The Norfolk Mystery (The County Guides) (31 page)

‘Are you always at the heel of the hunt?' said Morley, as I caught up with him, striding towards the hotel, and then added, ‘W.H. Ponsford.'

‘What?'

‘That was the name of the chap.'

‘Who?'

‘Who partnered Woodfull and Bradman. The manner of his swing there, that reminded me …'

‘Well, we were lucky Podger didn't hit us for six there.'

‘He was harmless.'

‘He might have killed us!'

‘Hardly. He wasn't going to touch us. He just wanted to get rid of us. Sometimes you have to tread on a tiger's tail to get what you want, Sefton.'

‘Is that right?'

‘Yes. Now, finally, we're getting somewhere, Sefton, eh!' he said as we ran towards the hotel.

‘W
HAT EXACTLY
is a sherry party?' asked Morley. ‘I've often wondered.'

‘It's like a cocktail party, Mr Morley. Only on good behaviour.'

‘Ah. Yes. So I feared.'

We had received our invitation on our return to the Blakeney Hotel. I had to persuade Morley to agree to attend, he was beginning to fret so terribly over the continuing delay to our timetable. We should, according to Morley's plan, have visited most of the churches of Norfolk by now, and investigated its major industries, visited all other places of cultural and historical interest, written up our notes, and been preparing to leave for our next county. Instead, we were stranded in a quayside village in the middle of nowhere, and Morley was becoming restless – a terrible danger, like the dog without its bone, or a man without meaningful work. Morley had to be – as he himself might relate it –
in mobile perpetuum
. If he wasn't, he grew first irritable, and then angry, and then, curiously, utterly listless, like a man falling into a trance or a coma. He was, at this stage in his perpetual cycle, becoming so restless that it was all I could do to talk him down from a plan to start producing our own evening expedition newspaper, based on the model of Scott's
South Polar Times
(‘All we need is a printing press,' he claimed. ‘Miriam could bring us something up from London, I'm sure'). To distract him, I had taken to playing speed chess with him, but things had got so bad, and he won so consistently, without joy or pleasure, that he was now threatening to get out his knitting – another one of those hobbies that, during our years together, was the cause both of much amusement and much trouble. (He was apt to launch into demonstrations and explanations of the craft – which had been taught to him by the menfolk of Taquile Island on Lake Titicaca, he said – at the most inappropriate of moments. The story of Morley, the dead baby and the mystery of the knitted shawl is perhaps not as widely known to the general public as some other episodes; I shall relate it at another time.) Frankly, the sherry party seemed like a welcome alternative to an evening discussing the history of Peruvian woolly hats.

‘But I cannot abide parties, Sefton,' he protested.

‘But this is only a sherry party, Mr Morley.'

‘Sherry party. Cocktail party. Card party. Shooting party. House party. Musical party.
Salon
.
Cénacle. Soirée
… Same region, soil and clime, Sefton. Waste and wild, the lot of them. Waste and wild.' He sighed a grand, Miltonic sigh. ‘And as for the timetable … It's slipping, Sefton. We're drifting dangerously off course. We must keep to the timetable.' Panicked and agitated, he could sound worryingly like Ismay on the
Titanic
. ‘I don't know if I can get us back, Sefton. It may not be possible.'

Given how far we were now off course, I managed to persuade him that a sherry party would hardly prove disastrous and that, besides, it might give us an opportunity to find out more about the unfortunate death of the reverend, which of course remained the cause of our spirit-sapping detention.

And so we found ourselves, on a balmy summer's evening, at the Thistle-Smiths', a rather bleak eighteenth-century house on the edge of Blakeney village, set about with mournful, desolate-looking laburnum hedging but stuffed inside both with lively guests and with Mrs Thistle-Smith's extraordinary bonsai collection, displayed in Ming bowls set on tables, shelves and plinths in the entrance hall to the house, and which gave the impression of one entering an enchanted forest inhabited by gibbering giants.

‘Imitation Ming bowls, actually,' Morley later corrected me. ‘For what I think might be more accurately described not as an “extraordinary” collection – for what, one wonders, might a merely “ordinary” collection of bonsai be, eh? – but rather as a
plethoric
collection of bonsai. Hmm? Plethoric, somnolent bonsai, one might say, if one needed the extra adjective, Sefton.'

In attendance, in addition to the plethoric somnolent bonsai, were the Grices, the Chapmans, the Wells, and many other north Norfolk worthies and dignitaries whose names escaped me.

‘Everyone is here!' proclaimed Mrs Thistle-Smith on our arrival, meaning, presumably, everyone in the village with an income, earned or unearned, above about ten pounds per week: a sherry party in north Norfolk being most definitely not a place for the common man. One might as well have been in Mayfair, the only difference being that the rich in the remoter corners of England seem uniquely and peculiarly unburdened when compared to their city counterparts, as though permanently on holiday, the men utterly self-satisfied and comfortable in their moth-eaten, third-generation tweeds, and the women thoroughly relaxed about both their mothballed appearance and their antique charms, though with the exception, I should say, of Mrs Thistle-Smith herself, who was a rather determinedly glamorous, made-up sort of lady, who would not have been out of place as a hostess at one of Miriam's parties down in London, and who was doggedly hanging on both to blonde hair and to fashionable clothes, and who clearly had no intention of allowing her young mob-capped and aproned maids to steal any of her sherry party limelight. Mrs Thistle-Smith was one of those older women who possess – and who are clearly not unaware of possessing – what one might call full candlepower presence, her welcoming smile, her voice, her manner and her powerful wreath of perfume acting like the rays of the sun shining down upon one. One had the feeling with Mrs Thistle-Smith that she had just conjured you into life on her doorstep, and that any previous existence had been merely a kind of limbo, waiting to be summoned forth into her life-giving light. I'm afraid I found her scintillations rather off-putting, but was nonetheless delighted to be able to accept the proffered glass of oloroso, and the promise of an evening's conversation unrelated to cross-stitch, needles and thread.

‘Remember, sherry is not a cordial, Sefton,' said Morley, peering at me disapprovingly over his moustache.

‘Now, Mr Morley, what can I get you, a dry fino or a sweet amontillado?' said Mrs Thistle-Smith in her finest silk-and-cashmere tones. She quickly and gently brushed a hand against Morley's arm as she spoke, establishing contact. I thought I saw Morley jerk away slightly as she did so. It was not an auspicious start.

‘I'll have a glass of water, madam, if I may?'

‘Water? Really? Are you not well?'

‘No, not well, madam. That's right.' Morley seemed uncharacteristically guarded.

‘If you're sure? You wouldn't rather something else? A cocktail, perhaps?'

‘No, thank you. Not a cocktail.'

‘I know that Mr Thistle-Smith has a nice Cockburn '96 reserved for himself, but I could get one of the girls to fetch it.'

‘No. That won't be necessary, madam. Water would be my preferred choice.' His tone was disapproving.

‘
Ariston men hudor
,' said Mrs Thistle-Smith.

‘Indeed,' agreed Morley. I detected an instant thawing of tone. He loved a Latin – or indeed a Greek – tag. And, as it turned out, he loved a woman who loved a Latin – or indeed a Greek – tag.

‘Well, I for one am in complete agreement with you, Mr Morley. There is surely nothing better for man than the taste of water.'

‘Exactly,' said Morley, who seemed suddenly to be flushing under Mrs Thistle-Smith's warming attentions. ‘I couldn't agree more.'

‘I have a great love of water,' said Mrs Thistle-Smith, sherry glass in hand. ‘Fountains, springs, mountain pools. So refreshing. So joyous.'

A maid was duly dispatched for water, and we were shown through the house into the garden room, passing on the way a vast excess of paintings, furniture and ornaments which had somehow been hoisted, yanked and crammed into every nook and cranny. One room we passed was filled almost entirely with chairs, huddled together like sheep in a pen – Chippendales and Hepplewhites, Charles the Second chairs with straight backs, little duets and trios and quartets of Victorian slipper chairs, every conceivable type of chair. It really was the most peculiar sight: the house as a storeroom rather than a home. I had recently read F. Scott Fitzgerald's short novel
The Great Gatsby
: the house struck me as the Norfolk equivalent of a West Egg mansion. I mentioned this later to Morley. ‘Wrong,' he said. ‘East Egg, you mean. Not West Egg. Do pay attention in your reading, Sefton.'

‘Are you or Mr Thistle-Smith a collector, perhaps, madam?' asked Morley.

‘I am, Mr Morley, for my sins. I don't know what Herr Freud would say about it.'

This seemed further to arouse Morley's interest, his interest already having been well and truly piqued, truth be told, by Mrs Thistle-Smith's welcoming balm. She might as well have revealed that her real name was Flaubert or Turgenev.

‘If you don't mind my saying so,' he said, ‘the name of Sigmund Freud is not one that one would expect to hear from the lips of the average Norfolk hostess.'

Mrs Thistle-Smith raised a well-tended eyebrow in response and pursed her carefully lipsticked lips.

‘Then – if you don't mind me saying so – you can perhaps assume, Mr Morley, that these are not the lips of an average Norfolk hostess.'

‘Indeed.'

And so ineffable charm met endless curiosity, and seemed to find each other quite fascinating. The two of them proceeded to spend some time discussing the finer points of collecting and psychoanalysis.

I made my excuses, took another glass of sherry, and mingled.

Small tables had been arrayed around the garden room, without chairs, intended presumably to suggest that one might move casually and informally among one's fellow guests, but suggesting also, alas, the odd, uncertain appearance of a railway station waiting room. The combination of faded velvet brocade, the cool tiles, the golden, misty light of the early evening, and the vague promise of less than fresh viands, reminded me also of a brothel I had visited in Barcelona.

There was the chattering murmur of voices, there were men and women of Dickensian features, there were fanciful flowers displayed in fine porcelain vases, and there were canapés. After one or two more glasses of sherry and a polite conversation with a woman who insisted on telling me about her love for the work of E. Nesbit, I realised that I was hungry, having subsisted largely, despite Morley's deprecations on breakfast, on cigarettes and coffee. Maids were circulating with small plates of food, and I excused myself from my interlocutor and homed in on the nearest tray. Quail's eggs. I was disappointed, the peeling of quail's eggs being a task, I find, requiring efforts much greater than the rewards, which are both insubstantial and less nourishing even than a railway sandwich.