by Colin Watson
Leaving the door open, Mrs Palgrove walked through the cool, grey-carpeted hallway and entered the kitchen. This was an impeccable, gleaming laboratory in saffron and white. Mrs Palgrove set down upon the central table the square cardboard box that had hung by its looped ribbon from her finger all the way from Penny’s Pantry. She untied the ribbon and carefully lifted the lid of the box. There rose the sugared, buttery smell, faintly tinged with violet and almond essences, of freshly made cakes. Mrs Palgrove reached across to the window and pulled the cord of the air extraction fan. Then she lifted the cakes one by one from the box and arranged them on a plate fashioned to resemble a huge glossy vineleaf. After regarding the collection for a few moments, she transferred a Chocolate Créme Log to a saucer which she put down on the floor. “Rodney!” she cried.
At third calling, the dog appeared. It licked some of the icing off the cake, then wandered away, bored. Mrs Palgrove stooped and cut the cake into small, neat cubes. The dog returned to sniff at them. “Cakey,” declared Mrs Palgrove. “Nice!” Despite her repeating both these observations several times, and quite vehemently, Rodney did not respond. Mrs Palgrove called him a naughty boy in the end and went off into the lounge on her own, carrying the rest of the cakes.
Her husband joined her ten minutes later, just in time for a solitary Coconut Kiss. He ate it quickly, standing up. Mrs Palgrove watched with distaste the absent-minded way he rubbed his stickled fingertips on one of the chintz chair covers. She picked up the empty plate and took it to the kitchen, where she washed and put it away.
“Got to go to Leicester tonight,” Leonard announced as soon as she was in the room again. He was still standing: he believed that standing was a sound way to keep weight down.
Leicester. Seventy or eighty miles. So that’s why he had been tinkering with that car of his...
“Why should you want to go to Leicester?”
“I don’t want to go. I said I have to. Business.”
“You’ll be late back, then?”
He turned, shrugging. “Lord, I’m not dragging back here the same night. I’ll stay over. Perhaps Tony can put me up.”
“Tony?” The tone implied that this was the first she had ever heard of a Tony, in Leicester or anywhere else.
“He’s with Hardy-Livingstone. You know him. Drives an Alvis.”
“You can’t just drop in on people like that. They aren’t hotel keepers.”
“Tony won’t mind. His wife won’t either.”
She looked at him bleakly. “What is it you’re going to do in Leicester?”
“Something to do with...with machinery. It wouldn’t mean anything to you.”
“It means something to me that without any warning you clear off to stay the night with some people or other I’ve never heard of.”
“But you have heard of him. Tony Wilcox. Bloody hell, you met him at the firm’s dinner a year ago. Two years, maybe.”
“Two years ago?”
“Yes.”
“You went on your own two years ago. I was having that sinus operation.”
“Well, three, then. What the hell does it matter?”
“Quite a lot, judging from the way you’re taking refuge in obscenities. It’s always the same when you’ve something to hide.”
Palgrove’s gaze went to the ceiling. “Oh, for Christ’s sake...”
It was, on the face of it, a fairly standard quarrel. The neighbours would not have given it much of a rating even if they had heard it, which they hadn’t. One fortuitous eavesdropper there was, however, whom the wrangle impressed. He was the boy from Dawson’s, delivering the evening newspaper. This boy had been reared in the very proper belief that rows were the prerogative of ordinary folk and had no place in the well-ordered lives of the sort of people who lived in Brompton Gardens. So when he heard coming through the slightly open window of Mrs Palgrove’s posh lounge some of the familiar expletives of home, he loitered in wonderment.
Which, for Mr Palgrove, was to prove unfortunate.
Chapter Five
By the time Mr Hive judged that to descend from his room would no longer entail the risk of being waylaid by his landlady, aggressively hospitable and redolent of fishcakes, he had consumed three-quarters of a bottle of gin. He was now quite confident that even if Mrs O’Brien had not yet cleared away such remnants of her daunting evening meal as she had been unable to coax and bully down the gullets of her other ‘gentlemen’, he at least was proof against persuasion.
It so happened that his optimism was not put to the test. Mrs O’Brien was off patrol, safely detained in her back kitchen by the gossip of a visiting neighbour.
Closing the street door as softly as he could behind him, Mr Hive set down upon the step the huge camera case that he had hugged close, for fear of its bumping the bannisters, during his tiptoe descent of the stairs. He touched his lilac silk cravat, stroked his moustache, and drew on one glove. He then slung the strap of the case over his left shoulder and walked as briskly as the load would allow to where he had parked, a few yards down the road, his small and elderly motorcar.
The car drew up five minutes later in the cobbled yard of the Three Crowns Hotel.
Mr Hive’s was the first arrival of the evening in the bar known as the Chandler’s Room, a name that survived from days when corn merchants in particular frequented it, passing around their little canvas bags of grain samples and swallowing Hollands-and-water from mugs as big as drench buckets. It was a low, panelled room that received little light from the narrow lane outside, but in recent years more lamps had been set in the ceiling while a rhubarb-pink glow emanated from the mirrored alcove behind a modern bar. The roof beams were genuine enough; their bowed and blackened oak gave the impression that the room was being gradually squashed by the rambling old house above and would one day admit only customers prepared to drink lying down.
Mr Hive, who was as yet nowhere near that extreme, nevertheless had to incline his head once or twice as he crossed from the door to the bar.
There was no one behind the bar. Mr Hive put his case down on the floor and rested one foot on it while he peered through a doorway into the further room from which he supposed service would arrive.
A girl—appraised by Mr Hive at once as a delicious girl, with ripe lips parted in helpful inquiry, plump white arms, and a positive reception committee of bosom—rose from a table where she had been writing in a ledger and came towards him.
Mr Hive removed his hat and kissed the bunched fingertips of his right hand.
He had intended to stay on gin, but that, he saw, would not now be suitable.
“I wonder, my dear, if you would be good enough to let me have some brandy?”
“What, to take out?” The barmaid, quite unused to circuitous gallantry, supposed that Mr Hive must be a doctor wanting restorative for somebody collapsed in the street.
He smiled. “I am scarcely likely to wish to consume it away from premises graced by so charming a person as yourself!”
She worked this one out, then turned to reach down a bottle. “Single?”
“No; a double, I fancy, would be more appropriate.” He gazed contentedly down her cleavage while she measured the drink.
She set the glass on a pink tissue mat and pushed nearer a jug of water and a soda siphon. “Seven shillings, please, sir.”
Mr Hive made a small, elegant bow of the head and drew a handful of change from his hip pocket. He held the coins in the extended palm of one hand and made unhurried selection from them. The operation served to display slim, dean and dexterous fingers, also faultlessly laundered cuffs whose gold links were in the semblance of crossed rowing sculls. These, the girl observed and indicated. “Pretty,” she said.
He looked at the links as if noticing them for the first time. He closed the hand with the money in it and turned it this way and that to make the little gold oars catch the light. “Relics of youthful athleticism,” he said, musingly. Then, brightening: “Oh, I don’t know. Henley, ’48�
�it’s not all that long ago. I dare say I could still stroke an eight.”
“I’ll bet,” the girl said.
Mr Hive put both hands in his pockets and gazed into the middle distance. His expression of benign abstraction spoke of long, golden afternoons on sun-dappled water, of the rhythmic creak of rowlocks, of bow-wave’s glug in the holes of river creatures...
“Ah, well.” He reached for the glass. “Here’s very good health to you, dear lady!”
“Cheers,” the girl murmured, softly. She waited until he had taken two or three ruminative sips of the brandy. “All right?”
Mr Hive half-closed one eye and pouted. “Superb!” he declared.
The girl nodded. “Seven shillings then, please, sir.”
With a fierce scowl of self-blame, Mr Hive rapped his forehead several times, then reached anew for money. This time he counted it assiduously into her waiting hand.
Other customers began to come into the bar. Mr Hive picked up his drink and his case and, with a final glance of admiration at the twin moonrise of flesh over the barmaid’s bodice, took himself off to a table at the side of the room opposite the door.
Twice in the next twenty minutes he went back to the bar to renew his order and, he hoped, to gain further favour in the eyes of the splendid young woman behind it.
On his first reappearance, she had asked, with becoming casualness: “Where are you from, then?” and he had invited her to guess, whereupon she had shaken her head coyly and he had rewarded her with the quotation, “From Dunbar’s ‘Flower of Cityes Alle’.” “Well I never,” she’d replied. “You don’t look Scotch.”
Now he was before her again, presenting her with his empty glass as if it were a rose. She busied herself with the bottle and the little pewter measure. Mr Hive glanced about him for an opening, non-literary this time, to further conversation. He noticed a box on the counter, a little to the left of his elbow. It was a collecting box and there was something about it, something oddly familiar, that caused him to pull a pair of spectacles from his breast pocket and read the label.
“Gracious me!” he exclaimed.
The girl looked up. She saw a grin of delighted recognition overspread her customer’s face.
“Lucy...” Mr Hive murmured to himself. He was looking happily abstracted again.
“Lucy Who?”
“Mmm...?”
“Never mind.” The girl put the re-charged glass on one of the little pink mats. Mr Hive paid without being prompted.
“Tell me, my dear,” he said with sudden resolution, “if you know who brought this box in here. It wasn’t, by any chance, a lady from London? A well-spoken, ah, personable lady?”
“I don’t know whether she came from London. She lives here now. In Flax.”
“Does she? Does she, indeed?”
“That’s right.” The girl regarded the box indifferently. She seemed to be in no degree emotionally involved with The New World Pony Rescue Campaign. “I’m trying to remember her name. Funny sort of name...”
“Miss Lucilla Teatime,” crisply announced Mr Hive.
“Yes.” The girl giggled. “That’s it. Teatime!” Instinct told her to keep hilarity in check. “Friend of yours?” she asked.
“A very old friend—and an altogether admirable lady.”
“She seemed very nice.”
“I’m happy to think you have had the privilege of knowing her.”
“Well, she doesn’t come in all that often, actually,” said the girl. “Just to see to the box, you know.”
Mr Hive nodded. “An indefatigable worker for good causes.” He again examined the box on the bar, this time a little narrowly; then he gave it an affectionate pat. “One of her favourite charities, that one,” he declared.
He returned to his seat. There were now seven or eight other people in the room. He surveyed them, one by one, over the top of his glass and decided that he liked them all, from the young couple with bright, country complexions and a careful way of sitting, to the ruminating old farmer whose extraordinary facial resemblance to a sheep was emphasized by his habit of emitting at the end of each swig of his beer a quiet little “Baaa”.
Mr Hive had just begun his fourth double brandy when three men entered the bar in a group. For a few moments they stood just inside the door while the foremost glanced searchingly round the company.
He was a man of medium height, with thin, brushed-back hair of no particular colour, a plump but sallow face and unblinking, protuberant eyes. His way of leaning forward from firmly planted feet suggested a readiness to be launched at very short notice. Even had Mr Hive not known who this man was, his powers of deduction would have told him that here was the classic attitude of preparedness for boys’ wicked wiles: the stance of a schoolmaster.
As it was, he recognized at once Mr Kingsley Booker, M.A., fourth year form-master and teacher of geography, religion and swimming at Flaxborough Grammar School. Mr Booker’s two companions he did not know, but he felt sure he was going to like them. He donned a smile in readiness.
Booker saw Hive and said: “Ah.” He came across the room at a slightly increased angle of forward tilt, as if walking against a stiff wind. He made introductions.
“Mr Mortimer Hive...Mr Clay—my headmaster.”
Mr Hive shook the soft, very warm hand of a brisk and tubby man who regarded him with eager concentration. Mr Clay had the cleanest, shiniest face Mr Hive had ever seen. His little beak-shaped nose was absolutely smooth, like pink porcelain, and had almost as high a polish as the lenses of the pince-nez it supported.
“And this is Mr O’Toole, the County Youth Employment Co-ordinator.”
“Now then, cocky,” said Mr O’Toole, affably. He did not offer his hand but turned at once to satisfy himself that some sort of drink-buying facilities existed in the room.
Hive asked what he could have the pleasure of fetching them. Mr Clay said after some consideration that a small and extremely dry sherry would be very nice. Mr Booker said he fancied to try this lager-and-lime that he had heard people talk about. Mr O’Toole said: “Pint of wallop.”
The girl behind the bar looked pleased to hear Mr Hive’s four-part order. “You’ve made some friends, then? That’s nice.” She set about the wettest part of the job first—pulling a pint of mild ale for the Youth Employment Co-ordinator.
“Oh, it’s a sociable little town,” said Mr Hive.
She poured a Tio Pepe, then a British-type lager which she vaccinated with a heavy dose of lime cordial. “For the ladies,” she announced waggishly. Mr Hive was about to correct this misconception, but decided to let it stand and to take whatever credit it might reflect.
Mr Booker helped to dispense the drinks round the table. The action revealed a big leather patch on each elbow of his tweed jacket. Both the jacket and the buttoned woollen cardigan beneath it looked as if they had been lived in for a considerable time.
Mr Clay accepted his sherry with a prim little nod that was in character with his general economy of movement (Must have a very tight skin, poor fellow, mused Mr Hive) and put it down some distance off, as though he intended to save it for Christmas.
“You are from London, I gather,” said the headmaster.
Mr Hive acknowledged that he was.
“A city of great opportunity.”
“Boundless.”
“You will appreciate, Mr Hive, that for our young people London is a magnet. To them, it promises fulfilment. We educationists may have a more sceptical view—and with good cause, I venture to say—but we do not flatter ourselves that we can correct the näive assumptions of youth. Only experience can do that.”
Mr Hive heard beside him a short, bitter laugh. It came from Mr O’Toole, who was rubbing the side of his jaw with the rim of his already empty glass. This friction made a curious sound—describable perhaps as a rasping tinkle.
“What the headmaster is leading up to, I think...”
“Now, Booker; pray allow me to do my own leading. Mr Hiv
e will see its object soon enough.” Mr Clay inclined a little closer to Mr Hive and waited for him to make a quick swallow of what remained of his brandy. He continued: “We arrange from time to time at the school what we term a careers symposium. It is attended by boys of the fifth and sixth forms and they are able to put questions to representatives of a variety of professions whom we invite as guests.”
“What a splendid idea!” exclaimed Mr Hive.
A tiny smile of pleasure augmented the glints and gleams of the headmaster’s polished face. “We have, I think I may say, found the idea a useful one.”
“Splendid!” (Mr Hive had decided that “splendid” was a splendid word.)
“Quite. Now it so happens that just such a symposium has been arranged for this evening, in, ah, twenty-five minutes’ time. The panel—I fancy that is the word—is a not undistinguished one. We have been promised the attendance of a solicitor, also an estate agent, an inspector of police, and a—let me see—a manager of a saw-mill, I believe.