Lord Mullion's Secret

by Michael Innes

  ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that you must be Mr Sylvanus Wyndowe? If so, perhaps I may be permitted to introduce myself, as I am at present your brother’s guest. Henry and I were schoolfellows. My name is Charles Honeybath.’

  ‘My dear Sir Charles, I am absolutely delighted to meet you!’ Sylvanus produced this as a shout, and at once shook hands with the enthusiasm of one who believes himself at last to have found a long-hoped-for boon companion.

  ‘Not Sir Charles, Mr Wyndowe. Plain Mr Honeybath.’

  ‘Good God!’ Sylvanus appeared appalled. ‘Crooners and footballers and low comedians honoured on every hand, and fellows eminent in literature and the arts and so forth ignored. It must distress the Queen very much. But what can the poor lady do? Has nothing at all in her own pocket, they say. Shocking times, Mr Honeybath. Bloody awful times, in fact.’

  Honeybath, although he doubted the validity of at least some of these propositions, was rather gratified by such enthusiasm from an unexpected quarter. He also felt instructed, although not exactly edified, by the manner in which any element of embarrassment inherent in the initial phase of this encounter had been cast into oblivion in his new acquaintance’s mind. It was now possible to advance upon a little civil conversation about the proposed portrait of Lady Mullion – in the course of which Sylvanus Wyndowe did not hesitate to avow that he had been a strong proponent of the idea in the first place, and indeed of his having been convinced that Honeybath was the ideal choice for the job. He had been much impressed by Honeybath’s treatment – particularly of the horse – in a recent effort commemorating the long services to fox hunting of a fellow MFH in the next county. If he had a bean of his own, he said, or could whip up a sufficient number of chums prepared to come forward with the ready, he would be on Honeybath’s doorstep any day himself – and damned-well leading one of his own nags by the bridle.

  Having delivered himself of this fond thought, Mr Wyndowe was prompted to glance at his watch – and to announce (with the first hint of perturbation he had betrayed during this peculiar meeting) that if he didn’t stir his stumps he would be late for the trough, which was something his wife and daughters particularly disapproved of. But at least he would have the pleasure of seeing Honeybath again soon, since it was his intention to drop into the castle with his family sometime within the next few days.

  With this encouraging thought, Sylvanus again shook hands vigorously, and then walked off hurriedly in what was presumably the direction of the Mullion dower house. Honeybath, remembering the black tie, hurried too.

  9

  It was the custom at the castle that Lord Wyndowe, destined to be Earl of Mullion, should yank Great-aunt Camilla out of her lift on those occasions when she elected to dine with the family. ‘Yank’ was Cyprian’s own word, and expressed the fact that he took a dark view of the whole thing. This was in the first instance because Miss Wyndowe herself took a dark view of any public and sanctioned indulgence in preprandial drinks. The serving of cocktails or even of a glass of sherry in a drawing-room at such an hour was, she believed, a disagreeable practice recently brought into vogue among commercial people. What gentlemen did in more appropriate apartments was their own affair, and Cyprian could no doubt demand gin in Savine’s pantry just as in former years he had been accustomed to demand chocolate biscuits and ginger pop in the housekeeper’s room. She was not disposed to be censorious in such matters. But decanters on a drawing-room table constituted a very vulgar idea indeed.

  Cyprian, owning a somewhat divided nature, was unable to let his conduct on these occasions match his familiar speech. He received his Great-aunt Camilla (not that she was exactly that) with unvarying gravity, and the ‘yanking’ resolved itself into offering her his arm with a decorum which would have been wholly adequate to the demands of the strictest Victorian society.

  Whether the arm was necessary other than as a matter of form Honeybath, observing the ritual for the first time, felt unable to determine. Miss Wyndowe was an old woman, and she looked older than she was – a fact to be attributed, perhaps, to the stresses and strains of intermittent nervous disturbance. She could certainly move at will under her own steam, with no more assistance than that of a stout but elegant ebony and silver walking-stick. At the bottom of the lift, however, there was held in reserve for her more ambitious perambulations that sort of multipedous device which, cautiously advanced in front of aged persons, falsifies the ancient gnomic assertion that as we begin our life on four feet so must we end it on only three. The lift had clearly been installed specifically for her use, since her quarters were almost as elevated as the castle’s great tower – from which Prince Rupert was reputed to have observed and directed sundry operations of war. Miss Wyndowe looked as if she would be capable of something of the sort herself; she had been a handsome woman, and had a commanding presence still. In just what her independent establishment consisted it wasn’t given to Honeybath to discover. But he suspected that she was one who could not prudently be left for long to her own devices. It seemed wholly amiable in the Mullions to incorporate this not particularly close kinswoman in their household, even if it was on what was coming to be known as the granny-flat principle.

  Lord Wyndowe continued his wardenship of the old lady on the way to the dining-room. There, at his mother’s direction, he led her to a chair which proved to be on Honeybath’s right hand. As her prescriptive place on family occasions would presumably be next to Lord Mullion, this arrangement appeared to suggest that Honeybath was, as it were, to be pitched in at the deep end without delay, and cope as he could with whatever mild or not so mild eccentricities it was Miss Wyndowe’s habit to display. Honeybath had, of course, already been presented to her, but as her only acknowledgement of the ceremony had been a grave bow he had no idea whether she had made anything either of his identity or the occasion of his presence at the castle. Thus established at table, and settled in her place by Savine with what Honeybath felt to be particular solicitousness and gloom, Miss Wyndowe reposed for some minutes in deep abstraction. Although Lady Mullion had at once begun to talk firmly to Patty on her left hand, Honeybath made no immediate attempt to initiate a conversation with his other neighbour. She was a member of the household, and he himself had never been near the place before, so the ball might be considered as in her court. Presently, indeed, she did turn her head and look at him. For some moments it was a calm and considering gaze, such as any woman habituated to good society would employ when determining the probable interests and resources of a stranger with whom talk must be carried on. Then her expression changed. It was as if she had detected Honeybath in slipping some of the Mullion spoons and forks into his pocket, or pierced a disguise and perceived that here was the burglar who had broken in upon her the night before – or even the escaped lethal lunatic lately mentioned in a local paper. And the effect was undeniably lunatic in itself. There was suddenly something quite wild about Miss Camilla Wyndowe. Honeybath didn’t like it at all. He even felt considerably alarmed. His hosts, he told himself, might at least have spared him this all too sudden confrontation with something out of the cupboard.

  ‘Have you got a good vicar here?’ Miss Wyndowe asked. Her tone was as politely calm as her expression had been a minute before. And the question was one, on the instant, uncommonly difficult to reply to. Honeybath might, indeed, say with an answering calm something like, ‘Dear lady, you’re off your head.’ But that, it had to be acknowledged, wouldn’t do at all.

  ‘Why, yes,’ he said. ‘I believe so. Dr Atlay, is it not? I had the pleasure of meeting him this morning, as a matter of fact.’

  Miss Wyndowe frowned. She appeared to regard this response as fundamentally unsatisfactory. And in the brief silence that succeeded, Lady Mullion (who must have been more alert than she seemed to be) turned to her husband’s kinswoman without haste. ‘Camilla, dear,’ she said, ‘you forget that you are not on a visit. You are at home, you know. And there is Henry at the other end of the table.’

  �
�At home? I am not a visitor in this house? How one’s keenest perceptions betray one! I am confused, indeed.’

  This extraordinary speech, Honeybath thought, might have been out of the kind of novel (at one time brought into vogue by Miss Ivy Compton-Burnett, whom he greatly admired) in which the numerous members of excessively well-bred families are excessively nasty to one another in an excessively oblique manner. But no such effect in fact attended Miss Wyndowe’s words. They had been uttered dreamily and entirely without animus. And now, without pause, she turned back to Honeybath with an expression that had wholly returned to an agreeable calm.

  ‘Have you seen any good plays lately?’ she inquired. ‘I have been told there is something quite amusing by Sir Arthur Wing Pinero. So odd a name! I believe the play to be called The Gay Lord Quex. It sounds as if it was about ducks. Sir Arthur, of course, is not so witty as Mr Wilde. But I am told his morals are exceptionable.’

  ‘It’s not at all improbable.’ Honeybath felt that he now had his bearings with Miss Wyndowe. She lived in the past – and not even her own past, unless his chronology was badly astray. He had only to humour this foible – or debility – with a decent gravity and urbanity. ‘I seldom go to the theatre nowadays,’ he said. ‘The actors are not what they were. Who now is so moving as Beerbohm Tree, or so amusing as Charles Hawtrey?’

  ‘Or Little Titch,’ Miss Wyndowe said with sudden animation. ‘I adore Little Titch.’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ It was rather feebly that Honeybath offered this concurrence, since it had occurred to him to wonder whether the alarming old woman was making fun of him. His embarrassment must have been remarked by Patty, since she now struck in promptly from the other side of the table.

  ‘You do know, don’t you, Aunt,’ she asked, ‘that Mr Honeybath, while at the castle, is going to paint my mother’s portrait? Mr Honeybath is a Royal Academician, and his portraits are held in very high regard.’ Patty paused, and must then have remembered one of Miss Wyndowe’s more marked eccentricities. ‘He is considered,’ she added, ‘quite the equal of either Mr Sargent or Sir John Lavery.’

  ‘I am most delighted to hear it.’ Miss Wyndowe said this with perfect propriety and ease of address. ‘But Mr Sargent’s work I do not myself greatly care for. More often than not, he paints people who are extremely common – or worse. He might be described as a kind of Velazquez de la boue. Nor do I think, Patty, that from the Americans in general we have much to learn. It is to be regretted, indeed, that the laying of the submarine cable has so expedited communication with them. Mr Honeybath, I am sure that you agree with me.’

  Honeybath produced some sort of murmur. Great-aunt Camilla, it seemed to him, was not mad quite as most people who are mad are mad. She certainly retained powers of astringent judgement and pungent expression of it. He wondered whether, were he to have her squarely before him through a dozen sittings, he would arrive at some sense of knowing his way about her. But the mere thought of such an assignment was alarming. And it might perfectly easily have happened. Henry could simply have invited him down to paint the portrait of a distinguished elderly member of his family whom he desired to honour. The thought made Honeybath reflect once more on the hazardousness of his calling.

  But now Miss Wyndowe (who seldom paused to eat) was well launched upon table-talk, mostly within the wide field of art and her own peregrinations in it. She had been received by Monet himself at Giverny, and had been a good deal encouraged by him. (Here at least, Honeybath thought, was a chronological possibility, if only because Monet had lived into his later eighties.) She had also wandered for some months in Provence, where the younger painters were beginning to congregate, and here too her budding talent had been freely acknowledged. She still owned numerous memorials of that time, and when she came to domesticate herself at Mullion her cousin Sylvanus (Henry’s father, not to be confused with the person in the dower house) had been kind enough to hang some of her work in the castle. And there it still was, although she didn’t, for the moment, precisely recall its location. After dinner, however, she would require that Honeybath be conducted to it.

  Honeybath, who was not infrequently called upon to admire the productions of talented amateurs, expressed his keen anticipation of this pleasure, and cautiously refrained from regretting Miss Wyndowe’s apparent neglect of the thraldom of artistic labour over some four or five subsequent decades. Miss Wyndowe’s reminiscences, although perhaps not untouched by imagination and certainly somewhat egocentric in effect, seemed sane enough in their way. She was undoubtedly dotty, all the same, and perhaps it was an early onset of this unfortunate condition that had dried up in her the well-springs of creation. Honeybath knew other artists to whom this had happened: inheritors, it might be said, of unfulfilled renown.

  ‘But you didn’t’ – it occurred to him to ask, recalling Lady Mullion’s account of the matter – ‘think to go on to Italy?’

  ‘Most certainly not!’ This was snapped out by Miss Wyndowe with so sudden a vehemence that Honeybath was startled. He had thoughtlessly stumbled, he supposed, on the dangerous territory of the old lady’s religious fanaticism.

  ‘Or ever thought,’ he continued hastily, ‘to travel in the Far East? I have myself always regretted never having visited Japan.’

  ‘Japan? Decidedly not! The sanitary conditions there are certain to be deplorable. And that held of Italy, at least at that time. My maid, Pipton, who accompanied me in France, had been briefly in Italy with my cousin, Parthenope Wyndowe. The conditions, Pipton said, were atrocious, and such as we should not think to face. And that, Mr Honeybath, was the occasion of my not venturing further than Provence.’

  ‘It was very prudent, no doubt.’ These bizarre considerations, he reflected, seemed to have little to do with a maniacal disapproval of the so-called Bishop of Rome. But Miss Wyndowe was really a muddled old soul, although in some ways she had to be regarded as sharp enough. It certainly wouldn’t do to challenge her on minor inconsistencies revealed in these autobiographical ramblings. So he cast round for a radical change of subject which should take him, as it were, to the end of his innings with Great-aunt Camilla. Some more sustained attention on the part of his hostess seemed to him a little overdue. Perhaps she was acting on the assumption that her aged kinswoman would particularly enjoy a long colloquy with a fellow artist.

  ‘This part of the country,’ he said, ‘always seems to me particularly beautiful at the present time of year. I had a delightful drive down this morning, on secondary roads for the most part. One sees much more of one’s surroundings that way.’

  ‘Is that why you were late for luncheon at the castle?’

  ‘Well, no.’ Honeybath was a shade disconcerted that Miss Wyndowe should have been told about his small failure as a punctilious guest, and suspected that her informant had been young Cyprian, who might even have adorned his tale with a little ludicrous fiction. ‘What happened was that I ran out of petrol. Or, rather, I imagined I had.’

  ‘Imagined you had? How very peculiar!’

  ‘It does sound odd.’ Honeybath considered embarking on a description of little green and red lights, but reflected that such gadgets didn’t belong to Miss Wyndowe’s period. ‘However, I was rescued by one of Henry’s gardeners, an obliging lad called Swithin Gore.’ Swithin, as one whom he had unjustly aspersed, was still running in Honeybath’s head.

  ‘Gore? I don’t think I know him.’ Miss Wyndowe appeared to consider this remark with care. ‘But he may be the boy who used to look after my donkey-cart, and who has received some promotion since then. Do you use a donkey cart, Mr Honeybath? As you know, the Queen enjoys driving one. Only they call hers a donkey carriage.’

  ‘Is that so?’ This information struck Honeybath as improbable, until it occurred to him that the sovereign thus augustly invoked had probably enjoyed this mode of conveyance at Osborne or Balmoral rather a long time ago.

  ‘And – now I come to think of it – there have been Gores on the estate over a number of gen
erations. I seem to recall an Abel Gore. One might imagine him to have been some sort of bull.’

  ‘The boy who coped with my car wasn’t at all like a bull.’ It had taken Honeybath a moment to catch up with the sense of Miss Wyndowe’s remark, which revealed a process of mind as peculiar as had yet come from her. He wondered whether she was adept at advanced crossword puzzles. ‘As a matter of fact, when I first glanced at him I supposed he might be Cyprian. But that had something to do with what he happened to be carrying.’

  ‘And also an Ammon Gore.’ Miss Wyndowe was pursuing her own line of thought. ‘Or was it Mammon? The lower classes were formerly prone to make an uninstructed use of scriptural names. But I think it was Ammon. The Ammonites were the children of Lot. His wife, you will recall, was of a retrospective habit, and was turned into a pillar of salt as a result. The notion of a pillar of salt is elusive, but some sort of stalagmite may have given rise to the conception. Can you tell me, Mr Honeybath, whether there are stalagmites in the Holy Land? It is on record as flowing with milk and honey – but not, so far as I know, with carbonate of lime.’

  Honeybath felt that this was getting beyond him. He wondered whether it represented a form of witty conversation fashionable at dinner-tables in this aged person’s youth. Or was it some kind of family joke that hadn’t been explained to him? This last speculation, which really had very little sense to it, at least confirmed the fact that he had a strong impulse to be bewildered by Great-aunt Camilla. He remembered Lady Mullion’s saying, on an impulse, that she felt her husband’s kinswoman as suggesting that some mystery attached to her; that she had a secret. Might it be that at least she had a past – which was not quite the same idea, but came close to it? The oddity of her conversation seemed not entirely a matter of senility or mental decay. It had too much intermittent point to it for that. Was it, conceivably, in part a defensive mechanism; something left over from a period in which an evasive inconsequence was useful to her? This notion, if not without subtlety, was rather unpersuasive as well, and Honeybath abandoned such idle speculation. During the rest of dinner he talked in the main with Lady Mullion. But on several occasions when conversation among the small party grew more general, and Miss Wyndowe contributed to it with a kind of random liberality, it struck him that a good deal of the effect she created proceeded from nothing more remarkable than a singularly patchy memory. This seemed to hold alike over the near and the remote past. If her memory was to be regarded as a route-map of the large areas of experience she had traversed in her eighty years (or whatever exactly they might be) then there were blank spaces scattered indifferently all over it. This, of course, was a rash conclusion to think to arrive at with any confidence on so short an acquaintance with the old creature as his at present was. Her mind might well reveal more extravagant contours on a better knowledge of her. Indeed, he had been as good as warned that it was so. But at least she was far from boring. Honeybath caught himself as being almost sorry, after all, that he hadn’t been invited to set up his easel in front of her.