Stop Press

by Michael Innes

  He uncoiled like a spring and stood looking down at her in her low chair from a comical height. ‘Patricia – you bark up trees?’ He swayed his arms like branches in a wind.

  They laughed – but Patricia felt that the momentary tension had left uncomfortable pressure ridges on her mind. ‘Barking up trees is in my family, as romancing and posing is in yours. If you – or Belinda – are the joker you are unlikely to go to certain extremes I’ve had in my head.’

  ‘Whatever do you mean?’

  ‘Do you know that Belinda has asked down my brother?’

  ‘I don’t know – but how nice.’

  ‘Belinda has asked him and I’ve hurried him up. He’ll be here for dinner. He’s a policeman.’

  ‘He’s what?’

  ‘A policeman. I’m afraid Mr Toplady will find it very strange. But the unfortunate Applebys have had to get along on their brains.’

  Timmy blushed and for a moment was reduced to a mumble. ‘I say, you don’t really think that – well, the joker is going to do something extreme?’

  ‘I think’ – Patricia glanced round the room – ‘that at the moment something quite moderate would have a considerable effect.’

  ‘I rather think it would. Did you say your brother was coming for dinner?’ He glanced at his watch. ‘If so, they’re both late. Do you see Belinda over there? Her inner eye is on the kitchen. The resources of Rust are a bit overtaxed, as they say, and disaster is only too probable. I think’ – he began to sidle positively awkwardly away – ‘I’ll go out and see what’s doing.’

  She watched him out of the room. Her feelings were confused. Perhaps they might have been sorted out into a realization that there are no fairy princes in this world, but only young men with necks and hands which emerge beautifully from their clothes, and characters which emerge much more problematically from their conversation. From all this she tilted away her chin – and then she remembered that John, as well as the dinner, was fifteen minutes late. Probably it was a puncture; perhaps it was an accident. She tilted up her chin farther and found herself contemplating a cluster of soft electric globes concealed in a large chandelier. Her eye was following the line of this when it vanished. For a moment a ghostly simulacrum of the room – Timmy’s butterflies, Rupert’s fish, Archie’s bridge, Belinda’s Renoir, and Mr Eliot’s guests – flickered on her retina. Then that vanished too. In the living-room at Rust a universal darkness had buried all.

  The shock produced absolute silence – a silence which was instantly caught and held on a chain of remote, sinister sound. From above, from outside – impossible to tell – came the faint tap-tap of a stick falling at measured paces on a hard surface. As if the listeners were hurtling at an incredible speed towards some enormous ticking clock, the sound grew in volume stroke by stroke, rose unbearably to a climax no louder than the fall of an axe across a broad field, ebbed away.

  Patricia heard Belinda’s voice, cold with anger, at her ear.

  ‘The tap’, said Belinda, ‘of the stick of the blind secretary of the Spider.’

  7

  A murmur, a babel of voices mounting swiftly through surprise, anxiety, fright towards the lower reaches of panic, filled the living-room at Rust. When light came it came bewilderingly, an arc sweeping diagonally from the skirting board to halt by the ceiling, and falling, the more collected could discern, through a lightly curtained french window from the terrace without. The babel of mere exclamations and cries was cut by a scream – it was Kermode’s fat lady; and by one of the odd tricks of communication which crisis brings the eyes of the company were drawn to the window. The curtain, now a sort of illuminated canvas like a cinematographic screen, showed the lurching silhouette of a man. The silhouette advanced, grew colossal, diminished again. There was a crack as of a window wrenched roughly open; the curtain was flung back; the light grew to a blaze and revealed itself as from the headlights of a car. A voice – ordinary, but combining volume with calm to an extent which constituted an elocutionary feat – said, ‘Be quiet. There is no danger.’ And, as if great valves had been closed, everything was still.

  Patricia, who had sprung to her feet with the darkness, found Belinda still standing beside her. ‘If the joker’, she said in a slightly unsteady voice, ‘hasn’t built up a stunning entrance for John.’

  ‘No danger at all,’ reiterated John Appleby. He spoke with the advancing briskness of a physician who is consolidating his hold on anxious relatives. ‘As far as I could see, the whole house went into darkness at once, so it may be a matter of a main fuse. I have a torch here, if anyone cares to investigate.’ He stepped into the room.

  It was like an amateur stage on which something has gone badly wrong with the lighting and the rehearsing simultaneously. In the tunnel of prickling illumination from the car the guests moved uneasily, conscious that they had been on the verge of participating in an embarrassing scene. The amenities of civilization will sometimes let us down with a bump, and the normally tuned mind is prepared for the isolated occasions on which the machine fails. It had failed at Rust now, and the effect, as Patricia had half prophesied, was considerable. For an atmosphere – the sort of atmosphere which Mr Eliot liked to build up in his romances – was building itself up in the house; Appleby, contemplating the scene from the window, was instructed by glances which were going sidelong over nervous shoulders. On this miscellaneous crowd funny-business was getting a grip.

  Mr Eliot emerged and there were brief introductions. ‘Patricia’s brother?’ he said. ‘Dear me, the day is full of surprises, and this is a most pleasant one. Your arrival was most opportune, as well as a capital thing in itself. I am afraid I failed badly in not immediately calling out a reassuring word. But the fact is that I was reminded of something odd and taken, I fear, rather by surprise. The deus ex machina is a much abused phrase, but on this occasion not inappropriate. And you are happy’ – when Mr Eliot let himself quote Pope he usually did so with the utmost unobtusiveness – ‘to catch us just at dinner-time. But to examine the fuses is, as you say, an excellent idea. I must apologize to everybody for this discomfort. Please all stay here while Mr Appleby and I go and investigate.’

  If Timmy, Patricia reflected, had flashes of Mr Eliot, Mr Eliot had his moments of being like Timmy. Disturbed, his conversation would break down into chatter – and certainly he was disturbed now. He gave the impression of having drifted farther away. From absence of mind and mild distraction he had passed earlier in the evening to a phase of strenuous concentration on the world immediately about him. Now he was gay. The trick of illumination from within was on him again, but it might have been fancied as an almost fevered light, with a hectic rather than its old lambent quality. Patricia looked at John and John looked at Patricia. And John’s glance said, Yes, that it was curious enough, and that he forgave her for hauling him down. A moment later he flicked on his torch and followed his host through the door. The room had fallen silent again; their steps and the ever so slightly too rapid voice of Mr Eliot faded down the corridor.

  Mr Eliot’s butler held the torch – nervously, for he had left Mr Eliot’s cook groping in the last distraction in the kitchen. The lad who was promoted on party occasions to the position of a sort of untwinned footman held the steps – unnecessarily, for Appleby’s balance was secure enough. Two palourmaids whom nobody had thought to dismiss held something like their peace. Mr Eliot himself held a candle which he waved to an effect of slight confusion above his head. Perhaps because of the complicated electric pipes, the wall was a maze of metres, switches, and fuse-boxes.

  ‘Really,’ said Mr Eliot, whom some inner impulsion urged still to unnecessary speech, ‘you seem, my dear Mr Appleby, to have the whole complicated installation at your finger-tips. May I ask you are an electrical engineer?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. As a matter of fact’ – even amid this little squad of domestic assistants it would be better to tell the truth at once – ‘I’m a policeman. I work in the CID at Scotland Yard.’
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br />   Mr Eliot’s candle side-slipped, steadied itself. ‘The CID?’ He pronounced the letters as blankly as if he had never peopled that institution with a score of imaginary officers; a moment later he seemed to recollect himself. ‘This is interesting indeed; I had no idea that Patricia had a brother so picturesquely employed. We shall be able to break a lance together, you and I. And truth will no doubt prove stranger than fiction once more.’

  Appleby smiled cheerfully down. ‘Truth’, he said idly, ‘is truth, and fiction is fiction – and here are the two meeting in the dark.’

  There was a little silence. ‘Do you think’ – the voice from below was suddenly strained – ‘that you can locate the trouble?’ It paused and added – as if afraid that it had too abruptly changed tone – ‘my dear fellow?’

  Appleby, who seldom touched a nerve without intending it, frowned into the darkness. ‘I’ve located it. As I thought, it’s a big fuse that’s blown. And there’ another, complete in its frame, that can be slipped in. There.’ A faint click came from above; Rust was flooded once more from a hundred points of light.

  The parlourmaids scuttled, the lad made off with the steps, the butler switched off the electric torch and stood contemplating his employer’s efficient guest with an expression of deference which was substantially genuine; the gentleman’s vocation might be out of the way, but he had drawn order from chaos and in the kitchens the situation was as good as saved. ‘Dinner’, said Mr Eliot’s butler to Mr Eliot – with the air of calling attention to a less spectacular but still meritorious conjuring trick of his own – ‘will be served in five minutes.’ And upon this the gentleman from the CID stripped off his overcoat and revealed himself as being as decently dinner-jacketed as anybody. Mr Eliot’s butler, a last shade of anxiety dismissed from his mind, bowed and withdrew.

  The nerve-centre of Rust’s electric supply stood in a small room off the hall, from which it was separated by a glass door identical with that of the telephone-room opposite. Mr Eliot, left alone with his new guest, appeared in two minds whether to linger in this retreat with the solitary unknown or to hasten back to the multitudinous and familiar elsewhere. He glanced through the glass door to the hall, where was only the retreating figure of the manservant; he glanced up at the array on the wall, and Appleby noticed that his gaze went competently enough to the fuse that had been concerned. And then his eye turned to his companion; an eye presaging a critical question. ‘Mr Appleby – I suppose you are peculiarly qualified to say – does it appear to have been accidental?’

  Appleby knew enough of the situation to understand that Mr Eliot had reason to apprehend malice; he knew nothing of the tapping which had followed the blackout. It was pleasant to open relations with a reassuring word. ‘Why, yes,’ he said. ‘The fuse was genuinely blown; one can tell. It appears to have been a mere accident.’

  Mr Eliot made an odd movement; he was spinning oddly on his heel; he was a crumple of black and white clothes on the black and white tessellated floor… And from far away, fainter than the faintest sounding of Siegfried’s distant horn, falling in its exhausted little cadences like a slow curtain on some accomplished scene, came the ebbing melody of the clarinet.

  Dinner was served at eight twenty-five, with Mr Eliot at the head of his table. Only Appleby had witnessed his collapse; consequently there was only Appleby to meditate on it. He had seen such tricks of the over-taxed mind before: on the physical side quickly over, but on the psychical holding tenaciously to the oblivion at which they are directed. Mr Eliot had forgotten; for the time being had comprehensively forgotten the blackness which had fallen upon his guests and the redness which had been scrawled above them; had forgotten the sounds which were beginning to drift out of his books and about the corridors of Rust; had forgotten Mrs Birdwire and the vicar and the schoolmistress and all that had followed in their train. For a blessed space the Spider slumbered again within his ink and paper walls; this party was as the party last year and the year before: something which pleased Wedge, and a number of other people no doubt capital in their way besides; the necessary annual complement of the curious but really frequently amusing way in which he had come to make an abundant living for Timmy and Belinda and Rupert and Archie and himself. It would soon be over, and meantime not even the large stuffed spider which somebody had suspended above the dinner-table could be regarded as seriously disturbing. The Spider was in his cupboard and all right with the world.

  Approximately these, thought Appleby, were his host’s mental processes. The result for the moment was a restored nervous equilibrium round the table, but the processes could hardly be regarded as promising in themselves. The mind does not devise such emergency measures save when hard-pressed; nor are they ever workable for long. If he were to be helpful he must move tolerably fast, and so far he possessed only inadequate sketches of the facts: Patricia’s letter, with Belinda’s invitation to come down; the beguiling if extravagant hypothesis with which Patricia had provided him on the telephone… He looked discreetly about the table.

  He saw – because his vision was arduously trained – that Belinda Eliot was acknowledging to herself that twenty-five minutes’ marking time had been none too good for the soup; that his sister was trying to make up her mind about a young man who must be Timmy Eliot; that Timmy Eliot was guiltily considering the possibility of playing truant on another and serious young man sitting near by; that a plump little man slightly resembling Mr Eliot had drunk a little too much on an empty stomach; that a large and ferocious man near the foot of the table had drunk much too much in the same condition; that most of the company knew of himself merely as the late arrival who had somewhat dramatically prevented minor panic; that the old lady sitting beside him knew a little more. All of which was scarcely useful. He was attempting further observation when the old lady spoke.

  ‘I’m afraid’, said the old lady, in what was evidently a formula, ‘that introductions are never thought necessary at this party. May I be very unconventional and say that I am Mrs Moule? You will sometimes see my name in teeny letters on–’

  ‘On the playbills,’ said Appleby. ‘It’s very nice to meet you. I am John Appleby, Patricia’s brother.’

  Mrs Moule blushed – not faintly but vividly, like Mr Disney’s dwarf. Appleby wrote her down in a businesslike way as a friend for the duration of the adventure. It was wonderful how useful a habit of retaining useless information sometimes proved. Mrs Moule laid a light hand on his sleeve. ‘Belinda’, she said in a low voice, ‘has confided in me.’

  One down, thought Appleby, to Belinda. But perhaps there was extenuating circumstance.

  Mrs Moule seemed to catch at his thought. ‘But Belinda is very discreet. I wouldn’t like to say that I have tried to be a mother to her, because it is a thing so many people tend to say of motherless children. But we have always been very friendly. She is a delightful girl. Perhaps a teeny bit modern, but of course that is to be expected.’

  Appleby agreed that it was to be expected that the young should be on the modern side. Mrs Moule said that the modern mind, though in many ways an improvement on the sorts of mind that had gone before, was inclined to be narrow. In five minutes Appleby was possessed of all Mrs Moule’s convictions on the unaccountable element in human affairs. ‘And now’, said Mrs Moule, ‘I am going to introduce you to Gerald Winter; I have been keeping him to myself for ever such a long time.’

  Winter was on Mrs Moule’s other side; the introduction was effected across her bosom and to the animated twinkling of her tiara. ‘Mr Winter’, said Mrs Moule, ‘is from Oxford. My brother, who is now Bishop of Udonga, though not at the same college, proves to have been at one almost next door.’

  Appleby, whose mind had been wandering during the latter part of Mrs Moule’s discourse, was momentarily at a loss for a suitable opening observation: the propinquity of Mr Winter’s college to that of the Bishop of Udonga was singularly barren of suggestion. Winter, however, immediately took charge of the conversation. ‘T
o be introduced’, he said, ‘as coming from Oxford: how exceedingly uninformative that is nowadays! A hundred odd years ago it meant that one was either a clergyman, a quasi-clergyman, or a dangerous democrat. Now the other fellow cannot be sure that one is not a micro-chemist, a trades-union secretary, a lover of Tamil and Telugu, or an international authority on the bacon industry. If the introduction is indistinct and takes place in the dark one’s sex is a matter of pure conjecture, and one’s complexion as likely to be black, yellow, or coffee as the traditional pinko-grey.’

  ‘I think’, said Mrs Moule, ‘that the universities are wonderfully unchanging places.’

  ‘You are mistaken; the pace is quite dizzying at both of them. At Oxford we have seen everything turned topsy-turvy within a generation. When our minds mellow and become disinclined for the sort of operations which distinguish a brisk civil-servant we are retired to little villas on the fringes of the town. The streets are thronged with learned ladies who have their more natural place in the poems of Lord Tennyson. Strange subjects are professed in the Schools: the bacon industry again, and even English literature – a lore hitherto properly confined to academics and to the native colleges of India.’ Winter paused briefly to sip hock. Appleby had time to reflect that the universities do indeed change, and this youngish aged don must be one of that diminishing remnant which continues to consult the art of dining out. Mr Eliot’s dinner-table was still far from easy, but one corner at least would produce a smooth flow of talk.

  ‘The dead languages’, continued Winter with the practised modulations which preserve a monologue from being a harangue, ‘which have been the most truly living languages for a matter of millennia, are now dying indeed. Boys come up from great public schools scarcely able to latinize their neck-verse. They have to be taught that Virgil and Sophocles were writers admired by Spenser and Milton: that a tragedy is a song of the goat; that “phonograph” is made up of two Greek words and that with the spread of the machine that name has passed into popular usage.’ He turned to Mrs Moule. ‘Do the people’, he asked with deft inconsequence, ‘really say “phonograph”? They do not. But it is the innocence of these cloistral beliefs, after all, that is their charm.’ He switched his eye to Appleby, the little climax at which he was aiming within sight. ‘Adorable dreamer,’ he quoted, ‘home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs and unpopular names’ his voice dropped gracefully ‘where a gramophone is a phonograph still!’