The Old English Peep Show Read Online Free PDF Page B

General giggled and the ghost was exorcised.
    â€œWhat’ll I see?” he sang, in a creaky countertenor, “I’ll see the sea.”
    Mr. Singleton sighed again, the sigh which Pibble, after years of working with certain police colleagues, recognized as that of a man faced with a levity he has not the authority to reprimand.
    â€œThe General is going sailing,” he said, “not to the theatre.”
    â€œGod forbid,” said the General. “I’m the last of the Philistines, Superintendent. I’ll see you at the inquest, no doubt.”
    He left with a bouncy little strut, rising slightly onto the ball of his foot at each step. Mr. Singleton sighed for the third time as the door closed, but this time the sigh suggested that conversation would now be easier, without the monitoring presence from a dead generation. He rose and walked to the window. He really was unusually tall, at least six feet four. He stood for half a minute gazing through the glass, and then spoke without turning his head. There was a softer note in his robotlike utterance.
    â€œThis is the most marvelous view in the world, though I say it myself. I draw deep inspiration from it every day.”
    It would have been churlish not to go and share such a view, so Pibble weltered out of the sofa and crossed the room. His first reaction was that Mr. Singleton’s source of inspiration was curiously dreamlike and escapist for so drearily pragmatic a man. They were looking at almost the same vista as the one he had glimpsed earlier from the colonnade, but the extra angle achieved by the jut of the Private Wing brought the Main Block into the picture, altering the whole perspective so that the further colonnade and the Kitchen Wing were no longer merely pretty in themselves, but became a necessary balance to the huge elegance of the central building. Down the first slope stood the famous lime tree, a solid fountain of yellowing leaf with a small herd of dappled deer grazing at its foot, and beyond that the traditional English landscape, at its most mistily genteel, rolled away into blueness.
    As an extra touch to the artificiality of the scene, there was a scarlet blob in the foreground, like the red buoy Turner used to pop into the foreground of his seascapes on varnishing day, except that this was an E-Type Jaguar convertible standing on the gravel below them. It really was below them, as the slope of the ground left the Private Wing a story higher this side than the other. The car looked posed, as though for a color advertisement, but as they gazed over those leagues of plebs-concealing greenness a glass door in the colonnade opened and the General came prancing down the steps to the drive. His peculiar, dainty, arrogant gait reminded Pibble instantly of the movements of stags, such as those that grazed under the lime tree—something poised, limber, and fierce, but at the same time preserved (carefully and against the odds) into an alien age and climate.
    Pibble knew at once that he wasn’t going to Chichester to sail, either. There must be a woman there.
    The General didn’t actually leap into the car as though it were a saddle, but he settled into his seat like a man used to horses. The extending bonnet became an expression of his personality. He raised one hand in a theatrically romantic salute to their window and roared away, gravel spitting in twin arcs behind his half-spinning wheels.
    â€œA very great man indeed,” said Mr. Singleton plonkingly.
    Before Pibble could answer, they were distracted by a new unreality in the panorama: out from behind one of the copses in the middle distance, crawling along a low embankment, came Stephenson’s Rocket; slow puffs of purplish smoke whuffled from its ridiculous smokestack, and the monstrous cylinders on either side pumped like the legs of a grasshopper. Behind the engine came a dozen open trucks which carried about forty solemn citizens, wearing