Read Busman’s Honeymoon for Free Online Page B

for.’
     
    *****
     
      A town, with a wide stone bridge, and lights reflected in the river—taking memory no further back than that morning. The Dowager’s closed car, with the Dowager discreetly seated beside the chauffeur; herself in cloth of gold and a soft fur cloak, and Peter, absurdly upright in morning dress, with a gardenia in his lapel, balancing a silk hat on his knee. ‘Well, Harriet, we’ve passed the Rubicon. Any qualms?’
      ‘No more than when we went up the Cherwell that night and moored on the far bank, and you asked the same question.’
      ‘Thank God! Stick to it, sweetheart. Only one more river.’
      ‘And that’s the river of Jordan.’
      ‘If I kiss you now I shall lose my head and something irreparable will happen to this accursed hat. Let us be very strange and well bred—as if we were not married at all.’
      One more river.
     
    *****
     
      ‘Are we getting anywhere near?’
      ‘Yes—this is Great Pagford, where we used to live. Look! that’s our old house with the three steps up to the door—there’s a doctor there still, you can see the surgery lamp.... After two miles you take the right hand turn for Pagford Parva, and sharp left by a big barn and straight on up the lane.
     
    *****
     
      When she was quite small, Dr Vane had had a dogcart—just like doctors in old-fashioned books. She had gone along this road, ever so many times, sitting beside him, sometimes allowed to pretend to hold the reins. Later on, it had been a car—a small and noisy one, very unlike this smooth, long-bonneted monster. The doctor had had to start on his rounds in good time, so as to leave a margin for break-downs. The second car had been more reliable—a pre-war Ford. She had learnt to drive that one. If her father had lived, he would be getting on for seventy—his strange new son-in-law would have been calling him ‘sir’. An odd way, this, to be coming home, and not home. This was Paggleham, where the old woman lived who had such terrible rheumatism in her hands—old Mrs, Mrs, Mrs Warner, that was it—she must have gone long ago.
     
    *****
     
      ‘That’s the barn, Peter.’
      ‘Right you are. Is that the house?’
      The house where the Batesons had lived—a dear old couple, a pleasantly tottering Darby and Joan pair, always ready to welcome little Miss Vane and give her strawberries and seedy-cake. Yes—the house—a huddle of black gables, with two piled chimney-stacks blotting out the stars. One would open the door and step straight in, through the sanded entry into the big kitchen with its wooden settles and its great oak rafters, hung with home-cured hams. Only, Darby and Joan were dead by now, and Noakes (she vaguely remembered him—a hard-faced, grasping man who hired out bicycles) would be waiting to receive them. But—there was no light in any of the windows at Talboys. ‘We’re a bit late,’ said Harriet, nervously; ‘he may have given us up.’
      ‘Then we shall firmly hand ourselves back to him,’ said Peter cheerfully. ‘People like you and me are not so easily got rid of. I told him, any time after eight o’clock. This looks like the gate.’
      Bunter climbed out and approached the gate in eloquent silence. He had known it; he had felt it in his bones; the arrangements had fallen through. At whatever cost, even if he had had to strangle pressmen with his bare hands, he ought to have come ahead to see to things. In the glare of the headlights a patch of white paper showed clearly on the top bar of the gate; he looked suspiciously at it, removed, with careful fingers, the tin-tack that secured it to the wood and brought it, still without a word, to his master.
      ‘NO BREAD AND MILK’ (it said) ‘TILL FURTHER NOTISE’.
      ‘Hmm!’ said Peter. ‘The occupier, I gather, has already taken his departure. This has been up for several days, by the look of it.’
      ‘He’s got to be there to let us in,’ said