Stop Press (23 page)

‘I should have thought’ – Gerald Winter spoke from a perch on the staircase above the others – ‘that it was capital, if obvious, moment: everybody hidden away for what was going to be – I have no doubt – a very amusing game.’ Winter contrived to look at once bored and perturbed.

‘The curious point’, said Appleby – and he might have been charged with insinuating a faintly irritating patience into his voice – ‘is not that we were all hiding, but that we were all hiding
in pairs
.’ Everybody – except Mr Eliot, who was sitting quite still on the lowest tread of the staircase – stirred uneasily and Appleby felt that, for good or ill, he had established himself as an investigator. He pressed on. ‘It would be interesting to know who was hiding with whom, and who, it may be, wasn’t hiding at all.’

‘A tally of who was hiding with whom?’ Timmy, sipping whisky distastefully in a corner, broke in. ‘You know, that might be a bit embarrassing.’ His tone was appreciative, as if he thought this possibility all to the good. ‘The Cavey wanted Appleby. But whom did she get?’

Mr Eliot looked up. ‘Miss Cavey and I’, he said, ‘hid ourselves in a linen-cupboard on the first floor.’ He spoke with effort, as if roused only by the conventional need of stopping Timmy making fun of an absent guest. ‘When I come to think of it, we seemed to be there an uncommonly long time. Miss Cavey told me a great deal about her new book, only’ – Mr Eliot frowned in perplexity – ‘it’s a very odd thing’ – the frown vanished and he lit up in appreciation of a humorous aspect of what he was going to say – ‘I can remember nothing at all about it.’ He smiled in momentary happiness at Timmy, drawn into the fun he had proposed to check. And then again he frowned. ‘There is something very odd about my memory tonight.’

Everyone was embarrassed. ‘It
was’
, said Belinda suddenly, ‘a very long game. And I don’t believe anybody was found at all. There’s always a racket when people break cover, and John and I didn’t hear a sound.’

‘Anyway’ – Timmy spoke impulsively – ‘there’s one person who wasn’t paired. That’s Archie. He was the hunter. And he’ll know if he caught anybody.’

All eyes turned to Sir Archibald Eliot. This too was embarrassing, because Sir Archibald was evidently drunk. Appleby remembered that it was on this round little man that he had been deprived of information when Mrs Moule had been led from the dining-room. Once more Appleby took a moment to place him. He was the unsuccessful engineer; more curiously he was in some obscure way the victim of the sadistic trend in Mr Eliot which had been under discussion some hours before. If persecuted, he seemed to bear up well. He exuded comfortableness, and a placidity which was only emphasized by liquor. From under heavily drooping eyelids he looked amiably at Timmy now. But it was Mr Eliot who spoke. ‘The pontiff,’ he said sharply; ‘what can he tell us?’

So there it was. For one whose bridge had behaved so badly the nickname was scarcely kind. But it was sanctioned, perhaps, by affectionate family usage; certainly the glance which Archie transferred to Mr Eliot was as amiable as ever. ‘Do I,’ asked Archie in a voice thick and yet not displeasing, ‘carry the moon in my pocket?’

Appleby sighed. The engineer too was literary.

‘These blackouts’, said Archie, as if gently complaining; ‘they keep on happening. A case of put out the light, and then put out the light.’ His eyes opened fully for a moment, as if he were astonished at his own felicity in quotation. ‘A game’s a game, my dear Richard. But even for the sake of a game was I to go stumbling about your rat-ridden stairs?’ He reflected. ‘Not’, he amended seriously, ‘that there really are rats at Rust. But in all that darkness could I really wander about catching people? Be reasonable, my dear chap.’ Quite inoffensive, Archie hiccuped.

Mr Eliot appeared to be momentarily at a loss and it was Timmy who replied. ‘So you didn’t catch anybody? But the lights didn’t go out, I’m quite sure, till a long time after you ought to have begun.’

It was so obvious that Archie could scarcely have been in a condition for effective hunting that the majority of the group turned upon Timmy eyes of mild reproof. Archie, however, was again reflecting. ‘Drowsy syrups,’ he said. ‘That was it: drowsy syrups.’ He looked vaguely about him, apparently expecting to find poppy and mandragora bestrewing the floor. Timmy, with the ghost of an unkind significance, splashed a little more soda into his glass. It was all very unedifying and nearly everybody was unhappy.

‘You mean, Sir Archibald’ – a new voice had broken in – ‘that you have been drugged?’ This was Dr Chown.

Once more Mr Eliot roused himself, seemingly anxious to put an end to his kinsman’s improbable plea. ‘No, no, Chown. Because of the party Archie has been celebrating a little. I really think we ought – ’

But Chown, paying no attention to his host, had briskly crossed the hall and thrust up one of Archie’s eyelids with no more ceremony than if he had been a hospital outpatient or an inanimate object. ‘He
is
drugged,’ he said shortly. ‘There can be no possible doubt of it.’

It was worse and worse. Patricia, who had lingered to companion Belinda, found herself reflecting that it would be far, far better if there were – as there presumably was not – a corpse in the library. A corpse justifies any amount of uncomfortableness; in the interest of a blood-hunt social decencies can cheerfully be abandoned. But the nearest thing to blood that had turned up at Rust so far was red water-colour paint. And the closest approximation to blood-lust that had come under observation was in Hugo Toplady when he had found that paint on his shaving-brush. There had been no crime – or no crime nearer than the grotesquerie of the Birdwire burglary. A burlesque burglary, a hazardous advertisement that Rust was Folly Hall, a bogus confession by Timmy, an absurd statement by this Archie Eliot which yet turned out to be true, sundry fragments of funny-business, a certain wild apprehension of her own: they all abundantly deserved Belinda’s strongest epithet of condemnation; they were tiresome, every one. Patricia, having got thus far, glanced across at her brother. And she saw that here at least was someone oblivious of either tiresomeness or awkwardness; at the moment oblivious of everything at Rust except its owner.

Openly or covertly, everybody was looking at Mr Eliot. Suddenly he had taken – undemonstratively but with deliberation – the centre of the stage; had taken it physically, standing in the middle of his hall with the little gathering grouped about him. ‘I am sorry’, he said, ‘that so many people have gone to bed. Those of you who remain will believe me when I say that I really do feel extremely the need of apologizing. It has been uncomfortable – most uncomfortable – but it has at least shown me what I must do. I have been in great doubt; at least the thing is now clear.’

Mr Eliot paused. He was a man defeated; at the same time he was a man conscious that there had been lifted from him some burden of uncertainty. His attitude was that of one who has finally arrived at facts crushing in themselves, but facts in the light of which it is at long last possible to act.

‘I am, as I say, ever so sorry. I am myself, of course, entirely responsible.’

The company stared at him, bewildered.

‘Of course one has to beware of coincidence: I have been keenly aware of that all along.’ Mr Eliot glanced about him for support, seemingly quite unconscious that his remarks were mysterious. ‘But now I think that there can be no doubt of it. And this is the Birthday Party.’

Belinda spoke in a low, strained voice. The birthday party, daddy?’

‘Yes, my dear but with capital letters. The Birthday Party. As we all know, it is a birthday party –
his
birthday party.’ Mr Eliot paused again and the company instinctively drew a little closer, as if this cautious turn of phrase had made a little more real the fantastic supposition that the Spider was at large at Rust. ‘It
is
a birthday party: that is point one. The lights went out: that is point two. So far there might be nothing but coincidence. But now Archie has been drugged. And that is conclusive. It is staggering; there was a period at which I was very much upset. But once faced – though I don’t think it
ought
to be faced for
long
– the thing is intensely interesting.’ Once more Mr Eliot looked round the circle of troubled faces. ‘I see that you are all naturally curious. There are, then, these points which assure me that this is the Birthday Party. And now let me tell you the fourth; let me’ – Mr Eliot was for the moment almost gay – ‘prophesy!’ His brow clouded suddenly. ‘Only my memory is really
not
good. I forget the details. Perhaps there never were any details. But of the fourth point I am convinced. It will be something about a picture.’

There was a baffled silence. It was broken by Appleby. ‘Was there not’, he asked quietly, ‘a fifth point: Folly Hall?’

Mr Eliot shook his head decisively. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no.’ His tone was oddly matter-of-fact. ‘You are thinking of something quite different. The Birthday Party you see, is ancient history, and – what is so very remarkable – history which never achieved itself. I am sure you will agree with me about the interest of the whole matter. There is nothing in it repugnant to the speculative intelligence, and yet it is more uncanny to an unreflective mind than anything that could be imagined’ – he looked cautiously round – ‘by our excellent friend Mrs Moule.’

The minds congregated round Mr Eliot were presumably of the unreflective kind; the features which they governed were growing increasingly blank. But Mr Eliot seemed to have no suspicion that he was being other than lucid and convincing.

‘I must confess myself to a pretty thorough-going rationalism. The vulgar supernatural has never held any attraction for me; I shall never believe in anything of the kind. But, as Winter and I agreed on the train this morning, this is a purely metaphysical matter.’

Mr Eliot paused and looked hopefully at Timmy’s tutor; Timmy’s tutor looked awkwardly back and appeared to feel that some utterance was necessary. ‘Mr Eliot’, he said, ‘is inclined to believe that imaginative writing is, strictly, creative; that there grows out of it an autonomous world, as real as our own. It is not quite our reality, but a reality nevertheless. The idea’ – he hesitated – ‘is one of very respectable ancestry and antiquity. But Mr Eliot further believes that these realities, normally discrete, sometimes get muddled up – like telephone conversations when the wires get crossed in a storm.’

Mr Eliot nodded emphatically, plainly pleased with the simile with which Winter had adorned his theory. He was about to continue when Appleby interposed. ‘So the Birthday Party is a former imaginative creation which has somehow come to enact itself about us tonight? A story you once wrote?’

Everybody was quiet, variously feeling that this was a critical question. And Mr Eliot’s response was immediate. ‘Not at all!’ he cried. ‘It is just here that the really absorbing point comes in. I never did write that story. I only projected it.’

There would have been another and chilled silence but for Winter. Perhaps because he thought to mitigate the embarrassment of the moment, perhaps because this sort of verbal conjuring was irresistible to him. He raised a debater’s finger and rushed into speech. ‘Then I don’t think you can claim to have created or originated the story. It seems much more likely that the story is something existing independently elsewhere, and that your projecting it, as you call it, represented your mind coming into some groping contact with it. It looks to me like one of those tricks which we are coming to believe can be played us by time. Perhaps this, here and now, is
really
the Birthday Party, and when you thought of it as a story your mind was taking a brief dip into the future. Perhaps all imaginative creation is no more than that. Perhaps
all
your stories will come true one day.’

At this Mr Eliot, who had been standing dominating the hall, suddenly sat down and passed a hand across his brow. His chosen defence against the bewildering turn his world had taken was in what Belinda had called philosophic chat. But philosophic chat was not his real line. Winter’s practised turning of his idea inside-out, coupled maybe with the mere fancy of his thirty-seven romances lurking in a pregnant future, appeared to have had the effect of bowling him over once more. ‘At least’, he said rather desperately, ‘I see what I had better do… It
may
stop it.’

Chown, frowning disapprovingly – seemingly at Timmy’s whisky but perhaps at the trend of things in general – and tapping a small table with an impatient finger, took advantage of the silence. ‘This metaphysical talk’, he said, ‘no doubt has its charms. Unfortunately, it is both out of place and so much damned nonsense.’

‘Hear, hear!’ A new voice broke in; it was that of Rupert Eliot, roused to sympathy by a little mild swearing. ‘Damned college nonsense. And all the time there is some low blackguard round the corner waiting to be laid by the heels.’

Appleby, who felt that the talk was liable to proceed with a positively Russian indefiniteness, sprang to his feet. ‘I suggest that perhaps we are wasting time. It seems very likely that this second failure of the lighting has been accompanied by some further demonstration. Mr Eliot believes that a picture will prove to be involved, and Sir Rupert Eliot is concerned about a low blackguard. I suggest we have a look round. Perhaps the blackguard has made off with the picture. Let us suppose him to be either a connoisseur or an astute commercial man; that suggests a reassuring glance at the most valuable picture in the house. What would that be?’

The gathering in the hall breathed more freely, relieved at having scrambled down to the prosaic level of burglars and policemen. Belinda stood up. ‘Far the most valuable picture is the El Greco in the library.’

‘The El Greco!’ When staying in a modest country house it is permissible to be mildly startled at the news that there is an El Greco round the corner.

‘Daddy bought it last year from the man who discovered it. It’s almost our secret. But it has been abundantly authenticated. And it’s a big one.’