Lord Mullion's Secret (3 page)

It was of his family – but of his family as at present constituted – that Lord Mullion now began to speak.

‘There are a great many Wyndowes around,' he said, ‘and most of them in what you might call obscure circumstances. Not in indigence or gaol or anything embarrassing of that kind. But in the colonies or in business: that sort of thing.' Lord Mullion paused on this; it was frequently apparent that he enjoyed indulging in mild humour. ‘You don't often find them in the news. But there they are, beavering away at this and that with the greatest devotion. A lot of them turn up on us from time to time, and it's not a thing to take exception to. The head of a family can't ignore an occasional nod from a kinsman, or even deny him a square meal when it appears to be called for. Still, there are undeniably the devil of a lot of Wyndowes. A kind of Crystal Palace of them, in fact.' This was clearly a familiar witticism. ‘Fortunately Mary is uncommonly good at keeping tabs on them. She has one of those little card-index things, and can do you the gen on anybody who calls cousins in two ticks.'

‘That must be very useful.' Honeybath felt he had been innocently required to admire this blending of a modish with an archaic vocabulary. ‘But what about your immediate household, Henry?'

‘Ah, that's not complicated at all, I'm glad to say. Everybody quite tolerably pleased with everybody else, for one thing – which is not a particularly fashionable state of affairs in families nowadays, I'm told. Applies even to Camilla.'

‘Camilla?'

‘Great-aunt Camilla, you know. At least that's what we call her, although of course she can't be the great-aunt of everybody around the place. She's the niece of my Wyndowe grandfather – so I have to regard her as a close relation, and there she is. At Mullion, I mean – and has been for a long time. Never married, and that's no doubt what made her a bit difficult in middle life. But since going out of her mind she's been no trouble in the world. Or only now and then.' Lord Mullion accepted a second glass of madeira. ‘There's a streak of oddity in us that shows up every now and then. Not one of those predictable things that regularly skips a generation or a couple of generations, like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and so forth. Whether it's advantageous to have that sort of advance notice of such troubles it's hard to say. My own children are sane enough, and commonly thought to take after their mother. I think you'll like them.'

‘I'm sure I shall. Are they mostly at home still?'

‘The girls seem content to spend most of their holidays with us – and Cyprian most of his vacations, for that matter. Cyprian's a Kingsman now, I'm glad to say, and enjoying Cambridge very much. Doing very well, too, in some boat or other. He went in for wet bobbing at the start, of course. Wasn't our line – eh, Charles?'

‘No more it was.'

‘I could never understand the desire to be a galley-slave. Much better to do something you can let up on when you want to.' Lord Mullion appeared to seek for an exemplification. ‘Painting, for instance. Eh, Charles?'

‘I've known painting to turn a little compulsive at times. And some of its swells are on record as having been quite unable to stop.'

‘Amateurs, too, come to think of it.' Lord Mullion, who seemed to have time on his hands, had settled back contentedly in a shabby but commodious armchair. It struck Honeybath that he was, in fact, the very type of the perfectly contented man: one whose demands upon life had been modest and had seldom failed of fulfilment. ‘You'll remember, Charles, that when we were small boys watercolour sketching still headed embroidering, and thumping the piano and the like, with the elderly idle women. I've known country houses plastered with the labours of female relatives from floor to ceiling. And Camilla had the mania in her time. We have stacks of her stuff stowed away at Mullion, and a few specimens tactfully on view as well. They may interest you.'

Honeybath, who (mistakenly, as it was to turn out) judged this improbable, asked a few questions about the interests and pursuits of Lady Mullion and her children. He heard without surprise that Lady Mullion was a devoted gardener. So was her elder daughter, Patty. Patty, indeed, was rapidly overtaking her mother in command of the more esoteric aspects of this appropriate pursuit. Boosie, the younger girl, had chosen on the other hand to take a precocious interest in politics, a sphere of activity to which singularly few Wyndowes had been notably drawn for some centuries. Boosie (it was a traditional family name, Lord Mullion explained) had successfully politicized the boarding-school of which she was now head girl, with the result that its ponies and lacrosse-sticks were at a discount, and ideological confrontations all the go. Of Cyprian, the future earl, it couldn't be said that he would ever be likely thus to move men. When he had done with all that strenuous ploughing up and down the Cam he would undoubtedly have to be ‘got into something'. His father, it was true, had never very strikingly got out of Mullion Castle. But times were changing, and Cyprian would have to be found what Lord Mullion frankly expressed as ‘a niche with a good screw to it'. Cyprian – Lord Mullion reported with satisfaction – said that he was all for a good screw.

‘And that's the lot,' Lord Mullion said. ‘Except, of course, that there are a few other Wyndowes within a bow-shot or two. My brother Sylvanus, for example. Sylvanus has the dower house – naturally on the understanding that he clears out if and when Mary lines up for it. Sylvanus is much younger than I am, but at a bit of a loose end. They kicked him out of the army.'

‘I'm sorry to hear it.' Honeybath felt that this ought to be said soberly.

‘No, no – nothing of that kind.' Lord Mullion was amused. ‘It was simply that Sylvanus isn't at all bright, and so they plucked him. He was quite frank about it. Nowadays the army is exams all the way up, and if you fail them they give you a nod and a wink, and that's that. Changed times again. It didn't help the poor devil a bit that he was Major the Honourable Sylvanus Wyndowe. Rather the opposite. Thought to be cumbrous, perhaps. However, he's fortunately given to what you might call rural pursuits. Proper in a Sylvanus, eh? Another old family name, of course. Camilla's father, another second son, was a Sylvanus. And so was mine.'

‘Your father was a second son?' It didn't occur to Honeybath to dissimulate the fact that he was not well informed about Lord Mullion's ancestry.

‘Good Lord, yes. My uncle Rupert would have succeeded, you know. But he died quite young and unmarried, so it was my father who came in. That's why I was Lord Wyndowe as a kid.'

‘Which is what Cyprian is now.'

‘Yes. Rather dull, he thinks it. But there isn't a handy second title around. Viscount Tom-noddy, or whatever. Rum things, titles of honour, and tiresome in shops. When I say “Lord Mullion” to a fellow I'm giving an order to he suspects me of being a con man at once.'

On this improbable note Lord Mullion got to his feet and took his leave, remarking that he would write about the details of ‘their little plan' in a few days' time. It seemed probable to Honeybath that Henry's wife as yet knew nothing about it. Perhaps Henry was plotting a birthday present, and perhaps Lady Mullion wouldn't be too keen on the boring business of sitting for her portrait. But her husband gave no hint of this, and at the door of the studio he did get one detail clear.

‘I'm told,' he said briskly, ‘that two thousand guineas is the going rate.'

‘Yes, it is.'

‘Capital, Charles, my dear fellow.' Lord Mullion, already half in the open air, paused and chuckled cheerfully. ‘Gad!' he said. ‘It must be marvellous to coin money at that rate. Particularly, mark you, when richly deserved. Do you know? I can't be said ever to have earned a penny in my life – or not since you used to tip me half-a-crown for extra chores, eh? We'll look forward tremendously to your coming down.' And with this Lord Mullion waved his hat and walked away.

Left to himself, Charles Honeybath consulted his desk diary. It showed a good many portrait commissions lined up, and several of them would involve him with a man or woman who had booked his services – for that was what it came to – virtually on a postcard or over the telephone, and this after no more than a casual reconnaissance in a club or over a luncheon table.

It was like whoredom, he told himself, this endless intimate clinching with total strangers. Or at least it was like this when one was feeling bad. When one was feeling good it was like something quite as exhausting and at the same time more difficult to define. In essence, perhaps, having an easel between you and a human being was no different from having it between you and a landscape. It was the same exploring and unveiling job. But at least a landscape didn't talk, or take irrational likings or dislikings to you. How pleasant to have been Corot, or one of those innumerable landscapists of the past who had their compositions unobtrusively peopled by figure-painters fetched in for the job.

This was a well-trodden little path in Honeybath's thought processes, and it didn't really mean much. He was in fact devoted to the region into which his bent and talents had taken him. And he found himself quite looking forward to the assignment which young Henry Wyndowe (now not so young Lord Mullion) was fixing up.

 

 

Lady Patience Wyndowe – ‘Patty' in the family – nowadays frequently found herself wondering how Swithin Gore had come by his not very common Christian name. His father, she had gathered, had been Ammon Gore. ‘Ammon', although not very common either, had apparently at one time enjoyed a certain rustic currency, whereas the only other Swithin she had ever come across was in a novel. The fictitious Swithin hadn't been a gardener's boy (which was the real Swithin's condition) but he had belonged roughly to that class of society – although there had been, at the same time, some gentle component to him the explanation of which now escaped Patty's memory. Sometimes it was possible to feel that a similar suggestion attached to Swithin Gore. The suggestion chiefly connected up with the way he looked at her when receiving this or that horticultural instruction. Swithin (who wasn't really a boy, and must indeed be within a year or two of her own age) owned a very direct glance. It wasn't impudent, or in any manner bold in the slightest degree. But it
was
direct, and at the same time distinguishably wondering. Wondering rather than admiring – and this had the happy effect of rendering it wholly unembarrassing. Patty felt that she was getting to know Swithin, with whom she had much to do, quite well. At least enough to realize, for instance, that he was an intelligent young man. It wasn't, however, well enough to ask him about his name. Or at least so Patty thought until she suddenly found that she was doing so.

‘Swithin,' she said, ‘what made them call you Swithin?'

Swithin straightened up – rather fast – from the flower bed over which he had been bending. Physically, Swithin was undeniably attractive. He was this all over. Even in the posture he had just abandoned, and when thus viewed from behind, this held of him – although its normal association for Patty would have been with vulgar postcards glimpsed at the seaside. But now Swithin was facing her, and he looked very well indeed.

‘The 15th of July,' Swithin said, a shade shortly. ‘My birthday.' And he added, after the slightest pause, ‘M'lady.'

‘Yes, of course. How stupid of me.' Patty wasn't going to show that she had been justly snubbed. And it
had
been stupid of her. Because of what it tells of the coming weather, St Swithin's Day is a landmark in the English rural mind, and it had been natural and even edifying for Ammon Gore to call his infant after the saint. It had been like naming as Noel a boy born at Christmas. And now, having been a little venturesome with her assistant, Patty went further. ‘So how old are you now, Swithin?'

‘Twenty. Did you say six inches?' This question, briskly uttered, referred to the dibbling operation in progress at the moment.

‘Yes, I think so. And not too deep. We're not in a turnip field.'

‘It would be a queer way to behave with turnips,' Swithin said matter-of-factly, and bent again to his task. He performed it from the waist and without bending his knees. This, muscularly, was the economical and professional thing. And, again, it was attractive in itself. ‘How old are
you
?' Swithin asked, his nose close to the ground.

The comeback was unexpected, and Patty found it disconcerting as well. Or rather she found disconcerting the fact that her spontaneous reaction to Swithin's echoing her own question had been, if ever so faintly, disapproving. If she asked a young man his age why on earth shouldn't he ask her hers? Her father, she knew, would judge the garden boy's reciprocal curiosity to be entirely civilized and in order. Indeed, Swithin's tossing the ball briskly back had been much nicer in him than that snubby ‘M'lady' he had started off with.

‘Twenty-one,' she said, suddenly pleased and laughing. ‘So we're both getting on. Do you like it here, Swithin?'

‘I've been here always, haven't I?' Erect again, Swithin Gore made this reply with what appeared to be no enigmatical intention. But was that very straight glance faintly mocking as well? Lady Patience Wyndowe found herself, for reasons that were obscure to her, rather hoping that it was.

‘Yes, I suppose you have,' she said. ‘And I have too – except for going away to school. I didn't much care for that.'

‘But Lady Lucy does.' Lady Lucy was Patty's younger sister Boosie. ‘She has told me about some high old times.'

‘Has she, now?' Patty was astonished by this information – and abruptly jealous of Boosie, whom she wouldn't have supposed ever to have held any conversation with Swithin at all. Perhaps Boosie was planning to convert Swithin to Euro-communism, or whatever it was that she at present believed in. ‘My sister bosses her school, Swithin, and that's why she enjoys it. Did you boss yours?'