suddenly raised its shrill mechanic voice. Some moments later Fledge materialized at my elbow.
“Telephone, Sir Hugo.”
Down the table eyes were lifted in mild curiosity, except Victor’s; he was deep in his Freud.
“Who is it, Fledge?”
Hilary began to smear marmalade on a piece of toast. Harriet was stirring her tea. I folded the
“It’s Mrs. Giblet.”
“Oh
I returned to the dining room five minutes later. An expectant hush greeted my reentry. “Well?” said Harriet. I sat down. I told Fledge to give me more tea. I then reported that Mrs. Giblet had been informed by Inspector Limp about the bicycle being dug up in the marsh. That, I said, was not all. Considering herself qualified to furnish some real assistance to the police (of whose intelligence she was apparently no great admirer), she had traveled to Ceck, and was even now ensconced in the Hodge and Purlet.
A gasp from Harriet. “Oh good heavens,” she said, gazing at me with genuine distress. “Hugo, must we have her here? We must.”
“I explained to Mrs. Giblet about our pipes,” I replied. “I told her she would be more comfortable where she was.”
“Well that’s a relief, at any rate,” murmured Harriet.
“I did, however, feel obliged to ask her to dine with us tonight.”
“Yes, of course,” said Harriet. “Oh dear, poor woman. She’s probably just as upset as Cleo. More so!” She sighed. She had already extended her full sympathy, as a woman and as a mother, to that ghastly old battle-ax, that dragon, who had settled now in our midst and would undoubtedly belch flame and ill-smelling smoke into all our lives. I made for the barn, reflecting, not for the first time, that if I’d had the slightest inkling of the trouble Sidney Giblet was going to cause, I’d never have let him within a mile of Crook in the first place.
The last night of the old year; and seven of us sat down to dinner. Next to me and to my left was Mrs. Giblet. She had arrived at Crook in a vast and shapeless fur coat with padded shoulders, and a black hat whose brim was pinned up on one side and embellished with sprigs of lace and crimson cherries. In one arm she clutched her lapdog; with the other she gripped the handle of her rubber-tipped walking stick, the one with the skull embedded in the crook. She wore gloves of black satin and a large white pearl in each pendent and withered earlobe. Fledge attempted to take her coat from her, but she insisted on keeping it on for the time being, until she was “adjusted.” Wily old bird, she realized immediately of course that in a house like this the central heating was probably tepid at the best of times. With burst pipes we had only fires to warm us, and Crook is a house of drafts.
Along the hallway she advanced, inspecting as she went and nodding to left and right with royal approbation. Her entry into the drawing room was stately; Henry and Victor both rose to their feet, and Harriet came forward with both arms outstretched. “Dear Mrs. Giblet,” she said warmly, “how good of you to come at such short notice.”
It was the perfect thing to say to Mrs. Giblet. “Not at all, Lady Coal,” she purred. “Ah! Cleo!” Cleo came forward quietly and brushed the old woman’s cheek with her lips. Mrs. Giblet then sank into the armchair Henry had vacated by the fire, and began to fumble for cigarettes. Harriet introduced her to the Horns, apologized profusely for the cold, and invited her to have a glass of sherry. Mrs. Giblet thought that would be nice. Then, failing altogether to beat about the bush, she declared to the room at large: “I have met the man Limp. Sir Hugo”—she wheeled about in her chair— “I am surprised that you place any confidence in him at all; to my mind he is a total incompetent.”
I frowned. “He has had very little to work with, Mrs. Giblet,” I said.
“That’s a moot point, Sir Hugo. With all the progress Limp is making we’ll be lucky to see Sidney in a box. I’m sorry, my dear”—Cleo had been unable to suppress a small cry—“but there’s no use holding out false hopes.”
She puffed lugubriously at her cigarette. A silence fell. The light died in her eyes and her face slowly collapsed, and in the sag of it there seemed to dwell such an immense despair that the atmosphere rapidly became very black indeed. Harriet rushed in to fill the breach. “Mrs. Giblet,” she cried, “come! There is no reason to despair, none at all. I keep telling Cleo, digging up a bicycle tells us nothing at all.”
Mrs. Giblet looked up. She reached for Harriet’s hand, and smiled that oddly charming smile I’d seen in London. “Of course it doesn’t,” she said. “Lady Coal, forgive me for infecting your home with my gloom. May I, I wonder, have more of that sherry? It really is very good.” And while Fledge was busy with the task, Mrs. Giblet, apparently somewhat “adjusted,” opened her coat. “Thank you,” she said, raising her face to Fledge, as he appeared with her sherry. “Personally,” she said, “I intend to go over the Ceck Marsh with a fine-tooth comb. You may be right about Limp, Sir Hugo, or then again you may not. I should simply like to convince myself that nothing has been overlooked. Would anyone, I wonder, care to help me?”
The brief silence that followed upon this bizarre invitation was broken by Victor. “Yes,” he cried, with alacrity, “I would!” This functioned as a piece of comic relief, although the boy was quite serious. A ripple of amusement passed over the drawing room, and then Fledge announced that dinner was served.
Going in to dinner, Mrs. Giblet attached herself to Harriet, to whom she had apparently taken a “shine,” and gushed. “All this
“I suppose I am, Mrs. Giblet,” murmured Harriet.
“I, too, am deeply conservative,” said Mrs. Giblet. “I always have been. Churchill’s my man; I knew him once, you know. Brilliant chap, erudite, extremely, and such wit!” The old lady chuckled slightly and tapped Harriet’s arm, upon which rested her own gnarled old claw. “Why once—but no, you don’t want to hear my stories, do you. Up here, next to Sir Hugo? Delighted. Thank you, Fledge.”
Seven of us, as I say, sat down to dinner that night, and a curious-looking group we made. With the central heating shut down, Crook was really very chilly, and in view of this fact I had decided that jerseys might be worn with evening dress. We thus had the spectacle of Henry Horn in a thick gray fisherman’s sweater that bulked clumsily under his dinner jacket and, in concert with his beard, made him look more than ever like a sea captain. Hilary, Harriet, and Cleo all looked very gauche, all in their thickest cardigans, with headscarves tied under their chins. Victor was hardy, and wore only his school uniform; and Mrs. Giblet, having, clearly, adjusted, and no doubt thinking it highly improper, regardless of climatic conditions, to dine in a country house in her coat, had slipped the great fur off her shoulders and was revealed in the full majesty and splendor of her evening gown.
It was a black satin garment that had resided, I hypothesized, for a good forty years in some mahogany wardrobe in that dingy house near the British Museum. It was shiny and sleeveless, and hung to the ground in stiff folds, and rustled, I noticed, when she moved. As she seated herself by me, I became aware of a distinct smell of mothballs; nor was that the only smell that clung to the woman. Rather, it served as a sort of deep bass to a veritable symphony of aromas, the melody, so to speak, being carried by a sharp little perfume which, so she told me (for I inquired) had been purchased in Strasbourg in 1934. Its sour and astringent qualities were vulgarized, however (my own nose, though not good, detected this), by a liberal application of cheap eau-de-cologne, and the whole was grimly inflected with the mundane odors of cigarette smoke, sherry, and the perfectly natural emanations of an aging flesh.
Her shoulders were bare, as were her upper arms, from which the skin hung in copious limp pouches. She’d donned her jewelry for dinner in the country, a tiara dotted with a diamond or two, and a string of pearls that dipped alarmingly toward the chasm that gaped within her bosom. The satin gloves reached to her elbows; she had wondered, she confided to me, whether they might not be a trifle
