Mrs Spain hesitated, then came to stand beside his chair, stiffly upright and with tight mouth. She held in her hands the cloth with which she had been polishing the Scenes from Dickens. In the friendliest manner imaginable, Mr Crispin slipped his left hand beneath her skirt and cupped it round that half of Mrs Spain’s bottom which presented itself most conveniently to his attention.
“Mrs Harper,” he told her quietly, “might have a son who’s a copper, but whatever she told you about Arnie and his missus is a load of fanny. Sophie’s just the sort of scheming cow who’d keep a clean nightie specially to put out every morning if she thought the hired help was taking any notice. You know what Sophie’s after, don’t you? The bloody magistrates’ bench.”
“A fine so-called magistrate that one would make!” exclaimed Mrs Spain, abandoning in the emotion of the moment her attempt to disengage from Crispin’s embrace. “There’s more than one in this town remember how she was always having to be brought back from that Polish air force camp out at Strawbridge.”
Reminiscence gleamed redly in the eye of ex-combatant Crispin. “Remember that tale about the Poles, girl? We were always hearing of women being taken to hospital with their tits chewed off.” He pondered, sighed. “Now it’s Kit-e-Kat and Chinese restaurants.”
“What I can’t understand is how she had the face to invite us to see her ridiculous curtain gadgets. As if it was the unveiling of a war memorial or something. You should have taken no notice. Gone nowhere near.”
“You got me to ask them round for sherry when we had the portico built.”
“Yes, but not specially to see it. That was just coincidence.”
Mr Crispin retrieved the hand from beneath Mrs Spain’s skirt in order to scratch his own thigh. He smiled.
“Bloody nearly bust his gut pretending not to notice it was there. Remember? Not that Arnie would know the difference between a portico and a pisspot.”
“There’s no call to be crude, Harry. You’ll be taken as no better than they are, if you’re not careful.”
He pulled a face of mock contrition.
“No, what I can’t forgive,” went on Mrs Spain, “was her looking at the pillars and asking when the builders were going to take the scaffolding poles away. Sarcastic cat. Of course, she’d never got over the way we made them look silly over that so-called swimming pool of theirs.”
“It must have cost him a bloody bomb, having to extend it like that.”
Crispin tugged happily at his nose in recollection. The Hatches, outdone in swimming pool acreage, had been obliged not only to demolish a greenhouse but to sacrifice several feet of tennis court in order to establish parity. What made the affair even more satisfactory was the tendency, shown after only a few weeks, of the older and newer halves of the pool to take part in a sort of continental drift, the result of which was a leakage so considerable that water had to be hosed in continuously at full pressure. Crispin, as member of the General Purposes Committee of Flaxborough Council, was greatly looking forward to hotter weather and its justification of his moving a general hosepipe ban. That would send the bloody tide out, all right.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you...”
Mrs Spain went to the sideboard and took a piece of paper from a drawer. “Somebody from that firm at Chalmsbury rang up today.” She looked at a note she had written. “Half-past ten in the morning—that’s when they’re coming to put the Barbecue Barn up.”
Mr Crispin rubbed his hands. “Oh, marvellous!” He made to reach for the paper she held. “They know which one, don’t they? I don’t want a cock-up.”
Mrs Spain peered at the paper, then handed it to him. It was an illustrated brochure. She pointed. “That one. ‘The Old Kentucky’,”
“Fine.”
“I still think that’s prettier, Harry.” Mrs Spain’s finger moved to “Ye Olde Trysting Place”. “It says it’s got thatch as an optional extra.”
“Thatch my arse. It’s not fitted for gas, girl; that’s the point. Ours will have a proper barbecue set built in.”
Mrs Spain did not argue the point further. She shrugged, a little sadly, then remembered something else.
“Titch Blossom rang just before you came in,” she said. “About the car. Something to do with lights.”
“That’s right. The Merc. What did he say?”
“He’ll pick it up first thing tomorrow.”
“O.K. I’ll take the Jag, then.”
Mrs Spain frowned. “What’s he going to do to the lights? They’re all right, aren’t they?”
“Sure. I’m just having some extra quartz-iodines fitted.”
“And what are they when they’re at home?”
“Headlights, my old darling. Just headlights. But extra special ones.” He lunged good-humouredly with open palms. “Like yours!”
Mrs Spain stepped back hastily, crossing her arms like Joan of Arc. She glanced out of the window at a dark and deserted Arnhem Crescent.
“One of these days, Harry Crispin,” she said, “you’ll do something when people are looking. And then you’ll be in trouble.”
Chapter Four
Mister Machonochie was always described in the local paper as “belonging to the Flaxborough stable of Mr Arnold Hatch, the well-known business man and club owner”.
The horse had never, in fact, been within thirty miles of Flaxborough. There was neither racing nor hunting land anywhere in the county, whose arable acres were far too profitable to be played with. “Stable”, in the context of Mister Machonochie, was merely a courtesy term, a journalistic abstraction. The animal was actually domiciled in a village near Newmarket, where for £20 a week a friendly trainer provided shelter and keep on condition that he was not expected to exercise it in company with his own animals, which he feared might thereby be infected with Mister Machonochie’s chronic lethargy (not arthritis, as Councillor Crispin had slanderously alleged).
This lodging arrangement was doubly convenient. The horse could be entered for an occasional race at the handy Newmarket course, thus maintaining Hatch’s status as racehorse owner without placing on the beast the unwarrantable extra strain of being transported around the country. And, as Newmarket was within an hour’s car ride from Flaxborough, Hatch could get over often enough to be pictured in the Citizen patting the nose of “Flaxborough’s hope for the Pountney Stakes” early each May and stroking the neck of the “local fancy for the Bruce Montgomery Handicap” in October.
In this year’s Pountney, Mister Machonochie had cantered home an easy eighth. After allowing it to rest near the post and get its breath back, Hatch gave it the large piece of crystallised pineapple procured for the occasion by his wife (whose interest in the turf did not extend to actually stepping on it) and, committing the animal to the care of the friendly trainer for another six months, he made his way to the owners’ car park.