The Long Divorce (A Gervase Fen Mystery) Page 3

  'All comfortable, sir?' asked Mogridge with offensively old-world hospitality. 'Got everything you need?'

  Mr Datchery's room had reversed his earlier opinion of the inn's amenities. He had laid down experimentally on the bed and found it of a board-like rigidity.

  'And there are spiders,' he complained, 'pelting about the walls like racehorses.'

  'Ah,' said Mogridge unabashed, 'but you've not seen any flies, sir, I'll wager. One of my colleagues on the Regional Committee of the Innkeepers' Guild was saying only the other day that –'

  But he had no chance to finish, for at this point a thin, pale straggle-haired woman with an expression of settled malevolence popped out of a near-by door and cut off Mogridge's colleague's dictum in its uninteresting bud. 'Oliver!' she snapped.

  'Coming at once, my love,' said Mogridge weakly. 'I was just making sure this gentleman had everything he wanted.'

  'Spiders,' Mr Datchery reiterated testily. 'There are spiders.'

  'Yes, yes, sir, I know.' Mogridge was petulant. 'There's no need to keep on about it.' Then his petulance faded as a possible pretext for eluding his wife occurred to him. 'I'd better go up straight away and deal with the trouble myself.'

  But his wife punctured this feeble artifice without effort, and carried him off incontinently to whatever of marital purgatory she had hoarded up for him, and Mr Datchery went back to the bar, where Colonel Babington, glum and in solitude, was still ingesting stout. At Mr Datchery's entry he opened his mouth to speak; in the event, however, his utterance was obliterated, after a single incomprehensible vowel-sound, by a violent fit of coughing, and by the time he had recovered from this, circumstances, in the shape of a newcomer who entered the inn from the street, had effectively distracted his attention from whatever he had intended to say.

  The newcomer was a man probably in his middle thirties. He was lean, dark, quiet, unobtrusive; and the most noticeable thing about him was a long white scar which traversed his left cheek from ear to mouth – the consequence, as Mr Datchery learned later, of a Japanese sabre-cut clumsily mended in the makeshift conditions of the Burmese jungle. But he was handsome in spite of it; and when he spoke, it was in the cadences of a warm Bucks accent which his education had minimized without ever quite abolishing. After a hurried, appraising glance at Mr Datchery, he addressed himself immediately to Colonel Babington.

  'Ah, here you are, sir,' he said. 'I've been trying to get in touch with you all afternoon.'

  'Been out walking,' Colonel Babington explained. 'What's up?'

  The newcomer murmured something which Mr Datchery, to his great chagrin, failed to catch. But the impact on Colonel Babington was plain enough: he jerked and grew rigid like a man whipped.

  'Beatrice?' he blurted incredulously. 'But that's impossible – 'I mean –' His voice tailed away as a new thought struck him. 'Not another of those damned letters?' he asked.

  The man with the scar nodded. 'I think so. And if you wouldn't mind, sir, I'd like to have a word with you about it.' He moved his head fractionally in Mr Datchery's direction. 'Perhaps if we were to stroll up and down outside . . .'

  'Yes, yes, of course.' The Colonel stood up. 'My God, what a ghastly business . . . And if anyone asked me, I'd have said Beatrice was the very last person to – to –' He gestured helplessly, and Mr Datchery saw that his normally vigorous complexion was now the colour and texture of grey sand.

  'Are you feeling all right, sir?' The other man's question was matter-of-fact and agreeably free from impertinent solicitude. 'If you liked, we could – '

  'No, no, I'm all right. Bit of a shock, that's all. Known her for years. Can't understand why a woman like her – No, this is no good: I'm maundering. Tell me about it.'

  They went out into the village street, leaving Mr Datchery to solitary speculation. Since Colonel Babington was Chief Constable, it seemed reasonable to assume that the man with the scar was that Inspector Casby of whom Penelope Rolt had spoken; and what had happened was presumably a suicide – though naturally enough the name Beatrice conveyed nothing to Mr Datchery's mind. During the short interval prior to Mogridge's chastened reappearance, Mr Datchery meditated these questions in his habitual impatient way, and his thoughts were occupied with the supposed Casby to a greater extent than, from a dispassionate point of view, that individual might have seemed to have warranted. Presently, however, Mr Datchery abandoned these reflections for want of matter, and began catechizing Mogridge, who by now was once more in the offing, with a view to satisfying himself as to certain other problems which interested him.

  'Who,' he demanded, 'is Rolt?'

  Mogridge, polishing glasses in a comatose manner behind the bar, started at being thus abruptly addressed.

  'Rolt?' he echoed. 'Would you be meaning Harry Rolt, sir?'

  'I dare say I would. Tell me about him.'

  'Well, sir, it's him that owns the saw-mill that's such a blot,' said Mogridge sanctimoniously, 'on our beautiful village.'

  'I see. What sort of a man is he?'

  'North-country,' Mogridge answered with irritating distaste. 'A pusher, if you know what I mean. With him, its money, money, money all the time.'

  'You don't strike me, Mogridge, as being exactly unworldly yourself,' said Mr Datchery. 'And even if you were, you still seem to dislike the man more that mere money-grubbing would justify.'

  'I'll tell you what it is, sir.' Mogridge ceased polishing, and held the cloth aloft in pursuance of some personal formula for imparting emphasis. 'Mr Rolt's not popular here. And when no one likes a man, then there's always good reason for it. I remember the Treasurer of our central committee, to whom I had the honour to be presented at a dinner at the Dorchester last year, saying to me. "Mogridge," he said –'

  'No, no, Mogridge,' said Mr Datchery kindly, 'you mustn't drift away from the point like that . . . I'm assuming, of course, that there is a point, and that the people here aren't just common or garden snobs.'

  'Snobs, sir?' The suggestion had plainly affronted some aspect of Mogridge's self-importance. 'Nothing of the kind. A nicer set of gentlefolk you couldn't hope to find. It's just that Mr Rolt – well, he's rude, to start with, and then –'

  'And then?'

  'Well, sir, there was a lot of trouble when he had the mill built, ten years ago. Our people – that's Colonel Babington and Miss Keats-Madderly and Sir Charles Wain and the rest of them – they wanted him to have it further up the stream, where it wouldn't spoil the amenities. But no, he wasn't having any of that, Mr Rolt wasn't. It'd got to be right on top of the village, or nothing.'

  'But surely,' said Mr Datchery, 'there may have been technical reasons for that.'

  'Oh no, sir. Not a bit of it. As a matter of fact, the site upstream would've actually been better than the one he's got, and Sir Charles, who owned it then and still does, was ready to sell it him at less than the market price, so as to save the village. But it wouldn't do for him, sir. He said he wasn't going to be stuck out in the wilderness because of what he called a lot of poppycock about unspoiled rural England, and if they didn't like it, they could lump it. They tried to stop him, of course, but there just didn't happen to be anything the lawyers could do about it.'

  Mogridge's indignation was obviously second-hand; but in the persons he aped it would be real enough, no doubt, and Mr Datchery found that on this issue of the mill he was able to sympathize both with them and with the obstinate Rolt.

  'But that,' he ventured, 'was ten years ago. Surely in ten years – '

  'Indeed yes, sir. In ten years you'd expect the old grudges to have got glossed over a bit. And after the mill was built and the damage done, our people did make a bit of an effort to be friendly with Mr Rolt. But he wouldn't have it. It was just like their kind, he said, to come smarming up to a man they'd insulted and they weren't the sort of neighbours he wanted to be friendly with. So that was that – and that's been that, ever since.'

  'I see.' Mr Datchery stared pensively out of the window near which he sat,
noting that Casby and Babington were temporarily out of sight, their conversation having presumably impelled them down a side turning.

  A nomadic chicken was pacing across the street, and by stretching his neck Mr Datchery could just make out a wheel, a mudguard, and a headlamp of the car in which, presumably, Casby had arrived. 'But all this' – he turned to Mogridge again – 'all this must be rather distressing for Rolt's family.'

  'There's only his daughter.' A mere nothing, Mogridge's tone implied. 'His wife was dead, I've heard, before he ever came here.'

  'But then, who looks after the daughter?'

  'Looks after her, sir? Why, no one. She's sixteen or seventeen – just left school.'

  'And is she as unwelcome here as her father?'

  'Oh no, sir. Our people' – this proprietary phrase was beginning to jar on Mr Datchery's nerves – 'our people like her, because she's quite a different sort from her father. They'd do a lot for her if she'd let them. But she suffers, sir, from a sinful pride,' said Mogridge, shaking his head in hypocritical sorrow, 'so she gives them the cold shoulder half the time.'

  'If you regard family loyalty as the equivalent of sinful pride, Mogridge,' said Mr Datchery severely, 'then it seems to me that you could do with a rather strenuous course in moral philosophy.'

  Mogridge made no attempt to contest this thesis otherwise than by vacant mirth.

  'Still, she's quite a pleasant young thing,' he said condescendingly. 'And I often think it a pity she should be tied to a father like that. Would it be him you've come here to see, sir?'

  'No, it wouldn't.'

  'Ah. Sir Charles, perhaps?'

  'I am a Mass Observer,' said Mr Datchery at random, 'engaged in studying certain aspects of rural life.'

  'Indeed, sir?' Mogridge was much interested. 'In that case you'll find –'

  But just what Mr Datchery would find was destined to remain for ever in the recesses of Mogridge's skull. In the last half-minute Mr Datchery had been aware of a car pulling up at the inn's door; and now, as Mogridge spoke, its owner entered the bar. She was perhaps thirty – tall and slender, with green eyes, a pink-and-white complexion, and hair whose undeniable mouse-colour was redeemed by its natural wave and its natural sheen. She wore a severely tailored brown coat and skirt which set off her admirable figure. And although she had the aspect of a professional or business woman, good nature and diffidence were both clearly legible in her face.

  Inside the door she hesitated, looking a little dazedly about her. The fingers of her left hand, ringless, brushed her forehead as though she were shading her eyes.

  'Has Colonel Babington been here, Mogridge?' she asked. 'I – I wanted to – I wanted to see him because –'

  And then she fainted. Mr Datchery was just in time to prevent her cumpling up in a heap on the floor.

  4

  HELEN DOWNING had woken that Friday morning before it was light.

  It was several months now since she had started to sleep badly. At bed-time she was always tired – so tired that often she fell asleep over her book, leaving the light burning. But at one – or as near as made no matter – she was resigned to waking again, unrefreshed; to snatching vainly at the fleeting remnants of drowsiness; to getting up, eventually, and making tea. With any luck at all, she could doze off again at about two-thirty. But at four, or even earlier, she woke a second time, and there would be no more sleep for her then. As a doctor, she had remedies to hand – barbitone, nembutal, luminal; but she shrank from using them, knowing that in her position they were too easily got to be taken otherwise than at a last resort. In any case, their palliating the symptoms would not affect the cause. And Helen Downing knew well enough why she woke and why she worried.

  So Friday's dawn, like many others, found her haggard, her body slightly aching, sitting up in bed with a tasteless cigarette in her mouth and the inevitable tea-tray at her side. As always, she had been taking stock, as she tossed and turned restlessly between the hot sheets, of her position and prospects – an exercise which, though doubtless salutary enough in itself, tends when indulged in on a burning pillow, at the turn of the night, to develop a pessimistic tinge. And certainly the conclusions which Helen Downing reached that dawning were too sombre for comfort.

  It was now five years since, with the money realized by her father's life-insurance policy, she had bought her house and her practice in Cotten Abbas.

  To state the transaction thus baldly is of course to over-simplify it. You did not, even before the introduction of the Health Act, buy a practice in the relatively casual manner of a housewife securing a cabbage at a shop. There were investigations to be made and a variety of contingencies to be anxiously assessed. There was the advice of knowledgeable friends to be weighed. There was much heart-searching to be endured in the small hours of the night.

  But general practice – in so many ways the most exacting career a doctor can undertake – had been Helen Downing's ambition all through the long and anxious years of her training. If she had any qualms as she put her name to the crucial papers, she kept them to herself. And when, in December of 1945, she moved into the friendly red-brick house at the back of the church, she felt able for the first time since her coming of age to face the future with reasonable confidence.

  At this time, Helen was twenty-six. Alice Riddick, who had piloted her deftly through her Oxford career, told her that for a doctor she was much too good-looking, but Helen thought this judgement whimsical rather than impressive, for she was diffident to a fault.

  'All the same, child, it's true,' Alice Riddick persisted. 'And if you imagine that looks are going to get you patients, you'd better think again. In my experience, they're a hindrance, not a help.'

  'But why?'

  'Because people are stupid, child, that's why. They can't see a pretty girl without thinking of her in terms of lovers and flirtations and marriage. And that means that they'll never be able to regard you as the impersonal creature they idiotically imagine the ideal doctor to be. Of course, if you had a husband, now . . .'

  But at twenty-six Helen was still unmarried, and her emotions had never been deeply stirred. A lonely life naturally makes for inexperience, and Helen's life had been nothing if not that. She was an only child; her mother had died not five months after bearing her; her father – a penurious, disappointed Essex parson – had lived (if you could call it that) withdrawn among his books; and since the social virtues cannot be exercised, even on a very limited scale, without a shilling or two to spare, the years of Helen's training had been almost as solitary as her childhood.

  She had never complained. Complaint would have seemed to her an indignity, and in any case she was too grateful for the chance of pursuing her chosen career to imagine that she had anything serious to complain about. But the scraping and saving which had so limited her youth made her look upon Cotten Abbas as the gateway to something easier and better and more free; made her pin more hopes to her new life than it was destined, for a time anyway, to be capable of bearing. And if the subsequent bitter disillusion did not warp her, that was because she possessed a great deal more courage and tenacity than her rather confused good nature would have led an outsider to expect.

  Of course, she had known all along that this practice which eventually she decided to buy would have its disadvantages.

  'It's a prosperous bit of country, child,' said Alice Riddick. 'And that means it'll be relatively healthy. What's more, you'll find the farmers rather conservative-minded when it comes to having a woman prodding them and dosing them. You'd probably do better in an industrial town, because generally speaking it's the poorer people who take most kindly to women doctors. Still, I don't want to discourage you, and it certainly is cheap enough.'

  This last consideration proved decisive. The resources left to Helen by her father (who had died, almost as imperceptibly as he had lived, a month before his daughter qualified) were far too scanty to cover the purchase of a really thriving practice, and the best she could hope for
was to buy a more or less derelict one which looked capable of improvement. Cotten Abbas did fulfil this condition. There would be competition, of course – but since it seemed that this would take the form of a young man almost as raw and inexperienced as herself, Helen felt that she ought to be able to cope with it at least to the extent of being able to earn a modest living.

  On the day she travelled to Cotten Abbas to embark on her new life there – an icy day with more than a hint of snow in the air – Helen Downing was troubled by all the wild misgivings of a small boy on his way to a new school. She believed, without conceit, that she would be able to do her job well enough. But in addition to this she longed to live more fully, to have more to do with people and parties and entertaining, than had been possible up to now, and she was horribly afraid of spoiling her chances by a false start – by over-eagerness, or by too much reserve, or by some unimaginable but conclusive faux pas. Such fears, as she well knew, were not a little absurd in a person of her age, but her circumstances had been uncommon, and had militated more than she could be aware against the growth of self-confidence in her. Staring from her compartment window at the bleak, flat country through which the train was moving, she experienced at certain moments on that crucial journey an emotion not far removed from panic.

  She need not have worried. Whatever their other faults, the people of Cotten Abbas were certainly not stand-offish or unfriendly. During that first week they called on her in droves to drink her tea, talk amiable scandal about one another, issue satisfyingly specific invitations, recommend pig-keeping (a flourishing local hobby), laud or denigrate tradespeople and proffer advice on the best disposition of her father's rather heavy and ecclesiastical furniture. In a word, they accepted her, without reservation or delay, as one of themselves. And since it never occurred to her that this excellent state of affairs might be due to any degree to her own personality and charm, Helen was deeply grateful. From the social point of view, she had been made magnificently welcome.