Death of a Fool ra-19 Read online

  “Thank God, darling. But—”

  “All the same, darling, darling Ralph, you must understand that although I go to sleep thinking of you and wake in a kind of pink paradise because of you, I am still determined to keep my head. People may say,” Camilla went on, waving a knitted paw, “that class is vieux jeu, but they’re only people who haven’t visited South Mardian. So what I propose—”

  “Sweetheart, it is I who propose. I do so now, Camilla. Will you marry me?”

  “Yes, thank you, I will indeed. Subject to the unequivocal consent of your papa and your great-aunt and, of course, my papa, who, I expect, would prefer an R.C., although I’m not one. Otherwise, I can guarantee he would be delighted. He fears I might contract an alliance with a drama student,” Camilla explained and turned upon Ralph a face eloquent with delight at her own absurdities. She was in that particular state of intoxication that attends the young woman who knows she is beloved and is therefore moved to show off for the unstinted applause of an audience of one.

  “I adore you,” Ralph repeated unsteadily and punctually. “But, sweetest, darling Camilla, I’ve got, I repeat, something that I ought to tell you about.”

  “Yes, of course you have. You began by saying so. Is it,” Camilla hazarded suddenly, “that you’ve had an affair?”

  “As a matter of fact, in a sort of way, it is, but—”

  Camilla began to look owlish. “I’m not much surprised by that,” she said. “After all, you are thirty and I’m eighteen. Even people of my vintage have affairs, you know, although, personally, I don’t care for the idea at all. But I’ve been given to understand it’s different for the gentlemen.”

  “Camilla, stop doing an act and listen to me.”

  Camilla looked at him and the impulse to show off for him suddenly left her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Well, go on.”

  He went on. They walked up the road to Yowford and for Camilla, as she listened, some of the brightness of the morning fell from the sky and was gone. When he had finished she could find nothing to say to him.

  “Well,” Ralph said presently, “I see it has made a difference.”

  “No, not at all,” Camilla rejoined politely. “I mean, not really. It couldn’t, could it? It’s just that somehow it’s strange because — well, I suppose because it’s here and someone I know.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ralph said.

  “I’ve been sort of buddies with Trixie. It seems impossible. Does she mind? Poor Trixie.”

  “No, she doesn’t. Really, she doesn’t. I’m not trying to explain anything away or to excuse myself, but they’ve got quite a different point of view in the villages. They think on entirely different lines about that sort of thing.”

  “ They‘? Different from whom?”

  “Well — from us,” Ralph said and saw his mistake. “It’s hard to understand,” he mumbled unhappily.

  “I ought to understand, oughtn’t I? Seeing I’m half ‘them.’ ”

  “Camilla, darling —”

  “You seem to have a sort of predilection for ‘them,’ don’t you? Trixie. Then me.”

  “That did hurt,” Ralph said after a pause.

  “I don’t want to be beastly about it.”

  “There was no question of anything serious — it was just — it just happened. Trixie was — kind. It didn’t mean a thing to either of us.”

  They walked on and stared blankly at dripping trees and dappled hillsides.

  “Isn’t it funny,” Camilla said, “how this seems to have sort of thrown me over on ‘their’ side? On Trixie’s side?”

  “Are you banging away about class again?”

  “But you see it in terms of class yourself. ‘They’ are different about that sort of thing, you say.”

  He made a helpless gesture.

  “Do other people know?” Camilla asked.

  “I’m afraid so. There’s been gossip. You know what—” He pulled himself up.

  “What they are?”

  Ralph swore violently.

  Camilla burst into tears.

  “I’m so sorry,” Ralph kept repeating. “I’m so terribly sorry you mind.”

  “Well,” Camilla sobbed, “it’s not much good going on like this and I daresay I’m being very silly.”

  “Do you think you’ll get over it?” he asked anxiously.

  “One can but try.”

  “Please try very hard,” Ralph said.

  “I expect it all comes of being an only child. My papa is extremely old-fashioned.”

  “Is he a roaring inverted snob like you?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Here comes the egregious Simmy-Dick. You’d better not be crying, darling, if you can manage not to.”

  “I’ll pretend it’s the cold air,” Camilla said, taking the handkerchief he offered her.

  Simon Begg came down the lane in a raffish red sports car. When he saw them he skidded to a standstill.

  “Hullo-ullo!” he shouted. “Fancy meeting you two. And how are we?”

  He looked at them both with such a knowing air, compounded half of surprise and half of a rather debased sort of comradeship, that Camilla found herself blushing.

  “I didn’t realize you two knew each other,” Simon went on. “No good offering you a lift, I suppose. I can just do three if we’re cozy.”

  “This is meant to be a hearty walk,” Ralph explained.

  “Quite, quite,” Simon said, beaming. “Hey, what’s the gen on this show this afternoon? Do you get it?”

  “I imagine it’s a reconstruction, isn’t it?”

  “We’re all meant to do what we all did on Wednesday?”

  “I should think so, wouldn’t you?”

  “Are the onlookers invited?”

  “I believe so. Some of them.”

  “The whole works?” Simon looked at Camilla, raised his eyebrows and grinned. “Including the ad libs?”

  Camilla pretended not to understand him.

  “Better put my running shoes on this time,” he said.

  “It’s not going to be such a very amusing party, after all,” Ralph pointed out stiffly, and Simon agreed, very cheerfully, that it was not. “I’m damn’ sorry about the poor Old Guiser,” he declared. “And I can’t exactly see what they hope to get out of it. Can you?”

  Ralph said coldly that he supposed they hoped to get the truth out of it. Simon was eying Camilla with unbridled enthusiasm.

  “In a moment,” she thought, “he will twiddle those awful moustaches.”

  “I reckon it’s a lot of bull,” Simon confided. “Suppose somebody did do something — well, is he going to turn it all on again like a good-boy for the police? Like hell, he is!”

  “We ought to move on, Camilla, if we’re to get back for lunch.”

  “Yes,” Camilla said. “Let’s.”

  Simon said earnestly, “Look, I’m sorry. I keep forgetting the relationship. It’s — well, it’s not all that easy to remember, is it? Look, Cam, hell, I am sorry.”

  Camilla, who had never before been called Cam, stared at him in bewilderment. His cheeks were rosy, his eyes were impertinent and blue and his moustache rampant. A half-smile hovered on his lips. “I am a goon,” said Simon, ruefully. “But, still —”

  Camilla, to her surprise, found she was not angry with him. “Never mind,” she said. “No bones broken.”

  “Honest? You are a pal. Well, be good, children,” said Simon and started up his engine. It responded with deafening alacrity. He waved his hand and shot off down the lane.

  “He is,” Ralph said, looking after him, “the definite and absolute rock bottom.”

  “Yes. But I find him rather touching,” said Camilla.

  The five Andersen boys were in the smithy. The four younger brothers sat on upturned boxes and stools. A large tin trunk stood on a cleared bench at the far end of the smithy. Dan turned the key in the padlock that secured it. Sergeant Obby, who was on duty, had slipped into a light doze in a dark co
rner. He was keen on his job but unused to late hours.

  “Wonderful queer to think of, hearts,” Dan said. “The Guiser’s savings. All these years.” He looked at Chris. “And you’d no notion of it?”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Chris said. “I knew he put it by, like. Same as grand-dad and his’n, before him.”

  “I knew,” Ernie volunteered. “He was a proper old miser, he was. Never let me have any, not for a wireless nor a telly nor nothing, he wouldn’t. I knew where he put it by, I did, but he kept watch over it like a bloody mastiff, so’s I dussn’t let on. Old tyrant, he was. Cruel hard and crankytankerous.”

  Andy passed his great hand across his mouth and sighed. “Doan’t talk that way,” he said, lowering his voice and glancing towards Sergeant Obby, who had returned to duty. “What did we tell you?”

  Dan agreed strongly. “Doan’t talk that way, you, Ern. You was a burden to him with your foolishness.”

  “And a burden to us,” Nat added, “as it turns out. Heavy and anxious.”

  “Get it into your thick head,” Chris advised Ernie, “that you’re born foolish and not up to our level when it comes to great affairs. Leave everything to us chaps. Doan’t say nothing and doan’t do nothing but what you was meant to do in the beginning.”

  “Huh!” Ernie shouted. “I’ll larn ’em! Whang!” He made a wild swiping gesture.

  “What’ll we do?” Andy asked, appealing to the others. “Listen to him!”

  Ernie surveyed his horrified brothers with the greatest complacency. “You doan’t need to fret yourselves, chaps,” he said. “I’m not so silly as what you all think I am. I can keep my tongue behind my teeth, fair enough. I be one too many for the coppers. Got ’em proper baffled, I ’ave.”

  “Shut up,” Chris whispered savagely.

  “No, I won’t, then.”

  “You will, if I have to lay you out first,” Chris muttered. He rose and walked across to his youngest brother. Chris was the biggest of the Andersens, a broad powerful man. He held his clenched fist in front of Ernie’s face as if it were an object of virtue. “You know me, Ern,” he said softly. “I’ve give you a hiding before this and never promised you one but what I’ve kept my word and laid it on solid. You got a taste last night. If you talk about — you know what — or open your silly damn’ mouth on any matter at all when we’re up-along, I’ll give you a masterpiece. Won’t I? Won’t I?”

  Ernie wiped his still-smiling mouth and nodded.

  “You’ll whiffle and you’ll dance and you’ll go where you went and you’ll hold your tongue and you’ll do no more nor that. Right?”

  Ernie nodded and backed away.

  “It’s for the best, Ernie-boy,” the gentle Andy said. “Us knows what’s for the best.”

  Ernie pointed at Chris and continued to back away from him.

  “You tell him to lay off of me,” he said. “I know him. Keep him off of me.”

  Chris made a disgusted gesture. He turned away and began to examine the tools near the anvil.

  “You keep your hands off of me,” Ernie shouted after him. Sergeant Obby woke with a little snort.

  “Don’t talk daft. There you go, see!” Nat ejaculated. “Talking proper daft.”

  Dan said, “Now, listen, Ern. Us chaps doan’t want to know nothing but what was according to plan. What you done, Wednesday, was what you was meant to do: whiffle, dance, bit of larking with Mr. Ralph, wait your turn and dance again. Which you done. And that’s all you done. Nothing else. Doan’t act as if there was anything else. There wasn’t.”

  “That’s right,” his brothers counselled, “that’s how ’tis.”

  They were so much alike, they might indeed have been a sort of rural chorus. Anxiety looked in the same way out of all their faces; they had similar mannerisms; their shared emotion ran a simple course through Dan’s elderly persistence, Andy’s softness, Nat’s despair and Chris’s anger. Even Ernie himself, half defiant, half scared, reflected something of his brothers’ emotion.

  And when Dan spoke again, it was as if he gave expression to this general resemblance.

  “Us Andersens,” he said, “stick close. Always have and always will, I reckon. So long as we stay that fashion, all together, we’re right, souls. The day any of us cuts loose and sets out to act on his own, agin the better judgment of the others, will be the day of disaster. Mind that.”

  Andy and Nat made sounds of profound agreement.

  “All right!” Ernie said. “All right. I never said nothing.”

  “Keep that way,” Dan said, “and you’ll do no harm. Mind that. And stick together, souls.”

  There was a sudden metallic clang. Sergeant Obby leapt to his feet. Chris, moved by some impulse of violence, had swung his great hammer and struck the cold anvil.

  It was as if the smithy had spoken with its own voice in support of Dan Andersen.

  Mrs. Bünz made a long entry in her journal. For this purpose she employed her native language and it calmed her a little to form the words and see them, old familiars, stand in their orderly ranks across her pages. Mrs. Bünz had an instinctive respect for regimentation — a respect and a fear. She laid down her pen, locked away her journal and began to think about policemen: not about any specific officer but about the genus Policeman as she saw it and believed it to be. She remembered all the things that had happened to her husband and herself in Germany before the war and the formalities that had attended their arrival in England. She remembered the anxieties and discomforts of the first months of the war when they had continually to satisfy the police of their innocuous attitude, and she remembered their temporary incarceration while this was going on.

  Mrs. Bünz did not put her trust in policemen.

  She thought of Trixie’s inexplicable entrance into her room that morning at a moment when Mrs. Bünz had every reason not to desire a visit. Was Trixie, perhaps, a police agent? A most disturbing thought.

  She went downstairs and ate what was, for her, a poor breakfast. She tried to read but was unable to concentrate. Presently, she went out to the shed where she kept the car she had bought from Simon Begg and, after a bit of a struggle, started up the engine. If she had intended to use the car she now changed her mind and, instead, took a short walk to Copse Forge. But the Andersen brothers were gathered in the doorway and responded very churlishly to the forced bonhomie of her greeting. She went to the village shop, purchased two faded postcards and was looked at sideways by the shopkeeper.

  Next, Mrs. Bünz visited the church but, being a rationalist, received and indeed sought no spiritual solace there. It was old but, from her point of view, not at all interesting. A bas-relief of a fourteenth-century Mardian merely reminded her unpleasingly of Dame Alice.

  As she was leaving, she met Sam Stayne coming up the path in his cassock. He greeted her very kindly. Encouraged by this manifestation, Mrs. Bünz pulled herself together and began to question him about the antiquities of South Mardian. She adopted a lomewhat patronizing tone that seemed to suggest a kind of intellectual unbending on her part. Her cold was still very heavy and lent to her manner a fortuitous air of complacency.

  “I have been lookink at your little church,” she said.

  “I’m glad you came in.”

  “Of course, for me it is not, you will excuse me, as interestink as, for instance, the Copse Forge.”

  “Isn’t it? It’s nothing of an archaeological ‘find,’ of course.”

  “Perhaps you do not interest yourself in ritual dancing?” Mrs. Bünz suggested with apparent irrelevance but following up her own line of thought.

  “Indeed I do,” Sam Stayne said warmly. “It’s of great interest to a priest, as are all such instinctive gestures.”

  “But it is pagan.”

  “Of course it is,” he said and began to look distressed. “As I see it,” he went on, choosing his words very carefully, “the Dance of the Sons is a kind of child’s view of a great truth. The Church, more or less, took the ceremony un
der her wing, you know, many years ago.”

  “How! Ach! Because, no doubt, there had been a liddle license? A liddle too much freedom?”

  “Well,” he said, “I daresay. Goings-on, of sorts. Anyway, somewhere back in the nineties, a predecessor of mine took possession of ‘Crack’s’ trappings and the Guiser’s and the Betty’s dresses and ‘props,’ as I think they call them in the theatre. He locked them up in the vestry. Ever since then, the parson has handed them out a week or so before the winter solstice to be looked over and repaired and used for the final practices and performance.”

  Mrs. Bünz stared at him and sneezed violently. She said in her cold-stricken voice, “Id is bost peculiar. I believe you because I have evidence of other cases. But for these joyous, pagan and, indeed, albost purely phallig objects to be lodged in an Aglicud church is, to say the least of it, adobalous.” She blew her nose with Teutonic thoroughness. “Rebarkable!” said Mrs. Bünz.

  “Well, there it is,” he said, “and now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go about my job.”

  “You are about to hold a service?”

  “No,” he said, “I’ve come to say my prayers.”

  She blinked at him. “Ach, so! Tell me, Mr. Stayne, in your church you do not, I believe, pray for the dead? That is dot your customb?”

  “I do,” Sam said. “That’s what I’m here for now: to say a prayer or two for old William’s soul.” He looked mildly at her. Something prompted him to add, “And for another and unhappier soul.”

  Mrs. Bünz blew her nose again and eyed him over the top of her handkerchief. “Beaningk?” she asked.

  “Meaning his murderer, you know,” the Rector said.

  Mrs. Bünz seemed to be so much struck by this remark that she forgot to lower her handkerchief. She nodded her head two or three times, however, and said something that sounded like “No doubt.” She wished the Rector good morning and returned to the Green Man.

  There she ran into Simon Begg. Alleyn and Fox witnessed their encounter from behind the window curtain. Simon contemplated Mrs. Bünz with, apparently, some misgiving. His very blue eyes stared out of his pink face and he climbed hurriedly from his car. Mrs. Bünz hastened towards him. He stood with his hands in his pockets and looked down at her. Alleyn saw her speak evidently with some urgency. Simon pulled at his flamboyant moustaches and listened with his head on one side. Mrs. Bünz glanced hastily at the pub as if she would have preferred not to be seen. She turned her back towards it and her head moved emphatically. Simon answered her with equal emphasis and presently with a reassuring gesture clapped his great hand down on her shoulder.