Appleby on Ararat (10 page)

“They murdered Sir Ponto Unumunu.”

“You are joking. Such an outlandish name can only be a joke.”

“He was a Negro – an educated negro. As for a demonstration, we have certainly had that too.”

“A negro? That might make some difference, I suppose.” Hailstone scanned the beach with a sort of placid apprehensiveness. “Yes, it is most unfortunate. It might even give them a taste–” He broke off and turned his blue-spectacled gaze to the lagoon. “The launch has been hunting for you further north. But it should be in here at any time, and I really think we had better collect your companions and be off. Not that there is any danger.” He waved limply towards the horizon. “The natives will certainly have made off. But on the other side we are all eager to welcome you – are we not, George?”

George, who had found it supremely restful to let his chin sink down upon his paws, turned upon Appleby an upwards glance which contrived to wring eloquence out of the dumb condition to which he had been born. Then he let his eyelids droop and began to snore.

“You were seen a couple of days ago, but the launch had broken down and nobody would come round. It is difficult to keep people at all on their toes in this part of the world.”

George snored loudly.

“And now perhaps you will introduce me to your companions? I can hardly restrain my impatience at the prospect of new faces.” Hailstone momentarily removed his glasses and regarded Appleby with amiable but lukewarm attention. His face was yellow and fleshy, untanned by the sun; there was about it some indefiniteness or ambiguity which was hard to place. He lowered his umbrella and tapped George on the rump. They all moved slowly up the beach. “I am doing a dig. Or rather I am going to do a dig; it is difficult, you know, to get people on the move.” He stopped again, appearing to find that conversation and pedestrianism could not conveniently be combined. “About your man who has been killed – we must send a message to the Governor.”

“There is a Governor on the island?”

“Dear me, no. On another island. I have never been quite sure where. In fact, I rather believe he moves about. He eats up one island and then moves to another. Rather like a sovereign progressing among his nobles in medieval times. But he is always on the same wave-length. I am sure he will send a boat for you if you wish. Only unfortunately our wireless has broken down. All technical skills tend to break down here, I have noticed. Even George’s tricks are not what they used to be.” Hailstone offered these disjointed communications with ample pauses in between. “I suppose you were wrecked?”

“Torpedoed.”

“Dear me – how all that spreads. Here on the island it is difficult to realise–”

Appleby moved resolutely forward. “By the way, Mr. Hailstone, what is your island called?”

“Called?” Hailstone stopped again, the energies available to him being apparently diverted into the channels of memory. George stopped too and raised a hind paw to scratch rather perplexedly at an ear. “I’m afraid it hasn’t got a name – not yet. I arrived first, so the job of naming it is really mine. And I have deferred the matter, feeling that one day a particularly appealing name will turn up. I have suggested George Island, but unfortunately there were objections from the hotel.” Hailstone lowered his voice, as one might do had one a confidential communication to make in a tube lift. “I am afraid I am being disingenuous. The island
has
a name. Viking Island. Only as yet nobody must know.”

“Dear me.” Appleby found the mild expletive infectious. “May I ask if a similar secrecy marks its whereabouts? I fancy I have seen land miraging up to the west.”

“Ah. Some of the islands do behave oddly. I sometimes think they must be like Alcinous’ island in the
Odyssey
. Do you read Greek?”

“Yes. I thought I saw land to the west.”

“Just another island. Probably the one the natives are on. The group is very scattered. But the first real
land
one would come to towards the west would be Australia. And to the east – and at about the same distance – one would come to the Isthmus of Panama. In fact we may be described as enjoying a central situation.” Hailstone laughed – carefully without vehemence, like a patient recovering from an abdominal operation. He turned towards the sea. “Ah, there they are.”

The faint chug of a petrol-engine could be heard at a distance, and with it came a waft, a broken phrase, a sudden wailing continuity of music. Again Appleby had the sense of incongruities piling up. Faintly in the advancing sound he could hear the beat of drums – drums not unlike those which had pulsed so powerfully in the night. But above the drums was a sob and moan of outlandish wood-winds and trumpets. Over the dazzle of the water, gliding by the coral, cutting across the image of a palm, there was somewhere advancing all the paraphernalia of the dance, locked in the magic sound-track of a disk. A worn disk, rightly wailing that it wasn’t so young any more, mournfully asserting the thousand miles of its travels, gallantly announcing its intention of hanging its hat on the Bam-bam-bammy shore.

And I ain’t so young any more…

The music was suddenly vibrant as round the curve of the further reef shot a long white motor-launch. It held a little crowd of people in topees, sun-glasses, skimpy bathers and purposively designed beach suits.

“The hotel, you know,” said Hailstone. He spoke with what was almost haste. “They are combining your rescue with a little expedition – fishing, and so on. Curious, too, no doubt. Not in very good taste, perhaps; but there you are.”

The launch turned on the water with a flash of scrubbed paint and burnished brass, turned again as if keeping time to the thrumming tune. At the helm, an indeterminate but commanding figure – Appleby had a glimpse, beggaring description, of flowing skirts and a beard – called an order; the engine faltered and stopped; the bathers and beach suits uncurled, straightened, bent and coiled again as if deliberately adorning the scene with a slow, plastic voluptuousness; at the prow a businesslike sailor appeared with a boat-hook; the music rose and hit the sense with a final blare and cry; in sudden silence the launch and its company glided across the inner lagoon. And in golden letters on the side Appleby could read the words:

Heaven’s Hermitage Hotel.

“Is everything,” asked Appleby, “as out of date as their dance tunes?”

Hailstone shook his head. “The hotel is very insistent that it offers
confort moderne
. But Mrs Heaven – the woman in the stern there – is something of an artist in her way. She thinks that the establishment should preserve as much of the atmosphere of the later twenties as it can. The thirties give the feeling, I suppose, of being too near the Deluge… George, mind your manners.”

George was backing slowly up the beach, as if a sea on which there floated Mrs Heaven’s launch was not one in which he would care to wet his paws. Now he paused, a dog learned and aloof, and viewed the scene with austere distaste, like an ancient satirist contemplating the Ship of Fools. From the launch someone was tactlessly whistling the rapid and monotonous whistle with which common dogs are summoned. George turned round and lay down with his behind presented to the offensive scene.

“Of course,” continued Hailstone, “I must stop and introduce you. Not that I know any of those people very well. I believe they are known as the Younger Crush. Now they’ve got out their little gangway. Yes, the woman in front is Miss Busst, the leader of the Younger Crush.”

“The fat woman who seems to have rheumatism?” asked Appleby.

“Yes. And the bald man behind is Mr Rumsby, the most prominent of the Younger Crush men. They are just handing him his stick. His sister, Mrs Sadgrove, is not there. She counts as a Younger Matron, I believe – but now seldom leaves her bed. There is Sir Mervyn Poulish; I am told he was at one time prominent in the City but has been in close retirement for years. Indeed, all these people are seekers of retirement, I suppose. But I do rather wish they hadn’t sought it on my island. It makes the servant problem difficult for one thing. If only the natives were as violent as you appear to believe we might get them to chase Heaven’s whole angelic circle away.” And Hailstone gave something between a chuckle and a sigh.

“They appear,” said Appleby, watching the party now approaching along the beach, “to be rather old for their roles.”

“It’s like the people on a cruise – have you noticed?” Hailstone cocked up his blue-spectacled face with sudden scientific incisiveness. “Go for a cruise and you get a glimpse of the western world forty years on. No young people worth speaking of. The birth rate down and the death rate up and the mean age of the population rising every year. It might solve some problems…

“This war” – Hailstone was vague again – “very disturbing – you must tell me about it sometime… Ah, Mrs Heaven, how do you do?”

Mrs Heaven was not in beach clothes; she was the bearded lady in skirts. And her stride had the same embarrassing masculinism as her features; she was ahead of the uncertainly moving Miss Busst and Mr Rumsby and with a jerked-out nod to Hailstone addressed Appleby direct. “The ladies,” she said; “did they save their jewels?”

“I fear not many. We were torpedoed during the day and while they were on deck.”

“Oh.” Mrs Heaven looked glum. “How sad for them. Welcome to the Hermitage. What’s your name? Appleby? North Country, I suppose. My husband is from Shropshire; I’m from nowhere worth speaking of. This is Miss Busst. This is Mr Rumsby. George is still far too fat, Mr Hailstone. Don’t bother about the people still in the boat. You’ll meet them presently. You’ll have a good time. We all have a good time.”

“A good time,” said Miss Busst with excessive decision. “That’s it.”

“Marvellous cooking,” said Mr Rumsby. “Mostly by Heaven himself. Marvellous swimming. Marvellous time.” Mr Rumsby’s mouth dropped open and he stared at nothing in particular.

George sniffed.

“A good time
in every way
,” said Miss Busst, a shade defensively. “There are a great many books. We hold a religious service on the first Sunday of every month. Sir Mervyn gives an address. A most devout man; he assures me that at home he never missed a religious service in years.”

“Ah,” said Appleby. “But that was in gaol.”

Mr Rumsby’s mouth opened a shade wider; Mrs Heaven gave a cheerless smile. “Of course we all know about the man’s misfortune. And we don’t bring it up.”

“You see, I am a police officer and my mind rather runs on such things. At present I am interested in a murder which took place on this beach only yesterday.” Appleby, thus triumphantly overgoing the forthright manner of Mrs Heaven, looked easily from one to another. “Perhaps good times are confined to your strip of the island. Here are my friends coming down the beach. Two women and two men. You have room in your hotel?”

“We’ll make it.” Mrs Heaven nodded briskly – she might well, Appleby thought, be the only brisk thing on the island. “And if you don’t want a good time – well, it’s not compulsory.” She was looking from Miss Busst to Mr Rumsby with a sudden sharp malice. “A good murder is no doubt more appealing to your type. I’m glad you’ve found one. It’s not part of the room-service of our hotel.” And abruptly Mrs Heaven got into her stride again and moved to meet Appleby’s companions.

It was all exceedingly odd; there was a protracted fuss of explanation and surprise during which Hailstone and George faded from the scene and Appleby withdrew a little to take a compendious view of it… Yes, it was odd; yesterday a desert island and today a good time at perhaps ten guineas a week. Yesterday murder and a deplorably empty sea; today any amount of queer fish for the net. Yesterday a threatening perpetuity of tête-à-tête; today a launch-load of over-age toast-golden Dianas and the prospect of Sir Mervyn Poulish engaged in sabbatical offices of pastoral care. But no doubt Hoppo would take over that… Appleby turned and walked further from the group; walked until it was a splash of colour and jerky movements against an emptiness of tropical beach and sky and sea. The right proportions were before him now. He shifted his ground until, close beside him, Unumunu’s grave served as a
repoussoir
to the scene. And there, then, was the problem, with only the elusive savages as a missing piece. The beach-suited embassy from Heaven’s Hermitage Hotel; the veterans of the sun-deck café; the tracks of a disappearing archaeologist and a superior dog: these and a mound of sand. A problem, and one for which – uniquely – he had to force himself to care. For it was provincial and meaningless; a problem of the world-forgot, of the vacuum into which they had been hurled by Hoppo’s whale. Hoppo’s whales were on the high seas, they were in the narrow seas and in the central sea. The war planes were over Europe and Asia; their shadows cut the spires of England, the mosques of Africa, the storied and fretted temples of the East. The lights were out in Paris; in Pittsburgh they scarred the night to guide, at a thousand lathes, the planet’s biggest race yet; in Sydney, in Ankara, in Tokio hands were ready on the switch. Madness – but an action of magnitude and significance, a universal tragedy to which every human being stood in some moral relation, a great big fight directly and simply attractive to an unattached young man… But here there was only the death of Sir Ponto Unumunu and the quaint dignity of a highly bred dog.

He walked slowly back. From the launch the Younger Crush were bathing; two frisky ladies had come on shore and were playfully pursuing a stout gentleman who flopped unbeautifully as he ran. Curious, Appleby reflected, that such an excessively un-Victorian way of life should have been foreseen by Edward Lear. But so it was:

There was an Old Man of Corfu,

Who never knew what he should do;

So he rushed up and down

Till the sun made him brown,

That bewildered Old Man of Corfu –

The very core of Hermitage Hotel doctrine was evidently in the lines… And suddenly Appleby’s heart warmed to the companions of his adventures. For they were not like that. Diana, who had found that nightmare voyage full-time; Miss Curricle, who had braced herself to begin all over again at Eve; Glover, who had remembered the propriety of reading a proclamation; even old Hoppo, who in a last delirium had disputed with the Great Doctor on the foundations of the Anglican faith; they were out of a different drawer.