‘You’re part of the privileged classes, of course.’
‘Is that what we are?’ Fred looked at a brace of unplucked birds hanging by the door. ‘Been a bad year for pheasants, has it?’
‘Has for the Stroves up Picton House. Some says it’s due to a nasty outbreak of raisins soaked in brandy put on fish-hooks.’
Fred bubbled with laughter again. ‘But you wouldn’t know anything about that, Tom, would you?’
Next morning in the Rectory Fred asked, ‘Why don’t we ever have deer’s brains on toast?’ He was dipping soldiers into a boiled egg, a childish habit of which he was trying to break himself.
Simeon was reading an article on himself, topped by a Vicky cartoon, in the New Statesman. ‘ “Unbelievers can see the benefit of no beggars, no hungry children, no one out of work. It’s harder for Christians. We seem to find starving children rather useful, I mean there has to be someone to receive the collection. I tell you,” ’ he read his own words with a certain satisfaction, ‘ “it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a Christian to enter the Kingdom of God.” It’s rather good,’ he told Dorothy and held up the magazine.
‘I do wish you’d try and keep out of the New Statesman.’ His wife looked genuinely distressed. ‘It’s so embarrassing. What were you talking about, Fred?’
‘I believe deer’s brains make a smashing breakfast.’
‘Could you try and not be quite so disgusting,’ Henry said wearily. ‘Watching you eat a boiled egg is revolting enough. Try not to put us completely off our food.’
‘Tom Nowt has deer’s brains every morning. Of course, he doesn’t dazzle them in his headlights and shoot them out of his old banger with a point 22 rifle. Oh no!’
‘Simcox Minor!’ Henry used his Knuckleberries voice. ‘Do shut up!’
‘And would he put raisins on fish-hooks to catch all the Strove pheasants round Picton Principal? Raisins soaked in brandy? Tom Nowt wouldn’t do that now, would he?’
‘Where ever have you been, Fred?’ Dorothy refilled his cup.
‘Oh, I was down at Tom’s old hut, in Hanging Wood.’ And then he looked down the table and saw what he had never seen before, his father angry.
‘Well, you’re not to go there again.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t think that was a particularly obscure remark. I don’t want you to go there again.’
‘Why ever shouldn’t I?’ Fred was trying to keep his end up but Simeon, collecting his letters and New Statesman, spoke with unusual severity.
‘Because I’m telling you not to. For once in your life.’
‘But why are you?’
Simeon stood up; he seemed to Fred to look suddenly very tall. ‘Don’t always be asking questions!’ he said and banged the dining-room door behind him as he left.
So, before the holidays ended, Fred went down to say goodbye to Tom Nowt. He didn’t go into the hut although invited but stood with his bicycle among the fallen leaves. ‘My father doesn’t want me to come down here any more.’
‘Not when you get back from school?’
‘Not ever. Why do you think that is?’
‘He’s got his reasons, I expect. Wouldn’t he tell you?’
‘No.’
‘Well, then. I don’t suppose he would.’
Back at Knuckleberries Fred noticed a change in Henry. His brother actively sought out his company, and that of Nubble. This was a mystery to Fred until he discovered that what Henry wanted to do was to read passages of his novel aloud to someone, and he had more sense than to choose his immediate friends and contemporaries, those who might become his fellow prefects, as a preview audience. After a good many hints and half-promises Henry met Fred and Nubble outside the old games pavilion carrying his notebook. He led them inside and they sat, on a damp Sunday afternoon, on the lockers while he read out the title, ‘A Tale Told by an Idiot: A Novel by Henry Simcox. What on earth’s eating you?’ for Nubble was having a fit of the giggles. ‘Isn’t it by you, Simcox?’
‘Yes, of course it’s by me.’
‘Well, are you the…’ Nubble didn’t quite dare to say it.
‘God! Are you completely illiterate?’
‘Almost completely,’ Nubble admitted.
‘It’s a quotation from Shakespeare. Macbeth.’ At that stage in his literary career Henry didn’t realize that his title wasn’t entirely original. ‘ “… a tale told by an idiot, Full of sound and fury”.’
‘Well. How were we to know?’
‘Really there’s no point in reading it to you now.’ Henry closed his notebook, although Arthur Nubble begged him not to.
‘Go on,’ Fred urged his brother wearily. ‘We’ve been asking you to read it for ages.’
‘Well, it’s not finished. It’s only a first draft.’
‘Read it to us when you’ve finished it then.’ Fred stood up and prepared to leave.
‘So you don’t want to hear it!’ Henry sounded almost triumphant.
‘I said read it to us when it’s finished. I’m going to Ma Price’s to get an egg and chips.’
‘Apparently everyone wants me to read my novel except my own brother!’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘We all have to sit for hours while you murder “Slow Boat to China” on those old scratch drums.’
‘You mean you want to read it now? All right then.’ Fred sat down again and waited patiently.
‘Well, apparently Nubble’s been looking forward to it.’
‘Oh yes, Simcox! I’ve been looking forward to it immensely.’
‘Don’t let’s disappoint Nubble,’ Fred agreed.
‘ “Told by an Idiot”,’ Henry started again.
‘Good title, that,’ Arthur said eagerly. ‘Isn’t it, Simcox?’
‘Chapter one,’ Henry went on firmly. ‘ “You’ll hardly believe this, Alan,” said Lady Cynthia Plumley, wrinkling her small retroussé nose and raising her plucked eyebrows, “but I’ve never actually made love in a punt before.” ’
‘That’s good. The first sentence gets you,’ Arthur Nubble told them. Henry had hit on a technique which he would discover was known in the film world as ‘coming in on the middle of a scene’. He went on reading. ‘ “But then, thought Alan Podgson, neither have I.” ’ Henry was getting into his stride. ‘ “As the son of a brewery worker Alan had never been able to afford such luxuries. In a way he felt ashamed, he was betraying his class, and his mates at work, by falling so much in love with Lady Cynthia, the owner’s daughter. He felt even more ashamed of his heavy boots and his baggy Aertex underpants.” ’
‘Can you say “underpants” in a book?’ Arthur wondered.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Nubble. You can nowadays.’ And Henry read on. ‘ “Alan started to make love in the expert way he had learnt with the girl workers in the bottling department. Cynthia felt small, delicate kisses land like butterflies on the backs of her knees, the inside of her elbows. Slowly and cunningly she was raised to a purring fever of excitement.” ’
A master in sports clothes pulled open the door and looked at them with disapproval. ‘I thought you fellows were meant to be taking exercise.’
‘We’ve taken it, Sir,’ Arthur Nubble chirped up respectfully. ‘Simcox was just reading us his history essay. It’s jolly interesting.’
‘Oh, is it?’ The master put out his hand for the exercise book. ‘Let’s have a look.’
‘Oh, you couldn’t read it, Sir.’ Arthur seemed to have taken charge of the situation.
‘Why ever not?’
‘Simcox has got such awful handwriting, he’s going to copy it out neatly later.’
‘Really?’
‘It’s terribly interesting, Sir. All about the relations between capital and labour in industrial England.’
‘Not my subject, that. Hope you all show as much keenness on your geography. All right, you fellows. Carry on with the prep.’ The master loped away and was soon los
t in the mists of autumn.
‘You know what, Nubble?’ Henry said. ‘You’re not quite so terribly unintelligent as you look.’
A week later disaster struck. Arthur Nubble came up to Fred during a break between Latin and yet more Latin. He was in a state of advanced panic and deathly pale, bearing ghastly news about a new chap called Strove.
‘I know him,’ Fred reassured him. ‘He lives near us.’
‘Well, I was talking to him and he said he had to go. He was late for his music lesson. Oh, Simcox Mi, what do you think he’s learning?’
Fred didn’t wait to be told. As of one mind the boys started running towards the music huts. As they did so Fred asked breathlessly, ‘Nubble! What did you do with the actual instrument?’
He didn’t have to wait long to find out. When they got to the prefabricated huts Nubble pointed to the dark space between the floor and the ground. There in the shadows, hidden from the world like some lurking jungle beast, lay the inert form of a huge double bass. And when they peered for a moment into the usually empty room they saw the music master with his back to them, seated at the piano. They watched with horror as Magnus Strove, a rather pretty, curly-haired boy with an astute financial sense, opened the tall, standing, double-bass container out of which poured, as from some mythical cornucopia, what appeared to be the entire tinned food department of Fortnum and Mason.
‘Cheerio, Nubble!’ Fred took to his heels then and didn’t stop running until he had arrived, five minutes early, for the next Latin lesson.
‘Nubble’s going to be sacked,’ Fred told Henry later in the dormitory. Arthur had been isolated in the sanatorium although suffering from no known disease.
‘Has he been jumping rather too low in the leap-frog?’ Henry used the usual Knuckleberries euphemism.
‘Not that. Running a black-market food stall in the music huts.’
‘Quite right then. You can’t have spivs at Knuckleberries.’
‘You’re not serious?’
‘Aren’t I?’
‘I mean, I thought you were all for the revolution, blowing up Knuckleberries or something.’
‘Of course I am. But while it’s here, well, it’s far better to keep the spivs out of it.’
Only Fred paid a brief tribute to the departed. ‘Poor old Nubble. I don’t suppose we’ll ever see him again.’
4
A Game of Murder
In the spring of the next year Simeon Simcox got a dose of flu and sat shivering by his study fire wearing a dressing-gown and a muffler, occasionally coughing as he read a large number of pamphlets on global concerns. Dr Salter was shown by Dorothy into his presence. Agnes Salter’s father was a short, broad-shouldered man with close-cropped greying hair, strong hands and stubby fingers. Dressed in a check hacking-jacket and still wearing breeches after his morning ride, he looked more like a hard-bitten horse-dealer than Hartscombe’s leading G.P.
‘He gets this wretched chest,’ Dorothy explained. ‘And his voice is going.’
‘Cut down on the sermons, I’m sure the congregation’ll be delighted. And,’ the Doctor asked, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a spot of brandy left over from Christmas?’
Dorothy looked at Simeon, who nodded his permission, and she went off to find it. When she had gone the Doctor pulled up an armchair, stretched his boots to the fire and lit a thin, aromatic cheroot which made Simeon cough. ‘Well,’ the Rector said plaintively, ‘surely you’ll take my temperature?’
‘I doubt if that’s going to do you much good.’
‘Dorothy thought we should call you in.’
‘Can’t imagine why.’ The Doctor blew out a perfect smoke-ring which floated up towards Karl Marx. ‘Surely a man of your persuasion ought to be grateful for a touch of spring flu. Don’t want to hang about in this vale of tears, do you? Fellows like you ought to get in the queue for heaven as quickly as possible. You want me to tinker with divine providence with a couple of aspirins and a bottle of cough mixture?’
‘For a doctor you have a remarkably simple-minded view of the Christian religion.’ Simeon couldn’t see why he should be expected to die of flu just because he was a clergyman.
‘Christian religion? I thought it was based on the extreme desirability of death.’ Dr Salter leaned back comfortably in his chair. ‘It’s a lesson I wish my patients would all learn. Duty of the sick, in my opinion, to get out of the way and make room for a few healthy breeders. But you take the Bishop of Worsfield, never knew a fellow so remarkably coy about meeting his Maker!’ Dorothy returned to them with a small liqueur glass about half full of brandy. ‘Is the Bishop not well?’ Simeon was concerned to know.
‘That’s amazingly generous of you, Dorothy.’ Dr Salter took the brandy, squinted at it like someone assessing a microscopic specimen, and finished it at a gulp. ‘The good Bishop has never been quite the same since you made him take part in an all-night vigil in his draughty great cathedral to protest about the South African Government.’
‘You can’t blame me for that.’ Simeon was troubled. As though to cheer him up Dr Salter slapped his jacket pockets, produced a pad and pencil and started to scribble a prescription.
‘Of course it was remarkably effective! Soon as the dear old Boers heard that you and the Bishop had gone without a night’s sleep they decided to elect a Blackamoor as prime minister. Or isn’t that what happened?’ The Doctor laughed, a short splutter of rapid gun-fire, and handed the prescription to Dorothy. ‘Get that made up for him in Hartscombe if you like,’ he said. ‘It can’t do him any particular harm.’
Dorothy, taking it, smiled unexpectedly. ‘We’ve missed you lately,’ she said.
‘Simeon doesn’t have to get sick for me to visit. In fact I avoid ill people as much as possible.’
‘One of the great mysteries of life,’ Simeon brooded with his head down, ‘is why you ever chose to become a doctor.’
‘Why did you choose to become a parson? Only one reason. Neither of us could hold down a decent job in a biscuit factory.’
Since his wife had died Agnes’s father often took her on his rounds with him during her school holidays. In fact she was outside the Rectory now, sitting in the passenger seat of the Doctor’s beautifully polished old Alvis coupé. And from nowhere in particular Fred emerged and stood by the car, scuffling his shoe in the gravel of the drive. He started, tentatively at first, to engage her in conversation, while indoors his mother was confiding her anxieties to Agnes’s father. ‘I’m worried about Simeon,’ she told him. ‘He gets so tired, and all these little colds of his. Is there nothing you recommend?’
‘Take up hunting.’ At which Simeon, a paid-up member of any society against blood sports, was seen to shiver in his chair and murmur, ‘Hardly!’
‘Not for killing foxes. That’s not the point,’ the Doctor explained. ‘They do you a wonderful death on the hunting-field! One minute you’re up there, sun in your face, fresh air in your nostrils, giving a brush hedge a clean pair of heels, and then you’ll come smack on the hard ground – break your neck and it’s over in a second! To hell with bedpans and the cottage hospital. I plan to finish up on a long run round Picton Principal.’
There was a silence then. Dorothy wandered to the window. ‘Your Agnes home from school, is she? Do let her come in.’
‘No. I don’t think so. She’s like her father. Can’t stand the sight of illness.’
But as she sat in the Alvis, Agnes was telling Fred that it was a shame and that she’d like to go in and look after the old people. In fact she wanted to be a nurse but her father wouldn’t allow it. ‘He says wanting to be a nurse just shows an unhealthy interest in disease. Fathers!’
‘Yes. I know.’ There was a long silence between them and then Fred went on, ‘What’re you doing for the holidays?’
‘Sitting out in the car. I told you.’
‘I thought of going on the river.’
‘In a rowing-boat?’
‘Yes. A boat on the river.’
/> Agnes shivered at the idea of the river in March. ‘Have you got any better at guiding it?’
‘I’ve always been rather good at navigation.’ Fred was nettled.
‘I don’t know. Just as long as you don’t get us suddenly out in the middle of the river and then want to go urgently.’
‘Oh.’ Fred sounded disappointed. ‘You remember that.’
‘Did you think I wouldn’t?’
There was another prolonged silence, and then he asked, ‘Are you going to Charlie Fanner’s party, at Rapstone Manor?’
‘Everyone’s going to Charlie Fanner’s. They’ve asked everybody,’ Agnes said. ‘They like doing that, don’t they? Inviting the tenants.’
‘I know,’ Fred agreed. ‘It’s a sort of national event! They’ve even asked Leslie Titmuss.’
Rapstone Manor is an old house on a hill a little way out of the village and has been, since Edward IV rewarded a steward with a sense of humour with the gift of a manor and the estates of Rapstone, the home of the Fanner family. The house was begun in the middle ages, added to under the Tudors and extended at the Restoration, when the Fanners received their reward for continued loyalty to the Royalist cause. An eighteenth-century Fanner built a new façade and added a folly in the shape of a Gothic tower in the park, and a Victorian Fanner put on the ostentatious portico which gives the house the disconsolate air of a small city railway station set down in the middle of the countryside, with no trains. It’s a house shaded by large trees, approached up a long drive, set in a park where the deer are constantly on the look-out for ways of escape from death at the hands of Tom Nowt.
The countryside was much divided during the Civil War. The Fanners at Rapstone were Royalists, the Stroves of Picton Principal, which then incorporated the entire village of Skurfield, supported Parliament. The Fanners were known as good landlords, usually cheerful and, perhaps because of their origins in the medieval catering business, fond of feasting the tenants on all occasions. The Stroves of Picton House were private people, often of a gloomy and withdrawn disposition, and much given to hanging their tenants from the boughs of the old yew tree by Skurfield Pond. When the young heir, Nicholas Fanner, was celebrating his twenty-first birthday at Rapstone in the usual manner with ox-roasting, bonfires, Morris dancing and a quite exceptional amount of feasting, the then Doughty Strove sent a number of Skurfield villagers to the party secretly carrying crowbars and reaping-hooks. These invaders fell upon the Rapstone tenants, Doughty rode in with a troop of Parliament men and Rapstone Manor was captured for the Puritan cause. Young Sir Nicholas was arrested, certain women of the household were raped, the barns burned and crops commandeered. During the Protectorate Rapstone Manor suffered a further series of violations.
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