Ngaio Marsh

Scales of Justice

DEDICATION

For Stella

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Map

Cast of Characters

1. Swevenings

2. Nunspardon

3. The Valley of the Chyne

4. Bottom Meadow

5. Hammer Farm

6. The Willow Grove

7. Watt’s Hill

8. Jacob’s Cottage

9. Chyning and Uplands

10. Return to Swevenings

11. Between Hammer and Nunspardon

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

MAP

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Nurse Kettle |  |
Mr Octavius Danberry-Phinn |  | Of Jacob’s Cottage
Commander Syce |  |
Colonel Cartarette |  | Of Hammer Farm
Rose Cartarette |  | His daughter
Kitty Cartarette |  | His wife
Sir Harold Lacklander Bt. |  | Of Nunspardon
Lady Lacklander |  | His wife
George Lacklander |  | Their son
Dr Mark Lacklander |  | George’s son
Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn |  |
Detective-Inspector Fox | Of the CID New Scotland Yard
Detective-Sergeants Bailey and Thompson |
Dr Curtis |  | Pathologist
Sergeant Oliphant |  | Of the Chyning Constabulary
PC Gripper |
Sir James Punston |  | Chief Constable of Barfordshire

CHAPTER 1

Swevenings

Nurse Kettle pushed her bicycle to the top of Watt’s Hill and there paused. Sweating lightly, she looked down on the village of Swevenings. Smoke rose in cosy plumes from one or two chimneys; roofs cuddled into surrounding greenery. The Chyne, a trout stream, meandered through meadow and coppice and slid blamelessly under two bridges. It was a circumspect landscape. Not a faux-pas, architectural or horticultural, marred the seemliness of the prospect.

‘Really,’ Nurse Kettle thought with satisfaction, ‘it is as pretty as a picture.’ And she remembered all the pretty pictures Lady Lacklander had made in irresolute watercolour, some from this very spot. She was reminded, too, of those illustrated maps that one finds in the Underground, with houses, trees and occupational figures amusingly dotted about them. Seen from above, like this, Swevenings resembled such a map. Nurse Kettle looked down at the orderly pattern of field, hedge, stream, and land, and fancifully imposed upon it the curling labels and carefully naïve figures that are proper to picture-maps.

From Watt’s Hill, Watt’s Lane ran steeply and obliquely into the valley. Between the lane and the Chyne was contained a hillside divided into three strips, each garnished with trees, gardens and a house of considerable age. These properties belonged to three of the principal householders of Swevenings: Mr Danberry-Phinn, Commander Syce and Colonel Cartarette.

Nurse Kettle’s map, she reflected, would have a little picture of Mr Danberry-Phinn at Jacob’s Cottage surrounded by his cats, and one of Commander Syce at Uplands, shooting off his bow-and-arrow. Next door at Hammer Farm (only it wasn’t a farm now but had been much converted) it would show Mrs Cartarette in a garden chair with a cocktail shaker, and Rose Cartarette, her stepdaughter, gracefully weeding. Her attention sharpened. There, in point of fact, deep down in the actual landscape, was Colonel Cartarette himself, a lilliputian figure, moving along his rented stretch of the Chyne, east of Bottom Bridge, and followed at a respectful distance by his spaniel Skip. His creel was slung over his shoulder and his rod was in his hand.

‘The evening rise,’ Nurse Kettle reflected, ‘he’s after the Old ’Un.’ And she added to her imaginary map the picture of an enormous trout lurking near Bottom Bridge with a curly label above it bearing a legend: ‘The Old ’Un.’

On the far side of the valley on the private golf course at Nunspardon Manor there would be Mr George Lacklander, doing a solitary round with a glance (thought the gossip-loving Nurse Kettle) across the valley at Mrs Cartarette. Lacklander’s son, Dr Mark, would be shown with his black bag in his hand and a stork, perhaps, quaintly flying overhead. And to complete, as it were, the gentry, there would be old Lady Lacklander big-bottomed on a sketching stool and her husband, Sir Harold, on a bed of sickness, alas, in his great room, the roof of which, after the manner of pictorial maps, had been removed to display him.

In the map it would be demonstrated how Watt’s Lane, wandering to the right and bending back again, neatly divided the gentry from what Nurse Kettle called the ‘ordinary folk.’ To the west lay the Danberry-Phinn, the Syce, the Cartarette and above all the Lacklander demesnes. Neatly disposed along the east margin of Watt’s Lane were five conscientiously preserved thatched cottages, the village shop and, across Monk’s Bridge, the church and rectory and the Boy and Donkey.

And that was all. No Pulls-In for Carmen, no Olde Bunne Shoppes (which Nurse Kettle had learned to despise), no spurious half-timbering, marred the perfection of Swevenings. Nurse Kettle, bringing her panting friends up to the top of Watt’s Hill, would point with her little finger at the valley and observe triumphantly: ‘Where every prospect pleases,’ without completing the quotation, because in Swevenings not even Man was Vile.

With a look of pleasure on her shining and kindly face she mounted her bicycle and began to coast down Watt’s Lane. Hedges and trees flew by. The road surface improved and on her left appeared the quickset hedge of Jacob’s Cottage. From the far side came the voice of Mr Octavius Danberry-Phinn.

‘Adorable!’ Mr Danberry-Phinn was saying. ‘Queen of Delight! Fish!’ He was answered by the trill of feline voices.

Nurse Kettle turned to the footpath, dexterously backpedalled, wobbled uncouthly and brought herself to anchor at Mr Danberry-Phinn’s gate.

‘Good evening,’ she said, clinging to the gate and retaining her seat. She looked through the entrance cut in the deep hedge. There was Mr Danberry-Phinn in his Elizabethan garden giving supper to his cats. In Swevenings, Mr Phinn (he allowed his nearer acquaintances to neglect the hyphen) was generally considered to be more than a little eccentric, but Nurse Kettle was used to him and didn’t find him at all disconcerting. He wore a smoking-cap, tasselled, embroidered with beads; and falling to pieces. On top of this was perched a pair of ready-made reading-glasses which he now removed and gaily waved at her.

‘You appear,’ he said, ‘like some exotic deity mounted on an engine quaintly devised by Inigo Jones. Good evening to you, Nurse Kettle. Pray, what has become of your automobile?’

‘She’s having a spot of beauty treatment and a minor op’.’ Mr Phinn flinched at this relentless breeziness, but Nurse Kettle, unaware of his reaction, carried heartily on, ‘And how’s the world treating you? Feeding your kitties, I see.’

‘The Persons of the House,’ Mr Phinn acquiesced, ‘now, as you observe, sup. Fatima,’ he cried squatting on his plump haunches, ‘Femme fatale. Miss Paddy-Paws! A morsel more of haddock? Eat up, my heavenly felines.’ Eight cats of varying kinds responded but slightly to these overtures, being occupied with eight dishes of haddock. The ninth, a mother cat, had completed her meal and was at her toilet. She blinked once at Mr Phinn and with a tender and gentle expression stretched herself out for the accommodation of her three fat kittens.

‘The celestial milk-bar is now open,’ Mr Phinn pointed out with a wave of his hand.

Nurse Kettle chuckled obligingly. ‘No nonsense about her, at least,’ she said. ‘Pity some human mums I could name haven’t got the same idea,’ she added, with an air of professional candour. ‘Clever Pussy!’

‘The name,’ Mr Phinn corrected tartly, ‘is Thomasina Twitchett, Thomasina modulating from Thomas and arising out of the usual mistake and Twitchett …’ He bared his crazy-looking head. ‘Hommage à la Divine Potter. The boy children are Ptolemy and Alexis. The girl-child who suffers from a marked mother-fixation is Edie.’

‘Edie?’ Nurse Kettle repeated doubtfully.

‘Edie Puss, of course,’ Mr Phinn rejoined and looked fixedly at her.

Nurse Kettle, who knew that one must cry out against puns, ejaculated: ‘How you dare! Honestly!’

Mr Phinn gave a short cackle of laughter and changed the subject.

‘What errand of therapeutic mercy,’ he asked, ‘has set you darkling in the saddle? What pain and anguish wring which brow?’

‘Well, I’ve one or two calls,’ said Nurse Kettle, ‘but the long and the short of me is that I’m on my way to spend the night at the big house. Relieving with the old gentleman, you know.’

She looked across the valley to Nunspardon Manor.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Mr Phinn softly. ‘Dear me! May one inquire …? Is Sir Harold –?’

‘He’s seventy-five,’ said Nurse Kettle briskly, ‘and he’s very tired. Still, you never know with cardiacs. He may perk up again.’

‘Indeed?’

‘Oh, yes. We’ve got a day-nurse for him but there’s no nightnurse to be had anywhere so I’m stop-gapping. To help Dr Mark out, really.’

‘Dr Mark Lacklander is attending his grandfather?’

‘Yes. He had a second opinion but more for his own satisfaction than anything else. But there! Talking out of school! I’m ashamed of you, Kettle.’

‘I’m very discreet,’ said Mr Phinn.

‘So’m I, really. Well, I suppose I had better go on me way rejoicing.’

Nurse Kettle did a tentative back-pedal and started to wriggle her foot out of one of the interstices in Mr Phinn’s garden gate. He disengaged a sated kitten from its mother and rubbed it against his illshaven cheek.

‘Is he conscious?’ he asked.

‘Off and on. Bit confused. There now! Gossiping again! Talking of gossip,’ said Nurse Kettle, with a twinkle, ‘I see the Colonel’s out for the evening rise.’

An extraordinary change at once took place in Mr Phinn. His face became suffused with purple, his eyes glittered and he bared his teeth in a canine grin.

‘A hideous curse upon his sport,’ he said. ‘Where is he?’

‘Just below the bridge.’

‘Let him venture a handspan above it and I’ll report him to the authorities. What fly has he mounted? Has he caught anything?’

‘I couldn’t see,’ said Nurse Kettle, already regretting her part in the conversation, ‘from the top of Watt’s Hill.’

Mr Phinn replaced the kitten.

‘It is a dreadful thing to say about a fellow-creature,’ he said, ‘a shocking thing. But I do say advisedly and deliberately that I suspect Colonel Cartarette of having recourse to improper practices.’

It was Nurse Kettle’s turn to blush.

‘I am sure I don’t know to what you refer,’ she said.

‘Bread! Worms!’ said Mr Phinn, spreading his arms. ‘Anything! Tickling, even! I’d put it as low as that.’

‘I’m sure you’re mistaken.’

‘It is not my habit, Miss Kettle, to mistake the wanton extravagances of infatuated humankind. Look, if you will, at Cartarette’s associates. Look, if your stomach is strong enough to sustain the experience, at Commander Syce.’

‘Good gracious me, what has the poor Commander done!’

‘That man,’ Mr Phinn said, turning pale and pointing with one hand to the mother-cat and with the other in the direction of the valley; ‘that intemperate filibuster, who divides his leisure between alcohol and the idiotic pursuit of archery, that wardroom cupid, my God, murdered the mother of Thomasina Twitchett.’

‘Not deliberately, I’m sure.’

‘How can you be sure?’

Mr Phinn leant over his garden gate and grasped the handlebars of Nurse Kettle’s bicycle. The tassel of his smoking-cap fell over his face and he blew it impatiently aside. His voice began to trace the pattern of a much-repeated, highly relished narrative.

‘In the cool of the evening Madame Thorns, for such was her name, was wont to promenade in the bottom meadow. Being great with kit she presented a considerable target. Syce, flushed no doubt with wine, and flattering himself he cut the devil of a figure, is to be pictured upon his archery lawn. The instrument of destruction, a bow with the drawing power, I am told, of sixty pounds, is in his grip and the lust of blood in his heart. He shot an arrow in the air,’ Mr Phinn concluded, ‘and if you tell me that it fell to earth he knew not where I shall flatly refuse to believe you. His target, his deliberate mark, I am persuaded, was my exquisite cat. Thomasina, my fur of furs, I am speaking of your mamma.’

The mother-cat blinked at Mr Phinn and so did Nurse Kettle.

‘I must say,’ she thought, ‘he really is a little off.’ And since she had a kind heart she was filled with a vague pity for him.

‘Living alone,’ she thought, ‘with only those cats. It’s not to be wondered at, really.’

She gave him her brightest professional smile and one of her standard valedictions.

‘Ah, well,’ said Nurse Kettle, letting go her anchorage on the gate, ‘be good, and if you can’t be good be careful.’

‘Care,’ Mr Danberry-Phinn countered with a look of real intemperance in his eye, ‘killed the Cat. I am not likely to forget it. Good evening to you, Nurse Kettle.’

II

Mr Phinn was a widower but Commander Syce was a bachelor. He lived next to Mr Phinn, in a Georgian house called Uplands, small and yet too big for Commander Syce, who had inherited it from an uncle. He was looked after by an ex-naval rating and his wife. The greater part of the grounds had been allowed to run to seed, but the kitchen garden was kept up by the married couple and the archery lawn by Commander Syce himself. It overlooked the valley of the Chyne and was, apparently, his only interest. At one end in fine weather stood a target on an easel and at the other on summer evenings from as far away as Nunspardon, Commander Syce could be observed, in the classic pose, shooting a round from his sixty-pound bow. He was reputed to be a fine marksman and it was noticed that however much his gait might waver, his stance, once he had opened his chest and stretched his bow, was that of a rock. He lived a solitary and aimless life. People would have inclined to be sorry for him if he had made any sign that he would welcome their sympathy. He did not do so and indeed at the smallest attempt at friendliness would sheer off, go about and make away as fast as possible. Although never seen in the bar, Commander Syce was a heroic supporter of the pub. Indeed, as Nurse Kettle pedalled up his overgrown drive, she encountered the lad from the Boy and Donkey pedalling down it with his bottle-carrier empty before him.

‘There’s the Boy,’ thought Nurse Kettle, rather pleased with herself for putting it that way, ‘and I’m very much afraid he’s just paid a visit to the Donkey.’

She, herself, had a bottle for Commander Syce, but it came from the chemist at Chyning. As she approached the house she heard the sound of steps on the gravel and saw him limping away round the far end, his bow in his hand and his quiver girt about his waist. Nurse Kettle pedalled after him.

‘Hi!’ she called out brightly. ‘Good evening, Commander!’

Her bicycle wobbled and she dismounted.

Syce turned, hesitated for a moment and then came towards her.

He was a fairish, sunburned man who had run to seed. He still reeked of the Navy and, as Nurse Kettle noticed when he drew nearer, of whisky. His eyes, blue and bewildered, stared into hers.

‘Sorry,’ he said rapidly. ‘Good evening. I beg your pardon.’

‘Dr Mark,’ she said, ‘asked me to drop in while I was passing and leave your prescription for you. There we are. The mixture as before.’

He took it from her with a darting movement of his hand. ‘Most awfully kind,’ he said. ‘Frightfully sorry. Nothing urgent.’

‘No bother at all,’ Nurse Kettle rejoined, noticing the tremor of his hand. ‘I see you’re going to have a shoot.’

‘Oh, yes. Yes,’ he said loudly, and backed away from her. ‘Well, thank you, thank you, thank you.’

‘I’m calling in at Hammer. Perhaps you won’t mind my trespassing. There’s a footpath down to the right-of-way, isn’t there?’

‘Of course. Please do. Allow me.’

He thrust his medicine into a pocket of his coat, took hold of her bicycle and laid his bow along the saddle and handlebars.

‘Now I’m being a nuisance,’ said Nurse Kettle cheerfully. ‘Shall I carry your bow?’

He shied away from her and began to wheel the bicycle round the end of the house. She followed him, carrying the bow and talking in the comfortable voice she used for nervous patients. They came out on the archery lawn and upon a surprising and lovely view over the little valley of the Chyne. The trout stream shone like pewter in the evening light, meadows lay as rich as velvet on either side, the trees looked like pincushions, and a sort of heraldic glow turned the whole landscape into the semblance of an illuminated illustration to some forgotten romance. There was Major Cartarette winding in his line below Bottom Bridge and there up the hill on the Nunspardon golf course were old Lady Lacklander and her elderly son George, taking a post-prandial stroll.

‘What a clear evening,’ Nurse Kettle exclaimed with pleasure. ‘And how close everything looks. Do tell me, Commander,’ she went on, noticing that he seemed to flinch at this form of address, ‘with this bow of yours could you shoot an arrow into Lady Lacklander?’

Syce darted a look at the almost square figure across the little valley. He muttered something about a clout at two hundred and forty yards and limped on. Nurse Kettle, chagrined by his manner, thought: ‘What you need, my dear, is a bit of gingering up.’

He pushed her bicycle down an untidy path through an overgrown shrubbery and she stumped after him.

‘I have been told,’ she said, ‘that once upon a time you hit a mark you didn’t bargain for, down there.’

Syce stopped dead. She saw that beads of sweat had formed on the back of his neck. ‘Alcoholic,’ she thought. ‘Flabby. Shame. He must have been a fine man when he looked after himself.’

‘Great grief!’ Syce cried out, thumping his fist on the seat of her bicycle, ‘you mean the bloody cat!’

‘Well!’

‘Great grief, it was an accident. I’ve told the old perisher! An accident! I like cats.’

He swung round and faced her. His eyes were misted and his lips trembled. ‘I like cats,’ he repeated.

‘We all make mistakes,’ said Nurse Kettle, comfortably.

He held his hand out for the bow and pointed to a little gate at the end of the path.

‘There’s the gate into Hammer,’ he said, and added with exquisite awkwardness, ‘I beg your pardon, I’m very poor company as you see. Thank you for bringing the stuff. Thank you, thank you.’

She gave him the bow and took charge of her bicycle. ‘Dr Mark Lacklander may be very young,’ she said bluffly, ‘but he’s as capable a GP as I’ve come across in thirty years’ nursing. If I were you, Commander, I’d have a good down-to-earth chinwag with him. Much obliged for the assistance. Good evening to you.’

She pushed her bicycle through the gate into the well-tended coppice belonging to Hammer Farm and along a path that ran between herbaceous borders. As she made her way towards the house she heard behind her at Uplands, the twang of a bow string and the ‘tock’ of an arrow in a target.

‘Poor chap,’ Nurse Kettle muttered, partly in a huff and partly compassionate. ‘Poor chap! Nothing to keep him out of mischief.’ And with a sense of vague uneasiness, she wheeled her bicycle in the direction of the Cartarettes’ rose garden where she could hear the snip of garden secateurs and a woman’s voice quietly singing.

‘That’ll be either Mrs,’ thought Nurse Kettle, ‘or the stepdaughter. Pretty tune.’

A man’s voice joined in, making a second part.

‘Come away, come away Death

And in sad cypress let me be laid.’

The words, thought Nurse Kettle, were a trifle morbid but the general effect was nice. The rose garden was enclosed behind quickset hedges and hidden from her, but the path she had taken led into it, and she must continue if she was to reach the house. Her rubber-shod feet made little sound on the flagstones and the bicycle discreetly clicked along beside her. She had an odd feeling that she was about to break in on a scene of exquisite intimacy. She approached a green archway and as she did so the woman’s voice broke off from its song, and said: ‘That’s my favourite of all.’

‘Strange,’ said a man’s voice that fetched Nurse Kettle up with a jolt, ‘strange, isn’t it, in a comedy, to make the love songs so sad! Don’t you think so, Rose? Rose … Darling …’

Nurse Kettle tinkled her bicycle bell, passed through the green archway and looked to her right. She discovered Miss Rose Cartarette and Dr Mark Lacklander gazing into each other’s eyes with unmistakable significance.

III

Miss Cartarette had been cutting roses and laying them in the basket held by Dr Lacklander. Dr Lacklander blushed to the roots of his hair and said, ‘Good God! Good heavens! Good evening,’ and Miss Cartarette said, ‘Oh, hallo, Nurse. Good evening.’ She, too, blushed, but more delicately than Dr Lacklander.

Nurse Kettle said: ‘Good evening, Miss Rose. Good evening, Doctor. Hope it’s all right my taking the short cut.’ She glanced with decorum at Dr Lacklander. ‘The child with the abscess,’ she said, in explanation of her own appearance.

‘Ah, yes,’ Dr Lacklander said. ‘I’ve had a look at her. It’s your gardener’s little girl, Rose.’

They both began to talk to Nurse Kettle who listened with an expression of good humour. She was a romantic woman and took pleasure in the look of excitement on Dr Lacklander’s face and of shyness on Rose’s.

‘Nurse Kettle,’ Dr Lacklander said rapidly, ‘like a perfect angel, is going to look after my grandfather tonight. I don’t know what we should have done without her.’

‘And by that same token,’ Nurse Kettle added, ‘I’d better go on me way rejoicing or I shall be late on duty.’

They smiled and nodded at her. She squared her shoulders, glanced in a jocular manner at her bicycle and stumped off with it through the rose garden.

‘Well,’ she thought, ‘if that’s not a case, I’ve never seen young love before. Blow me down flat, but I never guessed! Fancy!’

As much refreshed by this incident as she would have been by a good strong cup of tea, she made her way to the gardener’s cottage, her last port of call before going up to Nunspardon.

When her figure, stoutly clad in her District Nurse’s uniform, had bobbed its way out of the enclosed garden, Rose Cartarette and Mark Lacklander looked at each other and laughed nervously.

Lacklander said: ‘She’s a fantastically good sort, old Kettle, but at that particular moment I could have done without her. I mustn’t stay, I suppose.’

‘Don’t you want to see my papa?’

‘Yes. But I shouldn’t wait. Not that one can do anything much for the grandparent, but they like me to be there.’

‘I’ll tell Daddy as soon as he comes in. He’ll go up at once, of course.’

‘We’d be very grateful. Grandfather sets great store by his coming.’

Mark Lacklander looked at Rose over the basket he carried and said unsteadily: ‘Darling.’

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Honestly; don’t.’

‘No? Are you warning me off, Rose? Is it all a dead loss?’

She made a small ineloquent gesture, tried to speak and said nothing.

‘Well,’ Lacklander said, ‘I may as well tell you that I was going to ask if you’d marry me. I love you very dearly and I thought we seemed to sort of suit. Was I wrong about that?’

‘No,’ Rose said.

‘Well, I know I wasn’t. Obviously, we suit. So for pity’s sake what’s up? Don’t tell me you love me like a brother, because I can’t believe it.’

‘You needn’t try to.’

‘Well, then?’

‘I can’t think of getting engaged, much less married.’

‘Ah!’ Lacklander ejaculated. ‘Now we’re coming to it! This is going to be what I suspected. Oh, for God’s sake let me get rid of this bloody basket! Here. Come over to the bench. I’m not going till I’ve cleared this up.’

She followed him and they sat down together on a garden seat with the basket of roses at their feet. He took her by the wrist and stripped the heavy glove off her hand. ‘Now, tell me,’ he demanded. ‘Do you love me?’

‘You needn’t bellow it at me like that. Yes, I do.’

‘Rose, darling! I was so panicked you’d say you didn’t.’

‘Please listen, Mark. You’re not going to agree with a syllable of this, but please listen.’

‘All right. I know what it’s going to be but … all right.’

‘You can see what it’s like here. I mean the domestic set-up. You must have seen for yourself how much difference it makes to Daddy my being on tap.’

‘You are so funny when you use colloquialisms … a little girl shutting her eyes and firing off a popgun. All right; your father likes to have you about. So he well might and so he still would if we married. We’d probably live half our time at Nunspardon.’

‘It’s much more than that.’ Rose hesitated. She had drawn away from him and sat with her hands pressed together between her knees. She wore a long house-dress, her hair was drawn back into a knot at the base of her neck but a single fine strand had escaped and shone on her forehead. She used very little make-up and could afford this economy for she was a beautiful girl.

She said: ‘It’s simply that his second marriage hasn’t been a success. If I left him now he’d really and truly have nothing to live for. Really.’

‘Nonsense,’ Mark said uneasily.

‘He’s never been able to do without me. Even when I was little. Nanny and I and my governess all following the drum. So many countries and journeys. And then after the war when he was given all those special jobs: Vienna and Rome and Paris. I never went to school because he hated the idea of separation.’

‘All wrong, of course. Only half a life.’

‘No, no, no, that’s not true, honestly. It was a wonderfully rich life. I saw and heard and learnt all sorts of splendid things other girls miss.’

‘All the same …’

‘No, honestly, it was grand.’

‘You should have been allowed to get under your own steam.’

‘It wasn’t a case of being allowed. I was allowed almost anything I wanted. And when I did get under my own steam just see what happened! He was sent with that mission to Singapore and I stayed in Grenoble and took a course at the University. He was delayed and delayed … and I found out afterwards that he was wretchedly at a loose end. And then … it was while he was there … he met Kitty.’

Lacklander closed his well-kept doctor’s hand over the lower half of his face and behind it made an indeterminate sound.

‘Well,’ Rose said, ‘it turned out as badly as it possibly could, and it goes on getting worse, and if I’d been there I don’t think it would have happened.’

‘Why not? He’d have been just as likely to meet her. And even if he hadn’t, my heavenly and darling Rose, you cannot be allowed to think of yourself as a twister of the tail of fate.’

‘If I’d been there …’

‘Now look here!’ said Lacklander. ‘Look at it like this. If you removed yourself to Nunspardon as my wife, he and your stepmother might get together in a quick comeback.’

‘Oh, no,’ Rose said. ‘No, Mark. There’s not a chance of that.’

‘How do you know? Listen. We’re in love. I love you so desperately much it’s almost more than I can endure. I know I shall never meet anybody else who could make me so happy and, incredible though it may seem, I don’t believe you will either. I won’t be put off, Rose. You shall marry me and if your father’s life here is too unsatisfactory, well, we’ll find some way of improving it. Perhaps if they part company he could come to us.’

‘Never! Don’t you see? He couldn’t bear it. He’d feel sort of extraneous.’

‘I’m going to talk to him. I shall tell him I want to marry you.’

‘No, Mark, darling! No … please …’

His hand closed momentarily over hers. Then he was on his feet and had taken up the basket of roses. ‘Good evening, Mrs Cartarette,’ he said. ‘We’re robbing your garden for my grandmother. You’re very much ahead of us at Hammer with your roses.’

Kitty Cartarette had turned in by the green archway and was looking thoughtfully at them.

IV

The second Mrs Cartarette did not match her Edwardian name. She did not look like a Kitty. She was so fair that without her make-up she would have seemed bleached. Her figure was well-disciplined and her face had been skilfully drawn up into a beautifully cared-for mask. Her greatest asset was her acquired inscrutability. This, of itself, made a femme fatale of Kitty Cartarette. She had, as it were, been manipulated into a menace. She was dressed with some elaboration and, presumably because she was in the garden, she wore gloves.

‘How nice to see you, Mark,’ she said. ‘I thought I heard your voices. Is this a professional call?’

Mark said: ‘Partly so at least. I ran down with a message for Colonel Cartarette, and I had a look at your gardener’s small girl.’

‘How too kind,’ she said, glancing from Mark to her stepdaughter. She moved up to him and with her gloved hand took a dark rose from the basket and held it against her mouth.

‘What a smell!’ she said. ‘Almost improper, it’s so strong. Maurice is not in, but he won’t be long. Shall we go up?’

She led the way to the house. Exotic wafts of something that was not roses drifted in her wake. She kept her torso rigid as she walked and slightly swayed her hips. ‘Very expensive,’ Mark Lacklander thought; ‘but not entirely exclusive. Why on earth did he marry her?’

Mrs Cartarette’s pin heels tapped along the flagstone path to a group of garden furniture heaped with cushions. A tray with a decanter and brandy glasses was set out on a white iron table. She let herself down on a swinging seat, put up her feet, and arranged herself for Mark to look at.

‘Poorest Rose,’ she said, glancing at her stepdaughter, ‘you’re wearing such suitable gloves. Do cope with your scratchy namesakes for Mark. A box perhaps.’

‘Please don’t bother,’ Mark said. ‘I’ll take them as they are.’

‘We can’t allow that,’ Mrs Cartarette murmured. ‘You doctors mustn’t scratch your lovely hands, you know.’

Rose took the basket from him. He watched her go into the house and turned abruptly at the sound of Mrs Cartarette’s voice.

‘Let’s have a little drink, shall we?’ she said. ‘That’s Maurice’s pet brandy and meant to be too wonderful. Give me an infinitesimal drop and yourself a nice big one. I really prefer crème de menthe, but Maurice and Rose think it a common taste so I have to restrain my carnal appetite.’

Mark gave her the brandy. ‘I won’t, if you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘I’m by way of being on duty.’

‘Really? Who are you going to hover over, apart from the gardener’s child?’

‘My grandfather,’ Mark said.

‘How awful of me not to realize,’ she rejoined with the utmost composure. ‘How is Sir Harold?’

‘Not so well this evening, I’m afraid. In fact, I must get back. If I go by the river path perhaps I’ll meet the Colonel.’

‘Almost sure to, I should think,’ she agreed indifferently, ‘unless he’s poaching for that fabled fish on Mr Phinn’s preserves which, of course, he’s much too county to think of doing, whatever the old boy may say to the contrary.’

Mark said formally: ‘I’ll go that way, then, and hope to see him.’

She waved her rose at him in dismissal and held out her left hand in a gesture that he found distressingly second rate. He took it with his own left and shook it crisply.

‘Will you give your father a message from me?’ she said. ‘I know how worried he must be about your grandfather. Do tell him I wish so much one could help.’

The hand inside the glove gave his a sharp little squeeze and was withdrawn. ‘Don’t forget,’ she said.

Rose came back with the flowers in a box. Mark thought: ‘I can’t leave her like this, half-way through a proposal, damn it.’ He said coolly: ‘Come and meet your father. You don’t take enough exercise.’

‘I live in a state of almost perpetual motion,’ she rejoined, ‘and I’m not suitably shod or dressed for the river path.’

Mrs Cartarette gave a little laugh. ‘Poor Mark!’ she murmured. ‘But in any case, Rose, here comes your father.’

Colonel Cartarette had emerged from a spinney halfway down the hill and was climbing up through the rough grass below the lawn. He was followed by his spaniel, Skip, an old, obedient dog. The evening light had faded to a bleached greyness. Silvered grass, trees, lawns, flowers and the mildly curving thread of the shadowed trout stream joined in an announcement of oncoming night. Through this setting Colonel Cartarette moved as if he were an expression both of its substance and its spirit. It was as if from the remote past, through a quiet progression of dusks, his figure had come up from the valley of the Chyne.

When he saw the group by the lawn he lifted his hand in greeting. Mark went down to meet him. Rose, aware of her stepmother’s heightened curiosity, watched him with profound misgiving.

Colonel Cartarette was a native of Swevenings. His instincts were those of a countryman and he had never quite lost his air of belonging to the soil. His tastes, however, were for the arts and his talents for the conduct of government services in foreign places. This odd assortment of elements had set no particular mark upon their host. It was not until he spoke that something of his personality appeared.

‘Good evening, Mark,’ he called as soon as they were within comfortable earshot of each other. ‘My dear chap, what do you think? I’ve damned near bagged the Old ’Un.’

‘No!’ Mark shouted with appropriate enthusiasm.

‘I assure you! The Old ’Un! Below the bridge in his usual lurk, you know. I could see him …’

And as he panted up the hill the Colonel completed his classic tale of a magnificent strike, a homeric struggle and a broken cast. Mark, in spite of his own preoccupations, listened with interest. The Old ’Un was famous in Swevenings: a trout of magnitude and cunning, the despair and desire of every rod in the district.

‘… so I lost him,’ the Colonel ended, opening his eyes very wide and at the same time grinning for sympathy at Mark. ‘What a thing! By jove, if I’d got him I really believe old Phinn would have murdered me.’

‘Are you still at war, sir?’

‘Afraid so. The chap’s impossible, you know Good God, he’s accused me in so many words of poaching. Mad! How’s your grandfather?’

Mark said: ‘He’s failing pretty rapidly, I’m afraid. There’s nothing we can do. It’s on his account I’m here, sir.’ And he delivered his message.

‘I’ll come at once,’ the Colonel said. ‘Better drive round. Just give me a minute or two to clean up. Come with me, won’t you?’

But Mark felt suddenly that he could not face another encounter with Rose and said he would go home at once by the river path and would prepare his grandfather for the Colonel’s arrival.

He stood for a moment looking back through the dusk towards the house. He saw Rose gather up the full skirt of her housecoat and run across the lawn, and he saw her father set down his creel and rod, take off his hat and wait for her, his bald head gleaming. She joined her hands behind his neck and kissed him. They went on towards the house arm-in-arm. Mrs Cartarette’s hammock had begun to swing to and fro.

Mark turned away and walked quickly down into the valley and across Bottom Bridge.

The Old ’Un, with Colonel Cartarette’s cast in his jaw, lurked tranquilly under the bridge.

CHAPTER 2

Nunspardon

Sir Harold Lacklander watched Nurse Kettle as she moved about his room. Mark had given him something that had reduced his nightmare of discomfort and for the moment he seemed to enjoy the tragic self-importance that is the prerogative of the very ill. He preferred Nurse Kettle to the day-nurse. She was after all a native of the neighbouring village of Chyning and this gave him the same satisfaction as the knowledge that the flowers on his table came out of the Nunspardon conservatories.

He knew now that he was dying. His grandson had not told him in so many words but he had read the fact of death in the boy’s face and in the behaviour of his own wife and son. Seven years ago he had been furious when Mark wished to become a doctor; a Lacklander and the only grandson. He had made it as difficult as he could for Mark. But he was glad now to have the Lacklander nose bending over him and the Lacklander hands doing the things doctors seemed to think necessary. He would have taken a sort of pleasure in the eminence to which approaching death had raised him if he had not been tormented by the most grievous of all ills. He had a sense of guilt upon him.

‘Long time,’ he said. He used as few words as possible because with every one he uttered it was as if he squandered a measure of his dwindling capital. Nurse Kettle placed herself where he could see and hear her easily, and said: ‘Doctor Mark says the Colonel will be here quite soon. He’s been fishing.’

‘Luck?’

‘I don’t know. He’ll tell you.’

‘Old’n.’

‘Ah,’ said Nurse Kettle comfortably, ‘they won’t catch him in a hurry.’

The wraith of a chuckle drifted up from the bed and was followed by an anxious sigh. She looked closely at the face that seemed during that day to have receded from its own bones.

‘All right?’ she asked.

The lacklustre eyes searched hers. ‘Papers?’ the voice asked.

‘I found them just where you said. They’re on the table over there.’

‘Here.’

‘If it makes you feel more comfortable.’ She moved into the shadows at the far end of the great room and returned carrying a package, tied and sealed, which she put on his bedside table.

‘Memoirs,’ he whispered.

‘Fancy,’ said Nurse Kettle. ‘There must be a deal of work in them. I think it’s lovely to be an author. And now I’m going to leave you to have a little rest.’

She bent down and looked at him. He stared back anxiously. She nodded and smiled, and then moved away and took up an illustrated paper. For a time there were no sounds in the great bedroom but the breathing of the patient and the rustle of a turned page.

The door opened. Nurse Kettle stood up and put her hands behind her back as Mark Lacklander came into the room. He was followed by Colonel Cartarette.

‘All right, Nurse?’ Mark asked quietly.

‘Pretty much,’ she murmured. ‘Fretting. He’ll be glad to see the Colonel.’

‘I’ll just have a word with him first.’

He walked down the room to the enormous bed. His grandfather stared anxiously up at him and Mark, taking the restless old hand in his, said at once: ‘Here’s the Colonel, Grandfather. You’re quite ready for him, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. Now.’

‘Right.’ Mark kept his fingers on his grandfather’s wrist. Colonel Cartarette straightened his shoulders and joined him.

‘Hallo, Cartarette,’ said Sir Harold so loudly and clearly that Nurse Kettle made a little exclamation. ‘Nice of you to come.’

‘Hallo, sir,’ said the Colonel who was by twenty-five years the younger. ‘Sorry you’re feeling so cheap. Mark says you want to see me.’

‘Yes.’ The eyes turned towards the bedside table. ‘Those things,’ he said. ‘Take them, will you? Now.’

‘They’re the memoirs,’ Mark said.

‘Do you want me to read them?’ Cartarette asked, stooping over the bed.

‘If you will.’ There was a pause. Mark put the package into Colonel Cartarette’s hands. The old man’s eyes watched in what seemed to be an agony of interest.

‘I think,’ Mark said, ‘that Grandfather hopes you will edit the memoirs, sir.’

‘I’ll … Of course,’ the Colonel said after an infinitesimal pause. ‘I’ll be delighted; if you think you can trust me.’

‘Trust you. Implicitly. Implicitly. One other thing. Do you mind, Mark?’

‘Of course not, Grandfather. Nurse, shall we have a word?’

Nurse Kettle followed Mark out of the room. They stood together on a dark landing at the head of a wide stairway.

‘I don’t think,’ Mark said, ‘that it will be much longer.’

‘Wonderful, though, how he’s perked up for the Colonel.’

‘He’d set his will on it. I think,’ Mark said, ‘that he will now relinquish his life.’

Nurse Kettle agreed: ‘Funny how they can hang on and funny how they will give up.’

In the hall below a door opened and light flooded up the stairs. Mark looked over the banister and saw the enormously broad figure of his grandmother. Her hand flashed as it closed on the stair rail. She began heavily to ascend. He could hear her laboured breathing.

‘Steady does it, Gar,’ he said.

Lady Lacklander paused and looked up. ‘Ha!’ she said, ‘it’s the Doctor, is it?’ Mark grinned at the sardonic overtone.

She arrived on the landing. The train of her old velvet dinner-dress followed her and the diamonds which every evening she absentmindedly stuck about her enormous bosom burned and winked as it rose and fell.

‘Good evening, Kettle,’ she panted. ‘Good of you to come and help my poor old boy. How is he, Mark? Has, Maurice Cartarette arrived? Why are you both closeted together out here?’

‘The Colonel’s here, Gar. Grandfather wanted to have a word privately with him, so Nurse and I left them together.’

‘Something about those damned memoirs,’ said Lady Lacklander vexedly. ‘I suppose, in that case, I’d better not go in.’

‘I don’t think they’ll be long.’

There was a large Jacobean chair on the landing. He pulled it forward. She let herself down into it, shuffled her astonishingly small feet out of a pair of old slippers and looked critically at them.

‘Your father,’ she said, ‘has gone to sleep in the drawing-room muttering that he would like to see Maurice.’ She shifted her great bulk towards Nurse Kettle. ‘Now, before you settle to your watch, you kind soul,’ she said, ‘you won’t mind saving my mammoth legs a journey. Jog down to the drawing-room, rouse my lethargic son, tell him the Colonel’s here and make him give you a drink and a sandwich. Um?’

‘Yes, of course, Lady Lacklander,’ said Nurse Kettle, and descended briskly. ‘Wanted to get rid of me, she thought, ‘but it was tactfully done.’

‘Nice woman, Kettle,’ Lady Lacklander grunted. ‘She knows I wanted to be rid of her. Mark, what is it that’s making your grandfather unhappy?’

‘Is he unhappy, Gar?’

‘Don’t hedge. He’s worried to death …’ She stopped short. Her jewelled hands twitched in her lap. ‘He’s troubled in his mind,’ she said, ‘and for the second occasion in our married life I’m at a loss to know why. Is it something to do with Maurice and the memoirs?’

‘Apparently. He wants the Colonel to edit them.’

‘The first occasion,’ Lady Lacklander muttered, ‘was twenty years ago and it made me perfectly miserable. And now, when the time has come for us to part company … and it has come, child, hasn’t it?’

‘Yes, darling, I think so. He’s very tired.’

‘I know. And I’m not, I’m seventy-five and grotesquely fat, but I have a zest for life. There are still,’ Lady Lacklander said with a change in her rather wheezy voice, ‘there are still things to be tidied up. George, for example.’

‘What’s my poor papa doing that needs a tidying hand?’ Mark asked gently.

‘Your poor papa,’ she said, ‘is fifty and a widower and a Lacklander. Three ominous circumstances.’

‘Which can’t be altered, even by you.’

‘They can, however be … Maurice! What is it?’

Colonel Cartarette had opened the door and stood on the threshold with the packages still under his arm.

‘Can you come, Mark? Quickly.’

Mark went past him into the bedroom. Lady Lacklander had risen and followed with more celerity than he would have thought possible. Colonel Cartarette stopped her in the doorway.

‘My dear,’ he said, ‘wait a moment.’

‘Not a second,’ she said strongly. ‘Let me in, Maurice.’

A bell rang persistently in the hall below. Nurse Kettle, followed by a tall man in evening clothes, came hurrying up the stairs.

Colonel Cartarette stood on the landing and watched them go in.

Lady Lacklander was already at her husband’s bedside. Mark supported him with his right arm and with his left hand kept his thumb on a bell-push that lay on the bed. Sir Harold’s mouth was open and he was fetching his breath in a series of half-yawns. There was a movement under the bedclothes that seemed to be made by a continuous flexion and extension of his leg. Lady Lacklander stood massively beside him and took both his hands between hers.

I’m here, Hal,’ she said.

Nurse Kettle had appeared with a glass in her hand.

‘Brandy,’ she said. ‘Old-fashioned but good.’

Mark held it to his grandfather’s open mouth. ‘Try,’ he said. ‘It’ll help. Try.’

The mouth closed over the rim.

‘He’s got a little,’ Mark said. ‘I’ll give an injection.’

Nurse Kettle took his place. Mark turned away and found himself face-to-face with his father.

‘Can I do anything?’ George Lacklander asked.

‘Only wait here, if you will, Father.’

‘Here’s George, Hal,’ Lady Lacklander said. ‘We’re all here with you, my dear.’

From behind the mask against Nurse Kettle’s shoulder came a stutter. ‘Vic – Vic … Vic,’ as if the pulse that was soon to run down had become semi-articulate like a clock. They looked at each other in dismay.

‘What is it?’ Lady Lacklander asked. ‘What is it, Hal?’

‘Somebody called Vic?’ Nurse Kettle suggested brightly.

‘There is nobody called Vic,’ said George Lacklander, and sounded impatient. ‘For God’s sake, Mark, can’t you help him?’

‘In a moment,’ Mark said from the far end of the room.

‘Vic …’

‘The Vicar?’ Lady Lacklander asked, pressing his hand and bending over him. ‘Do you want the Vicar to come, Hal?’

His eyes stared up into hers. Something like a smile twitched at the corners of the gaping mouth. The head moved slightly.

Mark came back with a syringe and gave the injection. After a moment Nurse Kettle turned away. There was something in her manner that gave definition to the scene. Lady Lacklander and her son and grandson drew closer to the bed. She had taken her husband’s hands again.

‘What is it, Hal? What is it, my dearest?’ she asked. ‘Is it the Vicar?’

With a distinctness that astonished them, he whispered: ‘After all, you never know.’ And with his gaze still fixed on his wife he then died.

II

On the late afternoon three days after his father’s funeral, Sir George Lacklander sat in the study at Nunspardon going through the contents of the files and the desk. He was a handsome man with a look of conventional distinction. He had been dark but was now grizzled in the most becoming way possible with grey wings at his temples and a plume above his forehead. Inevitably, his mouth was firm and the nose above it appropriately hooked. He was, in short, rather like an illustration of an English gentleman in an American magazine.

He had arrived at the dangerous age for such men, being now fifty years old and remarkably vigorous.

Sir Harold had left everything in apple-pie order and his son anticipated little trouble. As he turned over the pages of his father’s diaries it occurred to him that as a family they richly deserved their too-much-publicized nickname of ‘Lucky Lacklanders.’ How lucky, for instance, that the eighth baronet, an immensely wealthy man, had developed a passion for precious stones and invested in them to such an extent that they constituted a vast realizable fortune in themselves. How lucky that their famous racing stables were so phenomenally successful. How uniquely and fantastically lucky they had been in that no fewer than three times in the past century a Lacklander had won the most famous of all sweepstakes. It was true, of course, that he himself might be said to have had a piece of ill-fortune when his wife had died in giving birth to Mark but as he remembered her, and he had to confess he no longer remembered her at all distinctly, she had been a disappointingly dull woman. Nothing like … But here he checked himself smartly and swept up his moustache with his thumb and forefinger. He was disconcerted when at this precise moment the butler came in to say that Colonel Cartarette had called and would like to see him. In a vague way the visit suggested a judgment. He took up a firm position on the hearthrug.

‘Hallo, Maurice,’ he said when the Colonel came in. ‘Glad to see you.’ He looked self-consciously into the Colonel’s face and with a changed voice said: ‘Anything wrong?’

‘Well, yes,’ the Colonel said. ‘A hell of a lot actually. I’m sorry to bother you, George, so soon after your trouble and all that but the truth is I’m so damned worried that I feel I’ve got to share my responsibility with you.’

‘Me!’ Sir George ejaculated, apparently with relief and a kind of astonishment. The Colonel took two envelopes from his pocket and laid them on the desk. Sir George saw that they were addressed in his father’s writing.

‘Read the letter first,’ the Colonel said, indicating the smaller of the two envelopes. George gave him a wondering look. He screwed in his eyeglass, drew a single sheet of paper from the envelope, and began to read. As he did so, his mouth fell gently open and his expression grew increasingly blank. Once he looked up at the troubled Colonel as if to ask a question but seemed to change his mind and fell again to reading.

At last the paper dropped from his fingers and his monocle from his eye to his waistcoat.

‘I don’t,’ he said, ‘understand a word of it.’

‘You will,’ the Colonel said, ‘when you have looked at this.’ He drew a thin sheaf of manuscript out of the larger envelope and placed it before George Lacklander. ‘It will take you ten minutes to read. If you don’t mind, I’ll wait.’

‘My dear fellow! Do sit down. What am I thinking of. A cigar! A drink.’

‘No, thank you, George. I’ll smoke a cigarette. No, don’t move. I’ve got one.’

George gave him a wondering look, replaced his eyeglass and began to read again. As he did so his face went through as many changes of expression as those depicted in strip-advertisements. He was a rubicund man but the fresh colour drained out of his face. His mouth lost its firmness and his eyes their assurance. When he raised a sheet of manuscript it quivered in his grasp.

Once, before he had read to the end, he did speak. ‘But it’s not true,’ he said. ‘We’ve always known what happened. It was well known.’ He touched his lips with his fingers and read on to the end. When the last page had fallen on the others Colonel Cartarette gathered them up and put them into their envelope.

‘I’m damned sorry, George,’ he said. ‘God knows I didn’t want to land you with all this.’

‘I can’t see now, why you’ve done it. Why bring it to me? Why do anything but throw it at the back of the fire?’

Cartarette said sombrely: ‘I see you haven’t listened to me. I told you. I’ve thought it over very carefully. He’s left the decision with me and I’ve decided I must publish’ – he held up the long envelope –’this. I must, George. Any other course would be impossible.’

‘But have you thought what it will do to us? Have you thought? It – it’s unthinkable. You’re an old friend, Maurice. My father trusted you with this business because he thought of you as a friend. In a way,’ George added, struggling with an idea that was a little too big for him, ‘in a way he’s bequeathed you our destiny.’

‘A most unwelcome legacy if it were so but of course it’s not. You’re putting it altogether too high. I know, believe me, George, I know, how painful and distressing this will be to you all, but I think the public will take a more charitable view than you might suppose.’

‘And since when,’ George demanded with a greater command of rhetoric than might have been expected of him, ‘since when have the Lacklanders stood cap in hand, waiting upon the charity of the public?’

Colonel Cartarette’s response to this was a helpless gesture. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said; ‘but I’m afraid that that sentiment has the advantage of sounding well and meaning nothing.’

‘Don’t be so bloody supercilious.’

‘All right, George, all right.’

‘The more I think of this the worse it gets. Look here, Maurice, if for no other reason, in common decency …’

‘I’ve tried to take common decency as my criterion.’

‘It’ll kill my mother.’

‘It will distress her very deeply, I know. I’ve thought of her, too.’

‘And Mark? Ruin! A young man! My son! Starting on his career.’

‘There was another young man, an only son, who was starting on his career.’

‘He’s dead!’ George cried out. ‘He can’t suffer. He’s dead.’

‘And his name? And his father?’

‘I can’t chop logic with you. I’m a simple sort of bloke with, I dare say, very unfashionable standards. I believe in the loyalty of friends and in the old families sticking together.’

‘At whatever the cost to other friends and other old families? Come off it, George,’ said the Colonel.

The colour flooded back into George’s face until it was empurpled. He said in an unrecognizable voice: ‘Give me my father’s manuscript. Give me that envelope. I demand it.’

‘I can’t, old boy. Good God, do you suppose that if I could chuck it away or burn it with anything like a clear conscience I wouldn’t do it? I tell you I hate this job.’

He returned the envelope to the breast pocket of his coat. ‘You’re free, of course,’ he said, ‘to talk this over with Lady Lacklander and Mark. Your father made no reservations about that. By the way, I’ve brought a copy of his letter in case you decide to tell them about it. Here it is.’ The Colonel produced a third envelope, laid it on the desk and moved towards the door. ‘And George,’ he said, ‘I beg you to believe I am sorry. I’m deeply sorry. If I could see any other way I’d thankfully take it. What?’

George Lacklander had made an inarticulate noise. He now pointed a heavy finger at the Colonel.

‘After this,’ he said, ‘I needn’t tell you that any question of an understanding between your girl and my boy is at an end.’

The Colonel was so quiet for so long that both men became aware of the ticking of a clock on the chimney breast.

‘I didn’t know,’ he said at last, ‘that there was any question of an understanding. I think you must be mistaken.’

‘I assure you that I am not. However, we needn’t discuss it. Mark … and Rose, I am sure … will both see that it is quite out of the question. No doubt you are as ready to ruin her chances as you are to destroy our happiness.’ For a moment he watched the Colonel’s blank face. ‘She’s head over heels in love with him,’ he added, ‘you can take my word for it.’

‘If Mark has told you this –’

‘Who says Mark told me? … I – I …’

The full, rather florid voice faltered and petered out.

‘Indeed,’ the Colonel said, ‘then may I ask where you got your information?’

They stared at each other and, curiously, the look of startled conjecture which had appeared on George Lacklander’s face was reflected on the Colonel’s. ‘It couldn’t matter less, in any case,’ the Colonel said. ‘Your informant, I am sure, is entirely mistaken. There’s no point in my staying. Goodbye.’

He went out. George, transfixed, saw him walk past the window. A sort of panic came over him. He dragged the telephone across his desk and with an unsteady hand dialled Colonel Cartarette’s number. A woman’s voice answered.

‘Kitty!’ he said. ‘Kitty, is that you?’

III

Colonel Cartarette went home by the right-of-way known as the River Path. It ran through Nunspardon from the top end of Watt’s Lane skirting the Lacklanders’ private golf course. It wound down to Bottom Bridge and up the opposite side to the Cartarettes’ spinney. From thence it crossed the lower portion of Commander Syce’s and Mr Phinn’s demesnes and rejoined Watt’s Lane just below the crest of Watt’s Hill.

The Colonel was feeling miserable. He was weighed down by his responsibility and upset by his falling out with George Lacklander who, pompous old ass though the Colonel thought him, was a lifetime friend. Worst of all he was wretchedly disturbed by the suggestion that Rose had fallen in love with Mark and by the inference, which he couldn’t help drawing, that George Lacklander had collected this information from the Colonel’s wife.

As he walked down the hillside he looked across the little valley into the gardens of Jacob’s Cottage, Uplands and Hammer Farm. There was Mr Phinn dodging about with a cat on his shoulder. ‘Like a blasted old warlock,’ thought the Colonel, who had fallen out with Mr Phinn over the trout stream, and there was poor Syce blazing away with his bow-and-arrow at his padded target. And there, at Hammer, was Kitty. With a characteristic movement of her hips she had emerged from the house in skintight velvet trousers and a flame-coloured top. Her long cigarette-holder was in her hand. She seemed to look across the valley at Nunspardon. The Colonel felt a sickening jolt under his diaphragm. ‘How I could!’ he thought (though subconsciously). ‘How I could!’ Rose was at her evening employment cutting off the deadheads in the garden. He sighed and looked up to the crest of the hill and there, plodding homewards, pushing her bicycle up Watt’s Lane, her uniform and hat appearing in gaps and vanishing behind hedges, was Nurse Kettle. ‘In Swevenings,’ thought the Colonel, ‘she crops up like a recurring decimal.’

He came to the foot of the hill and to Bottom Bridge. The bridge divided his fishing from Mr Danberry-Phinn’s; he had the lower reaches and Mr Phinn the upper. It was about the waters exactly under Bottom Bridge that they had fallen out. The Colonel crossed from Mr Phinn’s side to his own, folded his arms on the stone parapet and gazed into the sliding green world beneath. At first he stared absently but after a moment his attention sharpened. In the left bank of the Chyne near a broken-down boat shed where an old punt was moored, there was a hole. In its depths eddied and lurked a shadow among shadows; the Old ’Un. ‘Perhaps,’ the Colonel thought, ‘perhaps it would ease my mind a bit if I came down before dinner. He may stay on my side.’ He withdrew his gaze from the Old ’Un to find when he looked up at Jacob’s Cottage, that Mr Phinn, motionless, with his cat still on his shoulder, was looking at him through a pair of field-glasses.

‘Ah, hell!’ muttered the Colonel. He crossed the bridge and passed out of sight of Jacob’s Cottage and continued on his way home.

The path crossed a narrow meadow and climbed the lower reach of Watt’s Hill. His own coppice and Commander Syce’s spinney concealed from the Colonel the upper portions of the three demesnes. Someone was coming down the path at a heavy jog-trot. He actually heard the wheezing and puffing of this person and recognized the form of locomotion practised by Mr Phinn before the latter appeared wearing an old Norfolk jacket and tweed hat which, in addition to being stuck about with trout-fishing flies, had Mr Phinn’s reading spectacles thrust through the band like an Irishman’s pipe. He was carrying his elaborate collection of fishing impediments. He had the air of having got himself together in a hurry and was attended by Mrs Thomasina Twitchett, who, after the manner of her kind, suggested that their association was purely coincidental.

The path was narrow. It was essential that someone should give way and the Colonel, sick of rows with his neighbours, stood on one side. Mr Phinn jogged glassily down upon him. The cat suddenly cantered ahead.

‘Hallo, old girl,’ said the Colonel. He stooped down and snapped a finger and thumb at her. She stared briefly and passed him with a preoccupied air, twitching the tip of her tail.

The Colonel straightened up and found himself face to face with Mr Phinn.

‘Good evening,’ said the Colonel.

‘Sir,’ said Mr Phinn. He touched his dreadful hat with one finger, blew out his cheeks and advanced. ‘Thomasina,’ he added, ‘hold your body more seemly.’

For Thomasina, waywardly taken with the Colonel, had returned and rolled on her back at his feet.

‘Nice cat,’ said the Colonel, and added: ‘Good fishing to you. The Old ’Un lies below the bridge on my side, by the way.’

‘Indeed?’

‘As no doubt you guessed,’ the Colonel added against his better judgement, ‘when you watched me through your field-glasses.’

If Mr Phinn had contemplated a conciliatory position he at once abandoned it. He made a belligerent gesture with his net. ‘The landscape, so far as I am aware,’ he said, ‘is not under some optical interdict. It may be viewed, I believe. To the best of my knowledge, there are no squatter’s rights over the distant prospect of the Chyne.’

‘None whatever. You can stare,’ said the Colonel, ‘at the Chyne, or me or anything else you fancy till you are black in the face for all I care. But if you realized … If you …’ He scratched his head, a gesture that with the Colonel denoted profound emotional disturbance. ‘My dear Phinn …’ he began again, ‘if you only knew … God bless my soul what does it matter! Good evening to you.’

He encircled Mr Phinn and hurried up the path. ‘And for that grotesque,’ he thought resentfully, ‘for that impossible, that almost certifiable buffoon I have saddled myself with a responsibility that may well make me wretchedly uncomfortable for the rest of my life.’

He mended his pace and followed the path into the Hammer coppice. Whether summoned by maternal obligations or because she had taken an inscrutable cat’s fancy to the Colonel, Thomasina Twitchett accompanied him, trilling occasionally and looking about for an evening bird. They came within view of the lawn and there was Commander Syce, bow in hand, quiver at thigh and slightly unsteady on his feet, hunting about in the underbrush.

‘Hallo, Cartarette,’ he said. ‘Lost a damned arrow. What a thing! Missed the damned target and away she went.’

‘Missed it by a dangerously wide margin, didn’t you?’ the Colonel rejoined rather testily. After all, people did use the path, he reflected and he began to help in the search. Thomasina Twitchett, amused by the rustle of leaves, pretended to join in the hunt.

‘I know,’ Commander Syce agreed, ‘rotten bad show, but I saw old Phinn and it put me off. Did you hear what happened about me and his cat? Damnedest thing you ever knew! Purest accident, but the old whatnot wouldn’t have it. Great grief, I told him, I like cats.’

He thrust his hand into a heap of dead leaves. Thomasina Twitchett leapt merrily upon it and fleshed her claws in his wrist. ‘Perishing little bastard,’ said Commander Syce. He freed himself and aimed a spank at her which she easily avoided and being tired of their company, made for her home and kittens. The Colonel excused himself and turned up through the spinney into the open field below his own lawn.

His wife was in her hammock dangling a tightly-encased black velvet leg, a flame-coloured sleeve and a pair of enormous earrings. The cocktail tray was ready on her iron table.

‘How late you are,’ she said idly. ‘Dinner in half an hour. What have you been up to at Nunspardon?’

‘I had to see George.’

‘What about?’

‘Some business his father asked me to do.’

‘How illuminating.’

‘It was very private, my dear.’

‘How is George?’

The Colonel remembered George’s empurpled face and said: ‘Still rather upset.’

‘We must ask him to dinner. I’m learning to play golf with him tomorrow, by the way. He’s giving me some clubs. Nice, isn’t it?’

‘When did you arrange that?’

‘Just now. About twenty minutes ago,’ she said, watching him.

‘Kitty, I’d rather you didn’t.’

‘You don’t by any chance suspect me of playing you false with George, do you?’

‘Well,’ said the Colonel after a long pause, ‘are you?’

‘No.’

‘I still think it might be better not to play golf with him tomorrow.’

‘Why on earth?’

‘Kitty, what have you said to George about Mark and Rose?’

‘Nothing you couldn’t have seen for yourself, darling. Rose is obviously head over heels in love with Mark.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘My good Maurice, you don’t suppose the girl is going to spend the rest of her existence doting on Daddy, do you?’

‘I wouldn’t have it for the world. Not for the world.’

‘Well, then.’

‘But I … I didn’t know … I still don’t believe …’

‘He turned up here five minutes ago looking all churned up and they’re closeted together in the drawing-room. Go and see. I’ll excuse your changing, if you like.’

‘Thank you, my dear,’ the Colonel said miserably and went indoors.

If he hadn’t been so rattled and worried he would no doubt have given some sort of warning of his approach. As it was he crossed the heavy carpet of the hall, opened the drawing-room door and discovered his daughter locked in Mark Lacklander’s arms from which embrace she was making but ineffectual attempts to escape.

CHAPTER 3

The Valley of the Chyne

Rose and Mark behaved in the classic manner of surprised lovers. They released each other, Rose turned white and Mark red, and neither of them uttered a word.

The Colonel said: I’m sorry, my dear. Forgive me,’ and made his daughter a little bow.

Rose, with a sort of agitated spontaneity, ran to him, linked her hands behind his head, and cried: ‘It had to happen some time, darling, didn’t it?’

Mark said: ‘Sir, I want her to marry me.’

‘But I won’t,’ Rose said. ‘I won’t unless you can be happy about it. I’ve told him.’

The Colonel, with great gentleness, freed himself and then put an arm round his daughter.

‘Where have you come from, Mark?’ he asked.

‘From Chyning. It’s my day at the hospital.’

‘Yes, I see.’ The Colonel looked from his daughter to her lover and thought how ardent and vulnerable they seemed. ‘Sit down, both of you,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to think what I’m going to say to you. Sit down.’

They obeyed him with an air of bewilderment.

‘When you go back to Nunspardon, Mark,’ he said, ‘you will find your father very much upset. That is because of a talk I’ve just had with him. I’m at liberty to repeat the substance of that talk to you, but I feel some hesitation in doing so. I think he should be allowed to break it to you himself.’

‘Break it to me?’

‘It is not good news. You will find him entirely opposed to any thought of your marriage with Rose.’

‘I can’t believe it,’ Mark said.

‘You will, however. You may even find that you yourself (forgive me, Rose, my love, but it may be so), feel quite differently about’ – the Colonel smiled faintly –’about contracting an alliance with a Cartarette.’

‘But, my poorest Daddy,’ Rose ejaculated, clinging to a note of irony. ‘What have you been up to?’

‘The very devil and all, I’m afraid, my poppet,’ her father rejoined.

‘Well, whatever it may be,’ Mark said, and stood up, ‘I can assure you that blue murder wouldn’t make me change my mind about Rose.’

‘Oh,’ the Colonel rejoined mildly, ‘this is not blue murder.’

‘Good.’ Mark turned to Rose. ‘Don’t be fussed, darling,’ he said. ‘I’ll go home and sort it out.’

‘By all means go home,’ the Colonel agreed, ‘and try.’

He took Mark by the arm and led him to the door.

‘You won’t feel very friendly towards me tomorrow, Mark,’ he said. ‘Will you try to believe that the action I’ve been compelled to take is one that I detest taking?’

‘Compelled?’ Mark repeated. ‘Yes – well … yes, of course.’ He stuck out the Lacklander jaw and knitted the Lacklander brows. ‘Look here, sir,’ he said, ‘if my father welcomes our engagement – and I can’t conceive of his doing anything else – will you have any objection? I’d better tell you now that no objection on either side will make the smallest difference.’

‘In that case,’ the Colonel said, ‘your question is academic. And now I’ll leave you to have a word with Rose before you go home.’ He held out his hand. ‘Goodbye, Mark.’

When the Colonel had gone, Mark turned to Rose and took her hands in his. ‘But how ridiculous,’ he said. ‘How in the wide world could these old boys cook up anything that would upset us?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know how they could but it’s serious. He’s terribly worried, poor darling.’

‘Well,’ Mark said, ‘it’s no good attempting a diagnosis before we’ve heard the history. I’ll go home, see what’s happened and ring you up in about fifteen minutes. The all-important, utterly bewildering and heaven-sent joy is that you love me, Rose. Nothing,’ Mark continued with an air of coining a brand-new phrase, ‘nothing can alter that. Au revoir, darling.’

He kissed Rose in a business-like manner and was gone.

She sat still for a time hugging to herself the knowledge of their feeling for each other. What had happened to all her scruples about leaving her father? She didn’t even feel properly upset by her father’s extraordinary behaviour and when she realized this circumstance she realized the extent of her enthralment. She stood in the french window of the drawing-room and looked across the valley to Nunspardon. It was impossible to be anxious … her whole being ached with happiness. It was now and for the first time, that Rose understood the completeness of love.

Time went by without her taking thought for it. The gong sounded for dinner and at the same moment the telephone rang. She flew to it.

‘Rose,’ Mark said. ‘Say at once that you love me. At once.’

‘I love you.’

‘And on your most sacred word of honour that you’ll marry me. Say it, Rose. Promise it. Solemnly promise.’

‘I solemnly promise.’

‘Good,’ said Mark. ‘I’ll come back at nine.’

‘Do you know what’s wrong?’

‘Yes. It’s damn’ ticklish. Bless you, darling. Till nine.’

‘Till nine,’ Rose said, and in a state of enthralment went in to dinner.

II

By eight o’clock the evening depression had begun to settle over Commander Syce. At about five o’clock when the sun was over the yard arm he had a brandy and soda. This raised his spirits. With its successors, up to the third or fourth, they rose still farther. During this period he saw himself taking a job and making a howling success of it. From that emotional eminence he fell away with each succeeding dram and it was during his decline that he usually took to archery. It had been in such a state of almost suicidal depression that he had suddenly shot an arrow over his coppice into Mr Danberry-Phinn’s bottom meadow and slain the mother of Thomasina Twitchett.

Tonight the onset of depression was more than usually severe. Perhaps his encounter with the Colonel, whom he liked, gave point to his own loneliness. Moreover, his married couple were on their annual holiday and he had not been bothered to do anything about an evening meal. He found his arrow and limped back to the archery lawn. He no longer wanted to shoot. His gammy leg ached but he thought he’d take a turn up the drive.

When he arrived at the top it was to discover Nurse Kettle seated by the roadside in gloomy contemplation of her bicycle which stood upside down on its saddle and handlebars.

‘Hallo, Commander,’ said Nurse Kettle, ‘I’ve got a puncture.’

‘Evening. Really? Bore for you,’ Syce shot out at her.

‘I can’t make up me great mind to push her the three miles to Chyning so I’m going to have a shot at running repairs. Pumping’s no good,’ said Nurse Kettle.

She had opened a tool kit and was looking dubiously at its contents. Syce hung off and on, and watched her make a pass with a lever at her tyre.

‘Not like that,’ he shouted when he could no longer endure it. ‘Great grief, you’ll get nowhere that fashion.’

‘I believe you.’

‘And in any case, you’ll want a bucket of water to find the puncture.’ She looked helplessly at him. ‘Here!’ he mumbled. ‘Give it here.’

He righted the bicycle and with a further, completely inaudible remark began to wheel it down his drive. Nurse Kettle gathered up her tool kit and followed. A look strangely compounded of compassion and amusement had settled on her face.

Commander Syce wheeled the bicycle into a gardener’s shed and without the slightest attempt at any further conversation set about the removal of the tyre. Nurse Kettle hitched herself up on a bench and watched him. Presently she began to talk.

‘I am obliged to you. I’ve had a bit of a day. Epidemic in the village, odd cases all over the place and then this happens. There! Aren’t you neat-fingered. I looked in at Nunspardon this evening,’ she continued. ‘Lady Lacklander’s got a Toe and Dr Mark arranged for me to do the fomentations.’

Commander Syce made an inarticulate noise.

‘If you ask me the new baronet’s feeling his responsibilities. Came in just as I was leaving. Very bad colour and jumpy,’ Nurse Kettle gossiped cosily. She swung her short legs and interrupted herself from time to time to admire Syce’s handiwork. ‘Pity!’ she thought. ‘Shaky hands. Alcoholic skin. Nice chap, too. Pity!’

He repaired the puncture and replaced the tube and tyre. When he had finished and made as if to stand up, he gave a sharp cry of pain, clapped his hands to the small of his back and sank down again on his knees.

‘Hal-lo!’ Nurse Kettle ejaculated. ‘What’s all this? ’Bago?’

Commander Syce swore under his breath. Between clenched teeth he implored her to go away. ‘Most frightfully sorry,’ he groaned. ‘Ask you to excuse me. Ach!’

It was now that Nurse Kettle showed the quality that caused people to prefer her to grander and more up-to-date nurses. She exuded dependability, resourcefulness and authority. Even the common and pitilessly breezy flavour of her remarks was comfortable. To Commander Syce’s conjurations to leave him alone followed in the extremity of his pain by furious oaths, she paid no attention. She went down on all-fours beside him, enticed and aided him towards the bench, encouraged him to use it and her own person as aids to rising and finally had him, though almost bent double, on his feet. She helped him into his house and lowered him down on a sofa in a dismal drawing-room.

‘Down-a-bumps,’ she said. Sweating and gasping, he reclined there and glared at her. ‘Now, what are we going to do about you, I wonder? Did I or did I not see a rug in the hall? Wait a bit.’

She went out and came back with a rug. She called him ‘dear’ and, taking his pain seriously, covered him up, went out again and returned with a glass of water. ‘Making myself at home, I suppose you’re thinking. Here’s a couple of aspirins to go on with,’ said Nurse Kettle.

He took them without looking at her. ‘Please don’t trouble,’ he groaned. ‘Thank you. Under my own steam.’ She gave him a look and went out again.

In her absence, he attempted to get up but was galvanized with a monstrous jab of lumbago and subsided in agony. He began to think she had gone for good and to wonder how he was to support life while the attack lasted, when he heard her moving about in some remote part of the house. In a moment she came in with two hot-water bags.

‘At this stage,’ she said, ‘heat’s the ticket.’

‘Where did you get those things?’

‘Borrowed ‘em from the Cartarettes.’

‘My God!’

She laid them against his back.

‘Dr Mark’s coming to look at you,’ she said.

‘My God!’

‘He was at the Cartarettes and if you ask me there’s going to be some news from that quarter before any of us are much older. At least,’ Nurse Kettle added rather vexedly, ‘I would have said so, if it hadn’t been for them all looking a bit put out.’ To his horror she began to take off his shoes.

‘With a yo-heave-ho,’ said Nurse Kettle out of compliment to the navy. ‘Aspirin doing its stuff?’

‘I – I think so. I do beg –’

‘I suppose your bedroom’s upstairs?’

‘I do BEG –’

‘We’ll see what the doctor says, but I’d suggest you doss down in the housekeeper’s room to save the stairs. I mean to say,’ Nurse Kettle added with a hearty laugh, ‘always provided there’s no housekeeper.’

She looked into his face so good-humouredly and with such an air of believing him to be glad of her help that he found himself accepting it.

‘Like a cup of tea?’ She asked.

‘No, thank you.’

‘Well, it won’t be anything stronger unless the doctor says so.’

He reddened, caught her eye and grinned.

‘Come,’ she said, ‘that’s better.’

‘I’m really ashamed to trouble you so much.’

‘I might have said the same about my bike, mightn’t I? There’s the doctor.’

She bustled out again and came back with Mark Lacklander.

Mark, who was a good deal paler than his patient, took a crisp line with Syce’s expostulations.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I dare say I’m entirely extraneous. This isn’t a professional visit if you’d rather not.’

‘Great grief, my dear chap, I don’t mean that. Only too grateful but … I mean … busy man … right itself …’

‘Well, suppose I take a look-see,’ Mark suggested. ‘We won’t move you.’

The examination was brief. ‘If the lumbago doesn’t clear up we can do something a bit more drastic,’ Mark said, ‘but in the meantime Nurse Kettle’ll get you to bed …’

‘Good God!’

‘… and look in again tomorrow morning. So will I. you’ll need one or two things. I’ll ring up the hospital and get them sent out at once. All right?’

‘Thank you. Thank you. You don’t,’ said Syce to his own surprise, ‘look terribly fit yourself. Sorry to have dragged you in.’

‘That’s all right. We’ll bring your bed in here and put it near the telephone. Ring up if you’re in difficulties. By the way, Mrs Cartarette offered –’

‘No!’ shouted Commander Syce, and turned purple.

‘… to send in meals,’ Mark added. ‘But of course you may be up and about again tomorrow. In the meantime I think we can safely leave you to Nurse Kettle. Goodnight.’

When he had gone Nurse Kettle said cheerfully: ‘You’ll have to put up with me, it seems, if you don’t want lovely ladies all round you. Now we’ll get you washed up and settled for the night.’

Half an hour later when he was propped up in bed with a cup of hot milk and a plate of bread-and-butter, and a lamp within easy reach, Nurse Kettle looked down at him with her quizzical air.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I shall now, as they say, love you and leave you. Be good and if you can’t be good be careful.’

‘Thank you,’ gabbled Commander Syce, nervously. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’

She had plodded over to the door before his voice arrested her. ‘I – ah … I don’t suppose,’ he said, ‘that you are familiar with Aubrey’s Brief Lives, are you?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Who was he when he was at home?’

‘He wrote a Brief Life of a man called Sir Jonas Moore. It begins: ‘Sciatica he cured it, by boyling his buttocks.’ I’m glad, at least, you don’t propose to try that remedy.’

‘Well!’ cried Nurse Kettle delightedly. ‘You are coming out of your shell to be sure. Nighty-bye.’

III

During the next three days Nurse Kettle, pedalling about her duties, had occasion to notice, and she was sharp in such matters, that something untoward was going on in the district. Wherever she went, whether it was to attend upon Lady Lacklander’s toe, or upon the abscess of the gardener’s child at Hammer, or upon Commander Syce’s strangely persistent lumbago, she felt a kind of heightened tension in the behaviour of her patients and also in the behaviour of young Dr Mark Lacklander. Rose Cartarette, when she encountered her in the garden, was white and jumpy, the Colonel looked strained and Mrs Cartarette singularly excited.

‘Kettle,’ Lady Lacklander said, on Wednesday, wincing a little as she endured the approach of a fomentation to her toe, ‘have you got the cure for a bad conscience?’

Nurse Kettle did not resent being addressed in this restoration-comedy fashion by Lady Lacklander who had known her for some twenty years and used the form with an intimate and even an affectionate air much prized by Nurse Kettle.

‘Ah,’ said the latter, ‘there’s no mixture-as-before for that sort of trouble.’

‘No. How long,’ Lady Lacklander went on, ‘have you been looking after us in Swevenings, Kettle?’

‘Thirty years if you count five in the hospital at Chyning.’

‘Twenty-five years of fomentations, enemas, slappings and thumpings,’ mused Lady Lacklander. ‘And I suppose you’ve learnt quite a lot about us in that time. There’s nothing like illness to reveal character and there’s nothing like a love affair,’ she added unexpectedly, ‘to disguise it. This is agony,’ she ended mildly, referring to the fomentation.

‘Stick it if you can, dear,’ Nurse Kettle advised, and Lady Lacklander for her part did not object to being addressed as ‘dear’ by Nurse Kettle, who continued: ‘How do you mean I wonder about love disguising character?’

‘When people are in love,’ Lady Lacklander said, with a little scream as a new fomentation was applied, ‘they instinctively present themselves to each other in their most favourable light. They assume pleasing characteristics as unconsciously as a cock pheasant puts on his spring plumage. They display such virtues as magnanimity, charitableness and modesty and wait for them to be admired. They develop a positive genius for suppressing their least attractive points. They can’t help it, you know, Kettle. It’s just the behaviourism of courtship.’

‘Fancy.’

‘Now don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about because you most certainly do. You think straight and that’s more than anybody else seems to be capable of doing in Swevenings. You’re a gossip, of course,’ Lady Lacklander added, ‘but I don’t think you’re a malicious gossip, are you?’

‘Certainly not. The idea!’

‘No. Tell me, now, without any frills, what do you think of us.’

‘Meaning, I take it,’ Nurse Kettle returned, ‘the aristocracy?’

‘Meaning exactly that. Do you,’ asked Lady Lacklander with relish, ‘find us effete, ineffectual, vicious, obsolete and altogether extraneous?’

‘No,’ said Nurse Kettle stoutly, ‘I don’t.’

‘Some of us are, you know.’

Nurse Kettle squatted back on her haunches, retaining a firm grip on Lady Lacklander’s little heel. ‘It’s not the people so much as the idea,’ she said.

‘Ah,’ said Lady Lacklander, ‘you’re an Elizabethan, Kettle. You believe in degree. You’re a female Ulysses, old girl. But degree is now dependent upon behaviour, I’d have you know.’

Nurse Kettle gave a jolly laugh and said she didn’t know what that meant. Lady Lacklander rejoined that, among other things, it meant that if people fall below something called a certain standard they are asking for trouble. ‘I mean,’ Lady Lacklander went on, scowling with physical pain and mental concentration, ‘I mean we’d better behave ourselves in the admittedly few jobs that by right of heritage used to be ours. I mean, finally, that whether they think we’re rubbish or whether they think we’re not, people still expect that in certain situations we will give certain reactions. Don’t they, Kettle?’

Nurse Kettle said she supposed they did.

‘Not,’ Lady Lacklander said, ‘that I give a damn what they think. But still.’

She remained wrapped in moody contemplation while Nurse Kettle completed the treatment and bandaged the toe.

‘In short,’ her formidable patient at last declaimed, ‘we can allow ourselves to be almost anything but shabbily behaved. That we’d better avoid. I’m extremely worried, Kettle.’ Nurse Kettle looked up inquiringly. Tell me, is there any gossip in the village about my grandson? Romantic gossip?’

‘A bit,’ Nurse Kettle said, and after a pause added: ‘It’d be lovely, wouldn’t it? She’s a sweet girl. And an heiress into the bargain.’

‘Umph.’

‘Which is not to be sneezed at nowadays, I suppose. They tell me everything goes to the daughter.’

‘Entailed.’ Lady Lacklander said: ‘Mark, of course, gets nothing until he succeeds. But it’s not that that bothers me.’

‘Whatever it is, if I were you I should consult Dr Mark, Lady Lacklander. An old head on young shoulders if ever I saw one.’

‘My dear soul, my grandson is, as you have observed, in love. He is therefore, as I have tried to point out, extremely likely to take up a high-falutin attitude. Besides, he’s involved. No, I must take matters into my own hands, Kettle. Into my own hands. You go past Hammer on your way home, don’t you?’

Nurse Kettle said she did.

‘I’ve written a note to Colonel Cartarette. Drop it there like a good creature, will you?’

Nurse Kettle said she would and fetched it from Lady Lacklander’s writing-desk.

‘It’s a pity,’ Lady Lacklander muttered, as Nurse Kettle was about to leave her. ‘It’s a pity poor George is such an ass.’

IV

She considered that George gave only too clear a demonstration of being an ass when she caught a glimpse of him on the following evening. He was playing a round of golf with Mrs Cartarette. George, having attained the tricky age for Lacklanders, had fallen into a muddled, excited dotage upon Kitty Cartarette. She made him feel dangerous and this sensation enchanted him. She told him repeatedly how chivalrous he was and so cast a glow of knight-errantry over impulses that are not usually seen in that light. She allowed him only the most meagre rewards, doling out the lesser stimulants of courtship in positively homeopathic doses. Thus on the Nunspardon golf course, he was allowed to watch, criticize and correct her swing. If his interest in this exercise was far from being purely athletic, Mrs Cartarette gave only the slightest hint that she was aware of the fact and industriously swung and swung again while he fell back to observe, and advanced to adjust, her technique.

Lady Lacklander, tramping down River Path in the cool of the evening with a footman in attendance to carry her sketching impedimenta and her shooting-stick, observed her son and his pupil as it were in pantomime on the second tee. She noticed how George rocked on his feet, with his head on one side while Mrs Cartarette swung, as Lady Lacklander angrily noticed, everything that a woman could swing. Lady Lacklander looked at the two figures with distaste tempered by speculation. ‘Can George,’ she wondered, ‘have some notion of employing the strategy of indirect attack upon Maurice? But no, poor boy, he hasn’t got the brains.’

The two figures disappeared over the crest of the hill and Lady Lacklander plodded heavily on in great distress of mind. Because of her ulcerated toe she wore a pair of her late husband’s shooting-boots. On her head was a battered solar topee of immense antiquity which she found convenient as an eye-shade. For the rest, her vast person was clad in baggy tweeds and a tent-like blouse. Her hands, as always, were encrusted with diamonds.

She and the footman reached Bottom Bridge, turned left and came to a halt before a group of alders and the prospect of a bend in the stream. The footman, under Lady Lacklander’s direction, set up her easel, filled her water-jar at the stream, placed her camp stool and put her shooting-stick beside it. When she fell back from her work in order to observe it as a whole, Lady Lacklander was in the habit of supporting her bulk upon the shooting-stick.

The footman left her. She would reappear in her own time at Nunspardon and change for dinner at nine o’clock. The footman would return and collect her impedimenta. She fixed her spectacles on her nose, directed at her subject the sort of glance Nurse Kettle often bestowed on a recalcitrant patient, and set to work, massive and purposeful before her easel.

It was at six-thirty that she established herself there, in the meadow on the left bank of the Chyne not far below Bottom Bridge.

At seven, Mr Danberry-Phinn, having assembled his paraphernalia for fishing, set off down Watt’s Hill. He did not continue to Bottom Bridge but turned left, and made for the upper reaches of the Chyne.

At seven, Mark Lacklander, having looked in on a patient in the village, set off on foot along Watt’s Lane. He carried his case of instruments, as he wished to lance the abscess of the gardener’s child at Hammer, and his racket and shoes as he proposed to play tennis with Rose Cartarette. He also hoped to have an extremely serious talk with her father.

At seven, Nurse Kettle, having delivered Lady Lacklander’s note at Hammer, turned in at Commander Syce’s drive and free-wheeled to his front door.

At seven, Sir George Lacklander, finding himself favourably situated in a sheltered position behind a group of trees, embraced Mrs Cartarette with determination, fervour and an ulterior motive.

It was at this hour that the hopes, passions and fears that had slowly mounted in intensity since the death of Sir Harold Lacklander began to gather an emotional momentum and slide towards each other like so many downhill streams, influenced in their courses by accidents and detail, but destined for a common and profound agitation.

At Hammer, Rose and her father sat in his study and gazed at each other in dismay.

‘When did Mark tell you?’ Colonel Cartarette asked.

‘On that same night … after you came in and – and found us. He went to Nunspardon and his father told him and then he came back here and told me. Of course,’ Rose said, looking at her father with eyes as blue as periwinkles behind their black lashes, ‘of course it wouldn’t have been any good for Mark to pretend nothing had happened. It’s quite extraordinary how each of us seems to know exactly what the other one’s thinking.’

The Colonel leant his head on his hand and half-smiled at this expression of what he regarded as one of the major fallacies of love. ‘My poor darling,’ he murmured.

‘Daddy, you do understand, don’t you, that theoretically Mark is absolutely on your side? Because – well, because the facts of any case always should be demonstrated. I mean that’s the scientific point of view.’

The Colonel’s half-smile twisted, but he said nothing.

‘And I agree too, absolutely,’ Rose said, ‘other things being equal.’

‘Ah!’ said the Colonel.

‘But they’re not, darling,’ Rose cried out, ‘they’re nothing like equal. In terms of human happiness, they’re all cock-eyed. Mark says his grandmother’s so desperately worried that with all this coming on top of Sir Harold’s death and everything she may crack up altogether.’

The Colonel’s study commanded a view of his own spinney and of that part of the valley that the spinney did not mask; Bottom Bridge and a small area below it on the right bank of the Chyne. Rose went to the window and looked down. ‘She’s down there somewhere,’ she said, ‘sketching in Bottom Meadow on the far side. She only sketches when she’s fussed.’

‘She’s sent me a chit. She wants me to go down and talk to her at eight o’clock when I suppose she’ll have done a sketch and hopes to feel less fussed. Damned inconvenient hour, but there you are. I’ll cut dinner, darling, and try the evening rise. Ask them to leave supper for me, will you, and apologize to Kitty?’

‘OK,’ Rose said with forced airiness. ‘And, of course,’ she added, ‘there’s the further difficulty of Mark’s papa.’

‘George.’

‘Yes, indeed, George. Well, we know he’s not exactly as bright as sixpence, don’t we? But, all the same, he is Mark’s papa and he’s cutting up most awfully rough and …’

Rose caught back her breath, her lips trembled and her eyes filled with tears. She launched herself into her father’s arms and burst into a flood of tears. ‘What’s the use,’ poor Rose sobbed, ‘of being a brave little woman? I’m not in the least brave. When Mark asked me to marry him I said I wouldn’t because of you and there I was: so miserable that when he asked me again I said I would. And now, when we’re so desperately in love, this happens. We have to do them this really frightful injury. Mark says: of course they must take it and it won’t make any difference to us, but of course it will. And how can I bear to be married to Mark and know how his people feel about you when next to Mark, my darling, darling Daddy, I love you best in the world? And his father’ – Rose wept – ‘his father says that if Mark marries me he’ll never forgive him and that they’ll do a sort of Montague and Capulet thing at us and, darling, it wouldn’t be much fun for Mark and me, would it, to be star-crossed lovers?’

‘My poor baby,’ murmured the agitated and sentimental Colonel; ‘my poor baby!’ And he administered a number of unintentionally hard thumps between his daughter’s shoulder blades.

‘It’s so many people’s happiness,’ Rose sobbed. ‘It’s all of us.’

Her father dabbed at her eyes with his own handkerchief, kissed her and put her aside. In his turn he went over to the window and looked down at Bottom Bridge, and up at the roofs of Nunspardon. There were no figures in view on the golf course.

‘You know, Rose,’ the Colonel said in a changed voice, ‘I don’t carry the whole responsibility. There is a final decision to be made and mine must rest upon it. Don’t hold out too many hopes, my darling, but I suppose there is a chance. I’ve time to get it over before I talk to Lady Lacklander and indeed I suppose I should. There’s nothing to be gained by any further delay. I’ll go now.’

He went to his desk, unlocked a drawer and took out an envelope.

Rose said: ‘Does Kitty?’

‘Oh, yes,’ the Colonel said. ‘She knows.’

‘Did you tell her, Daddy?’

The Colonel had already gone to the door. Without turning his head and with an air too casual to be convincing he said: ‘Oh, no. No. She arranged to play a round of golf with George and I imagine he elected to tell her. He’s a fearful old gas-bag is George.’

‘She’s playing now, isn’t she?’

‘Is she? Yes,’ said the Colonel; ‘I believe she is. He came to fetch her, I think. It’s good for her to get out.’

‘Yes, rather,’ Rose agreed.

Her father went out to call on Mr Octavius Danberry-Phinn. He took his fishing gear with him as he intended to go straight on to his meeting with Lady Lacklander and to ease his troubled mind afterwards with the evening rise. He also took his spaniel Skip who was trained to good behaviour when he accompanied his master to the trout stream.

V

Lady Lacklander consulted the diamond-encrusted watch which was pinned to her tremendous bosom and discovered that it was now seven o’clock. She had been painting for half an hour and an all-too-familiar phenomenon had emerged from her efforts.

‘It’s a curious thing,’ she meditated, ‘that a woman of my character and determination should produce such a puny affair. However, it’s got me in better trim for Maurice Cartarette and that’s a damn’ good thing. An hour to go if he’s punctual and he’s sure to be that.’

She tilted her sketch and ran a faint green wash over the foreground. When it was partly dry she rose from her stool, tramped some distance away to the crest of a hillock, seated herself on her shooting-stick and contemplated her work through a lorgnette tricked out with diamonds. The shooting-stick sank beneath her in the soft meadowland so that the disc which was designed to check its descent was itself imbedded to the depth of several inches. When Lady Lacklander returned to her easel she merely abandoned her shooting-stick which remained in a vertical position and from a distance looked a little like a giant fungoid growth. Sticking up above intervening hillocks and rushes it was observed over the top of his glasses by the long-sighted Mr Phinn when, accompanied by Thomasina Twitchett, he came nearer to Bottom Bridge. Keeping on the right bank, he began to cast his fly in a somewhat mannered but adroit fashion over the waters most often frequented by the Old ’Un. Lady Lacklander, whose ears were as sharp as his, heard the whirr of his reel and, remaining invisible, was perfectly able to deduce the identity and movements of the angler. At the same time, far above them on Watt’s Hill, Colonel Cartarette, finding nobody but seven cats at home at Jacob’s Cottage, walked round the house and looking down into the little valley, at once spotted both Lady Lacklander and Mr Phinn, like figures in Nurse Kettle’s imaginary map, the one squatting on her camp stool, the other in slow motion near Bottom Bridge.

‘I’ve time to speak to him before I see her,’ thought the Colonel. ‘But I’ll leave it here in case we don’t meet.’ He posted his long envelope in Mr Phinn’s front door and then greatly troubled in spirit he made for the River Path and went down into the valley, the old spaniel, Skip, walking at his heels.

Nurse Kettle, looking through the drawing-room window at Uplands, caught sight of the Colonel before he disappeared beyond Commander Syce’s spinney. She administered a final tattoo with the edges of her muscular hands on Commander Syce’s lumbar muscles, and said: ‘There goes the Colonel for the evening rise. You wouldn’t have stood that amount of punishment two days ago, would you?’

‘No,’ a submerged voice said, ‘I suppose not.’

‘Well! So that’s all I get for my trouble.’

‘No, no! Look here, look here!’ he gabbled, twisting his head in an attempt to see her. ‘Good heavens! What are you saying?’

‘All right. I know. I was only pulling your leg. There!’ she said. ‘That’s all for today and I fancy it won’t be long now before I wash my hands of you altogether.’

‘Of course I can’t expect to impose on your kindness any longer.’

Nurse Kettle was clearing up. She appeared not to hear this remark and presently bustled away to wash her hands. When she returned Syce was sitting on the edge of his improvised bed. He wore slacks, a shirt, a scarf and a dressing-gown.

‘Jolly D.,’ said Nurse Kettle. ‘Done it all yourself.’

‘I hope you will give me the pleasure of joining me for a drink before you go.’

‘On duty?’

‘Isn’t it off duty, now?’

‘Well,’ said Nurse Kettle, ‘I’ll have a drink with you but I hope it won’t mean that when I’ve gone on me way rejoicing you’re going to have half a dozen more with yourself.’

Commander Syce turned red and muttered something about a fellah having nothing better to do.

‘Get along,’ said Nurse Kettle, ‘find something better. The idea!’

They had their drinks, looking at each other with an air of comradeship. Commander Syce, using a walking-stick and holding himself at an unusual angle, got out an album of photographs taken when he was on the active list in the navy. Nurse Kettle adored photographs and was genuinely interested in a long sequence of naval vessels, odd groups of officers and views of seaports. Presently she turned a page and discovered quite a dashing watercolour of a corvette and then an illustrated menu with lively little caricatures in the margin. These she greatly admired and observing a terrified and defiant expression on the face of her host, ejaculated: ‘You never did these yourself! You did! Well, aren’t you the clever one!’

Without answering he produced a small portfolio which he silently thrust at her. It contained many more sketches. Although Nurse Kettle knew nothing about pictures, she did, she maintained, know what she liked. And she liked these very much indeed. They were direct statements of facts and she awarded them direct statements of approval and was about to shut the portfolio when a sketch that had faced the wrong way round caught her attention. She turned it over. It was of a woman lying on a chaise-longue smoking a cigarette in a jade holder. A bougainvillaea flowered in the background.

‘Why,’ Nurse Kettle ejaculated. ‘Why, that’s Mrs Cartarette!’

If Syce had made some kind of movement to snatch the sketch from her he checked himself before it was completed. He said very rapidly: ‘Party. Met her Far East. Shore leave. Forgotten all about it.’

‘That would be before they were married, wouldn’t it?’ Nurse Kettle remarked with perfect simplicity. She shut the portfolio, said: ‘You know, I believe you could make my picture-map of Swevenings.’ And told him of her great desire for one. When she got up and collected her belongings he, too, rose, but with an ejaculation of distress.

‘I see I haven’t made a job of you yet,’ she remarked. ‘Same time tomorrow suit you?’

‘Admirably,’ he said. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ He gave her one of his rare painful smiles and watched her as she walked down the path towards his spinney. It was now a quarter to nine.

VI

Nurse Kettle had left her bicycle in the village where she was spending the evening with the Women’s Institute. She therefore took the River Path. Dusk had fallen over the valley of the Chyne and as she descended into it her own footfall sounded unnaturally loud on the firm turf. Thump, thump, thump she went, down the hillside. Once, she stopped dead, tilted her head and listened. From behind her at Uplands, came the not-unfamiliar sound of a twang followed by a sharp penetrating blow. She smiled to herself and walked on. Only desultory rural sounds disturbed the quiet of nightfall. She could actually hear the cool voice of the stream.

She did not cross Bottom Bridge but followed a rough path along the right bank of the Chyne, past a group of alders and another of willows. This second group, extending in a sickle-shaped mass from the water’s edge into Bottom Meadow rose up vapourishly in the dusk. She could smell willow-leaves and wet soil. As sometimes happens when we are solitary, she had the sensation of being observed but she was not a fanciful woman and soon dismissed this feeling.

‘It’s turned much cooler,’ she thought.

A cry of mourning, intolerably loud, rose from beyond the willows and hung on the night air. A thrush whirred out of the thicket close to her face and the cry broke and wavered again. It was the howl of a dog.

She pushed through the thicket into an opening by the river and found the body of Colonel Cartarette with his spaniel Skip beside it, mourning him.

CHAPTER 4

Bottom Meadow

Nurse Kettle was acquainted with death. She did not need Skip’s lament to tell her that the curled figure resting its head on a turf of river grass was dead. She knelt beside it and pushed her hand under the tweed jacket and silk shirt. ‘Cooling,’ she thought. A tweed hat with fisherman’s flies in the band lay over the face. Someone, she thought, might almost have dropped it there. She lifted it and remained quite still with it suspended in her hand. The Colonel’s temple had been broken as if his head had come under a waxworker’s hammer. The spaniel threw back his head and howled again.

‘Oh, do be quiet!’ Nurse Kettle ejaculated. She replaced the hat and stood up, knocking her head against a branch. The birds that spent the night in the willows stirred again and some of them flew out with a sharp whirring sound. The Chyne gurgled and plopped and somewhere up in Nunspardon woods an owl hooted. ‘He has been murdered,’ thought Nurse Kettle.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.