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Colonel Cartarette stood on the landing and watched them go in.
Lady Lacklander was already at her husband’s bedside. Mark supported him with his right arm and with his left hand kept his thumb on a bell-push that lay on the bed. Sir Harold’s mouth was open and he was fetching his breath in a series of half-yawns. There was a movement under the bedclothes that seemed to be made by a continuous flexion and extension of his leg. Lady Lacklander stood massively beside him and took both his hands between hers.
I’m here, Hal,’ she said.
Nurse Kettle had appeared with a glass in her hand.
‘Brandy,’ she said. ‘Old-fashioned but good.’
Mark held it to his grandfather’s open mouth. ‘Try,’ he said. ‘It’ll help. Try.’
The mouth closed over the rim.
‘He’s got a little,’ Mark said. ‘I’ll give an injection.’
Nurse Kettle took his place. Mark turned away and found himself face-to-face with his father.
‘Can I do anything?’ George Lacklander asked.
‘Only wait here, if you will, Father.’
‘Here’s George, Hal,’ Lady Lacklander said. ‘We’re all here with you, my dear.’
From behind the mask against Nurse Kettle’s shoulder came a stutter. ‘Vic – Vic … Vic,’ as if the pulse that was soon to run down had become semi-articulate like a clock. They looked at each other in dismay.
‘What is it?’ Lady Lacklander asked. ‘What is it, Hal?’
‘Somebody called Vic?’ Nurse Kettle suggested brightly.
‘There is nobody called Vic,’ said George Lacklander, and sounded impatient. ‘For God’s sake, Mark, can’t you help him?’
‘In a moment,’ Mark said from the far end of the room.
‘Vic …’
‘The Vicar?’ Lady Lacklander asked, pressing his hand and bending over him. ‘Do you want the Vicar to come, Hal?’
His eyes stared up into hers. Something like a smile twitched at the corners of the gaping mouth. The head moved slightly.
Mark came back with a syringe and gave the injection. After a moment Nurse Kettle turned away. There was something in her manner that gave definition to the scene. Lady Lacklander and her son and grandson drew closer to the bed. She had taken her husband’s hands again.
‘What is it, Hal? What is it, my dearest?’ she asked. ‘Is it the Vicar?’
With a distinctness that astonished them, he whispered: ‘After all, you never know.’ And with his gaze still fixed on his wife he then died.
II
On the late afternoon three days after his father’s funeral, Sir George Lacklander sat in the study at Nunspardon going through the contents of the files and the desk. He was a handsome man with a look of conventional distinction. He had been dark but was now grizzled in the most becoming way possible with grey wings at his temples and a plume above his forehead. Inevitably, his mouth was firm and the nose above it appropriately hooked. He was, in short, rather like an illustration of an English gentleman in an American magazine.
He had arrived at the dangerous age for such men, being now fifty years old and remarkably vigorous.
Sir Harold had left everything in apple-pie order and his son anticipated little trouble. As he turned over the pages of his father’s diaries it occurred to him that as a family they richly deserved their too-much-publicized nickname of ‘Lucky Lacklanders.’ How lucky, for instance, that the eighth baronet, an immensely wealthy man, had developed a passion for precious stones and invested in them to such an extent that they constituted a vast realizable fortune in themselves. How lucky that their famous racing stables were so phenomenally successful. How uniquely and fantastically lucky they had been in that no fewer than three times in the past century a Lacklander had won the most famous of all sweepstakes. It was true, of course, that he himself might be said to have had a piece of ill-fortune when his wife had died in giving birth to Mark but as he remembered her, and he had to confess he no longer remembered her at all distinctly, she had been a disappointingly dull woman. Nothing like … But here he checked himself smartly and swept up his moustache with his thumb and forefinger. He was disconcerted when at this precise moment the butler came in to say that Colonel Cartarette had called and would like to see him. In a vague way the visit suggested a judgment. He took up a firm position on the hearthrug.
‘Hallo, Maurice,’ he said when the Colonel came in. ‘Glad to see you.’ He looked self-consciously into the Colonel’s face and with a changed voice said: ‘Anything wrong?’
‘Well, yes,’ the Colonel said. ‘A hell of a lot actually. I’m sorry to bother you, George, so soon after your trouble and all that but the truth is I’m so damned worried that I feel I’ve got to share my responsibility with you.’
‘Me!’ Sir George ejaculated, apparently with relief and a kind of astonishment. The Colonel took two envelopes from his pocket and laid them on the desk. Sir George saw that they were addressed in his father’s writing.
‘Read the letter first,’ the Colonel said, indicating the smaller of the two envelopes. George gave him a wondering look. He screwed in his eyeglass, drew a single sheet of paper from the envelope, and began to read. As he did so, his mouth fell gently open and his expression grew increasingly blank. Once he looked up at the troubled Colonel as if to ask a question but seemed to change his mind and fell again to reading.
At last the paper dropped from his fingers and his monocle from his eye to his waistcoat.
‘I don’t,’ he said, ‘understand a word of it.’
‘You will,’ the Colonel said, ‘when you have looked at this.’ He drew a thin sheaf of manuscript out of the larger envelope and placed it before George Lacklander. ‘It will take you ten minutes to read. If you don’t mind, I’ll wait.’
‘My dear fellow! Do sit down. What am I thinking of. A cigar! A drink.’
‘No, thank you, George. I’ll smoke a cigarette. No, don’t move. I’ve got one.’
George gave him a wondering look, replaced his eyeglass and began to read again. As he did so his face went through as many changes of expression as those depicted in strip-advertisements. He was a rubicund man but the fresh colour drained out of his face. His mouth lost its firmness and his eyes their assurance. When he raised a sheet of manuscript it quivered in his grasp.
Once, before he had read to the end, he did speak. ‘But it’s not true,’ he said. ‘We’ve always known what happened. It was well known.’ He touched his lips with his fingers and read on to the end. When the last page had fallen on the others Colonel Cartarette gathered them up and put them into their envelope.
‘I’m damned sorry, George,’ he said. ‘God knows I didn’t want to land you with all this.’
‘I can’t see now, why you’ve done it. Why bring it to me? Why do anything but throw it at the back of the fire?’
Cartarette said sombrely: ‘I see you haven’t listened to me. I told you. I’ve thought it over very carefully. He’s left the decision with me and I’ve decided I must publish’ – he held up the long envelope –’this. I must, George. Any other course would be impossible.’
‘But have you thought what it will do to us? Have you thought? It – it’s unthinkable. You’re an old friend, Maurice. My father trusted you with this business because he thought of you as a friend. In a way,’ George added, struggling with an idea that was a little too big for him, ‘in a way he’s bequeathed you our destiny.’
‘A most unwelcome legacy if it were so but of course it’s not. You’re putting it altogether too high. I know, believe me, George, I know, how painful and distressing this will be to you all, but I think the public will take a more charitable view than you might suppose.’
‘And since when,’ George demanded with a greater command of rhetoric than might have been expected of him, ‘since when have the Lacklanders stood cap in hand, waiting upon the charity of the public?’
Colonel Cartarette’s response to this was a helpless gesture. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said; ‘but I’m afraid that that sentiment has the advantage of sounding well and meaning nothing.’
‘Don’t be so bloody supercilious.’
‘All right, George, all right.’
‘The more I think of this the worse it gets. Look here, Maurice, if for no other reason, in common decency …’
‘I’ve tried to take common decency as my criterion.’
‘It’ll kill my mother.’
‘It will distress her very deeply, I know. I’ve thought of her, too.’
‘And Mark? Ruin! A young man! My son! Starting on his career.’
‘There was another young man, an only son, who was starting on his career.’
‘He’s dead!’ George cried out. ‘He can’t suffer. He’s dead.’
‘And his name? And his father?’
‘I can’t chop logic with you. I’m a simple sort of bloke with, I dare say, very unfashionable standards. I believe in the loyalty of friends and in the old families sticking together.’
‘At whatever the cost to other friends and other old families? Come off it, George,’ said the Colonel.
The colour flooded back into George’s face until it was empurpled. He said in an unrecognizable voice: ‘Give me my father’s manuscript. Give me that envelope. I demand it.’
‘I can’t, old boy. Good God, do you suppose that if I could chuck it away or burn it with anything like a clear conscience I wouldn’t do it? I tell you I hate this job.’
He returned the envelope to the breast pocket of his coat. ‘You’re free, of course,’ he said, ‘to talk this over with Lady Lacklander and Mark. Your father made no reservations about that. By the way, I’ve brought a copy of his letter in case you decide to tell them about it. Here it is.’ The Colonel produced a third envelope, laid it on the desk and moved towards the door. ‘And George,’ he said, ‘I beg you to believe I am sorry. I’m deeply sorry. If I could see any other way I’d thankfully take it. What?’
George Lacklander had made an inarticulate noise. He now pointed a heavy finger at the Colonel.
‘After this,’ he said, ‘I needn’t tell you that any question of an understanding between your girl and my boy is at an end.’
The Colonel was so quiet for so long that both men became aware of the ticking of a clock on the chimney breast.
‘I didn’t know,’ he said at last, ‘that there was any question of an understanding. I think you must be mistaken.’
‘I assure you that I am not. However, we needn’t discuss it. Mark … and Rose, I am sure … will both see that it is quite out of the question. No doubt you are as ready to ruin her chances as you are to destroy our happiness.’ For a moment he watched the Colonel’s blank face. ‘She’s head over heels in love with him,’ he added, ‘you can take my word for it.’
‘If Mark has told you this –’
‘Who says Mark told me? … I – I …’
The full, rather florid voice faltered and petered out.
‘Indeed,’ the Colonel said, ‘then may I ask where you got your information?’
They stared at each other and, curiously, the look of startled conjecture which had appeared on George Lacklander’s face was reflected on the Colonel’s. ‘It couldn’t matter less, in any case,’ the Colonel said. ‘Your informant, I am sure, is entirely mistaken. There’s no point in my staying. Goodbye.’
He went out. George, transfixed, saw him walk past the window. A sort of panic came over him. He dragged the telephone across his desk and with an unsteady hand dialled Colonel Cartarette’s number. A woman’s voice answered.
‘Kitty!’ he said. ‘Kitty, is that you?’
III
Colonel Cartarette went home by the right-of-way known as the River Path. It ran through Nunspardon from the top end of Watt’s Lane skirting the Lacklanders’ private golf course. It wound down to Bottom Bridge and up the opposite side to the Cartarettes’ spinney. From thence it crossed the lower portion of Commander Syce’s and Mr Phinn’s demesnes and rejoined Watt’s Lane just below the crest of Watt’s Hill.
The Colonel was feeling miserable. He was weighed down by his responsibility and upset by his falling out with George Lacklander who, pompous old ass though the Colonel thought him, was a lifetime friend. Worst of all he was wretchedly disturbed by the suggestion that Rose had fallen in love with Mark and by the inference, which he couldn’t help drawing, that George Lacklander had collected this information from the Colonel’s wife.
As he walked down the hillside he looked across the little valley into the gardens of Jacob’s Cottage, Uplands and Hammer Farm. There was Mr Phinn dodging about with a cat on his shoulder. ‘Like a blasted old warlock,’ thought the Colonel, who had fallen out with Mr Phinn over the trout stream, and there was poor Syce blazing away with his bow-and-arrow at his padded target. And there, at Hammer, was Kitty. With a characteristic movement of her hips she had emerged from the house in skintight velvet trousers and a flame-coloured top. Her long cigarette-holder was in her hand. She seemed to look across the valley at Nunspardon. The Colonel felt a sickening jolt under his diaphragm. ‘How I could!’ he thought (though subconsciously). ‘How I could!’ Rose was at her evening employment cutting off the deadheads in the garden. He sighed and looked up to the crest of the hill and there, plodding homewards, pushing her bicycle up Watt’s Lane, her uniform and hat appearing in gaps and vanishing behind hedges, was Nurse Kettle. ‘In Swevenings,’ thought the Colonel, ‘she crops up like a recurring decimal.’
He came to the foot of the hill and to Bottom Bridge. The bridge divided his fishing from Mr Danberry-Phinn’s; he had the lower reaches and Mr Phinn the upper. It was about the waters exactly under Bottom Bridge that they had fallen out. The Colonel crossed from Mr Phinn’s side to his own, folded his arms on the stone parapet and gazed into the sliding green world beneath. At first he stared absently but after a moment his attention sharpened. In the left bank of the Chyne near a broken-down boat shed where an old punt was moored, there was a hole. In its depths eddied and lurked a shadow among shadows; the Old ’Un. ‘Perhaps,’ the Colonel thought, ‘perhaps it would ease my mind a bit if I came down before dinner. He may stay on my side.’ He withdrew his gaze from the Old ’Un to find when he looked up at Jacob’s Cottage, that Mr Phinn, motionless, with his cat still on his shoulder, was looking at him through a pair of field-glasses.
‘Ah, hell!’ muttered the Colonel. He crossed the bridge and passed out of sight of Jacob’s Cottage and continued on his way home.
The path crossed a narrow meadow and climbed the lower reach of Watt’s Hill. His own coppice and Commander Syce’s spinney concealed from the Colonel the upper portions of the three demesnes. Someone was coming down the path at a heavy jog-trot. He actually heard the wheezing and puffing of this person and recognized the form of locomotion practised by Mr Phinn before the latter appeared wearing an old Norfolk jacket and tweed hat which, in addition to being stuck about with trout-fishing flies, had Mr Phinn’s reading spectacles thrust through the band like an Irishman’s pipe. He was carrying his elaborate collection of fishing impediments. He had the air of having got himself together in a hurry and was attended by Mrs Thomasina Twitchett, who, after the manner of her kind, suggested that their association was purely coincidental.
The path was narrow. It was essential that someone should give way and the Colonel, sick of rows with his neighbours, stood on one side. Mr Phinn jogged glassily down upon him. The cat suddenly cantered ahead.
‘Hallo, old girl,’ said the Colonel. He stooped down and snapped a finger and thumb at her. She stared briefly and passed him with a preoccupied air, twitching the tip of her tail.
The Colonel straightened up and found himself face to face with Mr Phinn.
‘Good evening,’ said the Colonel.
‘Sir,’ said Mr Phinn. He touched his dreadful hat with one finger, blew out his cheeks and advanced. ‘Thomasina,’ he added, ‘hold your body more seemly.’
For Thomasina, waywardly taken with the Colonel, had returned and rolled on her back at his feet.
‘Nice cat,’ said the Colonel, and added: ‘Good fishing to you. The Old ’Un lies below the bridge on my side, by the way.’
‘Indeed?’
‘As no doubt you guessed,’ the Colonel added against his better judgement, ‘when you watched me through your field-glasses.’
If Mr Phinn had contemplated a conciliatory position he at once abandoned it. He made a belligerent gesture with his net. ‘The landscape, so far as I am aware,’ he said, ‘is not under some optical interdict. It may be viewed, I believe. To the best of my knowledge, there are no squatter’s rights over the distant prospect of the Chyne.’
‘None whatever. You can stare,’ said the Colonel, ‘at the Chyne, or me or anything else you fancy till you are black in the face for all I care. But if you realized … If you …’ He scratched his head, a gesture that with the Colonel denoted profound emotional disturbance. ‘My dear Phinn …’ he began again, ‘if you only knew … God bless my soul what does it matter! Good evening to you.’
He encircled Mr Phinn and hurried up the path. ‘And for that grotesque,’ he thought resentfully, ‘for that impossible, that almost certifiable buffoon I have saddled myself with a responsibility that may well make me wretchedly uncomfortable for the rest of my life.’
He mended his pace and followed the path into the Hammer coppice. Whether summoned by maternal obligations or because she had taken an inscrutable cat’s fancy to the Colonel, Thomasina Twitchett accompanied him, trilling occasionally and looking about for an evening bird. They came within view of the lawn and there was Commander Syce, bow in hand, quiver at thigh and slightly unsteady on his feet, hunting about in the underbrush.
‘Hallo, Cartarette,’ he said. ‘Lost a damned arrow. What a thing! Missed the damned target and away she went.’
‘Missed it by a dangerously wide margin, didn’t you?’ the Colonel rejoined rather testily. After all, people did use the path, he reflected and he began to help in the search. Thomasina Twitchett, amused by the rustle of leaves, pretended to join in the hunt.
‘I know,’ Commander Syce agreed, ‘rotten bad show, but I saw old Phinn and it put me off. Did you hear what happened about me and his cat? Damnedest thing you ever knew! Purest accident, but the old whatnot wouldn’t have it. Great grief, I told him, I like cats.’
He thrust his hand into a heap of dead leaves. Thomasina Twitchett leapt merrily upon it and fleshed her claws in his wrist. ‘Perishing little bastard,’ said Commander Syce. He freed himself and aimed a spank at her which she easily avoided and being tired of their company, made for her home and kittens. The Colonel excused himself and turned up through the spinney into the open field below his own lawn.
His wife was in her hammock dangling a tightly-encased black velvet leg, a flame-coloured sleeve and a pair of enormous earrings. The cocktail tray was ready on her iron table.
‘How late you are,’ she said idly. ‘Dinner in half an hour. What have you been up to at Nunspardon?’
‘I had to see George.’
‘What about?’
