“But how in the world, dear aunt, did you know I was here?” I asked.
“And if you knew you were going to be there, my dear nephew,” she retorted, “why the devil didn’t you give me your address?”
I could tell from her voice that she had hitched up her skirt — as a man hitches his trousers before exercise — and was settling down for a long chat. It was soon plain how the dark follower had picked up my scent.
“After you dropped me at Paddington Station,” she said, “I suddenly remembered I ought to have packed my boots and breeches.”
I remarked that she always looked very well in jodhpurs.
“But they might have wanted me to show Nur Jehan. And I couldn’t know that they weren’t all terribly smart and county. So I wired the admiral that I would take a later train and went home to get a proper outfit. Then someone from the museum called up to ask for your address. Didn’t catch his name. Dr. Paffletrout, it sounded like. But your colleagues do have the most extraordinary names, Charles.”
This engaged her for some while. She always found the names of international science a matter for robust comedy. When she returned to the point, it was to say that she had told Dr. Pizzlefish that she hadn’t got my address, that I was traveling and would let her know it later. The carpenter, passing the telephone, had then offered the information which I had privately given him before Georgina and I left the house. There it was. Simple as all that.
Under what observation our devoted sentry kept us I do not know. It must have been close unless he had the luck to see us drive off in a taxi while he was carrying out a routine patrol. I suspect that he then followed us to Paddington, lost touch with me when I jumped on a bus to catch my train at Euston, and trailed Georgina instead. As soon as he saw her return to the house he dashed straight for the nearest telephone booth on the off chance that he might get my address.
And now I must go back to explain the boots and breeches at the risk of resembling my dear aunt, whose conversation, like that of many intelligent women, only made sense retrospectively. I mean that it appeared incoherent until it arrived at its destination — when all the rest, if you could still remember it, fell into place and was relevant.
Two days after the death of the postman had been reported in the papers an Admiral Cunobel called at the house. He ceremoniously presented himself and his card, and regretted that Georgina was out. He had known both her and my parents in old days.
I asked him in and gave him a drink. I had not then received the pamphlet on which the Buchenwald officers’ mess was marked with a cross, and I was sure — almost — that the bomb could not have been meant for me. So I had no reason to be cautious with strangers.
I suspected that he might have something to do with the police. But it was not that at all. He was genuinely anxious about Georgina. He had lost track of her completely until he read of the zoologist and his aunt who taught riding. He had guessed — though he didn’t say so — that our simple life might be seriously disturbed by any emergency, and I think it had shocked him.
He was an arbitrary old charmer whom long years at sea had preserved from most modern thinking which was not professional. As he perched himself on the edge of my desk with a tumbler of pink gin beside him, he resembled a young tortoise eagerly exploring a new lettuce bed. The beak, the jowls and the leathery skin were unmistakable tortoise, but the sprightliness of pale blue eyes and dark blue suit suggested that he still enjoyed himself.
“As a matter of fact, we have met before,” he said.
“I ought to remember, but…”
“No, you oughtn’t! You were two weeks old! In 1912 I was Assistant Naval Attache in Vienna, and your mother was extraordinarily kind to me. Those were the days, my lad! None of this nationalism except among the lower classes! A man chose the side he would play for like a county cricketer. County of birth or county of residence—whichever he pleased —but he had to stick to it. I knew your Uncle Willi, who fought for the Tsar in the Imperial Guards, and your Uncle Fritz, who called himself a Bavarian and was killed before Verdun. And Hildegard, who married a Greek and nearly got shot by both sides for helping prisoners to escape. And your dear Aunt Georgina, who, I don’t mind telling you, would have married me if she hadn’t fallen in love with her second cousin, the English Dennim. What a horseman he was! Delightful boy, too! Good Lord, he’d be seventy-three now if he hadn’t died of wounds on the Somme!”
He went on and on, and I mentioned my surprise that he could remember all the ramifications of my family.
“Had to, my boy! Came under the head of useful information in those days. If you weren’t in the studbook yourself, the next best tiring was to know who was. I remember fretting about it with your mother. It’s all tradition, she said, and none of us can prove more than half of it. I’ll fix you up, she said — Cunobel from Cunobelinus. Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Oldest pedigree in Europe, if only you could fit a few missing pieces into the puzzle. And damned if she didn’t get Georgina to spread the rumor! God bless my soul, the Cunobels are a sound Cornish family, but small, small! But it was just like your parents. Anyone they liked had got to have everything they could give.”
I liked him very much, and we went out to lunch at his club. There, after doing me very well, he ventured onto the subject of Georgina and the bomb. It must have been a shock. Had she anywhere to go for a holiday? He owed the Dennims the happiest two years of his life. Did I think he might pick up old friendship?
I said that I was sure he might, but that Georgina could be very difficult if she suspected that anything was being arranged for her behind her back. She was extremely proud of her independence and did not care if she gave the impression of a hard woman. That made her easy to live with. She neither permitted her privacy to be invaded nor intruded upon that of anyone else.
The admiral explained that he was a bachelor — which of course made it unthinkable that Georgina should stay under his roof. I did not dare to smile. And in a way he was right. In spite of the fact that she was over sixty and he well over seventy, their vitality was such that any healthy and normal village would at once create a joyous legend about them.
No, what he had in mind was that she should stay as his guest, but with the vicar —where she would be doing him a great favor as well.
“The man’s in a mess,” he said. “He could do with some help.”
I indicated that Georgina’s general air and outspokenness might be disconcerting to a strange vicar.
“Blood and bones, boy, I didn’t mean sewing his surplices!” the admiral exclaimed. “He’s taken to horse-breeding!”
“With an eye on the 2.30?”
“No, no, no! A crazy parishioner left him his pet Arab stallion. Keeps it in the glebe meadow! Not even properly fenced! Too long a story —but the poor fellow is spending all his money on oats, and he and his daughter have to live on porridge. Well, Georgi might make some sense out of it. I’m bothered sick about the vicar, and I can’t keep an eye on everything which goes on in the village any longer.”
When I reported to Georgina in the evening that Admiral Cunobel had called on her and taken me out to lunch instead, I detected a sudden aura and fragrance of femininity. How, I don’t know. She neither fluttered nor giggled. I suspect that she immediately saw herself in a ball dress of 1912 and projected the image. She had been a very beautiful girl.
She invited the admiral to tea. This was a ceremony. Her friends and mine occasionally took a meal with us, but we had no pretensions; they ate whatever there was and drank a glass or two of wine as a symbol of hospitality. About twice a year, however, Georgi formally invited somebody to tea. She polished the silver tea service, made a number of tiny cakes and two big ones, cut paper-thin bread and butter in white and brown, and prepared every single offering proper to the tea cult of the older landed gentry. The illusion was complete. The parlormaid in dainty cap and apron so obviously brought in the silver tray and the muffins that it was an effort to remember one had not actually seen her.