The Old Contemptibles (15 page)

Some of these Inns were named—such as the Larches, at the foot of Windermere; but for the most part they were simply called Inns. What, he wondered, was this modern penchant for referring to
all
houses open to the public as “pubs”? Wordsworth called them Inns. The Saxons called them Inns. Could one possibly look at the White Hart in Scole or the New Inn in Amersham or the Old Silent in Stanbury and think only of “public house”? Did that famous little band of storytellers leave the Tabard “pub” behind them as they
made their way to Canterbury? Did thirsty Salopians, he wondered, say of Ludlow’s lovely, half-timbered Feathers, “Let’s go down the pub . . . ?”

These reflections led him back to Long Piddleton’s old inn, the Man with a Load of Mischief, sadly untenanted for over ten years. He would cycle up there occasionally, giving Mindy (who was once the proprietor’s dog) one of her infrequent forays into the world of exercise, remove his bicycle clips and walk around. In winter snow sometimes drifted to window level; in autumn, a dead leaf would skitter like steel across the cobbled courtyard. Mindy would sniff round the drains and the crusted duck pond, and Melrose wondered if animals remembered.

Sometimes he wished he couldn’t; but, then, perhaps Wordsworth had something. Perhaps memory was invention. Or, perhaps, as with Proust, one could absolutely lay claim to the past, could reconstruct it, call it back.

 • • • 

He went back to Dorothy’s rather amazing descriptions of the surrounding fells and her commentaries on her and William’s walks. His sister constantly referred to him as “Wm”:

Wm. and I returned from Picnick on Scafell. . . . Coleridge wants to walk Helvellyn. . . . Wm very tired.

I walked with Coleridge and Wm up the Lane by the Church, and then lingered with Coleridge in the garden. John and Wm were both gone to bed. . . .

Wm, Wum . . . It thrummed pleasantly in Melrose’s ear as he snapped shut the book.

 • • • 

Melrose paid his bill, walked from the lounge and saw, in a glass case in the entry-room, a china plate round which was scrolled a line from one of Wordsworth’s poems, a question, Melrose vaguely remembered from his reading, that Wordsworth had put to Coleridge or De Quincey, having met up with him on one of his walks:

“Who hath not seen the wonderful Swan?”

Who, indeed?

 • • • 

Earlier, he had overshot Ambleside and the road that would get him over to the other part of the Lakes and Boone. Thus, he had stopped off in Grasmere at the tourist information center and been told by the helpful lady there that, yes, certainly Wrynose Pass and Hard Knott would be a far more direct way to Wasdale Head and Wast Water; but it was quite an “iffy” little road. Fortunately, the weather was fine; he and his car wouldn’t have to contend with snow and ice.

Melrose didn’t care for the sound of that, but since the alternative was to drive back to Windermere and take a circuitous route from there, he decided to take the “iffy” road.

It had been a little after one o’clock when he left the center and he thought it might be helpful to poke about Grasmere, Wordsworth’s old village, picking up what he could, taking in the sights. It was a lovely place, despite its commercial bent. The car parks, taken together, were nearly as large as the village itself. He stopped in the perfumery and sent toilet water to Agatha and Ada Crisp. He made sure Ada’s was slightly larger than Agatha’s, in case they met. He also sent the gentleman’s version to Marshall Trueblood. The mingled scents in the Jack and Hammer might cover those of the cheetah and Mrs. Withersby.

He stopped in the book shop and picked up a copy of one of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals.

He stopped in a tiny little place that made gingerbread and shipped a smallish quantity to Agatha and a larger to his cook, Martha. To Martha’s order he added a container of rum butter.

He stopped in a little tea shop and bought a bun, which he ate standing up while reading a bit of a 1733 edition of
The Kendal Weekly Courant
that was hanging on the wall:
“Sir, though I am but a woman (and upon that account apprehenfive of being laughed at for appearing in your Courant), yet I can’t help telling the author, whoever he is, of the last copy of Verfes you made publick, that he abufed QUADRILLA after a very scandalous manner.”

Melrose munched his bun and meditated on this letter, sleepily. It had been a harsh and unbroken drive from Northants and he decided he needed more than the bun for sustenance, went to his car and headed back toward the Swan.

 • • • 

Now, having had his lunch in the venerable Swan, he knew he was going to have to face that further drive if he meant to get to Boone
by late afternoon. Still, when he saw Dove Cottage, on the road back to Ambleside, he decided he must see it. A guided tour would give him a quick fix on the Pond poets, and, besides, he was beginning to feel a certain camaraderie with Wum.

Dove Cottage had once been a pub called the Dove and Olive Branch. He learned this from the young man who faced his little group of tourists in a very small room of dark, burnished floorboards and timbers. It was the main room. Altogether, Melrose thought, Wordsworth and Dorothy’s home was more the size of a Wendy-house than a real one. And the poet was hardly a tiny man. Yet, for all of its petite structure, Dove Cottage struck Melrose as the paradigm of the English cottage, that amalgam of opposites: how could a house be drafty and cozy at the same time? Sparsely furnished and pleasantly cramped?

. . . and, good Lord, the young man was telling them that it wasn’t just the poet and his sister who occupied the house; the Coleridges, the Southeys and their various children had
all
free-loaded here, and
all
at one time.

Melrose looked about him. This little place had at one brief period housed thirteen people?
Thirteen?
And at one point, De Quincey, too? Sitting here having a smoke, no doubt.

Then he thought, Well, it wouldn’t seem any more crowded than having tea with Agatha in Plague Alley.

His small fund of knowledge about one of the greatest of his country’s poets embarrassed him. Oh, yes, he admired
The Prelude
and “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” He’d have to be an idiot not to.

Melrose had to admit it, though.

He preferred Sam to Wum.

 • • • 

Coleridge was a
voyant,
somewhat in the manner of Rimbaud, although not so conscious of it and certainly not so extreme. As Melrose hit the narrow road in the Langdales called Wrynose Pass, he thought of Rimbaud. He thought of Jim Morrison, mysteriously buried in that grave in Paris.

And he thought, most of all, of his friend Jury. How had he stood it? To be on the point of actually marrying and to have the woman either kill herself or be murdered? To come under suspicion
oneself
as the killer?

As he negotiated a bend, Melrose tried not to think of himself and
Marshall Trueblood doing their silly act in Venice, making up that absurd story. . . .

Perhaps it was as well that he was driving a killer road. It stopped him thinking about anything but getting off the damned thing.

 • • • 

Once out of danger, he pulled his Japanese car into the car park of one of those Inns mentioned by Wordsworth, and simply let his head fall against the steering wheel.

That
was the lady’s idea of “iffy”?

The Swaledale rams he’d passed, smitted with blue blobs, would have had even more fun staring if he’d been driving his Bentley.

What car to take had presented a problem. If one were applying for post of librarian, one probably wouldn’t arrive in a Bentley or Rolls. He supposed he should be grateful to the Japanese, even though he couldn’t get the damned thing up much over ninety on the M6. And it made noises. But it hugged the road like the fell sheep.

His clothes had presented another problem. Last evening, he had instructed Ruthven to pack old clothes, tatty ones.

“My Lord, you do not own any tatty clothes,” the butler had replied, seeming offended that he might allow His Lordship’s suits and sweaters to stagger downward, like old drunks, into the gutters of pulled threads and pills.

“Hell’s bells, there must be something that would make me look like an out-of-work librarian.” Melrose was inspecting one of his hand-sewn shirts; he tossed it on the bed in disgust; it was a masterpiece of tailoring. Why was he so self-indulgent? Why hadn’t he bought from the Oxfam shops, like a sensible person?

Ruthven pursed his lips and ran his fingers over jackets, trousers, robes. He pulled out a suit, holding it away from him with a frown. “This one might do, my lord. It’s all shapeless. Deconstructed, I’d say.”

Melrose heaved a sigh. “Ruthven, that’s an
Armani.”

Ruthven, a disciple of Savile Row and Bond Street, was not about to be awed by some foreign tailor. He gave a few little tugs to sleeves and long lapels, as if by way of improving the cut, shrugged, and
stuck it back in the closet. “Here’s one of your blazers, sir. Double-breasted and ten years old. This might do.” He held it up for inspection.

“It doesn’t even look ten
weeks
old. I always knew you took good care of my clothes, but this is a revelation.” While Ruthven simpered with pleasure, Melrose said, “Nothing to do but rub some life out of this Harris tweed.” He tossed the jacket to Ruthven. “Get Martha to pull out some threads and put patches on the elbows. And I’ll take the Armani and hope the Holdsworths aren’t fashion freaks.”

Ruthven walked out starchily, chin up, but holding the Harris tweed as if it were a dying baby.

He needed a drink, and here finally was Boone, and here was a small pub whose overhanging sign he might kill the owner for, so that he could nail it outside of Agatha’s cottage: the Old Contemptibles.

It was a sign in every sense of the word. It whistled to him, called to him, crooked its wooden finger at him, drew him like a magnet.

There appeared to be only the one bar, entered by way of a darkish hallway with a thread of oriental carpeting far more rubbed than the patches on his sleeves. A desk in the hall beneath some dusty prints of geese and pheasants held a registration book and a sign above that said
Accommodation.

The public bar would have been as dark as the hall except for the bronze-shaded fixtures and the shaded fluorescent light above a long, gilt-framed mirror in need of resilvering, overly ornate for such a simple room of deal tables and hardwood benches.

A framed document on the wall just inside the door announced that one O. Bottemly was licensed to serve alcohol and food.

It must have been O. Bottemly who came down the length of the bar, for he swaggered toward the newcomer with a proprietorial air. Sorry, sir, no Old Peculier, but there’s Jennings, very nice and rich that is, O. Bottemly assured him.

Obviously, such an out-of-the-way pub got few transients, for the half-dozen people rooted to their bar stools were certainly getting their fill of this one. Given the villagers he had seen outside on his way down the street (three of them bent over canes) and the ones
seated here, Melrose wondered if there was anyone in the place under fifty. Age was an epidemic in Boone for which no one had found a vaccine.

Not even the woman who came in through a curtained doorway had been successful in creating the illusion of youth. But she’d certainly tried hard enough, with her plump breasts and buttocks stuffed into a frilly, flowered dress, her beads and bangles, rouge and carmine lipstick overflowing the natural line of the mouth. She turned to the optics and drew off a glass of sherry, at the same time introducing herself over her shoulder as Connie Fish. Manageress, she made sure to add. O. Bottemly harumphed and sucked a toothpick.

“The old Con,” said one of the regulars, lifting a near-empty glass.

Another framed document on the wall had given the origin of the pub’s name: when the B.E.F. first landed in France at the outbreak of World War I, the Kaiser had dismissed them as those “old contemptibles.” That should teach one, Melrose thought, not to make easy assessments.

Melrose looked at the row of faces and smiled brightly. One of them had his head on the bar, asleep and snoring, but the other five smiled back, including Connie Fish, who really put her heart into it as her fingers went to her overmoussed and color-leached hair. It looked like bleached grass.

The gentleman sitting next to Melrose said, “Hoo do, squire?” and inspected him carefully.

Melrose returned the greeting and asked if he lived in the village.

This man nodded and then asked, surprisingly, “You be police?”

Melrose was surprised. “Not at all. Are you expecting police?”

When they all started talking at once, it was as if waters suddenly foamed in forces and ghylls down craggy slopes. He all but drowned in their rush of words.

An old, wet-eyed man, called “Rheumy” by the others, told him, “There’s that bairn gone missin’ . . .”

“. . . Holdsworth. Mum murdered.”

“. . . London, ’twas.”

The fattish woman named Mrs. Letterby leaned across three of her compatriots and called to Melrose, “ ’Twarn’t murder. The mum done hersen in.”

A bag of bones in a brown suit shook his head. Melrose couldn’t
tell whether this was in disagreement with Mrs. Letterby or the result of the palsy that also inhibited him from lifting his pint. The hands couldn’t make it to the mouth. The straw went back in the glass, making bubbles in its emptiness.

Suicide and disappearance didn’t quaff their thirst for excitement. They also wanted something liquid. They turned their heads rhythmically in his direction and fondled their empty glasses.

He ordered drinks for all and, after they arrived, asked, “When did all of this happen?”

“Few days ago,” said a man named Billy, hoisting his fresh pint to toast his benefactor.

“It sounds very bleak for the family. I expect that you know them?” Melrose took out his cigarette case and motioned to Billy Mossop to pass it along the row.