Free Sheiks and Adders by Michael Innes Page B

and table napkin, and gone off in a huff. I thought that, after all, he’d accept the thing as a joke when we actually went through with it. Because, you see, he’s jolly decent usually. If I’d known he’d really be cut up I wouldn’t have gone ahead. Not even if Cherry–’
    ‘Quite so. But I really don’t think that your explanation of Mr Chitfield’s absence from the scene is at all a plausible one. He might have done something rather drastic about your silly if harmless desert-lover affair. He might have ordered you out of the place, Mr Fancroft. But he wouldn’t withdraw in a sulk. I think you’re reading into him – well, a somewhat juvenile attitude of mind. Are you sure, by the way, that he has seen you in this get-up?’
    ‘Well, no. I’ve been lying pretty low, as a matter of fact. But somebody says they saw him go off towards the house. So I want to go and apologize to him. I think it would be the right thing. Don’t you, sir?’
    ‘Certainly I do.’ Appleby spoke as a senior man who has no doubts. ‘If you have acted contrary to his expressed wish – however unreasonable it may have seemed to you – here on his own ground and in concert with his own daughter, then you should tell him it was a mistake, and that you are sorry about it. My guess is that it will then all blow over at once.’
    ‘That’s what I’m going to do now, Sir John. But I want you to come with me. Or Cherry does.’
    ‘My dear young man, nothing could be more uncalled for or less suitable. I don’t know Mr Chitfield. I didn’t know any Chitfield until yesterday afternoon.’ Appleby paused, and remembered how imperiously Cherry had then bidden him to this cluttered-up garden-party-cum-fête. ‘Look!’ he said abruptly. ‘Do you think that Cherry has anything else – perhaps something quite different – in her head?’
    ‘I don’t understand.’
    ‘Nor do I, I’m afraid. Does she seem at all worried over something she hasn’t told you about? To speak frankly, Cherry seems to me to have her childish side. But she strikes me as a rather sensitive and observant young woman as well.’
    ‘I suppose that’s right.’ Tibby Fancroft received this by no means unqualified encomium upon his beloved without offence. ‘And I have thought her a bit worried about how things are here. I can’t think why. Everything seems very nice, to my mind, at Drool Court. And everybody’s very nice to me . Mrs Chitfield – of course she’s of a romantic turn of mind – seems almost to be hearing the wedding bells ringing out merrily already.’
    ‘I’m glad to hear it, Mr Fancroft. And, on second thoughts, I’ll come with you to the house.’
    There were still plenty of people in the gardens, on the lawns, and besieging the tea-tent. At one end of the terrace the military band still played; it was now dispensing random selections from the treasure-house of Gilbert and Sullivan opera, but at a subdued volume designed not to carry too disturbingly to the theatre at the other end of the grounds. It seemed to be regarded as quite admissible to cut the theatre and amuse oneself in other ways. Appleby had a glimpse of Mr Pring. This particular sheik, no doubt adequately refreshed, was walking composedly up and down between flowerbeds with his wife. Mrs Pring was taking her part sufficiently seriously to be carrying a somewhat cumbersome banner emblazoned with the Cross of Lorraine. She was a massive woman and – as was to be expected – of maturer years than the Maid of Orleans had been fated to attain.
    Appleby wasn’t given much time for this further survey. Tibby hurried him on. It appeared that, having been made aware of the impropriety of his conduct in proposing to carry off the younger Miss Chitfield to the tents of the Arabs, he was genuinely anxious to express his regrets to the girl’s offended father with as little delay as possible. It was a highly absurd business, and Tibby Fancroft was demonstrably a wholly