Authors: Gladys Mitchell

Here Comes a Chopper (2 page)

‘Talking of superstitions,’ he began.

‘Oh, you must think I’m mad,’ said the girl quickly.

‘On the contrary, I think you’re pretty marvellous. Do you know——?’ He recounted the tiny incident of the ashplant and mentioned that he had caught the bus they were on by the skin of his teeth. ‘And that alone was enough to warn me that something would happen,’ he said. ‘Still——’ he looked at her and smiled—‘I don’t mind now about old Bob, although I’m awfully sorry he’s done in his foot. He always was an old idiot.’

‘And did you feel,’ asked the girl, ‘when once you’d remembered the ashplant, that you’d got to go back for it, whether you wanted to or not?’

‘Oh, yes, I did. It would have worried me to
death not to go. But fancy your understanding that! It’s really rather extraordinary. We must be co-efficients, or soul-mates, or something don’t you think?’

‘I think,’ said the girl, who had been thought a soul-mate before and knew what it led to, ‘that when we get out of this bus we ought to walk miles and miles. It’s just the day for it, as long as it doesn’t rain. Couldn’t we get on to the route that you and Bob were going to take? Then you could go on tomorrow, just as you’d planned, and this evening I could go back by train.’

‘But Bob and I had planned twenty miles a day.’

‘Well, I can walk twenty miles.’

‘Oh, rot! And, if you could, I shouldn’t let you! Whatever next!’

‘All right. I’ll go home after lunch.’

This was not to Roger’s taste either.

‘All right. We’ll see,’ he said. The girl laughed, and he changed the subject clumsily. ‘Bob always mentioned a
kid
sister—named Dorothy, by the way. I’d thought of someone not more than twelve or thirteen.’

‘I was twenty-one last August.’

‘Well, I should hardly have thought that, you know. And I’m considered a pretty good judge. I’d have said not more than nineteen. I say, I wish I’d known about the birthday.’

‘We had quite a good party, but Bob said he didn’t think you’d come, so we didn’t invite you.’

‘Well, I’m damned!’

The conductress looked round disapprovingly. She did not have ‘language’ on her bus.

‘Rowberry Corner. And not too soon,’ she said. Roger hitched his rucksack over one arm and helped Dorothy out. The country road was firm beneath their feet, the sky, which had been cloudy, began to look brighter, they were both very young and it was spring.

‘This is quite good,’ said Roger. They tramped lightheartedly along, and stride for stride, until Roger looked at his watch. It was past midday. The bus ride had been a fairly long one.

‘Grub,’ he said. ‘I wonder where there’s a place?’

They came to an inn, a startlingly decorated roadhouse. ‘Looks pretty foul, doesn’t it?’ he added. ‘Here’s hoping, anyway.’ He entered.

‘Lunch?’ said the blonde behind the counter. ‘Only for regulars, dearie.’

‘But you can give us something, surely?’ suggested Roger.

‘Sandwich and a glass of beer. No lunches except for regulars,’ repeated the lady, diverting her attention from the hungry to the thirsty, and pulling half a pint of mild and bitter for a yeoman in loud checks. This man drained away the fluid, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, looked at the foam-rimmed glass, pushed it towards the blonde, and then volunteered information.

‘Might do you something at the
Crown
, mate.’

‘The
Crown?
Where’s that?’ enquired Roger. The blonde condescended to reply. Lifting a shapely
arm, she indicated the middle pane of the window of the saloon bar, and briefly replied:

‘Over there.’

‘What about it?’ asked Roger, turning his head. ‘Shall we have a drink here, and go on?’

‘Can’t serve anybody under eighteen,’ said the blonde, gazing with deep suspicion at Roger’s companion.

‘Who’s asking you to?’ asked Roger, irritated.

‘Never mind,’ said Dorothy, soothing him. ‘The
Crown
will be very much better.’

They did not find the
Crown
. Opposite the roadhouse was a turning along which they walked for about a couple of miles. It ended at last in an open grassy space and a clump of trees.

‘The village green,’ said Dorothy, pausing to watch some ducks which were splashing across a small brook.

‘Can’t be. No pub, no church, no cricket pitch, no war memorial,’ said Roger sapiently. ‘I say, this is a bit thick! Do you think we’ve come the way they meant?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. Let’s go on a bit, and see what happens.’

‘Let’s take this turning to the left, then. It ought to bring us back on to our road, and then I suppose we had better ask again, unless in the meantime we come to something else that can do us a meal.’

They took the turning, but it seemed to wind deeper into what has been rightly called the rural heart of England. It showed them hazel and willow,
the first green of the alder, quickening twigs in the hedges and the bright lesser celandine beneath. There were streams, some with early cresses, and above the streams were the first deep pink of the apple, the already full blossom of the pear, some half-grown lambs in the fields, the brilliant leaf-buds of hawthorn and the wide-open flowers of the elm; there were birds and the sleeping oak trees, the long, strange catkins of the poplar and everywhere the grass springing green.

But the beauties of earth and sky do not fill the void reserved in the human frame for beef and beer, and Roger began to suffer the pangs of bitter frustration and regret as well as of hunger.

‘I can’t think now why we refused a perfectly good offer of sandwiches at that wretched roadhouse,’ he groaned. They had long ago eaten all the chocolate he had brought in his rucksack. ‘Why on earth didn’t we sit down and begin when she gave us the chance?’

‘She wasn’t a nice barmaid, and it wasn’t a nice place,’ said Dorothy. She spoke firmly. She was young enough to be annoyed when people thought her under the legal age for drinks. ‘I should hate to have had anything there. I’m sure we’ll find somewhere quite soon.’

‘If we don’t, you’ll have a corpse on your hands,’ said Roger. Before them appeared the line of the roofs of some houses. With renewed hope they stepped out more briskly, and entered a village. Down the middle of the village street marched a line of ducks. They bobbed, with clumsy, amusing and rather touching purposefulness, one behind another, like a file of stout, heavy women all going to market. Roger and Dorothy followed. Suddenly
Roger said softly:

‘Don’t look now, but, when you do, see if you see what I see. Although I really think it’s a mirage.’

Dorothy smiled.

‘I saw it before you spoke. I think it’s a pub.’

It was a pub. It sported a large green board which advertised beers. Its own sign proved to be that of the
Dog and Duck
. It was not impressive to look at, although it was freshly painted and very clean. It was small, low-roofed, and was set well back from the road.

‘They’ll have to give us something,’ said Roger, stalking into the public bar whilst Dorothy remained on the doorstep. The small, narrow room contained, besides the bar counter, two men, a woman, a baby in a pram, the landlord (who was wearing a yellow waistcoat) and a small black and white dog which whined and quivered, apparently with impatience, for one of the men said, ‘All right! All right! I’m a-comin’.’

Roger’s enquiries were satisfactorily answered. The landlord provided him with a glass of rum and Dorothy with some sherry. Then he sent them round to the saloon bar. This was really the bar parlour, but it had a counter on to the public bar. It was furnished with three small tables, a set of good prints, and a yard or so of embroidery enclosed in a mahogany picture frame.

‘Well!’ said Roger, bestowing his blessing on the
place. The landlord himself served them, placing on the counter bread, cheese, butter, meat pasties and tankards of beer. They fell to, relaxed and happy. They smiled at one another across the little square table. By the time the meal was over they felt as though they had known one another since childhood. There is magic in bread and cheese and beer.

When the meal was over, Roger carried back to the counter the cutlery, plates and tankards, returned to his place, lighted a cigarette for Dorothy and a pipe for himself, and spread out the map on the table.

It showed what they thought was the roadhouse, and from it they traced their route to the
Dog and Duck
.

‘Here we are,’ said Roger. ‘Now, then, where shall we go?’

They discussed the possibilities for twenty minutes or so, and then, having mapped out their route and paid the score, they walked up the village street and came on to a by-pass road. It ran between fields with green hedges. They crossed the road and entered a high, narrow lane. Among the ground-ivy and wood anemones were dog violets. Roger, picking them carefully so as to have the stalks as long as possible, gathered a handful and gave them to the girl. Beneath their feet was the soft brown decadence of leaf-mould, spongy with rain. On one side a hill dropped down to a valley with a stream, and then the land rose in another rounded slope beyond the water. The top of the
hill was crowned absurdly with holly, and farther on were beech-woods, their trunks austere, their long buds gleaming copper-coloured and having points like spears.

There was plenty to see: the many-feathered birds, a grey horse harrowing the hillside, the rich brown turn of the soil; in the distance the quick green of larches springing like fire in the smoky, dim brown of the taller trees behind them.

The two walked, paused and loitered, and then at last stepped out. The path dropped to fields hedged with hawthorns, and passed a cow-byre with four young, sleepy Alderneys. Farther on was the farmhouse. The farmyard was powerfully heralded by its midden, a knee-deep mass of manure and filthy straw. On the opposite side of the path a dilapidated notice-board, surmounted by the shape of a hand cut in wood, seemed to indicate some sort of sign-post, but nothing in particular could be learned from it, and the path it pointed out was narrower, more overgrown and more muddy than the one they were already following.

Roger took out the map once more, and Dorothy looked at her watch. It was past five o’clock, and the lane showed no sign of terminating. Apart from the isolated farmhouse, they had passed no buildings for three hours.

‘We ought to be within sight of Dorsey,’ said Roger, ‘but I’m hanged if we are. We ought to have crossed More Heath common half an hour or more ago. Curse this confounded map! It must be wrong.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said the girl. ‘Let’s follow the path as far as that gate down there, and then, if it still seems wrong. we’ll come back to this other little path.’

Roger took out his pocket compass and stared at it in perplexity.

‘I can’t understand it,’ he said. ‘We’ve gone wrong somewhere. We ought to be walking north-east, but we’re not. We’ve veered round to north-west. I’ll tell you what I think, and you can call me names if you like. I think I picked the wrong footpath to take from that village. You know—where we stopped for grub. I’m sure now that this is the one we should have taken.’

He pointed with the stem of his pipe.

‘Oh, well, never mind. It’s been just as good a walk, I expect,’ said Dorothy.

‘That’s one way to argue, but I do dislike to be wrong. Besides, the further we go along here, the further we get off our route.’

‘We can get on to some other route, then. I don’t think it really matters.’

‘That’s all very well. Still, perhaps we’d better carry on, as we’ve come this far. It looks to me as though that gate of yours bars our way. Doesn’t it seem to you as though it’s right across the path?’

This did not prove to be the case. The lane made a sharp bend, and this brought the gate into full view. It opened on to unpromising, bramble-entangled land which scarcely seemed worth the fencing, but the path continued downhill.

Just as the couple reached the gate, a prospect
opened which made them feel more cheerful. Bracken, the new shoots just beginning to show, small hawthorn bushes (sinister to eyes which had read George Allingham’s poem), heather tufts, and some plants of wild strawberry, indicated a change in the soil, and away to the left the land rose, noble and spare.

‘This looks better,’ said Roger, as they turned aside to a ride of Downland turf. ‘Let’s sit down for a bit and take the weight off our feet, and then it ought to be easy going on this grass.’

Very faintly, from far, far away, they could hear the sound of a bell. Then, near them, was the thudding of hoofs, and three fine horses swept by. One was ridden by a tall, big man, black-haired, flat-shouldered and handsome. A very beautiful, red-haired woman, neither young nor old, rode the second; and on the third was a lively boy with thick, fair hair, flushed cheeks, and a look of pride and happiness very pleasant to see.

The impression, most stirring, was fleeting, for in less than a minute the riders, silhouetted for a moment against the sky at the top of the hill, thundered over the crest and were lost.

‘Father, mother and son, I suppose,’ said Dorothy.

‘Hardly likely,’ answered Roger. ‘Possible, of course, because the boy might be a recessive, but if that man and woman had children they’d be likely to have red hair.’

This pseudo-scientific statement silenced Dorothy. She lay and meditated, a slender,
round-limbed hamadryad, and Roger, watching her, said suddenly:

‘I say, I should like to kiss you. I suppose that would spoil your day?’

‘Yes, it would,’ she replied, without moving. ‘But if it would spoil yours not to, you’d better do it, and get it over.’

Roger spoke moodily, baffled by this reasonable answer.

‘I suppose most people want to?’

‘Yes, quite a lot of them do.’

‘Anybody in particular?’

‘Well—I suppose so. Yes.’

‘Oh? May I ask——?’

‘Yes, of course you may, but I don’t suppose I shall tell you.’

‘Why didn’t he come along with you today?’

‘I don’t think there’s any particular reason. I thought you were going to ask his name.’