Never in all his childhood years of laying waste to castles on the Dorset beaches can he have wielded a shovel to such spectacular ends. The clay shattered and sent a cascade of dust and small cobbles, as hard as rock, all over the apple house, Alec and me. I did not even have a chance to shut my mouth in time and the taste of that eggy, murky powder, coating my teeth and lips and then turning slick as I tried to spit it out again will be with me always. Alec fared rather better. He was still wearing the scarf around his face, for one thing, and he was above the worst of it so that only dust, puffing up, reached his hair and clothes. I, on the other hand, had little flakes and lumps of clay in all the creases of my clothing. I stood up and shook myself like a dog. Alec started laughing.
‘Funny now,’ I said. ‘Until we both go down with cholera.’ At least, though, there was no point in daintily picking through the mess, since we could not get any filthier if we tried, so I pulled my gloves back on, shuddering at the way they scraped over the silt on my skin, and plunged both hands into the middle of the cascade, roughly where I thought the key must be.
In retrospect, given that the key was about the size of a sixpence, knowing how long it can take to find a sixpence in a plum pudding, and allowing that the plum pudding in this case was larger than a whisky barrel, I should have been prepared for how long it took to find it. After another twenty minutes I was looking back ruefully at the moment I had believed we could not get filthier and was rehearsing a theory to put to Alec that the key was taken off the ribbon as the corpse broke the surface of the mud and that we were wasting our time, when suddenly I felt a hard little nub under my fingers. I grasped it and pressed it, expecting it to crumble like the many other little nubs which had fooled me as we crouched there. This time, my fingers felt something more unyielding than clay and I drew my hands out, noting the dust filling my turned-back cuffs, and held it up.
‘Oh thank God,’ Alec said. ‘Now where exactly are these lockers, Dan? Let’s go.’
‘In the ladies’ Turkish baths,’ I said. ‘We need to wait until night-time at least, if you actually come along at all. But that’s all right, because it will take us until then to get clean again.’
Before we left we covered our tracks. We scraped most of the clay back inside the barrel and tried to fashion it into the shape it might have assumed if the pin had spontaneously snapped, the door burst open and the contents spilled all on their own. It was not, one had to say, very convincing, especially as we forgot to drop the pin on the floor underneath the spill.
‘We could dig a hole and bury it,’ I said, but Alec picked it up and threw it across the room instead.
‘I’m not digging another inch in that stuff,’ he said. ‘It shot clear when the thing burst open.’
‘Which it wouldn’t do as the mud dried, would it?’ I said. This thought had been troubling me. ‘It would get smaller and shrink.’
‘It settled against the door, Dandy,’ Alec said very darkly. ‘And that’s the end of it. Now how are we getting home?’
The only possible thing, of course, was to go in my beloved little Cowley and we could not even ask for newspapers to cover the seats. Alec spread his handkerchief and I tried to hover as much as possible, hanging onto the steering wheel and not settling my whole weight onto the upholstery. I drove right around to the kitchen door at Auchenlea and Mrs Tilling and Pallister both came to see who it was.
Mrs Tilling stepped back and put her apron over her nose, but Pallister, to his credit, closed the motorcar door behind me and took the whole disgusting spectacle in his stride.
‘I shall fetch a blanket for you to wrap around yourself, madam, while you proceed to your bathroom and then you can lay it down on the floor. If you would care to step into the scullery, Mr Osborne’ – Mrs Tilling rumbled – ‘that is to say, if you would care to step over to the stables, Mr Osborne, we can take a first pass at you there. I shall look out some of Master’s things for you.’
When the blanket arrived, Mrs Tilling held it out to me at arm’s length as Pallister ushered Alec across the yard, putting his arm behind him without touching, the way a shepherd herds flighty sheep with an outstretched crook.
‘My goodness, madam,’ Mrs Tilling said. ‘What is it?’
‘Just mud,’ I said. ‘Almost entirely mud.’
‘Miss Grant’s not here, you know.’ It might have been a warning that I would have to manage on my own, but I did not think so.
‘Thank heaven for small mercies,’ I said. ‘I haven’t been put over someone’s knee and spanked with a brush for years.’
Mrs Tilling laughed and then buried her face in her apron again. ‘Don’t make me laugh, madam,’ she said. ‘It’s worse when you breathe it in deeply. Now, I’ll go and make a nice light luncheon for Mr Osborne and you, shall I?’
‘Anything but eggs,’ I said, then I kicked off my shoes, wound myself up in the blanket like a mummy and waddled off to my bathroom and the bliss of the hot water spray.
15
Apart from the oddness of Alec in Hugh’s clothes in Hugh’s seat at the table, luncheon was heaven. Simply to be clean and sweet-smelling was rather fine, but to feel for once that we were ahead of ourselves in this case, that we did not need to puzzle and wonder, but could wait for whatever the bag would tell us and talk in the meantime of other things, was a treat indeed. Donald and Teddy were better than I could have hoped for and since it had been their father who had plucked them away from the Hydro they were not, thankfully, complaining much to me. We were almost done before they mentioned it.
‘I must say,’ Donald announced, ‘that it’s always nice to know why. If it was the casino why not just say it was the casino and besides, we were always back here by the time it got going.’
‘Might have been the type it attracted,’ Teddy said. ‘Flappers and suchlike. What?’ he asked me, for I was staring at him.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Something about what you just… what was it?’
‘I don’t think it was that anyway,’ Donald said. ‘I think it was the mediums, actually.’ I had just swallowed a mouthful of cheese and was safe. Alec on the other hand inhaled an oatcake crumb and began coughing determinedly.
‘Ugh,’ he said. ‘I can still taste it when I cough, Dan. You know about the mediums then, you two?’
‘You can hardly miss them,’ Teddy said. ‘And there’s something about lying in rows of deckchairs all staring the same way that makes people very careless about whispering. We heard about the Big Seance even though it was supposed to be the most tremendous secret.’
‘Well, the Big Seance passed off last night without a murmur,’ I said. ‘Grant was there. She stayed at the Hydro to attend it.’
‘I don’t think so, Mother,’ Donald said. ‘I mean, I’m sure there was a seance last night – was Miss Grant really there? Why? – because they have one every time the sun goes down instead of cocktails. But the Big Seance is something else again. And it’s not going to be at the Hydro, is it, Ted?’
‘Up the hill,’ said Teddy. He was spreading butter on an oatcake and then crumbling cheese on top of the butter.
‘Teddy, for heaven’s sake,’ I said. He sighed and scraped the whole mess off again.
‘Are you going to be in for lunch every day?’ he asked me. ‘Because I think I’m well enough for picnics as long as the weather holds.’
So we had something to mull over after all during the afternoon, waiting for the time when we could slip into the ladies’ Turkish and search for the locker which matched the key.
‘I wonder if Grant will consent to attending the Big Seance Up the Hill,’ I said, lighting a cigarette. I could not help sniffing my fingers as I lifted the cigarette holder to my lips.