Farthing

1

It started when David came in from the lawn absolutely furious. We were down at Farthing for one of Mummy’s ghastly political squeezes. If we could have found any way out of it we would have been somewhere else, but Mummy was inexorable so there we were, in my old girlhood bedroom that I’d left behind so happily when I’d married David, him in a morning suit and me in a little knee-length beige Chanel thing.

He burst in, already drawing breath to speak. Lady Thirkie thinks you should sack me, Lucy!

I didn’t see at first that he was spitting mad, because I was busy trying to get my hair to stay on top of my head without disarranging my pearls. In fact, if my hair had been less recalcitrant about that sort of thing probably it would never have happened, because I’d have been on the lawn with David, and then Angela would never have been so dim. In any case, at first the whole thing struck me as funny, and I absolutely gurgled with laughter. Darling, you can’t sack a husband, can you? It would have to be divorce. Whatever have you been doing that Angela Thirkie thinks is enough for me to divorce you?

Lady Thirkie appears to have mistaken me for the hired help, David said, coming around behind me so I could see him in the mirror, and of course, when I saw him, I realized at once that he wasn’t the slightest bit amused by it, and that I shouldn’t have laughed, and in fact that laughing was probably the worst thing I could have done in the circumstances, at least without bringing David around to seeing the funny side of things first.

Angela Thirkie is a complete nincompoop. We’ve all been laughing at her for years, I said, which was completely true but didn’t help even a shred, because David, of course, hadn’t been laughing at her for years, hadn’t been there for years to laugh at her, so it was another thing pointing up the difference between me and him and just at the time when he’d had the difference rather shoved down his throat in the first place because of Angela’s idiocy.

He looked rather grim in my mirror, so I turned around to see if he looked any better the right way around. I kept my hands up in my hair because I nearly had it right at last. She thought I shouldn’t be helping myself to cocktails and she said she’d tell your mother and recommend she sack me, he said, smiling but in a way that meant he didn’t find it even the least bit funny. I suppose I do look rather like a waiter in this getup.

Oh darling, you don’t; you look delicious, I said, automatically soothing, although it was true. Angela’s a nitwit, truly. Hasn’t she been introduced to you?

Oh yes, at one of the engagement parties, and then again at the wedding, David said, his smile becoming even more brittle. But no doubt we all look the same to her.

Oh darling! I said, and let my hands go out towards him, abandoning my hair for the time being, because there was nothing I could say—he was right and we both knew he was. I’ll come back out with you now and we can give her such a snub.

I shouldn’t mind it, David said, taking my hands and looking down at me. Except that it reflects on you. You’d have been much more comfortable marrying someone of your own kind.

And this was true of course, there is a sort of comfort in being with people who think exactly as you do because they’ve been brought up exactly the same way and share all the same jokes. It’s a feeble kind of comfort and doesn’t last beyond seeing that you’ve nothing truly in common except that kind of upbringing and background. People don’t marry in order to be comfortable, I said. Then, as usual with people I trust, I let my train of thought go haring off out of control. Unless maybe Mummy did. That would explain a lot about her marriage. I put my hand to my mouth to cover a horrified laugh, and also to try to catch back the train of thought that had got away from me. My old governess, Abby, taught me to think of it that way and to do that. It helps for the blunders, at least if I do it in time, but it does mean that Mummy has reproved me on several occasions for keeping my hand up to my mouth more than a lady ought!

Then are you sure you didn’t marry me for the opposite reason? David asked, ignoring the diversion. Especially so you could use me to enjoy snubbing people like Lady Thirkie?

That’s absurd, I said, and turned back to the mirror, and this time I caught up my hair and the pearls all in one swirl and managed to get it just right where all my careful trying before had failed. I smiled at my reflection, and at David where he was standing behind me.

There was a certain grain of truth in what he said, but a very distant grain that wouldn’t be good for either of us or for our marriage if we spent time dwelling on it. Daddy had made me face all that on the night he’d agreed to the marriage going ahead. David had imagined that Daddy would make endless difficulties, but in fact he just gave me that one really hard talk and then buckled down and accepted David as one of the family. It was Mummy who made the difficulties, as I’d known it would be.

Daddy had called me into his office in London and told all the secretaries and everyone not to let anybody in. I’d felt simultaneously rather important, and as if I were ten years old and on the carpet for not doing my homework. I had to keep reminding myself I was the thoroughly grown-up and almost-on-the-shelf young lady I really was. I sat in the leather chair he keeps for visitors, clutching my purse on my knee, and he sat down behind his big eighteenth-century desk and just looked at me for a moment. He didn’t beat about the bush at all, no nonsense with drinks and cigarettes and getting comfortable. I’m sure you know what I want to talk to you about, Luce, he started.

I nodded. David, I said. I love him, Daddy, and I want to marry him.

David Kahn, Daddy had said, as if the words left a bad taste in his mouth.

I started to say something feeble in David’s defense, but Daddy held up a hand. I already know what you’re going to say, so save your breath. He was born in England, he’s a war hero, his family are very wealthy. I could counter with the fact that he was educated on the Continent, he’s a Jew, and not one of us.

I was just going to say we love each other, I said, with as much dignity as I could manage. Unlike Mummy, who could only make a nuisance of herself, Daddy really could have scuppered the whole thing at that point. Although I was twenty-three and, since Hugh died, heir to pretty much everything except Farthing and the title, I didn’t have any money of my own beyond what Daddy let me have, and neither did David. His family were wealthy enough, but he himself hardly had a bean, certainly not enough for the two of us to live on. His family, which surprised me at first though it made sense afterwards, didn’t approve of me one whit more than mine approved of him. So it could have been a real Romeo and Juliet affair if not for Daddy seeing sense and coming over to my side.

Having seen you together and talked to young David, I don’t doubt that, funnily enough, Daddy said. But what I want to know is whether that’s enough. Love’s a wonderful thing, but it can be a fragile flower when the winds blow cold against it, and I can see a lot of cold winds poised to howl down on the pair of you.

Just so long as you’re not one of those winds, Daddy, I said, pressing my knees together and sitting up straight, to look as mature and sensible as I could.

Daddy laughed. I’ve seen you sitting like that when you want to impress me since you were five years old, he said. Then he suddenly leaned forward and turned really serious. Have you thought what it’s going to mean being Mrs. Kahn? We share a name that we didn’t do anything personally to earn but which we inherited from our Eversley ancestors, who did. It is a name that opens doors for us. You’re talking about giving that up to become Mrs. Kahn—

Kahn means that David’s ancestors were priests in Israel when ours were painting themselves blue with woad, I said, quoting—or probably misquoting—Disraeli.

Daddy smiled. All the same, what it means to people now and in England will close a lot of doors in your face.

Not doors I want to go through, I said.

Daddy raised an eyebrow at that.

No, really, I have thought this through, I said, and I had, or thought I had. You remember when Billy Cheriton was taking me about everywhere? Billy had been one of Mummy’s worst ideas, the younger son of the Earl of Hampshire, who’s Mummy’s cousin and who happened to be married to one of her best friends. We’d known each other all our lives, gone to the same nursery parties, and then the same young-people parties, and Mummy’s idea had been what a natural match it would have been.

Daddy nodded. He didn’t think much of Billy.

Once we were down at Cheltenham for the racing because Tibs had a horse running and Billy was showing the family flag. We were in a crowd of nice people just like us, and the horse lost, of course.

Tibs Cheriton has never had an eye for horseflesh, Daddy said. Sorry. Go on.

So we were drowning our sorrows in Pimms, and I was bored, suddenly, bored to screaming point, not just with Cheltenham and that crowd but with the whole thing, the whole ritual. Tibs and one of the other boys were talking about horse breeding, and I thought that it was just the same with us, the fillies and the stallions, the young English gentry, breeding the next generation of English gentry, and I couldn’t think of anything more excruciatingly boring than to be married to Billy, or Tibs, or any of that cackling crowd. Not that I’d have married Tibs if he were the last man in the world, because I was pretty sure he was Athenian, and I think Mummy knew it too, otherwise it would have been Tibs she’d have been pushing me into going around with, not Billy. I don’t want that. I’ve been presented and done all the deb stuff and even before I met David I knew it wasn’t what I wanted.

That was when Daddy said it. Are you sure you’re not marrying David just to escape from that? he asked. To shock Billy and all the Billies by doing something they can’t countenance? Because if you are, it isn’t kind to David, and that’ll stop being fun too, much sooner than you think.

I thought about it, and I could see the smallest grain of that in me, the desire to give it all up and rub their faces in it with someone totally unacceptable by their own ridiculous standards. I’m afraid Mummy had rather done her bit to encourage that part of my feelings, while intending the opposite, of course. I do think there might be the tiniest bit of that, Daddy, I admitted. But really I love David, and he and I have so much in common in ways that aren’t to do with up-bringing and education and that count for a lot more with me.

He assured me he didn’t intend to pressure you to convert, Daddy said.

He’s not very religious himself, I said.

He told me he has no intention of giving up his religion. Daddy frowned.

Why should he? I asked. It’s not just a religion, it’s a culture. He’s not very religious, but he’s not ashamed of his culture, his background, and converting would be like saying he was. It wouldn’t make any difference to anything anyway—people who hate the Jews hate converts just as much. He says Jewish children take the religion of the mother, so that’s all right.

In the same way it would make no difference, people will always talk of you as ‘that Mrs. Kahn, Lucy Eversley that was.’ He made his voice into a cruel imitation of a society woman, of Mummy at her absolute bitchiest really.

I can’t say that didn’t hurt a bit, but even as it hurt, the tiny sting of it made me realize how unimportant it really was, compared to the way I loved David. I shook my head. Better that than not marrying David, I said.

You know, in Germany— Daddy began.

But we’re not in Germany. We fought a war—you and David both fought a war—to ensure that the border of the Third Reich stops at the Channel. It always will. Germany doesn’t have anything to do with anything.

Even in England you’ll come in for a lot of trouble, which your young man is used to but you won’t be, Daddy said. Little things like not being allowed into clubs, big things like not being allowed to buy land. And that will come to your children. When your daughters come out, they might not be allowed to be debs and be presented, with the name Kahn.

So much the better for them, I said, though that did shake me a little.

There might be stings and insults you don’t expect, Daddy added.

But although he was right, I generally found I didn’t mind them, or thought them funny, whereas poor David wasn’t used to them at all, like this thing now with idiotic Angela Thirkie and her stupid assumption that anyone with a face and coloring like David’s had to be a servant. Maybe he was better able to deal with an outright snub than this kind of casual disregard.

I let my hair go, cautiously, and when it stayed up, I turned back to David. I wanted to marry you because of you, and I’ve never given a damn about those people one way or the other and you should know that.

For a moment he kept on looking pained. Then he smiled and hugged me, and for the time being everything was all right again.

He took my hand and we walked out into the garden, where Mummy’s ghastly bash was now in full swing.

What I was thinking as we walked out there was that David and I really did have a tremendous amount in common, books and music and ways of thinking about things. I don’t mean usual ways of thinking, because I’m scatterbrained and not really very bright while David is tremendously clever, of course. But time after time we’ll come to the same conclusions about whether something is sound, starting from different places and using different methods of logic. David never bores me and he never gives me the feeling that other tremendously brainy people I’ve known have given me of leaving me streets behind. We can talk about anything, except perhaps some of the trickier bits of our own relationship. There are some things best left to the subconscious, after all, as David himself says.

I gave his hand an extra squeeze just because I loved him, and he looked down at me, for once not picking up what I meant but thinking I wanted something. So I put my face up to be kissed, and that was how we snubbed stupid insensitive Angela Thirkie, who was married to the most boring man in England, who everyone knows didn’t even want her, he wanted her sister, by kissing like newlyweds on the lawn when in fact we’d been married eight whole months and really ought to be settling down to life as old respectable married people.

But anyway, when I heard that Sir James Thirkie had been murdered, that’s the first thing I thought of, Angela Thirkie being mean to David the afternoon before, and I’m afraid the first thing to go through my mind, although fortunately I managed to catch the train before it got out of the tunnel that time so I didn’t say so, was that it well and truly served her right.

2

Inspector Peter Anthony Carmichael had been vaguely aware that Farthing was a country house in Hampshire; but before the murder he had only really heard of it in a political context. The Farthing Set, the newspapers would say, meaning a group of loosely connected movers and shakers, politicians, soldiers, socialites, financiers: the people who had brought peace to England. By peace was meant not Chamberlain’s precarious peace in our time but the lasting Peace with Honour after we’d fought Hitler to a standstill. The Inspector included himself in that we—as a young lieutenant he’d been one of the last to get away from Dunkirk. He’d cautiously welcomed the peace when it came, although at that point he’d had a sneaking fondness for crazy old Churchill’s fighting rhetoric and been afraid Hitler couldn’t be trusted. This Farthing Peace isn’t worth a farthing, Churchill had wheezed, and the newspapers had shown him holding up a farthing mockingly.

But time had showed that the Farthing Set were right. The Continent was the Continent and England was England, and old Adolf admired England and had no territorial ambitions across the Channel. Nine years had been enough to test the terms of the Farthing Peace and show that England and the Reich could be good friends. The Farthing Set had been vindicated and stayed at the centers of power. And now there had been a murder in Farthing House, so Farthing changed its meaning for him again and Inspector Carmichael found himself being driven through a green, peaceful, and very beautiful England on a Sunday morning early in May.

Carmichael came from Lancashire, not the industrial southern Lancashire of cotton mills and unemployment, but the bleak northern uplands of moorland and fell. His father lived in a crumbling house not much better than the farmhouses of his tenants and struggled to send his sons to minor public schools. Carmichael’s had been so minor it had since perished, with no loss to anyone, especially Carmichael. If he ever had sons, which he increasingly doubted, he’d certainly not have chosen to send them to that hell-hole to be starved and beaten. Still, that, with the Dunkirk experience, had been good enough for Scotland Yard, and he was a full inspector now at twenty-nine, with good pay and excellent prospects for advancement. Many hadn’t done as well in the lean post-war years. His older brother, Matthew, whose public school had been better, if still minor, was living in the North helping his father with the sheep. He didn’t see civilization more than once a month when he went into Lancaster to the bank and the solicitor and maybe a stop for lunch at the King’s Head and a quick hour at the pictures in the afternoon. It wasn’t much, and Carmichael sometimes paused in his enjoyment of the good things in life to consider the pitiful lot of his distant brother.

All the same, there was enough of the Northerner left in him to distrust the Hampshire countryside that was doing its best to beguile him. The trees, so much more frequent and so much broader here than on his native moor, were in fullest leaf and cast a delightful shade. Beneath them spread as solid a carpet of bluebells as he had ever seen, sending their scent drifting into the car as he was driven on past them. The sun was shining from a deep blue sky, as it rarely shone on Lancashire, the fields were ploughed and planted, the hay was already high, the grass was a verdant green, and the birds were singing. As if this wasn’t enough, every few miles the road wound its way through a little village with a church, a pub, a post office, thatched cottages, and just sufficient individuality to tell it from the last one. One might boast a manor house, a second a duck pond, a third a village green, or a mighty oak with two old men sitting beneath it as if they were about to hand down the wisdom of the elders. Carmichael sighed.

What’s wrong, sir? Sergeant Royston, at the wheel of the police Bentley, spared a quick glance for his superior. Didn’t fancy Sunday duty?

Not especially, Carmichael said. Though I hadn’t anything special to do today, and I might as well work now if the Yard needs me and have a free day in the week when the shops are open. It’s just this countryside depresses me somehow.

They swept into another little village. This one had a pretty girl feeding white Aylesbury ducks outside one of the cottages. It is lacking a bit of life compared to town, Royston said as he rounded the curve back into the endless fields and spinneys.

It’s not that, Carmichael said, as it suddenly came to him what it was. It’s all so fat and complacent somehow, as if it’s had too long living on its rich soils and warm summers. It’s fallen asleep in the sunshine. It could do with something to give it a shake and wake it up, like a famine, or a plague, or an invasion or something.

Royston slowed as they came into yet another village. Just past the church was an unpleasant reminder of the invasion that had nearly happened, an Anderson shelter, with children playing, running in and out of it. Royston said nothing, but Carmichael felt the red tide of embarrassment burning on his cheeks. He hadn’t meant the Germans, nothing had been farther from his mind, he’d been centuries away imagining Vikings or pirates descending on these smug sleepy peasants.

I don’t much care for bluebells myself, Royston said. If we had to drive down this way, I’d have preferred to do it a few weeks ago in primrose season. Primroses are a beautiful color, very cheering.

I find them a bit on the soft side myself, Carmichael said. Bluebells, now, we do have them in the North. I wouldn’t have thought you cared for flowers at all, sergeant. I thought you were a strictly town man.

Well, I was born and bred in London myself, but my mother’s family lived in the countryside.

Round here? Carmichael asked.

Kent. I have an aunt who still lives there; some of the family go down to see her at Easter and for the hop picking. Easter’s when we used to see the primroses, when I was a boy. It’s a good way east of here, but I suppose from the perspective of Lancashire it would count as these parts.

Carmichael laughed. All these years, and I’d never have suspected you of having a Kentish aunt, Royston. You hide it very well.

There was a fork in the road ahead. Royston slowed to a halt to check the arms of the little signpost. Would we want Farthing Green, Upper Farthing, or Farthing St. Mary? he asked.

Castle Farthing. Carmichael checked his notes and his map without effect. There was an area on the map labeled unhelpfully THE FARTHINGS. Head for Farthing St. Mary, he said, decisively.

Yes, sir, Royston said.

Carmichael knew the first secret of command, which was making a decision, right or wrong, but going ahead without hesitating. He might have sent them off the wrong way and condemned them to an endless trek through the barely charted Hampshire countryside, but at least he had made a decision.

By pure luck he was right. The next sign offered CASTLE FARTHING on one of its branches, and the lane it led down, with its heavy hedgerows, came at last to an end with a loop around a village green. There was a church, larger than most, a pub, the Eversley Arms, a row of cottages, and a high wall containing a pair of wrought-iron gates with the word FARTHING scrolling indolently across them as if there were no other possible Farthing, as indeed, for anyone beyond this little corner of Hampshire where people no doubt knew one Farthing from the next, there was not. Beneath the name was the ubiquitous robin, the obverse of the farthing coin, the political symbol of the Farthing Set. With a start, Carmichael realized that considering the antiquity of the gates, a century if it was a day and probably more, this particular robin must pre-date the Set and was doubtless the prototype for the whole thing.

Meanwhile, the gates were closed. Judging from the ruts in the gravel, this was an unusual state of affairs. Probably the local police shut them to close off the house from press and sightseers, Carmichael said, indicating the ruts.

Sightseers? Here? Royston’s London face dismissed the possibility. All the same, they should have left a bobby on the gates, he said, his tone reproving the absent local constabulary. Shall I try if they’re open, sir?

You do that, sergeant, Carmichael said. As a young officer he’d have got out to try them himself, and lost all his subordinate’s respect in the process. Now he sat back and watched Royston crunch across the gravel.

With the engine off, the bird-song seemed very loud. A nearby but invisible blackbird chirruped, Look at me. Look at me. This is my territ’ry. He was answered by other birds seeking mates, building nests, or defending their boundaries. They stilled to silence when they heard the clang of Royston shaking the gate, then started up again, for all the world as if they were gossiping about it. Royston started back towards the car, shaking his head.

Carmichael stuck his head out of the open window. Let’s give them a quick blast and see what that roots out, he said. Royston grinned. Carmichael leaned across the driver’s seat and tapped out a quick salute on the horn: Pa pa pa paaaarp!

The only immediate result was another avian hush, and Carmichael was about to try again when a middle-aged woman came hurrying from the nearest cottage, wiping her hands on her apron. You’ll be the police, she said. Excuse me not hearing you, but I was just getting dinner out. As if to authenticate her statement, the church clock suddenly chimed through its sequence and then struck noon. It was so close that none of them could speak over the clamor.

Isn’t that a bit loud? Royston asked, taking his hands down from his ears.

Oh, we’re used to it, the woman said. It has to be that loud so they can hear it up at the house. She nodded towards the gates.

Are you the gatekeeper? Carmichael asked.

She blinked. No . . . and I’m not rightly the gatekeeper’s wife neither, because there hasn’t been a gatekeeper since my father died. The gates stand open, mostly. I was saying to Jem this morning that I don’t know when we shut them last.

This confirmed Carmichael’s observation. He nodded. They’re not closed even at night? he asked.

No, not for ever so long now, she said. Not since my father died probably, the same year the old king died.

It was as Carmichael had thought. Anyone could have driven up to the house. The gravel held tracks. The local police would have driven up it this morning, but it might be possible to find some evidence even so. He got out of the car and stood beside Royston. So, if you’re not the gatekeeper, who are you? he asked the woman.

I’m Betty, she said, Betty Jordan. My husband Jem is the mechanic up at the big house.

Mechanic? Royston asked, surprised.

He keeps their cars and that going, she said.

But you have a key to the gate? Carmichael asked.

Yes, and the policeman from Winchester said you’d be arriving and to let you in when you did, she said, brandishing a large iron key inset with a robin to match the robin on the gates. You are the London police, aren’t you? She took their silence for assent and went on immediately. Isn’t it terrible, anarchists murdering Sir James in his bed like that?

And to think it might have been prevented if they’d only locked the gates, Carmichael said, taking the key from her unresisting hand. I’ll be sure to lock them behind me now, and to see that this key is returned to you later. We’ll also need to interview you and your family—does your husband sleep at home?

Jem? she asked, as if he might mean some