The Old English Peep Show (2 page)

There was no police car, only a ridiculous museum piece of an open tourer with a graying blonde at the wheel. Pibble had taken a prima-donna-ish dislike to the stationmaster and was unwilling to return and ask him for advice, so he walked across toward this chariot to ask the woman the way to Herryngs, but before he realized they were in conversational earshot, she spoke; she did not need to raise her voice, for she commanded that curious, carrying, upper-class timbre which Yeats once called “hound voice”—the accent of people used to communing with dogs.

“Superintendent Pibble?”

“Yes. Are you from Herryngs?”

“They asked me to come and fetch you. My name's Anthea Singleton. Jump up. I'm sorry to come in this bloody old thing, but the General wants the Jag to go to Chichester and all the Land-Rovers are busy.”

“I think it's beautiful,” said Pibble. “What is it?”

“A 1914 Prince Henry Vauxhall. I think it's beautiful, too, actually. I'm glad you like it. Would you prefer to drive?”

“No, thank you,” said Pibble, hoping the emphasis was not too noticeable.
Mrs.
Singleton, he remembered from the press cuttings, only daughter of Sir Ralph Clavering, married to one Harvey Singleton, who had had something to do with the Raid but was otherwise a gentleman of no antecedents that the gossip columnists had thought worth recording, and who was responsible for the growth of Herryngs into a dollar-spinning tourist trap.

Mrs. Singleton had large powder-blue eyes above Slavonic cheekbones. Her complexion had begun to rumple a little, the fine skin crinkling into innumerable tiny roughnesses like a once-used tissue, but that only increased her natural sexiness; a plum or pear tree, in the few years before it dies, fruits with overgenerous foison, and in the same way the appeal of certain women increases in the last few seasons before they pupate into old ladies.

Probably quite unconscious, thought Pibble. She may even be bored with the whole thing, but ten to one she has the men buzzing round her over the after-church Sunday sherry.

She wore a short-sleeved yellow cotton knit shirt and a tweedy skirt, and she drove beautifully, responding to the needs of the huge, slow-rotating engine with the same half-animal sympathy that enables a good show-jumper to respond to and get the best out of his horse. They sat several feet up, well above the tops of the hedgerows, and watched the tinted trees—elms and chestnuts and limes, their undersides shaved horizontal by browsing cows—amble backward.

“The General is always at me to put a modern engine into her,” said Mrs. Singleton. “Automatic transmission and all. But luckily Harvey won't allow it because she's an appreciating asset as she is. A bookkeeping husband can sometimes be useful, though you wouldn't think it.”

She laughed—a soft, syrupy chuckle.

“I don't know who I'll find to look after her now Deakin is dead,” she went on. “There are plenty of other mechanics about, running Old England, but they'd all want to tamper with her; they can't tell the phony from the real, I suppose.”

“Do you really call it Old England?” asked Pibble. “Among yourselves, I mean? I'd have thought you had some—some, well, nickname for it?”

She laughed again. (It really was a most engaging noise, mellow and autumnal, quite different from the commanding bark of her speaking voice.)

“D'you find it embarrassing?” she said. “It isn't really. The General calls it ‘our bloody peep show,' but Harvey won't let anyone else call it anything except Old England—you soon get used to it. He got the idea from Disneyland—in California, you know—which is a sort of fairground on the grandest scale imaginable; you can ride in a stagecoach or go on a trip up the Amazon. Harvey's got a story about Disney giving orders for a three-hundred-foot model of Mont Blanc to be built from photographs, and then going off on a tour round Europe with his family and actually seeing Mont Blanc, so that when he got back and saw the Disneyland one he said ‘Nothing like it—scrap it and start again.' Harvey says you've got to take it as seriously as that or the customers will sense that you're despising them, and that's as bad as swindling them. I married a very upright man, I now realize.”

She chuckled, as though recalling some enjoyable error.

“Is Deakin the man who is thought to have killed himself?” said Pibble.

“Yes. He was Uncle Dick's coxswain for years and years, and came to Herryngs when Uncle Dick retired. You aren't really supposed to take your coxswain round from job to job, I think, but they don't pay much attention to that kind of rule—Uncle Dick and the General, I mean. It gives me the willies, what they expect to get away with—like sending for you, for instance.”

“Why did they?” said Pibble. “The local police would be just as good at a thing like this. Better, if anything.”

“That's what Harvey said, but they insisted that they had to go straight to the top, bonk, and then there wouldn't be any silly gossip about the bigwigs pulling a fast one over the locals. We have to be bloody careful, you know. Journalists are bastards, and the little provincial ones are the worst—they'd sell their souls for six lines in Charles Greville. It's a funny thing, being a Clavering, you know: in theory I could wangle almost anything I wanted—free flights to Bermuda, hols on Onassis's yacht, complimentary models of new cars—but you keep remembering that you've only got to step out of line somewhere and your name will be plastered across every headline in the country. So you don't do either—step out of line or take the giveaways. Harvey says it soon gets about that you can be bought once you've allowed yourself to be.

“Anyway Deakin was a surly little gnome who loved us. What's more, I think he'd still have loved us if we hadn't been Claverings and St. Quentin had been canceled before a ship sailed. It was just like him, how tidily he hanged himself. Harvey heard the thump and went up and found him and tried to give him the kiss of life, but it wasn't any good.”

The road ran beside a walled beechwood and took a right-angled bend; the gates of Herryngs lay in the crook of the wood thus formed, with a half moon of gravel before them. They were shut—wrought iron twenty feet high, with the spotted lion of Clavering rampant at the top of either gatepost. Mrs. Singleton pooped her bulb horn, and at once a sweet old biddy in a mob-cap and sprigged apron came out to open the gates, followed by a gangling colt of a girl similarly attired. The ankle-length skirt looked charming on the old woman but very rum indeed on the girl.

“I recognized your horn, Miss Anty,” said the old woman as she undid the catch, “so I thought you wouldn't mind Claire coming out to practice.”

“Quite right, Mrs. Chuck. Let's see what you make of it, Claire. At any rate it's a change from Bunsen burners.”

The girl smiled sulkily and hauled her gate open. As the Prince Henry rolled between them, the women curtsied, the old one with an easy and becoming flourish, the younger rebelliously, like a boy who has to act the heroine in the school play. Mrs. Singleton stopped her car, and vaulted out.

“Oh dear, Claire,” she said, “it isn't the end of the world—it's only a sort of game. If you really hate it, we can find you something else to do, but please have a shot at it for a week or two.”

“I feel such a fool in this getup,” said Claire.

“Just think how Simon must feel in his black tights and mask and nothing else.”

“It's all right for a man,” said Claire, with a deep, slow blush.

“Shame!” said Mrs. Singleton. “You'll never be a professor of chemistry if you start kowtowing to men like that. I'll put my arm round your waist and we'll try it together. Now. Down, up. Slower. Do-own, up. That's better. Down, up. You're getting it. Super. Down, up.”

They practiced together, while Mrs. Chuck stood smiling by. Mrs. Singleton moved so easily, with such an unaffected dancerly sway, that before long she had coaxed Claire into her own mood. While they bobbed, she talked on.

“This is Superintendent Pibble, Mrs. Chuck, down, up, come down from London to investigate poor Deakin. Did you do all right out of that batch of visitors? Down, up. I think they were almost all Americans.”

“Yes, Miss Anty, six pounds twelve and six. I've put it in the book. There'll be three more coaches on the two-fifteen, I do hear. My, Claire, but you
are
coming on; you'll be putting me to shame in a week, and I've been doing it these three years.”

“Is that all?” said Pibble. “You manage to look as if you'd been doing it since you were a tot.”

“Lawk-a-mussy, no, sir. Four years back I was working in the Sketchleys' in the town, when Miss Anty came and asked me to keep the gate here and I've never regretted it, though it does mean graying my hair. It's not really this color, sir—more a sort of pepper-and-salt.”

“Whose idea is ‘lawk-a-mussy'?” said Pibble.

“That's one of Harvey's,” said Mrs. Singleton. “He compiled a sort of Old England vocabulary which everyone's supposed to use. Thank you, Mrs. Chuck. Give it a go for a few days, Claire, and then if you still don't fancy it come and see me on—let me see—Friday and we'll try and find something behind the scenes for you. I can't afford to lose Simon, not with that torso.”

Claire blushed again, a sweet, delicate mantling that would easily have dragged another shower of coins out of a coachload of tourists.

“Nice girl,” said Mrs. Singleton as they drove on, “and brainy, too. She's going to marry our hangman as soon as she's finished her degree. She does it by post, somehow, but I don't understand that sort of thing, never having had an education.”

She chuckled, pleased with the easy fruits of ignorance.

“Shall I have to dress up as a Bow Street runner?” said Pibble.

“Wrong period,” said Mrs. Singleton. “We aim at a vaguely turn-of-the-century feeling, like the rustics in
Puck of Pook's Hill.
But in any case there's no need for you even to be seen in the public side; it's a bloody great place, and we keep the nicest parts for ourselves, though Harvey's got his eye on them for expansion. But you've got to have somewhere private to eat and sleep—and commit suicide, I suppose.”

They rolled up the noble avenue, familiar from half a hundred beer advertisements. The Thetis fountain was squirting at full pressure at the end of it, and as the Prince Henry rounded the rumpled pool the last batch of tourists, guidebound at the top of the wide flight of entrance steps, fusilladed them with the whirr and click of shutters until the gravel took them around the corner of the central building. It was a huge mass of gold-gray stone, high Georgian, plonked down in the middle of the open fields by a Clavering who had come home with half the loot of India two centuries ago. John Wood had begun it, Robert Adam had finished it, and Lancelot Brown had marshaled regiments of laborers to melt the ungainly fields and lumpish hillocks into the swooping, tall-treed sward of the Englishman's dream. In front of them now lay another house, no larger than the average mansion, joined to the Main Block by a graceful curve of glassed-in colonnade.

“It doesn't look as though six pounds twelve and six would go far to maintain this lot,” said Pibble.

“Bless you, my dear man, we send all that sort of thing to Oxfam. The visitors pay eight guineas a head, all in except the souvenirs. No
money
changes hands. The guide tells them beforehand that what they give to Mrs. Chuck is for charity. It was Harvey's idea—it puts them in an expensive mood, all guilt assuaged for half a crown.”

She had brought the car to a standstill before she spoke the last sentence in her arrogant, penetrating voice; there was a man sitting in a deck chair on the sheltered nook of lawn to their left, and he looked up from his newspaper at the sound.

“You'll be late if you don't hurry, Mr. Waugh,” said Mrs. Single­ton a little chillily. “The last of them were going into the hall as we arrived.”

“Oh, Christ!” said the man. “Who'd be a sodding butler? I've got a god-awful head this morning.”

He looked as though he was used to it—a port or brandy man to judge by the deep flush of his complexion. He had been in shirtsleeves, but as he stood up he picked a black jacket from the stool beside him and slid into it. At once the mantle of the Ancestral Butler fell on him. Pibble noticed that the paper which he'd dropped was the
Stage.

“Thank you for the information, Madam,” said Mr. Waugh. “I will attend to the matter immediately.”

He even contrived to hurry like a butler, with a curious sliding trot. In a moment they saw him ghosting down the colonnade toward the Main Block.

“He's come for four years now,” said Mrs. Singleton, “and the drink gets worse into him every year. He usually gets a part in panto—the Dame or one of the Broker's Men—in the winter, but his ad's still appearing, so I don't think he's had any luck this time. Harvey won't like it if we have to put him up till spring, but we'd never get anyone half as good at the job. He gives them sherry off silver salvers in the Chinese Room and makes it worth the eight bob a glass they're paying. It's tea in the afternoon, of course. He does a marvelous act with one of the maids who has a minute smear of lipstick on her collar—I sometimes do her if we're short-staffed, and he always makes me feel that I'll never wear lipstick again.”

“You must be quite close to the end of the season now,” said Pibble.

“Yes, thank God. Two more weekends—and shorter days already, of course. At the height of the season, on Saturdays, we put three coachloads through every hour, from ten in the morning till seven at night—that's a thousand a day. Harvey's organized the timing so that it takes any given batch seventeen minutes to pass a particular point, and with a batch coming every twenty minutes there's only three minutes to cope if things go wrong. You have to book to come, you know—we can't have people rolling up on spec.”