Off with His Head, Page 3

  ‘That may be one way of looking at it,’ Trixie said loftily. ‘I must say it’s not mine. That dog of yours stinks,’ she added.

  ‘Same again,’ Ernie countered morosely.

  ‘She wasn’t brought as low as dust,’ Camilla objected indignantly. ‘She was happily married to my father who loved her like anything. He’s never really got over her death.’

  Camilla, as brilliantly sad as she had been happy, looked at Trixie and said: ‘They were in love. They married for love.’

  ‘So they did, then, and a wonderful thing it was for her,’ Trixie said comfortably. She drew a half-pint and pointedly left Ernie alone with it.

  ‘Killed ’er, didn’t it?’ Ernie demanded of his boots. ‘For all ’is great ’ordes of pelf and unearthly pride, ’e showed ’er the path to the grave.’

  ‘No. Oh, don’t! How can you!’

  ‘Never you heed,’ Trixie said and beckoned Camilla with a jerk of her head to the far end of the Private bar. ‘He’s queer,’ she said. ‘Not soft, mind, but queer. Don’t let it upset you.’

  ‘I had a message from Grandfather saying I could come. I thought they wanted to be friendly.’

  ‘And maybe they do. Ernie’s different. What’ll you take, maid?’

  ‘Cider, please. Have one yourself, Trixie.’

  There was a slight floundering noise on the stairs outside, followed by the entrance of Mrs Bünz. She had removed her cloak and all but one of her scarves and was cosy in Cotswold wool and wooden beads.

  ‘Good evening,’ she said pleasantly. ‘And what an evening! Snowing again!’

  ‘Good evening, ma’am,’ Trixie said, and Camilla, brightening up because she thought Mrs Bünz such a wonderful ‘character makeup’, said:

  ‘I know. Isn’t it too frightful!’

  Mrs Bünz had arrived at the bar and Trixie said: ‘Will you take anything just now?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Mrs Bünz. ‘A noggin will buck me up. Am I right in thinking that I am in the Mead Country?’

  Trixie caught Camilla’s eye and then, showing all her white teeth in the friendliest of grins, said: ‘Us don’t serve mead over the bar, ma’am, though it’s made hereabouts by them that fancies it.’

  Mrs Bünz leant her elbow in an easy manner on the counter. ‘By the Old Guiser,’ she suggested, ‘for example?’

  She was accustomed to the singular little pauses that followed her remarks. As she looked from one to the other of her hearers she blinked and smiled at them and her rosy cheeks bunched themselves up into shiny knobs. She was like an illustration to a tale by the brothers Grimm.

  ‘Would that be Mr William Andersen you mean, then?’ Trixie asked.

  Mrs Bünz nodded waggishly.

  Camilla started to say something and changed her mind. In the Public, Ernie cleared his throat.

  ‘I can’t serve you with anything then, ma’am?’ asked Trixie.

  ‘Indeed you can. I will take zider,’ decided Mrs Bünz, carefully regional. Camilla made an involuntary snuffling noise and, to cover it up, said: ‘William Andersen’s my grandfather. Do you know him?’

  This was not comfortable for Mrs Bünz, but she smiled and smiled and nodded and, as she did so, she told herself that she would never never master the extraordinary vagaries of class in Great Britain.

  ‘I have had the pleasure to meet him,’ she said. ‘This evening. On my way. A beautiful old gentleman,’ she added firmly.

  Camilla looked at her with astonishment.

  ‘Beautiful?’

  ‘Ach, yes. The spirit,’ Mrs Bünz explained, waving her paws, ‘the raciness, the élan!’

  ‘Oh,’ said Camilla dubiously. ‘I see.’ Mrs Bünz sipped her cider and presently took a letter from her bag and laid it on the bar. ‘I was asked to deliver this,’ she said, ‘to someone staying here. Perhaps you can help me?’

  Trixie glanced at it. ‘It’s for you, dear,’ she said to Camilla. Camilla took it. Her cheeks flamed like poppies and she looked with wonder at Mrs Bünz.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘but I don’t quite—I mean—are you—?’

  ‘A chance encounter,’ Mrs Bünz said airily. ‘I was delighted to help.’

  Camilla murmured a little politeness, excused herself and sat down in the inglenook to read her letter.

  Dear Enchanting Camilla (she read),

  Don’t be angry with me for coming home this week. I know you said I mustn’t follow you, but truly I had to because of the Mardian Morris and Christmas. I shan’t come near you at the pub and I won’t ring you up. But please be in church on Sunday. When you sing I shall see your breath going up in little clouds and I shall puff away too like a train so that at least we shall be doing something together. From this you will perceive that I love you.

  Ralph

  Camilla read this letter about six times in rapid succession and then put it in the pocket of her trousers. She would have liked to slip it under her thick sweater but was afraid it might fall out at the other end.

  Her eyes were like stars. She told herself she ought to be miserable because after all she had decided it was no go about Ralph Stayne. But somehow the letter was an antidote to misery, and there went her heart singing like a lunatic.

  Mrs Bünz had retired with her cider to the far side of the inglenook where she sat gazing—rather wistfully, Camilla thought—into the fire. The door of the Public opened. There was an abrupt onset of male voices; blurred and leisurely; unformed country voices. Trixie moved round to serve them, and her father, Ron Plowman, the landlord, came in to help. There was a general bumble of conversation. ‘I had forgotten,’ Camilla thought, ‘what they sound like. I’ve never found out about them. Where do I belong?’

  She heard Trixie say: ‘So she is, then, and setting in yonder.’

  A silence and a clearing of throats. Camilla saw that Mrs Bünz was looking at her. She got up and went to the bar. Through in the Public on the far side of Trixie’s plump shoulder she could see her five uncles: Dan, Andy, Nat, Chris and Ernie, and her grandfather, old William. There was something odd about seeing them like that, as if they were images in a glass and not real persons at all. She found this impression disagreeable and to dispel it called out loudly:

  ‘Hallo, there! Hallo, Grandfather!’

  Camilla’s mother, whose face was no longer perfectly remembered, advanced out of the past with the smile Dan offered his niece. She was there when Andy and Nat, the twins, sniffed at their knuckles as if they liked the smell of them. She was there in Chris’s auburn fringe of hair. Even Ernie, strangely at odds with reality, had his dead sister’s trick of looking up from under his brows.

  The link of resemblance must have come from the grandmother whom Camilla had never seen. Old William himself had none of these signs about him. Dwarfed by his sons he was less comely and looked much more aggressive. His face had settled into a fixed churlishness.

  He pushed his way through the group of his five sons and looked at his granddaughter through the frame made by shelves of bottles.

  ‘You’ve come, then,’ he said, glaring at her.

  ‘Of course. May I go through, Trixie?’

  Trixie lifted the counter flap and Camilla went into the Public. Her uncles stood back a little. She held out her hand to her grandfather.

  ‘Thank you for the message,’ she said. ‘I’ve often wanted to come but I didn’t know whether you’d like to see me.’

  ‘Us reckoned you’d be too mighty for your mother’s folk.’

  Camilla told herself that she would speak very quietly because she didn’t want the invisible Mrs Bünz to hear. Even so, her little speech sounded like a bit of diction exercise. But she couldn’t help that.

  ‘I’m an Andersen as much as I’m a Campion, Grandfather. Any “mightiness” has been on your side, not my father’s or mine. We’ve always wanted to be friends.’

  ‘Plain to see you’re as deadly self-willed and upperty as your mother before you,’ he said, blinking at her. ‘I’
ll say that for you.’

  ‘I am very like her, aren’t I? Growing more so, Daddy says.’ She turned to her uncles and went on, a little desperately, with her prepared speech. It sounded, she thought, quite awful. ‘We’ve only met once before, haven’t we? At my mother’s funeral. I’m not sure if I know which is which, even.’ Here, poor Camilla stopped, hoping that they might perhaps tell her. But they only shuffled their feet and made noises in their throats. She took a deep breath and went on. (‘Voice pitched too high,’ she thought.) ‘May I try and guess? You’re the eldest, You’re my Uncle Dan, aren’t you, and you’re a widower with a son. And there are Andy and Nat, the twins. You’re both married but I don’t know what families you’ve got. And then came Mummy. And then you, Uncle Chris, the one she liked so much, and I don’t know if you’re married.’

  Chris, the ruddy one, looked quickly at Trixie, turned the colour of his own hair and shook his head.

  ‘And I’ve already met Uncle Ernie,’ Camilla ended, and heard her voice fade uneasily.

  There seemed little more to say. It had been a struggle to say as much as that. There they were with their countrymen’s clothes and boots, their labourers’ bodies and their apparent unreadiness to ease a situation that they themselves, or the old man, at least, had brought about.

  ‘Us didn’t reckon you’d carry our names so ready,’ Dan said and smiled at her again.

  ‘Oh,’ Camilla cried, seizing at this, ‘that was easy. Mummy used to tell me I could always remember your names in order because they spelt DANCE: Dan, Andy, Nat, Chris, Ernie. She said she thought Grandfather might have named you that way because of Sword Wednesday and the Dance of the Five Sons. Did you, Grandfather?’

  In the inglenook of the Private, Mrs Bünz, her cider half-way to her lips, was held in ecstatic suspension.

  A slightly less truculent look appeared in old William’s face.

  ‘That’s not a maid’s business,’ he said. ‘It’s man’s gear, that is.’

  ‘I know. She told me. But we can look on, can’t we? Will the swords be out on the Wednesday after the 21st, Grandfather?’

  ‘Certain sure they’ll be out.’

  ‘I be Whiffler,’ Ernie said very loudly. ‘Bean’t I, chaps?’

  ‘Hold your noise then. Us all knows you be Whiffler,’ said his father irritably, ‘and going in mortal dread of our lives on account of it.’

  ‘And the Wing-Commander’s “Crack”,’ Ernie said monotonously pursuing his theme. ‘Wing-Commander Begg, that is. Old ’Oss, that is. ’E commanded my crowd ’e did: I was ’is servant, I was. Wing-Commander Simon Begg, only we called ’im Simmy-Dick, we did. ’E’ll be Old ’Oss, ’e will.’

  ‘Ya-a-as, ya-a-as,’ said his four brothers soothingly in unison. Ernie’s dog came out from behind the door and gloomily contemplated its master.

  ‘We can’t have that poor stinking beast in here,’ Trixie remarked.

  ‘Not healthy,’ Tom Plowman said. ‘Sorry, Ern, but there you are. Not healthy.’

  ‘No more ’tis,’ Andy agreed. ‘Send it back home, Ern.’

  His father loudly ordered the dog to be removed, going so far as to say that it ought to be put out of its misery, in which opinion his sons heartily concurred. The effect of this pronouncement upon Ernie was disturbing. He turned sheet-white, snatched up the dog and, looking from one to the other of his relations, backed towards the door.

  ‘I’ll be the cold death of any one of you that tries,’ he said violently.

  A stillness fell upon the company. Ernie blundered out into the dark, carrying his dog.

  His brothers scraped their boots on the floor and cleared their throats. His father said: ‘Damned young fool, when all’s said.’ Trixie explained that she was as fond of animals as anybody but you had to draw the line.

  Presently Ernie returned, alone, and after eyeing his father for some moments, began to complain like a child.

  ‘A chap bean’t let ’ave nothin’ he sets his fancy to,’ Ernie whined. ‘Nor let do nothin’ he’s a notion to do. Take my case. Can’t ’ave me dog. Can’t do Fool’s act in the Five Sons. I’m the best lepper and caperer of the lot of you. I’d be a proper good Fool, I would.’ He pointed to his father. ‘You’re altogether beyond it, as the doctor in ’is wisdom ’as laid down. Why can’t you heed ’im and let me take over?’

  His father rejoined with some heat: ‘You’re lucky to whiffle. Hold your tongue and don’t meddle in what you don’t understand. Which reminds me,’ he added, advancing upon Trixie. ‘There was a foreign wumman up along to Copse Forge. Proper old nosey besom. If so be—Ar?’

  Camilla had tugged at his coat and was gesturing in the direction of the hidden Mrs Bünz. Trixie mouthed distractedly. The four senior brothers made unhappy noises in their throats.

  ‘In parlour, is she?’ William bawled. ‘Is she biding?’

  ‘A few days,’ Trixie murmured. Her father said firmly: ‘Don’t talk so loud, Guiser.’

  ‘I’ll talk as loud as I’m minded. Us doan’t want no furreignesses hereabouts—’

  ‘Doan’t, then Dad,’ his sons urged him.

  But greatly inflamed, the Guiser roared on. Camilla looked through into the Private and saw Mrs Bünz wearing an expression of artificial abstraction. She tiptoed past the gap and disappeared.

  ‘Grandfather!’ Camilla cried out indignantly, ‘she heard you! How could you! You’ve hurt her feelings dreadfully and she’s not even English—’

  ‘Hold your tongue, then.’

  ‘I don’t see why I should.’

  Ernie astonished them all by bursting into shouts of laughter.

  ‘Like mother, like maid,’ he said, jerking his thumb at Camilla. ‘Hark to our Bessie’s girl.’

  Old William glowered at his granddaughter. ‘Bad blood,’ he said darkly.

  ‘Nonsense! You’re behaving,’ Camilla recklessly continued, ‘exactly like an over-played “heavy”. Absolute ham, if you don’t mind my saying so, Grandather!’

  ‘What kind of loose talk’s that?’

  ‘Theatre slang, actually.’

  ‘Theatre!’ he roared. ‘Doan’t tell me you’re shaming your sex by taking up with that trash. That’s the devil’s counting-house, that is.’

  ‘With respect, Grandfather, it’s nothing of the sort.’

  ‘My granddaughter!’ William said, himself with considerable histrionic effort, ‘a play-actress! Ar, well! Us might have expected it, seeing she was nossled at the breast of the Scarlet Woman.’

  Nat and Andy with the occasional unanimity of twins groaned: ‘Ar, dear!’

  The landlord said: ‘Steady, souls.’

  ‘I really don’t know what you mean by that,’ Camilla said hotly. ‘If you’re talking about Daddy’s Church you must know jolly well that it isn’t mine. He and Mummy laid that on before I was born. I wasn’t to be a Roman and if my brother had lived he would have been one. I’m C. of E.’

  ‘That’s next door as bad,’ William shouted. ‘Turning your back on Chapel and canoodling with Popery.’

  He had come quite close to her. His face was scored with exasperation. He pouted, too, pushing out his lips at her and making a piping sound behind them.

  To her own astonishment Camilla said: ‘No, honestly! You’re nothing but an old baby after all,’ and suddenly kissed him.

  ‘There now!’ Trixie ejaculated, clapping her hands.

  Tom Plowman said: ‘Reckon that calls for one all round on the house.’

  The outside door was pushed open and a tall man in a duffle coat came in.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Begg,’ said Trixie.

  ‘How’s Trix?’ asked Wing-Commander Simon Begg.

  II

  Later on, when she had seen more of him, Camilla was to think of the first remark she heard Simon Begg make as completely typical of him. He was the sort of man who has a talent for discovering the Christian names of waiters and waitresses and uses them continually. He was powerfully built and not ill-lookin
g, with large blue eyes, longish hair and a blond moustache. He wore an RAF tie, and a vast woollen scarf in the same colours. He had achieved distinction (she was to discover) as a bomber pilot during the war.

  The elder Andersens, slow to recover from Camilla’s kiss, greeted Begg confusedly, but Ernie laughed with pleasure and threw him a crashing salute. Begg clapped him on the shoulder. ‘How’s the corporal?’ he said. ‘Sharpening up the old whiffler, what?’

  ‘Crikey!’ Camilla thought, ‘he isn’t half a cup of tea, is the Wing-Commander.’ He gave her a glance for which the word ‘practised’ seemed to be appropriate and ordered his drink.

  ‘Quite a party tonight,’ he said.

  ‘Celebration, too,’ Trixie rejoined. ‘Here’s the Guiser’s granddaughter come to see us after five years.’

  ‘No!’ he exclaimed. ‘Guiser! Introduce me, please.’

  After a fashion old William did so. It was clear that for all his affectation of astonishment, Begg had heard about Camilla. He began to ask her questions that contrived to suggest that they belonged to the same world. Did she by any chance know a little spot called ‘Phipps’ near Shepherd’s Market—quite a bright little spot, really. Camilla, to whom he seemed almost elderly, thought that somehow he was also pathetic. She felt she was a failure with him and decided that she ought to slip away from the Public where she now seemed out of place. Before she could do so, however, there was a further arrival: a pleasant-looking elderly man in an old-fashioned covert-coat with a professional air about him.

  There was a chorus of ‘Evenin’, Doctor.’ The newcomer at once advanced upon Camilla and said: ‘Why, bless my soul, there’s no need to tell me who this is: I’m Henry Otterly, child. I ushered your mama into the world. Last time I spoke to her she was about your age and as like as could be. How very nice to see you.’

  They shook hands warmly. Camilla remembered that five years ago when a famous specialist had taken his tactful leave of her mother, she had whispered: ‘All the same, you couldn’t beat Dr Otterly up to Mardian.’ When she had died, they carried her back to Mardian and Dr Otterly had spoken gently to Camilla and her father.