Charity Ends At Home

crossed rowing sculls. These, the girl observed and indicated. “Pretty,” she said.

He looked at the links as if noticing them for the first time. He closed the hand with the money in it and turned it this way and that to make the little gold oars catch the light. “Relics of youthful athleticism,” he said, musingly. Then, brightening: “Oh, I don’t know. Henley, ’48—it’s not all that long ago. I dare say I could still stroke an eight.”

“I’ll bet,” the girl said.

Mr Hive put both hands in his pockets and gazed into the middle distance. His expression of benign abstraction spoke of long, golden afternoons on sun-dappled water, of the rhythmic creak of rowlocks, of bow- wave’s glug in the holes of river creatures...

“Ah, well.” He reached for the glass. “Here’s very good health to you, dear lady!”

“Cheers,” the girl murmured, softly. She waited until he had taken two or three ruminative sips of the brandy. “All right?”

Mr Hive half-closed one eye and pouted. “Superb!” he declared.

The girl nodded. “Seven shillings then, please, sir.”

With a fierce scowl of self-blame, Mr Hive rapped his forehead several times, then reached anew for money. This time he counted it assiduously into her waiting hand.

Other customers began to come into the bar. Mr Hive picked up his drink and his case and, with a final glance of admiration at the twin moonrise of flesh over the barmaid’s bodice, took himself off to a table at the side of the room opposite the door.

Twice in the next twenty minutes he went back to the bar to renew his order and, he hoped, to gain further favour in the eyes of the splendid young woman behind it.

On his first reappearance, she had asked, with becoming casualness: “Where are you from, then?” and he had invited her to guess, whereupon she had shaken her head coyly and he had rewarded her with the quotation, “From Dunbar’s ‘Flower of Cityes Alle’.” “Well I never,” she’d replied. “You don’t look Scotch.”

Now he was before her again, presenting her with his empty glass as if it were a rose. She busied herself with the bottle and the little pewter measure. Mr Hive glanced about him for an opening, non-literary this time, to further conversation. He noticed a box on the counter, a little to the left of his elbow. It was a collecting box and there was something about it, something oddly familiar, that caused him to pull a pair of spectacles from his breast pocket and read the label.

“Gracious me!” he exclaimed.

The girl looked up. She saw a grin of delighted recognition overspread her customer’s face.

“Lucy...” Mr Hive murmured to himself. He was looking happily abstracted again.

“Lucy Who?”

“Mmm...?”

“Never mind.” The girl put the re-charged glass on one of the little pink mats. Mr Hive paid without being prompted.

“Tell me, my dear,” he said with sudden resolution, “if you know who brought this box in here. It wasn’t, by any chance, a lady from London? A well-spoken, ah, personable lady?”

“I don’t know whether she came from London. She lives here now. In Flax.”

“Does she? Does she, indeed?”

“That’s right.” The girl regarded the box indifferently. She seemed to be in no degree emotionally involved with The New World Pony Rescue Campaign. “I’m trying to remember her name. Funny sort of name...”

“Miss Lucilla Teatime,” crisply announced Mr Hive.

“Yes.” The girl giggled. “That’s it. Teatime!” Instinct told her to keep hilarity in check. “Friend of yours?” she asked.

“A very old friend—and an altogether admirable lady.”

“She seemed very nice.”

“I’m happy to think you have had the privilege of knowing her.”

“Well, she doesn’t come in all that often, actually,” said the girl. “Just to see to the box, you know.”

Mr Hive nodded. “An indefatigable worker for good causes.” He again examined the box on the bar, this time a little narrowly; then he gave it an affectionate pat. “One of her favourite charities, that one,” he declared.

He returned to his seat. There were now seven or eight other people in the room. He surveyed them, one by one, over the top of his glass and decided that he liked them all, from the young couple with bright, country complexions and a careful way of sitting, to the ruminating old farmer whose extraordinary facial resemblance to a sheep was emphasized by his habit of emitting at the end of each swig of his beer a quiet little “Baaa”.

Mr Hive had just begun his fourth double brandy when three men entered the bar in a group. For a few moments they stood just inside the door while the foremost glanced searchingly round the company.

He was a man of medium height, with thin, brushed-back hair of no particular colour, a plump but sallow face and unblinking, protuberant eyes. His way of leaning forward from firmly planted feet suggested a readiness to be launched at very short notice. Even had Mr Hive not known who this man was, his powers of deduction would have told him that here was the classic attitude of preparedness for boys’ wicked wiles: the stance of a schoolmaster.

As it was, he recognized at once Mr Kingsley Booker, M.A., fourth year form-master and teacher of geography, religion and swimming at Flaxborough Grammar School. Mr Booker’s two companions he did not know, but he felt sure he was going to like them. He donned a smile in readiness.