Appleby on Ararat (16 page)

Two stars came out. The mind, tirelessly contriving its fictions, announced them as points defining a straight line – but they were indeterminate messes without a relationship to each other save in terms of some third thing at some one time.

The sound of the sea was alien and discouraging; the crickets were allies in whose impotence one’s own fate could be read. Swiftly the shadowy curtains of night fell; the island withdrew like a dancer within her veils; there was only the fat woman wriggling upwards into a dress and, far away in Hailstone’s bungalow, one light burning.

Appleby, framed in the doorway to take his leave, turned round. “What about prose, Mr Mudge? Did you ever read
Treasure Island
?”

“No, Mr Appleby, I can’t say that I did.”

“A few honest men and a boy found themselves on an island like this with a pack of rascals. They had to fight it out. Only first there was the job of getting quite clear who were rascals and who were honest men.”

Mudge, slipping on the white coat in which he would presently direct the serving of dinner, paused to digest this literary intelligence. “I suppose,” he asked, “the rascals would have a ringleader?”

“They had. He was called Long John Silver.”

“And here, Mr Appleby, there would be a ringleader too? And perhaps you know who he is, though not who all his followers are?”

“Yes.”

Mudge sighed. “There are great disadvantages in the meditative temperament, sir. It prevents one from getting up with things as quickly as one could. Might I ask how you found out?”

“I’m not sure that I can tell you. Yes – it was something that happened on a table… You and I must keep an eye on each other. Good night.”

And Appleby went out. From the Hermitage a xylophone was summoning softly to whatever Mr Heaven had substituted for edible worms. Although, hours before, he had told Diana that he was hungry, he ignored the call now; reaching the hotel, he walked to a far corner of the veranda from which he could look out to sea. The night was chilly, as the island nights were. But there was something else to it, Appleby thought, tonight – a breath, a tremor that the weather-wise might read. Before him, the ocean was only an uncertain, glimmering floor; the intellect alone knew it as estranging and vast. And he looked out over it gravely, as one who searches for a definite and significant thing.

There was a step behind him and he turned to see the glow of a cigarette, the glimmer of white evening clothes, the sardonic features, faintly and dramatically lit from below, of the ruined financier, Sir Mervyn Poulish. The man spoke – indifferently, with the casual courtesy of a liner’s deck. “Had any good fishing?”

Appleby shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not yet.”

The point, thought Appleby, looking round the Hermitage dining room, is that probably I gave myself away. The tempo of the affair may now be governed by that. Perhaps a couple of hours more of the Appleby manner and the affair will begin to conduct itself to a different tune. Meanwhile, best make talk while the electricity shines. For it may very well go out.

He looked about the dining room again and realised that it bore an unfamiliar air. Mr Heaven, in fact, had arranged what he called a
divertissement
. Appleby, who was not among those who relish expecting a dinner and finding a
divertissement
instead, surveyed the scene with a gloom not unworthy of the hound of the Hailstones itself. The usual tables had gone and in their place stood a great many small ones laid for two. On entering the dining room one was given the end of a tangled silk ribbon; this Ariadne-like thread one followed until partnered with the particular Minotaur with whom one was expected to dine. It was, presumably, just another way of having a Good Time. And it had set Hoppo opposite the leader of the Younger Crush, Miss Busst; Miss Curricle opposite the vapid Mr Rumsby; and Colonel Glover opposite Jenner, that exemplar of a superior purpose whose only recorded activity was the kicking of George… Appleby took the end of his ribbon. Sir Mervyn Poulish, who had come in behind him, did the same. As they were the last to arrive and only one table stood vacant the situation was clear. Nevertheless some sheepish deference to the Spirit of Good Times induced them to make a show of following their ribbons. It meant, Appleby noticed, a sort of dance. He turned to Poulish. “Did you ever,” he asked gravely, “give yourself away?” And he moved off across the room.

This adherence to the rules of the game was approved by the seated guests. They met again in a far corner amid some applause. And Poulish, apparently, was uncertain of what he had heard. “I beg your pardon?” he said.

“I asked if you had ever given yourself badly away. I have – only today. Excuse me.” He retreated, hauling in as he went.

They neared each other again in the middle of the room. Miss Curricle, Appleby noted, was taking out her
divertissement
in fixed glances at inanimate objects around her; Hoppo was the wise man who submits to innocent folly with a good grace; Glover looked badly in need of a copy of the
Times
. And here was Poulish again. “Or did I?” asked Appleby. “Did I perhaps manage to cover myself up? You know the feeling. And policemen get it very badly at times. Ah, here we are.”

Their table was before them and they sat down, Poulish with a doubtful eye on his partner. “I suppose,” said Appleby, “the idea is good.” He indicated the paired diners around them. “Interchange of information…points of view…that sort of thing.”

“Yes.” There was a silence and Poulish added morosely, “Jolly good fun.”

“Quite so.” The table, Appleby noticed, was laid with hammers, chisels and saw. And in the middle, like a sword between Poulish and himself, was an enormous loaf about four feet long. He took up his saw and fell to work on it.

“I say” – Poulish spoke almost nervously – “I don’t think you’re meant to do that. It’s a sort of joke – like sometimes on ships. In a minute a boy will come and take all this away. Then there’ll be something decent to eat.”

But Appleby, who had successfully cut through a large segment of the loaf, began to munch. “A joke? I don’t agree with you. I suppose this loaf to be a symbol. The bread of idleness. An element in the celebration of a sort of lily-livered mass. My own feeling is that even a black mass is preferable to that.”

Poulish had darkly flushed. “We are some of us not here entirely of our own accord. Yourself, for instance.”

“No doubt.” Appleby munched again, with a sudden satisfaction not perhaps occasioned by the quality of the bread. “There are more reasons than one for seeking a hermitage, I don’t deny.” He looked round the room. “Would you be at all interested if I told you that many of these people are not where they think they are?”

Poulish took some seconds to consider this. “I should be rather pleased,” he said. There was another silence, while they parted – Appleby somewhat reluctantly – with the hammers and saws. “What was that you meant,” asked Poulish suddenly, “about giving yourself away?”

“I was confessing a habit. And I’m going to do it again. Let’s talk about Cottonreels.”

“About
what
?”

“Cottonreels and Missionaries and Sydney Views. And perhaps Triangular Capes.”

“Never heard of them.”

“Ah,” said Appleby; “then you are one of those who has diamonds.”

Poulish spooned up toheroa soup. “You don’t seem to me to be the kind of man who gives himself away – unless accidentally on purpose.”

Appleby shook his head. “I suddenly saw battle where I had thought there was only boredom. It made me incautious. But, as I was saying, you are living on diamonds while some of the others are living on stamps. I’m living on credit myself, which is one better still.”

Involuntarily and somewhat uncertainly, Poulish smiled. “I could give you a tip or two on that…but, as you say, it’s diamonds for me now. Lucky diamonds, as the phrase is. Things went to pieces while I was in quod, and it was – as your friend Mrs Kittery says – a lucky break when diamonds came along.”

“But the manner of their coming had its inconveniences? It meant, for instance, a discreet retreat?” Appleby looked placidly at his plate. A somewhat commonplace concoction of smoked oysters, he saw, had been substituted for the promised edible worms. “The situation was more or less that?”

“I am not concerned to contradict you.” Poulish smiled with more confidence this time; it struck Appleby that the man had taken a liking to him.

“Quite so. And, in fact, Sir Mervyn, it was because of the diamonds – and, of course, what you heard on the radio – that you murdered Unumunu?”

Poulish put down his fork, opened his eyes wide, turned slowly pale. “May I ask,” he said carefully, “what makes you put such an extraordinary question?”

“Haste. And may I ask you to answer it?”

“I will. I have never murdered anybody. Such a thing is not in my nature. I am a financier – a very dishonest one, as you know. When cornered we sometimes commit suicide. But homicide never. It is a matter of psychological type.” And Poulish raised a glass to his lips with a slightly trembling hand.

There was a constrained silence. Looking up, Appleby saw Hoppo bobbing at him merrily from across the room; Miss Busst was having a success. Nearer at hand, Glover and Jenner were arguing vigorously. And, in a far corner, Miss Curricle was talking steadily and instructively to Mr Rumsby. He looked at Poulish again. “I think you know Kimberley?”

It was some sort of hit. For the man blinked. “Yes…yes, of course I do.”

“Well, you killed this Unumunu because you had heard over the radio that he knew too much about something at Kimberley. I suppose you got a glimpse of us when we were cast on the island, and recognised him. A horrid shock – and an astounding coincidence.”

Poulish leant forward on his chair; he was pale to the lips now. “It’s a fiendish lie!”

Appleby sighed. “You see that fellow Jenner over there? It’s said that he kicked George.”

“And what the devil of that?”

“Only that it’s a fiendish lie too.”

Coffee was on the veranda. Appleby, slipping to a solitary corner of this, presently found Diana beside him. “Hullo,” he said, “did you have a good dinner?”

“I had an old man who wasn’t nice.” Diana was brief. “What about you?”

“I’ve made a pal. And now I’m looking for more. What about trying Heaven? I think I can hear him coming.”

There was a murmuring below them and presently they could see a dim round shape drifting through the darkness – rather like one of those aberrant and supernumerary moons which alarmed the Romans at the time of Caesar’s murder. It mounted a flight of steps, and now was like a turnip-lantern on the end of a pole. Heaven, in a dinner-jacket and a billowing black tie, was coming to make the round of his guests. A clever chap, Appleby thought. He and his wife contrived to run something like a luxury hotel with the help of a pack of semi-savages. Which meant hard work, too… “Good evening,” he said.

Heaven stopped, smiled and bowed – to the accompaniment of those faint noises which suggested, somewhere about him, the presence of an invisible herd of elfin cattle. “Good evening, sir; good evening, my dear madam. I hope our little effort at diversion was a success?
Dulce est desipere in loco:
we follow the Horatian rule.”

“I should have thought not so much
in
loco
,” said Appleby, “as
in secula seculorum
. The non-stop Good Time, or what used to be called the Earthly Paradise. Your effort, Mr Heaven, is at that. And I admire your temerity. It has been achieved in paint – Watteau did it and Giorgione too, though with Giorgione disturbing ideas crept in. But in actuality it has always broken down. In fact,
dis aliter visum
has been the memorial of all such schemes yet.”

Diana sat down, saucer-eyed at this coruscation of culture. And Heaven rather uneasily laughed. “The gods had other ideas? But we have other ideas about the gods. The Hermitage doesn’t believe in them, I am sorry to say.”

“Are you sure? You think there is only one effective belief here, your own belief in money. But there may be people who worship other gods – and with surprising fervour. You belong to a past century, Mr Heaven.”

Heaven looked puzzled. “Really, I’m not sure of what you mean.” He gave a chuckle and an inarticulate murmur. “Or whether you’re being at all kind.”

“Only kindness is intended. And what I mean is this. Your hotel, pitched at great cost and labour at the other end of nowhere to meet a foreseen demand, is an example of what used to be called Free Enterprise at its most enterprising. You rate profit so high that you are prepared to go a great distance for it. Perhaps you are prepared to go to great lengths too. Anyway it interests me. You must be a man of quite exceptional cupidity and greed.”

“John,” Diana interrupted mildly, “is this what you call making pals?”

“No; it’s what I call making things clear. Mr Heaven thinks he is the only person here with a drive – and his drive is towards money. Hence an Earthly Paradise reared on smuggled diamonds and stamps. If he sees any drive at all in other people it will be his own drive that he tends to see. But I am saying that there are other drives: more today than there were, say, fifty years ago. And he may fail to see them, largely because he is that old-fashioned thing: a materialist wrapped up as an aesthete. He may fail to see them, when such a failure is dangerous.”

“Really,” said Heaven, “it is a great pleasure to meet so fresh and charming a mind. Particularly” – he turned and bowed to Diana – “when it is partnered by so fresh and–”

“I do advise you” – Appleby cut in on the compliment – “to think it over.”

“Be assured I shall.” Heaven laughed and murmured. But he was nervous now; his body was swaying with its odd, butting motion; his hands were playing indecisively before his chest.

“And before it is too late.”

Heaven made a new sound – something like a sharp hiss. “What do you mean? What is this about other drives, and danger?”

“Other drives? I was saying that there are people who are out for other things than cash. Think of the scientists. Think, for example, of Hailstone and Dunchue over there, absorbed in their archaeology.”