Mr Cadmus

Peter Ackroyd

Description

Two apparently harmless women reside in cottages one building apart in the idyllic English village of Little Camborne. Miss Finch and Miss Swallow, cousins, have put their pasts behind them and settled into conventional country life. But when a mysterious foreigner, Theodore Cadmus - from a Mediterranean island nobody has heard of - moves into the middle cottage, the safe monotony of their lives is shattered. Soon, long-hidden secrets and long-held grudges threaten to surface, drawing all into a vortex of subterfuge, theft, violence, mayhem . . . and murder.

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786898951
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning author of novelsincluding Hawksmoor , Chatterton and The Last Testamentof Oscar Wilde , biographies of Ezra Pound, Blake andDickens among others, and acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London: The Biography and Thames: Sacred River . He haswon the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Societyof Literature’s William Heinemann Award, the James TaitBlack Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, theSomerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize forLiterature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.
Also by Peter Ackroyd
FICTION
The Great Fire of London
The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
Hawksmoor
Chatterton
First Light
English Music
The House of Doctor Dee
Dan Leno and the Limehouse
Golem
Milton in America
The Plato Papers
The Mystery of Charles Dickens
The Clerkenwell Tales
The Lambs of London
The Fall of Troy
The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein
The Canterbury Tales - A Retelling
The Death of King Arthur: The
Immortal Legend - A Retelling
Three Brothers
NON-FICTION
Notes for a New Culture: An Essay
on Modernism
Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag,
the History of an Obsession
Ezra Pound and His World
T. S. Eliot
Dickens London: An Imaginative
Vision
Ezra Pound and his World (1989)
Dickens
Introduction to Dickens
Blake
The Life of Thomas More
London: The Biography
The Collection: Journalism, Reviews,
Essays, Short Stories, Lectures
Dickens: Public Life and Private
Passion
Albion: The Origins of the English
Imagination
The Beginning
Illustrated London
Escape From Earth
Ancient Egypt
Chaucer (Penguin Classics ‘Brief Lives’ series)
Shakespeare: The Biography
Ancient Greece
Ancient Rome
Turner (Penguin Classics’‘Brief Lives’ series)
Thames: Sacred River
Coffee with Dickens
(with Paul Schlicke)
Newton (Penguin Classics
‘Brief Lives’ series)
Poe: A Life Cut Short
Venice: Pure City
The English Ghost
London Under
The History of England,
v.1 Foundation
Wilkie Collins (Penguin Classics
‘Brief Lives’ series)
The History of England, v.2 Tudors
The History of England, v.3 Civil
War (also available as Rebellion:
The History of England from James
I to the Glorious Revolution)
Charlie Chaplin
Alfred Hitchcock
The History of England,
v.4 Revolution
Queer City
The History of England,
v.5 Dominion

The paperback edition published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2021 by Canongate Books Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2020 by Canongate Books
Copyright Peter Ackroyd, 2020
The right of Peter Ackroyd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 897 5
eISBN 978 1 78689 895 1
Contents
Chapter 1. The Yellow Car
Chapter 2. Montmorency
Chapter 3. Tesco
Chapter 4. Poor Isolde
Chapter 5. Hairy Men
Chapter 6. Dum Di Dum Di Dum
Chapter 7. The Earthquake
Chapter 8. The Rose Tree
Chapter 9. The Christopher
Chapter 10. The Island
Chapter 11. Goats and Dust
Chapter 12. A Conniption Fit
Chapter 13. Green Fingers
Chapter 14. The Line
Chapter 15. The Cat and the Parrot
Chapter 16. The Gypsy
Chapter 17. Very Poorly
Chapter 18. Sad Case
Chapter 19. A Bed of Roses
Chapter 20. Enough Is Enough
Chapter 21. In My Head
Chapter 22. The Funeral
Chapter 23. The Aftermath
Chapter 1
The Yellow Car
 
The three cottages stood in a row at the eastern end of Little Camborne. They had once been owned by three families who worked the land of the local squire, but the badly dressed stone of the eighteenth century had been restored and replastered. They were now painted white, and the thatch had given way to tiles.
The first of them - 1, The Coppice - was owned by Maud Finch. At the age of fifty-five Miss Finch still held herself erect; she had firm opinions and a firm manner of expressing them. She wore rather severe clothes and from a distance might have been mistaken for either sex. Millicent Swallow lived at 3, The Coppice. Miss Swallow was a mild and complaisant woman; she was younger than Miss Finch, and was described by her neighbour as a little vague around the edges . She had wispy hair and her eyes watered in the wind; she favoured silk blouses and cashmere scarves, but she always looked as if her clothes had been put on in a hurry. In this respect she was perfectly unlike her neighbour, who dressed with what she believed to be finesse. How they had struck so firm a friendship was one of the small mysteries of Little Camborne.
The cottage that stood between them had been vacant for over three months. Its previous occupant had been a retired schoolmaster, Mr Herrick, who had soon become something of an irritant to both ladies. He played Chopin too loudly on the gramophone, and the offensive smoke from his pipe drifted over their garden fences. So the ladies were not displeased when he died suddenly of heart failure. Now they contemplated the fate of the empty cottage. I hope it s not people from London, Miss Swallow remarked nervously on the day after the funeral.
Or a family.
Surely it s not big enough for a family?
You never know. Some of them live like pigs.
A few prospective purchasers had visited the cottage, in the company of the agent, and one or other of the ladies managed to busy herself in her front garden as they left. It is a lovely little property, the agent would say. Quite bijou.
What does that mean? Miss Swallow asked Miss Finch on the first occasion she heard it.
It is French. That seemed to satisfy both of them. The likely purchasers were, in Miss Finch s opinion, all ghastly . A retired couple from Barnes were considered to be common, while two young men arriving in a smart sports-car were treated with great suspicion. Don t say anything , Miss Finch told her.
But you see them on television all the time.
That doesn t make it right .
When the agent brought with him a single man, in his early forties, Miss Swallow was greatly relieved. I know a gentleman when I see one, she said to her neighbour. Very much of the old school.
Too good to be true. The estate agent tells me that he is working for a foreign client.
A foreign client? Oh my goodness.
It was with some trepidation, therefore, that, two weeks later, they watched a large removal van draw up before the cottages. Both of them looked out of their windows at the same moment, but nothing happened. A few minutes later a small yellow car appeared around the bend of the dusty road, and came to a halt behind the van. Out of it jumped a man wearing green trousers and a scarlet sweater, with a plaid scarf tied loosely around his neck. This, Miss Finch said to herself, is the foreigner.
Two men in green overalls now alighted from the van as the foreign gentleman opened the gate to the middle cottage and scampered up the path of the front garden. Oh, this is excellent. Too excellent for words. He turned to the two men. Well, my friends, what do you think of my lovely English cottage? Is it not enchanting? He put his hands to his lips, and blew it a kiss. You are irresistible. Highly irresistible.
Miss Finch noted that he had a slightly swarthy complexion, with a pencil-thin moustache. He was perhaps in his late fifties, of middle height, and seemed to her to resemble a mature Douglas Fairbanks. Miss Swallow, on the other hand, saw in him a likeness to William Holden, whom she had watched in The Towering Inferno some years before.
He caught sight of her before she had time to move away from her window, and he put out his arms. Oh, my good English neighbour! I hope you will make me welcome! She did not know quite what to do, but she waved her hand in a timid greeting. To her acute embarrassment he blew a kiss to her. Miss Finch, half-hidden by a large vase of lilies on her window ledge, drew in her breath. She could not see what Miss Swallow was doing, but she hoped that she was not encouraging him. She now stepped out so that she was in full view, and he noticed the movement. Oh, I am blessed, he said. Two lovely ladies on my doorstep! He did not blow her a kiss, but put his hand upon his heart; or at least upon the relevant part of his scarlet jumper.
The two removal men had opened the back of the van, and with a flourish of his keys the new neighbour hastened into the cottage. The two ladies now pressed more eagerly against their windows. A small piano came out, followed by a wooden chest and a sideboard of polished mahogany. A single bed then emerged, as well as a divan and a dining-room table. Rolled carpets, lamps, and what looked suspiciously like tapestries, were carried into the cottage. Miss Finch could hear him singing what she took to be an Italian medley in a strong baritone voice. And what was this? A large and empty parrot cage. Several suitcases were then taken inside together with stools, chairs and leather pouffes. Some ornate candelabra were the last to leave the van.
Miss Swallow felt quite exhausted by all the activity. She sat down in her favourite armchair, covered in faded green silk. She did not think she had the strength to make herself a cup of tea. She dared not leave the house, in case he should emerge, but she desperately wanted to consult with Miss Finch. So she called her on the telephone.
Maud, what an extraordinary way to behave!
Did you see his car? It is so yellow.
But all that kissing and screaming-
I don t think he screamed, dear, Maud told her. But he was loud.
What are we to make of him?
We will have to wait and see. He was singing Italian songs, by the way.
Is that where he s from?
I haven t the faint