An April Shroud

He stood up and dropped his fag end into Bertie’s mug. When it came down to it, he distrusted facts almost as much as atmosphere. He knew at least three innocent men who would be bashing their bishops in Her Majesty’s prisons for many years to come because of so-called facts. On the other hand, on other occasions other facts had saved all three from well-deserved sentences. We are in God’s hands.

So he abandoned facts and set off on a walkabout of the house hoping to encounter truth.

He strolled along the brown horror of the entrance hall opening doors at random. One room contained a full-size billiard table, presumably the one on which the coffin had rested. There were two or three balls on the table and a cue leaned up against a pocket. Someone had not waited long to resume playing.

Dalziel moved on and reached the next door just as a telephone rang inside.

‘Hello!’ said old Fielding’s reedy but still imperious voice. ‘Yes. This is Hereward Fielding speaking.’

So that’s what ‘Herrie’ was short for. Jesus wept!

He remained at the door. He was firmly of the conviction that if you didn’t have enough sense to lower your voice, then you either wanted or deserved to be overheard.

‘No, I will not change my mind,’ said Fielding. ‘And I am too old to be bribed, persuaded or flattered into doing so. Now please, leave me alone. I have just buried my son today, yes, my son. Spare me your sympathy. You may come tomorrow if you wish, but I make no promises about my availability. Good day.’

The phone was replaced with a loud click. Dalziel pushed open the door and entered.

The room was large and ugly, its furnishings and decoration old enough to be tatty without getting anywhere near the ever-shifting bourne of the antique. Fielding had turned from the telephone to a wall cabinet, the door of which seemed to be jammed. He glanced up at Dalziel.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said, heaving. The door flew open and a glass unbalanced and fell to the threadbare carpet. He ignored it, but plucked another from inside and with it a bottle. Dalziel fixed his gaze on this. It took a strong man to stand with a bottle in one hand, a glass in the other, and not offer him a drink.

‘Can I help you?’ asked Fielding.

‘No. The others seem to be in conference and I was just having a look around,’ said Dalziel.

‘Were you? Well, this room, by general consensus the coldest and draughtiest in this cold and draughty house, is sometimes regarded as my sitting-room. Though naturally should anyone else wish to eat, drink, sleep, play records, make love or merely take a walk in it, my selfish demands for privacy are not allowed to get in the way.’

‘That’s good of you,’ said Dalziel heartily, closing the door behind him. ‘Terrible, this weather. I pity all the poor sods on holiday.’

‘I understood you were on holiday,’ said Fielding, filling his glass.

‘So I am,’ said Dalziel, mildly surprised at the idea. ‘Pity me then. Yes, it’s still chucking it down. I hope your grandson’s all right.’

‘What?’

‘Your grandson. He’s run away, I believe. I’m sorry, didn’t you know?’

The old man took a long swallow from his glass. What was it? wondered Dalziel. He couldn’t see the label which was obscured by Fielding’s long bony fingers, but the liquid was an attractive pale amber.

‘It would be too optimistic to hope you might mean Bertie?’ said Fielding.

‘No. The lad. Nigel.’

‘I feared so. It was ever thus. Wilde was wrong. You don’t have to kill the things you love. Just wait long enough and they’ll go away.’

‘Who?’ said Dalziel, pouncing on this further reference to killing and wanting to get its provenance right.

‘Who? You mean, who … Oscar Wilde. The Ballad of Reading Gaol.’

‘Oh, the poof,’ said Dalziel, his interest evaporating.

Unexpectedly Fielding laughed.

‘That’s the one,’ he said. ‘Will you have a drink, Mr …?’

‘Dalziel. Yes, I will.’ Here’s another one who thinks he’s summed me up and can start patronizing me, thought Dalziel as his huge hand held the glass he had retrieved from the floor steadfastly under the bottle till the meniscus touched the rim and Fielding said ironically, ‘Say when.’

It was brandy, a cheap brand Dalziel suspected, not from any connoisseurship of the liquor but by simple taste-bud comparison with the smoothness of his own favourite malt whisky. Something of his reaction must have shown and he realized he had inadvertently got back at Fielding for his suspected condescension when the old man said, ‘I’m sorry, it’s not good, but these days we all have to make sacrifices.’

‘It’s fine. Just the job for this weather,’ said Dalziel, emptying his glass and proffering it for a refill.

‘The weather. Yes. That foolish boy. I hope he will be all right. He never goes far, at least he didn’t when Conrad – that’s his father, my son – was alive.’

‘Fond of his dad, was he?’

‘Very,’ said the old man firmly.

‘But he still ran away, even then?’

‘Certainly. It’s in the family. Conrad was always taking off when he was a boy. I myself ran off to join the Army in 1914. I was sixteen at the time.’

‘Did they take you?’ asked Dalziel.

‘Not then. I looked very young. We were younger then, you know. Balls dropping, menstruation, it all happened later in my generation. But now they seem to need jockstraps and brassieres in the cradle.’

Fielding laughed harshly.

‘Anyway, it was a blessing I see now. I went legally and forcibly in 1916 and within six months I was ready to run away again, home this time.’

‘It must have been terrible,’ said Dalziel with spurious sympathy. ‘All that mud.’

‘Mud? Oh no. I didn’t mean the trenches. I never really saw the trenches. It was just the sheer boredom of the whole thing that made me want to run away. Very unfashionable. I wrote a book about my experiences a few years after the war. A light, comic thing, it went down well enough with your general reader, but it put me in bad with the intelligentsia for the next decade. But then I did a bit of Eliot-bashing and that was a help. Even so, I still got the cold shoulder, more or less, until the fifties. After that it was just a question of survival. Hang on long enough and you’re bound to become a Grand Old Man. Like the essays Paul Pennyfeather set in Decline and Fall. The reward is for length, regardless of merit.’

He laughed again, a series of glottally-stopped cracks, like a night-stick rattling along metal railings. Dalziel contemplated making him laboriously explain what he had just said, sentence by sentence, but decided against it on the grounds that the poor old sod probably couldn’t help himself.

‘So you’re not too worried about the boy?’

‘In the sense that he is too sensible to contribute willingly to his own harm, no. But as you say, the weather is appalling and, in addition, we live in troubled times, Mr Dalziel. The post-war period is an age of unbalance, of violence. Women and children cannot wander around with impunity as in my boyhood. Even the police seem more likely to be a source of molestation than a protection against it.’

‘They’ve a hard job,’ said Dalziel mildly.

‘I dare say. They certainly make hard work of finding an answer to the crime wave.’

‘Oh, the answer’s simple,’ said Dalziel. ‘Charge two guineas a pint for petrol, have a dusk to dawn curfew, and deport regular offenders to Manchester.’

It was a Yorkshire joke. Fielding was not very amused.

‘It’s in man’s mind, not his motorways, that the answer lies,’ he said reprovingly. ‘Has Bonnie organized a search for Nigel? No, you said they were in conference, didn’t you? Conference! You see how this house is run, Mr Dalziel!’