Lord Mullion's Secret Page 5

  ‘Yes, indeed – and with three daughters. Sylvanus Wyndowe came out of the army several years ago, and is now our local MFH. A very jolly fellow. One can scarcely glance at him without thinking of beef and ale.’

  ‘Dear me!’

  ‘“Ruddy” would he the first word to occur to me were I endeavouring to describe the outward man. And he goes in for roaring.’

  ‘Roaring?’

  ‘Just that. A squirearchal type of the old school. One would scarcely associate him with the higher nobility. There is perhaps a touch of affectation about it. But he is a most agreeable fellow, and you will enjoy his company.’

  Honeybath wished he could feel assured of this. He judged that he might prove rather allergic to being roared at. But as the thought crossed his mind something not totally dissimilar happened to him in the form of a loud summons from what he recognized as the horn of his own motor car.

  ‘Bless my soul!’ he exclaimed. ‘It must be that young man.’ And without much ceremony he hurried to the church door and pulled it open. The rain was still falling – but there, only a dozen yards away, was Swithin Gore with his car. Swithin, perhaps exhilarated by his position at its wheel, seemed unconscious that there had been anything peremptory about his behaviour.

  ‘Here you are, sir!’ he now shouted. ‘I guessed you might have dodged in there. So come along, and you may still be in time for the soup.’

  Honeybath, who was far from taking umbrage at this brisk behaviour, signalled his acquiescence, renewed his expressions of gratitude to Dr Atlay, and then ran for the car. It was a new car, and in acquiring it he had for some reason treated himself to a vehicle of a distinctly superior order. It obviously pleased Swithin very much, so Honeybath insisted that Swithin should continue to drive.

  Swithin drove far from rashly, and they were through the castle gates and inside the park before he relaxed sufficiently to speak.

  ‘Didn’t you know,’ he asked wonderingly, ‘that there’s a reserve tank?’

  ‘A reserve tank?’

  ‘Didn’t you see that little red light? It’s off again now, but it must have been on for quite a long time. It tells you the main tank is emptying.’

  ‘It was most unobservant of me, I fear.’ Honeybath might have been disconcerted, or even offended, by this ruthless exposure of his incompetence. But Swithin’s pleasure, imperfectly dissimulated, in his own superior knowledge was infectious rather than irritating.

  ‘What you have to do is flick down that switch.’ Swithin took a hand briefly from the wheel the more certainly to elucidate this mystery.

  ‘Then the red light goes off, and the green one above it comes on as it is now. It’s to continue to remind you that you’re now on the reserve tank. And that’s a gallon and a half.’

  ‘I see. Thank you very much.’

  ‘You won’t forget?’ Swithin asked seriously.

  ‘No, I promise not to forget.’

  ‘No use having those superior gadgets, sir, if you don’t master them.’

  ‘Perfectly true.’

  It was thus that a chastened Charles Honeybath arrived, chauffeur-driven, at Mullion Castle.

  6

  Swithin’s hope was fulfilled, and Honeybath was in time for the soup. He suspected, indeed, that it had been put back for half an hour in the continued expectation of his arrival. And it was pretty well all that had been put back, since the Mullions’ luncheon, although attended by several servants, consisted of an unassuming potage du jour followed by bread and cheese.

  ‘I’m sure you won’t mind falling in with our ways, Charles,’ Lord Mullion said by way of commenting on this. ‘On wholly domestic occasions, that’s to say. The fact is that when one’s getting on what one comes to appreciate is a single slap-up meal in the day.’

  ‘I quite agree,’ Honeybath said. ‘As the perspectives shorten, one doesn’t want to spend one’s afternoons half-asleep.’

  ‘No, indeed,’ Lady Mullion said briskly. And her glance upon her guest and prospective portraitist was, for the first time, definitely approving.

  ‘So we dine,’ Lord Mullion pursued with a hint of apology, ‘in what you might call an almost formal way. Black tie, Charles, if it isn’t too much of a bore.’

  ‘Not at all. Every wise man still carries such a thing around.’

  ‘A damned funny thing.’ Cyprian Wyndowe interjected at this point. ‘A chap at King’s – an up-and-coming prole – got an invitation from the Provost’s wife or somebody saying “Black tie”. He hadn’t a notion it meant a dinner-jacket–’

  ‘And why should he?’ Boosie Wyndowe interrupted. ‘It’s a perfectly idiotic expression.’

  ‘And he probably didn’t own such a thing, anyway. So he turned up in an imitation London suit, and an enormous sailor’s knot black tie, as if the wretched woman’s dinner party was a funeral.’

  ‘And now we all laugh,’ Boosie said. ‘O God, O Montreal!’

  Lord and Lady Mullion, unfamiliar with the poetry of the second Samuel Butler, looked perplexed. They must have been conscious, too, Honeybath supposed, of a certain callow quality in their son and heir’s notion of an entertaining anecdote. But Lord Mullion pursued his theme unruffled.

  ‘After all,’ he said, ‘one must wash. And if one washes one might as well change. So I’ve no quarrel with a black tie. And Camilla usually comes down to dine with us, you know, and she likes it. Or I’m not sure that she does. White ties every night would be her thing. At least we’ve got away from all that, except at those big vulgar does. Great-aunt Camilla is Victorian to the core.’

  ‘With the justification, I imagine, of having been born in that reign?’ Honeybath said.

  ‘I rather think not quite. Mary, would that be right?’

  ‘It’s almost impossible to say – at least if one believes what she says.’ Lady Mullion spoke on a note of affectionate amusement. ‘She claims to have been born on the day the Old Queen died. But it’s not a point I’ve checked up on – as I’ve had to do so often with so many of you Wyndowes.’

  ‘Perhaps the ancient creature fancies herself as a prompt reincarnation of that tough old Teuton,’ Cyprian said, and paused as if to have this sally admired. Nothing of the sort happening he added. ‘I’d have supposed her a good deal older, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Splendidly ageless, really,’ Lady Patience Wyndowe said. ‘But I do think of her as belonging to a time quite out of mind.’

  ‘As at your age, my dear Patty, you may well do.’ Lord Mullion paused while digging a spoon vigorously into a Stilton. ‘But nothing of the kind. I believe our worthy vicar, for example, could give her ten years or thereabout. Did Martin Atlay entertain you to any family history, Charles?’

  ‘Very moderately. We did a short round of the Wyndowe monuments.’

  ‘He’d know all about them. And he knows all about us. If puzzled, Charles, ask Atlay. He’s a historically minded chap.’

  ‘I might have heard more if the young man hadn’t turned up so smartly with my car.’ Honeybath recalled his resolution to be emphatically commendatory about the young man. ‘He was quite uncommonly efficient and friendly.’

  ‘Glad to hear it, Charles. Was it Gore, did you say? A promising lad, I believe, and certainly not morose like so many of them. Willing, if not particularly bright, I imagine.’

  ‘Swithin Gore is very bright indeed, papa.’ Patty had come out with this swiftly – and struck Honeybath as instantly surprised, and perhaps annoyed, that she had done so.

  ‘Agreed,’ Boosie said. ‘I’ve flirted with Swithin like mad, and his heart is quite gorgeously adamant. He’s amused, but he knows everything not to do or say. Which doesn’t hold of all Eton and King’s – or not in my experience.’

  This extravagance didn’t please young Lord Wyndowe, who said something crude about pig-tailed brats looking for kicks from clod-hoppers. Honeybath suspected it didn’t please Patty either. It certainly didn’t please her mother, who changed the subject.

&nb
sp; ‘I’m so glad, Mr Honeybath, that you have turned up today and not tomorrow. Wednesdays are terribly restless, and Saturdays are, too.’

  ‘Ah, yes, Charles!’ Lord Mullion broke in. ‘I was going to tell you, wasn’t I? The place is open to the public on those days, and at this time of year they pile in like mad. It’s quite a problem. We can’t hide in the attics, because that’s where Prince Rupert lodged his officers and held his councils of war. There are maps on the walls and cannon-balls in the fireplaces and even plumed hats on the clothes pegs. So they all have to be shown, and we have to skulk where we can.’

  ‘Or be shown ourselves,’ Boosie said.

  ‘Just so, my dear. I sometimes wish we’d remained papists for longer than we did, and had provided the castle with a clutch of priest’s holes. They’d come in handy.’ This was evidently one of Lord Mullion’s well-worn jokes. ‘However, I think we can hide you away, Charles.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Cyprian said, ‘Mr Honeybath would like to pay at the turnstile and be taken round.’

  For the first time since his arrival, Honeybath observed Lord Mullion to frown. Rightly or wrongly, he had regarded this sally of his son’s as hinting insolence.

  ‘Don’t be foolish, Cyprian. And, by the way, please don’t do just that again yourself. Once or twice was a passable joke, but after that it involves a lack of consideration to the people who are good enough to help us run the thing.’

  ‘Very well, sir.’ Cyprian, although not pleased at being publicly rebuked, looked at his father without resentment. Honeybath told himself that here was a household getting along with no more than moderate friction. If anyone went in for belligerency it was probably Boosie. And, indeed, Boosie had a fling now.

  ‘Cyprian,’ she explained to Honeybath, ‘paid at the door, and attached himself to a party, and kept on asking silly questions. It was an old friend of the family, Miss Kinder-Scout, who was taking round that particular lot, and of course she knew Cyprian perfectly well. She must have been rather upset.’

  ‘It must certainly have been a little surprising.’

  ‘But he did something sillier still.’ Lady Lucy Wyndowe (to give Boosie her proper name) seemed not a particularly tactful child, and she had a sisterly indictment to press home. ‘He’d taken care to leave his own silver cigarette case on a table in the library, and when he thought that Miss Kinder-Scout wasn’t looking and that several visitors were, he put out a stealthy hand and pocketed the thing. One flinches from the thought of peering inside the head of anybody who could put on so idiotic a turn.’

  ‘It was an experiment in the psychology of crowd behaviour,’ Cyprian said calmly. ‘You know what one reads about it. Half a dozen people see a silver-haired old gentleman being robbed, or a blind beggar being beaten up, or a girl being raped–’

  ‘Cyprian, dear,’ Lady Mullion said.

  ‘Well, anything of that sort. And half a dozen people look on and do nothing about it, because some completely inhibitory mechanism takes charge. And that’s what happened here.’

  ‘But not for long, as you perfectly well know,’ Boosie said. ‘For Miss Kinder-Scout had seen you after all, and she’d had enough. So she called out in that rather loud voice she has: “Lord Wyndowe, I am glad to see you have found the cigarette case you mislaid.” And I suppose the party took you for a harmless family lunatic.’

  ‘We’re pretty well furnished in that line already, aren’t we?’ Cyprian asked. Then he turned to his father. ‘By the way, sir, what are we going to do about providing Mr Honeybath with a studio?’

  ‘Excellent question.’ Lord Mullion was plainly relieved that the late slightly unbecoming exchanges were over. ‘Only we mustn’t hurry Honeybath into a decision about anything of that kind. Charles, I’m sure you’ll want to get to know the place a bit for a start?’

  ‘Decidedly, Henry. And, Lady Mullion, you–’

  ‘Mary – please.’

  ‘And you, Mary, may have your own orders to give. I seem to remember Henry speaking of your portrait as being required for hanging on the other side of the fireplace from his. But I suspect he was being funny.’

  ‘Oh, definitely,’ Lord Mullion said. ‘Or call it une façon de parler, Charles. I just felt we ought both to be done, you know.’

  ‘Quite so. And if the one portrait needn’t control the other, then Mary can choose between various possibilities. A neutral background, for example, or a formal and traditional one–’

  ‘Marble pillars,’ Boosie said. ‘improbably draped with velvet curtains and gold tassels? She won’t want that.’

  ‘Or a favourite corner of a room, or the open air,’ Honeybath concluded.

  ‘Under the castle chestnut tree the castle beauty stands,’ Patty said. ‘I vote for that. Or I would if we had a chestnut tree – which I don’t think we do. But what about a dress, Mr Honeybath? May my mother choose that?’

  ‘Ah, there we come on delicate ground.’ Honeybath was well-acquainted with this sort of chatter, and believed himself to have a modest skill in treating it lightly. ‘But one can come to an accommodation with women in a way one often can’t with men. Men have all those absurd and inflexible fancy-dresses that Virginia Woolf made fun of. Uniforms and mayoral gowns and doctoral robes. It would be all right if they didn’t have complexions – often confoundedly pronounced complexions – as well. Monkey with the hue of the uniform and they treat you as if you were a fraudulent military tailor. Tackle the problem through the complexion and they accuse you of representing them either as dipsomaniac or at death’s door. Be compliant and the critics laugh at you – and fairly enough. Painters are like policemen. Their lot is not a happy one.’

  This little routine on the mysteries of art was well received, and stimulated the younger Wyndowes to various jocose suggestions. Cyprian expressed the hope that Honeybath wouldn’t insist on his mother being paraded in all the Mullion diamonds, since this would result in the embarrassing disclosure that his father had been constrained to put them quietly up the spout. Boosie, who didn’t approve of this flight of fancy, advanced one of her own – to the effect that her mother might be represented signing a cheque to pay off her brother’s embarrassments of a different character at Cambridge and elsewhere. Lady Mullion, seeing the conversation thus veer again towards family pleasantry of an undesirable sort, rose and said firmly that they would take coffee on the terrace.

  Castles are not properly provided with terraces, or not of a formally balustraded kind. But Mullion had been adorned with this amenity by filling in part of the moat on the south side. Lord Mullion went into a routine of his own about this. The moat, he explained, was quite bogus, after all. It had been dug out at the time the Wyndowes had been allowed to crenellate, and licence for that had come only when castles were pretty well finished, anyway. Even Prince Rupert hadn’t been fool enough to think to hold Mullion; he had persuaded the sixth earl to cede it gracefully, and had followed this up by himself briskly winning several minor skirmishes in its neighbourhood. Boosie said that this hadn’t amounted to much, and that extensive reading had brought her to the conclusion that the Cavaliers had been a pretty button-headed lot. Wily peers had gone with the other crowd, like the people over at Broughton Castle in the next county. Patty said that a family ought to stick by its own order, and a lively debate – this time blessedly impersonal – followed. Honeybath began to wonder whether the repose essential for the labours of artistic creation was going to be readily obtainable at Mullion Castle. But he was a man rather short of acquaintance among the spirited young, and was disposed to be well contented with his entertainment so far.

  7

  In the early afternoon Lady Mullion took Honeybath round the castle. It was a little tour made with a minimum of historical expatiation, and would probably have been regarded as inadequate by any of the hard-working ladies who performed the job on a professional basis on Wednesdays and Saturdays. But then one’s friends, as distinct from one’s customers, are not to be regarded as avid for their
pennyworth of information. Faintly in Lady Mullion’s attitude, too, there could be detected a feeling that there wasn’t, after all, a great deal to show off. Mullion Castle was an interesting old place, and she had with a proper marital loyalty become extremely fond of it. But a medieval castle, even when it had been given an Elizabethan face-lift on one façade and some further Jacobean flourishes here and there, remained a slightly quaint place to live in. Honeybath felt a mild puzzle here until he recalled Lady Mullion’s own background. The Wyndowes weren’t all that in the way of ancientry, the original Sir Rufus Windy himself being very much a post-Conquest man. Even so, they were a whole lot older-established than Lady Mullion’s own family, which had bobbed up only under Queen Anne. Then, however, it had bobbed up fast and far, and for many generations now had dwelt amid a Palladian magnificence unexcelled in England. So deep in Lady Mullion’s mind was the thought that Mullion Castle was a kind of cottage orné in which it was rather fun to perch in a consciously modest way.