The Old English Peep Show (4 page)

“This is the most marvelous view in the world, though I say it myself. I draw deep inspiration from it every day.”

It would have been churlish not to go and share such a view, so Pibble weltered out of the sofa and crossed the room. His first reaction was that Mr. Singleton's source of inspiration was curiously dreamlike and escapist for so drearily pragmatic a man. They were looking at almost the same vista as the one he had glimpsed earlier from the colonnade, but the extra angle achieved by the jut of the Private Wing brought the Main Block into the picture, altering the whole perspective so that the further colonnade and the Kitchen Wing were no longer merely pretty in themselves, but became a necessary balance to the huge elegance of the central building. Down the first slope stood the famous lime tree, a solid fountain of yellowing leaf with a small herd of dappled deer grazing at its foot, and beyond that the traditional English landscape, at its most mistily genteel, rolled away into blueness.

As an extra touch to the artificiality of the scene, there was a scarlet blob in the foreground, like the red buoy Turner used to pop into the foreground of his seascapes on varnishing day, except that this was an E-Type Jaguar convertible standing on the gravel below them. It really was below them, as the slope of the ground left the Private Wing a story higher this side than the other. The car looked posed, as though for a color advertisement, but as they gazed over those leagues of plebs-concealing greenness a glass door in the colonnade opened and the General came prancing down the steps to the drive. His peculiar, dainty, arrogant gait reminded Pibble instantly of the movements of stags, such as those that grazed under the lime tree—something poised, limber, and fierce, but at the same time preserved (carefully and against the odds) into an alien age and climate.

Pibble knew at once that he wasn't going to Chichester to sail, either. There must be a woman there.

The General didn't actually leap into the car as though it were a saddle, but he settled into his seat like a man used to horses. The extending bonnet became an expression of his personality. He raised one hand in a theatrically romantic salute to their window and roared away, gravel spitting in twin arcs behind his half-spinning wheels.

“A very great man indeed,” said Mr. Singleton plonkingly.

Before Pibble could answer, they were distracted by a new unreality in the panorama: out from behind one of the copses in the middle distance, crawling along a low embankment, came Stephenson's
Rocket;
slow puffs of purplish smoke whuffled from its ridiculous smokestack, and the monstrous cylinders on either side pumped like the legs of a grasshopper. Behind the engine came a dozen open trucks which carried about forty solemn citizens, wearing anachronistic bonnets and stovepipe hats. Only the incessant working of their limbs as they clicked, focused, panned, whirred, and hectically changed films showed that they were the same group of Americans that had shared Pibble's train.

“If an airliner exploded over here,” he said, “you'd have a perfect­ record of the event. There'd be bound to be at least one cine­camera pointing skyward at any given moment.”

“Couldn't happen,” said Mr. Singleton. “I've had them all routed out of our air space. What would our visitors think of Old England if we allowed bloody great Boeings to come whining over during a peak moment like the execution? Excuse me.”

He picked up the intercom.

“Judith? Yes, I know—we saw him go. Did he say anything important to you? No, I've got him here. O.K., fine, you've done very well. Now, look, will you get on to Fritz and tell him he's putting too much color into that damned smoke again—we don't want them all thinking their films have been wrongly developed. Good. When Kirtle and that policeman turn up, put them in the Zoffany Room. We'll be in Deakin's pantry for about ten minutes, and then over in the Kitchens, in the meat store. Right. Look after yourself.”

Pibble had been half listening, vaguely aware of the sudden liveliness of tone, but really more interested by the way the
Rocket
disappeared into the next cutting—slowly, not with the rush and thump of a modern train slogging into a tunnel, but more like a millipede wriggling under a stone. There was something appealingly pathetic about it—such a weak, hopeless mutation of transport to have sired the snorting generations of the Iron Horse.

“That all right by you?” said Mr. Singleton. “If that train's on time, it is eleven-fifty-eight. You've time to see the pantry and the body, and then talk to the Doctor and Constable What's-His-Name, before luncheon. Spruheim, the Coroner, will be here soon after luncheon, and I trust we'll be able to put you on the four-forty with everything tidied up and ready for the inquest.”

“That suits me very well,” said Pibble. “You must pay a fantastic amount of attention to detail. I enjoyed Mrs. Chuck's ‘lawk-a-mussy'—how did you choose the vocabulary?”

“I took a speed-reading course,” said Mr. Singleton. “I confess I would have done that in any case—it seems to me essential in this day and age—but the first major project I used it for was to read all Thomas Hardy and all Mary Webb. This way.”

Pibble could no longer protract his drowning in that dream landscape, for Mr. Singleton was already holding the door for him. The stairs were wide and soft-carpeted, their edges emitting a drowsy smell of floor polish. A pretty mini-dome, glassed like the colonnade, provided light for the square central well. On the first landing, through an open door, he saw a maid vacuuming the floor of a happily proportioned bedroom.

“One doesn't think of big houses having bits like this in them,” he said, “where people can live a comfortable twentieth-century life.”

He felt a fool the moment he said it, infected with the falsity of Herryngs, seduced into the suggestion that the Pibbles, too, dwelt habitually in marble, but in their case uncomfortable, halls, and maids vacuumed their bedroom. Singleton did not seem to notice the wrong note.

“Yes,” he said as they started up the next flight, “but it is a wholly uneconomic arrangement. All this space could be … But I won't bother you with irrelevant details.”

The speed at which he went upstairs seemed to Pibble to be also a wholly uneconomic arrangement, but it wasn't shortness of breath that had caused him to whisper. He approached the top landing with the reverence of a tourist who enters a two-star cathedral and finds a mass being sung.

“Uncle Dick's working in there,” breathed Mr. Singleton, pointing along the landing. (This landing was in fact a gallery running around all four sides of the stair well, with half a dozen doors opening off it. The door he pointed at had the barrel of a huge old key protruding half an inch through the keyhole.) “You can see he's locked himself in. That's his bathroom, that's a spare bathroom, that's Deakin's pantry, that's Deakin's room, the other two are spare rooms which we seldom use. This is the key of the pantry. Perhaps you would prefer to unlock it yourself.”

The key was the size of a hatchet, but moved effortlessly in the lock of the big door. “Pantry” turned out to be a curious name for what was more of a workshop, a small room smelling of oils and paints and fresh-cut timber. Most of the wall space was filled by cupboards, but a small workbench stood against the left-hand wall, and above it was fixed a large rectangle of pegboard, from whose hooks and clips hung a carefully ranged collection of excellent tools, all bearing that peculiar rich patina, on steel and wood, which comes from the endless rubbing of palms that have handled them often and properly. An upright chair stood by the sink under the window; there was a tiny cooker. On the bench was a finished but only half-painted model of a landing craft, about three feet long, and beside it a noose of rope cut off diagonally nine inches above the knot. The other piece of the rope was still hanging from a water pipe that crossed the ceiling. A kitchen stool lay diagonally across the linoleum.

“Did anyone think of putting a seal on the door?” said Pibble.

“The General wanted to,” said Mr. Singleton, “but Sergeant Thing was shocked by the idea, and we had no wish to offend him. He did the fingerprinting and I took the photographs for him, which came out excellently though I say it myself. They were all mine and Deakin's. I have the proofs in my desk.”

He was still whispering, though they must have been out of earshot of the lion-fancying Admiral; Pibble wondered whether it could have been a curious decency toward the dead which Mr. Singleton would never have manifested if the coxswain had been living, bowing, and scraping flesh. That, too, seemed improbable.

There was really nothing to look at: the cupboards were full of neatly arranged paints, glues, glass jars containing nails and screws, boxes of carefully sorted miscellanea, boxes of taps and dies, plugs and sockets, electric cords in various gauges, and so on. There was nothing conceivably personal, no reading matter or diary or family photographs, but there was a pad and pencil with which the suicide could have written his long farewell. Pibble held the pad sideways to the light and found the impression of the previous sheet still visible—a diagram and a set of figures, such as a man jots down when he is fitting a set of shelves into an alcove.

The noose on the workbench was as tidily made as the model beside it, with a proper hangman's knot to catch you under the corner of your jaw when your momentum—thirty-two feet per sec. per sec.—would jerk your head sideways and snap the vertebrae as finally as a chef breaking an egg. Pibble measured the distances with his eye: Deakin had been a little man, a runt; the stool was two feet six; he must have calculated things nicely to give himself the maximum drop, and finished with his toes a bare inch from the ground.

“You said something about a drumming noise,” said Pibble.

“Yes,” said Mr. Singleton. “I think he might have kicked out against that cupboard door, though that's only my own opinion.”

Perhaps, but why worry? A suicide is a suicide, whatever noises he makes in his last six seconds.

Deakin's bedroom was even bleaker than his pantry; bed, upright chairs, chairs, satinwood cupboard, and chest of drawers full of carefully mended clothes of coarse quality, tin trunk containing much-mothballed uniforms, no books, no papers. Only on the small, bare table was there any sign of a personality, and that was not Deakin's: in a tooled blue morocco frame, almost three feet high, stood a signed photograph of Sir Richard Clavering riding in the Coronation procession. The old hero looked magnificent, small on his enormous horse, but as easy in his saddle as a border thief (he'd probably ridden to hounds since he was five, after all), withdrawn but assured, the embodiment of all that the Clavering myth meant to the English. The likeness between the brothers seemed much more noticeable in this picture than it had in the one in Pibble's file, despite the Admiral's clean-shaven lips and clipped eyebrows. But, subtly, the difference seemed stronger, too: here was none of the suggestion of the jockey, so noticeable in the General; the assuredness was far from breezy; Pibble was certain that the Admiral's walk would be entirely different from Sir Ralph's gazelle-like strut.

“Seen enough?” said Mr. Singleton sharply, from the door. “It will take us three and a half minutes to walk down to the Kitchen Wing and one and a half to come back. Kirtle should be here in ten minutes, which will leave you five to inspect the body. I have no wish to hurry you, of course.”

They walked in silence down the stairs and along the colonnade under the scented muscats.

The Main Block was a different world, an air almost too grandiose to breathe: first a vast, chill salon, a perfect cube frilled with gilt plaster but mitigated by a deep-arched alcove which enshrined the scandalous Zoffany (nothing like as lubricious as Pibble had been led to expect); next the prodigious vaulted hall, which made the salon seem like a broom cupboard by its size, and out of which the marble stairs, frothing with statuary, swept upward. Here like a plump ghost with no one to haunt, mooned Mr. Waugh.

“All well?” said Mr. Singleton.

“To the best of my knowledge, sir,” said Mr. Waugh. “The foreign visitors seemed both impressed and satisfied.”

“Good,” said Mr. Singleton. “I will take Superintendent Pibble down to the Kitchen Wing, and then I will come back and have a word with you.”

Mr. Waugh bowed, a barely perceptible waggle of acquiescence, and they walked on across the furlong of polished oak. Mr. Singleton wore Hush Puppies which went squeak-squeak on the shiny surface, and Pibble's honest leather answered with a plebeian clack-clack. Beyond the hall, entered through a grape-swagged pair of fifteen-foot doors, was the Chinese Withdrawing Room, a double cube this time; in the remote corner the last knot of a batch of tourists was being sucked out of another pair of doors, slaves to Mr. Singleton's implacable schedule.

“The Americans must appreciate the warmth,” said Pibble. “I don't see any radiators.”

He looked around the monster collection of conversation bait: armor and weapons from every century; glass display cases full of documents and medals and curios; fine furniture enough to glut Sotheby's; and, gloaming down upon the bric-a-brac, the generations of Claverings, from the stiff yellow-and-black pre-Holbein portraits, through Vandyke and Reynolds and Romney and Sargent and Birley, to the General's practical-joke portrait by Dali and Epstein's genial bronze bust of the Admiral.

“We keep this room at seventy-two,” said Mr. Singleton, not pausing in his stride. “I confess I was lucky in this case. Old Josiah had lived half his life in India and did not mind what he paid to be warm, so he installed a primitive hypocaust, which I simply adapted for oil. This way.”

The other colonnade was also run as a greenhouse, but with a difference; the heavy smell, near to rottenness, of the muscats was missing, and so were the plants put out to wither; everything here was for display, and it must have needed another large greenhouse to keep this one stocked. An old man with a spade beard, his face hidden beneath a droop-brimmed hat, his trousers tied with string below the knee, was spraying an arrangement of ferns; he touched his hat as they passed, but did not look up. The doors at the far end led directly into the kitchen, a big plain room with deal tables and settles filling two-thirds of it. A big, plain woman was counting slabs of steak onto a butcher's block beside a bed of glowing charcoal.