Appleby at Allington by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online

years?’
    ‘Certainly. I can remember her in bonnets and long clothes. Queer things they dressed infants in in those days.’
    ‘Would you say that, from the first, she was peculiarly adept at getting her own way?’
    ‘That puts it a little strongly, perhaps.’ Wilfred Osborne wasn’t at all at a loss before this question. ‘But she had marked strength of character from the first. Most important in the – what would you call it? – battle of life. I often reflected that the fellow who married her would bless himself. Splendid housewife, too – eh? Capital lunch.’

 
     
5
    It appeared that the annual fête at Allington Park was not quite so modest and local an affair as Owain Allington had intimated. People came from both the Dreams (Stony Dream and the Applebys’ own Long Dream), from Linger, and even from Boxer’s Bottom. None of them had any direct interest in the objects of this particular charitable effort. In the village hall of Allington all the doors had come off their hinges and half the windows had fallen out of their frames – but who at Linger cared about that? In inclement weather rainwater dripped down the neck of the Reverend Mr Scrape as he murmured from his pulpit to Owain Allington, Owain Allington’s farm-manager, Owain Allington’s farm-manager’s wife, old Scurl (who rang the bell), and the assembled young of Allington village, penned mute in the chancel, and facetiously referred to as the choir. Yet this would hardly have struck anybody in Boxer’s Bottom as anything out of the way. The grand project for a changing-room and lavatory on the new playing-field (gift of Owain Allington Esquire), if bruited in any of these other rural centres, would doubtless have been commented upon as a mere delusion of grandeur.
    Nevertheless, people poured into Allington Park. The men came to shoot clay pigeons under the superintendence of Owain Allington’s keeper, and also in the hope that one or another of their children would win not a lollipop or a comic but a bottle of whisky or gin from the threepenny lottery. The children came to ride the ponies of their more fortunately circumstanced contemporaries, to scream, to run, to collide with each other and with the adults, and occasionally to fall into the lake. The women came to gossip – and in the perennial hope that the gentry, whether in miserable ignorance or to curry favour, would be selling their fruitcakes and chutney and jam well below market prices. These may be declared the main motivating forces at play within this wholesome English festival.
    It was a beautiful afternoon, and the sunlight glittered on the lake as Appleby swung the car into the long drive that led straight up to the north front of the house. The castle was visible across the water and slightly to the west; what wasn’t visible was the scaffolding erected for the son et lumière . Sure enough, it had vanished, and in its place was a marquee and some smaller tents. A faint waft of music came across the lake. Owain Allington’s flag was flying from his housetop.
    ‘Quick work,’ Appleby said. And then, suddenly, he exclaimed. ‘Do you know? I think they’ve taken away the gazebo-affair too.’
    ‘It would have been rather a skeleton at the feast, eh?’ Osborne suggested. ‘At a junketing like this you don’t want a standing reminder – quite literally standing, one may say – of a rather gruesome happening the day before.’
    ‘True enough. But I’m surprised at the police. When you have an unexplained fatality in a temporary structure like that, you don’t generally whisk it out of existence twelve hours later.’
    ‘Owain would have insisted on it.’ Osborne spoke innocently if a shade dryly. ‘It’s wonderful what can be insisted on by a grandee – wouldn’t you say?’
    ‘Particularly in the green heart of England,’ Judith amplified. She had marked her husband’s disapproval, and regarded it as highly promising. ‘Perhaps, John, you’ll be