Sybil produced a tray with elegant flute glasses. ‘Perhaps we should all get gloriously drunk. Nothing much else to do, on a horrid day like this. I’m afraid there’s something wrong with the central heating. The thermostat’s being temperamental.’ She peered out of the window. ‘Goodness, look, the sea seems to be getting higher and higher! Rearing with a roar. Poets always think they know best, don’t they?’
They heard a sound like that of a train approaching from a long way down a tube.
‘I find it jolly curious that nature should be so keen on building up such portentous threats instead of getting on with whatever release of forces it has in mind,’ said Feversham.
‘Sometimes I find myself wondering what it would be like if the house got swept away by a giant wave,’ Sybil said dreamily, hooking her arm through Feversham’s.
‘I used to dream of treasures long lost at sea,’ said Oswald. ‘I imagined ornate chests overflowing with rubies embedded in nacreous green rock, shifted here and there on the sandy floor by shoals of spotted fish … As a young man I was extremely romantic … Still am, I suppose …’
The door opened. Antonia expected it would be Ella wearing a new dress.
But it was Doctor Klein who entered the room.
He was wearing a dress.
25
THE PERFECT STORM
Antonia remembered what had been bothering her.
And, mind you, when a girl tries to catch anything in her lap she throws her knees apart; she doesn’t clap them together, the way you did when you caught the lump of lead.
That was how the woman had known that Huck Finn was a boy and not a girl. Well, Doctor Klein had done just the opposite – he had thrown his knees apart – that’s why the folded Times had fallen to the floor – that’s when Antonia had started suspecting he was in fact a woman. Or had been.
The cork popped and at the same time the storm broke. There was an audible hiss and roar as the rain came down on the house. The windows rattled.
Doctor Klein sat in a high-backed chair. He said nothing. His eyes were fixed on Oswald Ramskritt.
Doctor Klein’s dress was of the long and loose variety. It was lavishly decorated with artificial flowers and bows around the coy décolletage. Doctor Klein carried an embroidered reticule, which he now placed on his lap.
Payne drew his forefinger across his jaw. The sight they were witnessing was without doubt monstrous, unnatural and quite grotesque. How should civilised people react when a male fellow guest of great girth suddenly and without prior warning turns up en travestie? There is nothing about it in the etiquette books. Staring, gasping and demanding an explanation was not on, he didn’t think. At least that would be the well-bred British attitude.
But Ramskritt wasn’t British. Ramskritt laughed.
‘What’s up, Doc? What’s the idea?’ Ramskritt had started dispensing champagne, filling flutes and handing them round. ‘Getting in touch with your feminine side? Or is that more of what our friend Feversham calls an “experiment of considerable psychological complexity”?’
Doctor Klein sat very still. He had a slightly disoriented air about him. He looked extremely unwell. His pale fat face hung in pouches. His eyes were a little unfocused. His lips were a pale purple colour. He seemed to have a problem breathing.
Had he taken something? Was he under the influence of some drug? Antonia wondered. What did she know about transsexuals? Not much, apart from the fact that it was a long and frequently painful process. Apparently it was easier for a man to become a woman than the other way round. She remembered reading a detective story by the late Patricia Moyes. Who is Simon Warrick? The twist at the end hinged on the fact that Simon Warrick had been born a woman, but nobody had had an inkling about it. Antonia had had doubts as to whether a woman could ever make a convincing man. She shuddered as she recalled watching a Channel 4 documentary about a woman who became a man.
Doctor Klein said, ‘I don’t suppose you remember me, Oswald?’
Ramskritt took a swill from his champagne glass. ‘Of course I remember you. I have never forgotten you. You are Doctor Klein. I think your first name is Friedrich. You are my shrink, dermatologist and reflexologist.’ He raised the glass to his lips once more, emptied it, then gave himself a refill. ‘You did wonders with my rashes. As good as rid me of them. You understand me when I talk to you. Only you know the real me. I feel good after I have talked to you. Thanks to you, I am a new man …’
A deafening clap of thunder made all the windows shake and rattle.
Hysterectomy … Mastectomy … Gender reassignment surgery … Psychoanalysis … A course of androgen paves the way to the transformation … Hormone treatment … Depression … Strong drugs can have adverse effect … Reversals … Mood swings … Psychotic episodes … Antonia went on watching Klein …
Something was the matter. Had the drugs stopped taking effect? Would that explain the dress? Was he – she – having a reversal, which was also a psychotic episode?
‘Don’t you recognise me?’ Doctor Klein asked.
Ramskritt, glass in hand, went up to where Doctor Klein sat. He walked around him. He took a sip of champagne, then put his glass down on a side table. He stood frowning at Klein, his hands thrust into his pockets. Doctor Klein might have been something displayed in a glass tank.
‘I don’t know what you mean. It couldn’t matter less,’ Ramskritt said, ‘but are you actually a girl?’
‘Would you like a drop of champagne, Doctor Klein?’ Sybil said in her best society hostess manner. ‘It’s deliciously dry.’ She carried a full glass to him. When he didn’t react and continued clutching at the reticule, she put his glass on the side table, beside Ramskritt’s.
Ramskritt brought his face close to Doctor Klein’s. ‘Why, I believe you are a girl … Yes … No sign of a stubble and such small hands … Well, I am jiggered.’ He straightened himself up. ‘I don’t think I have ever seen anything like it in my whole life.’
‘Freddie Hansen. Do you remember Freddie Hansen?’ Doctor Klein asked. His voice, Antonia noted, had become a little slurred. He seemed to find it hard to get the words out.
‘Can’t say I do. Who’s he?’
‘She. Freddie was Gabriele’s sister. You met them in Berlin. In 1980.’
‘Berlin 1980?’ Ramskritt echoed. ‘Was I in Berlin in 1980? Now, what was that about? Berlin 1980 … .Yes … Yes … But that’s more than thirty-five years ago! An interesting time in my life.’ Ramskritt drew back a little. ‘Perhaps I should have done things differently. But I am not going to apologise to anyone. No sir. Hey, what’s the idea? What do you know about Berlin 1980?’
‘Gabriele and her sister put their trust in you,’ Klein said. ‘You took advantage of them. You deceived them. You destroyed them.’
‘Freddie and Gabriele. Oh yes. Ghosts from the past. Not the sweetest of memories. I didn’t set out to destroy them. That wasn’t my intention. I am not a bad man, whatever that bitch Ella may have told you about me. I can’t remember all the details now, Doc, but I didn’t want them to die.’
‘You destroyed them,’ Doctor Klein repeated.
‘I was only doing my job. My duty to my country. To Ronnie. To Western Civilisation. Ronnie was our President, wasn’t he? It was an important job. Not many men could have done it. Spying is dangerous business.’ Oswald picked up his glass and drank off the remaining champagne. ‘I was doing my duty to mankind.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Maisie, darling, bring over the bottle. I need a refill. My duty to mankind, that’s right, that’s what I believed in.’
‘Here you are, my dear fellow.’ It was Feversham who had brought the bottle over to him.
‘No, not you, you old fool. I said Maisie. Go back and give the bottle to her. These things matter to me. I want a beautiful girl to do the pouring, not an old fool.’
‘No call for that kind of talk, Ramskritt.’ Feversham bristled. ‘This is not on. Most definitely not on. Would you apologise? A public insult deser
ves a public apology.’
‘I honestly believed I was helping the world to become a better place. Thank you, sweetheart,’ Ramskritt said as Maisie stood by his side and held up the bottle. ‘More. I want my glass to overflow. Sybil was right. Let’s get drunk.’ He looked at the full glass Maisie had placed on the side table, licked his lips in anticipation, but didn’t pick it up. ‘I was on a mission. Us against Them. The damned Commies. But who are you? Some relative – their father? What were those girls called now? Oh yes, Gabriele and Freddie. No, you can’t be their father – are you their mother? I have no idea how old you are. You could be anything –’
Doctor Klein gazed up at him out of his odd dolorous eyes. He raised his hand slowly and pointed to his left eyebrow.
‘I am Freddie.’
Mrs Garrison-Gore watched fascinated. There was more tragedy in Doctor Klein’s eyes than Hamlet watching Little Nell’s death on the sinking Titanic …
It was the kind of situation she would love to put in a book!
It was getting darker by the minute. Only a single table lamp of low voltage had been turned on. There was a ghostly pool of light around it. Perhaps it was better that way. More – dramatic. The skies outside were the colour of tar now – the wind howled like hounds from hell – the sea roared. The sea gods were angry, no doubt about it.
Something is about to happen, Mrs Garrison-Gore thought.
There was a cracking sound – as though the windows were going to burst out of their frames.
It was a moment of great psychological intensity, of that Mrs Garrison-Gore had no doubt. She was susceptible to atmosphere, even though she didn’t always succeed in conjuring it up by the force of her pen. Thinking of which, where was her pen? She meant her silver-bullet pen. It would protect you from evil, Sybil had said. Opening her bag she started rummaging in it frantically. I don’t believe in superstitions, she thought.
An idea dawned on her. It was so outrageously bold and brilliant, it took her breath away. For a moment she stood very still, not daring to breathe, then closing her bag slowly, she looked across at Doctor Klein once more.
Doctor Klein’s face glistened in the dim light. He was deadly pale. His lips were blue. He sat perfectly immobile, like a stuffed thing … Medication gone wrong?
She had known he was a transsexual since she had seen the photos, which she had found in his drawer. ‘Before’ and ‘after’. ‘She’ becomes a ‘he’. She had gone through his file, which contained a record of the transformation … He hadn’t been so fat to start with … Why had Klein brought the file to the island? Did he – she – need a constant reminder of the hell he’d been through? Had he experienced some kind of identity crisis? She couldn’t help wondering. She was interested in mysteries.
What was it Klein had above his left eyebrow? Unobtrusively she moved nearer and peered. Some mark – an old wound in the shape of a horseshoe. Most distinctive!
So that’s what he had been trying to conceal. That’s what he had been dabbing at when she saw him sitting in his room. She had seen him take out a powder compact and dab at his forehead …
‘But you can’t be,’ Oswald Ramskritt said. ‘Freddie’s dead.’
‘I am Freddie,’ Doctor Klein said again.
Oswald’s face had a sickly grey tinge to it. He took a step back.
Mrs Garrison-Gore glanced across at the windows, at the darkness outside.
Another crack came. One giant billiard ball might have hit another. A sound like a breaking-up of icebergs. The house shook.
‘King Lear in all his madness couldn’t have bawled for a more clamorous storm,’ she heard Major Payne murmur.
Doctor Klein made as though he was about to rise to his feet. Oswald swore under his breath. All eyes, as far as Mrs Garrison-Gore could see, were on the two of them.
Later she was to say to Antonia that sometimes the purveyor of sensational fiction in her tended to take over. She couldn’t help herself. Awful of her, but there it was. People stopped being people and became characters. Was that a feeling Antonia Darcy was familiar with? It was terrible, wasn’t it?
As the wind intensified, it seemed the house would be torn off its foundations and hurled into the sea.
The sound of glass smashing, when it came, was deafening.
For a wild moment Payne imagined that a bomb had been detonated somewhere close by.
One of the French windows had given up its resistance. The blast of the wind was so powerful, that books, papers, bowls of dried flowers and brick-a-brack as well as bits of glass flew up in the air and swirled round the room in a frenzied dance. The library was filled with rain.
Someone screamed.
The portrait with the bullet hole in Charles de Coverley’s eye was swept off the wall and crashed to the floor.
26
SPARKLING CYANIDE
‘I hope no one is hurt? Have you all got your drinkies? Make sure the library door is shut, whoever’s fetching up the rear. Who is fetching up the rear? Is that you, Maisie?’ Sybil de Coverley glanced over her shoulder. She was leading the exodus down the corridor and seemed quite unperturbed. ‘Well done. No danger of anyone being sucked into the stratosphere now, Dorothy-fashion. Thank God we have no dogs. A dog is the last thing we’d want. Do let’s go into the drawing room, shall we?’
‘Why not the dining room? What about brekkers?’ Payne asked his aunt sotto voce. He smoothed back his damp hair.
‘We all had toast and marmalade in the kitchen. That was before you put in an appearance. Far from satisfactory but we meant to give you a proper scare.’
‘You made it look as though everybody had vanished into thin air, or that you’d been murdered in your beds.’ He shook his head.
‘That was another of Mrs Garrison-Gore’s ideas. So glad we are on speakers again.’ Lady Grylls beamed. ‘Nothing like a crisis to bring people together. I am sure Ella and Maisie can rustle up some bacon and eggs for you. Not the way you envisaged your tenth wedding anniversary, is it?’
‘Not quite the way, no.’
They entered the drawing room.
‘We can draw the curtains across the windows and turn on all the table lamps,’ Sybil said. ‘This room can be made to look terribly cosy. We can light the fire. Have you got the champers, Fever? Well done. Goodness, dear boy, you are bleeding!’
‘Ay scratch, ay scratch, tis not as deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door.’ Feversham held up his bleeding hand. ‘Some treacherous shard. Not to worry.’
‘It looks bad to me! I’ll bandage it. It may turn septic. Hope no one else is injured? Well, I must say I’ve never seen anything like this on Sphinx Island before. Never!’
‘Your poor library, Sybil,’ Lady Grylls said.
Sybil shrugged. ‘Nothing’s permanent, nothing endures.’
‘I suppose it would be impossible to start boarding up that window right now?’
‘I don’t see how it could be done and who could possibly do it.’
‘I used to do carpentry as a hobby. Not any longer. I’m a martyr to back pain,’ Feversham said with a heavy sigh. ‘Old back injury.’
‘If I have to be perfectly honest, Nellie, I don’t care two pins what happens to my “poor” library,’ Sybil said. ‘It’s full of unreadable books. To swift destruction doomed. Sometimes the poet gets it just right, don’t they? No regrets, as la Piaf put it. Well, it’s begun.’
‘What’s begun?’
‘The demolition process. Oswald said he’d have the house pulled apart and a brand new one built the moment he took over, didn’t you, Oswald?’
‘Yes, ma’m. That is correct.’ Oswald seemed preoccupied.
‘We’ll sign the papers as soon as possible, shall we? I’m yearning for the lights of London. Can’t wait to get out of this hole … I see you managed to save your glass. Well done.’
‘My glass, yes.’ Oswald put down his glass on a small table beside his chair. He ran his hand across his face.
‘Oh,
what about the anniversary cake? We left the anniversary cake behind!’ Maisie cried. She was standing beside Oswald. ‘Couldn’t someone go back to the library and fetch it?’
‘Too damned dangerous.’ Feversham was walking round, turning on lamps. ‘I have the feeling the cake wasn’t exactly a hit, eh, Payne?’
As the house shook again, Payne observed that in his opinion the anniversary cake’s chances of surviving the storm were negligible.
‘Doctor Klein is not here,’ Mrs Garrison-Gore said. ‘Did anyone see where he went?’
‘I suppose he went upstairs, to his room, which is perhaps for the best. Oh hallo, my dear,’ Sybil said as Ella entered.
Ella looked stunning in a dress of shimmering gold with bare shoulders and elbow-length gloves. She was holding a golden purse. Her outfit was quite inappropriate for this time of day, but perhaps that was the intention, Antonia reflected. It was a gesture of showy defiance. Ella’s expression was impossible to fathom.
Even though she passed close by and paused beside the table with his champagne glass, Oswald Ramskritt took no notice of her. He was staring before him.
‘I can’t believe that Doctor Klein is a woman, is he?’ Maisie said, glancing round. ‘I think he is very ill.’ She turned towards Ramskritt. ‘What did he want from you? Who is Freddie?’
There was a pause. Oswald slowly looked up. His eyes were bloodshot. ‘Who is Freddie? You really wanna know? It happened such a long time ago. Freddie was a German girl. She lived in East Berlin. She was attractive in a haggard, offbeat kind of way. Nothing like you, my sweet.’ He patted Maisie’s cheek. ‘You look like a young goddess.’
‘Was she very young?’
‘She was then in her twenties, I reckon. She rather liked me. She took to me. She believed I could help her join her sister in West Berlin. I recruited her. I was a master spy of sorts. Freddie did a couple of jobs for the free world, but, unfortunately, was arrested and tried for treason. She was executed by the East German authorities. At least that’s what I was told. Crucified by the Commies, as our wordsmith here may wish to put it, eh, Mrs G-G? Tragic of course. Very tragic. Not my fault. I told her to be careful.’
The Riddle of Sphinx Island Page 15