The Longer Bodies Page 5

  ‘I’ll give you an eiderdown,’ whispered Celia. ‘Come with me.’

  She led the way to her room, went in, and immediately returned with the eiderdown, which she thrust into his arms.

  ‘Good night,’ she whispered. ‘I wish I knew what you mean. What’s queer about the house tonight?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ muttered Clive. ‘Tell you more in the morning. Good night. Keep your door locked.’

  He turned and walked away. Celia stood at her bedroom door listening intently. Suddenly she heard a cry and a crash.

  ‘Silly ass,’ she thought, running towards the head of the stairs. ‘He’s tripped on the corner of the eiderdown and fallen downstairs.’

  Candles and electric torches soon lighted up the scene. They issued from every bedroom door except that of Great-aunt Puddequet. Priscilla, awakened by the noise and finding Celia gone, came running out to the head of the stairs.

  Clive lay at the foot of them. He was completely entangled in a thick and handsome eiderdown quilt of a rich shade of orange. It had broken his fall. Save for a bump on the head and a bruised shin, he was none the worse. He had a strange tale to tell. As he had trodden on the first stair to descend to the hall, someone had given him a hearty push in the small of the back. Burdened with the eiderdown quilt, he had been unable to offer any resistance to the unexpected pressure from behind, and had rolled from top to bottom of the staircase.

  ‘It’s all very well for you fellows to look like that,’ he concluded, when he had told the tale to the other athletes in the gymnasium before breakfast next morning, ‘but some very funny things went on in the house last night. To begin with, somebody frightened Priscilla out of her room. I stayed in the library reading until after half-past twelve last night. I’d forgotten that the gate between the sunk garden and the sports ground is locked at half-past eleven, so that I couldn’t get back to my hut without a lot of trouble, so I let myself out by the front door (which of course I had to unbolt first) and shut it behind me. It was not until I had walked down the steps that I remembered about the gate. Still, it struck me I could probably climb over, but, just as I got to the bottom of the steps and was making my way to the gate, I was just in time to see a jolly queer bit of business. Somebody came out of the front door. Couldn’t see me because of the darkness of the sunk garden under the shadow of the wall, but I could spot him because he showed up like Indian ink in the moonlight against the white wall of the house. He walked along the terrace and began coming down the steps. All at once, just as I was going to hail him, for of course I recognized his walk, something struck me as being rather queer. For a second I couldn’t quite work out what was wrong. Then I knew. The chap was coming down those stone steps without a sound.

  ‘He stopped when he was about halfway down and turned round. In the bedroom immediately above the steps a candle was burning. I saw his arm go up and I heard the crack of a stone hitting a window. No sooner had he flung the stone than he bolted up the steps again as fast as ever he could go. At the same instant the window opened and a girl’s voice called out:

  ‘“Who’s there?”

  ‘At the same minute, or pretty nearly so, the candle went out. Too much draught, I suppose. Well, I thought it was a funny thing to do, to go heaving bricks at girls’ bedroom windows at about one o’clock in the morning and scaring them to death, but, still, I didn’t see what I could do except chase the fellow and point out what a poor sort of fool I thought he was. So I was just going to hop it up the steps when I’m blowed if there wasn’t a sound of wheels on the cinder track just outside the garden door where I was standing, and, do you know, it sounded for all the world like the old lady’s bathchair doing a record sprint round the ground. Couldn’t have been, I suppose, but it gave me quite a jar.

  ‘Anyway, I took to the steps and mounted into the house. Opened the door with my latchkey, of course. Luckily the other fellow hadn’t shot the bolts. Couldn’t find him, though. Tried all the downstairs rooms. Searched quietly but well for about half an hour. Quite a sporting way of getting through a dull night. By rotten luck my torch gave out then, but, as it did so, I passed an open bedroom door. Thinking my bird might possibly have gone to ground in a spare bedroom, I toddled in. The moonlight was lovely. I soon found that the room was empty. I stepped to the window, and was rather surprised to find that this was the very room the lout must have aimed the brick at. The girl occupant, however, had obviously tazzed off. I stepped up to the bed to take a cautious squint and find out whether this really was so, when my young sister at the door nearly frightened me to death by suddenly yelling, “Hands up!” Though I say it, that kid’s got sand. It isn’t every girl who’d have yelled “Hands up!” at a fellow she had every reason to believe was a burglar or something. It seems the other girl was Priscilla, and she had legged it into Celia’s room for the rest of the night. Then Celia gave me an eiderdown so that I could camp out on the dining-room settee, and, as I say, I’m blowed if someone didn’t jolly well shove me down the stairs. I suppose it was the stone-throwing effort who did it, but I can’t think where he was in hiding.’

  ‘But who was the chap?’ asked Malpas Yeomond. ‘You said you recognized him.’

  ‘Yes, so I did. It was that blighter Kost, of course. I’d know that walk of his anywhere.’

  ‘Kost?’ repeated Francis Yeomond in surprise.

  ‘Impossible,’ said Richard Cowes firmly, biting the head off a young spring onion.

  ‘Shouldn’t think it could be Kost,’ said Malpas. ‘You see, he’s never up at the house. Sleeps in his own hut. No reason for him to be up at the house. Besides, the idea of Kost playing foolish tricks like throwing stones at bedroom windows and shoving people down the stairs doesn’t fit in with what we know of him. I don’t care for the man, I must say, but he isn’t that sort of fool.’

  ‘Well,’ said Clive deliberately, ‘I may be wrong. It was night. I didn’t see his face. He came out of the house, and went back into it. But it was Kost’s walk and run to the life. I’d swear to it anywhere. Where’s your young brother, by the way?’

  ‘Gone for a swim,’ replied Malpas. ‘Too jolly cold for me. In fact, this whole place about does me in. I’m tired of making a fool of myself. Championship class! We shall never be anywhere near the championship class in these field events. Honestly, I’m wondering whether I won’t tell Aunt that I’m sick of it, and push off home tomorrow. I mean, we’ve all given the thing a trial, haven’t we? And we’re none of us any good. Besides’—he waved his arm towards the southern end of the sports ground and at the horizon beyond—‘I ask you! Did you ever see such a hagridden hell of desolation in all your life? I never did. What do you say, Frank?’

  ‘Term begins in a week’s time,’ said Francis Yeomond, dancing up and down on his toes and tying his sweater more closely about his neck, for the morning air was golden, but inclined to be cold.

  ‘Personally,’ said Richard Cowes, ‘I find myself longing for a real bed once more.’

  ‘And H., I know, is fed up with it here,’ said Malpas. He looked expectantly at Clive Brown-Jenkins. ‘So how do we go?’ he asked.

  Clive Brown-Jenkins eyed him very deliberately.

  ‘I take it, you mean that because you chaps don’t stand an earthly chance of getting a place in the next international athletics team, you want me to give up my chance of collecting the old lady’s money to keep you company,’ he said. ‘Well, you can take it that I’ve no intention of standing down. If you want to chuck up the sponge, do it. I’m staying here.’

  He set his obstinate jaw.

  Francis grinned.

  ‘The old girl ought to be in a home,’ he said. ‘The whole thing’s a lot of rot. Still, if Brown-Jenkins is going to stick it out, so am I. Although if that fellow Kost doesn’t alter the tone of his remarks, the next jump I make is going to be on his fat face. The man’s a swine. I mean to say, one has sat in a boat and endured a certain number of quietly insulting epithets, but the man Kost is
offensive. Still, if we’re here for the duration’—he made a gesture of resignation—‘we’re here.’

  Richard Cowes, who was now consuming a lengthy stick of rhubarb, waved the twelve inches of it which remained with a sweeping gesture.

  ‘For my own part,’ he said, ‘I agree with Cousin Brown.’ He turned to Francis Yeomond. ‘I confess, too, that at present, every time I attempt to put this weight I am told, unkindly, by the person surnamed Kost, that I am putting it at the wrong angle or with the wrong hand or on the wrong wormcast. However,’ he bit a succulent two inches off the stick of rhubarb and chewed them defiantly, ‘the brave man faces scorn and calumny with a light heart and an undaunted demeanour. Besides, my sister’s coming down here any day now, so I must stick it out until then.’

  Malpas Yeomond looked at first one and then another of them thoughtfully. At last he said with bitter emphasis, ‘Any of you ever heard of a play called Wurzel-Flummery?’

  ‘Don’t be harsh, Yeomond, my dear fellow,’ said Richard Cowes soothingly. ‘What about a little breakfast? The laws of the S.P.P.I. demand that I shall be fed.’

  Chapter Five

  Abrupt Termination of an Inglorious Career

  I

  ‘I TELL YOU for the ninth time,’ said Priscilla heatedly, ‘that a man walked into my room at about one o’clock this morning and distinctly coughed.’

  Her brothers hooted her down.

  ‘And I tell you for the nineteenth time,’ said Clive, helping himself liberally to the marmalade, ‘that just as I was coming downstairs at about one-thirty this morning, some blighter put both hands into the small of my back and shoved me a mighty good shove. I bounced off every stair separately. Stand by my yarn, Priscilla, and I stand by yours,’ he concluded handsomely.

  Priscilla’s face clouded.

  ‘I do believe you, Clive,’ she stated, glaring defiantly at her brothers. ‘Some nasty things happened in this house last night.’

  ‘“There is something terrible about this house,”’ quoted Malpas solemnly. He winked at Francis.

  ‘It isn’t funny,’ said Priscilla. She poured out a second cup of coffee for herself and dropped in a lump of sugar like a full stop. It appeared that the subject was closed. Timon Anthony reopened it.

  ‘Well, I tell you all for the twenty-ninth time that it was real blood on the tips of those two javelins —or, as Joe Herring will have it—on that one javelin which made positively two appearances. Blood, children, blood!’

  He smacked his lips and looked wickedly across the table at the angular Miss Caddick.

  ‘And one of the poor little bunnies was missing yesterday,’ he added pointedly. ‘I believe the cannibal Kost ate it, having first dipped the javelin in its ber-lud.’

  ‘There’s another funny thing, if you really want to know,’ said Clive Brown-Jenkins. ‘And that’s the tale of the old iron pot, or, in this case, of Great-aunt’s bathchair. Which of you girls was taking it out for a walk at about ten minutes to one this morning? It passed the wooden door of the sunk garden at, roughly, one o’clock.’

  Before anyone else could reply, Priscilla Yeomond broke in.

  ‘You needn’t laugh at him,’ she said. ‘He heard it. I saw it.’

  ‘Saw it?’ said Miss Caddick, interested. All eyes turned upon the thin, angular, upright woman. ‘Did you, really?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Priscilla. ‘The moon came out and I saw it quite clearly. Someone was in it, and someone—a man, I think—was pushing it. It was going along ever so fast. The man behind was running.’

  ‘I knew it went out at nights,’ said Miss Caddick, with a little shudder. She turned to Hilary. ‘I said so, you remember.’

  ‘No longer ago than yesterday, sister Caddick,’ replied the young man. ‘I disbelieved you. I apologize. Sweet coz, forgive me.’

  ‘No I didn’t mean that. I mean, corroboration,’ said Miss Caddick vaguely. She glanced into her cup, drank what remained of its contents, glanced at her watch, and rose from the table.

  ‘You must please excuse me,’ she said. ‘Mrs Puddequet will wish to interview the cook, and I must go along and help her to dress first.’

  ‘I’ll tell you another rum thing,’ said Hilary slowly, when Miss Caddick had gone. ‘I went for a swim this morning.’ He held up his hand to stem the tide of brotherly comment which this simple statement immediately invoked. ‘No, I’m not calling you stinkers,’ he protested. ‘Let me get on. Well, I dived a bit deep and my fingers touched something clammy.’

  ‘Mud,’ said Francis helpfully.

  ‘Couldn’t have been mud,’ said Timon Anthony. ‘Old lady had it all cleaned out and decoded—I mean deodorized, and the bottom nicely sanded with the best materials only—you should have been here when it was all being done! There’s no mud within a hundred feet of the diving-boards, I know.’

  ‘Well,’ continued Hilary, ‘it felt like somebody’s face! You know when you play water polo, and you push a chap’s face with your foot—’

  ‘What sort of water polo do you play, for heaven’s sake?’ asked Richard Cowes.

  ‘Oh, shut up, Dick,’ said Priscilla. ‘Go on, H.’

  ‘Yes, well, it felt like a face on the end of your foot, only it was my hands that grabbed it,’ explained Hilary. ‘I expect really it was a fish.’

  ‘Oh, yes. A fish would stop there at the bottom of the water while your great paws grabbed hold of it,’ said Celia Brown-Jenkins with fine scorn. ‘I am surprised that a boy like you should be such a little liar.’

  The approval of the Yeomond family at this frank expression of their own sentiments was only quelled by the entrance of old Mrs Puddequet in her bathchair. She seemed annoyed. Miss Caddick, who was pushing the bathchair, was finishing a sentence as they came through the doorway.

  ‘And so, of course, I sent him away,’ she said.

  ‘I should think so too,’ squealed Great-aunt Puddequet. ‘But that is no reason for leaving me to be dressed by Amaris Cowes and the cook, particularly as the cook is greatly incensed at the loss of her privately owned and almost new clothesline!’

  ‘Amaris?’ cried Richard. ‘You didn’t say Amaris, did you, Aunt?’

  Old Mrs Puddequet turned her yellowish eyes upon him.

  ‘I have never been told that my articulation is indistinct, Grandnephew,’ she retorted. ‘You will find your sister in the sunk garden. I offered her breakfast. She refused it. I asked her for explanations. She laughed at me. It appears that at just after three o’clock this morning she arrived on a milk train at Market Longer station and walked to the house. She says that she did not expect to gain admission to the house, so she strolled about until she found an open door to one of the erections in the grounds, and there’—Great-aunt Puddequet’s scandalized tones rose higher and higher in her indignation—‘she slept. Slept! With the door wide open!’

  ‘That was for reasons of health, Great-aunt,’ said Amaris Cowes from the doorway.

  She sauntered in, both hands in the pockets of her knitted suit, large walking-shoes on her feet, and a cap of closely cropped black hair crowning her well-poised head. Her face was large, clever, and ugly; her dark-blue eyes deep-set and austere. She had a prizefighter’s jowl, and, when she took them out of her pockets to accept and light the cigarette which her brother immediately proffered, exceedingly slender and beautiful hands.

  ‘Thanks, Dick,’ she said, as he returned the case to his pocket. She grinned, and nodded to the others. Malpas Yeomond offered her his chair. Celia poured out coffee. Clive rang the bell for hot food. Timon Anthony tilted back his chair and regarded her with intense interest. At length he restored the chair to its normal position on four legs and observed negligently, ‘The New Woman.’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Amaris Cowes, taking careful stock of him, ‘I regard myself as the direct reincarnation of Lilith, the legendary wife of our great forefather.’

  ‘Irreverent,’ squealed Great-aunt Puddequet, who objected to becoming part
of the background to this exceedingly vital figure. Amaris Cowes stared at her.

  ‘Great-aunt,’ she said slowly, ‘after breakfast I want to see the sunk garden again. I’ve been looking at it for half an hour, and I want to look at it again in company with somebody who knows it really well. And tell me—who is the ancient Roman complete with sword? Not Horatius keeping the bridge, surely?’

  She paused. Great-aunt Puddequet said nothing. Her yellowish eyes glowered suspiciously upon this ugly duckling who was so obviously something of a swan.

  ‘That sunk garden,’ Amaris Cowes went on, taking the cigarette from between her lips and making a graceful and expressive gesture with her left arm, ‘that sunk garden has a soul, Great-aunt.’

  She replaced the cigarette, took a plate of kidneys and bacon from the maid, and accepted a piece of bread from a plate proffered by Hilary.

  ‘Throw that thing away and get your breakfast, do,’ said Celia. ‘You must be starving.’

  Amaris Cowes took out the cigarette, glanced at it, and then tossed it through the open window. She grinned at Celia and picked up her knife and fork.

  ‘I am,’ she said.

  It is always interesting to watch other people eat. The Yeomonds, the two Brown-Jenkins, her brother Richard, even Great-aunt Puddequet and her companion followed the movements of Amaris as she ate a hearty meal.

  Just as she had refused a fourth cup of coffee, a maid entered and conferred with Miss Caddick.

  ‘Dear me,’ the angular lady remarked. ‘Ask him into the library.’

  ‘Who?’ demanded Great-aunt Puddequet peevishly.

  ‘Jane says it is the sergeant from Market Longer Police Station,’ replied Miss Caddick. ‘They seem to have lost a man called Jacob Hobson. At least, his wife has. So awkward, of course, to lose one’s husband at the weekend.’

  ‘Lost him?’ squealed Great-aunt Puddequet. ‘Well, do they suppose I’ve found him? Go along at once, companion, and send the sergeant away. What nonsense to come here after every drunk and disorderly ruffian in the village! What was Constable Copple thinking about, to allow such a man to get lost?’