Singing in the Shrouds (6 page)

Evidently Dennis had heard about Alleyn. He hurried to the door, smiled winsomely and said, “Not generally, but I’m going to have the pleasure of looking after
you,
Mr. Broderick.”

Alleyn tipped him five pounds. Dennis said, “Oh, you shouldn’t, sir, really,” and pocketed the note. He indicated the flowers and said, “I just can’t make up my mind, sir. Mrs. Dillington-Blick said I was to take some into the dining-room and lounge and as soon as I’ve finished in the bar I’m going to, but I
don’t
know which to choose. Such an umberance-der-riches! What would you say for the
lounge,
sir? The décor’s dirty
pink
.”

Alleyn was so long answering that Dennis gave a little giggle. “Isn’t it
diffy
!” he sympathized.

Alleyn pointed a long finger. “That,” he said. “I should certainly make it that one,” and went on his way to the passengers’ lounge.

It was a modest combination of bar, smoking-room, and card-room and in it the passengers were assembled for coffee. Already by the curious mechanism of human attraction and repulsion they had begun to sort themselves into groups. Mr. McAngus, having found himself alongside the Cuddys at luncheon, was re-appropriated by them both and seemed to be not altogether at ease in their company, perhaps because Mrs. Cuddy stared so very fixedly at his hair, which, Alleyn noticed, was of an unexpected shade of nut brown with no parting and a good deal of overhang at the back. He drew a packet of herbal cigarettes from his pocket and lit one, explaining that he suffered from asthma. They began to chat more cosily about diseases. Mr. McAngus confided that he was but recently recovered from an operation and Mr. Cuddy returned this lead with a lively account of a suspected duodenal ulcer.

Father Jourdain and Mr. Merryman had discovered a common taste in crime fiction and smiled quite excitedly at each other over their coffee cups. Of all the men among the passengers, Alleyn thought, Father Jourdain had the most arresting appearance. He wondered what procession of events had led this man to become an Anglo-Catholic celibate priest. There was intelligence and liveliness in the face whose pallor, induced no doubt by the habit of his life, emphasized rather than concealed the opulence of the mouth and watchfulness of the dark eyes. His short white hands were muscular and his hair thick and glossy. He was infinitely more vivid than his companion, whose baby-faced petulance, Alleyn felt, was probably the outward wall of the conventional house master. He caught himself up. “Conventional?” Was Mr. Merryman the too-familiar pedant who cultivates the eccentric to compensate himself for the deadly boredom of scholastic routine? A don
manqué
? Alleyn took himself mildy to task for indulgence in idle speculation and looked elsewhere.

Dr. Timothy Makepiece stood over Brigid Carmichael with the slightly mulish air of a young Englishman in the early stages of an attraction. Alleyn noted the formidable lines of Dr. Makepiece’s jaw and mouth, and being at the moment interested in hands, the unusual length of the fingers.

Miss Abbott sat by herself on a settee against the wall. She was reading. The hands that held her neatly covered book were large and muscular. Her face, he reflected, would have been not unhandsome if it had been only slightly less inflexible and if there had not been the suggestion of — what was it — harshness? — about the jaw.

As for Aubyn Dale, there he was, with Mrs. Dillington-Blick, who had set herself up with him hard by the little bar. When she saw Alleyn she beckoned gaily to him. She was busy establishing a coterie. As Alleyn joined them Aubyn Dale laid a large, beautifully tended hand over hers and burst into a peal of all-too-infectious laughter. “What a perfectly marvelous person you are!” he cried boyishly and appealed to Alleyn. “Isn’t she wonderful?”

Alleyn agreed fervently and offered them liqueurs.

“You take the words out of my mouth, dear boy,” Dale exclaimed.

“I oughtn’t to!” Mrs. Dillington-Blick protested. “I’m on an
inquisitorial
diet!” She awarded her opulence a downward glance and Alleyn an upward one. She raised her eyebrows. “My dear!” she cried. “You can see for yourself. I oughtn’t.”

“But you’re going to,” he rejoined and the drinks were served by the ubiquitous Dennis, who had appeared behind the bar. Mrs. Dillington-Blick, with a meaning look at Dale, said that if she put on another ounce she would never get into her Jolyon swimsuit and they began to talk about his famous session on commercial television. It appeared that when he visited America and did a specially sponsored half-hour, he had been supported by a great mass of superb models all wearing Jolyon swimsuits. His hands eloquently sketched their curves. He leaned towards Mrs. Dillington-Blick and whispered. Alleyn noticed the slight puffiness under his eyes and the blurring weight of flesh beneath the inconsiderable jaw which formerly his beard had hidden. “Is this the face,” Alleyn asked himself, “that launched a thousand hips?” and wondered why.

“You haven’t forgotten the flowers?” Mrs. Dillington-Blick asked Dennis and he assured her that he hadn’t.

“As soon as I’ve a spare
sec
I’ll pop away and fetch them,” he promised and smiled archly at Alleyn. “They’re all chosen and ready.”

As Aubyn Dale’s conversation with Mrs. Dillington-Blick tended to get more and more confidential Alleyn felt himself at liberty to move away. At the far end of the lounge Mr. Merryman was talking excitedly to Father Jourdain, who had begun to look uncomfortable. He caught Alleyn’s eye and nodded pleasantly. Alleyn dodged round the Cuddys and Mr. McAngus and bypassed Miss Abbott. There was a settee near the far end, but as he made for it Father Jourdain said, “Do come and join us. These chairs are much more comfortable and we’d like to introduce ourselves.”

Alleyn said, “I should be delighted,” and introductions were made. Mr. Merryman looked sharply at him over the tops of his spectacles and said, “How do you do, sir.” He added astonishingly, “I perceived that you were effecting an escape from what was no doubt an excruciating situation.”

“I?” Alleyn said. “I don’t quite—”

“The sight,” Mr. Merryman continued in none too quiet a voice, “of yonder popinjay ruffling his dubious plumage at the bar is singularly distasteful to me and no doubt intolerable to you.”

“Oh, come, now!” Father Jourdain protested.

Alleyn said, “He’s not as bad as that, is he?”

“You know who he is, of course.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Yes, yes,” said Father Jourdain. “We know. Ssh!”

“Have you witnessed his weekly exhibitions of indecent exposure on the television?”

“I’m not much of a viewer,” Alleyn said.

“Ah! You show your good judgment. As an underpaid pedagogue it has been my hideous lot to sit on Tuesday evenings among upper-middle-class adolescents of low intelligence, ‘looking in’ (loathsome phrase) at this man’s antics. Let me tell you what he does, sir. He advertises women’s bathing clothes and to this end he incites — arrogant presumption — he incites members of the public to bring their troubles to him! And the fools do! Conceive!” Mr. Merryman invited. “Picture to yourself! A dupe is discovered, his back (or much more often hers) to the camera. Out of focus, unrecognizable, therefore. Facing this person and us, remorselessly illuminated, enthroned and elevated in blasphemous (you will appreciate that in clerical company I use the adjective advisedly) in blasphemous supremacy is or was the countenance you see before you, but garnished with a hirsute growth which lent it a wholly spurious distinction.”

Alleyn glanced with amusement at Mr. Merryman and thought what bad luck it was for him that he was unable to give visual expression to his spleen. For all the world he looked like an indignant baby.

“If you will believe me,” he continued angrily whispering, “a frightful process known as ‘talking it over’ now intervenes. The subject discloses to That Person, and to however many thousands of listening observers there may be, some intimate predicament of her (it is, I repeat, usually a woman) private life.
He
then propounds a solution, is thanked, applauded, preens himself, and is presented with a fresh sacrifice. Now! What do you think of
that
!” whispered Mr. Merryman.

“I think it all sounds very embarrassing,” Alleyn said.

Father Jourdain made a comically despairing face at him. “Let’s talk about something else,” he suggested. “You were saying, Mr. Merryman, that the psychopathic murderer—”

“You heard of course,” Mr. Merryman remorselessly interjected, “what an exhibition he made of himself at a later assignment. ‘Lady Agatha’s umbilicus globular,’ ” he quoted, and broke into à shrill laugh.

“You know,” Father Jourdain remarked, “I’m on holiday and honestly don’t want to start throwing my priestly weight about.” Before Mr. Merryman could reply he raised his voice a little and added, “To go back, as somebody, was it Humpty Dumpty? said, to the last conversation but one, I’m immensely interested in what you were saying about criminals of the Heath type. What was the book you recommended? By an American psychiatrist, I think you said.”

Mr. Merryman muttered huffily, “I don’t recollect.”

Alleyn asked, “Not, by any chance,
The Show of Violence,
by Frederic Wertham?”

Father Jourdain turned to him with unconcealed relief. “Ah!” he said. “You’re an addict, too, and a learned one, evidently.”

“Not I. The merest amateur. Why, by the way, is everybody so fascinated by crimes of violence?” He looked at Father Jourdain. “What do you think, sir?”

Father Jourdain hesitated and Mr. Merryman cut in.

“I am persuaded,” he said, “that people read about murder as an alternative to committing it.”

“A safety valve?” Alleyn suggested.

“A conversion. The so-called antisocial urge is fed into a socially acceptable channel; we thus commit our crimes of violence at a safe remove. We are all,” Mr. Merryman said tranquilly folding his hands over his stomach, “savages at heart.” He seemed to have recovered his good humour.

“Do you agree?” Alleyn asked Father Jourdain.

“I fancy,” he rejoined, “that Mr. Merryman is talking about something I call original sin. If he is, I do of course agree.”

An accidental silence had fallen on the little assembly. Into this silence with raised voice, as a stone into a pool, Alleyn dropped his next remark.

“Take, for instance, this strangler — the man who ‘says it with’—what are they? Roses? What, do you suppose, is behind all that?”

The silence continued for perhaps five seconds.

Miss Abbott said, “Not roses. Hyacinths. Flowers of several kinds.”

She had lifted her gaze from her book and fixed it on Mrs. Dillington-Blick. “Hot-house flowers,” she said. “It being winter. The first time it was snowdrops, I believe.”

“And the second,” Mr. Merryman said, “hyacinths.”

Aubyn Dale cleared his throat.

“Ah, yes!” Alleyn said. “I remember now. Hyacinths.”

“Isn’t it awful?” Mrs. Cuddly gloated.

“Shocking,” Mr. Cuddy agreed. “Hyacinths! Fancy!”

Mr. McAngus said gently, “Poor things.”

Mr. Merryman with the falsely innocent air of a child that knows it’s being naughty asked loudly, “Hasn’t there been something on television about these flowers? Something rather ludicrous? Of what can I be thinking?”

Everybody avoided looking at Aubyn Dale, but not even Father Jourdain found anything to say.

It was at this juncture that Dennis staggered into the room with a vast basket of flowers which he set down on the central table.

“Hyacinths!” Mrs. Cuddy shrilly pointed out. “What a coincidence!”

It was one of those naïve arrangements which can give nothing but pleasure to the person who receives them unless, of course, that person is allergic to scented flowers. The hyacinths were rooted and blooming in a mossy bed. They trembled slightly with the motion of the ship, shook out their incongruous fragrance and filled the smoking-room with reminiscences of the more expensive kinds of shops, restaurants, and women.

Dennis fell back a pace to admire them.

“Thank you, Dennis,” Mrs. Dillington-Blick said.

“It’s a pleasure, Mrs. Dillington-Blick,” he rejoined. “Aren’t they gorgeous?”

He retired behind the bar. The passengers stared at the growing flowers and the flowers, quivering, laid upon them a further burden of sweetness.

Mrs. Dillington-Blick explained hurriedly, “There isn’t room for all one’s flowers in one’s cabin. I thought we’d enjoy them together.”

Alleyn said, “But what a charming gesture.” And was barely supported by a dilatory murmur.

Brigid agreed quickly, “Isn’t it? Thank you so much, they’re quite lovely.”

Tim Makepiece murmured, “What nice manners you’ve got, Grandmama.”

“I do hope,” Mrs. Dillington-Blick said, “that nobody finds the scent too much. Me, I simply wallow in it.”

She turned to Aubyn Dale. He rejoined, “But of course. You’re so wonderfully exotic.” Mr. Merryman snorted.

Mrs. Cuddy said loudly, “I’m afraid we’re going to be spoil-sports. Mr. Cuddy can’t stay in the same room with flowers that have a heavy perfume. He’s allergic to them.”

“Oh, I
am
so sorry,” Mrs. Dillington-Blick cried. “Then, of course, they must go.” She waved her hands helplessly.

“I’m sure there’s no need for that,” Mrs. Cuddy announced. “We don’t want to make things uncomfortable. We were going to take a turn on deck anyway. Weren’t we, dear?”

Alleyn asked, “Do you suffer from hay fever, Mr. Cuddy?”

Mrs. Cuddy answered for her husband. “Not exactly hay fever, is it, dear? He just comes over queer.”

“Extraordinary,” Alleyn murmured.

“Well, it’s quite awkward sometimes.”

“At weddings and funerals, for instance, it must be.”

“Well, on our
silver
wedding some of the gentlemen from Mr. Cuddy’s lodge brought us a gorgeous mixed booky of hot-house flowers and he had to say how much he appreciated it and all the time he was feeling peculiar and when they’d gone he said, ‘I’m sorry, Mum, but it’s me or the booky,’ and we live opposite a hospital so he took them across and had to go for a long walk afterwards to get over it, didn’t you, dear?”