The Longer Bodies (4 page)

There were to be two round waterlily-goldfish ponds. There was to be crazy paving. There were to be alcoves, stone garden seats, statues of fauns and mermaids, and a seated stone figure of Poseidon. There were to be small, unexpected stone steps. There was to be a small maze. There was to be a sundial . . .

The expert in sunk gardens smiled noncommittally and wrote copious notes.

So far the main flight of steps was completed, and two concrete basins, each of ten feet in diameter, one still covered modestly with a large tarpaulin, were the main indications that Great-aunt Puddequet's designs for the sunk garden were in process of being carried out. The statuary consisted of a stone mermaid with a very curly tail and a life-size, slightly ironic rendering of a Roman gladiator in bronze.

The hawthorn hedge, which had once upon a time divided the desert from the sown, had been removed. So had another which separated water-meadow the first from water-meadow the second—another stretch of unhappy land which sloped down to a sad-looking mere of considerable size, into which a slow-flowing, reedy stream meandered.

This second meadow Great-aunt Puddequet had also acquired for the use of the athletes. The mere had been deepened and cleaned out, and its sagging, oozy banks had been cunningly shored up. At one end a high diving-board had been erected. A low wooden shelter had been put up to accommodate those wishing to bathe. A clump or two of writhing thorn-trees and some scattered pollard willows gave melancholy attractiveness to an otherwise dispiriting scene.

Dinner was over, and Priscilla Yeomond, who, ‘as threatened'—Hilary's words—had accompanied her brothers on their journey to Great-aunt Puddequet's house, put on a wrap and came out on to the top of the stone steps for air. A peculiarity of all the downstairs rooms in Great-aunt Puddequet's house seemed to be an atmosphere of oppressive stuffiness. Entranced by the beauty of the evening and attracted by the unusual character of her surroundings, Priscilla, who entirely failed to recognize the environs of the house for those she had known from her father's descriptions and stories, walked down the steps, through the wooden doorway, and on to the sports ground. She pursued her way upon the turf which bordered the cinder track for about fifty yards until she came to an open gate. She passed through this, and found herself facing one of the huts which old Mrs Puddequet had caused to be erected for the housing of the athletes while they were in training.

A slight sound behind her caused her to look round. A light-haired, weedy young man in a flannel suit was standing in the gateway leading into the sports ground. It was Great-aunt Puddequet's adopted grandson, Timon Anthony.

‘Go indoors! Go indoors!' he said urgently.

Priscilla gazed in amazement.

‘I mean it,' said the light-haired young man. ‘And get those brothers of yours back to London.'

‘I don't understand you,' said Priscilla frigidly. ‘What do you mean?'

The young man waved his hand expressively.

‘All this low-lying land is most unhealthy,' he informed her. ‘All the infections that the sun sucks up from bogs, fens, flats—'

Priscilla laughed.

The young man shook his head at her. ‘I really don't think the night air here does anybody any good, so come along indoors,' he said.

He took her by the left elbow and piloted her back by the way she had come. At the top of the stone steps he released her arm and walked away without a word.

‘Well,' said Priscilla, as she leaned on the balustrade and looked at his retreating figure.

At the bottom of the stone steps he turned and waved to her.

Priscilla knitted her brows. He seemed a queer boy, she thought. She wondered how much he liked the idea of a group of his patron's relatives coming along to wrest from him the inheritance he had been brought up to believe would be his own.

‘It's jolly unfair of Great-aunt Puddequet,' thought Priscilla, as she stepped inside the great outer door of the house. ‘And he looks as though he's taking it very well.'

She put a question to the old lady next day.

‘Timon Anthony?' squealed Great-aunt Puddequet venomously. ‘No, Grandniece! No! The puppy wants to go on the stage! On the stage, I say! I won't leave him a penny-piece, and so I've told him!'

‘But won't he have a chance of—of running and jumping with the other boys?' asked Priscilla, whose sense of fairness was up in arms.

‘Run?' squealed Great-aunt Puddequet. ‘Yes, he can run from his creditors when he's run through his allowance! That's the amount of running he'll do!'

And she refused to hear or to say another word.

‘
IT'S A FUNNY
thing,' said Joseph Herring meditatively. He went from hutch to hutch and counted again.

‘There's three Belgian 'ares and two white Angoras—that's all right on that side. But them young Flemish Giants—blowed if I don't think there was three in each 'utch! But there's only two in 'ere.'

He counted again to make certain, and then scratched his jaw.

‘It's a bloomin' rum go, that is! I'll 'ave to see into it. The old girl won't 'arf say 'er prayers if she gets to know anythink about it being gorn.'

It was the beautiful morning of Friday, April 18th, and the athletes had been in training for eleven days. As the day was so fine and warm, Great-aunt Puddequet, having emerged triumphant from her diurnal battle with the cook, signified her intention of going to watch the lads at practice on the sports field.

The first person she and her escort encountered was the trainer Kost, a fair-haired, stocky, determined-looking fellow, clean-shaven, blue-eyed, handsome in a clean, hard, Scandinavian fashion, and clad in flannel trousers and a heavy woollen sweater. He looked warm and angry, and was for the fifth day in succession engaged in initiating Clive Brown-Jenkins into the mysteries of the pole vault.

‘And it's no use, perhaps, to be timid, Mr Brown,' he said contemptuously. ‘I can't instruct cowards. No.'

Clive Brown-Jenkins dropped the pole on the ground, pulled his sweater over his head, dropped the garment beside the pole, and walked deliberately up to the trainer. His jaw was set hard, and his grey eyes gleamed.

‘You can't instruct what?' he said, with a quiet but ugly pugnacity. Kost stared back at him.

‘Fools, perhaps,' he said, with a grin. ‘What's the matter with your temper, perhaps?'

Clive turned on his heel and picked up the pole again.

Great-aunt Puddequet nodded approvingly. The trainer was earning his pay. She gave the word, and her equipage rolled along the cinder track to the long-jump pitch.

‘You want to jump higher,' said Hilary Yeomond to his brother Francis as old Mrs Puddequet came up behind them.

‘Nonsense, Grandnephew!' she squealed. ‘He wants to jump a long way along, not a long way up!'

‘Pardon me, Madam,' said the voice of the trainer behind her, ‘but Mr Yeomond there is quite right, perhaps.'

He stepped in front of the bathchair, and quickly and neatly stretched a piece of white worsted across the long-jump pit between two four-feet high sticks which had apparently been placed there previously for the purpose.

‘Now, Mr Yeomond two,' he said, stepping back a pace, ‘right over without breaking the thread, perhaps.'

Francis paced the required distance, and commenced his run.

‘Faster, faster! Lazy you are! Lazy!' yelled Kost, dancing in agony on the verdant pasture as Francis burst the flimsy wool and fell forward on to his face.

Francis picked himself up and smiled slightly.

‘You must better go back and teach yourself to walk holding the seats of the chairs,' said Kost unpleasantly. Francis's smile deepened. Unruffled, he paced out the number of strides again.

‘What a difference,' murmured the angular Miss Caddick to her employer, ‘from the attitude adopted by Mr Brown-Jenkins.'

‘What?' said Great-aunt Puddequet, clicking her tongue, as, for the third time in succession, Richard Cowes lost control of the shot in making a spasmodic leap across the seven-foot putting-circle, and dropped the heavy weight with a dull thud almost on to his own foot. The eagle eye of the trainer chanced to fall on him.

‘You are the animated clockwork grasshopper, perhaps!' he roared. ‘Sure, you have contracted the housemaid's knee, isn't it!' He left the docile Francis to his own devices and dashed across to Richard, who had retrieved the twelve-pound shot and seemed undecided whether to hurl it at the trainer or to burst into tears.

‘Most noticeable,' continued Miss Caddick brightly.

‘Don't be a fool, Companion Caddick!' screamed the old lady.

‘Oh, but I'm not, dear Mrs Puddequet,' said Miss Caddick, blinking her pale eyes earnestly. ‘It
is
most noticeable! The beautiful, the
gentlemanly
behaviour of Mr Malpas, and Mr Francis, and Mr Hilary when they are taken to task by our dear trainer! And the morose, the boorish, the almost
resentful
way in which Mr Richard and Mr Clive receive his well-intentioned comments.'

At this moment the wheel of the bathchair jolted uncomfortably over something on the grass, for Joseph, in response to a snapping of his employer's fingers, had pushed onwards towards the centre of the ground. Here, looking, even in his shorts and singlet, more like a fifth-century Greek than the fifth-century Greeks themselves, Hilary Yeomond was in the act of throwing the discus.

The obstruction over which the wheel of the bathchair had passed proved to be a javelin of the kind that is used in athletics. The bathchair halted. Its occupant and her satellite investigated. The Scrounger, always thankful for any respite from his duties, stood back and let his eyes rove over the now familiar scene. Hilary Yeomond, having finished his throw, and being disinclined to walk after the discus and retrieve it, strolled across to his elderly relative and bent to see what was lying half-hidden in the grass by the wheel of her chariot.

‘Pick it up, boy! Pick it up!' squealed old Mrs Puddequet, leaning forward in the bathchair and dealing him a swipe across the legs with her umbrella.

It was the angular Miss Caddick, however, who stooped and gingerly raised the long shaft of the javelin from the ground. She held it out so that its discoloured point came within ten inches of Great-aunt Puddequet's face.

‘Blood,' said Miss Caddick, with great pleasure. She licked her thin lips hungrily, and touched the stained end of the spear delicately with her fingertips.

‘Repulsive,' said old Mrs Puddequet. ‘Prod the attendant.'

Miss Caddick, however, discovered a more tactful method of attracting Joseph's attention. She walked forward until she blocked his line of vision, and then spoke. Joe, who was preparing to expectorate, less from necessity than as an expression of opinion on Malpas Yeomond's performance over the high jump, which he had been watching in growing disgust during the past moment or so, recollected himself hastily and stood to attention.

‘Mam?' said he, turning smartly towards Great-aunt Puddequet.

‘Remove this implement.'

‘This 'ere javelin, mam?'

‘Certainly.'

‘Where to, mam?'

‘Attendant,' said Great-aunt Puddequet irritably, ‘don't be a fool!' She clicked her tongue in annoyance as Malpas Yeomond failed for the third time to clear five feet eleven inches.

‘Up, Grandnephew, up!' she squawked angrily. Malpas replaced the high-jump bar and smiled at her.

Joseph Herring took the javelin which Miss Caddick handed him and walked away in the direction of the house.

‘And, attendant,' screamed Great-aunt Puddequet at his retreating back, ‘discover, if possible, how it came to be lying there on the grass.'

Joe lifted his left eyebrow comically, and observed:

‘Beg pardon, mam, but I expect it was left on the grass be one of the young gents after practice yesterday and 'as gorn rusty. Steel what is left on the damp grass, mam, 'as an 'abit of going rusty.'

He wheeled smartly, and, pursued by a screamed objurgation to which he paid no attention whatsoever, skirted one of the huts and made his way round to the kitchen garden.

Great-aunt Puddequet raised her field-glasses and watched another abortive attempt by Clive Brown-Jenkins to clear the bar of the pole vault.

‘Very poor, Grandnephew,' screamed his elderly relative unnecessarily. Clive, who had fallen awkwardly with his leg doubled under him, looked round. Then, slowly, he stood up and came limping towards her.

‘What did you say?' he enquired.

Great-aunt Puddequet ignored him. She snapped her fingers and motioned Miss Caddick to take up the duties of the absent Joseph. Clive picked up his pole, and prepared to try again, while Great-aunt Puddequet looked grimly on.

At this moment the fair-haired trainer, Kost, came up to Clive.

‘You'll never do yourself justice, Mr Jenkins, while you hold the pole so low,' he remonstrated briefly. ‘Look here, perhaps. Now watch me.'

‘Blasted acrobat,' said Clive Brown-Jenkins pithily, as the trainer concluded a finished exhibition.

‘It is not a case of acrobatics, Mr Jenkins,' observed Miss Caddick, before Great-aunt Puddequet could deliver a broadside. ‘I believe the correct development of the abdominal muscles plays some part in the proper performance of the exercise, and the lift of the legs, forward and upward, together with a certain measure of confidence in one's own ability—'

‘Abstain from quotation, companion,' said Great-aunt Puddequet querulously. ‘Quotation is the last refuge of the little-minded. If you have no thought of your own on the subject of success in the pole vault, remain silent. Grandnephew, you should develop the arm and shoulder muscles. You appear to me flabby and spineless. You lack biceps and determination, Grandnephew. Remedy these things. A slow-motion film will be shown in the village school-room this evening. Trainer!'