“I ought to understand, oughtn’t I? Seeing I’m half ‘them.’ ”
“Camilla, darling —”
“You seem to have a sort of predilection for ‘them,’ don’t you? Trixie. Then me.”
“That did hurt,” Ralph said after a pause.
“I don’t want to be beastly about it.”
“There was no question of anything serious — it was just — it just happened. Trixie was — kind. It didn’t mean a thing to either of us.”
They walked on and stared blankly at dripping trees and dappled hillsides.
“Isn’t it funny,” Camilla said, “how this seems to have sort of thrown me over on ‘their’ side? On Trixie’s side?”
“Are you banging away about class again?”
“But you see it in terms of class yourself. ‘They’ are different about that sort of thing, you say.”
He made a helpless gesture.
“Do other people know?” Camilla asked.
“I’m afraid so. There’s been gossip. You know what—” He pulled himself up.
“What they are?”
Ralph swore violently.
Camilla burst into tears.
“I’m so sorry,” Ralph kept repeating. “I’m so terribly sorry you mind.”
“Well,” Camilla sobbed, “it’s not much good going on like this and I daresay I’m being very silly.”
“Do you think you’ll get over it?” he asked anxiously.
“One can but try.”
“Please try very hard,” Ralph said.
“I expect it all comes of being an only child. My papa is extremely old-fashioned.”
“Is he a roaring inverted snob like you?”
“Certainly not.”
“Here comes the egregious Simmy-Dick. You’d better not be crying, darling, if you can manage not to.”
“I’ll pretend it’s the cold air,” Camilla said, taking the handkerchief he offered her.
Simon Begg came down the lane in a raffish red sports car. When he saw them he skidded to a standstill.
“Hullo-ullo!” he shouted. “Fancy meeting you two. And how are we?”
He looked at them both with such a knowing air, compounded half of surprise and half of a rather debased sort of comradeship, that Camilla found herself blushing.
“I didn’t realize you two knew each other,” Simon went on. “No good offering you a lift, I suppose. I can just do three if we’re cozy.”
“This is meant to be a hearty walk,” Ralph explained.
“Quite, quite,” Simon said, beaming. “Hey, what’s the gen on this show this afternoon? Do you get it?”
“I imagine it’s a reconstruction, isn’t it?”
“We’re all meant to do what we all did on Wednesday?”
“I should think so, wouldn’t you?”
“Are the onlookers invited?”
“I believe so. Some of them.”
“The whole works?” Simon looked at Camilla, raised his eyebrows and grinned. “Including the ad libs?”
Camilla pretended not to understand him.
“Better put my running shoes on this time,” he said.
“It’s not going to be such a very amusing party, after all,” Ralph pointed out stiffly, and Simon agreed, very cheerfully, that it was not. “I’m damn’ sorry about the poor Old Guiser,” he declared. “And I can’t exactly see what they hope to get out of it. Can you?”
Ralph said coldly that he supposed they hoped to get the truth out of it. Simon was eying Camilla with unbridled enthusiasm.
“In a moment,” she thought, “he will twiddle those awful moustaches.”
“I reckon it’s a lot of bull,” Simon confided. “Suppose somebody did do something — well, is he going to turn it all on again like a good-boy for the police? Like hell, he is!”
“We ought to move on, Camilla, if we’re to get back for lunch.”
“Yes,” Camilla said. “Let’s.”
Simon said earnestly, “Look, I’m sorry. I keep forgetting the relationship. It’s — well, it’s not all that easy to remember, is it? Look, Cam, hell, I am sorry.”
Camilla, who had never before been called Cam, stared at him in bewilderment. His cheeks were rosy, his eyes were impertinent and blue and his moustache rampant. A half-smile hovered on his lips. “I am a goon,” said Simon, ruefully. “But, still —”
Camilla, to her surprise, found she was not angry with him. “Never mind,” she said. “No bones broken.”
“Honest? You are a pal. Well, be good, children,” said Simon and started up his engine. It responded with deafening alacrity. He waved his hand and shot off down the lane.
“He is,” Ralph said, looking after him, “the definite and absolute rock bottom.”
“Yes. But I find him rather touching,” said Camilla.
The five Andersen boys were in the smithy. The four younger brothers sat on upturned boxes and stools. A large tin trunk stood on a cleared bench at the far end of the smithy. Dan turned the key in the padlock that secured it. Sergeant Obby, who was on duty, had slipped into a light doze in a dark corner. He was keen on his job but unused to late hours.
“Wonderful queer to think of, hearts,” Dan said. “The Guiser’s savings. All these years.” He looked at Chris. “And you’d no notion of it?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Chris said. “I knew he put it by, like. Same as grand-dad and his’n, before him.”
“I knew,” Ernie volunteered. “He was a proper old miser, he was. Never let me have any, not for a wireless nor a telly nor nothing, he wouldn’t. I knew where he put it by, I did, but he kept watch over it like a bloody mastiff, so’s I dussn’t let on. Old tyrant, he was. Cruel hard and crankytankerous.”
Andy passed his great hand across his mouth and sighed. “Doan’t talk that way,” he said, lowering his voice and glancing towards Sergeant Obby, who had returned to duty. “What did we tell you?”
Dan agreed strongly. “Doan’t talk that way, you, Ern. You was a burden to him with your foolishness.”
“And a burden to us,” Nat added, “as it turns out. Heavy and anxious.”
“Get it into your thick head,” Chris advised Ernie, “that you’re born foolish and not up to our level when it comes to great affairs. Leave everything to us chaps. Doan’t say nothing and doan’t do nothing but what you was meant to do in the beginning.”
“Huh!” Ernie shouted. “I’ll larn ’em! Whang!” He made a wild swiping gesture.
“What’ll we do?” Andy asked, appealing to the others. “Listen to him!”
Ernie surveyed his horrified brothers with the greatest complacency. “You doan’t need to fret yourselves, chaps,” he said. “I’m not so silly as what you all think I am. I can keep my tongue behind my teeth, fair enough. I be one too many for the coppers. Got ’em proper baffled, I ’ave.”
“Shut up,” Chris whispered savagely.
“No, I won’t, then.”
“You will, if I have to lay you out first,” Chris muttered. He rose and walked across to his youngest brother. Chris was the biggest of the Andersens, a broad powerful man. He held his clenched fist in front of Ernie’s face as if it were an object of virtue. “You know me, Ern,” he said softly. “I’ve give you a hiding before this and never promised you one but what I’ve kept my word and laid it on solid. You got a taste last night. If you talk about — you know what — or open your silly damn’ mouth on any matter at all when we’re up-along, I’ll give you a masterpiece. Won’t I? Won’t I?”
Ernie wiped his still-smiling mouth and nodded.
“You’ll whiffle and you’ll dance and you’ll go where you went and you’ll hold your tongue and you’ll do no more nor that. Right?”
Ernie nodded and backed away.