Mr. Sandal was to come on Thursday night and stay over till after luncheon on Friday.
On Thursday morning Bee said that she was going into Westover to do some special shopping for Mr. Sandal’s meals, and what would Brat like to do with his day?
Brat said that he would like to come with her and see Westover again, and Bee looked pleased.
“We can stop on the way through the village,” she said, “and let Mrs. Gloom run her eye over you. It will be one less for you to meet after church on Sunday.”
So they stopped at the newsagent’s, and Brat was exhibited, and Mrs. Gloom sucked the last ounce of satisfaction out of the drama of his return, and they laughed together about her as they sped away to the sea.
“People who can’t sing are horribly frustrated,” Bee said, after a little.
Brat considered this non sequitur. “The highest mountain in Britain is Ben Nevis,” he said, proffering one in his turn.
Bee laughed at that and said: “No, I just meant that I should like to sing at the top of my voice, but I can only croak. Can you sing?”
“No. I croak too. We could croak together.”
“I doubt if it is legal to croak in a built-up area. One never knows nowadays. And anyhow, there is that.” She waved her hand at a large sign which read:
MOTORISTS. PLEASE REFRAIN FROM USING YOUR HORN.
THIS IS A HOSPITAL.
Brat glanced up at the building, set on the slope above the town, and remarked that it was uncommonly pretty for a hospital.
“Yes; much less terrifying than the normal place. It is a great pity that that was allowed to happen.” She jerked her chin at the row of cheap shops on the opposite side of the road; some of them not much better than shacks. Dingy cafés, a cobbler’s, a bicycle “depot,” a seller of wreaths and crosses, a rival seller of flowers, a greengrocer’s, and anonymous businesses with windows painted half-way up and odd bills tacked in the window.
They were running down the slope into the town, and this miscellaneous strip of roadside commerce was the last petering-out of the poorer suburbs. Beyond was Westover proper: clean and neat and shining in the reflected light from the sea.
As Bee turned into the car park she said: “You don’t want to tail round looking at ‘sea-food’ for Mr. Sandal’s consumption. Go away and amuse yourself, and we’ll meet for lunch at the Angel about a quarter to one.”
He was some distance away when she called him back. “I forgot to ask if you were short of money. I can lend you some if you ——”
“Oh, no, thanks; I still have some of what Cosset, Thring and what-you-may-call-’em advanced me.”
He went first to the harbour to see the place that he was supposed to have set out from eight years ago. It was filled with coastwise shipping and fishing boats, very gay in the dancing light. He leaned against the warm stones of the breakwater and contemplated it. It was here that Alec Loding had sat painting his “old scow” on the last day of Pat Ashby’s life. It was over those cliffs away to the right that Pat Ashby had fallen to his death.
He pushed himself off the breakwater and went to look for the office of the Westover Times. It took him some time to find it because, although every citizen of Westover read the local paper, very few of them had occasion to seek it out in its home. Its home was a stone’s-throw from the harbour, in a small old house in a small old street which still had its original cobbles. The entrance was so low that Brat instinctively ducked his head as he went in. Beyond, after the bright sunlight outside, there was blackness. But out of the blackness the unmistakable adolescent voice of an office boy said: “Yes?”
Brat said that he would like to see Mr. Macallan.
The voice said that Mr. Macallan was out.
“I suppose you couldn’t tell me where I could find him?”
“The fourth table on the left upstairs at the Blue Bird.”
“That’s explicit.”
“Can’t help it; that’s where he is. That’s where he always is, this time of day.”
The Blue Bird, it seemed, was a coffee-shop round the corner on the harbour front. And Mr. Macallan was indeed sitting at the fourth table on the left upstairs, which was the one by the far window. Mr. Macallan was sitting with a half-drunk cup of coffee in front of him, glowering down on the bright front. He greeted Brat amiably, however, as one old friend to another, and pulled out a chair for him.
“I’m afraid I haven’t been much good to you,” Brat said.
“The only way I’ll ever get myself on to the front page of the Clarion is in a trunk,” Mr. Macallan said.
“A trunk?”
“In sections. And I can’t help feeling that would be a wee bit drastic.” He spread out that morning’s Clarion so that the shrieking black print screamed up from the table. The trunk murder was still front-page news after three days, it having been discovered that the legs in the case belonged to two different persons; a complication which put the present case hors concurs in the trunk-murder class.
“What’s horrible about murder,” Mr. Macallan said reflectively, “is not that it happens, but that it happens to your Aunt Agnes, if you follow me. Hi! Miss! A cup of coffee for my friend here. Brother Johnny goes to the war and gets killed and it is all very sad, but no one is shocked — civilisation being what it is. But if someone bumps Aunt Agnes off on her way home one night that is a shock. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen to people you know.”
“It must be worse when someone you know bumps off someone’s Aunt Agnes.”
“Ay,” said Mr. Macallan, shooting an extra spoonful of sugar into his half-cold coffee and stirring it vigorously. “I’ve seen some of that. Families, you know. It’s always the same: they just can’t believe it. Their Johnny. That is the horror in murder. The domesticity of it.” He took out his cigarette case and offered it. “And how do you like being Clare’s white-headed boy? Are you glad to be back?”
“You can’t imagine how glad.”
“After that fine free life in Arizona or Texas or wherever it was? You mean you actually prefer this?” Mr. Macallan jerked his head at the Westover front filled with placid shoppers. And, as Brat nodded: “Mercy-be-here! I can hardly credit it.”
“Why? Don’t you like the place?”
Mr. Macallan looked down at the southern English walking about in their southern English sunshine, and metaphorically spat. “They’re so satisfied with themselves I can’t take my eyes off them,” he said.
“Satisfied with their lot, you mean? Why not?”
“Nothing in this world came out of satisfaction.”
“Except the human race,” said Brat.
Mr. Macallan grinned. “I’ll allow you that.” But he went on glowering down at the bright harbour scene. “I look at them and think: ‘These people kept Scotland fighting for four hundred years,’ and I can’t find the answer.”
“The answer, of course, is that they didn’t.”
“No? Let me tell you that my country ——”
“They’ve been much too busy for the last thousand years keeping the shores of England. But for them your Scotland would be part of Spain to-day.”
This was apparently a new idea to Mr. Macallan. He decided to let it ride.
“You weren’t looking for me, were you? When you came to the Blue Bird?”
“Yes. I went to the office first and they told me you would be here. There’s something I want and I thought that you might help me to it.”
“Not publicity, I take it,” Mr. Macallan said dryly.
“No, I want to read my obituary.”
“Man, who doesn’t! You’re a privileged person, Mr. Ashby, a very privileged person.”
“I suppose the Westover Times keeps back numbers.”
“Och, yes, back to June the 18th, 1827. Or is it June the 28th? I forget. So you want to look at the files. Well, there’s not very much, but you’ll find it very interesting of course. One’s own death must be a fascinating subject to read about.”
“You’ve read about it, then?”
“Och, yes. Before I went out to Latchetts on Tuesday, I naturally looked you up.”
So it was that, when they stumbled down the dark stairs to the cellar of the Westover Times offices, Mr. Macallan was able to put his hand on the required copy without delay and without raising the dust of a hundred and fifty years about their ears.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Mr. Macallan said, spreading the volume open under the naked light above the old-fashioned sloping desk. “Have a good time. If there is anything else I can do for you, just let me know. And drop in when you feel like it.”
He trotted up the stone stairs, and the scuffling sound of his shoes faded upwards into the world of men, and Brat was left alone with the past.
The Westover Times appeared twice a week: on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Patrick Ashby’s death had occurred on a Saturday, so that a single Wednesday issue carried both the announcement of his death and the report of the inquest. As well as the usual announcement inserted by the family in the list of deaths, there was a short news item on the middle page. The Westover Times had been owned and run by a Westover family since its founding, and it still kept the stateliness, the good manners, and the reticence of an early Edwardian doctor’s brougham plying between Harley Street and Knightsbridge. The paper announced the sad occurrence and offered its sympathy to the family in this great trial which had come to them so soon after the tragic deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Ashby in a flying accident. It offered no information beyond the fact that on Saturday afternoon or evening Patrick Ashby had met his death by falling over the cliffs to the west of the town. An account of the inquest would be found on page five.
On page five there was a whole column on the inquest. A column was not enough, of course, to do justice to the inquest in detail, but all the salient facts were there, and now and then a piece of evidence was reported verbatim.
Saturday afternoon was a holiday for the Ashby children and they were accustomed in the summer to take a “piece” with them and pursue their various interests in the countryside until it was time to come home to their evening meal. No alarm had been raised about Patrick’s non-appearance in the evening until he had been missing for several hours. It was taken for granted that he had gone farther than he had intended in his latest hobby of bird-watching, and that he was merely late. When darkness closed down and he still had not come home, telephoned inquiries were sent all round the countryside in an effort to find someone who had seen him, so that if an accident had overtaken him rescue might be directed to the proper locality. When these inquiries proved barren, a search-party was organised to beat all the likely places for the missing boy. The search was conducted both on horse and on foot, and along the roads by car, without success.
In the first light of early morning the boy’s jacket was found by a coastguard patrolling along the cliffs. Albert Potticary, the coastguard in question, gave evidence that the coat was lying about fifty yards from the cliff-edge, just where the path from Tanbitches began to descend through the gap to the harbour at Westover. It was lying a few yards off the path on the side nearer the cliff, and was weighted in its place by a stone. It was wet with dew when he picked it up, and the pockets were empty except for a note written in thin ink. The note was the one now shown him. He telephoned the news to the police and at once instituted a search for a body on the beach. No body was found. High tide the previous night had been at seven-twenty-nine, and if the boy had fallen into the water, or if he had fallen before high-water so that his body was taken out by the tide, it would not be washed up again at Westover. No one drowned in the Westover district had ever been washed up nearer than Castleton, away to the west; and most of them farther west than that. He was therefore not hopeful of finding any body when he instituted the search. It was merely routine.
The last person to see Patrick Ashby turned out to be Abel Tusk, the shepherd. He had met the boy in the early afternoon, about half-way between Tanbitches and the cliff.
Q. What was he doing?
A. He was lying on his belly in the grass.
Q. Doing what?
A. Waiting for a lark.
Q. What kind of lark?
A. An English lark.
Q. Ah, you mean he was bird-watching. Did he appear his normal self?
Yes, Abel said, as far as he could judge Pat Ashby had looked much as usual. Never very “gabby” at any time. A quiet boy? Yes, a nice quiet boy. They discussed birds for a little and then parted. He, Abel Tusk, was on his way into Westover by the cliff path, it being also his own half-holiday. He did not get back until late at night and did not hear about the search for the boy until Sunday morning.
Asked if many people used that cliff path he said no. There were buses from the village that got you into Westover in a tenth of the time, but he didn’t care for buses. It was rough walking, the cliff part of the path, and not suitable for the kind of shoes that people going to town would be wearing. So no one but someone like himself who was already on the sea side of Tanbitches hill would think of going to Westover that way.
Bee gave evidence that his parents’ deaths had been a great shock to the boy, but that he had taken it well and had seemed to be recovering. She had no reason to think that he contemplated taking his own life. The children separated on Saturday afternoons because their interests were different, so that it was not unusual for Patrick to be alone.
Q. His twin did not accompany him?
A. No. Patrick was fascinated by birds, but Simon’s tastes are mechanical.
Q. You have seen the note found in the boy’s coat, and you recognise it as the handwriting of your nephew Patrick?
A. Oh, yes. Patrick had a very individual way of making his capital letters. And he was the only person I know who wrote with a stylograph.
She explained the nature of a stylograph. The one Patrick owned had been black vulcanite with a thin yellow spiral down the barrel. Yes, it was missing. He carried it always with him; it was one of his pet possessions.
Q. Can you think of any reason why this sudden desire to take his own life should overcome him, when he seemed to his friend, the shepherd, to be normally happy in the afternoon?
A. I can only suggest that he was normally happy during the afternoon, but that when it was time to turn homeward the thought of going back to a house empty of so much that had made life fine for him was suddenly too much, and that he was overcome by an impulse born of a moment’s despair.
And that was the verdict of the court, too. That the boy had succumbed to a passing impulse at a moment when the balance of his mind had been disturbed.
That was the end of the column and that was the end of Patrick Ashby. Brat turned over the pages of the next issue, filled with the small importances of summer-time Westover: shows, bowling competitions, tennis tournaments, council meetings, trade outings; but there was no mention of Pat Ashby. Pat Ashby already belonged to the past.
Brat sat back in the dead quiet of the cellar and thought about it all. The boy lying in the summer grass waiting for his beloved larks to drop out of the sky. And the night coming. And no boy coming home across Tanbitches hill.
Mechanical interests, Bee had said, describing Simon’s way of spending his half-holiday. That meant the internal combustion engine, he supposed. It was about the age of thirteen that one did begin to be interested in cars. Simon had probably been innocently tinkering in the garage at Latchetts. Certainly there was no suggestion at the inquest, as reported in the Press, that his whereabouts had been a matter for question.
When he joined Bee for lunch at the Angel he longed to ask her bluntly where Simon had been that afternoon. But of course one could not say: “Where was Simon the afternoon I ran away from home?” It was an utterly pointless question. He must think up some other way of bringing the subject into the conversation. He was distracted by the old head-waiter at the Angel, who had known all the Ashby children and was shaken to the core, apparently, by Patrick’s unexpected return. His old hands trembled as they laid the various dishes in front of him, and each dish was accompanied by a quavered “Mr. Patrick, sir,” as if he was glad to use the name. But the climax came with the sweet course. The sweet was fruit tart, and he had already served both Bee and Brat, but he returned immediately and with great empressment laid a large meringue on a silver dish in front of Brat’s place. Brat gazed at it in surprise and then looked up to find the old man waiting for his comment with a proud smile and tears in his eyes. His mind was so full of Simon that he was not quick enough, and it was Bee who saved the situation.
“How wonderful of Daniel to remember that you always had that!” she said, and Brat followed her lead and the old man went away pleased and moved, mopping his eyes on a dazzling white handkerchief that looked as large as a sheet.
“Thanks,” Brat said to Bee. “I hadn’t remembered that.”
“Dear old Daniel. I think it is almost like seeing his own son coming back. He had three, you know. They all died in one war, and his grandsons all died in the following one. He was very fond of you children, so I expect it is very wonderful for him to see anyone he has loved come back from the dead. What have you been doing with your morning?”
“Reading my obituary.”
“How morbid of you. Or, no, of course, it isn’t. It is what we all want to do. Did you see little Mr. Macallan?”
“I did. He sent his best respects to you. Aunt Bee ——”
“You are too old to begin calling me aunt.”
“Bee, what were Simon’s ‘mechanical interests’?”
“Simon never had any mechanical interests as far as I know.”
“You said at the inquest that he had.”
“I did? I can’t imagine what they could have been. What was it apropos of?”
“To explain why we didn’t do things together on a Saturday afternoon. What did Simon do when I went bird-watching?” He tried to make it sound like someone trying to remember an old way of life.
“Pottered about, I expect. Simon was always a potterer. His hobbies never lasted longer than a fortnight at the outside.”
“So you don’t remember what Simon was using for a hobby the day I ran away?”
“It’s absurd of me, my dear, but I don’t. I don’t even remember where he was that day. When something dreadful happens, you know, you push it down in your mind and never bring it up again if you can help it. I do remember that he spent all night out on his pony looking frantically for you. Poor Simon. You did him a bad turn, Brat. I don’t know if you realise it. Simon changed after you went. I don’t know whether it was the shock of your going or the lack of your sober companionship, but he was a different person afterwards.”
Since Brat had no answer to this he ate in silence, and presently she said: “And you did me a bad turn in never writing to me. Why didn’t you, Brat?”
This was the weak spot in the whole structure, as Loding had continually pointed out.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Honestly, I don’t know!”
The exasperation and desperation of his tone had an appropriateness that he had not foreseen.
“All right,” she said. “I won’t worry you, my dear. I didn’t mean to. It is just something that has puzzled me. I was so very fond of you when you were small, and we were such very good friends. It was not like you to live a life of your own without once glancing back.”
He raked up an offering from the depths of his own experience. “It’s easier than you’d think to drop the past behind you when you are fourteen. If you are continually meeting fresh experience, I mean. The past has no greater reality than something you saw in a cinema. No personal reality, I mean.”
“I must try running away one day,” she said lightly. “There is a lot of the past I should like to drop behind me.”
And Daniel came with the cheese, and they talked about other things.
Brat had not been prepared to find birthday presents by his plate on Friday morning. He had not, in fact, reckoned with a birthday at all. “All celebration has been postponed until Mr. Charles Ashby comes back to this country,” Mr. Sandal had said to him in London, and it was not until Bee had drawn his attention to it that he had remembered that, celebration apart, there would inevitably be a day on which he would become twenty-one. He had had so little experience of birthdays that he had taken it for granted that a postponement of celebration meant a simple verbal congratulation from each member of the family, and he was dismayed by the pile of parcels by his breakfast plate. He quailed at the thought of having to open them in public.
The sardonic light in Simon’s eye braced him to the task. He had a suspicion that Simon’s punctuality at breakfast this morning was due less to the presence of Mr. Sandal than to the prospect of enjoying his embarrassment over those presents.
“Happy birthday, Brat!” they said, as they came in. “Happy birthday, Brat!” One after another. So that the light benedictions fell round him like confetti.
He wished he didn’t feel so bad about it. He wished that they were really his family, and that these were his presents by his plate, and that it was his birthday. It was a very nice thing, a family birthday.
“Are you an opener-before-breakfast or an opener-after, Brat?” Eleanor asked.
“After,” he said promptly, and won a breathing-space.
After several cups of strong coffee he might feel braver.
Simon had, as well as presents, a pile of telegrams from the still large numbers of his acquaintances who had not heard of his twin’s return, and he opened them as he ate and shared the contents. Having read each message aloud he added a postscript of comment.
“An exact shilling, the cheeseparing adding-machine! And I gave her a wonderful lunch last time I was in town.... What do you imagine Bobby is doing in Skye? He loathes mountains and is a martyr to midges.... Gore and Bowen. I suppose that’s to remind me to pay my bill.... I’m sure I don’t know anyone called Bert Burt. Do you think he can be a bookie?”
When eventually Brat could no longer postpone the opening of his parcels, his task was made easier by the fact that his presents were for the most part replicas of those Simon was pulling out of his own pile. Mr. Sandal’s Georgian sugar-sifter, Bee’s silver flask, Eleanor’s whip, and the twins’ pocket-book, were all duplicated. Only the present from the Rectory was individual. It was a small wooden box that played a tune when the lid was opened. Brat had never seen or heard of such a thing before, and was so delighted with it that he forgot to be self-conscious and became absorbed in it.
“That came from Clare Park,” Bee said.
And at that reminder of Loding he came back to reality and shut down the lid on the sweet frail melody.
This morning he was going to sign his soul away. It was no time for tinkling little tunes.
This signing-away was also the subject of surprise. He had imagined in his innocence that various papers would be put in front of him and he would sign them, and that would be that. A matter of twenty minutes at the most. But it proved to be a matter of hours. He and Mr. Sandal sat side by side at the big table in the library, and the whole economic history of Latchetts was laid open for his inspection. Cosset, Thring and Noble were accounting to their young client for the years of his minority.
Brat, a little bewildered but interested, toiled after Mr. Sandal in his progress through the years, and admired the way the old man handled this legal and mathematical exploration.
“Your dear mother’s fortune is not what it was in the prosperous days when she inherited it, of course; but it will be sufficient to ensure that you may live at Latchetts in the future without anxiety. As you have observed, the margin of safety has often been very small during the years of your minority, but it was Miss Ashby’s wish that there should be no borrowing on the strength of your inheritance from your mother. She was determined that that should come to you intact when you were twenty-one.”
He went on laying statements in front of Brat, and for the first time Brat was aware of the struggle and the insecurity that lay behind the assured contentment that Latchetts presented to the eye.
“What happened that year?” he asked, putting his finger on a particularly black record.
Mr. Sandal flipped over some papers. “Ah, yes. I remember. That was a bad year. A very bad year. One of the mares died and two were barren, and a very fine foal broke a leg. A heart-breaking year. It is a precarious way of making a living. That year, for instance,” his thin dry finger pointed out another unsatisfactory report, “everything went swimmingly at Latchetts but it happened to be a year when no one was buying and none of the yearlings made their reserve price at the sales. A matter of luck. Merely luck. You will observe that some of the years were exceedingly lucky ones, so that the losses were overtaken.”
He left the stables and went on to the farms: the conditions of lease, the improvements, the standing of the tenants, the nature of the crops. Eventually he came to the matter of personal income.
“Your father made a very good income in his profession of consulting engineer, and there seemed, of course, nothing to prevent him making that large yearly sum for a lifetime to come. He therefore spent generously on Latchetts and on the horses that were his hobby. Bought expensive and finely-bred mares, and so on, so that when he died his investments were not very extensive, and death duties had of course to be paid, so the investments had to go.”
He slipped another sheet in front of Brat’s eye, showing how the duty had been paid without mortgaging Latchetts.
“Miss Ashby has her own income and has never taken an allowance from the Latchetts estate. Except a house-keeping one, that is. The two elder children have had increasing allowances as they grew up. With the exception of some personal possessions — the children’s ponies, for instance — the horses in the stable belong to the estate. When the children went to sales to buy for re-selling they were given money by Miss Ashby, and any profit on the improved horses went towards the expenses of Latchetts. I understand, however, that Simon has lately bought one or two with the result of profitable bets, and Eleanor with the result of her efforts as an instructress in the art of riding. Miss Ashby will no doubt tell you which these are. They do not appear in the relevant papers. The Shetland ponies were Miss Ashby’s own venture, and are her own property. I hope that is all clear?”
Brat said that it was.
“Now about the future. It is the Bank’s advice that the money left you by your mother should stay invested as it is now. Have you any objection to that?”
“I don’t want any lump sum,” Loding had said. “I should only blue it, in the first place. And in the second place, it would cause a shocking amount of heart-searching at the bank. We don’t want any heart-searching once you’re in the saddle. All I want is a cosy little weekly allowance for the rest of my life, so that I can thumb my nose at Equity, and managements, and producers who say that I’m always late for rehearsals. And landladies. Riches, my boy, don’t consist in having things, but in not having to do something you don’t want to do. And don’t you forget it. Riches is being able to thumb your nose.”
“What income would that bring me, as it is?” Brat asked Mr. Sandal, and Mr. Sandal told him.
That was all right. He could peel Loding’s cut off that and still have enough to meet his obligations at Latchetts.
“These are the children’s present allowances. The twins, of course, will be going away to school presently, and that will be a charge on the estate for a few years.”
He was surprised by the smallness of the allowances. Why, he thought, I made more than that in three months at the dude ranch. It subtly altered his attitude to Simon that Simon in the matter of spending money should have been so much his inferior.
“They’re not very big, are they?” he said to Mr. Sandal, and the old man looked taken aback.
“They are in accordance with the size of the estate,” he said dryly.
“Well, I think they ought to be stepped up a bit now.”
“Yes; that would be quite in order. But you cannot expect to carry two adults as passengers on the estate. It would not be just to the estate. They are both capable of earning their own living.”
“What do you suggest, then?”
“I would suggest that Eleanor be given a slightly increased allowance while she lives at Latchetts, or until she marries.”
“Is she thinking of getting married?”
“My dear boy, all young ladies think of getting married, especially when they are as pleasant to look upon as your sister. I am not aware, however, that she has so far exhibited any specific interest in the matter.”
“Oh. And Simon?”
“Simon’s case is difficult. Until a few weeks ago he looked upon Latchetts as his. He is not likely to remain long at Latchetts now, but the slightly increased allowance you suggest could be paid to him while he gives you his services here.”
“I don’t think that is good enough,” said Brat, who was surprised by Mr. Sandal’s assumption that Simon would go. Simon showed no signs of going. “I think a bit of the estate is owing to him.”
“Morally owing, you mean?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“No doubt you are right, but it is a dangerous assumption which you cannot expect me to countenance. One cannot hand out bits of a financial estate and still keep the said estate in good heart. An allowance is one thing: it comes out of income. But the giving away of the fabric of the thing is to damage its whole structure.”
“Well, I suggest that if Simon wants to go away and begin somewhere on his own that the money to start should be lent to him out of the estate at a nominal rate of interest. I suppose if I say without interest you’ll jump down my throat.”
The old man smiled on him, quite kindly. “I think there is nothing against that. I am looking forward to a period of great prosperity for Latchetts now that the lean years are over. I don’t suppose a loan to Simon would greatly incommode the estate. There would be the saving of the allowance to balance it. Now, about the increase in the present allowances ——”
They settled the amounts of that.
“Lastly,” said Mr. Sandal, “the pensioners.”
“Pensioners?”
“Yes. The various dependents of the family who have become too old to work.”
For the fourth time that morning Brat was surprised. He looked at the long list and wondered if all established English families had this drain on their income. Mr. Sandal seemed to take it as a matter of course; as much a commonplace of honourable practice as paying one’s income tax. Mr. Sandal had frowned on any extravagance where the family was concerned: able-bodied Ashbys must earn their own living. The obligation to support the aged and infirm retainers of the family he took for granted. There was Nannie, who was now ninety-two and lived in a place called New Deer in Scotland; there was an old groom of eighty-nine who lived in the village, and another at Guessgate; there was a cook who had cooked for them until she was sixty-eight and now lived with a daughter of sixty-nine in Horsham; and so on.
He thought of the brassy blonde in the flowered rayon who had bade him welcome to Latchetts. Who would pension her? The country, he supposed. For long and honourable service?
Brat agreed to the continuance of the pensions, and then Simon was called in to do his share of signing. It pleased Brat, who had found it a depressing morning, to notice the sudden widening of Simon’s eye as it lighted on his own signature. It was nearly a decade since Simon had set eyes on those capital letters of Patrick’s, and here they were blandly confronting him on the library table. That would “larn” him to be sardonic over Brat’s efforts to carry off a birthday that was not his.
Then Bee came in, and Mr. Sandal explained the increased provisions in the matter of allowances and the plan for providing for Simon’s future. When Simon heard of the plan he eyed Brat thoughtfully; and Brat could read quite plainly what the look said. “Bribery, is that it? Well, it won’t work. I’m damned well staying here and you will damned well pay me that allowance.” Whatever plans Simon had, they centred round Latchetts.
Bee seemed pleased, however. She put her arm through his to lead him to lunch, and squeezed it. “Dear Brat!” she said.
“I congratulated you both and gave you my good wishes at breakfast,” Mr. Sandal said, picking up his glass of claret, “but I should like now to drink a toast.” He lifted his glass to Brat. “To Patrick, who has not only succeeded to his inheritance but has accepted its obligations.”
“To Patrick!” they said. “To Patrick!”
“To Patrick!” said Jane, last.
He looked at her and found that she was smiling at him.
Simon took Mr. Sandal to the station in the afternoon, and when they had gone Bee said: “If you want to avoid the social life this afternoon I’ll hold the fort for you. I have the books to do, anyhow. Perhaps you would like to take out one of the horses with Eleanor. She has gone back to the stables, I think.”
There were few things in life that Brat would have liked so much as to go riding with Eleanor, but there was one thing that he wanted to do more. He wanted, on this day when Pat Ashby should have come into his inheritance, to walk over Tanbitches hill by the path that Pat had taken on the last day of his life.
“I want to go with Brat,” Ruth said; and he noticed that Jane lingered to hear the result of this proposition, as if she too might have come. But Bee quashed the suggestion. Brat had had enough of his family for a little, she said.
“But he is going with Eleanor!” protested Ruth.
But Brat said no. He was going walking by himself.
He avoided the avenue, in case that he might meet visitors bound for the house, and went down through the paddocks to the road. In one of the paddocks that bordered the avenue Eleanor was lunging a bay colt. He stood under the trees and watched her; her unruffled patience, her mastery of the puzzled and resentful youngster; the way she managed, even at the end of a long rein, to reassure him. He wondered if that doctor fellow knew anything about horses.
The turf on Tanbitches delighted him. He had not had turf like that underfoot since he was a child. He walked slowly upward, smelling the grassy smell and watching the great cloud shadows flying before the wind. He bore away from the path towards the crown of beeches on the hill-top. If he went up there he would be able to see the whole slope of the countryside to the cliff edge; the countryside that Pat Ashby had shared with the larks.
As he came level with the green clump of bushes and young trees that marked the old quarry, he found an old man sitting in its shelter eating solid slabs of bread and jam, and gave him a greeting as he passed.
“Proud, a’nt yu!” said the old man tartly.
Brat swung on his heel and stared.
“Wonderful dentical and Frenchy furrin parts makes folks, surely.”
He took another large bite and surveyed Brat from under the battered felt of his hat.
“Dunnamany nests you’d never seen but fur me.”
“Abel!” said Brat.
“Well, that’s summat,” said the old man grudgingly.
“Abel!” said Brat, and sat down beside him. “Am I glad to see you!”
“Adone do!” Abel said to his dog, who came out from under the spread of his coat to sniff at the newcomer.
“Abel!” He could hardly believe that yesterday’s occupant of a newspaper morgue was here in the flesh.
Abel began to exhibit signs of gratification at this undoubted enthusiasm for his society, and allowed that he had recognised him afar off. “Lame, are yu?”
“Just a bit.”
“Bruck?”
“Yes.”
“Weren’t never one to make a pucker,” Abel said, approving his laconic acceptance of bad luck.
Brat propped his back against the stout wooden fencing that kept the sheep from the quarry face, took out his cigarette case, and settled down for the afternoon.
In the hour that followed he learned a great deal about Pat Ashby, but nothing that helped to explain his suicide. Like everyone else, old Abel had been shocked and surprised by the boy’s death, and now felt that his disbelief in a suicidal Patrick had been vindicated.
Patrick “weren’t never one to make a pucker,” no matter how “tedious bad” things were.
The old shepherd walked with him to the beeches, and Brat stayed there and watched man and dog grow small in the distance. Long after they were indistinguishable he stayed there, soothed by the loneliness and the great “hush” of the wind in the beech trees. Then he followed them down into the green plain until he came to the path, and let it lead him back over the hill to Clare.
As he came down the north slope to the road, a familiar “clink-clink” came up to him on the wind. For a moment he was back on the Wilson ranch, with the forge glowing in the thin mountain air and — what was her name? — Cora waiting for him beyond the barn when he was tidied up after supper. Then he remembered where the forge was: in that cottage at the foot of the hill. It was early yet. He would go and see what an English smithy looked like.
It looked very like the Wilson one, when at last he stood in the doorway, except that the roof was a good deal lower. The smith was alone, his mate being no doubt an employee and subject to a rationing of labour, and he was fashioning horse-shoes. He looked up as Brat darkened the doorway, and gave him a greeting without pausing in his work. Brat watched him for a little in a companionable quiet, and then moved over to work the bellows for him. The man looked up and smiled. He finished what he was doing at the moment and then said: “I didn’t know you against the light. I’m unaccountable glad to see you in my place again, Mr. Patrick.”
“Thanks, Mr. Pilbeam.”
“You’re a deal handier with that thing than you used to be.”
“I’ve earned my living at it since I saw you last.”
“You have? Well, I’ll be ——!” He took a half-made shoe red-hot from the furnace and was about to resume work when he changed his mind and held it out with a grin to Brat. Brat accepted the challenge and made a good job of it, Mr. Pilbeam acting as mate with critical approval.
“Funny,” he said, as Brat plunged the shoe into the water, “if any Ashby was to earn his living at this job it ought to have been your brother.”
“Why?”
“You never showed much interest.”
“And did Simon?”
“There was a time when I couldn’t keep him out of this place. There wasn’t anything he wasn’t going to make, from a candlestick to gates for the avenue at Latchetts. Far as I remember, all he ever made was a sheep-crook, and that not over-well. But he was always round the place. It was a craze of his for the whole of a summer.”
“Which summer was that?”
“Summer you left us, it was. I’d misremember about it, only he was here seeing us put an iron on a cartwheel the day you ran away. I had to shoo him home for his supper.”
Brat considered the shoe he had made, while Mr. Pilbeam made ready to call it a day.
“I ought to hang that up,” Mr. Pilbeam said, nodding at Brat’s handiwork, “and label it: Made by Patrick Ashby of Latchetts. And I couldn’t make a better one myself,” he added handsomely.
“Give it to old Abel to nail on his door.”
“Bless you, old Abel wouldn’t have cold iron on his threshold. Keep his visitors away.”
“Oh. Friendly with ‘them,’ is he?”
“Do all his washing up and keep his house clean, if you’d believe all you hear.”
“I wouldn’t put it past him,” Brat said. And set out for Latchetts.
So Simon had an alibi. Simon had been nowhere near the cliffs that afternoon. He had never been out of the Clare valley.
And so that was that.
On his way home up the ride between the paddocks he met Jane. Jane had every appearance of “hanging around,” and he wondered if it was to intercept him that she lingered there. She was talking to Honey and her foal, and made no effort to efface herself as she had done hitherto at his approach.
“Hullo, Jane,” he said, and joined in the intercourse with Honey to give her time. Her small pale face had flushed, and she was evidently struggling with a quite unusual emotion.
“It’s about time we were going home to wash up,” he suggested at last, as she seemed no nearer speech.
She dropped her hand from Honey’s head and turned to face him, braced for effort.
“I wanted to say something to you. Do you mind?”
“Something you want me to do for you?”
“Oh, no. Nothing like that. It’s just that I wasn’t very nice to you when you came home from America, and I want to apologise.”
“Oh, Jane,” he said, wanting to take the small brave figure in his arms.
“It wasn’t because I wanted to be horrid to you,” she said, anxious that he should understand. “It was because — it was because ——”
“I know why it was.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, of course. It was a very natural thing to feel.”
“Was it?”
“In fact, all things considered, it does you credit.”
“Then you’ll accept my apology?”
“I accept your apology,” Brat said gravely, and they shook hands.
She did not immediately put her arm through his as Ruth would have done. She walked beside him in a grown-up fashion, talking politely about the chances of Honey’s foal in the market, and what it should be called. The matter of the name was such an absorbing and exciting one that presently she forgot her self-consciousness, so that by the time they reached the house she was chattering unreservedly.
As they crossed the wide gravel sweep, Bee came to the door and stood there watching them come.
“You are going to be late for dinner, you two,” she said.
So Brat took possession of Latchetts and of everyone in it, with the exception of Simon.
He went to church on Sunday and submitted to being stared at for an hour and a half with time off for prayers. The only people not in Clare Church that morning were the Nonconformists and three children who had measles. Indeed, there were, as Bee pointed out, several members of the congregation whose normal place of Sunday worship was the blue brick barn at the other end of the village, and who had decided to put up with ritual and prelacy this once in order to share in the sensation of his appearance. As for the orthodox flock, there were individuals there, Bee said, who had not entered a church since their last child was christened. There was even Lana Adams who, as far as anyone knew, had not been in any church since her own baptism in the blue brick barn some twenty years ago.
Brat sat between Bee and Eleanor, and Simon on the other side of Bee. The twins were beyond Eleanor; Ruth wallowing in the drama and singing hymns loudly with a rapt expression, and Jane looking at the congregation with stony disapproval. Brat read the Ashby tablets over and over again, and listened to the Rector’s unemphatic voice providing the inhabitants of Clare with their weekly ration of the abstract. The Rector did not preach, in the accepted meaning of the term. He sounded as if he were arguing the matter out for himself; so that, if you shut your eyes, you could be in a chair at the other side of the Rectory fireplace listening to him talk. Brat thought of the fine variety of preachers who had come to take Sunday service at the orphanage: the shouters, the between-you-and-me-ers, the drama merchants who varied their tones and dropped their voices like amateur reciters, the hearties, the mincing aesthetes; and he thought that George Peck came very well out of the comparison. George Peck really did look as if he were not thinking about himself at all; as if he might conceivably have become a clergyman even if there had been no such inducement as public appearances in a pulpit.
After service Brat went to Sunday lunch at the Rectory, but not until he had run the gamut of village good wishes. Bee had come out of church at his side ready to pilot him through the ordeal, but she was accosted by Mrs. Gloom, and he was left defenceless. He looked in panic at the first of these unknowns bearing down on him: a big apple-cheeked woman with pink roses in a crinoline hat. How was he going to pretend to remember her? Or all the others who were obviously lingering?
“You remember Sarah Godwin, who used to come on washing days,” a voice said, and there was Eleanor at his elbow. She moved him on from one group to another as expertly as a social secretary, briefing him quickly in a muttered phrase as each new face loomed up. “Harry Watts. Used to mend our bicycles.” “Miss Marchant. Village school.” “Mrs. Stapley. Midwife.” “Tommy Fitt. Used to be the gardener’s boy.” “Mrs. Stack. Rural industries.”
She saw him safely to the little iron gate that led into the Rectory garden, opened it, pushed him through, and said: “Now you’re safe. That’s ‘coolee’.”
“That’s what?”
“Don’t tell me you have forgotten that. In our hide-and-seek games a safe hide was always a ‘coolee’.”
Some day, Brat Farrar, he thought as he walked down the path to the Rectory, you are going to be faced with something that you couldn’t possibly have forgotten.
At luncheon he and his host sat in relaxed silence while Nancy entertained them, and afterwards he walked in the garden with the Rector and answered his questions about the life he had been leading these last eight years. One of George Peck’s charms was that he listened to what was said to him.
On Monday he went to London and sat in a chair while rolls of cloth were exhibited several yards away from him, and were then brought forward to touching distance so that he might gauge the weight, texture, and wearing qualities of the cloth. He was fitted by Gore and Bowen, and measured by Walters, and assured by both that in record time he would have an outfit that no Englishman would blush to own. It was a revelation to him that shirts were made to measure. He had been pleased that he could present himself to the Ashby tailors in a suit as respect-worthy as that made for him by Mr. Sandal’s tailor, and it was a shock to him to be sympathised with about the nice clean blue American shirt that he was wearing under it. However, when in Rome.... So he was measured for shirts too.
He lunched with Mr. Sandal, who took him to meet the manager of his bank. He cashed a cheque at the bank, bought a registered envelope, and sent a fat wad of notes to Alec Loding. That had been the arrangement; “notes and no note,” Loding had said. No telephones either. There must never be any communication between them again beyond the anonymous notes in the registered envelope.
This first payment to his partner in crime left a taste in his mouth that was not entirely due to the gum on the envelope that he had licked. He went and had a beer to wash it away, but it was still there. So he got on a 24 bus and went to have a look at his late lodgings in Pimlico, and immediately felt better.
He caught the 4.10 down, and Eleanor was waiting in the bug at Guessgate to meet him. His heart was no longer in his mouth, and Eleanor was no longer an abstraction and an enemy.
“It seemed a shame to let you wait for the bus when I was free to come to meet you,” she said, and he got in beside her and she drove him home.
“Now you won’t have to go away again for a long time,” she said.
“No. Except for a fitting, and to the dentist.”
“Yes; just up for the day. And perhaps Uncle Charles will expect someone to go up to meet him. But until then we can settle down and be quiet.”
So he settled down.
He exercised the horses in the mornings, or schooled them over the jumps in the paddock. He rode out with Eleanor and the children from Clare Park; and so satisfied Antony Toselli’s romantic soul that he arrived for his lesson one morning in a complete “child’s riding outfit,” to obtain which he had sent telegrams of a length and fluency that made history in the life of the Clare post office. He lunged the yearling for Eleanor, and watched while she taught a young thoroughbred from a racing stable to walk collected and carry his head like a gentleman. Nearly all his days were spent with Eleanor, and when they came in in the evenings it was to plan for to-morrow’s task.
Bee watched this companionship with pleasure, but wished that Simon had more share in it. Simon found more and more excuses to be away from home from breakfast to dinner. He would school Timber or Scapa in the morning, and then find some excuse for going into Westover for lunch. Occasionally when he came home for dinner after being out all day Bee wondered whether he was quite sober. But except for the fact that he now took two drinks where once he would have taken one, he drank little at home, and so she decided that she must be mistaken. His alternate fits of moodiness and gaiety were nothing new: Simon had always been mercurial. She took it that his absence was his way of reducing the strain of a difficult situation, and hoped that presently he would make a third in the partnership that was blossoming so happily between Eleanor and Patrick.
“You’ll have to do something at the Bures Show,” Eleanor said one day as they came in tired from the stables. “Otherwise people will think it very odd.”
“I could ride in a race, as Ruth suggested.”
“But that is just fun. I mean, no one takes that seriously. You ought to show one of the horses. Your own riding things will be here in time, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t.”
“No.”
“I’m getting to know that monosyllable of yours.”
“It’s no monopoly of mine.”
“No. Just your speciality.”
“What could I ride in the races?”
“Well, after Timber, Chevron is the fastest we have.”
“But Chevron is Simon’s.”
“Oh, no. Chevron was bought by Bee with stable money. Have you ridden races at all?”
“Oh, yes. Often. Local ones, of course. For small stakes.”
“Well, I think Bee plans to show Chevron as a hack, but that’s no reason she shouldn’t be entered for the races at the end of the day. She’s very nervous and excitable, but she jumps clean and she’s very fast.”
They put the proposition to Bee at dinner, and Bee agreed to it. “What do you ride at, Brat?”
“Nine stone thirteen.”
Bee looked at him reflectively as he ate his dinner. He was too fine-drawn. None of the Ashbys of the last two generations had run to weight, but there was a used-up look about the boy; especially at the end of the day. Presently, when the business of the celebration was all over, they must do something about his leg. Perhaps that accounted for the strung look that marked his spareness. Both physically and psychologically it must be a drag on him. She must ask Peter Spence about a good surgeon to consult.
Bee had been delighted to find that Brat had what Simon so conspicuously lacked: an interest in the genus horse in the abstract. Simon was knowledgeable about breeding in so far as it concerned his own particular interests, but his theoretical study of the matter was confined to Racing Up to Date. Brat, on the other hand, took to stud books as some people take to detection. She had gone in one evening to turn off a light that someone had evidently left on in the library, and found Brat poring over a stud book. He was trying to work back on Honey’s pedigree, he said.
“You’ve got the wrong book,” she said, and provided him with the right one. She was busy with some W.R.I. matter and so she left him to it and forgot him. But nearly two hours later she noticed the light still there and went in to find Brat surrounded by tomes of all kinds and so dead to the world that he did not hear her come in.
“It’s fascinating, Bee,” he said. He was mooning over a photograph of Bend Or, and had propped various other volumes open at photographs that gave him particular pleasure, so that the big table looked like some second-hand bookstall with the plates exhibited to entice the purchaser.
“You haven’t got my favourite in your collection,” she said, having examined his choice, and brought another tome from the shelves. And then, finding that he was totally ignorant, she took him back to the beginning and showed him the foundations — Arab, Barb, and Turk — of the finished product. By midnight there were more books on the floor than there were on the shelves but they had both had a marvellous time.
After that if Brat was missing from the normal orbit, one could always find him in the library, either working out something in a stud book or going slowly through the photographs of remarkable horses.
He sat openly at Gregg’s feet, with the result that in a week Gregg was according him a respect that he had never paid to Simon. Bee noticed that where he addressed Simon as “Mr. Simon,” Brat was “Mr. Patrick, sir.” There was never any trace of the defensive attitude of a stud-groom faced with a newcomer who was also his master. Gregg recognised an enthusiast who did not think that he already knew it all, and so Brat was “Mr. Patrick, sir.” Bee would smile as she passed the saddle room and heard the long monotone of Gregg’s speech punctuated by Brat’s monosyllables.
“Shoot him, I said, I’ll do nothing of the kind, that horse’ll walk out of here like a Christian inside a month, your blasted hounds can starve, I said, before they get their jaws on as good a piece of horseflesh as ever looked through a bridle, so what do you think I did?”
“What?”
Bee was humbly grateful to fate not only for her nephew’s return but for the form in which he had returned. Rehearsing in her mind all the shapes that Patrick might have reappeared in, she was filled with wonder that the actual one should be so cut-to-measure, so according to her own prescription. Brat was what she would have indented for if she could have chosen. He was too silent, of course; too reticent. One felt at peace in his company without having any feeling of knowing him. But his unchanging front was surely easier to deal with than Simon’s fluidity.
She wrote a long letter to Uncle Charles, to meet him at Marseilles, describing this new nephew to him, and saying all that could not be said in the initial cables. It would not impress Charles, of course, that Brat was useful with horses, since Charles loathed horses; which he held to be animals of an invincible stupidity, uncontrolled imagination, and faulty deduction. Indeed, Charles claimed that a three-months-old child not actually suffering from encephalitis or other congenital incapacity was more capable of drawing a correct deduction than the most intelligent and most impeccably bred thoroughbred. Charles liked cats; and if ever against his better judgement he was lured within smell of a stable, he made friends with the stable cat and retired with it to some quiet corner until the process of horse exhibition was finished. He was rather like a cat himself; a large soft man with a soft round face that creased only sufficiently to hold an eyeglass; in either eye, according to which hand Charles had free at the moment. And although he was over six feet tall, he padded as lightly on his large feet as though he were partly filled with air.
Charles was devoted to his old home and to his family, but was fond of declaring himself a throw-back to a more virile age when a horse was simply a means of transport, capable of carrying a respectable weight, and it was not necessary for a man to develop bones that would disgrace a chicken so that brittle thoroughbreds should be induced to surmount unnecessary and unwarrantable obstacles.
A half-starved cat could out-jump any horse anyhow; and no one had to teach it to, either.
But his brother’s grandchildren were the apple of his eye, and he loved every brittle bone of them. And it was to this Charles that Bee commended his new nephew.
“In the short two weeks that he has been here, he has passed from being a complete stranger to being so much part of Latchetts that one doesn’t notice him. He has a peculiar trick of being part of the landscape, of course, but it is not just that he is self-effacing. It is that he has dropped into place. I notice that even the country people, to whom he ought still to be strange and a matter for sideways-looking, treat him as if he had been here all along. He is very silent, and rarely volunteers a remark, but his mind is extraordinarily alive, and his comment when he makes one would be blistering sometimes if it were not uttered so gently. He speaks very correct American — which, dear Uncle Charles, is very correct English with a flat A— and drawls a little. It is quite a different drawl from Simon’s. I mean, from the drawl Simon uses when he drawls. It is not a comment; just a method of production.
“His greatest conquest was Jane, who resented his coming bitterly, on Simon’s behalf. She made a wide sweep round him for days, and then capitulated. Ruth made a tremendous fuss of him, but got little encouragement — I think he felt her disloyalty to Simon — and she is now a little ‘off’ him.
“George Peck seems pleased with him, but I think finds it hard to forgive his silence all those years. I do too, of course. I find it inexplicable. One can only try to understand the immensity of the upheaval that sent him away from us.
“Simon has been beyond praise. He has taken his relegation to second place with a fortitude and a grace that is touching. I think he is very unhappy, and finds it difficult to join up this new Patrick with the old one. The greatest wrong Pat did in keeping silence was the wrong to Simon. I can only suppose that he intended never to come back at all. I have tried to sound him about it, but he is not an easy person to talk to. He was a reserved child and he is even more reserved to-day. Perhaps he will talk to you when you come.
“We are busy preparing for the Bures Show — which, you will be glad to hear, occurs at least three days before you are even due to arrive in England — and have hopes of a little successful publicity for Latchetts. We have three new horses that are well above average, and we are hoping that at least two of them are of Olympia standard. We shall see what their ring manners are like when we take them to Bures. Patrick has refused to take any part in this year’s showings, leaving all the kudos to Simon and Eleanor — to whom, of course, it belongs. I think that, more than anything, describes this Patrick who has come home to us.”
Because it was Simon who would show Timber and jump him, Brat left his schooling entirely to him, and shared his attentions between the other horses. But there were days, especially now that Simon absented himself more and more, when someone else had to exercise Timber, and Brat looked forward to those days more than he acknowledged even to himself. He liked most of the Latchetts horses, despised a few, and had an affection for the lively Chevron, the kind, sensible Scapa, and Eleanor’s aged hack, Buster: a disillusioned but lovable old gentleman. But Timber was something else again. Timber was challenge, and excitement, and satisfaction; Timber was question and glory.
He planned to cure Timber of brushing people off his back, but he would do nothing yet a while. It was important, if he was going to be jumped at Bures, that nothing should be done to damage his self-confidence. Some day, if Brat had anything to do with it, Timber was going to feel very small indeed, but meanwhile let Simon have at his command every jot of that lordly assurance. So Brat exercised him mildly, and as he rode round the countryside kept his eyes open for a likely curing-place for Timber when the time came. The beeches on Tanbitches had no branches low enough for his purpose, and there was no room on that hill-top to get up the necessary speed. He wanted some open country with isolated or bunched trees with their lowest branches the right height from the ground to tempt Timber to his undoing. He remembered that Timber’s most spectacular exploit had been in Lerridge Park and over there was Clare Park, with its surrounding stretch of turf and trees.
“Do the Clare Park people mind if we ride through the park?” he asked Eleanor one day when there was still seven days before the Bures Show.
Eleanor said no, provided they kept away from the playing fields. “They don’t play anything because organised games are dreadful unless they are organised by Russians in Russia, but they keep the playing fields because they look well in the prospectus.”
So Brat took Timber to the other side of the valley, and cantered him gently on the centuries-old turf of Clare Park, keeping well away from the trees. Then he walked him round the various clumps, gauging the height of the lowest limbs from the ground. The manoeuvre was received by Timber with a puzzled but passionate interest. One could almost see him trying to work it out. What was this for? What did the man come and look at large trees for? With a horse’s abnormal memory, he was well aware that large trees were associated with private delights of his own, but, being a horse, he was also incapable of drawing any reasonable deduction from his rider’s interest in the same kind of trees.
He walked up to each clump with a mannerly grace, until they approached the large oak which had been for five hundred years the pride of Clare Park. As they came within its flung shadow Timber propped himself suddenly on his forelegs and snorted with fright. Brat was puzzled. What did he remember about the oak that would cause a reaction as strong as that? He looked at the ears that were sticking up as stiff as horns. Perhaps it wasn’t a memory. Perhaps there was something in the grass.
“Do you always sneak up on girls under trees?” said a voice from the shadows, and from the grass there emerged the seal-like form of Miss Parslow. She propped herself on an elbow and surveyed the pair. Brat was a little surprised that she was alone. “Don’t you ever ride anything but that black brute?”
Brat said that he did, quite often.
“I suppose it would be too much to expect that you were looking for me when you came over to the park to ride?”
Brat said that he was looking for a place to teach Timber manners.
“What’s the matter with his manners?”
“He has a habit of diving suddenly under a tree so that he scrapes his rider off.”
Miss Parslow propped herself a little farther up and looked with new interest at the horse. “You don’t say! I never thought the brutes had that much sense. How are you going to stop him?”
“I’m going to make riding under trees a painful experience for him.”
“You mean you’ll beat him when he tries to do it?”
“Oh, no. That wouldn’t do much good.”
“After he has actually done it, then?”
“No. He mightn’t associate the beating with a tree at all.” He rubbed his whip up Timber’s dark crest, and Timber bowed. “You’d be surprised at the odd things they associate.”
“Nothing would surprise me to any extent about horses. How are you going to do it then?”
“Let him go full bat near a nice tempting tree, and when he swerves under it give him a cut on the belly that he’ll remember all his life.”
“Oh, no, that’s too bad. The poor brute.”
“It will be just too bad if I don’t time my slip sideways on the saddle properly,” Brat said dryly.
“And will that cure him?”
“I hope so. Next time he sees a likely tree he’ll remember that it hurt like the blazes last time he tried it.”
“But he’ll hate you.”
Brat smiled. “I’d be very surprised if he associated me with the business at all. I’d be surprised if he even associated it with the whip. Horses don’t think like humans.”
“What will he think hurt him, then?”
“The tree, more than likely.”
“I always thought they were awfully silly animals.”
It occurred to Brat that she had not made one of those riding parties on which he had accompanied Eleanor. Nor had he seen her about the stables lately. He asked how her riding was getting on.
“I’ve given it up.”
“Altogether?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But you were getting on well, weren’t you? Eleanor said you had learned to bump.”
“It was a very slithery bump, and it hurt me far more than it hurt the horse.” She pulled a long grass and began to chew it, eyeing him with a sly amusement. “I don’t have to hang around the stables any more. If I want to see Simon I know where to find him nowadays.”
“Where?” said Brat before he could stop himself.
“The upstairs bar at the Angel.”
“In Westover? But are you allowed to go to Westover when you like?”
“I’m attending a Westover dentist.” She giggled. “Or rather, I was. The school made the first appointment for me, of course, but after that I just told them when I had to go next. I’ve reckoned that I have about thirty teeth, which should last me till the end of term quite nicely.” She opened her red mouth wide and laughed. They were excellent teeth. “That’s what I’m doing at the moment. Putting off time till the Westover bus is due. I could have gone with the earlier one but there is a very good-looking conductor on this one. He’s got the length of asking me to the pictures one night next week. If Simon was going on the way he has been all those months, not knowing I’m alive, I’d maybe have done something about the conductor boy — he has lashes about an inch long — but now that Simon has stopped looking down his nose I think I’ll give the conductor boy a miss.” She chewed the stalk provocatively. “Got quite matey, Simon has.”
“Oh.”
“Have you been seducing the Gates girl from him, like I suggested?”
“I have not.”
“That’s funny. He’s distinctly off her. And he’s not awfully enamoured of you, if it comes to that. So I thought you’d been cutting him out with that Peggy woman. But I suppose it’s just that you cut him out of Latchetts.”
“You’re going to miss your bus, aren’t you?”
“You can be just as squashing as Simon, in your own way.”
“I was only pointing out that the bus is almost at the smithy. It will be at the Park gates in ——”
“What!” she shrieked, exploding to her feet in one enormous convulsion, so that Timber whirled in alarm from the wild eruption. “Oh, great heavens! Oh, for the love of...! Oh! Oh!”
She fled down the park to the avenue gates, screaming her distress as she went. Brat watched the green bus skim along the road past the white gates of Latchetts and slow down as it came to the gates of Clare Park. She was going to catch it after all, and her day would not be wasted. She would find Simon. At the Angel. In the upstairs bar.
That Simon should spend his time in Westover in the Angel bar was distressing but not, in the circumstances, surprising. What was surprising was the emergence of a Simon who was “matey” with Sheila Parslow. In Simon’s eyes the Parslow girl had always been something beneath contempt; a lower form of life. He dismissed her with a gibe when her name was mentioned and in her presence was, as she had said herself, unaware that she was alive. What had happened to Simon that he was not only resigned to her companionship, but was “matey”? The girl was not lying about it. If her glowing self-satisfaction was not sufficient evidence, there was the obvious fact that Simon could avoid her by changing his drinking place. There was no lack of pubs in Westover; most of them more exclusively masculine haunts than the very social and female-ridden Angel.
Brat tried to imagine Simon with Sheila Parslow and failed.
What had come over Simon — the fastidious, critical Simon — that he found it possible to endure her? To spend hours in her company?
Was it a sort of “laming” his family for the disappointment he had been caused? A sort of you-don’t-like-me-therefore-I’ll-take-up-with-Sheila-Parslow? A sorry-when-I’m-dead reaction? There was a very childish side to Simon.
There was also, Brat thought from all he had heard, a very practical side and Sheila Parslow had money, and Simon needed it. But somehow Brat could not believe that Simon, even in his most deplorable moments, would ever consider pawning his life to a nymphomaniacal moron.
As he walked Timber home he considered yet once more the general oddity of Simon, but as usual came to no conclusion.
He handed Timber over to Arthur to be rubbed down, and went down with Eleanor to inspect Regina’s new foal.
“She’s an old marvel, isn’t she,” Eleanor said, watching the new arrival stagger about on its out-of-proportion legs. “It’s another good one. Not much wonder that she looks complacent. People have been coming to admire her foals for practically a lifetime, the old duchess. I think foals to her are just a means of achieving this annual homage. She doesn’t care a rap about the foal.”
“It’s not any better than Honey’s,” Brat said, looking at the foal without enthusiasm.
“You and your Honey!”
“And you wait and see what Honey will produce next year with this new mating. A foal that will make history.”
“Your enthusiasm for Honey borders on the indecent.”
“You heard Bee say that.”
“How do you know?”
“I heard her too.”
They laughed a little, and she said: “It’s so nice to have you here, Brat.” He noticed that she did not say: It is so nice to have you back, Patrick; but he realised that she herself was unaware of any oddity in the form she used.
“Is that doctor chap going over to Bures for the show?”
“I shouldn’t think so. He’s much too busy. What made you think of him?”
Brat did not know.
They pottered round the paddocks for so long that they came in for tea very late, and had it by themselves. Jane was pounding her way through a Chopin valse with conscientious accuracy, and stopped with undisguised relief when they came in.
“Could I say twenty-five minutes was half an hour, Eleanor?” she asked. “It’s twenty-five-and-a-half minutes, really.”
“You can say anything you like as long as we don’t have to listen to that valse while we eat.”
So Jane slid off the piano-stool, removed the glasses that gave her such an owl-like look, pushed them into her breeches pocket, and disappeared thankfully into the out-of-doors.
“Ruth puts in all the tiddley bits and the expression and doesn’t mind how many wrong notes she strikes, but with Jane it is accuracy or nothing. I don’t know which Chopin would have hated more,” Eleanor said, folding bread and butter into a thickness that would match her appetite.
Brat watched her pour the tea with a delight in her clean unhurried movements. Some day the foundation of the life he was living here would give way; Simon would achieve the plan he was devising to undo him, or some incautious word of his own would bring the whole structure crashing down; and then there would be no more Eleanor.
It was not the least of his fears for the future.
They ate in a friendly silence, dropping unrelated remarks into the quiet as they happened to occur to them.
Presently Eleanor said: “Did you ask Bee about colours for the race next week?”
Brat said that he had forgotten.
“Let’s go and look them out now. They are in that locker in the saddle room.”
So they went back to the stables. The saddle room was empty; Gregg had gone home to his supper; but Eleanor knew where the key was.
“They are practically in ribbons, they are so old,” she said as she spread the colours on the table. “They were actually made for Father, and then they were taken in a bit for Simon to wear at point-to-points when he was narrower than he is now. And then let out again when he grew. So they are just hanging together. Perhaps now we’ll be able to afford ——” She pulled herself up.
“Yes. We’ll have a new set.”
“I think violet and primrose are nice colours, don’t you; but they do fade an unattractive shade. Simon goes blue with cold in the winter, and he says the colours were designed to tone with his face.”
They rummaged in the chest, turning up souvenirs of old races. They moved round the saddle room studying the long row of ribbon rosettes, each with its tab under it telling where and how it had been won.
At last Eleanor shut the chest, saying: “It is time we got ready for dinner.” She locked the chest and hung up the key. “We’ll take the colours with us. I expect they’ll fit you all right, since Simon was the last to wear them. But they’ll have to be pressed.”
She took the colours in her arms, and together they walked out of the saddle-room door and came face to face with Simon.
“Oh, you’re back, Simon,” Eleanor was beginning, when she caught sight of his face.
“Who had Timber out?” he said, furious.
“I had,” Brat said.
“Timber is my business and you have no right to have him out when my back is turned.”
“Someone had to exercise him to-day,” Brat said mildly.
“No one exercises Timber but me. No one. If I’m going to be responsible for jumping him, then I say when he is to be exercised, and I do the exercising.”
“But, Simon,” Eleanor said, “that is absurd. There are ——”
“Shut up!” he said, through his teeth.
“I will not shut up! The horses are Brat’s, and if anyone says who does what, and when, then it is ——”
“Shut up, I tell you. I won’t have a ham-handed lout from the backwoods ruining a good piece of horseflesh like Timber.”
“Simon! Really!”
“Coming from nowhere and interfering in the stables as if he had lived here all his life!”
“You must be drunk, Simon, to talk like that about your own brother.”
“My brother! That! Why, you poor little fool, he isn’t even an Ashby. God knows what he is. Somebody’s groom, I have no doubt. And that is what he should be doing. Sweeping out stables. Not lording it round the countryside on my best horses. After this, you damned little upstart, you leave the horses I intend to ride in their stable unless I say they are to be taken out, and if I say they are to be taken out it is not you who will ride them. We have plenty of other stablemen.”
His chin was sticking out about two feet from Brat’s face, and Brat could have brought one from the ground that would have lifted him half over the saddle room. He longed to do it, but not with Eleanor there. And not now, perhaps. Better not do anything that he could not foresee the consequences of.
“Well? Did you hear me?” shouted Simon, maddened by his silence.
“I heard you,” Brat said.
“Well, see that you remember what I said. Timber is my business, and you don’t put a leg across him again until I say so.”
And he flung away from them towards the house.
Eleanor looked stricken.
“Oh, Brat, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. He had that mad notion about your not being Patrick before he ever saw you, and now that he has been drinking I suppose it came from the back of his mind and he said it because he was angry. He always did say a lot of things he didn’t mean when he was in a temper, you know.”
It was Brat’s experience that, on the contrary, it was only when a person was in a temper that they said exactly what they did mean. But he refrained from telling Eleanor that.
“He has been drinking, you know,” she went on. “I know he doesn’t look as if he has, but I can tell from his eyes. And he would never have behaved like that when he was sober, even in a temper. I do apologise for him.”
Brat said that everyone made a fool of themselves some time or other when they had “drink taken,” and she was not to bother about it.
They followed Simon to the house soberly, the happiness of their long afternoon together vanished as if it had not been.
As he changed into what he still thought of as “his good suit” Brat thought that if the cracks that were showing in Simon widened sufficiently he might one day show his hand, and he would find out what Simon’s plans for him were. He wondered if Simon would be sober enough to behave normally at dinner.
But there was no Simon at dinner, and when Eleanor asked where he was, Bee said that he had gone over to the pub at Guessgate to meet a friend who was staying there. Someone had telephoned just before dinner, it appeared.
Bee looked equable, and Brat decided that Simon had seemed normal to her and that she had believed his story of the friend staying the night at the Guessgate inn.
And in the morning Simon came down to breakfast his usual sunny self.
“I’m afraid I was tight last night,” he said. “And very objectionable, I’m afraid. I apologise unreservedly.”
He regarded Brat and Eleanor, the only other people at the table, with friendly confidence. “I ought never to drink gin,” he said. “It obscures the judgement and destroys the soul.”
“You were quite horrible,” Eleanor said coldly.
But the atmosphere cleared, and the day was just another day. Bee came in from out-of-doors for her second cup of coffee; Jane arrived clutching to her stomach the bowl of porridge which she had fetched from the kitchen for herself, according to Latchetts routine; Ruth came flying in very late with a “diamond” clasp in her hair and was sent back to take the thing off.
“Where did she get that loathsome object,” Bee said, when Ruth had disappeared with wild cries that Bee was going to make her late for lessons.
“She bought it at Woolworth’s last time we were in Westover,” Jane said. “They’re not real diamonds, you know, but it seemed a bargain for one-and-sixpence.”
“Why didn’t you buy one then, Jane?” Bee asked, looking at the aged kirby-grip that kept Jane’s hair off her face.
“Oh, I don’t think I’m the diamond type,” Jane said.
So the Ashby household settled back to its normal placidity, and to its preparations for that day at Bures that was to alter all their lives.
Bures was a little market town, set north of Westover and almost in the middle of the county. It was like almost every other little market town in the south of England, except perhaps that it stood in slightly richer and more unspoiled country than most. For which reason the Bures Agricultural Show, although a small country affair, had a standing and reputation considerably greater than its size alone would warrant. Every year animals would appear at the Bures Show on their way to more mature triumphs elsewhere, and it was common for someone, watching an exhibit at one of the great shows, to say: “I remember that when it was a novice at Bures three years ago.”
It was a pleasant, civilised little town, with a minister, some fine old inns, a High Street both broad and gay, and no self-consciousness whatsoever. The farmers who brought their wares to its markets would have annoyed Mr. Macallan exceedingly by their content with their lot, and their evident unawareness that there were other worlds to conquer. An air of well-being came off the Bures pavements like reflected sunlight. Bad years there might be, for both tradespeople and farmers, but that was a risk that was incidental in a life that was satisfying and good.
The annual show, in the early summer, was a social reunion as well as a business affair, and the day ended with a “ball” in the assembly room of the Chequers, at which farmers’ wives who hadn’t seen each other since New Year swopped gossip, and young blades who had not met since the Combined Hunts Ball swopped horses. The combined hunts, between them, embraced the town; the Lerridge to the south and the Kenley Vale to the north; and did much to ensure that the horses exhibited at Bures should be worth more than a passing glance. And since almost every farmer well enough off to own both a horse and a tractor belonged to one or other of the hunts, there was never any lack of competition.
In the early days of the show, when transport was still by horse and slow, it was the custom to stay overnight at Bures; and the Chequers, the Rose and Crown, the Wellington, and the Kenley Arms packed them in three to a bed. But with the coming of the motor all that changed. It was more fun to go home nine-to-a-car in the summer dawn than to sleep three-to-a-bed in the Wellington. It was not always a successful method of getting home, of course, and more than one young farmer had spent his summer months in hospital after the Bures Show, but to the younger generation it was inconceivable that they should sleep in an inn when their home was less than forty miles away. So only the older exhibitors, who clung to tradition, or those who lived at an inconvenient distance from Bures, or could not, owing to difficult communications, get their animals away on the evening of the show, still stayed overnight at Bures. And of these most stayed at the Chequers.
The Ashbys had had the same bedrooms at the Chequers for the night of the Bures Show since the days of William Ashby the Seventh: he who had joined the Westover Fencibles to resist the expected invasion of Napoleon the First. They were not the best bedrooms, because in those days the best bedrooms went to the Ledinghams of Clare, who also, of course, had a yearly reservation for the night of the show. What the Ledinghams left went to the Shirleys of Penbury and the Hallands of Hallands House. The Hallands, on whose lands on the outskirts of the town the show was held, had used the bedrooms only for their overflow of guests, but a Hallands guest rated a great deal higher, of course, than any Ashby in the flesh.
Penbury was now the possession of the nation in the shape of the National Trust; a shillingsworth of uplift for coachloads who didn’t know Gibbons from Adam and wanted their tea. Hallands House was also the possession of the nation, in the shape of a Government department. No one quite knew what this alien community did. Mrs. Thrale, who ran the Singing Kettle tea-rooms out on the Westover road, once boldly asked a young Government employee who was drinking her coffee what her task was at the moment, and was told that it was “arranging the translation of Tom Jones into Turkish”; but this was held to be merely a misunderstanding on Mrs. Thrale’s part, and no one had the heart to question the aliens further. They kept themselves to themselves very determinedly, and it was no longer possible for the people of Bures to walk through Hallands Park.
It would have been possible long ago for the Ashbys on their annual visit to have some of the finer bedrooms at the Chequers, but no such idea ever crossed an Ashby mind. The difference between Number 3 and Number 17 was not that one was a fine room with a pleasant outlook and good furniture and the other a back room looking on to the roof of the assembly room, but that one wasn’t “their” room and the other was. So they still had the three little rooms in the older wing, which, since the bathroom had been added at the end of the passage, made it practically an Ashby apartment.
Gregg took the horses over to Bures on Tuesday evening. Arthur followed on Wednesday morning with the ponies and Eleanor’s hack, Buster, who hated any box but his own, and was liable to kick a strange stable to pieces. Simon and the twins went in the car with Bee; and Brat shared the bug with Eleanor and Tony Toselli, who had insisted on being allowed to compete in the Best Child Rider class. (“My father will commit suicide if I am not allowed to try.”)
Brat wished that this tadpole creature was not sitting between himself and Eleanor. The feeling that his time with Eleanor was short was constantly with him, making each indifferent moment a matter of consequence. But Eleanor seemed happy enough to feel charitable even to Tony Toselli.
“It’s going to be perfect weather,” she said, looking at the high arch of the sky with no cloud in it. “I can remember only one real soaker at Bures and that’s years ago. They’ve always been awfully lucky. Did I put my string gloves in the locker?”
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do all the morning? Look at Mrs. Godwin’s jam exhibit?”
“I’m going to walk the course.”
“Canny Brat,” she said, approving. “How right you are.”
“The other fellows probably know every inch of it.”
“Oh, yes. For most of them it is an annual. In fact, if you started the horses off they’d probably go round by themselves, they are so used to it. Did Bee remember to give you your stand ticket?”
“Yes.”
“And have you got it with you?”
“I have.”
“I sound a fusser this morning, don’t I? You are a nice reassuring person to be with. Do you never get excited, Brat?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Inside-churning excited?”
“Inside turning over and over.”
“That’s interesting. It just doesn’t show, I suppose.”
“I suppose not.”
“It’s an extraordinarily useful sort of face to have. Mine goes a dull unhealthy pink, as you can see.”
He thought the warm childish flush on her normally cool features touching and endearing.
“I hear that Peggy Gates has a new outfit for the occasion. Have you ever seen her on a horse? I can’t remember.”
“No.”
“She looks nice,” Eleanor said approvingly. “She rides very well. I think she will do justice to that horse of Dick Pope’s.”
It was typical of Eleanor that her judgement was independent of her emotions.
The High Street of Bures glittered in the low morning sunlight. Large Motoring Association signs encouraged the traveller, and fluttering advertisements cajoled him. “Carr’s Meal for Calves,” said a banner. “Saffo, the Safe Disinfectant!” screamed a chimney-to-chimney pendant. “Pett’s Dip,” said a placard quietly, taking it for granted that the Dip was sufficiently famous to explain itself.
In the dim hall of the Chequers Bee was waiting for them. Simon had gone round to the stables, she said.
“The rooms are Numbers 17, 18, and 19, Brat. You are sharing 17 with Simon, Nell and I have 18, and the twins are in the connecting one, 19.”
Sharing a room with Simon was something he had not reckoned with, but there was nothing he could do about it. He picked up Eleanor’s bag and his own and went upstairs with them, since the hall was a flurry of arriving guests. Eleanor came with him and showed him where the rooms were.
“The first time I came here and was allowed to stay the night I thought life had nothing left to offer,” she said. “Put it down there, Brat, thank you, and I’ll unpack it at once or my frock will be ruined.”
In Number 17 Simon’s things were already strewn all over the room, including the second bed. It was odd how these inanimate belongings of Simon’s had, even in his absence, a kind of arrogance.
Brat cleared his own bed and unpacked, hanging his new evening things carefully in the still empty wardrobe. To-night for the first time in his life he would wear evening clothes.
“In case you get lost, Brat,” Bee said to him when he came down, “lunch is at twelve-thirty in the luncheon tent. The last table to your left as you come in. What do you plan to do this morning? Poke the pigs?”
“No, he is going to walk the course,” Eleanor said.
“All right. Don’t stray off it into any Government holy-of-holies and get yourself arrested, will you?”
Tony was handed over to Mrs. Stack, who, being interested solely in rural industries, represented a Fixed Point in the flux of an agricultural show.
“If he tells you that his father is dying and he is urgently wanted at home, don’t believe him,” Eleanor said.
“Is his father ill, then?”
“No, but Tony may grow bored before half-past twelve. I’ll come and fetch him for lunch.”
Brat walked into the High Street of Bures with a feeling of escape. For the first time for nearly a month he was his own master, free to be himself. He had forgotten what it was like to walk about without care. For nearly three hours he could go where he liked, ask what he wanted, and answer without a curb on his tongue.
“Hallands Park,” said the direction sign on a bus, so he got on the bus and went there. He had never been to a country show before, and he went round the exhibits with an interest that was at once fresh and critical, comparing all he saw with similar things seen elsewhere. Homespuns in Arizona, farm implements in Normandy, rams in Zacatecas, Herefords after American air, pottery in New Mexico. Occasionally someone looked at him curiously, and more than one hand was half lifted in salutation only to fall again. He was too like an Ashby ever to be completely free in Bures. But, speaking generally, people were too absorbed in the exhibits and in their own cares at that hour of the morning to take much interest in the passer-by.
Having exhausted the exhibition, he walked out into the park, where the red flags marked out the temporary race-course. It was a straight, fast-galloping course over hurdles for the first half-mile through the park, then it went out into the country in a wide curve of a mile or more, came back to the park about half a mile from the stands, and from then on was another series of hurdles up to the finish in front of the stands. Except for the sharp turns and a few very blind fences in the country, it was not a difficult course. The hurdles in the park stretches were regulation racing ones, and the turf was wonderful. Brat’s heart lifted.
It was very peaceful out there in the country, and he came back to the show with a sense of reluctance. But he was surprised to find how glad he was to see the familiar faces round the table in the luncheon tent when he got there; how glad he was to sink into the place kept for him, and be part of this family again.
People came up to their table to welcome him back to Bures Show, to England. People who had known Bill and Nora Ashby, and Bill’s father before him. None of them expected him to remember them, and he had merely to be polite.