Off With His Head. Ngaio Marsh
Bünz leant her elbow in an easy manner on the counter. ‘By the Old Guiser,’ she suggested, ‘for example?’
She was accustomed to the singular little pauses that followed her remarks. As she looked from one to the other of her hearers she blinked and smiled at them and her rosy cheeks bunched themselves up into shiny knobs. She was like an illustration to a tale by the brothers Grimm.
‘Would that be Mr William Andersen you mean, then?’ Trixie asked.
Mrs Bünz nodded waggishly.
Camilla started to say something and changed her mind. In the Public, Ernie cleared his throat.
‘I can’t serve you with anything then, ma’am?’ asked Trixie.
‘Indeed you can. I will take zider,’ decided Mrs Bünz, carefully regional. Camilla made an involuntary snuffling noise and, to cover it up, said: ‘William Andersen’s my grandfather. Do you know him?’
This was not comfortable for Mrs Bünz, but she smiled and smiled and nodded and, as she did so, she told herself that she would never never master the extraordinary vagaries of class in Great Britain.
‘I have had the pleasure to meet him,’ she said. ‘This evening. On my way. A beautiful old gentleman,’ she added firmly.
Camilla looked at her with astonishment.
‘Beautiful?’
‘Ach, yes. The spirit,’ Mrs Bünz explained, waving her paws, ‘the raciness, the élan!’
‘Oh,’ said Camilla dubiously. ‘I see.’ Mrs Bünz sipped her cider and presently took a letter from her bag and laid it on the bar. ‘I was asked to deliver this,’ she said, ‘to someone staying here. Perhaps you can help me?’
Trixie glanced at it. ‘It’s for you, dear,’ she said to Camilla. Camilla took it. Her cheeks flamed like poppies and she looked with wonder at Mrs Bünz.
‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘but I don’t quite – I mean – are you –?’
‘A chance encounter,’ Mrs Bünz said airily. ‘I was delighted to help.’
Camilla murmured a little politeness, excused herself and sat down in the inglenook to read her letter.
Dear Enchanting Camilla (she read),
Don’t be angry with me for coming home this week. I know you said I mustn’t follow you, but truly I had to because of the Mardian Morris and Christmas. I shan’t come near you at the pub and I won’t ring you up. But please be in church on Sunday. When you sing I shall see your breath going up in little clouds and I shall puff away too like a train so that at least we shall be doing something together. From this you will perceive that I love you.
Ralph
Camilla read this letter about six times in rapid succession and then put it in the pocket of her trousers. She would have liked to slip it under her thick sweater but was afraid it might fall out at the other end.
Her eyes were like stars. She told herself she ought to be miserable because after all she had decided it was no go about Ralph Stayne. But somehow the letter was an antidote to misery, and there went her heart singing like a lunatic.
Mrs Bünz had retired with her cider to the far side of the inglenook where she sat gazing – rather wistfully, Camilla thought – into the fire. The door of the Public opened. There was an abrupt onset of male voices; blurred and leisurely; unformed country voices. Trixie moved round to serve them, and her father, Ron Plowman, the landlord, came in to help. There was a general bumble of conversation. ‘I had forgotten,’ Camilla thought, ‘what they sound like. I’ve never found out about them. Where do I belong?’
She heard Trixie say: ‘So she is, then, and setting in yonder.’
A silence and a clearing of throats. Camilla saw that Mrs Bünz was looking at her. She got up and went to the bar. Through in the Public on the far side of Trixie’s plump shoulder she could see her five uncles: Dan, Andy, Nat, Chris and Ernie, and her grandfather, old William. There was something odd about seeing them like that, as if they were images in a glass and not real persons at all. She found this impression disagreeable and to dispel it called out loudly:
‘Hallo, there! Hallo, Grandfather!’
Camilla’s mother, whose face was no longer perfectly remembered, advanced out of the past with the smile Dan offered his niece. She was there when Andy and Nat, the twins, sniffed at their knuckles as if they liked the smell of them. She was there in Chris’s auburn fringe of hair. Even Ernie, strangely at odds with reality, had his dead sister’s trick of looking up from under his brows.
The link of resemblance must have come from the grandmother whom Camilla had never seen. Old William himself had none of these signs about him. Dwarfed by his sons he was less comely and looked much more aggressive. His face had settled into a fixed churlishness.
He pushed his way through the group of his five sons and looked at his granddaughter through the frame made by shelves of bottles.
‘You’ve come, then,’ he said, glaring at her.
‘Of course. May I go through, Trixie?’
Trixie lifted the counter flap and Camilla went into the Public. Her uncles stood back a little. She held out her hand to her grandfather.
‘Thank you for the message,’ she said. ‘I’ve often wanted to come but I didn’t know whether you’d like to see me.’
‘Us reckoned you’d be too mighty for your mother’s folk.’
Camilla told herself that she would speak very quietly because she didn’t want the invisible Mrs Bünz to hear. Even so, her little speech sounded like a bit of diction exercise. But she couldn’t help that.
‘I’m an Andersen as much as I’m a Campion, Grandfather. Any “mightiness” has been on your side, not my father’s or mine. We’ve always wanted to be friends.’
‘Plain to see you’re as deadly self-willed and upperty as your mother before you,’ he said, blinking at her. ‘I’ll say that for you.’
‘I am very like her, aren’t I? Growing more so, Daddy says.’ She turned to her uncles and went on, a little desperately, with her prepared speech. It sounded, she thought, quite awful. ‘We’ve only met once before, haven’t we? At my mother’s funeral. I’m not sure if I know which is which, even.’ Here, poor Camilla stopped, hoping that they might perhaps tell her. But they only shuffled their feet and made noises in their throats. She took a deep breath and went on. (‘Voice pitched too high,’ she thought.) ‘May I try and guess? You’re the eldest, You’re my Uncle Dan, aren’t you, and you’re a widower with a son. And there are Andy and Nat, the twins. You’re both married but I don’t know what families you’ve got. And then came Mummy. And then you, Uncle Chris, the one she liked so much, and I don’t know if you’re married.’
Chris, the ruddy one, looked quickly at Trixie, turned the colour of his own hair and shook his head.
‘And I’ve already met Uncle Ernie,’ Camilla ended, and heard her voice fade uneasily.
There seemed little more to say. It had been a struggle to say as much as that. There they were with their countrymen’s clothes and boots, their labourers’ bodies and their apparent unreadiness to ease a situation that they themselves, or the old man, at least, had brought about.
‘Us didn’t reckon you’d carry our names so ready,’ Dan said and smiled at her again.
‘Oh,’ Camilla cried, seizing at this, ‘that was easy. Mummy used to tell me I could always remember your names in order because they spelt DANCE: Dan, Andy, Nat, Chris, Ernie. She said she thought Grandfather might have named you that way because of Sword Wednesday and the Dance of the Five Sons. Did you, Grandfather?’
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