The Old English Peep Show (9 page)

3:10 P.M.

P
ibble leaned over the parapet, and gasped: his first impression had been right—it
was
an Oriental building sunk two stories into the ground. He was looking down, as if from the rooftops, into an unpaved courtyard, fuzzy with scrub. The towers assumed their proper proportions now that their bases were visible, and between them ran a double series of cloisters, one above the other; the exaggeratedly ogive arches were frilled with a lacework of stone right down to the ground. The pit looked as if it were used—there were some mounds of what seemed to be dog's feces at the foot of one of the further towers—but nothing stirred in it. Presumably some of the lions from the enclosure were occasionally quartered here. There was a cage under one of the arches in the left-hand wall, with a gate which slid up and down like a portcullis; it was shut now.

To his left, at ground level, was a wooden notice on a post, of the kind used by local authorities to warn strangers of by-laws. It turned out to display an extract from a letter written in 1765 by Horace Walpole to George Montagu.

I have sworn a vow on the bones of, oh, whatever saint you will (so be it not those of the fat ox of Smithfield, whom I know to be the only saint you and your rustick neighbours acknowledge) that I will speak neither good nor ill of Herryngs until three hundred more of our English summers have been grumbled away. Now 'tis but a pile, a raw new quarry turn'd inside-out. Let it become
mossy,
and then I will pronounce.

But one part I must tell you of, for it has quite ravished me with its absurdity. Josiah, that is the
Nabob
twin and not his stay-at-home toad of a brother who slops about still down at the Abbey (which I may tell you is ugly enough, for it is old and mean) is so prodigious rich that he has built a palace for his very animals. Two tygers which he brought from the Indies (being the only friends he made there, I doubt not) he has housed with true Nabobish phantasy in a great pit lined all around with Brahminical cloisters, enough to perambulate a whole templefull of monks, and all sunk below our honest English sward. Four towers squat at the corners which are copied from a ruin'd fort at
Calcutta,
but (since their foundations spring some fathoms below the horizontal) the effect is finely ridiculous. Mr. Clavering's first two friends were drowned by one of our little English
monsouns,
the pit filling with water, but he has undertaken prodigies of drainage and sent for two more. Their roarings will fright Hampshire, but less than it frights me to consider what a treasure house of thievery (for these
Nabobs,
you know, are nothing but land pirates) has been spent on the mere digging and ornamenting of a hole.

Pibble leaned again over the waist-high parapet and prepared to gaze with enjoyable melancholy at old Josiah's folly (as Mrs. Singleton had guessed, it was very much his kind of thing—Mrs. Pibble found him a difficult companion on holidays) when his half-arranged pose was stilted by a deep, breathy, thudding bark from enormous lungs. Islands of his skin, phobogenous zones, chilled—the voice was addressed to him. It came from the pit.

There was a lion down there, a large male with a heavy black mane and a tuft of black fur at its tail tip. It was whisking its tail busily from side to side, but the rest of its body was entirely still and it was staring at Pibble—not the tired, dilettante stare with which the lions in the open ground had followed his passage, but an intent and focused gaze. Thus Galileo peered at the moons of Jupiter; thus a cat watches a wren; thus the chrysoberyl eyes looked at Pibble. Still unblinking, the animal raised its head and made its noise again, neither roar nor bark nor cough, so that Pibble could see the yellow teeth, reef-like, widely separated, useless for chewing but ideal for shearing off lumps of flesh to be swallowed whole. The pink tongue, wide but thin, curled up in a beckoning gesture before the jaws clicked shut.

“Scare the hell out of you, that one,” said a voice at Pibble's elbow. He turned and saw the woman who had opened the gate for them. She bobbed him a curtsy, neither solemn like Mrs. Chuck's nor inept like Claire's, but jokey and conspiratorial. Mrs. Singleton was already on the other side of the fence, walking fast with her gun under her arm. Pibble watched her for a few seconds, hoping that she might turn and wave, but she strode on. He looked at this other woman—Maureen Finnick, presumably—and saw that she had understood the meaning of his gaze over her shoulder. She was roundfaced, apple-cheeked, blue-eyed, plum-lipped, buxom, and sly. About twenty-five, perhaps, but watchful as an old hunter.

“You were wishful to talk with me, sir?' she said. What he had at first taken for a babble of urgency turned out to be her normal mode of speech, as though she had just run up three flights of stairs to impart fatal news.

“Don't you find that uniform a nuisance?” said Pibble. “I mean for instance making your hair look twentieth-century when you want to go out in the evening.”

“Lor' love you, sir,” said Miss Finnick, patting a russet ringlet into position, “there's little enough going out of an evening down in these parts, though, to be sure, if you was wishful to take me I would not disgrace you. Shall us go back down to my stall? There'll be visitors any minute, I do be thinking.”

“You can talk twentieth-century if you prefer,” said Pibble. “I'm afraid I'm only police, and I believe you may be able to help me clear up the problem why Mr. Deakin hanged himself.”

Her watchfulness neither increased nor diminished.

“Ah,” she said, “but even a clever City gentleman like yourself, sir, would find it a terrible thing to go chopping and changing your way of talking from sunup to cattle-calling time. No, sir, I'll bide by Mr. Harvey's manual, for the sake of the practice, and 'tis you must tell me if you think I might be overdoing it. Poor Arthur Deakin! And who'd have told you I might be knowing anything about him?”

“Nobody told me. The thing is this, Miss Finnick: I have no doubt at all that Deakin did hang himself, but he didn't leave a message. Suicides usually do, you know”
(You
would, my girl, a message calculated to stir up the maximum possible misery; you're just that type) “and it saves having everybody guessing stupid and embarrassing reasons if one can find out why he actually did it. Did you see much of him?”

“Arthur Deakin was seeing a deal more of me than ever I was of him,” said Miss Finnick, with an exaggerated flounce. “Always hanging about in the shaw behind my stall, and peeking and prying—after you, sir. 'Tis more fitting.”

She held the door of the cottage for him and he went in.

“Crippen,” he said. “Is this another example of Mr. Singleton's passion for detail?”

“Indeed it is, though I haven't had time to arrange it proper orderly. They did be moving me down to the Abbey, and all my knickknacks, these three days past.”

Her calling it a stall had misled him into thinking the room would be like a shop, with revolving stands of colored postcards and big polished counters cluttered with coarse pottery souvenirs. Postcards there were, but in a casual-looking line along the shelf above the crackling fire. A clutter of souvenirs there was, too, but so spread out along dressers and corner cupboards and old oak tables that the effect was of a large cottage room, desperately overfurnished. Nor were the souvenirs in the usual gnomeware style. Straight in front of the entrance was a farmhouse dresser whose shelves held a row of kitchen plates, blue and white, with the spotted lion of the Claverings in the center; in front of these stood three model gibbets complete with dangling bodies, a stagecoach about five inches high, and a hay wain to the same scale. Elsewhere in the room were lanthorns and pistols, antique sickles and kitchen implements, and a number of old iron gadgets (of the sort which people write to
Country Life
about, asking what they are) used in the forgotten techniques of a rustic economy. Apart from the models (another dresser held several sizes of full-rigged ship), everything looked cottagy and serviceable, and everything was stamped or branded with the lion crest. No attempt had been made to fake antiquity; all the ironwork looked as though the blacksmith had been hammering it yesterday. On the other hand it also looked as if there had been a blacksmith who hammered it, instead of some million-copy mold in Birmingham.

“Do the gallows sell well?” said Pibble.

“Mortal well, sir. They visitors do be desperate astonished by the hanging down at the Abbey, and they often fancy summat to mind them of it.”

“Did Deakin ever make models for you?”

“Him!” said Miss Finnick, in a totally changed voice. “Too bloody concerned with …”

“Never mind,” said Pibble. “I think you
were
overdoing it anyway. Are you on the stage, too, like Mr. Waugh?”

Miss Finnick put up a pretty little hand under her mob-cap and scratched at her scalp in sighing perplexity. The action unsettled both her cap and the russet curls, which slipped downward in a fashion no live hair could possibly achieve. She swore, mid-twentieth-century style, and pulled off cap and wig, revealing a sleek black Eton crop. Then she stood looking calculatingly at Pibble from under her long black lashes while she twiddled the cap around her index finger. At last she sighed again, like a sculptor rejecting a piece of unworkable marble, and turned to a wall mirror. As she adjusted her image back into the non-world of Herryngs, she talked in her other voice, which he'd heard for a moment up by the Tiger Pit and then again when she cursed the dead coxswain. It was quiet, sensible, a little hard.

“I am a schoolmaster's daughter, Mr. Pibble—that's the name, isn't it? I was all set to go to Sussex University and begin the long drift into matrimony when they came down here to film
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.
I don't suppose you ever saw it—it was just after
Tom Jones
and they hoped to make the same sort of money by pulling the same sort of gags, but of course people were tired of that by then and they lost a packet. Anyway, I was an extra and the director gave me two or three words to speak, for reasons not wholly concerned with the aesthetics of celluloid. Of course they'd shot far more film than they could use—nine hours' worth or something ridiculous—and I think my three words must have been the very first things they cut. My director had got bored with me by then, but I went up to London and pestered him for another job—I didn't want
him
any more, he was a nasty little twit—and he wangled me another tiny part to get rid of me. We were about quits then, I reckoned—wangling parts isn't easy with Equity watching every credit line. But they cut that part, too, for the finished film, and a nice old biddy who I'd struck up with who makes a living by playing marchionesses in the background of ballroom scenes took me out to a lunch she couldn't afford just to tell me to go home, because I wasn't going to be any good—not even good enough for the background of ballroom scenes. I was always overdoing it, she said. Hetty, that's old Lady Clavering, the General's wife, was my godmother, and I was allowed to invite myself to Herryngs when I wanted to, although she had been dead for years, so I came here and gave the Admiral a bad weekend, telling him how harsh life was for someone who hadn't led his sheltered kind of existence.”

“What was she like?” said Pibble.

“Hetty? She died before I had any idea what she was like—children have no idea, you know. Soft, easy, straightforward, beautiful, I think. Anty's the only one who will talk about her—she doted on her. There isn't a picture of her anywhere in the House, unless the Admiral's got one shut away in a drawer. Neither of them ever loved anyone else, I think.”

She turned from the mirror, wig and cap prettily arranged, but face drawn into tired modern lines, like a debt-harassed mum helping out with charades.

“She was too good to live, Deakin once said,” she added. “He had a knack of pronouncing some dreary old cliché as though it were all the law and the prophets. Where was I?”

“Pouring out your sorrows on the Admiral's shoulder.”

“Truer than you know. I didn't realize what a cunning old sod he was. But he made Harvey give me a job—he was just starting up then. I was in the House at first, but Harvey decided I spoilt the atmosphere by hamming my part and moved me out here because I can do sums. He still gets sick at me for hamming, but he can't get rid of me without employing two other people—one to charm the visitors and one to keep the accounts. He doesn't have to worry anywhere else in Herryngs, because the rest of it's inclusive in the entrance fee. But here—well, look at those bloody little gallows, for instance: he bulk-bought the parts, and now he's decided that we've got to unload them by next June, latest, before some liberal busybody in Fleet Street hears about them and whips up a great fuss about their being bad for the image of England. So I've got to muck around with prices according to the feel and smell of every batch of tourists who come in clutching their hot little traveler's checks. I'll manage O.K., and Harvey knows it, but it drives him up the wall when he hears me ad-libbing his precious dialect. I'd go mad with boredom if I didn't; as it is, I don't say I'm miserable, I don't say I'm happy, and it's acting of a sort, I suppose, though Harvey swears there isn't a worse actress in all
Who's Who in the Theatre.
Oh, Christ, poor old Deakin. Look, Mr. Pibble, the visitors will be here any second. Twice seventeen is thirty-four, and say fifteen for the last batch, that makes fifty minutes. Could you come back in an hour and I'll have a chance to collect my wits and tell you what happened to old Deakin?”

“Fine,” said Pibble, reflecting that that might make it possible for him to miss the four-forty and thus throw the whole dotty plot out of gear. “I only meant I thought you were overdoing the lingo, you know. Everything else works beautifully.”