What Happened at Hazelwood?

by Michael Innes

  But it would have been better to go down with the flag flying… And that, I remembered, was what, for himself at least, George seemed obscurely to be proposing. I tried to get the hang of it. The Australian Simneys had turned up unexpectedly and George was in some queer way cornered. Treasure Island came into my head; I thought of the blind man coming tap-tapping out of nowhere and tipping Jim Hawkins’ nautical guest the black spot. Had the Simneys tipped George the black spot? Gerard, I was pretty sure, had not. He had been quite ready to join in vigorous recriminations over the ancient business of Dismal Swamp – but Dismal Swamp had seemed an incident merely shabby, certainly not sinister enough to bring a black spot into play, and if graver matters had since appeared I was tolerably convinced that Gerard had not got the hang of them. Perhaps this was because he hadn’t been attending, having preoccupied himself from the first with the romantic notion of rescuing his hostess from her shameful condition.

  I made snowballs and pelted on oak – the windows of Hazelwood watching me blankly across the park the while. It was warming, it was even in some degree heartening, and Hazelwood seemed to grow smaller as I stood panting for breath. Bevis and his spurious respectability, Mervyn and his nauseous wit and doting mother (who had given me that glance of hatred): all these – and even the sexually obsessed Grace with her recent snooping triumph – seemed to grow smaller too. Only Timmy Owdon, who must now be filling coal scuttles or polishing frosty bits and bridles, remained life size.

  I was still thinking about the young Owdon when I came upon the old one.

  The snowballing had given out on me and I had a notion that were I to turn round Hazelwood would show ,as large as life again, a great stone and brick and mortar fact not to be escaped from. And at that I had walked towards the northeast corner of the park, where only a narrow strip of meadow separates it from the high road. I wanted to see a bus or two filled with country folk, or cars travelling fast across this particular stretch of England in the confident expectation of arriving at another. What I did see was George’s butler – a black hurrying skulking figure against the snow. He was carrying two heavy suitcases and looked much like a raven hobbling guiltily away with some cumbersome fruit of theft.

  It was an abrupt encounter, for though Owdon too was evidently making towards the high road we had been converging from either side of a spinney. He stopped in his tracks and I suppose I must have done the same. I remember framing a question – and then deciding that he was very much George’s servant, after all, and that I need by no means concern myself with him. I glanced up at the sky. ‘It looks,’ I said, ‘as if there will be more snow.’

  Whatever he had expected it was not conversation; there was a nervous twitch to his mouth as he stood there which told of considerable distress of mind. But when he spoke it was impassively enough.

  ‘It must be regarded as seasonable, your ladyship, at this time of year.’

  This, thoughtfully and indeed heavily offered, was quite in the Owdon manner – and it was so remote from Timmy as to set anybody wondering at once. I have already mentioned the stupidity of Owdon; the thing is one of the basic facts of Hazelwood life; but now suddenly I was asking myself if Owdon’s stupidity was not so obvious – so dazzling, so to speak – as to obscure what might otherwise be at least equally significant characteristics. That the man had some disreputable past, and that George cherished him for it, I had no doubt of whatever. But there was also, it struck me, something enigmatic about him here and now. There was something odd and indefinable in his relationship to the household, to George, to myself – and this was more than the aura which must surround any manservant who has long ago been implicated in some intimate family scandal. What was out of the way about Owdon – and whatever it might be I could by no means define it – was more than his being the father of Timmy (if he was that). And here I pulled myself up. For surely I had set myself romancing about the man simply because of the actual mystery before me: namely, that here he was hurrying furtively through the park with a couple of suitcases when he ought to have been superintending the labours of such servants as were left to us.

  A prosaic and yet startling explanation struck me. Were those suit-cases perhaps crammed with the Simney family silver, and was Owdon decisively reverting to his pirate days?

  ‘Owdon,’ I said, ‘are you making off with the spoons?’

  I think you will agree that it was queer – so queer as to deserve a little paragraph to itself. Timmy would have called it cheap, and moreover Owdon could have walked off with every stick in Hazelwood and I wouldn’t have given a damn. So how I came to utter such words I don’t at all know. Perhaps I was remembering the broken glasses and the man’s unaccountable perturbation on the night before, and hoping to startle or sting him into some explanation of himself. Or perhaps I was just feeling oafish. Certainly I was preoccupied. The scene in that bare, horrid room of George’s, the angry men, the smashed portrait with the safe behind it, the broken whiskey-bottle on the table and George stretching out his hand to it: I had got to turning these images round and round in my head as if they were going to reveal something… Anyway, and however that may be, here I was insulting a servant.

  And Owdon set down the suitcases in the snow. ‘It would be reasonable enough,’ he said.

  If my question had been odd this reply was surely a good deal odder. Moreover it was, in some subterraneous way, a new Owdon who delivered himself of it. The man was looking at me consideringly, and for a moment I felt that I had become something more than the person to whom he was accustomed to announce that dinner was served. I was sure that he was a very bad man, with a history of villainy by no means confined to getting an illegitimate son on the upper classes. Yet I was aware that at this moment some decent human feeling towards me was animating him – and that it was so only some seconds after I had been extremely rude. And – what is more – I felt an altogether unexpected current within myself. We stood there, the two of us, in the snow – Owdon between his suit-cases like some creature led into a stall. And, if momentarily only, some sympathy, some obscure intimation of fellow-feeling, declared itself. Then my mind went back to what he had said. Why should it be reasonable enough that Owdon should make off with the spoons? Did George owe him money? Had he, too, when in Australia been cheated in the matter of a Dismal Swamp?

  During these few seconds I was on the verge of having it out with Owdon. But I hesitated – it was just the sort of failure I had known an hour before with Gerard – and what followed was a lot of lies. Owdon explained that the suitcases belonged to our departed housemaid and that he was benevolently taking them to the bus. Perhaps this was the best story he could think up. Or perhaps he had forgotten that when a new maid came to Hazelwood I had the housekeeper bring her to me and myself settled her into her room. The girl whom Timmy had kissed quite a lot was one of those whom I had received in this way. I remembered her luggage perfectly well. And those suitcases were nothing like it.

  At that I left Owdon and went on my way. He was, I concluded, preparing to make an unobtrusive bolt, and to this end was caching some of his possessions near the high road. He had been at Hazelwood ten times as long as I had – and now within twenty-four hours of the arrival of the Australians he was getting ready to cut and run. Such behaviour on the part of an old retainer surely suggested a first-rate mystery, and it may seem surprising that as I tramped on I didn’t give my mind to it. But somehow I couldn’t bring Owdon anywhere near the centre of things; to the Hazelwood problem as I saw it he was peripheral only. And I think it was because of this – because, I mean, I didn’t start speculating on why Owdon should be preparing his get-away – that ten minutes later the incident sprang up in my mind again in quite a different focus.

  What if it wasn’t his own unobtrusive departure that Owdon was preparing? What if it was Timmy’s?

  The notion alarmed me. It alarmed me because it brought up the knight-errant the
me again. Gerard Simney had come with ludicrous speed to the notion that it might be altogether virtuous and laudable to abscond with me to the antipodes. That was tiresome enough. But young Timmy was a fowl of a different feather; it was impossible that he could have grown up without feelings of injustice and dispossession; and the suppressed rage bred of this he had somehow hitched on to the spectacle of George and myself. Of this I had been granted a sudden revealing glimpse not many hours before. Was it possible that Owdon knew more of the boy – and feared more?

  The drift of my mind here must seem melodramatic enough. But remember, please, that Simneys as a race are impossibly rash – and that Timmy, whether on the distaff side or not, is a Simney every inch. Quite simply, then, I was confronting this: that Owdon feared the lad’s doing George some horrible violence – and was proposing to get him out of the way either before or after such an event.

  But this was not the only possibility. The matter might be altogether different. Some threat was in the air. The Australians had brought it with them. Owdon had felt it at some word spoken by Hippias. The depleted Hazelwood crystal witnessed to this. Nay, Owdon had felt it earlier; the very arrival of those people on the doorstep had discomposed him. And what if, in some obscure way, the threat were to his boy? Why had George attempted to hustle from the room the lad whom he had been so indecently ready to exhibit in the character of a footman? Were those suitcases designed to accompany Timmy to some less unhealthy spot?

  I was revolving all this not without anxiety – for Timmy somehow did concern me – when the next of that morning’s regular succession of incidents occurred… This is a thoroughly artless recital, I would have you observe. I simply tramp from point to point about George Simney’s beastly great park – and something happens to me every time.

  This time it was a bit of eavesdropping.

  It isn’t easy to eavesdrop in the middle of a park covered in snow. And, of course, if you are a nice person it isn’t easy to do at all. Persons who have to admit to the fact commonly are at some pains to represent how the thing came upon them unawares, and how before they knew what they were about they were landed in a situation from which there was no immediate extricating themselves without hopeless embarrassment. But it wasn’t like that with me on this occasion. And when I say that in the quite near future I was to be constrained to relate the whole incident to the police I think you will agree that I more or less expiated my conduct now.

  I indianed. This is something which very nice children do in books which were read to me in my early teens. The nice children indianed not, of course, for the purpose of vulgar eavesdropping but in order to lurk unseen upon the flanks of other nice children co-operating in imaginative games. I used to practise indianing, although there were no co-operative children. I could do it quite well in heather. And now – what was uncomfortable – I did it in snow. And my object was to overhear a conversation between Bevis and Hippias.

  There they were in the shelter of our boundary wall, swathed in ulsters and perched on shooting-sticks, looking like country gentlemen in an advertisement designed to attract city clerks, and so very earnestly discoursing that the steam rose continuously from their mouths as from a pair of small, florid dragons. I guessed that they had tramped out for the sake of privacy – and this privacy I at once proceeded to violate. For their talk, I supposed, might illuminate whatever mystery the southern hemisphere had newly delivered on us; and it had come to me that if the facts were to be known I had better know them. The revelations and half-revelations of the past twelve hours or so had really come to shake me at last; I felt that there were factors of which I couldn’t estimate the gravity; and that in fuller knowledge here might be at least some shadow of power… So I got right down on my belly and indianed to a ditch, and along that I got on hands and knees to a point almost directly behind them. I think I have said that everything was coming to feel tail-end and impermanent with me – which is no doubt why I confronted with very tolerable equanimity the substantial possibility of being discovered in this untoward situation. If they liked to turn round and see Lady Simney squinnying at them from a ditch they were welcome. And meanwhile I strained my ears.

  ‘A terrible thing,’ Bevis was saying. ‘I do beg you to see, my dear fellow, that it is a terrible thing. Shocking to think of such a stain on the family name.’

  ‘Fiddle-de-dee,’ said Hippias. ‘And I don’t remember that a fellow cared to talk like a parson in my day. Every Simney is pretty well booked from birth as a stain upon the family name – even if he happens to go by the name of Owdon.’

  I think I crouched a bit lower in my ditch at this – for it seemed to confirm my uneasy suspicion that Timmy was somehow near the centre of the picture. And as I did so Hippias’ laughter went bellowing over my shoulders. It was necessary to conclude that the little matter of a bar sinister in the family amused him greatly. There was a pause.

  ‘Owdon,’ repeated Hippias relishingly. ‘It’s a dam’ good name. In fact, about as plebeian as you could find.’

  ‘In that regard,’ said Bevis, ‘it may be said that Joyleen runs it pretty close.’

  This gratuitous stroke at his daughter-in-law by no means offended Hippias. He merely bellowed with laughter again. ‘Girl’s father was certainly the first to wear boots,’ he said. ‘But pots of money, my dear boy. Just what you will be hunting for in a few years for your own brat. Particularly–’

  Bevis’ voice interrupted angrily. ‘Particularly what, damn you?’

  For a moment Hippias hesitated. ‘Particularly if his idea of earning a living consists of going after the village wenches with a paintbrush.’ Again the horrid bellow blew over me. ‘A paintbrush, heaven save the mark! When I was a lad–’

  ‘When you were a lad,’ said Bevis, ‘there were some nasty young fellows about.’

  All this was at least spirited, and I had a momentary hope that the two small, florid dragons would actually go for each other’s throats. But Hippias merely tilted himself a little further back on his shooting-stick and raised an admonitory and chronically unsteady finger. ‘Stick to the bally point, Bevis, my boy,’ he said. ‘And just try to consider what the result is going to be. Tick over the family one by one and make sure you know just how it will affect each of us.’

  ‘A most intolerable scandal!’ Bevis was evidently both alarmed and furious. ‘And in its origins, confound you all, entirely colonial. I heartily wish your beastly continent off the map. It has only been there since the time of Captain Cook and could very easily be spared.’

  This stupid rudeness, it occurred to me, was just the sort of thing into which the spuriously decorous Bevis might be expected to decline. But it didn’t worry Hippias. ‘No doubt it’s a new country,’ he said. ‘Place where blood goes blue astonishingly quick. Fellow is no end of a swell if he can produce a great-grandfather in the honourable estate of an apothecary or attorney in Huddersfield or Hull.’ And Hippias guffawed with what appeared to be quite genuine merriment at this witticism. ‘Not that this is at all to the point – not to the point at all.’

  ‘I was simply saying,’ said Bevis, ‘that in Australia things of that sort have their place, no doubt. But you really can’t bring them over here.’

  ‘I didn’t.’ Hippias was emphatic. ‘All I brought was the little matter of Dismal Swamp. Do me the justice to see that, my dear fellow-me-lad. But when you ask me to hold my tongue simply to advance your own beastly interests – well, it comes to a matter of a consideration, doesn’t it?’

  From where I crouched I could hear Bevis suddenly breathing hard. ‘You little backwoods blackguard,’ he said. ‘Are you asking me to write a cheque?’

  Hippias gave his equable chuckle. ‘The things are always dashed useful, I’m bound to admit. But talking of blackguards, my dear Bevis, just where do you stand? Are you really after avoiding scandal? Or are you after wholesale theft? It’s in the blood, y
ou know. Remember your brother and Dismal Swamp.’

  There was a longer pause. ‘Look here,’ said Bevis, ‘would you take twenty thousand?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘Is your boy in on this – or his trollop of a wife?’

  Hippias chuckled, unoffended. ‘Gerard hasn’t tumbled to it so far as I know. And Joyleen would never tumble to anything.’

  ‘Very well. You won’t have to share out. I call twenty thousand a very reasonable offer.’ Bevis hesitated. ‘We don’t positively know of any marriage, after all. Besides, you must remember that I have to consider Lady Simney – Nicolette.’

  I think I almost exclaimed at this. For that Bevis had to consider me in some way when debating paying the unlovely Hippias a tidy sum in what appeared to be blackmail was a notion utterly obscure to me. It ought not to have been so, as I can now clearly see. But squatting there in the snow I could not at all understand the manner in which I was being dragged into the deal. No more had I been able to understand a certain appraising scrutiny to which Lucy had subjected me the night before.

  There is matter for the psychologist in this, and it is plain that there were certain areas in my life which I was just not prepared to contemplate… But now – and even as I was peering out at Bevis in blank astonishment – this curious interview at which I had been assisting picked itself up and receded from my ken. For no particular reason that I could discern the two disputants unstuck their shooting sticks and marched off, still arguing hotly.