A Family Affair Read online

‘Oh, dear me – no.’ Mr Meatyard shook his head. ‘Silver hair, and had to walk around with the help of a stick. A gold-headed stick, it was. He told me it had been given him by the King of Spain.’

  ‘There isn’t a King of Spain.’

  ‘Ah, but long ago. When he was young, and his talent was first being noticed. He was called to Madrid to paint the Infanta. I remember wondering if the Infanta was a hospital or a cathedral.’ Mr Meatyard chuckled luxuriously. ‘Well, I’ve seen what’s to be seen in the Prado and the Escorial since then. Sir Joshua – the real Sir Joshua – is small beer, Sir John, when you get to know Velazquez. I recommend Velazquez to you.’

  ‘I must certainly get to know him, some time.’ Appleby produced this with proper gravity. ‘And then Sir Joshua showed you round his studio?’

  ‘Yes – and there were stacks of paintings. Not in frames, you know, but scattered around against the walls. Portraits, mostly. He told me that what he really liked doing was landscapes, particularly wooded ones. But he hadn’t much time to follow his private inclination, so he supposed the landscapes would have a certain scarcity value one day. He hunted around to show me one or two – and, sure enough, there didn’t seem many of them. Autumn was what he really liked, he said. And a little after that – quite by chance, you might say, his hand fell on “Autumn Woods”. I’ve never been one to be afraid of speaking up, Sir John. So I asked him for his figure, and offered him cash down. He acted like a perfect gentleman of the older sort – the sort, I’ve always noticed, who make no bones about money. “Eight thousand,” he said – just like that. So it was a deal. And when I’d fixed up about Martha’s sittings, I walked out the owner of “Autumn Woods”.’

  ‘You must look at it before you go.’ Mrs Meatyard made this reiterated suggestion an occasion for standing up; she was competently resolved, Appleby supposed, that her husband’s dinner hour should not be interfered with even by the most eminent of retired policemen. ‘But, first, there’s one question I’d like to ask you, Sir John. Just how have you come to interest yourself in our experience?’

  ‘It was brought to my notice at the time it happened, Mrs Meatyard, although it wasn’t my business actually to carry out an investigation. And now – as I have explained to your husband – it turns out to be only one in a series of frauds connected with works of art of one sort or another.’

  ‘And to be quite small beer among them.’ Mr Meatyard interjected this with morose satisfaction. ‘Sir John tells me I’ve been a minor victim. Which suggests there have been some super-Charlies, if you ask me.’

  ‘I see.’ Mrs Meatyard’s intelligent gaze was directed for a moment very thoughtfully upon Appleby. ‘When £8,000 is a minor matter, it must be really large-scale crime that is in question?’

  ‘Bigger rackets go on, Mrs Meatyard. Still, “large-scale crime” is fair enough.’

  ‘I suppose you are accustomed to such things, Sir John, and able to take them lightly. Can they be taken too lightly? Not that Albert and I haven’t been at fault ourselves, perhaps, in rather making a joke of it all. And we’ve only been able to do that because – as there’s no denying – Albert is a wealthy man now. In a way, of course, it was a joke. We’ve talked about that already. Were any of the other frauds like that, Sir John?’

  ‘Yes. Or at least it is safe to say that there is an element of the freakish in all of them.’

  ‘They were thought of by what must be called a freakish mind?’

  ‘Decidedly.’

  ‘And about a freakish mind there is always something unpredictable?’

  ‘Essentially so, I suppose.’ Appleby was beginning to find something vaguely disturbing in this inquisition.

  ‘So far, I take it, nobody can honestly be said to have suffered through these frauds? Really suffered, I mean?’

  ‘Well, no. Nobody has been put in any danger of missing his next day’s dinner, Mrs Meatyard.’

  ‘Which is why we talk about bets, and champagne, and a sporting interest. The whole thing is simply an amusing puzzle, Sir John, which you have taken it into your head you are going to work out?’

  ‘I don’t think I am able to quarrel with that analysis.’

  ‘Martha,’ Mr Meatyard said, ‘has a very analytical mind. I’ve been at her to sit on a board or two often enough. But she believes that a woman’s sphere is the home.’

  ‘But suppose this joker’s jokes caught up with him,’ Mrs Meatyard said. ‘What would happen then?’

  ‘It’s a question,’ Mr Meatyard said. ‘It’s a real question. He’s been playing for high stakes – hasn’t he? – if £8,000 is peanuts to him. He might turn nasty, if you ask me. Have you considered that, Sir John?’

  ‘I don’t believe I have.’ Appleby found himself uncertain whether to be amused or impressed. ‘But it’s a possibility I’ll bear in mind from now on. And now, I must really take my leave. But not before seeing “Autumn Woods”. And I’d like, of course, to see your Cézanne and your Gainsboroughs as well.’

  Part Two

  Three Visits

  10

  Sir Thomas Carrington, of Monks Amble in the County of Northamptonshire, Bart., was by temperament something of a recluse. Moreover the disposition had been growing on him with the years. He had lately abandoned hunting, for example, as an impossibly gregarious pursuit, requiring a quite literal rubbing shoulders with a rabble of upstart townees. It was true that the MFH was his brother-in-law, and because of this he was constrained to permit the meet’s being held once or twice in the season before the windows of Monks Amble itself. But he always caused the shutters to be closed for the occasion, and by leaving ostentatiously bare the flag-pole on the west turret of his residence he intimated, at least to the adequately well-informed, that there was no possibility of his being found at home. He had turned shooting into a solitary occupation – much to the indignation of sundry neighbours who in former times had been welcome to turn up with a gun. Even so, Sir Thomas distinctly preferred fishing, since it called only for imitation flies and not for real dogs. It was indeed averred by the devout of the parish (Monks Amble with Toddle Canonicorum) that this reclusive squire was most exact in his weekly attendance at divine service. But as the Carrington family pew stood ten feet high, and was entered through a door giving directly upon Monks Amble park, this appeared a claim impossible of substantiation. There were even ribald and disaffected persons who declared it to be a myth unscrupulously fabricated for the edification of the village.

  So much Bobby Appleby had gathered from his father on the occasion of being given his present odd commission. And it really was rather odd. He had gone home for the weekend with some notion of running his father over to Keynes Court – and had promptly been handed this minor reconnaissance all on his own. Sir Thomas Carrington was the man who – quite some time ago – might or might not have been defrauded of a genuine Stubbs. Bobby was to beard Sir Thomas and learn all about it.

  Bobby’s views on a career were as yet of a somewhat negative order. He was quite clear that he did not propose to become a policeman. Unlike the Church or the Army or the Law (he obscurely felt), it was not a thing that ought to run in families. One Appleby at the top of that tree was enough; he himself was going to find another one. Perhaps not a tree at all. Just a shrub. For the fact that one wasn’t at all thick – was quite a long way from that, it seemed – didn’t at all guarantee that one was going to shoot up in the world But at least he wasn’t taking what might be called a vocational test now. It must simply be that his father had thought it would amuse him.

  He stopped his car, and surveyed the countryside, map in hand. The church on the horizon was Aldwinkle All Saints, and the poet Dryden had been born in its rectory. Dryden’s grandfather had been a baronet, and his next-door neighbour in the baronetcy had no doubt been a Carrington. Perhaps Sir Thomas could be chatted up with a little literary stuff of that kind. But it didn’t seem likely. The fine arts might be more promising. But then Sir Thomas was probably a bit touchy
on that ground, on account of having lost his Stubbs. Shooting would probably be better. Or Bobby could even try Dryden, and then nip on to shooting if Dryden proved no go. There was a natural transition, come to think of it. One of Dryden’s successors as Poet Laureate had been a harmless country gentleman called Thomas Pye. Pye had written a poem called The Progress of Refinement, but hadn’t made an awful lot of the theme. So he had fallen back on more native interests. His second poem had been called just Shooting – which had been splendidly simple, if nothing else. Perhaps Sir Thomas Carrington would relish a little talk about Pye… Bobby frowned gloomily. If that was the sort of notion Oxford put into his head, then Oxford was doing little more than make him addle-pated. Nobody would suffer a total stranger to walk in on him and start an instructive harangue on the English Poets Laureate. There was nothing for it, Bobby saw, but to drive up to Monks Amble and trust to the spur of the moment. And there the house was: an uncompromisingly square Georgian box in the middle distance. It seemed very much exposed to the elements. It would have been less intimidating, somehow, if decently screened by a few plantations. Bobby shoved into gear, and drove on.

  There was a drive, with elaborate wrought-iron gates and a lodge. The gates were locked, but the lodge appeared to be inhabited. Bobby rather supposed that, in this situation, one simply sat back and sounded one’s horn. Or was that wrong? Did one get out of one’s car, knock at a door, and make affable noises to anybody who chose to appear? Bobby didn’t know. They didn’t run to anything of the sort at Dream, and although Bobby had a reasonable acquaintance among dwellers in country houses they none of them had any notion of living behind locked gates. Being, however, a resourceful youth, he presently hit on a plan for avoiding plain solecism, either way. He got out of his car and found a door. It proved to have a bell, and on this he contrived to ring a moderate but not ineffectively diffident peal. The door opened almost at once, and an old woman peered out at him.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Bobby said engagingly, ‘but I seem to have lost my way. Can you by any chance tell me how to get to Monks Amble – Sir Thomas Carrington’s house?’

  ‘You have got. It’s here.’

  ‘I say, what luck!’ Bobby registered gratified astonishment. ‘Would you mind opening the gates?’

  ‘Be you the lad that’s to clean out cesspool?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not.’ Bobby was rather gratified, if anything, at having this lowly status suggested for him, since he shared with a whole generation of privileged English youth a vague aspiration after classlessness.

  ‘Then you mun go away again. It’s only the lad for the cesspool that’s to be let in.’

  ‘But I want to call on Sir Thomas.’

  ‘Then you mun keep on wanting. Sir Thomas don’t want to see ’ee.’

  ‘But that’s absurd! Surely, my dear lady’ – Bobby found that he had almost said ‘my good woman’, but his principles had prevailed in time – ‘you can’t know that Sir Thomas doesn’t want to see me? You know nothing about me.’

  ‘No more do Sir Thomas, like enough. Not that it would help if he did.’ The old woman began to close the door, as if the business that had called her to it had been satisfactorily concluded. Bobby felt that some emergency procedure was called for, and he had an idea that ruthless prevarication was probably the right thing in an efficient detective.

  ‘As it happens,’ he said shamelessly, ‘I am a relation of Sir Thomas’. You’ve probably heard him speak of me – his nephew, Robert.’ Bobby felt that this would sound more convincing with a little superadded detail. ‘Back from Canada,’ he said, ‘on a short and unexpected visit.’

  ‘A relation?’ The old woman opened the door a little wider, but this didn’t prove to be for the purpose of any warmer welcome. ‘So much the worse. Sir Thomas, he don’t receive the county. And Sir Thomas, he don’t receive the local gentry either. But when it comes to relations, be they his own or be they her late ladyship’s, Sir Thomas, he gets out his gun.’ The door shut with a bang in Bobby’s startled face. Then, unexpectedly, it momentarily opened again. ‘Except,’ the old woman said, ‘that sometimes he do prefer a dog-whip.’

  This time, the door closed for good.

  So Bobby Appleby climbed back into his car. He wondered darkly how much his father had gathered about the domestic life of Sir Thomas Carrington, and whether he had himself been sent on this mission as a species of poor family joke. But he certainly wasn’t going to go home now, leaving Sir Thomas uninterviewed – not even if the alternative meant risking atrocious assault. Bobby had never been peppered with pellets, and a dog-whip was not among the fairly numerous instruments with which he had been corrected at one or another school. He could only live and learn.

  He might, of course, simply climb over a wall or fence, or push through a hedge. But he was going to drive up to Monks Amble in proper style if he could. Probably there would be less imposing entrances, designed for one or another sort of rural traffic with the great house, which nobody bothered to lock. Behind the mansion, indeed, and at no more than a modest remove from it, was a small huddle of buildings which might be a home farm. He consulted his map again. It said, sure enough, Monks Amble Manor Farm. Bobby started the engine and skirted the small park. Within a couple of minutes he was among stables. And from these there was no difficulty in driving round to the front of the house.

  It occurred to him to hope that the old woman in the lodge wasn’t equipped with a telephone; that she hadn’t, repenting her uncivil behaviour, rung up Sir Thomas to say how reluctantly she had turned away a wandering nephew from Canada. But that was absurd, and so had the whole notion of false pretences been. He would simply have a go under his own colours. The house, now that he was close up to it, seemed rather reassuring; it had a respectable and well-cared-for look that didn’t suggest habitation by a ferocious eccentric. Only the scene did a little lack animation. Bobby would have liked to see a housemaid circumspectly gossiping with a gardener’s boy through an open window, or even just a couple of contented spaniels lazing by the front door. But nothing of the sort was visible. He got out of his car and rang a bell. It was answered by a manservant who didn’t look too promising. He might have been younger brother, indeed, to the old woman in the lodge.

  ‘Good morning,’ Bobby said. ‘Is Sir Thomas–’

  ‘Not at home.’

  There is always a daunting absoluteness about these conventional words. Very little can be achieved in face of them. One can leave a visiting card (supposing one to have so archaic an object about one’s person). One can claim the right to sit down in a man’s hall and scribble him a note. One can’t – or not on any purely social assumption – say firmly, ‘I’ll wait’. Bobby felt at an impasse. Unlike the old woman, Sir Thomas’ butler was too well-trained positively to close the door before the caller had turned away. On the other hand, he appeared to acknowledge no obligation to further utterance. Bobby felt that a decisive move on his own part was required, even if it meant breaking his recent resolution to avoid prevarication.

  ‘But I’ve come about the cesspool,’ Bobby said.

  ‘Then get into it.’

  ‘But I have to see Sir Thomas first.’ Bobby, although inwardly aghast at having plunged into this further piece of nonsense, spoke confidently. ‘I have to take his instructions, you see, before preparing an estimate.’ He looked past the butler and into the recesses of a large and murky hall as he thus piled fib on fib. For a moment he thought he glimpsed a moving figure – and even what might have been a human face behind an enormous moustache. Then he heard a noise. It was a very familiar noise indeed. He made it himself whenever he slipped a couple of cartridges into the old 12-bore he had inherited from an uncle. In his present circumstances, he didn’t like the sound at all. He would willingly have swopped it even for a sinister preliminary crack of a whip. Still, he wasn’t going to be intimidated. ‘So will you please,’ he said, ‘tell your master I am here?’

  The butler had been d
isconcerted – which was something. But at this his eyes narrowed suspiciously. Perhaps, Bobby thought, ‘your master’ had been a false note. It was probably not a locution employed by persons in the cesspool business. And it was this point that the butler now took up. He comprehended Bobby’s clothes and his haircut, his complexion and his fingernails, in a single professional and sombrely sceptical glance.

  ‘You don’t look like a young man who has come about the drains,’ the butler said. ‘You look more like a college lad, if you ask me.’

  ‘But I am a college lad. I mean, I’ve been a college lad. An honours degree in sanitation is essential for the cesspool business now. I got mine at Oxford. Please take Sir Thomas my name. It’s Appleby.’

  At this, rather surprisingly, Sir Thomas Carrington’s butler took half a step into the open air. This appeared to be for the purpose of scrutinizing Bobby in a better light.

  ‘You wait here.’ Something had emerged, Bobby felt, to shake the butler into this wholly irregular formula – one permissible at the portals only of altogether humbler domiciles. Bobby, left standing on the doorstep, did his best to use his ears. It might be vital to manage a timely skip behind one of the bleak Doric pillars which flanked Sir Thomas’ front door. But neither shotgun nor dog-whip gave any further indication of its existence. Instead, a muttered colloquy made itself heard. Bobby fancied he distinguished – very perplexingly – the word ‘Twickenham’. Even more strangely, the same voice said something about ‘injury time’, and the butler distinctly enunciated the phrase, ‘far out on the twenty-five’. And then the butler was back again. He was carrying what was instantly identifiable as a not very recent copy of the Illustrated London News. He halted in the doorway; he looked at this organ of the press; he looked at Bobby. ‘It would be Mr Robert Appleby?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s right. My father–’ Bobby broke off. His mind (although lately coming to be reported upon so agreeably by his tutors) was susceptible to moments of confusion. This was one of them. That his name was known at Monks Amble could only be the consequence, he supposed, of some further deplorable family joke.