Stop Press

by Michael Innes

  Winter tucked his feet under him. ‘But – er – on whom is the call to be made?’

  Toplady frowned. ‘That’, he said, ‘is the next thing to consider.’

  Gently the taxi bumped into another taxi in front.

  Over the river the train runs from the London of landmarks and unique statements to the London of remorseless repetitions and submerged identities, the London of a million chimney-pots, each assertive only of the uselessness of assertion. Rapidly traversed, this region demonstrates that things in general are without an objective and without a plan. How fortunate, thought Winter, that in the train we are of another world, in which life is a matter of efficiently accomplished journeys in pursuit of rational ends! He frowned and stood up to reach himself The Times. The unread obituaries were still a refuge between himself and the advancing perplexities of the Eliots.

  ‘I think’, said Toplady, leaning back in somewhat apprehensive experiment in the third-class carriage, ‘the chief constable.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Mr Eliot’s call. The chief constable – or a person of that sort.’

  Timmy, who was curled in a corner making a brazenly childish assault on a large square of chocolate, interrupted. ‘By the way, Winter, we are discovered – did you know? I saw the Master climbing in at the back.’

  ‘Bussenschutt? He’s off to see an old party called Shoon.’

  ‘Shoon? Why, that’s–’

  ‘The chief constable’, said Toplady politely but firmly. ‘Or a person of that sort.’

  Timmy, busy stripping the last shred of tinfoil from his refection, shook his head. ‘Chief constables or such-like did come in over the Birdwire burglary. But daddy didn’t like them. You see, the books are full of policemen. It used to be the Spider’s regular business to outwit them. Now he simply outpaces them. In either case they have to be pretty painfully stupid. So when it proves necessary for real police to come in and investigate us – investigate something that seems actually to spring from the books – naturally daddy finds it a bit–’

  ‘Embarrassing.’ Toplady helpfully supplied what appeared to be the key word in description of Mr Eliot’s position. ‘We must look elsewhere.’ He took off his bowler and peered into that.

  ‘It is’, said Timmy, ‘a bit difficult to know how to move. You’ll both realize that when you get a whiff of our household. Daddy’s very shy.’

  Winter rather wondered if the very shy Mr Eliot was going greatly to relish either an inquisition by a strange don or the diplomatic counsels of the admired Toplady. ‘Does your father’, he asked with sudden suspicion, ‘know that we’re coming down?’

  ‘Yes, indeed, Winter. I sent him a telegram just before we set off.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You needn’t be alarmed. He doesn’t a bit mind whom we bring down.’

  Toplady, who was brushing his bowler in an elderly way with the sleeve of his overcoat, desisted as if aware that this last remark of his friend’s required analysis. Winter said: ‘We are relieved.’

  ‘Of course I haven’t told him about Chown.’

  ‘About Chown?’

  ‘Yes: the psychiatrist. I’ve asked him down too. I thought he might penetrate to the mind and motive of the joker. Will he be expensive?’

  ‘Very.’ Winter nodded emphatically. ‘And I may say I’m thinking of putting in a bill myself.’

  Toplady directed upon Winter a glance of restrained social censure. ‘I have it in mind’, he said carefully, ‘that a friend has told me of his impression, gained perhaps indirectly, that in more than one family Herbert Chown has been helpful; indeed, very helpful indeed. But I do think, Timmy – and I not only think but I say – that it would have been wiser, and indeed more the thing, if a friend may go as far as to say that too, to let your father judge for himself if Chown’s help is needed, and if needed desired.’

  Timmy was quite abashed – a state of feeling, Winter reflected, which he himself had never been able to induce in his pupil. ‘But, Hugo, please–’

  ‘And if’, continued Toplady, ‘you have – as I think I may say I suspect you have, as you have said you have mentioned something of it to Mr Winter – called in Chown because of a feeling of anxiety as to how your father is taking the thing, that, though another matter, is also a graver one which I hope you have thought to discuss with some older member of your family. Have you?’

  Into the serious Toplady, Winter was thinking, it would be nice to stick a pin. Nevertheless there was sense in his laborious precision and it seemed possible moreover that he might elicit from Timmy a less fragmentary account of the Eliot mystery than he had hitherto given. So Winter chorused approvingly: ‘Have you?’

  Timmy slid back the corridor door and pitched his chocolate paper not very tidily through it. ‘Well, no. Chown is a slight acquaintance of the family and I thought he might be brought down without remark. And I did think he might calm daddy down a bit; they’ve had dealings before. But chiefly I hoped he could tell us what sort of brain was at work.’

  ‘Is it’, asked Winter, ‘calming down your father to bring home a whole’ – he looked blandly at the sedate Toplady – ‘circus?’

  ‘I thought the problem might be tackled from several sides at once. It was as soon as I heard that Chown would come that I ran up to collar you. And then I went round and collected Hugo. Perhaps it is all rather on a grand scale. But I assure you we shall hardly be noticed in the crowd.’

  ‘The crowd?’

  ‘The Spider’s twenty-firster,’ said Timmy. ‘Ever such a big party.’ Delicately he licked a chocolate-coated thumb and produced his clamantly thoroughbred pipe. ‘Winter, might I have those matches again, please?’

  There was a heavy silence. What a tangled web, thought Winter sadly regarding Timmy, we weave when once we practise to deceive. ‘I understood’, he said, ‘that these pointless and elaborate jokes had thrown your father into considerable distress of mind. Do you mean to say that he has chosen this moment to hold a junketing in the Spider’s honour?’

  ‘Surely’, said Toplady, acting chorus in his turn, ‘he hasn’t done that?’

  ‘It’s not really daddy; it’s his publisher – chap called Wedge. He arranges the birthday-party every year, and then he puts it in his house journal and even gets bits into the illustrated weeklies. And this particular year daddy didn’t like to put him off.’

  Toplady looked at the communication cord and made a tentative movement to grab his hat. Then he sank back in his seat and said, ‘Publicity.’ Just so, Winter thought, might medieval man have said, ‘Plague.’

  ‘Daddy sent me a note who’s coming. I expect there are quite a number travelling down now.’ Timmy stood up to reach for his coat. ‘Oh, bother; they always get the lights wrong on this futile line.’ For with a hoot the train had plunged abruptly into darkness. ‘It’s the only tunnel and they often forget–’

  Timmy’s voice and the rattle of the train’s subterraneous plunge were alike drowned in awful and bewildering clamour. A pandemonium of sound, latrant, mugient, reboatory, and beyond all words, reverberated between the walls of the tunnel. The multitude of the damned, vocal with all the sad variety of hell, could scarcely have surpassed the momentary effect of horror. It was only momentary; then the unknown identified itself as dogs – a disgracefully large number of dogs in a neighbouring compartment. Toplady was heard saying ‘Dogs!’; there were bumping noises in the corridor; a strident female voice said, ‘Guard!’; the tardy lights switched on overhead; seconds later the train ran into daylight.

  Timmy, still standing up, thrust his head into the corridor – as a number of disturbed passengers were doing. ‘What a filthy – oh, lord!’

  The strident female voice had drawn nearer. Raised above the continued ululations of the dogs, it expressed the brisk and authoritative displeasure of the propertied classes. ‘These’, it said, ‘are most sensitive animals – most sensitive. It is disgraceful that they should be exposed to such c
arelessness. Can’t you hear how upset they are?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. The whole train can do that.’ That man’s voice was that of one who remembers and resents that he has been bribed. ‘But the dogs oughtn’t rightly to be in the compartment at all. Look at their tickets and you’ll see it says the van.’

  Timmy leant forward and whispered to his companions. ‘If we’re not all getting together! It’s the Birdwire outfit en route.’

  At this Winter warily thrust out his head in turn. A little way off, and outside a first-class compartment, an aggressively tweeded female, of the sort whose characteristic accoutrements are binoculars, a shooting-stick, and a large cardboard label, was rebuking a uniformed attendant. What they call a stone-in-the-rain, thought Winter – and let his glance travel farther down the corridor. Beyond a vista of indignant faces, and from the last compartment of all, protruded the supremely indignant face of Bussenschutt. Winter bowed politely to this ultimate appearance and withdrew his head. Still supported by a swelling canine diapason, the strident voice continued. ‘We shall not make a complaint. Mrs Birdwire is not that sort of person. But please be more careful about the lights another time. It is bad for the dogs. And might lead to immorality as well. And now please see that we are brought coffee and biscuits.’ There was the sound of a door slid to and for a moment the doggy din was muted. Then it rose again as the door was reopened and the stone-in-the-rain, more stridently yet to catch the retreating attendant, called: ‘Mrs Birdwire must have ginger biscuits.’

  ‘The woman’, said Timmy, ‘is the Birdwire’s familiar. Name of Pike. Lady Pike. The Pike is awfully wealthy – much wealthier than the Birdwire. But being God’s own hanger-on she lives with the Birdwire and manages for her. Anima naturaliter toady.’ Timmy smiled complacently, apparently in tribute to his own skill in character-drawing. ‘If you meet her’, he added as an afterthought, ‘she’ll ask you if you have a garden of character.’

  Winter was thinking of Benton. He wondered if Bussenschutt in his compartment was aware that the Lady whose chattels had created the recent uproar was the same whose name had so disturbed his senior tutor. In explanation of that subsidiary mystery it could now at least be said that the Birdwire milieu was likely to be uncongenial to the academic mind. And Winter turned to Timmy. ‘I hope’, he said, ‘not to meet either of them. I take it they’re not likely to be asked to the party?’

  ‘Not at all likely. But they might turn up. The Birdwire likes enemies as well as friends. An aggressive old person. Daddy isn’t at all aggressive.’

  Timmy,’ said Toplady, seizing upon this opportunity with a readiness which Winter had to admire, ‘I would like you to tell us something about your father. Or rather, just because you have told us something, I think we may fairly ask you to tell us something more. For if as we have been given to suppose you believe that it isn’t without a certain effect on his spirits and indeed on his way of feeling about things generally that this thing has happened, then it will be better surely, if we are to be of any help – and indeed for the mere business of getting on in an unembarrassed way – that we should know just how and to what extent that certain effect is evident.’

  This tactful composition, Winter said to himself, was to the point. The fantasy of the vitalized Spider was in itself pleasing enough, but by resulting mental derangement in his prospective host he was unprepared to be amused. Timmy’s account of his father’s condition had been vague – and probably slightly alarmist; here was Toplady decently pressing for exacter information. Waiting with some keenness for Timmy’s reply. Winter felt slightly uncomfortable; and it was this perhaps that prompted him to stick his head once more into the corridor and look round. He was just in time for something odd.

  He saw an eye. Quite far away – beyond the end compartment which he knew housed Bussenschutt – and appearing cautiously from a little recess which led to a lavatory, he saw an eye and exactly as much of a man’s face as an eye must carry with it if it is to peer successfully round a corner. The effect was curiously unreal – suggestive, it occurred to Winter, less of cautious observation than of a pictorial convention of cautious observation on the cover of a magazine – and it was fleeting; in a moment the eye was seconded by an uncertain nose, half of a close-cropped grey moustache and the corresponding half of a rather less uncertain mouth. Then the whole man came into view – a middle-aged man clad with casual and well-worn elegance – and stepped hurriedly down the corridor. Reaching the neighbourhood of Mrs Birdwire’s and Lady Pike’s compartment, and as if suddenly infected by the brute creation still intermittently vociferous within, he dropped on his hands and knees and scampered briskly past. Then he rose to his feet with deftness and dignify, glanced rapidly into several compartments, murmuring aloud the while. He came nearer, paused to allow Winter to withdraw his head, turned in through the open door, and – still murmuring – sat down. He looked absently round – first at Timmy, then at Toplady, and then at Winter. Finally his glance returned to Timmy and broke into friendly recognition. ‘Hullo’, he said, ‘how are you?’

  ‘Gerald Winter and Hugo Toplady,’ said Timmy formally, ‘– my father.’

  3

  Mr Eliot – the student of Pope, creator of the Spider, and parent doomed to the bin – preserved in middle-age the athletic slimness of his son. But though spare rather than rotund he gave something of the impression of a child’s balloon – of a delicate equilibrium, vibrating with the promise of rising gently into the air at a touch, and this buoyancy carrying with it in its turn the suggestion of deflatability. Mr Eliot, it might be hazarded, possessed the sort of good spirits that are the more engaging for being of a sort peculiarly vulnerable to the arrows of fate. And he was indeed probably shy; he had the rapid social instinct which the shy and cultivated must develop. ‘I hope’, he said, ‘that Timmy is bringing you down to stop with us?’

  Winter and Toplady made the grateful murmurings of those who feel that their position is being regularized. Timmy said something about his telegram. Mr Eliot nodded with a vagueness which was still perhaps tact. ‘I had to run up to town,’ he said; ‘a thing that doesn’t often happen nowadays. But Belinda will have got the wire and be sending someone to the station. I’m afraid’ – and he addressed Winter – ‘that this is a very tedious train. Sometimes I’ve thought of writing to the company.’ He paused on the polite implication that this was an issue on which Winter might say the wisely definitive word. ‘But I’ve no doubt’, he added practically, ‘that its vagaries are directed at dividends, and I’m a shareholder myself. Still, it’s very tedious, particularly if one isn’t used to it,’ and Mr Eliot smiled, clearly finding the tediousness of his train among this world’s soothing and satisfactory things.

  With considerable relief Winter determined that Mr Eliot was demonstrably sane. But he felt an impulse of irritation against the romancing of Timmy. And it was perhaps as a reflex to this that he said, not wholly kindly: ‘I find this train not at all unentertaining.’ He let his eye stray to the corridor.

  Toplady, though ignorant of Mr Eliot’s peculiar proceedings of a few minutes before, divined the need for intervention. ‘The house on the hill’, he said didactically and with unusual directness, ‘belongs to some cousins of mine.’

  They all looked out of the window. Perched with urbane aggressiveness on top of a hill – and violating thereby the nicest canons of its period – was a spreading eighteenth-century mansion, its empty and impeccable proportions emphasized against a wintry sky-line. ‘A big house,’ said Winter with malicious respect. He glimpsed Timmy grinning understandingly – as with the intimation of his knowing from experience that his tutor was feeling relieved, annoyed, and ready to plunge into sustained verbal extravagance.

  Toplady, conscious that his claim had been without motive of arrogance, proceeded to set the now retreating mansion in a sympathetic light. ‘Steynfield Hall,’ he said. ‘Even more than it would be so unhappily natural to suppose, they have been hit by death duties during
the past thirty years. Recently my cousin had to disperse the library. And now he thinks – or so it is thought – that he may even have to give up his mastership of hounds. How bad – are they not? – things are.’

  The landowner in Mr Eliot nodded sincere by absent agreement. The novelist – Winter suspected – made a mental note of Toplady’s peculiar rhetoric. But it was a third Mr Eliot who spoke. ‘The Steynfield library? I remember the sale very well. There were several Caxtons. Belinda went.’ He turned to Winter. ‘My daughter is interested in early printers’ devices.’ He spoke casually, as a well-bred man plays his trump card. ‘She has already had one or two papers in the Library.’ Mr Eliot’s eye glanced with a hint of reproach towards Timmy and returned, with the same hint faintly lingering, to Winter. It would be nice, the remote implication ran, if Belinda’s brother had caught similar scholarly tastes from his tutor.

  From Timmy’s corner came a succession of faint snaps. He had produced another cake of chocolate and was breaking it into irregular chunks. ‘Books,’ he said, ‘’tis a dull and endless strife. Chocolate?’

  Mr Eliot took a piece of chocolate and father and son sat munching side by side. ‘Come, hear the woodland linnet? Yes – yes, indeed. But I don’t think Wordsworth meant to condemn books outright – or even bookishness. He speaks very appreciatively of books in the Prelude. We couldn’t really get on without books; not even without that sort of books to the making of which there is no end. Don’t you think?’ And Mr Eliot, plainly proposing the pleasures of a little literary conversation, turned again to Winter.

  At this moment the train bumped to a stop. ‘The junction,’ said Timmy. In his voice was the peculiar tone by which the outsider recognizes a family joke.

  Mr Eliot, hitherto a monument of placid content, was at this transformed into a vessel of quintessential and incomprehensible gaiety – a gaiety that stirred neither in word not in gesture but was all in a momentary translucency of the physical man, as if someone had contrived an exquisite electrical effect. At the same time he contrived to appear acutely apprehensive. ‘You look,’ he said urgently to his son.