Illywhacker

"No, no, no. In order to pretend to break it."

If he had not observed, through the slightly open curtain, a pretty young flapper with her arm in a sling, he would have thought the woman ready for the asylum. His pencil hovered over his notebook uncertainly.

"I will, of course, wish to speak to your superiors. Perhaps you could have a man call on me."

I am a man, thought Sergeant House, and the police force is not a draper's shop engaged in home deliveries. False teeth or no, he was on the brink of pointing this out when Mrs Kentwell tapped her umbrella for attention.

"My father was a Colonel McInlay, " she told the sergeant who had successfully conspired to shoot a major in Ypres. "We have lived in this house for one hundred years, before, well before this bullock driver and his flappers came and did this."

And to add weight to her claim and to underline the detestable nature of the aeroplane which rocked frailly before her, she gave it a good poke with her umbrella.

The umbrella speared the fuselage and stuck there.

Mrs Kentwell stared at it with astonishment. Her teeth clacked inside her mouth.

"My brother is very ill," she said defiantly. She withdrew her weapon, leaving a perfect round hole in the fuselage. She looked up at Sergeant House who thought she was going to smile. But she turned on her heel and retreated to the house.

The sergeant regarded the hole in the fuselage, his pencil hovering over the notebook. Then he closed the book and put it away.

47

The other potential investor was Ian Oswald-Smith. He was tall, well built, olive-skinned and his red-lipped long-lashed face was saved from prettiness by the blue cast of his beard. He was also a squatter and an Imaginary Englishman, but he was a different animal to the Cocky Abbots – irony was his great amusement and if it was not detected, so much the better.

He had never seen, in all his travels, such enthusiastic use of electricity. He had already quietly amused himself by drawing Molly on this very subject. He had prevailed upon her to speak of the virtues of all the electrical devices, beginning with the four-globe radiator of which she said: "To ignore the radiator, Mr Oswald-Smith, is to refuse to take advantage of the investment one has already made by installing electricity in the first place." It seemed she was going to say more but was prevented by shortness of breath. She took her daughter's hand, then sipped a glass of water.

The hostess, the aviator, the flapper, the bullocky and the two Cocky Abbots attacked their big unappetizing plates of goose and roast vegetables while he teased his hostess about the bills such a contrivance might accumulate. His teasing was as gentle as a caress and in spite of her simplicity, or because of it, he liked her. They managed to discuss the lighting, His Master's Voice, the wireless, and the kettle on the ornate stand that she used to make tea at the table. And all the while his dark attractive eyes roamed the walls and floors where the hostess's enthusiasm for the electric connection had crossed and recrossed the brown Victorian wallpaper, draped the high picture rails and fallen from the ceiling like crepe-paper decorations for a progressive Christmas.

For a man with such potential for sarcasm, with such skill at asserting the superiority of his class, he spared his hosts and himself any scorn, drank the strong tea he was offered and did not mind that he was given four spoons of sugar without his tastes being inquired after. The McGraths seemed to him perfectly simple and honest people and he was memorizing them and memorizing the room so that in future he could entertain his friends with stories about their characters.