In the library, as the voices of Bee and Mr. Macallan faded down the hall and into the out-of-doors, there was silence. Brat, uncertain of the quality of that silence, turned to the shelves and began to consider the books.
“Well,” said Simon, lounging in the window, “another hazard safely negotiated.”
Brat waited, trying to analyse the sound of the words while they still hung in the air.
“Hazard?” he said at length.
“The snags and bunkers in the difficult business of coming back. It must have taken some nerve, all things considered. What moved you to it, Brat — homesickness?”
This was the first frank question he had been asked, and he suddenly liked Ashby the better for it.
“Not exactly. A realisation that my place was here, after all.” He felt that that had a self-righteous sound, and added: “I mean, that my place in the world was here.”
This was succeeded by another silence. Brat went on looking at books and hoped that he was not going to like young Ashby. That would be an unforeseen complication. It was bad enough not to be able to face the person he was supplanting, now that he was left alone in a room with him; but to find himself liking that person would make the situation intolerable.
It was Bee who broke the silence.
“I think we should have offered the poor little man a drink,” she said, coming in. “However, it’s too late now. He can get one from his ‘contact’ at the White Hart.”
“The Bell, I suspect,” Simon said.
“Why the Bell?”
“Our Lana frequents that in preference to the White Hart.”
“Ah, well. The sooner everyone knows the sooner the fuss will be over.” She smiled at Brat to take any sting from the words. “Let’s go and look at the horses, shall we? Have you any riding clothes with you, Brat?”
“Not any that Latchetts would recognise as riding clothes,” Brat said, noticing how thankfully she seized on the excuse not to call him Patrick.
“Come up with me,” Simon said, “and I’ll find you something.”
“Good,” said Bee, looking pleased with him. “I’ll collect Eleanor.”
“Did you like being given the old night nursery?” Simon asked, preceding Brat upstairs.
“Very much.”
“Same old paper, I suppose you noticed.”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember the night we had an Ivanhoe-Hereward battle?”
“No; I don’t remember that.”
“No. Of course you wouldn’t.”
Again the words hung on the silence, teasing Brat’s ear with an echo of their tone.
He followed young Ashby into the room he had shared with his brother, and noticed that there was no suggestion in the room that it had ever been shared by another person. It was, on the contrary, very much Simon’s own room; being furnished with his possessions to an extent that made it as much a sitting-room as a bedroom. Shelves of books, rows of silver cups, framed sketches of horses on the walls, easy chairs, and a small desk with a telephone extension on it.
Brat moved over to the window while Simon rummaged among his clothes for appropriate garments. The window, as he knew, looked over the stables, but a green hedge of lilac and laburnum trees hid the buildings from view. Above them, in the middle distance, rose the tower of Clare church. On Sunday, he supposed, he would be taken to service there. Another hazard. Hazard had been an odd word for young Ashby to choose, surely?
Simon emerged from the cupboard with breeches and a tweed coat.
“I think these ought to do,” he said, throwing them on the bed. “I’ll find you a shirt.” He opened a drawer of the chest which held his dressing mirror and toilet things. The chest stood by the window, and Brat, still uneasy in Ashby’s vicinity, moved over to the fireplace and began to look at the silver cups on the mantelpiece. All of them were prizes for horsemanship, and they ranged from a hurdle race at the local point-to-point to Olympia. All of them except one were of a date too late to have concerned Patrick Ashby; the exception being a small and humble chalice that had been awarded to Simon Ashby on “Patience” for being the winner of the juvenile jumping class at the Bures Agricultural Show in the year before Patrick Ashby committed suicide.
Simon, looking round and seeing the small cup in Brat’s hand, smiled and said: “I took that from you, if you remember.”
“From me?” Brat said, unprepared.
“You would have won on Old Harry if I hadn’t done you out of it by doing a perfect second round.”
“Oh, yes,” Brat said. And to lay a new scent: “You seem to have done well for yourself since.”
“Not badly,” Simon said, his attention going back to his shirt drawer. “But I’m going to do a lot better. Ballsbridge and all stops to Olympia.” It was said absentmindedly, but with confidence; as if the money to buy good horseflesh would automatically be available. Brat wondered a little, but felt that this was no moment for discussing the financial future.
“Do you remember the object that used to hang at the end of your bed?” Simon asked casually, pushing the shirt drawer shut.
“The little horse?” Brat said. “Yes, of course. Travesty,” he added, giving its name and mock breeding. “By Irish Peasant out of Bog Oak.”
He turned from the exhibits on the mantelpiece, meaning to collect the clothes that Ashby had looked out for him; but as he turned he saw Ashby’s face in the mirror, and the naked shock on that face stopped him in his tracks. Simon had been in the act of pushing the drawer shut, but the action was arrested half-way. It was, thought Brat, exactly the reaction of someone who has heard a telephone ring; the involuntary pause and then the resumed movement.
Simon turned to face him, slowly, the shirt hanging over his left forearm. “I think you’ll find that all right,” he said, taking the shirt in his right hand and holding it out to Brat but keeping his eyes on Brat’s face. His expression was no longer shocked; he merely looked blank, as if his mind were elsewhere. As if, Brat thought, he were doing sums in his head.
Brat took the shirt, collected the rest of the clothes, expressed his thanks, and made for the door.
“Come down when you’re ready,” Simon said, still staring at him in that blank way. “We’ll be waiting for you.”
And Brat, making his way round the landing to his own room in the opposite wing, was shocked in his turn. Ashby hadn’t expected him to know that. Ashby had been so certain, indeed, that he would not know about the toy horse that he had been rocked back on his heels when it was clear that he did know about it.
And that meant?
It could mean only one thing.
It meant that young Ashby had not believed for a moment that he was Patrick.
Brat shut the door of the peaceful old night nursery behind him and stood leaning against it, the clothes cascading slowly to the ground from his slackened arm.
Simon had not been fooled. That touching little scene over the sherry glasses had been only an act.
It was a staggering thought.
Why had Simon bothered to pretend?
Why had he not said at once, “You are not Patrick and nothing will make me believe that you are!”?
That had been his original line, if Lana’s report and the family atmosphere meant anything. Up to the last moment they had been unsure of his reaction to Brat’s arrival; and he had gratified them all by a frank and charming capitulation.
Why the gratuitous capitulation?
Was it — was it a trap of some sort? Were the welcome and the charm merely the grass and green leaves laid over a pit he had prepared?
But he could not have known until the actual face-to-face meeting that he, Brat, was not Patrick. And he had apparently known instantly that the person he was facing was not his brother. Why then should he....
Brat stooped to pick up the clothes from the floor and straightened himself abruptly. He had remembered something. He had remembered that odd relaxing on Simon’s part the moment he had had a good look at himself. That suggestion of relief. Of being “let off.”
So that was it!
Simon had been afraid that it was Patrick.
When he found that he was faced with a mere impostor he must have had difficulty in refraining from embracing him.
But that still did not explain the capitulation.
Perhaps it was a mere postponement; a setting to partners. It might be that he planned a more dramatic dénouement; a more public discrediting.
If that were so, Brat thought, there were a few surprises in store for young Mr. Ashby. The more he thought about the surprises the better he began to feel about things. As he changed into riding clothes he recalled with something like pleasure that shocked face in the mirror. Simon had been unaware that he, Brat, had passed any “family” tests. He had not been present when Brat passed the searching test of knowing his way about the house; and he had not had any chance of being told about it. All that he knew was that Brat had satisfied the lawyers of his identity. Having been faced with, to him, an obvious impostor he must have looked forward with a delighted malice to baiting the pretender.
Yes; all ready to pull the wings off flies was young Mr. Ashby.
The first tentative pull had been about the Ivanhoe-Hereward battle. Something that only Patrick would know about. But something, too, that he might easily have forgotten.
The little wooden horse was something that only Patrick would know about and something that Patrick could in no circumstances have forgotten.
And Brat had known about it.
Not much wonder that Ashby had been shocked. Shocked and at sea. Not much wonder that he looked as if he were doing sums in his head.
Brat spared a kind thought for that master tutor, Alec Loding. Loding had missed his vocation; as a coach he was superb. Sometime, somewhere, something was going to turn up that Alec Loding had either forgotten to tell him about or had not himself known; and the moment was going to be a very sticky one; but so far he had known his lines. So far he was word perfect.
Even to the point of Travesty.
A little object of black bog oak, it had been. “Rudimentary and surrealist,” Loding had said, “but recognisable as a horse.” It had originally been yoked to a jaunting car, the whole turn-out being one of those bog-oak souvenirs that tourists brought back from Ireland in the days before it was more advisable to bring home the bacon. The small car, being made of bits and pieces, soon went the way of all nursery objects; but the little horse, chunky and solid, had survived and had become Patrick’s halidom and fetish. It was Alec Loding who had been responsible for its naming; one winter evening over nursery tea. He and Nancy had looked in at Latchetts on their way home from some pony races, hoping for a drink; but finding no one at home except Nora, who was having tea upstairs with her children, they had joined the nursery party. And there, while they made toast, they had sought a name for Patrick’s talisman. Patrick, who always referred to the object as “my little Irish horse,” and was conscious of no need for a more particular description, rejected all suggestions.
“What would you call it, Alec?” his mother asked Loding, who had been too busy consuming buttered toast to care what a toy was called.
“Travesty,” Alec had said, eyeing the thing. “By Irish Peasant out of Bog Oak.”
The grown-ups had laughed, but Patrick, who was too young to know the meaning of the word, thought that Travesty was a fine, proud-sounding name. A name filled with the tramplings and prancings and curvettings of war horses, and worthy therefore of the little black object of his love.
“He kept it in a pocket,” Loding had said in Queen Adelaide’s sitting-room (it was raining that morning) “but when he grew too big for that it hung on a frayed Stewart tartan ribbon off a box of Edinburgh rock at the end of his bed.”
Yes: not much wonder that Simon had been shaken to the core. No stranger to the Ashby family could have known about Travesty.
Brat, buttoning himself into Ashby garments and noticing how a well-cut article adapts itself even to an alien figure, wondered what Simon was making of the problem. He had no doubt learned by now that the “impostor” not only knew about the existence of Travesty but had walked about the house with the confidence of long acquaintance. A faint flare of excitement woke in Brat. The same excitement that had made those interviews with old Mr. Sandal so enjoyable. For the last couple of hours — ever since his arrival at Guessgate station — he had been received with kindness and welcome, and the result had been a faint queasiness, a sort of spiritual indigestion. What had been a dice game for dangerous stakes had become a mere taking candy from a baby. Now that Simon was his opponent, the thing was once more a contest.
Not dice, thought Brat, considering himself in the mirror. Chequers rather. A matter of cautious moves, of anticipating attack, of blocking an unforeseen thrust. Yes; chequers.
Brat went downstairs buoyed up with a new anticipation. He would not any more have to stand with his back to young Ashby because he was unable to face him. The pieces were laid out on the board and they faced each other across it.
Through the wide-open door of the hall he could see the Ashbys grouped in the sunlight on the steps and went forward to join them. Ruth, with her chronically roving eye, was the first to see him.
“Oh, doesn’t he look nice,” said Ruth, still paying court.
Brat was aware that he looked “nice” but wished that Ruth had not called attention to his borrowed finery. He wondered if anyone had ever smacked Ruth Ashby.
“You must get some riding clothes from Walters as soon as may be,” Bee said. “These are almost a good enough fit to do as a pattern. Which would save you having to go to town for measurements only.”
“Those breeches aren’t Walters’,” Simon said, eyeing the clothes lazily. “They’re Gore and Bowen’s. Walters never made a good pair of breeches in his life.”
He was draped against the wall by the doorway, relaxed and apparently at peace with the world. His eyes travelled slowly up from Brat’s boots to his shirt, and came to rest, with the same detached interest on his face.
“Well,” he said amiably, pushing himself off the wall, “let’s go and look at some horses.”
Not chequers, thought Brat. No, not chequers. Poker.
“We’ll show you the stables this afternoon,” Bee said, “and leave the mares until after tea.”
She ran an arm through Brat’s and gathered Simon in with her other one, so that they went towards the stables arm-in-arm like old friends; Eleanor and the twins tailing along behind.
“Gregg is all agog to see you,” she said. “Not that you’ll notice any agogness, of course. His face doesn’t permit anything like that. You’ll just have to believe me that he is excited inside.”
“What happened to old Malpas?” Brat asked, although he had heard all about old Malpas one afternoon outside the Orangery.
“He became very astigmatic,” Bee said. “Figuratively speaking. We could never see eye to eye. He didn’t really like taking orders from a woman. So he retired about eighteen months after I took over, and we’ve had Gregg ever since. He’s a misanthropist, and a misogynist, and he has his perks, of course; but he doesn’t let any of them interfere with the running of the stables. There was a noted drop in the fodder bills after old Malpas left. And the local people like Gregg better because he buys his hay direct from the farmers and not through a contractor. And I think on the whole he’s a better horsemaster than Malpas was. Cleverer at getting a poor horse into condition. And a genius at doctoring a sick one.”
Why doesn’t he relax? she was thinking, feeling the boy’s arm rigid under her fingers. The ordeal is over now, surely. Why doesn’t he relax?
And Brat for his part was conscious of her fingers clasping his forearm as he had never been conscious before of a woman’s hand. He was experiencing again that surge of an unrecognised emotion that had filled him when Bee had taken his hand to lead him to the interview with Mr. Macallan.
But his first sight of the stables distracted his attention from both emotional and ethical problems.
His reaction to the stable yard at Latchetts was very much the reaction of a merchant seaman to his first acquaintance with one of His Majesty’s ships. A sort of contemptuous but kindly amusement. A wonder that the thing wasn’t finished off with ribbons. Only the fact that several horses’ heads protruded inquisitively from the loose boxes convinced him that the place was seriously used as a stable at all. It was like nothing so much as one of the toy models he had seen in expensive toy shops. He had always imagined that those gay little affairs with their bright paint and their flowers in tubs had been manufactured to a child’s taste. But apparently they had been authentic copies of an actual article. He was looking at one of the articles at this moment, and being very much surprised.
Not even the dude ranch had prepared him for this. There was paint galore at the dude ranch, but there was also a tradition of toughness. The dude ranch would never have thought of mowing the bit of grass in the middle until it looked like a square of green baize, so neat-edged and trim that it looked as if you could roll it up and take it away. At the dude ranch there was still a suggestion of the mud, dung, sweat, and flies which are inseparable from a life alongside horseflesh.
The little building on the left of the yard entrance was the saddle room, and in the saddle-room door was the stud-groom, Gregg. Gregg had in the highest degree that disillusioned air common to those who make their living out of horses. He had also the horseman’s quality of agelessness. He was probably fifty, but it would not be surprising to be told that he was thirty-five.
He took two paces forward and waited for them to come up to him. The two paces were his concession to good manners, and the waiting emphasised the fact that he was receiving them on his own ground. His clear blue eyes ran over Brat as Bee introduced them, but his expression remained polite and inscrutable. He gave Brat a conventional welcome and a crushing hand-clasp.
“I hear you’ve been riding horses in America,” he said.
“Only western ones,” Brat said. “Working horses.”
“Oh, these work,” Gregg said, inclining his head towards the boxes. Don’t be in any doubt about it, the tone said. It was as if he had understood Brat’s distrust of the spit and polish. His eyes went past Brat to Eleanor standing behind and he said: “Have you seen what’s in the saddle room, Miss Eleanor?”
From the gloom of the saddle room there materialised as if in answer to his question the figure of a small boy. He materialised rather reluctantly as if uncertain of his welcome. In spite of a change of costume Brat recognised him as the rider of the stone lion at the gates of Clare. His present apparel, though less startling, was hardly more orthodox than his leopard-skin outfit. He was wearing a striped football jersey that clung to his tadpole body, a pair of jodhpurs so large that they hung in a fold above each skinny knee, a steeple-chasing jockey cap with the crash-lining showing at the back, and a pair of grubby red moccasins.
“Tony!” said Eleanor. “Tony, what are you doing here?”
“I’ve come for my ride,” said Tony, his eyes darting to and fro among the group like lizards.
“But this isn’t the day for your ride.”
“Isn’t it, Eleanor? I thought it was.”
“You know quite well that you don’t ride on a Tuesday.”
“I thought this was Wednesday.”
“You’re a dreadful little liar, Tony,” Eleanor said dispassionately. “You knew quite well this wasn’t Wednesday. You just saw me in a car with a stranger and so you came along to find out who the stranger was.”
“Eleanor,” murmured Bee, deprecating.
“You don’t know him,” Eleanor said, as if the subject of discussion was not present. “His curiosity amounts to a mania. It’s almost his only human attribute.”
“If you take him to-day you won’t have to take him to-morrow,” Simon said, eyeing the Toselli child with distaste.
“He can’t come and expect to ride just when he feels like it!” Eleanor said. “Besides, I said I wouldn’t take him out again in these things. I told you to get a pair of boots, Tony.”
The black eyes stopped being lizards and became two brimming pools of grief. “My father can’t afford boots for me,” said Tony with a catch in his alto, guaranteed to draw blood from a stone.
“Your father has ￡12,000 a year free of income tax,” Eleanor said briskly.
“If you took him to-day, Nell,” Bee said, “you’d be free to help me to-morrow when half the countryside comes dropping in to have a look at Brat.” And, as Eleanor hesitated: “You might as well get it over now that he’s here.”
“And he’ll still be wearing moccasins to-morrow,” Simon drawled.
“Indian riders wear moccasins,” Tony observed mildly, “and they are very good riders.”
“I don’t think your destitute father would be very pleased if you turned up with moccasins in the Row. You get a pair of boots. And if I take you this afternoon, Tony, you are not to think that you can make a habit of this.”
“Oh, no, Eleanor.”
“If you come on the wrong day again you’ll just have to go away without a ride.”
“Yes, Eleanor.” The eyes were lizards again, darting and sliding.
“All right. Go and ask Arthur to saddle Spuds for you.”
“Yes, Eleanor.”
“No thanks, you’ll observe,” Eleanor said, watching him go.
“What is the crash helmet for?” Simon asked.
“His skull is as thin as cellophane, he says, and must be protected. I don’t know how he got one that size. Out of a circus, I should imagine. What with his Indian longings I suppose I should be thankful that he doesn’t turn up in a headband and a single feather.”
“He will one day, when it occurs to him,” Simon said.
“Oh, well, I suppose I’d better go and saddle Buster. I’m sorry, Brat,” she said, smiling a little at him, “but it is really one of those blessings in disguise. The pony he rides will be a lot less fresh with him to-day than he would be to-morrow, after a day in the stable. And you don’t really need three people to show you round. I’ll go round the paddocks with you after tea.”
Brat’s tendency to be patronising about spit and polish died painlessly and permanently somewhere between the fourth and fifth boxes. The pampered darlings that he had been prepared to find in these boxes did not exist. Thoroughbred, half-bred, cob, or pony, the shine on their coats came from condition and grooming and not from coddling in warm stables; Brat had lived long enough with horses to recognise that. The only ribbons that had ever been tied on these animals were rosettes of red or blue or yellow; and the rosettes were quite properly in the saddle room.
Bee did the honours, with Gregg as assistant; but since it is not possible for four horsemen to consider any given horse without entering into a discussion, the occasion soon lost the slight formality of its beginnings and degenerated into a friendly free-for-all. And presently Brat, always a little detached from his surroundings, noticed that Bee was leaving the discussion more and more to Simon. That it was Simon instead of Bee who said: “This is a throwout from a racing stable that Eleanor is schooling into a hack,” or, “Do you remember old Thora? This is a son of hers by Cold Steel.” That Bee was quite deliberately edging herself out.
The twins had soon grown tired and evaporated; Ruth because horses bored her, and Jane because she knew all that was to be known about the horses and did not like the thought that they belonged to a person she did not know. And Gregg, congenitally taciturn, fell more and more into the background with Bee. So that in no time at all it was Simon’s occasion; Simon’s and Brat’s.
Simon behaved as if he had not a care in the world. As if this were just another afternoon and Brat just another visitor. A rather privileged and knowledgeable visitor; unquestionably welcome. Brat, coming to the surface every now and then from his beguilement with the horses, would listen to the light drawl discussing pedigree, conformation, character, or prospects; would watch the cool untroubled profile, and wonder. “A bit light in front,” the cool voice would be saying, and the untroubled eyes would be running over the animal as if no more important matter clouded the sun. “Nice, though, don’t you think?” or “This one should really be turned out: he’s been hunted all the winter; but I’m going pot-hunting on him this summer. And anyhow Bee’s awfully stingy with her pasture.”
And Bee would put in her tuppenceworth and fade out again.
It was Bee who “ran” Latchetts, but the various interests involved were divided between the three Ashbys. Eleanor’s chief concerns were the hacks and hunters, Simon’s were hunters and show jumpers, and Bee’s were the mares and the Shetland ponies. During Bill Ashby’s lifetime, when Latchetts was purely a breeding establishment, the hacks and hunters in the stables had been there for family use and amusement. Occasionally, when there happened to be an extra-good horse in the stable, Bee, who was a better horsewoman than her brother, would come down from London for a week or two to school it and afterwards show it for him. It was good advertisement for Latchetts; not because Latchetts ever dealt in made horses but because the simple repetition of a name is of value in the commercial world, as the writers of advertisements have discovered. Nowadays the younger Ashbys, under Bee’s supervision, had turned the stables into a profitable rival to the brood mares.
“Mr. Gates is asking if he can speak to you, sir,” said the stable-man to Gregg. And Gregg excused himself and went back to the saddle room.
Fourposter came to the door of his box, stared coldly at Brat for a moment, and then nudged him jocosely with his Roman nose.
“Has he always been Jane’s?” Brat asked.
“No,” Bee said, “he was bought for Simon’s fourteenth birthday. But Simon grew so fast that in a year or so he had outgrown him, and Jane at four was already clamouring to ride a ‘real’ horse instead of a Shetland. So she fell heir to him. If he ever had any manners he has forgotten them, but he and Jane seem to understand each other.”
Gregg came back to say that it was Miss Ashby that Gates wanted to see. It was about the fencing.
“All right, I’ll come,” Bee said. And as Gregg went away: “What he really wants to see is Brat, but he’ll just wait till to-morrow like the rest of the countryside. It’s so like Gates to try to steal a march. Opportunism is his middle name. If you two go trying out any of the horses, do be back for tea. I want to go round the paddocks with Brat before it gets dark.”
“Do you remember Gates?” Simon asked, opening the door of another box.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“He’s the tenant of Wigsell.”
“What became of Vidler, then?”
“He died. This man was married to his daughter and had a small farm the other side of Bures.”
Well, Simon had dealt him the cards he needed that time. He looked at Simon to see how he had taken it, but Simon’s whole interest seemed to be in the horse he was leading out of the box.
“These last three boxes are all new acquisitions, bought with an eye on the show ring. But this is the pick of the bunch. He’s a four-year-old by High Wood out of a mare called Shout Aloud. His name is Timber.”
Timber was a black without a brown hair in him. He had a rudimentary white star, and a ring of white on each coronet; and he was quite the handsomest thing in horseflesh that Brat had ever been at close quarters with. He came out of his box with an air of benevolent condescension, as if aware of his good looks and pleased that they should be the subject of tribute. There was something oddly demure about him, Brat thought, watching him. Perhaps it was just the way he was standing, with his forefeet close together. Whatever it was it didn’t go with the self-confident, considering eye.
“Difficult to fault, isn’t he?” Simon said.
Brat, lost in admiration of his physical conformation, was still puzzled by what he thought of as the butter-wouldn’t-melt air.
“He has one of the best-looking heads I’ve ever seen on a horse,” Simon said. “And just look at the bone.” He led the horse round. “And a sweet mover, too,” he said.
Brat went on looking in silence, admiring and puzzled.
“Well?” Simon said, waiting for Brat’s comment.
“Isn’t he conceited!” said Brat.
Simon laughed.
“Yes, I suppose he is. But not without cause.”
“No. He’s a good-looker all right.”
“He is more than that. He’s a lovely ride. And he can jump anything you can see the sky over.”
Brat moved forward to the horse and made friendly overtures. Timber accepted the gesture without responding. He looked gratified but faintly bored.
“He should have been a tenor,” Brat said.
“A tenor?” Simon said. “Oh, I see. The conceit.” He considered the horse afresh. “I suppose he is rather pleased with himself. I hadn’t thought about it before. Would you like to try him out, by the way?”
“I certainly would.”
“He ought to have some exercise to-day and he hasn’t had it so far.” He hailed a stable-man. “Arthur, bring a saddle for Timber.”
“Yes, sir. A double bridle, sir?”
“No; a snaffle.” And, as the man went, to Brat: “He has a mouth like a glove.”
Brat wondered if he was merely reluctant to submit that tender mouth to the ham hands of a Westerner with a curb rein at his disposal.
While Timber was being saddled they inspected the two remaining “acquisitions.” They were a long-backed bay mare with a good head and quarters (“Two good ends make up for a middle,” as Simon said) who was called Scapa; and Chevron, a bright chestnut of great quality with a nervous eye.
“What are you riding?” Brat asked, as Simon led Chevron back to his box.
Simon bolted the half-door and turned to face him.
“I thought you might like to have a look round by yourself,” he said. And as Brat, surprised by this piece of luck, was momentarily wordless: “Don’t let him get lit-up too much, will you, or he’ll break out again when he has been dried.”
“No, I’ll bring him back cool,” Brat said; and flung his leg across his first English horse.
He took one of the two whips that Arthur was holding out for his choosing, and turned the horse to the inner end of the yard.
“Where are you going?” Simon asked, as if surprised.
“Up to the down, I think,” Brat said, as if Simon’s question had applied to his choice of a place to ride in.
If that gate at the north-west corner of the yard didn’t still lead to the short-cut to the downs, then Simon would have to tell him. If it still did lead there, Simon would have one more item to worry about.
“You haven’t chosen a very good whip for shutting gates with,” Simon said smoothly. “Or are you going to jump everything you come to?” You rodeo artist, the tone said.
“I’ll shut the gates,” Brat said equably.
He began to walk Timber to the corner of the yard.
“He has his tricks, so look out for him,” Simon said, as an afterthought.
“I’ll look out for him,” Brat said, and rode away to the inner gate which Arthur was waiting to open for him.
Arthur grinned at him in a friendly fashion and said admiringly: “He’s a fly one, that, sir.”
As he turned to his right into the little lane he considered the implication of that very English adjective. It was a long time since he had heard anything called fly. “Fly” was “cute”— in the English sense, not in the American. Fly was something on the side. A fly cup. Something sly with a hint of cleverness in it.
A fly one, Timber was.
The fly one walked composedly up the track between the green banks netted with violets, his ears erect in anticipation of the turf ahead of them. As they came in sight of the gate at the far end he danced a little. “No,” said Brat’s hands, and he desisted at once. Someone had left the gate open, but since there was a notice saying PLEASE SHUT THE GAT neatly painted in the middle of it, Brat manoeuvred Timber into the appropriate position for closing it. Timber seemed as well acquainted with gates and their uses as a cow pony was with a rope, but never before had Brat had so delicate and so well-oiled a mechanism under him. Timber obeyed the slightest indication of hand or heel with a lack of questioning and a confidence that was new in Brat’s experience. Surprised and delighted, Brat experimented with this new adaptability. And Timber, even with the turf in front of him, with the turf practically under his feet, moved sweetly and obediently under his hands.
“You wonder!” said Brat softly.
The ears flicked at him.
“You perishing marvel,” he said, and closed his knees as he turned to face the down. Timber broke into a slow canter, headed for the clumps of gorse and juniper bushes that marked the skyline.
So this was what riding a good English horse was like, he thought. This communion, this being one half of a whole. This effortlessness. This magic.
The close, fine turf slipped by under them, and it was odd to see no little spurt of dust coming up as the shoes struck. England, England, England, said the shoes as they struck. A soft drum on the English turf.
I don’t care, he thought, I don’t care. I’m a criminal, and a heel, but I’ve got what I wanted, and it’s worth it. By God, it’s worth it. If I died to-morrow, it’s worth it.
They came to the level top of the down and faced the double row of bushes that made a rough natural avenue, about fifty yards wide, along the crest. This was something that Alec Loding had forgotten to tell him about, and something that had not appeared on a map. Even the Ordnance Survey can hardly take note of juniper growths. He pulled up to consider it. But Timber was in no considering mood. Timber knew all about that level stretch of down between the rows of bushes.
“All right,” said Brat, “let’s see what you can do,” and let him go.
Brat had ridden flyers before. Dozens of them. He had ridden sprinters and won money with them. He had been bolted with at the speed of jet propulsion. Mere speed no longer surprised him. What surprised him was the smoothness of the progress. It was like being carried through the air on a horse suspended to a merry-go-round.
The soft air parted round his face and tickled his ears and fled away behind them, smelling of grass with the sun on it and leather and gorse. Who cares, who cares, who cares! said the galloping feet. Who cares, who cares, who cares! said the blood in Brat’s veins.
If he died to-morrow it was all the same to him.
As they came to the end of the stretch Timber began to pull up of his own accord, but it was against Brat’s instincts to let a horse make the decisions, so he kept him going, turned him round the south end of the green corridor, and cantered him gently to a walk, and Timber responded without question.
“Brother,” said Brat, running his fingers up the dark crest, “are there more like you in England, or do you rate special?”
Timber bent his head to the caress, still with the air of one receiving his due.
But as they walked back on the south side of the irregular green hedge Brat’s attention and interest went to the countryside spread below them. Except that he was looking at it upside down, as it were — from the north, instead of from the south as one looks normally at a map — this was Clare as he had first become acquainted with it. All laid out below his eye in Ordnance Survey clarity and precision.
Down below him, a little to his left, were the crimson roofs of Latchetts, set in the neat squares of paddock. Farther to the left was the church, on its own small rise; and left of it again, the village of Clare, a huddle of roofs in pale green trees. Where the land sloped up from the village to make the south side of the small valley stood Clare Park, a long white house sheltered from the south-west Channel gales by the slope behind it.
Directly opposite him that slope rose into a smaller and tamer version of the down he was sitting on; a low green hill called Tanbitches. It was an open stretch of grazing, marked half-way up with the green scar of an old quarry, and crowned by the beeches that had given it its name. There were only seven beeches now instead of ten, but the clump made a decorative and satisfying climax to the southern side of the valley.
The other side of the Tanbitches hill, as he knew from the maps, ran away in a gentle slope for a mile and a half to the cliffs. To the cliffs where Patrick Ashby had put an end to his life. Behind the lower rise of the valley, on the reverse slope of Clare Park, were farms that merged imperceptibly in a mile or two into the suburbs of Westover. In the slight hollow that marked the Clare Park slope from Tanbitches hill was a path that led to the coast. The path that Patrick Ashby had taken on that day eight years ago.
It was suddenly more real to him than it had ever been so far: this tragedy which he was using to his advantage. More real even than it had been in the rooms that Patrick had lived in. In the house there had been other associations besides Patrick: associations more present and alive. There had been the distractions of human intercourse and of his own need to be constantly wary. Out here in the open and alone it had a reality that it had never had before. Up that straggling path on the other side of the valley a boy had gone, so loaded with misery that this neat green English world had meant nothing to him. He had had horses like Timber, and friends and family, and a belonging-place, and it had all meant nothing to him.
For the first time in his detached existence Brat was personally aware of another’s tragedy. When Loding had first told him the story, in that London pub, he had had nothing but contempt for the boy who had had so much and could not do without that little extra. A poor thing, he had thought. Then Loding had brought those photographs to Kew, and had shown him Patrick, and he had had that odd feeling of identification, of partisanship.
“That is Pat Ashby. He was about eleven there,” Loding had said, his feet propped comfortably on the railings of the park, and had passed him the piece of paper. It was a snapshot taken with a Brownie 2A, and Brat had accepted it with a curiosity that was active but not urgent.
But Pat Ashby had not been the anonymous “poor thing” that he had so far held in his mind. He had been a real person. A likeable real person. A person who would have been, Brat felt, very much his cup of tea. From being vaguely anti-Patrick he had become Patrick’s champion.
It was not, however, until this moment of quiet above Latchetts that he had been moved to sorrow for him.
Clink — clink! came the faint sound from the valley; and Brat’s eyes travelled down from Tanbitches to the cottage at its foot. The blacksmith’s, that was. A quarter of a mile west of the village. A tiny black square by the roadside it had been on the map; now it was a small building with a black chimney and an occupant who made musical sounds with a hammer.
The whole scene was very like the picture from which he had acquired his first-year French. Voilà le forgeron. It needed only a curé coming from the church. And a postman on a bicycle between the forge and the village.
Brat slid from Timber’s back, from long habit loosened the girths as if he saddled up hours ago, and sat down with his back to the gorse and juniper to feast his eyes on this primer of the English countryside.
The great clouds sailed up and past, the sunlight flickered and ran, the uncertain soft wind edged in and out of the junipers and made soft scufflings in the grass. Timber made small sounds with his bit, and cropped turf in a tentative and superior fashion. Brat sank into a daze of pleasure and ceased altogether from conscious thought.
He was roused by the swift fling-up of Timber’s head, and almost at the same moment a female voice behind him said, as if it were a chant and rhymed:
“Don’t look,
Don’t move,
Shut your eyes
And guess who.”
It was a slightly Cockney voice, and it dripped with archness.
Like anyone else in the circumstances Brat disobeyed the injunction automatically. He looked round into the face of a girl of sixteen or so. She was a large, plumpish girl, with bright auburn hair and prominent blue eyes. The eyes were remarkable in that they managed to be at once avid and sleepy. As they met Brat’s they almost popped out altogether.
“Oh!” said the girl, in a half-shriek. “I thought you were Simon. You’re not!”
“No,” agreed Brat, beginning to get to his feet.
But before he could move she had dropped to the grass beside him.
“My, you gave me a shock. I bet I know who you are. You’re the long-lost brother, aren’t you? You must be; you’re so like Simon. That’s who you are, isn’t it?”
Brat said that it was.
“You even wear the same kind of clothes.”
Brat said that they were Simon’s clothes. “You know Simon?”
“Of course I know Simon. I’m Sheila Parslow. I’m a boarder at Clare Park.”
“Oh.” The school for dodgers, Eleanor had called it. The place where no one had to learn the nine-times.
“I’m doing my best to have an affaire with Simon, but it’s uphill work.”
Brat did not know the correct rejoinder to this, but she did not need conversational encouragement.
“I have to do something to put some pep into life at Clare Park. You can’t imagine the screaming boredom of it. You simply can’t imagine. There is nothing, but I mean nothing, that you are forbidden to do. I once got so desperate I took off all my clothes and walked into Cedric’s office — Cedric is our Leader, he doesn’t like being called the Head, but that’s what he is, of course — I walked in with nothing on, not a stitch, and all he said was: ‘Have you ever thought of going on a diet, Sheila dear?’ Just took a look at me and said: ‘Have you ever thought of going on a diet?’ and then went on with looking up Who’s Who. He’s always looking up Who’s Who. You don’t really stand much of a chance of fetching up at Clare Park unless your father is in Who’s Who. Or your mother, of course. My father’s not in it, but he has millions, my father, and that makes a very good substitute. Millions are a very good introduction, aren’t they?”
Brat said that he supposed they were.
“I flapped Father’s millions in front of Simon; Simon has a great respect for a good investment and I hoped it would weight my charms, so to speak; but he’s a frightful snob, Simon, isn’t he?”
“Is he?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I’ve only met him to-day.”
“Oh, of course. You’ve just come back. How exciting for you. I can understand Simon not being overjoyed, of course, but it must be exciting for you to put his nose out of joint.”
Brat wondered if she, too, pulled the wings off flies.
“I may have more chance with Simon now that you’ve taken his fortune from him. I’ll have to waylay him somewhere and see. I thought I was waylaying him now, when I saw Timber. He often comes up here because it’s his favourite place for exercising the horses. He hates Tanbitches.” She jerked her chin at the opposite side of the valley. “And this is a good place for getting him alone. So I came up here on spec, and then I saw that black brute, and I thought I had him cold. But it was only you.”
“I’m sorry,” Brat said meekly.
She considered him.
“I suppose it’s no good my trying to seduce you instead?” she said.
“I’m afraid not.”
“Is it that I’m not your type, or is it not your line?”
“Not much in my line, I’m afraid.”
“No, I suppose not,” she said, agreeing with him. “You have a face like a monk. Funny you should look so like Simon and yet look so different. Simon’s no monk; as that Gates girl over at Wigsell could tell you. I make images of that Gates girl and stick pins in them, but it doesn’t do any good. She goes on blooming like a blasted peony and fascinating him like fly-paper.”
She was rather like a well-blown peony herself, he thought, looking at her wet red mouth and the buttons straining the cloth across her ample bust. A rather drooping and disappointed peony at the moment.
“Does Simon know that you are fond of him?” Brat asked.
“Fond of him? I’m not fond of him. I don’t think I like him at all. I just want to have an affaire with him to brighten up the term a bit. Until I can leave this boring place.”
“If you can do anything you like, why can’t you leave now?” Brat asked reasonably.
“Well, I don’t want to look too much of a fool, you know. I went to school at Ling Abbey, you see, and I made the place a hell so that my people would take me away and send me here. I thought I was going to have the time of my life here, with no lessons and no timetable and no rules or anything. I had no idea it would be so boring. I could weep with boredom.”
“Isn’t there anyone at Clare Park you could substitute for Simon? I mean, someone who would be more — accommodating?”
“No, I had a look at them first. Skinny and hairy and intellectual. Have you ever noticed how the intellect runs to hair? Some people get a kick out of disgust, but not me. I like them good-looking. And you have to admit Simon is very good-looking. There was an under-gardener at Ling Abbey that was almost as handsome, but he hadn’t that lovely God-damn-you look that Simon has.”
“Didn’t the under-gardener keep you at the Abbey place?”
“Oh, no, they sacked him. It was easier than expelling me and having a scandal. But they had to expel me in any case, so they might as well have kept poor Albert. He was much better with his lobelias than he was with girls. But of course they couldn’t be expected to know that. I suppose you wouldn’t put in a good word for me with Simon? It would be such a pity to waste all the agony I’ve gone through trying to interest him.”
“Agony?”
“You don’t suppose I endure hours on those horrible quadrupeds just for fun, do you? With that cold stick of a sister of his looking down her nose at me. Oh, I forgot: she’s your sister too, isn’t she? But perhaps you’ve been away so long that you don’t think of her the way a boy thinks of his sister.”
“I certainly don’t,” Brat said; but she was not listening.
“I suppose you’ve ridden horses since you could crawl, so you have no idea what it is like to be bumped about on a great shapeless mountain of a thing that’s far too high from the ground and has nothing to hold on to. It looks so easy when Simon does it. The horse looks so nice and narrow when you’re standing on the ground. You think you could ride it the way you ride a bicycle. It’s only when you get up you find that its back is simply acres across and you can make no impression on it at all. You just sit there and are bumped about, and your legs slip backwards and forwards instead of staying still like Simon’s, and you get large blisters and can’t sit down in the bath for weeks. You don’t look quite so like a monk when you smile a bit.”
Brat suggested that surely there were better ways of attracting favourable notice than being a tyro at something that the object of one’s pursuit already did to perfection.
“Oh, I didn’t think that I’d attract him that way. It just gave me an excuse for being round the stables. That sister of — your sister doesn’t stand any hanging round if you haven’t got business.”
“Your sister,” he thought, and liked the sound of it.
He had three sisters now, and at least two of them were the kind he would have indented for. Presently he must go down and make their further acquaintance.
“I’m afraid I must go,” he said, getting up and putting the reins over Timber’s head.
“I wish you didn’t have to,” she said, watching him tighten the girth. “You are quite the nicest person I have talked to since I came to Clare. It’s a pity you aren’t interested in women. You might cut Simon out with the Gates girl, and then I’d have more chance. Do you know the Gates girl?”
“No,” Brat said, getting up on Timber.
“Well, have a look at her. She’s very pretty.”
“I’ll do that,” Brat said.
“Now that you’re home, I’ll be running across you in the stables, I suppose.”
“I expect so.”
“You wouldn’t like to give me one of my lessons instead of your sister, would you?”
“I’m afraid that’s not my department.”
“Oh, well.” She sounded resigned. “You look very nice on that brute. I suppose his back is acres across too. They all are. It’s a conspiracy.”
“Good-bye,” said Brat.
“Do you know, I don’t know your name. Someone told me, of course, but I forget. What is it?”
“Patrick.”
And as he said the word his mind went back to the path across the valley, and he forgot Miss Parslow almost instantly. He cantered back along the top of the down until he came level with Latchetts, and then began to walk Timber down. Below him, a green ride led through the paddocks to the west of the house and so to the sweep of gravel in front of it. It was by that way that Jane had come this morning, when she had become mixed up with his reception at the front door. The gate to the ride stood open, the gate lying flat against the stout paddock rails that bordered the ride. Brat rode down until the steepness of the down gave way to a gentle slope and then pressed Timber into a canter. The green tunnel of the ride with its soft floor was open before them, and he was not going to spoil it by stopping to shut another gate that someone else had left open.
It was due to no good riding on Brat’s part that his left leg was still whole five seconds later. It was due entirely to the years of rough-riding that had made his physical reactions quicker than conscious thought. The swerve was so sudden and so wholehearted that the white rail was scraping along the saddle where his leg should have been before he realised that his leg was not there. That he had taken it away before he had had time to think about it.
As Timber came away from the rails he settled back into the saddle and pulled the horse to a stop. Timber stopped obediently.
“Whew!” said Brat, expelling his pent breath. He looked down at Timber standing innocent and demure in the exact centre of the ride.
“You ornery thing, you,” he said, amused.
Timber went on looking demure but the ears listened to him. A trifle apprehensively, Brat thought.
“I know men who’d beat the bejasus out of you for that,” Brat said, and turned the horse’s nose to the down again. Timber retraced his steps obediently, but was obviously not easy in his mind. When he was far enough away from the gate Brat took him into a canter once more and down to the opening. He had neither spurs nor curb but he was curious to see what Timber would do this time. Timber, as he had expected, swept good-manneredly into the ride, bisecting the distance from either rail with mathematical precision.
“What, me!” he seemed to be saying. “Do a thing like that on purpose? Me, with my perfect manners? Of course not. I just lost my balance for a moment, coming into the ride there. It can happen to the best of us.”
“Well, well,” thought Brat, pulling him to a walk. “Think you’re smart, don’t you,” he said aloud, walking him down the ride. “Far smarter horses than you have tried to brush me off, take it from me. I’ve been brushed off horses that would make you look like five-cents worth of candy.”
The black ears flickered, listening to him, analysing the sound of his voice, its tone; puzzled.
The mares came to the rails to watch them pass, pleased with this small event in their placid lives; and the foals ran round and round in a self-induced excitement. But Timber took no notice of them. He had lost any active interest in mares at a very early age, and just now his whole interest seemed to be in the fact that he had been outwitted, and that the outwitting one made sounds which he did not understand. His ears, which should have been pricked at the thought of his nearing stable, were restless and enquiring.
Brat rode round the front of the house, as Jane had that morning, but he saw no one. He went on to the stables and found Eleanor just riding in with a led horse, having given Tony his lesson and left him at Clare Park.
“Hullo!” she said, “have you been out on Timber?” She sounded a little surprised. “I hope Simon warned you about him.”
“Yes, thank you, he warned me.”
“One of my bad buys,” she said ruefully, eyeing Timber as they rode side by side towards the yard.
“Yours?” he said.
“Yes. Didn’t Simon tell you about that?”
“No.”
“That was nice of him. I expect he didn’t want you to find out too soon what a fool of a sister you have.” She smiled a little at him, as if she were glad to be his sister. “I bought him at the Lerridge Hunt sale. It was Timber who killed old Felix. Old Felix Hunstanton, the Master, you know. Did Simon tell you?”
“No. No, he just told me about his tricks.”
“Old Felix had some good horses, and when they were being sold I went over to see what I could pick up. None of the Lerridge Hunt regulars was bidding for Timber, but I thought it was because of sentiment, perhaps. I thought they probably didn’t want to own the horse the Master was killed on. As if there was ever any sentiment about horse-dealing! I oughtn’t to be let out alone. Even so, I ought to have wondered why I was getting him so cheap; with his looks and his breeding and his performance. It was only afterwards that we found that he had done the same thing to the huntsman a few days later, only the branches were small and broke, instead of braining him or sweeping him off.”
“I see,” said Brat, who was beginning to.
“Not that anyone needed convincing, apparently. No one who was there when Felix was killed believed it was an accident. It was a Lerridge Castle meet, and they had found in one of the Lerridge woods and gone away over the park. Good open galloping country with the trees isolated. And yet Timber took Felix under an oak, going an awful bat, and he was dead before he hit the ground. But of course we heard about all that later. All I knew when I was bidding for him was that Felix had hit his head on a branch during the hunt. Which is something that has been happening to people ever since William Rufus.”
“Did anyone actually see it happen?”
“No, I don’t think so. Everyone just knew that with the whole park to choose from Felix wouldn’t have ridden under the oak. And when he tried the same thing on Samms, the huntsman, there was no doubt. So he is put into the sale with the rest of the lot and all the Lerridge regulars sit around in silence and watch Eleanor Ashby from over Clare way buying a pup.”
“He’s a very elegant pup, there’s no denying,” Brat said, rubbing Timber’s neck.
“He’s beautiful,” Eleanor said. “And a faultless jumper. Did you jump him at all to-day? No? You must next time. He is safest jumping because his mind is distracted. He hasn’t time to think up mischief. It’s odd, isn’t it; he doesn’t look untrustworthy,” she added, still eyeing her bad bargain with a puzzled eye.
“No.”
She caught the tone and said: “You don’t sound too sure.”
“Well, I must allow he is the most conceited animal I’ve ever met.”
This seemed to be as new an idea to Eleanor as it had been to Simon.
“Vain, is he? Yes, I suppose he is. I expect I’d be conceited if I were a horse and I had been clever enough to kill a man. Did he try any tricks to-day?”
“He swerved at the entrance to the ride, but that was all.” He did not say: He took advantage of the first good stout piece of timber to mash my leg against. That was something between the horse and himself. He and Timber had a long acquaintanceship in front of them, and a lot to say to each other.
“He behaves like an angel most of the time,” Eleanor said. “That is what is so lethal about him. We have all ridden him; Simon and Gregg and Arthur and me, and he has only twice played up. Once with Simon and once with Arthur. But of course,” she added with a grin, “we have always given trees a wide berth.”
“He’d be a great success in the desert. Not a rail or a limb in a day’s journey.”
Eleanor looked sadly at the black horse as Brat drew up to let her precede him into the yard. “He’d think up something else, I expect.”
And Brat, thinking it over, agreed with her. Timber was that rare thing in horses: a deliberate and intelligent rogue. Balked of his normal fun, he would think up something new. There was nothing small-time about Timber.
Nor was Simon exactly small-time. Simon had sent him out on a notorious rogue, with a light remark about the horse “having its tricks.” As neat a piece of vicarious manslaughter as anyone ever thought up.
Beatrice Ashby looked down the dining-table at her nephew Patrick and thought how well he was doing it. The occasion must be an extraordinarily difficult one for him, but he was carrying it off beautifully. He was neither awkward nor exuberant. He brought to the situation the same quiet detachment that he had shown on their first meeting in that Pimlico room. It was a very adult quality, and a little surprising in a boy not yet twenty-one. He had great dignity this Patrick Ashby, she thought, watching him dealing with the Rector. Surely never before can anyone have been so silent by habit without appearing either stiff or stupid.
It was she who had brought Simon up, and she was pleased with the result. But this boy had brought himself up, and the result was even better, it seemed. Perhaps it was a case of “giving the first seven years” and the rest followed automatically. Or perhaps it was that the goodness in Patrick had been so innate that he had needed no other guidance. He had followed his own lights, and the result was this quiet, adult young man with the still face.
It was a mask of a face; a sad mask, on the whole. It was such a contrast to the similar set of features in Simon’s mobile countenance that they reminded one of those reversible comedy-tragedy masks that are used to decorate the title-pages of plays.
Simon was being particularly gay to-night, and Bee’s heart ached for him. He too was doing it well, and to-night she loved him almost without reservation. Simon was abdicating, and doing it with a grace and spontaneity that she would not have believed possible. She felt a little guilty that she had underrated him. She had not credited the selfish, acquisitive Simon with such a power of renunciation.
They were choosing a name for Honey’s filly foal, and the conversation was growing ribald. Nancy was insisting that “honey” was an endearment, and should be translated as “poppet,” and Eleanor said that no thoroughbred as good as Honey’s present foal should be damned by a name like Poppet. If Eleanor had refused to dress especially for Patrick’s arrival, she had now made up for it. It was a long time since Bee had seen her looking so well or so pretty. Eleanor belonged to a type which did not glow easily.
“Brat is in love with Honey,” Eleanor said.
“I suppose Bee dragged you round the paddocks before you were well over the doorstep,” said Nancy. “Were you impressed, Brat?”
She too had adopted the nickname. Only the Rector called him Patrick.
“I’m in love with the whole bunch,” Brat said. “And I found an old friend.”
“Oh? Who was that?”
“Regina.”
“Oh, yes, of course. Poor old Regina. She must be about twenty!” Nancy said.
“Not so much of the ‘poor’,” said Simon. “Regina has kept us shod and clothed for a whole generation. We ought to pay her a dividend.”
“She takes her dividends out in pasture,” Eleanor said. “She was always a greedy eater.”
“When you drop foals like Regina year after year without a break, you’re entitled to an appetite,” Simon said.
Simon was drinking a great deal more than usual, but it seemed to be having little effect on him. Bee thought that the Rector looked at him now and then with pity in his eyes.
And Brat, too, at the other end of the table, was watching Simon, but without pity. Pity was not an emotion that Brat indulged in very often: like everyone who despises self-pity he did not readily pity others; but it was not because of his native disinclination to pity that he withheld sympathy from Simon Ashby. It was not even because Simon was his declared enemy; he had admired enemies before now. It was because there was something about Simon Ashby that repelled him. There was something unaccountable about Simon. There he sat, being light-hearted and charming, and there sat his relations and friends silently applauding his nobility and his courage. They were applauding an “act,” but they would all be staggered to know what an act Simon was really putting on for their benefit.
Watching him as he displayed his graces, Brat felt that Simon reminded him of someone that he had met quite lately. Someone who had just that air of breeding, and excellent good manners, and good looks, and that — unaccountability. Who could that have been?
He was maddened by that tip-of-the-tongue feeling. In one more second he would remember. Loding? No. Someone on the ship coming over? Not very likely. That lawyer chap: the K.C. chap, Macdermott? No. Then who could it ——
“Don’t you think so, Patrick?”
It was the Rector again. He must be careful with the old boy. He had been more afraid of meeting George Peck than of anyone but Simon. After a twin brother there is no one who is liable to remember so much about you or to remember that much so well as the man who taught you. There would be a score of small things that George Peck would know about Patrick Ashby that not even Patrick Ashby’s mother would know. But the meeting had gone off very well. Nancy Peck had kissed him on both cheeks and said: “Oh, dear, you’ve got very grown-up and serious, haven’t you!”
“Patrick always was,” the Rector had said, and had shaken hands.
He had looked consideringly at Brat, but no more consideringly than was normal in a man examining an old pupil met after a decade of absence. And Brat, who had no love for the Cloth, found himself liking the Rector. He was still wary of him, but the wariness was due not to the Rector’s calling but to his knowledge of Pat Ashby, and to the intelligence and penetration of the eyes in his simian face.
Considering that intelligence, Brat was glad that he was particularly well primed in the matter of Pat Ashby’s schooling. The Rector was Alec Loding’s brother-in-law, and Loding had had what he called a front-stall view of the Ashby twins’ education.
As for Alec Loding’s sister, she was the most beautiful woman that Brat had ever seen. He had never heard of the famous Nancy Ledingham, but her brother had been eloquent about her. “Could have had anyone in the world; any man would have been delighted to keep her just to look at; but she had to choose George Peck.” He had been shown Nancy in every kind of garment, from a swimming suit to her court presentation gown, but none of the photographs had done justice to her serene beauty, her gaiety, her general niceness. He felt that George Peck must be all right if Nancy had married him.
“Was that the Toselli child you had out with you?” she was saying to Eleanor. “That object I met you with this afternoon?”
“That was Tony,” Eleanor said.
“How he brought back the days of my youth!”
“Tony did? How?”
“You won’t remember it, but there used to be things called cavalry regiments. And every regiment had a trick-riding team. And every trick-riding team had a “comedy” member. And every “comedy” member of a trick-riding team looked just like Tony.”
“So they did!” Bee said, delighted. “That was what he reminded me of this afternoon and I couldn’t think of it at the time. That masterly irrelevance. The completely unrelated garments.”
“You may wonder why I took him out at all,” Eleanor remarked. “But after Sheila Parslow he’s a positive holiday. He’ll ride quite well some day, Tony.”
“To the prospective horseman all things are forgiven, are they?” the Rector said, mocking mildly.
“Doesn’t La Parslow get any better?” Simon asked.
“She will never get any better. She skates about in the saddle like a block of ice on a plate. I could weep for the horse all the time we are out. Luckily Cherrypicker has an indestructible frame and practically no feelings.”
The move from the dining-room to the living-room produced an anti-climax. The talk ceased to flow and ran into aimless trickles. Brat was suddenly so tired that he could hardly stand up. He hoped that no one would spring anything on him now; his normally hard head was muzzy with unaccustomed wine, and his thoughts fumbled and stuck. The twins said good night and went upstairs. Bee poured the coffee which had been placed in readiness for them on a low table by the fire, and it was not as hot as it should have been. Bee made despairing grimaces at Nancy.
“Our Lana, is it?” Nancy asked, sympathetic.
“Yes. I suppose she had to meet our Arthur and couldn’t wait another ten minutes.”
Simon, too, fell silent, as if the effort he had been making seemed suddenly not worth while. Only Eleanor seemed to have brought from the dining-room the warmth and happiness that had made dinner a success. In the moments of silence between the slow spurts of talk the rain fell against the tall windows with a soft shush.
“You were right about the weather, Aunt Bee,” Eleanor said. “She said this morning that it was that too-bright kind that would bring rain before night.”
“Bee is perennially right,” the Rector said, giving her a look that was half a smile, half a benediction.
“It sounds loathsome,” Bee said.
Nancy waited until they had lingered properly over their coffee and then said: “It has been a very full day for Brat, Bee; and I expect you are all tired. We won’t stay now, but you’ll come over and see us when you can crawl out from under the crush, won’t you, Brat?”
Simon fetched her wraps and they all went out to the doorstep to see their guests off. On the doorstep Nancy took off her evening shoes, tucked them under her arm, and stepped into a pair of Wellingtons that she had left behind the door. Then she tucked her other arm under her husband’s, huddled close to him under their single umbrella, and walked away with him into the night.
“Good old Nancy,” Simon said. “You can’t keep a Ledingham down.” He sounded just a little drunk.
“Dear Nan,” Bee said softly. She moved into the living-room and surveyed it in an absent fashion.
“I think Nan is right,” she said. “It is time we all went to bed. It has been an exciting day for all of us.”
“We don’t want it to end so soon, do we?” Eleanor said.
“You have La Parslow at nine-thirty to-morrow,” Simon reminded her. “I saw it in the book.”
“What were you doing with the riding book?”
“I like to see that you’re not cheating on your income tax.”
“Oh, yes, let’s go to bed,” Eleanor said, with a wide happy yawn. “It’s been a wonderful day.”
She turned to Brat to say good night, became suddenly shy, gave him her hand and said: “Good night then, Brat. Sleep well,” and went away upstairs.
Brat turned to Bee, but she said: “I shall come in to see you on my way up.” So he turned back to face Simon.
“Good night, Simon.” He met the clear cold eyes levelly.
“Good night to you — Patrick,” Simon said, looking faintly amused. He had managed to make the name sound like a provocation.
“Are you coming up now?” Brat heard Bee ask him as he climbed the stairs.
“Not quite yet.”
“Will you see that the lights are out, then? And make sure of the locks?”
“Yes, of course I’ll do that. Good night, Bee darling.”
As Brat turned on to the landing he saw Bee’s arms go round Simon. And he was stabbed by a hot despairing jealousy that shocked him. What had it to do with him?
Bee followed him into the old night nursery in a few moments. She looked with a practised eye at the bed and said: “That moron promised to put in a hot-water bottle and she has forgotten to do it.”
“Don’t worry,” Brat said. “I’d only have put it out again. I don’t use the things.”
“You must think us a crowd of soft-livers,” she said.
“I think you’re a nice crowd,” he said.
She looked at him and smiled.
“Tired?”
“Yes.”
“Too tired for breakfast at eight-thirty?”
“That sounds luxuriously late to me.”
“Did you enjoy it, that hard life — Brat?”
“Sure.”
“I think you’re nice too,” she said, and kissed him lightly. “I wish you hadn’t stayed away from us so long, but we are glad to have you back. Good night, my dear.” And as she went out: “It’s no use ringing a bell, of course, because no one will answer. But if you have a mad desire for fried shrimps, or iced water, or a copy of the Pilgrim’s Progress or something, come along to my room. It is still the right-hand one in front.”
“Good night,” he said.
She stood for a moment outside his room, the door-knob still in her hand, and then moved away to Eleanor’s door. She knocked and went in. For the last year or so Eleanor had been a great comfort to her. She had been so long alone in her need for judgment and resolution that it was refreshing to have the companionship of her own kind; to have Eleanor’s unemotional good sense on tap when she wanted it.
“Hullo, Bee,” Eleanor said, looking up through the hair she was brushing. She was beginning to drop the “aunt,” as Simon did.
Bee sank into a chair and said: “Well, that’s over.”
“It turned out to be quite a success, didn’t it,” Eleanor said. “Simon behaved beautifully. Poor Simon.”
“Yes. Poor Simon.”
“Perhaps Brat — Patrick — will offer him some kind of partnership. Do you think? After all, Simon helped to make the stable. It wouldn’t be fair to walk in and grab the lot after taking no interest for years and years.”
“No. I don’t know. I hope so.”
“You sound tired.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“D’you know, Bee, I must confess I have the greatest difficulty in connecting the two.”
“The two? Simon and Patrick?”
“No. Patrick and Brat.”
There was a moment’s silence, filled with the soft sound of the rain and the strokes of Eleanor’s brush.
“You mean you — don’t think he is Patrick?”
Eleanor stopped brushing and looked up, her eyes wide with surprise. “Of course he’s Patrick,” she said, astonished. “Who else would he be?” She put down the brush and began to tie up her hair in a blue ribbon. “It’s just that I have no feeling of ever having met him before. Odd, isn’t it? When we spent nearly twelve years of our lives together. I like him; don’t you?”
“Yes,” Bee said. “I like him.” She, too, had no feeling of ever having met him before, and she too did not see “who else he could be.”
“Did Patrick not smile very often?”
“No; he was a serious child.”
“When Brat smiles I want to cry.”
“Good heavens, Eleanor.”
“You can ‘good heavens’ all you like, but I expect you know what I mean.”
Bee thought that she did.
“Did he tell you why he didn’t write to us all those years?”
“No. There wasn’t much opportunity for confidences.”
“I thought you might have asked him when you were going round the paddocks with him this evening.”
“No. He was too interested in the horses.”
“Why do you think he didn’t take any interest in us after he left?”
“Perhaps he took what old Nannie used to call a ‘scunner’ to us. It’s not so surprising, in a way, as the fact that he ran away in the first place. The urge to put Latchetts behind him must have been overwhelming.”
“Yes. I suppose so. But he was such a kind person: Pat. And so fond of us all. He mightn’t have wanted to come back, but you would have thought he’d want to let us know that he was safe.”
Since this was her own private stumbling-block, Bee had no help to offer.
“It must have been difficult to come back,” Eleanor said, running the comb through her brush. “He looked so tired to-night that he looked like a dead man. It’s not a very lively face at the best of times, is it? If you chopped it off behind the ears and hung it on a wall, no one would know the difference.”
Bee knew Eleanor well enough, and agreed with her sufficiently, to translate this successfully.
“You don’t think he’ll want to sheer off again once the excitement of coming home has worn off?”
“Oh, no, I’m quite sure he won’t.”
“You think he is here for keeps?”
“Of course I do.”
But Brat, standing in the dark before the open window of his room and looking at the curve of the down in the wet starlight, was wondering about that very matter. The thing had succeeded beyond Loding’s most extravagant promises, and now?
Where did he go from here? How long would it be before Simon had him cold? And if Simon failed, how long could he go on living a life where at any moment someone might spring a mine?
That is what he had set out to do, of course. But somehow he had not really looked beyond the first stages. In his heart he had been unable to believe that he would succeed. Now that success was his he felt rather like someone who has climbed a pinnacle and can’t get down again. Elated but misgiving.
He turned from the window and switched the lamp on. His landlady in Pimlico used to say that she “was so tired that she felt as if she’d been through a mangle”; he knew now how good a description that had been. That was exactly how he felt. Wrung out and empty. So limp that it was an effort to lift a hand to undress. He pulled off his nice new suit — the suit that had made him feel so guilty in that other life way back in London — and made himself hang it up. He peeled off his underclothes and stumbled into his faded old pyjamas. He wondered for a moment whether they would mind if the rain came in and marked the carpet, but decided to risk it. So he left the window wide open and got into bed.
He lay for a long time listening to the quiet sound of the rain and looking at the room. Now was the time for Pat Ashby’s ghost to come and chill that room. He waited for the ghost but it did not come. The room was warm and welcoming. The figures on the wallpaper, the figures that those children had grown up with, looked friendly and alive. He turned his head to look at the groups by the bedside. To look for the one Eleanor had been in love with. The chap with the profile. He wondered if she was in love with anyone now.
His eyes went on to the wood of the bedstead, and he remembered that this was Alec Loding’s bed, and was pleased once more by the irony of it all. It was fantastically right that he should come to Latchetts only to sleep in Alec Loding’s bed. He must tell him one day. It was the kind of thing that Loding would appreciate.
He wondered whether it was Eleanor or Bee who had put the flowers in the bowl. Flowers to welcome him — home.
Latchetts, he said to himself, looking at the room. This is Latchetts. I’m here. This is Latchetts.
The sound of the word was a soporific; like the swing of a hammock. He put out his hand and switched off the light. In the dark the rain suddenly sounded louder.
This morning he had got up and dressed in that back room under the slates, with the crowding chimney-pots beyond the window. And here he was, going to sleep in Latchetts, with the sweet cold smell of the down blowing in on the damp air from the window.
As sleep drew him under he had an odd feeling of reassurance. A feeling that Pat Ashby didn’t mind his being there; that he was on the contrary pleased about it all.
The unlikeliness of this roused him a little, and his thoughts, running on approval and disapproval, went to Bee. What was it that he had felt when Bee took his hand to lead him to the interview this afternoon? What was different from any other of the thousand handclasps he had experienced in his time? Why the surge of warmth under his heart, and what kind of emotion was it anyway? He had suffered the same obscure gratification when Bee had thrust her arm through his on the way to the stables. What was so remarkable about a woman putting her hand on your arm? A woman, moreover, that you were not in love with, and were never likely to be in love with.
It was because she was a woman, of course, but the thing that made it remarkable was something else again. It had something to do with being taken for granted by her. No one else had taken his hand in just that way. Casual but — no, not possessive. Quite a few had been possessive with him, and he had not been gratified in the least. Casual but — what? Belonging. It had something to do with belonging. The hand had taken him for granted because he belonged. It was the unthinking friendliness of a woman to one of her family. Was it because he had never “belonged” before, that made that commonplace gesture into a benediction?
He went on thinking of Bee as he fell asleep. Her sidelong glance when she was considering something; her courage; the way she had braced herself to meet him that day in the back room in Pimlico; the way she had kissed him before she was sure, just in case he was Patrick; the way she had dealt with the suspense of Simon’s absence when he arrived to-day.
She was a lovely woman, Beatrice Ashby, and he loved her.
He had reached the toppling-over place of sleep when he was yanked of a sudden wide awake.
He had remembered something.
He knew now who it was that Simon Ashby reminded him of.
It was Timber.
On Wednesday morning Bee took him to call on the tenants of the three farms: Frenchland, Upacres, and Wigsell. “Gates last; just to larn him,” Bee said. Gates was last also in importance, since Wigsell was the smallest of the three farms. It had originally been the home farm of Latchetts and lay just beyond the Rectory, on the slope north of the village. It was almost too small a farm to be self-supporting, but Gates also ran the butcher’s shop in the village (open twice a week) and was not dependent on what he made from Wigsell.
“Do you drive, Brat?” Bee asked, as they prepared to get into the car.
“Yes, but I’d rather you did. You know the”—“road” he had almost said —“the car better.”
“Nice of you to call it a car. I expect you’re used to a left-hand drive.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry it had to be the bug. It isn’t often the car goes wrong on us. Jameson has all its inside out on the garage floor, and is conducting a post-mortem in a silent fury.”
“I like the bug. I came from the station in it yesterday.”
“So you did. What a very long time ago that seems. Does it seem like that to you?”
“Yes.” It seemed years away to him.
“Have you heard that we’ve been saved from the Clarion?” she asked, as they sped down the avenue to the accompaniment of the bug’s sewing-machine song.
“No?”
“Are you not a consumer of the Press at breakfast?” asked Bee, who had breakfasted at eight o’clock.
“I never lived where we had papers to read at breakfast. We just switched on the radio.”
“Oh, lord, yes. I forget that your generation doesn’t have to read.”
“How have we been saved?”
“We have been rescued by three people we never heard of, and are never likely to meet. The fourth wife of a Manchester dentist, the husband of a principal boy, and the owner of a black leather trunk.” She pressed the horn and turned slowly to the right out of the avenue. “The owner of the trunk left it at Charing Cross with someone’s arms and legs in it. Or, of course, it may be the owner’s arms and legs. That is a question which will occupy the Clarion for some time to come, I expect. The husband of the principal boy is suing for alienation of affection, and none of the three people concerned has ever been bothered with an inhibition, which is very nice for the Clarion. Since the reports of divorce cases have been pruned the Clarion has been suffering from frustration, and a suit for alienation of affection is a gift from heaven. Especially when it is Tattie Thacker’s affections.” She looked with pleasure at the morning. “I do like a morning after rain.”
“You’ve still one to come?”
“What?”
“The fourth wife of the Manchester dentist.”
“Oh. Yes. She, poor wretch, has just been exhumed from a very expensive and elaborate tomb and found to be loaded with arsenic. Her husband is found to be missing.”
“And you think that the Clarion will be too busy to bother about — us?”
“I’m sure of it. They haven’t room as it is for all they want to do with Tattie. She had a whole page to herself this morning. If they ever bothered about the Ashbys they would print the report in a tiny paragraph at the bottom of a page, and five million people would read it and not be able to tell you two minutes later what was in it. I think we are quite safe. The Westover Times will have one of their usual discreet paragraphs this morning, and that will be the end of the matter.”
Well, that was another snag out of the way. In the meantime he must keep his wits alive for the visits to Frenchland and Upacres. He was supposed to know these people.
Frenchland was farmed by a tall rosy old man and his tall sallow sister. “Everyone was terrified of Miss Hassell,” Loding had said. “She had a face like a witch, and a tongue that took the skin off you. She didn’t talk; just made one remark and you found that you were raw.”
“Well, this is an honour,” old Mr. Hassell said, coming to the garden gate and seeing whom Bee had with her. “Mr. Patrick, I’m glad to see you. I’m tarnation glad to see you.” He took Brat’s hand in his gnarled old fist and closed on it with his other one. There was no doubt that he was glad to see Patrick Ashby again.
It was difficult to know whether Miss Hassell was glad or not. She eyed Brat while she shook hands with him and said: “This is an unexpected pleasure.” Her dry use of the conventional phrase and its wicked appropriateness amused Brat.
“Foreign parts don’t seem to have changed you much,” she said, as she set out glasses in the crowded little parlour.
“I’ve changed in one way,” Brat said.
“You have?” She wasn’t going to gratify him by asking in what way.
“I’m not frightened of you any more.”
Old Mr. Hassell laughed.
“You beat me there, son. She still puts the fear of God in me. If I’m half an hour late getting home from market I creep up the lane with my tail down like I was a sheep-stealer.”
Miss Hassell said nothing, but Brat thought there was a new interest in her glance; almost as if she were pleased with him. And she went away and fetched some shortbread from the kitchen which she had obviously had no intention of producing before.
They drank a liquid called White Port Wine Type, and discussed Rhode Island Reds.
At Upacres there was only plump Mrs. Docket, and she was busy making butter in the dairy at the back.
“Come in, whoever you are!” she called, and they went down the cool tiled passage from the open front door, and turned into the chill of the dairy.
“I can’t stop this,” she said, looking round at them. “The butter is just —— Oh, goodness, I didn’t know! I just thought it was someone passing. The children are all at school and Carrie is out in the barn and —— Goodness! To think of it!”
Bee automatically took her place at the churn while she shook hands with Brat.
“Well, well,” said kind plump Mrs. Docket, “a fine, good-looking Ashby you are. You’re more like Mr. Simon than ever you were.”
Brat thought that Bee looked up with interest when she said that.
“It’s a happy day for us all, Miss Ashby, isn’t it? I could hardly believe it. I just said to Joe, I don’t believe it, I said. It’s the kind of thing that happens in books. And in pictures and plays. Not the kind of thing that would happen to quiet folk like us in a quiet place like Clare, I said. And yet here you are and it’s really happened. My, Mr. Patrick, it’s nice to see you again, and looking so well and bonny.”
“Can I have a shot at that?” Brat asked, indicating the churn. “I’ve never handled one of those things.”
“But of course you have!” Mrs. Docket said, looking taken aback. “You used to come in special on Saturday mornings to have a go at it.”
Brat’s heart missed a beat. “Did I?” he said. “I’ve forgotten that.”
Always say quite frankly that you don’t remember, Loding had advised. No one can deny that you don’t remember, but they will certainly jump on you if you try to make-believe about anything.
“I thought you did this by electricity now,” he heard Bee say as she made way for him at the churn.
“Oh, we do everything else by electricity, of course,” Mrs. Docket said. “But I can’t believe it makes good butter. No more home-made taste to it than you’d get at the International in Westover. Sometimes when I’m rushed I switch on the electricity, but I’m always sorry afterwards. Awful mechanical, it is. No artfulness about it.”
They drank hot black tea and ate light floury scones and discussed the children’s schooling.
“She’s a darling, Mrs. Docket,” Bee said as they drove away. “I think she is still of the opinion in her heart of hearts that electricity is an invention of the devil.”
But Brat was thoughtful. He must stop himself from volunteering remarks. It was not important about the churn, but it quite easily might have been something vital. He must be less forthcoming.
“About Friday, Brat,” Bee said, as they made their way back to Clare and to Wigsell.
“What is on Friday?” said Brat, out of his absorption.
Bee looked round and smiled at him. “Your birthday,” she said.
Of course. He was now the possessor of a birthday.
“Had you forgotten that you are going to be twenty-one on Friday?” she asked.
“I had, almost.” He caught her sidelong look at him. After a pause she said: “You came of age a long time ago, didn’t you.” She said it without smiling and it was not a question.
“About Friday,” she went on. “I thought that since we have postponed the celebrations for Uncle Charles’s benefit, we wouldn’t have a party on Friday. Mr. Sandal will be coming down with the papers he wants you to sign, so we shall have him to lunch, and make it just a quiet family party.”
Papers to sign. Yes, he had known that there would be papers to sign sooner or later. He had even learned to make his capital letters the way Patrick did, thanks to an old exercise book that Loding had unearthed and filched from the Rectory. And, after all, signing a paper didn’t make him any more of a heel than he was being at this moment. It just put him more surely in the Law’s reverence, made the thing irrevocable.
“Is that how you would like it?”
“What? Oh, the birthday. Yes, of course. I don’t want a party. I don’t want a celebration, if it comes to that. Can’t we just take this coming-of-age for granted?”
“I don’t think the neighbourhood would be very pleased if we did. They are all looking forward to some kind of party. I think we shall have to give them one. Even the invitation cards are all ready. I altered the date to a fortnight after Charles’s arrival. He is due in about twenty-three days. So you’ll have to ‘thole’ it, as old Nannie used to say.”
Yes, he would have to thole it. Anyhow, he could sit back now and relax for a little. He was not supposed to know the Gates family.
They were coming back to the village now; the white rails of the south paddocks on their left. It was a washed and shining morning, but it had an uneasy glitter. The sky was metallic, and the light had a silver edge to it.
As they passed the entrance to the Rectory Bee said: “Alec Loding came down for the week-end not long ago.”
“Oh? What is he doing now?”
“Still playing roué parts in dreadful little comedies and farces. You know: four characters, five doors, and one bed. I didn’t see him, but Nancy said he had improved.”
“In what way?”
“Oh, more interested in other people. Kindlier. He even made efforts to get on with George. Nancy thought age was beginning to tell. He was quite happy to sit for hours with a book in George’s study when George was out. And when George was in they would yarn quite happily. Nancy was delighted. She has always been fond of Alec, but she used to dread his visits. The country bored him and George bored him even more, and he never bothered to hide it. So it was a pleasant change.”
Half-way through the village they turned into the lane that led to Wigsell.
“You don’t remember Emmy Vidler, do you?” she asked Brat. “She was brought up at Wigsell, and married Gates when he had a farm the other side of Bures. When her father died, Gates put a bailiff into his farm and took over Wigsell. And, of course, the butcher’s shop. So they are very comfortably off. The boy couldn’t stand his father, and got himself a job in the Midlands somewhere; engineering. But the girl lives at home, and is the apple of her father’s eye. She went to an expensive boarding school, where I understand she was known as Margot. Her name is Peggy.”
They swung into the farm entrance and came to rest on the small old cobbles of the yard. Two dogs rushed at them in wild self-importance, yelling their arrival to the world.
“I do wish Gates would train his dogs,” said Bee, whose dogs were as well-trained as her horses.
The clamour brought Mrs. Gates to the front door. She was a faded and subdued little woman who must once have been very pretty.
“Glen! Joy! Be quiet!” she called, ineffectually, and came forward to greet them. But before she reached them Gates came round the corner of the house, and in a few strides had anticipated her. His pompous welcome drowned her more genuine pleasure, and she stood smiling gently at Brat while her husband trumpeted forth their satisfaction in seeing Patrick Ashby on their doorstep again.
Gates was a large, coarse individual, but Brat supposed that once he had had the youthful vigour and assurance that appealed to pretty, fragile little women like Emmy Vidler.
“They tell me that you’ve been making money in horses over there,” he said to Brat.
“I’ve earned my living from them,” Brat said.
“You come and see what I’ve got in my stable.” He began to lead the way to the back of the house.
“But Harry, they must come in and sit down for a little,” his wife protested.
“They’ll sit down presently. They’d much rather look at a piece of good horseflesh than at your gewgaws. Come along, Mr. Patrick. Come along, Miss Ashby. Alfred!” he bellowed as they went down the yard. “Turn out that new horse for Miss Ashby to see.”
Mrs. Gates, tailing along behind, found herself side by side with Brat. “I am so happy about this,” she said quietly. “So happy about your coming back. I remember you when you were little; when I lived here in my father’s day. Except for my own son I’ve never been so fond of a small boy as I was of you.”
“Now then, Mr. Patrick, have a look at this here, have a look at this! Tell me if that doesn’t fill the eye for you.”
Gates swept his great limb of an arm at the stable door where Alfred was leading out a brown horse that looked oddly out of place in the small farmyard, even in a region where every small farmer kept a mount that would carry him across country in the winter. There was no denying it, the brown horse was something exceptional.
“There! what do you think of that, eh? What do you think of that?”
Bee, having looked, said: “But that, surely, is the horse that Dick Pope won the jumping on at the Bath Show last year.”
“That’s the horse,” Gates said complacently. “And not only the jumping. The cup for the best riding horse in the show. Cost me a pretty penny, that did, but I can afford it and nothing’s too good for my girl. Oh ah! It’s for Peggy I bought it. That wouldn’t carry me, that wouldn’t.” He gave an abrupt shout of laughter; at least Brat supposed it was laughter. “But my girl, now, she’s a feather in the saddle. I don’t have to tell you, Miss Ashby; you’ve seen her. There’s no one in the county deserves a good horse better than my Peggy, and I don’t grudge the money for it.”
“You’ve certainly got a good horse, Mr. Gates,” Bee said, with an enthusiasm in her voice that surprised Brat. He looked across at her and wondered why she was looking so pleased. After all, this brown horse was a potential rival to Timber, and all the other Latchetts’ animals.
“Got a vet’s certificate with it, I need hardly say. I don’t buy pigs in pokes.”
“Is Peggy going to show it this year?”
“Of course she is, of course she is. What did I buy it for but for her to show?”
Bee’s face was positively blissful. “How nice!” she said, and she sounded rapturous.
“Do you like it, Miss Ashby?” Peggy Gates said, appearing at Brat’s side.
Peggy was a very pretty creature. Pink and white and gold. Brat thought that if it were possible to cross Miss Parslow and Eleanor the result would probably be Peggy Gates. She accepted her introduction to Brat with composure, but managed to convey the impression that it was personally delightful to her to have Patrick home again. Her small hand lay in his with a soft pressure that was intimate rather than friendly. Brat shook it heartily and resisted a temptation to wipe his palm down his hip.
She accepted Bee’s congratulations on her possession of the horse, allowed a decent interval for further contemplation of it, and then with an admirable display of social dexterity, lifted the whole family from the yard into the drawing-room of the house. It was called the drawing-room, and was furnished as such, but Bee, who remembered it as old Mrs. Vidler’s parlour, thought the water-colours and wistaria wallpaper a poor exchange for the lustre jugs and framed engravings of Mrs. Vidler’s day.
They drank very good madeira and talked about the Bures Agricultural Show.
And they drove home with Bee still looking as if someone had left her a fortune. She caught Brat’s considering look at her and said: “Well?”
“You look like a cat that has been given cream,” he said.
She gave him her sideways, amused glance. “Cream and fish and liver,” she said; but did not tell him the translation.
“When all the fuss of Friday is over, Brat,” she said, “you must go up to town and get yourself a wardrobe. Walters will take weeks to make your evening things, and you’ll need them for the celebration when Uncle Charles comes home.”
“What shall I get?” he asked, at a loss for the first time.
“I should leave it to Walters, if I were you.”
“Outfit for a young English gentleman,” Brat said.
And she looked sideways again, surprised by the twist in his voice.
Eleanor came into the sitting-room as Bee was opening the midday post, and said: “She bumped!”
Bee looked up hazily, her mind still on the contents of her mail.
“She bumped, I tell you. For a whole fifty yards she bumped like a good ’un.”
“The Parslow girl? Oh, congratulations, Nell, dear.”
“I never thought I’d live to see this day. Is no one having sherry?”
“Brat and I have drunk sufficient strange liquids this morning to last us for the rest of the week.”
“How did it go, Brat?” Eleanor asked, pouring herself some sherry.
“Not as badly as I’d been prepared for,” Brat said, watching her thin capable hand manipulating the glasses. That hand wouldn’t lie soft and confidential and insinuating in one’s own.
“Did Docket tell you how he got his wound?”
“Docket was at market,” Bee said. “But we had hot buttered scones from Mrs. Docket.”
“Dear Mrs. Docket. What did Miss Hassell give you?”
“Shortbread. She wasn’t going to give us that, but she succumbed to Brat’s charms.” So Bee had noticed that.
“I’m not surprised,” Eleanor said, looking at Brat over her glass. “And Wigsell?”
“Do you remember that brown horse of Dick Pope’s? The one he swept the board with at Bath last year?”
“Certainly.”
“Gates has bought it for Peggy.”
Eleanor stopped sipping sherry and thought about this in silence for a moment or two.
“For Peggy to show.”
“Yes.”
“Well, well!” said Eleanor slowly: and she looked amused and thoughtful. She looked at Bee, met Bee’s glance, and looked away again. “Well, well!” she said again, and went on sipping sherry. After an interval broken only by the rip of paper as Bee opened envelopes, she said: “I don’t know that that was such a very good move.”
“No,” said Bee, not looking up.
“I’m going to wash. What is for lunch?”
“Goulash.”
“As made by our Mrs. Betts, that is just stew.”
The twins came in from lessons at the Rectory, and Simon from the stables, and they went in to lunch.
Simon had come down so late to breakfast that Brat’s only intercourse with him to-day had been to wish him good morning. He seemed amiable and relaxed, and inquired with what appeared to be genuine interest about the success of the morning. Bee provided an account, with periodic confirmation from Brat. When she came to Wigsell, Eleanor interrupted her to say:
“Did you know that Gates has bought Peggy a new horse?”
“No,” Simon said, looking up with mild interest.
“He has bought her that brown horse of Dick Pope’s.”
“Riding Light?”
“Yes. Riding Light. She is going to show it this year.”
For the first time since he had met him Brat saw Simon Ashby flush. He paused for a moment, and then went on with his lunch. The flush slowly died, and the cool pale profile resumed its normal calm. Both Eleanor and Bee had avoided looking at him while he absorbed the news, but Ruth studied him with interest.
And Brat, eating Mrs. Betts’s goulash, studied him with his mind. Simon Ashby was reputedly crazy about the Gates girl. But was he glad that the girl had been given a good horse? No. He was furious. And what was more, his womenfolk had known that he would be furious. They had known beforehand that he would find Peggy’s entry as a rival unforgivable. They had, understandably, not wanted the Gates affair to last or to become serious; and they had recognised instantly, both of them, that Peggy’s possession of Riding Light had saved them. What kind of creature was this Simon Ashby, who could not bear to be beaten by the girl he was in love with?
He remembered Bee’s inordinate pleasure in the brown horse. He saw again Eleanor’s slow amusement at the news. They had known at once that that was the end of the Peggy affair. Gates had bought that horse to be “upsides” with Latchetts; to give his daughter a mount as good as any owned by the man he hoped she would marry. And all he had done was to destroy any chance that Peggy ever had of being mistress of Latchetts.
Well, Simon was no longer master of Latchetts, so it would not matter to the Gates family that Simon resented Peggy’s possession of the horse. But what kind of heel was Simon that he could not love a rival?
“What is Brat going to ride at the Bures Show,” he heard Eleanor say, and brought his attention back to the lunch table.
“All of them,” Simon said. And as Eleanor looked her question: “They are his horses.”
This was the kind of thing that the English did not say. Simon must be very angry to desert the habit of a lifetime.
“I’m not going to ‘show’ any horses, if that is what you mean,” Brat said. “That requires technique, and I haven’t got it.”
“But you used to be very good,” Bee said.
“Did I? Oh, well, that is a long time ago. I certainly don’t want to show any horses in the ring at Bures.”
“The show isn’t for nearly three weeks yet,” Eleanor said. “Bee could coach you for a day or two, and you’d be as good as ever.”
But Brat was not to be moved. It would have been fun to see what he could do against English horsemen; fun especially to jump the Latchetts horses and perhaps win with them; but he was not going to make any public appearance as Patrick Ashby of Latchetts if he could help it.
“Brat could ride in the races,” Ruth said. “The races they end up with. He could beat everyone on Timber, couldn’t he?”
“Timber is not going to be knocked about in any country bumpkins’ race if I still have any say in the matter,” Simon said, speaking into his plate. “He is going to Olympia, which is his proper place.”
“I agree,” Brat said. And the atmosphere ceased to be tense. Jane wanted to know why fractions were vulgar, and Ruth wanted a new bicycle tire, and the conversation became the normal family conversation of any meal-time in any home.
Before lunch was over the first of the visitors arrived; and the steady stream went on, from after-luncheon coffee, through tea, to six o’clock drinks. They had all come to inspect Brat, but he noticed that those who had known Patrick Ashby came with a genuine pleasure in welcoming him back. Each of them had some small memory of him to recount, and all of them had kept the memory green because they had liked Pat Ashby and grieved for him. And Brat caught himself being gratified in an absurd and proprietorial way, as if some protégé of his own was being praised. The light that had been shed on Simon this morning made him more than ever Patrick’s champion. It was all wrong that Latchetts should have been Simon’s all those years. It was Patrick’s inheritance and it was all wrong that Patrick should not be here to inherit it. Patrick was all right. Patrick would not have gone sick with rage because his best girl had a better horse than he had. Patrick was all right.
So he accepted the small verbal gifts on Patrick’s behalf and was pleased and gratified.
About the time when tea-cups were being mixed up with cocktail glasses the local doctor appeared, and Brat ceased to be gratified, and became interested in Eleanor’s reactions to the doctor. Eleanor seemed to like the doctor very much, and Brat, knowing nothing whatever about him, was straightway convinced that he was not good enough for her. The only guests left now were Colonel Smollett, the Chief Constable for the county; the two Misses Byrne, who occupied the Jacobean house at the far end of the village and, according to Bee, had their walls hung with “plates and warming-pans, and other kitchen utensils”; and Dr. Spence. Dr. Spence was young and red-haired and bony, and he had freckles and a friendly manner. He was the successor of the old country doctor who had brought the whole Ashby family up, and he was, so Bee confided in an interval of tea-pouring, “much too brilliant to stay in a country practice.” Brat wondered if he stayed for Eleanor’s sake; he seemed to like Eleanor very much.
“You caused us a lot of trouble, young man,” Colonel Smollett had said, greeting him; and Brat, after the polite evasions he had experienced so far, was glad of his frankness. Just as his notions of English middle-class had been derived from American films, so his idea of a colonel had been derived from the English Press, and was equally erroneous. Colonel Smollett was a small, thin man with a beaked nose and a self-effacing manner. What one noticed about him was his extraordinary neatness and his gay blue eyes.
The Colonel gave the Misses Byrne a lift in his car, but the doctor lingered, and it was only when Bee asked him to stay for dinner that he pulled himself together and went.
“Poor Dr. Spence,” Bee said at dinner. “I’m sorry he wouldn’t stay. I’m sure that landlady of his starves him.”
“Nonsense,” said Simon, who had recovered his good temper and had been very bright all the afternoon; “that lean, red-haired type always look underfed. Besides, he wouldn’t have eaten, anyhow. All he wants is to sit and look at Eleanor.”
Which confirmed Brat’s worst fears.
But all Eleanor said was: “Don’t be absurd”; and she said it without heat and without interest.
They were all tired by dinner-time, and it was a quiet meal. The excitement of having Brat there had died into acceptance, and they no longer treated him as a newcomer. Even the unforthcoming Jane had stopped accusing him with her eyes. He was part of the landscape. It was wonderfully restful to be part of the landscape again. For the first time since he came to Latchetts he was hungry.
But as he got ready for bed he puzzled over the problem of Simon. Simon, who was quite sure that he was not Patrick, but had no intention of saying so. (Why? Because he would not be believed, and his protest would be put down to resentment at his brother’s return? Because he had plans for a dramatic unveiling? Because he had some better way of dealing with an impostor who would not be unveiled?) Simon, who was so good a dissembler that he could fool his own family about his inmost feelings. Simon, who was so self-centred, so vain, that to come between him and the sun was to insult him. Simon, who had charm enough for ten men, and an appealing air of vulnerability. Simon, who was like Timber.
He stood again at the open window in the dark, looking at the curve of the down against the sky. Perhaps because he was less tired to-night he was no longer so afraid; but the incalculable factor in this life that he was due to lead was still Simon.
If Simon so resented Peggy Gates’s owning a better horse than his, what, wondered Brat, could have been his reaction to Patrick’s sudden succession to Latchetts?
He considered this a long time, staring into the dark.
And as he turned at last to put the light on, a voice in his mind said: I wonder where Simon was when Patrick went over the cliff.
But he noticed the heinousness of this at once, of course. What was he suggesting? Murder? In Latchetts? In Clare? By a boy of thirteen? He was letting his antipathy to Simon run away with his common sense.
The suicide of Patrick Ashby had been a police affair. An affair of inquest and evidence. The thing had been investigated, and the police had been satisfied that it was in truth suicide.
Satisfied? Or just without a case?
Where would that coroner’s report be now? In the police records he supposed. And it was not easy for a civilian to persuade the police to satisfy an idle curiosity; they were busy people.
But the thing must have been reported in the local Press. It must have been a local sensation. Somewhere in the files there would be an account of that inquest, and he, Brat Farrar, would unearth it at the first opportunity.
Antipathy or no antipathy, common sense or no common sense, he wanted to know where Simon Ashby was when his twin went over the Westover cliffs.