of, ah, official recognition of your...” Again he left at the end of the sentence a space that he hoped Mr Hive would fill in.
“Various little things have come my way, you know.”
Mr Clay leaned forward and assumed the expression of one who has just recalled what might prove a valuable clue.
“I seem to remember,” he said slowly, “having seen your name before somewhere. In, I think,
“Court?” echoed Mr Hive, eagerly.
“Yes.”
“Oh, very probably.”
“A citation, I fancy...” Mr Clay felt intoxicated by his own mendacity.
Mr Hive smiled at his finger-ends, then, much more warmly, at Mr Clay.
“You can have no idea,” he said, “of how gratifying it is to a mere toiler in the vineyard to hear that his wine has earned good report.”
“Then I may tell the boys, may I not, that their, ah, guest of honour, has been cited, ah...?”
“By all means, my dear sir! Forty-seven times.”
Chapter Six
In the middle of one of the smaller lawns at the back of the Palgroves’ home was a circular wall of concrete, about three feet in diameter and a little less than three feet high, from which two posts rose to support a steeply pitched roof. The posts also carried a crank, set in a roller from which hung a chain. The wall was brightly painted in imitation of brick. The little roof, held up like an umbrella by the posts, was in fact plastic but it was the same jolly red as the wall and from a distance might have been taken as tile. The whole contrivance, of course, was intended to resemble an old country well-head—a ‘wishing well’, in fact, according to the catalogue of the firm of garden furniture manufacturers from which Mrs Palgrove had bought it a couple of years before.
Around the well, set in the grass, were several large plastic toadstools, coloured in rich browns and reds and yellows. Upon one of them squatted a giant frog, very droll, very lifelike. Lifelike, too, were the dwarfs, modelled in attitudes of fey mischief, that completed the tableau.
Mrs Palgrove paused on her way from the house and watched the effect of the setting sun upon the little plastic community. Against the long shadow cast by the well across the grass, the dwarfs’ scarlet caps gleamed like peppers.
Rodney ran past her and toured the toadstools, sniffing them and making equitable bestowal of stale. “Bad boy! Nasty!” called Mrs Palgrove mechanically and quite without rancour. Rodney ignored her.
She went up to the well. It was filled almost to the brim with water. In the depths glided thin orange shapes. Mrs Palgrove took from the pocket of her coat a small jar with perforated lid and shook white crumbs on the surface. The crumbs spread out and began to sink slowly. A pair, three, four goldfish came mouthing up to the food. Mrs Palgrove unconsciously imitated a fish’s ingesting pout as she watched them suck in the descending, disintegrating fragments.
“Good boys! Clever boys!”
The last of the sun had slid from the lawns and was climbing the beech hedge at the far side of the garden. In the chilly, deepening shade, the dwarfs and the toadstools and the frog reverted to lifeless shapes, scarcely identifiable. The vermilion of the dummy well became the colour of dried blood. A cold breeze rustled the leaves of the chestnut trees.
Mrs Palgrove bade the goldfish good night and went back to the house. Rodney was there already, painstakingly gnawing the tapestry cover off one of the chairs in the dining-room.
“Bad boy! Naughty!” She left Rodney to its depredations and went into the lounge, switching on the light. This came from a set of candle-like lamps fixed to a varnished oak frame suspended from the ceiling by four chains. The frame only just cleared Mrs Palgrove’s head. She knelt and switched on the electric fire; it simulated glowing coals.
Looking round for the evening paper, she spotted it on the table by the french window. Her husband had left it, racing page uppermost, propped against a model of a Spanish galleon. The model was complete in every detail; it had been a wedding present and Mrs Palgrove supposed it to be fragile and valuable. Carefully she removed the newspaper and took it over to the settee, glancing on the way at the dock on the mantlepiece. It was twenty minutes past seven.
At a quarter to eight, Mrs Palgrove folded the paper and added it to others in a rack by the fireplace. The rack was in the form of a pair of shields, embossed with heraldic designs and dipped back to back. She walked soundlessly across the thick, silver-grey carpet, patterned here and there with little yellow maps (of Rodney’s devising), and let down the front flap of a writing cabinet. Then, uncasing the portable typewriter that had been stood beneath the cabinet, she put it on the extended flap and drew up a chair.
She wound into the typewriter a sheet of grey paper headed with the words FOUR FOOT HAVEN in large green capitals above a printed line drawing of two dogs, one in lace cap and apron, the other bespectaded and smoking a pipe, seated in humanized postures of relaxation on either side of a fireplace.
Mrs Palgrove began to type, addressing the letter to: Miss L. E. C. Teatime, Secretary, Flaxborough and Eastern Counties Charities Alliance, 31 St Anne’s Gate, Flaxborough.
She considered a moment and went on, striking the keys slowly but with deliberation and accuracy.
The committee of my society considered at their last meeting a certain incident of which you must be aware and which took place on the 14th inst. I refer to the breaking open after dark of the Haven kennels (‘Rover-Holme’) and the introduction of an unauthorised animal which the committee have reason to believe was an ‘unwell’ lady dog. The result was that ‘Rover-Holme’ was empty the next day and we have had to send members with cars as far away as Chalmsbury to collect our poor animals. More than twenty are still missing and it may well be that they
