Read Online The Bloody Wood by Michael Innes - Free Book Online Page B

She didn’t look pleased. Interesting men, one was constrained to feel, represented a category she judged it unnecessary to approve of. ‘Judith, dear, how delightful you should be at Charne! We must have a tremendous gossip.’ The emphasis with which she said this failed, somehow, to suggest that there was much substance in the proposition. But she took Judith by the arm, and walked her away.
    ‘How splendid the place looks!’ Edward Pendleton said to Appleby. ‘I always enjoy coming to rusticate at Charne.’
    ‘It’s ceasing to be all that rustic. The town will be lapping round it in no time.’
    ‘I know, I know! Terrible, isn’t it? It was Hitler’s war that did it, wouldn’t you say? Producing, I mean, as a kind of undesigned by-product, the first true dawn of scientific medicine. And that – my own trade, and all those wretched moulds and antibiotics – ensuring the survival and proliferation of millions of totally unnecessary little people. Sad, sad!’
    Edward Pendleton, in fact, had his own kind of chat. Appleby listened to it for some time, and then asked a question.
    ‘That chap Fell,’ he said. ‘I rather got the impression you’d met him before?’
    ‘Fell?’ Pendleton looked blank.
    ‘The Martineaus’ GP – whom we met a minute ago.’
    ‘Ah, yes. I’m not aware of ever having spoken to him. What a splendid oak that is, straight ahead! I envy Charles his timber. It’s something one can’t summon round oneself in a hurry. Now, tell me about the family, my dear fellow.’
    Appleby told Edward Pendleton about the family. But he wondered why he had been so firmly shut up.

 
     
8
    Grace Martineau now no longer appeared at lunch time, but when she was well enough she liked one or another member of the household to join her for this meal in her room. On the present occasion this distinction fell to Mrs Gillingham, who had arrived just after noon. It was impossible not to be impressed by Mrs Gillingham, or even to impugn her entire suitability for the difficult role which her hostess was conjectured as being minded to assign her. She had driven herself up in a car which, although less splendid than the Pendleton battleship, seemed to speak of rather more than modest competence. It was not to be conjectured, therefore, that she had an eye on Charne – if, so far, she could be said to have an eye on it at all – out of any pressing sense of material necessity. Again, Mrs Gillingham had, it appeared, a daughter, and this child could be viewed as offering reassurance in two ways. She was conveniently tucked away in a suitably expensive boarding school, and the circumstances of her existing at all proved her mother to have passed an apprenticeship in the crucial power of bearing children.
    Perhaps these facts in themselves would not have taken Barbara Gillingham very far in any mature regard. But there had to be added to them the evident circumstance of her being a very nice woman. Moreover her good looks – for she had good looks – suggested themselves as of a kind that would continue into an autumnal phase, and her cultivation – which one similarly couldn’t doubt – seemed of a kind less showy than hard-wearing. But, above all, Mrs Gillingham incontestably had the gift of repose. She wasn’t stodgy; it would have been misleading and unfair even to describe her as placid; and if she was equally remote from being sprightly – which had been Martine’s derogatory word – there was no reason to apprehend that she would be without her moments of exhilarating vivacity. All in all, she was formidable. Martine’s eyes might be said to have narrowed on her – and Bobby Angrave’s, correspondingly, to have rounded – the moment she entered the house.
    Nor – and this was unusual – did Mrs Martineau appear at tea. This consequently was dispensed by Martine in a small drawing-room not much frequented except for the purpose. Many people, habituated to a great deal of space around them,