What Happened at Hazelwood? by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page B

shut it again. I felt sorry for him, for I saw that his marriage must be pretty awful. In fact we rowed in the same galley, Gerard and I. And if I’d had my wits about me I would have seen that he might be making the same observation.
    ‘Blackfellows?’ said Hippias. He applied himself vigorously to his veal. ‘George and Denzell had dealings with blackfellows – of a sort.’
    Grace was upon this like a flash. ‘Black women?’ she demanded.
    Hippias looked at my unmarried sister-in-law, sizing her up. ‘That’s telling,’ he leered.
    And at that I saw that Hippias was the nastiest of the lot. Not even Mervyn Cockayne could touch quite this. For it was plain to me that although Hippias had intended some innuendo in this matter of George and the blackfellows it had actually nothing to do with women – or at least with immoral relations with women. Hippias was just joining in baiting Grace.
    I’m not fanatical about smut. I suspect that it has a sanative place in the intimate society of young adult males. Aerated by wit, I’m prepared to stick it – even put it across – on the stage. But I don’t like it at my dinner table, and in front of a parlour-maid. I can tell you I felt pretty well through with Simneys that night.
    ‘Yes,’ said George, ‘it all floats back. Blackfellows, buffalo, billabongs and tepid bottled beer. A wonderful life. How eager you must be to get back. And yet how much of England Joyleen must be shown first. How her mind and spirit will expand as she actually sees so much that her education has led her to expect. Can you stop at so dull a place as Hazelwood till Wednesday – or even Thursday? Nicolette, do persuade our cousins to spare us several days.’
    I uttered some decent form of words. It was unfair of George – I was thinking – to silence Mervyn and then embark on so poor an imitation of the little toad’s vein. But here was only another sign that George was not so much in command of the situation as he seemed to claim. And somehow I was alarmed by this. I think I had a feeling that if, for mysterious reasons, he was going to be driven hard by his cousin Hippias he would make up for this disagreeable experience by taking it out of others nearer home.
    I didn’t know that George’s death was going to take place just twenty-seven hours later.
    And I daresay you are just longing for it – or even for a general extinction of the Simneys, as at the conclusion of an Elizabethan play. Well, don’t despair. Of that blunt instrument, at least, we are within reasonable reach now. As to whether any of the others are to die I don’t yet know. Somebody has declared that we shed our sicknesses in books, and perhaps that’s why I’m writing. And possibly the more effective the book the more effective the cure – so I had better build up what suspense I can. Anyway, all those Simneys are alive for the moment. You might say indeed that they have the horrid vitality shown by many of the lower forms of life.
     
    At that meal there was a certain amount of further cryptic talk. I could report it and then later on you could perhaps turn back and see its lurking relevance. But even in this sort of narrative much cryptic talk is tiresome. Certainly I was tired of it at dinner that night. And I was glad when I got the women away to the drawing-room.
    Joyleen walked to the fire and said, ‘Coal!’ with the air of one preferring a mild indictment.
    ‘I expect,’ I said, ‘that you will feel the cold, arriving in winter like this.’
    ‘You should wear plenty of clothes,’ said Grace – and seemed rather to imply that if Joyleen had her way she would appear in nothing but a string of beads and a sarong.
    ‘And wool next the skin,’ said Lucy. ‘But no doubt you will know about wool. The Sussex Hallidays have cousins in Victoria – or is it Queensland? – who are said to have contrived to grow very good wool. Of course, with a special sort of sheep. I expect it would be rather like