by Ngaio Marsh
‘No,’ he said.
‘Shut up.’
‘I want to talk to you.’
‘What about? Same old thing all the time. Talk, talk, talk. You make me tired.’
‘You know what. Give us a kiss.’
Huia laughed and rolled her eyes. ‘You’re mad. Behave yourself. Mrs Claire will go crook if you hang about. I’m going home.’
‘Come on,’ he muttered, and flung his arms about her. She fought him off, laughing angrily, and he began to upbraid her. ‘I’m not posh enough. Going with a pakeha now, aren’t you? That’s right, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t you talk to me like that. You’re no good. You’re a no-good boy.’
‘I haven’t got a car and I’m not a thief. Questing’s a ruddy thief.’
‘That’s a big lie,’ said Huia blandly. ‘He’s all right.’
‘What’s he doing at night on the Peak? He’s got no business on the Peak.’
‘Talk, talk, talk. All the time.’
‘You tell him if he doesn’t look out he’ll be in for it. How’ll you like it if he gets packed up?’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Don’t you? Don’t you?’
‘Oh, you are silly,’ cried Huia, stamping her foot. ‘Silly fool! Now get out of my way and let me go home. I’ll tell my great-grandfather about you and he’ll makutu you.’
‘Kid-stakes! Nobody’s going to put a jinx on me.’
‘My great-grandfather can do it,’ said Huia and her eyes flashed.
‘Listen, Huia,’ said Eru. ‘You think you can get away with dynamite. OK. But don’t come at it with me. And another thing. Next time this joker Questing wants to have you on to go driving, you can tell him from me to lay off. See? Tell him from me, no kidding, that if he tries any more funny stuff, it’ll be the stone end of his trips up the Peak.’
‘Tell him yourself,’ said Huia. She added, in dog Maori, an extremely pointed insult, and taking him off his guard slipped past him and ran round the hill.
Eru stood looking at the ground. His cigarette burnt his lip and he spat it out. After a moment he turned and slowly followed her.
Chapter 2
Mr Questing Goes Down
for the First Time
‘We’ve heard from Dr Forster, sir,’ said Dikon Bell. He glanced anxiously at his employer. When Gaunt stood with his hands rammed down in the pockets of his dressing-gown and his shoulders hunched to his ears one watched one’s step. Gaunt turned away from the window, and Dikon noticed apprehensively that his leg was very stiff this morning.
‘Ha!’ said Gaunt.
‘He makes a suggestion.’
‘I won’t go to that sulphurous resort.’
‘Rotorua, sir?’
‘Is that what it’s called?’
‘He realizes you want somewhere quiet, sir. He’s made inquiries about another place. It’s in the Northland. On the west coast. Subtropical climate.’
‘Sulphurous pneumonia?’
‘Well, sir, we do want to clear up that leg, don’t we?’
‘We do.’ With one of those swift changes of demeanour by which he so easily commanded devotion, Gaunt turned to his secretary and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘I think you’re as homesick as I am, Dikon. Isn’t that true? You’re a New Zealander, of course, but wouldn’t you ten thousand times rather be there? In London? Isn’t it exactly as if someone you loved was ill and you couldn’t get to them?’
‘A little like that, certainly,’ said Dikon drily.
‘I shouldn’t keep you here. Go back, my dear chap. I’ll find somebody in New Zealand,’ said Gaunt with a certain melancholy relish.
‘Are you giving me the sack, sir?’
‘If only they can patch me up…’
‘But they will, sir. Dr Forster said the leg ought to respond very quickly to hydrotherapy,’ said Dikon with a prime imitation of the doctor’s manner. ‘They simply hated the sight of me in the Australian recruiting offices. And I fancy I should have little more than refuse value at home. I’m as blind as a bat, you know. Of course, there’s office work.’
‘You must do what you think best,’ said Gaunt gloomily. ‘Leave me to stagnate. I’m no good to my country. Ha!’
‘If you can call raising twelve thousand for colonial patriotic funds no good…’
‘I’m a useless hulk,’ said Gaunt, and even Dikon was reminded of the penultimate scene in Jane Eyre.
‘What are you grinning at, blast you?’ Gaunt demanded.
‘You don’t look precisely like a useless hulk. I’ll stay a little longer if you’ll have me.’
‘Well, let’s hear about this new place. You’re looking wonderfully self-conscious. What hideous surprise have you got up your sleeve?’
Dikon put his attache case on the writing-table and opened it.
‘There’s a princely fan mail today,’ he said, and laid a stack of typed sheets and photographs on one side.
‘Good! I adore being adored. How many have written a little something themselves and wonder if I can advise them how to have their plays produced?’
‘Four. One lady has sent a copy of her piece. She has dedicated it to you. It’s a fantasy.’
‘God!’
‘Here is Dr Forster’s letter, and one enclosed from a Dr James Ackrington who appears to be a celebrity from Harley Street. Perhaps you’d like to read them.’
‘I should hate to read them.’
‘I think you’d better, sir.’
Gaunt grimaced, took the letters and lowered himself into a chair by the writing-desk. Dikon watched him rather nervously.
Geoffrey Gaunt had spent twenty-seven of his forty-five years on the stage, and the last sixteen had seen him firmly established in the first rank. He was what used to be called a romantic actor, but he was also an intelligent one. His greatest distinction lay in his genius for making an audience hear the sense as well as the music of Shakespearean verse. So accurate and clear was his tracing out of the speeches’ content that his art had about it something of mathematical precision and was saved from coldness only by the apparent profundity of his emotional understanding. How far this understanding was instinctive and how far intellectual, not even his secretary, who had been with him for six years, could decide. He was middle-sized, dark, and not particularly striking, but as an actor he possessed the two great assets: his skull was well-shaped, and his hands were beautiful. As for his disposition, Dikon Bell, writing six years before from London to a friend in New Zealand, had said, after a week in Gaunt’s employment: ‘He’s tricky, affected, clever as a bagful of monkeys, a bit of a bounder with the temper of a fury, and no end of an egotist, but I think I’m going to like him.’ He had never found reason to revise this first impression.
Gaunt read Dr Forster’s note and then Dr Ackrington’s letter. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ he cried, ‘what sort of an antic is this old person? Have you noted the acid treatment of his relations? Does he call this letter a recommendation? Discomfort leavened with inefficient kindness is the bait he offers. Moreover, there’s a dirty little knock at me in the last paragraph. If Forster wants me to endure the place, one would have thought his policy would have been to suppress the letter. He’s a poor psychologist.’
‘The psychology,’ said Dikon modestly, ‘is mine. Forster wanted to suppress the letter. I took it upon myself to show it to you. I thought that if you jibbed at the Claires, sir, you wouldn’t be able to resist Dr Ackrington.’
Gaunt shot a suspicious glance at his secretary. ‘You’re too clever by half, my friend,’ he said.
‘And he does say,’ Dikon added persuasively, ‘he does say “the mud may be miraculous”.’
Gaunt laughed, made an abrupt movement, and drew in his breath sharply.
‘Isn’t it worth enduring the place if it puts your legs right, sir? And at least we could get on with the book.’
‘Certain it is I can’t write in this bloody hotel. How I hate hotels. Dikon,’ cried Gaunt with an a
ssumption of boyish enthusiasm, ‘shall we fly to America? Shall we do Henry V in New York? They’d take it, you know, just now. “And Crispin, Crispian shall ne’er go by…” God, I think I must play Henry in New York.’
‘Wouldn’t you rather play him in London, sir, on a fit-up stage with the blitz for battle noises off?’
‘Of course I would, damn you.’
‘Why not try this place? At least it may turn out to be copy for the Life. Thermal divertissements. And then, when you’re fit and ready to hit ’em…London.’
‘You talk like a nanny in her dotage,’ said Gaunt fretfully. ‘I suppose you and Colly have plotted this frightfulness between you. Where is Colly?’
‘Ironing your trousers, sir.’
‘Tell him to come here.’
Dikon spoke on the telephone and in a moment the door opened to admit a wisp of a man with a face that resembled a wrinkled kid glove. This was Gaunt’s dresser and personal servant, Alfred Colly. Colly had been the dresser provided by the management when Gaunt, a promising young leading man with no social background, had made his first great success. After a phenomenal run, Colly accepted Gaunt’s offer of permanent employment, but had never adopted the technique of a manservant. His attitudes towards his employer held the balance between extreme familiarity and a cheerful recognition of Gaunt’s prestige. He laid the trousers that he carried over the back of a chair, folded his hands and blinked.
‘You’ve heard all about this damned hot spot, no doubt?’ said Gaunt.
‘That’s right, sir,’ said Colly. ‘Going to run mudlarks, aren’t we?’
‘I haven’t said so.’
‘It’s about time we did something about ourself though, isn’t it, sir? We’re not sleeping as pretty as we’d like, are we? And how about our leg?’
‘Oh, you go to hell,’ said Gaunt.
‘There’s a gentleman downstairs, sir, wants to see you. Come in over an hour ago. They told him in the office you were seeing nobody and he said that’s all right and give in his card. They say it’s no use, you only see visitors by appointment, and he comes back with that’s just too bad and sits in the lounge with a Scotch and soda, reading the paper and watching the door.’
‘That won’t do him much good,’ said Dikon. ‘Mr Gaunt’s not going out. The masseur will be here in half an hour. What’s this man look like? Pressman?’
‘Noüe!’ said Colly, with the cockney’s singular emphasis. ‘More like business. Hard. Smooth worsted suiting. Go-getter type. I was thinking you might like to see him, Mr Bell.’
‘Why?’
‘I was thinking you might. Satisfy him.’
Dikon looked fixedly at Colly and saw the faintest vibration of his left eyelid.
‘Perhaps I’d better get rid of him,’ he said. ‘Did they give you his card?’
Colly dipped his finger and thumb in a pocket of his black alpaca coat. ‘Persistent sort of bloke, sir,’ he said, and fished out a card.
‘Oh, get rid of him, Dikon, for God’s sake,’ said Gaunt. ‘You know all the answers. I won’t leer out of advertisements, I won’t open fetes, I won’t attend amateur productions, I’m accepting no invitations. I think New Zealand’s marvellous. I wish I was in London. If it’s anything to do with the war effort, reserve your answer. If they want me to do something for the troops, I will if I can.’
Dikon went down to the lounge. In the lift he looked at the visitor’s card:
MR MAURICE QUESTING
Wai-ata-tapu Thermal Springs.
Scribbled across the bottom he read: ‘May I have five minutes? Matter of interest to yourself. MQ.’
II
Mr Maurice Questing was about fifty years old and so much a type that a casual observer would have found it difficult to describe him. He might have been any one of a group of heavy men playing cards on a rug in the first-class carriage of a train. He appeared in triplicate at private bars, hotel lounges, business meetings and race courses. His features were blurred and thick, his eyes sharp. His clothes always looked expensive and new. His speech, both in accent and in choice of words, was an affair of mass production rather than selection. It suggested that wherever he went he would instinctively adopt the cheapest, the slickest and the most popular commercial phrases of the community in which he found himself. Yet though he was as voluble as a radio advertiser, shooting out his machine-turned phrases in a loud voice, and with a great air of assurance, every word he uttered seemed synthetic and quite unrelated to his thoughts. His conversation was full of the near-Americanisms that are part of the New Zealand dialect, but they, too, sounded dubious, and it was impossible to guess at his place of origin though he sometimes spoke of himself vaguely as a native of New South Wales. He was a successful man of business.
When Dikon Bell walked into the hotel lobby, Mr Questing at once flung down his paper and rose to his feet.
‘Pardon me if I speak in error,’ he said, ‘but is this Mr Bell?’
‘Er, yes,’ said Dikon, who still held the card in his fingers.
‘Mr Gaunt’s private secretary?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s great,’ said Mr Questing, shaking hands ruthlessly, and breaking into laughter. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr Bell. I know you’re a busy man, but I’d be very very happy if you could spare me five minutes.’
‘Well, I…’
‘That’s fine,’ said Mr Questing, jamming a flat pale thumb against a bell-push. ‘Great work! Sit down.’
Dikon sat sedately on a small chair, crossed his legs, joined his hands, and looked attentively over his glasses at Mr Questing.
‘How’s the Big Man?’ Mr Questing asked.
‘Mr Gaunt? Not very well, I’m afraid.’
‘So I understand. So I understand. Well, now, Mr Bell, I had hoped for a word with him, but I’ve got an idea that a little chat with you will be very very satisfactory. What’ll you have?’
Dikon refused a drink. Mr Questing ordered whisky and soda. ‘Yes,’ said Mr Questing with a heartiness that suggested a complete understanding between them. ‘Yes. That’s fine. Well now, Mr Bell, I’m going to tell you, flat out, that I think I’m in a position to help you. Now!’
‘I see,’ said Dikon, ‘that you come from Wai-ata-tapu Springs.’
‘That is the case. Yes. Yes, I’m going to be quite frank with you, Mr Bell. I’m going to tell you that not only do I come from the Springs, but I’ve got a very considerable interest in the Springs.’
‘Do you mean that you own the place? I thought a Colonel and Mrs Claire…’
‘Well, now, Mr Bell, shall we just take things as they come? I’m going to bring you right into my confidence about the Springs. The Springs mean a lot to me.’
‘Financially?’ asked Dikon mildly. ‘Therapeutically? Or sentimentally?’
Mr Questing, who had looked restlessly at Dikon’s tie, shoes and hands, now took a furtive glance at his face.
‘Don’t make it too hot,’ he said merrily.
With a rapid movement suggestive of sleight-of-hand he produced from an inner pocket a sheaf of pamphlets which he laid before Dikon. ‘Read these at your leisure. May I suggest that you bring them to Mr Gaunt’s notice?’
‘Look here, Mr Questing,’ said Dikon briskly, ‘would you mind, awfully, if we came to the point? You’ve evidently discovered that we’ve heard about this place. You’ve come to recommend it. That’s very kind of you, but I gather your motive isn’t purely altruistic. You’ve spoken of frankness so perhaps you won’t object to my asking again if you’ve a financial interest in Wai-ata-tapu.’
Mr Questing laughed uproariously and said that he saw they understood each other. His conversation became thick with hints and evasions. After a minute or two Dikon saw that he himself was being offered some sort of inducement. Mr Questing told him repeatedly that he would be looked after, that he would have every cause for personal gratification if Geoffrey Gaunt decided to take the cure. It was not by any means the first scene of i
ts kind. Dikon was mildly entertained, and, while he listened to Mr Questing, turned over the pamphlets. The medical recommendations seemed very good. A set of rooms—Mr Questing called it a suite—would be theirs. Mr Questing would see to it that the rooms were refurnished. Dikon’s eyebrows went up, and Mr Questing, becoming very confidential, said that he believed in doing things in a big way. He was not, he said, going to pretend that he didn’t recognize the value of such a guest to the Springs. Dikon distrusted him more with every phrase he uttered, but he began to think that if such enormous efforts were to be made, Gaunt should be tolerably comfortable at Wai-ata-tapu. He put out a feeler.
‘I understand,’ he said, ‘that there is a resident doctor.’
He was surprised to see Mr Questing change colour. ‘Dr Tonks,’ Questing said, ‘doesn’t actually reside at the Springs, Mr Bell. He’s at Harpoon. Only a few minutes by road. A very, very fine doctor.’
‘I meant Dr James Ackrington.’
Mr Questing did not answer immediately. He offered Dikon a cigarette, lit one himself and rang the bell again.
‘Dr Ackrington,’ Dikon repeated.
‘Oh, yes. Ye-es. The old doctor. Quite a character.’
‘Doesn’t he live at the hostel?’
‘That is correct. Yes. That is the case. The old doctor’s retired now, I understand.’
‘He’s something of an authority on muscular and nervous complaints, isn’t he?’
‘Is that so?’ said Mr Questing. ‘Well, well, well. The old doctor, eh? Quite a character. Well, now, Mr Bell, I’ve a little suggestion to make. I’ve been wondering if you’d be interested in a wee trip to the Springs. I’m driving back there tomorrow. It’s a six hours’ run and I’d be very very delighted to take you with me. Of course the suite won’t be poshed up by then. You’ll see us in the raw, sir, but any suggestions you cared to make…’
‘Do you live there, Mr Questing?’
‘You can’t keep me away from the Springs for long,’ cried Mr Questing evasively. ‘Now about this suggestion of mine…’
‘It’s very kind of you,’ said Dikon thoughtfully. He rose to his feet and held out his hand. ‘I’ll tell Mr Gaunt about it. Thank you so much.’