Landed Gently csg-4 Page 8

  ‘Confound the man!’ fumed Sir Daynes balefully. ‘Does he think we’re giving a party, or some damn thing?’

  ‘You’ll not be swearing on Christmas Day, Sir Daynes,’ came a reproving voice from without the door.

  ‘Eh?’ exclaimed the baronet. ‘What’s that? Didn’t see you there, Mrs Barnes.’

  ‘It doesna matter if you did or you didna, Sir Daynes.’ The little silvery-haired housekeeper took a step into the doorway. ‘It doesna become a man of your standing and principle to be making heathen oaths on such a day, and well you know it.’

  ‘But dash it all, Mrs Barnes-’

  ‘Och, there you go again.’

  ‘I mean — bless my soul! A fine thing at a police inquiry-’

  ‘You are not quarrelling with your vittels, Sir Daynes?’

  Sir Daynes bit back an unholy expletive.

  ‘Now just take it easy, or you’ll be ruining your digestion. In forrty years there hasna been a man nor mouse in this establishment who lacked his vittels on a Christmas Day, and the good laird will make no exception now…’

  Mrs Barnes departed with her minions, leaving a smirk on the face of Inspector Dyson and a broad grin on that of Gently. Sir Daynes tried to quell his rebellious subjects with a display of baronetics, but giving it up as a bad job, ordered an immediate assault on the offending tea-table. It was obeyed with alacrity. Five appreciative policemen set themselves to expunge all matters of business from their minds until justice had been done to the hospitality of Merely Place. Crackers, alas, were pulled, and caps were worn, and Sir Daynes, forgetting the relative solemnity of the moment, laughed loud and long at a printed joke that for some reason struck none of the others as being particularly funny. He remembered himself immediately, however. From the serious way in which he lit his cigar, it was plain that he felt his hilarity to have been out of place. Christmas Day it might be, but it was a grim occurrence that had brought this odd quintet together at its festive board.

  ‘Ring the bell and get this lot cleared away — we’ve still got the best part of a day’s work in front of us!’

  A reluctant constable, Corona in hand, went to do the baronet’s bidding. Soon the table was bared and replaced in its official position, and the room, apart from lingering samples of fruit and confectionery, more in keeping with its temporary character. Inspector Dyson reoccupied the inquisitorial seat, his shorthand man took office beside him, Sir Daynes straddled the hearth, and Gently, continuing to acknowledge his role of supercargo, retired once more to the seat by the window. But before a fresh victim could be hailed in there was a tap on the door, and Somerhayes entered.

  ‘I thought I’d look in, Daynes, to make sure that you had been well looked after.’

  ‘Eh?’ queried Sir Daynes, frowning. ‘Yes, thank you, Henry — everything first-class. Couldn’t have been better. Compliments to Mrs Barnes, Henry.’

  ‘If there is anything you would like sent in…’

  ‘Nothing, man, nothing. We’re damn near bursting at the seams.’

  Somerhayes hesitated, as though at a loss to express himself; then he turned to Gently at the window.

  ‘You are fully occupied here, Mr Gently?’

  ‘Occupied…?’ Gently glanced at him in mild surprise.

  ‘I cannot help remembering that you are a guest who has been unhappily involved in this tragic affair… If you feel you would like to relax for a little while, my library is a very quiet and comfortable room.’

  It was said with studied indifference, but both Gently and Sir Daynes caught the curious little undertone of appeal that accompanied it. Sir Daynes fired a sharp look, first at Somerhayes and then at Gently. The latter, after a moment’s pause, rose slowly to his feet.

  ‘Thank you for the offer… I think I might take advantage of it.’

  ‘In that case I am glad I thought of it.’ There was no mistaking the eagerness in Somerhayes’s tone. ‘You did not require Mr Gently, Daynes?’

  ‘Require him? No! Daresay we can get along on our own.’

  ‘Then I can carry him off with a clear conscience… I would not want to interrupt if he were assisting you.’

  ‘Damn it, man!’ erupted the baronet. ‘Think the Northshire County Constabulary can’t handle an investigation on their own?’

  Somerhayes smiled humourlessly and retired with his capture.

  He led the way down a long, parquet-floored corridor from the grey-panelled walls of which stared down several generations of the Feverell family, their wives and their children. He gestured to them ruefully in passing.

  ‘Decline and fall,’ he observed. ‘My father hung them there, and I have not had the heart to take them down. This way, if you please.’

  Gently shrugged and followed him. They had turned a corner into a small hall, and from here a door decorated with a painted armorial shield gave into the library. Somerhayes, having made way for Gently, closed the door silently behind them.

  It was a large, well-appointed room with a handsomely decorated drop-ceiling and six tall windows draped with green damask curtains. The walls were completely furnished with glass-fronted mahogany bookcases, about half of them fitted with cupboards below, and a glance at the shelves showed a great catholicity in bindings and periods. Opposite the windows an ashy wood fire burned in a basket in an immense freestone hearth, the mantel of which was ornamented with shields, and above it hung framed several antique maps of the county in their original colouring and gilt. From the ceiling depended two chandeliers, but the only illumination came from a parchment-shaded pedestal lamp standing near the hearth. At an appropriate distance were arranged two wing-chairs with a table and decanter between them.

  ‘Please sit down and make yourself comfortable, Mr Gently. Can I pour you a glass of this port?’

  Gently shook his head and selected the chair nearest the lamp.

  ‘You will join me in a cigar, perhaps?’

  ‘No, thank you… I’ve had rather too many.’

  ‘Like you, I find they pall if one smokes nothing else.’

  Somerhayes poured himself a glass from the decanter and took it to the other chair. In spite of Gently’s strategic positioning, the nobleman’s handsome features were indifferently lit, and by withdrawing them slightly he could obscure them in the shadow of the chair-wing.

  ‘You know, this is not our first meeting, Mr Gently.’

  ‘Hmn?’ Gently was really surprised.

  ‘No. Though I doubt whether you would be able to remember the other occasions. But I have been in court twice when you were giving evidence at the Quarter Sessions here, once at the Old Bailey, once at Lewes, and once at the Bow Street Magistrates’ Court. So you see, in a manner of speaking we are old acquaintances.’

  Gently nodded dubiously. ‘In a manner of speaking…’

  ‘More so, perhaps, than you think, Mr Gently.’

  Was there a smile playing round that thin-lipped mouth?

  ‘As you are perhaps aware, there are few situations which reveal a man’s character and personality so strongly as the occupancy of a witness-box. This is true at any level, but particularly true where such a grave matter as homicide is in question, and where the witness has a great deal of sometimes complex evidence to give, in the teeth of ruthless attacks by the defence counsel. Those are the times which try men’s souls, Mr Gently. They bring to the surface all the strengths and weaknesses, the virtues, the vices, in a phrase, the naked ego of a man. One sometimes sees one’s friends as one would not wish to see them.’

  ‘I trust I didn’t expose myself too much…’ Gently stirred uneasily.

  ‘On the contrary — quite on the contrary. It was by being able to observe you in these circumstances that I became so strongly impressed with your personality, Mr Gently. I am not a man who impresses easily. By education and avocation I have learned to treat my fellow men with the greatest reserve and, I am afraid, distrust. But in your case I felt an immediate confidence. I felt that there stood a man with a
deep and — may I say it? — compassionate understanding of human failings and follies. I felt this so powerfully that I made a point of being present at other times when you were likely to be called, and when I learned that you were visiting the neighbourhood, I took immediate steps to become personally acquainted. I felt, in a sense, that the hand of providence was in the circumstance.’

  Somerhayes paused, watching Gently from the shadow of the wing. The glass of port in his hand glowed ruddily in the fitful firelight, and the same illumination made a livid mask of one side of his face. Gently shrugged an indifferent shoulder.

  ‘It’s a great pity somebody jogged the hand of providence.’

  Somerhayes laughed softly. ‘In a way, yes. But only in a way. Even this unhappy tragedy is subject to the point of view. And what makes you so certain that the hand was jogged, Mr Gently? Could it not have moved deliberately, when a certain propitious assembly of factors was complete?’

  ‘An assembly of factors…’ Gently’s eyebrows rose.

  ‘I call it that. You must consider me as being a fatalist.’

  ‘Me… I’m just a realist.’

  ‘That is your privilege, Mr Gently.’

  ‘I can see it in only one way. A young man who I liked has been killed… literally, on the threshold of life.’

  Somerhayes’s head dropped a little. ‘I, also, was fond of Lieutenant Earle.’

  ‘By way of corollary, there’s a killer at large.’

  ‘And killers must be stopped — you are talking to one who has heard all the arguments. Yet consider a little, Mr Gently. The ways of providence are not our ways. A young man is killed. Another life must be given for his. Will you say outright that the event is devoid of pattern, and that a meaningless brutality has taken place and will take place? I do not believe you can be so positive. I believe there may be a point of view which, if it does not justify, will at least explain the occurrence and give it significance. We may not need to be divine to understand the workings of divinity.’

  Somerhayes raised his glass and drank, and having lowered the glass, looked at it intently for a few moments as though giving Gently time to appreciate the point.

  ‘And you think you have this… point of view?’

  Somerhayes nodded slowly. ‘To a limited extent, perhaps.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t mind explaining it to me?’

  ‘I’m not sure that I can, Mr Gently, though it may be that you are the one man who could understand it. But it is very difficult, and very complex.’

  A silence fell between them… How complete were the silences in that great house! In this room there didn’t even seem to be a clock to break the cloistered stillness. Gently felt in his pocket for Dutt’s pipe, and finding it unemptied, rose and tapped it out against the smouldering log.

  ‘Suppose we start at the beginning?’ he suggested. ‘Just tell me how you came to start this tapestry business.’

  Somerhayes repeated his soft laugh. ‘You realize, then, that the tapestry workshop was the beginning?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s where you gave up politics, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes… though it goes back further.’

  ‘Well, go back as far as you want… I’m here to listen.’

  Somerhayes nodded and set down his glass on the table.

  ‘When I was in my teens — that would be in the Thirties — the world was still something of a place to live in. For me, I mean. For the prospective sixth Baron Somerhayes.’

  Gently returned the nod… He remembered the Thirties!

  ‘My father continued to do things in Edwardian style, even up to the war. One was only vaguely aware that a world had changed and a world was dying, and that the standards to which one was born and bred were gravely suspect. Before I went to Oxford I never had any doubt. The social unrest that went on before my eyes did not belong to the world I inhabited. More important, perhaps, were the political events in Europe. They were certainly ominous, and more directly affecting the career of diplomacy for which, following the family tradition, I was being prepared…’

  Gently filled his pipe from his magnificent quarter-pound tin and settled himself in the comfortable wing-chair. Somerhayes was not watching him now. Retired into his shadow, his eyes were on the sinking fire, his low, balanced, cultured voice seeming to flow from him without effort or conscious direction. Had he ever talked like this before, this enigmatic man with his lost and wistful eyes? Had he ever before drawn in words the pattern of his bewildered life? He was doing it now, talking, talking. Like a film that had never been unwound, it was coming off its spool.

  He had gone up to Oxford, certain and sure of himself. The world had been his, wealth, rank and power to come. He was one of the elect. He was one of a chosen race. Far away had been the rotten tooth of envy and the jealous anger of the mob. And there he had met — whom? A young man, working his way through college. An angry young man, an arguing young man, a young man who thrashed the pretensions of the callow nobleman with the scorpions of Marx and Engels and Lenin and Shaw. And Somerhayes had had no answer to those scathing propositions. His naive Weltanschauung had taken no notice of such perverse logic. His defences were scattered, his arguments flattened, his comfortable assumptions buried under an avalanche of vicious, destroying fact. And what was a thousand times worse, he was obliged to admire the person who had bowled him over. Jepson, as his name was, appeared to Somerhayes as the epitome of all he would like to be but was not. In despair he made the comparison — himself, the spiritually bankrupt descendant of a family of social bandits; Jepson, the blazing prophet of a robbed and wrathful people. Could he fail to see that one was a dead branch, the other a new and irresistible shoot, in the tree of history?

  ‘You will observe what a quandary I was in. I dared not follow the direction which my new convictions urged on me. I was not simply a private person. I was the future Lord Somerhayes. My niche was already waiting for me in the Foreign Office, in the Lords, in Society and in the expectations of a father who had just lost his wife, and was himself already a sick man. How could I deal him such a blow as to declare myself, his only son, a Marxist, and he, my most affectionate parent, a social criminal?’

  But something had had to come out of the shock he had received. It was impossible for him to continue entirely in support of a masquerade grown loathsome to him. It could not be Marxism, nor even socialism; the most he dared do was to proclaim himself a Liberal. And this, unfortunately, was enough to set him at odds with his father, to whom it appeared as a betrayal of the great Tory tradition of the Feverell family.

  Jepson had graduated during Somerhayes’s second year, and with the removal of the irritant the young nobleman began to recover some of his lost equilibrium. To justify a step that had only been a compromise, he threw himself energetically into the cause of liberalism, seeking to find there a creed that would strike a balance between the implacable opposites of competitive industry and social justice. He learned many of the answers to Jepson’s furious logic. He discovered that the problem could not be stated in terms of pure black and pure white. When he emerged from the university he felt that to some degree he had achieved a balanced view of the contemporary social situation, and that, holding on to it firmly, he might proceed to his career with sufficient confidence. He had been admitted to the Foreign Office, and in due course was attached to the Paris Embassy.

  ‘At that time, although I did not know it, Leslie Brass had just forsaken the Latin Quarter for the tapestry factory at Aubusson.’

  ‘You didn’t meet him in Paris?’ enquired Gently, breaking the long monologue.

  ‘No. How should I have done? Our circles were hermetically sealed from each other. But it has always seemed significant to me that he and I were young men in Paris together.’

  ‘How do you mean… significant?’

  Somerhayes’s eyes dwelt on him wistfully. ‘One of us a young artist, just beginning to find the channels for his creativity, the other… I won’t insist, Mr G
ently. And now he and I are together.’

  ‘You wanted to be an artist too?’

  ‘In a way, I suppose, though I understand its impossibility.’

  ‘Could you explain?’

  Somerhayes shrugged his elegant shoulders. ‘I don’t know, but I’ll go on trying.’

  Eighteen months after he had gone to Paris Germany had invaded Poland. Back in London he had received quick promotion, and was engaged first in the tortuous relations that existed with the Vichy Government, and later in the endless negotiations and exchanges with Washington. Soon after the war his father had died, and Somerhayes succeeded to the title and a seat in the House of Lords. He had also been considerably impoverished by death duties, as a result of which he had been obliged to offer Merely Place to the National Trust. He now lived as a tenant in the petrified glories of the house that the second lord had built with the money that the first lord had ravished from the country at the time of the Bubble.

  ‘In effect I have become a curator… I am doing public penance, perhaps, for the sins of my ancestors.’

  On his succession, Somerhayes had resigned from his post in the Foreign Office. His father had had a large town house in Mayfair, but this was much too big both for the tastes and the revenue of the new lord, so he had sold it and bought a smaller one in Chelsea. There, for several years, he had lived a rather solitary life during the parliamentary terms. The political climate of his father’s circle had made it uncongenial to him, and he was not a man who made new acquaintances easily. His predilection for art, however, had brought him into contact with several painters, among them Leslie Brass, who had now settled in Kensington and was making quite a stir with his pictures and tapestry. It was easy to detect Somerhayes’s almost reverent admiration for the man. Perhaps nobody but the plebeian Brass with his buoyant self-confidence and cynical shrewdness could have aroused it so strongly. Here was Jepson again, but better than Jepson. Jepson had been a mere revolutionary, a stormbird, an iconoclast; Brass was a creator, an artist, a visionary. Once more, Somerhayes had found all he was not enshrined in another man. Once more, he was shaken from an apparently secure spiritual perch, and driven to put himself agonized questions.