The Bloody Wood (8 page)

‘Bobby – do you see much of Dr Fell?’

This sharp and sudden question from Charles Martineau diverted Appleby’s mind effectively enough. It had occurred during a lull in conversation, and against a background only of the drinking of tea and the eating of tomato sandwiches – activities in themselves almost noiseless in polite society. Bobby Angrave appeared to find it surprising.

‘Fell, Uncle Charles? I don’t see him at all, except to pass the time of day when he visits here. Except once, that is, when I was staying with you last vac. I went over and consulted him about writer’s cramp.’

‘Writer’s cramp? Bobby would suffer from that!’ Diana Page broke in with this; to scoff at Bobby was becoming rather compulsive with her. ‘I suppose it’s what they call an occupational disease. You can’t imagine Bobby catching a useful one – say, housemaid’s knee.’

‘I’d read somewhere that writer’s cramp is terribly psychosomatic, like stammering and bed-wetting.’ Bobby seemed to say this out of a sudden impulse to give wild offence. ‘So I went and saw Fell. He treated my sufferings lightly, I’m sorry to say. But why do you ask, Uncle Charles?’

Charles Martineau made no reply; instead, he preoccupied himself with picking up the plate of sandwiches and offering it somewhat at random to Mrs Gillingham. Mrs Gillingham, although she had moved on to a cake and was making little headway with it, accepted a sandwich at once. She was a tactful woman. She even shifted a little on her sofa, so that Martineau was constrained to sit down beside her.

‘After lunch,’ she said, ‘I took a walk in the wood. It is most delightful, a great joy. And I found some Alpine Woundwort. I am sure you will have noticed it. Isn’t it very rare – except perhaps in Denbighshire? At first, of course, one may mistake it for Wood Woundwort, which is common enough. But not at a second glance, because the bracteoles exceed the pedicels.’

Charles Martineau received this with grave attention. He even found something to say about Field Woundwort, which was to be found near the river, just beyond the park. He hoped that Mrs Gillingham would take a stroll with him in that direction, one day.

Appleby, although the Woundworts scarcely constituted one of his passions, had listened to this exchange with interest. It was his impression that Martineau was without any inner disposition to give Mrs Gillingham a serious thought, one way or another. From this there appeared to follow the conclusion that if Grace Martineau really nourished the strange design which Martine imputed to her she had not yet offered any hint of it to her husband. It was not a consciousness of that design, therefore, that could be the occasion in Martineau of some new species of anxiety which was to be sensed in him.

Appleby’s feeling here seemed at first to make no sense. A dreadful cloud hung over Martineau’s every hour, and if his sky now seemed even darker the explanation must surely lie in a further lowering in the same direction. Yet this seemed not quite to fit. Martineau was much like a man freshly conscious of some lesser evil treading hard upon the heels of a greater. And Bobby Angrave was somehow involved in this; there had been an edge to that odd and inconsequent question about Fell that pointed to something of the sort. It was conceivable that Martineau had fallen into some sudden and morbid anxiety about his nephew’s health – an attempted displacement of stress which would puzzle no psychologist. Certainly anything of the sort must surely be fanciful. Bobby, although he had the appearance of a sedentary creature, more at home with Greek participles than tennis balls, obviously enjoyed the rude and regardless health of his years.

You could look at Charles Martineau twice, Appleby reflected, without concluding yourself to be in the presence of anything out of the way; a standard sort of breeding and a standard sort of reticence appeared to sum him up. But his gentleness was a product of real sensibility. He was of a type to suffer acutely in and for others. It is something in which there is a kind of softness, Appleby told himself; a stoical man can be too little resistant to pain and unhappiness in those he loves – and the result is a personality not well tempered against some of the common exigencies of life.

‘I wonder whether the nightingales will sing again tonight?’ Martine asked. She turned to Mrs Gillingham. ‘I am sure you will be interested in our nightingales, as well as in our toadstools.’

‘Toadstools?’ It was naturally not without surprise that Mrs Gillingham repeated the word.

‘Weren’t you speaking to Uncle Charles about toadstools? And so learnedly, we all thought.’

This had the appearance of a declaration of war. Mrs Gillingham didn’t seem other than merely puzzled by it. But Charles Martineau was sufficiently attentive to be displeased – and this he expressed with a kind of gentle severity.

‘Martine, dear, if you can’t distinguish between
flora
and
fungi
it will really be best that you don’t embark upon botanical discussion.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ Martine was immediately graceful. ‘But what I meant to embark upon was ornithology – the nightingales. Or is it just one nightingale? Again, I’m shockingly ignorant. Is the nightingale a solitary bird?’

‘The poets–’ Bobby began.

‘Not the poets again, for goodness sake!’ It was, of course, Diana who broke in with this.

‘It’s my impression,’ Charles Martineau said, ‘that at present there are two male birds, although last night we heard only one. Perhaps we’ll hear both tonight.’ He turned politely to Irene Pendleton. ‘But if you would like to hear a chorus of them, we could all drive over to Proby Copse. They haven’t yet begun to be driven from there.’

‘That would be most delightful. Only this evening, Charles, let us be loyal to your own diminished band, whether solo or duet.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ Mrs Gillingham corroborated. ‘Grace would like that best too. At lunch time she was talking about the kingfishers.’

‘She loved the kingfishers.’ Charles Martineau’s voice was not quite under control. ‘But as we were saying last night, they have taken their departure.’

‘But Grace has a plan.’ Mrs Gillingham, having finished her cake, paused to make a token attack upon her second sandwich, so that something like a tiny current of suspense seemed to generate itself for a moment in the small drawing-room. ‘It is for deepening the stream a little, and sanding it in some places, but with stretches of pebble and stone. Then it could be stocked with suitable small fish which are bred at a place somewhere in Gloucestershire. Grace gave me the name. And then, she thinks, the kingfishers may come back – although it may only be after a season or two.’

There was a moment’s silence.

‘That is certainly to look splendidly ahead,’ Martine said. ‘If it ever happens, you must come back and see if it has been a success.’

‘Yes, indeed.’ Again it seemed to Appleby that Mrs Gillingham was no more than puzzled.

‘How sad,’ Bobby Angrave said, ‘that it is in the nature of plans to go wrong. Yes – how very, very sad.’

Charles Martineau stirred uneasily.

‘Diana,’ he said, ‘Martine and Bobby are tired of polite conversation. Take them away, please, and play croquet with them.’ Although his tone had been merely whimsical, the three young people, rather to Appleby’s surprise, rose and obeyed like children. They went out through a French window, and their voices faded across the lawn. ‘And now,’ Martineau went on, ‘we have sacrificed the possibility of a game of our own! But I wonder whether you would care to walk round the rose garden?’ He had addressed this question courteously to Mrs Gillingham, so that to the others the invitation was no more than implied. ‘Grace will be joining us, I think, quite soon. And there are a number of things there that she would like to show you.’

A moment later he was leading Mrs Gillingham from the room. It was obvious that he had become aware of his nephew and niece as hostile to her. He was displeased – and, like Mrs Gillingham herself, he was puzzled. Perhaps, Appleby thought, he wouldn’t be puzzled for long. So far today, Grace Martineau had been husbanding her strength. It seemed not improbable that it was because she felt she had a big effort to make.

Searching his recollection of this evening shortly afterwards – and it was something he was rather grimly to be constrained to do – Appleby found himself recalling it as restless with a sense of obscure manoeuvre. The effect scarcely built up to the ominous – although retrospectively, and after the catastrophe, it was easy to imagine it as having done so. Charne was, of course, a place where a raised voice, an impatient tone, an ill-chosen phrase tended to reverberate – this simply because the house itself gave the impression of having been murmuring for generations that the paramount duty of its inhabitants was to consult the social ease of their fellows.

The game of croquet hadn’t lasted long – which was, perhaps, not surprising, since it had only been begun more or less under orders. It is said to be an amusement that has a useful function in providing a harmless and ritual discharge of irritation and uncharitable feeling. Certainly it appeared to have given Bobby Angrave time to reflect. When he returned to his elders it was to be quite as agreeable to Mrs Gillingham as his uncle could have wished. Or – for that matter – his aunt. For Grace Martineau had now appeared – tranquil, and with the small clear stream of vitality that could still rise in her seeming to be running freely. It wasn’t often, Appleby had noticed, that she looked at Bobby with any appearance of other than a strictly temperate pleasure. But his behaviour to Mrs Gillingham plainly pleased her – or did so until it might almost have been described as getting out of hand. Bobby could hardly have been taken for one of the world’s great lovers, but he was clever, handsome, probably sexually unscrupulous, and certainly possessed of a sufficient technique for putting these things across while remaining well within the boundaries of polite convention. If Mrs Gillingham was puzzled – which seemed to be her role at Charne – she was certainly less offended than amused. When Bobby finally led her off gaily for a ramble in Charne Wood it was almost possible to feel – quite scandalously – that the last thing they would presently be thinking of would be the subtle difference between one and another Woundwort. Appleby was sufficiently struck by this to carry his wife away to a corner of the garden on some botanical pretext of his own.

‘Just what,’ he asked, ‘would you say that young Bobby is after?’

‘He wants to annoy Martine. Martine believes herself to be considering at leisure whether, for the sake of possessing herself of Charne, she should put up with marrying Bobby. Bobby doesn’t find being weighed up at all agreeable. So he has taken it into his head to show that, when he wants to, he can carry any woman off her feet.’ Judith glanced at Appleby suspiciously. ‘But I believe you want to unload yourself of a theory of your own.’

‘Bobby is going to thwart Grace’s plan that Charles should marry Mrs Gillingham by rapidly marrying her himself. Of course he will have to ditch Martine in the process.’

‘You think the woman would rather have Charne plus Bobby than Charne plus Charles?’

‘It’s possible. One might describe it as depending on her sexual constitution.’

‘But Grace would be furious.’

‘Grace might be dead before Bobby’s counter-plan was a week old.’ Appleby paused, frowning, in front of a mass of roses. ‘We have three more days at Charne, haven’t we? I rather wish they were up. I know the Martineaus are very old friends. But all this seems to be distinctly their private affair.’

‘I think you’re right. But you have begun scratching at it, you know, and you’ll have to go on.’ Judith bent down to sniff at a rose. ‘So shall I give you one further fact?’

‘Yes, do.’

‘Bobby wouldn’t dream of marrying this Barbara Gillingham.’

‘That isn’t a fact. It’s an opinion.’

‘In that case it’s a strong one. Bobby is very vain. He couldn’t face being laughed at or smiled over as a young man in the tow of a matronly wife. Within five years he’d have a stepdaughter who would look more of an age for him than his wife did. He wouldn’t find that at all agreeable.’

‘Then my idea is nonsense?’

‘Not at all. It may conceivably be well in the target area. Bobby needn’t plan to marry the woman. All he has to do is to seduce her.’

‘God bless my soul! At Charne?’

‘Why not? If he could do that, and deftly turn the occasion to open scandal, that would finish Mrs Gillingham with Grace.’

‘If that’s Master Bobby’s idea, Master Bobby will have to hurry up. He must keep an eye on – well, call it Dr Fell.’

‘Quite so. And perhaps bring it off – scandal and all – before it dawns on Mrs Gillingham that she has a chance of Charles. If Mrs Gillingham
has
a chance, that is to say. This plan of Grace’s may be sheer invention on our part.’

‘I continue to bear an open mind as to that. Still, I do think we are excelling ourselves in rather gross imaginings. One can’t suppose that now, at this moment, there in the wood–’

‘Probably not – although I believe that such things are sometimes best achieved bang off like that.’

‘I think there’s a flaw in the plausibility of your notion too. An improper affair with Bobby Angrave would certainly finish Mrs Gillingham with Grace. But surely it would also finish Bobby with Charles. It would have been such an affront to Grace that he would never forgive the boy. It’s not as if Bobby were a son, whom it would be unjust to exclude on the score even of some most reprehensible action. He’s only a contender for favour.’

‘I don’t think I agree with that.’ Judith turned round, and they began to move back towards the rest of the party. ‘Even if not explicitly, Bobby is the acknowledged heir. He needn’t do a thing, and Charne will be his in the fullness of time – apart from this supposed threat, that is from the Gillingham woman. Once Grace is gone, and with that plan unachieved, it’s inconceivable to me that there would ever be any question of Charles’ marrying.’

‘Not even if Grace left a dying injunction that he was to do so, unaccompanied by pointing at Mrs Gillingham or any other particular woman?’