Rodney ran past her and toured the toadstools, sniffing them and making equitable bestowal of stale. “Bad boy! Nasty!” called Mrs Palgrove mechanically and quite without rancour. Rodney ignored her.
She went up to the well. It was filled almost to the brim with water. In the depths glided thin orange shapes. Mrs Palgrove took from the pocket of her coat a small jar with perforated lid and shook white crumbs on the surface. The crumbs spread out and began to sink slowly. A pair, three, four goldfish came mouthing up to the food. Mrs Palgrove unconsciously imitated a fish’s ingesting pout as she watched them suck in the descending, disintegrating fragments.
“Good boys! Clever boys!”
The last of the sun had slid from the lawns and was climbing the beech hedge at the far side of the garden. In the chilly, deepening shade, the dwarfs and the toadstools and the frog reverted to lifeless shapes, scarcely identifiable. The vermilion of the dummy well became the colour of dried blood. A cold breeze rustled the leaves of the chestnut trees.
Mrs Palgrove bade the goldfish good night and went back to the house. Rodney was there already, painstakingly gnawing the tapestry cover off one of the chairs in the dining-room.
“Bad boy! Naughty!” She left Rodney to its depredations and went into the lounge, switching on the light. This came from a set of candle-like lamps fixed to a varnished oak frame suspended from the ceiling by four chains. The frame only just cleared Mrs Palgrove’s head. She knelt and switched on the electric fire; it simulated glowing coals.
Looking round for the evening paper, she spotted it on the table by the french window. Her husband had left it, racing page uppermost, propped against a model of a Spanish galleon. The model was complete in every detail; it had been a wedding present and Mrs Palgrove supposed it to be fragile and valuable. Carefully she removed the newspaper and took it over to the settee, glancing on the way at the dock on the mantlepiece. It was twenty minutes past seven.
At a quarter to eight, Mrs Palgrove folded the paper and added it to others in a rack by the fireplace. The rack was in the form of a pair of shields, embossed with heraldic designs and dipped back to back. She walked soundlessly across the thick, silver-grey carpet, patterned here and there with little yellow maps (of Rodney’s devising), and let down the front flap of a writing cabinet. Then, uncasing the portable typewriter that had been stood beneath the cabinet, she put it on the extended flap and drew up a chair.
She wound into the typewriter a sheet of grey paper headed with the words FOUR FOOT HAVEN in large green capitals above a printed line drawing of two dogs, one in lace cap and apron, the other bespectaded and smoking a pipe, seated in humanized postures of relaxation on either side of a fireplace.
Mrs Palgrove began to type, addressing the letter to: Miss L. E. C. Teatime, Secretary, Flaxborough and Eastern Counties Charities Alliance, 31 St Anne’s Gate, Flaxborough.
Dear Madam...
She considered a moment and went on, striking the keys slowly but with deliberation and accuracy.
The committee of my society considered at their last meeting a certain incident of which you must be aware and which took place on the 14th inst. I refer to the breaking open after dark of the Haven kennels (‘Rover-Holme’) and the introduction of an unauthorised animal which the committee have reason to believe was an ‘unwell’ lady dog. The result was that ‘Rover-Holme’ was empty the next day and we have had to send members with cars as far away as Chalmsbury to collect our poor animals. More than twenty are still missing and it may well be that they have fallen into the hands of the Vivisectionists. I would not have Somebody’s conscience for all the tea in China.
THE POLICE HAVE BEEN INFORMED
Now what my committee wish to be known is that we are not going to be intimidated by ANYBODY, no matter what that ‘Anybody’ may do next. The Four Foot Haven is a truly INDEPENDENT body and it refuses to be swallowed up by a big organisation using ruthless and un-English methods.
Mrs Palgrove paused and read back what she had written. She pondered a full minute before adding the final paragraph.
It may interest you to know that certain information has reached me privately concerning the disposal of funds raised not a hundred miles from here in the name of so-called ‘charity’. I am reluctant to pass this information to the authorities, but I shall not hesitate to do so if the need arises. ‘If the cap fits...etc.’ Need I say more?
Yours very sincerely,
Again she sat in thought, staring at the sheet of paper before her. Then, in sudden resolve, she released it from the machine, put aside the carbon copy and added her signature in large angular script. She addressed an envelope, affixed a stamp that she took from a supply in a flat tin box, folded the letter and sealed it within the envelope.
Three minutes later, Mrs Palgrove was walking energetically along Brompton Gardens towards the post-box at the Heston Lane corner.
The careers symposium was held in the physics lecture theatre of the Grammar School. The room was in one of the oldest parts of the building. Its loftiness, its row of narrow, pseudo-Gothic windows, its oak and cast-iron desks, radiating in rising tiers from a huge demonstration bench, all testified to mid-Victorian zeal for the propagation of science.
Some three dozen boys had distributed themselves, mainly in the four back rows. Aware that the occasion was ostensibly one of voluntary attendance, they were in a mood to extract from it such entertainment as they could. Their headmaster sensed it as soon as he entered the room and led his guests to the line of chairs that had been prepared for them on a dais behind the demonstration bench. “Watch them, Booker,” he murmured. “I fear persiflage.”
With much scuffling of feet and several extravagant sighs intended to sound symptomatic of premature ageing brought about by too many after-school obligations, the boys rose.
Mr Clay waited for silence, then told them they might sit. They did so as if they had just come in from an assault course.
The headmaster went quickly through his routine explanation of what a careers symposium was supposed to achieve and then proceeded to introduce those whom he termed “our visitors from the world of effort and accomplishment.”
He indicated first Mr Ernest Hideaway, estate agent and valuer.
Mr Hideaway, a merry-looking baldy with big, floppy lips and eyes that constantly monitored his audience as if on the watch for bids, was a familiar performer at these functions. The boys waited for him to play his joke. As soon as his name was mentioned, he produced from his pocket a gavel and rapped with it three times on the bench. “Sold to the gentleman on the back row!” cried Mr Hideaway. There was noisy applause. The headmaster smiled icily and held up his hand.
“Next I should like to welcome Inspector Purbright, of the Borough Constabulary, who has very kindly taken time off from his many pressing duties so that his advice may be available to us this evening.”
Some of the more sanguine watched for the inspector to outdo Mr Hideaway by whipping out a truncheon, but he simply smiled and continued to lean back with folded arms.
“A no less distinguished representative of the law, though in another field, is our old friend Mr Justin Scorpe.”