What Happened at Hazelwood? (6 page)

‘But quite often,’ interrupted Lucy, ‘there
is
nobody in particular. The Shropshire Mortimer’s have cousins in a place called the Flinders Ranges. And they say that there is nobody in particular within hundreds of miles of them. Nobody, that is to say, except ordinary colonials.’

Gerard put down his knife and fork, and I could see that he was quite quickly learning to be less annoyed than amused by talk of this sort. ‘But we are all ordinary colonials,’ he said. ‘Except of course those of us who are indigenous and black.’

‘Black?’ said Lucy. ‘I thought that was Africa.’

At this Joyleen felt she must take a hand. ‘There aren’t
many
blacks,’ she said defensively. ‘Or not any longer. They were protected, and that sort of thing, so that now there are very few of them left. They are quite horrid, of course, and particularly the children.’

Gerard opened his mouth and shut it again. I felt sorry for him, for I saw that his marriage must be pretty awful. In fact we rowed in the same galley, Gerard and I. And if I’d had my wits about me I would have seen that he might be making the same observation.

‘Blackfellows?’ said Hippias. He applied himself vigorously to his veal. ‘George and Denzell had dealings with blackfellows – of a sort.’

Grace was upon this like a flash. ‘Black women?’ she demanded.

Hippias looked at my unmarried sister-in-law, sizing her up. ‘That’s telling,’ he leered.

And at that I saw that Hippias was the nastiest of the lot. Not even Mervyn Cockayne could touch quite this. For it was plain to me that although Hippias had intended some innuendo in this matter of George and the blackfellows it had actually nothing to do with women – or at least with immoral relations with women. Hippias was just joining in baiting Grace.

I’m not fanatical about smut. I suspect that it has a sanative place in the intimate society of young adult males. Aerated by wit, I’m prepared to stick it – even put it across – on the stage. But I don’t like it at my dinner table, and in front of a parlour-maid. I can tell you I felt pretty well through with Simneys that night.

‘Yes,’ said George, ‘it all floats back. Blackfellows, buffalo, billabongs and tepid bottled beer. A wonderful life. How eager you must be to get back. And yet how much of England Joyleen must be shown first. How her mind and spirit will expand as she actually sees so much that her education has led her to expect. Can you stop at so dull a place as Hazelwood till Wednesday – or even Thursday? Nicolette, do persuade our cousins to spare us several days.’

I uttered some decent form of words. It was unfair of George – I was thinking – to silence Mervyn and then embark on so poor an imitation of the little toad’s vein. But here was only another sign that George was not so much in command of the situation as he seemed to claim. And somehow I was alarmed by this. I think I had a feeling that if, for mysterious reasons, he was going to be driven hard by his cousin Hippias he would make up for this disagreeable experience by taking it out of others nearer home.

I didn’t know that George’s death was going to take place just twenty-seven hours later.

And I daresay you are just longing for it – or even for a general extinction of the Simneys, as at the conclusion of an Elizabethan play. Well, don’t despair. Of that blunt instrument, at least, we are within reasonable reach now. As to whether any of the others are to die I don’t yet know. Somebody has declared that we shed our sicknesses in books, and perhaps that’s why I’m writing. And possibly the more effective the book the more effective the cure – so I had better build up what suspense I can. Anyway, all those Simneys are alive for the moment. You might say indeed that they have the horrid vitality shown by many of the lower forms of life.

At that meal there was a certain amount of further cryptic talk. I could report it and then later on you could perhaps turn back and see its lurking relevance. But even in this sort of narrative much cryptic talk is tiresome. Certainly I was tired of it at dinner that night. And I was glad when I got the women away to the drawing-room.

Joyleen walked to the fire and said, ‘Coal!’ with the air of one preferring a mild indictment.

‘I expect,’ I said, ‘that you will feel the cold, arriving in winter like this.’

‘You should wear plenty of clothes,’ said Grace – and seemed rather to imply that if Joyleen had her way she would appear in nothing but a string of beads and a sarong.

‘And wool next the skin,’ said Lucy. ‘But no doubt you will know about wool. The Sussex Hallidays have cousins in Victoria – or is it Queensland? – who are said to have contrived to grow very good wool. Of course, with a special sort of sheep. I expect it would be rather like a goat.’

‘Talking of goats,’ said a voice at the door, ‘how do you really like your father-in-law, Joyleen?’

It was – needless to say – Mervyn; he had slipped away to escape that edict of silence. But for the fact that I was coming to feel things at Hazelwood as curiously ghost-like and impermanent I think I should have taken over the schoolroom business from George and ordered him to bed.

But Joyleen didn’t seem to find anything offensive or even odd in the question. ‘I like him,’ she said. ‘He’s not so slow as Gerard.’

Mervyn grinned wickedly at this cheap speech. ‘No, I suppose not. In fact I should imagine him to have been quite fast in his day.’

Joyleen assumed an expression of importance and mystery. ‘There are stories about him.’

‘Ah,’ said Grace.

‘About him and Sir George and that brother of Sir George’s they were talking of – the one with the funny name.’

‘Denzell,’ said Mervyn. ‘Denzell is the funny name – Joyleen, my dear.’

I don’t think Joyleen saw this – and in Bondi, no doubt, there are Joyleens in every street. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘–Denzell. Of course it was ever so long ago and I don’t really know about it. But I think they were all nearly charged with – with absorption.’

‘Absorption?’ I exclaimed. It seemed an improbable crime – unless indeed the reference was to some illegal attempt to drain Dismal Swamp.

‘Abortion,’ said Mervyn easily. ‘The dear, pure girl means abortion.’

‘She means abduction.’ Grace was quite decided. ‘It is just what one would expect of George. And of Hippias as well. As soon as he came into the dining-room I saw that he was a loose fish.’

‘He is also,’ said Mervyn, ‘a widower, and in that sense loose too. So let Grace get out her rod and line.’

But Grace paid no attention to this. She was too absorbed in the fresh revelation of her brother’s depravities. ‘Abduction!’ she repeated.

Joyleen nodded. ‘And on a large scale,’ she added solemnly.

Grace’s eye took on its most fanatical gleam. ‘Is there no end,’ she exclaimed with passion, ‘to our family shame? Three of us nearly charged with the abduction of numerous women.’

Joyleen stared. ‘Women?’ she said. ‘But it wasn’t anything like that. It was b1ackbirds.’

One has, of course, heard that if a common sparrow appears in Australia whole populations go on the hunt, shot-gun in hand. And, conceivably, legal consequences to the abducting of blackbirds were merely another ornithological eccentricity of the place. This mystery would presently have been resolved – Joyleen indeed had opened her mouth to continue – when we were interrupted by a loud crash from the corridor, mingled with the horrid sound of much breaking glass.

Really sedate members of the landed gentry, I am sure, pay no attention to such domestic calamities, maintaining an air of obliviousness until the time comes to say something nasty next morning. Being only an actress, I was out of the drawing-room door in a jiffy. And the others, infected by this bourgeois behaviour, followed.

So we all saw both Owdon and Hippias. Hippias was walking away from us and in the act of turning the corner which led to George’s study. But evidently he had just passed Owdon and was presumably responsible for the wretched man’s condition. For Owdon was standing staring after him, a silver tray and a litter of shivered glass on the parquetry at his feet, and his arms hanging in a sort of limp tremble at his sides. You can seldom read any expression on Owdon’s face – the pirates have left too little of it for that – but he retains a circulatory and respiratory system, and consequently a complexion capable of registering emotional changes. He had now gone a parchment colour, with greenish mottlings as of mildew or blight. Just such dead, it occurred to me, must Dismal Swamp render up from time to time.

Of course the damage was pretty steep – two or three decanters and quite a lot of rather pleasant old glass. But such disasters are a sort of professional risk with butlers, and I didn’t see that he should be so upset as all that.

‘Owdon,’ I said sharply – for the fellow seemed in a perfect daze – ‘all you need is a dust-pan and a broom.’

He looked at me for a second unknowingly. ‘Dust-pans and brooms,’ he murmured, ‘baize aprons and silver polish. The key of the cellars and a book for keeping accounts.’

Joyleen giggled; I suppose she was scared by this untoward turn to things in a baronial hall. And I’m not sure I wasn’t a bit scared myself, for I had never known Owdon behave in so queer a fashion before. There was something queer too in his voice which I couldn’t at all define, and I was seized by that irrational and overpowering feeling of a thing’s having happened before which is the product, it is said, of certain sorts of fatigue. Long ago Owdon had spoken just these words… Yes, I was scared, for now I positively stamped my foot at him. ‘Or if you’re shaken up,’ I said, ‘send Timmy. We can’t have this mess left about.’

‘Yes,’ he said. He was looking at me unknowingly out of his one eye. Then recognition dawned in it. ‘Yes, your ladyship,’ he murmured. And he continued to look at me.

The look was stranger than his voice had been. I had a panicky feeling that he was seeing something that he hadn’t seen before; or that I had suddenly appeared to him in a fresh light. ‘Don’t let the past come back,’ he said. ‘Strangle it. Anything is better than the return of the past.’

Well, it is difficult to express how confounding this was. Its most obvious aspect was that of crude melodrama – for what could be more conventionally conceived than this of the mysterious manservant acquired in the master’s shady days and now thrown sensationally off his balance by the appearance of some link with the bad old times? The stricken butler and the shattered glass: ought it not to have been possible to predict the snowstorm and the blunt instrument straightaway?

But there was more than this simple melodrama. There was something odd in the man’s choice of words – and something very odd in the manner of their address to me. They ought to have been, so to speak, turned inward; pure soliloquy;
0 what a rogue and peasant slave am I
. Instead of which they seemed addressed to me by way of serious admonition. Owdon was speaking out of his own experience – but he was speaking to
me.

Owdon certainly has a past – in fact several pasts, including Timmy. And no doubt I have a past too. But assuredly our pasts have nothing in common and I didn’t at all see why at the moment I should be dragged in. Nor, seconds later and when he had recovered himself, did Owdon himself; he stopped off squinneying at me and applied himself to picking up the larger chunks of broken decanter.

And at this Grace spoke up. It was surprising that she hadn’t uttered before. I fancy she had been rather intimidated by an Owdon who had momentarily become something other than an automaton. It was true that, unless some Simney lady had possessed tastes decidedly peculiar, one must suppose him to have been this at least once before. But we had known him for years as a dummy; and for a time Grace had been disconcerted and silent. Now however, and seeing Owdon occupied in a properly menial fashion with the debris, she provided her own sort of commentary to the scene.

‘Were my poor dear father alive,’ said Grace, ‘how he would wince at these disorderly scenes. He was a man of the purest moral principles and believed above all things in the sanctity of the home.’

‘He,’ said Mervyn, ‘brought back no pirates from Pinnaroo, no butlers from Bumbunga.’

‘Guilty consciences,’ said Grace looking at Owdon. ‘And hidden courses and irregular passions,’ she added looking at me.

‘And not even,’ said Mervyn, ‘the after-dinner quiet which might reconcile us to these. Willoughby throws a glass of sherry, and at once Owdon is prompted to hurl whole services of crystal. What will be his corresponding riposte should Deamer appear and defend the honour of the village maidens by shooting uncle George? Holocaust at Hazelwood. The End of the House of Simney. In one of the novels of Thomas Hardy there is an unnatural little boy – one much like myself – who hangs himself and all his relations in a big dark cupboard. Looking round the Simneys, and as a mere Cockayne, I have often thought of it. But Owdon, maybe, will forestall me.’

‘Mervyn,’ said Lucy, ‘what you say is very clever, dear, and I am sure that your uncle George would be amused. But I do not know that it is quite nice for Joyleen, who is young and may not understand our sophisticated ways.’

‘Possibly not, mama. But does she understand our mystery?’

‘Our mystery, darling? I don’t know what you can mean.’ But Mervyn had swung round upon Joyleen and was addressing her direct. He is an acute little beast enough, and I think he realized that something might be got out of her by sudden assault. ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘–what is it? There is more to all this than just Dismal Swamp. Or something more has cropped up – suddenly, tonight. Look at Owdon. The past is stirring, and I have an idea that it will be better for us all if it stays put. So what do you know about it?’

I looked at Mervyn in surprise, for I could scarcely remember another occasion upon which he had spoken without intolerable affectation. And then I looked at Joyleen – and it was my instant conclusion that she was just dumb. She was bewildered, of course, but I imagine that she had anticipated bewilderment in the ancient seat of the Simneys, and that even a row of bodies dangling in a cupboard might have struck her as merely part of the way in which matters conduct themselves in England. ‘Know about it?’ she said sulkily. ‘I don’t know anything at all. But I do think you were right about after-dinner quiet. We had a horrid train journey and I would like a little quiet very much.’