Mingled With Venom

‘An important woman? Have we heard of her?’

‘Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley. Her secretary, a Mrs Gavin, and two friends, travelled down with her, but Poltrethy gathers that the holiday marks a reunion of the three younger women, who have now gone off together. Dame Beatrice belongs to a much older generation than the others, and wishes them to enjoy a more adventurous time than the hotel can provide.’

‘Perhaps each of the others will buy a picture later on. When one member of an adult party shows interest, the others often feel inclined to follow suit. They are sure to return and pick her up, so I will have pictures ready.’

‘Then away with you, my dear, and put brush to canvas. Of course I will wash up the dishes.’

Bluebell collected her materials and, so burdened, did not attempt the route by way of the garden, the stepping stones and the smugglers’ track, but went through to the front of the house and took the steep but made-up slope which led to the village street and so down to the hotel and its small grey beach.

‘Somebody pushed my great grandmother over the edge of the cliff?’ said Gamaliel to Garnet on the following morning. ‘But who would do a thing like that to an old lady?’

‘How do you know anything about it, Greg?’

‘Oh,’ said Gamaliel, with a gesture which showed the pinkish palm of his hand, ‘I heard my mother and father talking about it. They also said you had done yourself a bit of no good by having Fiona here. Does that mean she will not give you her money when she dies?’

‘No, of course it doesn’t. In any case, she isn’t going to die for years and years yet.’

‘It must have frightened her very much, that fall. Old ladies are easily scared.’

‘Not this one. She was mad at herself, not scared.’

‘But how could she be mad at herself? She ought to have been mad with the man who pushed her.’

‘I’ll tell you something, Greg. There wasn’t any man. Nobody pushed her. She said there was because they are—I mean my mother and Fiona and even Mattie Lunn—they are always warning her that she ought not to be taking these cliff walks alone at her age. Her sight isn’t good, you see, and also, if she takes a fancy to a plant or a flower, she is apt to scramble after it. The cliff-path is perfectly safe for ordinary walkers, but not for a half-blind old lady who seems to think she’s a goat.’

‘So you think she slipped and was not pushed?’

‘Yes. She confesses she was digging up a plant. She shouldn’t have been doing that, anyway. Conservation, you know, and all that.’

‘So Allah, the conserver and the judge, pushed her over the cliff to teach her a lesson, but because He is all- merciful, all-compassionate, and because Mohammed is His prophet she was not hurt.’

‘Eh?’ said Garnet, taken aback by this evidence of discipleship. ‘What’s all this about conservers and judges?’

‘My conception of my faith. I am a Mohammedan with Hindoo thoughts. When my boxing career is over I shall found a new religion. My people are good at religion. Swing low, sweet chariot. Jewish, Old Testament. Virgin Mary have a baby boy. Christian, New Testament. The bird of Time has but a little way to fly. Persian, Omar Khayyam. If the red slayer think he slays. Buddha, by understanding English poet of enlightened kind. Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads. Hindoo poem of Rabindranath Tagore. Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law. Aleister Crowley, a bad man, perhaps, but with his ideas I have sympathy, as I have with witchcraft watched over by the Great Mother and the Horned God. All religions are good in their own way, and my religion will be a mixture of them all. Meanwhile, I am thinking like Muhammad Ali, the Muslim way.’

‘I don’t know why you say you won’t pass your O levels,’ said Garnet.

‘I think too much, that is why. O levels do not require thought, only a good memory to produce what my teachers have said.’

‘Well, to get back to the subject of my grandmother’s fall down the cliff—’

‘You say it was only a fall, not a push.’

‘If she’d really been pushed, she would have landed on the rocks below. No, no. She lost her footing and fell just a dozen feet or so. She bellowed for help because she couldn’t scramble back to the path again, although you or I or an active girl or woman could have done it easily.’

‘And you helped her up to the top.’

‘Yes, that’s about it. She’s a proud and obstinate old lady and she would never admit that other people had been right and that she ought not to take these walks and scrambles alone.’

On the following day, however, Garnet was compelled to alter his opinion about Romula’s mishap on the cliff path. He set out early in the morning from Seawards and took the rough, hilly route which Parsifal had followed to reach Campions and concealed himself in the woods there until he saw Rupert come out by the wicket gate. He waited until the sound of Rupert’s car could no longer be heard and then announced himself to Diana, who had come to the wicket gate to let her dogs out for a run in the woods.

‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Will you give me some breakfast?’

Diana was in shorts and a bolero which showed her midriff. Garnet thought she was beginning to show her age, too. For the first time he saw her as a pathetic figure, a woman trying to protect herself against the onset of middle age. She let the dogs loose and held the gate open for him.

‘Sometimes you are in the right place at the right time; sometimes you’re not,’ she said.

‘You mean there’s no breakfast for me?’

‘Of course I don’t mean that.’ He followed her in to the house. ‘Will eggs and bacon do?’

‘Yes, and I’ll cook them if you’ll allow me. I know how I like them done.’

‘All right. Do some for me, too. I never eat breakfast with Rupert. He’s always in such a hurry.’