Free The Old English Peep Show by Peter Dickinson Page B

lions.”
    â€œNasty heathenish things,” snarled the cook. “It’s all very well for you to say they only eat black men, but who’s to know they won’t acquire the taste and we’ll all be gnawed to pieces in our beds?”
    The Admiral didn’t even look in her direction, but turned exaggeratedly toward Pibble.
    â€œNo, that’s a very interesting aspect of lion psychology,” he said. “Some of them do literally acquire a taste for man-flesh, and can’t be satisfied with anything else. There’s not been any research done on man-eating, though, for obvious …”
    His soft voice was almost a whisper, but the cook looked at him, put her hands over her ears, and rushed out.
    â€œNow you’ve upset her,” said Mr. Singleton to the room in general. “Go and soothe her down, Anty.”
    Mrs. Singleton rose and left. Pibble sat in a daze. How in holy hell had they thought they could get away with it? Who had persuaded whom? And what in God’s name were they up to, to make it necessary? He pulled himself together to listen to his host, who was murmuring again about lions, but during the monologue he kept thinking of other little bits of confirmation: the Epstein and the cook had started him off; then there were the Adamson books; the General’s stagy departure; the locked door upstairs; Singleton’s whispering—to emphasize the Admiral’s presence behind it; the mere necessity of having a policeman down from London for a case that didn’t warrant it; the too-painstaking collusion in social hypnotism which he’d felt so strongly in the meat store; the volte-face over post-mortem … Oh, Crippen! And presumably Deakin had looked after the Admiral’s shoes, hung up his clothes, taken his trays up, made his bed, even.
    When Mrs. Singleton came back, she simply nodded to her husband and sat down. Pibble felt edgy now, but couldn’t decide whether the others did, too, or whether he was attributing his own unease to them. Only Miss Scoplow seemed uninfected with this social itch; she talked little but listened to Mr. Singleton’s jerky explanation of the economics of the wine trade with great animation; she had a pleasant trick of showing interest by opening her eyes absurdly wide, so that the white showed all around the iris. She gave the impression that she could have listened with intense delight to an account of a golf match between two moderate players on a featureless plain.
    But Mr. Singleton’s lecture seemed not to stimulate even himself; he had the tense air of an actor ad-libbing while he waits for a colleague to make a delayed entrance. Mrs. Singleton turned one fragment of meat over and over, as if it were the last piece of a jigsaw which was somehow the wrong shape for the last hole. And the old hero was now retailing complete myth as certified lion lore, even the false claw in the tail with which the beast is supposed to lash itself into a frenzy of rage, like some hack satirist.
    â€œNo pudding,” said Mrs. Singleton suddenly, “and we’ve eaten the last of the nectarines. There’s blue Cheshire and grapes and apples.”
    The shuffling to remove plates and queue (in charadelike parody of housewives at a greengrocer’s) for muscats and pippins (not Cox or Ribston—something Pibble had never met before) broke the tension. As they settled again, Clavering turned to Miss Scoplow­ and told her all the legends he had just told Pibble, while she listened to each nonsensical detail with astonished eyes. This left Pibble free for the first time to enjoy Mrs. Singleton’s presence; the contrast with Miss Scoplow served to emphasize her musky, autumnal quality. You soon got used to the voice; it wasn’t, after all, loud, just penetrating. She must know what was up, Pibble decided, but Miss Scoplow mightn’t. If she thought of Adam the Gardener as “a marvelous old