Stop Press (50 page)

Appleby shook his head. ‘I have quite enough guessing on hand – and so has Sir Rupert. Out with it.’

‘He’s been discussing the plot of one of his books with Jasper.’

‘He’s been
what
?’ Rupert, staring gloomily into the fire, had swung sharply round.

‘Arguing about just what happened in
Grand Tarantula
. They’ve even made a bet on it. Nothing so odd has ever happened before. I’ve never known daddy do other than shy off discussion of any of the old books. And it’s stranger because I believe he has decided not at all to like Jasper. He even disparages his pigs.’

‘Dear me. I can’t really imagine your father disparaging anything. He’s much too amiable.’ Appleby shook a bewildered head.

Belinda laughed. ‘But yes. He tells me he’s taken a secret prowl round the Tamworths, and that they won’t do. They lack finish. Like Peter in drawing-room comedy.’

Holme sighed softly. ‘It’s too much. Mystery. Dark speeches. And now people being rude again.’ He lounged to his feet. ‘To hard words I am resigned. But I do think it time the mystery was cleared up. It’s becoming as lowering as a record run of Eliot-cum-Moule.’

‘You won’t have long to wait.’ Appleby too had got to his feet and was looking at the clock. ‘The point of maximum obfuscation has been reached.’ He turned from Holme to Rupert. ‘The sands are running out.’ His glance travelled on to Belinda. ‘And the crisis, Belinda, has been announced by you.’

A Death in the Desert

Evening, like a gallant enfolding his lady in some fine-spun shawl of Kashmir or Ispahan, dropped its shadows over England. At Rust in the apartments of Mrs Timothy Eliot, where time stood so strangely still, the sun retreated from its diurnal vain assault and Mrs Jenkins, lighting the lamps and bringing out the tatting, prepared for her mistress the restrained entertainment of a Victorian night. The shutters were up in Snug and Warter; in Low Swaffham it was time to open the Five Mows of Barley; around the church at Wing the Martyrs slipped from their torments with a yawn and a stretch, the Fathers laid down their pens and idled, heaven and hell blended and faded, Judgement was suspended until the dawn. Mrs Birdwire’s Zulus, building the little camp-fire which was allowed them as a Sunday treat, mingled their strange exclaiming music with the growls of the unslumbering La Hacienda dogs; Horace Benton, overtaken by the skirts of darkness on the London road, leant back in his hired limousine and gave himself to the building up of vengeful and sadistic fantasies about Dr Bussenschutt. On these and on the temperance institute at Pigg, on Caedmon’s Cowshed at Little Limber and on the blanket-factory at King’s Cleve, the deepening twilight fell. One further heave eastwards and rural England would be in bed, drawing about itself an eiderdown of stars.

Dusk was over the Shoon Abbey. The sun, for a last moment touching the tip of the west tower like a pennant on an admiral’s staff, had expanded its last weak beams on air. About the broken buttresses and bogus tombs the shadows were darkening. The glimmer of the ornamental waters which wound in the exactest taste about the estate was fading on the sight. A browner horror possessed the groves, the grots, and the Gardens of Idea. At no hour was Jasper Shoons fantasy more impressive. For the Abbey – in this unlike the lady in Gilbert’s song – looked its most venerable in the dusk with the light behind it.

Within, this glide of England towards the cone of night was apprehended in a glance at a watch or in the sound, caught amid a hum of talk, of the chiming hour. Seven o’clock was treading hard upon the heels of six; nine o’clock must come. And at nine o’clock there might be another hoax as ingeniously alarming as the affair of the middle black; there might be this or there might be some less harmless variation of the Spider’s theme. According to Appleby a murder had been arranged – nothing less. And Gerald Winter, contemplating the party which was now drifting about the Abbey as it had drifted about Rust, reflected on this expectation with both a troubled and a puzzled mind. In the beginning the affair of the Spider had seemed to him a joke, and as the affair developed he had been reluctant to shed the conviction that basically it remained just that. The episode of the middle black had been a joke of an effective if brutal kind; the susequent threats against Rupert Eliot had all the appearance of being the same sort of thing. Try as he might he could see nothing but a malicious japing, desultory in its methods and random in its choice of victim, in what had occurred. To this, murder seemed the unlikeliest of sequels. And yet here was Appleby preparing for murder with an unnerving mixture of confidence and professional indifference – rather like a busy obstetrician looking forward to a normal delivery.

All unconsciously, Winter frowned with something of Kermode’s ferocity at Miss Cavey…
Not
with indifference. In Appleby’s attitude within the last hour or so there could be detected what was definitely satisfaction. That he really believed that murder was to be attempted Winter was convinced; that he was not altogether confident of his ability to prevent the attempt Winter shrewdly suspected; nevertheless he had the air of one who waits for the spin of a coin on the satisfactory basis of heads I win and tails you lose. Winter, who had formed the opinion that Appleby was by no means an irresponsible person, was bewildered and in some suspense.

Everywhere the hum of talk. Presently there was to be another boring inspection of the resources of the Abbey, and after this there was to be a supper before the Rust contingent departed. But at the moment there was conversation. The remaining Friends of the Venerable Bede, who had not mixed too well at first with the forces of the Spider, were now being affable and indeed discreetly instructive. A large man, who turned out to be a microchemist, had delighted Mrs Moule by taking her away and showing her an experiment on so small a scale as to be totally invisible; one of his colleagues, who dealt – in Shoon’s phrase – in much more extensive effects, was entertaining Hugo Toplady with a discussion of some topic the cataclysmic nature of which might be guessed at from the violent gestures with which it was illustrated. Everyone seemed tolerably at ease except Rupert Eliot; his eyes were straying frequently to the clock, and once Winter was startled to see Appleby shake his head at him in a particularly portentous and foreboding way: Appleby, who denied the significance of mere malice in whatever mystery was going forward, seemed to be engaged in the quiet practice of it himself.

Talk. It had been going on for days. He had contributed more than his fair share himself. But now it seemed to Winter like a meaningless music issuing from a wireless-set – listened to only because at any moment it may be faded out for some curt announcement of crisis or catastrophe. It was with vague irritation that he observed Appleby himself as having joined the chatterers. In a remote corner of the tribune he had been for some time in sustained colloquy with Bussenschutt. These two had now been joined by Mr Eliot, and the conversation was clearly as brisk as it affected to be idle.

‘It was remarked by Aristotle’, said Dr Bussenschutt, ‘that nothing more certainly promotes clear thinking than to have hold of the right end of the stick from the start. In considering an action or series of actions let us always begin by asking: “
To what does this conduce
?”’ Bussenschutt beamed on Appleby and Mr Eliot alike. ‘A commonplace reflection, but I am moved to it by considering that it must be the grand principle of each of your professions.’

Mr Eliot, although disposed to some absence of mind, nodded his head in agreement. It was evident that he approved of the conversation of Bussenschutt, finding it as fluent as Winter’s but with less unacademic levity. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘when one knows the goal to which things are moving one is at once much surer of one’s ground.’ He stared absently once more at one of Shoon’s magnificent log fires.

Appleby nodded. ‘To know the agent and his mechanism while remaining in the dark as to his motive can be disconcerting. But on the other hand to have hold only of that part of the stick which is labelled
motive
can be very disconcerting too. In either case action is difficult.’

‘In your responses to my observation’, said Bussenschutt – and it was disturbing, Appleby reflected, to note how swifly intelligent the cold blue eye which brooded above his ponderous manner of utterance – ‘I am conscious of undercurrents of hidden meaning. A cryptic element which it is a temptation to probe.’

Mr Eliot laughed a shade nervously. ‘If our talk is cryptic let us break off – as indeed we must presently do to inspect the Shoon Press. You speak of my profession. In my sort of story nothing is more tedious than prolonged dark talk. It is a matter of good manners, I suppose. For one’s characters to converse together – even to fence together – in a mysteriously understanding way while the reader must stand excluded in a corner is really rather boorish.’ He sighed. ‘I sometimes fail to detect such little discourtesies until my proofs come to me paged up. It used to be difficult to persuade Wedge of the necessity of alteration. Not that Wedge is not a capital fellow and most liberal in matters of expense. But once a book is put in production there is a time-table. He sets great store on the time-table and I have no doubt he is right.’ Mr Eliot, sunk in the recesses of an enormous chair, seemed disposed to vague communicativeness. ‘I would not disoblige Wedge in any way. That is why I mean to fulfil my present contract. Three more novels and the Spider – in what I believe is Timmy’s favourite phrase – will be led into the wings.’

‘Alas!’ said Bussenschutt. ‘Such a decision will eclipse the gaiety of nations.’

‘It will be relief to the children. And I believe to myself. These jokes in which we have all been involved affected me for a time very oddly. They would not have done so, I am convinced, if I had been quite happy about the books – about their whole tenor. I confess to you, Dr Bussenschutt, that I have come to be uneasy about their morality. They are full of violence and of ingeniously contrived and concealed crimes. I am brought to ask, in your own phrase: “
To what does this conduce
?” Certainly not to edification.’

‘My dear sir,’ interrupted Bussenschutt, ‘this is too–’

‘I know that they may be held to be innocently recreative. But can one be certain that they are only that? May they not conduce to actual violence and ruthlessness – which are already the nightmares of the modern world?’

‘Chown–’ Appleby began.

‘Yes, John, I know.’ Mr Eliot had interrupted with an impatient gesture. ‘Such yarns as mine help people to indulge impulses of violence and destructiveness in a vicarious and harmless fashion. But I have reasons – I have the most intimate reasons – for supposing that the thing may act in a directly contrary way…’ He looked thoughtfully at his companions. ‘Archie’s conduct’, he added quickly, ‘has disturbed me very much.’

Bussenschutt got decorously but reluctantly to his feet. ‘I must see if my colleague Benton has returned from his mysterious dash to town.’

‘My dear Bussenschutt, please do not go. As one who professes moral science you must expect from time to time to be burdened with other people’s ethical problems. I was merely going to remark that my cousin Archie – who is one of the best fellows in the world – has been – if only in the most trivial way – directly corrupted by my imaginings. It so happens that Archie’s character is not quite so strong as is his taste for claret.’

Bussenschutt sat down again. ‘In this’, he said, ‘which of us can be sure of escaping judgement.’

‘And he actually learnt from one of my books the technique for picking the lock of my own cellar. I abundantly agree’ – for Bussenschutt was evincing dignified amusement – ‘that the incident it best viewed in a humorous light. But consider what it suggests. My stories are full of laborously thought-out criminal expedients. Can I be certain – can I be any more certain than our host Shoon – that I am not placing weapons in dangerous hands? John, do you not agree?’

Appleby reflected. ‘I remember just two instances of an actual criminal attempting to use methods drawn from your sort of book. And in each case the attempt was his undoing. Had he gone about his job in his own way he might have pulled it off. As it was, he came a cropper. Your fears seem to me greatly exaggerated.’

‘But they cannot but have some basis. And I have been so conscious of this for some years that I have been pitching my crimes of violence in more and more unlikely spots. Wedge begins to complain of it.
The Trapdoor
, for instance. There is murder in that, but the technique would be feasible only within the Antarctic circle. If anyone were to get a hint for murder out of my more recent books he would first have to get his victim into an uncommonly unlikely environment. But the truth is that I have learnt enough from Chown to believe that these scruples are really the product of boredom. I am really feeling disposed – indeed I have already made my dispositions – for a big mop up. And then I shall develop other interests which twenty years of authorship have rather starved.’ Mr Eliot stretched himself with a luxurious gesture reminiscent of Timmy and stared with a good deal of complacency into the fire.

‘Perhaps’, said Bussenschutt idly, ‘you will turn bibliophil like our friend Shoon?’

Mr Eliot looked oddly startled. ‘Dear me, no. I am thinking of nothing like that.’ He got to his feet. ‘Contrariwise, as Tweedledum said.’

The incident of the Shoon Press, effective in itself, was rendered additionally striking by the setting in which it took place. There was something funereal about the descent into the bowels of the Abbey which the inspection entailed; there was something more than funereal in the sequence of underground chambers and passages through which the party had to pass. For it was here that the Gothic side of Jasper Shoon’s fancy had played most at large, and all those devices of terror and astonishment with which the writers of horrid fiction in the eighteenth century had equipped their catacombs and caves and castles were here ranged for the delectation of visitors to the Abbey. Unwittingly as one passed down the gloomy corridors one’s feet pressed on hidden springs – with the result that chains clanked, gaunt hands thrust themselves from dungeon-like apertures, skeletons erected themselves and made mystic gestures with their arms or a forbidding champing with their jaws, sheeted ghosts flitted amid the shadows ahead, panels opened in the living rock from which the passages were hewn and subjected one to the scrutiny of unnaturally glaring eyes, voices piteously groaned from grated pits beneath the feet, or cried out in a dismal and surprising manner as from the recesses of a labyrinth.