And so I would like you to see it – although it was, of course, a commonplace object enough, such as it would take a Chardin or a Cezanne to render significant. But there it was on the table, broken off short below the neck in an ugly, jagged line of glass such as one might cut a throat with, and standing round it were five Simneys pale and cursing. Or five Simneys, pale and cursing, in a sort of inner Circle – and beyond that ten more Simneys, immobile and watching from amid the female companionship with which George had provided them.
Something held me momentarily motionless before this scene, and as I stood in the doorway George glanced up and (I suppose) decided that there was something consciously theatrical in my attitude. Anyway, he was quite viciously annoyed. ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘Come right down stage, my dear, take a well-deserved round of applause, and then join our domestic comedy.’
I walked in and the others followed. ‘Or pot-house tragedy,’ I said.
‘Mama,’ said Mervyn, ‘are the gentlemen in their cups?’
Lucy shook her head. ‘Hush, dear – I’m afraid that something upsetting must have occurred.’
‘Hippias has occurred – and Gerard and Joyleen. And the upsetting has taken Owdon in the most literal way. And why, I wonder, in one’s cups?’ Mervyn looked round in the easiest fashion, and I almost believed that he was honestly attempting to relieve the obscure tension in the room with his badinage. ‘Why not in one’s glasses, or one’s bottles? But now that Owdon and Hippias have done their worst there are, of course, no glasses left. And here too’ – he looked at the whiskey-bottle – ‘there appears to have been a clash of mighty opposites. Or has Willoughby merely been performing a parlour trick? Or has Gerard been wolfing a little broken glass by way of demonstrating the feeding habits of the Australian ostrich?’
‘Emu,’ said Gerard. He was looking at the broken bottle as if he saw in it as much as I did.
‘Or has uncle Bevis, perhaps–’
‘Be quiet,’ said George.
I looked at my husband in surprise. Assuredly he was in a vile temper – and yet this rebuke to Mervyn was half-hearted and unconvincing. Mervyn realized the fact and ran happily on. I had a moment to study the situation.
They were all angry – and it seemed to me that they were all bewildered, like men to whom it had suddenly come that they did not at all know where they stood. I decided to ask a question.
‘Is this bottle,’ I said, ‘the result of more quiet family talk about Dismal Swamp?’
There was a moment’s silence. Then Gerard answered.
‘They were talking about that.’ He glanced at me with strangely troubled eyes.
The whole group were perplexed. But Gerard, I thought, was more perplexed than the rest, so that I wondered if there had been some crisis or disclosure which he hadn’t tumbled to.
‘Hippias is in liquor,’ said Bevis.
This was obviously true – and it was information offered as if to explain the whole thing.
‘Drank too much of George’s bally port,’ said Hippias. ‘Then felt like a lil’ bit of fun. Shorry about glasses, m’dear. Shorry about bally bottle.’
Extremely clumsily, Hippias was taking his cue. There was no doubt that he had drunk too much; but then neither was there any doubt that what had been going on was more than drunken frolic – or drunken quarrel.
Grace however saw no reason to think so. ‘Horrible!’ she said. ‘A family reunion after many years – and yet all it leads to is a debauch.’ She looked round the study and her eye caught (I imagine) Tintoretto’s Danae waiting for Jove’s shower of gold. ‘Not,’ she continued, ‘that more is to be expected in an apartment embellished with all the allurements of vice.’
‘Or all,’ said Mervyn, also glancing round, ‘except the blacksmith’s fair-haired daughter. And what would aunt Grace’s Mr Deamer think of uncle George’s Paphian shrine? Would he be reassured by the presence of the Honourable and Right Reverend Bishop Denzell?’ And Mervyn affected to consult Kneller’s portrait. ‘I judge not. He would hold it still to be what the poet Keats calls a purple-lined palace of sweet sin. And, indeed, if any improvement could be effected it would surely be a purple wallpaper, with true love-knots heavily embossed in gold.’ Mervyn turned to me. ‘Nicolette, do you not agree?’
I don’t know that I would have answered. But – surprisingly – Gerard answered for me: and with physical action considerably more pronounced than Willoughby’s earlier in the evening. ‘You howling little cad,’ he said. And at that he picked up Mervyn, strode with him to the window, flung up the sash and dropped him through. He closed the window. ‘There is quite thick snow,’ he explained, ‘so I hope no damage will be done to the flower beds.’
‘It isn’t a flower bed,’ I said. ‘It’s a rockery.’
And that got rid of Lucy as well. One may, after all, be pardoned a little maternal agitation on seeing one’s only child pitched through a first-storey window. She hurried off down the corridor calling upon Owdon to follow her.
For a moment George’s large laughter filled the room. But it was not the laughter with which he would normally have greeted an incident so much to his taste. And again I tried to get the hang of how these men were feeling. ‘Who threw the bottle?’ I asked.
What happened at Hazelwood? My question, as it happened, was really the first attempt at solving that. Or at least it exposed a preliminary mystery. For they didn’t want to answer. Some queer panic or uncertainty was upon them and they were all for concealing whatever they could. But they were quite ineffective. They could, after all, simply have turned Grace (who was very much the chafing-dish again) and myself out of the room; and George ought to have been quite fit for this with no ceremony. But instead they looked at one another like third-form boys caught smoking in a barn. Bevis, although one could see that he had been in the thick of the quarrel, was endeavouring to look dignified and composed; this gave him the air of the unpleasant sort of child who, at such a discovery, edges himself towards the side of law and order.
Willoughby was a little more genuinely detached. My eye followed his straying to the Caravaggio Venus in her almost trompe d’œil quality over the fireplace. He was far, I knew, from seeing her as what Grace called an allurement to vice. For art is a mysterious but increasingly real other world to Willoughby, and perpetually entices him from the banal environment in which he quite willingly spends most of his time. He looked at the goddess now as one might look at some transcendental backstairs or fire-escape. Then he turned back and scowled rather conscientiously at each of us in turn.
Hippias moved with exaggerated unsteadiness across the room. ‘Mush better go to bed,’ he stuttered. ‘Lil’ dispute over cards.’
‘Cards?’ I said. There was no sign of cards in George’s study, nor ever had been since I could remember.
‘Horses,’ corrected Hippias readily. ‘Lil’ alter – altercation about name of animal won the Derby in ’06.’
‘He means in ’07,’ said George – and as he spoke gave me a look which made me at once afraid and furious. For I could see how George’s mind was working. The mystery, whatever it was, had got him in a tight spot. And (as I had suspected might happen) he was going to take it out of someone else. ‘Among gentlemen such matters are always settled with a bottle. Get back to your own brand of tattle, my dear, and leave us to ours. But just see that Mervyn’s all right first. And tell Owdon to bring more glasses.’
It is funny just what one won’t stand. There had been times when, if George had taken a hunting-crop to me, I should have regarded it as one of the legitimate consequences of a marriage made in a bad moment. But this about the glasses was definitive.
‘Owdon,’ I snapped, ‘has had his last orders from me. And I from you.’
I could see George hesitate, and again I knew that he had much more on his mind than I could get at. ‘You are mi
staken,’ he said.
The significance of this – if significance it had – was obscured by Grace, who gave a sudden and indignant yelp of surprise. ‘George’s portrait!’ she exclaimed. ‘How utterly disgraceful!’
We all looked at it. Alone of all the oils in the room, this picture was for some reason glazed. And here, it seemed, was where the whiskey-bottle had found its mark. The glass was shattered, and in the lower centre of the canvas itself there was a gaping rent. Grace as she looked at this turned pale with fury; an obscure assault upon her brother plainly went very deep. Since (as I have explained) that pink hunting-coat toned George’s portrait right in with the allurements to vice her attitude was really very unreasonable. But now she started on one of those tirades of hers which it would be useless to reproduce. And this annoyed Willoughby.
‘Shut up,’ Willoughby said. ‘For goodness sake, stow it.’
The night was full of surprises. For Willoughby to pitch a glass of sherry at Mervyn was one thing; for him to address an aunt like this was quite another. Even Hippias looked at him in befuddled surprise.
‘It’s a perfectly ghastly picture, anyway,’ said Willoughby. ‘The very worst sort of picture.’ He paused and sought fleeting comfort from the Caravaggio once more. ‘Do you know, every year they used to take me to Burlington House and then to luncheon at a horrible great hotel afterwards. And always I used to be sick going back to school on the train. I thought it was the luncheon, and every year I ventured to eat less and less. But I was always sick, just the same. And then I realized that it wasn’t the food but the Royal Academicians. Well, this very bad picture of uncle George is just that sort. Who wouldn’t heave a whiskey bottle through it? Not that I’d throw a bottle. I’d throw a–’
‘Willoughby,’ said Bevis, ‘you forget yourself.’
It was, I suppose, all pretty comical, and they had all very abundantly forgotten themselves. But I wasn’t a bit amused. Jokes about the Royal Academy can scarcely be said to have the charm of novelty, and this one seemed altogether untimely. I could see that Willoughby was jabbering like this because he was upset; I could give him a good mark for being genuine about George’s beastly portrait as well as tiresome. But certainly I couldn’t be amused.
Nor could Grace. From a chafing-dish she turned to a coffee-percolator – one that suddenly bubbles and erupts. ‘Willoughby,’ she screamed, ‘was it you who–’
‘Of course it was.’ Willoughby nodded savagely. ‘I’m roaring drunk and I pitched the bottle through the beastly picture.’
There was an uncertain pause. Then Gerard spoke.
‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘It was my father. Cousin George was here by the fireplace, and it is fair to say that he said something very insulting. My father, who had just returned to the room, picked up the bottle and threw it at him. It was a rash act.’
‘It was a deuced ineffective one.’ Bevis spoke abruptly, as on a sudden discovery. ‘Try to chuck a bottle towards the fireplace and succeed in hitting that picture? It doesn’t make sense.’
Well, quite a lot just didn’t. And I was going to point out that Hippias, being a bit fuddled, must have got himself foxed by George’s absurd mirrors when there was another exclamation of surprise. This time it was from Gerard, who had walked over to examine the damage done to the picture.
‘It’s hinged!’ he exclaimed.
We all turned to look – and were in time to see the remains of the pink-coated George swing outwards. What was revealed was nothing so very startling. In fact, it was merely a small safe let into the wall.
But somehow the whole of the events of the evening seemed – quite irrationally – to fall into place as so much deliberate build-up for this discovery. Naturally George had a safe for his more private papers. And naturally it would be masked in just such a way as this. A wall-safe is as proper to a baronet as is a study, or a row of ancestors, or a pink coat.
Yet we all looked at it much as if here was the truth revealed at last.
8
Some nine hours later the winter sun rose for the last time on George Simney. It rose, too, upon a day full of incident. Indeed, I have something to record of the very moment in which I opened my eyes.
At first I thought that Mervyn was prowling about my room; then I realized that it was Timmy Owdon. He had set down a tray and was putting considerable subdued rage into pulling back the curtains; the light caught his curls and the fine line of his nose; it was, after all, the best of the Simneys (I came wide awake reflecting) who had been born on the wrong side of the blanket.
This didn’t prevent my feeling annoyed. For one thing, Timmy was apt to remind me of that day when I had first met George and him out riding, and I could always reflect that if his beauty had not somehow set off George’s vigorous physical life I might have been spared landing myself in a scrape. Then, again, the meaning of Timmy’s being here was plain to me from previous experience. One or more of the housemaids had left in a hurry, and the boy had been turned on to the first necessary job. Whether newly promoted footmen are commonly given such tasks I don’t know – and on the preceding night it had rather been my impression that George designed to dismiss him to the outdoors again for good. But, anyway, here he was. I sat up, reached for a wrap, and poured tea. ‘Good morning, Timmy,’ I said. ‘Why is this?’
Timmy moved to the next window. ‘If you don’t like it,’ he said, ‘you can have Martin. Or so I would suppose. But her ladyship seems to hold it beneath her dignity to stir until you have to be got on your feet. That’s why it’s me. Nothing’s beneath my dignity, of course. I hope the tea’s all right. I made it.’
‘It’s the Lapsang,’ I said gratefully. ‘Have a piece of bread and butter.’
Timmy took a piece. He took a quick glance at the door and then sat down on the foot of the bed. ‘Oh, lord!’ he said.
When we were alone together this sultry boy and I were human beings. There was much impropriety in this, I don’t doubt. It had just happened.
‘How is Mervyn?’ I asked.
‘Bruises.’ Timmy’s voice held satisfaction. ‘But nothing broken and no sprains.’ This he added dejectedly.
I pushed towards him the second of the three slivers of bread and butter which he had brought in. ‘I don’t think you like Mervyn very much?’
‘I admire him.’
‘You mustn’t do that.’
‘I admire him. I am ignorant enough to admire him. He has been to a public school while I have groomed horses or cleaned knives.’
I laughed. ‘What’s the good of a public school? It means nothing but manners and an accent.’
Timmy Owdon looked up swiftly. ‘My accent is identical with his. And my manners are a great deal better.’
Both these statements, it occurred to me, were true. ‘Yes,’ I said gently, ‘–of course.’
‘These are facts which tell you a good deal about me.’ Timmy moved away the tray, jumped off the bed and brought me a hand mirror. ‘Would this be the next part of the ritual? Anyway, you will find it heartening.’
‘Heartening?’
‘You bear up very well.’ He smiled as he spoke, and his smile was at once wicked and friendly. ‘Your ladyship is quite an example to me. But then, of course, I am young enough to feel my position keenly.’ He frowned, as if catching in his own voice the echo of Mervyn’s self-conscious manner of speech. ‘Damn Mervyn.’ He flushed darkly. ‘I say – I’m frightfully sorry.’
‘Sorry, Timmy?’
‘For saying damn.’
I just managed not to laugh – and I should have very much hated myself otherwise. For I had stopped being annoyed. There are gentlemen and gentlemen, and Timmy Owdon belonged with a scarcer sort. ‘I think,’ I said, ‘that you know too much and not enough.’
‘Yes.’ He looked at me questioningly. ‘I suppose it is very un
usual?’
‘Very. Lots of boys are born in that way, Timmy. But either their birth is concealed from them or they are given the breeding of their legitimate brothers – though perhaps at a distance.’
‘I see.’ He hesitated. ‘Of course I hate him a little – Sir George. But not tremendously – because of that. If – if anything ever happened, I would like you to know it was not because of that.’
I let the mirror drop on the bed. ‘Timmy,’ I said, ‘what do you mean?’
He looked at me directly – and suddenly with flashing eyes. ‘They say it was my mother,’ he said. ‘But do I really know about my father – though Owdon is my name? It may have been the other way. He may be my father – Sir George. Nicolette, how I wish I could be sure that he was not.’
I was startled by this – both by the boy’s obliviously calling me Nicolette, and by the marked impression of breeding which he gave, and by the obscure tenor of his words. But instead of inquiring into these (as I ought perhaps to have done) I changed to a less awkward topic. ‘There was a row last night,’ I said.
Timmy nodded. ‘That is why a fool of a girl called Mary has left. I shall miss her rather, because I used to kiss her quite a lot. Do you think that cheap?’
This time I did laugh – we were getting on well enough for that. ‘No, Timmy, I don’t. Only don’t ever positively seduce a virgin without thinking hard and long. It’s incalculable.’
He looked at me with a faint flush and knit his brows, considering. ‘Do you know,’ he said anxiously, ‘I can’t promise?’
‘Certainly you can’t. You wouldn’t be a Simney if you could.’
What Happened at Hazelwood? Page 6