Appleby on Ararat (11 page)

He was back where he had started and looking with a thoughtful eye at the paw-prints of the retreating George, at the brisk administrative capacity of the masculine Mrs Heaven… Yes, they were a different sort. One could make a team of them, if need drove.

Miss Curricle adjusted a deck-chair to the least lounging of its positions and sat down. “The hotel is comfortable and clean,” she said.

“Tolerably clean,” said Mr Hoppo.

“The hotel is comfortable and clean.” Miss Curricle spoke with something like the semi-proprietorship of a man in a tourist office. At the same time her tone hinted at possible qualifications of the amenities described; the food might be indifferent or the guests undesirable. “Commonly I ask to be shown a room before booking. But in our present circumstances it would have been out of place. Particularly as Mr Heaven is a somewhat unusual type to be proprietor of an hotel. I wonder what his history can be, and where he found such a wife? A gentleman, it seems.”

“Perhaps,” said Hoppo, “gentlemanlike would be the better description.”

“I do not disagree with you. Possibly the son of a musician or painter of the self-made sort. His dress is not quite that of the gentleman. That diamond ring.”

Colonel Glover looked up from a two-year old copy of the
Times
. “As a matter of fact, he claims to belong to the Shropshire Heavens. A bad hat, I suppose. He had to find himself a job, he says, being very much a younger son. And I know they are a – um – prolific family.”

“Perhaps a Seventh Heaven.” Diana was looking happily into the depths of an enormous refrigerated drink. “And now” – the joke could be seen dawning on her mind in its full splendour – “he is Hoppo’s Heaven. They’re ever such cobbers – pals, I mean.”

“How we all wish that we had Mrs Kittery’s inexhaustible wit,” Hoppo gave a laugh in which whisky and soda was just perceptibly operative. “Everything is so vague here that I have been trying to sound him out. And we have a common interest. We are both philatelists.”

Diana’s eyes rounded. “You didn’t seem to be that when we believed it was a desert island. And I didn’t think clergymen were allowed to be.”

There was a moment’s baffled silence and then, from a corner of the veranda, Appleby chuckled. “Philanderers, Diana. Philatelists are something quite different.” He turned to Hoppo. “Heaven collects stamps?”

Miss Curricle wobbled in her chair; Hoppo splashed whisky on his borrowed shirt. For with the words Appleby had given the effect of pouncing in the oddest way – rather as a physician on holiday might pounce at a glimpse of an intriguing rash.

“Yes, indeed. A most interesting collection. Ragged, as almost any totally unspecialised collection must be nowadays. But with a number of remarkable things: a Moldavian Bull, for instance, and an Inverted Swan. And, although I cannot say he has a scholarly grasp of the subject–”

Glover rustled the browned and brittle
Times
with some impatience. “My boys used to collect stamps,” he said. “But grown men–”

“One of the finest modern collections” – and Hoppo smiled as a man who plays a trump card – “was formed by the late King George the Fifth.”

Appleby had risen and walked to the edge of the veranda. He looked down on the boat house, the power-station, the spick-and-span outbuildings in their fresh, softly-toned paints. “
All this, and Heaven too
,” he murmured. And then he frowned, for before him there had risen the picture of the thick smashed skull of Unumunu. Behind him his companions were restrainedly bickering; in front, in the middle distance, the hotel folk were splashing in the swimming pool. And not many miles beyond, but made remote by more than a difficult climb, was the old encampment and the black man’s grave.

“Comfortable and clean.” Miss Curricle had gone back on her tracks. “Nevertheless I am with Mr Hailstone and can well appreciate how he resents this intrusion. The dignity of science has always been appreciated in my family. Our dear father, though much burdened by the responsibilities of a senior civil servant, was always keenly interested. My maternal grandfather was acquainted with Lord Kelvin.”

Glover had put the
Times
over his face. His spare stomach rhythmically rose and fell.

“And so I can say with some confidence that Mr Hailstone is the type of the true scientist. And just as he is on the verge, maybe, of an important discovery, Mr Heaven arrives and builds his hotel for the convenience of pleasure-seekers and escapists – people
not
in a good tradition at all.”

“Incidentally,” said Hoppo, “for the convenience of ourselves. And on credit, too, more or less.”

“No doubt. I do not question our good fortune. I merely assert that Mr Hailstone–”

“Hailstone seems to me an uncommonly lazy fellow.” Mr Hoppo eased a cushion behind his head.

“I suggest that you confuse him with his dog. Of George I admit that I cannot approve. My dear mother–”

Appleby wandered out of earshot and into the hot sun. Somewhere the gramophone was again churning out a sad exclaiming dance-music with the senseless pertinacity of some fated machine for which the magic check has been forgotten. Old music still, infinitely dolorous, about the Valley of the Moon.
The vaaaley
of the moooon…the vaaaaaley
– Abruptly the lugubrious strains ceased, as if, after all, the sorcerer and his word had returned. For a moment there were only the squeals and yells from the bathing pool, a hullabaloo as of demoralised savages in rut, and then the gramophone, like some slick little time-machine, slipped back five years further and spoke of Valencia – spoke of Valencia over and over again. Valencia…
Valencia
…tum-ti tum-ti tum-ti
tum
…
VALENCIA
. Banal and calculated, the stuff trickled out of a futile past, worked on the gut, lapped up to the higher centres, sent a sticky and emotive spindrift over the very ramparts of the mind. Appleby took to his heels. There was the swimming pool to pass and then he would have a chance of setting his wits to work… Ragged, he said to himself as he ran. Ragged…no scholarly grasp. He frowned at a fat woman slopping past him in sandals. Probably a side-line, he thought. He dropped to a walk with the pool before him. Hailstone must know a lot. If he can be spurred to utter.

Half-a-dozen people were grampusing about the pool, with more persistent activity of lungs than of limb. Until their own arrival at the hotel there could not have been many more than a dozen guests all told. But after the nightmare solitude of the ocean, the too-familiar society of the glade, the new faces had been as baffling as a stellar arithmetic. Now they had sorted themselves out. Over there by the drinks were the crafty features Appleby had recalled at once – Sir Mervyn Poulish’s, the magnate who so sensationally went to gaol after the sugar scandal. No doing of Appleby’s, so social embarrassment need not result. And the fellow beside him who was being slapped and kneaded by the handyman Mudge – Jenner, his name – might well be his twin in polished rascality. The others, though they would not be approved of by the severe and gloomy body of men who compose His Majesty’s judges, seemed not criminal in type. Appleby remembered in the old play the characters so excellently named Supervacuo and Lussurioso. That was about the size of them – as Miss Curricle said,
not
in a good tradition at all. But one could make a note that one might rely on Mudge…

And there was Heaven himself, sufficiently odd to make an adequate companion piece to his grotesque wife. He was a man lank and then suddenly pudgy-faced, like a baby monstrously sprouted; filling the brief intermissions of his pretentious patter with involuntary and infantile sounds, as if he had never contrived through a long verbal development to shut down on his first efforts at speech. Appleby paused for a moment to observe him. His philately too, perhaps, was a sort of fossil from the past. But Appleby wondered.

“John!” It was Diana panting behind him. “Take me.”

“I’m going away to think.”

“I’ll help. I did once, didn’t I? When you said perhaps you ought to have taken out classes too?”

“You helped. It was a first gleam of light – or thereabouts. And we need more.”

“It’s all so vague, isn’t it?” She had fallen into step by his side.

He smiled. “A general lack of definition is at present the keynote of the whole affair. But do you want to come? I thought that now you had the run of a soda fountain–”

“Listen.” They stopped, and the throb of the gramophone faintly reached them. “Something about a little jacket of blue. That all the sailors knew. It was going about five years ago when I was nineteen. When I got married. I can’t bear it.”

He looked at her curiously, careful still to know nothing of her history. “They’re certainly mournful, old popular tunes.”

“I feel blue again, John, myself. Just like on the liner.” She surveyed the beach, the seeping sunshine, the water, the people idling – surveyed its familiarity, puzzled. “It ought to be alright –
all right
, I mean. It’s like a little bit of Bondi. But I hate it.”

“The war–”

“Yes, I know. And it’s worse for a man.” She looked at the person called Jenner who was being pounded by Mudge. “For a real man. But just the – the white man in the tropics is a bit blue. An island like this is for Ponto – for Ham. And now Ponto’s not here. Only all these – these–”

“Japhets.”

“Yes. And then–” She stopped. “But I’m getting in the way of your think. Is it about Ponto and the savages?”

“Certainly not about the savages.”

“There’s George.” She pointed to an eminence on their right. And there certainly was George. In a patch of shade, and from his favourite position of calculated repose, he was surveying the pool with an extreme of gloom. But now he rose and came forward, his large black nose minutely working and his paws exactly clearing the ground as he moved. Diana fussed over him and he responded with the economical graciousness of royalty at a party. It was clear that George regarded the newcomers as distinct from the general run of hotel folk. All three moved on together.

“John” – Diana spoke with unusual deliberation – “there weren’t any savages, were there?”

He stopped in his tracks. “How do you know that?”

“Just because of that time when I said there was a – a discrepancy. We thought of savages and cooking pots, and that might be right or wrong. But savages smuggling a body into the sea–”

“Quite so. Unumunu was killed in the jungle and his body hauled laboriously through its cover until just opposite the spot where a current would carry it right away. It didn’t look like savages. Still, I wasn’t at all sure. Natives in some stage of demoralisation or tribal disintegration might behave in that way – gratifying the instinct to kill on the quiet. But I doubted it, and was impressed when Hailstone in his lackadaisical way plainly doubted it too. But there was another and much more conclusive fact. You remember the spear that landed in our table?”

“Yes. We all looked at it.”

Appleby grinned. “But nobody smelt it but me. And I discovered that the flaming effect was secured with petrol – nothing less. And savages haven’t the knack of refining petroleum, as far as I know. I don’t doubt that there are savages and that we may come on them yet. But everything that we encountered was a put-up job. No wonder we weren’t all slaughtered.”

From George, who had ambled into the undergrowth, there came an obscure noise. It sounded not unlike a chuckle. But perhaps it was a perfunctory display of belligerence against a lizard.

“I don’t at all see that it’s no wonder. Why should it be just Ponto that was to be slaughtered?”

“Perhaps it was to be all of us. Perhaps Unumunu was just dealt with first. But, you see, it became known that we were on the island, and a general slaughter – even if put down to visiting natives – might have been reckoned to produce an undesirable sensation or panic.” He paused. “Take it in this order. You kill Unumunu and so arrange things that his body, forty to one, will float out to sea. Well, the disappearance of one odd black man may not create much fuss. But the body is found and it is evident he has been murdered; soon everyone will know. What, in a tiny community like this, is the best way to huddle the matter up? Somewhere within reach there are natives of doubtful habits. So make out that the black man was killed by them. Support this by the alarming but harmless nocturnal raid to which we were subjected. The story then is that some copper-coloured savages have killed a nigger and brandished a spear or two before decamping. Still no great cause for alarm – or even for curiosity in a lethargic place like this – but, at the same time, any wholesale elimination of us newcomers is no longer practicable at the moment… Grant some motive for extreme measures at the beginning and it is all coherent enough.”

Diana stooped to pluck an orchid. “I love the way you talk,” she said. “The – the way your mind goes. It’s like watching Don Bradman bat.”

He was startled at the enormousness of the compliment. And he was suddenly aware of how far he was from home. The assistant-commissioner, restless and gloomy behind his desk, would not equate the elements of logic with the strokes of Hammond or Jack Hobbs. “And now consider this. Was Unumunu just a beginning and the sequel abortive because the killer learnt that our existence had become generally known? Or was it just Unumunu whom it was necessary to despatch? Do you collect Moldavian Bulls, or Hoppo’s Inverted Hippos?” He grinned at her, pleased with this sudden transition to obscurity.

But Diana remained grave. “The stamp collecting really means something? It’s – it’s relevant? You’re not just throwing it in as trimmings?”

George had expended sufficient effort to get some way in front; he had turned and, planted on the path, was fixing Appleby with a censorious eye.

“I believe the stamps really to be an obscure sort of pointer. Not directly towards Unumunu but towards a general situation in terms of which his death may be explained. Have you noticed how slowly we learn any sort of why and wherefore about this island? How cut off are we; how often and how freely can people come and go; what has brought them here in their several groups; what is the past of each?” He peered into the impenetrable jungle. “All that.”