A Question of Upbringing - Anthony Powell [18]
Out on the road again, Templer said: “First we are rushed into this horrible place: then we are rushed out again. What is supposed to be on?”
Stringham said: “I’ve just had a word with the police.”
“What about?”
“On the subject of Braddock alias Thorne.”
“Who’s that?”
“The chap they wanted for fraud.”
“What about him?”
“Just to inform them of his whereabouts.”
“Is this a joke?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you tell them to look?”
“In a field beyond the railway line.”
“Why?”
“Set your mind to it.”
“Le Bas?”
“Neat, wasn’t it?”
“What did they say?”
“I rang up in the character of Le Bas himself,” Stringham said. “I told them that a man ‘described as looking rather like me’ had been piling up bills at various shops in the town where I had accounts: that I had positive information that the man in question had been only a few minutes earlier at the place I described.”
“Did the police swallow that?”
“They asked me to come to the station. I pretended to get angry at the delay, and – in a really magnificent Le Bas outburst – I said that I had an urgent appointment to address the confirmation candidates – although, as far as I can remember, it is the wrong time of year to be confirmed – that I was late already and must set off at once: and that, if the man were not arrested, I should hold the local police responsible.”
“I foresee the hell of a row,” said Templer. “Still, one must admit that it was a good idea. Meanwhile, the sooner we get back to the house and supply a few alibis, the better.”
We walked at a fairly smart pace down the road Widmerpool had traversed when I had seen him returning from his run at the end of the previous year: the tar now soft under foot from the heat of the summer sun. Inside, the house was quiet and comparatively cool. Templer, who had recently relaxed his rule of never reading for pleasure, took up Sanders of the River, while Stringham and I discussed the probable course that events would take if the police decided to act as a result of the telephone message. We sat about until the bell began to ring for evening chapel.
“Come on,” said Stringham. “Let’s see if there is any news.”
At the foot of the stairs, we met Widmerpool in the hall. He had just come in from outside, and he seemed unusually excited about something. As we passed – contrary in my experience to all precedent so far as his normal behaviour was concerned – he addressed himself to Stringham, in point of age the nearest to him, saying in his shrillest voice: “I say, do you know Le Bas has been arrested?”
He stood there in the shadowy space by the slab in a setting of brown-paper parcels, dog-eared school books, and crumbs – a precinct of which the moral and physical cleansing provoked endless activity in the mind of Le Bas – and stood with his feet apart and eyes expanded, his panting, as Templer had justly described it, like that of an elderly lap-dog: his appearance suggesting rather some unusual creature actually bred in those depths by the slab, amphibious perhaps, though largely belonging to this land-world of blankets and carbolic: scents which attained their maximum density at this point, where they met and mingled with the Irish stew, which, coming from the territories of laundry baskets and coke, reached its most potent force on the first step of the stairs.
Stringham turned to Widmerpool. “I am not surprised,” he said coldly. “How did it happen?”
“I was coming back from my walk,” said Widmerpool, in spite of his excitement lowering his voice a little, as though touching on a very sacred subject in thus referring to his personal habits, “I was coming back from my walk,” he repeated, dwelling on the words, “and, as I strolled across one of the fields by the railway line, I saw Le Bas lying on the ground reading a book.