Appleby And Honeybath

by Michael Innes

  ‘My dear Charles, what a fantastic idea! Or are you merely being good fun?’

  ‘Well, one must try, you know, to make a moment merry. But there really is something slightly unnerving in not being quite believed. John, God bless him, is a believer. He believes not only that I came on a man in the library, but that I came on a dead man. Denver credits me with coming on something – or I rather think he does. But I seem to sense a general persuasion that poor old Honeybath was simply seeing things. His job, of course. Even portrait painters make their living ninety per cent out of portraying what isn’t there. Every year the walls of Burlington House proclaim it.’

  ‘Thank goodness, Charles, you keep so entirely cheerful.’

  ‘I’m not cheerful.’

  ‘Gamesome, then, and willing to entertain. And I can see the situation is vexatious. But not that there’s anything to complain about in the police having taken themselves off.’

  ‘It’s tantamount to saying that nothing has happened.’

  ‘I can’t see that. They probably have a rule about an eight-hour day, and getting home to the wife and kiddies. They’ll turn up again in the morning, and fall to with a will, arresting us left and right. This company will never sit down to dinner together again.’

  ‘It’s a mixed lot, isn’t it? Fourteen all told, if I’ve counted right, and several of them I still don’t know from Adam. Who’s that extraordinary woman on John’s left?’

  ‘A Mrs Mustard. She was talking to me before dinner, and it seems she’s entirely ready to take over from Mr Denver.’

  ‘Good Lord! A kind of Miss Marple – female sleuth?’

  ‘No, nothing so prosaic. She thinks we ought to call spirits from the vasty deep. Discover the truth by holding some sort of séance, in fact. It seems that she herself possesses quite outstanding mediumistic powers.’

  ‘Heaven save us!’ Honeybath sounded quite genuinely alarmed. ‘But at least the woman on John’s other side isn’t off her head. A Miss or Doctor or Professor Arne. I had some talk with her this morning. Agreeable and well-informed – in the right proportions, too.’

  Judith took a moment to consider this last discriminating remark.

  ‘One can certainly have too much,’ she then said, ‘either of the quality on the one hand or of the acquirement on the other. I hope you’re not going to find my remote kinsman Terence extremely boring. He comes more short on the second than on the first, and even his agreeableness is a bit chancy.’

  ‘He seems to have the power of being absolutely intolerable without occasioning much resentment. I have to come to understand him, you know, and I’m not going to find it easy. Do you think that he’s perhaps one of the celebrated Grinton odd bods heavily disguised?’

  ‘Whether he is or isn’t, Charles, you ought to paint him as just that. It would be a stimulating exercise.’

  ‘No doubt I need stimulating badly, Judith. But if I do paint him – which I begin to doubt – I’ll paint him straight.’

  ‘Portrait of a gentleman thinking about the chicken fund.’

  ‘Whatever’s that?’

  ‘Something to do with the hunt. Terence spends a lot of time brooding over it. He thinks he ought to have control of the chicken fund. But it seems not to have been the customary thing with the Nether Barset. Do you know that there are seventeenth-century poems with titles like Instructions to a Painter, and beginning, “Paint me this” or “Paint me that”? Paint me Terence as a Napoleon of high finance. Get it all into the furrow on his brow.’ Judith glanced briefly at Honeybath and judged that this chatter had sufficiently relieved his mind. ‘And now you’d better talk to Magda,’ she said.

  So Honeybath prepared to address himself to this task. He had a few moments’ leisure to do so, since Magda was engaged with her other neighbour, an elderly red-faced man very much in the Terence tradition. Apart from Miss Arne’s commendation of Magda as a capable pupil, Honeybath knew very little about the Tancocks. Was Magda the Grintons’ only child? If so – and Honeybath had heard nothing of a son – the young gentleman who, with his parents and sister, had gone in pursuit of rabbits that afternoon was presumably heir to the Grinton estate and fortune, such as it was. Perhaps he would be required to take on a hyphenated life as Mr Tancock-Grinton or Grinton-Tancock. His mother could scarcely be asked about this, but it would be in order to express civil interest in the children. Then there was Giles Tancock’s profession. Apparently it involved standing on a rostrum and banging some convenient surface with a gavel. What thereupon changed hands was commonly no doubt an object of refined interest in one or another field of art or bibliopoly. Nevertheless it was hard (at least for Charles Honeybath, many of whose notions came out of Noah’s ark) to view the activity as quite properly that of a gentleman. Certainly to say to Magda, ‘I gather your husband’s an auctioneer?’ would probably be regarded as a little lacking in the felicitous. ‘Are you a Londoner, as I am?’ might be a bit better. But in rural society (from which Magda herself sprang) ‘Londoner’ was often much the same in implication as ‘townee’ or even ‘weekender’. Semantically – Honeybath reflected – ‘weekender’ was interesting. A couple of generations ago, most persons of consequence were weekenders more weekends than not: moving augustly round one another’s country residences. No doubt that activity continued, if on a diminished scale. But more commonly a weekender was now a citizen who had bought a village hovel, gentrified it, and when in residence knew nothing of his neighbours or even of their dogs and cats.

  ‘Did the children enjoy their afternoon with the rabbits?’ Honeybath asked. The red-faced man had fallen silent.

  ‘Not in the least. It’s a ritual activity insisted upon by my father when we pay one of these family visits to Grinton. Demetrius and Florinda aren’t in the least enchanted by it.’

  ‘Children are not always very receptive of the pleasures prepared for them.’ Honeybath, who knew little about children, supposed this to have a reasonable chance of being true. Give your progeny affected names like Demetrius and Florinda, he was reflecting, and you can’t expect them to be keen on the simpler country pleasures.

  ‘My husband sets them a very bad example – simply slinking away and going after his own affairs. Of course it is rather disgusting. There is a nasty old man with two or three ferrets in a bag – and the poor things haven’t even the chance of a square meal, since their snouts are tied up before the fun begins. Otherwise, it seems, they would simply settle down to a long guzzle and a quiet snooze inside the warren. As it is, out come the rabbits, and Demetrius is supposed to shoot them dead. Of course all he has is a little airgun, and he hasn’t bagged a rabbit yet. But I am always afraid he may bag Florinda.’

  ‘That must be a considerable anxiety.’

  ‘It’s not as if it’s the poor boy’s duty to instruct himself in such rusticities. He isn’t going to have Grinton, you know.’

  Honeybath felt that ‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ would be an excessive response to this information, which was both mildly surprising as being volunteered in this way and such as entirely to confound his own idle speculations of only a few minutes before. So he only said, ‘Is that so?’ much as if he had been given information on the present state of the Grinton tennis court.

  ‘I have an elder brother who does some sort of farming in South Africa because he doesn’t get on with my father, but who will arrive and take over when the time comes. It’s not something we at all resent, Giles and I. Florinda is going to do ballet – though I say it she’s a most talented child – and it would be marvellous if Demetrius did too. We’ve been assured by somebody who really knows that he has just the right legs. There’s a lot of silly prejudice about male dancers, don’t you think? About their sexual habits, and the idea that their job is simply to take a deep breath and hold the women up in the air with a palm of the hand to their bottom. So I’d adore Demetrius, as I say, to become a ballet dancer too. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he turned out like Nureyev, or even Nijinsky himself,
and Florinda were as good as the Fonteyn? A prima ballerina assoluta! A stunning pas de deux by a brother and sister would be quite something at Covent Garden.’

  ‘I shall hope to see their debut,’ Honeybath said dishonestly. Mrs Tancock’s speech had depressed him a good deal – the lady not being all that might be expected of an approved Somerville girl privileged to have been taught by Miss Kate Arne. Silly metropolitan ways, he said to himself, and society is turning wholly rubbishing. Aloud, he asked a relevant question. ‘When does a dancer’s full-time education begin, Mrs Tancock? At humbler levels of the same sort of thing – for circuses, and so forth – the infant puts in most of his time being taught to tumble right from the start.’ It was perhaps not quite innocently that Honeybath produced this demeaning comparison. ‘Will Demetrius have to go to a special sort of school almost straight away?’

  ‘Dear me, no. Naturally, he must go through Eton first. And Florinda will at least begin at a proper girl’s public school – although certainly one at which a great deal of attention is given to dancing. It’s all going to be dreadfully expensive. Of course we hope – or at least Giles hopes – that my father will put his hand in his pocket. Giles says he wouldn’t come within a mile of Grinton if it wasn’t for that. I have doubts about it myself. For one thing, I’m not sure my father has a pocket to put a hand in. And I suspect that, really and truly, Giles thinks the same. I’ve heard him say you can tell by the claret.’

  Honeybath found himself putting down his own claret glass abruptly, as if to avoid the enormity of appearing to be checking up on this last aspersion. He had listened in deepening dumbfounderment to Magda Tancock’s entire performance, and could only suppose that devastating candour had become the ‘in’ entertainment at such social gatherings as she normally frequented. Or perhaps it was a turn her set put on when constrained to converse with boring old persons such as Royal Academicians and emeritus professors and the higher clergy. And suddenly Magda Tancock said a surprising thing.

  ‘I’ve been talking absolutely out of turn, Mr Honeybath, and nineteen to the dozen. Anything rather than get on to what you found in that library.’

  ‘My dear lady, it wouldn’t occur to me to broach the subject. It had much better be let sleep for a time. If possible, put clean out of mind.’

  ‘I find myself thinking about it a good deal. A mysterious death in the house, and policemen asking everybody questions. I suppose it’s silly to feel it rather frightening. But I do.’ Magda paused for a moment. ‘The claret seems all right to me,’ she said. And she was then almost silent for the rest of the meal.

  After the claret there was a sip of port, and then Dolly Grinton gathered up the ladies and departed to the drawing-room. The gentlemen shuffled down the table towards their host, before whom Burrow, with an air of subdued prodigality, set down a fresh decanter. Those less familiar with the habits of the house waited hopefully for the appearance of cigars, but Burrow had concluded his ministrations and now disappeared – perhaps to a refection of cold pheasant and claret in his pantry.

  Terence Grinton picked up the fresh decanter, and almost forgot to go through the ritual of replenishing the glass of the man to his right before applying himself liberally to the stuff on his own behalf. It was clear that he felt some formal remarks to be incumbent upon him, but that he wasn’t at all clear what they were. There was a situation requiring thought – that most vexatious and slippery of commodities. He cleared his throat – nervously, yet so explosively that it might be supposed he had found one of his numerous occasions for inordinate mirth.

  ‘Terribly sorry,’ he said gruffly, ‘about all that bother earlier this evening. Owe an apology to you fellows. All blown over, of course. Nothing in it at all. Silly that we sent for that policeman. Idea was to reassure the women.’

  These clipped utterances were received in silence, except that one anxiously tactful guest muttered a supportive ‘Quite right’, and then nervously lit a cigarette. Terence would no doubt have done well to turn to a topic more likely to conduce to relaxed general chat. But he seemed to feel that the mystery of the library must be expanded upon.

  ‘We must all sympathize with Honeybath,’ he said. ‘Indeed, I owe him an apology. Honeybath, my dear fellow, I apologize. Everybody knows that somehow or other nobody happens ever to go into the library. Just one of those things. So when Honeybath went in – a perfectly natural thing to do, of course, particularly if one is of an enquiring mind – he was naturally rather put out at finding another fellow in the room. Various misunderstandings followed, but have all been cleared up. We can put it out of our heads. By the way, I believe Dolly is thinking of bridge. But if anybody is inclined to billiards, I’m his man. And she won’t mind at all.’

  Honeybath – although only minutes earlier he had been recommending the ‘out of mind’ procedure to Magda Tancock – was naturally not gratified by this performance. He was, in fact, outraged – and the more so because no clear course of action was apparent to him. Apart from a slight imputation of vulgar curiosity (not unjustified, for that matter) he hadn’t been directly aspersed by his host of any unbecoming behaviour. It hadn’t been suggested that he had shuffled or told fibs or got in a funk, so he couldn’t at once rise and withdraw alike from his commission and the entire Grinton demesne. And it was Terence Grinton – the old fool – who for some reason was in a funk. He had (Honeybath felt sure) a bad conscience about the whole thing, and just couldn’t leave it alone. This was why, quite out of the blue, he had made a speech, the only intelligible content of which was to the effect that nobody must be cross with Charles Honeybath RA, who was only a harmless dotard with an unfortunate tendency to hallucinations. Grinton had even put a charitable interpretation on the thing by subscribing to the fiction that there had been ‘another fellow in the room’. Or so Honeybath interpreted those rambling remarks.

  ‘Silly old bastard.’ This was murmured into Honeybath’s ear, apparently by way of moral support, by a familiar voice proving to be that of Hallam Hillam. But Honeybath, although thoroughly disposed to concur in the sentiment, disapproved of its enunciation. One really ought not to say that sort of thing about a man, however tiresome, whose port one was at that moment drinking. Or certainly it shouldn’t be thus murmured by a virtual stranger. From Appleby it would have been entirely comforting. Honeybath resolved to seek out Appleby as soon as they got back to the drawing-room.

  ‘It’s a very trying thing,’ he said with reserve, ‘for a man to find happening in his house. So one mustn’t be censorious.’

  ‘There’s been a happening, all right,’ Hillam went on – undeterred and in a louder voice. ‘So it’s absurd to think to huff and puff it away. And I don’t like it. It worries me. It upsets things.’

  ‘It is very generally upsetting, of course.’ Honeybath was conscious of feeling puzzled. It was almost as if this man Hillam was angry as well as at a loss before the mystery, and had spoken in an unguarded way. ‘Have you ever taken a glance into that library yourself?’

  Honeybath had asked this question quite thoughtlessly: simply because a further word or two seemed necessary before shaking the fellow off. But Hillam was disconcerted by it, much as if it had been the pouncing kind of thing that Inspector Denver might have fired off at him.

  ‘I don’t know Grinton at all well,’ Hillam said. ‘This is my first visit here. Mrs G. was very keen I should come down.’

  This was scarcely an answer. It was in fact evasive. So Honeybath concluded that Hillam was another who, in the last couple of days, had taken a peep at the confounded room, but without any such disconcerting experience as had attended his own indiscretion. And now Hillam was well-established in the chair next to him; no general talk was getting underway; it seemed necessary to continue some sort of tête-à-tête.

  ‘I gather’ – Honeybath said by way of at least changing the subject – ‘that Indian antiquities are your particular thing: a field I’m sadly ignorant of.’

  ‘Well, not exactly
.’ Hillam hesitated oddly: it was almost as if he would have been glad to claim that this was indeed so. ‘I suppose I ought to be called an art historian.’

  This was awkward. The man was, in some way, persistently awkward. But the present awkwardness was intelligible. Honeybath must at least in a general way know his way about among art historians. So not already knowing that this curating Hallam Hillam was among them rendered a slightly injurious effect. Of course this was a common liability when moving around in learned and academic circles. The crude way of dealing with the thing was to ejaculate something like, ‘What, the Hillam!’ and hope for the best. But Charles Honeybath wasn’t good at dealing in such parlour subterfuges. So he was relieved that at this point Terence Grinton got reluctantly to his feet and suggested joining the ladies. Honeybath, however, joined Appleby – winking him (it might be said) into a corner of the drawing-room.

  ‘John,’ he said, ‘I wonder if you can advise me? It seems to me, you know, that I find myself in rather an awkward position.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it.’ Appleby reflected that Charles was rather prone to finding himself – or perhaps feeling himself – to be in an awkward position. Although a person both of philosophical mind and very adequate social aplomb, he exposed to the world a considerable area of vulnerability in all things connected with his art.

  ‘It’s this fellow Grinton,’ Honeybath said. ‘I’m here on a purely professional engagement, and know next to nothing about him. Whereas you are an old family friend, as I understand the matter. So of course I hesitate to say anything disparaging about him.’