Griselda was unable to imagine why she had never thought to look up Hugo Raunds’s address in ‘Who’s Who’, or even in the Telephone Directory, and write to him for possible news of Louise’s whereabouts.
Distracted by the omission, and full of resolve to repair it as soon, as possible, she imparted to Lena, who seemed pleasingly without over-pressing curiosity, a somewhat slender account of her recent experiences.
‘But is it a madhouse?’
‘I think it’s just a very old family.’
They were walking down the drive towards the main entrance to the park. As the big elaborately wrought gates came into view, it appeared also that a small crowd was assembled outside. The first idea that they were faithful tenants come to enquire about the course of their protector’s illness, or to mourn his passing, was dispelled by the way they stood packed together in the heat, by the fact that the lodge-keeper seemed to be remonstrating with them from behind the bars, and, most of all, by the noise they were making. In the end, Griselda saw that some of them carried placards, hideously lettered with slogans: ‘Aid To Abyssinia, Guatemala, Democratic Spain, And Chiang-Kai-Shek’; ‘Workers! The Intelligentsia Stands Behind You’; and, most immediate in its application, ‘Sir Travis Raunds Must Go’. The inclusion of the title struck Griselda as a courteous detail, inconsistent with much else; but perhaps it served to spur David by making Goliath look fiercer.
‘I wonder you ’aven’t all something better to do on a nice day like this,’ the lodge-keeper was saying. Clearly he had allowed himself to be drawn into unwise disputation. He was a mild elderly man with lank hair and an habitual air of having recently been rescued from drowning.
His remark was greeted with catcalls.
‘Why don’t you join us in fighting the enemy of your class?’ enquired a tall prematurely bald young man with spectacles. He carried a battered puppet dangling from a crude gallows, which he had looted, during a university rag, from a Punch and Judy stand. Two or three of his fellow demonstrators began to chant the Internationale.
‘My tea’s waiting for me, you know.’
At this there was a burst of perceptibly forced laughter.
‘I’ll send for a policeman.’
‘Call out the Cossacks!’
Lena went up to the lodge-keeper and spoke in his ear. He stepped back. Lena raised her hand.
‘Sir Travis Raunds is dead. He died this afternoon,’ she said in her clear voice. ‘So go home.’
There were a few jeers, and a cry of ‘Why couldn’t you say so?’ but the group began to retreat, more or less content in the knowledge that they were alive and that the future was theirs. It seemed to occur to none of them to doubt Lena’s statement.
‘That was brave of you, Lena,’ said Griselda.
‘So it was, miss,’ said the lodge-keeper. ‘But, of course, I ’ad old Cupid up my sleeve all the time.’
‘Would Cupid have helped?’
‘Torn ’em apart, miss. Cupid only needed a word from me to tear ’em apart. Just one word. That’s Cupid.’ He indicated a vague black shape which looked too big for the white wooden kennel placed in the lodge-keeper’s miniature garden. ‘Sir Travis named him after a gentleman he used to know when he was in politics.’
‘Good old Cupid.’
It seemed unnecessary to pat Cupid, as he was asleep. He wore a collar with large spikes, like a drawing by Cruikshank; and his muzzle was matted with some sticky substance. When Griselda mentioned his name, he growled in his sleep.
‘It’s sad news about Sir Travis.’
‘Yes and no, miss. Times have changed since the Old Queen’s day. Not that either of you young ladies will care about that. But up at the house it’s just as if the Old Queen was still with us. Just like Windsor Castle, it is.’
‘You don’t say so?’ said Griselda sympathetically.
‘I expect you young ladies believe in being modern and up-to-date?’
‘You can tell at a glance,’ said Lena.
‘It’s the best thing. But Sir Travis, he never would see it.’
Outside the park, they found their way without particular difficulty to where they had left the rest of the party.
‘You’re good at it,’ said Griselda. ‘You must have what is known as a sense of direction.’
‘These little jaunts are symbolical,’ replied Lena. ‘Instead of leaving the organization to me, who, as you rightly say, am good at it, they will always leave it to Geoffrey, because they like him and because he’s no good at it at all, which saves them the anguish of envying him. Not that I greatly care,’ she added. ‘I really only come to watch.’
‘I’m not bad at finding the way myself, you know, Lena. Women often are better at things than men, aren’t they?’
‘Men have uses, all the same.’
Griselda said nothing; because at that moment the place where they had lunched came into view.
There was no sign of the party. Instead, a troop of Boy scouts were learning about the Arctic.
‘Was there anyone here when you arrived?’ asked Griselda. ‘Sitting on the grass?’
‘No one at all,’ replied the scoutmaster. ‘Only rather a lot of litter, I regret to say.’
A rustle went round the troop at Griselda’s good looks and Lena’s trousers.
‘Come to the pictures, miss,’ cried out one of the more precocious scouts.
So Griselda and Lena had to find their way back to London unattended; which they did with much pleasure. The day ended with Lena accompanying Griselda back to Greenwood Tree House for coffee and anchovies. It was after midnight when Lena departed, but there was still no sign of Peggy.
XXVI
Hugo Raunds was not in the Telephone Directory, and even in ‘Who’s Who’ he figured solely as his father’s heir, without even an address of his own. To Sir Travis were ascribed four different residences, one in each of the four kingdoms; but Griselda wrote to Sir Hugo at the one she knew. She asked simply if he had any knowledge of the possible whereabouts of a girl named Louise, whom she had met at Mrs Hatch’s house, Beams, had since lost touch with, and wished to meet again. ‘In the course of conversation she mentioned you several times; so I venture to trouble you.’
One day in the shop a pleasant young man made a really determined attempt to engage Griselda’s interest. Entering merely in order to enquire for a copy of The Last Days of Pompeii, he had not departed before, in Mr Tamburlane’s temporary absence, he had persuaded her to accompany him that evening to the Piccadilly Hotel for drinks.
‘We might dance somewhere afterwards.’
‘I don’t dance.’
‘Then we’ll go somewhere else and have some more drinks.’
It proved all too true. By the time they had migrated from the Piccadilly Hotel to Oddenino’s and from Oddenino’s to the Criterion and from the Criterion to the Bodega, Griselda had begun to feel faint.
‘Eat?’ said the young man. ‘Of course. Come back to my place and my girl will run us something up. She’s Italian, you know, or, more accurately, Sardinian.’
He was out of the Bodega (Griselda had felt faint between drinks) and into a taxi with such dexterity that Griselda could not escape without an absurd and embarrassing scene before the cynical eye of the taxi-driver.
‘By the way, my name’s Dennis Hooper. You’ve probably heard of me? I should have told you before.’
Griselda hadn’t. She said nothing. The motion of the taxi was suddenly making her feel really ill; and also there seemed a case for reticence.
He didn’t seem to mind that she hadn’t heard of him.
‘I bet your name’s Anne?’
‘How can you tell?’
‘Every single girl I meet’s called Anne these days. There’s a positive Anne epidemic.’
Griselda could for the moment do nothing but groan.