Appleby And Honeybath (10 page)

‘I’m aware of something interesting about him.’ There was nobody at Grinton at the moment about whom Appleby might not have offered this temperate statement. ‘Is he an old friend of yours?’

‘Not remotely!’ Dolly picked up her glass again, simply for the purpose of giving a small airy wave with it. ‘I met him at a party somewhere no time ago, and he talked in the most marvellous way about burning ghats and things of that sort.’

‘That’s his line, is it: Indian religions, and so on?’

‘No, it seems to be just a hobby. Hillam has the most wonderful breadth of mind. He says that he’s by profession an iconographer. That means Russian, I suppose. It’s the Russians, isn’t it, who go in for icons and the like?’

‘Certainly it is. But I rather believe that an iconographer is something a little different. He occupies a specific corner in the general field of the history of the figurative arts.’ Appleby was conscious that this speech, although reasonably concise, had been a little heavily informative for a preprandial occasion. ‘So you struck up an acquaintanceship,’ he said, ‘and invited Mr Hillam down for the weekend?’

‘Not exactly that. He simply wrote and proposed himself. It was so charmingly unconventional! He said he had enjoyed our chat.’

‘
Dinner is served, madam!
’

Dolly Grinton touched Appleby on the arm. It might almost have been a tap with a fan.

‘I’ve put you beside Kate Arne,’ she said. ‘Such an interesting old soul! She was my daughter Magda’s tutor at Somerville.’

The world’s population, Appleby thought, was ageing even more rapidly than the great globe itself. In the ‘Deaths’ column of newspapers circulating among the more prosperous classes people were ceasing to record the tale of years to which a parent or grandparent or great-grandparent had attained, as if positively ashamed that a member of the family should have cumbered the earth so long. Even among those vast populations of ‘undeveloped’ countries hovering on the verge of starvation infants were surviving a few more months into childhood than in unhappier times, and this pushed up the average age of living people as a whole. In England it might be said that he and his neighbour Miss Arne had already joined the Great Majority, if by that term might be understood persons retired from active life.

Miss Arne, indeed, looked fit for a good deal of activity yet. She must already have been a very senior Oxford don when Magda Grinton’s tutor, but she bore every appearance of being able, at need, to put young people through it still – or elderly people too, for the matter of that.

‘It is no doubt the understood thing,’ Miss Arne said briskly, ‘that we don’t sit round this table and gossip about the obscure event of the afternoon. Even when sitting beside such an authority on low life and criminal practice as Sir John Appleby.’

Appleby judged that ‘low life and criminal practice’ was legitimated in Miss Arne’s eyes as being a quotation of which he ought to be able to identify the literary source. He also judged that in conversation with Miss Arne it was necessary to pull one’s socks up.

‘Gracious lady,’ he said firmly, ‘I have no evidence that anything largely criminal has occurred at Grinton, although there have certainly been some policemen around. And I believe – although I am not sure that the police do – that somebody has died. But I do agree with you that the facts, meagre as they are, suggest little that can properly be gossiped about.’

‘Then, Sir John, we must find some other field of joint interest. There are the Grintons, who have so agreeably brought us together. But I suppose one doesn’t anatomize common friends when actually at their board.’

‘Well, no – I suppose not. Not Grintons present, but what about Grintons past? That would be fair enough, and I believe the family history might interest me. How about Magda’s knowledge of that? Did she strike you, when your pupil, as knowing much about her forbears?’

‘Not as much as I did.’

‘Ah.’

‘It is rather an amusing situation, which many college tutors must have encountered from time to time. You have positively to inform a girl that her great-grandfather was prime minister of Great Britain.’

‘Not quite that, surely.’

‘Well, no – but at dinner one is allowed a little picturesque exaggeration. Certainly a great-granduncle.’

‘Did you have to tell Magda just that?’

‘Of course not. I’m not aware of any Grinton as having made much mark on the public life of the country. There have been successful City Grintons from time to time, and one or two modest fortunes extorted from the West Indies. But it has been in literature and the arts, and to some extent in philosophy, that oddity has appeared in the family on certain rare occasions.’

‘Oddity, certainly.’ Appleby glanced towards Terence Grinton at the foot of the table. ‘Almost hard to believe. But my wife has told me as much, in a general way. She had oddities in her own family, and there is even some hitch-up with a Grinton oddity somewhere in its annals. And Grinton himself mentioned to me earlier today a certain Ambrose Grinton, of whose moral character he seemed not to think highly. Ambrose took up with artists, and collected rubbish from them.’

‘He also travelled in France and Italy, which Mr Grinton would certainly consider a dubious activity in itself I have read a little about Ambrose somewhere, and am not particularly curious about him. But I’d like to know more about Jonathan, Ambrose’s grandson, who flourished in the first decades of the eighteenth century. Jonathan collected men of letters – and their productions, no doubt, as well.’

‘Which is what gives you your interest in him.’ Appleby said this at a venture, but confidently. It was a fair guess that what Miss Arne had taught Magda Grinton at Somerville had been English literature. The lady was what is known, with a curious ambiguity of language, as an English scholar.

‘That is true. Jonathan Grinton belongs to a period in which the relations between writers and artists on the one hand and their patrons among the aristocracy and the gentry on the other was in a curious transitional phase. It is my impression that the writers were a little ahead of the artists and the musicians – and certainly of the actors – in point of social acceptance. But they were scarcely abreast with the French. Voltaire, indeed, could be humiliated and beaten in the street for the mere amusement of a group of nobles. But he belonged to a caste already secure of its rights and regarding itself virtually as an estate of the realm. When he came to England and visited Congreve he was disgusted to find a distinguished dramatist chiefly concerned to cut a figure as a fine gentleman.’

Miss Arne, thus showing alarming signs of delivering the proem to a full-scale lecture, paused to address herself to what was probably the last dish of pheasant to appear at Grinton for many months. Appleby being silent and politely attentive, she then went on.

‘In the mid-eighteenth century we find Samuel Johnson, the son of an obscure bookseller, received almost everywhere with deep respect. But he handed out the same thing handsomely in return. He believed quite as wholeheartedly as James Boswell did in the grand principle of subordination.’

‘There had been some awkward chaps rather earlier,’ Appleby ventured. ‘Swift, for example.’

‘Very true. Swift had very little impulse to subordinate himself to any man. And his eventual reward was to hobnob familiarly with a number of distinctly exalted persons. His friend Alexander Pope is another special case. Pope was of course precocious, and was receiving patronage as quite a young man, being entertained in great houses and often writing about them and their owners either agreeably or disagreeably as he felt inclined. If one of his celebrated pieces could be associated with your house or estate, it was quite something.’

‘Somewhere or other, there’s an affair called Pope’s Tower.’

‘At Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire. He seems to have been entertained by the Harcourts during 1717 and 1718, when he was working on his translation of the
Iliad
. It was when he was finishing off the fifth volume that there was the tremendous thunderstorm that killed two rural lovers in one another’s arms in a harvest field. You will recall the incident, Sir John. The then Lord Harcourt had Pope write an epitaph for them. But that is by the way. We are considering Jonathan Grinton. It was probably some years before the Stanton Harcourt visit that he nobbled the celebrated young poet and lodged him in this house for an unknown but probably quite brief period. If Pope wrote anything about the place it has never been discovered. But it seems not unlikely that he did.’

‘It was his habit?’

‘At
Timon’s
Villa let us pass a day, Sir John.’ Miss Arne quoted this to an effect of mild reproach, as to a pupil inadequately prepared.

‘Yes, indeed. Yet hence the
Poor
are cloath’d, the
Hungry
fed.’ Appleby thus pulled up his socks with admirable speed.

‘And of Stanton Harcourt – where he was, I think, very well treated – he left a witty description which has of course survived. It would be pleasant to know a little more about Jonathan. He represents a tiny but not wholly unpromising plot of unexplored territory in eighteenth-century social history.’

‘I suppose so. But you have never profited by your acquaintance with the family to do a little exploring on your own? On this present visit, for example?’

‘Dear me, no!’ Miss Arne sounded surprised. ‘Mr Grinton, as you can see, would not be well-disposed to anything of the sort. And Mrs Grinton invites me here from time to time simply as judging it pleasant that her daughter should meet an old teacher. And so it is. Magda is an intelligent girl, and did very well at Somerville.’ Miss Arne lowered her voice only very slightly. ‘It is perhaps a pity that she married that intellectually undistinguished young man.’

‘The auctioneer?’

‘I believe that to be his trade, and that he knows the right price for a rare book. A drab accomplishment. He is said to have been at least promisingly freakish as a young man. But some piece of nonsense got him sent down from Oxford, and the endowment hasn’t been heard of since.’

With this remark – which seemed a trifle freakish in itself – Miss Arne turned and talked briskly to her other neighbour.

Appleby, as well as a very fair dinner, had food for thought before him. What might have appeared a merely freakish suggestion of his own to the effect that undercover literary research had been going on in the Grinton library had received sudden and unexpected reinforcement through this conversation with his learned neighbour. There must be many scholars who would be delighted to discover such a rarity as an unknown poem by Alexander Pope celebrating or perhaps mocking Grinton and the Grintons. But substantially it would be the pure dry light of scholarship that would be involved. Of course such a minor literary
trouvaille
would have – Appleby supposed – considerable pecuniary value; put up at the right sort of sale, it would be knocked down for quite a comfortable sum. But surely not for anything astronomical. In fact, it seemed unlikely to be for reward of this kind that an elaborate and chancy operation would be mounted. If the solution of the Grinton mystery lay in any such area, enthusiasm rather than cupidity must be the mainspring of the action. And it was extremely unlikely to be enthusiasm of a character prompting the doing of anybody to death.

But all this remained merely perplexing. If one suddenly finds that one has been sufficiently ill-advised to murder somebody, one is quite likely – either immediately or very soon thereafter – to judge it prudent to do something about the body. Drop it down a disused well, or something of that kind. But if one merely comes upon somebody who has died – or who, conceivably, has been inexplicably murdered by somebody else – it is very improbable that any such trafficking with the corpse can have anything to recommend it. One simply hurries off (as Honeybath had done) in search of help.

The circumstances of the moment, however, did not admit of prolonged brooding over the enigma. Miss Arne had presumably finished off with Appleby for the duration of the meal, but the lady on his other hand had been waiting her turn. She was a Mrs Mustard. So much, and no more, Appleby knew about her. The principal garment encasing her person appeared to be contrived out of a complexity of diaphanous veils, abundantly adequate for decency, the interrelationship of which would have baffled a couturier. Within, she seemed to be of substantial build and mature years. Without, she was further adorned with numerous enormous bangles and two enormous rings. She suggested, if the thought be a conceivable one, a bourgeois version of the late Dame Edith Sitwell. She must be one of Dolly Grinton’s queerer fish. So much had Appleby time to observe and conjecture, and then Mrs Mustard spoke.

‘I don’t know whether you have heard,’ she said. ‘But a most remarkable thing has happened at Grinton this afternoon.’

‘Indeed?’ Appleby took it into his head to speak as one politely expectant before a commonplace remark. ‘Grinton doesn’t strike me as a likely milieu for remarkable happenings.’

‘Your eyes are sealed.’ Mrs Mustard offered this derogatory information with great solemnity. ‘It is often in the most banal surroundings that we come closest to the heart of the mystery. It is often in lineaments wholly unpurged that we discern the impress of beatitude. Look at Terence Grinton.’

Obediently, Appleby looked at Terence Grinton. There was conceivably an elusive sense in which ‘unpurged’ was applicable to what he saw. But this didn’t mean that Mrs Mustard was other than an embarrassing conversationalist. She was going to discourse on New Thought or something of that kind. She probably frequented an ashram and swore by a favourite Swami as more certainly in touch with the infinite than any other in the whole swarm of Swamis that now raved and recited and maddened round the land. Was it possible to hold her down to earth?

‘Here at Grinton, you were saying,’ Appleby said firmly. ‘A remarkable happening. Just what?’

‘A clear instance of bilocation. Not that bilocation is especially remarkable in itself. In India – I am sure you adore India, Sir John – it is quite common for sacred persons to enjoy the power of instantaneously transporting themselves from one place to another.’