore, that she had an eye on Charne – if, so far, she could be said to have an eye on it at all – out of any pressing sense of material necessity. Again, Mrs Gillingham had, it appeared, a daughter, and this child could be viewed as offering reassurance in two ways. She was conveniently tucked away in a suitably expensive boarding school, and the circumstances of her existing at all proved her mother to have passed an apprenticeship in the crucial power of bearing children.

Perhaps these facts in themselves would not have taken Barbara Gillingham very far in any mature regard. But there had to be added to them the evident circumstance of her being a very nice woman. Moreover her good looks – for she had good looks – suggested themselves as of a kind that would continue into an autumnal phase, and her cultivation – which one similarly couldn’t doubt – seemed of a kind less showy than hard-wearing. But, above all, Mrs Gillingham incontestably had the gift of repose. She wasn’t stodgy; it would have been misleading and unfair even to describe her as placid; and if she was equally remote from being sprightly – which had been Martine’s derogatory word – there was no reason to apprehend that she would be without her moments of exhilarating vivacity. All in all, she was formidable. Martine’s eyes might be said to have narrowed on her – and Bobby Angrave’s, correspondingly, to have rounded – the moment she entered the house.

Nor – and this was unusual – did Mrs Martineau appear at tea. This consequently was dispensed by Martine in a small drawing-room not much frequented except for the purpose. Many people, habituated to a great deal of space around them, never enter one room or another for weeks on end. The Martineaus, however, led an almost nomadic existence at Charne, so that if one visited there for only a short time one was apt to carry away the impression that one had seldom encountered one’s hosts twice in the same spot. Judith Appleby had a theory – probably a perfectly valid one – that this slightly restless habit had been formed out of consideration for the servants, who might have considered it discouraging continually to dust, polish and burnish spaces and objects upon which their employers’ glances or persons seldom reposed. Thus tomorrow at this hour Friary might be rounding people up with the murmured information that tea was being served in the Old Orangery. Appleby found himself already wondering whether the former Mrs Gillingham would continue this odd expression of a social conscience.

Mrs Gillingham was being attended to mainly by Bobby – Bobby’s uncle appearing to be in no particular hurry to single her out for any more distinction than she might properly expect. Perhaps Bobby would really be indifferent to the bizarre plan conjectured to be getting under way at Charne. Perhaps he judged that an appearance of indifference would be politic. Perhaps he would fall for Mrs Gillingham himself; she would make a very suitable maternal mistress – at least a dream one – for a young man of Bobby Angrave’s mingled cleverness and emotional immaturity. Or yet again – and this was how one would develop the situation if one were writing a novel – Bobby would conduct an actual whirlwind courtship of the lady, and marry her while Grace Martineau’s funeral baked meats were still on the board – thus thwarting his deceased aunt’s shade. Having arrived at this not altogether agreeable fantasy, Appleby decided that he had better turn to thinking about something else.