Stop Press (15 page)

‘A muster? Dear me!’ Mr Eliot looked bewildered.

‘I should expect’ – Chown gave the reading lamp a deft push, so that it picked out Mr Eliot’s features a little more clearly – ‘a very perceptible degree of shock. Short of a professional window-cleaner or steeplejack, the adventure would be unfamiliar – it would be that even to an experienced climber. And novel danger always leaves its mark. The person would be nervous and distraught; there would be a detectable trauma.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Mr Eliot – perhaps the Mr Eliot who liked a little learned talk – brightened slightly. ‘Trauma – yes, I follow you.’ He started as a coal fell in the grate.

‘As it is’ – Chown was soothing – ‘we are of course entirely without evidence of that sort. But, even so, we shall, I am confident – ah – get things straight.’ He leant forward and poked Mr Eliot’s fire in a friendly way. ‘I think you said it all began with a telephone call?’ He was aware that on how it all began his host had said nothing at all. But Mr Eliot’s mind was confused and he might safely take a few short cuts. ‘And I think you were called to the instrument by your son, who had answered the call?’

‘Yes, that is so.’ Mr Eliot’s reply was again absent. He had lifted his head, listening. A chatter of excited voices was drifting past the room. Chown was meditating how best to proceed in face of this highly suggestible state when Mr Eliot corrected himself. ‘No; that is wrong. I am afraid my attention wandered. I recollect clearly that when the bell rang I picked up the receiver myself. Timmy had no hand in it. He was unaware of what had happened until I told him later in the evening.’

Chown nodded into the fire with a great appearance of thoughtfulness. ‘And now’, he said, ‘let us consider suspects.’

‘Suspects?’ Mr Eliot shifted uncomfortably in his enveloping chair and his tone was defensive. ‘I have considered’, he added apologetically, ‘so many in my time.’ For a second he lit up into gaiety, glowing like some submarine creature that carries its own electric lighting about the ocean bed. ‘I suspect the whole suspect-business.’

Dr Chown looked serious at once. He had found that nothing so disturbs the course of an analysis as an access of
euphoria
in the patient and he was always on his guard, therefore, against cheerfulness breaking in. ‘I only wish’, he said, ‘that we could take a light-hearted view. But in saying that the matter can be controlled I would not wish to mislead you. It may be graver than we think.’ Mr Eliot looked appropriately dashed. ‘And now let us come to a review of the members of your house-party.’

Mr Eliot, thus called upon to review the retinue of the Spider, sighed gently. ‘And wonder’, he murmured, ‘how the devil they got there.’ The quotation encouraged him to add, ‘I think I heard the dressing bell?’

‘And now,’ said Chown remorselessly some fifteen minutes later, ‘take the members of your own household. To begin with there are your cousins: do you trust them?’

‘Trust Rupert and Archie?’ Mr Eliot could be felt as groping after the conventional answer to this question. He groped in vain; with atmosphere of the confessional. ‘I can’t say that I do. Not all round, that is to say. Of course they are both good fellows, very good fellows indeed, and I was exceedingly glad when they came to live with us. Rupert and I were brought up as boys together – quite
arcades ambo
indeed. And of recent years Archie has been most congenial. He has literary tastes. I fear his tastes were a little too literary for his profession; he was highly successful for a time and many of his structures were referred to as poems in steel. Unfortunately there was often some slip or hitch on the material side – which is of course important in engineering.’

‘Sir Archibald, then, despite admirable qualities, is not entirely trustworthy?’

‘Well, not perhaps entirely so. There was an embarrassing incident some years ago when Archie was found to have gained access to the wine-cellar by means of a skeleton key. As a matter of fact, I had got up the process of manufacture of such things myself; my writing, you know, takes me into odd corners of knowledge. Archie simply lifted the idea from my book. And that added, somehow, to the uncomfortableness of the thing.’

Chown nodded. Mr Eliot, it seemed, had already had some experience of what he called one’s fantasies returning upon one again. ‘And Sir Rupert?’ he prompted.

‘Rupert?’ Mr Eliot was uncomfortable but helpless. ‘Rupert is a capital fellow, with a great deal of knowledge of the world. He has knocked about quite surprisingly; a man of action, as he sometimes says himself.’

‘He had been active recently?’

At this penetrating question Mr Eliot looked quite surprised. ‘When I come to think of it, no. He seems to have grown very fond of Rust.’ He wriggled in his chair – rather as if he were edging round to the bright side of something. ‘Of course he is safer here. As I say, he is not wholly reliable.’

‘Ah.’

Mr Eliot’s helplessness grew. ‘About money, chiefly. He never seems quite to have understood it. I remember as a boy a wholly deplorable incident over the poor-box in our parish church. The rector took a particularly dark view; I suppose he was bound to consider sacrilege as more serious than common theft. Nowadays it is chiefly cheques. They offer more scope.’

Having got thus pleasingly far Dr Chown eased off. He spoke of the folly of regarding the robbing of a poor-box in a criminal rather than a strictly scientific light; he spoke of the evil of priests and priestcraft in general. Mr Eliot threw a log on the fire and Chown gave it another friendly stir with the poker. And then the armistice was over. ‘There remain’, said Chown, ‘your own children. This is always a delicate subject, but it has to be faced. The attitude of your children is highly ambivalent, very highly ambivalent indeed.’

Mr Eliot stared thoughtfully into the fire; he seemed reluctant to be drawn even by a learned word this time.

‘They like you’, continued Chown soothingly; ‘they really like you very much indeed. At the same time they hate you. And this is particularly so of your son.’

‘Really,’ protested Mr Eliot, roused at length, ‘I hardly think you know enough of Timmy – ’

Chown raised an authoritative hand. ‘I am speaking’, he said, ‘of something arrived at inductively from the study of thousands of parents and children. We may protest. But the thing is a scientific fact. We may cling to the illusion. But this is the reality.’ Chown was prone to this antithecal sort of utterance when confronted by people whose minds were obstinately set against the light; he wrought it now to a positively Lucretian elevation. ‘You may rebel against the law. But it is wiser to draw strength from it. We are wounded. But we know that the wound is in the nature of things.’

Mr Eliot winced – perhaps at the memory of the sort of wounds to which Chown referred, perhaps because he disliked too many sentences beginning with prepositions. ‘Is the gist of this’, he asked, ‘that Timmy and Belinda may be playing an ungenerous joke on me?’

A momentary frown disturbed the studied serenity with which Chown was accustomed to conduct his operations. He disapproved of patients asking questions; he disliked swift transitions from abstraction to the concrete. ‘Certainly not,’ he said. ‘I am far from thinking that we are in a position to make suggestions… Would you say that your children are freakish?’

‘Yes. They are at a freakish age. Though for that matter I am freakish myself.’

‘Ah!’ said Chown. He made a full pause. ‘As you say, the dressing bell has gone. No doubt we must break off.’

‘Break off?’ repeated Mr Eliot, and sighed as he caught the implication. ‘Yes, perhaps we better had. I have to attend’ – his tone was apologetic – ‘to so many guests at present. It is really quite a strain.’

Chown rose and moved towards the door. ‘We must not hurry.’ he said. ‘I have known little matters of this sort – disconcerting, but by no means tragic – resist elucidation until a four hundredth consultation.’ His eye grew abstracted, as if he were contemplating an invisible slot-machine of gigantic proportions. ‘I grow more and more conscious, my dear Eliot, of the wonderful depth and complexity of the human mind. I would describe it, were the word not so justly suspect, as a sacred thing.’ Dr Chown halted for a moment at the door, benignly meditative. ‘How pleasant’, he said, ‘that dinner is drawing on. I have quite an appetite.’ He nodded in whimsical recognition of his own human frailty and was gone.

That’, said Mrs Moule, ‘is Mr Kermode.’

The party was assembling for dinner in the large and nondescript room to which it had adjourned after luncheon. Though the room was large it failed quite to hold the party, or perhaps quite to fit it. The furniture was not excessive, but it seemed to be disposed in lines and masses which resented and subtly resisted the unfamiliar rhythms and manoeuvres around it. At Rust one grew up with the knowledge that the only wall-space that could be found for great-uncle Richard’s moose was some five feet from the floor; as a result one never caught one’s hair in its antlers or got jabbed in the nape of the neck. Though interest in Timmy’s enormous collection of butterflies was entirely a thing of the past, the show-case in which it reposed still stood in the place of honour to which it had been promoted ten years before. It was unnecessary to remove it; everybody knew that since the historic scrap which its owner had fought with a visiting cousin at the age of fifteen it was a treacherous article on which to lean. And everyone was aware that the cushions on the window-seats squeaked loudly when one stood up; this was no longer the glorious Christmas novelty it had once been; it was no longer even a mild joke, but simply the way in which cushions in window-seats naturally behave. And, more simply, everyone knew the proper path from one part of the room to another; that if one attempted to pass between the sofa before the fire and the refectory table behind it one must remember the curious Chinese footstool which had been sent to Aunt Agatha; and that if one wanted to get from that again to the table on which the drinks stood by the farther wall one must take account of the shallow step which was said – mysteriously – to be necessitated by drains.

It was a living-room – a living-room with the ineffaceable stamp of what directories call the lesser landed gentry. There was an absence of taste, without anything which could be called a lack of it. There was a great deal of solidity, a great deal of shabbiness, and just a little of the encroaching opulence of the Spider – that latter in process of being triumphantly absorbed. The books were the books which the Eliots had owned before they produced either a novelist or a student of Pope: leather-bound books, topographical, historical and genealogical, which had been occasionally consulted by great-great grandparents; three-decker novels which grandparents had read aloud to their children; parents’ books, beginning with Huxley and Ruskin and Carlyle and ending with the earliest Kiplings. The walls were hung with watercolours: English watercolours of the great tradition side and side with the decently accomplished efforts of Eliot ladies. Sir Rupert had a corner crowded with stuffed fish and Sir Archie had a glass case with an unblushing model of his ill-fated bridge. It was a family room, and Mr Eliot’s guests bumped rather awkwardly about it.

To that abstraction of Dr Chown’s, the disinterested guest, the party might have appeared more restless than its character and hour required. This would have been particularly so if the observer had stood by the french windows at the end of the room, for from here everything was seen against a background of massive repose. Dominating the farther wall, and in startling contrast with almost everything else in the room, was a magnificent Renoir, Mr Eliot’s twenty-first birthday present to his daughter. It was a bathing woman, an exuberance of the flesh untouched by its enemy, thought, its over-opulent curves irradiated and redeemed in light, brightness falling from the air to a still, dark pool below; absolute evanescence made eternal. The guests eddied before it. Most disturbing was a fat lady who was behaving with particular animation near by; on a pair of scales she and the woman in the picture would have been almost in equipoise, and when the one stood before the other they seemed to tell the whole disheartening truth of the difference between life and art. The fat lady, unconscious of the symbolical role she thus assumed, stood firmly by the picture, occasionally uttering excited cries as she greeted or discerned her friends. It was a characteristic of the party that its composition seemed to be constantly changing, some guests trickling steadily in and others vanishing down an invisible avenue. Perhaps people were actually still arriving; others conceivably had grown tired since lunch-time and really disappeared; or it may be that these people had the habit of greeting each other over and over again.

The party was restless under the knowledge that odd things were happening at Rust. The unkind statement which had fleetingly appeared on the architrave had been calculated with some nicety. It might have seemed not so very remote from the little affair of the umbrella on grandfather Richard’s bull – a type of humour evidently normal and accepted at Rust during the present season. Nevertheless – perhaps it had been so hazardously achieved – it had indefinably suggested itself as something other than a joke; had established itself even as a move in some sinister design. The restlessness of the party could be distinguished as anticipation; all these people were waiting to see what would happen next.

But there was another current of feeling – already, while still far below the surface, making its strength felt. Neither a jest nor a plot was perhaps in question: rather what Mrs Moule, barely restraining presagements of disaster, called a manifestation. Of Mr Eliot’s current creations – it was rumoured – a creature of his own creating had taken control; the house was echoing to ambiguous sounds, to ditties of no tone which had existed hitherto only in the silent paraphrase of print; to the Spider’s party the Spider himself was come as a principal guest… It was fantastic; the party, though largely consisting of people who paid their way by more than common nervosity, had an over-plus of scepticism too; it was only on Mr Eliot that these obscurer speculations might be suspected as producing positive unease. Mr Eliot was putting the greatest concentration into the task of being attentive to the people about him; nevertheless he could be distinguished as moving amid some increasing isolation of his own devising. It was almost as if he had lost his grip upon the common life around him and were being carried by an invisible current towards the realm of his own melodrama, where it is necessary that small causes should produce great trepidations, and incidents innocent to the ignorant may appear as dire warnings to the instructed few.