‘Never.’ Mrs Husbands hesitated. ‘Beyond that, I have, of course, no knowledge.’
‘I suppose not.’ Appleby had walked to the desk, and now he tapped the postcard which still lay on it. ‘You have heard that this is the beginning of a quotation from Shakespeare – a speech of Cardinal Wolsey’s in Henry VIII, after his fall? Farewell, a long farewell, to all my greatness. You can’t think of anything specific that Mr Packford might have thought to refer to in that way? It mightn’t refer to an approaching need to live in some much more modest fashion than here at Urchins?’
‘I think that very unlikely indeed.’ Mrs Husbands spoke with decision. ‘It would be much more likely to refer, surely, to his very considerable reputation. I have often been told that Mr Packford was, quite strictly, a great scholar. And he naturally set much more store by that than by the mere fact of being a country gentleman with a small estate. But I don’t myself believe that he was thinking either of one sort of greatness or another. He would often produce what were clearly quotations with only a very partial application to the circumstances prompting them.’
‘That’s something I was aware of in him myself.’ Mrs Husbands, it seemed to Appleby, if not very intelligent, was nevertheless a perfectly shrewd woman when unexcited. ‘You don’t know, I suppose, what happens to Urchins now?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘I understand from Mr Edward that his late brother’s solicitor, a Mr Rood, is coming down this evening about matters of that sort. Do you know him?’
‘Yes, I do. He has been here several times. I believe he shared some of Mr Packford’s learned interests. Perhaps that is why Mr Packford employed him.’
‘You speak, Mrs Husbands, as if you rather distrusted the man.’
‘I don’t know about that. But I decidedly don’t care for him. He appears to me to be simultaneously arid and conceited. It is a combination for which there is nothing to be said.’
‘Well, I would agree with the general proposition.’ Mrs Husbands, Appleby thought, was certainly possessed of an academic past, and had picked up from it turns of phrase which were not entirely natural to her. She seemed, too, to have a considerable capacity for disapproving of people. And this reflection prompted Appleby to a final, slightly odd question. ‘Who would you say,’ he asked, ‘is the most sensible person about Urchins at the moment?’
Mrs Husbands had picked up the tray and was moving to the door. Her answer came without a moment’s hesitation. ‘Canon Rixon, without a doubt.’
‘Does he take a dark view of people?’
‘A dark view?’ Mrs Husbands almost flushed, so that it was clear that this very mild thrust had gone home. ‘Far from it. I should describe him as a benevolent man.’
‘I think,’ Appleby said, ‘I’ll have a word with him next. But first I propose to have a further look around this library.’
‘To search it, you mean?’ Mrs Husbands was very chilly again.
‘More or less that.’ Appleby crossed the room and politely opened the door. ‘And I needn’t detain you longer,’ he said.
There were, of course, tens of thousands of books – and all, it was clear, of a learned and solid sort. Urchins no doubt ran to a certain amount of light literature. But that would be kept in other apartments, where it could be picked up and laid down again by casual readers without any disturbance of the maturer studies of the owner of the house. Appleby poked about the drawers and cabinets – not with much conviction, since, after all, Cavill had been there before him. He climbed the little spiral staircase and examined some of the very topmost rows of books. These appeared unfrequented, and were not free from a fine film of dust. He guessed that Mrs Husbands had superintended a major cleaning operation of the library during Packford’s absence in Italy, and that when he was at home he didn’t much like the place to be disturbed. He descended, and studied the manner in which the main collection was arranged on the shelves. There wasn’t any very substantial evidence of system. Packford, like many of his kind, probably prided himself on the power of his memory to take him straight to a wanted book. Nevertheless the volumes all had shelf-marks, and there was a substantial card-index in what appeared to be good order. During the immediately preceding few years Packford had taken to noting in this the dates of his acquisitions and purchases. It might be possible, if one had occasion for so laborious a job, to distinguish, by means of this, something of the particular directions in which his mind had been reaching out during the period. But this wasn’t an activity which Appleby proposed for himself at the moment.
Nevertheless the books continued to occupy him for some time. Sometimes he stood back, as if to gain some general impression of a substantial section of them. Sometimes he peered minutely at one row or another. He wondered whether Packford had employed an assistant: and, if so, what sort of operations that assistant performed. He might ask Mrs Husbands.
But better not do that, he said to himself as he left the room. It was just possible that he was on to something. If he was, it would be prudent to keep quite, quite dark about it at the moment.
6
Appleby found Canon Rixon in the garden. He was seated in an arbour, playing Snakes and Ladders with a young woman. The Canon was very ugly and the young woman quite ravishingly pretty. She was posed – for it was much as if her companion had deliberately posed her for his own pleasure and Appleby’s – in a small shifting dapple of sunlight and shadow. And she was like some commonplace flower in a cottage garden – as such a flower might appear when viewed under the influence of mescalin. Or she might have been something on a canvas of Renoir’s. Only that would have been a pity, since then it wouldn’t have been possible to take her clothes off.
This last wasn’t, perhaps, a proper thought by which to be visited in the presence of a clergyman. But then the Canon himself seemed to take in the young woman a delight which certainly comprehended more than her immortal soul. ‘Do you know Alice?’ he asked cheerfully when Appleby had introduced himself. ‘She ought, you know, to be Alice Packford. Only it seems that she isn’t – and that’s a great shame. Although, as things have turned out, it wouldn’t have made so very much difference – would it, my dear?’ He had turned to Alice and – in what, Appleby admitted, was a properly fatherly way – patted the small rosy hand which was holding a dice-box. ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury, it is true, might not be in agreement with me. But we must remember that there is to be neither marrying nor giving in marriage later on. So, at least, our recent awkward situation won’t simply repeat itself again in heaven. Alice, my child, it’s your throw.’
Alice threw vigorously. ‘Five!’ she cried in triumph. And then her face fell. ‘It’s the very same horrid snake as last time!’
‘So it is.’ Rixon shook a commiserating head. ‘And you see what a really trying game it is. Compare it with real life. There are any number of snakes in that. But you can’t be called upon to visit the tummy of precisely the same snake twice. That is what, in my profession, we call a comfortable thought. Now – let me see.’ He rattled the dice-box. ‘Four! Dear, dear – it takes me just past the longest ladder on the board.’
‘I’ll win yet.’ Alice rattled with determination. She was clearly dead keen on the game. At the same time she was weeping softly. The tears on her cheeks were like drops of dew on a peach. ‘Six! That means I have another turn.’
‘Now there, you see, Snakes and Ladders doesn’t differ from life. There’s always the possibility of another turn. Not perhaps for an old fellow like myself, but certainly for the young. Six again! That puts you right ahead of me. I’m not sure that this is at all a Christian game. It keeps on upping one person and downing another. Whereas Christianity, as my dear old bishop used to say, puts us all on a common level.’
Appleby watched the game in silence until it ended in Alice’s victory. Canon Rixon continued to talk cheerfully throughout, and it had to be concluded that he had his own peculiar system of pastoral care, which he was in fact at present d
irecting upon Alice with some success. Despite the girl’s blooming beauty, there was more than her occasional slow tears to show that she had been through deep distress. And unhappiness seemed all wrong for Alice. Appleby could see that any man whose eye rested on her twice might find himself absolutely compelled to do anything in the world to preserve her in a condition of unflawed enjoyment of the world. Perhaps it had been like that with the late Lewis Packford.
And this confirmed itself as soon as Alice began to talk. ‘Do you know,’ she asked Appleby gravely, ‘that nobody has been so nice to me as the Reverend here?’ This appeared to be her way of referring to Rixon. ‘And that’s a thing you’d never expect, now – would you?’
At this Rixon gave Appleby a cheerful wink. ‘Alice,’ he said, ‘you’re an ignorant girl. Your knowledge of the beneficed clergy of the Church of England is, I perceive, nebulous. But you’re a good child, all the same.’
‘And it was true right from the start,’ Alice went on. ‘I mean, from when I arrived. And I was mad, you know. Oh, my – wasn’t I mad!’
Appleby nodded. ‘At not being married?’
‘Well – that, of course. It was a terrible sell. Yes, it was a terrible let-down. But what I was chiefly mad at was his being so silly. Loo, I mean.’
‘Our late friend,’ Rixon interpolated.
‘I only wanted a ring, you know.’ Alice appeared to have embarked upon what she appeared to regard as a process of apology. ‘Just a Woolworth ring, like other girls have. There wouldn’t – would there? – have been any real harm in that. I mean there wouldn’t have been any more harm. The Reverend says there wouldn’t.’
Rixon coughed. ‘In point of fact,’ he said to Appleby, ‘I believe I used the phrase “virtually no more harm.” But no matter.’
‘And there would have been a nice feeling about it.’ Alice paused. ‘I must have pestered Loo. It was that bad of me. And one day he simply said we were going to get married – only that we’d keep it quiet. Well, that was all right by me. But I never thought he was doing what he was. Oh, my – I was mad!’ She sighed, produced a handkerchief, and wiped away a tear. ‘I was in a tearing fury with him that I arrived here. And I think Loo’ – suddenly she burst out sobbing – ‘got me wrong!’
‘Got you wrong?’ Appleby considered this. ‘You mean your being mad wasn’t for the reason he supposed it to be?’
Alice shook her head mutely. She was incapable of reply. And Canon Rixon took it upon himself to explain. ‘That is precisely it. Alice felt that her – that Packford had done something extremely dangerous just for her sake. That was it, Alice, wasn’t it?’
Alice nodded. ‘It’s something they put you inside for,’ she sobbed. ‘I know. They did it to my Uncle Jim. And it wouldn’t matter how I lied. Not after it was found out. Because of course it’s in writing in the place we were married. They’d be certain to get him. And that’s why I was so mad with him – for being so silly just because I’d had a fancy for something. And I think he thought it was because I’d started hating him, the great silly.’
‘Yes, I see.’ What Appleby was chiefly seeing was Alice’s large appeal. Not only were all her tangible and visible surfaces golden. She quite plainly had a heart of gold as well. ‘And you’re afraid,’ he asked, ‘that his making that mistake may have – well, got him down?’
‘Just that. After all, the others were really hating him.’
‘The others?’
‘Ruth was really hating him. And the old woman too – his cook. I could see that in her at once.’
‘His cook?’ Appleby was puzzled.
‘Alice means the capable Mrs Husbands,’ Rixon interrupted. ‘She does, no doubt, supervise the culinary side of the establishment. And she might be described as of full years. I hope Alice exaggerates. It would be quite reasonable that Mrs Husbands should be, shall we say, cross. But hatred is another matter. And as for Ruth, my dear Alice, the fact is that you don’t quite understand her type. You haven’t come across it, I dare say.’
‘You meet all sorts in my trade.’ Alice was ingenuously indignant. ‘And I’d like you to know that I’ve always been mostly on the saloon and private-bar side. So I see all the superior ones too, believe me. But it’s true that Ruth has me guessing. And what poor Loo could see in a–’
‘Quite so, quite so.’ Rixon made a restraining gesture. ‘But the point, my dear, was this. Ruth was very cold and cutting. But that doesn’t mean hate – not in a woman of that type of education, and so forth. Ruth may have been feeling very much as you were. I hope Sir John will bear me out in this.’
Challenged in this way, Appleby felt that there would at least be no harm in a conventional expression of agreement. ‘And I don’t see,’ he added, turning to Alice, ‘that you can really have anything with which to reproach yourself. In your attitude, I mean, to Mr Packford just before his death.’
‘But, you see, I don’t remember!’ Alice again applied her handkerchief to her eyes. The fact that she did so with a refined gesture becoming in one on the private-bar side didn’t make her woe any less appealing. ‘I often don’t, when I’m upset. Not since the bottle.’
‘Not since the bottle?’ Appleby supposed for a moment that this must be an idiom meant to express the period since Alice’s first infancy.
‘Alice,’ Canon Rixon explained, ‘was hit on the head with a bottle.’ He spoke with the casual ease of a clergyman who prides himself on knowing the world. ‘It is, of course, one of the professional risks of the licensed trade.’
‘But it was in the snug,’ Alice added – as if this circumstance removed the affair somewhat out of the ordinary. ‘It was in the snug, and by a very well-conducted gentleman who came in regular as clockwork to listen to the nine o’clock news. He had to be put away, poor soul.’
‘And you have been liable,’ Appleby asked, ‘to bouts of forgetfulness ever since then?’
‘Only when I’ve been upset really bad.’ Alice was anxious, it seemed, not to exaggerate this aspect of her personality.
‘A purely hysterical amnesia,’ Rixon said. There appeared to be few spheres into which his technique of cheerful reassurance didn’t reach. ‘There is seldom, I understand, anything at all serious in that sort of thing.’ He paused. ‘Although it must, of course, have its inconveniences.’
‘Quite so.’ Appleby didn’t give much more than civil attention to this. He was looking curiously at the young woman. ‘And what happens?’ he asked. ‘How do you behave when you have these temporary failures of memory?’
‘I can’t tell, can I?’ Alice made this point with a great appearance of reason.
‘Well, no.’ Appleby smiled as encouragingly as he could, for it struck him that the girl was now rather frightened. ‘But I suppose you are given tolerably reliable information about it from time to time?’
‘People don’t say much. It’s kind of awkward, you see.’
‘Yes, I do see that.’ Appleby was patient. ‘And you certainly needn’t talk about this at all, if you don’t want to.’
Alice took a deep breath. She was helpless before this magnanimity. ‘But they do say,’ she said, ‘that I can behave real queer.’
‘And it was like that the other evening? There’s a big gap in what you can remember anything about?’
‘Yes. From the sweet.’
‘From the sweet?’ Appleby was puzzled.
Alice blushed. ‘What we had at the end. The dessert.’
Rixon chuckled. ‘Which the profane vulgar,’ he said, ‘do denominate pudding.’ He patted Alice’s hand again. It was something, Appleby reflected, that could quite rapidly build up into a habit.
‘Because after that,’ Alice went on, ‘I can remember nothing at all. Not until I woke up next morning.’ She looked at Appleby with large woebegone eyes. ‘Not,’ she amplified, ‘until they woke me up in my own bed with a cup of tea next morning.’
And at this Alice went indoors. Appleby thoughtfully watched her departure. ‘I suppose
,’ he asked Rixon, ‘that the poor girl was summoned after the discovery of Packford’s death? It wasn’t left until that cup of tea?’
‘She was certainly summoned. We all were. But I can well believe she was in some state she didn’t afterwards remember. There was something somnambulistic about her, without question. She registered what, superficially, one would have called normal shock. And yet there was something odd about it.’ Rixon hesitated. ‘You don’t think, my dear sir, that she could conceivably have been in any way responsible for–’
‘One can’t, in a business of this sort, afford to rule anything out. And a girl who, on the night of a somewhat mysterious fatality, may have been wandering about in what is called, I believe, a dissociated state certainly mustn’t be ignored. Not that I’m so interested in Alice as I am in you.’
‘In me?’ Canon Rixon was undoubtedly startled by this sudden assault. He had picked up the Snakes and Ladders, and now the dice and counters could be heard to rattle sharply in their box.
‘Or in anybody whose connection with the dead man was more on his professional and learned than on his personal and – shall we say? – amorous side. You see, Dr Rixon, the spectacle of a man of Lewis Packford’s standing and intelligence being pursued by two enraged wives is so exceedingly surprising that it tends to shove itself into the very centre of the picture. And that may be unjustifiable. It’s true that he must have found marriage an extremely interesting experience–’
Rixon nodded. ‘The evidence,’ he said urbanely, ‘points that way.’
‘But I doubt whether it was really so absorbing as his work.’
‘I rather agree.’
‘Well then, consider that scrawled message found on his desk. Accept the straightforward view that Lewis Packford wrote it and then blew his brains out. And accept, too, the supposition that he used that particular quotation not entirely at random. What would be your comment on it?’
The Long Farewell Page 9