Sheiks and Adders Page 6

  It was while Appleby was taking note of this that Mark appeared again, and this time he was accompanied by the hitherto absent Cherry. The young man had carried out his intention of changing into what might be called mufti; it was mufti of considerable elegance; he had moreover found time for a drastic scrub-up as well. These changes had turned him very definitely into the son of the house, in which role he was carrying out those duties of an amiable host to be expected of his still invisible father. The effect however was not without a hint of indulgence or even disdain for all the childishness round about him which those who detected it couldn’t have been too pleased with. Appleby didn’t make much of his sister’s attire. Cherry was wearing a sola topi and a trouser-suit of white drill which may have been designed to establish her either as a tropical explorer or as a Mem-sahib tagging along behind a tiger hunt. She would have looked quite well on the elephant upon which Appleby had earlier fancied himself in the character of a rajah. She was certainly remote from being any sort of mediaeval princess.

  ‘Hullo, Sir John!’ she said. ‘Patty told me you’d turned up. Good on you!’

  ‘It’s all being most enjoyable, Miss Chitfield.’ And Appleby added – perhaps as judging this response to be on the conventional side – ‘Has Patty gone to bed?’

  ‘Why ever should she do that? Is she feeling ill?’

  ‘No – but she said she was longing for bedtime.’

  ‘Our parents oughtn’t to have named her Patience,’ Mark said. ‘It’s a shockingly rustic name, for one thing. And, for another, it was tempting providence. Patty has turned out to be without an atom of the quality in her composition. Not like me. I’m cascading it over this whole idiotic revel.’

  ‘No doubt you’re doing your best,’ Appleby said. ‘I hope, by the way, that one of you is going to introduce me to your parents. I’d like to pay them my respects.’

  ‘It would have to be right-about-turn for my mother.’ Mark jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘She’ll be in that enormous tent, presiding over the people who are dishing out the refreshments.’

  ‘She’s a sensible woman at times,’ Cherry said concessively, ‘and can put first things first. But my father is bound to be in the theatre, so come along. It’s very much his thing.’

  ‘So I supposed. I’ve just met, incidentally, one of his business associates. At least he claimed to be that. A drouthy character called Pring.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ Mark said. ‘Is Pring out already? It must be the work of the Parole Board. They’ve been suborned.’

  This was presumably Mark Chitfield’s percurrent bad joke. His sister ignored it, and took Appleby rather engagingly by the arm.

  ‘I suppose they’ll be beginning with the Ancient Britons,’ she said. ‘All skin-tights and woad. When it gets to Sherwood, Sir John, you’ll be able to join in. Daddy is very hot on audience participation. Perhaps we’ll have quite a lot of it.’

  Cherry Chitfield was far from being the woebegone maiden of the day before. She was in good spirits. In fact she was distinctly excited. Appleby took another glance at her attire, and found himself wondering about Tibby Fancroft, that other elusive character on the fringes of the scene. He had formed a hypothetical picture of Tibby as not among the most dominant of males, and he suspected that whatever Tibby was doing at that moment it was something Cherry had put him up to. But this was guesswork such as competent policemen never indulge in. Appleby told himself that he wasn’t at Drool Court as a competent policeman. Tommy Pride was that. He himself had come along simply as an elderly gentleman with time on his hands. But this didn’t mean that he wasn’t to ask questions when they came into his head.

  ‘A fête on this scale,’ he said to Mark, ‘and one with such a variety of goings-on, must take a good deal of trouble to mount. And, of course, a good deal of time as well. I suppose it’s all planned well in advance?’

  ‘Very definitely. My father has been devoting much of his hard-won leisure to it over the past six months. Or when he isn’t catching fish. Not that we’re sure he does catch fish. He probably employs somebody to do just that. It’s called delegating responsibility.’

  ‘He believes in getting everything cut and dried?’ Appleby was not to be diverted by this rather tired joke on Mark’s part.

  ‘Oh, yes. It all goes down on paper at the start, and everybody has to stick to it.’

  ‘The fancy-dress element in this present affair, for instance: it wouldn’t have been a recent afterthought?’

  ‘Distinctly not. I think we began to hear about it before Christmas. Wouldn’t that be right, Cherry?’

  ‘Yes – and then off and on ever since. It’s all rather boring, really – organizing like mad for a stupid party. Let’s put Sir John in the front row, Mark, and then see if we can find Daddy. He’ll be hearing somebody their lines at the eleventh hour, or gumming on their whiskers.’

  It was with reluctance that Appleby thus found himself dumped in a position of some prominence and then left to his own devices. The auditorium, which lay in bright sunshine, was filling up. In front of it, and before the stage, a curtain hung incongruously against the sky, supported on cables slung between two beech trees. There was a buzz of talk and a smell of trodden grass. Within further curtained-off areas it was clear that numerous preparatory activities were going on, although it was improbable that they could conceal whole hordes of Ancient Britons and centuries of Romans.

  ‘Excuse me,’ a woman’s voice said behind Appleby’s ear, ‘but can you tell me what a romantic rescue is?’

  ‘A romantic rescue? I’m afraid I don’t understand you, madam.’ Appleby had turned round, and saw a middle-aged woman poring over her programme.

  ‘That’s what it says. “A Romantic Rescue”. Do you think it might mean Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett? I’d have thought that a little too literary – wouldn’t you? For this sort of audience, I mean.’

  ‘Possibly so.’

  ‘And not really a very central incident in English History.’

  ‘Certainly not that.’ This gratuitously talkative person, Appleby thought, was of a somewhat captious disposition. ‘But it’s clear that they’ve strung a very miscellaneous collection of turns together, isn’t it? People must have come along offering to put on this and that, and they’ve just imposed some vague pattern on the result. How fortunate that it is so fine an afternoon.’

  Thus bringing this conversation to a decorous close, Appleby squared himself on his chair again and turned to his own reflections. It seemed to him that ‘A Romantic Rescue’, although probably meant to refer to the mediaeval Cherry preserved from an enchanter by her knight, might by a little stretch of meaning cover the modern Cherry carried off by her desert lover. Perhaps the title had been arrived at in a spirit of compromise when the admissibility of Cherry’s own wishes in the matter had still been in debate within her family.

  ‘I thought you might know because I saw you with the young Chitfields.’ Appleby had not, after all, shaken off the woman behind him. ‘How delightful they are.’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’

  ‘Or my husband might know, since he is intimate with Richard Chitfield, and Richard is so much the moving spirit in this sort of thing. I wonder whether you know my husband?’

  ‘I don’t think I have that pleasure, madam.’ Appleby had been obliged to turn round again. His interlocutor wore a pair of wings – obviously wings of the most expensive sort – and a dress seemingly designed to suggest the firmament on a starry night. She also carried a wand with a further twinkling star at the end of it. She might have been the Good Fairy in a pantomime, but was probably intended to be of a superior order to that. A Fairy Queen, in fact – and not Spenser’s but Shakespeare’s. Here, in other words, was Titania – or this was an assumption so substantial that Appleby judged it possible to proceed on it. ‘Is it your husband,’ he asked, ‘
who is sustaining the part of Bottom?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’ Titania was delighted by this feat of ratiocination. ‘Rupert has very considerable textile interests in the Far East. So I thought nothing could be more appropriate for him than Nick Bottom the weaver. I had the ass’s head specially made for him so that he has no need to take it off. He can’t eat or drink, of course. But it has a cunning little window set inside the mouth.’

  ‘Most ingenious. I congratulate you.’ Appleby reflected that poor Bottom couldn’t have been making for the bar, after all. ‘And have you brought along a friend,’ he asked, ‘in the character of Oberon?’

  ‘Well, no. But how delightful that you are a lover of Shakespeare! Rupert is a great lover of Shakespeare. You really must meet him.’

  ‘I shall hope for an opportunity.’ Appleby, a hardened proponent of what used to be called the forms, produced this response unflinchingly. He didn’t know this confounded woman from Adam’s Eve, but it was necessary to be civil to her.

  ‘Of course I know who you are, Sir John. Ambrose Birch-Blackie pointed you out to me earlier in the afternoon. He had just spotted you, and was hoping to have a chat with you later. I am Cynthia Plenderleith.’

  ‘How do you do? I think the curtain is about to go up.’

  ‘I don’t think so. They are merely testing it. I do hope Rupert will be back by the time the pageant really begins. He had to slip away, he said. I can’t think why.’

  Appleby might have said, ‘I suppose he wants a bit of hush.’ Or even, ‘Perhaps he’s looking for the loo.’ But as neither of these conjectures was admissible in polite conversation with a Queen of the Fairies he held his peace.

  ‘He said he might be away for half an hour. So meanwhile, Sir John, I feel quite unattended.’

  ‘I’m sure you need never, in fact, be that.’ Appleby produced this slightly laboured compliment while wondering whether it was requisite that he should move back a row and himself squire the lady. He decided to change the subject.

  ‘Is Richard Chitfield in fancy dress?’ he asked. ‘I suppose he ought to be Theseus, Duke of Athens. For here we are at a Court of sorts, and with a wood hard by.’

  ‘What an exciting thought, Sir John!’ Mrs Plenderleith, like her husband, was evidently a profound Shakespearian. ‘Do you think we shall soon fall into all sorts of confusion?’

  ‘I think it unlikely. This entertainment will no doubt have its muddled moments. But I doubt whether we shall fall into any mystifications ourselves.’

  But in this opinion – if, indeed, he held it – Sir John Appleby was to turn out wrong.

  7

  There was nothing particularly surprising in the fact that neither Mark nor Cherry Chitfield had reappeared before the curtain went up on the Ancient Britons and their bear. They had dumped Appleby with a vague suggestion that their father was to be located and introduced to him. But they had plenty of other things in their heads. And so, certainly, had Richard Chitfield himself.

  The Britons and their bear were quite funny in a knockabout way. Mrs Plenderleith, with her mind running on Shakespeare, might have remarked that the creature had been borrowed from The Winter’s Tale – with the difference that whereas in the play the bear chases Antigonus, here the high-spirited young people in woad chased the bear. Shakespeare moreover is said to have borrowed an authentic quadruped from the neighbouring bear garden, while this one would prove in real life to have only two feet. In fact he was first cousin to the Teddy bears that had been engaging in archery, and might even be described as second cousin to the missing textile tycoon alias Nick Bottom the weaver.

  When the curtain came down on the bear-hunt a good many of the spectators got up and moved around. Experienced in such amateur entertainments, they knew that some little time would elapse before anything further happened. Appleby followed their example – cautiously, since his prime object was to distance himself unobtrusively from the loquacious Mrs Plenderleith. Ill met – he might have been murmuring – by moonlight, proud Titania. Only it was, of course, by sunlight still – although for that matter it did look as if night might fall before this over-abundant theatrical banquet was over. So Appleby discreetly faded away. He may have been not wholly without thought of that licensed bar, since a mild depression had settled upon him. It was the consequence of a sense that he had set himself a fool’s errand. Even if the Chitfield fête did harbour some sort of conundrum, it was no business of his. But now something incipiently enlivening happened. Appleby ran into his fourth sheik.

  Not that this was exactly the way of it, for on the present occasion it was definitely a matter of the sheik seeking him out. The sheik, in fact, came up in a hurry, and addressed him without ceremony.

  ‘I say,’ the sheik said, ‘are you the right Robin Hood?’

  ‘That’s hard to know.’ Appleby saw instantly that here at last was Tibby Fancroft: an agitated English boy whose pink-and-white complexion was absurdly emphasized by a little black beard stuck slightly aslant on his chin. ‘There’s certainly another one around, and there may be several. There are undoubtedly a surprising number of sheiks.’

  ‘Yes, it’s very puzzling. But what I mean is, are you the Robin Hood who knows Cherry Chitfield? Sir John Somebody.’

  ‘Appleby. Yes, I am. How do you do, Mr Fancroft?’

  ‘Bloody badly. We’re fearfully bothered. Or rather Cherry is. So of course I am too.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘She told me to find you, and I hope it isn’t cheek. You see, Mr Chitfield has disappeared. He’s nowhere around the theatre at all.’

  ‘Is that so very alarming? He may simply have been called away about something. I’m told he’s very much a man of affairs.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But it’s – well, it’s unexampled. Cherry says just nothing – or nothing at all normal – would drag him away from this show. Not once it had started, that is. It’s so absolutely his thing.’

  ‘So I gather.’

  ‘What I myself think is that he’s terribly offended. With Cherry and me, I mean. He has seen me in this beastly tablecloth and table napkin, and gone off in a huff. I thought that, after all, he’d accept the thing as a joke when we actually went through with it. Because, you see, he’s jolly decent usually. If I’d known he’d really be cut up I wouldn’t have gone ahead. Not even if Cherry–’

  ‘Quite so. But I really don’t think that your explanation of Mr Chitfield’s absence from the scene is at all a plausible one. He might have done something rather drastic about your silly if harmless desert-lover affair. He might have ordered you out of the place, Mr Fancroft. But he wouldn’t withdraw in a sulk. I think you’re reading into him – well, a somewhat juvenile attitude of mind. Are you sure, by the way, that he has seen you in this get-up?’

  ‘Well, no. I’ve been lying pretty low, as a matter of fact. But somebody says they saw him go off towards the house. So I want to go and apologize to him. I think it would be the right thing. Don’t you, sir?’

  ‘Certainly I do.’ Appleby spoke as a senior man who has no doubts. ‘If you have acted contrary to his expressed wish – however unreasonable it may have seemed to you – here on his own ground and in concert with his own daughter, then you should tell him it was a mistake, and that you are sorry about it. My guess is that it will then all blow over at once.’

  ‘That’s what I’m going to do now, Sir John. But I want you to come with me. Or Cherry does.’

  ‘My dear young man, nothing could be more uncalled for or less suitable. I don’t know Mr Chitfield. I didn’t know any Chitfield until yesterday afternoon.’ Appleby paused, and remembered how imperiously Cherry had then bidden him to this cluttered-up garden-party-cum-fête. ‘Look!’ he said abruptly. ‘Do you think that Cherry has anything else – perhaps something quite different – in her head?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’
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  ‘Nor do I, I’m afraid. Does she seem at all worried over something she hasn’t told you about? To speak frankly, Cherry seems to me to have her childish side. But she strikes me as a rather sensitive and observant young woman as well.’

  ‘I suppose that’s right.’ Tibby Fancroft received this by no means unqualified encomium upon his beloved without offence. ‘And I have thought her a bit worried about how things are here. I can’t think why. Everything seems very nice, to my mind, at Drool Court. And everybody’s very nice to me. Mrs Chitfield – of course she’s of a romantic turn of mind – seems almost to be hearing the wedding bells ringing out merrily already.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it, Mr Fancroft. And, on second thoughts, I’ll come with you to the house.’

  There were still plenty of people in the gardens, on the lawns, and besieging the tea-tent. At one end of the terrace the military band still played; it was now dispensing random selections from the treasure-house of Gilbert and Sullivan opera, but at a subdued volume designed not to carry too disturbingly to the theatre at the other end of the grounds. It seemed to be regarded as quite admissible to cut the theatre and amuse oneself in other ways. Appleby had a glimpse of Mr Pring. This particular sheik, no doubt adequately refreshed, was walking composedly up and down between flowerbeds with his wife. Mrs Pring was taking her part sufficiently seriously to be carrying a somewhat cumbersome banner emblazoned with the Cross of Lorraine. She was a massive woman and – as was to be expected – of maturer years than the Maid of Orleans had been fated to attain.

  Appleby wasn’t given much time for this further survey. Tibby hurried him on. It appeared that, having been made aware of the impropriety of his conduct in proposing to carry off the younger Miss Chitfield to the tents of the Arabs, he was genuinely anxious to express his regrets to the girl’s offended father with as little delay as possible. It was a highly absurd business, and Tibby Fancroft was demonstrably a wholly ingenuous young man. Appleby, who was still quite clear that he himself had no business to be in on the act, accompanied the boy with increasing misgiving.