‘A sherry-party? Good heavens!’
‘We provide the party and he provides the sherry. His wife will be so delighted to see us, and will we excuse her not calling first, as she has a Women’s Institute this afternoon.’
‘Must we?’
‘I think we must. Our example has encouraged him to start a sherry-fashion in these parts, and he has sent for a bottle on purpose.’
Harriet gazed at him in dismay.
‘Where from?’
‘From the best hotel in Pagford. . . . I accepted with pleasure for both of us. Was that wrong?’
‘Peter, you’re not normal. You have a social conscience far in advance of your sex. Public-house sherry at the vicarage! Ordinary, decent men shuffle and lie till their wives drag them out by the ears. There must be something you’ll jib at. Will you refuse to put on a boiled shirt?’
‘Do you think a boiled shirt would please them? I suppose it would. Besides, you’ve got a new frock you want to show me.’
‘You’re definitely too good to live. . . . Of course we’ll go and drink their sherry, if we die of it. But couldn’t we just be selfish and naughty this afternoon?’
‘As how?’
‘Go off somewhere by ourselves.’
‘By God we will! . . . Is that really your notion of happiness?’
‘To that depth have I fallen. I admit it. Don’t dance on a woman when she’s down. Have some of this – I don’t know what it is – this thing Bunter’s made. It looks absolutely marvellous.’
‘Just how naughty and selfish may I be? . . . May I drive fast? . . . I mean, really fast?’
Harriet repressed a shudder. She liked to drive, and even liked being driven, but anything over seventy miles an hour made her feel hollow inside. Still, married people cannot have everything their own way.
‘Yes, really fast – if you feel like that.’
‘Definitely too good to live!’
‘I should say, definitely too good to die. . . . But really fast means the main road.’
‘So it does. Well, we’ll do the main road really fast and get rid of it.’
The ordeal lasted only as far as Great Pagford. Happily they encountered none of Superintendent Kirk’s black sheep parked on bends, though, just outside, they shot past Frank Crutchley driving a taxi and were rewarded by his astonished and admiring stare. Passing the police-station at a demure legal thirty, they turned out westward and took to the side-roads. Harriet, who could not distinctly recollect having breathed at all since they left Paggleham, filled her lungs and observed in resolutely steady tones that it was a lovely day for a run.
‘Isn’t it? Do you approve of this road?’
‘It’s beautiful,’ said Harriet, fervently. ‘All corners!’ He laughed.
‘Príre de ne pas brutaliser la machine. I ought to know better – God knows I’m frightened of enough things myself. I must have a streak of my father in me. He was one of the old school – you either faced a fence of your own accord or were walloped over and no nonsense. It worked – after a fashion. One learnt to pretend one wasn’t a coward, and take out the change in bad dreams.’
‘You certainly don’t show any signs of it.’
‘One of these days you’ll find me out, I expect. I don’t happen to be afraid of speed – that’s why I like to show off. But I give you my word I won’t do it again, this trip.’
He let the needle drop back to twenty-five and they dawdled on through the lanes in silence, with no particular direction. About the mid-afternoon, they found themselves in a village some thirty miles from home – an old village with a new church and a pond flanking a trim central green, all clustered at the base of a little rise. On the side opposite the church, a narrow and rather ill-made lane appeared to rise towards the brow of the hill.
‘Let’s go up there,’ said Harriet, appealed to for instructions. ‘It looks as though we should get a good view.’
The car swung into the lane and wound its way up with lazy ease between low hedges already touched with autumn. Below and to their left was spread the pleasant English country, green and russet with well-wooded fields sloping to a stream that twinkled placidly in the October sunshine. Here and there the pale glint of stubble showed amid the pasture; or the blue smoke drifted above the trees from the red chimneys of a farm. On their right, at a bend of the road, they came upon a ruined church, only the porch and a portion of the chancel arch left standing. The other stone-work had doubtless been carried away to build the new church in the centre of the village; but the abandoned graves with their ancient headstones had been trimly kept, and just within the open gate a space had been levelled and made into a kind of garden-plot with flower-beds and a sun-dial and a wooden seat on which visitors could rest to view the distant prospect. Peter gave an exclamation, and let the car slide to a standstill on the grass verge.
‘May I lose my last dollar,’ he said, ‘if that isn’t one of our chimney-pots!’
‘I believe you’re right,’ said Harriet, staring at the sundial, whose column did indeed bear a remarkable resemblance to a ‘Tooder pot’. She followed Peter out of the car and through the gate. Seen close to, the sun-dial revealed itself as a miscellany; the dial and gnomon were ancient; the base was a mill-stone; the column, when sharply tapped, sounded hollow.
‘I will have my pot back,’ said Peter in determined tones, ‘if I die for it. We will present the village with a handsome stone pillar in its place. Jack shall have Jill, Naught shall go ill, The man shall have his mare again and all go well. This suggests a new variation of the time-honoured sport of pot-hunting. We will track down our bartered chimneys from end to end of the county, as the Roman legions sought the lost eagles of Varus. I think the luck went out of the house with the chimney-pots, and it’s our job to bring it back.’
‘That will be fun. I counted this morning: there are only four of them missing. This looks exactly like the three that are left.’
‘I’m positive it is ours. Something tells me so. Let us register our claim to it by a trifling act of vandalism which the first rain will blot out.’ He solemnly took out a pencil and inscribed upon the pot: ‘Talboys, Suam quisque homo rem meminit. Peter Wimsey.’ He handed the pencil to his wife, who added, ‘Harriet Wimsey,’ with the date below.
‘First time of writing it?’
‘Yes. It looks a little drunk, but that’s because I had to squat down to it.’
‘No matter – it’s an occasion. Let’s occupy this handsome seat and contemplate the landscape. The car’s well off the road if anybody wants to get up the lane.’
The seat was solid and comfortable. Harriet pulled off her hat and sat down, pleased to feel the soft wind stir her hair. Her gaze wandered idly over the sunlit valley. Peter hung his hat on the extended hand of a stout eighteenth-century cherub engaged in perusing a lichenous book on an adjacent tombstone, sat down on the other end of the seat and stared reflectively at his companion.
His spirits were in a state of confusion, into which the discovery of the murder and the problem of Joe Sellon and the clock had introduced only a subsidiary set of disturbing factors. These he dismissed from his mind, and set himself to reduce the chaos of his personal emotions to some sort of order.
He had got what he wanted. For nearly six years he directed his resolution stubbornly to a single end. Up to the very moment of achievement he had not paused to consider what might be the results of his victory. The last two days had given him little time for thought. He only knew that he was faced with an entirely strange situation, which was doing something quite extraordinary to his feelings.
He forced himself to examine his wife with detachment. Her face had character, but no one would ever think of calling it beautiful, and he had always – carelessly and condescendingly – demanded beauty as a pre-requisite. She was long-limbed and sturdily made, with a kind of loosely-knit freedom of movement that might, with a more controlled assurance, grow into grace; yet he could have named – and if he ha
d chosen might have had – a score of women far lovelier in form and motion. Her speaking voice was deep and attractive; yet, after all, he had once owned the finest lyric soprano in Europe. Otherwise, what? – A skin like pale honey and a mind of a curious, tough quality that stimulated his own. Yet no woman had ever so stirred his blood; she had only to look or speak to make the very bones shake in his body.
He knew now that she could render back passion for passion with an eagerness beyond all expectation – and also with a kind of astonished gratitude that told him more than she knew. While a mannerly reticence forbade that the name of her dead lover should ever be mentioned between them, Peter, interpreting phenomena in the light of expert knowledge, found himself mentally applying to that unhappy young man quite a number of epithets, among which ‘clumsy lout’ and ‘egotistical puppy’ were the kindest. But the passionate exchange of felicity was no new experience: what was new was the enormous importance of the whole relationship. It was not merely that the present bond could not be sundered without scandal and expense and the troublesome interference of lawyers. It was that, for the first time in his experience, it really mattered to him what his relations with a lover were. He had somehow vaguely imagined that, the end of desire attained, soul and sense would lie down together like the lion and the lamb; but they did nothing of the sort. With orb and sceptre thrust into his hands, he was afraid to take hold on power and call his empire his own.
He remembered having said to his uncle (with a solemn dogmatism better befitting a much younger man): ‘Surely it is possible to love with the head as well as the heart.’ Mr Delagardie had replied, somewhat drily: ‘No doubt; so long as you do not end by thinking with your entrails instead of your brain.’ This, he felt, was precisely what was happening to him. As soon as he tried to think, a soft, inexorable clutch seemed to fasten itself upon his bowels. He had become vulnerable in the very point where always, until now, he had been most triumphantly sure of himself. His wife’s serene face told him that she had somehow gained all the confidence he had lost. Before their marriage, he had never seen her look like that.
‘Harriet,’ he said, suddenly, ‘what do you think about life? I mean, do you find it good on the whole? Worth living?’
(He could, at any rate, trust her not to protest, archly: ‘That’s a nice thing to ask on one’s honeymoon!’)
She turned to him with a quick readiness, as though here was the opportunity to say something she had been wanting to say for a long time:
‘Yes! I’ve always felt absolutely certain it was good – if only one could get it straightened out. I’ve hated almost everything that ever happened to me, but I knew all the time it was just things that were wrong, not everything. Even when I felt most awful I never thought of killing myself or wanting to die – only of somehow getting out of the mess and starting again.’
‘That’s rather admirable. With me it’s always been the other way round. I can enjoy practically everything that comes along – while it’s happening. Only I have to keep on doing things, because, if I once stop, it all seems a lot of rot and I don’t care a damn if I go west tomorrow. At least, that’s what I should have said. Now – I don’t know. I’m beginning to think there may be something in it after all . . . Harriet—’
‘It sounds like Jack Sprat and his wife.’
‘If there was any possible chance of straightening it out for you. . . . We’ve begun well, haven’t we, with this awful bloody mess? When once we get clear of it, I’d give anything. But there you are, you see, it’s the same thing over again.’
‘But that’s what I’m trying to tell you. It ought to be, but it isn’t. Things have come straight. I always knew they would if one hung on long enough, waiting for a miracle.’
‘Honestly, Harriet?’
‘Well, it seems like a miracle to be able to look forward – to – to see all the minutes in front of one come hopping along with something marvellous in them, instead of just saying, Well, that one didn’t actually hurt and the next may be quite bearable if only something beastly doesn’t come pouncing out—’
‘As bad as that?’
‘No, not really, because one got used to it – to being everlastingly tightened up to face things, you see. But when one doesn’t have to any more, it’s different – I can’t tell you what a difference it makes. You – you – you – Oh, damn and blast you, Peter, you know you’re making me feel exactly like Heaven, so what’s the sense of trying to spare your feelings?’
‘I don’t know it and I can’t believe it, but come here and I’ll try. That’s better. His chin was pressed upon her head when the sword came back from sea. No, you are not too heavy – you needn’t insult me. Listen, dear, if that’s true or even half true, I shall begin to be afraid of death. At my age it’s rather disturbing. All right – you needn’t apologise. I like new sensations.’
Women had found paradise in his arms before now – and told him so, with considerable emphasis and eloquence. He had accepted the assurance cheerfully, because he had not really cared whether they found paradise or only the Champs-Elysées, so long as the place was a pleasant one. He was as much troubled and confused now as though somebody had credited him with the possession of a soul. In strict logic, of course, he would have had to admit that he had as much right to a soul as anybody else, but the mocking analogy of the camel and the needle’s eye was enough to make that claim stick in his throat as a silly piece of presumption. Of such was not the Kingdom of Heaven. He had the kingdoms of the earth, and they should be enough for him: though nowadays it was in better taste to pretend neither to desire nor deserve them. But he was filled with a curious misgiving, as though he had meddled in matters too high for him; as though he were being forced, body and bones, through some enormous wringer that was squeezing out of him something undifferentiated till now, and even now excessively nebulous and inapprehensible. Vagula, blandula, he thought – pleasantly erratic and surely of no consequence – it couldn’t possibly turn into something that had to be reckoned with. He made the mental gesture of waving away an intrusive moth, and tightened his bodily hold on his wife as though to remind himself of the palpable presence of the flesh. She responded with a small contented sound like a snort – an absurd sound that seemed to lift the sealing stone and release some well-spring of laughter deep down within him. It came bubbling and leaping up in the most tremendous hurry to reach the sunlight, so that all his blood danced with it and his lungs were stifled with the rush and surge of this extraordinary fountain of delight. He felt himself at once ridiculous and omnipotent. He was exultant. He wanted to shout.
Actually, he neither moved nor spoke. He sat still, letting the mysterious rapture have its way with him. Whatever it was, it was something that had been suddenly liberated and was intoxicated by its new freedom. It was behaving very foolishly and its folly enchanted him.
‘Peter?’
‘What is it, lady?’
‘Have I got any money?’
The preposterous irrelevance of the question made the fountain shoot sky-high.
‘My darling fool, yes, of course you have. We spent a whole morning signing papers.’
‘Yes, I know, but where is it? I mean, can I draw a cheque on it? I was thinking, I’d never paid my secretary her salary and at the moment I haven’t got a penny in the world except what’s yours.’
‘It isn’t mine, it’s your own. Settled on you. Murbles explained all that, though I don’t suppose you were listening. But I know what you mean, and yes, it’s there, and yes, you can draw a cheque on it straight away. Why this sudden state of destitution?’
‘Because, Mr Rochester, I wasn’t going to be married in grey alpaca. And I spent every blessed thing I had to do you proud, and then some. I left poor Miss Bracey lamenting and borrowed ten bob of her at the last minute for enough petrol to get me to Oxford. That’s right, laugh! I did kill my pride – but, oh, Peter! it had a lovely death.’
‘Full sacrificial rites. Harriet, I really be
lieve you love me. You couldn’t do anything so unutterably and divinely right by accident. Quelle folie – mais quel geste!’
‘I thought it would amuse you. That’s why I told you instead of borrowing a stamp from Bunter and writing a formal inquiry to the bank.’
‘Meaning that you don’t grudge me my victory. Generous woman! While you’re about it, tell me something else. How the blazes, with all the other things, did you manage to afford the Donne autograph?’
‘That was a special effort. Three five-thousand-word shorts at forty guineas each for the Thrill Magazine.’
‘What? The story about the young man who murdered his aunt with a boomerang?’
‘Yes; and the unpleasant stockbroker who was found in the curate’s front parlour with his head bashed in, like old Noakes – Oh, dear! I was forgetting all about poor Mr Noakes.’
‘Damn old Noakes! At least, perhaps I’d better not say that. It might be true. I remember the curate. What was the third? The cook who put prussic acid in the almond icing?’
‘Yes. Where did you get hold of that exceedingly low-class rag? Does Bunter pore over it in his leisure moments?’
‘No; he reads photographic journals. But there are such things as press-cutting agencies.’
‘Are there, indeed? How long have you been collecting cuttings?’
‘Nearly six years, isn’t it, by now? They lead a shamefaced existence in a locked drawer, and Bunter pretends to know nothing about them. When some impertinent beast of a bone-headed reviewer has turned me dyspeptic with fury, he politely attributes my ill-temper to the inclement season. Your turn to laugh. I had to be maudlin over something, curse it, and you didn’t overwhelm me with material. I once lived three weeks on a belated notice in Punch. Brute, fiend, devil-woman – you might say you’re sorry.’
‘I can’t be sorry for anything. I’ve forgotten how.’
He was silent. The fountain had become a stream that ran chuckling and glittering through his consciousness, spreading as it went into a wide river that swept him up and drowned him in itself. To speak of it was impossible; he could only have taken refuge in inanities. His wife looked at him, thoughtfully drew her feet up on to the seat so as to take her weight from his knees and settled herself into acquiescence with his mood.