Appleby on Ararat (6 page)

Another shoal of fish flashed past, swerving with the precision of an automobile in knock-about comedy. Somewhere on the island a kookaburra cackled; another and another took up the sound; the air was filled with a brief and diabolic laughter which ebbed to a silence in which there was only heard the faint slap of the water against the dead man’s flanks.

“Diana, it’s Unumunu; he’s drowned. Go ashore and I’ll try to bring him in.”

But she was swimming forward still, although she must have realised the truth before he spoke. Now she turned round and trod water; she was pale and opened her lips cautiously, as if doubting what would emerge. “I’ll help.” She tossed water from her hair and the sound of her voice seemed to give her confidence. “It’s difficult, a body. Even if it’s well gassed-up.” She was groping for a foothold on the submerged rock.

For Appleby a dead man was scarcely an event, and he was still chiefly interested in the girl. So this, perhaps, was the Song the Sirens sang – bodies well gassed-up being a natural region of their singing. “Don’t get worried,” he said by way of discounting his thoughts. “And if we go one on each side–”

“No.” Whether worried or not, Diana abruptly took command. And her instructions were efficient in the extreme; they had the body and were making headway towards the shore.

A current caught them momentarily and Appleby had a first glimpse of Unumunu’s face. The sight hurried him into speech. “You seem to know about it,” he said.

“John?” She turned her head, startled.

“Handling a body in water.”

“Too right. I mean, yes. We have lots of this on our beach. And I’ve belonged to the life-savers for years. It’s great fun.” She paused, perhaps feeling this an inappropriate truth, perhaps because the current, catching them again, made it necessary to conserve her breath. “But I never thought it would come to bringing in poor old Ponto.” She twisted round to look at the black man’s face with the innocent interest of a child examining a dead canary.

“
John
!”

“Yes.”

They got the body to the beach and laid it on its back; they dropped down exhausted beside it. And Appleby looked again. Unumunu’s face would soon be dust. But now it looked like something utterly permanent, like a piece of sculpture that would have great value in a museum, like the effigy of a divine being infinitely remote in the primitive consciousness of mankind. Such things are brought from the Gold Coast, from the Congo, and they rebuke every hope, negate every category of the Western mind. The dead Sir Ponto, with Eton and anthropology evaporated from his clay and his eyes open without expectation on the sky, looked like that. And the effect of sculptural fragment was increased because he had no back to his head. The back of his head had been bashed in.

“Has he been dead long? I
thought
I saw him, you know, across the lagoon.” Diana’s wondering eyes travelled the length of the ebony body. “The fish have been nibbling his toes.” She stopped, her eyes widened. “So if
he
had nibbled
me
–” Abruptly she sat up and began to cry. She cried for a long time, while Appleby stared at the sea. “I think,” she said obscurely, “he was jolly decent. Considering he was a black.” The idyll was over; the fantasy – in which she was to marry a black and he was to marry the Curricle – was broken; the story had taken its quirk and the key was changed. He stood up. “We must find the others.”

She nodded. And then her eyebrows puckered, as if she were attempting some elementary sum. “Then it must–” She checked herself. “Could he have
fallen
?” she almost whispered.

“From a great height, yes. But there is no great height from which a body could end up in the lagoon.”

“Then–”

“Yes. Come along.”

They stepped off the beach and into their now familiar miniature jungle – an other world which made what was behind them unbelievable at once. The bowery loneliness was like Eden, Appleby thought – and like the second Eden of our infancy was the determined innocence that trod by his side. Or rather that had just left it – for Diana had suddenly darted into the undergrowth and disappeared. Perhaps he should arrest her and everybody else; perhaps he should have affected to find Unumunu’s death explicable by natural means and bided his time…

She was back again, tears and triumph on her face and in her hands a pigeon. “Ponto’s,” she said. “He
was
so good at all that.” She sniffed and felt for a handkerchief which had disappeared long ago. “We shall never get along without him.” She felt at the bird. “A nice plump one too. Let’s keep it for ourselves.”

He laughed. She looked at him reproachfully. “John, you shouldn’t laugh. Not after such a dreadful thing. Not even if you
are
a policeman – you’re not really, are you?”

“Of course I am. And a puzzled one.”

“Puzzled?” Her look now had its quick intelligence. “Well,
I
don’t believe it. It’s not believable. That one of them, I mean–”

“But, Diana, only an hour ago you were making up just such an improbability.”

“No. I never said” – she hesitated, plunged – “that Hoppo or the colonel would or could kill anybody. I said one of – of you two might.
They’re
not maddened men.”

“Haven’t I sufficiently impressed upon you that
I
am not a maddened man?”

“Yes, you are – in a way. And Ponto too. But the other two just don’t
attend
. I ought to know, oughtn’t I?”

“You think Unumunu attended? Have you ever heard of the Hottentot Venus?”

“No.” Diana looked suspicious.

“She is exceedingly unlike you. And Unumunu I should judge to have had rather strict ideas, really. A little make-believe, of course. But fundamentally you would be – well, beneath his dignity. He wasn’t a coloured boxer.” Appleby frowned thoughtfully. “I hope,” he added somewhat absent-mindedly, “you’re not offended by my putting it that way?”

“Well, I’ve never been called a coloured boxer’s type before. But if Ponto wasn’t a maddened man, it seems to leave just
you
. Because
certainly
Hoppo and the colonel don’t count.”

“I said I was puzzled, didn’t I? But I see possibilities. Why not a maddened woman?” He paused and looked at her gravely. “Or why not a soldier or a clergyman not maddened at all, but with something quite different in his head?”

“I don’t think you at all believe what you’re saying.”

Appleby smiled. “Perhaps you should be a policeman too. Very well, then. A maddened man, as you insist. And why should Hoppo and Glover not count? Very inhibited people–”

“What?”

“Very restrained and shy and anxiously correct people are often dippier than others. And our circumstances here are very strange and likely to call up the primitive. Perhaps it really has been called up a little quicker than I expected. Look at Miss Curricle; it was bubbling in her from the first. And it may very well be that Hoppo or Glover has gone – to a civilised mind – quietly off his head. Kill the males and possess the females. It’s at once absurd, shocking, and possible.”

“Nonsense.” Diana was plucking the pigeon as she walked, so that she had the appearance of engaging in some leisurely paper-chase. “It’s all nonsense.” She spoke with a largeness and a decisiveness against which logic and consistency had no chance. “Why, Hoppo and the colonel–” Abruptly she stopped and laid a hand on his arm. “Look. Listen.”

They had reached the edge of the glade which was still their living quarters, and through a screen of hibiscus could see what was happening within. Hoppo and Glover were sitting side by side on a fallen tree-trunk; Hoppo was opening oysters and Glover was washing yams. It was a domestic scene – nor was the conversation which could be overheard of a dramatic character.

“I think I may claim,” Hoppo was saying, “that I have a very devotional interior.” He peered enquiringly into a dubious oyster. “Devotional and, at the same time, comfortable too.”

“It was pretty certain, then” – Glover scraped at a yam with a razor shell – “that the tribes were out. That night I ordered up the seven-pounders.”

“Though not a stone of the fabric, mark you, dates from before the Reformation.”

“We had four pom-poms–”

“The west front is by Butterfield.”

“…a howitzer badly in need of overhaul–”

“Some really nice modern glass–”

“…and a machine-gun – a new-fangled thing in which, naturally, one didn’t believe.”

“…wonderfully
realistic
snow. The shepherds are in blue–”

“…yelling like devils.”

“There is a scroll above; it says simply
Peace on Earth
.”

“…gave them a whiff of shrapnel…”

Diana put an arm round Appleby and gave his ribs an unexpected and vigorous squeeze. “There!” she whispered. “You see? They don’t even attend to each other any longer. It’s just like people in
Č
apek.”

He stared at her, perplexed. Here in the green shade her flesh, golden-brown as impossible toast on a hoarding, held half-lights like old bronze. “Diana, one day you will get right in the target area. Chekov, perhaps. What makes you so literary? I suppose you enjoyed the Australian higher education?”

She looked at him suspiciously. “I took out some classes,” she said briefly. “Come on.”

They broke cover and advanced across the glade. Light crackled on them from a high and burning sun; the purple jacaranda-carpet shimmered and seemed to breathe; invisible crickets chirmed like an army of power-looms far away. Appleby walked up to the two men. “Unumunu has been murdered,” he said.

Their arms and their jaws dropped as if they had been idle derricks; they stared at him blankly and he stared at them hard. It occurred to him that this was something to which he had never been moved before; during all their adventures it had not happened that he had given them a searching glance. And this was discouraging. For his world had long been divided into palpable sheep and potential goats, and it was to the goats that he had developed the habit of attending.

“Murdered?” said Glover. “Good Gad!”

“Murdered?” said Hoppo. “Heaven forfend!”

They were men, surely, as simply faithful to their sort as the creations of Peter Arno. The inner life, the stifled fear, the secret lust, the
libido
, the
id
, the complex and the neurosis: these were all conceptions that wilted and failed before their absolute fidelity to the simplest of the laws of kind. The large-eyed, toast-golden Diana, who had taken out classes and who trod the island like a child, was a monster of complexity, was a fathomless well compared with these. Appleby contemplated them with a hopelessness which he tried to hope was premature.

Hoppo stood up in agitation. “Have you seen a canoe? Is there any sign of the savages?”

And Glover stood up as a man for whom the gong has sounded. “A raider! Or perhaps another part of the island is used for basing submarines. With luck we might give them a surprise. Killed – poor chap! A fine type. Magnificent fighters, you know – broke a British square or two in the old days, did his sort. Rather a sophisticated specimen, perhaps; always a mistake to let them get that way.” He paused to take breath amid these unusually extended remarks. “But loyal – one of ourselves as far as this show goes. Killed! By Jove, sir, we’ll have their scalps.” And Glover looked aggressively round the glade, a sheep belligerent and declared.

“We must remember,” said Hoppo, “that we are unarmed. It would be rash–”

“There is no sign of savages – or of any enemy.” Appleby sat down on the tree-trunk. “We have no reason to believe that, apart from ourselves, there is a soul within hundreds of miles. So we must do a little thinking. And go carefully with each other. The facts are these.” And he gave a brief account of what they had found.

Hoppo, a sheep
à pure et à plein
, looked scared. Glover went immobile, like an organism with limited reactions in the presence of the unknown. And Diana Kittery played with a lizard, as a schoolchild might do who has no need to attend to a lesson a second time.

“And so,” said Appleby, “I repeat that we must go carefully. If one of us in this little community turns out to have killed Unumunu what are we going to do? What is it in our power to do? And, to begin with, what attitude is expedient and discreet? I think myself that the mystery is one which we must try to solve. But then I have a professional angle on mysteries and I may be prejudiced.”

“We must have the truth if we can.” Glover spoke gruffly and with difficulty. “Without it, the situation is intolerable. And then we must decide.”

“I agree.” Hoppo had braced himself and spoke with unexpected decision. “And it may be that there was great provocation – that there was justification even. We know very little of this oddly westernised negro whom chance made our companion. And we know little of what relations may…there are certain dangers so–” He floundered, picked up a gaping oyster and tried to press it shut; the action seemed to translate itself into some injunction in his mind. “Really,” he said, “it is difficult to know just what to say.”

“Where,” said Diana, “is Miss Curricle?”

The burial of the black man was pushed through against material and spiritual difficulties. Without tools it is not easy to dig a large hole even in sand; without more guidance than an Ethiopian complexion, an Eton accent and a professed interest in anthropology it is hard to determine the extent and character of observances proper to the occasion. Appleby however contrived a grave and Hoppo gave Unumunu what he called the benefit of the doubt. It was finished, and they looked uncertainly at the hump of sand that witnessed to it, momentarily aware that this death was in essence no more mysterious than that of the meanest of the ephemeridae in its season. Then, turning to perplexities compassable by the intellect, they wondered again about the absence of Miss Curricle.

It was not yet anything definitively out of the way, not yet adequate ground for the open voicing of suspicion. Anxiety however was reasonable and Glover talked of a search. But even this was premature; Miss Curricle had developed of late a habit that was increasingly solitary. She had, indeed, pronounced against personal relations as likely to be insupportable in the circumstances in which they were placed. There was to be – when her companions’ understanding had sufficiently advanced to march with her own – a dark and subliminal communion out of which a strong and primitive new life was to grow. Meanwhile something of the seclusion of the anchorite would help the new consciousness to flower, and between meals – or even over one – Miss Curricle was accustomed to withdraw herself from society. Her ideas, Appleby judged, were not literary in inspiration – from the speculations of dear Lord Tennyson they could scarcely be derived – and their period of incubation was probably painful. Indeed Miss Curricle, wandering the island and discovering herself as an original thinker and fount of the new humanity, was quite likely to go mad. Perhaps this had already happened and the death of Unumunu was a result.