Appleby at Allington by Michael Innes

he was thinking, to believe anything that Tristram Travis said.
    ‘Not that at all. Mrs Junkin, who belongs to the virtuous poor, has banished me from her granddaughter’s sight. I’ve been unable to persuade her that my intentions are honourable. It’s terribly unfair. Lady Appleby – I think it is Lady Appleby? – will you help me in my suit?’
    ‘Certainly not. But I shall look forward to seeing the ravishing Miss Junkin. And now, I think we must walk on. We have to put in an appearance again at the Park before going home. Are you banished from the entire district, Mr Tristram? Does Mr Allington support Mavis’ grandmother?’
    ‘I don’t think he’d mind my calling. As a matter of fact, we got on quite well. Over the son et lumière , that is. I stayed at Allington, you see, to do the research. That’s how I met Muriel.’
    ‘Mavis.’
    ‘That’s right – Mavis. I wonder if I might come along with you? Would you mind? I have quite good manners.’
    ‘And morals to match.’ Judith laughed – causing her husband to conclude gloomily that she had taken a fancy to this idiotic young man. Not, probably, that he was all that idiotic. He was simply putting on a turn – and the point of the joke seemed to be that nobody was expected to be taken in by it. Which was excessively foolish in itself. And this meant that one’s view of Mr Travis appeared to move rapidly in a closed circle. Appleby decided to exercise the privilege of an elderly man and ask some direct questions.
    ‘Of course you can come along with us,’ he said. ‘You read History at Oxford?’
    ‘Thank you so much. Read History? Yes, I did.’
    ‘And took a First Class in the School?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘So that you are now a junior fellow of a college, or at least on the way to being that?’
    ‘Yes.’ Travis looked demurely at Appleby. ‘I’m afraid that to a person like yourself it must all be terribly obscure. Will there be drinks at the Park, do you think?’
    ‘Champagne,’ Judith said. ‘It’s to celebrate the close of an unusually hectic period in the quiet Allington year. There’s even been a corpse.’
    ‘A corpse, Lady Appleby?’ They were now all three moving down towards the lake together. But Mr Travis appeared sufficiently startled to come momentarily to a halt.
    ‘An unfortunate man was found electrocuted among the son et lumière stuff last night. By my husband, as a matter of fact.’
    ‘What a queer thing to get out the champagne on top of.’ Travis walked on. ‘But then this chap Allington, you know, is rather a strange character. I didn’t get on his wave-length, at all.’
    ‘I understood you to say,’ Appleby interposed, ‘that you had enjoyed good relations with him.’
    ‘That’s perfectly true. He took the historical basis of his blessed entertainment quite seriously. He wouldn’t have hired a chap like me to dig it out and write it up – not if he’d felt any old thing would do. And anything would have done, of course. From a historical point of view, it obviously isn’t a very critical audience that rolls in its buses into an affair of that sort. By the way, they’ve left the hell of a mess, haven’t they? And the lorries taking away all that hardware, I suppose. Look over there.’ Travis suddenly got out his field glasses again, and handed them to Judith. ‘Verges chewed up along the drive, and some damage to perfectly decent trees. That big white gate knocked clean off its hinges. Of course you can’t have a show like that without a lot of disturbance and quite a bit of damage. The question I kept asking was, why on earth the chap did it.’
    They had arrived near the end of the lake, and were looking across its narrowing extremity towards the high road and the entrance to the drive. Allington Park had a grander approach from another quarter, with a beech-avenue which had arisen like everything else, presumably, at Humphrey Repton’s command. It was this route that Appleby had come