What Happened at Hazelwood? Read Free

a bit of the atmosphere of the Simneys being laid on right at the start. Here is one facet – the showing-off facet. Gerard (so recently arrived from Australia) calls it their fondness for showing their grudge. The Simneys are grudgy. A most extraordinary phrase, but not inexpressive: what is implied is showing off not with the simple aim of gratifying one’s own vanity but with some deliberate intention of irritating. And I can think of another epithet that fits. When I was at Oxford carefully spoken undergraduates, I discovered, used the word bloody (so omnibus a word with the world at large) in a very precise way. To call a man bloody , it seemed, was to ascribe to him a very specific quality of intolerableness – one not easy to define but perfectly well understood in that society. Well, in this sense the Simneys are bloody . Are they – or is one of them – bloody in another sense?
     
    Now does he feel
    His secret murders sticking on his hands…
     
    Is one of them like that? Those grey-haired men propose to find out.
    And now I ought to give you first a genealogical account of the Simneys (illustrated by one of those family trees that Galsworthy popularized among novelists) and second a chronological and topographical description of the actual fatality (with a regular crime-story plan: x marks the Spot).
    Somehow or other all this will have to come, but it seems to me that I had better begin with at least a short scene of greater animation. For I want to gain your interest in this George Simney affair. It interests me.
    So consider dinnertime on the Monday. There is a natural starting place there. And if you will unpack your bag, so to speak, for a week’s visit to Hazelwood beginning on that day you will have a reasonable opportunity of getting acquainted with us before the thing actually happens and a chance of receiving the final solution just as the car comes round to take you to the station on the following Sunday evening. I don’t say that you will find this week at Hazelwood wholly edifying or exactly comfortable. Some rather improper things will happen, numerous meals will be completely upset and it is likely that on several mornings the agitated servants will quite neglect to bring you your hot water or your tea. Still, it will be tolerably lively most of the time.
    Moreover you won’t be the only visitor. For that was what happened at dinnertime on the Monday. Another couple of Simneys turned up, and one of them brought a wife as well. They turned up without warning from twelve thousand miles away, loudly declaring that George had in some way cheated or defrauded them. This, of course, was likely enough. But we felt that they might well have left these business issues till next morning – particularly as in brief inarticulate intervals they put away so much of that dinner that there was very little left for anybody else. No doubt this was just their rude colonial health. They looked healthy – and Joyleen excessively so: she has the physical perfection that comes of living in sun and surf and idleness. She is also sexy in a thoroughly vulgar way, like the girls in advertisements for swimsuits. She caught George’s eye from the first.
    But why start with Joyleen? There’s no logic in that.
    Notice to begin with, then, that this dinner would have been quite notable even if those antipodean cousins hadn’t turned up. It would probably have been quite uncomfortable too. George never really got on with his younger brother, Bevis – this, perhaps, because of their long separation in youth – and nothing brought them together except the ritual business of shooting over each other’s land. But now here was Bevis staying at Hazelwood, and with him was his son, Willoughby. George was fifty-four, Bevis is fifty-three, and Willoughby is twenty. I can’t see how to avoid these bald slabs of information in starting a family chronicle like this. And I warn you that you have to remember them – more or