Christmas at Candleshoe by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online

inherited an instinct for brisk and open commerce. Had the impulse moved her, she might have offered Lord Scattergood in his own octagon room a round figure for everything within sight. She would be capable of doing the same thing – Grant reflects with a fine imaginative flight – while being shown the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London. And she believes that she has discovered Candleshoe. Horridly pat, like an actor taking a heavily signalled cue in some banal play, the place had peeped out from behind its beech-trees in the very instant that the good lady was discoursing on the satisfaction of rescuing a period piece from oblivion.
    Grant does not at all object to his mother’s buying a derelict English manor-house. What he has glimpsed of Candleshoe pleases him, and he knows that his sisters would adore it. But Oxford, although he is doubtless to derive large benefits from his residence there in the end, has rather muddled him for the time, and he has a morbid fear that his mother is going to do something crude. How is he to circumvent this? There comes to him the inspiration that he must be crude himself – so crude that his mother will at once be all reaction. So he turns to Mr Armigel. ‘Say,’ he offers conversationally, ‘what sort of sanitation do you have here?’
    They are walking down a short covered way of no great antiquity, and the house is in flank before them. Mrs Feather nearly drops her bag – half-crown, cheque-book, and all. She remembers that it was very hot in the gardens at Benison, and wonders anxiously if Grant has suffered a sun-stroke. Mr Armigel however appears to take the inquiry entirely in good part.
    ‘Now, that is an interesting question – a very interesting question, indeed. Only, I think you use rather a grand word, if I may say so, for anything of the sort at Candleshoe. We never have had anything that you could quite term that.’
    ‘Is that so, sir?’
    ‘In fact, all that I can recall at the moment, are two or three quite small and nasty affairs.’
    ‘I see.’
    ‘And, of course, that sort of thing has fallen more and more out of favour in England. We have lost the taste for it. In your country, I understand, the posture of affairs is somewhat different. The thing keeps on cropping up.’
    ‘Well, yes, sir.’ Grant is rather at a loss. ‘In fact we just aren’t happy without it.’
    ‘Deplorable!’ Mr Armigel shakes his venerable head, and for the first time speaks with some severity. ‘But I should be happy to tell you our own experiences, if your interest runs that way. They are, I fear, malodorous. And underground.’
    At this Mrs Feather stops in her tracks. ‘It just occurs to me’, she says, ‘to inquire what you suppose my son to be talking about?’
    Mr Armigel turns to her courteously. ‘Assassination, madam. The topic is an interesting if repulsive one. And as it is commonly applied in England only to homicide of some political or large public significance, I have remarked that it is not quite an appropriate word in a quiet place like this. But we have had our bloodstained pages, 1 am bound to admit.’
    Grant wonders whether Mr Armigel is really a little deaf. Meanwhile they have turned aside into a ruined garden, perhaps that they may approach the house by way of its main façade. The garden is like the faded and shrunken ghost of something at Hatfield or Longford – intricately formal within a great rectangular hedge grown wild and ragged, and with all its ordered elaboration of arabesques and knots overgrown and only in part distinguishable, like a schoolchild’s geometrical drawing largely obliterated by the sweep of an India rubber. At the far end is a small pool covered with duckweed, and in the middle of this an eroded Nereid patiently clasps a lichened shell from which water has ceased to issue a long time ago. Grant recalls the gardens at Benison and their great jet d’eau . Presently, he thinks, time’s impatient India rubber will