“Or a degenerate monster,” Hugh added helpfully.
“Go on, you’re having us on!” protested the reporter.
“You think so? You didn’t see the second son at the service this afternoon, did you?”
“You devil!” whispered Dinah.
Hugh didn’t even trouble to warn her to silence; he knew she disapproved, or at the very best withheld her approval, but he also knew she wouldn’t do anything to spoil the game, if it amused him.
“I didn’t even know there was another son,” admitted the oldest reporter, and looked round the assembled and now oddly quiet company for confirmation. Heads nodded and voices murmured; there was another son.
“Oh, yes, he exists, all right,” Hugh said sombrely, handing along the refilled pint-pot to Dave, and passing a pound note back to Nobbie at the bar. He made a brief, impressive pause, and the interested onlookers obligingly provided him with absolute silence, which he knew exactly when to break. “I’ve seen himl” he said in a sepulchral whisper; and that was all.
In the electric hush that followed, Nobbie’s sense of mischief got the better of her. She looked round the circle of intense faces, the natives and the strangers, and then deliberately smacked down a handful of silver and coppers on the bar.
“Your change, Mr. Macsen-Martel!”
The awful pause felt like a year, but was actually no more than a couple of seconds. Then, with exquisite tact, everyone not directly involved turned, formed new and casual groups, and began to talk abut the weather and football. It was done, and seen to be done, not in order to bury the shock for ever, but merely to keep it on ice while the victims were given a chance to slip away, so that their discomfiture could be properly and privately enjoyed by those who belonged here. And slip away they did, scarlet and speechless and hideously embarrassed. The youngest one, without so much as a word to anyone, simply picked up his coat and slunk out, the other two made a pitiful attempt to carry it off with forced smiles and a sudden pretence that they had just noticed how late it was. The big photographer, who had said least and committed himself least, took his time about withdrawing, and looked round the room defiantly before he went. In particular he looked with fixed interest at Hugh, who had not moved a muscle or said a word to ease the situation.
“You know, I thought you looked a bit like the old lady.”
It was an artificial exit line, and Hugh could quite well have said: “Liar!” Instead, and just as devastatingly, he said: “God forbid!” which shook the photographer considerably more.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said uneasily. “Fine, straight old lady for her age. Must be seventy, I suppose?” His eye flickered round the bar once again. “Very interesting evening! And a very interesting door!” he added with recovered assurance, and walked out with a curious private smile on his face.
The inhabitants stirred, sighed, cautiously stretched, expanding to fill the quitted space.
“Did you have to do that?” Hugh asked Nobbie reproachfully.
“Did you have to?” murmured Dinah resignedly.
“Coming to something,” marvelled Willie the Twig, “when those boys get hypersensitive.”
Saul put back his teeth, and ordered one of Ellie Crouch’s pork pies. And Nobbie, patting her blonde kiss-curl into place, said complacently. “I reckon I won, anyhow. And they won’t be back in a hurry.” For so far from inviting alien custom, “The Sitting Duck” was constantly compelled to protect its limited supplies of home-brewed in the interests of its regulars.
Nevertheless, within ten days one of the strangers did come back. And this time to stay.
CHAPTER 2
« ^ »
THE photographer from Birmingham reappeared in Mottisham unexpectedly on a Tuesday morning of mid-October, shortly before noon. It was the first foggy day of the autumn, in a month which tended to be productive of thick mists in the deep, river-threaded cleft of Middlehope; but it was not the low visibility that brought the stranger crawling into the forecourt of Cressett and Martel at approximately fifteen miles an hour, and caused him to heave a sigh of relief at his safe arrival. Somewhere along the road from Comerbourne he had hit a stray stone, probably shed from a lorry, and his steering had begun to afflict him at the most inconvenient moments with a terrifying judder. He had no intention of driving a car with that sort of handicap any farther than he had to on a foggy day, and Dave’s was the first garage at the Comerbourne side of the village. The driver clambered out thankfully, and Dave came out from the workshop to serve him.
He recognised the shock-head of straw-coloured hair and the slightly racy clothes at once. “Oh, hullo, back again? What’s the trouble?”
The photographer was willing to talk. His name was Gerry Bracewell, he lived in Edgbaston—he produced a business card to prove it—and he had just driven over to take one more look at that church door, and maybe the house it came from, too. Very interesting thing, that, he said with a sly, self-satisfied smile. And now his steering had practically packed it in on him, and could Dave do anything about it by this evening? Or tomorrow morning, if necessary, he might be staying overnight in any case.
“Taking photographs in this weather?” Dave couldn’t refrain from asking him casually.
Bracewell grinned. He had an amiable, cocky, knowing smile that belonged to the city. “Haven’t even brought a camera along this time. No, just interested. You never know where there may be a story lurking, do you? Pictures I can get later if there’s anything in it.” He prowled the yard while Dave looked at the sick Morris, and for the first time his eye fell upon the two names above the entrance. “Martel? Is that the same one?”
“It’s all right,” said Dave from the driving-seat, “he’s gone into Comerbourne with a respray job. Yes, it’s the same one. He’s my partner.”
“One of the Macsen-Martels? That lot that gave the door back to the church?”
“The one that got away,” said Dave. “He’s been working here with me nearly four years. It’s what he likes doing, and what he’s good at.”
“Well, bully for him! A bit of a card, isn’t he?”
“That leg-pull in the ‘Duck’? They like their fun. I wouldn’t take too much notice, if I were you.”
Bracewell came closer. “He fall out with his folks, or something? I mean, it’s a bit unusual to find somebody like him cutting loose like this and working with his hands, isn’t it?”
“Not particularly. Inevitable, I should say. Feudal families are living in changed circumstances these days. All the land that went with the house is gone long ago, there never was much money. Robert works in an office, Hugh works here. They have to live.”
Not a talkative chap, Bracewell thought. Dave had told him nothing he couldn’t have got from anyone in the village. “This National Trust business. You think they’ll take the place on?”
“I think they will. It’s more or less agreed, I believe.” He himself did not think all that highly of the Abbey as an architectural monument; just a stark grey stone house with a single vast expanse of roof, and blunt, massive chimneys; but apparently there were those who did. Parts of it dated from Edward the Fourth, so they said, notably the vaulted cellars, but Dave was as little impressed by mere age as was Hugh himself. But the urgent fact was that there was no money to maintain the property, the roof, according to Hugh, leaked in half a dozen places, and something had to be done about it quickly. Either sell it—which would probably mean selling it for demolition and redevelopment—or else get the National Trust to take it over, help to maintain it, and permit the former owners to continue in residence on condition that they showed it perhaps once a week. Well, that was about as good a deal as Robert was likely to get.