The Old English Peep Show (8 page)

“Fine,” lied Pibble, irritated at his failure to fix anything or anyone.

“The bog's the second on the left up there,” said Mr. Singleton. “Maureen Finnick, eh?”

Mr. Spruheim glanced at him with a flicker of his pale eyes. A telephone rang on the hall table, and Mr. Singleton picked it up.

“Of course not,” Pibble heard him saying as he moved up the passage. “I don't care if he owns half Texas—let me talk to him. Hello, hello … Now, sir, I understand you wish to photograph our haunted Abbey by moonlight. Yes. I'm afraid, sir, that we have an absolute …”

The heavy mahogany of the cloakroom door cut him off. Pibble, having taken advantage of his immurement among the gray and peacock tiles, mooned about looking at brown photographs of groups of officers outside messes, others of polo teams posed under palm trees, and others which were barely more than enlarged snaps of nondescript scenes of military and naval activity. One large frame held nearly a dozen photographs with donnish captions and a label at the bottom saying that they were taken by the Signals officer at the St. Quentin Raid, who had nothing to do after his wirelesses had been temporarily put out of commission by friendly action. (Pibble remembered about that: the General had personally removed a selection of vital valves so that he was unable to receive what looked like becoming a series of pusillanimous messages from London.)
“Audis quo strepitu janua?”
said one caption: “Major Singleton in Horatian mood.” It was difficult to make out what was actually going on in the doorway, and the central figure had his back to the camera, but once you realized that the figure was Singleton, the seemingly contextless flurry of action (there was another uniformed figure crouched at the far doorpost, apparently throwing something through a broken panel, as well as a corpse on the threshold) locked itself into a pattern of violence all centered on the muscled buttocks which were propelling the tall body—automatic weapon dangling low in the right hand, left shoulder hunched forward as a single-purpose projectile at the crack where the arched doors met.

Curious, thought Pibble. He ought to have a stammer or something, with all that aggression locked away under the computer casing—or perhaps the sheer drabness of his speech style is an equivalent. And another thing: he's brainy, quick, self-confident but he keeps making elementary mistakes, such as not being surprised about Maureen Finnick, and then bringing her up with such belated emphasis that even the Coroner was bound to notice there was something a bit off. Or look at it another way: allow fantasy full rein and suppose they'd done away with the old Admiral (Lord knows why), then who's responsible for this loopy charade? Who'd agreed it would work? The General, probably, more out of pleasure in the absurdity of the melodrama than for down-to-earth practical reasons; Mrs. Singleton, perhaps, out of the inbred habit of getting away with the unforgivable; but sane, business-efficiency Harvey Singleton?
He
must have known what the odds against it were.

Or … ah, hell, leave it for the moment. Don't flush lav, because that's the signal Mrs. Singleton will be waiting for—sneak out and look for Elsa. He did so, conscious of the technical impossibility of tiptoeing around a house like this while trying to create the impression (if anyone should pop out of a door) that he'd lost his bearings.

He needn't have worried: Mrs. Singleton was in the kitchen, sitting on the cover of the Aga's cool plate. Elsa sat bolt upright in a wheel-back chair, her large raw-meat hands clenched so tightly into each other that the skin around the knuckles took on the whiteness of the underlying bone.

“Couldn't you make the waterworks waterwork?” said Mrs. Singleton. “They make an awful racket in here, don't they, Elsa?”

“Oh, Lord,” said Pibble, and scuttered out.

“Don't be embarrassed,” said Mrs. Singleton when he returned. “I'm always forgetting and it makes Harvey absolutely furious. The General's been reading pop psychology, and he says that's typical of both of us. Were you hoping to ask Elsa something?”

“Only the recipe of the pheasant we had for lunch.”

“Super, wasn't it?” said Mrs. Singleton. “Elsa'll tell you about it while I go and find a gun—you don't want me to put on my jodhpurs and topee, as I do for the visitors, I hope.”

Pibble made a deprecating cluck, thinking that a gun was about as much masculine gear as he could cope with on this honey woman if he wasn't to start actually slavering. Mrs. Singleton slid down from her perch and smoothed the back of her skirt with luxurious suppleness.

“I don't believe it gives you piles,” she said, and left.

“Elizabeth David,” said the cook.
“French Provincial Cooking,
page four hundred and nineteen. She calls it fezzon à la coshwaz. Your missus can get it out of the liberry, I dessay.”

She spoke without looking at him, but with an astonishing active malevolence.

“Let me just write that down,” said Pibble, getting out his notebook. “Page four hundred and …”

“Nineteen.”

“Thanks. I'm afraid you must be missing Mr. Deakin.”

“'Im.”

“I mean, he must have been useful carrying trays up to the Admiral and things like that.”

“Not 'im,” said the cook. Her hands were now clenched so fiercely into each other that Pibble could see the blue-mauve crescent of skin where the nails bit in among the protruding veins at the back of each hand.

“Fine,” said Pibble. “David,
French Provincial Cooking,
four one nine. Bet ours isn't as good as yours.”

The cook didn't say anything.

“Ready?” said Mrs. Singleton, from the door. “It's about twelve minutes' walk.”

She was carrying an ordinary .303 rifle under the crook of her right arm, as one carries a shotgun. She led him around by the front of the Main Block, where the Thetis fountain was once again lifting its ostrich plume of water against the background of yellowing limes—a distillation of the grand life whose pump could, presumably, be switched on and off for the benefit of “visitors,” a horde of whom now frothed around the two coaches whose hunched lines and pop-art paintwork fought with the solemnity of the old stone. Pibble saw that you could tell that these were parting guests because they wore or carried an anachronistic collection of old English headgear, from Cavalier wide-awakes through Georgian three-cornereds up to Victorian stovepipes and deerstalkers.

Singleton was there, arguing with one of the leavers, a squat gentleman in purple whose stance implied a world of frustrated pleading. Singleton's gestures and manner were those of a very classy headwaiter dealing with a tipsy diner who has imagined some deficiency of service—deference concealing contempt.

“Is that the chap who wants to photograph the Abbey by moonlight?” said Pibble.

“I hadn't heard about that,” said Mrs. Singleton. “These Americans can be tiresomely persistent, and some of them offer us fabulous wads of lolly to satisfy their whims. But Harvey says it does you no good in the long run if word gets out that you can be bought. He soaks the advertising people for all they're worth, for instance, but he puts a fantastic penalty clause in the contract so that they can't mention the name of Clavering or Herryngs in the copy. I suppose I mustn't ask what you want to see Maureen about.”

Pibble shivered as a little flaw of wind drifted the ostrich plume in their direction, enveloping them in a momentary microclimate of Scotch mist. It made him realize how close winter actually was, how illusory the slant sun's warmth.

“I heard she might know something about Deakin's love life,” he said.

“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Singleton. “I'm afraid that's only too likely. Poor Deakin.”

They walked on in a private two-minute silence for the dead man and his stilled lusts.

On the far side of the ha-ha, which they crossed by a pretty little Gothick bridge at a point where the railway lines had ceased, the parkland tilted away to form a wide hollow. The near slope was dotted with copses and thickets, so placed that though there seemed to be wide reaches of turf between them they completely screened the whole stretch of land that lay in the hollow. The path twisted through a clump of bamboo, and they reached a little gate in an enormously high fence of stout pig wire.

“We don't often bring visitors this way,” said Mrs. Singleton. “The
Rocket
takes them all through the Lion Ground on a loop on their way back from Maureen's stall. It saves all the tiresome business of guides—white hunters they call them at Longleat. I'd better just load this thing.”

She jerked the magazine off, fished half a dozen rounds out of the pocket of her tweed skirt, pressed them expertly in, and slapped the magazine home, working the bolt to send the first round into the breech.

“I won't offer to carry it,” said Pibble, “because I suppose it would invalidate the insurance. Besides, you look as if you'd do better with it than I would.”

“You're right about the insurance, anyway,” she said, with her golden-syrup chuckle. “I'm afraid we keep the key under that stone there, and that's
not
in the insurance, but we simply couldn't find a sensible way of making sure it was available when anybody wanted it, because it always seemed to be in Uncle Dick's pocket on the other side of the park.”

Pibble found the key and opened the gate.

“Hang it up on that little hook,” said Mrs. Singleton, “so we can reach it on the way back. If a lion comes right up to you, stand still. They're very inquisitive, and if you start jumping about they think it's a game and I'm afraid they play very rough. Don't worry—it isn't likely.”

They saw several lions in the next few hundred yards, but none close except for a sleeping lioness who was draped across two low lime-tree branches beside the path, so floppy with indolence that she looked as if she were composed of some immensely viscous liquid. Two cubs scratched at another tree, leaving deep gouges in the bark, and around a fallen trunk a group of five or six adult lions had posed themselves in greenery-yallery attitudes. Two of them turned their heads to watch the passing humans with an amber, unblinking stare.

The lion enclosure did not seem to be very large, but now that Pibble's position relative to the screening copses had changed, he began to catch glimpses of chimneys and roofs beyond it. The basin through which they were walking itself sloped southward, and then dipped quite sharply. It was in this dip that the hitherto hidden building stood.

“Is that the old Abbey?” he said.

“It isn't really an abbey,” said Mrs. Singleton, “except that parts of it came from an abbey they pulled down at Scambling at the dissolution of the monasteries. That's when my family started to come up in the world, you know—the early ones had a knack of backing the right kings. But have you ever noticed how they all seemed to build their houses in hollows, and it wasn't really till Queen Anne that people started building in places where you could see something from? The Abbey's the center of Old England now, with plastic ghosts popping out from behind panels, and tape-recorded clankings and wailings. But it really
is
old, and not at all phony, so it's always a wow with visitors.”

“What else do they like?”

“They like everything. Harvey's very clever about that because he has this craze for authenticity. The duel always goes very well, because two of the visitors actually do the fighting and a couple of our people act as seconds and tell them, very po-faced, about all the etiquette that's expected of them; we do that on the Bowling Green, which has the most super echoes. Then there's a highwayman who robs a coach and they catch and hang him—it's terribly convincing. . .Hello, Maureen seems to be expecting us.”

They had rounded a corner and another wire gate lay before them, but it was already open, held for them by a woman wearing the same mobcap and sprigged apron as Mrs. Chuck and Claire had at the main gate, but wearing them with a difference. Behind her rose four bizarrely foreshortened towers with onion-shaped roofs, as though a section of Brighton Pavilion or the Kremlin or the Taj Mahal had sunk, by some freak convulsion of the terrain, into the ground until only its topmost pinnacles were showing.

“Oh, Miss Anty,” babbled the woman, “your hair appointment. Miss Whatnot, your new secretary, was speaking to me of it on the telephone.”

“Bloody Hades!” said Mrs. Singleton. “When was it supposed to be for?”

“Three-thirty, she did be saying.”

Mrs. Singleton looked at her watch.

“Oh, that's all right,” she said. “I've just got time to talk to you about the inventory, if the Superintendent doesn't mind waiting, then I'll hare back. Mr. Pibble, do you mind if I get my job done first, and leave you? A girl comes to friz me up, and it doesn't seem fair to keep her hanging about. I'll send someone over to fetch you.”

“Can't I get back round the outside of the fence?” said Pibble.

“Well, you could, if you don't mind walking a bit farther. And it's a bit overgrown, I'm afraid. Actually, it'd be a great help, because we'll all be busy giving the afternoon lot tea out of tiny little tinkling cups. It's much more of a nuisance than the sherry the morning ones get. I'll only keep Maureen for five minutes now, so perhaps it would amuse you to look at the old Tiger Pit—it's rather your sort of thing, I shouldn't wonder.”

She waved, a gesture of seductive dismissal, toward the stunted minarets, and walked off with the woman in the mobcap toward a white thatched cottage which lay about thirty yards down the slope, under a superb sycamore.

“Fine,” said Pibble, not even surprised that she hadn't waited for his assent.

PART II

THE LION GROUND

Once he lay in the mouth of a cave

And sunned his whiskers,

And lashed his tail slowly, slowly

Thinking of voluptuousness

Even of blood.

But later, in the sun of the afternoon,

Having tasted all there was to taste, and having slept his fill

He fell to frowning, as he lay with his head on his paws

And the sun coming in through the narrowest fibril of a slit in his eyes.

—D. H. Lawrence, “The Beast of St. Mark”