Quickly now Dalziel almost slid down the remaining few feet.
‘You want to be careful,’ observed Papworth. ‘I thought you were going over just now.’
Dalziel did not reply at once but retrieved his beer bottle and emptied what remained in a single draught.
‘Lucky you were here,’ he said.
Papworth shrugged, an ambiguous gesture.
‘I heard you,’ he said. ‘What were you doing?’
It was a blunt question, bluntly put, but justifiable from an employee of the house to a comparative stranger, thought Dalziel charitably.
‘Morbid curiosity,’ he answered. ‘I just wanted to see where it happened. Was he much good at do-it-yourself?’
‘Fielding?’ said Papworth. ‘I suppose so.’
‘He didn’t ask you to give him a hand in here then?’
‘No,’ said Papworth, turning away. ‘I’m not paid to work at this.’
He began to walk towards the door.
‘Just what are you paid to work at, Mr Papworth?’ said Dalziel to his back.
‘Maintenance,’ said the man, pausing and glancing over his shoulder. ‘House and garden. Not this.’
‘I see,’ said Dalziel. ‘And Mrs Greave? She’s in charge of cooking and cleaning. That right?’
‘Right,’ said Papworth.
‘So neither of you would have much occasion to come in here,’ continued Dalziel. ‘Strange, I’ve found you in here twice.’
‘Wrong,’ said Papworth, turning. ‘I’ve found you in here twice. I don’t know what right you think you’ve got questioning me, mister. You stick to the family. Do what you want there. You can get your leg across each of ’em in turn, and see if it bothers me. But don’t try leaning on me.’
‘Sorry,’ said Dalziel with a smile. ‘Like I said, just morbid curiosity.’
Papworth set off for the door once more but a man more acquainted with the sunshine of Dalziel’s smile would have known matters were not at an end.
‘What about Mrs Greave?’ mused Dalziel.
‘What about her?’ demanded Papworth, halting.
‘You still here? I’m sorry. I was just wondering if it was all right to get my leg across Mrs Greave. Or is she taken?’
‘What do you mean?’ said Papworth, his brown leathery face set in a mask of suspicion.
‘I mean, what about you and Mrs Greave? Have you got full-time rights there?’
‘She’s my daughter,’ said Papworth in a low voice.
Dalziel laughed.
‘And I’m your long-lost sister Annie,’ he mocked. ‘Come on, Papworth. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. We all need it now and then! It won’t stay in the mind for ever.’
‘With a gut like yours it’s got to be in the mind,’ snapped Papworth. He looked for a moment as if he were going to say a great deal more, but his control was good and he left without another word.
Dalziel watched him go, then resumed his inspection of the hall and his ingestion of the meat pie. Afterwards he collected his raincoat without meeting any of the others and set off at a gentle walk along the road which led to the village. The pub was still open when he got there and it seemed silly to miss the chance. The landlord proved to be an amiable and forthcoming drinking companion, ready to talk knowledgeably and scandalously about everything in the neighbourhood. Fortified with drink and information, Dalziel next retired to the telephone-box outside the little post office. He spent an interesting half-hour in there too.
As he strode vigorously back towards Lake House he was passed by a total of three cars, each containing two men. None offered him a lift though one did slow down. Thirty minutes later, when with somewhat diminished vigour he finally splashed through the water by the gate and climbed up the drive, he saw the trio parked outside the house.
The Gumbelow deputation had arrived.
10
The Presentation of Awards
The house was full of noise, most of it emanating from Hereward Fielding’s sitting-room. Dalziel met Bonnie in the hall. She looked exasperated but her face lit up when she saw him. He did not know what he had done to cause this reaction but felt himself basking in the glow.
‘There you are!’ she said.
‘I went for a walk,’ he explained.
‘We’ll have to do something about that surplus energy,’ she said. ‘These people have arrived; you know, the award people. But Herrie’s throwing another tantrum. I used to think Conrad was the world champion, but he was minor country stuff compared with this. Do you think you could speak to him?’
‘Me?’ said Dalziel. ‘You must be joking! I’m not even good with animals. Besides I don’t know what the old bugg—fellow is talking about half the time.’
‘That’s part of your charm,’ said Bonnie. ‘He mentioned you at lunch today, said it was nice to have someone safe and ordinary about the place for a change. I know it’s a liberty, but if you could just let him know you think it’s daft to turn down good money, he might take some notice.’
Dalziel let himself be led into the sitting-room, the whiles considering safe and ordinary. They were not adjectives many of his acquaintance would have applied to him, he thought. But safe in particular was an interesting choice for the old man to make.
The room seemed crowded with people, all gathered round the bay window in which, looking both defiant and trepid, stood Fielding. Dalziel’s expert eye categorized the onlookers in a trice. The family and the other residents were there, of course. In addition there were two men in athletic middle age and well-cut grey suits, wearing such similarly cast serious expressions that differences of feature were eliminated and they might have been brothers. They also might have been gang leaders, astronauts, presidential aides or Mormon PR men, but they were unmistakably American. Alongside them, preserving the symmetry of the tableau, were two equally unmistakably English men (it’s something about the eyes, decided Dalziel) who had had the misfortune to turn up, presumably without premeditation, in identical off-white corduroy suits. They looked as if they were part of an advertising campaign for spaghetti, thought Dalziel. One was balding rapidly but wore his hair so long at the back that it seemed as if the weight of it had merely pulled his forehead up over his crown. Associated with him was a pop-eyed girl, festooned with the impedimenta of photography and wearing a light green tunic which matched her chosen make-up. The other spaghetti man was presumably the radio interviewer for no one else could so impassively have ignored the comments and questions of a small Negro with hornrimmed spectacles who was fiddling apparently haphazardly with a large tape-recorder.
‘Let’s all have a drink, shall we?’ said Bonnie in her best no-nonsense voice. No one, Dalziel noticed with approval, attempted to breach Herrie’s well-fortified drink cupboard, but Tillotson disappeared and returned almost immediately with a laden tray, which must have been prepared for just such an emergency. Pausing only to seize two large glasses of scotch, Dalziel joined the old man.
‘You drinking?’ he asked, glancing at the almost empty brandy balloon which stood on the window sill. ‘Well, sup up and try this.’
‘You’re still here,’ stated Fielding with a scornful surprise. But he took the drink.
‘Aye,’ said Dalziel. ‘I only start enjoying parties when I’ve outstayed my welcome.’
‘I’m sorry. I had no right to be rude,’ said Fielding, suddenly contrite.
‘Don’t apologize for Christ’s sake,’ said Dalziel. ‘Once you start that game, you never can stop. I’ve no right to tell you to take this sodding money, but I’m going to. Why don’t you want it?’
‘It’s not the money, it’s the principle of the thing,’ protested Fielding, raising his voice so that the others could hear him. ‘All these people can talk about is Westminster Bridge which I published in 1938. They seem to imagine I’ve written nothing since then.’
‘Keep your voice down,’ said Dalziel grimly. ‘All you want to worry about writing now is cheques. Don’t give me th
is point of principle crap. What’s the matter with the money?’
Hereward Fielding glared at him with an air of indignation approaching the apoplectic. Dalziel began to feel that his excursion into diplomacy was going to be as unsuccessful as it had been uncharacteristic. But now the old man’s face paled to a less hectic hue and he said in a low conversational tone, ‘Money’s not everything.’
Dalziel sensed that this banal assertion was not a mere continuation of the hurt pride debate.
‘A thousand quid’s two hundred bottles of good brandy,’ he said reasonably. ‘That’s a lot of drinking.’
‘Which needs a lot of time,’ mused Fielding. ‘It’s your considered opinion, is it, Dalziel, that I would have this time?’
It was an odd question, but Dalziel took it in his stride.
‘I can’t guarantee it,’ he said. ‘But it’s worth a try.’
‘Mr Fielding, sir,’ murmured a low, flat, American voice.
One of the Americans had approached with an expression of deferential determination, like an undertaker who is not going to let you buy pine.
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘let me assure you that the Gumbelow Foundation is aware of and wishes to honour the totality of your achievement. My colleague, Mr Flower, mentioned Westminster Bridge merely as a volume of radical interest to the student of your mature work. Volumes such as Victory Again, Indian Summer and A Kiss on the Other Cheek are, of course, equally well known to us and equally admired also. It would be a grave disappointment …’
‘Oh come on,’ snapped Fielding impatiently. ‘Let’s get on with it.’
Long-winded the American may have been, but he could move at great speed when the circumstances demanded. Fielding was led to an armchair by a low table on which copies of what Dalziel presumed to be his books were strewn. There were five or six, about the size and thickness of police promotion manuals. The photographer, who answered to Nikki (the spelling formed itself unbidden in Dalziel’s mind), took a stream of pictures, not seeming to care much who she got in the frame. Her camera appeared to require as little reloading as one of those guns the good cowboys used to have in the pre-psychological westerns. The tape-recorder was switched on and the Negro placed a microphone on the table and invited Fielding to say a few words.
‘Must we have this sodding thing cluttering up the place?’ he demanded. He referred to the microphone, but each of the visitors looked perturbed for a moment.
‘We’d like to get the moment permanently recorded for posterity,’ said the second spaghetti man.
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Alex Penitent, BBC. I shall be interviewing you after the presentation.’
‘Shall you? We’ll see.’
‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, may we commence?’ said the American. ‘Mr Flower.’
‘Thank you, Mr Bergmann.’
Flower sat on a hard chair opposite Fielding while Bergmann stood alongside his colleague and put one hand inside his jacket. They looked as if they were about to make the old man an offer he couldn’t refuse.
‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ said Bergmann. ‘Right, Mr Flower.’
Flower began to speak in the deep vibrant tones of the travelogue commentator.
‘For fifty years and more the Gumbelow Foundation of America has been seeking out and acknowledging rare examples of merit in the Arts. The Gumbelow Foundation does not make annual awards, for so high is the standard set that in some years no work attains this standard. Past recipients of awards have included …’
Here followed a list which might have been an extract from a telephone directory to Dalziel except that it contained the name of a British artist whose talents had burgeoned during a gaol sentence for armed robbery. Dalziel did not know him through his paintings but through the more personal contact of having kneed him in the crutch when he resisted arrest. As far as he could make out, the Gumbelow Foundation had not given any money to a policeman.
Flower proceeded with his potted history of the Foundation and after a while Dalziel was pleased to note most of the others were beginning to look as impatient as he felt. Someone squeezed his arm. It was Bonnie who smiled at him and mouthed ‘Thanks.’
Fielding brought matters to a head by turning away from the table and waving his empty glass at Tillotson who nodded understandingly, came forward with a bottle and tripped over the microphone wire.
When the confusion had been sorted out, Flower looked enquiringly at the tape-recorder man and said, ‘Shall I start again?’
‘Oh no, oh no,’ cried the Negro. ‘We can tidy it up. Oh yes.’
Flower seemed to sense the mood of the gathering for the first time and when he resumed his speech, his voice rose half an octave and accelerated by about fifty words a minute.
‘In conclusion,’ he concluded, ‘may I say that few occasions have given me personally greater pleasure than this meeting with you, Hereward Fielding. On behalf of the Gumbelow Foundation of America, I ask you to accept this award for services to literature. It comes with the admiration, awe and sincere respect of lovers of beauty the whole world over.’
He held up his left hand. Bergmann withdrew his right from inside his jacket and slapped a large white envelope into Flower’s palm. The envelope was then thrust aggressively towards Fielding and Nikki’s camera began clicking like a Geiger-counter in a uranium mine.
‘Keep it there, keep it there, good, good, super, super,’ she said. Flower held the pose, smiling fixedly at Fielding who, it gradually began to dawn on the spectators, was staring at the outstretched hand as if it were holding a dead rat. Even Nikki eventually became aware that all was not quite right and the clickings became intermittent, finally dying away into a silence which for a moment was complete.
‘Oh Herrie!’ breathed Bonnie.
The old man spoke. His voice was light, meditative.
‘It is interesting to me that you only make your awards in those years which see the production of work of rare merit, particularly as I have published nothing for more than five years now. Still, better late than never, they say. Though I am not sure I agree with that either. I have been writing for over fifty years now and half a century is very late indeed. I am, of course – I have to be, I suppose – grateful for your offer. But fifty years … !’
He shook his head and sighed.
‘If you’d given me this when I was twenty, I might have bought myself a big meal, a floppy hat like Roy Campbell’s and one of those delicious little tarts who used to hang around the Café Royal.
‘If you’d given it to me when I was thirty, I might have bought my kids some new clothes and my wife a sunnier disposition.
‘Even if you had given it to me when I was forty or fifty, I’d have found a use for it. A more comfortable car, for instance. Or a cruise round the Greek islands to see the cradle of civilization.
‘But now I am old and I am ill. I have little appetite for food or women. My children have grown up and gone their ways. Or died. I no longer care to travel by car. And civilization is dying where it began.
‘So you might say that in a fashion not untypically American you have come too bloody late.’
He paused. No one spoke. The envelope remained in Flower’s outstretched hand. The American’s expression never deviated from respectful admiration, and the expressions of the others varied from amusement via distaste and indifference to Bonnie’s evident anxiety.
‘Bravo.’
It was Bertie who broke the silence, uttering the word with overstressed irony.
‘Shut it, Bertie,’ said Mavis warningly.
Bergmann shrugged, a massive Central European bewildered shrug which crumbled his streamlined New York façade as an earth tremor might destroy a skyscraper. Flower seemed to take a cue and relaxed in his chair, dropping his hand to the table. The old man’s arm shot out as the envelope moved and he pulled it rudely from Flower’s grasp.
‘However,’ he said, very Churchillian, ‘I will not refuse your gift, late though it is. Fo
r I recall that I never did get a hat like Roy Campbell’s. But now I shall. And I shall wear it slightly askew as I walk through the village in the hope that the tedious inmates will shun me as a man unbalanced and in the even vainer hope that this reputation might somehow distress my neglectful friends and ungrateful descendants. Bonnie, my glass is empty.’
After that somehow a party began. The BBC man tried for a while to get his intimate interview but in the end recognized that his efforts were losing him ground in the drinks race and set about catching up. The feature writer, aptly named Butt, was well in the lead, though Bergmann would have been neck and neck if his new flamboyancy of gesture had not been joined by a matching volubility of speech. Flower on the other hand was a recidivist and his speech got lower and slower and more and more slurred till he sounded like a second-rate English mimic doing James Stewart. Nikki had stopped clicking and was gurgling merrily through glass after nauseating glass of port and brandy. Even Arkwright, the tape-recorder man, found time from his task of preventing others resting their glasses and persons on his equipment to down mouthfuls from a half-pint glass of gin.
Nor were the residents of Lake House far behind and Dalziel, ever a pragmatist, put all care for the past or the future out of his mind and set to with a will.
After a while for a relatively small gathering the noise became deafening. He found himself next to Fielding who was still holding the envelope tight to his chest as though fearing it would be taken from him. His words to Dalziel seemed to confirm this impression.
‘It will be all right, you assure me of that?’ he cried in what was relatively a whisper.
Dalziel nodded wisely, winked and turned away in search of Bonnie. Behind him the conversation between Fielding and the Americans resumed.
An April Shroud Page 11