Gay Phoenix (12 page)

‘Judith, you’re a perfectly horrible woman. And what you say is essentially accurate, as far as it goes. But there’s a little more to it. Bread’s a crook.’

‘Oh, dear!’

‘No, I’m
not
imagining things. Quite enough real crooks around, without having to dream them up. Bread has a beard.’

‘A beard? A kind of barley bread, I suppose.’ Judith made a gesture of despair. ‘All sorts of people wear beards nowadays. Our own son Bobby, for instance. And Bobby’s not a crook. He’s a perfectly respectable rising novelist. Even novelists can be persons of perfectly impeccable life.’

‘True, Judith, true. But beards, you see, always suggest to me – through long professional habit – the possibility of hastily assumed disguise. I have the trick of looking not at beards but
through
them. I strip bearded characters of their beards at sight. A straight habit of the imagination. Just as a dirty old man–’

‘Yes, of course. So you stripped Bread of his beard. Just what charms were then revealed?’

‘But seriously, Judith. I just wouldn’t have
looked
at the man,
except
for his beard. But I did. And I realized I’d seen him before.’

‘Well, that’s a different matter, I admit.’ Judith had begun to be impressed. ‘Just where had you seen him before?’

‘I haven’t a clue. It’s most annoying. At the Old Bailey, perhaps.’

‘In the dock?’

‘Certainly not on the bench or at the bar.’

‘So where do we go from here?’

‘Oh, nowhere at all.’ Appleby suddenly assumed a large lack of interest in the mysterious Bread. ‘If a tycoon chooses to employ a shady character as his secretary it’s no business of ours. Absolutely not.’

‘Absolutely and definitely not.’ Judith wasn’t impressed. ‘Bread rang some bell with you. Do you think you rang a bell with him?’

‘My name might. Of course I had to give my name. That’s quite possible, and might explain his doing such a lot of talking.’

‘Was it just general polite chat?’

‘Not in the least. It was a kind of orientation course in the character and habits of his employer. Don’t you think that was odd?’

‘Far from it. He wasn’t seeing you as a policeman, obscurely evoking his criminal past. He was merely seeing you as his boss’ new neighbour, harmlessly curious as to what’s cooking up at Brockholes. And he was putting you in the picture, simply in the interest of cordial future relations. But just what was the picture like?’

Appleby didn’t immediately reply to this question. He was filling his pipe in the deliberate fashion he was inclined to affect when giving time to ordering his ideas. He didn’t look much like a man continuing to discuss a topic of no interest to him. He had brought to a high state of development – Judith reflected – a strong natural aptitude for pouncing on puzzles and shaking them until their interlocked components fell apart. Dr Dunton had presented him with a new and shiny puzzle of this sort (not that anybody else would have
seen
it as a puzzle) and he had given it a preliminary shake or twist or twiddle that morning.

‘The picture,’ he said slowly, ‘wasn’t just of a tycoon. It was of an
embarrassed
tycoon. Financially embarrassed, I mean. Charles Povey has created – not inherited – some very large enterprises. But they’re not really his cup of tea. His true mind inclines to other and higher things. So they’ve been inclining of late to go more than a little wrong. I was given the notion of a kind of Antonio in
The Merchant of Venice
, with his argosies going down all over the Mediterranean. The poor chap is too retiring, you see; too much given to elevated thought. Transcendental Meditation, perhaps, just as our good Vicar proposed.’

‘It sounds the most awful nonsense.’

‘You’re right. It sounds the most awful nonsense. Or a confidential secretary’s admitting and obtruding it does. But the scene was well depicted, I’m bound to admit. Quite an able character, Mr Secretary Bread. Povey, being of an extremely retiring disposition, has left matters far too much in the hands of subordinates. There’s a popular view of him, Bread says, which the press has been building up, as a kind of all-powerful spider sitting in the centre of an immense web. It’s a piece of minor financial mythology which I happen to know is true. But it’s based on a misapprehension of Povey’s beautiful character. Such was Bread’s theme, copiously developed for the benefit of a total stranger paying a morning call. What do you make of it?’

‘It has the air of a defensive operation.’ Judith paused to consider this judgement. ‘There’s real trouble brewing, and entrenchments – psychological entrenchments, as it were – are being hastily dug.’

‘Yes. And there was another theme. Povey has had private troubles, shocks, traumatic experiences which have borne hard upon his sensitive nature. Hence his digging in – the entrenchment image again – at Brockholes. The world forgetting, by the world forgot. We mustn’t expect to see too much of him.’

‘Did Bread particularize – in this business of shocks, I mean?’

‘There was something about the brother – a deeply beloved younger brother – lost at sea. It was a horrible accident of some sort. Charles Povey witnessed it, and immediately on top of it came other hideous experiences. They have left him not always quite right in the head. There was a definite hint of that.’

‘I’m with you that it sounds odder and odder. Did Bread give any instances of how this distressing intermittent lunacy appears?’

‘He gave one instance, which doesn’t sound particularly lunatic at all. Povey bolts into yet deeper retirement from time to time. Goes off for a breather under an assumed name. Perfectly innocent and reasonable, that seems to me. But Bread is worried by it.’

Appleby had joined Judith at the window, and was frowning slightly. But this expression of displeasure might have been occasioned merely by what he surveyed through the glass.

‘Really,’ he said, ‘Solo excels himself. He doesn’t do a stroke. It’s the burden of his early environment, I suppose. He’s been larruped around all through his boyhood. And now, because I won’t let Hoobin take a strap to him, the boy conceives himself arrived in the land of the lotus-eaters. Sleep after toil does greatly please. I positively believe he is capable of sleeping on his feet.’

‘Does it occur to you,’ Judith asked, ‘that what you’ve been in contact with is not so much Povey’s problems as Bread’s?’

‘Oh, decidedly. He’s beginning to organize resistance in a tight spot. Something like that. Trouble brewing, as you say. And he’s building up a coherent picture designed to forestall undesirable inferences. However, it’s absolutely no business of ours. I insist on that. I’m not going to be shoved into poking around in it.’

‘Of course not.’ Judith Appleby was just short of speechlessness before this monstrous perversion of the situation. ‘Why not go out and larrup Solo? It would come as a great surprise.’

‘I’m not interested in surprises. I cultivate roses. I’m not sure I don’t keep bees and play the fiddle, and I’m not sure I don’t feel a strong affinity with Solo.
Cum dignitate otium
. An expression in Cicero, if I remember rightly.’

‘Of all the barefaced–!’ Judith checked herself, since Mrs Colpoys, the Applebys’ housekeeper, had appeared to clear away the luncheon. ‘I’m going into Linger to shop,’ she said briskly. And she left her husband to his meditations.

Linger is a small market town disposed round a large market place. Its local paper, the
Linger
Weekly
, is fond of styling it the metropolis of the vale – meaning that it draws upon the vigorous rural life of King’s Yatter, Abbot’s Yatter, Drool, Boxer’s Bottom, Sleeps Hill, Snarl, and Long Dream itself. Persons from all these subsidiary centres do their shopping there, reaching it either in private conveyances or ramshackle and wandering buses according to their means and station. Everything parks in the market place itself, observing or ignoring a system of white lines, very up-to-date in its time and still just distinguishable on the cobbles, invented by Judith Appleby’s deceased cousin, Everard Raven, barrister-at-law. The white lines radiate, like the spokes of a wheel, from a marble statue of the Queen-Empress executed by Everard’s uncle, Theodore Raven, and by him generously donated to the Urban District Council upon some Jubilee occasion. One of the more obscure pubs (which are numerous) calls itself the Raven Arms.

These circumstances resulted in Judith’s being accorded a certain consequence among the more historically-minded of Linger’s citizens. When she went into the Linger Stores (formerly Odger’s Shop) an octogenarian assistant would fish out for her a chair normally concealed beneath the counter – although in general, and conformably with the egalitarian spirit of the age, chairs for the gentry had disappeared from all the emporia of Linger with the single exception of Ulstrup the Saddler’s.

Judith was thus accommodated, and going through a considerable list of requirements, when Mrs Birch-Blackie came into the shop. This represented something of a crisis for the establishment. Although Judith was Lady Appleby (and was on all occasions loudly so denominated by the well-affected) the Birch-Blackies were much grander than the Applebys. This was not at all because Colonel Birch-Blackie’s father was understood to have been eminent in the history of the Sudan; it was because the Birch-Blackies, in addition to having been around for a long time, still owned more local acres than Ravens in their heyday had ever been heir to.

Mrs Birch-Blackie, however, was not one to acknowledge a small
contretemps
of this sort. She resolved the matter by sweeping from the counter sundry small tins of fish paste and peanut butter, and perching on the surface thus cleared with all the ease to be expected of an expert horsewoman.

‘My dear Judith,’ she said without preliminary greeting, ‘have you heard of the arrival of this absurd person at Brockholes?’

‘Yes, I have. But only yesterday.’

‘It has been known for some time. Ambrose has been very doubtful about it. There are rumours of some very shady connections. Although they were perfectly respectable people at one time.’

‘I suppose so. But I know very little about them.’

‘But you must have known the Poveys when you were a girl, surely. This man’s father wasn’t quite normal, of course. He went in for music and things of that sort. But they were certainly on visiting terms round about.’

‘You forget, Jane, that we weren’t quite normal ourselves. The Ravens, I mean.’

‘Perfectly true.’ Jane Birch-Blackie appeared to see no point in disagreeing with this.

‘Both my uncles – Everard and Luke – never bothered much with people who didn’t interest them. Of course we did meet Poveys from time to time. But my memory of them is quite vague.’

‘No loss, so far as the two boys were concerned. The younger was called Arthur, and it seems he’s now dead. A light-fingered lad.’

‘Light-fingered?’ Judith was mildly astonished. ‘You mean he was known to be a thief?’

‘In a petty way. Even so, it couldn’t be called a nice thing in a country gentleman’s son. Creates a bad impression. Not a thing one cares to see get around. Ambrose felt that very strongly when there was trouble over his cigarette box.’

‘Colonel Birch-Blackie’s cigarette box?’

‘Of course it was a long time ago. When Arthur Povey was an undergraduate, in fact. And he was uncommonly clumsy over it. He let our parlourmaid see him pocket the thing.’

‘That certainly wasn’t too bright of Arthur.’

‘The person who was bright was the parlourmaid. She might have shouted at the little brute, and there would have been a scandal there and then. But she simply went and told Ambrose. Courageous of her, really, to do anything at all. She might have been terrified and kept mum. Servants hate being involved in anything of that sort.’

‘What did your husband do?’

‘He was extremely upset. The box had something to do with pig-sticking.’

‘How very odd.’

‘I suppose Ambrose had stuck a record number, or something of that sort, and it had been given him by his subalterns to celebrate. At Poona, perhaps. If Poona’s a place where they do stick pigs. Of course Ambrose tackled Arthur Povey quietly, and asked him to return the box. The young man denied all knowledge of it, so Ambrose had to tell his father. He was dreadfully in doubt as to whether it was the proper thing to do. It hadn’t ever happened to him before, you see. And Ambrose doesn’t like what you might call unprecedented situations.’

‘What happened then?’

‘Nothing at all. Arthur simply told his father that Ambrose must be potty. So what more could be done?’

‘I suppose Arthur was too old for his father to larrup,’ Judith said, thinking of Solo Hoobin. ‘But he could have turned him out of the house.’

‘I think he was resigned to Arthur’s getting into that sort of trouble. It was a matter of bad associations, it seems. He had taken up with a dishonest stable lad, or some such person. However, Arthur Povey is dead now, and we mustn’t report ill of him.’ As she said this, Mrs Birch-Blackie looked severely at the octogenarian assistant, who was plainly straining his decayed hearing in an endeavour to catch this notable conference between exalted persons. ‘It’s the elder brother Charles who has come back and bought Brockholes. And Charles was quite a different proposition. By which I mean that he showed promise of being a blackguard on a much larger scale. He burnt his grandmother’s will, and when a fuss was made over that he tried to burn down the house as well. When really quite young he seduced half the girls of the village, and was believed by many to have raped the rest. And of course he successfully blackmailed the then Vicar, who was universally regarded as a man of the most saintly life. There were various other disgraceful incidents I don’t remember.’

‘I don’t believe a word of it – or not more than every second word of it.’ Judith, who had known Jane Birch-Blackie for a long time, was openly amused. ‘You are simply retailing wild gossip from a misty past. If this Charles Povey was half as notorious as you suggest, he would be most unlikely to return to the scene of his misdemeanours and shamelessly set up in the old home. It doesn’t make sense.’