Lord Mullion's Secret

by Michael Innes

  ‘The 15th of July,’ Swithin said, a shade shortly. ‘My birthday.’ And he added, after the slightest pause, ‘M’lady.’

  ‘Yes, of course. How stupid of me.’ Patty wasn’t going to show that she had been justly snubbed. And it had been stupid of her. Because of what it tells of the coming weather, St Swithin’s Day is a landmark in the English rural mind, and it had been natural and even edifying for Ammon Gore to call his infant after the saint. It had been like naming as Noel a boy born at Christmas. And now, having been a little venturesome with her assistant, Patty went further. ‘So how old are you now, Swithin?’

  ‘Twenty. Did you say six inches?’ This question, briskly uttered, referred to the dibbling operation in progress at the moment.

  ‘Yes, I think so. And not too deep. We’re not in a turnip field.’

  ‘It would be a queer way to behave with turnips,’ Swithin said matter-of-factly, and bent again to his task. He performed it from the waist and without bending his knees. This, muscularly, was the economical and professional thing. And, again, it was attractive in itself. ‘How old are you?’ Swithin asked, his nose close to the ground.

  The comeback was unexpected, and Patty found it disconcerting as well. Or rather she found disconcerting the fact that her spontaneous reaction to Swithin’s echoing her own question had been, if ever so faintly, disapproving. If she asked a young man his age why on earth shouldn’t he ask her hers? Her father, she knew, would judge the garden boy’s reciprocal curiosity to be entirely civilized and in order. Indeed, Swithin’s tossing the ball briskly back had been much nicer in him than that snubby ‘M’lady’ he had started off with.

  ‘Twenty-one,’ she said, suddenly pleased and laughing. ‘So we’re both getting on. Do you like it here, Swithin?’

  ‘I’ve been here always, haven’t I?’ Erect again, Swithin Gore made this reply with what appeared to be no enigmatical intention. But was that very straight glance faintly mocking as well? Lady Patience Wyndowe found herself, for reasons that were obscure to her, rather hoping that it was.

  ‘Yes, I suppose you have,’ she said. ‘And I have too – except for going away to school. I didn’t much care for that.’

  ‘But Lady Lucy does.’ Lady Lucy was Patty’s younger sister Boosie. ‘She has told me about some high old times.’

  ‘Has she, now?’ Patty was astonished by this information – and abruptly jealous of Boosie, whom she wouldn’t have supposed ever to have held any conversation with Swithin at all. Perhaps Boosie was planning to convert Swithin to Euro-communism, or whatever it was that she at present believed in. ‘My sister bosses her school, Swithin, and that’s why she enjoys it. Did you boss yours?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  This had flashed out from Swithin in a surprising way. Patty had only a vague notion of the kind of school a garden boy came from, but supposed it to begin with toddlers in snot-covered smocks and end up with beefy louts and larking hoydens largely beyond anybody’s control. The mere fact that he was alert and clever must have made Swithin something of an odd boy out. If he had really come out on top it was necessary to conclude that he had something. And this was becoming Patty’s impression anyway.

  But Swithin had returned to his work on the biennials, planting out with mathematical precision the wallflowers and polyanthus that would fill this one large bed in one of the several small gardens lying outside the moat of Mullion Castle. Patty was just deciding that it would be judicious (after this curious breakthrough) to leave him to it when Swithin spoke again.

  ‘The poor man’s flower,’ Swithin said.

  ‘What’s that, Swithin?’

  ‘The polyanthus. It’s in a poem as that. “Or polyanthus, edged with golden wire, the poor man’s flower.” It’s just like that, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes – and how very interesting.’ What Patty meant was that Swithin was very interesting. He was becoming rather alarming as well.

  ‘Or did you ever hear,’ Swithin asked, ‘of something being described as smart as a gardener’s dog with a polyanthus in his mouth?’

  ‘I don’t think I ever did.’

  ‘Then you ought to have, m’lady. Because, you see, it’s in The Water-Babies. And it must have been in your nursery, I’d be thinking, that book.’

  ‘I suppose so. In fact, I’m sure it was.’ Patty found herself not resenting the measure of reproof in Swithin’s observation. She had also become conscious that Swithin, although he didn’t talk in the refined manner of, say, Savine, her father’s butler, didn’t quite have the accents of a gardener’s boy either. It was odd that her ear had never detected this now perfectly patent fact. As ears go, Swithin’s must be better than hers. And he must have employed it, whether consciously or not, during such opportunities as he had of listening to the conversation of what Great-aunt Camilla would call his betters. Perhaps he had notions of improving himself, which would be sensible enough. More probably – since the result was so far from disagreeable – it was something that had just happened. But now a new line of inquiry had presented itself. And Patty, being a straightforward young woman, went ahead with it. ‘Do you read a lot?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’ This was the rather abrupt Swithin again. Patty recalled how the Vicar of Mullion, an old man given to antique usages, sometimes described himself as having been ‘villaging’ – by which he meant going round the cottagers and chatting them up. It wouldn’t do to turn on a villaging act with this twenty-year-old young man. On the other hand, having once taken him on, as now, not as a hind but as a human being, why funk it? Patty again went ahead. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked. ‘Stop on here? I suppose you might become my brother’s head gardener one day. If there continue to be such people, that is. But perhaps it would really come down to the turnips – and to the two of you tugging them out and mashing them up together. That’s my sister’s vision of the future.’

  ‘She might have a worse one.’

  Much as if she had been a turnip herself, this pulled Patty up.

  ‘It would be to chuck a lot on the scrap heap,’ she said.

  ‘Obviously. But I don’t reckon there’s any cause for alarm. Lady Lucy’s fine, but just a bit doctrinaire. She’s very young, of course.’

  This was a moment of perfect agreement between these two mature persons. Boosie (at eighteen) was demonstrably very young. As for Swithin, he was rapidly becoming increasingly puzzling. But he was rapidly (although Patty didn’t clearly formulate just how) becoming something else as well. It was with an entire lack of awkwardness that, in the interest of this sustained conversation, he had now desisted from his labours. He had been working hard, and there were tiny beads of perspiration on his forehead. He had an agreeable and slightly disturbing smell. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up to the armpit, and on the bronzed skin thus revealed glinted a fine powdering of golden hairs. These ought not to have suggested anything in particular to Lady Patience Wyndowe. But in fact they did. Had this encounter – she suddenly realized – ended only some moments ago she might have returned to the castle and blithely remarked to her mother that she had been flirting with Swithin Gore. It was something she would not now do.

  ‘I might manage to get to a polytechnic,’ Swithin said prosaically.

  Patty’s wild thought that she was perhaps falling in love with Swithin was far from rendered the less disconcerting by this announcement. Swithin as less garden boy than garden god was one thing; Swithin as hopeful postulant for some gruesome form of further education was quite another.

  ‘Oh, Swithin,’ Patty said, ‘that would be perfectly splendid!’ There was a small silence. It marked, on Swithin’s part, a remorseless registering that she had, for the first time, said something stupid and insensitive; had, in fact, started villaging.

  ‘It wouldn’t exactly be high life,’ Swithin said dryly. ‘But it might he a foot in the door.’

  ‘I meant something like that, Swithin. And I didn’t mean to gush.’

  Swithin, who had moment
arily withdrawn tautly within himself, relaxed again. The effect, although not designed as extravagant, was rather that of a young Olympian in sudden effulgence. His glance, however, was less that of a divinity upon a mortal than of one operating the other way on. It was the wondering glance, more frankly accented this time than hitherto.

  ‘That was very nice of you, Lady Patience,’ he said.

  ‘We must plan for it,’ Patty said soberly. ‘And my father would be interested, I know. Perhaps he isn’t very informed about such things himself. But he’s certain to know the people who are. Shall I–’

  ‘Then I may speak to his lordship,’ Swithin said calmly. ‘If you think it a good idea, that is.’ He paused. ‘And now I’d better be getting on with the wallflowers. Perhaps you’ll come and look at the effect later, m’lady.’

  For a moment Patty felt that she had been abruptly dismissed. Then she realized that this wasn’t the state of the case at all. She had known – clearly although through some bewilderment – that it was high time to bring this encounter to a close. And Swithin Gore, if he hadn’t agreed, had understood. She hadn’t been dismissed. She had been – for today she had been – let off.

  4

  Swithin Gore went on with his job of planting out the biennials. Whether he enjoyed doing so, or enjoyed his horticultural employment in general, we don’t yet know. Nothing positively to throw light on the question have we heard pass between Lady Patience and himself. She, indeed, believes he takes pleasure in his work because if he didn’t he wouldn’t be as efficient at it as he is. This reasoning is insecure. The fact that Swithin hopes to go to a polytechnic tells us little. Everything under the sun is (in a fashion) taught in such places – including, perhaps, how to become a municipal gardener in a big way. Mr Pring, the head gardener at Mullion Castle and so Swithin’s boss, would prefer his present situation to gardening all Bournemouth. But Mr Pring (like Dr Atlay, the vicar) has old-fashioned notions, and believes that there is something aristocratic about working for the aristocracy. There is no reason to suppose that Swithin Gore adopts this view – although he may, just at present, have a very decided motive for holding down his job with one particular aristocratic household.

  Not that Swithin’s job is under threat. Mr Pring thinks well of him, although he has at times been disposed to feel that the boy is a little too prone to keeping his own concerns and intentions firmly under his thatch. Indeed, Mr Pring thinks better of Swithin than he does of his other two assistants, since it is Swithin alone who can be relied upon to carry out instructions unmarred by ludicrous misconception. And even if Mr Pring disapproved of Swithin (as thinking too well of himself – which is the verdict upon him of his two fellows) it is probable that Swithin would get away with it. For of the Mullion household in its extended sense he is what an academic society would describe as a gremial member, having been born within the Mullion protestas, nurtured in its lap, bred up within its servitude, and thus assured of its protection. In fact there is an aspect of things, active at least in Lord Mullion’s mind, in which Mr Pring himself, because hired in middle life, possesses a lesser status than Swithin Gore and other retainers to be judged of a hereditary order. This doesn’t mean that Lord Mullion addresses more than a brief greeting to Swithin about half-a-dozen times in the twelvemonth. But he is aware of the lad, and would miss him if he cleared out – just as he would miss the disappearance from the castle of some inconsiderable piece of furniture that has been about for a long time.

  Swithin, being clever, is aware of all this, but doesn’t trade on it. He thinks that the Wyndowes, within the bounds set by the monstrous social injustices to which they subscribe, treat him decently enough, and probably did so from the start. He knows, without having to be told by Lady Patience, that if he makes a properly respectful approach to Lord Mullion access will be granted to him immediately and his ideas about a changed course of life will be entertained and sized up. But he knows he is still going to hesitate about this. He has somehow grown very fond of Mullion (although not of its wallflowers and other biennials in particular), and even if Lady Patience (Patty, he calls her to himself) were banished to Peru for keeps he would himself he reluctant to quit the place for good. He has a nebulous notion that he might even be trained to run it in the exalted station of its proprietor’s agent – which, given the know-how, he believes he would be perfectly capable of doing. The snag about this daydream is Lord Wyndowe (whom he has no disposition to think of as Cyprian). Lord Wyndowe, as his father’s heir, is only a heartbeat away from owning Mullion Castle and much else. And Swithin doesn’t care for young Lord Wyndowe at all.

  These thoughts, and certain others of a more elusive cast, were in Swithin’s mind as he prepared to knock off for dinner. But there were more immediate and practical matters to think of as well. Heavy rain-clouds were banking up in the west, and it looked as if the afternoon would see drenching summer rain. Pring had declared that it would infallibly hold off till nightfall. If this dogmatism proved unjustified Pring would be in a bad temper, and disposed in consequence to direct his subordinates to tasks as boring and disagreeable as he could think up. But there were various means of circumventing him here, in the deploying of which Swithin had developed considerable cunning. He was giving his mind to this as he walked down the drive in the direction of the main gates, some distance beyond which lay the cottage where he lodged. The route took him past the tennis court. Here he found something that arrested his attention.

  On the previous afternoon there had been a tennis party going on. It had been his business to keep away from it, but he had heard a good deal of shouting and chatter and laughter, as well as the regular clop-clop of the balls, as he wheeled a gigantic amount of compost from one place to another. The net had now been let down and everything tidied up, except in one particular. On a garden chair lay a racket, with its press tossed down beside it. And also on the grass were a blazer, a sweater, and a long woollen scarf garishly striped. That was Cyprian Wyndowe, and the colours on display were no doubt a species of tribal emblem associated either with King’s College, Cambridge, or with his lordship’s earlier place of education. Lord Wyndowe didn’t merely chuck things around all over the place; he expected them to be collected and fawningly brought back to him by whoever found them, much as if the entire staff of the castle were so many spaniels, retrievers, or similar canine serfs.

  Swithin looked at these objects, and then looked up at the sky. There could now be no doubt about the rain; it might come pouring down at any moment. Swithin had no call to notice Lord Wyndowe’s bits and pieces, but in the circumstances it seemed churlish and even bloody-minded to ignore them. He decided to collect them, proceed on his way, and return them to the castle when he went back to work. So he crossed the court (with which his own dealings were confined to cutting and rolling the turf and applying whitewash with meticulous care to its lines), screwed the racket into its press, and gathered the garments together and draped them around him. Then he went on his way.

  He reached the main entrance to the castle grounds, and the lodge guarding it. The lodge, unlike the castle, had been built in an age in which symmetry was regarded as the only means to elegance, and it consisted of four diminutive rooms, each in a kind of pygmy Gothic, disposed two on one and two on the other side of the drive. This dwelling (or these dwellings) had no tenants, it having for long proved impossible to find human beings, however humble and however devoted to the Mullion name, to submit to a regular scamper through open air between supper and bed. Swithin had decided that when he took charge of things he would attach the one hutch to the other in the manner of Siamese twins – perhaps with a structure like the Rialto or (less ambitiously) the Bridge of Sighs as he had viewed these exotic structures in some picture-book.

  Now he turned left, and passed on his left hand (since it lay not without but within the curtilage of the castle) Mullion parish church. The vicar, Dr Atlay, was standing in the porch, affixing to it a notice announcing sundry dates upon whi
ch no divine service would take place. Dr Atlay was aware of Swithin Gore as not among the devout, and was the more punctilious with a heartily unaffected greeting as a result. Swithin had no quarrel with heartily unaffected greetings, and responded by waving Lord Wyndowe’s scarf. It would have been more appropriate, no doubt, to tug respectfully at a forelock – which was an object that a number of the older male inhabitants of Mullion continued to cultivate apparently to make this specific gesture of subjection possible. Swithin wound the scarf round his neck and walked on.

  A wayfarer hove into view. He was approaching with a gait that suggested (if this be conceivable) resignation tempered by mild grievance, and he was not to be mistaken for other than gentry. He might have been about ages with Lord Mullion (whom Swithin thought of as distinctly elderly) and he was dressed in country clothes of the sort that indefinably suggest the townee. (Or so Swithin, who cultivated social perceptions inappropriate to his station, sagely opined.)

  The stranger drew near, hesitated, and came to a halt. He studied Swithin. At least Swithin felt it to be that, although the glance was in fact entirely momentary. It was – the young man somewhat confusedly felt – as if here was somebody with a trained eye of an unusual sort.

  ‘Good morning,’ the stranger said – and it was to be observed that his mild pedestrianism had put him slightly out of breath. ‘Is it possible that I am speaking to Lord Wyndowe?’

  ‘I’m not Lord Wyndowe. I’m one of the under-gardeners.’ Swithin managed to provide this correction in a wholly composed manner, although he thought the question addressed to him excessively odd. Then he suddenly realized what must have occasioned it. Here he was, virtually within the purlieus of Mullion Castle, carrying a tennis racket and pretty well swathed in garments tagged all over with miscellaneous armorial emblazonments. He had, in fact, been sailing along under false colours. His first impulse was to explain to the stranger how this state of affairs had come about. But he resisted this – it is to be feared for no better reason than that it was more fun to leave the mystery momentarily unresolved. ‘Can I help you in any way?’ he asked. The stranger took this further perplexity (since the idiom was not quite a gardener’s, whether under or otherwise) commendably in his stride.