Bones in the Barrow (9 page)

But on the Saturday morning of Alastair Hilton's visit the sun rose splendid in a clear sky, lifting late daffodils and tulips downtrodden by the rain, and filling the upper windows of the little hotel with the scent of wallflowers.

Mr. Hilton had arrived after dark the night before. He had driven himself from Boxwood in the old but well cared-for Standard he had owned since 1939. That had meant going home from London at the end of the business day, packing up a suitcase, eating a few sandwiches left by his housekeeper, who could never be persuaded to stay alone in the house when he spent a week end away, and taking the car down to Billings, the chief Boxwood garage, for petrol and oil and air. A slow cross-suburban journey brought him to Leatherhead; from there he gained the main road to Horsham, and so on to this secluded corner between Brighton and Worthing.

He was welcomed as an old friend. Mrs. Norbury, alone now, since her husband Pat died three years after the war, liked her old customers best. She could rely on them to stay at the White Hart at least six week ends during the season: she knew that they paid their bills, and tipped her staff, and did not steal the fittings, or try to cash cheques in the bar. Besides, her oldest customers, amongst whom was Alastair Hilton, had known Pat, and she could allow herself the tearful luxury of recalling the first years of her ownership, when the White Hart was a new, uncertain venture, mopping up Pat's gratuity and all her own savings like blotting paper, and giving them nightmares after they had been over the accounts when the guests were all in bed. She could remind him of Pat's good luck in the war, missing everything, wounds, tropical diseases, imprisonment, death; and of his bad luck in the peace, dying in twenty-four hours of polio, just as the doctors were rushing him off to an iron lung.

It was on account of Mr. Hilton's special standing that she gave him the small table near the window in the dining room; the table where the early-morning sun, falling on one of her little circular posy bowls, turned the petals of late primroses into transparent webs of gold tissue, and forget-me-nots into clear specks of sky, and wallflower heads into a blaze of orange-red velvet.

He did not come down very early, but Mrs. Norbury was not surprised. She knew he worked hard. His business was not large, and was very personal. She had always considered him unwise not to sell out to a bigger firm and take an executive post at a fixed income with superannuation and pension. But he was too independent, of course. And in a way, too unbusiness-like. Unworldly, might be a fairer word. He appeared to be comfortably off, with no ambition of any kind.

So when she looked into the dining room and found his table still neat and bare in the sunshine, while the rest were littered with crumbs and used cups standing out of place, and bits of envelopes on the sticky plates, Mrs. Norbury smiled indulgently at Norah, the waitress on duty.

“No sign of Mr. Hilton yet?” she asked.

“Not a sign.”

“He had his tea at seven?”

“Daisy took it up. She said he was awake, reading a book, when he called her in.”

“He may have dropped off again. It's his Easter holiday, after all. He always comes the fortnight early to miss the crowds. Sensible man, and lucky for us,” she added, smiling again at Norah this time. She could depend on the girl's good nature to keep the guest's coffee and porridge hot, and persuade the kitchen to cook his rasher and egg the moment he appeared. She would not need to go to the kitchen herself until she had been upstairs to the linen cupboard.

On her way up she met Mr. Hilton coming down. He was wearing old grey flannel trousers and a tweed coat with leather elbows. He looked rather pale, she thought, and tired. Ready for his holiday.

“A week end isn't enough for you busy men,” she said, after greeting him. “You look as if you could do with a fortnight.”

“I could do with it,” he answered with a short laugh. “But I couldn't afford it.”

“Everyone says that,” she answered. “Never mind. The weather's going to be kind to you today. You'll be up at the barrows, I suppose?”

“That's it. My old vice.”

“If you want anything cleaned when you come in, ask Norah. She's very obliging. You've got your old table, Mr. Hilton. In the sun.”

“You spoil me,” he said, with a boyish look that touched her suddenly.

As she went on, mounting slowly, she heard him jump down the last two steps of the stairs, and smiled to herself. The man was lonely, she thought, as well as overworked. His wife never came with him on these digging holidays of his. That was rather a shame. Surely she could amuse herself watching him, even if she didn't take any interest in prehistoric crockery and old skeletons. Perhaps, after all, he was better off without her. He enjoyed his digging in his own quiet way; and there was very little to show for it. Mrs. Hilton might easily get bored. The vicar wasn't likely to have given permission for fresh digging in those barrows if he thought Mr. Hilton would find anything of importance. Mrs. Norbury shook the unsatisfactory Mrs. Hilton from her thoughts as she went on down the corridor.

Alastair Hilton was away all day. All day the sun shone brightly and Mrs. Norbury and her staff worked like beavers to supply morning coffee, lunches, and teas, to week enders making the most of the fine weather. As well as all this the bars, public and saloon, were crammed during opening hours in the middle of the day, and promised to be equally full when dusk fell.

Coming down the long chalk path from the hills, Alastair stopped to admire Duckington church spire, thin and elegant above a sturdy tower, and shining red-gold in the sunset. He patted the heavy bag slung over one shoulder. A successful day; perhaps he would call on the vicar tomorrow to renew their slight acquaintance, and describe his wonderful finds. After all, it was good of him to allow an amateur a free hand, even if these particular barrows had officially been cleared some years ago. When he thought how lucky he had been, he nearly laughed aloud. But the sun was fading from the tower, and colour was draining from the trees and the grass. Below him the White Hart's windows shone invitingly. He pushed his bag further off his hip, and went on down the hill.

When he reached the inn, he thought at first that he would have a beer in the saloon bar before going upstairs to change. He was thirsty and he would have to wait half an hour at least for his dinner. But the crowd round the bar was three or four deep and he felt discouraged. So he made his way into the small resident's lounge and rang the bell.

For some time nothing happened. The staff was fully occupied. The other resident guests were out or in the bar; Hilton was alone in his importunity.

But Mrs. Norbury's rule was that service meant business, so she left off superintending the final stages of the dinner to go to the lounge herself. Mr. Hilton, of course, she said to herself, and looking more worn out than ever.

“Well, you do look as if you'd had a day of it,” she said. “Absolutely done up, aren't you?”

“Not absolutely. Just pleasantly tired, really. I've had a wonderful day. But I've a colossal thirst and the house seems to be full to overflowing. I wondered if I might have a bitter in here.”

“Now you go up to your room and sit down quietly,” the landlady said, with motherly vigor. “Your feet must be tired, if nothing else, walking all day, when you're not used to it. You go and change your shoes, and I'll send Daisy up with a pint. Dinner will be served at a quarter to,” she reminded him, looking over his head at the lounge clock, which gave the time as twenty minutes past seven.

Mr. Hilton thanked her and retired to his room, where he spread his finds on a newspaper on the small table under his window and then, collecting clean clothes and a towel, went off to have a quick bath, which he hoped would check the stiffness already making itself felt in his shoulders and calves.

As he was returning along the corridor not more than fifteen minutes later, he saw the chambermaid, Daisy, with an empty tray in her hand, leaving his room. The bitter had taken some time to arrive, he thought, or else Daisy had been trying to find him. But when he entered the room, he saw at once what had happened.

Without arranging his finds in any particular order, he had, on laying them out on the newspaper, put the bones on one side and the pieces of iron and bits of pottery on the other. One almost complete jug, of the late Bronze Age, he had set by itself. This was the specimen that had made him so satisfied with his day's toil. It fixed the latest date of the barrow, and fixed it, he thought, much later than the official date hitherto ascribed to it. But that, of course, was for the experts to decide. He looked forward to presenting them the jug. This was the first time he had ever been in a position to do such a thing. Stiffness was negligible beside the honour that awaited him. For this he had spent the best part of the afternoon picking loose chalk away with his fingers.

But now, as he looked across the room, anger flamed up within him. The jug was missing. The fragment, balanced before on its nearly complete base, was simply not there. But a frantic search revealed it a few seconds later. It lay now, in half a dozen crumbling and insignificant pieces, at the bottom of the waste-paper basket.

He was white with rage as he finished dressing, brushed his hair, and finally drank the beer that had cost him so much. He would report Daisy's damned curiosity and clumsiness to Mrs. Norbury, but of course the little slut would deny touching the jug. Say it blew off when she opened the door, or the window curtain blew in and swept it off. Make a good excuse, and deny everything else. Nevertheless, Mrs. Norbury had better know she had a snooper on her staff. What else had she been fingering, besides?

He put down his tankard at this thought and stood staring at his other finds. Then swiftly wrapping them in newspaper he packed them, together with the ruined vase, in the bottom of his suitcase, pushed in the haversack on top, and locked up the case. That done, he took his empty tankard and went downstairs to the lounge.

Mrs. Norbury was outwardly shocked and solicitous, inwardly derisive. If men must play such idiotic games, digging up old rubbish that broke at a touch, why didn't they take more care of it? But she promised to speak to Daisy. Fingering the guests' belongings, however innocently, might lead to worse disasters.

Daisy, as Alastair Hilton expected, denied hotly that she had touched the vase. She hadn't touched anything; not likely. Catch her laying her hands on mouldy bones; bits of old bodies that had lain with the worms for hundreds of years. It was indecent; it was unsanitary. They gave her the horrors. On being pressed by Mrs. Norbury she said she had noticed some broken pieces of what looked like pottery on the floor near the table, and merely tidied them into the waste-paper basket. The wind must have blown the jug over, or else the curtain caught in it.

“There isn't a wind,” said Mrs. Norbury. “There hasn't been a breath all day.”

Daisy shrugged, not answering.

“Now just you be careful, my girl,” went on Mrs. Norbury. “You can be as independent as you like, but I took you on when the Royal Arms fired you for your offhand ways. Admittedly I need you here, and you can get a job elsewhere any day you please. But not in Duckington, as you very well know. If you want to go on working here and living at home you can watch your step. Otherwise—”

She left the threat unspoken; it was more effective that way. She knew Daisy's boy friend worked in the bar at the Royal Arms. Daisy hadn't got him up to the point of a proposal yet, and the last thing the girl wanted was an interruption of her courtship at this stage.

“Yes, Mrs. Norbury,” she said in a subdued voice.

“Now go straight off, and apologize to Mr. Hilton.”

“I couldn't!”

“You can say you're ever so sorry you knocked it off putting down the tray,” Mrs. Norbury suggested readily.

“I never. I put the tray on a chair, as there wasn't no room on the table.”

“And swept everything out of the way, without asking yourself if any of it mattered. I know. I've seen you do it. Now, I don't want to hear what you were thinking. I haven't the time or the patience, and I'm not interested. Go and tell Mr. Hilton what you like, as long as you apologize. And keep your hands off the visitors' things in future. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, Mrs. Norbury. I'm sorry.”

“I should think so.”

A sulky, awkward Daisy made a rough apology, full of self-pity, later in the evening. Hilton received it absent-mindedly, but quietly. She wondered if he quite took in what she was saying. But when she tried to repeat it, he gave her a look so cold and so inimical that her self-importance shrivelled away inside her, and she went off feeling she might, after all, have guilt on her soul.

It was a very different Daisy who, on the following afternoon, confided a revised version of her mischance to Joe, her boy friend at the Royal Arms.

“Must be something queer about him, bringing all that stuff into the house,” she said disdainfully. “Old bits of crocks and things like old nails, all bent and rusty. Not to mention the bones.”

“Bones?” said Joe, astonished.

“That's right. Like they have in museums.”

Daisy had been taken to a Natural History Museum at an impressionable age, and had since then connected all skeletons with show cases.

“Human bones?”

“That's right. Disgusting, I call it. Digging the poor creatures up after all these hundreds of years—”

“Thousands, isn't it? Prehistoric, don't they call the barrows?”

“You're very up in it, aren't you? Anyone at the Arms been bringing in broken pots and bones?”

“Not exactly. But there was a chap in the bar Friday night wanted to know if we had any remains about here. I told him the vicar was the one to ask, but I thought they'd finished up on the down. He seemed real interested. I told him the vicar had wrote a little book on the subject.”