“Yes,” said Oliver.
Minchip shifted his position in his chair.
“Now, why I came to see you, sir, is that I thought you might like to change your account of what you did in the latter part of the evening.” Oliver took a sip of his tea. “That account never quite made sense to me. A walk in the garden, yes. So long a walk, no. You’d been very conscientious earlier in the evening—seeing the young children were all right, talking to Lady Wadham, who—well, never mind what I think of Lady Wadham. Then suddenly you forget about the party and the games and take a long, long walk round and round a darkened garden (one that isn’t at all attractive even in daylight). Your evening, if you take my point, doesn’t hang together.”
“It’s what happened,” said Oliver.
“So I ask myself,” said Minchip, ignoring him, “whether something rather different might have occurred. One possibility is that you saw the Major leaving, and decided to follow him. Natural, in the circumstances, after the cruel tricks that had been played on your family. You probably thought he was up to some further mischief, as indeed he was. If that’s what happened, you could also have seen what went on in the grounds of Hallam, and you could either confirm or contradict the Major’s account.”
He left a short space of silence, but Oliver said nothing.
“There is another possibility, of course, and that is that you anticipated trouble that evening. You’re an intelligent chap, and you realized that everyone would know that the Hallam family would be at Beecham Park that night. So it is just possible that you took the lane some time before the Major, that you heard somebody coming along the river path, and concealed yourself behind the willow tree. And that you were so enraged by what you saw that you threw yourself on Chris Keene, with the result that we know.”
This time the pause was more definite, but Oliver obviously realized he could not let it go on too long.
“No,” he said calmly. “I just walked around at Beecham, as I told you.”
• • •
“It was appalling,” said Dennis, his handsome face positively haggard with misery. He poured himself a strong Scotch, and forgot to offer anybody else anything. “Absolutely humiliating and upsetting. I’m a damned fool. I should have realized.”
“But, darling, how on earth could you?” Helen asked. Her eyes, from the sofa, were of a watery brilliance.
“That innkeeper’s behaviour should have told me. He was almost impertinent. I should have realized then. The people in the villages have never had much sympathy for us, but they’ve always been civil.”
“Who was this man?” Sarah asked. “The one who called you a murderer?”
“I have an idea he works for Edwards, at Wilton Farm. I think his name is Dunnock.”
“Ah,” said Sarah. “Mrs. Keene’s friends.”
“Mrs. Keene’s friends?” Helen turned to ask.
“When Oliver called to see her, Mrs. Dunnock was there. She was very unpleasant.”
“Oh dear,” said Helen. “In all this trouble I forgot to ask Oliver about Mrs. Keene. Not that it matters. It doesn’t sound as if she would allow us to do anything for her.”
“What exactly did he say, Daddy?” Elizabeth asked.
Dennis took a gulp of his whisky, then realized he was the only one drinking and went over to the sideboard to pour them some sherry. With his back turned to them he said:
“I asked him to give me a shove, you see. To try and get Bumps started. And he turned and just stood there, looking at me. Then he said: ‘No. Push your own bloody car.’ And then he said he didn’t have any truck with . . . murderers.” Dennis straightened and brought the glasses over, his face a mask of pain. “It was like being . . . hit with a heavy club. I had to sit in the car to get my breath back. I just couldn’t believe the words had been spoken.”
“But if they are friends of Mrs. Keene—” Helen Hallam began.
“Oh, that wasn’t the end. I had to walk home, of course. And that meant coming through Chowton. There weren’t many people about, luckily, because it was nearly five, but the ones that were . . . looked right through me. And one man—Sid Cotton, you know, someone I’ve always thought a splendid chap—he simply turned round and went back the way he’d come, to avoid meeting me. It was terrible.”
Elizabeth unconvincingly said: “You’re sure you’re not imagining some of this, Daddy?”
“Yes, yes, I’m sure . . . You knew about it, didn’t you, Sarah?”
“Yes,” Sarah said simply. “And Oliver knew. We decided to say nothing to you. We hoped it would blow over, though I don’t think we thought it would. Not until someone was arrested.”
“Of course, I’ve always known they had no great affection for us, for me,” said Dennis bitterly. “The younger son who stepped into his brother’s shoes. Edward would have done the Squire thing so much better: he enjoyed it, and they liked him. They wept in the village when he died. I was the cuckoo in the nest. And then there were those daft rumours about my wound.” He looked at Sarah. “I suppose you’ve heard them?”
Sarah nodded.
“Oliver hinted something about them, after he’d been to see Mrs. Keene.”
“I thought they’d been laid to rest long ago, but I suppose this business has revived them. People remember, in villages.”
“Perhaps we should have fought harder against them,” said Helen.
“I wouldn’t have deigned to. A pacifist proving his fighting credentials? Anyway, the truth is so ludicrous they’d never have believed it. Shot in the foot by a bloody careless Welshman, who couldn’t even do firearms drill without letting the thing off.” He turned to Sarah again. “We were both in Cairo, as part of the Expeditionary Force preparing for the Dardanelles campaign. The care I got for my wound was hopeless, it started festering, and I was shipped home. The Welshman survived Gallipoli, and sends me a card every Christmas saying it’s wonderful how famous I’ve become and he hopes the wound isn’t hurting. What am I supposed to do? Show the card around to prove I didn’t do it myself? The whole thing was farcical—practically surreal.”
“I don’t think anyone who knew you would believe you did it yourself,” Elizabeth said stoutly.
“But they do! They must do! That’s why all the Major’s slanders have fallen on such fertile ground. Of course I know they’ve never understood us, or what we’ve tried to do all these years. I remember saying as much to you, Sarah, when you first arrived. But you would think that when something like this came up, they’d stand by us, wouldn’t you? Not immediately jump to the worst conclusion . . . You know, I really think that all our work for peace just confirms them in the belief that I’m a coward who shot himself to get out of the war . . . Sometimes I despair.”
Helen patted the cushion on the sofa beside her, and he came to sit by her with a rueful smile.
“You bear the brunt of all my black moods,” he said. She took his hands.
“We’ll come through it, Dennis. We always have,” she said. “Through my silly fling with Jerry Cousins, through Edward’s death, through your coming home wounded and all those rumours the first time round. We must be survivors, I think. We’ll come through all this as well.”
“Of course we will . . . Meanwhile the business of coming through has to be faced up to, and I don’t know that I’m ready for it yet.” Dennis brushed the hair from his eyes, reminding Sarah very much of Will. “I was going to go up to London tomorrow, to see Victor Gollancz. You know, about the Writers for Peace anthology that he wants me to put together for the Left Book Club. I was going to take the train from Hatherton, but I don’t think I could meet their faces on the platform. I think I’ll drive in to Banbury . . . Isn’t it ridiculous? I feel guilty and ashamed even though I’ve done nothing. It’s like being a child again.”
Elizabeth said: “It’s Coffey who ought to feel ashamed. Even if he didn’t kill him, he started it all off.”
Helen said: “Please God it may all end soon. Please God they make an
arrest.”
Sarah remembered Oliver’s words, echoed by Winifred: “The longer the investigation lasts, the less likely there is to be an arrest.”
CHAPTER 17
Sarah was having a nightmare. Except that it didn’t feel like any nightmare she had had before in her short life. For a start she felt herself to be awake, and always in the past she had struggled, suffocatingly, to waken. Then, this nightmare seemed not to centre on concrete dangers or horrors—monsters, deformed men, precipices or juggernaut machines—but somehow to be about ideas, interpretations, mental states.
To be sure there were objects in it, and those objects seemed to have come together in some Alice in Wonderland sort of conjunction, but they seemed not so much terrifying as ridiculous. A cream cake and an old sepia photograph of cricket teams. Sometimes the photograph, in a silver-gilt frame, sat on top of the cream cake. Sometimes they seemed to dance in her consciousness in some lunatic waltz.
If she struggled she could pinpoint whence they had intruded themselves into her sleeping mind. Surely she was sleeping? They were associated with her first day at Hallam. They had eaten cream cake, and she had found it too rich . . . But that wasn’t it . . . And Dennis had talked about a cricket game played just before the war, between a team of his own friends, and a team of village men. The photograph she had somehow imagined for herself, on the model of sepia photographs of parish outings that they had had at home. She had never seen any actual photograph of the teams at Hallam.
But it wasn’t the cream cake or the photograph as objects that were important. Some significance lay behind them. There were questions that the cake and the photograph were trying to thrust upon her, but which she struggled against articulating. And when they did assume some verbal form in her mind, they seemed merely silly: when Helen offered to go and fetch the cream cake from the kitchen, did she know cream cakes shouldn’t sit out in the sun? When Dennis said that by 1916 only two of the cricketers were still alive, was he talking about both teams, or just the team of his own friends? The questions were absurd.
But there was something behind them, some significance that would not let itself be thrust down, however reluctant Sarah was to look it squarely in the face. It seemed ungrateful, selfish, almost impious, to go into the implications of the questions, and yet . . .
Mrs. Munday was very hard-worked. Pinner too, but Mrs. Munday especially. She worked gladly, cheerfully, with love—for she really did love the Hallams. But did that make it better or worse? The Hallams were uneasy with the whole business of being employers of servants. That was why they employed daily women from the village. But wouldn’t life have been a great deal easier for Mrs. Munday if there had been a few more full-time servants? It was Mrs. Munday, Sarah remembered, who had eventually brought out the cake.
She herself—this was when Sarah hated herself for her selfishness—had had a wonderful feeling when she arrived of being part of the family. And such a family. So warm, and friendly, and wise, and good-looking. They had treated her, always, as a person, not as a governess. When she had asked for time off, it had been conceded without question: whenever she wanted it, she only had to ask. But wouldn’t it have been better if she had not had to ask? If they had come to some agreement about evenings off, days off, as soon as she’d taken up the position? She hadn’t liked to ask too often, and of course the opportunities offered by the villages were few. She had really worked very hard since she had arrived at Hallam.
Of course she had worked with love—for Chloe, for Helen. She felt they, all of them, had liberated her. She had cast off at Hallam the small-mindedness and petty tyrannies of her home. And yet was there not a danger that she might, willingly and with love, have shaken off one set of family chains, only to assume another set? Was that what Winifred, in her kind, not very articulate way, had been trying to warn her against?
How often had Helen put Chloe to bed since she arrived? How often had she seen Helen helping Mrs. Munday in the kitchen?
Sarah put those questions from her, as being too ridiculously petty.
Because the other question really was the more important. Somehow she was morally sure that Dennis had meant that only two from his team were still alive in 1916. Two from his world of witty, well-spoken, well-educated people—the sort of people with whom he felt at home.
The Hallam world suddenly presented itself to her as two tracts of territory, separated by a ditch. Within the inner circle were the family and servants at Hallam—a warm, beautiful, cosy community. Beyond the ditch was humanity at large, for whom the Hallams had a great, generous love, the highest aspirations. But between those two worlds were the people in the ditch: the people among whom the Hallams lived, and for whom they felt nothing. For example the people in the villages—ordinary, humdrum, inarticulate humanity.
Helen barely knew the names of the women who came daily from the village to scrub and vacuum and dust. She was always very charming to them, but she hardly knew them—what families they had, what problems there were in living on a farm-labourer’s subsistence wage. Even her mother had taken more interest than that in the villagers of Stetford. Dennis knew more names, but he confessed himself unable to communicate with the local men, or they with him. Dennis lamented the terrible slaughter of the Great War, but when Mrs. Keene’s husband died a delayed death from his wartime gassing, it was Oliver who had gone to help her get money for his funeral from the Foresters and the British Legion. Dear, kind, unglamorous Oliver—it was always he who shouldered the difficult tasks. And when he had gone to see Mrs. Keene after Chris’s death, Helen had even forgotten to ask him if there was anything they could do.
Of course the Hallams had been embarrassed by the whole idea of being gentry, by the pattern of proprietorship and subservience that it implied. Yet they had lived the life of the gentry, hadn’t they? They hadn’t given it up. They had just given up the gentry’s duties.
And it wasn’t just the villagers who were somehow outside their vision. Helen had no sympathy for Winifred Hallam’s frustrated maternal instincts. Her longing for children merely repelled and frightened her. It aroused no pity. And Mostyn they all dismissed as stupid.
Did Mostyn Hallam deserve the ridicule that the Hallams served him with whenever his name came up? She remembered them suggesting that he would hate them arriving at Cabbot in Bumps, but he hadn’t displayed any such reaction, merely unashamed pleasure at seeing them there. He had been perfectly amiable to a wide range of people, something the Hallams found it difficult to be. There were many different kinds of exclusiveness, and Sarah suddenly realized that her Hallams were intensely exclusive people.
It was Winifred Hallam who had discovered her passion for gardens. Helen had never probed her interests. And Winifred had suggested a practical way of using that passion in a future career. Sarah remembered Roland telling her who had helped him get his Oxford scholarship: “Mr. Mostyn Hallam.” And Mostyn helped him out in vacations by employing him. Admittedly Mostyn was the local MP, and had to curry favour. But she didn’t think Roland saw it like that. There had been an emphasis: “Mostyn Hallam.” Had he been trying to say that he could have expected no help or encouragement from the Dennis Hallams? That they did nothing for the ordinary people in the village?
Why, when this business had blown up, had the villagers been against the Hallams right from the start? The Major was a mere outsider—usually a figure of suspicion in a village. His manner was not of the sort to gain him support. His attitudes were reactionary in a way hardly calculated to appeal to ordinary people. But they had been, all the time, instinctively on his side. Was it because they were instinctively against the Hallams?
There was something about the Hallams’ attitude to people, their relationships with them . . .
Chan. Suddenly Sarah thought of Chan. Had he liked being called Chan? The name of a ridiculous Chinese detective. She put the thought from her, despising herself. They had got on well with Chan: he had liked them, and they had liked him. Oliver
and doubtless all his friends at Oxford had called him Chan. It was no different from shortening William to Will . . . Will, rather than Bill. Shakespeare, rather than Sikes . . .
There was something about the Hallams that instinctively shrugged off everything that was common and ordinary and homespun.
They could talk to Chan, because he was one of themselves—a thinking, intellectual, politically active person. They could not talk to Mrs. Keene. Only Oliver—kind, concerned Oliver—could talk to Mrs. Keene. A phrase from Bleak House thrust itself into her brain: Telescopic Philanthropy. The Hallams kept their eyes on the horizon, on a new and better world, but they hardly noticed what went on around their feet. There was in the Hallams, for all their high-thinking and their social concern, a sort of lack, a sort of blankness.
And they were quite unaware of it themselves. When Dennis had talked about his brutal reception in the village, surely there had been—she had noticed it, but hastily suppressed the knowledge—a note of self-pity in his voice. You would have thought, he had said, that the village would have stood by him. His better self would have told him that loyalty had to be earned. But at the crisis he had retreated into the role of squire, expecting the backing of the peasantry.
Loyalty had to be earned. But the public-spiritedness of the Hallams had spread itself too wide, had been too general or too abstract. And here at home they had not had enough love or concern to extend it to their poorer, less intelligent neighbours in the village. They had retreated into their warm little nest, the loving family circle with their devoted servants and their funny old car, and their ball-games on the lawn with Bounce.
The Skeleton in the Grass Page 16