Complete Stories of Eveyln, Page 23

  V

  “. . . the Scouts are badly in need of a new hut,” said Colonel Hodge.

  “No use coming to me,” said Mr. Metcalfe. “I’m leaving the neighbourhood.”

  “I was thinking,” said Colonel Hodge, “that Westmacott’s field would be just the place for it. . . .”

  And so it was arranged. Mr. Hornbeam gave a pound, Colonel Hodge a guinea, Lady Peabury £250. A jumble sale, a white-elephant-tea, a raffle, a pageant, and a house-to-house collection, produced a further 30s. Mr. Metcalfe found the rest. It cost him, all told, a little over £500. He gave with a good heart. There was no question now of jockeying him into a raw deal. In the rôle of public benefactor he gave with positive relish, and when Lady Peabury suggested that the field should be reserved for a camping site and the building of the hut postponed, it was Mr. Metcalfe who pressed on with the building and secured the old stone tiles from the roof of a dismantled barn. In the circumstances, Lady Peabury could not protest when the building was named the Metcalfe-Peabury Hall. Mr. Metcalfe found the title invigorating and was soon in negotiation with the brewery for a change of name at the Brakehurst Arms. It is true that Boggett still speaks of it as “the Brakehurst,” but the new name is plainly lettered for all to read: The Metcalfe Arms.

  And so Mr. Hargood-Hood passed out of the history of Much Malcock. He and his lawyer drove away to their home beyond the hills. The lawyer was Mr. Hargood-Hood’s brother.

  “We cut that pretty fine, Jock. I thought, for once, we were going to be left with the baby.”

  They drove to Mr. Hargood-Hood’s home, a double quadrangle of mellow brick that was famous far beyond the county. On the days when the gardens were open to the public, record crowds came to admire the topiary work, yews and boxes of prodigious size and fantastic shape which gave perpetual employment to three gardeners. Mr. Hargood-Hood’s ancestors had built the house and planted the gardens in a happier time, before the days of property tax and imported grain. A sterner age demanded more strenuous efforts for their preservation.

  “Well, that has settled Schedule A for another year and left something over for cleaning the fishponds. But it was an anxious month. I shouldn’t care to go through it again. We must be more careful next time, Jock. How about moving east?”

  Together the two brothers unfolded the inch ordnance map of Norfolk, spread it on the table of the Great Hall and began their preliminary, expert search for a likely, unspoilt, well-loved village.

  THE SYMPATHETIC

  PASSENGER

  As Mr. James shut the side door behind him, radio music burst from every window of his house. Agnes, in the kitchen, was tuned in to one station; his wife, washing her hair in the bathroom, to another.

  The competing programmes followed him to the garage and into the lane.

  He had twelve miles to drive to the station, and for the first five of them he remained in a black mood.

  He was in most matters a mild-tempered person—in all matters, it might be said, except one; he abominated the wireless.

  It was not merely that it gave him no pleasure; it gave active pain, and, in the course of years, he had come to regard the invention as being directed deliberately against himself, a conspiracy of his enemies to disturb and embitter what should have been the placid last years of his life.

  He was far from being an old man; he was, in fact, in his middle fifties; he had retired young, almost precipitously, as soon as a small legacy had made it possible. He had been a lover of quiet all his life.

  Mrs. James did not share this preference.

  Now they were settled in a small country house, twelve miles from a suitable cinema.

  The wireless, for Mrs. James, was a link with the clean pavements and bright shop windows, a communion with millions of fellow beings.

  Mr. James saw it in just that light too. It was what he minded most—the violation of his privacy. He brooded with growing resentment on the vulgarity of womankind.

  In this mood he observed a burly man of about his own age signalling to him for a lift from the side of the road. He stopped.

  “I wonder if by any chance you are going to the railway station?” The man spoke politely with a low, rather melancholy voice.

  “I am; I have to pick up a parcel. Jump in.”

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  The man took his place beside Mr. James. His boots were dusty, and he sank back in his seat as though he had come from far and was weary.

  He had very large, ugly hands, close-cut grey hair, a bony, rather sunken face.

  For a mile or so he did not speak. Then he asked suddenly, “Has this car got a wireless?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “What is that knob for?” He began examining the dashboard. “And that?”

  “One is the self-starter. The other is supposed to light cigarettes. It does not work. If,” he continued sharply, “you have stopped me in the hope of hearing the wireless, I can only suggest that I put you down and let you try your luck on someone else.”

  “Heaven forbid,” said his passenger. “I detest the thing.”

  “So do I.”

  “Sir, you are one among millions. I regard myself as highly privileged in making your acquaintance.”

  “Thank you. It is a beastly invention.”

  The passenger’s eyes glowed with passionate sympathy. “It is worse. It is diabolical.”

  “Very true.”

  “Literally diabolical. It is put here by the devil to destroy us. Did you know that it spread the most terrible diseases?”

  “I didn’t know. But I can well believe it.”

  “It causes cancer, tuberculosis, infantile paralysis, and the common cold. I have proved it.”

  “It certainly causes headaches,” said Mr. James.

  “No man,” said his passenger, “has suffered more excruciating headaches than I.

  “They have tried to kill me with headaches. But I was too clever for them. Did you know that the BBC has its own secret police, its own prisons, its own torture chambers?”

  “I have long suspected it.”

  “I know. I have experienced them. Now it is the time of revenge.”

  Mr. James glanced rather uneasily at his passenger and drove a little faster.

  “I have a plan,” continued the big man. “I am going to London to put it into execution. I am going to kill the Director-General. I shall kill them all.”

  They drove on in silence. They were nearing the outskirts of the town when a larger car driven by a girl drew abreast of them and passed. From inside it came the unmistakable sounds of a jazz band. The big man sat up in his seat, rigid as a pointer.

  “Do you hear that?” he said. “She’s got one. After her, quick.”

  “No good,” said Mr. James. “We can never catch that car.”

  “We can try. We shall try, unless,” he said with a new and more sinister note in his voice, “unless you don’t want to.”

  Mr. James accelerated. But the large car was nearly out of sight.

  “Once before,” said his passenger, “I was tricked. The BBC sent one of their spies. He was very like you. He pretended to be one of my followers; he said he was taking me to the Director-General’s office. Instead he took me to a prison. Now I know what to do with spies. I kill them.” He leaned towards Mr. James.

  “I assure you, my dear sir, you have no more loyal supporter than myself. It is simply a question of cars. I cannot overtake her. But no doubt we shall find her at the station.”

  “We shall see. If we do not, I shall know whom to thank, and how to thank him.”

  They were in the town now and making for the station. Mr. James looked despairingly at the policeman on point duty, but was signalled on with a negligent flick of the hand. In the station yard the passenger looked round eagerly.

  “I do not see that car,” he said.

  Mr. James fumbled for a second with the catch of the door and then tumbled out. “Help!” he cried. “Help!
There’s a madman here.”

  With a great shout of anger the man dodged round the front of the car and bore down on him.

  At that moment three men in uniforms charged out of the station doorway. There was a brief scuffle; then, adroitly, they had their man strapped up.

  “We thought he’d make for the railway,” said their chief. “You must have had quite an exciting drive, sir.”

  Mr. James could scarcely speak. “Wireless,” he muttered weakly.

  “Ho, he’s been talking to you about that, has he? Then you’re very lucky to be here to tell us. It’s his foible, as you might say. I hope you didn’t disagree with him.”

  “No,” said Mr. James. “At least, not at first.”

  “Well, you’re luckier than some. He can’t be crossed, not about wireless. Gets very wild. Why, he killed two people and half killed a third last time he got away. Well, many thanks for bringing him in so nicely, sir. We must be getting him home.”

  Home. Mr. James drove back along the familiar road.

  “Why,” said his wife when he entered the house. “How quick you’ve been. Where’s the parcel?”

  “I think I must have forgotten it.”

  “How very unlike you. Why, you’re looking quite ill. I’ll run in and tell Agnes to switch off the radio. She can’t have heard you come in.”

  “No,” said Mr. James, sitting down heavily. “Not switch off radio. Like it. Homely.”

  MY FATHER’S HOUSE

  Chapter One of the unfinished novel Work Suspended

  I

  At the time of my father’s death I was in Morocco, at a small French hotel outside the fortifications of Fez. I had been there for six weeks, doing little else but write, and my book, Murder at Mountrichard Castle, was within twenty thousand words of its end. In three weeks I should pack it up for the typist; perhaps sooner, for I had nearly passed that heavy middle period where less conscientious writers introduce their second corpse. I was thirty-three years of age at the time, and a serious writer. I had always been a one-corpse man and, as far as possible, a clean corpse man, eschewing the blood-transfusions to which most of my rivals resorted to revitalize their flagging stories; moreover, I eschewed anything that was even remotely sordid or salacious. My corpses, invariably, were male, solitary, of high position in the world and, as near as possible, bloodless. I abhorred blunt instruments and “features battered beyond recognition.” Lord George Vanburgh, in Death in the Dukeries, was decapitated but only, it will be remembered, after he had been dead for some time through other causes. My poisons were painless; no character of mine ever writhed or vomited. Cardinal Vascari, in Vengeance at the Vatican, my first and in other ways my least successful story, met death in a model fashion, lapsing into coma while he sat at his window, one tranquil autumn evening, overlooking the Tiber; the fingers relaxed in the scarlet lap and the rosary with the missing decade—that ingenious clue—slipped unnoticed to the carpet. That was how John Plant’s characters died.

  On the other hand, while avoiding blood, I was tolerably free with the thunder. I despised a purely functional novel as I despised contemporary architecture; the girders and struts of the plot require adornment and concealment; I relish the masked buttresses, false domes, superfluous columns, all the subterfuges of literary architecture and the plaster and gilt of its decoration. A tenth of my writing or more—and some of the best of it—went on stage effects; sudden eddies of cold air would stir my curtains, candles guttered, horses lathered themselves to frenzy in their stalls; idiots gibbered; my policemen hunted their man in a landscape of crag, torrent, ruin, and fallen oak. And now and then, when the sequence of emotions I planned for my readers required a moment of revulsion and terror, I would kill an animal in atrocious circumstances—Lady Belinda’s Blenheim spaniel, for example, in The Frightened Footman.

  Murder at Mountrichard Castle bristled with Gothic enrichments and I was tolerably confident of its good reception. Success, even at its first approach, failed to surprise me. I took pains with my work and I thought it excellent. Each of my seven books sold better than its predecessor. Moreover, the sale was in their first three months, at seven and sixpence. I did not have to relabel the library edition for the book-stalls. People bought my books and kept them—not in the spare bedrooms but in the library, all seven of them together on a shelf. My contract provided me with an advance on each book corresponding with the total earnings of the one before it. In six weeks’ time, when my manuscript had been typed, revised and delivered I should receive a cheque for something over nine hundred pounds. This would pay off my overdraft and Income Tax and leave me with five hundred or so, on which, with another overdraft, I should live until my next book was ready. That was how I ordered my affairs. Had I wished it, I could have earned considerably more. I never tried to sell my stories as serials; the delicate fibres of a story suffer when it is chopped up into weekly or monthly parts and never completely heal. Often, when I have been reading the work of a competitor, I have said, “She was writing with an eye on the magazines. She had to close this episode prematurely; she had to introduce that extraneous bit of melodrama, so as to make each installment a readable unit. Well,” I would reflect, “she has a husband to support and two sons at school. She must not expect to do two jobs well, to be a good mother and a good novelist.” I chose to live modestly on the royalties of my books.

  I never found economy the least irksome; on the contrary I took pleasure in it. My friends, I know, considered me parsimonious; it was a joke among them, which I found quite inoffensive, for there are two distinct kinds of meanness—those which come of loving money and of disliking it. Mine was the latter sort. My ambition was to eradicate money as much as I could from my life and to do so required planning. I acquired as few possessions as possible. I preferred to pay interest to my bank rather than be bothered by tradesmen’s bills. I decided what I wanted to do and then devised ways of doing it cheaply and tidily; money wasted meant more money to be earned. I disliked profusion; it recalled stories in the Daily Express about prizefighters and comedians dying in penury . . . they had spent £200 a week, entertaining and lending; they had worn a new pair of black silk socks every evening; no old pal ever left them empty-handed . . . ten-shilling tips to commissionaires . . . Bohemians.

  I chose my career deliberately at the age of twenty-one. I had a naturally ingenious and constructive mind and the taste for writing. I was youthfully zealous of good fame. There seemed few ways, of which a writer need not be ashamed, by which he could make a decent living. To produce something, saleable in large quantities to the public, which had absolutely nothing of myself in it; to sell something for which the kind of people I liked and respected, would have a use; that was what I sought, and detective stories fulfilled the purpose. They were an art which admitted of classical canons of technique and taste. Their writing was painful—though much less painful than any other form would have been—because I have the unhappy combination of being both lazy and fastidious. It was immune, anyway, from the obnoxious comment to which lighter work is exposed. “How you must revel in writing your delicious books, Mr. So-and-So.” My friend Roger Simmonds, who was with me at the University and set up as a professional humorist at the same time as I wrote Vengeance at the Vatican, is constantly plagued by that kind of remark. Instead, women say to me, “How difficult it must be to think of all those complicated clues, Mr. Plant.” I agree. “It is, intolerably difficult.” “And do you do your writing here in London?” “No, I find I have to go away to work.” “Away from telephones and parties and things?” “Exactly.”

  I had tried a dozen or more retreats in England and abroad—country inns, furnished cottages, seaside hotels out of the season—Fez was by far the best of them. It is a splendid, compact city and in early March, with flowers springing everywhere in the surrounding hills and in the untidy patios of the Arab houses, one of the most beautiful in the world. I liked the little hotel. It was cheap and rather chilly—an indispensable auster
ity. The food was digestible with, again, that element of sparseness which I find agreeable. It had an intermediate place between the semi-Egyptian splendours of the tourists’ palace on the hill, and the bustling commercial hotels of the new town, half an hour’s walk away. The clientele was exclusively French; the wives of civil servants and elderly couples of small means wintering in the sun. In the evening Spahi officers came to the bar to play bagatelle. I used to work on the verandah of my room, overlooking a ravine where Senegalese infantrymen were constantly washing their linen. My recreations were few and simple. Once a week after dinner I took the bus to the Moulay Abdullah; once a week I dined at the Consulate. The consul allowed me to come to him for a bath. I used to walk up, under the walls, swinging my sponge-bag, through the dusk. He, his wife and their governess were the only English people I met; the only people, indeed, with whom I did more than exchange bare civilities. Sometimes I visited the native cinema where old, silent films were shown in a babel of catcalls. On other evenings I took a dose of Dial and was asleep by half past nine. In these circumstances the book progressed well. I have since, on occasions, looked back at them with envy.

  As an odd survival of the age of capitulations there was at that time a British Post Office at the Consulate, used mainly, the French believed, for treasonable purposes by disaffected Arabs. When there was anything for me the postman used to come down the hill on his bicycle to my hotel. He had a badge in his cap and on his arm a brassard with the royal escutcheon; he invariably honoured me with a stiff, military salute which increased my importance in the hotel at the expense of my reputation as an innocent and unofficial man of letters. It was this postman who brought the news of my father’s death in a letter from my Uncle Andrew, his brother.

  My father, it appeared, had been knocked down by a motor-car more than a week ago and had died without regaining consciousness. I was his only child and, with the exception of my uncle, his only near relative. “All arrangements” had been made. The funeral was taking place that day. “In spite of your father’s opinions, in the absence of any formal instructions to the contrary,” my Uncle Andrew wrote, “your Aunt and I thought it best to have a religious ceremony of an unostentatious kind.”