Mrs Turnbull rejoined me just as the coffee arrived, looking rather revolting with bare legs and sleeves cut short to the shoulder. I had kept my little jacket around my shoulders and I had to try hard not to cradle the coffee cup in my hands for warmth when she passed it to me.
‘Yes, poor Mr Dudgeon,’ I said again, as we took our first sips.
Mrs Turnbull looked rather drawn both ways at this. She wanted nothing more than to launch into all that she felt about the death, but she did not want to start from a point of sympathizing with the departed. She pursed her mouth and made a tsk-ing sound.
‘The children are terribly unnerved by it all,’ she said.
‘Your children?’ I asked, wondering why that should be so.
‘In a sense,’ she answered. ‘My husband and I have not been blessed with children of our own, and so we think of all his charges as our children. And, as I say, they are beginning to make up silly stories about it already to frighten themselves with.’
‘It was most unfortunate,’ I said. ‘Dozens of them must have been right there on the spot when he fell. One can only hope that it was all over so quickly that they could be led away before they really latched on to what was happening.’
‘If only that were so,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘But I’m afraid the parents, nine times out of ten, take no care at all to keep their talk away from little ears. And when they try to be discreet they simply confuse the children even more. By the very next day, there were half a dozen different versions of what had happened, all wildly fanciful, of course. I heard them regaling one another as they sat having their picnics. Quite tiny children some of them and you would not believe what they came out with.’
‘Oh, I think I would,’ I said, laughing. ‘I’ve been exposed to the Dudgeons next door.’
‘The who?’ said Mrs Turnbull.
‘Next door to Robert and Chrissie,’ I said. ‘The little red-headed scamps. They have some simply bloodcurdling tales to tell of what goes on in those woods.’
‘Well,’ said Mrs Turnbull, frowning slightly, ‘there we cannot blame the parents. Donald is one of our stalwarts.’
‘Really?’ I said, wondering to what manner of stalwart she was alluding.
‘Oh yes, a tireless worker for the cause.’
I racked my brain briefly to determine which cause this might be. He did seem to have a green thumb, but could horticulture, even to such as the Turnbulls, really be called ‘a cause’?
‘He is quite the most charismatic speaker on our entire summer circuit,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘His success rate astonishes even me sometimes. In fact, I have suggested to him that he would make an excellent lay-preacher, but he’s a religious conservative through and through. He wouldn’t hear of it.’
I was having to work pretty hard by now to stop myself from gaping. Charismatic? A speaker? A lay-preacher, even?
‘You seem surprised, Mrs Gilver,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘Have you and Donald met?’
‘I have met him, just briefly,’ I said. ‘And more to the point I’ve seen the whisky bottles on the rubbish heap outside his cottage. I shouldn’t have thought he was lay-preacher material at all.’
Mrs Turnbull threw back her head and let out a peal of laughter. Happy as I always am to provide entertainment for my fellow man, I felt the stirrings of annoyance as wave after wave of chuckles issued from her. I was glad to see that she slopped some coffee on to the lap of her dress, which was rather pale, and I hoped it left a stain.
‘He speaks in our Temperance tent,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘And each time he does, men flock to the front to hand over their bottles and watch him pour them out into the ground. It’s a marvellous sight, Mrs Gilver. But I suppose it does mean that he ends up with more than a few empties!’ She was laughing again, and this time I had the grace to smile a little with her.
‘Well, so much for my judgement of character then,’ I said with what I thought was great magnanimity. ‘I thought he looked a born drinker. In fact, I thought he was drunk!’
‘Appearances can be deceptive,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘It’s not the first time poor Donald, with his looks what they are, has been taken for one of the lost lambs instead of the shepherd. But he is as fierce a foe of the demon drink as any man born and he is leading his children along the straight path in the most determined way.’
I thought wryly to myself that he might care to widen his scope a little. They were perhaps well drilled in the evils of drink but their minds ran far from the lessons of Sunday school when at play in the woods.
‘Well, I’m glad for the sake of the children and their mother to have the source of all the bottles cleared up,’ I said. I was merely making chit-chat, but to my horror Mrs Turnbull read rather more into it than I had meant.
‘You’re of our mind?’ she said. ‘I had heard that at Mrs de Cassilis’s little party, you had a cocktail in your hand. But I’m delighted to hear it.’
I began to gabble. ‘Well, no, that is, yes. You did. I’m not. I can’t abide whisky but I’m not a teetotaller. Not that I’d say I’m a drinker, you understand. I’m – you know, a glass of sherry before lunch, a cocktail or two, wine with dinner and perhaps a little something afterwards…’ I ground to a halt, thinking that this list sounded positively debauched when one said it out loud in one breath like that. ‘Moderation in all things,’ I finished, lamely.
‘The doctrine of moderation in all things,’ said Mrs Turnbull, ‘is as harmful as it is hypocritical.’ I blinked. ‘That may sound radical,’ she went on. I had been thinking it sounded insufferably rude, but she was welcome to call it radical if she chose. ‘But no one actually means moderation in all things. No one really advocates moderation in murder, moderation in slavery.’ This was obviously a pre-prepared speech, one which had been wheeled out many a time before now and would be many more times to come. What a cheek, to make me sit through it here in her parlour where etiquette prevented me from escape!
‘In short, moderation is only to be recommended where the phenomenon in question is essentially harmless.’
‘I don’t agree,’ I said, which was a bald statement to make in any normal social intercourse, but as my sons would say ‘she started it’. ‘I think moderation can be safely advocated if the… stuff,’ I had forgotten her wording, ‘is harmless in moderation.’
‘Oh, but my dear Mrs Gilver,’ she said, earnestly coming to sit on the edge of her seat and leaning towards me, ‘it’s not. It’s poison.’
Under the present circumstances, I felt I could say nothing in argument against that. Mr Dudgeon’s intake had been far from moderate, it was true, but he was on his way to be buried that very morning and I was in no heart to champion whisky any further. One point worth noting in passing, I thought, was that this readiness on Mrs Turnbull’s part to talk of whisky as ‘poison’ rather pointed to her innocence in the matter of Robert Dudgeon’s death. She would hardly want to draw a close comparison between the two if she or her husband were the author of the crime.
‘It’s utter, utter poison and quite useless in the bodily economy,’ Mrs Turnbull was saying. ‘If my husband were only here he could tell you.’