by Ngaio Marsh
‘Speaking for myself,’ said Gaunt, ‘they inspire me with vertigo, nausea, and a strongly marked impulse towards felo-de-se. However, having come so far I refuse to turn back. That fence looks tolerably strong. I shall cling to it.’ He smiled at Barbara. ‘If you should happen to notice a mad glint of suicide in my eye,’ he said, ‘I wish you’d fling your arms round me and thus restore me to my nobler self.’
‘But what about your leg, sir?’ said Dikon. ‘How’s it holding out?’
‘Never you mind about my leg. You go ahead with Claire. We’ll take it in our own time.’
Dikon, having gathered from sundry pieces of distressingly obvious pantomime on Simon’s part that this suggestion met with his approval, followed him at a gruelling pace up the track. The ocean spread out blandly before them as they mounted. Dikon, unused to such exercise, very rapidly acquired a pain in the chest, a stitch, and a thudding heart. Sweat gathered behind his spectacles. The smooth soles of his shoes slipped on the dry grass, and Simon’s hobnailed boots threw dust into his face.
‘If we kick it in,’ said Simon presently, ‘we can get up to the place where I reckon I saw the signalling on Thursday night.’
‘Oh.’
‘The others won’t come any farther than this.’
They had climbed to a place where the track widened and ran out to a short headland. Here they found a group of some ten or twelve men who squatted on the dry turf, chewed ends of grass and stared out to sea. Two youths greeted Simon. Dikon recognized one of them as Eru Saul.
‘What d’you know?’ Simon asked.
‘She’s out there,’ said Eru. ‘Going down quick, now. You can pick her up through the glasses.’
They had left the Colonel’s glasses with Gaunt, but Eru lent them his. Dikon had some difficulty focusing them but eventually the hazy blue field clarified and in a moment or two he found a tiny black triangle. It looked appallingly insignificant.
‘They’ve been out to see if they could salvage anything,’ said Eru, ‘but not a chance. She’s packed up all right. Tough!’
‘I’ll say,’ said Simon. ‘Come on, Bell.’
Dikon returned the field glasses, thanked Eru Saul and with feelings of the liveliest distaste meekly followed Simon up the fence line which now rose precipitously before flattening out to encompass a higher shoulder of the Peak. At last they reached a very small platform, no more than a shelf in the seaward face of the mountain. Dikon was profoundly relieved to see Simon, who was well ahead, come to a halt and squat on his heels.
‘What I reckon,’ said Simon as Dikon crawled up beside him, ‘he must have worked it from here.’
Dry-mouthed and still very short-winded, Dikon prepared to fling himself down on the ledge.
‘Here!’ said Simon. ‘Better cut that out. Stay where you are. We don’t want it mucked up. Pity it rained yesterday.’
‘And what do you expect to find, may I ask?’ asked Dikon acidly. Physical discomfort did not increase his tolerance for Simon’s high-handedness. ‘Are you by any chance building on footprints? My poor fellow, let me tell you that footprints exist only on sandy beaches and in the minds of detective fiction-mongers. All that twittering about bent blades of grass and imprints slightly defaced by rain! In my opinion, they do not occur.’
‘Don’t they?’ returned Simon combatively. ‘Somebody’s been up this track ahead of us. Didn’t you pick that?’
‘How could I “pick” anything when you did nothing but kick dust in my glasses? Show me a footprint and I’ll believe in it. Not before.’
‘Good-oh, then. There. What’s that?’
‘You’ve just made it with your own flat foot,’ said Dikon crossly.
‘What if I have? It’s a print, isn’t it? Goes to show.’
‘Possibly.’ Dikon wiped his glasses and peered round. ‘What are those things?’ he said. ‘Over by the bank. Dents in the ground?’
He pointed and Simon gave a raucous cry of triumph. ‘What did I tell you? Prints!’ He removed his boots and crossed to the bank. ‘You better take a look,’ he said. Dikon removed his shoes. He had a blister on each heel and was glad to do so. He joined Simon.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The footprints after all, and I can tell you exactly how they would be described by the know-alls. Several confused impressions of the Booted Foot, two being more clearly defined and making an angle of approximately thirty degrees the one with the other. Distance between inside margins of heel, half an inch. Distance between position of outside margin of big toes, approximately ten inches. This latter pair of impressions was found in damp clay but had been protected from recent rain by a bank which overhung them at a height of approximately three feet. There’s great virtue in the word “approximately”.’
‘Good-ow!’ said Simon on a more enthusiastic inflection than he usually gave to this odious expression. ‘Nice work, go on.’
‘Nails in the soles and heels. Toes more deeply indented than heels. Right foot, four nails in heel; six in sole. Left foot, three in heel, six in sole. Ergo, he lost a nail.’
‘How much, he lost a nail?’
‘Ergo. I’m being affected.’
‘Huh! Yeh, well, what sort of chap is he? Does he act like Questing? Stands with his heels close together and his toes apart. Puts more weight on his toes than his heels. Say what you like, you can deduce quite a bit if you use your nut.’
‘As, for instance, he must be a dwarf.’
‘Eye?’
‘The bank overhangs the prints at a height of three feet. How could he stand?’
‘Aw heck!’
‘Would squatting fill the bill? The other prints show where he scuffled round trying to settle.’
‘That’s right. OK, he squatted. For a long time.’
‘With his weight forward on his toes,’ Dikon suggested. He had begun to feel mildly stimulated. ‘The clay was damp at the time. Yesterday’s rain was easterly and hasn’t got in under the bank. On Thursday night there was a light rain from the sea.’
‘Don’t I know it? I was away out there, don’t forget.’
Dikon looked out to his left. The shoulder of the hill hid Harpoon and the harbour, but Simon’s rock was just visible, a shapeless spot down in the blue. ‘If you stand on the edge you can just see the other boulders leading out to it,’ said Simon.
‘Thanks, I’ll take your word for them.’
‘Gee, can’t you see the sand spit under the water clearly from up here? That’s what it’ll be like from the air. Coastal patrol work. Cripey, I wish they’d get on with it and pull me in.’
Simon stood on the lip of the shelf and Dikon looked at him. His chin was up. A light breeze whipped his hair back from his forehead. His shoulders were squared. Human beings gain prestige when they are seen at a great height against a simple background of sea and sky. Simon lost his uncouthness and became a significant figure. Dikon took off his glasses and wiped them. The young Simon was blurred.
‘I envy you,’ said Dikon.
‘Me? What for?’
‘You have the right of entry to danger. You’ll move out towards it. I’m one of the sort that sit pretty and wait. Blind as a bat, you know.’
‘Tough luck. Still, they reckon this is everyone’s war, don’t they?’
‘They do.’
‘Lend a hand to catch this joker Questing. There’s a job for you.’
‘Quite so,’ said Dikon, who already regretted his digression. ‘What have we decided? That Questing climbed up here on Thursday night, wearing hobnailed boots? That he signalled to a U-boat information about a ship loading at Harpoon and sailing the following night? By the way, can you visualize Questing in hobnailed boots?’
‘He’s been mucking about on the Peak for the last three months. He must have learnt sense.’
‘Perhaps they are hobnailed shoes. Was there moonlight on Thursday night?’
‘Not after the rain came up, but he was here by then. There was, before that.’
‘They’ll have to look
at all his shoes. Should we perhaps try to make a sort of record of these prints? Glare at them until they leave an indelible impression on our minds and we can take oaths about them hereafter? Or shall I try to make a sketch of them?’
‘That’s an idea. If they knew their business they’d take casts. I’ve read about that.’
‘Who precisely are they?’ asked Dikon, taking out his notebook and beginning to sketch. ‘The police? The army? Have we got anything approaching a secret service in New Zealand? What’s the matter!’ he added angrily. Simon had uttered a loud exclamation and Dikon’s pencil skidded across his sketch.
‘There’s some bloke out here from Scotland Yard. A big pot. There was something about him in the papers a week or two back. They reckoned he’d come here to investigate fifth columnists, and Uncle James said they ought to be put in jail for giving away official secrets. By cripey, he’s the joker we ought to get hold of. Go to the top if you want to get things done.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘That’s the catch,’ said Simon. ‘I’ve forgotten.’
III
Barbara and Gaunt did not go up the hill after all. They watched Simon and Dikon clinging to the fence and slipping on the short grass and friable soil.
‘I have decided that my leg jibs at the prospect,’ said Gaunt. ‘Don’t you think it would be much pleasanter to go a little way towards the sea and smoke a cigarette? This morbid desire to look at sinking ships! Isn’t it kinder to let her go down alone? I feel that it would be rather like watching the public execution of a good friend. And we know the crew is safe. Don’t you agree?’
Barbara agreed, thinking that he was talking to her as if she herself was a good friend. It was the first time they had been alone together.
They found a place near to the sea. Gaunt flung himself down with an air of boyish enthusiasm which would have intensely annoyed his secretary. Barbara knelt, sitting back on her heels, the light wind blowing full in her face.
‘Do you mind if I tell you you should always do your hair like that?’ said Gaunt.
‘Like this?’ She raised her hand to her head. The wind flattened her cotton dress. It might have been drenched in rain, so closely did it cling to her. She turned her head quickly, and Gaunt, as quickly, looked again at her hair. ‘Yes. Straight off your face and brushed fiercely back. No frizz or nonsense. Terribly simple.’
‘Orders?’ said Barbara. It was so miraculously easy to talk to him.
‘Please.’
‘I’m afraid I’ll look very bony.’
‘But that’s how you should look when you have good bones. Do you know that soon after we met I told Dikon I thought you had—but I’m making you self-conscious, and that’s bad manners, isn’t it? I’m afraid,’ said Gaunt with a sort of aftermath of the Rochester manner, ‘that I’m accustomed to say pretty much what I think. Do you mind?’
‘No,’ said Barbara, suddenly at a loss.
It was years, Gaunt thought, since he had met a young woman who was simply shy. Nervous, or deliberately coy young women, yes; but not a girl who blushed with pleasure and was too wellmannered to turn away her head. If only she would always behave like this she would be charming. He was taking exactly the right line with her. He began to talk to her about himself.
Barbara was enchanted. He spoke so intimately, as if she were somebody with a special gift of understanding. He told her all sorts of things. How, as a boy in school, he had been set to read ‘The Eve of Crispian’ speech from Henry V, and had started in the accepted wooden style which he now imitated comically for her amusement. Then, so he told her, something had happened to him. The heady phrases began to ring through his voice. To the astonishment of his English master (here followed a neat mimicry of the English master) and, strange to say, the enthralment of his classmates, he gave the speech something of its due. ‘There were mistakes, of course. I had no technique beyond an instinctive knowledge of certain values. But—’ he tapped the breast pocket of his coat—‘it was there. I knew then that I must become a Shakespearean actor. I heard the lines as if someone else spoke them:
‘And Crispin, Crispian shall ne’er go by From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remembered.’
Gulls mewed overhead and the sea thudded and dragged at the coast, a thrilling accompaniment, Barbara thought, to the lovely words.
‘Isn’t there any more?’ she asked greedily.
‘Little ignoramus! There’s a lot more.’ He took her hand. ‘You are my Cousin Westmoreland. Listen, my fair cousin.’ And he gave her the whole speech. It was impossible for him to be anything but touched and delighted by her eagerness, by the tears of excitement that stood in her eyes when he ended. He still held her hand. Dikon, limping over the brow of the hill ahead of Simon, was just in time to see him lightly kiss it.
Dikon drove back with Simon, completely mum, beside him in the front seat. Gaunt and Barbara, after a few desultory questions about the wreck, were also silent, a circumstance that Dikon mistrusted, and with some reason, for Barbara was lost in enchantment. One glance at her face had been all too enlightening. ‘Besotted,’ Dikon muttered to himself. ‘What has he been up to? Telling her the story of his life, I don’t doubt, with all the trimmings. Acting his socks off. Kissing her hand. By heaven, if the place had a second floor, before we knew where we were he’d be treating her to the balcony scene. Romeo with fibrositis! The truth is, he’s reached the age when a girl’s ignorance and adulation can make a fool of a man. It’s revolting.’ But although he allowed himself to fume inwardly, he would have resented and denied such imputations against Gaunt from any outsider, for not the least of his troubles lay in his sense of divided allegiance. He reflected that, Barbara apart, he liked his employer too much to enjoy the spectacle of him making a fool of himself.
When they returned to the house they found Mr Septimus Falls and Mr Questing sitting in deck chairs side by side on the verandah, a singular association. Dikon had implored Simon to show no signs of particular animosity when he encountered Questing, but was nevertheless very much relieved when Simon grunted a word of thanks to Gaunt and walked off in the direction of his cabin. Barbara, with a radiant face, ran straight past Questing into the house. Gaunt, before leaving the car, leant forward and said: ‘I haven’t been so delightfully entertained for years. She’s a darling and she shall certainly be told who sent the dress.’
Dikon drove the car round to the garage.
When he returned he found that Questing, having introduced Septimus Falls to Gaunt, had adopted the manner of a sort of referee or ring master. ‘I’ve been telling this gentleman all the morning, Mr Gaunt, that you and he must get together. “Here’s our celebrated guest,” I said, “with nobody to provide him with the correct cultural stimulus until you came along.” It seems this gentleman is a great student of the drama, Mr Gaunt.’
‘Really?’ said Gaunt, and contrived to suggest distaste of Questing without positively insulting Falls.
Falls made a deprecating and slightly precious gesture. ‘Mr Questing is too generous,’ he said. ‘The merest tyro, I assure you, sir. Calliope rather than Thalia commands me.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘There you are!’ cried Mr Questing admiringly. ‘And I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Mr Falls has been telling me that he’s a great fan of yours, Mr Gaunt.’
His victims laughed unhappily and Falls, with an air of making the best of a bad business, said: ‘That, at least, is true. I don’t believe I’ve missed a London production of yours for ten years or more.’
‘Splendid,’ said Gaunt more cordially. ‘You’ve met my secretary, haven’t you? Let’s sit down for pity’s sake.’ They sat down. Mr Falls hitched his chair a little nearer to Gaunt’s.
‘I’ve often thought I should like to ask you to confirm or refute a pet theory of mine,’ he said. ‘It concerns Horatio’s very palpable lie in reference to the liquidation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. It seems to me tha
t in view of your brilliant reading of Hamlet’s account of the affair—’
‘Yes, yes. I know what you’re at. “He never gave commandment for their death.” Pure whitewash. What else?’
‘I have always thought the line refers to Claudius. Your Horatio—’
‘No, no. To Hamlet. Obviously to Hamlet.’
‘Of course the comparison is absurd, but I was going to ask you if you had ever seen Gustav Gründgen’s treatment—’
‘Gründgen’s? But that’s Hitler’s tame actor, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, yes.’ Mr Falls made a little movement, gave a little yelp, and clapped his hand to the small of his back. ‘This odious complaint!’ he lamented. ‘Yes, that is the fellow. A ridiculous performer. You never saw anything like the Hamlet. Madder and madder and madder does he grow and they think he’s marvellous. I witnessed it. Before the war, of course. Naturally.’
‘Naturally!’ said Questing with a loud laugh.
‘But we were speaking of the play. I have always considered—’ And Mr Falls was off on an extremely knowledgeable discussion of the minor puzzles of the play. Six years’ association with Shakespearean productions had not killed Dikon’s passion for Hamlet and he listened with interest. Falls was a good talker if an affected one. He had all sorts of mannerisms, nervous movements of his hands that accorded ill with his face, which was tranquil and remarkably comely. He had taken out a pipe, but, instead of lighting it, emphasized the points in his argument by knocking it out against the leg of his deck chair. ‘To make three acts where in the text there are five!’ he said, excitedly, and the dottle from his pipe flew about Mrs Claire’s clean verandah as he illustrated his theme with appropriate and angry raps on the chair leg: ‘Three, mind you, three, three! In God’s name, why not leave the play as he wrote it?’
‘But we do play it in its entirety, sometimes.’
‘My dear sir, I know you do. I am enormously grateful as all Shakespeareans must be. Do forgive me. I am riding my hobby horse to death, and before you of all people. Arrogant presumption!’