Gay Phoenix (18 page)

‘Perfectly true – and so he was. His marriage has taken place – in a registry office, I fear – subsequently to his coming into residence among us. Quite a romantic and whirlwind affair. One understands that the lady, a Miss Porter, was professionally engaged at Brockholes, having received a commission to embellish and decorate the interior of the mansion. My new parishioner fell in love with her. And they were married – to express it vulgarly – at the drop of a handkerchief.’

‘Fishy business,’ Colonel Birch-Blackie commented. ‘Queer lot, those Poveys. Always were. Not our sort. And some deuced odd goings-on at Brockholes at this moment, if you ask me. A lot of talk among the village folk. No smoke without fire, you know.’

‘Ambrose has never quite forgotten his cigarette box,’ Mrs Birch-Blackie said indulgently. ‘Just as our humbler neighbours seem never to have forgotten their wives and daughters.’

‘Surely the poet Gray was sadly mistaken when he wrote of the short and simple annals of the poor.’ Dr Dunton was delighted to have thought of this. ‘The genealogies of Boxer’s Bottom or of King’s Yatter alone, I sometimes reflect, must surpass in complexity those of the Borgias themselves. And the oddest breaches of the tables of consanguinity, if seldom openly referred to, are equally seldom forgotten. I have read of primitive peoples whose entire lore consists of an exact knowledge of such matters within the tribe over a period of many generations. It is scarcely otherwise under our own greenwood tree.’

‘But I take it,’ Appleby said, ‘that what you have called the provocation offered by Mrs Corp turned upon something altogether simpler?’

‘Yes, indeed. I own to a certain admiration for Mrs Corp. She may be said openly to have proclaimed her shame (although, of course, everybody knew about it anyway) in the interest of securing some material advantage for her son Sammy, who is a young man not very well able to wrestle for the world’s prizes himself.’

‘Half-wit, eh?’ Colonel Birch-Blackie said. ‘Nice to see one or two still around, I always think. Mad-doctors far too keen on rounding them up and bunging them into their bins. Useless burden on the rates and so on, and only makes the poor devils miserable. Much better left pottering round the village pond, even if they go exposing themselves to old women, and all the rest of it.’

‘There is much to be said, Colonel, for that robust and liberal point of view.’ Dr Dunton had nodded approvingly. ‘But let me return to Mrs Corp. Whether or not Mr Povey has actually acknowledged the paternity of her child, I do not know. But he has given her money, which was conceivably generous but undeniably injudicious.’

‘And rather odd,’ Appleby said.

‘I agree, and the point is one to which I shall return in a moment. But here is Mrs Corp, one of a number of persons in our neighbourhood who prove to have tenacious and unfavourable memories of the new owner of Brockholes. It is rumoured that she marched Sammy up to the house–’

‘It’s not a rumour. It’s a fact. I saw it happen.’ Judith Appleby announced this calmly, but observed the Vicar to be somewhat taken aback. ‘I was walking in the park, you see – and within view of the front door.’

‘That is a most interesting circumstance. Mrs Corp, it seems, was rebuffed by some member of the household, and her next step was to make a great deal of fuss in the village. Mr Povey was Sammy’s father, and she was going to have the law on him. That sort of thing. I must not, out of any tenderness for Mrs Corp – in many ways so admirable a woman – mask the fact that she is of a somewhat intemperate habit. One may suspect that the vials of her wrath had been replenished with ale. Having thus largely advertised what she claimed to have been her former relationship with the new arrival at Brockholes, she returned there – no doubt again accompanied by Sammy – a few days later. This time she encountered Charles Povey himself. On just what happened there is only her own word. Unless, of course, Lady Appleby–’

‘I’m afraid not,’ Judith said. ‘Once was enough.’

‘Quite so. Well, Mrs Corp’s tale is to the effect that Povey listened to her for a time, evinced increasing signs of guilt and perturbation, and then suddenly produced a small fistful of ten-pound notes, thrust them at her, and walked rapidly away.’

‘Ten-pound notes!’ Mrs Birch-Blackie exclaimed. ‘The man must be off his head.’

‘Or demoralized,’ Appleby said. ‘And more probably that. I begin to suspect that in quite a variety of ways this mysterious millionaire is having rather a bad time. Did he accompany his bride when she opened your bazaar, Vicar?’

‘Yes, he did – and he reminded me rather of a fellow let out of prison on parole. I’ve had to do with such characters in my time.’

‘So Brockholes may be a kind of prison? A most suggestive idea.’ Appleby was amused. ‘And did Povey appear to enjoy his trip outside?’

‘I don’t suppose he enjoyed the little scene I now go on to describe, my dear Sir John. It would not have happened were not Mrs Corp a woman of some imagination. On what had she spent that money? I invite you to guess.’

‘On dressing herself up.’

‘Not at all. But on dressing Sammy up. She had dressed Sammy as a gentleman. And very skilfully, oddly enough. She must be a woman of sharp observation and considerable taste. The clothes were even right for the occasion. Sammy looked much as Lord Linger’s elder boy would have looked, had he dreamed of turning out to our affair. Unfortunately it went down very badly.’

‘With Povey and his wife?’

‘No, no – with the rustic world at large. Everybody was outraged and furious.’

‘How frightfully mean!’ Judith Appleby was indignant. ‘Why ever should they be?’

‘It was felt to be a kind of jumping the gun on Mrs Corp’s part. The more simple-minded probably believed that Sammy’s new habiliments signified his actually having been adopted within the ranks of the gentry. Of having slipped from the wrong to the right side of the blanket, as it were, and being now virtually the heir of Brockholes. Your worthy Hoobin was among those who felt a sense of personal injustice before the spectacle. Why Sammy Corp, when there were so many equally valid claimants in every village around? And pre-eminent among these – Mr Hoobin loudly averred – his own nephew Solo. He hauled Solo forward, and bade the company at large to remark his Povey nose. Fortunately I was supported that afternoon by both my sons, it being the last week of the Oxford vacation. They hustled the Hoobins into the vicarage, plied them with cider until they were stupefied, and then drove them home. I can only hope that they were fit for their work here next day.’

‘And then all went well?’ Judith asked.

‘All went smoothly for the remainder of the sale. The Poveys walked round, buying this and that in the manner expected of them.’

‘With ten-pound notes?’

‘Well, yes. But one may suppose such currency to constitute a tycoon’s notion of small change. Mrs Povey – when she had recovered from the Hoobins’ unfortunate demonstration – appeared greatly to enjoy the whole affair. Perhaps she had never previously had an opportunity of playing lady of the manor. She was handed a bouquet by one of the Heyhoe children in a pink frock. There appear to be about a hundred of them in the parish. Heyhoe children, that is; not pink frocks. Mrs Povey received the tribute most gracefully. She might positively have been a royal, Lady Appleby, doing her thing, as the young people say, on a more august occasion of the same sort. My own reflection was that the poor lady must be leading rather a boring life at Brockholes so avidly to have seized upon our small junketing as a vehicle of
divertissement
. Indeed, the whole spectacle of Brockholes troubles me, I am bound to admit. That grotesque fence, for example. One supposes such things to have been erected round concentration camps.’

‘Is it to keep people in?’ Mrs Birch-Blackie asked. ‘Or to keep people out?’

‘Primarily,’ Appleby said, ‘I see it as neither. It is essentially an exercise in public relations.’

This enigmatic comment produced a moment’s silence at Lady Appleby’s luncheon table.

‘Public relations?’ Colonel Birch-Blackie then reiterated blankly. ‘Explain yourself, my dear fellow. Looks more like private relations to me.’

‘Very well. This man Charles Povey has a reputation as a financier – or whatever it’s to be called – eccentrically given to a reclusive and elusive way of life. The fence is designed to play up on that idea. Povey, for reasons unknown to us, judges himself – or is judged by advisers – to be at risk when he walks at large. All sorts of explanations are possible. I’m only surprised, Vicar, that he turned out even for your small but laudable occasion.’

‘Quite so. I take the point.’ Dr Dunton was unoffended by this placing of his annual jamboree. ‘I’m sometimes surprised that I face up to it myself.’ The Vicar chuckled comfortably over this unprofessional avowal. ‘Parish fetes can pretty well be fates worse than death, eh?’

Mrs Birch-Blackie was amused by this joke. To her husband, however, it had to be explained; and this held up the discussion for a moment. Appleby then continued his speculative course.

‘They’re after him, if you ask me. Gunning for him – as, my dear Vicar, your young people say. Who “they” can be, I don’t know at all. But the chap himself gets restless, even desperate. Part of him is screaming to be let out. Perhaps his newly acquired wife is screaming too. And they make a little break for it to your admirable sale. Quite a mystery, the whole affair.’

‘A mystery?’ Colonel Birch-Blackie had a flair for coming in on an interrogative note. He hesitated. ‘Oughtn’t to repeat the gossip of a club,’ he continued gruffly. ‘Still, I have heard something rather odd. Happened when I last ran up to town. Fellow in the City heard I was this chap’s neighbour, and murmured a thing or two. The Povey concerns are in a damnable mess, it seems. Scores of people will presently be calling themselves creditors. Anxious Povey won’t bolt from the country, and so on. Shocking state of affairs. Said even to have set spies on him. Disgraceful situation. Man’s a considerable landowner, after all.’

‘That would explain my Ent,’ Judith Appleby said.

Not unnaturally, it was only Appleby who failed to find this an obscure remark. Mrs Birch-Blackie, however, had been pursuing a thought of her own, and she now came out with it.

‘Charles Povey ought never to have come back to Brockholes. It wasn’t even his property. He had to buy it. And he was simply running his neck into a noose.’

‘Corps and Hoobins?’ Appleby asked. ‘Only a petty sort of noose, that. It can’t really be what’s now controlling the man’s way of life.’

‘Probably not. But it needn’t be vast financial troubles either. He shuts himself away because he’s morbidly sensitive.’

‘Morbidly sensitive?’ Colonel Birch-Blackie repeated. ‘Extra-ordinary things you sometimes say, Jane. Often can’t make head or tail of them. No getting a handle on them. Comes of reading all those rubbishing novels from the County Library. By papists and communists and unnatural women. Litter the place. Can’t think why you do it. Damn it, woman, you can still sit a horse.’

Mrs Birch-Blackie was quite unperturbed at being thus publicly indicted of a premature indulgence in literary pursuits. She simply turned to Appleby and continued her remarks.

‘My uncle Gerald, for example,’ she said. ‘He had only one ear. There was really nothing out of the way about it. He could hear perfectly well. It was simply a congenital thing, which happens to turn up in my family a couple of times in a century or thereabout. Distinguished in a way – like haemophilia, and oddities of that sort. But my uncle was always extremely touchy about it. You might have expected it to wear off as he grew older. Not a bit of it. He eventually resigned his perfectly safe seat in parliament. In his last years, if he simply couldn’t avoid going out to dinner, he wore a black silk balaclava helmet. People used to suppose he was a Tibetan lama, or something of that sort.’

‘A reasonable misapprehension.’ Appleby was impressed. ‘And has Charles Povey only one ear too?’

‘All that Mr Povey lacks is the index finger of his left hand. But he may be extremely sensitive about that.’

‘I see.’ Appleby sounded unconvinced. ‘Another matter of congenital malformation?’

‘Nothing of the kind. Merely an accident when he was a young man. But there was an ugly rumour about it at the time – and, of course, that might induce morbid feelings in him later. It was said that the finger had been chopped off by his brother Arthur.’

‘It sounds a most revolting accident.’

‘No, not an accident. An entirely deliberate action. And in a wood-shed, they say, which makes it appear particularly squalid.’

There was a moment’s silence. Appleby appeared not much concerned with the logic of Mrs Birch-Blackie’s last remark. Rather, he might have been gazing into hiding places many years deep.

‘Arthur?’ he said. ‘A younger brother – and haven’t I heard he lost his life at sea?’

‘You probably have. It was in the papers at the time. Charles and Arthur were on a yacht together. And something fell on Arthur and brained him.’

‘And Charles suffered various privations thereafter?’

‘Apparently. Yes – there was a bit about that too.’

‘A harrowing incident, no doubt. It might itself affect Charles Povey’s temperament, don’t you think? Turn him into a bit of a recluse, and so forth.’

‘No occasion for treating yourself to a ten-foot fence,’ Colonel Birch-Blackie said. ‘But one sympathizes, of course. Bad show, losing a brother. Even if he did once take a chopper to you.’

‘Perfectly true.’ Appleby concurred with these sage observations as if from a certain absence of mind. Indeed, his interest in Mr Charles Povey of Brockholes Abbey seemed to have evaporated. ‘Coffee in the library, I think,’ he said. ‘I rather want your advice, Birch-Blackie, on a bit of drainage we’re thinking of in the field beyond the spinney.’

‘My dear fellow, I’ll be delighted.’

‘Good. I’ll be most grateful.’ Appleby got to his feet. ‘We feel it’s quite important,’ he said. ‘We’re thinking about it a lot.’

The subject thus proposed for conference proved to open up a somewhat wider field of discussion than Appleby had perhaps reckoned. Colonel Birch-Blackie had heard favourable reports of a new type of land drain, approximately twice the normal length, particularly designed for use where there was likely to be trouble from moles. And Dr Dunton proved to have relevant facts fresh in mind, since he had been conducting a spirited dispute with higher ecclesiastical authorities on the troublesome frequency with which floodwater made its way into his glebe. It was a further hour, therefore, before the guests took their departure. Appleby saw the Birch-Blackies punctiliously into their car. He walked with the Vicar (who wheeled his bicycle) to the bottom of the Long Dream drive. Then he returned to the house at a very brisk pace indeed. He was glancing at his watch as he crossed the hall – so that Judith, who was helping Mrs Colpoys to clear up, glanced at him curiously, but said nothing. He went into the butler’s pantry, which nowadays accommodated not a manservant but a deep-freeze and a telephone. It was the telephone to which he turned.