It so happened that his optimism was not put to the test. Mrs O’Brien was off patrol, safely detained in her back kitchen by the gossip of a visiting neighbour.
Closing the street door as softly as he could behind him, Mr Hive set down upon the step the huge camera case that he had hugged close, for fear of its bumping the bannisters, during his tiptoe descent of the stairs. He touched his lilac silk cravat, stroked his moustache, and drew on one glove. He then slung the strap of the case over his left shoulder and walked as briskly as the load would allow to where he had parked, a few yards down the road, his small and elderly motorcar.
The car drew up five minutes later in the cobbled yard of the Three Crowns Hotel.
Mr Hive’s was the first arrival of the evening in the bar known as the Chandler’s Room, a name that survived from days when corn merchants in particular frequented it, passing around their little canvas bags of grain samples and swallowing Hollands-and-water from mugs as big as drench buckets. It was a low, panelled room that received little light from the narrow lane outside, but in recent years more lamps had been set in the ceiling while a rhubarb-pink glow emanated from the mirrored alcove behind a modern bar. The roof beams were genuine enough; their bowed and blackened oak gave the impression that the room was being gradually squashed by the rambling old house above and would one day admit only customers prepared to drink lying down.
Mr Hive, who was as yet nowhere near that extreme, nevertheless had to incline his head once or twice as he crossed from the door to the bar.
There was no one behind the bar. Mr Hive put his case down on the floor and rested one foot on it while he peered through a doorway into the further room from which he supposed service would arrive.
A girl—appraised by Mr Hive at once as a delicious girl, with ripe lips parted in helpful inquiry, plump white arms, and a positive reception committee of bosom—rose from a table where she had been writing in a ledger and came towards him.
Mr Hive removed his hat and kissed the bunched fingertips of his right hand.
He had intended to stay on gin, but that, he saw, would not now be suitable.
“I wonder, my dear, if you would be good enough to let me have some brandy?”
“What, to take out?” The barmaid, quite unused to circuitous gallantry, supposed that Mr Hive must be a doctor wanting restorative for somebody collapsed in the street.
He smiled. “I am scarcely likely to wish to consume it away from premises graced by so charming a person as yourself!”
She worked this one out, then turned to reach down a bottle. “Single?”
“No; a double, I fancy, would be more appropriate.” He gazed contentedly down her cleavage while she measured the drink.
She set the glass on a pink tissue mat and pushed nearer a jug of water and a soda siphon. “Seven shillings, please, sir.”
Mr Hive made a small, elegant bow of the head and drew a handful of change from his hip pocket. He held the coins in the extended palm of one hand and made unhurried selection from them. The operation served to display slim, dean and dexterous fingers, also faultlessly laundered cuffs whose gold links were in the semblance of crossed rowing sculls. These, the girl observed and indicated. “Pretty,” she said.
He looked at the links as if noticing them for the first time. He closed the hand with the money in it and turned it this way and that to make the little gold oars catch the light. “Relics of youthful athleticism,” he said, musingly. Then, brightening: “Oh, I don’t know. Henley, ’48—it’s not all that long ago. I dare say I could still stroke an eight.”
“I’ll bet,” the girl said.
Mr Hive put both hands in his pockets and gazed into the middle distance. His expression of benign abstraction spoke of long, golden afternoons on sun-dappled water, of the rhythmic creak of rowlocks, of bow-wave’s glug in the holes of river creatures...
“Ah, well.” He reached for the glass. “Here’s very good health to you, dear lady!”
“Cheers,” the girl murmured, softly. She waited until he had taken two or three ruminative sips of the brandy. “All right?”
Mr Hive half-closed one eye and pouted. “Superb!” he declared.
The girl nodded. “Seven shillings then, please, sir.”
With a fierce scowl of self-blame, Mr Hive rapped his forehead several times, then reached anew for money. This time he counted it assiduously into her waiting hand.
Other customers began to come into the bar. Mr Hive picked up his drink and his case and, with a final glance of admiration at the twin moonrise of flesh over the barmaid’s bodice, took himself off to a table at the side of the room opposite the door.
Twice in the next twenty minutes he went back to the bar to renew his order and, he hoped, to gain further favour in the eyes of the splendid young woman behind it.
On his first reappearance, she had asked, with becoming casualness: “Where are you from, then?” and he had invited her to guess, whereupon she had shaken her head coyly and he had rewarded her with the quotation, “From Dunbar’s ‘Flower of Cityes Alle’.” “Well I never,” she’d replied. “You don’t look Scotch.”
Now he was before her again, presenting her with his empty glass as if it were a rose. She busied herself with the bottle and the little pewter measure. Mr Hive glanced about him for an opening, non-literary this time, to further conversation. He noticed a box on the counter, a little to the left of his elbow. It was a collecting box and there was something about it, something oddly familiar, that caused him to pull a pair of spectacles from his breast pocket and read the label.
“Gracious me!” he exclaimed.
The girl looked up. She saw a grin of delighted recognition overspread her customer’s face.
“Lucy...” Mr Hive murmured to himself. He was looking happily abstracted again.
“Lucy Who?”
“Mmm...?”
“Never mind.” The girl put the re-charged glass on one of the little pink mats. Mr Hive paid without being prompted.
“Tell me, my dear,” he said with sudden resolution, “if you know who brought this box in here. It wasn’t, by any chance, a lady from London? A well-spoken, ah, personable lady?”
“I don’t know whether she came from London. She lives here now. In Flax.”
“Does she? Does she, indeed?”
“That’s right.” The girl regarded the box indifferently. She seemed to be in no degree emotionally involved with The New World Pony Rescue Campaign. “I’m trying to remember her name. Funny sort of name...”
“Miss Lucilla Teatime,” crisply announced Mr Hive.
“Yes.” The girl giggled. “That’s it. Teatime!” Instinct told her to keep hilarity in check. “Friend of yours?” she asked.
“A very old friend—and an altogether admirable lady.”