Nest of Vipers

Chapter Two

Nest of Vipers

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(1)

SO, by the time I got back from Paris, all the alterations had been completed, the repairs and the interior and exterior decorations had been done and my first batch of tenants had been installed. Niobe had managed to turn the house into ten flats and of these only two were unoccupied.

The renovations surprised and pleased me very much, but the inhabitants of my newly-furbished property pleased me a great deal less. Niobe had prophesied that there would be tenants, but those I found in possession of my house were ludicrously different from any I might have envisaged.

I had thought of a retired naval or military man, a wealthy widow or two, a well-known actor or actress ‘resting’ between shows but still well able to afford the rent of a flat on my well-situated property, a business man still keen on a round or two of golf, a couple well-heeled enough to afford a spacious apartment while they waited to get possession of a house they were buying, and perhaps a wealthy recluse happy to find peace and security far from the madding crowd. Instead of these comfortable, predictable types, all my tenants turned out to be writers of one sort or another.

‘I thought you’d feel more at home with them, being a writer yourself,’ said Niobe. ‘Birds of a feather, and all that, you know.’

‘Birds of a feather can peck one another to death,’ I said ‘and these aren’t even “of a feather”. What has Evesham Evans in common with Constance Kent?’

‘They happen to be a respectable married couple, although I can’t think why she chose the pen-name of Constance Kent,’ said Niobe, going off at a tangent, as women will.

‘Oh, I can,’ I said. ‘The instinct for self-martyrdom is strong in some people. She probably sees Constance Kent, the real one, as her alter ego.’

‘Constance Kent was a murderess.’

‘Nonsense! She decided to carry the can for her father.’

‘I won’t argue with you. I am certain to get the worst of it. What have you against these people?’ Niobe’s voice had become slightly shrill and, as so often, there were tears in her eyes. ‘What’s wrong with them, I say?’

‘Nothing at all, provided they pay their rent and behave themselves,’ I said, weakly giving ground.

‘Why shouldn’t they?’ Her tone still had a sharp edge. Apparently I was supposed to approve her choice of tenants.

‘I have no idea. I’ll take your word for them,’ I said.

‘Well, then!’

‘Oh, let it go,’ I said.

(2)

As I had told Niobe, I had never intended to live in the house. A bachelor flat in Mayfair, with a manservant to cook, clean and act as my valet (a romantic dream engendered by the stories of P.G. Wodehouse) had been the target on which I had set my sights. When I saw the apartment which Niobe had set aside for me, I changed my mind.

This apartment was on the ground floor and comprised the entrance hall and its noble Jacobean staircase, together with two large, handsome rooms, one of which had an overmantel carved by Grinling Gibbons.

Niobe had contrived a luxurious bathroom for me in what had been the garden-room of the original mansion, the room, that is to say, where the cut blooms were placed ready to be sorted over so that a choice could be made for the drawing-room and dining-room vases. There was no kitchen as part of my flat, although everybody else had one, but when I pointed this out to Niobe she had a ready answer. My meals were to be cooked in the kitchen of the original owner and were to be served in a little dining-room Niobe had contrived out of what had been the game larder. A resident cook was already installed and she and her kitchenmaid had bedrooms up in the attics.

‘You can afford it, can’t you?’ said Niobe. ‘You and I will eat together. To share your cook will be one of my perks. I’ve gone to a great deal of trouble on your behalf, you know. In return i expect free board and lodging and the same pay I was getting at the pool. I am prepared to run this place for you. Everything will go like clockwork. I’ve found my métier.’

The idea of having her permanenty round my neck appalled me. For three meals a day I was doomed, it seemed, to sit at table with her and, apart from this, to me, most undesirable propinquity, it meant that the meals would be served at regular and stated times, I attempted to hedge.

‘I don’t think the mealtimes will work,’ I said. ‘I can’t be tied down to regular hours like that. No writer can.’

‘You have only to say you’re working,’ said Niobe. ‘I can manage the kitchen staff, you’ll find.’

There seemed no more to be said. Short of turning her out of the house altogether and sacking the cook and the kitchen maid and foraging for myself (which would be a more serious interruption of my writing than sitting down to regular meals with Niobe) there was no self-assertive attitude I could take.

‘Now I’ll show you my quarters,’ she said blithely. ‘Are we agreed upon my wages?’

‘They are not exactly excessive. You might have done better if you had brought a breach of promise case!’ I laughed as I said it, but she remained grave.

‘That isn’t a nice thing to say, Chelion. You must know there could never be any question of that. I have my pride and some self-respect.’

Her own apartments were also on the ground floor. She had converted what had been the housekeeper’s dayroom, the butler’s pantry and the servants’ hall into a very cosy little flat which she showed me with pride. What pleased me less, since it brought her into closer contact with my own little realm than I deemed advisable, was that she had allocated to herself as an office – ‘I must have a room to which they can come to pay their rent and bring their complaints, Chelion’ – the room to the right of the front door opposite to that which I had decided to use as my library and study. However, since she was willing – eager, in fact – to take the whole running of the venture off my hands, it seemed unreasonable to cavil at what was, after all, a perfectly sensible arrangement, so I assented to it without argument except to query the word complaints.

‘What the hell would they have to complain about?’ I asked.

‘One another, mostly, I expect,’ said Niobe composedly. ‘Did you ever know a collection of writers who didn’t hate each other’s guts?’

‘I don’t know a collection of writers.’ It was true. In spite of my year in Paris, I had not finished my novel, let alone sold it, and therefore I was not eligible to join any literary society except a local one which did not expect many of its members to achieve publication unless they paid for it themselves.

As for my tenants, their talents proved to be so various that, with unconscious snobbery (as I see it now), I would hardly have called some of them writers at all, although there is no denying that every one of them did actually write for a living and, what is more, made enough money to pay the rent.

To take them in my own order of importance: at the top of the list came Evesham Evans. He was a not very successful member of the Ernest Hemingway school of fiction and looked and dressed for what he saw as the part. He was untidy, gruff, bluff and self-consciously addicted to the bottle and the four-letter word. When he roamed the grounds in search of inspiration he habitually carried a sporting-rifle over his arm although, except for some grey squirrels and a colony of rooks, there was nothing to shoot in my park. I think he put on an act to bolster up his ego because his wife earned more than he did.

Next in my order of meritorious authorship came Mandrake Shard. That this was his real name seems open to doubt, but all his letters, both business and personal, were addressed to him under this cognomen. He wrote highly successful spy stories and an occasional play of the same nature for the BBC. He was a mild, almost furtive, tiny little character; he dressed like an undertaker and was a Methodist lay preacher. I went to hear him once and was surprised and immensely (although secretly amused by his doctrine of hell fire and his promises of a heaven, which seemed a combination of Blackpool on a bank holiday and a recital by a Welsh male-voice choir. There was no doubt, however, of his financial success as a author. By accident I once saw his royalties statement and was staggered.

Although Evesham Evans’s tough novels had their small following, from the money point of view, as I have said, he was less successful than was Constance Kent, his wife. She was a grim, soldierly woman, older, I think, than he was, and, of all things, she specialised in would-be sultry love-stories which, however, remained so definitely within the bounds of an almost Puritan propriety that it might be said of any heroine of hers: ‘Kind are her answers, but her performance keeps no day.’ However, many women must have found vicarious satisfaction in her work, for once, out of curiosity, I went to the public library for a copy of one of her books and discovered that, although more than a score were in the catalogue, not one was left on the shelves.

We had three other couples on the hooks, but they came low on my list. I place above them a bachelor whose pen-name was Latimer Targe. He wrote up real-life crimes, especially murders, in a form which the masses could assimilate without effort. Privately I thought of him as Mr Sunday Papers and there was no doubt that, although his syntax was shaky and his style deplorable, he was not only readable but, in his obvious affection for his murderers, definitely endearing. I suppose that among all my tenants, he was, perhaps, my favourite, although that is not saying much.

The couples were ‘Polly’ Hempseed, a light-hearted young man whose real name was Conway. Under his pseudonym, he wrote the sob-stuff page in a woman’s magazine. His partner, a down-to-earth and, some would say, unattractive woman a year or two older than her paramour, was called Cassie McHaig and this, I think, was her real name. As it somewhat blatantly suggests, she was a Scot, but, except at moments of excitement or crisis, one would hardly have guessed it from her accent. She was a weekly columnist on one of the West Country papers and wrote forthrightly on such matters as naughty politicians and the even naughtier public services, including such sitting birds as British Rail, the Post Office and the extravagances in public spending. I was sorry for her. Polly had a roving eye.

Then there were the Irelath Moores. He was a poet who lived mostly on a generous allowance from his father, a Canadian-Irish cattle rancher. Irelath’s girl, who was called Sumatra and who came from Bali, wrote (only I always thought that Irelath did the work and she merely signed it) the beauty hints for a glossy monthly. Her photograph, which looked like the reproduction of a picture by Sir Gerald Kelly, always appeared at the top of her column and was the best advertisement which could ever have been conceived to bear witness to the veracity of her claim to be a beauty specialist. She was the loveliest thing I have ever seen, small, slender, beautifully made with an entrancing smile and the most engaging, childlike simplicity of both manners and conversation.

Our last couple – for their passionate friendship warrants, and, indeed, calls for, that description – were two women named Billie Kennett and Elysée Barnes. One reported crime for a local paper, the other wrote up the latest fashions and even illustrated her work with her own charming sketches. She was also employed at times as a model and I think that she made a good deal of the money which kept them both. Billie, who was short, square and dark, a karate expert and a confirmed Women’s Libber, adored her to what, for outsiders, was often an embarrassing degree, but which Elysée accepted with nonchalance and tacit approval, although, having once made a pass at Elysée myself, I have the impression that, when the right man comes along, she’ll ditch Billie like a pair of torn tights.

All these people had apartments in the house, but Niobe had also converted the stables into a small bungalow which she had named The Lodge. This had been rented by a female recluse. Miss Minnie was, and remained, an enigma. She had opted for the bungalow, Niobe told me, as soon as she had seen the advertisement of it. She claimed that she edited the esoteric journal of a small religious sect called the Panconscious People, but had volunteered no other information about herself. However, Niobe claimed that, like Edmund Blunden’s barn, Miss Minnie was old, not strange.

To mark my return home I had a house-warming party for which I gave word of mouth invitations, calling at each apartment as the simplest and most direct means of getting to know something about my tenants.

I chose a Sunday for my visits to them and set aside the following Sunday for the party. This was because some of the tenants were out and about on their lawful occasions during the week and in the evenings, but on Sundays, as Niobe had told me, all were to be found in residence.

Evesham and Constance gave me a drink, so did Polly and Cassie and the two girls, Billie and Elysée. Sumatra and Irelath refused the invitation, although charmingly. Sumatra said, ‘Sunday is sacred to love-making, Chelion, so, although we are pleased to see you, please go away.’ Irelath said, ‘We’re only young once, Chelion. Can’t afford to let the golden days slip by. Obliged for the invitation all the same.’

Mandrake Shard thanked me for my invitation, which he accepted, but told me apologetically that he did not drink. ‘Used to be an alcoholic. Daren’t touch the stuff now, my dear fellow.’ I promised we would lay on coffee. Coffee, of the instant variety, was also supplied to me by Latimer Targe when I called with my invitation. He said he had run out of whisky. He accepted the invitation and volunteered to ‘bring a couple of bottles, old man, if you like, in case you run short. I know what these literary types can put away when the drinks are on the house’. I assured him that there would be no shortage, but I thanked him for the kind thought and decided that I did not like him very much after all.

Niobe had volunteered to help the cook manufacture the cocktail snacks, but I had vetoed this. ‘Snacks for a dozen people, most of whom probably eat like wolves?’ I said. ‘It would take both of you all the week, and cook would probably give notice. No, my dear girl. I think we’ll let a caterer cope,’ I added firmly.

There remained Miss Minnie, the woman apart. I had felt enough curiosity about her to examine, in Niobe’s office, her tenancy agreement. She had signed it Minnie, D-J (Miss). I took it that D-J were the initials of her baptismal names and was intrigued by the hyphen. I pointed it out to Niobe, who said, to my slight surprise:

‘I don’t believe Minnie is her real name. She is hiding from avaricious relatives, I expect.’

‘Well, I hope she’s not a criminal fleeing from justice,’ I answered lightly.

She did not answer my repeated knocking on her door, so I thought, as it was a fine day, that she might be in the garden at the back of the house. You may have seen descriptions of my property in the newspapers, Dame Beatrice, but perhaps I had better give a short account of its situation and lay-out.

I have mentioned a seaside town and its shops, but actually we had the sea itself at the bottom of the front lawn, just beyond Miss M’s bungalow. The gardens and park were at the back of the house, but in front there was this lawn which went down to the almost semi-circular inlet in a much larger bay on whose opposite shore the white-walled town, less than a mile away as the crow flies, could always be seen from our lawn unless the weather was misty. The deception lay in the fact that to reach the town by road involved a journey of ten miles along narrow twisting lanes (one could not call them roads) which made safe walking out of the question, apart from the added difficulty that the countryside was extremely hilly.

Our inlet was attractive enough at high tide, when the sea almost lapped against the grass verge, less so when the tide was low, for then we had an expanse of uninviting muddy sand between us and the sea. I used to bathe on the incoming tide, but I was (so far as I know) the only resident who ever went for a swim there. Knowing, as I suppose you do, what has happened, you will realise the importance of this and the part it has played in my predicament.

The town was on the south side of the big bay of which our inlet was so tiny a part, so my house faced north. It was entered from an ornate but not unpleasing portico which had been built on at a date much later than the building itself in order, I suppose, to add to the importance of the façade. Below a very high bank which formed one of the boundaries of the front lawn there were the stables (now converted to Miss Minnie’s bungalow), which caused me to think that, before the portico had been added, the true front of the house had faced south, overlooking the gardens and park, for all the best rooms also faced that way. This proved important later on, for it meant that for the other tenants Miss Minnie’s bungalow was out of sight.

(3)

This seems a long preamble, but Rufford has told me not to leave anything out. So far as my house-warming party was concerned, I don’t think there is anything to say. Miss Minnie was not in the garden and I hardly liked to snoop around her bungalow peering in at windows, so I concluded either that she was out or that she chose not to answer my knocking. I got Niobe to type an invitation to the house-warming and asked her to put it, in an envelope, through Miss Minnie’s letterbox. A typed reply came next day, Miss Minnie would thank me not to interrupt her Sunday devotions by hammering on her door and was not interested in drunken orgies. I handed this missive to Niobe, who sniffed and filed it.

‘Worth keeping, I think, the horrid old cat,’ she said. At the party itself Mandrake Shard drank the strong coffee Niobe had prepared for him, backed into a corner to show her some tricks with a piece of string and left soon afterwards, afraid, I suppose, poor little devil, of being tempted to have a drink.

Billie and Elysée got a bit tight and then treated us to the quarrel scene in Julius Caesar between Brutus and Cassius which, I must admit, they did extremely well.

Polly Hempseed got drunk and offered to fight Evesham Evans for refusing to swap mates for the evening and night. Cassie McHaig boxed his ears and took him back to their apartment in disgrace.

Evesham Evans, who had handled the situation well, and Constance Kent, who had completely ignored it, proved to be ideal guests in that both remained sober. Latimer Targe got maudlin tipsy and insisted upon kissing Niobe and advising me to make an honest woman of her before it was too late. He stayed long after the others had gone and, in the end, I dragged him to his room and gave him a large whisky doped with aspirin and left him lying on his bed. He was contrite next day and begged my pardon for misbehaving himself with Niobe. He wanted to apologise to her, too, but I headed him off.

‘What a shame!’ said Niobe. ‘He might have kissed me again!’ We discussed Miss Minnie’s unkind and unnecessary comments on what she had supposed our house-warming would be like.

‘In a sense I suppose she wasn’t so very far wrong,’ I said, ‘when you think of that young goat Hempseed and his wife-swapping nonsense and Targe going all maudlin and making scandalous suggestions to me about you.’

‘Yes,’ said Niobe a trifle frostily, I thought. (Could she have enjoyed the old reprobate’s drunken kisses?) ‘Yes perhaps Miss Minnie wasn’t so far wrong, as you say, but, you know, Chelion, I think Billie Kennett is right. She says nobody could be so secretive and peculiar as Miss Minnie unless she was a woman with a past.’

‘I expect she’s a reformed and retired Madame,’ I said lightly. ‘She has the look of one.’

‘You get the idea from having spent a year in Paris, I suppose,’ said Niobe markedly changing her tone.

‘Not at all. Just my imagination functioning. In France I don’t believe a Madame ever retires.’

‘Anyway, I’m glad Miss Minnie didn’t come to the party. I wish Irelath and Sumatra hadn’t turned it down, though. We could have done with them. The others were a pretty stodgy lot,’ said Niobe, ‘whether they got drunk or stayed sober.’

‘Billie and Elysée,’ I suggested, ‘were lively enough.’

‘They make me sick. You know, I still have old-fashioned prejudices, Chelion.’

‘Live and let live is my motto. They won’t do any harm if they’re left alone,’ I said uncomfortably.

‘I suppose you’d say that about a tarantula or a black mamba!’

‘Why not? – provided it didn’t choose me for its victim, of course, and neither of the girls is likely to do that.’

I hoped she did not know of the rush I had so misguidedly given Elysée, so I changed the subject with what may have been injudicious haste when she said, with a certain emphasis, ‘Neither of the girls?’

‘Why,’ I asked, ‘are you glad that Miss Minnie did not come to the party? Just because some of the company got tight and stepped a bit out of line? She may be a curmudgeonly old harridan, but it seems to me that she must be a pretty lonely one. Do her good to see something of the rest of us, one would have thought.’

‘She sees something of Elysée Barnes,’ said Niobe. ‘That nymph picks her up in their little car when Billie Kennett isn’t using it and runs her into the town for shopping.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I keep my eyes and ears open.’

‘But I thought Miss Minnie had refused all offers of a lift into the town.’

‘From the men, yes. Incidentally, what was in that letter you opened by mistake the other day?’

Well, now, Dame Beatrice, I had better come clean about that letter. It had lain on the hall table for a couple of days without being claimed and it had been postmarked with one of those advertising slogans the Post Office is so fond of. The result was that the name of the intended recipient was almost obscured. Thinking that I had better find out for whom it was intended, I slit the letter open, but as soon as I saw it began: ‘Dear Sister in Pan,’ I guessed for whom it was intended and, as Niobe was about to walk into the village and would be passing near enough to the bungalow, I asked her to drop it in, and remarked that I would tell the postman that any correspondence for Miss Minnie should be left at The Lodge. I slipped a note in with the letter apologising for having opened it in error and suggesting that Miss Minnie make a point of informing her correspondents of her correct address.

‘I have no idea what was in the letter,’ I said, nettled by Niobe’s tone. ‘Have you? You took it over to her.’

‘I do know something of what was in it, Chelion,’ said Niobe, ‘but not because I read it. Miss Minnie herself tackled me about it because the letter had been opened. She was furious about it. “I suppose that upstart thinks I have no claim,” she said, “but this house is mine. He can open all the letters he likes, but one day I shall make my claim good and he can go back to his job as bath-attendant.” ’

I had no idea that Miss Minnie knew of my swimming pool era. I could only suppose that she had instituted some enquiries. I certainly thought she had a bee in her bonnet about my inheritance, so all I said was:

‘If she can prove her claim, good luck to her. Does she think she ought to have Mrs Dupont-Jacobson’s money as well?’

Niobe said, eyeing me without friendliness.

‘I don’t know. I only know that she begrudges the rent she pays. She told me so and gave me the reason. She claims that she was Mrs Dupont-Jacobson’s next of kin and that a later will exists than the one which gave you the property.’

‘You had better refer her to the lawyers. Heaven knows I don’t want to do her out of her rights, if she has any, but I don’t really think she has,’ I said.

‘Of course she hasn’t. If you ask me, she’s just a bewildered, rather nasty old thing with a grudge against you.’

I was not easy in my mind. It had never seemed to me likely that Mrs Dupont-Jacobson had no living relatives. There was every chance that one day (and sooner rather than later) one of them would turn up and contest the will, but the lawyers had been satisfied that everything was in order and I had taken their word for it. Now I began to doubt, as I had done at first, and my mind was not eased by a series of small, but, it seems to me now, significant events which followed my house-warming party.

(4)

The first of these was ludicrous, rather than alarming. At Niobe’s instigation we had decided to re-name the house. So far, it had been called Creek Dupont.

‘It’s an awful name,’ said Niobe. ‘It sounds like a not too choosy country club with a dubious reputation.’

‘Well, that’s what you’ve turned it into, by and large,’ I pointed out. ‘Still, I’d like to get rid of the Dupont angle, ungrateful to my benefactor though it may be to say so. Anyway, what shall we call it?’

‘We ought to connect it with the village, I suppose. We shall have to notify the Post Office if we change the name, but that should be a simple enough matter.’

‘And the inmates must be told, so that they can notify their correspondents – and that includes Miss Minnie.’

‘Yes, of course. How about presenting each flat with a packet of headed notepaper? Let’s give them a little surprise. People are tickled to death to be given things free of charge.’

The nearest village was called Polweston. After some thought, we discarded the first syllable and settled for Weston Pipers. (Piper, of course, is my own surname and I was rather flattered when Niobe suggested that we use it.) We notified the Post Office of the change and ordered the notepaper.

Again at Niobe’s suggestion, we had never numbered the apartments, as all letters came by way of the front door and it was my business – although actually, as her office opened off the hall, Niobe often made it hers – to put out the correspondence on a small table just to the left of the front door (to which all had keys) so that people could come and collect their letters at their convenience. The exception, of course, was Miss Minnie, whose correspondence, if any, was delivered through her own front door at The Lodge – or should have been, as I pointed out to Niobe.

The first news that there had been a printer’s error of some magnitude came from Constance Kent. The printer’s boy had delivered the packages by hand at midday on that particular morning. I had asked for the packets to be made up separately for each tenant, so when the boy arrived, as Niobe was on the telephone to one of our tradesmen, I set out the packages, each with a typed name on the cover, so that each tenant could pick up his or her own. I intended to put Miss Minnie’s through her letterbox later, as hers was addressed like the rest and so did not include the words The Lodge, although I assumed she would add those two words herself to the headed notepaper.

I had notified the tenants that there was to be a change of address with the arrival, sooner or later, of complimentary packets of notepaper, and apparently Constance Kent, who, when she was not visiting her publishers or her literary agent or had some other reason for going up to London, was always in residence, had seen the boy’s arrival. She was down the stairs and into the hall while I was still setting out the packages on the hall table.

‘Ah!’ she said, picking up the one with her name on it. ‘You didn’t say what the new address was to be. I should like to have seen proofs, but I suppose you didn’t bother to ask for any. You amateurs!’

She tore off the wrappings and uttered an incredulous yelp. ‘Oh, no! Oh, no!’ she said; and burst into hysterical shrieks of laughter. ‘Oh, how absolutely priceless! The printer’s error to end all printers’ errors, and God knows how we suffer from those!’ She thrust the top sheet of her notepaper under my nose and I saw the heading. Nest of Vipers it said, in beautiful italic type.