by Ngaio Marsh
‘You don’t mean to say you bicycled to that headland beyond Harpoon? It must be seven miles.’
‘Yeah, that’s right. I beat Questing hands down, too. I sat on that ruddy bluff till I just about froze to the rock, and I’ll bet you anything you like I never took me eyes off the Peak. I looked right across the harbour. There’s a big ship in and she was loading in the blackout. Gee I’d like to know what she was loading. I bet Bert Smith knows. He’s cobbers with some of the wharfies, him and Eru Saul. Eru and Bert get shickered with the wharfies. They were shickered last night, Bert says. I don’t think it’s so hot going round with—’
‘The Peak and Mr Questing,’ Dikon reminded him.
‘OK. Well, just when I thought I’d been had for a mug, it started. A little point of light right where I told you on the seaward face. Popping in and out.’
‘Could you read it?’
‘Neow!’ said Simon angrily in his broadest twang. ‘If it was Morse it was some code. Just a lot of t’s and i’s and s’s. He wouldn’t use plain language. You bet he wouldn’t. There’d be a system of signals. A long flash repeated three times at intervals of a minute. “Come in. I’m talking to you.” Then the message. Say five short flashes: “Ship in port.” That’d be repeated three times. Then the day when she sails. One long flash: “Tonight.” Two short flashes: “Tomorrow.” Three short flashes: “Tomorrow night.” Repeat. Then a long interval, and the whole show over again. What I reckon,’ Simon concluded, and inhaled a prodigious draught of smoke.
‘But did you, in fact, see the sequence you’ve described?’
With maddening deliberation Simon ground out his cigarette, made several small backward movements of his head which invested him with an extraordinary air of complacency, and said: ‘Six times at fifteen-minute intervals. The end signal was three flashes each time.’
‘Was it, by George!’ Dikon murmured.
‘Course I haven’t got the reading OK. May be something quite different.’
‘Of course.’ They stared at each other, a sense of companionship weaving between them.
‘But I’d like to know what that ship’s loading,’ Simon said.
‘Was there any answering flash out at sea? I couldn’t know less about such things.’
‘I didn’t pick it. But I don’t reckon she’d do anything. If it’s a raider I reckon she’d come in close on the north side of the Peak, so’s to keep it between herself and Harpoon, and wait to see. There’s nothing but bays and rough stuff up the coast north of the Peak.’
‘How long did you stay?’
‘Till there was no more signalling. The tide was in by then. By heck, I didn’t much enjoy wading back. He beat me to it coming home. Me blinking tyre had gone flat on me and I had to pump up three times. His bus was in the garage. By cripey, he’s a beaut. Wait till I get him. That’ll be the day.’
‘What will you do about it?’
‘Bike into town and go to the police station.’
‘I’ll ask for the car.’
‘Heck, no. I’ll bike. Here, you’d better not say anything to him.’
‘Who?’
Simon jerked his head.
‘Gaunt? I can’t promise not to do that. You see we’ve discussed Questing so much, and Colly talks to Gaunt and you’ve talked to Colly. And anyway,’ said Dikon, ‘I can’t suddenly begin keeping him in the dark about things. You’ve got a fantastic idea of Gaunt. He’s—dear me, how embarrassing the word still is—he’s a patriot. He gave the entire profit of the last three weeks’ Shakespearean season in Melbourne to the war effort.’
‘Huh,’ Simon grunted. ‘Money.’
‘It’s what’s wanted. And I’d like to talk to him about last night for another reason. He took the car out after dinner. Once in a blue moon he gets a sudden idea he wants to drive. He may have noticed a light out to sea. He said he’d go up the coast road to the north.’
‘And what he’s done to the car is nobody’s business. It’s a terrible road. Have you looked at her? Covered in mud and scratched all over the wings. It’s not his fault he didn’t burst up the back axle in a pot hole. He’s a shocking driver.’
Dikon decided to ignore this. ‘What about Dr Ackrington?’ he said. ‘After all he was the first to suspect something. Oughtn’t you to take his advice before you make a move?’
‘Uncle James doesn’t see things my way,’ said Simon aggressively, ‘and I don’t see things his way. He thinks I’m crude and I think he’s a nark and a dug-out.’
‘Nevertheless I think I should tell him.’
‘I dunno where he’s got to.’
‘He’s returning tomorrow, isn’t he? Wait till he comes before you do anything.’
A motor horn sounded on the main road.
‘Is that the mail?’ cried Dikon.
‘That’s right. What about it?’
Dikon looked out of the window. ‘It’s beginning to rain again.’
‘What of it?’
‘Nothing, nothing,’ said Dikon in a hurry.
II
It was Barbara, after all, who went first to get the mail. Dikon saw her run out of the house with her mackintosh over her shoulders, and heard Mrs Claire call out something about the rain spoiling the bread. Of course. It was the day for the bread, thought Dikon, who had reached the secondary stage of occupation when the routine of a household is becoming familiar. With an extraordinary sensation of approaching disaster he watched Barbara go haring up the hill in the rain. ‘But it’s ridiculous,’ he told himself, ‘to treat a mere incident as if it was an epic. What the devil has come upon me that I can do nothing but fidget like an old woman over this damn girl’s clothes? Blast her clothes. Either she refuses or she accepts them. Either she guesses who sent for them or she doesn’t. The affair will merely become an anecdote, amusing or dull. To hell with it.’
The little figure ran over the brow of the hill and disappeared.
Dikon, obeying orders, went to tell his employer that the mail was in.
Barbara was happy as she ran up the hill. The rain was soft on her face; thin like mist, and warm. The scent of wet earth was more pungent than the reek of sulphur, and a light breeze brought a sensation of the ocean across the hills. Her spirit rose to meet it, and all the impending disasters of Wai-ata-tapu could not check her humour. It was impossible for Barbara to be unhappy that morning. She had received in small doses during the past week an antidote of unhappiness. With each little sign of friendliness and interest from Gaunt, and he had given her many such signs, her spirit danced. Barbara had not been protected against green-sickness by inoculations of calflove. Unable to compete with the few neighbouring families whom her parents considered ‘suitable’, and prevented by a hundred reservations and prejudices from forming friendships with the ‘unsuitable’, she had ended by forming no friendships at all. Occasionally, she would be asked to some local festivity, but her clothes were all wrong, her face unpainted, and her manner nervous and uneven. She alarmed the young men with her gusts of frightened laughter and her too eager attentiveness. If her shyness had taken any other form she might have found someone to befriend her, but as it was she hovered on the outside of every group, making her hostess uneasy or irritable, refusing to recognize the rising misery of her own loneliness. She was happier when she was no longer invited and settled down to her course of emotional starvation, hardly aware, until Gaunt came, of her sickness. How, then, could the financial crisis, still only half-realized by Barbara, cast more than a faint shadow over her new exhilaration? Geoffrey Gaunt smiled at her, quiet prim Mr Bell sought her out to talk to her. And, though she would never have admitted it, Mr Questing’s behaviour, odious and terrifying as it had been at the time, was not altogether ungratifying in retrospect. As for his matrimonial alternative to financial disaster, she contrived to hide the memory of it under a layer of less disturbing recollections.
The parcel from Sarah Snappe lay under the mail box, half obscured by tussock and loaves of bread. At
first she thought it had been left there by mistake, then that it was for Gaunt or Dikon Bell; then she read her own name. Her brain skipped about among improbabilities. Unknown Auntie Wynne had sent another lot of alien and faintly squalid cast-offs. This was the first of her conjectures. Only when she was fumbling with the wet string did she notice the smart modern lettering on the label and the New Zealand stamps and postmark.
It lay under folds of tissue paper, immaculately folded.
She might have knelt there in the wet grass for much longer if a gentle drift of rain had not dimmed the three steel stars. With a nervous movement of her hands she thrust down the lid of the box and pulled the wrapping paper over it. Still she knelt before it, haloed in mist, bewildered, her hands pressed upon the parcel. Simon came upon her there. She turned and looked at him with a glance halfradiant, half-incredulous.
‘It’s not meant for me,’ she said.
He asked what was in the parcel. By this time she had taken off her mackintosh and wrapped the box in it. ‘A black dress,’ she said. ‘With three stars on it. Other things, underneath. Another box. I didn’t look past the dress. It’s not meant for me.’
‘Aunt Wynne.’
‘It’s not one of Aunt Wynne’s dresses. It’s new. It came from Auckland. There must be another Barbara Claire.’
‘You’re nuts,’ said Simon. ‘I suppose she’s sent the money or something. Why the heck have you taken your mac off? You’ll get wet.’
Barbara rose to her feet clutching the enormous package. ‘It’s got my name on it. Barbara Claire, Wai-ata-tapu Spa, via Harpoon. There’s an envelope inside, too, with my name on it.’
‘What was in it?’
‘I didn’t look.’
‘You’re dopey.’
‘It can’t be for me.’
‘Gee whiz, you’re mad. Here, what about the bread and the rest of the mail?’
‘I didn’t look.’
‘Aw, hell, you’re mad as a meat axe.’ Simon opened the letter box. ‘There’s a postcard from Uncle James. He’s coming back tonight. A telegram for Mum from Auckland. That’s funny. And a whole swag for the boarders. Yes, and look at the bread kicking around in the dirt. No trouble to you. Wait on.’
But Barbara, clutching the parcel, was running down the hill in the rain.
Gaunt waited on the verandah in his dressing-gown; ‘very dark and magnificent,’ thought Dikon maliciously. Whatever the fate of the dress, whatever Barbara’s subsequent reaction, Gaunt had his reward, Dikon thought, when she ran across the pumice and laid the parcel on the verandah table, calling her mother.
‘Hullo,’ said Gaunt. ‘Had a birthday?’
‘No. It’s something that’s happened. I can’t understand it.’ She was unwrapping the mackintosh from the parcel. Her hands, stained with housework but not yet thickened, shook a little. She unfolded the wrapping paper.
‘Is it china that you handle it so gingerly?’
‘No. It’s—my hands!’ She ran down the verandah to the bathroom. Simon came slowly across the pumice with the bread and walked through the house.
‘Did you tell them what to write?’ Gaunt asked Dikon.
‘Yes.’
Barbara returned, shouting for her mother. Mrs Claire and the Colonel appeared looking as if they anticipated some new catastrophe.
‘Barbie, not quite so noisy, my dear,’ said her mother. She glanced at her celebrated visitor and smiled uncertainly. Her husband and her brother did not stroll about the verandah in exotic dressinggowns but she had begun to formulate a sort of spare code of manners for Gaunt, who, as Dikon had not failed to notice, spoke to her nicely and repeatedly of his mother.
Barbara lifted the lid from her box. Her parents, making uncertain noises, stared at the dress. She took up the envelope. ‘How can it be for me?’ she said, and Dikon saw that she was afraid to open the envelope.
‘Good Lord!’ her father ejaculated. ‘What on earth have you been buying?’
‘I haven’t, Daddy. It’s—’
‘From Auntie Wynne. How kind,’ said Mrs Claire.
‘That’s not Wynne’s writing,’ said the Colonel suddenly.
‘No.’ Barbara opened the envelope and a large card fell on the black surface of the dress. The inscription in green ink had been written across it somewhat flamboyantly and in an extremely feminine script. Barbara read it aloud.
‘If you accept it, then its worth is great.’
‘That’s all,’ said Barbara, and her parents began to look baffled and mulish. Simon appeared and repeated his suggestion that the aunt had sent a cheque to the shop in Auckland.
‘But she’s never been to Auckland,’ said the Colonel crossly. ‘How can a woman living in Poona write cheques to shops she’s never heard of in New Zealand? The thing’s absurd.’
‘I must say,’ said Mrs Claire, ‘that although it’s very kind of dear Wynne, I think it’s always nice not to make mysteries. You must write and thank her just the same, Barbie, of course.’
‘But I repeat, Agnes, that it’s not from Wynne.’
‘How can we tell, dear, when she doesn’t write her name? That’s what I mean when I say we would rather she put in a little note as usual.’
‘It’s not her writing. Green ink and loud flourishes! Ridiculous.’
‘I suppose she wanted to puzzle us.’
Colonel Claire suddenly walked away, looking miserable.
‘Mayn’t we see the dress?’ asked Gaunt.
Barbara drew it from the box and sheets of tissue paper fell from it as she held it up. The three stars shone again in the folds of the skirt. It was a beautifully simple dress.
‘But it’s charming,’ Gaunt said. ‘It couldn’t be better. Do you like it?’
‘Like it?’ Barbara looked at him and her eyes filled with tears. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ she said, ‘that I can’t believe it’s true.’
‘There are more things in the box, aren’t there? Shall I hold the dress?’
He took it from her and she knelt on the chair, exploring feverishly. Dikon, whose orders had been to give Sarah Snappe carte blanche, saw that she had taken him at his word. The shell-coloured satin was dull and heavy and the lace delicately rich. There seemed to be a complete set of garments. Barbara folded them back, lifted an extraordinarily pert and scanty object, turned crimson in the face and hurriedly replaced it. Her mother stepped between her and Gaunt. ‘Wouldn’t it be best if you took your parcel indoors, dear?’ she said with poise. Barbara blundered through the door with her box and, to her mother’s evident dismay, Gaunt followed, holding the dress. A curious scene was enacted in the dining-room. Barbara hesitated between rapture and embarrassment, as Gaunt actually began to inspect the contents of the box while Mrs Claire attempted to catch his attention with a distracted résumé of the distant Wynne’s dual office of aunt and godmother, Dikon looked on, and Simon read the morning paper. The smaller boxes were found to contain shoes and stockings. ‘Bless my soul,’ said Gaunt lightly. ‘It’s a trousseau.’
Colonel Claire appeared briefly in the doorway. ‘It must be James,’ he said, and walked away again, quickly.
‘Uncle James!’ cried Barbara. ‘Mother, could it be Uncle James?’
‘Perhaps Wynne wrote to James,’ began her mother, and Simon said from behind his paper: ‘She doesn’t know him.’
‘She knows of him,’ said Mrs Claire gravely.
‘You’ve got that telegram in your hand, Mum,’ said Simon. ‘Why don’t you read it? It might have something to do with Barbie’s clothes.’
They all stared at her while she read the telegram. Her expression suggested astonishment, followed by the liveliest consternation. ‘Oh, no,’ she cried out at last. ‘We can’t have another. Oh dear!’
‘What’s up?’ asked Simon.
‘It’s from a Mr Septimus Falls. He says he’s got lumbago and is coming for a fortnight. What am I to do?’
‘Put him off.’
‘I can’t. There’s no add
ress. It just says “Kindly reserve single room Friday and arrange treatment lumbago staying fortnight Septimus Falls.” Friday. Friday!’ wailed Mrs Claire. ‘What are we to do? That’s today.’
III
Mr Septimus Falls arrived by train and taxi at 4.30, within a few minutes of Dr Ackrington, who picked up his own car in Harpoon. By some Herculean effort the Claires had made ready for Mr Falls. Simon moved into his cabin, Barbara moved into Simon’s room, Barbara’s room was made ready for Mr Falls. He turned out to be a middle-aged Englishman, tall but bent forward at a wooden angle and leaning heavily on his stick. He was good-looking, wellmannered, and inclined to be bookishly facetious.