Stop Press (48 page)

It was the letters, Appleby was to reflect afterwards, that were definitive; it was the letters that sealed the fate of a great deal of valuable property.

Shoon, it appeared, had three special collections of letters, and nearly all the great names in English literature were represented in each. The collections were of Love Letters, of Last Letters, and of Loan Letters.

Astonishing to see how many of the English poets, philosophers, dramatists, novelists, and essayists had been chronically compelled to go cadging round among their friends for a loan. Shoon’s letters, neatly and handsomely encased in cellophane, were so arranged that one could conveniently make a comparative study of the techniques. It would constitute, Appleby thought, an excellent subject for a thesis (
The Theme of Indigence in English Epistolary Art:
1579–1834) or a satire (
The Spongy Helicon
) or one of Herbert Chown’s clever analyses of the poets in a psychological vocabulary
(Penury and the Literary Lifestyle
). Shoon’s guests studied these letters for some time; desperate letters about the rent, despairing letters about confinements and babies and burials, wily letters about money owed by dishonest relatives or conscienceless publishers. There were letters scrawled on the backs of rejected manuscripts, letters painfully printed out in a palsied or feverish hand, letters into which there kept creeping the evidences of a disordered mind, letters a little spoilt from a commercial point of view because here and there a word had been rendered illegible by falling tears. Appleby found a letter in which a great poet, having extracted a loan from a nobleman and hoping to extract more, wrote that he had been so lost in contemplation of the moral beauty of his lordship’s act that it had been a long time before he came to an awareness that he himself was the beneficiary.

And then they went on to the Last Letters.

One could make a graph, it seemed to Appleby, of how people faced the thing: here the splendid curve of a full and eager life declining to a whimper; there a tedious and humdrum journeymanship in literature rising into some striking gesture of farewell. It all depended, no doubt, on how the bugs went to work. The poet who had written on the moral beauty of his lordship’s act had given the last minutes of his life to composing a begging letter on behalf of an old servant; another had died while in the middle of a long and incoherent letter to the mistress he had deserted thirty years before: here was the unfinished page, with a little splash of ink where the pen had finally dropped from the writer’s hand.

These Last Letters, Appleby found, were in his line, held for him a particular and curious charm not unrelated, perhaps, to the charm which keyholes held for Sir Archibald Eliot. It was strange that while Archie’s habit would be universally condemned as disreputable one could peer like this at the letters dying men had written to their mistresses and intimate friends and be regarded as behaving in a highly respectable and cultivated way the while… Appleby emerged from these reflections to find that the company had moved on to the Love Letters.

‘The Love Letters’, said Shoon, ‘are so completely representative of English Erotic Correspondence that I venture to predict that their eventual publication will rank as a very considerable contribution …’

Appleby’s attention, again straying, was caught by Gerald Winter. With half an eye on the letters under review, Winter had drifted up to Timmy and Patricia. ‘The real Henrys and Eleanors,’ he was saying; ‘they are no whit less strange, Timmy, than their shadowy brothers and sisters in your father’s books.’

‘No doubt,’ said Timmy. He spoke loudly, apparently with the design of silencing his tutor by drawing general attention to him.

But Winter was not to be put off. ‘Sexual appetite – how familiar and comprehensible it is, fleeting and intermittent as almost everything else to which we own! But what you nervously call luv is another and more tricksy thing – capable of taking on the strange character of constancy, sometimes of performance. Selecting factors’ – and he swept round to include first Patricia and then Appleby in his conversation – ‘selective factors, buried deep in the unconscious, make themselves powerfully felt – driving the conscious mind to fantastic choices and exclusions, to unpardonable betrayals and impracticable fidelities. Overall, don’t you agree?’

As on the occasion of the baiting of Miss Cavey at the breakfast table, Winter was twisting to the purpose of benevolent diversion matter begun purely in mischief. He had reached out for Overall’s attention and was talking his very best.

‘The oddity of the process forms the stock-in-trade of two-thirds of the world’s imaginative writing. Because a strange woman carries about her a chance trinket that strikes back to some potent fetish of the nursery years one follows her as a pligrim soul. And the result’ – he waved his hand in open amusement at Shoon amid his letters – ‘may be the splendours and the humiliations, the seiges, shifts, tediums, entanglements, and tragedies of which our host is now handing round the finest specimens which Dreamworld Cinemas and Medicinal Opium can command.’ He took Overall in a friendly way by the arm. ‘Incidentally, what about slipping quietly away from this junk and finding a drink?’

The manoeovre had the reserve of the effect intended. Perhaps because Winter’s facile patter seemed actively to add to the horror around him, perhaps because he saw in Winter’s audience the nucleus of an audience for himself, Gib Overall acted. He picked up the letter nearest to hand and waved it. He shouted. He shouted down Shoon’s Long Gallery. And Shoon’s Long Gallery proved a capital place down which to shout.

He shouted because he was a failure, a scribbler of popular literature which wouldn’t even sell. He shouted because he was envious and resentful, and because he was frightened of what would happen to him next – because he was frightened of being even more frightened tomorrow than he was today. He shouted because what Winter had been calling factors buried deep in the unconscious dictated that at this moment and in this way he should make an exhibition of himself. All this was evident and embarrassing. What made Overall’s demonstration obscurely impressive was the fact that through his incoherent indignation sounded the voices of Chatteron and Burns, was released all that agony of the artist which Shoon had so efficiently imprisoned in cellophane and velvet and morocco. For a moment this mournful and seedy and unsuccessful person had startlingly infringed his host’s expensively acquired monopoly in English Literature and the Voice of Liberty.

It was quickly over. Winter, with tact and a dash of unexpected respect, got Overall away. The guests, manfully ignoring the disturbance, cordially professing the pleasure and edification they had received from the Collection, were shepherded out to the little landing and won the lift in batches. Shoon turned the last key, switched off the lights, secured the outer doors. The best that has been said and thought in England, ranged behind its lattices, straitened in snowy vellum, guarded by ten thousand Shoon hyenas, slumbered again. Downstairs there was tea – the subdued but subterraneously light-hearted kind which commonly follows a decisively accomplished burial.

‘A murder’, said Appleby, ‘has been arranged.’

Dr Chown, setting down his teacup carefully on a passing tray, contrived to suggest that he was patient only because patience ministered to his own dignity. ‘But, my dear – ah – inspector, were you not under that impression last night – and were you not wrong? If anything has been arranged can you be sure that it is not merely yet another violent joke?’

‘Very tolerably sure. Jokes will no longer serve. And so we may expect the real thing.’

‘But this is most distressing intelligence.’ Chown’s voice expressed the blandest unconcern. ‘Our unfortunate friend Eliot is to be hanged, then, in good earnest?’

Appleby looked at Chown with innocent surprise. ‘Eliot? Oh dear me, no. Eliot is quite safe. I can see now that he has been quite safe from the first. His death wouldn’t suit our joker at all. What is ahead of us this evening is the murder of someone else.’

‘May I ask of whom?’

‘Unfortunately I don’t know. Sir Rupert, perhaps; he has been as good as promised his quietus at nine sharp. Or it may be any one of the Friends of the Venerable Bede.’

Chown frowned. ‘I can only suppose that you are attempting some pleasantry. Do you really suggest as a logical sequel to the deplorable events we have witnessed at Rust the murder of an obscure associate of our present host here at the Abbey?’

‘A murder has been arranged. I don’t know of whom. But I do know why.’

‘Perhaps you know
by
whom?’

‘Again – unfortunately – no. There are one or two pointers, but they don’t satisfy me.’

Chown’s patience was modulating into attention. ‘I doubt if I have ever heard a more extraordinary claim. You know just what all this is about, but nothing of the identity of the agents concerned?’

‘Just that.’

‘And you think I can help?’

‘Yes. The heart of the mystery is in the joker’s clairvoyance. You had your own explanation of that: you believed Eliot to be playing tricks on himself. But the affair of the middle black–’

Chown gave a curt nod. ‘Quite so. I am the first to admit that it makes my theory difficult to maintain. I can only say that you are welcome to put forward a better.’

‘I have hinted at my theory already. You may remember that on the object of medical hypnosis you were good enough to offer to recommend some books to me?’

‘I do. Though what put hypnotism in your head–’

Appleby smiled.

‘Oh, Gerald Winter put it in my head. He formed the theory that you might be holding Eliot in some sort of hypnotic thrall. Like the stage hypnotists who make people jump into tubs of water.’ Appleby paused in order to let Chown’s extreme indignation at this revelation subside. ‘But Winter’s idea put something else in my head. And when you mentioned books on your subject I hinted that scientists like yourself have other channels of communication besides published books.’ Appleby paused again and plunged. ‘Eliot has been your patient?’

‘You must be aware, my dear sir, that physicians are not in the habit of giving information of that kind.’

‘And they don’t discuss their patients?’

‘They do not.’

‘
Never
?’ Appleby raised a hand as Chown was about to protest again. ‘Please don’t misunderstand me. What is in my mind is this. Your branch of medicine is peculiar in that you have often to deal with the whole intellectual and professional life of your patients. The books you write are full of the activities of your patients – sometimes sketchily reviewed, sometimes narrated and analysed in very great detail. In such works, you are, of course, careful to secure an absolute concealment of identity. But that might not always be possible.’

Chown had sat down on a sofa. ‘This’, he said, ‘is at least an interesting idea. What you are getting at I think I can guess. Go on.’

‘Suppose Byron or Scott or Dickens were alive today and came to you for treatment. It would be virtually impossible to write up his case history for publication. Without suppressions and distortions which would impair the scientific value of what you wrote it would be impossible to prevent the reader from guessing who your patient had really been. So with any very popular writer. So particularly with a popular writer who sticks to one theme or to one character: it would be impossible to publish any extended psychological analysis of such a person without revealing his identity to any reader acute enough to be interested in your sort of work. And this is a dilemna which must often arise.’

‘It does.’

‘Literary and artistic people – many neurotic or mildly mad – must be among the most interesting of your patients. They bring a great deal of material for study. A writer comes to you and you learn much from reading his books; a painter comes and you go to his studio and apply your analytical technique to his pictures. In the process you create knowledge, and that knowledge it is your duty to disseminate among other workers in your own field. You achieve this principally by means of communications to learned journals – journals which are not read by a general public. Still, most of such journals are available to anyone who has the curiosity to go after them. And it is likely, therefore, that as a profession you are likely to evolve other and more private channels of communication. One can imagine – ’

‘What one can imagine’, said Chown, ‘is – as any psychologist will tell you – quite remarkable.’

‘No doubt. Turn, then, to another point. Let us imagine that Eliot has been your patient. And let us, if we may, admit a piece of positive knowledge: that you practise the comparatively rare science of medical hypnotism. You would be interested in Eliot’s work; it would afford the key to his mental life. You would use your technique to get at many aspects of it which were not freely available to his own normal consciousness. Plans and projects, details of actions and episodes thought of and rejected or deferred – all these would come within the scope of your study. And, as much of your investigation would be conducted with the patient hypnotically controlled, it is possible to suppose that he might have in the end very little notion of what he had communicated to you. In a word, you are yourself far the most likely suspect in this whole matter of the joker’s clairvoyance. As to this I have no doubt that you will agree with me at once.’

Chown looked from Appleby to Shoon’s eddying party in the middle distance. ‘Do you drink?’ he asked.

‘Not noticeably.’

‘It occurred to me that it might be intemperance which has brought you to your curious profession. I am inclined to think that your intelligence might make a not altogether negligible mark in the sciences.’

‘The point’, said Appleby, not pausing to acknowledge this measured compliment, ‘is the likelihood of your having made some inadvertent disclosure about Eliot. Articles in a journal in which his identity was not quite adequately concealed from some unusually acute reader. Some privately printed paper circulated to colleagues in which the same condition obtained. Conversations or consultations protected by rules of professional secrecy which somebody unknown has violated. If one could believe there were grounds for supposing something of the sort it might be possible to set about bringing the thing home to an individual. Perhaps it is worth remarking that the man they call André might have access to medical sources of information… You will now understand what I mean by saying that I think you might be able to help.’