A Night of Errors Read online

  ‘We know that rural communities are always full of evil gossip.’ Mr Greengrave raised his stick and pointed down the little village street before them. ‘You see those cottages – so picturesque, so peaceful, so suggestive of the comfortableness of calendars and Christmas cards? There is scarcely one about which some foul story is not current among its neighbours. And about the gentry they have all sorts of extraordinary beliefs. But our own minds surely we should keep clear of such stuff.’

  The vicar’s brow had darkened as he spoke and his words had come with unusual energy. Lucy seemed impressed and anxious to make herself understood.

  ‘You think me cynical and ungrateful. It all isn’t easy to explain. But this waiting for Oliver during the past few weeks is only an intensification of something that has been going on for years. There is a queer perpetual expectation about mama, and it spreads to Oliver and myself without our at all understanding it. We’re like Mr Micawber – always expecting something to turn up. Not Dickens’ cheerful Mr Micawber, of course. If you can imagine a Micawber invented by Chekhov and given touches by Dostoievski–’

  Mr Greengrave frowned; he disapproved of serious conversation being given these literary embellishments. ‘Beneath Lady Dromio’s placidity,’ he said, ‘I have more than once felt something of the sort. I confess that I have hoped that it might be a scarcely recognized craving for deeper spiritual experience.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t just that she became very early a widow and obscurely feels that she has always been cheated of something.’ Lucy delivered this by way of concession. ‘Rather it has been a constant muted expectation of some definitive event, as of somebody coming in at the door or – or of a skeleton coming out of a cupboard. I have always had the feeling that I was brought in just to pass the time until something happened – and that I fell down on the job. Mama stroked my little curls in a very becoming way and we were the admiration of visitors. But her eyes were on that cupboard all the time. They are on it still. And I almost believe that she has lately done something to – well, to make the door give a preliminary creak.’

  ‘Lucy, my dear, this is mere mystery-mongering.’ But the vicar’s voice lacked confidence. ‘We must find better things to think about.’

  ‘I don’t agree. If one could think – but can one? – this would be a very useful thing to think about. It ought to be cleared up. I should be less of a mess – more of a credit to you as a parishioner, Mr Greengrave – if it were got out into the open. And I think it would help Oliver. Won’t you try?’

  ‘You like finding out about people. I can see that.’

  ‘Try, Lucy?’ The vicar was startled.

  ‘I don’t at all like doing anything of the sort. It is apt to seem officious and impertinent, even in a priest.’

  ‘Yes, I know that too. You find personal relationships rather a trial. But you happen to have the sort of brain that does eventually piece people together and see what a thing is all about.’

  Mr Greengrave laughed. ‘You seem already to know much more about me that I can ever hope to learn about you – let alone about this rather hypothetical skeleton in Lady Dromio’s cupboard. But of course if I could help it would be my duty to do so. And I should be very pleased to help you, my dear. I am afraid I spoke to you rather crudely at the beginning of our walk.’

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ Lucy sighed. ‘Well, I hardly suppose you can come back to the Hall now and begin turning out the cupboards straight away. Still’ – her voice took on a resigned tone – ‘there’s plenty of time. We take our tempo from Swindle, I think. There’s always oceans of time with the Dromios.’

  But in this, as it happened, Lucy was mistaken.

  2

  To talk in one’s sleep is common enough, and only occasionally dangerous. To walk in one’s sleep is a frequent vagary, much exploited by sensational writers long before Wilkie Collins wrote The Moonstone. To drink in one’s sleep is an accomplishment altogether more unusual, and one the possibilities of which fiction has left unexplored. Swindle, the ancient butler at Sherris, was said to do all three of these things.

  Swindle was sleeping now. A cheerful fire burnt in his sanctum; every now and then it was noiselessly replenished by one of the two able-bodied young men whom Swindle kept in thrall. Before this the feet of Swindle, unprofessionally encased in felt slippers, comfortably toasted. His snowy head reposed upon a handsome cushion which Lady Dromio had for some time missed from her favourite corner of the drawing-room. Beside him was a decanter and a glass of port. From this, and without calling upon the unnecessary intervention of the conscious mind, Swindle recruited himself as he slept.

  Port wine has long since ceased to be regarded as a normal before-dinner drink. But Swindle – apart from the half-pint of sherry which he always consumed after his morning stroll in the park – drank nothing else, and this for a curious reason. Fifty years ago it had been discovered that of all those who served the then vast and ramifying Dromio interests it was Sir Romeo’s butler who had the most exact and finely discriminating palate for wines. As the years passed, and Swindle’s experience and virtuosity grew, he had become increasingly without challenge the firm’s final court of appeal, being often whirled away to pronounce, before an anxious board of directors, a verdict upon the Beaune of Les Fèves, Les Grèves, or Le Clos de la Mousse. And Swindle, holding to the persuasion that if one is to taste wines one must certainly not acquire the habit of drinking them, confined himself to the exports of Jerez and Oporto. It is possible that had Swindle regularly allowed himself recourse to the mollifying and mundifying influences of one of the grand crus classés his character would have resisted that corruption which – the historian tells us – all power brings. As it was, Swindle’s was not an amiable disposition. By Pride or Covetousness he was not notably distinguished. But of the five remaining Deadly Sins he was a very sufficient licentiate of four, while to the fifth it was believed that he had said good-bye only round about his eightieth birthday. And chiefly Sloth and Ire struggled for the master-hand within him. If Lucy Dromio for her own convenience wished his slumbers shorter the menials subordinate to him heartily wished them conterminous with the clock.

  Swindle slept. And Sherris Hall, like some palace appropriately disposed round its Sleeping Beauty, slept too. Doves cooed behind the stables; faintly from woods beyond came the caw of rooks; in the rose garden the last belated bees were making their rounds. Cobweb and dead leaves possessed the racquet-court; the billiard-table showed white and shrouded like some gigantic mortuary slab; in the kitchens culinary preparations proceeded on the unambitious level and restricted scale proper to a masterless house. But it was over Sir Oliver’s study, a handsome room giving on the west terrace, that the heaviest sense of suspended animation hung. Dust and soot were gathering on the elaborately laid fire in the enormous fireplace. On one side of the desk was ranged a row of unopened financial journals and on the other, ominously high, a pile of bills. In the tantalus nearby the decanters were filled to the brim and beneath them stood a file of glasses in undisturbed repose. Every day housemaids went dutifully through the room with dusters. But for weeks, and apart from this, almost nothing had been touched except the cigar cabinet, a repository which Swindle found occasion to visit each morning shortly after breakfast.

  Everyone was idle.

  In the slanting rays of the declining sun Grubb the gardener sat on a barrow and smoked his pipe. His day’s work had consisted in walking slowly through the greenhouses and pinching off appropriate parts of the tomato plants. Although only in late middle age, Grubb had memories of Sherris stretching back to very different times, and he mingled the irritating role of laudatory temporis acti with some immemorial grudge against the whole establishment for which he laboured or was employed to labour. Now he was watching, censoriously but without any prompting to appropriate action, his assistant William neglect the necessary repair of the lawn-mower to gossip with a groom who was failing to exercise Miss Lucy’s mare.

  No
r were matters anywhere more actively ordered within doors, and Miss Lucy herself was now sitting idly at her bureau, a bookseller’s bill and two letters from a dressmaker lying forlornly before her. Lady Dromio alone was unaffected by the spell; she prowled from room to room, vague but yet alert, and whenever her eye fell upon a calendar she paused before it and her lips moved in silent calculation. And silence held the house. Only in the dining-room where the parlourmaid, being sulky, was contriving to extract noise out of laying silver for three, could a sound be heard. Sherris, like the house of Morpheus in the poem, might have been conceived as wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies. But this, as it happened, would have been an error. Fate was marching upon Sherris now.

  High above the offices the hands of the stable clock moved to the minute before seven. A deep whir, as of the clock gathering its forces to strike the hour, floated down and through the nearer gardens and the house itself. Almost imperceptibly the household stirred uneasily. Swindle set down his glass and opened an eye. Grubb took his pipe from his mouth as if about to admonish Williams in the matter of the mower. The parlourmaid set two forks silently on the table and turned briskly for the spoons. Lucy made as if to take up her pen. Lady Dromio laid a decisive finger on the calendar before her…

  But only silence followed. Some months ago the stable clock had ceased to strike and any preliminary mustering of its powers was in vain. Swindle closed his eye, Grubb returned to sucking his pipe, the parlourmaid set down the salt-cellars with a slap, Lucy’s hand fell to her side, Lady Dromio turned and drifted restlessly to the next room.

  At five minutes past seven the blast of a motor horn sounded from the highroad half a mile off. Not many seconds later it was heard more loudly at the lodge gates. Then again, and most unnecessarily, it blared out on the drive.

  Instantaneously Sherris came to life. Grubb seized his barrow and trundled it away. William bent to his mower, the groom vanished, the parlourmaid scurried from the dining-room. Swindle drained his glass, woke up and reached for his shoes. Lucy jumped to her feet. Lady Dromio sat down.

  Lady Dromio sat down, took up a piece of embroidery, and looked extremely composed. ‘Swindle,’ she said as the butler shuffled through the hall, ‘what was that horrible noise?’

  Swindle gave his mistress a sidelong malevolent glance. ‘Urrr!’ he said disagreeably, and proceeded on his way.

  Lady Dromio sighed, with the air of one whom the insolence of an old retainer has long since subdued. But the eye which she directed upon the doorway was keen and cold. She had not long to wait. There was a screech of brakes beneath the portico beyond, a bang and a clatter in the vestibule, and the door was flung open to admit a hurrying man somewhat past late middle age. ‘Well!’ His glance seized upon Lady Dromio at once. ‘Is he here?’

  Very deliberately Lady Dromio completed a stitch. She rose. ‘Sebastian,’ she said, ‘how nice to see you. But we were afraid you would not arrive till after dinner. I do hope that the water is reasonably hot. Swindle–’

  Swindle made a displeasing snuffling noise in his nose. He was looking at Mr Sebastian Dromio with a dim but questioning eye. ‘We do our best, your ladyship,’ he said. ‘But the boiler isn’t what it was, not by a long way.’ It would have been charitable to say that Swindle’s voice croaked, since this is a quality that may be induced merely by age. It contrived at once to croak and snarl. ‘It might run to a shower – not but what that looks less than Mr Sebastian needs.’

  It was true that Sebastian Dromio gave the impression of being extremely hot and dusty. Now he sent his hat skimming towards the stomach of an advancing footman and himself strode over to his sister-in-law. ‘Well,’ he reiterated unceremoniously, and on a rising note. ‘Has he turned up? This afternoon I found out–’

  Lady Dromio’s eye travelled from Swindle twitching his wrinkled nose to the second footman retrieving the hat, and then on to the first footman who was coming through the vestibule with Sebastian’s bags. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that I will come upstairs with you myself, just to see that things are as they should be. Robert, those suitcases are very dusty; take them away and clean them before bringing them to Mr Dromio’s room.’ Lady Dromio turned and mounted the stairs. ‘Really, Sebastian,’ she murmured, ‘you might be a little less dramatic, whatever the occasion may be. I have been reading a very interesting novel, all about a big hotel, and there is a man who keeps rushing–’

  ‘Damn your novel! Has Oliver not turned up?’

  ‘He has not turned up.’ Lady Dromio’s placidity was unruffled. ‘There is quite enough remark about it all already, without your shouting the house down. And a great deal of practical awkwardness too. The local bank manager came to see me this morning. It seems that there has been some hitch in the money that comes through from London–’

  ‘I can well believe it.’

  ‘And, as you know, the mere monthly outgoings here are very large. It is absurd in Oliver to keep so many servants, particularly those tiresome men. But here is your room, and everything seems in order. I expect that Lucy has given an eye to it.’

  ‘Very kind of her.’ Sebastian was perfunctory. ‘But the point is that there’s more than awkwardness round the corner. There’s some deuced odd revelation.’

  ‘Some revelation!’ Lady Dromio had gone very still. ‘What sort of revelation do you mean?’

  ‘Money, of course.’ Sebastian Dromio threw off his dustcoat and sat down by a window which commanded the park. He was old, his sister-in-law thought as she looked at him in the level evening light. In fact he was just as old as her dead husband would be now… She shivered – and at the same time relaxed. ‘Money?’ she questioned vaguely.

  ‘Have you never felt that there is something odd about Oliver and money? Has he ever told you anything? After all, his mother–’

  ‘Oliver seldom mentions such things. Of course I know he needs money. But about that, you must admit, he has been doing his best.’

  ‘A damned poor best, if you ask me.’ Sebastian lifted a tired chin, and the action seemed to show him not a tired man merely but a sick man as well. ‘I don’t care for your son, you know.’

  ‘I realize that. Oliver is not a very attractive person, I suppose. Although I believe that Lucy–’

  ‘The more fool she.’ Sebastian Dromio’s harsh tone seemed momentarily to soften as he mentioned the girl. ‘I’ve sometimes thought that your abominable fire couldn’t have done worse. If it had been one of the others that Romeo got out the brat might have proved a less poor fish than Oliver.’

  Lady Dromio flushed – but with what emotion it would have been hard to discern. ‘That is rather a brutal thing to say – and gets us nowhere.’

  ‘No more it does.’ Sebastian’s face – one of those faces that harden as they grow old – contrived an appearance of contrition. He shifted restlessly in his chair. ‘The business,’ he said, ‘I have my finger pretty well on the pulse of that. And I keep liking it less and less. But there’s something else.’ His fingers drummed on the arm of his chair. ‘Look here, Kate, about that Mrs Gollifer–’

  ‘Mrs Gollifer!’ Lady Dromio drew a careful stitch through her embroidery and then looked up blankly at her brother-in-law.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Gollifer. Is she Oliver’s mistress?’

  Lady Dromio’s expression of astonishment grew – but there was an obscure horror behind it. ‘Sebastian, Oliver is forty, and Mary Gollifer is old enough to be his–’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know all that. Only some people have queer tastes. Otherwise I don’t see–’ Sebastian hesitated. ‘Tell me,’ he said quietly, ‘do you know Oliver to be hiding?’

  ‘I have no idea what you mean.’

  ‘He hasn’t been down here – quietly?’

  ‘Of course not! He’s in America still.’

  ‘He’s no such thing, Kate. I saw Oliver in London at lunchtime today.’

  Lady Dromio said nothing. She rose, walked to another window, and searched the park rather as if expecting
her absent son to be lurking behind an elm or in a ha-ha. ‘You spoke to him?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I did not. It was a deuced queer thing. I’d gone into a restaurant to lunch – sometimes, you know, I feel I can’t stick the faces in that damned club – and I had got pretty well through a filthy meal when I became aware of two men getting up from a table on t’other side of a pillar. As they rose their voices reached me for the first time – or I attended to them for the first time – and I’ll be damned if one of them wasn’t Oliver’s. I swung round, pretty thoroughly surprised. I had no more notion than you’ – and Sebastian glanced swiftly at Lady Dromio, silent by her window – ‘that he was back in England. There he was, pretty well within a couple of yards of me. But I saw him only for an instant, for no sooner had our eyes met than he whipped out a handkerchief, buried his nose in it like a fellow being led into a police court and hoping to dodge the photographers, and bolted through the door. Fishy way for a nephew to behave towards his uncle, it seemed to me.’

  ‘It was certainly strange.’ Lady Dromio returned from the window and sat down quietly in her chair. ‘But didn’t you follow?’

  ‘I sat tight. It was too queer to be comfortable, and it struck me at once that Oliver might have got into some pretty stiff pickle. Mightn’t want to be greeted, you know, before this other fellow. You see, I’ve had my doubts for some time. This disappearing into America and not being heard of–’ Sebastian broke off. ‘Look here, Kate, what was the last you heard?’

  ‘Money.’ Lady Dromio smiled faintly. ‘He had some heavy call for money over there about six weeks ago, and for some reason he couldn’t get it from our New York office.’

  ‘I’m sure he couldn’t.’ Sebastian’s tone was grim.

  ‘And of course there is fuss about getting sterling to America and old Mr Pomeroy had to ring me up to fish out some papers. That was how I heard of it.’ Lady Dromio paused, picked up her embroidery and executed a couple of stitches. ‘But what,’ she asked abruptly, ‘about the other man?’