‘So you think she slipped and was not pushed?’
‘Yes. She confesses she was digging up a plant. She shouldn’t have been doing that, anyway. Conservation, you know, and all that.’
‘So Allah, the conserver and the judge, pushed her over the cliff to teach her a lesson, but because He is all-merciful, all-compassionate, and because Mohammed is His prophet she was not hurt.’
‘Eh?’ said Garnet, taken aback by this evidence of discipleship. ‘What’s all this about conservers and judges?’
‘My conception of my faith. I am a Mohammedan with Hindoo thoughts. When my boxing career is over I shall found a new religion. My people are good at religion. Swing low, sweet chariot. Jewish, Old Testament. Virgin Mary have a baby boy. Christian, New Testament. The bird of Time has but a little way to fly. Persian, Omar Khayyam. If the red slayer think he slays. Buddha, by understanding English poet of enlightened kind. Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads. Hindoo poem of Rabindranath Tagore. Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law. Aleister Crowley, a bad man, perhaps, but with his ideas I have sympathy, as I have with witchcraft watched over by the Great Mother and the Horned God. All religions are good in their own way, and my religion will be a mixture of them all. Meanwhile, I am thinking like Muhammad Ali, the Muslim way.’
‘I don’t know why you say you won’t pass your O levels,’ said Garnet.
‘I think too much, that is why. O levels do not require thought, only a good memory to produce what my teachers have said.’
‘Well, to get back to the subject of my grandmother’s fall down the cliff—’
‘You say it was only a fall, not a push.’
‘If she’d really been pushed, she would have landed on the rocks below. No, no. She lost her footing and fell just a dozen feet or so. She bellowed for help because she couldn’t scramble back to the path again, although you or I or an active girl or woman could have done it easily.’
‘And you helped her up to the top.’
‘Yes, that’s about it. She’s a proud and obstinate old lady and she would never admit that other people had been right and that she ought not to take these walks and scrambles alone.’
On the following day, however, Garnet was compelled to alter his opinion about Romula’s mishap on the cliff path. He set out early in the morning from Seawards and took the rough, hilly route which Parsifal had followed to reach Campions and concealed himself in the woods there until he saw Rupert come out by the wicket gate. He waited until the sound of Rupert’s car could no longer be heard and then announced himself to Diana, who had come to the wicket gate to let her dogs out for a run in the woods.
‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Will you give me some breakfast?’
Diana was in shorts and a bolero which showed her midriff. Garnet thought she was beginning to show her age, too. For the first time he saw her as a pathetic figure, a woman trying to protect herself against the onset of middle age. She let the dogs loose and held the gate open for him.
‘Sometimes you are in the right place at the right time; sometimes you’re not,’ she said.
‘You mean there’s no breakfast for me?’
‘Of course I don’t mean that.’ He followed her in to the house. ‘Will eggs and bacon do?’
‘Yes, and I’ll cook them if you’ll allow me. I know how I like them done.’
‘All right. Do some for me, too. I never eat breakfast with Rupert. He’s always in such a hurry.’
‘Gone to Truro, has he?’
‘No, botanising for this new book of his. Sometimes I wish he’d fall into a quarry and break his neck.’
‘Or over the cliffs like my grandmother,’ said Garnet, dealing with his cookery in an expert manner. He began to laugh. ‘The old fraud,’ he concluded.
‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Diana.
‘What I said to Gamaliel yesterday. She was no more pushed over the cliff than I was. She lost her footing and tumbled down, that’s all, but she made up that story to forestall criticism. My mother and Fiona are always warning her against taking these cliff walks on her own.’
‘But Garnet, I think she was pushed.’
‘Oh, well, all right, if you think so.’
‘Garnet, I don’t just think. I know.’
‘Don’t tell me you got behind her and did the pushing, because I shan’t believe you.’
‘Maybe not, but what would you say if I told you that the same thing happened to me?’
‘What! You’re joking!’
‘All right. Is this a joke?’ She came up to the stove and spread out the palms of her hands almost under his nose. They were badly lacerated. ‘Gorse prickles,’ she said. ‘I was lucky enough to grab a bush as I went over the edge. I’d gone out with the dogs to give them a run and I had knelt down to look at Beethoven’s paw, because he was limping, when somebody gave me a dirty great shove in the back and sent me flying.’
‘Good Lord! Did you see anybody?’
‘No. The dogs set up hell, of course, and the next thing I knew was that I’d fetched up clutching this gorsebush.’
‘But nobody would push you over a cliff.’
‘The fact remains that somebody did.’
‘One of the dogs lurched against you and you imagined the rest.’
‘I hope your eggs and bacon choke you!’
‘Oh, well, they’re ready. Where’s the toast?’
‘There isn’t any. You’ll have to make do with bread.’
‘That cliff-path ought to be patrolled. There must be some kind of maniac about, unless—’
‘Unless what?’
‘Unless somebody with a grudge wants to murder somebody in our family.’
‘Why pick on me and your grandmother?’
‘Somebody knows something about her Will and possibly the same person knows about you and me.’
‘The only person who cares anything about our relationship is your grandmother herself. At least, that is what I suppose. Oh, no, she isn’t, though! What about the black boy? He resents our relationship, I’ll bet, and he thinks, after the way he greased round her at that dinner party, that he stands to gain something when she dies.’
‘Don’t talk such utter nonsense! Gamaliel doesn’t have any expectations at all.’
‘Yes, he does—well, most likely he does. At the dinner party Mrs Leyden promised that she would have him taught to ride and made a tremendous fuss of him.’
‘Gamaliel’s a good kid, one of the best.’
‘That’s what you think. You and Parsifal have your occupations and Blue has her painting. How much do any of you really keep tabs on that boy? I tell you, Garnet, you have no idea what goes on in his mind, no idea at all.’
Remembering a recent conversation with Gamaliel—‘A bad man, perhaps, but with his ideas I have sympathy’— Garnet began to wonder whether she was right. What did he know of what went on in Gamaliel’s mind?
Chapter 6
The Smugglers’ Inn
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With becoming modesty the hotel called itself The Smugglers’ Inn. It was the kind of place which attracts the same visitors year after year. It was expensive, but not ruinously so, children were not encouraged and dogs were barred. It was a family business and Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley had visited it at various times over the years and had known the proprietors, grandfather, father and son, for more than half a century. Old John Poltrethy had been dead for the last twenty years, his son Paul had retired and bought the house opposite the hotel, and the Smugglers’ was now in the possession of young Trevelyan Poltrethy, known to his constant and appreciative guests as Trev.