The Old English Peep Show Read online

  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.”

  “It sounds terrifying,” said Pibble.

  “We have strong nerves, thank God,” said Mrs. Singleton. “Even so, I can’t think how we’d have coped if all this had happened a couple of months ago.”

  “Deakin was very important to the enterprise, then?” said Pibble.

  “Deakin?” said Mrs. Singleton, with a tiny lilt of surprise. “He hated it. What makes you …”

  “You said ‘all this,’” said Pibble, “and it rather suggested …”

  “Oh, I see what you mean. No, but it is terribly upsetting, of course, and it makes it difficult to keep a proper eye on things, and so on. Come and meet the General. We live in this bit. There were meant to be four, one at each corner of the Main Block, but they only built two, thank God. The other one’s the old Kitchens, which Harvey’s turned into a super sort of ye olde restaurant. This way. They’ll be in the study, I should think.”

  She led him through a glass door into the colonnade. Through the arch opposite he could see the symmetrical colonnade curving away from the main building to where the symmetrical block stood, pretty and refined by distance, a beautifully judged piece of perspective. It was difficult to think that even now a roistering lunch was being prepared so that two coachloads of Americans could contribute to the tottering economy of the country. This colonnade was used as a greenhouse and was heavy with rich, dusty, vegetable odors, dominated by the muscat vine which reached across the corridor ten paces from where they had entered; there were a few clusters of grapes pendent from it. Mrs. Singleton led him in the other direction, into the Private Wing.

  At first sniff and glance it was surprisingly like the inside of any other largish house. The stairs leading up from the hall were wood and not the expected marble, and the furniture was handsome but ordinary. The hall was really only a widening in a long passage that led straight ahead of him, with half a dozen doors on either side; it was dark enough for the lights to be on.

  “Josiah built it for visiting orchestras and genealogists and people like that,” said Mrs. Singleton, “people who weren’t quite servants and weren’t quite gentry. He had nightmares about a penniless Scotch flutist running off with one of his daughters, so he wanted to keep that kind of visitor separate, which makes it much more comfortable than the Main Block, by our standards. Let’s try in here.”

  She opened the second door on the left, and for a moment the noise of a male voice, low, droning, persuasive, hung in the air. It stopped short. Mrs. Singleton went in, but stood aside so that Pibble could pass through.

  “This is Superintendent Pibble,” she said. “You’ll have to watch your step, General, he’s as quick as old Treacle. I’ll go and see how the visitors are getting on—Mr. Waugh was still reading his paper when they came, Harvey. You’ll have to watch your step, too, Mr. Pibble. The General likes telling lies. I hope I’ll see you again at luncheon. Goodbye for now.”

  She was gone. Pibble, who had been trapped in the predicament of having to listen to somebody who was behind him without turning his back on the people he was being introduced to, moved properly into the room. There were two men there, both already standing, though he could see from their attitudes that they had just risen from a pair of long, chintz-covered, brokenspringed armchairs on either side of the fireplace. The older man walked across and held out his hand for Pibble to shake; it was dry, cold and rough-textured, like the skin of a grass snake. Pibble looked curiously at the famous face. He remembered his image of the chosen vulture. At close quarters this did not seem like a lion who was ready to have his carcass settled onto.

  11:30 A.M.

  You mustn’t worry about Anty,” said the General. “She talks like that and expects everyone to follow because she never went to a proper school. Treacle was a Jack Russell—best ratter I ever owned. Let’s have a look at you.”

  The words came with such authority in the high but husky voice that they were offenseless. Pibble suppressed an instinct to stand to attention and looked back at the General. Sir Ralph Clavering was a smallish man, not as small as a jockey, though there was something about his stance which gave that impression­; and his clothes were definitely horsy—a flared russet jacket, scrambled-­egg waistcoat, and narrow twill trousers. The white eyebrows probed forward like the horns of a stag beetle, and the brisk mustache repeated the note. There hadn’t been any color photographs in the folder, so Pibble was surprised by the General’s tan—an even fawn color like a starlet’s legs, with only a faint suggestion­ of the mottlings of age beneath it. The eyes were a guileless blue, clear as a child’s except for the red-laced whites.

  “You a gentleman?” said the General abruptly.

  “Not even in a technical sense,” said Pibble.

  “Excellent!” said the General, with an alto giggle. “Absolutely excellent!”

  He crossed the room to the desk and flicked a button on a tape recorder.

  “File this under test section,” he said. “Asked policeman who came to see about Deakin the usual. Answer ‘Not even in a technical sense.’ No hesitation.”

  He flicked another button and turned back.

  “Funny how few people have the nerve to say yes, straight out,” he said. “This is my
son-in-law, Harvey Singleton. He runs our sideshows. He’ll explain why we got you down rather than letting in the local cops. Put it more glibly than me. Bloody lampreys! Sit down.”

  They all sat, Pibble on one of those many-cushioned sofas the slackness of whose upholstery precludes any posture except a lounging one. Mr. Singleton settled back into his chair and began to poke about at strawy wisps of tobacco in the bowl of an ugly great pipe, not as though he had any intention of smoking it but as though fiddling with it was a substitute for more vehement action. Pibble had hardly looked at him before he spoke, and had a vague feeling that he was unusually tall. Now he saw a pale, high-domed face, curly black hair, and an oddly straight mouth. When Mr. Singleton spoke, his lower jaw moved all of a piece, with a fluttering, but vaguely mechanical motion, like that of a TV puppet. The droning voice which their arrival had interrupted had been his.

  “Not glibly,” he said. “Plainly; the General tends not to mean precisely what he says. I do. Let me say at once, Superintendent, that we live an odd life here at Herryngs. I would not want you to think that we are proud of our ability to pull strings, such as the ones we pulled to get you down here. There are times when we are literally forced into actions of this sort. To put it bluntly, we have found the local police are too free with what they pass on to newspapermen. I don’t know whether you know about journalists in an area like this—I have to, because we are so concerned with publicity—but most of them have some sort of connection with at least one of the national papers, and they can make a few quid by sending tidbits about Herryngs up to London.

  “To be honest, we are usually glad of this arrangement, and from time to time we stage a newsworthy event, just to keep our name in the papers. But I spoke to one of them at a reception we gave and—I’m sorry to have to tell you this, and ought in fairness to add that he’d already drunk more than he could hold—he said that what he would really like from Herryngs was a nice juicy scandal. This may seem very shocking to you, Superintendent, but it is a fact we have to live with.