Stop Press

by Michael Innes

  ‘I am afraid’, said Mr Eliot, ‘that the roof leaks. When I come to think of it, Laslett has complained more than once. And I believe that I replied most dogmatically that the roof couldn’t leak. How liable one is to take up rash a-prioristic positions.’

  Winter wondered if Laslett would get his roof repaired, or if Mr Eliot regarded the impact of experience as adequately met with a philosophic aphorism. He stood up and joined Toplady, who was peering through the door.

  ‘I think’, said Toplady, ‘that we must expect an unsettled weekend.’ He gave Winter a meaningful look which unflatteringly underlined the subtlety of this remark. Then he lowered his voice. ‘Ought we to have come? You know what I myself chiefly feel, and really at this particular moment as I have never done, is the sheer stretch of time between Friday’s luncheon and Monday’s breakfast.’

  Winter looked at his watch. ‘Is there to be a Friday’s luncheon?’

  ‘If only we could arrive I should imagine a good one. Our friends don’t seem anywhere very much à l’étroit. I suppose all those books must have made something like a fortune. And that must so definitely add to the disconcertingness of the present situation, don’t you think? Imagine’ – said Toplady with real feeling – ‘uncanny things happening to one’s bonds and dividend warrants.’

  ‘I find it difficult enough to imagine uncanny things happening to Eliot’s manuscripts. It wouldn’t surprise me if that part of the story were Timmy’s imagination.’

  Toplady glanced cautiously behind him. ‘Timmy is certainly rather eccentric. I suppose that in his family it is more of less the thing. Last term, for instance, he did something very odd. He sent me a long series of sonnets.’

  ‘Sonnets?’

  ‘I can’t think why. I’m not really interested in poetry and didn’t feel at all competent to criticize.’ Toplady looked with mild doubt at Winter. ‘And I discovered that last year he sent just the same poems to a man at Balliol – a black man.’

  ‘Dear me.’

  ‘So he really is rather unaccountable. But I don’t think he would romance about his father’s embarrassments. And I don’t think you will disagree with me when I say that whatever the facts that we should so much like to know about more exactly may be they do constitute a situation of a delicacy to be tactfully approached if at all.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Winter.

  ‘I thought,’ continued Toplady conscientiously, ‘that what you discussed in the train, though you won’t suspect that I question its interest to people who are interested in that sort of thing – among whom no doubt Mr Eliot himself might be guessed to be – led rather unfortunately perhaps–’

  ‘I agree’, said Winter, ‘with what you are in process of saying.’ Cautiously he stuck his head out of the barn. Near at hand he imagined that he had heard the purr of a motor-car.

  ‘Timmy said’, said Toplady, ‘that you were confident you could solve–’

  Winter interrupted brusquely. ‘That at least was Timmy’s nonsense. I’m quite sure I shall solve nothing. Nor you either.’

  Toplady did not dispute this perhaps unnecessary thrust. ‘Then I wish’, he said stolidly, ‘we might find a person who could.’

  Somebody was whistling. A little falling melody, at once limp and luxurious like the recital of a neurotic symptom, ebbed about the barn. There was an interval of silence and the phrases were repeated – so carefully that it became evident that the interval had been given to their dispassionate appraisal. This time the melody was taken a little farther, slowing down as it moved. There was another considering pause and the theme was dismissed – decisively sped on its way with a couple of bars from the overture to Figaro. ‘Excuse me,’ said a voice. ‘Are you with Mr Eliot?’

  Winter and Toplady turned round. The figure of a girl, enveloped in a raincoat which was much too big for her, had appeared at a corner of the barn. At the same moment Mr Eliot came forward from behind them. ‘My dear Patricia,’ he cried, ‘however did you hunt us down?’

  The girl called Patricia stepped into the barn and sent a shower of raindrops tossing from her bare head. ‘I noticed the sparrows’, she said, ‘and worked it out for myself.’

  Mr Eliot, at once wet and faintly luminous like a corposant or a fragment of Greek fire, performed introductions. ‘This is Mr Winter, Timmy’s tutor – and this is his friend, Hugo Toplady. Our rescuer is Patricia Appleby.’

  Miss Appleby knit conventional murmurs to a glance which was frankly appraising. ‘Belinda sent me,’ she told Mr Eliot, ‘and I promised that in fifteen minutes you should lunch. So come along. You must be hungry. Though I expect’ – and she looked for the first time at Timmy – ‘you’ve been having boiled sweets to keep body and soul together.’

  ‘Chocolate,’ said Mr Eliot cheerfully.

  ‘It used to be boiled sweets. Webster, it’s ages since we met.’

  For a second they eyed each other like shy and wary savages. Timmy’s reply, it was pleasant to observe, was an unwonted mumble; he edged a little nearer to Toplady. The girl – she was slight and in a sharply chiselled way beautiful – pushed a wet wisp of hair behind an ear and the movement brought up a chin more decided than Timmy’s own. ‘You’ve grown,’ she said and wheeled briskly to the others.

  Timmy had no doubt grown. But in their second of life the physical statement and the swerve away had held a challenge as direct and primordial as hide-and-seek in Eden. Winter was abruptly conscious that for this weekend he was on leave from a cloister. He turned to Mr Eliot. ‘I am old’, he said, ‘and labour after vanities.’

  Mr Eliot, glowing faintly in the dusk of the barn, meditated for a moment. Then for plainly he liked to catch an implication – he shone positively lambent. ‘But at least’, he said, ‘there is luncheon. Patricia – the car.’ And Winter followed the others into the rain, plunged in sudden and treacherous gloom.

  The car, sleekly streaming like a pachyderm, was standing by the side of the barn. It was big and new; Queen Anne’s white showed no scratch or stain; and inside the air was warm and dry. Winter, climbing in beside Miss Appleby, wondered idly to what extent his host was wedded to such gifts of the Spider. There was every indication that life at Rust Hall was, in Toplady’s phrase, by no means à l’étroit. But then a large part of our total human effort is directed at dumping abounding commodities and services on the rich and the process – unlike Lady Pike and Mrs Birdwire – is one which the rich are unable to dodge by odd manoeuvres in trains. To be showy must be, for the rich man, the line of least resistance; to be lavish to the satisfaction of others without being loud to a point distressing to himself must be a very considerable study. Mr Eliot perhaps bought the cars that were thought good for him and let his own taste for quiet and informed elegance spread itself in the paint.

  ‘It isn’t’, said Patricia Appleby, as if approximately aware of Winter’s line of thought, ‘my sort of car. But it seems to manage itself. Do you notice how when one does this’– and she trod on the accelerator – ‘it hits you gently but firmly in the back?’ They swooped between high dripping hedges like a leaf before a gale. ‘And the only sound is from the tyres.’

  ‘Are you’, asked Winter – who took a little time to adjust himself to conversation with young women – ‘keen on cars?’

  ‘Keen on cars?’ Miss Appleby’s hands went smoothly over the controls and they slowed down, slid accurately round a sharp bend, miraculously avoided a half-drowned dog, and leapt ahead once more with terrifying acceleration. ‘Not a bit.’ They ran on in silence for a minute and took another corner so that Winter found himself pressing hard against the floorboards with his feet. In the back Timmy was chattering excitedly to Toplady about a landscape invisible behind curtains of rain; Mr Eliot, subdued perhaps by a consciousness of the prodigal party awaiting him, huddled unnoticeably in his corner. ‘Belinda and Timmy and I’, said Miss Appleby, as if feeling that some remark less negative than her last would be polite, ‘were at school together. But I haven’t seen Timmy
since – nor much of Belinda until we got a job together not long ago. Do you believe in co-education?’

  In the common-room one’s faiths are seldom challenged in this simple way. ‘I really don’t know,’ said Winter. ‘But the system seems to produce very charming–’

  Miss Appleby trod on the accelerator to the extent of annihilating what he realized to be a fatuous compliment. ‘I’, she said, ‘do. Were you ever in a women’s college?’

  ‘Not effectively.’

  ‘It doesn’t march. Me-he! There her lily snaps.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘The Spanish Cloister – poem.’

  ‘Oh, yes. But, after all, his lily. And I’m sure the malice of the monastery is fully as robust as that of the nunnery. It would be nice, though, to offer Oxford a very great sum of money if it would establish a co-educational college. I can just imagine my colleague Horace Benton–’

  ‘Horace Benton?’ said Miss Appleby. ‘I sent him a telegram this morning.’

  ‘Or old Mummery–’

  ‘Mummery? I sent him one too.’ She glanced at him curiously. ‘I’m afraid’, she said formally, ‘I didn’t quite catch your name.’

  ‘Winter.’

  ‘How very odd.’

  ‘Odd?’

  She shook her head. ‘I oughtn’t to have mentioned it. A breach’ – she shook her eyes from the road and glanced at him in ironical solemnity – ‘of professional confidence. And here we are.’

  The car swept through lodge gates and purred up a drive.

  Mr Eliot’s proceedings at Rust station had been curiously paralleled by Dr Bussenschutt at the junction. For Dr Bussenschutt like Mr Eliot was determined on an unobtrusive exit; only his method was a little different and in keeping with the dignity of his position. To the porter who came to pick up his bags Bussenschutt said briefly, ‘Hide them.’

  ‘Beg pardon, sir?’

  ‘My good man, I am concerned to elude observation. Hide them.’ Bussenschutt disbursed what he judged to be a sufficient sum of money, took a curious view of Mr Eliot’s guests stowing themselves in the cream cars, took a further and cautious glance at another big car waiting across the yard, and retired with a pile of books to a lavatory. He allowed himself a ten minutes’ respite with the Journal of Classical Archaeology and then returned doggedly to Little Grains of Sand. Thoroughness had been the keynote of his career. The quarrel with his colleague Mummery dated from the occasion on which Mummery had informed him, to the accompaniment of a significant snort, that thoroughness was too often a poor substitute for logic.

  Bussenschutt’s travels had been almost exclusively in the realms of gold. Sometimes he had conducted bands of fellow Hellenists around the glory that was Greece; more commonly he had traversed the same ground within the four walls of his library. Reading Little Grains of Sand, which was Mrs Birdwire’s account of wanderings in Central Australia, he was appalled that such places should exist, and yet further appalled that they could be celebrated in so excruciating a prose. Nevertheless he read attentively to the end. Then he took another fortifying swig of archaeology and turned to the next volume. Before leaving Oxford he had equipped himself with the complete works of Mrs Birdwire from Mr Blackwell’s bookshop.

  It was to be noticed that all Mrs Birdwire’s narratives began and ended in an old English garden. The substance of the book might concern Esquimaux or Bantu, the Loire or the Limpopo, bull-fighting or Arctic exploring. But always this garden lay tranquilly at either end, crowded with flowers that bade the departing traveller a thousand fragrant farewells, paraded by dogs whose business it was to recognize their much-enduring mistress and welcome her boisterously home. Dr Bussenschutt, who knew nothing of horticulture, felt that he must give the flowers the benefit of a doubt. But of the dogs he found that he strongly disapproved; the thing had been done with greater effect and economy in the Odyssey. So he skipped the next garden, wrapped his overcoat about him, and sailed with Mrs Birdwire for Tango Island. On Tango, it appeared, the inhabitants were allowed a bottle of whisky per head on Monday mornings; on Thursdays, Friday, and Saturdays the Administrator gave garden parties with a running buffet; and on Sundays the Bishop of Tango-Tango gave an entertainment at the conclusion of divine service. Mrs Birdwire had been impressed and moved by the loyalty of the people of Tango to the imperial idea. Bussenschutt, unimpressed, closed the book and got up to reconnoitre.

  The local train had departed, as had the large car which had been awaiting Mr Shoon’s guest in the station yard. Bussenschutt emerged on the platform, took a turn up and down in fugitive sunshine, and summoned his porter. ‘Get me’, he said, ‘a substantial ham sandwich and a quiet taxi-cab.’ The confidence of his demand would have done credit to Mrs Birdwire herself addressing a band of Sherpas, Fellaheen, or Caribs; the sandwich appeared and Bussenschutt consumed it while continuing his perambulation and studying a map. The taxi shortly followed and gave substantial evidence of quietude; its driver was an ancient person in a smock. ‘Good day to you, my master’, said Bussenschutt, whose manner on rural excursions became markedly old-world, ‘are you well furnished with fuel?’

  The driver, having subjected this enquiry to some species of mental interpretation, answered that he was all right.

  ‘I am going to Shoon Abbey. But first I propose to take the air. Drive me’ – he consulted his map – ‘to Little Limber.’ He superintended the disposal of his bags and climbed in. ‘Proceed’, he commanded, ‘at a moderate pace. I am engaged in study.’

  The taxi crawled through England – an England which was wintry, wet, and beautiful under November. The evergreens were burnished by the rain and their berries a dark fire; stubble still alternated with the ploughlands and spread its dull gold beneath the flight of the redwings; oak and ash stripped themselves like athletes against the sky as their fading wealth of autumn passed away; the sun, coming and going amid rain clouds that were drawing in, reared to the north the fragmentary rainbow of Constable or Crome. But to these lovely and elevating appearances Bussenschutt was blind; his ear, too, was sealed against the pheasants and the fieldfares. He had pitched Little Grains of Sand, together with the book on Tango Island, into the ditch, and was concentrating his mind on Minarets, Monasteries, and Myself. When the taxi eventually stopped he looked about him with a frown. ‘My good fellow,’ he said distastefully, ‘what wretched hamlet is this?’

  ‘Little Limber, sir – the same you asked to be driven to.’

  ‘Ah! Proceed’ – Bussenschutt glanced abstractedly at his map – ‘to Pigg.’

  ‘Pigg, sir? We came through Pigg not fifteen minutes back.’ The ancient person driving was aggrieved. Had his fare displayed a passing interest in the countryside he would have put him down as a harmless urban eccentric. But he objected to being employed for purposes offensive to human reason.

  ‘My physician’, said Bussenschutt readily, ‘has prescribed carriage-exercise. Proceed to Pigg.’ Mrs Birdwire, he had just read, was skilled in gaining access to the less familiar institutions of the Near East by disguising herself as a eunuch.

  The ancient person unwillingly circled the village green of Little Limber and set his bonnet towards Pigg. A shower had been and gone, leaving the air remotely pungent with earth; flocks of finches swept across a sky whose grey was faintly green and faintly blue. But Bussenschutt continued to read at his normal pace of a hundred and eighty pages an hour. Camels, it appeared, had an inordinate affection for Mrs Birdwire. They nuzzled. Bussenschutt remembered that this was behaviour hitherto ascribed to the dogs in the epilogues. He turned on. The dogs in the epilogue to Minarets, Monasteries, and Myself fawned.

  ‘Pigg, sir.’

  Bussenschutt looked up from his book. ‘Pigg revisited’, he said with jocularity. ‘You may now proceed to the Abbey, my master, but let your route be by Snug.’

  The driver was past expostulation. He made a note to raise his fare by threepence a mile, circled the village green of Pigg, drove steadily on and thro
ugh Little Limber, turned off down a winding lane.

  ‘Stay!’ said Bussenschutt suddenly. ‘Whose is that curious house on the hill?’

  ‘Belongs to a Mrs Birdwire, sir.’

  ‘Mrs Birdwire? How more’ – Bussenschutt was quite superfluously mendacious – ‘than strange. And that is her carriage drive?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Bussenschutt glanced at his watch. ‘My friends at the Abbey’, he said, ‘must wait. Mrs Birdwire and I have been all over the globe together and it is only proper that I should call.’ He closed Minarets, Monasteries, and Myself and pitched it over a hedge. ‘Drive up.’

  4

  Introduced into the dining-room at the tail-end of a meal, Winter had the feeling that it had all happened before. Among this crowd, engorging with just this animation and just this unconsciousness of the fundamental oddity of the process these very custards and pastries, he had come at this very moment long ago.

  One’s first reaction to a feeling of this sort is to see to what details it will stretch. Winter looked to his left and saw a sweet omelette which was certainly part of the picture; he looked before him and saw a plate of soup with the same distant but piercing familiarity; he looked to his right and saw a meringue – and with the meringue the illusion broke down. He must, he thought, be tired; for it is fatigue that plays this disconcerting trick. One’s awareness flickers momentarily so that a scene slips past unnoticed to the region of memory, from which it instantly rebounds with the quality of reminiscence and jostles with the direct impressions of a second later. Perhaps the most disconcerting of all approximately normal tricks of the mind. Dr Herbert Chown, whose frequently publicized features he distinguished some way down the table, would call it paramnesia…

  Winter, obscurely disturbed, remembered his dream of the night before. In sleep he had moved through just this babble of sound, this ceaseless semi-automatic talk. The only difference was that the chattering in his dreams had been the chattering of dons, whereas this was the chattering of people who chattered a pitch higher and two shades louder – and who made rather more noise too with glasses and forks and spoons. Mr Eliot’s dining-room, during the dubious celebrations now in progress, was not altogether unsuggestive of another dream: the nightmare of being back at school. The table was almost as long; the mental age of those about it was not perhaps very different; only – Winter thankfully acknowledged – the soup was wholly of another world.