Stop Press (28 page)

‘I’m glad you take that view, sir. I understand the lady wouldn’t have flown at the lad if she hadn’t taken ill some chaff that was being offered her by Archibald.’

Appleby nodded absently. ‘To use such a picture for a joke of that kind’, he said, ‘is an outrage of which my friends in the criminal classes are quite incapable.’

‘Yes, sir. I can’t say that I have those feelings myself – though I’m acquainted with them, if you understand me. They come with money, Mr Appleby; with money enjoyed for several generations. Sir Rupert, now, is very angry; he says the horrible blackguard must be found.’

‘Ah, yes – Sir Rupert. And what about Mr Eliot?’

‘Well, now, there’s a curious thing. As you can see, Mr Appleby, I’m very much upset; such a thing hasn’t happened at Rust before, I assure you. And you might expect the master himself to be very much upset indeed; he’s a sensitive man, as you no doubt know, and there has been a lot to worry him lately. But, if anything, he seemed pleased at the way the picture had turned up. I can quote his words, sir. “Bowles,” he said, “the thing is some vulgar foolery we needn’t take account of. And tell Miss Belinda to manage people as she can till luncheon ; I’m going out to see Laslett about his bullocks.” At that he left me and away he went as tranquil as could be. He’d got a bit down the drive – this was only a few minutes ago, Mr Appleby – when he turned back, thoughtful gentleman that he always is, to say that if Joseph was feeling awkward he might go to his cousins at Wing till the party was over, and if he did would I manage as I could. I sometimes think in my old-fashioned way that it’s something of a privilege to be in service at Rust – Mr Eliot being so truly benevolent.’

To this respectable manorial sentiment Appleby paid the tribute of a few moments’ silence. It took him this space to persuade himself that Mr Eliot’s reactions, though surprising, were not incoherent. The man, in Kermode’s phrase, had bounced up again, and Appleby increasingly suspected that he always would bounce up. If, as one might for the moment presume, a persecutor was aiming at Mr Eliot’s sanity he had chosen a deceptive mark. His victim was easily harassed, but he had quite remarkable resources for recovering mental equilibrium. Mr Eliot’s creation had been made to become alive, had performed embarrassing and alarming tricks, had quite frighteningly reached into the recesses of his creator’s mind. Mr Eliot, easily worked upon imaginatively, had behaved, when faced with all this, oddly but with admirable biological healthiness – calling in his reason to throw up a breastwork of metaphysical speculation. From this refuge, sufficient for a time, he had been ingeniously dislodged the night before. The assault on Belinda’s picture had been a blow against which philosophical detachment was inadequate. It had been this because it had turned The Spider – Mr Eliot’s own creation for the market-place – against the symbol of a private emotional relation; had done this at a time when Mr Eliot had persuaded himself that the disconcerting things happening around him were in some obscurely metaphysical way his own responsibility. The persecutor had been subtle enough; it was more interesting that he had promptly overreached himself.

The joke with the Renoir had fallen into two parts; theft and recovery. The first had been wholly successful, so that Mr Eliot had gone to bed a bewildered and perhaps defeated man. The second had been a fiasco. The design had been further to harass Mr Eliot by further insulting Belinda; the means had been the dumping of Renoir’s bathing woman into the bed of a footman. Such a thought was as vulgar as could be, and out of its vulgarity, Mr Eliot had – it appeared – brilliantly snatched his equilibrium once more. Such antics were not within the province of his craft; they were, indeed, so completely alien to his mind that his mind could have nothing to do with them. It followed that his recent and disturbing speculations were at fault; that all the tricks which had been taking place were extraneous foolery, best accounted for by rational explanations. Mr Eliot had arrived, by a devious course enough, at a position from which he would have done better never to have departed: that somebody was having a joke on him. His astonishing resilience had triumphed and for the moment he had dismissed the whole matter in favour of Laslett’s bullocks. As Kermode had declared, the position was one of as-you-were.

Appleby contemplated his own effort at psychological reconstruction and provisionally accepted it. There remained a number of problems. The most beguiling – though not perhaps the most urgent – of these was the problem of the joker’s prescience. The joker had known, for example, that Mr Eliot had once meditated a story called
The Birthday Party
, and that this story was to include among its elements a particular method of interfering with a lighting system, the use of a drug, some operation concerning a picture, perhaps some business of footprints outside a window: these elements the joker had confusedly used in the enactment of something like a dream-version of the story. But Mr Eliot declared that he had never committed a fragment of the story to paper. And of this prescience there had apparently been other examples – difficult, unfortunately, to elicit from so elusive a person as the owner of Rust. What was the explanation?

Another and severely practical problem had to be considered. This was Folly Hall. Was Folly Hall the name Mr Eliot had given to the scene of
Murder at Midnight
? If so, what was likely to happen? Did the fact that Mr Eliot had rebounded from an elaborate and insidious attack upon his state of mind conceivably put him in different and more immediate danger? Only a knowledge of the kind and degree of malice behind the manifestations would make an answer to this question more than a guess.

It was with this thought in his mind that Appleby now pursued his enquiries. And as he cast about in his mind for an opening he found Bowles’ final words echoing conveniently in his head.

‘Mr Eliot’s benevolence’, he offered solemnly, ‘must make him generally beloved in his household.’

‘Undoubtedly, Mr Appleby.’ Without rising to the bait Bowles yet contrived to imply that Appleby’s observation was more to the credit of his heart than of his knowledge of human nature.

‘And yet he certainly has an enemy somewhere – as witness all these vexatious tricks.’

‘Very true, sir.’ Bowles nodded sagely, as one who is aware that the decent exchange of platitudes is among the necessary amenities of social intercourse. ‘I never did think, Mr Appleby, that the master greatly enjoyed these parties. He’s of the retiring sort, sir – and particularly so with books and writing-people and the like. He prefers his books quick and his authors dead, as you might say; and not the other way about.’ Bowles, seemingly unconscious of having achieved a devastating commentary on his employer’s literary acquaintance, shook a gloomy head. ‘It’s done great things for Rust, I won’t deny. But I never did think good would come of it in the end.’

‘You mean of Mr Eliot’s pursuit of popular literature?’

‘Just that, Mr Appleby. I’m prejudiced, I dare say. Nothing of the sort has run in any family with which I’ve been connected before. I was at Scamnum Court as a lad, and it’s true that Duke would write an occasional monograph on fish – but you’ll agree that that’s not quite the same thing. And the Marquis of Kincrae – his heir, as you know, Mr Appleby – did once put out a book of verses. But he was known to be peculiar, poor gentleman, and had to be sent away to govern something in the end. And I doubt–’

‘So you feel’ – Appleby boldly interrupted these aristocratic reminiscences – ‘that the mischief probably lies among the people with whom Mr Eliot has become acquainted through his books? My experience is that troubles of this sort are more commonly family affairs.’

‘Indeed, sir.’

Appleby was on the point of giving up; but he tried a final direct appeal. ‘As you know, I am a police-officer, though not here officially. I feel, for what my feeling is worth, that you are not yet through with these troublesome incidents at Rust, and that they may assume a much graver character than hitherto. It seems desirable to collect what information I can as quickly as possible. The household is an unusual one. I should like you to tell me what you feel you can about the family history.’

For a moment Bowles looked doubtful. But Appleby’s little speech had been framed with professional skill, and the butler was impressed. He cleared his throat. ‘I fear it’s scarcely my gift, sir, but I’ll do what I can. There’s really little to tell – or little that I know to tell of. It will be proper, I think, to begin with the baronetcy.’

Appleby agreed that the baronetcy would be a good starting point.

‘Well, sir, although there have been Eliots at Rust time out of mind the baronetcy is something quite recent – recent in itself and more recent still as having any connexion with this house and estate. All baronets, I understand, are more or less new-fangled; I’ve heard the Duke of Horton remark more than once that they and the counter-jumpers spring up together. Be that as it may’ – Bowles seemed conscious that he must not let his more exalted past obtrude – ‘the first Eliot baronet was little more than a century back, and what estates he had were in Cumberland – nowhere near Rust. Sir Gervase – who was the grandfather of Mr Eliot as well as of Sir Rupert and Mr Archibald – was the first of that line to own Rust Hall, and he came to it after his fathers for near three generations had owned nothing at all. This Sir Gervase came to Rust and died not long after, about the end of the reign of the old Queen. He had four sons: Sir Herbert, who was father of our Sir Rupert; Timothy, that had Herbert, Charles, and John; John, that had Timothy and our Mr Richard; and Charles, that had Mr Archie, or Sir Arcibald as now is. I hope, Mr Appleby, I make myself clear.’

‘Gervase’, said Appleby, ‘had Herbert, Timothy, John, and Charles. Herbert had Rupert. Timothy had Herbert, Charles, and John. John had Timothy and Richard. Charles had Archibald. Go on.’

‘Well, sir’ – Bowles stole a cautious glance at Appleby, rather as if he were something in a show – ‘the interesting thing is this. Title and lands having drifted together so late in the day, they weren’t it seems tied fast together by the lawyers. But Sir Gervase held Rust, and his son Sir Herbert held Rust, and
his
son Rupert was brought up at Rust in the expectation of holding Rust too. I don’t doubt the point will have its interest for you, Mr Appleby.’ There was perhaps a hint of irony in Bowles’ voice, but he continued soberly enough. ‘Not that there was much to hold, I understand. For by this time the affairs of Rust were in a poor way.

‘Now, Mr Appleby, when Sir Herbert was here at Rust, and his son, Rupert, a lad not yet ripe for Eton, Sir Herbert’s second brother, John, was taken away. He was a widower, and he died none too well off and leaving two orphan boys, Timothy and our Mr Richard. Sir Herbert took the boys and brought them up at Rust along with Rupert; they were much of an age, all three. You’ll notice how far at that time Mr Richard was from having any expectation of coming into Rust. There was first Rupert, the baronet that was to be. Then there were the three cousins, Herbert and Charles and John, who were the sons of his father’s elder brother, Timothy. And then there was his elder brother, also a Timothy. Nevertheless Mr Eliot was to come into Rust, for what it was worth. His cousins died childless, as did his own brother too. And Rupert – I’ll have to come to that, I fear – was disinherited by his father, Sir Herbert.’

Appleby lifted his head sharply. ‘One moment. Sir Rupert had no legitimate children?’

‘None, sir.’

‘Then if Mr Timmy died Sir Archibald, as the only son of Sir Gervase’s youngest son, Charles, would succeed Sir Rupert in the baronetcy?’

‘Yes, Mr Appleby. If I may say so, you have an uncommon head for this sort of thing.’

‘Sir Archibald would also come in for the bulk of the estate?’

Bowles hesitated. ‘I couldn’t say as to that with certainty. The land may be tied up to the male line in some such way. But Mr Eliot’s personal property – which is what we live on here – would certainly go, as you may imagine, to Miss Belinda.’ Bowles was again doubtful; it was apparent that the conversation was of a species contrary to his instinct.

‘And Sir Rupert, you say, was disinherited?’

‘Yes, Mr Appleby. Rupert – though a most excellent gentleman now, no doubt – was a disappointment, it seems, to his father. Not exactly wild, I think; more getting quietly into serious trouble of a sort I’ve never thought it my business to enquire about. And finally his father, that had both the temper and the power to do it, packed him off to some horrid colonial spot on a remittance, and left everything he had control of to his own brother Timmy so that in time, as I say, various unexpected deaths brought in Mr Richard. Rupert was packed off, they say, before he was nineteen, and he was never heard of again until Mr Eliot’s books began to make him a wealthy man. On that he turned up and he’s been at Rust, off and on, ever since. Vulgarity put, Mr Appleby, he lives on us.’

‘And Sir Archibald – is it a good guess that he turned up in just the same way?’

‘You couldn’t guess better, sir. Sir Archibald presented himself from I don’t know where, trusting to this same benevolence of Mr Eliot’s and not being disappointed. With even less justification, in a way. For Mr Richard and Sir Rupert had, as I’ve told you, been brought up together, and Mr Richard now held that which Sir Rupert had been bred to expect as his own. Whereas Sir Archibald was a cousin that Mr Richard had barely met with in all his life before until he turned up with his trunks and – if it’s decent to mention it – a pocketful of unpaid bills. Of course I don’t mean that Sir Archibald isn’t an excellent gentleman too, Mr Appleby. He had misfortunes, I understand, in the mechanical line. His real tastes seem to have been more in the literary way and that, no doubt, has made him an agreeable companion for Mr Eliot. There’s a nickname for him in the family: the pontiff, they call him. Which I always understood, Mr Appleby, to be a title of the Pope of Rome. But apparently the first to hear the name dealt in bridges and the like. A very interesting subject, sir, is that of titles.’