Carson's Conspiracy (13 page)

‘Then I mustn't hold you up,' Appleby said. And he went to join his guests beneath the perilous cedar of Lebanon.

 

 

The first person Appleby noticed on the lawn was Mary Watling. He didn't know her – or, indeed, any of the family at Upton Grange – very well. But he knew that she had become an art-student, and that for a time she had prosecuted the activity in America. As she was merely a girl, and had thus not violated the military traditions of the Watlings in general, she had no doubt been allowed to follow her own inclinations in the matter. With what success she was busying herself as an artist, now, Appleby had never heard. But the fact would explain her taking up with the Lelys, who lived not far away.

‘We've come to bag some tea,' Humphry Lely said cheerfully, as Appleby shook hands with the visitors. ‘And we picked up Mary on the way. Mary was just walking for pleasure, and was getting tired of it. Kate and I' – Kate was Mrs Lely – ‘were out on business.'

‘Sketching
en plein air
?' Appleby asked.

‘Something much more rewarding than that.'

‘Simply drinking in inspiration,' the clerical Dr Folliott suggested humorously, ‘from the meadows, groves, and streams.

‘Nothing of the kind. Pocketing the cash. And literally the cash. Fifty-pound notes. Think of that.'

‘All in Humphry's bulging pockets now,' Mrs Lely said. ‘Shall I, or will our little ones, ever see any of them again? I doubt it. Judith, I'm delighted to notice muffins. There's sense in muffins
en plein air
. And they sustain. May I unobtrusively secret a couple of them for the twins?'

‘Whenever I hear,' Dr Folliott said, ‘of unexpected brief affluence befalling a parishioner, I turn the conversation to the Mission Field. Or – more hopefully, it may be – to the state of our church's roof. To be dripped on during a sermon is a double affliction which everybody understands.'

Appleby reflected that Herbert Folliott, equally with Hoobin, was a perusing man. He spent most of his time, that was to say, with his nose happily in print. But whereas Hoobin's texts bore at least some distant relationship to the Queen's English, those favoured by Folliott were in Hebrew. Folliott was the odd sort of country clergyman who happens to be a theologian as well. All the more credit to him, surely, that on some afternoons he attended polite tea drinkings with their harmless chatter such as was now going on, and on others dodged in and out of cottages, helped old women to hang out their washing and children to recite with some approximation to accuracy even the more advanced of their multiplication tables.

‘I hope,' Judith was saying to the vicar, ‘that the bazaar went well?' This was simply Judith doing her stuff – as she always did. Equally with her husband, she no doubt judged it odd that institutions for public worship and the administering of sacraments should have to fund themselves out of cake and candy stalls. But she said the right things, which Appleby himself often culpably neglected to do. And Dr Folliott, although he presumably held the same persuasions much more strongly, always made the right replies.

‘Thank you – yes,' he now said. ‘Mary here was a tower of strength to me.'

‘I blew up balloons,' Mary Watling said. ‘Not with honest puff, but from a cylinder of some sort of gas. So they were real balloons, and floated on a string above the heads of the children who had given their pennies for them. Quite often they escaped, of course, and soared off into the air. It was rather like a psychological experiment. Some of the bereft children raged, some blubbered, some watched delighted and entranced, and others at once stumped off to mum or dad for the means to buy another balloon. Recorded on a sufficient scale to admit of significant statistical analysis, there might be quite a study in it after the Piaget fashion.'

Appleby glanced at Mary Watling with some interest. Her account of the children had been lively and first-hand; the bit about Piaget was the dutiful addition of a college-bred girl. That she had been very seriously an art student was perhaps questionable. Her American trip had probably been a matter of having a good time.

‘And Mrs Carson at Garford was most generous,' Dr Folliott was saying, and at the same time he glanced at Judith with a faintly conspiratorial amusement. Judith, no doubt, had stumped up rather well, but was not to be complimented across her own alfresco tea-table. ‘She sent several gallons of milk – really a wonderful idea – and also a sack of somewhat mysteriously special potatoes.'

Thus to qualify Cynthia Carson's potatoes was perhaps not quite the thing. But Appleby didn't think of this. Because he had been glancing at Mary Watling, he was aware of something slightly odd about her. At the mention of Mrs Carson at Garford she had perceptibly stiffened, and directed her gaze on her own toes. There was something perplexingly wary about this. But now Humphry Lely was speaking.

‘It's at Garford,' he said, ‘that Kate and I have been spoiling the Egyptians. You remember, John, the luncheon we had there? It led to my painting the chap's portrait – right in the heart of his own domain. I had it home for some days for a little hocussing, and then we shoved it in the van and delivered it this afternoon.'

‘Is it a success?' Judith asked.

‘I hardly know as to that. But I think perhaps not. In fact, the chap rather eluded me. But not in the financial sense. He did very promptly fork out.'

‘Humphry,' Mrs Lely said, ‘do tell.' This was a favourite exhortation on the part of Lely's wife. ‘For it really was rather amusing.'

‘It was rather awkward, in a way. The chap was a bit jumpy, for a start. Of course it's not unusual, that. Having yourself as a chum on your own wall does seem to be upsetting at times. But the point is that I expected him to write me out a cheque. It's what he'd said he'd do, as a matter of fact. But he just unlocked a drawer and a whopping great drawer it was – and counted me out the proper number of those fifty-pound notes. Made me thumb through them like a bank clerk, too, to make sure he'd got it just right. The drawer was absolutely stuffed with the things. Tight wads of them. It struck me they might be intended as an eccentric sort of present for that son of his back from America.'

‘The son is really back?' Appleby asked in some surprise. ‘Robin Carson?'

‘Well, he didn't seem to be around. But I suppose so. At the last sitting Carson gave me he said he'd had a cable from the lad a day or two before saying that he was more or less on his way.'

‘I see.' Appleby wondered whether he did see – or at least see anything relevant to his small Carson mystery. In his actual visual field, indeed, there was something to remark. At the first mention of the elusive Robin, Mary Watling had again acted in a rather odd fashion. She had stood up, murmured something to her hostess, and walked away down the nearest garden path. There was no hurry about it; every now and then, indeed, Mary paused as if to admire the efforts of Hoobin and Solo in one herbaceous border or another. It wasn't, on so informal an occasion, an unmannerly thing to do. Nevertheless, she had set a distance between herself and any further casual talk about the people at Garford House.

 

The Lelys departed, banknotes and all, taking Mary Watling along with them. Judith excused herself, explaining to the vicar that she had something baking in an oven: an ambiguous statement from which Dr Folliott didn't fail to extract a pleasantry.

‘I shan't inquire,' he said, ‘whether your concern is of a culinary or a ceramic order. Perhaps, after a fashion, it's both. Into your kiln has gone what will emerge as a succulent china fish, or even an enormous plum pudding, complete with sprigs of holly. But I forget how abstract your art has lately become, my dear.' Folliott had been a family friend for many years, and with Judith in particular enjoyed talking nonsense which would have merely perplexed most of his other parishioners.

‘I very much hope it's my dinner,' Appleby said. ‘But, talking of fish, come down to the pond, Herbert, and view Solo's latest. He becomes steadily more ambitious – and of course we are glad to see him taking an active interest in anything. He buys the monstrosities, and I pay the bills. His latest acquisition is a couple of telescope-fish.'

‘Dear me! I fear I haven't heard of them.'

‘They must be a product of Chinese ingenuity, I suppose. They look rather like mini-bull-dogs in a state of extreme terror. Their eyes almost pop out of their heads. Solo will gaze at them for an hour on end, without once remembering to drop asleep.'

‘Telescope-fish sound highly disagreeable, so I am the happier to learn that they have some therapeutic virtue. By all means let us inspect them.'

So they walked down to Solo's pond and viewed the goldfish. They were numerous and varied, and it was clear that Solo's taste inclined to the grotesque.

‘Yes,' Dr Folliott said presently. ‘Yes, indeed. They appear to take some explaining, do they not? Where can possibly be any answer to the riddle they present? Perhaps, my dear John, the problem may be solved by reflecting on the doctrine of the Divine Abundance. God, you know, has to kill not merely time, but all eternity as well. So he calls into being absolutely everything he can think of. Even fish like mini-bulldogs. Yes – that must be it.'

‘Perhaps so. But it makes God sound uncommonly like a Chinaman.' Appleby could say anything to Folliott. ‘I was in China once, and stared at the Great Wall. I think I'd agree that only the Deity could have conceived that.'

‘Indubitably. But Solo, now.' Dr Folliott had turned away from the fish pond, and Appleby realized at once from his tone that he had become serious. ‘For some time I've had it in mind to have a word with Judith about your Solo. There's record of the boy's having been baptized – and in fact I can recall the occasion quite clearly. But, although he must be coming up to eighteen, I can't find that he has ever been confirmed. It's a real problem, John. But not, of course, unique. Rural society turns up no end of Solos. If one is in contact with them over a reasonable span of time, can they be deemed to have been adequately prepared or instructed for confirmation? I don't know that the whole bench of bishops has ever contrived to talk much sense about the problem. But Judith – who you will permit me to say is more of a churchwoman than you are a churchman, my dear fellow – may have a more useful opinion on this particular instance of the general puzzle. For it
is
a puzzle, wouldn't you say?'

‘My own puzzle at the moment is those people at Garford.'

Appleby made this not very deft transition abruptly, since he was experiencing the common discomfort of agnostic persons when suddenly confronted with assumptions and convictions alien to them. And Dr Folliott understood this at once.

‘Ah, yes,' he said. ‘Garford. There are perplexities there, beyond a doubt. And not wholly remote from what we must call the Solo problem. Mrs Carson, so prodigal of potatoes and the products of vaccimulgence, is dotty in her own way.'

‘I rather agree – although on a very slight acquaintance.' Appleby had taken a moment to nail ‘vaccimulgence'. ‘She's much taken up with their son – and in a commonplace and unremarkable manner. He did wonderfully at Harvard, and that sort of thing. It's on other subjects that she's rather odder. But there's just something – an elusive something – that I don't quite get hold of.'

‘I don't exactly see, John, what you find positively perturbing – as I have a notion you do – about the Garford set-up. If indeed, one can speak about such a thing. Perplexities, as I've said. But look at any household steadily, and puzzles emerge.'

‘It's the man more than the woman. We lunched with the Carsons a little time ago, and I didn't think much about them. But then their son came home, or started coming home, and some sort of hitch seems to have developed. It doesn't sound at all interesting. But the other day Carson turned up on me in rather an unaccountable fashion. What he had on his mind, he said, was just this of the boy's not arriving. But he had come over to tell me that we ourselves – Judith and I – mustn't be worried about it. That struck me as moonshine. And the man himself was more worried than he confessed to being. That was quite in order: an Englishman keeping a stiff upper lip – that sort of thing. But I had a sense that a more complex piece of play-acting than that was going on. It keeps bothering me. And there's the further fact that Carson is either suddenly very hard up or – again – putting on a turn that way. I just don't, at the moment, make any clear sense of it.'

‘Would a man who was very hard up keep a large drawer stuffed with fifty-pound notes?'

‘Well, yes, he just might. It's a matter of scale, isn't it? If a man is hard up on what you might call a heroic scale, he may find it convenient to keep a mere few thousand pounds in the form of cash in hand.'

‘Dear me! Of course that is so. How naive I am in money matters, John. But what about
pretending
to be hard up? It's an odd notion in itself.'

‘Not necessarily in, say, a domestic context. For instance, one might so pretend by way of curbing one's wife's extravagance, or one's children's extravagance. But that isn't quite the puzzle here. Supposing that Carson, for some more obscure reason,
is
making such a pretence, why should he go out of his way to open a drawer stuffed with money under the very nose of an intelligent spectator? I can think, by the way, of one reason that
isn't
particularly obscure for getting together cash in a large way. One's business affairs are so embarrassed, and one's conduct of them has been so doubtful, that one is preparing to make oneself scarce with one's pockets full of pence. But in such a situation one certainly doesn't open that drawer on the pennies.'