Your Secret Friend (Timothy Herring) Page 6

  “Never mind him. Tell me more about you and Marchmont Pallis. Why Marchmont?”

  “Because she has a half-sister at the school, so one is known as Miss Marchmont Pallis and the other as Miss Vere Pallis.”

  “How aristocratic! Why did I have to marry a man named Parsons? But surely she’s got a first name which isn’t quite so high-sounding?”

  “Alison, I believe. I am almost certain that April mentioned the name Alison. It was Miss Salter who told me they were only half-sisters. I’m glad. I didn’t much take to Vere.”

  “Alison Herring? . . . no, perhaps not. Well, come along with those crocks and let’s wash them romantically all among the weeds and watercresses. You can take off your shoes and socks and roll up your trousers. You like paddling, don’t you?”

  “Not as much as you do. Besides, you’ve such lovely legs. I shall adore seeing you put on your stockings after I’ve dried your delicate feet on a handkerchief which, thereafter, will never leave my heart.”

  “You won’t get the chance. I’m not going to risk treading on a newt. You can do the wading, if any.”

  Diana was right about her husband’s long windedness. She and Timothy had washed up the plates and glasses and had been seated in the deckchairs for the best part of an hour before the other two came out of the farmhouse to find Diana knitting and Timothy ungallantly asleep. Diana prodded him with a knitting needle as the other two approached.

  “They’re back,” she said. “Now it’s our turn. Do sit down, Miss Pallis. You must be worn out. Tom always gets carried away, if I’m not there to stop him talking.”

  “It’s been fascinating,” said Marchmont, taking the chair which Timothy had vacated, “but there’s a terrifying amount to be done.”

  “Come and show me, Tim,” said Diana, holding out her hands to be pulled up from her deckchair. Tom Parsons seated himself when his wife had taken Timothy into the house, filled a pipe, lit it and, having smoked in silence for a few minutes, took the pipe from his mouth and studied his companion. She was lying back in the deckchair with her eyes closed, and he noted not only the length of her dark eyelashes, but the shadows under the eyes and the hollow cheekbones in the sallow face.

  As though she had become conscious that he was gazing at her, Marchmont opened her eyes and smiled at him.

  “Old Tim,” said Parsons, “is a very good sort of chap. I know he’ll do his best for you with our committee, and I’ll back him up. He tells me you’ve probably got another friend at court, too. Do you know Lady Grace Norton?”

  “I’ve heard of her. Doesn’t she run one of the Oxfam things?”

  “Yes, full of good works, and also one of our keenest members. Tim has found out that she visited this place several years ago and tried to interest the tenants in getting it properly restored, but they wouldn’t be bothered. Probably preferred it as it is. I think it might be a very good idea to bring her down to have another look at it before Tim sees the committee about it next month. She’s got a lot of influence with the big shots. When does your vacation begin?”

  “The week after next. School breaks up on Thursday, but I shall stay on for a few days. I’ve a lot of odd jobs to do, and after I’ve cleared them out of the way I’m going to Greece. The best plan would be for me to hand you over the keys of this place. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you and Mr. Herring for giving up your time like this, especially now that his cousin is no longer interested.”

  “Oh, really, there’s no need for gratitude. Tim loves to stick his oar in and, as for me, it’s just part of my job to come along and look at places he thinks Phisbe would like. By the way—I did mention it while we were in the house—I suppose you do realise that, by the time we’ve finished the job, you’ll only be able to use that vaulted undercroft as a cellar and general storehouse? I mean, we shall rip out all the present fittings.”

  “Oh, I shall have plenty of junk to put in it, I expect, and I did understand when you explained.”

  “And that when we’ve taken down those party walls on the first floor you’ll have a room forty feet long and sixteen wide?”

  “Yes, but I shall only use that if I give a party. I shall furnish it hardly at all—just a refectory table and some benches along the wall, I thought. The solar will be my living-room and the second chamber my bedroom. Must I really put them on show?”

  “Phisbe will have to go into a huddle with you about that, and, if I were you, I’d keep the second chamber strictly to myself, but you might have to agree to show the undercroft, the solar, and the great hall. Phisbe is pretty reasonable, you’ll find, and, if you stick to your guns, I’m sure you’ll get your own way.”

  “I almost wish I’d agreed to pay for the reconstruction myself. I still hate the idea of opening the house to strangers who’ve paid for admission.”

  “Yes, of course you do, but there’s no help for that, I’m afraid. Still, as I say, you can call the tune to some extent. Phisbe will always meet the owner at least halfway, and I’ll back you up all I can, and so will Tim, and it won’t cost you anything but a token payment for absolutely expert work.”

  Inside the farmhouse Timothy was engaged in the pleasant task of apprising Diana Parsons of the alterations which he hoped would take place.

  “Although,” he said, when he had finished his explanations, “what Miss Alison Marchmont Pallis wants with a house of this kind passes my comprehension. By the time we’ve finished with it, she might as well be living in Tutankhamen’s tomb. No electric light, no gas, no water except from the well—I can’t see that any woman on her own will be able to stick it. Do you think she realises what she’s in for? You see, if Phisbe foots the bill, we shall make a proper job of it and with no half-measures. By the time Tom’s finished with it, it will be a place that very few people could bear to live in.”

  “Well, apparently people in the thirteenth century could bear to live in it. Of course I realise that their standards wouldn’t be quite the same as ours.”

  “Besides that, you see, they probably had large families and, in a house of this type, servants. It’s the fact that, now April has thrown in her hand, Miss Pallis will be living here alone that worries me.”

  “She may not intend to live alone, Tim dear. If you ask me, there’s a man involved. Your boomerang proves that, I should say. I wouldn’t be surprised if your cousin was only brought in as a sort of smoke-screen.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that. Anyway, Miss Pallis will have to employ at least a charwoman. She couldn’t manage a place this size and teach and write this book they talked about, without some kind of domestic help. Then there’s the question of food. How is she going to cook after we’ve ripped out that kitchen range in the undercroft?”

  “I shouldn’t think food will be much of a problem for her, you know, except at week-ends. She is certain to have a midday meal at school five days a week, and her tea as well. I expect. Otherwise she’ll eat out. Didn’t you say there was a perfectly good restaurant at the mill-house? Any snacks, or an egg-and-bacon breakfast, she can cook on one of those cartridge picnic stoves, likewise make tea and coffee. Much more important, to my mind, is the question of artificial light. She won’t want to ruin her eyesight trying to read by candle-light or with an oil lamp, and I don’t suppose you’ll allow her to have the place wired for electricity.”

  “She can have wall-lighting in the great hall to look like torches, I suppose, and there’s no reason why she shouldn’t have an electric reading-lamp in the solar. Modern wiring can be inconspicuous.”

  “She’ll also need the telephone and the radio and a television set and a record player, and I expect she’ll want electric fires and night-storage heaters, so it’s a good thing you’re not going to cut her off from the modern world entirely.”

  “I must talk to Tom about it, but first things first. The committee will have to be tackled about the general restoration before we go into details. I think my best plan will be to write to Lady Grace Norton, so that
we’ve got a friend at court before we bring the rest of the members into it. If Coningsby is right—and he always is —he’ll be on our side, I should think. Well, shall we join the others?”

  Marchmont was reading. Tom, who had finished his pipe, was painstakingly undoing his wife’s knitting to where he had spotted a fault.

  “We’ve been discussing ways and means of living in a thirteenth-century house,” said Diana. “Oh, have I done my knitting wrong? Yes, I can see I have. Tim and I have been going deeply into questions of lighting and cooking. Had you thought about that sort of thing, Miss Pallis? That’s it, darling. Now will you pick up the stitches for me? You knit much better than I do.”

  “The house will be wired for electricity, of course,” said Parsons, doing as his wife suggested. “There you are, my dear. There’s nothing to stop Miss Pallis from having electric light and electric fires laid on. It need not spoil the look of the place if we have it done discreetly. I can’t see any reason why she shouldn’t be comfortable.”

  “He’s human, after all, you see,” said Diana to Marchmont.

  “The only problem is to get the committee to agree to all this,” went on Parsons. “They can’t be expected to pay for the wiring or any of the electric fittings, of course,” he added, turning to Marchmont, who had closed her book and straightened up, “but I’m afraid they’ll want their say.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” she said. “I’ll be glad of their advice. I may get an offer of help from somebody who loves old houses and has taken a great deal of interest in this one.”

  “More interest than young April showed, apparently,” said Timothy, meeting Diana’s eyes and receiving a glance which said, I told you so.”

  “Well, that’s fine,” said Parsons. “Another thing: we might be able to persuade Phisbe to agree to confine the cash customers to, say, June, July, and August, when you’d be on holiday some of the time. Phisbe could put a caretaker in charge while you were away, and that way you would hardly have any bother at all. When’s the next committee meeting, Tim? I think I’d better come along.”

  “It’s quite on the cards that the committee would like to talk to you, too, Miss Pallis,” said Timothy. “We meet next Tuesday, at three. Could you manage that?”

  “Yes, if they want to see me. It will be in the middle of the tennis tournament, so I can easily ask for leave. I’m not a bit good at interviews, though. Would it be all right if I brought my friend to do most of the talking?”

  “Of course it will be all right,” said Timothy. “Bring along anyone you like. We’ve had whole families, not to mention a complete Cathedral Chapter, at our meetings before now.”

  They dropped Marchmont at the school gates after having had tea at the mill. Parsons then observed: “That woman is a dark horse and a femme fatale.”

  “So you noticed it, too,” said Timothy. I lit on it by accident, but once I’d spotted it I couldn’t think why it hadn’t hit me in the eye first go off.”

  “It didn’t, because at first I expect she was nervous and shy, so you thought her gawky, plain, spinsterish, donnish, and beginning to look middle-aged,” said Diana. I wonder what the so-called friend is like?”

  “A shambling, ugly, old-maidish, pedantic, even more donnish, and really middle-aged woman,” said Tom Parsons, “so to hell with your ideas of romance! It’s probably her headmistress.”

  “Nonsense! It’s a man, and he’s married, and he and Miss Pallis—surely he doesn’t call her Marchmont?—are tangled up in a hopeless love-affair which has gone on ever since she was a student and he was a junior lecturer at her university,” said Diana. “He’s got a wife in a mental hospital, or in a home for inebriates, or with an incurable illness or something, and either can’t get a divorce or hasn’t the heart to ask for one.”

  “Write it up in novelette form, and sell it on the railway bookstalls,” suggested her husband. “It’s been written a million times before, but what of that? It still makes money.”

  “You may jibe, but, after all, who called her a dark horse and a femme fatale?” retorted his wife.

  “I didn’t give her a romantic love-affair. That was your contribution. I only meant that she smoulders.”

  “And to think I left you alone with her inside that house all that time!”

  “While you went off with the glamorous lad who is now sitting beside you! Yes, we should both have known better. Will you sue for a divorce, or shall I?”

  “I fancy it’s a man,” said Timothy. “If it’s a woman, I think she’d have mentioned her name. And it obviously isn’t her sister, or surely she’d have said so.”

  “A dark horse,” repeated Diana thoughtfully. “A coltpixie, perhaps.”

  “What on earth is a coltpixie?” demanded Timothy.

  “A sort of devil-horse which lures real horses into swamps and so destroys them.”

  “So you be careful, my lad,” said Tom Parsons. “She sounds (wait for the pun) a nightmare to me.”

  “That’s silly!” said Diana. “She isn’t in the least frightening. I should think she has all her fights inside herself, that’s all.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Phisbe Commits Itself

  The formal business of the committee over—the president never wasted much time—the members settled down to enjoy themselves. Rumour had gone round that there was an attractive proposition coming up for discussion and they proposed to make the most of it. The president’s introduction, after the settlement of Other Business, seldom varied. “Got anything for us, Tim?”

  “Yes,” replied Timothy, rising. “A year or two ago Lady Grace Norton,” he bowed to her, “spotted a thirteenth-century farmhouse in Dorset which had been sadly Victorianised. The people allowed her to inspect it, but were not interested in her suggestion that it ought to be restored. She sent us in a memo, but there was nothing we could do about it at that time. The tenants were satisfied with the place and were determined not to be disturbed. Since then, however, they have left, and the place has come up for sale. It has found a purchaser who is ready and willing to let us have a go. I have copies of plans and elevations, showing what could be done, and some photographs of what the house looks like at present. I don’t know whether you’d care to pass them round, and then we can discuss them and find out members’ views.”

  The sheets were passed round. The faithful and industrious Coningsby had provided a dozen copies. There was an interested and respectful silence as members studied the plans and photographs. The treasurer was the first to speak.

  “What’s it going to cost?” he asked, as treasurers must. “Not a lot,” replied Parsons. “I can’t quote figures yet, but the fabric is pretty sound. Most of the work will be that of demolition. As you can see, that will involve a general throwing out of extraneous ceilings and party walls. It remains to be seen what will have to be done to the roof when the ceilings come down, but I’ve been up into the loft and had a look at the timbers. Some will need replacement, but it’s by no means a wholesale job, because the previous tenants have looked after the roof particularly well.”

  “How did Mr. Herring come to find the place?” asked the woman member at whose suggestion Timothy had first gone to Monkshood Mill.

  “By chance, really,” said Timothy. “The mill was no good to us, so, after I had looked it over, I was fortunate enough to be shown over the very fine Georgian house which you must have noticed when you were there.”

  “Oh, yes, I stayed there as the guest of the Purfleets. Years ago, of course. I don’t really know what put the mill into my mind all that time afterwards, but I’m very glad you went, if it led you to this most exciting house.”

  “You approve of the suggestion that we should do up Little Monkshood, then, Mrs. Miles?” asked the president.

  “Oh, yes, of course! But Mr. Herring was going to tell us . . .”

  “Yes,” said Timothy. “Well, both at the house, which is now a school, and at the church, which I also visited, I was recomme
nded to go and look at Little Monkshood. I realised that it had possibilities for us, so much so that I would have suggested we buy it. However, we have been forestalled over that, but the new owner is prepared to let us do what we like with it before she takes up residence, provided that we get to work promptly, as, of course, she wants to live in it as soon as possible.”

  “I suppose she knows that she will be obliged to open it to the public if we do the work?” said a crusty member.

  “Yes, that has been pointed out to her.”

  “And she doesn’t regard that as an obstacle?”

  “I think we had better put it to her officially,” said the treasurer. “We don’t want there to be any misunderstanding. Our rules are quite clear and must be adhered to. When can we contact the lady?”

  “She is waiting in the ante-chamber. I thought you might like to talk to her, so I asked her to come along.”

  “Before we have her in,” said an elderly member, “I wonder whether you’d mind explaining exactly what you have in mind to do to the house? These plans and things are all very well, but I don’t get much idea from them as to what you really intend.”

  “Parsons?” said the president, looking at Tom expectantly.

  “Yes, certainly,” said Tom, getting up from his seat at the foot of the table. “Tim dates the house as from 1260 to 1280. Originally it consisted of a vaulted undercroft with a central row of pillars, and, above this, a hall, and a solar. There is also a fine second chamber. The last was added in the fourteenth century and I think we should retain it.

  “An outside stone staircase, still in good repair, leads up to this floor, and internal newel staircases lead down from the hall, the original kitchen (from which the screens have disappeared, so at present it is incorporated with the hall), the solar and the second chamber, to the undercroft which, at present, is in use as a farmhouse kitchen—or was, before the tenants left.