What Happened at Hazelwood?

by Michael Innes

‘You should wear plenty of clothes,’ said Grace – and seemed rather to imply that if Joyleen had her way she would appear in nothing but a string of beads and a sarong.

  ‘And wool next the skin,’ said Lucy. ‘But no doubt you will know about wool. The Sussex Hallidays have cousins in Victoria – or is it Queensland? – who are said to have contrived to grow very good wool. Of course, with a special sort of sheep. I expect it would be rather like a goat.’

  ‘Talking of goats,’ said a voice at the door, ‘how do you really like your father-in-law, Joyleen?’

  It was – needless to say – Mervyn; he had slipped away to escape that edict of silence. But for the fact that I was coming to feel things at Hazelwood as curiously ghost-like and impermanent I think I should have taken over the schoolroom business from George and ordered him to bed.

  But Joyleen didn’t seem to find anything offensive or even odd in the question. ‘I like him,’ she said. ‘He’s not so slow as Gerard.’

  Mervyn grinned wickedly at this cheap speech. ‘No, I suppose not. In fact I should imagine him to have been quite fast in his day.’

  Joyleen assumed an expression of importance and mystery. ‘There are stories about him.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Grace.

  ‘About him and Sir George and that brother of Sir George’s they were talking of – the one with the funny name.’

  ‘Denzell,’ said Mervyn. ‘Denzell is the funny name – Joyleen, my dear.’

  I don’t think Joyleen saw this – and in Bondi, no doubt, there are Joyleens in every street. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘–Denzell. Of course it was ever so long ago and I don’t really know about it. But I think they were all nearly charged with – with absorption.’

  ‘Absorption?’ I exclaimed. It seemed an improbable crime – unless indeed the reference was to some illegal attempt to drain Dismal Swamp.

  ‘Abortion,’ said Mervyn easily. ‘The dear, pure girl means abortion.’

  ‘She means abduction.’ Grace was quite decided. ‘It is just what one would expect of George. And of Hippias as well. As soon as he came into the dining-room I saw that he was a loose fish.’

  ‘He is also,’ said Mervyn, ‘a widower, and in that sense loose too. So let Grace get out her rod and line.’

  But Grace paid no attention to this. She was too absorbed in the fresh revelation of her brother’s depravities. ‘Abduction!’ she repeated.

  Joyleen nodded. ‘And on a large scale,’ she added solemnly.

  Grace’s eye took on its most fanatical gleam. ‘Is there no end,’ she exclaimed with passion, ‘to our family shame? Three of us nearly charged with the abduction of numerous women.’

  Joyleen stared. ‘Women?’ she said. ‘But it wasn’t anything like that. It was b1ackbirds.’

  One has, of course, heard that if a common sparrow appears in Australia whole populations go on the hunt, shot-gun in hand. And, conceivably, legal consequences to the abducting of blackbirds were merely another ornithological eccentricity of the place. This mystery would presently have been resolved – Joyleen indeed had opened her mouth to continue – when we were interrupted by a loud crash from the corridor, mingled with the horrid sound of much breaking glass.

  Really sedate members of the landed gentry, I am sure, pay no attention to such domestic calamities, maintaining an air of obliviousness until the time comes to say something nasty next morning. Being only an actress, I was out of the drawing-room door in a jiffy. And the others, infected by this bourgeois behaviour, followed.

  So we all saw both Owdon and Hippias. Hippias was walking away from us and in the act of turning the corner which led to George’s study. But evidently he had just passed Owdon and was presumably responsible for the wretched man’s condition. For Owdon was standing staring after him, a silver tray and a litter of shivered glass on the parquetry at his feet, and his arms hanging in a sort of limp tremble at his sides. You can seldom read any expression on Owdon’s face – the pirates have left too little of it for that – but he retains a circulatory and respiratory system, and consequently a complexion capable of registering emotional changes. He had now gone a parchment colour, with greenish mottlings as of mildew or blight. Just such dead, it occurred to me, must Dismal Swamp render up from time to time.

  Of course the damage was pretty steep – two or three decanters and quite a lot of rather pleasant old glass. But such disasters are a sort of professional risk with butlers, and I didn’t see that he should be so upset as all that.

  ‘Owdon,’ I said sharply – for the fellow seemed in a perfect daze – ‘all you need is a dust-pan and a broom.’

  He looked at me for a second unknowingly. ‘Dust-pans and brooms,’ he murmured, ‘baize aprons and silver polish. The key of the cellars and a book for keeping accounts.’

  Joyleen giggled; I suppose she was scared by this untoward turn to things in a baronial hall. And I’m not sure I wasn’t a bit scared myself, for I had never known Owdon behave in so queer a fashion before. There was something queer too in his voice which I couldn’t at all define, and I was seized by that irrational and overpowering feeling of a thing’s having happened before which is the product, it is said, of certain sorts of fatigue. Long ago Owdon had spoken just these words… Yes, I was scared, for now I positively stamped my foot at him. ‘Or if you’re shaken up,’ I said, ‘send Timmy. We can’t have this mess left about.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He was looking at me unknowingly out of his one eye. Then recognition dawned in it. ‘Yes, your ladyship,’ he murmured. And he continued to look at me.

  The look was stranger than his voice had been. I had a panicky feeling that he was seeing something that he hadn’t seen before; or that I had suddenly appeared to him in a fresh light. ‘Don’t let the past come back,’ he said. ‘Strangle it. Anything is better than the return of the past.’

  Well, it is difficult to express how confounding this was. Its most obvious aspect was that of crude melodrama – for what could be more conventionally conceived than this of the mysterious manservant acquired in the master’s shady days and now thrown sensationally off his balance by the appearance of some link with the bad old times? The stricken butler and the shattered glass: ought it not to have been possible to predict the snowstorm and the blunt instrument straightaway?

  But there was more than this simple melodrama. There was something odd in the man’s choice of words – and something very odd in the manner of their address to me. They ought to have been, so to speak, turned inward; pure soliloquy; 0 what a rogue and peasant slave am I. Instead of which they seemed addressed to me by way of serious admonition. Owdon was speaking out of his own experience – but he was speaking to me.

  Owdon certainly has a past – in fact several pasts, including Timmy. And no doubt I have a past too. But assuredly our pasts have nothing in common and I didn’t at all see why at the moment I should be dragged in. Nor, seconds later and when he had recovered himself, did Owdon himself; he stopped off squinneying at me and applied himself to picking up the larger chunks of broken decanter.

  And at this Grace spoke up. It was surprising that she hadn’t uttered before. I fancy she had been rather intimidated by an Owdon who had momentarily become something other than an automaton. It was true that, unless some Simney lady had possessed tastes decidedly peculiar, one must suppose him to have been this at least once before. But we had known him for years as a dummy; and for a time Grace had been disconcerted and silent. Now however, and seeing Owdon occupied in a properly menial fashion with the debris, she provided her own sort of commentary to the scene.

  ‘Were my poor dear father alive,’ said Grace, ‘how he would wince at these disorderly scenes. He was a man of the purest moral principles and believed above all things in the sanctity of the home.’

  ‘He,’ said Mervyn, ‘brought back no pirates from Pinnaroo, no butlers from Bumbunga
.’

  ‘Guilty consciences,’ said Grace looking at Owdon. ‘And hidden courses and irregular passions,’ she added looking at me.

  ‘And not even,’ said Mervyn, ‘the after-dinner quiet which might reconcile us to these. Willoughby throws a glass of sherry, and at once Owdon is prompted to hurl whole services of crystal. What will be his corresponding riposte should Deamer appear and defend the honour of the village maidens by shooting uncle George? Holocaust at Hazelwood. The End of the House of Simney. In one of the novels of Thomas Hardy there is an unnatural little boy – one much like myself – who hangs himself and all his relations in a big dark cupboard. Looking round the Simneys, and as a mere Cockayne, I have often thought of it. But Owdon, maybe, will forestall me.’

  ‘Mervyn,’ said Lucy, ‘what you say is very clever, dear, and I am sure that your uncle George would be amused. But I do not know that it is quite nice for Joyleen, who is young and may not understand our sophisticated ways.’

  ‘Possibly not, mama. But does she understand our mystery?’

  ‘Our mystery, darling? I don’t know what you can mean.’ But Mervyn had swung round upon Joyleen and was addressing her direct. He is an acute little beast enough, and I think he realized that something might be got out of her by sudden assault. ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘–what is it? There is more to all this than just Dismal Swamp. Or something more has cropped up – suddenly, tonight. Look at Owdon. The past is stirring, and I have an idea that it will be better for us all if it stays put. So what do you know about it?’

  I looked at Mervyn in surprise, for I could scarcely remember another occasion upon which he had spoken without intolerable affectation. And then I looked at Joyleen – and it was my instant conclusion that she was just dumb. She was bewildered, of course, but I imagine that she had anticipated bewilderment in the ancient seat of the Simneys, and that even a row of bodies dangling in a cupboard might have struck her as merely part of the way in which matters conduct themselves in England. ‘Know about it?’ she said sulkily. ‘I don’t know anything at all. But I do think you were right about after-dinner quiet. We had a horrid train journey and I would like a little quiet very much.’

  Mervyn was upon this in a flash. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘you’d better go and find your Gerard. For he is the quiet one, I think you said, But if you will just tell us first what you meant by black–’

  ‘Mervyn, dear, that is rather rude.’ Lucy shook a fondly disapproving head. ‘Grace and I both want to have a quiet chat with Joyleen, and do not at all intend to worry her with mysteries. Perhaps you had better join the other men. They will be missing you – particularly uncle George.’

  ‘They can have Timmy,’ said Mervyn.

  ‘Now, dear, don’t be silly. I think you will find that they are all having a cosy chat of their own in your uncle’s study. And Willoughby will be expecting you, because of course he will want to apologize.’

  ‘I think not.’ Mervyn spoke as sulkily as Joyleen had just done. ‘All that Willoughby is likely to want is an occasion for further violence.’

  ‘Nonsense, darling.’ And Lucy stroked Mervyn’s beautiful curly hair with a fondness which was part nauseating and part pathetic. Then she turned to Joyleen. ‘You will soon,’ she said, ‘come to understand that we are really a very loving family. And certainly there is never any occasion for violence at Hazelwood.’

  But as Lucy spoke there was a sudden angry shout from round the angle of the corridor ahead of us. And it was followed – for the second time that night – by the sound of shattered glass.

  7

  But this fracas in George’s study mustn’t raise false hopes. We haven’t yet reached the main action of the piece. There will be no corpse available for your inspection, Gentle Reader, until you have struggled on some way ahead.

  Nevertheless it is tolerably certain that without this affair in the study on the night of the Australian cousins’ arrival the sensational event of the night following would not have taken place. The little business now to be related was, in fact, cardinal in the whole affair. So sharpen your perceptions and cease reading with that hurrying eye.

  If George was no fool he certainly was no student either, and there seemed small reason why he should have a study any more than a smithy or a laboratory or a consulting room. Tradition of course, decrees something of the sort. A baronet must have a library, a study and a gun-room just as certainly as his wife must have a drawing-room and a boudoir. These necessities are mysterious – a boudoir means, it appears, a room to be sulky in, and why should the over-privileged have particular need of that? – but there seems to be no harm in them. Only there was, a little – in George’s case.

  George’s study is not in the least traditional; in fact it is one of his rather offensive jokes. A long, dusky, ill-lit room on the first floor, it is furnished with nothing more than a refectory table accommodating writing materials and scattered magazines, half a dozen hard chairs, and a few statuettes on short marble pillars. This is all the furnishing, that is to say, if one doesn’t count the pictures.

  Originally there were only family portraits: to be precise, the ten Simney baronets ending with George himself. I do not know that an inspection of them would have been well calculated to support any simple faith in the blessings of pedigree; from the original Sir Hippias onwards they were, I should have judged, a thoroughly dissipated lot. Still, the effect must have been respectable enough: Sir Hippias (although in fact a superior peddler who had done well out of profit-inflations under James I) was represented by Mytens as a blue-blooded person casting a casual eye over the deeds of his Trojan ancestors in a large folio of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Britonum! the first Sir Denzell, who had been a bishop as well as a baronet, had elected to be painted by Kneller in full canonicals, surrounded by his favourite hounds; Sir Bevis, who had not only, like George, married an actress, but strangled her as well, appeared in a canvas of Wilkie’s deeply absorbed in the ground-plan of an orphanage. Perhaps it was the fact that despite the disguisements of art, they nearly all suggest in mouth or eye that loose-fish quality discerned by Grace: perhaps it was this that gave George his notion.

  The Simneys have quite a collection of Old Masters, brought together for the most part in the eighteenth century and, despite rising values, obstinately retained since. George had gone round these, picked out the most effective nudes, and dispersed them among his ancestors by way of female companionship. Thus over the fireplace, her lurking quality amid a heavy chiaroscuro emphasized by the elaborately carved Grinling Gibbons pillars between which she is recessed, stands a long-thighed Venus by Caravaggio, her allurements emphasized by the ghost of a lawn smock. And on each side of her stand fully – indeed elaborately – clothed Simney gentlemen, so that the total effect is not unlike that ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ with which the painter Manet contrived to shock Paris in 1863. Opposite this, and on either side of the room’s only window, are a Danae by Tintoretto and a Pasiphae by Bordone respectively. The Danae is flanked by Sir Guy Simney, depicted by Cornelius Janssen in his counting-house amid little piles of golden coin; and the Pasiphae stands next to the second Sir Bevis, a Victorian gentleman who is shown by Stanhope Forbes as leaning over a fence to examine a prize bull. These little jokes (and the ability to contrive them was probably about all that remained to George of a classical education) the reigning baronet had contrived to crown by having himself painted in a pink hunting coat which exactly toned with the flesh of a post-Matisse lady sprawled on a sofa. All this being achieved, George had added two large mirrors at each end of the room, so that from certain angles it was possible to contemplate an infinite regress of Simneys and sirens, baronets and bagnio-ladies. Such a juxtaposing of Venetian prodigality and solid English hypocrisy might be amusing on the pages of an ephemeral magazine. As a permanent set-up in a gentleman’s house it has never struck me – I must confess – as other than displeasing in the ex
treme. However this may be, it was the setting of the scene which follows. If it hadn’t been for these beastly pictures – or rather for this beastly arrangement of pictures – the affair would have turned out differently. For a long time 1 had known that if ever I was to have a real row with George it would more probably happen in his study than anywhere else.

  Lucy had been explaining to Joyleen that we were a loving family, and that at Hazelwood violence was not at all the thing – when there had been that second explosion of shattered glass following hard upon an angry shout.

  I don’t doubt that just this sound-sequence at just this after-dinner hour had been heard at Hazelwood often enough, and that the womenfolk of the household had stayed discreetly put until the men chose to present themselves and sober up on tea. But I have never, somehow, grown into these old-world ways, and now I pushed past Owdon – who was looking more disconcerted than just the prospect of further litter could have made him – and made for the study.

  Odd factors can colour one’s emotional state at such moments. I was annoyed that more Simneys seem to mean not a decent reticence and lowering of tensions but simply additional rumpus. But I was even more annoyed by something in the mere geography of the thing. All this dropping of trays in corridors and shouting and smashing of lord knew what was taking place hard by any privacy that Hazelwood afforded me. On my right as I went down this corridor were George’s bedroom and bathroom, on my left were my own bedroom, bath-room and sitting-room – and this study of George’s was straight ahead. Old houses are not always rationally arranged, and there was nothing out of the way in all this. Nevertheless – for now there were further shouts and angry voices – it made me feel as if I lived on the fringes of a tap-room. So did the whiskey bottle.

  Now, so far as my own part in the ensuing events was concerned that whiskey-bottle was crucial. The image of it – broken in that particular way, standing on that particular refectory table, and between the four walls of that particular room, came back to me later invested with a quite mysterious repulsiveness. But there was more to it than that. Jinn live in bottles and when a bottle is broken a jinnee may escape. From this bottle there was to come an evil spirit indeed – and sudden death was to be the consequence.