‘Do you mean,’ Judith Appleby asked, ‘that you went on till you were stopped?’
‘Precisely that. I observed your canons in such matters to the letter.’ Appleby accepted a second cup of tea, shook his head austerely at a seducing plate of chocolate Bath Olivers, and then nodded it in gloomy substantiation of what he had just said. ‘And no good came of it. No good ever does.’
‘It doesn’t strike me that way at all.’ Judith, whose weight remained constant regardless of dietary indulgence, picked up one of the biscuits. ‘You arrived home with a mystery – or at least with the tip or the ghost of a mystery – and you’ve been battening on it ever since. All that business, for example, of rushing over to alarm poor Tommy Pride. You enjoy it enormously. Just like old times. Much better fun than stacking wood. By the way, we’ll be out of dry wood and living in a smoky house before Christmas if you don’t–’
‘Very well.’ Appleby gave a decisive nod. ‘I’ll tell Hoobin.’
‘Yes, do tell Hoobin, John. And don’t forget his bottle of whisky. It will be for his eightieth birthday.’
‘Of course not.’ Appleby gave a resigned sigh. ‘Your hale and hearty husband will go through this Caliban act, stacking wood. And the octogenarian Hoobin, a dignified Prospero, will tipple whisky in the potting shed. What were we talking about?’
‘The Great Maquis Mystery. Or perhaps Peril at Ashmore Chase. And about scaring Tommy Pride.’
‘I’m not in the least averse to scaring Tommy Pride. I wasn’t at school with him. I didn’t dance with him at hunt balls, as you–’
‘Of course not. Men don’t do that sort of thing at hunt balls. Or not at the balls of good hunts.’
‘You are quite idiotic. I am only saying that I don’t mind scaring your Tommy. Not that it is scaring him. Pride’s a very good scout. As for the maquis, it’s not to be joked about. In France itself such things went on happening for years after the war. A fellow would square this chap and that, and get himself solemnly acquitted in court of any species of collaboration. And then young men – or not so young men – who had acquired a taste for summary justice under résistance rules would turn up one night and simply rub him out. Read Les Mandarins. Simone de Beauvoir, you know.’
‘I do know. But they didn’t fall down on the job every 10th of October.’
‘Fair enough.’ Appleby got up and paced the room. ‘There’s something really fiendish in that. It’s as if they want to break his nerve – just as it was once broken by some hideous secret police long ago. So far, it looks as if this old man – who is an old man, and destined by some freak of heredity to go on getting yet older for a long time – allows himself to get worried for about twenty-four hours in the year. They want really to get him down. And then, I suppose, they’ll end up that series of near-misses, and contrive a square hit. It’s not at all nice. I didn’t scare Pride, but I’m glad to think I’ve alerted him. He feels he may have rather rashly discounted this Martyn Ashmore’s seemingly incredible yarn. He’s making inquiries. As a matter of fact I expect him to drop in this evening.’
‘John, do you believe this fantastic tale?’
‘I believe in that hunk of stone. And so would you, my dear, if you’d felt the wind of it on your left ear.’
‘I believe in it too.’ Judith looked seriously at her husband. There had been plenty of times when she had sat over two poached eggs round about 9 p.m., trying not to wonder whether she would ever see John again. She didn’t like this story of sudden and insane danger during a day’s ramble from Long Dream. ‘But I don’t at all know what to believe about your young Frenchman. Of course it’s true that Martyn Ashmore has French relations.’
‘His father married a de Voisin?’
‘His father – Ayden Ashmore – married ages ago a bonne bourgeoise called Annette Dupont. Very much the haute bourgeoisie, as they say. Related to all sorts of people, however, with much grander names.’
‘How you contrive–’
‘I knew some of them when I was almost finished for good at that ghastly French school. Before I ran away to the Slade. Before I met my glorious policeman.’
‘No doubt.’ Appleby sat down again, and with conscious complacency finished his tea. ‘And you also know all about this rash of Ashmores who appear to be our near neighbours at the other end of the county. I think I’ll want to know about them too… Judith, why aren’t you listening to me?’
‘Of course I’m listening to you.’ But Lady Appleby’s ear had been quite detectably attuned to the outer world. ‘But Bobby’s coming for the weekend. I thought I heard what might be his car.’
‘Fine. You’ll be able to talk to him about Simone de Beauvoir.’
‘Bobby thinks the Beaver and Sartre and all that fearfully old-hat. Bobby belongs to the anti-roman school. What he goes in for is called la nouvelle écriture.’
‘He hasn’t given up hope of educating me.’ Appleby picked up a book. ‘I’ve been told to read this, by a chap called Alain Robbe-Grillet. It’s described as a novel, but a great deal of it seems just to be describing a house. The first paragraph is about a veranda. Listen.
Since its width is the same for the central portion as for the sides, the line of shadow cast by the column extends precisely to the corner of the house; but it stops there, for only the veranda flagstones are reached by the sun… At this moment the shadow of the outer edge of the roof coincides exactly with the right angle formed by the terrace and the two vertical surfaces of the corner of the house.’[1]
Appleby put down the book. ‘Odd, don’t you think?’
‘It ought to appeal to you. It’s by rather an observing kind of person.’
‘That’s undeniable.’ Forgetting about Monsieur Robbe-Grillet, Appleby walked to the window. He too was hearkening to the outer world. He was commonly as relieved as Judith when their youngest child’s alarming car was heard to come safely to a stop in the drive. Bobby Appleby had once been a useful youth in the middle of the front row of a scrum. He had then surprisingly transformed himself into an even more useful scrum-half. In that position he had played a very decent game against the All Blacks. Appleby believed that he himself concealed behind an impenetrable mask his satisfaction in his son’s having thereafter even more surprisingly transformed himself from an Appleby into a Raven. Nearly all Judith’s relations had been – and were – pretty mad. But they had followed a remarkable variety of curious pursuits. Writing Anglicized versions of the nouveau roman was simply the latest of these. ‘Stop bothering about Bobby,’ Appleby shamelessly went on, ‘and tell me about all those Ashmores. I’d like to be clued up on them before Pride arrives.’
‘Very well.’ Judith extinguished the small ritual lamp on her tea-tray. ‘The Ashmores have been around these parts for quite a time. Since the Conquest, in fact.’
‘Absolute rubbish. Nobody has been around since the Conquest – except in the commonplace sense in which we all have. The Ashmores no doubt emerged from their hovels in the time of Thomas Cromwell, and liberated something substantial from a monastery. Not that it’s material. Go on.’
‘It certainly wasn’t all that number of generations back. Not their generations.’
‘I know. Their ultimate ancestor was a tortoise. Or a Galapagos turtle. Martyn Ashmore told me all that. His grandmother was present at the Rape of the Lock. I accorded his recital – offered in the presence of appropriate family portraits – instant and implicit belief. But it scarcely appears a factor in the present mystery.’
‘I suppose not. But I don’t see how I’m going to tell you about the Ashmores if you will go on talking.’
Appleby made a resigned gesture. Then he threw a log on the fire – thereby bringing the looming Hoobin crisis one step nearer – and filled his pipe.
‘The Ashmores,’ Judith said, ‘have a reputation for eccentricity. They’ve had it for a long time, and occasionally it seems to deepen into madness. That must be the Chief Constable’s excuse for ignoring Martyn Ashmore when he started some tale of mysterious persecution over a glass of sherry.’
‘Pride didn’t exactly ignore it. He had somebody go round asking discreet questions. But nothing emerged. And it seems that Ashmore wasn’t in any sense asking for help. It was this neighbour business again – feeling it due to a fellow to tell him about something that was going on. And if that isn’t nearer to madness than to eccentricity I don’t know what is.’
‘If that’s one salient point about Martyn Ashmore, another is his wealth. There’s far more money than simply comes to him from land.’
‘That’s not quite what he suggested to me. He implied that it was safe, broad acres with him, and what I remember his calling bubble-and-squeak stock-jobbing in his numerous relations.’
‘He was being less than candid.’ Judith appeared in no doubt about this. ‘It’s combining a large fortune with really miserly habits that has given him so picturesque a reputation.’
‘There didn’t seem to be a servant about the place. He said they demand exorbitant wages.’
‘I think he was being less than candid again. There are said to be some old creatures lurking around the place, although he refuses to have them quartered in the house. As to the whole family, I don’t know much about them in recent years – not really since they used to be around when I was a girl. Martyn wasn’t the head of the family. An elder brother had the Chase, and was married and had a son. Martyn inherited only because his brother and nephew were killed in a motor smash. There were two younger brothers who are still in circulation, although they aren’t at all young now. And there are nephews and nieces, and great-nephews and great-nieces. Even the younger ones are much in these parts from time to time. Shall we have a big party and ask the lot? You could go round questioning them closely. That would clue you up.’
‘I think not. But I’d like to know more about the French side – for instance how Martyn Ashmore’s French ancestry landed him in France, and in what capacity, during the war. That young Frenchman, de Voisin, puzzles me quite a lot. Why on earth should he have turned up like that?’
‘Might he have been the villain of the piece? Might it have been he who chucked the stone?’
‘In theory, yes – although it would have involved some very funny business with a motor-cycle engine. The only clear point is that his arrival on that particular day cannot conceivably have been purely coincidental.’
‘You used to say that the most inconceivable coincidences just do happen.’
‘They weren’t happening at Ashmore Chase.’ Appleby paused to allow for his wife’s amusement before this dogmatic statement. ‘I’d like to help this chap.’
‘The mysteriously irruptive Jules de Voisin?’
‘Of course not. Ashmore. He’s so queerly discontinuous that he’s hard to assess. But he’s not a bad old chap. Kept some sort of end up under pressure both from within and without. And he has some uncommonly good claret.’
‘Obviously a worthy object of benevolence. But do you think–’
‘Colonel Pride, my lady,’ a voice said at the door.