Gay Phoenix

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The Gay Phoenix

 

First published in 1976
© Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1976-2011

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

 

The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

 

This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
 
Typeset by House of Stratus.

 

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

 

		EAN			ISBN		Edition
		1842327356			9781842327357		Print
		0755118081			9780755118083		Pdf
		0755119770			9780755119776		Kindle
		0755120965			9780755120963		Epub

 

This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

 

www.houseofstratus.com

 

Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.

After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of
Florio's
translation of
Montaigne's Essays
and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.

By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel,
Death at the President's Lodging
. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.

After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen's University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the
Oxford History of English Literature
.

Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.

The Povey brothers eyed one another. Charles Povey’s gaze was more fixed than Arthur Povey’s – which was in the nature of things, since Charles was dead. Arthur found he greatly disliked being stared at by a corpse. As with Banquo’s ghost when it had obeyed Macbeth’s summons to the feast, there was no speculation in the eyes that it did glare with. But there was no reason for Arthur to suppose that there was anything particularly unusual about his feelings. Most people probably found such an experience disagreeable, and that was why it was customary to close the eyes of deceased persons. You put out a finger – Arthur Povey supposed – and edged down first one lid and then the other, rather as if coping with some defect in the mechanism of a ‘sleeping’ doll.

For some moments, Arthur found he lacked courage to perform this office for Charles. He sat back and imagined – for he had a lively imagination – a fly crawling slowly across first his brother’s right eye and then his brother’s left eye: sightless and unflinching orbs. Not that there could be many flies around. Not here aboard a small craft tossing uneasily in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

And Charles – Arthur reflected with what was only a fresh spurt of familiar resentment – had died abruptly and for no good reason at all. He had simply not hopped out of the way quick enough. And as a consequence of his lethargic behaviour his younger brother had been left in a more desperate hole than ever. It was absolutely
like
Charles to fix things that way.

Still, one had to be fair. Arthur’s hole, with Charles dead, was not quite so desperate as Charles’ hole would have been, had it been Arthur who had incontinently got himself killed. This was because it was Arthur who really knew the sea. That was why he had been dragged into this ‘adventure’ in the first place. Charles had recruited him without ceremony, and in exchange for nothing more than his keep, precisely as if he had been some adequately qualified lounger of the sort to be picked up on any waterfront. Damn Charles and his adventures. They had always been idiotic and gratuitous. There wasn’t even money in them.

Not that this one had looked particularly hazardous. The yacht had been – it still mostly was – uncommonly well found. You could advertise it in a journal for freshwater sailors as owning all mod cons. It was true that – now, and since the sizable storm which had just blown itself out – the yacht lacked one or two rather important bits and pieces. Notably, it lacked its mainmast. That was what Charles had failed to get out of the way of as it came crashing down – with the consequence that the up-flying butt of the thing, lethally jagged, had gone through the back of his head like a knife. The moment had been one of sheer nightmare – particularly as Arthur’s own head hadn’t escaped scot-free. Something, he didn’t know quite what, had given it a flip or blip which had landed him with a filthy headache now.

Cautiously, and for the third or fourth time, Arthur Povey felt his skull. You could fracture your skull, he supposed, without its then positively wobbling under your fingers. But there couldn’t be so much as a cut on his, since with the slightest scalp wound you bled like a pig. And he certainly wasn’t concussed. So he had been lucky. Lucky so far.

As for the yacht, he could continue to make do with it. Once back in a trade route, his job would be simply not to fall fatally asleep in the path of an unstoppable tanker before hailing something more likely to be charitably interested in him. Eventually he would collect a certain amount of credit and publicity (but not, unfortunately, remunerative publicity) for managing to turn up alive. Of course, a Sunday paper might buy his ‘story’. There would be a small something in that.

Hunched by the idle wheel, Arthur Povey brooded. Alone on a wide wide sea, he brooded for a long time. Not that he was unconscious of some action as being required of him fairly quickly. The bloody sun at noon – and here his sole working capital, his imagination, was at work again – would very soon operate on his brother’s body in an undesirable way. The sun breeds maggots in a dead dog, being a god kissing carrion. (Or a good kissing-carrion, Arthur crazily told himself – recalling some fragment of his expensive and useless education.) Hygiene called for the rapid disposal of Charles. Decency and piety required the rummaging out of some scrap of sailcloth and the stitching of the body into it before consignment to the deep. There was even something in the Book of Common Prayer that one ought to read aloud first. (The Poveys were English gentlemen, and had been well brought up.) It seemed doubtful, however, whether the mod cons ran to such a volume. Nautical manuals and a few mildly erotic paperbacks constituted, so far as he could remember, the entire library the
Gay Phoenix
boasted.

Arthur Povey scowled. The contracting of his forehead brought on an extra stab of pain, and again his fingers went to the back of his head – to the spot which, on his brother’s head, he didn’t propose, if he could help it, to look at again. A less uncultivated man than Charles, he was always irritated when he remembered that Charles’ trim craft bore that peculiarly idiotic name. The
Gay Phoenix!
There had been a time when Charles had indulged a rich man’s fancy for owning racehorses, and it seemed to be a convention that you could call such brutes any nonsensical thing you pleased. Yachts ought to be different. Arthur Povey, being a person of exact sensibility, was very clear about that.

This trivial displeasure was scarcely one to take up much time, and he was therefore startled when he suddenly noticed what was happening to the now swiftly moderating sea. That vast unharvested deep had taken to sliding up to and beneath the
Gay Phoenix
in a tumble of molten golden guineas – a perfectly familiar phenomenon, but one declaring that the sun had dropped almost to the horizon. He had been sitting immobile and paralysed for hours! The discovery frightened him. It frightened him because it told him he
was
frightened; that shock had been succeeded by blind terror.
Charles had died
. Charles had suffered death by misadventure – something the possibility of which one was always theoretically aware of, but the actual enactment of which before one’s eyes appeared a brute and incredible thing. It was, after a fashion, a natural death, yet it now seemed unnatural in the highest degree: a stroke so arbitrary as to induce ungovernable fear when one tried to focus it. Why had the Dark Angel chosen Charles? Equally it might have chosen him! He felt like a man who had been playing Russian roulette with a revolver every second chamber of which held a live bullet. He had pulled the trigger and there had been nothing but a click. The issue might have been a shattering oblivion.