‘I see …’ said the Chief-Inspector, suppressing a smile. ‘So you think he was being deliberately rude to you?’
‘I don’t think, I know. He never let a chance go by to mock my most deeply held beliefs. When the Colonel passed some blameless remark about the Great War – you remember, Roger – about how we’d stemmed the tide against the Hun, I observed that being born British meant that one had drawn first prize in the Lottery of Life. Gentry being incapable of offering any plausible argument against that, he simply scoffed. And I mean scoffed!
‘You know, Inspector, until I met him I never really knew the meaning of that word. I mean to say, I know what it looks like, what it physically looks like, when somebody sneers, for example, or frowns or scowls. But scoffs? Well, Raymond Gentry truly, physically, did scoff. He made an extremely indecent noise by blowing saliva through his lips. Obscene little bubbles were actually visible between his front teeth. Ah, I see you don’t believe me, but – Evie? Aren’t I speaking the truth?’
‘Why, yes, Clem, I never thought of it like that,’ said Evadne Mount. ‘Yet you’re right. Gentry really did give a new meaning to the word “scoff”. I assure you, Trubshawe, Clem’s made quite an insightful remark there.’
‘Why, thank you, Evie,’ said the Vicar, unaccustomed to compliments from somebody generally so parsimonious with them.
‘And it’s a remark, if I’m not mistaken,’ said Trubshawe, ‘that brings us to the very crux of the matter.’
‘The crux, you say?’
‘I mean the War. You just referred to the Great War.’
The Vicar blanched. Here it was. Here and now was what he dreaded most. If ever a face was an open book, it was his at that instant.
‘You’ll recall, Vicar,’ the policeman continued, ‘that the first line of Gentry’s notes read: REV – WAR. And, later, Miss Mount made mention of what she called aspersions, aspersions that Gentry cast on your war record. Isn’t that so?’
‘Er … yes,’ said the Vicar, ‘that – that is correct.’
A few seconds elapsed during which neither he nor Trubshawe nor anybody else spoke. Like a group of miscreant schoolboys who, waiting in a morose huddle to be punished by their headmaster, anxiously scrutinise the features of the first boy to emerge from his study for any external clues as to the nature of that punishment, the ffolkeses and their guests were probably thinking as much of their own future plight as of the Vicar’s present one.
‘Would you care to elucidate?’ Trubshawe finally asked.
‘Well, I – I – I don’t really see how …’
‘Come now, sir, we did all agree, did we not? The unvarnished truth? So shall we have it?’
The wretched clergyman, at whom seemingly not even his wife could for the moment bear to look, realised there was no longer any escape.
‘Farrar?’
‘Yes, Vicar?’
‘I wonder if – if I might have a glass of water? My throat seems a little tight. Constricted, somehow.’
‘Why, certainly, Vicar.’
‘Thank you.’
A moment later, having taken a few modest sips, he was ready to continue – or as ready as he’d ever be.
‘Well, you know, I – I took up my post here in 1919 – in January, was it? Or February – oh well, I don’t suppose it really matters.’
‘No, it really doesn’t,’ said the Chief-Inspector drily. ‘Just go on.’
‘Anyway, it was in one or other of the early months of 1919, so not too long after the end of the War, and my predecessor in the parish had been a young man, relatively young, but nevertheless much liked, I might almost say much loved, by his parishioners. All the more so because he’d been killed in action – during one of the last Big Pushes. I ought to explain, too, that he’d been so keen to do his bit for King and Country he’d actually concealed the fact that he was a clergyman and enlisted as a common soldier. Then he was posted to the front, where he died quite the hero’s death. He was mentioned in dispatches, you know, and there was vague talk of a posthumous George Cross.
‘In any event, when I arrived here to take up my living in 1919, I found that his presence, if I may put it that way, was still very, very powerful. Not that there was any resentment against me, I hasten to add – well, not to start with – it was just that the locals hadn’t forgotten the shining example of his courage. I fear I must have struck them as something of a letdown by comparison.
‘That would certainly explain why, when Cynthia and I moved in, the parish was at first a trifle standoffish, a trifle “sniffy”. There was, in particular, a Mrs de Cazalis. She’s our local grande dame and she’d evidently been very “in” with my predecessor. Harker, the village’s odd-job man, had a nickname for her – Vicar’s Pet. You know, like the kind of schoolchild who gets ragged for being Teacher’s Pet?
‘Well, it soon became clear that she expected things to go on just as they had before. My predecessor had been a bachelor, you see, and whilst you might expect that to have counted as a point against him, it had in reality turned out to be the reverse. All the local ladies – now, Inspector, I wouldn’t like to suggest that they were all busybodies – but all the local ladies who participated, don’t you know, who organised our Charity Sales and Mystery Tours and Charabanc Outings for the Old Folk, well, they were absolutely in seventh heaven that there was no interfering vicar’s wife to run these things, which is traditionally the case.
‘Hence it was, at least in the first few months, a rather lonely life for us. It’s a lonely part of the country, anyway, and we had problems making new friends, as we tend to do. So, without thinking of the possible consequences, Cynthia eventually elected to busy herself with all the usual chores of a vicar’s wife and, I’m afraid, only succeeded in putting a few noses out of joint. There was even, at last, a sort of showdown – is that what it’s called? – a showdown in the Vicarage.
‘I can still see them all sitting in our little front room, rattling their teacups in their laps, and after some pointed comments on the very exceptional calibre of my predecessor, on his heroism, all of that, Mrs de Cazalis turned to me and enquired, bold as brass, “And what did you do in the Great War, Vicar?” The italics, needless to say, were hers.’
There was a pregnant pause, and it was the Chief-Inspector, the only one of the Vicar’s listeners not to know his story’s dénouement, who nudged him into continuing.
‘You understand, Inspector,’ said the Vicar, ‘I really didn’t mean to tell a lie. I didn’t. It was almost as though – well, as though I wasn’t stealing the truth – which is what I always think a lie is, you know, a stolen truth – but, as it were, embezzling it.’
This original concept clearly intrigued the policeman.
‘Embezzling the truth? I confess I …’
‘As though I’d temporarily stolen somebody else’s truth to get myself out of a hole, but fully intended to replace it once the crisis was over.
‘Alas,’ he sighed, ‘like so many embezzlers before me, I was to discover that there never does arrive that convenient moment when you’re able to return what you’ve stolen. Before you could say Jack Robinson, I’d gone on stealing other truths that didn’t belong to me, until I found myself – oh dear God forgive me! – I found myself living a permanent lie.’
The poor man now really was on the verge of tears, and his wife would have attempted to offer him comfort, except that she must have realised that at such a point any display of affectionate solidarity on her part would have done for him.
‘Mr Wattis,’ said Trubshawe, ‘I know how difficult this is for you, but I have to ask. What was this “truth” which you – you embezzled? That you too had been a war hero, p’raps?’