The Long Divorce (A Gervase Fen Mystery) Read online

  'And the other sort – ?'

  'The other sort says things about people that are true.'

  'An unpopular practice,' Mr Datchery said drily, 'I admit.'

  'Oh dear, I'm afraid I'm not explaining it very well . . . But – well, for example, there was Mr Mogridge.'

  'Who is Mr Mogridge?'

  'He's landlord of "The Marlborough Head". And he was carrying on, you see, with Cora.'

  'I don't see at all,' complained Mr Datchery.

  'Patience, patience!' The girl turned her head to grin at him. 'That's what Miss Bowlby always used to say at school when we didn't understand something . . . Where was I?'

  'You'd just conjured up someone called Cora.'

  'Oh, yes. Well, Cora is – was, I should say – the chambermaid at "The Marlborough Head". You know, the well-cushioned sort.' And Penelope glanced rather shyly back at Mr Datchery to see how this timid essay in worldliness would affect him; reassured by the complete blankness of his countenance, she went on: 'Anyway, Mr Mogridge had been – making love to her for, oh, years. Everyone knew about it, except, of course, Mrs Mogridge. But then about a fortnight ago she got one of these letters, and it told her where Mr Mogridge and Cora were meeting, and when, and of course then there was a terrific dust up.'

  'I see,' Mr Datchery was pensive. 'Yes, I see. And have many of the letters been of this – this tale-bearing kind?'

  Penelope nodded. 'Lots.'

  'And the tales have been true?'

  'Yes, almost always.'

  'But isn't it rather odd that anyone should be acquainted with so many of the skeletons in other people's closets?'

  'If you can say that,' Penelope answered sagely, 'then it's jolly obvious you've never lived in a village. In a village, everyone knows all the scandal about everyone else – but of course, people take care it shan't get to the ears of anyone it'd hurt and upset.'

  'I see,' said Mr Datchery again. And indeed he did see, for he knew that although small communities are bound to gossip, they develop by instinct a technique from preventing gossip from reaching the wrong ears, and realize perfectly well – though probably the knowledge is never consciously formulated – that any widespread breakdown of this technique would rapidly make life intolerable. 'But if,' he added, 'there are two sorts of letter-(a) the damaging and (b) the merely obscene – doesn't that suggest that there are two different people writing them?'

  'Peter doesn't think so,' said Penelope, remounting her hobby-horse with alacrity. 'He says both sorts of letter show exactly the same kind of paranoia, and that it's not likely we'd have two people in Cotten who are potty like that. He says it'd be frightfully interesting to talk to this woman who's writing the letters, and find out about when she was a child and so forth.'

  'Woman?' queried Mr Datchery.

  'Peter says it's always a woman who writes foul letters, because of being repressed and so on, and he says it's usually a middle-class spinster.'

  Mr Datchery's enthusiasm for Rubi, which had never been excessive, waned still further. It was really unforgiveable of him to have stuffed the girl's head with this muddled, inaccurate, prurient lore. Mr Datchery judged, however, that this sentiment had better be kept to himself for the time being, and all he said was:

  'Interesting, I take it that you haven't been troubled with any of these letters?'

  'No. Pa has – but then, so's everyone else who's anyone.' Penelope's face clouded. 'A bit of Pa's was about me and Peter. He was furious. He doesn't like Peter very much. He says it's dangerous' – this with great scorn – 'for me to go about with him.'

  The which persuasion, Mr Datchery reflected, seemed distinctly a point in Mr Rolt's favour. It was true that, to judge from what Mr Datchery had seen of Rubi, a woman trapped naked with him on a desert island would run no more intimate risk from his company than the risk of death from boredom. But perhaps it was only his opinions that Mr Rolt thought dangerous – and in that case Mr Rolt had much reason on his side . . .

  'And just what form,' Mr Datchery asked, 'do the letters take?'

  'Form . . .? Oh, I see what you mean. Well, I haven't actually seen one myself, but, of course, everyone's been gassing about them, so I know what they're like. They're made up of words and letters cut out of lots of different newspapers and stuck on to a bit of writing-paper. Oh, and the envelopes are addressed in capitals. That's all, I think.'

  'Are they signed at all?'

  'You mean Pro Bono Publico, or something like that. No, they're not.'

  'And what is being done about them?'

  'Well, the police are on to it, of course. And so they jolly well ought to be,' said Penelope censoriously, 'considering there's two of them actually living in the village. Colonel Babington got one of the letters himself. He was frightfully angry.'

  'Who is Colonel Babington?'

  'He's Chief Constable. And the other's Inspector Casby, who lives next door to Dr Downing. He belongs to the county C.I.D., so he's been in charge of the case.'

  'And are there any clues?'

  Penelope shrugged elaborately. 'Don't know. Shouldn't think so.'

  'You consider the Inspector incompetent?'

  'N-no, not exactly. He's all right. But if he hasn't suceeded in stopping the letters after three weeks, then it doesn't look as if he ever will, does it?'

  'I think perhaps you're unduly pessimistic,' said Mr Datchery; and added, after a glance at the odd and unexpected expression on the girl's face: 'Or should I say, optimistic?'

  'It all makes life a bit more interesting,' she answered slowly and warily.

  'Really? But I can't imagine your enthusiam is very widely shared. One way and another, the social life of the place must have been a good deal upset.'

  Penelope laughed, shortly and unpleasantly.

  'Upset?' she said. 'You're telling me.' And Mr Datchery, dismayed, saw that her eyes were alight with malicious pleasure. 'It's got so that they all suspect each other so much they can barely be polite.'

  'And obviously,' said Mr Datchery, 'you yourself regard that as quite a desirable thing.'

  They were out of the wood by now, and passing through a kissing-gate into a narrow, tree-lined lane. Penelope halted abruptly.

  'It serves them all right,' she said. 'It'll teach them not to be so beastly superior in future.'

  Mr Datchery, halting likewise, fished out a cigarette, put it in his mouth, and began groping for matches.

  'I haven't the least idea what you're talking about,' he observed. 'But I'm afraid that like most people you over-estimate the refining powers of tribulation. Superiority, however beastly, often comes out of it quite unscathed.'

  'Well then, it'll punish them.'

  'No doubt.' Mr Datchery lit his cigarette shielding the match-flame with cupped hands from a mild breeze. 'Exactly what, in your opinion, do they have to be punished for?'

  She turned away from his tranquil contemplation of her to stare pointlessly along the empty lane.

  'It's Pa,' she said, and her voice shook a little. 'It's the way they treat Pa.'

  'How do they treat him?'

  'They – they're snobs, you see. They hate him because he's not cultured and educated, the way they are. Well, perhaps he isn't, but he's as good as them any day. And they say the mill spoils the – the village's amenities. And – and – well, I expect he is a bit rough and brusque sometimes, but he doesn't mean anything by it. I – I – ' Tears started into her eyes.

  'Unpleasant,' said Mr Datchery, salutarily brisk. 'I'm very sorry to hear it.'

  Penelope struggled stoically to regain control of herself.

  'I – I don't know why I'm telling you all this. It must be very boring for you. And of course if people choose to be silly, it doesn't worry us.' Her pride was at once touching and admirable. 'I – I say, I've just remembered something.'

  'Yes?'

  'I said I'd be back by five sharp, and if I don't hurry I'm not going to be. D'you mind if I leave you and run on ahead? You can easily
find your own way from here. You turn left at the next cross-roads and that takes you straight into Cotten.'

  It was a justifiable pretence, Mr Datchery thought; like most people who have confided on an impulse, the girl was anxious to get away, as quickly as possible, from her confidant. He said, therefore:

  'Please go ahead. It's very kind of you to have brought me as far as this.'

  'Th-thanks.' She was already backing away. 'I'll be seeing you, I expect.' She paused, struggling with some emotion at which he could only guess. 'I'm not really glad about those rotten letters,' she blurted, 'but – but – '

  And then she turned and ran.

  Smoking pensively, Mr Datchery watched her thin figure until it was out of sight; and he gave her a long start before he himself set off to stroll in the same direction. A lonely child, he thought, her loneliness complicated by the ostracizing of her father (though probably she had exaggerated that), by her devotion to the unconscionable Rubi, and by the normal worries and embarrassments – insignificant in retrospect, but sometimes looming formidably large at the time of their occurring – of adolescence. Her age, too, was the age at which children for the first time become objectively aware of their parents; at which, in consequence, they are apt for quite trivial reasons to become ashamed of those parents, and to be ashamed of that shame . . . Mr Datchery sighed. If there was one thing about Penelope Rolt that was clearer than another, that thing was that she badly needed sympathy and guidance, and was not getting them.

  The lane twisted between fields of maturing rye and barley. At the cross-roads Mr Datchery turned left into what he guessed to be a loop of the Twelford road. And presently, down a long and gentle slope, he came into the village of Cotten Abbas.

  3

  COTTEN ABBAS is sixty or seventy miles from London and obscurely conveys the impression of having strayed there out of a film set. As with most show-villages, you are apt to feel, when confronted with it, that some impalpable process of embalming or refrigeration is at work, some prophylactic against change and decay which while altogether creditable in itself has yet resulted in a certain degree of stagnation. But for all that, its charm is undeniable; and just past the alms-houses Mr Datchery halted, at gaze, in order to drink it in.

  Cotten Abbas that afternoon was pranked out in sunlight like a woman dressed for a ball. Ahead of Mr Datchery, as he entered the village from the Twelford direction, was the gentle curve of the broad and airy main street; to his left was an irregular but graceful line of little Georgian and Queen Anne houses, broken half-way along by the façade of 'The Marlborough Head'; and to his right was a row of cottages, with a discreet and barely perceptible shop or two interspersed among them. This row was cut short by a right-angle turning; and just beyond the turning was the church – a large Perpendicular-style fabric which lay alongside the village street like a ship drawn up at a quay. Beyond that was the Vicarage; beyond that – recessed, and deducible only by its out-thrust sign – a second inn; and finally, after a few scattered houses a little more modern than the rest, open country again.

  It all had a prosperous look – but its prosperity, Mr Datchery thought, was less that of a working village than that of a village which has been settled by the well-to-do: in a population which could scarcely number more than a couple of hundred, it was obviously the invading middle class that ruled, badly weakened now by post-war conditions, but still hanging on. To them, no doubt, in their between-wars heyday, the preservation of the village's beauty must be ascribed. And their houses, eloquent of a time more prolific of servants than ours, were to be glimpsed through trees and past roof-tops, hemming the place in like an encircling force.

  Lying placid under the June sky, Cotten Abbas at the moment was quiet and almost deserted. A baker's man whistled as he strode through a tradesman's entrance, his basket slung from his arm and his pouch fat with coppers. An infant, precocious in vandalism as in letters, was laboriously chalking the legend JANE LUVS BOB WATCHET on a convenient wall. The distant droning of a saw-mill was like the summer sound of bees . . . For perhaps a minute Mr Datchery stood accumulating and interpreting first impressions; then, squaring his shoulders with the resolute air of a man in transit from a steam room to a cold shower, he walked on along the street to the door of 'The Marlborough Head'.

  'The Marlborough Head', he found, was an inn of low ceilings, uneven floors, and massive chimney-stacks, whose frontage of irregular beams and plaster, pierced by diminutive leaded windows, faced the Vicarage. Entering, you crossed a tiny golosh-littered vestibule and came immediately into the Lounge Bar – a long but rather cramped room, dark after the sunshine outside, and furnished in chintz and old oak. The hunting-prints on its walls, and in general its rather ostentatious rejection of modernity, gave it a vaguely self-conscious look; but it was nevertheless pleasing enough, and Mr Datchery, experienced in the astounding discomforts which the majority of rural inns provide, felt his spirits rise as he contemplated it.

  It seemed that summer opening time in Cotten Abbas was at five, for 'The Marlborough Head' already had a customer – a small, neat, energetic-looking elderly man with a clipped grey moustache, who was drinking Guinness in a window-seat and bullying the landlord over the top of his glass.

  'You bore people, Mogridge,' he was saying as Mr Datchery entered, 'when you go on and on like that about your dreary conferences and resolutions and by-laws. No one in his senses cares twopence about the grievances of inn-keepers, except for wishing they were ten times worse. If you ask me, their putting you on that committee was nothing short of disastrous. It's got so that you're incapable of talking about anything else.'

  Mogridge laughed feebly. He was a little, rounded person of indefinite age, whose slightly protruding eyes were moist as though with appetite or secret sorrow; and he had something the air – as a result, possibly, of the domestic upheaval sketched by Penelope Rolt – of a man trapped without trousers in a crowded tube train.

  'You will have your joke, Colonel Babington,' he said. 'Would you care for a packet of twenty Players? I've got a good stock in at the moment.'

  Colonel Babington stiffened.

  'Damn you, Mogridge,' he said with feeling, 'how dare you offer me cigarettes? You know perfectly well I've given up smoking.'

  'Why, so you have, sir.' Clearly Mogridge was delighted with the success of his counter-thrust. 'I was forgetting. And how do you find yourself?'

  'Find myself, Mogridge? Find myself?'

  'I mean, sir, are you managing to keep it up?'

  'Of course I am,' said Colonel Babington sharply. 'When I decide to do a thing, I do it.'

  'They do say it's a bit unpleasant, sir, at first.'

  'Tcha!' Colonel Babington waved this effete suggestion away into limbo. 'Will-power, that's all that's needed. Will-power.' He nodded emphatically. 'It's trying, of course, I don't deny that. But my view is that a man who lets a drug get control of him and then can't throw it off isn't a man at all. He's a mouse.'

  'I never heard,' said Mogridge, 'that mice were much addicted – '

  'A mouse, Mogridge!' snarled Colonel Babington in sudden rage. 'A mouse, a mouse, a mouse!' With some difficulty he managed to control himself. 'I've no use for these chaps who say they can't give up smoking. No use for them at all.'

  'Now, I've never smoked,' said Mogridge complacently, 'so I wouldn't know what it's like to give it up. But Will Watchet, he's been trying to do it, and he says it's hell.'

  Colonel Babington snorted. 'Never heard such rubbish in my life . . . It's a mild discomfort, that's all, a mild discomfort.'

  'What's more,' Mogridge persisted, 'he says it plays the devil with a man's temper.'

  'Temper?' Colonel Babington was convulsed with anger. 'Whatever next? You don't find me losing my temper just because I've stopped fouling my lungs with smoke.'

  'Ah, but then, sir, you've not been at it long.'

  'I've been at it nearly thirty-six hours, damn you, Mogridge. And the first two days are always the worst
. It gets easier after that.'

  'I once,' said Mogridge, staring reminiscently at the ceiling, 'met a man in a train who said he'd given up smoking five years ago, and still longed for one.'

  Colonel Babington had no answer to this. He looked at Mr Datchery, who had moved to the bar and was lighting a cigarette in a sneaking, apologetic manner, and then looked hurriedly away again.

  'But he was unusual, I dare say,' pronounced Mogridge in hot pursuit of his advantage. 'Most people lose the craving after' – he pretended to reflect – 'oh, six months or so.'

  'Well, all I can say' – for the moment Colonel Babington was definitely subdued – 'is, that I feel better for it already. Appetite's improved. More energy. Mark my words, Mogridge, all this smoking enervates a man.' He gazed at Mr Datchery with hatred and groped automatically in his pocket for an absent cigarette-case; then, abruptly realizing the futility of this proceeding, sighed heavily and desisted from it. 'Afternoon, sir,' he said to Mr Datchery with unexpected mildness.

  Mr Datchery, having returned the greeting, inquired whether Mogridge could let him have a room for a few days.

  'Can do, sir,' said Mogridge with watery affability. 'Would that be your bag, I wonder, that came in on the bus?'

  Mr Datchery agreed that it probably would. 'But before I move from here,' he added, 'I want to drink a pint or two of beer.' He eyed Colonel Babington. 'What will you have, sir?'

  'Very good of you,' said Colonel Babington gruffly. 'Mine's a Guinness. Don't feel I have to give that up, I'm glad to say.'

  'Drink is sometimes more harmful than smoking,' said Mr Datchery unkindly. 'Of the two –'

  'I dare say.' The Colonel was evidently not prepared to stand any further inroads on his self-confidence, 'I dare say.'

  'A pint, then, of bitter,' said Mr Datchery, 'and a Guinness. I've walked here from Twelford and I'm thirsty. This is a remarkably pretty village, isn't it?'

  He exchanged remarks on this subject with Colonel Babington while Mogridge drew the beer; and later, having conversed neutrally on neutral topics, was conducted to his room. Returning after ten minutes, he met Mogridge at the foot of the stairs.