As it happened, the mysterious Mr Bunnett’s name cropped up at dinner, though in a context very far removed from church music. Nigel was a firm believer in first impressions. He thought that you could find out more about a person in the first ten minutes than in the next ten days, because then the mind was unprejudiced, the intuition like a smooth wax tablet ready to take a clear imprint. So, while he sipped his sherry and talked trivialities with Mrs Cammison, he was closely observing her and her husband. It was not easy to recognise in this swarthy, taciturn doctor the harum-scarum undergraduate of ten years ago. Cammison’s face was peculiarly unrevealing, his voice quiet and non-committal. Two vertical furrows above his nose might indicate worry or concentration. There was a sort of stealthiness about his movement, like a cat’s, and at the same time a suggestion of perfect nervous co-ordination. His hands were very quiet and very sensitive—a surgeon’s hands. They seemed to handle knife, fork and glass of their own volition, as though they could go on working if their owner was asleep or dead. Nigel only saw Herbert Cammison smile once during dinner and that was at his wife during a lull in the conversation: it was a smile of curious warmth and complicity.
The relations between these two were obviously of the best. There was none of that slightly petulant, semi-affectionate verbal sparring in which ill-assorted couples are apt to indulge before strangers. Nor did they compete with each other at all for their guest’s attention. Nigel was wondering idly why Sophie Cammison, with her dark hair and high colouring, wore such insipid pastel shades instead of something more crude and barbaric, when the name of Bunnett cropped up. Cammison had asked him would he have beer or whisky. Nigel chose beer. As he fingered the bottle, he saw it was labelled, ‘BUNNETT’S BREWERY, MAIDEN ASTBURY, DORSET.’
‘Is this something to do with the man I’m meeting tonight?’ he asked, and was instantly aware of a tension in the atmosphere, a guarded deliberation in the way Mrs Cammison answered:
‘Yes, he owns the local brewery.’ She went on quickly and smoothly, ‘Mr Bunnett wanted to meet Mr Strangeways, so I asked him with a few others to come round after the meeting.’
‘Oh,’ said Herbert Cammison. ‘I see.’
On the face of it, one couldn’t imagine two more ordinary remarks: but Nigel somehow felt that Mrs Cammison’s tone implied, ‘Don’t show surprise, Herbert: leave me to manage this’, and her husband’s answer a more than superficial acquiescence.
‘Well,’ said Cammison in his usual sombre tones, ‘here’s luck.’ He raised his glass and waggled his little finger at Nigel—a gesture that suddenly bridged the gulf between Oxford and Maiden Astbury. ‘I wonder are we drinking Truffles tonight,’ he added.
‘Drinking truffles?’ asked Nigel in amazement.
‘Herbert!’ Mrs Cammison remonstrated. ‘Don’t be so disgusting! Anyway, that brew wouldn’t have matured yet.’
‘I don’t mind. It would add body,’ said Herbert equably.
‘What on earth is all this about? An old Dorset recipe?’
‘Not exactly,’ Cammison answered. ‘Truffles fell into one of the open coppers a week or two ago. Eustace Bunnett’s dog. A happy release for the abominable little beast, I should call it. Bunnett made the hell of a to-do about it, I believe.’
‘A happy release?’
‘Yes,’ said Cammison crisply. ‘I suspect Eustace Bunnett of sadist tendencies. Amongst other things.’
‘Herbert!’ his wife exclaimed. It was something more than the conventional ‘shocked’ expostulation.
Herbert replied grimly:
‘Well, perhaps “suspect” is the wrong word. We all know——’
‘Do you mind people asking questions after your address?’ Sophie interrupted hastily. Nigel grimaced.
‘That’s part of the bargain, I’m afraid,’ he said.
When dinner was over they walked along to the hall. It was a dusty, fusty, depressing place, smelling of varnish and stewed tea—the centre, Nigel imagined, of all Maiden Astbury’s more gruesome activities, from jumble sales to inquests. The intelligentsia, so to speak, of the town was already assembled. Nigel was introduced to a strapping great woman of aggressively civic aspect who might have sat, suitably draped, for a statue of the Goddess of Public Works (‘this is Miss Mellors, our president’), and followed in her wake up to the dais. The Goddess of Public Works breathed heavily on him, took out a bottle of eau-de-Cologne, liberally lustrated herself and boomed at Nigel:
‘Glad you could come. Good turn-out tonight. Feeling nervous?’
‘Paralysed. However, I’ve fortified myself with some of your Mr Bunnett’s excellent booze. Good stuff, isn’t it?’
‘Indeed? “Good” is not the word I should apply myself. I am vice-president of the Blue Ribbon Society. We aim to stamp out liquor-drinking.’
‘Oh,’ said Nigel, reflecting that anything Miss Mellors stamped on would stand little chance of survival. He fidgeted with his notes and began to scrutinise the audience. Lower-middlebrow, he decided, was the prevailing tendency: he began to wonder whether a lecture on the post-war poets was quite their dish of tea. Still, it was too late to do anything about it now. The front row was occupied, reading from left to right, by two ladies with ear-trumpets huge as cornucopias; a small boy sucking a lollipop and looking mutinous, as well he might be, Nigel considered, after being dragged to a party like this; a bucolic woman—his mother, presumably, who looked as if she would be more at home with fatstock prices than with sprung rhythm; an old gentleman with hand already cupped expectantly to ear; two nuns; three empty chairs; a beaming curate.
‘Do—er—all these people belong to the Literary Society?’ he asked Miss Mellors timidly.
‘Oh, no. We threw the meeting open to the public. Coffee and sandwiches are being provided afterwards.’
‘Oh,’ thought Nigel, ‘so that accounts for it. She might have put it a little more tactfully, though. Bread and circuses, with me figuring as the circus, I suppose.’
‘Only respectable people are admitted, of course,’ said Miss Mellors.
‘Of course.’
As Miss Mellors rose to introduce him—in words that were neither few nor remarkably well-chosen, Nigel resumed his study of the audience. His eye was attracted by a gentleman in the third row who was regarding him coldly through a pair of pince-nez: Nigel took an instant dislike to him; his roundish face and small, petulant mouth contrasted disagreeably with something mean, ascetic and arrogant in the eyes. Without removing his gaze from Nigel, the man made a remark to a faded, pathetic-looking little woman by his side, twisting his mouth towards her contemptuously. She looked up at him as she answered, the white of her eyes showing in an expression horribly fawning and docile—as though she were his dog. Some distance behind, Nigel caught sight of his host and hostess, Herbert unsmiling, self-contained as ever, his wife grinning mischievously at Nigel. Away to the right sat a young man in a stained tweed coat, a khaki shirt and side-whiskers, manifestly trying to dissociate himself from the whole proceedings. The contemptuous pout of his lips reminded Nigel vaguely of somebody—who could it be, now? Beside him sat another young man, who appeared to be already asleep: ‘the local press, no doubt,’ said Nigel to himself. Miss Mellors was whipping herself up to her peroration, speaking in an affected mimsy sort of voice that she reserved presumably for cultural pronouncements: Nigel preferred her normal, unmitigated boom.
‘… and I am sure we all feel privileged to have such a distinguished author with us tonight. Mr Strangeways’ fame in another field is well known to us. No doubt, as an eminent detective, he will be able to give us some clues as to this modern poetry, and I feel sure that most of us need them. Ha! ha!’ (‘Hear, hear!’ unexpectedly roared the old gentleman with his hand cupped to his ear.) ‘Well, you have not come here to listen to me, so without more ado I will call upon Mr Nigel Strangeways to give us his delightful lecture. Mr Strangeways.’
Nigel rose and gave them his delightful lecture …
When it was
over, and the coffee and sandwich binge had ended, Miss Mellors called for questions.
A gentleman with a white moustache and mottled complexion instantly rose and launched into a philippic against the alleged bolshevist tendencies of the younger poets. His speech ended on a note of interrogation; but as it had contained only rhetorical questions, Nigel had to content himself with replying that there was no doubt a great deal in what the last speaker had said.
A rather pretty young woman got up, blushing, and said that there seemed to her to be no music in modern poetry.
Nigel quoted a number of passages to refute this heresy.
A considerably less pretty young woman, with protruding teeth and a theosophical glint in her eye, asked:
‘What about the music of the spheres?’
This was the first question—in the strictly grammatical sense—that Nigel had received: but, as he did not know the answer, he had to remain silent. At this impasse, the young man in the khaki shirt brought relief.
‘What is your opinion of surrealism?’ he asked truculently.
Nigel translated his opinion of surrealism into comparatively uncensorable language. The young man then showed signs of making a fighting speech, but was quelled simultaneously by a nasty look from Miss Mellors and by the uprising of the gentleman to whom Nigel had taken an instant dislike.
‘Mr Bunnett,’ said Miss Mellors.
‘So that is Mr Bunnett,’ thought Nigel: ‘I might have guessed.’
All heads turned as the local brewer adjusted his pince-nez and gave a dry cough.
‘I don’t think,’ he said in a dry, crackling voice, ‘that we can profitably concern ourselves with surrealism. We may not be experts on artistic questions’—his little mouth twisted sideways towards the last speaker—‘but at least we can recognise stark lunacy when we see it.’
‘Hear, hear!’ exclaimed the mottled gentleman.
Mr Bunnett removed his pince-nez and pointed them at Nigel.
‘Now, sir. You were saying, I think, that modern poets feel themselves bound to the truth, to the exploration of reality, however ugly or painful it—and often, I fear, the poetical results too—may be. Now this is my point. You may think me an old fogey, but I read my Tennyson, my Browning, my—er—Shakespeare, and I don’t want reality in my poetry. There is quite enough of it in ordinary life. If I want reality, I look at the butcher’s hook.’
Mr Bunnett paused meaningly. The faded woman beside him tittered, a signal for polite laughter from the rest of the audience.
‘No, sir,’ proceeded Mr Bunnett, his voice throbbing, rather as though he had pulled out a vox humana stop; ‘what I ask the poet for is Beauty: I ask him to make me forget the ugliness and difficulties of this world, to lead me into a fairy garden.’
‘I am sure, sir,’ rejoined Nigel in his politest and most non-committal voice, ‘that no modern poet would wish to lead you up the fairy garden path.’
There was an instant of anxious silence, as the audience sought to assess the exact significance of this remark. Then a colder silence set in like the Arctic night, broken only by a sound—which might have been a snore or a snort—from the local press.
‘It evidently doesn’t do to sauce your Mr Bunnett in this town,’ said Nigel as he walked back with Mrs Cammison to her house.
‘No,’ she replied evenly: ‘he is highly respected, as they say.’ Suddenly she began to chuckle, and waggling an imaginary pair of pince-nez at Nigel, rasped in the most exact imitation of Mr Bunnett’s tones:
‘I ask the poet to lead me into a fairy garden.’ Her voice changed. She was saying, half to herself, ‘A fairy garden. Yes. Perhaps it’s not so incongruous. The fairies were malevolent spirits, weren’t they?’
Nigel hesitated, decided against the question he would have liked to ask, and said lightly:
‘You’re a remarkably good mimic.’
‘Yes, so they tell me. You ought to see this street in moonlight: there are lovely shadows. The full moon is just over, though.’
What a queer mixture of straightforward and mysterious this woman was! Her talk of moonlight and shadows for some reason put Brahms’ ‘Sapphic Ode’ into Nigel’s head. He began to hum it gently. He was still humming it when they stopped at the front door and Sophie Cammison put her hand on his arm and said:
‘Nigel. Don’t sauce Mr Bunnett any more, will you?’
He had never heard her voice sound more neutral and equable. Nor was there anything in her words to explain the little shiver that ran up his back, as though the spirit of fear itself had laid one icy and deliberate finger upon him.
Five minutes later Mrs Cammison’s comfortable, untidy drawing-room was filled with people. Miss Mellors occupied the greater part of one sofa. Nigel was introduced to Eustace Bunnett and the pathetic-looking woman, his wife; then to the young man in the khaki shirt, Gabriel Sorn; then to several others, whose names he did not catch. Herbert Cammison was attending to the drinks, pouring them out with noticeable dexterity and holding the glasses up to the light as if they were test-tubes. He turned to Miss Mellors, his dark face quite expressionless.
‘Whisky, sherry, a cocktail or tomato-juice, Miss Mellors?’
‘You naughty man!’ she laughed roguishly; ‘are you trying to make me break the pledge?’
The doctor was evidently a favourite.
‘Mrs Bunnett?’
She started a little, and said breathlessly:
‘Oh, me? Sherry. Just a little sherry, please,’ then looked round apologetically at her husband.
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have some ice-water, Emily?’ asked Eustace Bunnett in his precise, crackling voice, jingling a bunch of keys in his pocket. There was a moment’s embarrassing pause. Then, simultaneously, Dr Cammison said dourly:
‘There is no ice-water’, and Emily Bunnett, catching Nigel’s eye, flushed painfully and said:
‘No, dear, I think I will have some sherry.’
Nigel observed a faint contraction of Bunnett’s cheek muscles. He wondered how long ago was the last occasion on which Mrs Bunnett had asserted herself: no doubt she would be made to pay for it later: Nigel found himself disliking the brewer more and more.
For a while the conversation was general. Then Gabriel Sorn came up to Nigel and began talking about surrealism. He talked well. Soon the others were listening. When Sorn realised this, his enthusiastic, rather naïve manner changed. His mouth twisted into a theatrically cynical expression, and he said, ‘Of course, the advantage of the method is that you are not responsible—not consciously—for anything you create, and therefore you’re not open to criticism.’
‘Aren’t you betraying your beliefs now?’ asked Nigel gently. The young man gave him a startled, almost respectful glance; then took a gulp at his whisky—he had been drinking pretty heavily—and exclaimed:
‘It’s not the first time. I spend my life betraying them. Didn’t you know that I am the brewery bard?’
Eustace Bunnett took off his pince-nez and opened his mouth, but Sorn forestalled him.
‘Oh, yes,’ he went on wildly, ‘you must have seen some of my—occasional verses, shall we call them?
“North, south, east and west,
Bunnett’s beers are still the best.”
Eustace Bunnett cut in, his voice suave as ice:
‘Mr Sorn does some of our publicity work, Mr Strangeways, amongst his—er—other duties.’
‘Well,’ said Nigel, ‘it certainly gives you a public. I’m all for poetry being popular. Get the ordinary man used to the idea of verse—on hoardings, the films, anywhere—and there’ll be more chance of his wanting to read serious work.’
‘I don’t agree,’ said Sorn: ‘poetry can never be a popular medium again. It will have to appeal to a small circle of highly-trained, sensitive persons. I——’
‘Now, Gabriel,’ Mr Bunnett interrupted, ‘we can’t have you monopolising our distinguished guest. Run along and talk to Mrs Cammison.’
S
orn’s fists clenched. Nigel was terrified for a moment that there might be a scene. Then the young man’s shoulders drooped; he kicked the fender childishly and moved away. Mr Bunnett clearly disapproved of his employees muscling in on the limelight. He now straddled his short legs in front of the fireplace, made a movement with his hands as though straightening an invisible piece of blotting-paper on an imaginary table before him, and said:
‘I have a little problem for you, Mr Strangeways—in your detective rather than your literary capacity.’
Nigel received the impression that everyone in the room had been frozen into immobility, in the middle of a word or a gesture: it reminded him of the children’s game called ‘Grandmother’s Steps’. Mr Bunnett had his audience where he wanted them.
‘Yes,’ he proceeded, ‘I am sure it would interest you. A fortnight ago, on the second of this month, to be precise—my fox-terrier, Truffles, disappeared. He was found later when my men were cleaning out one of the open coppers. The flesh, of course, had been all absorbed, but we identified him by the metal tag on his collar.’
Eustace Bunnett paused impressively.
‘But where do I come in?’ asked Nigel.
‘I understand that you are interested in crime,’ said the brewer in a measured, perfectly serious voice: ‘there is not the least doubt in my mind that THE DOG WAS MURDERED.’