Read Online Buffet for Unwelcome Guests by Christianna Brand - Free Book Online Page B

away from papa, playing in an amateurish way with stocks and shares, up in London; and horrid to his step-son, Bill, who, brought into the family by the now departed wife, had immediately been pushed off to relatives in the United States to be out of Mr. Caxton’s way. And he was horrid to poor young Dr. Ross who, having devotedly attended the wife in her last illness, now as devotedly attended Mr. Caxton’s own soaring blood-pressure and resultant apoplectic fits; and horrid to his few friends and many poor relations, all of whom he kept on tenterhooks with promises of remembrances in his will when one of the choking fits should have carried him off. He would no doubt have been horrid to Inspector Cockrill; but—Mr. Caxton being incapable of keeping peaceably to a law designed for other people as well as for himself—Cockie got in first and was horrid to him . It must have been Elizabeth, he reflected, who had promoted his invitation to the wedding.
    The little nurse had stayed on to help with things after the poor wife died; had gradually drifted into indisperisability and so into accepting the pudgy hand of the widower. Not without some heart-searching however; Inspector Cockrill himself had, in his off-duty moments, lent a shoulder in those days of Mr. Caxton’s uninhibited courtship; and she had had a little weep there, and told him of the one great love lost to her, and how she no longer looked for that kind of happiness in marriage; but was sick of work, sick of loneliness, sick of insecurity…‘But a trained nurse like you can get wonderful jobs,’ Inspector Cockrill had protested. ‘Travel all over the place, see the world.’ She had seen the world, she said, and it was too big, it scared her; she wanted to stay put, she wanted a home: and a home meant a man. ‘There are other men?’ he had suggested; and she had burst out that there were indeed other men, too many men, all men—it was dreadful, it was frightening, to be the sort of woman that, for some unknown reason, all men looked at, all men gooped at, all men—wanted. ‘With him, at least I’ll be safe; no one will dare to—to drool over me like that when he’s around.’ Inspector Cockrill had somewhat hurriedly disengaged his shoulder. He was a younger man in those days of Mr. Caxton’s second marriage and subsequent departure from this life; and taking no chances.
    And so the affair had gone forward. The engagement and imminent wedding had been announced and in the same breath the household staff—faithful apparently in death as in life, to the late Mrs. Caxton—had made their own announcement: they had Seen it Coming and were now sweeping out in a body, preferring, thank you very much, not to continue in service under That Nurse. The bride, un-chaperoned, had perforce modestly retired to a London hotel and from thence left most of the wedding arrangements to Son Theo and Step-son Bill—Theo running up and down from London, Bill temporarily accommodated for the occasion beneath the family roof.
    Despite the difficulties of its achievement, Mr. Caxton was far from satisfied with the wedding breakfast. ‘I never did like oysters, Elizabeth, as you must very well know. Why couldn’t we have had smoked salmon? And I don’t like cold meat, I don’t like it in any form. Not in any form,’ he insisted, looking once again at his virgin queen with an ugly leer. Inspector Cockrill surprised upon the faces of all the males present, drones and workers alike, a look of malevolence which really quite shocked him.
    She protested, trembling. ‘But, Cyrus, it’s been so difficult with no servants. We got what was easiest.’
    ‘Very well, then. Having got it, let us have it.’ He gestured to the empty oyster shells. ‘With all these women around—am I to sit in front of a dirty plate for ever?’
    The female relations upon this broad hint rose from their places like a flock of sitting pheasants and began scurrying to and fro, clearing used