What Happened at Hazelwood? Read Free Page A

less.
    These were the visitors. The permanents were George’s widowed sister, Lucy Cockayne, and her son, Mervyn. Lucy is two years younger than Bevis, and Mervyn a year younger than Willoughby – which is symmetrical enough. Then there was George’s younger sister, Grace, who is thirty-eight and unmarried. Or at least she is thought to be unmarried. Once you get among baronets and blunt instruments you can never be quite sure of little matters like that, can you?
    Oh – and, of course, there was me.
     
    I seem to have started with the genealogy after all, and let the animated scene wait. Still, it’s coming. And as for the genealogy, there are vital bits missing still. Don’t forget that.
    For instance, Timmy. A vital part of his genealogy is notoriously missing. On that evening it didn’t seem greatly to matter. You don’t need a genealogy to hand soup.
    ‘Timmy,’ said George abruptly, ‘do you like doing this sort of thing?’
    And Timmy Owdon glided behind his father and set down a plate quietly. He wasn’t going to let clumsiness express his feelings, as if those feelings came to no more than sulkiness. Timmy Owdon set down a plate and before replying to his master’s question reached for another. Old Owdon stood behind George’s chair, his one eye impassive and unwinking. If Timmy’s insolence penetrated to his torpid mental processes he gave no sign. Timmy set the second plate. Then he said: ‘No, sir.’
    ‘That so? Pity. Reckoned as promotion, I’m told.’ George, with the frown of a short-sighted but also of a saturnine man, peered up the table. ‘Lucy, Grace, you look quite glum. Have a glass of sherry. Or let Owdon pour the claret now.’
    Neither Lucy nor Grace replied. Owdon remained immobile in his place. Timmy glanced slowly round the table, but his gaze passed some eighteen inches too high for empty plates. He was taking a good look at us – and very plainly consigning most of us to the nethermost pit.
    Bevis took a glance at the boy, flushed, dropped his eyes. ‘George–’ he began, and stopped.
    ‘Yes, Bevis?’
    Bevis compressed his lips and absorbed himself with the Simney crest on his spoon. There was a silence. George laid his little finger on a glass. Owdon poured sherry.
    It pleased George to have Timmy Owdon in the room. In order to achieve this he had contrived (by simple means) to drive one of the parlour-maids from the house. Timmy was to have her place. I believe there was a time when footmen were like game – never provided except in twos or multiples of two. But now here was this solitary youth in a sort of livery, which his father had fished out from somewhere and which by no means fitted him. An uncouth lad would have been a scarecrow. With Timmy you didn’t notice. He would have looked beautiful in anything. And now in his deep smouldering anger at having been taken away from the horses and turned into an indoor servant like his father he looked like a stripling cherub, a fallen angel with all his brightness still about him.
    And yet if there had been an artist in that dining-room (and, oddly enough, Bevis’ boy, Willoughby, is shaping that way) Timmy Owdon would not have stood alone in the limelight. For there was Mervyn Cockayne, George’s nephew and Lucy’s son. Mervyn too was like an angel. In fact, he was like the same angel.
    In that lay George’s little joke. His butler’s boy and his sister’s were equally Simneys. You had only to look at them to see that there could be no doubt of it.
     
    So already, you see, the plot begins to thicken. To no lady of feasible age and of the Simney blood could this clamant genetic fact be palatable. And few country gentlemen whose butler has thus obscurely distinguished himself among his womenfolk will first continue to employ the man and then, some sixteen years on, bring the natural child to his table as a footman. But George liked that sort of thing. Hitherto Timmy had lived unobtrusively in the stables. This was