Late and Cold (Timothy Herring) Page 3

  “I see.” Timothy got up. “Well, I’m more sorry than I can say, and, of course, I’ll put it before my committee, but I really don’t think we can help you.”

  “You do say you’ll put it before your committee, though?”

  “I will do that, of course, but it’s only routine, you know. Nothing will come of it, I’m sure. You must make up your mind to face that. And, I repeat, I really am sorry, but it’s out of my hands, you see.”

  “Yes,” she said dispiritedly, “I see. Well, it seems I must just put up with things until Mrs. Studd turns us out. Good-bye, Mr. Herring. It was nice of you to call and—and put an end to my hopes so quickly. It’s better that way, I suppose.”

  “Oh, something will turn up, you’ll see,” said Timothy, with false and caddish cheerfulness.

  “Oh, Mr. Micawber!” she said bitterly. “Good-bye—and mind those front steps.”

  “Wouldn’t mind if I fell down them and broke my neck, I shouldn’t wonder,” thought Timothy, running downstairs and almost colliding with Mrs. Ralley, who, with Mrs. Studd close behind her, was hovering in the passage.

  “Did you find her in?” asked the former. The latter merely sniffed.

  “Oh, yes, of course,” said Timothy. Mrs. Studd exchanged the sniff for utterance.

  “Well, you won’t, next time you come, young man. I’ve only been waiting for her gentlemen friends to start coming here,” she said. “I know her sort and yours.”

  “A controversial statement,” he said, “and one which will bring you up before the courts for slander and defamation of character, if you’re not very careful. I should watch my step, if I were you.” He went out to his car and slammed the driver’s door with unprecedented violence. “You bloody old vultures!” he thought. “I’m damned if I don’t get that woman and those kids out of there, if it’s the very last thing I do.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Nanradoc in Sunshine

  “Well, of course I’ll look after the woman’s children for two or three days if you really want to go gallivanting off to the wilds with her,” said Timothy’s sister, “but what’s the big idea, and how are you going to explain her at the hotels?”

  “Ain’t going to be no hotels. Diana Parsons is going to put us up. Is that respectable enough to suit you?”

  “It’s nothing to me what you do. How old are the children?”

  “Eight, eight, and two.”

  “Oh, well, the twins can’t possibly be worse devils than my Terence and Marguerite, and two years old is my favourite age in children. But what exactly are you up to with the girl? I know there’s some connection with this Society of yours, but how does she come into it?”

  “I want to get her and the kids re-housed.”

  “What, in this castle thing you’ve been talking about? They’ll get pneumonia.”

  “The ‘castle thing’ you mention happens to be her property. At least, she claims it is. I want to take her to see it, and then I want to persuade her to sell it to me, and then I want to talk Phisbe into taking it off my hands and doing it up, and then I think we’ll turn it into a show-place at sixpence a time, and perhaps house a small museum in the undercroft, as they’ve done at Bunratty in Ireland.”

  “But couldn’t you shorten up the negotiations by getting Phisbe to take it over straight away? Why do you have to be a sort of middleman, and lay out your own money on the thing?”

  “Well, Phisbe can be quite long-winded, you know, especially when a controversial proposition is laid before it, and this will be nothing if not controversial. It will have to go before the committee, sooner or later, and I think Purvis, who rather enjoys what I call being obstructive and he calls ‘looking after the Society’s interests,’ will insist on a general meeting extraordinary, and that means waiting until near enough to Christmas before anything definite is agreed. Meanwhile, this unfortunate hen and her three chicks are at the mercy of an old bitch of a landlady who’s only looking for an excuse to sling them into the street.”

  “But can she do that?”

  “Legally, probably not. I have an idea that their rooms were let to them unfurnished, but I also fancy that the tenant is in no good shape to stand up to all the unpleasantness there would be if she stuck her feet in and refused to play ball with her ghoulish landlady.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “Sixty, shrewish, mucky, raddled, rapacious, dirty-minded . . .”

  “The girl, idiot, not the landlady!”

  “Oh, well, not really such a girl. I shouldn’t think she’ll see her twenties again, even the latest of them. Anyway, don’t you worry. She’s not my cup of tea. I like them with flesh on the bones and a smile on the lips. This woman hasn’t got either.”

  “You’re going to rather a lot of trouble and expense on her behalf, it seems to me. What, exactly, is the idea? It isn’t like you to act Sir Galahad.”

  “Bless your suspicious elder-sisterly heart! I’m very sorry for her, that’s all.”

  “Sorry for her my foot! I know you, and I know you’re stalling. You haven’t really told me anything about her. Be a good boy and come clean. What is she like?”

  “I hardly looked at her—certainly not in the way you seem to think. We spent most of the time correcting children’s essays.”

  “How very interesting! I’ve never heard of that as the female equivalent of looking at a gentleman’s etchings!”

  “I don’t know where you get these appalling ideas. ‘You wasn’t brought up that way, Bessie!’ Honestly, dear sister, this unfortunate woman appeals to me simply because she’s underpaid, undernourished, under pressure, and under the weather, and because I hate the guts of her dreadful landlady.”

  “So the bleating of the kid excites the tiger?”

  “I am not a tiger! Anyway, you say you’ll take on these babes for two or three days, and for that I forgive and thank you. No, really, do believe me! I’m genuinely sorry for the woman, and that’s all.”

  “I wish pity weren’t akin to love.”

  “It isn’t—not in this case, anyway.”

  “All right. Bring those children when you must, but do watch your step with the girl. I think she’s a very fishy customer. What’s she doing with three children, anyway?”

  “I’ve explained all that.”

  “You haven’t explained the third one, and neither did she.”

  “It’s no business of anybody except the woman herself, and, as a matter of fact, she did explain, as I told you. A friend on the stage, and all that. May or may not be true.”

  “All right. When do you want me to take on these three brats?”

  “I’ll bring them on Whit Tuesday. The local schools get a week’s holiday at Whitsun, so that’s when I’ve fixed things up.”

  On Whit Tuesday Timothy met Miss Jones and the children outside a suburban tube station. This was at her request. She had begged him not to call for them at the house. The boy sat beside him in front, and Miss Jones and the two little girls had the back seat until Timothy dropped off the children at his sister’s house near Malmesbury. From there he drove Miss Jones to Shrewsbury and gave her lunch on the way.

  She talked comparatively little, but seemed cheerful, and, after dinner that evening with Diana and Tom Parsons, she told more about her inheritance. Pembroke Pritchard Jones, her cousin, had given her Nanradoc on condition that she got it repaired.

  “Of course, if it weren’t for the children, I wouldn’t have considered the offer for a single instant,” she asserted. “I’m perfectly happy in my job and, on my own, I could afford a small flat. As things are, the rooms we live in are cheap, but, of course, they’re not what I want, so when Pembroke made this offer I couldn’t help thinking what a good thing it would be for the children to go and live in the country among mountains and rivers and lakes. Of course, I couldn’t see how on earth I was going to be able to afford to repair the castle—Pembroke told me, quite honestly, that it was in a very bad state—but then, when
I was in the library one Saturday morning while the children were at the cinema, I happened to pick up a copy of Transactions of the Society for the Preservation of Buildings of Historic Interest, and I read reports of the help that had been given in restoring various houses and churches and things, and it suddenly came to me that the Society might be able to help me, too. I was rather upset when Mr. Herring said they wouldn’t do it, but I’ve got over my disappointment.”

  “Yes,” said Tom Parsons, “we don’t help individuals like that. We can’t. It isn’t our job. I’m glad Herring is taking you to Nanradoc, because then you’ll see just how much would need to be done to put the place into any sort of habitable shape. Even if it were our pigeon, I doubt whether our members would be prepared to spend much money on it.”

  “Yes, I know,” she answered, “and I’m very grateful to him for taking even that much interest. I do realise that my application is hopeless, so I’m just going to make the most of my little holiday. It’s wonderful to feel free of responsibility, even for a day or two. Children are very wearing when you have them all the time at school, and then come home to three more of them in the evening.”

  “Talking of that,” said Timothy, “I suppose you really had thought out all the snags in connection with living in Nanradoc, before you wrote to us?”

  “How do you mean? What snags?”

  “Your job. The children’s education. Shopping, and all that.”

  “I hadn’t intended to go on teaching. I thought perhaps I could do the sort of thing I’ve heard they do at Bunratty Castle in Eire—have medieval banquets and get people to pay an awful lot and help themselves out of the dishes and throw the bones under the table and have a minstrel to sing old ballads to the harp, and some big dogs—wolfhounds, I thought—to add a touch of atmosphere. I suppose it sounds mad when I say it out loud, but it seemed quite possible while I kept it to myself, and really terribly exciting.”

  “Bunratty?” said Tom Parsons. He looked at Timothy and grinned. “Very odd you should say that. But Bunratty is near Shannon Airport and gets lots of American visitors who are prepared to pay the earth for that kind of thing. Moreover, there is an excellent hotel almost next door to Bunratty Castle, so that there is always a clientele with money to spend, even apart from those who land at the airport. Nanradoc has no such help at hand.”

  “Nanradoc isn’t all that far from Betws-y-Coed and other Welsh beauty spots,” argued Miss Jones. “It must be quite near Snowdon and Rhyl and Colwyn Bay and Llandudno and all sorts of places where tourists go every summer. Then one could advertise, I suppose, for visitors. I mean, everybody seems to have a car to get about in nowadays. I’m sure I could have made a go of it.”

  “And the children’s education?” asked Diana.

  “I’m fully qualified to teach them myself, or perhaps they could go to the village school for a bit.”

  “The nearest village school would be at least five miles from the castle, I think,” said Timothy. “I don’t believe your plans would work out, you know. Had you thought of what you’d have to pay for all the help you’d need in running this medieval banquet business? For one thing, you’d need a first-class cook, apart from waiters and washers-up, and so forth.”

  “I’d have managed somehow, until it really got going,” said Miss Jones, “but I can see it was only a pipe-dream, so what does it matter?”

  Upon Diana’s suggestion that the following day might be long and tiring, Miss Jones went to bed at an early hour, and shortly afterwards Diana suggested that, as the two men would enjoy a gossip together, she, too, would go upstairs.

  Left with his friend, Tom Parsons lighted a pipe, put another log on the fire, smoked ruminatively for a while and then said,

  “Well, Tim, what exactly are you up to?”

  “Up to? Why, how do you mean?”

  “I mean, why are you carting this girl off into the Welsh mountains to look at a pipe-dream?”

  “She wants to see Nanradoc, and I want her to see it. I felt I had to convince her that it’s out of our terms of reference to repair it so that she and her Pied Piper rabble can use it as a dwelling-place, that’s all.”

  “Why not have written to tell her so? Why the personal involvement? That’s what’s puzzling me.”

  “You’re as bad as my sister! There is no personal involvement. I didn’t feel, having seen her, that I could just fob her off with a letter. Her request will have to go before the committee, in any case. You know that, as well as I do. I thought it might soften the blow a bit if she saw for herself that her proposition is hopeless.”

  “And since when have you been a buffer between people and their disappointments?”

  “Well, actually . . .” said Timothy.

  “Ah, I thought we should get at something, sooner or later. You interest me, Timmy. Say on.”

  “Well, actually,” said Timothy again, looking at the beautifully symmetrical grey ash on the end of his cigar, “I’m thinking of making her an offer for the place—enough to buy a small house, I thought. Then I’d get you and Mason to go into the possibilities of restoring the castle, and then I’ll ask Phisbe to buy it from me and show it.”

  “You must be crazy!”

  “Granted, but there aren’t so very many Welsh strongholds built by Llewelyn the Great.”

  “This girl may not have a good title to the property. Have you thought of that?”

  “Yes, of course I have. Don’t worry. I shan’t buy a pig in a poke.”

  “Or take any wooden nickels, I hope. Well, good luck, and don’t say I didn’t warn you. That girl’s young enough to be dangerous.”

  “Young enough? Thirty, if she’s a day!”

  “Don’t you believe it, sonny boy. She doesn’t wear too well, I’ll admit—too much to do and too little to do it on—but I shall be surprised if she’s yet seen her twenty-fourth birthday.”

  On the following morning Timothy took Miss Jones to see Nanradoc Castle. He tried to make conversation on the way, but she seemed so distrait, and her thoughts so much engaged, that he was obliged to give up all attempts to entertain her. He gave her lunch in Chester, but she made no reference to the fact that her cousin, Pembroke Pritchard Jones, lived in or near the city, and this surprised and puzzled him. Presumably, if the artist had made his property over to her, she must at least have had a letter from him with his address on it.

  Arrived within view of the castle, Timothy parked the car and led the way up to the keep.

  “Well, there we are,” he said. “I’m going to sit here on this chunk of masonry while you make your inspection. Don’t hurry. I have a paperback thriller and plenty of cigarettes, and the day is most seasonably clement, so take your time and have your fill.”

  “All right,” she responded. He gazed thoughtfully after her until she disappeared inside the ruined keep. He had warned her that one staircase ended in airy nothingness and that the other was dangerous, and hoped that she would remember what he had said. However, she was out of the tower again before he had risen to his feet to go after her and repeat the warning. She came back to him.

  “I see what you mean,” she said. “We could never live in that thing.”

  “Nobody did, except a few soldiers, I imagine,” said Timothy. “That was only part of the castle.” He pointed to where, at the base of the motte, lay the ruins of the great hall. “Those were the domestic quarters, and you can see what would have to be done to render them habitable again.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “It’s quite hopeless. It would take a fortune to restore it. I wonder why Pembroke thought we could live in it? He wrote in his letter something about Nanradoc which made me think it was a sort of manor house.”

  “Did he now?” said Timothy, suddenly enlightened. “Then I wonder . . . Look here, are you game for a little adventure?”

  “What sort of adventure?”

  “I want to gate-crash a stately home, but I can’t do it without a reasonable excuse. You could be that excus
e, if you would.”

  “I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about, but I can follow a lead. What do you want me to do?”

  “Well, somewhere over there,” he pointed to the north-west, “lies the stately home I mentioned. It’s inhabited, I think, by two rather unusual people. I’d like you to meet them. By the way, do you know your cousin Pembroke by sight?”

  “I haven’t seen him since I was a child. He sent Miranda in charge of a hired nursemaid.”

  Timothy made no comment on this enlightening statement. So the friend on the stage was a myth.

  “So you might not recognise him if you met him,” he said. “Oh, well, we shall have to chance it. Come on, and watch your step. The path is overgrown and very rough in places. I’ll go first until we come to the bridge.”

  “Wait a minute,” she said. She was flushed and looked animated and excited. He could see now that she was younger than he had thought. “You don’t mean that Nanradoc really is a manor house, and that Pembroke means me to have it? But that would be absolutely fabulous! Oh, I’ll forgive him everything! I’m afraid I’ve been thinking some rather hard thoughts since I looked at that awful keep.”

  “Now, steady on!” said Timothy. “You’re leaping to unwarranted conclusions. There is a manor house, yes, but I don’t even know whether it belongs to Nanradoc—whether it’s on the Nanradoc estate, I mean. I’ve a strong feeling that two people I met when I came here on my own, although they seem a bit on the eccentric side, are almost certainly the owners. So shut down on the excitement, because I’m merely experimenting. I’m not campaigning for your rights, so, for goodness’ sake, don’t go getting wild ideas into your head.”

  “No, but, really,” argued Miss Jones, “isn’t it far more likely that my cousin . . .”

  “Nothing is likely. We must see these people and find out what the position is, that’s all. You take your cue from me, and don’t go butting in.”