Stop Press (31 page)

Wedge, who did not remember meeting before a don who sighed after peach-bloom, wondered if there might not be in Winter anything between forty and a hundred and fifty pounds. He contemplated his companion with interest. Twopences and threepences – he was fond of remarking with an amusing illustrative anecdote – do mount up. ‘Peaches?’ he said. His train of thought, through momentary, had been absorbing and he had forgotten just how the fruit came in.

‘Consider’, said Winter, pushing on with his own reflections, ‘the grisaille monotony of Oxford. Cinereous colleges, ashen churches, and nowadays a number of miscellaneous ecclesiastical edifices which are precisely the colour of mud. A Gothic sprawling from slate through neutral to dun; watered by glaucous rills, haunted by leaden vapours, and canopied by livid, lowering, low-toned clouds. When I look over the city I sometimes feel I could take it up and squeeze it till it gushed red like a fig at the fissure.’

Wedge took cautious soundings. ‘Have you ever thought’, he asked, ‘of writing these impressions down?’

‘And if we are to speak thus of Oxford what words have we left for the grey and dismal core of urban England? Thrice happy, my dear sir’ – and Winter nodded fleetingly to an Appleby who had just strolled up – ‘the Nero with a modern technique; the Nero who has thermite to assist his labours before sitting down to compose a rhapsody on the Pleasures of Pyromania! To make the soot-swathed slums to kiss the ground, the grimy factories to fall apart amid a leaping of scarlet and gold and vermilion–’

‘You sound’, Appleby managed to interpolate, ‘as if you were waiting to be fed. Have you met Kermode? He talks just like that when hungry – only perhaps a dash less style.’

‘And finally’ – Winter was evidently determined not to have his concoction truncated – ‘oneself to combust last of all, burning with a hard gem-like flame… How well, my dear Appleby, you understand the springs of human motive.’ He glanced at his watch.

Wedge plunged. ‘Would you’, he asked, ‘consider a contract?’

‘A contract? Do you want me to turn novelist?’

‘Oh no; not necessarily anything of that sort.’ Wedge appeared anxious to deprecate any offensive suggestion. ‘Memoirs, perhaps. Anything conveying the notion of scholarly relaxation. Dust-wrapper of yourself against a background of nicely tooled books. And I would advise dictation; it captures the natural speaking voice. I could get you–’

Winter was shaking his head. ‘I am no writer,’ he said, ‘and I have the grace to know it. Pray, my dear Wedge, against such enlightenment spreading – it would mean that those machines of yours would indeed stop dead.’

Wedge sighed. ‘And all you would need is a dictaphone. It seems a great pity.’

Winter caressed grandfather Richard’s bull. ‘Our friend’, he said to Appleby, ‘possesses unslumbering machines that call constantly for food. He prowls in their interest. He would even take his hungry presses poetry if you could guarantee a Wordsworthian output. By day and night he prowls. He gets you in the dark corner and wishes authorship on you.’

Under this extravagant raillery Wedge amiably grinned; being accustomed in the way of business to suffer conversation a great deal odder than Winter’s he was not at all put off. ‘A man must live,’ he said. ‘And – as Winter now knows – a machine must turn.’

‘At any hour of the twenty-four’, proceeded Winter, ‘he is more likely to be going after a manuscript than not. Name any hour and I’ll bet you five shillings he was hard at work. We’ll trust him to be umpire.’

‘A quarter to twelve last night,’ said Appleby. He was amused. Winter’s manoeuvring for position had been quite wantonly elaborate. But amateurs can afford to fool about.

‘Wedge shook his head evasively. ‘A quarter to twelve last night? How am I to remember amid all this whirl of gaiety just what I was doing then?’

‘I can tell you, approximately.’ Winter’s voice was slightly bored, as if the silliness of his bet had presented itself to him and irked him. ‘You were hiding in a cupboard with a person unknown – quite the place to stick somebody for a book. Who was it?’

‘Peter Holme.’ Wedge turned to Appleby. ‘Do you always take round an apprentice like this?’ He smiled happily at Winter’s discomfiture. ‘Holme will swear to me as I to him. We were practically hugging each other all the time. Holme chose me out himself. He’s nervous of being put in the dark with matrons or even misses. Actors have to be so careful, poor dears… Well, well, I expect you’ll be wanting to move down your beat.’ He strolled away, paused, turned. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘Winter wins five shillings.’ He disappeared into the house.

‘After all that rhetorical effort’, said Appleby,’ I’m afraid it was a very meagre harvest. Are you going round the whole household doing this sort of thing?’

Winter seemed as near confusion as a very self-possessed man can get. ‘As a matter of fact, yes. It seems a line.’

‘Bless you, everything’s a line. The art is in choosing the straightest and therefore the quickest. You’re fascinated by the fact that we were all hiding in pairs. Well, why were we? Either because
one
the joker is Archie or some other odd person who wasn’t hiding, or
two
the joker had some trick which enabled him to give his partner the slip, or
three
two paired people were in collusion. Your line, in fact, is one to fall back on if several others fail. I think myself that the best line is the telegraph line.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘But – as we’re on the topic – whom were
you
paired with?’

‘The little translator fellow, André. He chattered steadily and I made decent responses. As Kermode likes to say, you’ve got nothing on me… By the way’ – Winter’s transition was deliberately abrupt – ‘did you know that Chown goes in for medical hypnotism?’

Appleby made exaggeratedly round eyes. ‘If your mind doesn’t run on sinister lines!’

‘It sounds absurd, no doubt. But I have Chown in my head as a sinister influence – perhaps because Belinda appears to regard him that way. Have you read
The Moonstone
?’

Perplexity and merriment might have been discerned as struggling on Appleby’s features. ‘
The Moonstone
? I remember some Indians who practice hypnotism. But I don’t see – ’

‘Or alternatively’, said Winter, ‘drugs. The chief point of the story is that under the influence of a drug a man may do things utterly alien to his own nature and remember nothing about it afterwards. Well, Archie Eliot was drugged, and it has occurred to me that Eliot himself may have been drugged too – and done lord knows what. I’ve discovered that he mayn’t have been in that linen cupboard with Miss Cavey for more than a minute at each end; she admits she talked herself oblivious of his presence.’

‘And the hypnotism?’

‘That’ – Winter looked slightly uncomfortable – ‘is just an alternative I thought of afterwards when I remembered about Chown and his technique. Subjects of a certain type can be made to do the most extraordinary things under hypnotic influence.’

Appleby contemplated his apprentice with the frankest of grins. ‘If we don’t keep on making progress!’ He stared out over the landscape; turned back with a sudden and startling seriousness. ‘Yes,’ he said soberly; ‘we make progress.’

Winter looked at him sharply. ‘While I’ve been messing round with bookish notions you have hunted down the vital finger-print?’

Appleby shook his head absently. ‘No finger-prints,’ he said. ‘You’re as old-fashioned as the man who monkeyed with the Renoir. And often no hunting down. Have you ever talked to crack newspapermen? They’ll tell you that the big things come not through hunting but simply through carrying round a certain state of mind… You’re really interested?’

‘Intensely.’

Appleby gave him an almost doubtful glance. ‘This curious business is my life,’ he said. ‘And I’m learning that it isn’t the nature of truth really to hide itself. It’s there – like something significant but very familiar in a room waiting for one’s awareness.
Think you, ’mid all this mighty sum–’

‘Dear man, we have enough of that at Rust.’

Appleby looked at Winter with serious far-away eyes and reiterated:

‘Think you, ’mid all this mighty sum

Of things for ever speaking,

That nothing of itself will come,

But we must still be seeking?’

He smiled again, cheerfully friendly. ‘Quotation’, he said, ‘sometimes does pin it down.’

Obscure irritation rose in Winter. ‘Wise policemanly passiveness,’ he said. ‘Who would have thought of that one?’

Again Appleby smiled, unsettled. ‘It’s true, though, and it’s what makes the game interesting. You never know where you are. The truth – substantial truth and no mirage – may suddenly rear its exquisite pinnacles from the very deserts of boredom… As I say, we make progress.’

‘I’m glad. I’ve been here twenty-four hours and I see nothing but a mess.’ Winter spoke with sudden unhappy sincerity. ‘What exactly is the progress we make?’

‘Not the brute temporal sort.’ Appleby skipped deftly to evasion. ‘Somebody is conducting an experiment with time. The Rust clocks are not behaving well. Some have insisted on striking twelve at ten and eleven. The latest of the incidental sound-effects. Others have hurried on to twelve and stopped there.
Murder at Midnight
, you know.’

‘Rather what Faust wanted.’ Winter straightened up, suddenly excited. ‘But, man! – doesn’t that mean considerable technical skill?’

‘Something like knowing which cog to eliminate, I should suppose – knowledge which might be arrived at by experiment. Rupert has dangled a screwdriver before my nose in a workroom – Archie’s workroom really, as it turns out. Eliot himself is spasmodically mechanically-minded. Overall has confided to Mrs Moule that he has the loveliest electric railway in an attic at home. When you went excavating in Arabia you mugged up and took charge of the chronometers.’

Winter felt within himself a sudden nervous jerk – what storytellers have in mind, no doubt, when they speak of a man jumping. ‘And you advertise yourself’, he said bitterly, ‘as sitting on his old grey stone, dreaming your time away.’

‘Routine, you know. Telegraph wires, telephone wires – and knowing the likely people to tap.’ Appleby’s smile, it struck Winter, was controlled in rather a businesslike way. It faded now. ‘
Murder at Midnight
,’ he repeated. ‘Like the clocks, this thing must stop. Whenever you have another thought like that about
The Moonstone
, bring it along. Every little helps.’

Winter opened his mouth to reply, paused, gaped down the terrace. ‘Approaching you’, he said, ‘are our host; his
bête noire
Mrs Birdwire; my
bête noire
Dr Bussenschutt; and a presence that can be none other than Jasper Shoon himself,
amator sacrosanctae antiquitatis
. Incidentally, I quite forgot to use your damned telegraph wires to reply to a civil invitation from him. It is much, much too much. Officer, farewell.’ He vanished with discreet haste through a window.

Appleby turned round. ‘Come you in peace’, he murmured, ‘or come you in war?’ He strode confidently towards the approaching party.

Confidences and ignorance are often children of one birth. As he progressed down the terrace he became aware of expressions of wonder and consternation on the faces of Mr Eliot’s new guests. These grew; Appleby, considerably taken aback, was conjecturing what sudden and mortifying change could have taken place in his own appearance when he heard an incredible but unmistakable noise behind him. He turned round. Absurdly on Mr Eliot’s unpretending but decorous terrace, catastrophically towards the august party before him, he was leading a drove of sizable black pigs.

Even as footmen are unready to grapple with ladies who suddenly reveal themselves as the raw material of art, so policemen – however impeccably trained – may be at momentary loss when incontinently transmogrified into swineherds on the terraces of country houses. Appleby stopped in his tracks. Nor did the wisest passiveness reveal to him that he was contemplating the prologue to grotesque tragedy.

The party came up. Mr Eliot was the first to speak – a Mr Eliot who would have been familiar to Winter but whose acquaintance Appleby had not yet made. ‘This’, he said, ‘is a curious but far from unfortunate circumstance. You can meet at once some of the most important inhabitants of Rust. My dear Mr Shoon’ – he looked at the great man with diffident gaiety – ‘are you by any chance interested in middle blacks? Our herd is not without points of interest.’

Mr Shoon, who was old and silver-grey and in bearing distinguished to a point quite beyond probability, stood his ground as if to be surrounded by pigs was the first thing he had expected at Rust Hall. ‘I cherish them,’ he said without extravagance, ‘as I cherish every diminishing remnant of better times. The middle black, like the native squirrel which the imported varieties are chasing so remorselessly from our woods, has surely some title to our antiquarian regard.’ With great elegance Mr Shoon applied an ivory walking stick to the task of scratching the nearest middle-black back. ‘Dr Bussenschutt, do you not agree with me?’

Dr Bussenschutt was clearly uncertain as to what degree of seriousness or levity the unexpected encounter called for. ‘I am afraid’, he said, ‘that all ungulate non-ruminant mammals are one to me.’ He edged nervously from a routing snout and appeared to consider that he had dipped too far towards facetiousness. ‘But I congratulate you, my master’ – he had no doubts as to Appleby’s role – ‘on your attractive charges. To an unskilled eye at least they seem to be in – ah – capital fleece.’ He made a wary attempt to emulate the caressing tactic of Mr Shoon. Appleby, remembering a fragment of Horace which bore on pigs, repeated it in the sort of accent that philologists classify as Received Standard. Dr Bussenschutt, further at a loss, frowned severely, cleared his throat and fired something back in Greek. The pigs, seemingly intrigued by their novel environment, supplied an Aristophanic chorus. The situation was eminently absurd.

And it was Mrs Birdwire’s turn. Mrs Birdwire, a large red woman, gave the nearest pig a vigorous kick – the action might be called swinish, Appleby philosophically reflected – and raised an equally vigorous voice. The point about Mrs Birdwire was immediately clear: she was of those who believe it feasible to be unfriendly and familiar, rude and jolly – all these in one. ‘Dirty brutes,’ cried Mrs Birdwire impossibly; ‘dirty brutes in their domestic degradation!’ She turned on Mr Eliot as if he were responsible for debauching the pristine purity of the whole porcine species. ‘If only’, she said with loud cheerful scorn, ‘you could see the magnificent wild pigs of the Tango-Tango!’