Gay Phoenix (13 page)

‘Effrontery, don’t you think? But I didn’t say he’d been exactly notorious. When you have a bad hat in the family you keep the fact as dark as may be. And being extremely conceited, he probably believes by now that he got away undetected with a good deal which in fact was known and talked about. And, of course, he has made a fortune. It appears there’s no doubt about that. A rascal’s fortune, one doesn’t doubt. But a fortune it is. And if you’re an impudent beggar already, you’ll be a damned impudent beggar when on horseback.’

At this point in Mrs Birch-Blackie’s discourse Judith became aware that the octogenarian, having finished making up her large order, was preparing to stagger respectfully out to her car with it. So she stood up.

‘Are you going to know him?’ she asked. ‘Receive him, as our parents expressed it?’

‘I shall let Ambrose decide.’ Mrs Birch-Blackie failed to avoid the suggestion that this was a hedging reply. ‘He has already made some enquiries, and it is certain that the man isn’t at all well regarded in the City. On the other hand, it appears that he still belongs to a perfectly respectable club.’

‘John says that you can’t get turned out of a club nowadays except for pertinacious indulgence in vices simply not, my dear Jane, mentionable between gentlewomen.’

The octogenarian looked alarmed; Mrs Birch-Blackie, on the other hand, found risible the notion of gentlewomen inhibited in this way.

‘I don’t believe it,’ she said robustly. ‘From what I’ve heard of those tiresome places you could take your favourite pig into them and nobody would blink an eyelid. But cheating at cards, now. That must be another matter. As for this Charles Povey, I shall at least give the man a nod.’

‘You mayn’t have the opportunity, Jane. There’s a distinct suggestion going round that he’s acquired Brockholes simply to lead the life of a recluse. He’ll ignore people.’

‘What monstrous impertinence!’ With very little logic, Mrs Birch-Blackie was extremely indignant.

‘Or he may lavishly entertain his own sort of people while ignoring us locals.’

‘His own sort of people? Jet set trash, I suppose, and fashionable tarts, and unspeakably common Americans.’

‘Quite possibly. And perhaps our husbands will be able to peep at the tarts while crouching lasciviously in the Brockholes ha-ha.’ The octogenarian had by this time fortunately tottered out of the shop, and was thus not affronted by this ultimate frivolity between high-born ladies. ‘You must both of you please come and lunch at Dream quite soon. We can have another gorgeous go at poor Mr Povey.’

‘Agreed,’ Mrs Birch-Blackie said briskly. ‘And we’ll both collect a little more information meanwhile.’

It was perhaps in the interest of this proposal that Judith made a detour by Brockholes on the way home. It was a course of action not wholly consistent with the attitude she had hinted to her husband’s impulse of curiosity earlier that day. But as she now knew Mr Charles Povey to be absent in London it couldn’t be averred that she was endeavouring to take a peep at
him
. And a peep at the house – she pointed out to herself – was another matter. It was a long time since she had taken a look at it. And it held an authentic architectural interest in a minor way.

Brockholes Abbey wasn’t, of course, an abbey. Its stone hadn’t even been quarried out of the ruins of one, since by the time it was built any such ruins there may have been had long since disappeared into dykes and hovels and pigsties. According to the learned Dr Dunton there had never been an abbey at all, but only a minor farm served by lay brethren belonging to a great Cistercian monastery eighty miles away. But since the site had at least vague ecclesiastical associations, whoever had built the existing house had judged Brockholes Abbey to be a reasonable and dignified name for it. The same general idea had led to its being designed – although only half-heartedly – in a pseudo-mediaeval idiom. It was really a great big square box with Gothic screens and curtains and bits and pieces tagged on. There was a tower which was said to afford an admirable view of the surrounding countryside.

The property ran to a small park, and it was on rising ground commanding this that Judith brought her car to a halt. The house, which thus stood revealed at a middle distance, exhibited nothing remarkable, except that half a dozen cars, vans and lorries were scattered around in front of it. What was striking was an activity going on round the perimeter of the whole place, and at this point near completion. This was a wire fence of inordinate height – it must be a full ten feet – and curving over at the top in a manner suggesting the sort of structure designed to discourage the egress of dangerous animals from a zoological park. Here, however, the curve was outward-facing, as if the animals were to be prevented not from leaving but from entering. The operation must be costing a great deal of money – there was a small army at work on it now – and was wildly incongruous with the surrounding peacefully rural scene. One would conjecture Brockholes to be in the occupancy of some section of the investigating classes dedicated to exploring the possibilities of chemical warfare or nuclear fission. John hadn’t reported this phenomenon; he had perhaps entered the place by the main avenue on the other side of the house, where these appearances were as yet not obvious.

There was only one possible conclusion: that Charles Povey’s desire for a retired way of life was mounting in the direction of the pathological. Judith’s immediate impulse was to challenge this incipient security. John had done so, if unwittingly, and she wasn’t herself going to do less. Her resolution having been taken, she drove on, rounded the park, and left her car near the entrance gates to the avenue. These were open, and there was nobody around. The defences of Brockholes – if that was the true conception of the matter – appeared to be as yet in a random state. It occurred to her that this indicated something like panic. She marched up the drive, which ran between beech trees straight to the main façade of the house. The house, thus positioned, was slightly intimidating; it rendered the effect of staring at her aggressively through a score of eyes. Of the numerous workmen who must be responsible for the cars and lorries there wasn’t any sign. Perhaps they had Solo Hoobin’s habit of frequent periods of repose.

She was now near enough to make out the front door. It stood within a shallow portico which left it clearly in view. Judith wondered whether it was really discreet to go farther, for it would be a shade awkward if somebody emerged from the house and accosted her. Even as she hesitated on this thought, the door did open, and what appeared to be a small group of people emerged. Then she saw that it was three people – two men and a woman – together with a couple of very large dogs. A moment later, she realized that a certain touch of obscure drama characterized the spectacle thus afforded. One of the men, who could be distinguished as holding the dogs on leads, was waving an arm angrily in an imperious gesture of dismissal or banishment. The woman, who was small and dumpy, was protesting vigorously. The second man, who was very tall, appeared to be playing a passive role. Suddenly the woman began screaming, the man began shouting, and the dogs began to bark. The effect was raucous and displeasing in the extreme, even at the remove at which Judith stood. Such scenes, she reflected, simply don’t transact themselves at the front doors of well-conducted country houses. She was about to turn away, retracing her steps down the avenue, when the brawl or fracas abruptly ended. The man in charge of the dogs had stooped to them with the plain intention of letting them loose. And at this the dumpy woman turned and walked hastily away, hauling the tall man (who appeared to be of positively torpid habit) behind her.

Judith now stood her ground. Once at a safe remove from the house – the door of which had been banged to – the dumpy woman resumed her clamour. She didn’t seem, however, to be shouting at her companion; her remarks gave the impression of being passionately directed at the empty air. Judith felt rather curious about them. So she waited, planted in the middle of the avenue.

‘I’ll have the law on him!’ the woman was yelling. ‘Back he comes to these parts, bold as brass, the bloody bastard! And his bleeding lordship is unable to see you, they say. And go away or we call the police, they say. And he’s never heard of you, they say. Me – an honest girl that I was, doing no more than be the first to show him you know where, and that simply to oblige! I’ll have him up at sessions. I’ll have him before the gentry on their bench, I will. Him that’s my Sammy’s honest father before heaven, and never the sight of a shilling to this day. But Sammy will have his rights of the dirty bugger! Won’t ’ee, Sammy?’

At this question the tall man (who might have been no more than twenty), realizing he was being addressed, oddly agitated his lower jaw, and thus produced a low effervescent sound, suggestive of the opening of a rather flat bottle of lemonade. Judith saw, with some distress and dismay, that this large person was either dumb or half-witted. Perhaps he was both. She also realized that the woman who had directed so informative a discourse to the empty heavens was known to her, at least by name, having been at one time in the employment of a near neighbour in the respectable condition of a washerwoman.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Corp,’ she said. ‘Is this your son Sammy?’

Mrs Corp’s response to this civil greeting could scarcely have been termed rational. Mrs Corp waved her arms (actually in a theatrical rather than a threatening manner) and again addressed invisible powers above.

‘And him rioting all these years with harlots in their palaces! We’ve heard on ’un, we have, and he need make no mistake about it. Like to fill Brockholes with them now, he be – and you the first of them, you rakes, you jakes, you painted callet!’

It was a moment before Judith understood, with a mild sense of shock, that she was now being harangued directly. This frenzied woman appeared to believe, rightly or wrongly, that the new owner of the house from which she had just been turned away indulged himself in a lavish concubinage, and that Judith herself was one of those under his protection. Although tolerably well-preserved, Sir John Appleby’s wife had been for some years a grandmother, and she wasn’t sure that she ought by any means to take offence at being credited with the charms of a successful courtesan. Nevertheless, it seemed desirable to get the record straight, if only to restore Mrs Corp to some more or less normal condition of mind. It had to be conjectured that she believed (or feigned to believe) that the home-coming Charles Povey was Sammy’s father, and that she had visited Brockholes for the legitimate if embarrassing purpose of making father and son acquainted with one another. It didn’t very clearly appear that Sammy Corp (or Sammy Povey) was a young man likely to commend himself to a putative parent in such circumstances. Nor, for that matter, did Charles Povey, by all accounts, sound a good buy as a long-lost father. In any case, the proposed
rapprochement
had not been a success. The Corps had been repulsed by some underling (perhaps John’s new acquaintance Bread); and for the time being, at least, Mrs Corp was extremely upset. Whether Sammy had it in him to be upset was not, for the moment, clear.

‘Come, come, Mrs Corp,’ Judith said firmly. ‘You ought to be able to recognize me as Lady Appleby from Long Dream. And I have never so much as met Mr Povey, unless it was casually and more than twenty years ago.’

‘And a dirty little brute he was long afore of that,’ Mrs Corp interpolated with vigour. ‘Wasn’t there what Hannah Sloggett saw behind Scurl’s barn? And what Johnnie Spawl told his ma about after Sunday School? And what Jane Grope heard her dad say he had to go to the doctor for? What about Farmer Pell’s chimbley and Gammer Jemmet’s nanny goat? I ask you.’

‘Mrs Corp, I know nothing about such matters.’ Judith was reflecting on the alarming length of rustic memories – something which the returning Charles Povey seemed to have failed to reckon with. ‘So please calm yourself. Whatever business you may have with Mr Povey, it was foolish to be in such a hurry about it. And if you feel there is something due to Sammy, you ought to have a quiet talk about it with Dr Dunton. He will give you very good advice about any steps you should take.’ Judith was about to add, ‘That’s what he’s there for,’ but decided that this sense of the matter, although widespread among a harassed gentry, was not quite orthodox. ‘And now,’ she said instead, ‘if it’s of any help to you, I can drive you both home.’

‘Thank you for nothing, ma’am.’ Mrs Corp, it was plain, was still in a shockingly disaffected mood. ‘Sammy, my poor lamb, you come with me.’ And Mrs Corp grabbed her rejected son – actually reached up, indeed, and took him by the ear – and marched firmly off down the avenue.

Judith watched them go, and then took another look at Brockholes. She found she wanted to have nothing more to do with the place. She would impress upon John how right he had been in his pious reflection that the new situation there was no business of theirs. The Warren Hastings
de nos
jours
, clearly, had miscalculated in any supposition that the rural populace of Daylesford would turn out with banners to welcome the restored fortunes of his house. It looked as if he was going to prove a most undesirable influence in the district at large.

And now she had better go home. But Mrs Corp, or more probably Mrs Corp’s son, had upset her slightly. And the house was still glaring at her in what appeared a malign way. She found she didn’t want to retreat down the avenue, with this phenomenon behind her and the possibility of again encountering the pausing Corps ahead. She decided on a small detour through the seclusion of the park.

The park was untended and untidy – and had never, indeed, been a very impressive specimen of its kind. There were a few large trees of the isolated and splendid sort, but in the main it was an affair of small clumps and spinneys. She covered this terrain briskly, and found that the house, although she was presently viewing it in flank, was still intermittently very much in evidence. Then she spotted a kestrel, a more satisfactory sight, and followed its flight. It hovered, swooped, and disappeared behind one of the spinneys. On the edge of this she remarked something else: the stump of what must have been a large tree, standing in a cleared space. Its girth was considerable, and it was about six feet high. Trees are not commonly felled at that inconvenient height, and as she walked towards it she was faintly puzzled. She was a good deal more puzzled when the stump bestirred itself and moved on.