Stop Press

by Michael Innes

  It was a November evening in Oxford and the air was stagnant, raw, and insidiously chill. Vapours – half-hearted ghosts on the verge of visibility – played desultory acoustic tricks about the city, like bored technicians flicking to and fro the sound screens in a radio studio. A wafer of eaten stone, loosened by a last infinitesimal charge of condensing acid, would slither to the ground with disconcerting resonance. The masons’ mallets, making good in random patches centuries of such mellow decay, tapped like so many tiny typewriters in an engulfing silence. The sky, a sheet of lead rapidly oxidizing, was fading through glaucous tones to cinereous; lights were furred about their edges; in the gathering twilight Gothic and Tudor, Palladian and Venetian melted into an architecture of dreams. And the hovering vapours, as if taking heart of darkness, glided in increasing concentration by walls and buttresses – like the first inheritors of the place, robed and cowled, returning to take possession with the night.

  ‘Webster!’

  The young man who had turned so abruptly out of the porter’s lodge ignored the call. He had an athletic figure of the slimmer sort, disproportionately attired. Round his neck were accumulated a sweater, a towel, a blazer, and a large muffler; below this level he wore nothing but a pair of shoes, and diminutive shorts cut in the faith that the squatting position is the only one known to man. This peg-top appearance is common in those who have just come off the river, and there was nothing out of the way about the young man except the haste which had suddenly possessed him. As if the ghosts had verily appeared to him, he ran. Ignoring another friend’s call, he charged across the college lawn – a route which would have cost him five shillings had a traditionally minded don observed him – tripped over the college tortoise, recovered, skilfully swerved round an advancing tray of crumpets and anchovy-toast, dodged through a narrow archway and pounded up a dark and ancient staircase. A dim person, whom the youth hailed as Webster had long believed to be a kitchen-man but who was in point of fact the Regius Professor of Eschatology, stood politely aside to let him pass; he took the last treads at a bound, thumped at a door, pitched himself precipitately through it, and collapsed into a wickerwork chair – a chair, like his shorts, moulded to a theory: this time that man sits not, but either curls or sprawls.

  Gerald Winter, the don who owned the room, surveyed his panting visitor, enunciated with simple irony the words, ‘Come in’, and helped himself to a muffin from a dish by the fire. Then, resigning himself to the exercise of hospitality, he said, ‘Muffin.’

  The young man took half a muffin. Presently he scrambled up the back of the chair and reached himself a cup and saucer. ‘I’m frightfully sorry’, he murmured conventionally as he poured out tea, ‘to burst in.’ He jumped up and foraged three lumps of sugar. One he ate and the others he dropped with a splash in his cup. And then he sat down again, looked warily at his host and fidgeted. ‘Frightfully sorry,’ he repeated inanely and vaguely. He was a young man with a firm mouth and a resolute chin.

  Winter made a movement after the kettle that concealed a scrutiny of his guest. ‘My good Timmy,’ he said – for it was only Timothy Eliot’s closest friends who were privileged to call him Webster; and Winter, who was merely his tutor, was not of this degree of intimacy – ‘My good Timmy, not at all.’ He began to fill his pipe, which was a ritual indicating a mood of sympathetic leisure. He was by no means attached to the role of confidential adviser to the young; nevertheless this job frequently fell to him. Troubles material and spiritual came regularly up his staircase, sometimes at a resistless bound, sometimes with the most dubious pauses landing by landing. The Professor of Eschatology had formed the conclusion that Winter was a sinisterly sociable person. Actually Winter was rather shy and when he heard these characteristic approaches he frequently took refuge on the roof. But Timothy Eliot had caught him and now he said briefly: ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s the Spider.’

  Winter looked gloomy. If there was anything tedious about Timmy it was a chronic sensitiveness about this harmless invention of his father’s. Since coming up to Oxford Timmy had been constrained to endure a good deal of fun about the Spider, for it is a characteristic of undergraduates to revive kinds of humour in abeyance since they left their private schools. There was, for instance, the amusement of addressing Timmy out of what was called Webster’s Dictionary: which meant weaving into conversation – if possible undetected – phrases from the earlier and more picturesque conversation of Mr Eliot’s hero. And there was the solemn assumption that Timmy himself was the author of the books, this being an ingenious way of avoiding the impropriety of making direct fun of a man’s parent. The jokes about Webster Eliot were judiciously intermittent – to harp on them would have been boorish – but Timmy, while playing up to them amiably enough, was reputed at times to brood over the curious family industry which was the occasion of them. So now Winter sighed and said dryly: ‘Oh, that.’ He felt that he was unlikely to be helpful about the Spider.

  But Timmy shook his head. ‘It’s not’, he said, ‘just the old quiet fun. It’s something queer at home. Something – well – that seems to be happening to daddy.’

  To Winter Mr Eliot the elder was not much more than a name and an odd reputation. He thought it sufficient therefore to indicate conventional concern. ‘Happening?’ he murmured.

  ‘Doomed to the bin.’

  ‘Doomed to the bin – the Spider? You mean he’s being scrapped?’

  ‘Not the Spider, daddy. And I mean he seems to be going gently off his rocker. Taking something to heart. I don’t know quite what to do about it. Awkward thing in a family. I thought you might think of something.’ And Timmy, with a fragment of muffin he had reserved for the purpose, began mopping up the surplus butter in the muffin dish. He did it in jabs that echoed the jerky sentences.

  There was a little silence. A bus rumbled down the High and Winter’s windows rattled angrily; from the quad below floated up the voices of hearty men discussing a football practice. Winter straightened himself, feeling that somnolescence was no longer decent. ‘The facts,’ he said.

  ‘Very simple. He thinks the Spider has come alive.’

  ‘Come alive?’ Experience with undergraduate predicaments did not prevent Winter feeling uncomfortable.

  ‘Just that. Pygmalion and Galatea situation. The beloved marble stirs and lives. Only daddy doesn’t greatly love the Spider.’

  Winter looked at his pupil suspiciously. ‘What – if anything – has actually happened?’

  ‘A joke – put across by some precious ass on daddy. And it’s been too dam’ successful.’ Timmy pushed the empty muffin dish away ungratefully. ‘Doomed to the bin,’ he repeated and seemed to find comfort in this succinct statement of the worst.

  ‘Surely it’s not as bad as all that. Whatever the joke may have been, your father will presumably forget about it in time.’

  ‘You haven’t got the idea. The joke’s still going on.’

  ‘Oh!’ Winter looked disconcerted.

  ‘It’s quite a tale – and goes back some months. I expect you know how a person in daddy’s situation may be pestered. He’s read by hundreds of thousands of people, and that means by hundreds of mild pests. There are always a few badgering him. They’re being poisoned by their wives or shut up as mad by their uncles or systematically persecuted by the Prime Minister or the Archbishop of Canterbury. In the old days they sometimes complained that the Spider was after them with a gun. You can imagine all that.’

  ‘Effortlessly.’ Fellows of Oxford colleges, Winter was thinking, are seldom subjected to such paranoiac importunities and would be uncommonly worried if they were. ‘I gather you’ve even been badgered a bit yourself.’

  ‘Oh, that. It was a bit bad at my prepper. They called me Miss Muffet. That was worse, somehow, than Webster. I’ve never minded much since, really. Do you know that at Balliol there’s a man whose father is the world’s biggest manufacturer of–’

  ‘No doubt. But to your tale.’

>   ‘Well, it’s characteristic of these badgerers that they fade out. I suppose when they get no change they turn to badgering someone else. That’s one thing that makes the present badgerer unique: tenacity. And there’s another. Daddy’s had lots of messages and so on about the Spider as if he were a real person; he’s never had any from the Spider as if he were a real person.’

  ‘Surely it’s an obvious enough joke? You don’t mean to say’ – there was decent anxiety in Winter’s voice – ‘that your father is seriously–’

  ‘This badgerer’, Timmy interrupted, ‘knows too much. He has a sort of slogan: The Spider Knows All. And apparently it’s more or less true.’

  Winter looked up sharply. ‘Timmy Eliot, don’t talk nonsense.’

  ‘It’s not nonsense. It’s the point of the whole thing. This badgerer knows what only the real Spider could know.’

  ‘The real Spider?’

  ‘Oh, dear, I mean the real Spider – the one in the books.’

  Winter stirred uneasily in his chair. ‘You are sure’, he said, ‘that you are not a badgerer yourself, trying to pull my leg? Or that you haven’t been reading too hard?’

  The young man opposite stretched himself in feline luxury in his rowing kit. ‘Do I look’, he asked, ‘like a Grammarian’s Funeral? And I’m really quite serious. This person pretending to be the Spider knows what only the real Spider could know.’

  ‘Timmy, you’re saying something meaningless. What you call the real Spider isn’t a person with a brain and knowledge. He’s a number of black marks printed on paper. This person can’t know what only the Spider could know.’

  ‘Prosaically true. But he knows, daddy says, things that the Spider of the books thought of doing, and didn’t. In other words, he has a supernatural insight into daddy’s mind.’

  Another bus lumbered down the High and again the windows rattled as if in the clutch of an angry demon. Far away, muffled in the thickening air, a deep bell began to toll.

  ‘It started’, said Timmy, ‘in the long vac. With the perpetration of a very elaborate joke. The person chiefly concerned is a Mrs Birdwire, and first I must tell you about her.’

  ‘I seem to have heard of her. A traveller, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes. Only you mustn’t call her that: she doesn’t like it. The explorer. Mrs Birdwire the celebrated explorer. She’s our nearest neighbour about a couple of miles off.’

  Winter raised his eyebrows. ‘I didn’t know you were as isolated as that.’

  ‘Not our nearest local neighbour; our nearest county neighbour. Mrs Birdwire is the nearest polite society we have – she’s incredible vulgar, by the way – and Mrs Birdwire was burgled by the Spider. It was all very difficult. You see, daddy and she have never got on.’

  ‘Embarrasing.’

  ‘Quite so. Mrs Birdwire was burgled and a lot of beastly trophies and curios and things taken, and the Spider left his celebrated signature: a large Spider cut out of black velvet. He left it in Mrs Birdwire’s very own bath.’

  ‘He always does that?’

  Timmy blushed. ‘Rather foul rot, isn’t it? He used always to do something of the sort. Remember that the burglary was by the Spider of very long ago; he’s been doing nothing but detective stuff for years now. He had a bad throwback, so to speak, and burgled Mrs Birdwire. He also insulted her. You must know that there’s supposed to be a Mr Birdwire, though nobody has ever seen him. Mrs Birdwire’s formula is that he’s “cruelly tied to the city”, and there’s a joke to the effect that one day Mrs Birdwire may go exploring after him. Well, the Spider left a picture. It showed Mrs Birdwire in the fantastic tropical kit she’s photographed in, cutting her way through a jungle of telephones and typewriters to a little man who was sitting at a desk necking with a secretary. And underneath was written: “Mr Birdwire I presume?” Just like that.’

  Winter gave a loud unacademic guffaw. ‘Crude,’ he said, ‘unquestionably crude. But satisfactory nevertheless. Where was the picture?’

  ‘Mrs Birdwire has built herself a house in an awful style she calls Spanish Mission – all white walls and little bogus wrought-iron grills. The Spider chose the biggest, whitest wall he could find and did his drawing rather more than life size in red paint. It was a place of pilgrimage from miles around for days.’

  For a moment Winter closed his eyes as if the better to visualize this revolting manifesto. ‘Timmy,’ he said, ‘you fascinate me. But let me say that your linguistic habits are appalling. Consistently to refer to this joker as “the Spider” is sheer encouragement to the confusion of mind which you say has overtaken your father.’

  ‘It seems convenient. Actually, I ought to have spoken so far of Spider One.’

  ‘Spider One?’

  ‘The master-crook. You see no sooner was Mrs Birdwire burgled by Spider One than Spider Two – the super-detective of recent years – fell to and began clearing the matter up.’

  ‘The dickens he did!’

  ‘Spider Two – daddy’s Spider Two – has a habit of reading newspaper reports of mysterious crimes and then sending the police vital hints which they’d otherwise have missed. Mrs Birdwire’s Spider Two did just that. The red paint had been bone dry when the gardener discovered it early in the morning. The Spider wrote to the police and pointed out that the only ordinary paint that would dry as quickly as that was some foreign stuff that was just beginning to be imported in small quantities. And sure enough that gave the police a line they’d missed. They traced a purchase of this stuff from a London warehouse by an unknown customer. This unknown had paid cash and asked that the stuff be delivered at some address in a suburb. It was duly delivered at an empty house and the unknown was there to receive it; he seems just to have commandeered an unoccupied house at random, breaking in at the back. No trace of him was ever found again. But Mrs Birdwire’s curios and what-not were neatly arranged round the floor of the principal room. If Spider Two hadn’t pointed out a valid detective process they would presumably never have been recovered. The thing, in fact, was a large, broad, pointless joke. Am I most frightfully boring you?’

  ‘I repeat that I am fascinated. Your story opens vistas of bewilderment. May I remind you, however, that you have yet to explain–’

  But Timmy Eliot had jumped up. ‘And now’, he said, ‘will you come down?’

  ‘Come down?’

  ‘Home with me for the weekend to see if we can get to the bottom of the business. I expect you can work me an exeat from Benton. And dons are always weekending.’

  Winter scrambled from his chair, genuinely perturbed. ‘Young man, steady on! And will you tell me why you have suddenly come to me with all this in such a hurry?’

  ‘Will you come down?’

  ‘And just what warrant may there be for the fantastic statement that this joker knows things your father’s precious character thought of doing, and didn’t?’

  Timmy grinned, as if conscious of the strength of his bait. ‘That’s the real beguilement, isn’t it – how can a joker give the impression of peering into a writer’s mind? Once more, will you come down?’

  Close by the chapel bell began its urgent and perfunctory peal. Winter glanced at a calendar, dived for his surplice. ‘Lord help me!’ he cried in despair. ‘I have to read Numbers xxxiii and I haven’t looked up the pronunciations.’ He turned to Timmy. ‘To your bath. And if you breakfast with me at half past eight I’ll make up my mind then.’

  Left to himself, Winter gave a moment to the dubious contemplation of his fire. In Timmy Eliot’s story there was a hint of matter sufficiently baffling to interest him; nevertheless he was inclined to call himself a fool for half-promising to investigate. He hurried downstairs with a mounting sense of his own rashness. In the quadrangle he ran into several of his colleagues and drew comfort from the thought that the adventure, should he undertake it, would afford a holiday from familiar faces.

  As it happened, this as a miscalculation. A good many familiar faces were to take part in the comedy of the
next few days: some of them were actually about him in the quadrangle now. And the comedy was to be of the classical sort which is based on character. But for Gerald Winter’s rashness – but for a rashness which repeated itself almost within the hour – the history of a celebrated writer of romances would have been wholly different.

  After-dinner procedure in the senior common-room is dictated by Dr Groper. The little table, the middle-sized table, the big table, and the supernumerary table are his idea.

  A distinguished mathematics and for long Master of the college, Dr Groper worked out his system during the anxious period when Oxford was awaiting the news of Waterloo. His dispositions have been respected ever since for the simple reason that he made a considerable endowment of the college cellar dependent on them. It is true that in the mid-nineteenth century a radically-minded Master, who was voraciously sociable and objected particularly to the little table, persuaded his colleagues to take legal advice. But learned counsel, after studying Dr Groper’s will with the help of several Cambridge mathematicians, delivered the opinion that the system is rational, reasonable, and in no way repugnant to the public interest; in fact that if the system goes, half the cellar fund must go as well. The system has never been questioned since.

  Dr Groper desired that an edifying time should be had by all, and by all equally; and to the realization of this proposition he dedicated his science. The after-dinner hour, he believed, is peculiarly propitious to those sudden starts of mind by which the boundaries of human knowledge are extended. Periodically, therefore, a scholar should have the opportunity of discussing his port in meditative seclusion. Hence the little table, which stands apart and furnished for one in a corner of the room; here every Fellow of the college must take his place in turn and await such inspiration as may visit him. Next comes the middle-sized table, which is for three; here Dr Groper hoped for fruitful discussions of a sustained and serious sort. The big table is for seven, and at this conversation is naturally more general and fragmentary; Dr Groper mentioned in his will that he solicited innocent mirth. And this completes the normal arrangements. The college is small and these eleven places accommodate the Master and statutory number of Fellows. Their orderly progression night by night from table to table would be a simple affair but for the complication introduced by occasional guests. When such are present they are entertained at the supernumerary table by the Master, the Dean, and the Fellow who would normally sit fifth at the big table supposing – as is not the case – that no guests are ever entertained on Sunday. It is this last provision that makes the calculations a little complicated; it was instituted by Dr Groper as likely to maintain the standard of mathematical study in the college. And over the system’s learnedly ordered convivialities the figure of Dr Groper still presides in the shape of a portrait by Raeburn. A puffy man in rusty clericals, he stands pointing with an incongruously military gesture at the open page of his own justly celebrated Commentary on Newton’s Principia. Beside him rests a brilliantly rendered silver and brass orrery. A touch of that gesturing hand – it seems – would set planets and moons on their intricate dance about the sun. But Dr Groper’s eye is outward over the common-room, as if controlling the scarcely less elaborate and secular gyrations which his will has imposed on generations of scholars unborn.