The Deadly Joker Read online

  I was delighted to find a full muster of fellows at St. Joseph’s, and one or two others, including Tom Barnard, who had been headmaster of Amberley when I was on the staff and was later appointed Dean of Silchester Cathedral. At dinner I sat on the master’s left hand, with Barnard opposite me, his eighty years weighing as lightly upon him, it seemed, as did his mortarboard forty years ago.

  The dinner was alpha plus. But far better was to come. When we retired to the Senior Common Room, the master announced—to my unmeasured surprise and gratification—that he and the Fellows wished to offer me an honorary fellowship in the college. I could not conceal my emotion as I listened to the master’s charming little speech, followed by a few words from Tom Barnard, who is our visitor. St. Joseph’s is not one of the most distinguished colleges, perhaps, but an honorary fellowship there—a thing I had never dreamed of—does mean something. Though I have contributed a little, it may be, to classical scholarship and to educational practice, the honour St. Joseph’s was doing me seemed altogether too exalted for my deserts. But how happy dear Jenny would be about it: I resolved to ring her up before I went to bed.

  When the informal ceremony was over, we broke up into small groups over our coffee and brandy. Tom Barnard and I got together. He turned upon me his intelligent old eyes beneath their white bushy eyebrows.

  “Well, John, I’ll bet you never anticipated this when you were taking my Classical Sixth at Amberley.”

  “I still can’t quite believe it. I fear they must have mistaken me for some tremendous nob with the same name.”

  “Rubbish, my dear fellow! You were always far too diffident and modest. Take a lesson from me. I pushed myself into a headmastership and then a deanery. Thruster Barnard, they called me. Ha! With your brains and my push, we could really have got somewhere. Canterbury, I dare say.”

  This was nice, coming from a man of the most unworldly and saintly character. Tom inquired after my children, and my wife whom he had not met.

  “I hear you’re settling down somewhere in Dorset. Lucky man.”

  “Yes, a tiny place called Netherplash Cantorum.”

  “Why, bless my soul, I used to know it well. Stayed at the Manor in my young days: holiday tutor to—what was his name?—Aylwin, no, Alwyn Card. Is he there still? I heard his father had died and left him that huge house and a lot of debts.”

  “They’ve sold the house—moved into a smaller one. But the debts go on, I suspect.”

  “Curious boy, he was. Bright, very bright. Second in his Eton election. But you never quite knew where you were with him. A bit tricksy. His father’s fault chiefly, I seem to remember. Bone-headed fellow he was: tried to turn the boy into a huntin’, shootin’, three-bottle chap like himself. Alwyn was his mother’s pet—adored her. When she died, he went off the rails a bit.”

  “In what way?”

  “Oh, nothing criminal. He was one of the Bright Young Things in the Twenties. The usual escapades and exhibitionism. Too much energy chasing too few ideals. He got a name as a practical joker.”

  “Did he indeed?”

  “Yes. He’d played some curious tricks on me when I was tutoring him. But this was different—much more elaborate. Alwyn planned them in the most complex detail; and he always got away with them scot-free, I remember someone telling me, even when his accomplices were caught out. One of his masterpieces was switching lecturers at Cambridge. He’d gone down by then, but he worked it with some friends who were still up.”

  The venerable dean chuckled like a schoolboy at the memory.

  “An American professor of literature—from Yale, I think it was—had been invited to give a public lecture. This was in the days, remember, before the Americans had taken over the rigours of German scholarship and begun to make an industry of lit. crit. Nobody at Cambridge knew this chap personally, though his reputation was high enough to fill the lecture hall. Well, Alwyn’s friends met him at the station—what was his name?—Stobb, yes, Pelham Y. Stobb. They dined him copiously, then took him off to address a meeting of earnest scientists at their own college. His address was so inspissated with learning, I believe, that the scientists were for some time unaware that he was not speaking about enzymes, or whatever subject they had been led to believe the distinguished American scientist was an authority on.

  “Meanwhile, Alwyn, heavily bearded, had been dined by one or two unsuspecting members of the English faculty, and conveyed to the lecture hall. There, in an impeccable Connecticut accent, he delivered an extremely long and insufferably pedantic lecture.”

  Tom Barnard’s eyes twinkled at me, as he paused to light a fresh cigar.

  “But I don’t see how—” I began.

  “A lecture on a non-existent writer. Alwyn, you see, invented an English poet, floruit somewhere around 1690, who had emigrated to America at the age of thirty. I mentioned Alwyn’s attention to detail. In order to lecture about this poet, it was necessary first to write his works. Alwyn had a gift for pastiche, as well as for vocal mimicry.

  “He turned out several hundred lines of a didactic poem on potato-culture, rather in the manner of Denham, upon which he commented copiously in his interminable lecture.

  “But better still was to come. It seems that this poet—Jacynth Frome—turned violently against the American way of life after a few years in Virginia, and wrote a blistering satire upon it. The lecturer quoted extracts from this, also. And they proved to be in the most mature style of Alexander Pope—yet written at a time when Pope had not begun even to lisp in numbers. Professor Pelham Y. Stobb then proceeded to dish out some heavy sarcasm at the expense of the pundits on British faculties of literature who still remained brutishly ignorant of this talented and versatile poet who had been Pope’s strongest, if unacknowledged, influence.

  “The result of all this was quite a shambles. Pupils pestered their English instructors to give them more light upon Jacynth Frome; and a few of the dimmer dons wrote to the real Pelham Stobb, back in Newhaven, asking for information. Alwyn got clean away with it. It was a year or two before the origin of the hoax was discovered. It just shows what brilliant inventiveness, backed by sound staff work, can do.”

  I began to think that, as a neighbour, Alwyn Card might be rather more stimulating than I could wish. I had reason to suspect that age had not entirely atrophied in him whatever element it is which makes a man indulge in such elaborate pranks. I drew out Tom Barnard to produce a theory of the practical joker—like any intelligent Oxford man of any age, he takes to theorising, the more far-fetched the better, like a baby to the bottle. As he worked it out now, the cause was Alwyn’s natural wildness and initiative coming out in the form of a sort of Terrae-Filius (he quoted Nicholas Amhurst) ragging of society—a protest against the conventional values of a father he both despised and feared.

  “There’s a wild streak in the family. I’m told that Alwyn’s half-brother got involved in some very discreditable escapade and was asked to resign from his regiment. Have you met him yet?”

  “Yes. He lives with Alwyn.” I did not feel able to discuss Bertie Card: antipathy warps judgment. To cover my embarrassment, I told Tom about the cuckoo. He heard me out with keen interest, then beckoned one of the visitors over to our table.

  “Here’s the man for you. Lightfoot, you know John Waterson? Lightfoot is in charge of ornithological research at the new institute. Tell him your little problem.”

  I repeated my account of the eccentricities of the Netherplash cuckoo. Lightfoot, a serious-eyed, untidy man of about forty, seemed both surprised and sceptical. “You’re quite sure of your facts?” he asked, with a scientist’s forthrightness.

  “Of course I am. The bird kept me awake into the small hours. Ask anyone in the village, they’ll tell you the same.”

  “It’s certainly most unusual. At high latitudes, in Scotland or Scandinavia where the midsummer dusk lasts very late, cuckoos do call till well on towards midnight. But in Dorset, in May—no, I should say it was unprecedented. Still,
I’ll look up the records.”

  “He seems quite chagrined, poor fellow,” said Tom when Lightfoot had moved away. “It does rile these scientists when nature breaks the regulations they’ve laid down for her. He’s an able man, though …”

  I excused myself from the company soon after this, went to the lodge, and asked the head porter to put through a trunk call to my wife at the Quiet Drop.

  “Mrs. Waterson will be gratified to hear your good news, sir. And I should like, if I may, to offer you my own congratulations.”

  As well keep a secret from the Almighty as from a senior college servant.

  Jenny was indeed overjoyed when I told her of the honorary fellowship. But I detected a distrait note in her voice, which she could not long conceal, and asked if there was anything wrong at her end.

  “Oh, not really, it’s too absurd. I was a little upset at the time, but—it’ll be lovely to see you to-morrow, darling.”

  “Yes. But tell me now, Jenny. Don’t bottle it up.”

  She had gone into Green Lane this morning and found that, during the night, someone—village children, presumably—had broken in and scrawled on the white distemper of my study wall. What had they written, I asked. “Lhude sing cuckoo. Yes,” said Jenny, her voice faltering a little, “spelt that way.”

  How extraordinary that, in a remote village, someone should write a line from a medieval lyric on my wall. Oh, dear me, that loud cuckoo!

  3. The Orient Pearl

  It was not till the third week-end after we had settled in that we met the Pastons. Jenny and I had had plenty to keep us occupied: there was the furniture to arrange and rearrange; the garden, which the last occupant of Green Lane had neglected, needed a lot of attention; Jenny set aside a couple of hours a day for piano practice; and most days through the halcyon weather we took out a picnic lunch or tea and explored the countryside. We needed no company but our own. But now, at the beginning of June, we should have my daughter, Corinna, with us. She had developed glandular fever at school—not a dangerous attack, but the authorities thought it advisable for her to come home for the rest of the term to convalesce.

  Jenny herself was blossoming out like the summer. I had been perturbed, on returning from Oxford, to find her so shaken by the words written on my study wall. Whoever did it had got in through an unlatched window: nothing was stolen—there was nothing in the empty house to steal. I did not go to the police about it. Yet I could not dismiss the affair as trivial. Village children do not customarily draw upon medieval poetry for their graffiti. To make sure, I visited the head teacher of the school at Tollerton to which the Netherplash children are conveyed by bus: she assured me, after inquiry, that her pupils had not been introduced to the poem, either in class or through the medium of Britten’s Spring Symphony.

  For me, there had been something disquieting in the idea of an adult person doing this. And why in my room particularly, I wondered. Jenny had been upset for a simpler reason. The writing on the wall she felt as the equivalent of an anonymous letter: anonymous letters are always nasty, heart-constricting things to get, and poor Jenny had a special reason to dread them. Still, it had only been a little cloud on our horizon, and now it had gone and the sky was set fair. So I thought.

  The Pastons’ invitation came by post in curiously formal form, on glossy writing paper headed from Ronald Paston, the Manor House, Netherplash Cantorum, Dorset, and the message was typed. It invited us to dinner (black tie) on the following Saturday. I was for refusing it, since Corinna would only have got home the day before, and my son Sam was coming from Bristol for the week-end. However, Jenny thought it would be unneighbourly, and was keen to see the Pastons’ house: why not ring them up and ask if we might bring Sam and Corinna? So it was that I first heard the voice of the woman I had seen, three weeks ago, walking in her golden sari on the dewy lawn. Even over the telephone it had a melodiously ethereal quality, like some exotic musical instrument.

  I explained our predicament. Before I could say any more, the voice cut in:

  “Oh, you must bring them both. Of course.”

  “I’m afraid it’s rather an infliction on you.”

  “Oh, no. I’m sure it’ll be all right.”

  Vera Paston said it in a vague, almost dreamy way, as if arrangements for a dinner party were altogether outside her sphere of interest. Perhaps the household was run by a team of servants, I thought; or by an automatic brain. I thanked her, adding:

  “I don’t know about my son. Sam has a violent prejudice against wearing a dinner jacket, especially in hot weather.”

  She broke into what, with any other voice, would be called a giggle, but in hers sounded like a chime of temple bells. “Please. Let him come as he likes. I don’t know why my husband has ‘black tie’ put on the invitations. It’s just a few friends. At least, I think so. I never know who Ronald may bring down for the week-end.” She giggled again. “Oh, and bring your bathing dresses, if you’d like to take a dip.”

  The quaintly stiff little phrase of slang was the first indication, apart from a trace of foreign accent in her perfect English, that Vera Paston was not yet entirely Westernised. I started to say how much we looked forward to seeing the Manor, then realised that the line was dead. I was to get used to the way Vera signed off, so to speak, without warning—a trait of her elusive personality; and I would discover before long how this very elusiveness, consciously or no, insinuated into a man’s mind the idea of pursuit.

  On Friday after lunch we met Corinna at Dorchester. She was looking a bit pale and peaky, but she has always been a finely-drawn creature, never having had to pass through the puppy-fat stage. Her delight in the new house and the village redoubled our own happiness in them, and it gave me a special pleasure to see again how easy was the relationship between her and Jenny—more like a younger sister’s with an elder than that of stepmother and daughter. Jenny had taken great trouble in decorating a bed-sitting-room for Corinna on the sunny side of the house: they’d had their heads together over patterns for many hours during the spring vacation—Jenny has a wonderful gift for guiding taste rather than imposing it; and when Corinna saw the room, she gave a little gasp of pleasure, then flung her arms round Jenny’s neck, crying, “Oh, it’s the best! It really is. Thank you, darling.” I must say I do like girls to be enjoying and demonstrative: how dismal it must be to have a daughter who goes clumping glumly about the place, muttering her distaste for her elders and all their works.

  Late that afternoon Sam turned up in his vintage Morris. Unlike his sister, he is the reverse of demonstrative, his affection for Jenny revealing itself by indirections—to-day, in the form of a huge lobster which he extracted from the boot, together with a battered grip-bag, a bundle of newspapers, a pair of muddy shoes, some musical scores and a tennis racket, and presented to his stepmother. Our reunion was interrupted by a faint whingeing sound from the front seat of the Morris.

  “Oh, I forgot the pooch,” muttered Sam.

  He lifted out an object like a fur-coated doughnut, and placed it, wriggling, in Corinna’s arms.

  “It’s a dog,” he said, “little as you might suspect it. Yes, for you. You’ll need one now if you’re going to be a strapping country girl striding about in the rain and bellowing at point-to-points. Afraid I couldn’t afford a horse.”

  “Oh, Sam! Darling! It’s angelic of you. What’s his name?”

  “Buster. The only trouble is, he’s rather delicate,” Sam continued with his most expressionless expression. “He has to be fed on the best salmon steaks, finely chopped; and of course, only T.T. milk, laced with a little rum.”

  Corinna, who is charmingly literal-minded, never fails to fall for her brother’s solemn fantasies.

  So there we were, four of the happiest people you could have found in the length and breadth of England, with Buster tottering about on the carpet like an amiable clown, and the evening sunlight pouring in.

  It felt odd to be walking across the village green, next eveni
ng, in a dinner jacket. Sam, who had reluctantly put on his, looked even more bizarre, for he had draped his bathing trunks round his neck.

  “Do you suppose it’ll be an orgy?’ he hopefully asked. “Tycoons tumbling into the pool with naked call-girls?”

  “I sincerely trust not.”

  Jenny and Corinna, walking ahead of us in short evening dresses, made a delectable pair.

  “You know what the name of this village means?”

  I did: but I have always followed the principle of allowing the young to instruct me—it is educational for them.

  “Netherplash means ‘lower pool,’” Sam continued. “Cantorum, ‘of the singers.’ There are the remains of a medieval chantry somewhere in the woods up there.” He pointed vaguely to the south-east. “Just exactly what was a chantry?”

  “In this case, a small chapel with an endowment for priests to sing mass for the repose of a departed soul.”

  Sam digested this in silence for a few moments. I remembered, with a bitter-sweet pang, his saying to me, when he was a boy of nine or ten and a funeral passed us in the street, “I hope you don’t die for a long time, Father.”

  “How did you know all this?” I asked.

  “I looked it up. When you wrote to say you were moving here.” Stooping, he picked a dandelion and put it in his buttonhole. “Jenny really is quite well again?” he asked, diffidently.

  “I hope and believe she is.”

  “This damned party won’t be too much of an excitement for her?”

  “It’s not a convocation of Elks.”

  Nevertheless, the great drawing-room of the Manor did seem thickly peopled when we were shown in. A round-faced man of middle height came forward and introduced himself as our host, welcoming us warmly and apologising for having left it so long before making our acquaintance. At his elbow, a little behind him, stood his wife. Mrs. Paston was wearing a fuchsia-coloured sari to-night. The hand she gave me was tiny, exquisitely shaped, and felt boneless. Her voice and grace of movement I have already attempted to describe: the beauty of her face, which I now saw for the first time at close quarters, was quite surpassing—high cheek-bones; large, darkly-glinting eyes, set well apart over a delicate nose; the mouth voluptuous; the brow low, clustered about with ebony-black hair. I got the impression of a kind of gleaming opacity—that of a black pearl, though in fact her skin was no darker than café-au-lait. And again, as on the telephone, I felt a withdrawnness about her, an elusiveness which had nothing to do with shyness but seemed more like a dissociation of herself, deliberate or involuntary, from the life around her.