Chapter Four
Daisy, judicial tasks accomplished the evening before and desperate to escape the castle, where Cad still continued very sombre, was all enthusiasm the next morning at breakfast. This was taken in the Great Hall at the Great Table on the newly arrived Great Chairs, since amongst all the other matters they had neglected in their childlike embracing of castle life, Buttercup and Cadwallader did not seem to have thought of a breakfast room. It was not too bad just yet; for one thing we were all good friends and a powerful note of new plaster and varnish still hung around, but I could imagine that as time went by and the Great Hall became redolent of rich dinners and cigar smoke as all dining rooms do in the end it would become insupportable to trail in to breakfast to sit at the same table with all the same bores who had driven one off to early bed the evening before.
‘We must do our very best today, Freddy,’ said Cadwallader, through a huge, choking mouthful of sausage – he always loaded his fork as though pitching hay with a rainstorm threatening – ‘to strike the right note. We’ve got to keep things perky enough to stop the whole jamboree feeling like a funeral, but at the same time we should take care not to be…’
‘Unseemly in our merry-making?’ I suggested. Cad brandished his knife at me.
‘Exactly! We must respond to the mood of the crowd for one thing. We don’t want to seem more morose than these good people who had known him for years. Freddy, are you listening?’ Buttercup – patently not listening – nodded hastily and assumed a rapt expression. ‘But at the same time we must not for one minute look as though we’re careless of the fact that he died, in case some near relation or bosom pal happens to notice.’
I felt suddenly rather sorry for Cadwallader. He was in a ticklish kind of a spot and his attempts to plan a route through it only made it the more obvious how hopeless it was to have him swan in and fill the role he was filling. Hugh, I am sure, would have done more or less exactly what Cad was now outlining but he would have done it without a moment’s thought and certainly without a syllable being uttered.
‘At least by the end of today we should know what happened,’ Cadwallader continued. ‘I’ve asked Inspector Cruickshank and Dr Rennick to track me down at the Fair as soon as the autopsy’s over and tell me the results.’
Daisy rolled her eyes. ‘Mightn’t that inject a bit of a note, Cad darling?’ she said. ‘Mightn’t that tip the scales just a shade towards ghoulish?’
Cadwallader’s eyes clouded with doubt, but I could not face any more strategizing and so I broke in, rather rudely, to ask Buttercup: ‘What happens when? And where is it all? Please tell me the babies are first, because I won’t enjoy a thing until I’ve got that horror out of the way.’
‘Oh, I’m declaring it open at ten, I think,’ said Buttercup. ‘I was going to ask you what I should say in my speech, Dan.’
‘Frederica, you’re not even trying!’ said Cadwallader, with the note of wounded exasperation I remembered hearing from mistresses and house matrons (for a while until they all gave up).
‘It’ll be fine, Cad darling, stop fussing,’ said Buttercup, and of course, because Daisy and I spent the next hour and a half fretting over the speech for her and making notes on little cards, it was. As she delivered it, tears were wiped but there was laughter too and when she had finished, the townspeople quite seemed to regard their coconut-shying and sack-racing as marks of respect for Robert Dudgeon, so purposefully did they make their ways to the various sideshows or the table where officials were taking entrants’ names. The fairmen started up their hurdy-gurdies, and a fiddler struck up a tune to which people immediately began to dance one of those terrifically complicated Scottish country dances.
By twelve a queue of children had begun to form at the town hall steps.
‘Such a good idea,’ said Mrs Meiklejohn, the Provost’s wife. ‘They queue to get a ticket, and then they take their ticket all the way along to McIver’s Brae and queue again to get a bag of picnic goodies and a balloon so by the time they plump down on the grass to eat it they’re nicely calmed down and well exercised to boot.’
‘Do I detect Mr Turnbull’s hand?’ I said. ‘He seems very keen on lungfuls of good fresh air and the rest of it.’
‘Lord, no,’ said Mrs Meiklejohn, with a laugh. ‘Mr Turnbull might well have them chasing around the town to get their hands on their lunch bag, but he wouldn’t approve at all of what’s inside it. Mind you, Mrs Gilver, he’s doing marvellous things up at the school. Drafting in lecturers from a college in Edinburgh, was the latest I heard, and the children are taking to it like so many ducks to water. In fact our doctor’s wife – terribly set in her ways although a wonderful friend and neighbour really – told me almost in spite of herself that she thought Mr Turnbull’s techniques were showing results already.’
The gods were smiling upon us, for it was at this fortuitous juncture that Mr Turnbull himself appeared suddenly behind Mrs Meiklejohn, with a bashful grin. Had he been half a minute earlier, it might have been awkward.
‘Spare my blushes, Mrs Meiklejohn, please,’ he said in self-satisfied tones. Mrs Meiklejohn looked at me with dancing eyes but managed not to giggle. ‘I do my best.’
We said nothing, Mrs Meiklejohn and I, gave him no encouragement, but he was clearly one of those who did not need any.
‘If I can see to it that even one child of mine stays away from the bottling hall, out of the mines and off the fishing boats,’ he said, ‘I shall count myself a success. Horticulture, Mrs Gilver. Horticulture, agriculture, arboriculture and husbandry. There is good wholesome work on the land for as many as want it.’ He waited, preening, for some response.
‘I can see why the bottling hall mightn’t be to everyone’s taste,’ I said carefully, thinking that I for one could not spend a working day amongst whisky fumes without sickening. ‘And coal mining is filthy and dangerous work to be sure. But whatever is your objection to the fishing boats? I’d have thought bobbing around on the ocean wave…’
‘Shale mining,’ Mrs Meiklejohn corrected me mildly. ‘It’s shale mining round here, Mrs Gilver. Not so heavy but just as beset with -’ At this Mr Turnbull interrupted her.
‘Coal mining or shale mining, there’s very little difference in the essentials. It all encourages superstition and morbidity. And fishing is worse than either. Tall tales and talismans filling their heads with nonsense.’
‘Ah,’ I said, understanding him at last. ‘Certainly, yes. If one puts one’s life at risk every day one would naturally try to be lucky.’
‘There’s nothing natural about it,’ said Mr Turnbull.
‘And the problem with the bottling hall is…?’ I said, although I could easily guess.
‘The demon drink,’ Mr Turnbull confirmed. Beside me, Mrs Meiklejohn was breathing heavily, trying to control her laughter. ‘But I’ll save them, Mrs Gilver. The children will pass out of my sphere as bonny and pure as they enter yours today.’
‘My sphere?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘That’s what I came to tell you,’ said Mr Turnbull. ‘Your infants await.’
‘Oh golly!’ I said and followed him. Ahead of us at the Bellstane I could see a gathering crowd of women, each with an armful of frilled and beribboned baby. Most of these seemed to be bawling and some of the women, dressed in black, looked so near tears themselves that one could not imagine why they had not withdrawn their entry.
‘Oh well, it’s only a bit of fun, Mr Turnbull, isn’t it?’ I said in an attempt to rally myself.
‘Not really,’ he said, showing no tact whatsoever, I thought. ‘There is the prize.’ He pointed towards a handsome wooden high chair, newly painted in a cheerful pale blue and with a motif of little ducklings across it. ‘Such good practical prizes,’ he went on, with immense satisfaction, nodding towards the town crier who had been parading around all the morning with a pair of boots hanging from the top of his staff.