What Happened at Hazelwood? by Michael Innes Page A

mask; and at that I really was frightened all through. I put out my hand to him. ‘Timmy,’ I said, ‘stop it . And listen. If I need help from anyone in this household, I’ll come to you.’
    ‘Is that a promise?’ He flushed. ‘I’m – I’m only sixteen.’
    ‘It’s a promise that I’ll come to you. And now be off. Clean knives. Polish Mrs Gerard’s exquisite Australian shoes.’
    Timmy Owdon sprang to his feet, and his face was radiant with its wicked, eager smile. ‘Your ladyship,’ he said, ‘should be about and caring for your guests. I will send your ladyship’s ladyship as fast as a stick can drive her up the back stairs.’
    And he was gone. I finished my tea and stared blankly into the empty cup. One cannot hold such a conversation as this with a houseboy – even though he be obscurely one of the family – without feeling oneself amid a dreamlike and altogether impermanent scene of things.
     
    Mervyn kept his bed that morning; Owdon, as befitted his dignity, was not in attendance at breakfast; but everybody else was there – including Timmy, who took round coffee like an automaton. I concluded that George had judged it futile, after all, to attempt to conceal him from the Australians (and why he had in the first case been prompted to do so I could not guess), and had therefore rescinded his banishment. That everyone should appear at once was slightly surprising after the events of the night before; one would have predicted that the family would slip in one by one after cautious reconnaissance and snatch a kipper to gnaw in the garden. But there they all were in a rather distrustful circle – and Lucy passed me the marmalade.
    A good deal can be put into passing the marmalade: adoration, cordiality, indifference, distaste. But what Lucy put in was hate – which is an altogether different matter. Just how she contrived it I could not now describe, but the impression was vivid enough at the time and wholly unambiguous. It was the more surprising, too, because – so far as I was aware – it was something quite new in our relations. Between sisters-in-law, I suppose, there must always be undercurrents of animosity; and these will be definite where it is a matter of a resident sister-in-law in such a queer household as ours. But why (I asked myself while doing what justice I could to marmalade so delivered) hate ? Was it because she credited me with inspiring Gerard to pitch her precious Mervyn out of the window? Almost certainly it had to do with Mervyn in some way. For except in relation to Mervyn Lucy was surely incapable of any intensity whatever; she was a stupid, vague creature except when touched off at this one point of maternal solicitude. But here she was suddenly hating me – and (I could have sworn) studying my complexion. It was unnerving. And although the riddle had its obvious solution this just didn’t occur to me. Perhaps I was too preoccupied with Gerard.
    This was because Gerard was too preoccupied with me. Timmy had made me a bit edgy and I was reckoning that one would-be protector was a little more than enough. Yet here was Gerard so carefully not looking at me that he was obviously meditating both me and my position in the household all the time. Perhaps he was intelligent enough to be wondering not only how on earth I got there but why on earth I stayed. Even in the great Australian out-back wives are presumably not serfs – so why should they be so on the estate of an English baronet? Yes, perhaps Gerard was meditating that. And last night he had been, after all, rather unnecessarily helpful. Mervyn might very well have been let alone… Gerard, who was likeable, could (I saw) also be indiscreet. And he looked as if he might be taking Timmy’s line on Lady Simney – and that on the strength of an uncommonly short acquaintance.
    It is quite nauseous to be representing myself as a typical femme fatale – particularly if this aspect of the mystery is likely to prove to