The Old Contemptibles

by Grimes, Martha

  Melrose pointed out that Dick’s new menu had several oddities on it that it could do without.

  “Well, I’m sure my wife’s every bit as good a cook as Trevor Sly,” said Dick, huffily shaking out the Bald Eagle.

  “Anybody’s as good a cook as Trevor Sly. That’s not the point. I don’t see why you have to try to change the old pub. I don’t like change.”

  “You mustn’t be so upset Miss Rivington’s gone, sir.”

  “I’m upset that Mr. Jury might go the same way,” muttered Melrose.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” Melrose stabbed his cigarette into the ashtray, felt the chill air as the “Saloon” door opened. “Hell’s bells, it’s six P.M., where is everyone?”

  “Right here, old sweat,” said Marshall Trueblood, Long Piddleton’s Everyone.

  It did at least give Melrose a certain satisfaction to be able to wipe the smile off Trueblood’s face. “I have news for you.”

  “Interesting?” Trueblood nodded to Dick. “My usual, Mr. Scroggs.” As Dick drifted over to the optics, Trueblood called, “And if it’s watered down like last time, I’m going to the Blue Parrot.”

  “Ha! As if Sly’s ain’t.”

  “Well, his water comes from a well. What news?”

  “Jury’s getting married.”

  “Of course he is. We haven’t settled definitely on a date, though. Vivian—”

  “I don’t mean our version, I mean his.” Melrose raised his glass, disgusted.

  “He doesn’t have a version, don’t be silly.” Trueblood refused to be ruffled. “Who in hell would he marry, anyway?”

  “Look, there are women in London.” The distant brr of Scroggs’s telephone sounded as Trueblood waved the suggestion aside. “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about.”

  “For you, m’lord,” called Scroggs. “It’s Mr. Ruthven.”

  “Why must people be bothering me here?” He marched heavily round to the public bar.

  • • •

  . . . And returned like a sleepwalker. Melrose sat down and stared at Trueblood. “She’s dead.”

  “You mean Agatha finally—?” He was absolutely gleeful. Then his face darkened. “Still, it won’t be the same here without the old finagler.”

  “Not her. Jury’s lady-friend. And he’s been suspended.”

  Trueblood was tapping a pink Sobranie on his polished thumbnail and raised an equally well-manicured eyebrow when he looked from Melrose to Dick Scroggs. “He’s really gone round the bend this time, Dick. Give him a drink.”

  “Just did,” said Scroggs, sharing Trueblood’s opinion of the report on Jury.

  A new voice chimed in, although the sound was far from bell-like; it was more a rusty clapper hitting dull metal. Mrs. Withersby, whose glass was as empty as the plate she passed at Sunday service (ther’s some ain’t any more Chris’en than . . . she’d tell the vicar), came down the bar to utter her dark prognosis, which would become darker the longer she had to wait for a refill. “Fam’bly alius ’as been a bit, you-know—” Here she made small circles round her temple with her finger and circles with her glass on the bar. She had a cigarette behind her ear but she meant to hang on to it, asking Marshall Trueblood for one of his “fag ends,” and laughing uproariously at her own joke. “Look at ’im, come all over white, ’e ’as. Stout’s not good fer that . . . ah, thankye, thankye,” she concluded as Melrose shoved the untouched glass toward her. Happy now with her fag and her half-pint, she shuffled away.

  Melrose’s eyes were still glazed over. He shook his head, quickly, trying to clear it.

  “Listen, old trout, you need a vacation.”

  “We just got back from Italy, you idiot.” He was so upset over the news he actually took a green Sobranie when his friend offered it. “I’m going to the Lake District.” He drew in on the cigarette, coughed.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Trueblood shuddered.

  “Southey?” The name seemed to taste, in Melrose’s mouth, as unfamiliar as the bright green cigarette he dashed out.

  Scroggs shook his head, his eyes still clamped on his paper. “Cumbria, m’lord. North.”

  “Is Theo still open?” Melrose checked his watch.

  “Why? Yes,” said Trueblood. “That money-grubber stays open every night until seven, seven-thirty. You’re not going there?”

  Melrose didn’t answer as he hurried out the door.

  • • •

  The door of the Wrenn’s Nest Book Shoppe stood open, all ready to admit March winds of gale force so long as they blew a customer in.

  Theo Wrenn Browne, proprietor, sat like a hawk atop his library ladder marking up the price of a first edition. He declared himself as an antiquarian book dealer, but Melrose generally found him either deep in some American bestselling woman author’s décolletage (the picture on the back) or deep in his cash drawer as if he were robbing his own shop.

  This evening, however, he was up at just the right height to look down on Melrose Plant, whom he disliked intensely, although not so much as Marshall Trueblood, whom he absolutely loathed, most probably because Trueblood’s sexual persuasion, despite his flying the colors that Theo loved to see, was actually in doubt; whereas there was no closet stout enough (in a manner of speaking) to contain Theo Wrenn Browne, even though he thought he was hiding from everyone back in the cobwebbed corners. Theo Wrenn Browne was such a flamer he would have burst out of the London Silver Vaults.

  Any way of demonstrating his superiority over Melrose Plant (Long Pidd’s most popular citizen) or Marshall Trueblood (the village’s most colorful one) made him nearly gag with pleasure. Thus his finding out that his own knowledge of the Lake poets surpassed Plant’s made Theo almost swing on his perch. “You mean Robert Southey, I take it.”

  “Well, are there any more Southey poets?” asked Melrose innocently.

  Sniffing sarcasm (where none was intended), Theo’s no was as snappish as the book he snapped shut. He came down and rolled the ladder along to the far side of the shelves and was annoyed that he hadn’t a Southey edition. “Here’s a Collected Works. Wordsworth, Coleridge, De Quincey, Southey.” He handed down the heavy book.

  “It’s not the poetry. I’ve read Lyrical Ballads. Something on their lives, in addition to all the usual gibberish about Dorothy and William. And don’t you have anything shorter? I’ve only got till tomorrow morning to bone up. How about one of those A-Plus-level booklets?”

  Theo Wrenn Browne looked shocked. “Don’t tell me you’d stoop to a student’s crib-manual.”

  “Yes. Do you have one on the first half of the nineteenth century?”

  “I don’t have any of them. I don’t encourage that sort of thing. Here.” He handed Melrose a small book. Guide to the Lake District by William Wordsworth. “One of the better-known volumes on the Lakes.”

  “A guide? Do I want a guide?”

  Said Theo, prissily, “You obviously need one.” He returned his eyes to the shelf. “The West is here. That’s Thomas West,” he said, looking down at Melrose and mouthing the name as if his customer were retarded. “But I believe Wordsworth refers to it in his own book.”

  “Give it to me. Might as well. There’s one on Dorothy’s letters. Might as well let me have that too.”

  Theo pursed his mouth. “The West is rare. Expensive.”

  Melrose sighed and got out his checkbook.

  Part II

  Fat Man’s Agony

  15

  “I’ll put my teeth in when I damned well feel like it,” said Adam Holdsworth to one of the tastefully dressed nurses who comprised part of the Castle Howe staff.

  No uniforms here, but they still talked nurse-talk. “Come now, Mr. Holdsworth,” Miss Rupert said in her best wheedling voice, “we’re ever so handsome with our teeth in.” Miss Rupert did her best to keep the ends of her mouth tucked up in a tiny smile.

  “You may be, Miss Rhubarb, but not me.”

  “Rupert, as you very well know.” The smile
-tucks vanished. “Your teeth, Mr. Holdsworth—”

  “For God’s sake, woman, I’m eighty-nine and look like Alas-poor-Yorick, fresh from the grave. Now, get that blood-pressure cuff off and get out of my way!” Stringy as a runner-bean she was, but when she clamped your wrist it was the same as wearing manacles. He pushed the lever on his electric wheelchair and Miss Rupert had to jump back.

  Castle Howe had nothing appended to its name (such as “nursing” or “retirement” home) that would tarnish the image the brochure meant to convey of grand vistas and luxurious appointments. It was, of course, both, in a sense, there being several nurses, two doctors who came in part-time and two resident doctor-psychiatrists who got more business than all the rest of them, entertainment opportunities being otherwise negligible. None of the staff wore uniforms, however; their clothes were simple but expensively tailored. Everything was done to keep the “guests” (never “patients,” whether they fell facedown or died “quietly” in their sleep)—to keep their minds off illness, mild or terminal.

  Those who took up residence at Castle Howe were (it would appear) merely coincidentally sixty and up, or as Mrs. Colin-Jackson, the owner-manager, put it, in their “golden years.” This was the phrase she used to describe Castle Howe’s prospective “guests.” And the residents lived not in mere “rooms” but in “suites,” the difference being that the “suites” had a small alcove in which there was a fridge, a Teasmaid, and a kettle. The “suites” were not numbered but named with any name that might fit the Lakeland heritage: the “Wordsworth,” the “Coleridge,” the “De Quincey” (which was Adam Holdsworth’s, who tried to live up to the name by filling the room with cigar smoke, since opium was at a premium), and other poetical names, reaching even into Scotland for “Burns” and “Scott.”

  It was very difficult to describe Castle Howe without a fulsome use of italics. Adverts in The Lady, Country Life, and occasionally in the Times assured the prospective client of its wondrous scenery and its splendid appointments. All words that bore the stigma of nursing or retirement homes were avoided. Both ads and brochure were artfully composed by Mrs. Colin-Jackson, obviously aimed at the well-to-do who wanted to dump their rich old mums and aunties and grans who might hang on for two more months or two more decades.

  The colored brochure displayed a living room and a music room stuffed with antiques and dressed in William Morris wallpaper complemented by gorgeous moldings and silk curtains. It also showed a candlelit dining room worthy of an expensive hotel, with its linen and white-jacketed waiter apparently taking the order of two men and a woman who looked rich enough to spend their time in takeover bids of airlines and computer companies.

  The advert, with its pen-and-ink drawing of the manor house, certainly did not draw attention to the small-print stipulation that prospective residents must be “largely ambulatory” and must have a “clean psychiatric record,” both phrases so ambiguous that they could be translated in any way that Mrs. Colin-Jackson wished. Thus, she was in a position to decide for herself whether the elderly prospect would be suitable, a decision taken on the basis of money only.

  It was troublesome to Mrs. Colin-Jackson that there were, among the middle class (rather than the upper, to which she really catered), daughters and sons and nephews and nieces so self-sacrificing that they would spend their last penny to see that Mummy or Uncle John could live in posh surroundings. Last pennies held little interest for Mrs. Colin-Jackson. In a case such as one where bequests would be unlikely and the children were intent upon walking around and actually assessing the accommodation, Mrs. Colin-Jackson would explain that “largely ambulatory” allowed for a cane or two and their mummy could make her way round only with a walker. If all else failed, there simply would be no suite available, but, yes, the name could be added to the list after the names of the Duchess of Wanderby and Viscountess Stuart.

  If a resident became especially troublesome, Mrs. Colin-Jackson would kick him or her out by ringing up the family and telling them that their golden oldster had suddenly become unmanageable—throwing bits of food or making advances to the doctor; she would apologize profusely but insist the resident be removed. A week’s grace was permitted, or if the relations were willing to pay half-again the cost, a month’s notice could be managed.

  • • •

  Adam Holdsworth knew all of this, of course. He was the only resident there who had chosen to come, and chosen it over the protests of his relations, made nervous by the thought of money walking out the door, perhaps to end up as a bequest to the dear woman who had overseen Adam’s golden years. There was an irony in all of this, thought Adam: the residents were treated far better by owner and staff than they would have been at home, where they would have been ignored unless one mentioned a change in one’s will. Mrs. Colin-Jackson’s money-grubbing didn’t bother Adam at all since she had to pay dearly (in time and in patience) for things like Mr. Wynchcomb’s planting his bowl of Weetabix on one of the Dunster sisters’ heads. Not only put up with it, but smarmily, as if she thought them to be quite the pranksters, but they wouldn’t do it again, now would they? If poor old Wynchcomb had pulled that prank at home, he would have been locked in the attic.

  None of this was illegal or even by a stretch of the imagination, dishonest. The rooms pictured on the brochure did indeed exist, although the angle of the camera might have been wrong; and the food was extremely good, for all that it was served up by people who knew only four words of English.

  Adam had got Millie Thale to wheel him up to Castle Howe, where his interview with Mrs. Colin-Jackson had been satisfactorily concluded by the exchange of several thousands of pounds to stretch the interpretation of “largely ambulatory.” She had smiled and smiled and said that she would need time to converse with her “staff” and Adam had said, Go on, I’ll give you fifteen minutes. And still she smiled smarmily.

  He knew the only person she wanted to converse with was his banker at Lloyd’s. And since Adam had chosen the place himself, he clearly wasn’t being tossed aside. Not only that, his home was so near that he would (he said) be visiting his relations quite often.

  Then he had rolled himself into the brochure-pictured high-ceilinged and silk-draped library where an old girl in handsome tweeds, holding a Bible, was ministering to a nonexistent audience. Don’t bother about Miss Smithson, Mrs. Colin-Jackson had told him, her family is coming to pick her up. We really can’t have this annoyance in Castle Howe.

  Thus it was that Adam had moved into the De Quincey suite.

  • • •

  Mummy is so independent; I know she couldn’t abide the restraints of a nursing home.

  Over the two years he’d been living there, it always amazed him that the scenario was so predictable. He enjoyed making his unambulatory self highly visible when he knew an “interview” was coming up because it drove Mrs. Colin-Jackson to distraction. Through gritted teeth she would point out that “our Mr. Holdsworth can get round in that wheelchair faster than a marathon runner” and then bray with laughter.

  She had several times requested that Adam make himself scarce (not to put too fine a point on it) while she was talking to prospects. Naturally, he didn’t; he would sit in the wide door of the Southey Room with his stocking cap on and his teeth out when the pigeons were in that lushly furnished drawing room being bilked for two thousand a month to take on Mummy.

  To hear that “Mummy” or “Dad” or “Auntie” had to have their independence and then to see the old frails practically brought in in baskets was testament to the small print of Mrs. Colin-Jackson’s contracts. Actually, though, after they got to Castle Howe, they began perking up, tossing the Weetabix and dueling with canes in the lush environs of the conservatory.

  And there was the brochure’s much-touted freedom of the grounds. Anyone was free to leave at any time. Given a two-thousand-dollar security deposit and a waiting list, any guest was free to fall off the ramparts or into the pond as far as Mrs. Colin-Jackson was concerned.

/>   Indeed, it was considered quite a social plum to have one’s barmy old relative in Castle Howe (Auntie Florence? Oh, yes, after that hectic world cruise she felt she must have a bit of a rest and was quite mad for the chance of living at Castle Howe; when in reality—a scarce commodity at the Castle—Aunt Flo had never got nearer a cruise than her rear garden pond where she screamed obscenities to any luckless person who was taking the public footpath).

  • • •

  So he had moved in to thoroughly enjoy a number of “annoyances”—if one considered things like the flaming and long-standing row between the Dunsters or Colin-Jackson’s sidekick, Miss Maltings, who sat near the entrance, eternally knitting black wool. Adam catalogued such incidents in a leather notebook with a Mont Blanc pen held in a hand that was just a little trembly, something like the idling of a motor engine. He could still write, although sometimes he thought the result looked a little like a page zipped off one of those electrocardiogram machines.

  He had an electric wheelchair with which he would, when things got dull, race about the grounds to see how many residents he could tumble or autos he could bring to a screeching halt. It had almost as many gears as a motor car. Once in a while he would ring up the house and ask for Millie to come round and give him a ride outside, through the grounds and garden. He liked Millie’s company. The only ones at the house he trusted unconditionally were Millie and her cat.

  His time at Tarn House was spent largely in the kitchen, which was warm and cozy and delicious-smelling and where he was welcome but not fawned over. On many of these visits he insisted on a staring contest with the cat Sorcerer. It annoyed him no end that he, Adam, was always the first to look away. That cat was almost enough to make him believe in reincarnation. In one of the cat’s former lives, he must have been Rasputin. Mrs. Callow, when she wasn’t imbibing (with the butler), cooked the vegetables, and Millie always had something simmering in a pot. Like her mother, Millie was a born cook. He liked to wheel about in the kitchen hiding pence and pounds in the crockery for her to find later. He wasn’t concerned about Callow’s finding it; she couldn’t see straight for the port.