4.50 from Paddington

Lucy was careful to display no embarrassment.

‘I expect you think I’m very nosy,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I was just wondering if something couldn’t be made out of this place—growing mushrooms for the market, that sort of thing. Everything seems to have been let go terribly.’

‘That’s the master, that is. Won’t spend a penny. Ought to have two men and a boy here, I ought, to keep the place proper, but won’t hear of it, he won’t. Had all I could do to make him get a motor mower. Wanted me to mow all that front grass by hand, he did.’

‘But if the place could be made to pay—with some repairs?’

‘Won’t get a place like this to pay—too far gone. And he wouldn’t care about that, anyway. Only cares about saving. Knows well enough what’ll happen after he’s gone—the young gentlemen’ll sell up as fast as they can. Only waiting for him to pop off, they are. Going to come into a tidy lot of money when he dies, so I’ve heard.’

‘I suppose he’s a very rich man?’ said Lucy.

‘Crackenthorpe’s Fancies, that’s what they are. The old gentleman started it, Mr Crackenthorpe’s father. A sharp one he was, by all accounts. Made his fortune, and built this place. Hard as nails, they say, and never forgot an injury. But with all that, he was open-handed. Nothing of the miser about him. Disappointed in both his sons, so the story goes. Give ’em an education and brought ’em up to be gentlemen—Oxford and all. But they were too much of gentlemen to want to go into the business. The younger one married an actress and then smashed himself up in a car accident when he’d been drinking. The elder one, our one here, his father never fancied so much. Abroad a lot, he was, bought a lot of heathen statues and had them sent home. Wasn’t so close with his money when he was young—come on him more in middle age, it did. No, they never did hit it off, him and his father, so I’ve heard.’

Lucy digested this information with an air of polite interest. The old man leant against the wall and prepared to go on with his saga. He much preferred talking to doing any work.

‘Died before the war, the old gentleman did. Terrible temper he had. Didn’t do to give him any cause, he wouldn’t stand for it.’

‘And after he died, this Mr Crackenthorpe came and lived here?’

‘Him and his family, yes. Nigh grown up they was by then.’

‘But surely … Oh, I see, you mean the 1914 war.’

‘No, I don’t. Died in 1928, that’s what I mean.’

Lucy supposed that 1928 qualified as ‘before the war’ though it was not the way she would have described it herself.

She said: ‘Well, I expect you’ll be wanting to go on with your work. You mustn’t let me keep you.’

‘Ar,’ said old Hillman without enthusiasm, ‘not much you can do this time of day. Light’s too bad.’

Lucy went back to the house, pausing to investigate a likely-looking copse of birch and azalea on her way.

She found Emma Crackenthorpe standing in the hall reading a letter. The afternoon post had just been delivered.

‘My nephew will be here tomorrow—with a school-friend. Alexander’s room is the one over the porch. The one next to it will do for James Stoddart-West. They’ll use the bathroom just opposite.’

‘Yes, Miss Crackenthorpe. I’ll see the rooms are prepared.’

‘They’ll arrive in the morning before lunch.’ She hesitated. ‘I expect they’ll be hungry.’

‘I bet they will,’ said Lucy. ‘Roast beef, do you think? And perhaps treacle tart?’

‘Alexander’s very fond of treacle tart.’

The two boys arrived on the following morning. They both had well-brushed hair, suspiciously angelic faces, and perfect manners. Alexander Eastley had fair hair and blue eyes, Stoddart-West was dark and spectacled.

They discoursed gravely during lunch on events in the sporting world, with occasional references to the latest space fiction. Their manner was that of elderly professors discussing palaeolithic implements. In comparison with them, Lucy felt quite young.

The sirloin of beef vanished in no time and every crumb of treacle tart was consumed.

Mr Crackenthorpe grumbled: ‘You two will eat me out of house and home.’

Alexander gave him a blue-eyed reproving glance.

‘We’ll have bread and cheese if you can’t afford meat, Grandfather.’

‘Afford it? I can afford it. I don’t like waste.’

‘We haven’t wasted any, sir,’ said Stoddart-West, looking down at his plate which bore clear testimony of that fact.

‘You boys both eat twice as much as I do.’

‘We’re at the body-building stage,’ Alexander explained. ‘We need a big intake of proteins.’

The old man grunted.

As the two boys left the table, Lucy heard Alexander say apologetically to his friend:

‘You mustn’t pay any attention to my grandfather. He’s on a diet or something and that makes him rather peculiar. He’s terribly mean, too. I think it must be a complex of some kind.’

Stoddart-West said comprehendingly:

‘I had an aunt who kept thinking she was going bankrupt. Really, she had oodles of money. Pathological, the doctor said. Have you got that football, Alex?’

After she had cleared away and washed up lunch, Lucy went out. She could hear the boys calling out in the distance on the lawn. She herself went in the opposite direction, down the front drive and from there she struck across to some clumped masses of rhododendron bushes. She began to hunt carefully, holding back the leaves and peering inside. She moved from clump to clump systematically, and was raking inside with a golf club when the polite voice of Alexander Eastley made her start.

‘Are you looking for something, Miss Eyelesbarrow?’

‘A golf ball,’ said Lucy promptly. ‘Several golf balls in fact. I’ve been practising golf shots most afternoons and I’ve lost quite a lot of balls. I thought that to-day I really must find some of them.’

‘We’ll help you,’ said Alexander obligingly.

‘That’s very kind of you. I thought you were playing football.’

‘One can’t go on playing footer,’ explained Stoddart-West. ‘One gets too hot. Do you play a lot of golf?’

‘I’m quite fond of it. I don’t get much opportunity.’

‘I suppose you don’t. You do the cooking here, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you cook the lunch to-day?’

‘Yes. Was it all right?’

‘Simply wizard,’ said Alexander. ‘We get awful meat at school, all dried up. I love beef that’s pink and juicy inside. That treacle tart was pretty smashing, too.’