Honeybath's Haven (10 page)

 

 

 

It was because the idea of exploration was in his head that Honeybath decided to begin by having another go at that maze. He still remembered his former behaviour in it as slightly ludicrous. He remembered, too, assuring the gardener who had then surprised him that he might penetrate to some sort of aviary at the centre of the thing upon a later occasion. Parakeets had been mentioned. He'd go and take a look at the birds.

It wasn't in the least difficult. The birds helped. On his previous visit they must have been asleep; now they screeched and squawked in a manner that provided bearings of a sort. But the noise wasn't otherwise attractive, so that Honeybath thought he'd have done better to make straight for the park, above which larks were singing in an appropriate way. But now here he was at the centre of the labyrinth. He glimpsed the parakeets and then ceased to notice them. For the place had another visitor. It was the man in the Panama hat.

‘Good morning,' Honeybath said – being determined to be, as it were, quick on the draw this time. But the Panama man displayed an identical determination, and more rapidly still. In his case, moreover, there was nothing merely metaphorical about it. His right hand had disappeared under his left armpit in a manner that Honeybath (who had a weakness for gangster films) could interpret in only one way. But this untoward behaviour instantly cancelled itself, and what the Panama man actually produced was an innocuous silk handkerchief. With this he dabbed in a ritual manner at his brow.

‘Warm day,' he said. ‘How do you do? My name is Brown.' He was keeping a careful eye on Honeybath's hands. ‘Brown,' he repeated a little more loudly – much as if prompted to refute a false persuasion on Honeybath's part that his name was in fact Green or Gray. ‘Seen you here before, I think?' Mr Brown said. ‘Just calling in? No more than that?'

‘Precisely so. My name is Honeybath, and I am merely visiting afriend.' Honeybath glanced at the aviary, which at least suggested a conversational resource. ‘Are you fond of birds?' he asked.

‘Never see one now.' Mr Brown spoke with sudden gloom. ‘Or not under sixty or thereabout.'

‘Ah, is that so?' For a moment Honeybath was a little at sea, and he even reflected that members of the parrot family are notably long-lived. When the force of Mr Brown's colloquialism came home to him, however, he recalled the gardener's informing him that the man with the Panama hat was one of the shy ones. Presumably Brown had been explaining that this disability lay particularly heavily upon him in regard to young female persons. But since this appeared not a suitable subject for discussion with an acquaintance of only a couple of minutes' standing Honeybath became more explicit. ‘You must have got to know those parakeets quite well,” he said. ‘If, as I imagine, this is a favourite haunt of yours.'

‘Quite right,' Mr Brown said emphatically. ‘Peaceful creatures, aren't they? Birds of a feather, you might say. And yet never so much as a peck or a scratch between them.'

‘Is that so?' It might have been said that Honeybath hadn't quite followed that argument here. ‘They look well cared for and comfortable,' he offered vaguely.

‘Just that.' Mr Brown was emphatic once more. ‘Just like they'd been nicked, in a manner of speaking. Not that all them that are inside are that. Comfortable, perhaps – although the food is cruelly uninteresting at times. But no security that would set a man's mind at rest. Believe you me, anything can happen at any time, once a man's inside. You needn't even have grassed – or nothing to speak of.'

‘Most interesting.' Honeybath, a man of acute perception, realized that Mr Brown must be commenting on conditions obtaining in Her Majesty's prisons. It was again a peculiar topic of conversation, and the more so because of a certain air with which Mr Brown delivered himself of it. He spoke with entire ease, and as one perfectly conversant with the canons observed in what might be called upper-class chitchat. But there was undeniably something socially anomalous in Mr Brown. Was he one who had risen from below the middle station of life to sudden affluence, perhaps by winning an enormous ‘dividend' on the pools? Had he done this, opted for the genteel idleness of Hanwell Court, and taken some random and uncertain steps (such as buying a supply of Panama hats) in living up to his new station? But if this was so, why was he drawn to topics unlikely to be of much concern to the law-abiding sections of society? And why was his idiom almost obtrusively that of the imperfectly educated? He undoubtedly counted as an inmate, since Honeybath had once or twice glimpsed him in the interior of the house when making previous visits to Lightfoot. Was it possible – this really brilliant idea came to Honeybath like a flash – that Brown was another sufferer from Flannel Foot disease, a perfectly respectable citizen gaining some perverse satisfaction from hinting a background in low life and criminal practice? Was it even conceivable that Edwin had put him up to it, had passed on the Flannel Foot game to a new player? This was an extravagant notion, and Honeybath dismissed it. But he did wonder whether this new acquaintance would have anything to say about Edwin. Had he been aware, for instance, of the storm in a teacup over Lady Munden?

‘I suppose,' he asked, ‘you know my friend Lightfoot, whom I've come to visit? He has been here for a couple of years now. And so, I believe, have you.'

‘Oh, yes – I know
him
.' Brown had produced a swiftly wary glance – rather in Edwin's manner, Honeybath reflected, but considerably more intense. ‘One of the nutters, some of them take him for. But you can never tell, you know. I've read a story somewhere of a man who faked it he was loco, just to seem harmless and innocent-like when he had it in for another guy.'

‘I believe it to be an archetypal theme.' Seeing that this learned comment made little impression on Mr Brown, Honeybath added, ‘But you wouldn't think of my friend Lightfoot as being like that? He couldn't entertain malign designs against you.'

‘You can't ever be sure, if you ask me. Not of anybody.'

This was a distressing remark. It suggested – as seemed only too probable – that mildly paranoid feelings blew rather freely around Hanwell Court.

‘Oh, come, Mr Brown!' Honeybath essayed a robust note. ‘You've known me for about ten minutes. But you'd trust me with your wallet, wouldn't you, with no misgiving at all? One knows at once these simple things about a man.'

‘I don't say you're wrong there, Mr Honeybath. Not in certain cases that is. Sometimes I can take a good look at a man – keeping my distance, mark you, and my head low – and I can see he's on the square.'

‘Perhaps you'll put me in that category sufficiently to join me in my short walk?' Honeybath asked this on an odd impulse; it was as if he felt that with Brown he was on the tip of the tail of something he wanted to get hold of. It was a wholly irrational feeling. ‘Just up to that statue, perhaps, at the head of the drive.'

‘I'll be very happy, I'm sure.' Brown said this with a considerable air of magnanimity. ‘And one gets out of this maze in no time, you know. It's easier to get out than to get in. Which isn't the case with you know where.'

As this could only be a further reference to incarceration under penal conditions, Honeybath was constrained to conclude that Mr Brown was the victim of something like an
idée fixe
. The condition, he believed, could be an extremely painful one – almost as bad as an agonizing phobia. Brown didn't, indeed, have the air of a man positively haunted, but this was perhaps due to the ministrations of Dr Michaelis – whose main function, Honeybath had by now come to understand, was to assist those of the inmates who had come to Hanwell under the quota system. Yet this explanation didn't quite account for Brown, and particularly for his perplexingly plebeian facet. And now Honeybath had another brilliant idea. (He was surprisingly prolific in these.) Brown belonged to that rapidly increasing number of persons who have been highly successful financiers in their time but who, having been a shade neglectful of certain niceties of the law, have been obliged to spend a considerable term of years (as Brown would express it) ‘inside'. Much in the manners, and even mode of speech, of those with whom they had thus for long associated would almost unavoidably rub off on them. Brown, in fact, was what was vulgarly termed an old lag. Before being ‘nicked' he had providently salted away a competence adequate to maintain him in his present honourable retirement.

‘This way out,' Brown was saying. ‘The middle of the maze isn't at the middle at all – twig? It's right at one side. Half-a-dozen steps this way, and we're out in the garden again.'

This proved to be so, and Honeybath and his new companion set out on their short walk. Honeybath, although that latent curiosity in him had been stirred again, wasn't quite easy in his mind. It was really time that he was returning to the house and discovering how Prout was getting on with Edwin. There was also the difficulty of finding a fresh topic of conversation – and one that might at least temporarily relieve Brown from the oppressive compulsion under which he seemed to labour. Brown's fellow residents were a possible resource here. The golf-ball man wouldn't do, since Honeybath had never got round to learning his name. Mr Gaunt of the
misérecordes
and
mains gauches
might serve, but had better be ruled out as himself somewhat morbidly disposed. And Lady Munden belonged to that category of females over sixty which had prompted Brown to his discontented remark on the absence of birds.

‘Do you know Colonel Dacre?' Honeybath asked.

‘Ah, a useful chap, Dacre.' Brown had paused in his stride. ‘Dacre could get a man with a mere revolver at thirty yards. Which takes that amount of doing, you'd be surprised. As for that rifle of his – why, he could make it lethal at a quarter of a mile.'

‘Could he, indeed?' Having given this appreciative reply, Honeybath felt prompted to ask, ‘Is that how he got Admiral Emery?' But this might sound unsuitably frivolous. ‘I suppose,' he offered instead, ‘it
could
be useful. Under wartime conditions, that is.'

‘Or take a gang.' Mr Brown was walking on. ‘You know how it is nowadays. The swamping trick. Learnt from the fuzz themselves, that is. You turn up – at a bank, say – ten or a dozen strong. Suppose they came at us like that. Not in spies but in a bloody battalion. Why, Dacre could pick off half of them before you said six. And a splendid sight it would be.'

Brown had offered this last comment with a sudden malignant glee that Honeybath judged alarming. They were now approaching the perimeter of the park. The park was totally deserted, and so was a stretch of high road immediately beyond. Honeybath found himself wondering whether it had perhaps been just here that Admiral Emery had been innocently wandering when picked off by the colonel – absorbed, with an equal innocence as it might have been, in the charms of a new telescopic sight. Honeybath noticed that Brown's wariness had now increased. He was scanning the road, and the drive leading from it, as if himself under the influence of some fantasy equally absurd.

‘And here we are,' Brown said presently. They had come to a halt before
Poseidon urging the Sea-Monster to attack Laomedon
. ‘Looks like he was going to clobber somebody, doesn't he? Something nasty gone missing from that right hand, if you ask me. It ought to be restored, it should. I often come and look at him. A wonderful thing, art is. It can say something to a man. Some heathen, I take him to be.'

‘The sea-god Neptune,' Honeybath said instructively. ‘Homer calls him the Earthshaker.'

‘Is that so?' Brown's tone was becomingly respectful. ‘Then those would be his sharks, I suppose. I've always supposed they were dogs. Heathen dogs, of course, since dogs don't come like that nowadays. Man-eating sharks, they'll be. And he'd feed you to them, once he'd taken care of you.'

‘I must be getting back to the house,' Honeybath said. He spoke a little abruptly, having decided that Brown's imagination was agreeable in short spells only.

‘Then I'll leave you to it.' Surprisingly, and perhaps recalling the conventions of those distant days before the shades of the prison house had closed on him, Brown formally doffed his Panama hat. ‘I'll just hang around for a bit. I like it here.'

 

 

 

The big room that had become Edwin Lightfoot's studio at Hanwell was untenanted. Perhaps Edwin and Prout had themselves gone for a stroll. Honeybath surveyed the place at leisure, and found the general effect reassuring. Whatever labour force was here the equivalent of Mrs Plover must insist on regularly doing its stuff. Edwin had accumulated quite a number of pleasing possessions during the past two years, and a great deal of junk as well. But everything was scrupulously clean, and of disorder there was no more than tends to declare itself in the surroundings of any vigorously creative person. And it looked as if Edwin was in a phase of being such a person. He had a big landscape composition on hand. The pigments were still wet on it, and on a table beside the easel there was a litter of sketches and sketch-books. Unfortunately – for the effort was quite far advanced – Honeybath could see at a glance that Edwin was still painting very badly. It was even possible to infer from the canvas what his current behaviour would be like. ‘Jumpy' would be the word for it. Edwin inhabited an agitated universe. So, finally, had Van Gogh. But Edwin's vision of all things turned to flame and light (if he had it) went badly wrong as it was handed on. There were also a few more of the odd portrait affairs around. It was almost – Honeybath reflected – as if these limited and unimportant felicities were by another chap. Honeybath had a dim sense that Edwin might be splitting up.