Stop Press

by Michael Innes

  ‘Ah!’ Winter interrupted in a heavy forensic manner. ‘Then they do exist.’

  ‘I suppose they do. I’ve seen only one set of verses of the sort; it was about Mr Wedge, and most amusing.’

  ‘With the true Papinian barb?’

  ‘Quite with the true barb.’ Mrs Moule smiled as at a thoroughly satisfactory reminiscence, and then checked herself. ‘It is a curious trait’, she added conscientiously, ‘in so kind-hearted a man as Mr Eliot. But, you know, I wasn’t thinking of lampoons, or anything of that sort, when I spoke of mild sadism.’

  ‘Then’, said Winter with a hint of impatience, ‘what were you thinking of?’

  ‘Why’ – Mrs Moule spoke with the surprise of one to whom an answer is obvious – ‘I was thinking of poor Sir Archibald, of course.’

  Appleby took a moment to place poor Sir Archibald in his mind; this name had figured in Patricia’s account in the most fleeting way. ‘Sir Archibald Eliot? Well, now you must tell me about him.’

  It was too late. Belinda had caught the fat lady’s eye. Lightly and ponderously, gracefully and awkwardly, the women were preparing to troop from the room.

  8

  Rust Hall withdrew farther into darkness, like some untidy but mellow little monster of burrowing habits going to earth with the night. The monster had four heads and not much else – it was in this that its untidiness consisted – and each head, couched low on the ground, had peered all day through mist and rain towards a different quarter of the compass. In the fabric were stones which Chaucer might have paused by the wayside to watch the fashioning of, but the first distinguishable fragments were of the fifteenth-century manor house which faced the east. This was still the dominating façade when Leland passed – the house, he recorded, ‘reasonably well-builded of stone and timbar’ and having a glimpse through its park of that prosperous little market town of Rust which Camden had called emporiolum non inelegans. The later sixteenth century had seen a right-about turn; Rust Hall now faced the heath and furze of the west – bruaria, says Camden – and its back, itself mouldering, was discreetly to a Rust which some shifting rural balance was bringing to the first verge of decay. This was the period of the emergence of the Eliots; stretching out firmly acquisitive hands from counters and warehouses in the city of London they possessed themselves of the manor and several properties adjoining; buying here, stealing there, and sometimes using a growing interest at court to achieve a judicious mean between the two. The seventeenth century had seen the house peopled with gentlemen now grossly gay and now portentously moral and scientific after the fashion of the Restoration, but all of them forgetful of commerce save at an orthodox second-hand; these turned south and built an imposing little Caroline front, adorned with statues botched by a Fleming out of an unfamiliar stone, and rising to gables which stood against the sky in convolutes and scrolls, almost florid and almost – many an Eliot thought –fit to crown a nobleman’s seat. For more than a hundred years this constituted the front of Rust Hall, and then the eighteenth century, turning away from the prospect of pastures which broke at an invisible distance in cliffs to the sea, built solidly to the north a classical screen and portico, with cyclops’ eye in the middle which seemed to keep watch over the pleasing and undistinguished arable country – Eliot land to the horizon on a sufficiently misty day – like an impassive steward. And this was the farthest that Rust Hall attained on the road to the imposing. The Eliot fortunes took an ill turn. Wits reputatble but dull, wits keen but reckless followed upon each other for some fatal generations. There was no more building and not very much money for paint. The fabric deteriorated and cracks appeared along the main joining lines, as if the centuries were going to sever themselves by fissure into their independent constituent parts. The arrival of Mr Richard Eliot, drifting into the estate on the deaths of sundry cousins and a brother, drifting soon afterwards into the command of unlimited underpinning and Queen Anne’s white, averted the threatened destruction. Heterogeneous but not undistinguished, Rust Hall prospered again.

  It had faded now into the entire darkness of a starless winter night. Though not rambling, it was confused; though long since fallen into some sort of harmony to the eye, it was yet incoherent and baffling to the exploring foot: an aggregate of improbable angles and broken lines, like a crystal which has been damaged in the slow process of accretion. Generations had moulded it and the structure had in its slighter degree the inconsequence of a great pubic building which has grown through centuries unoppressed by the historical sense.

  A wanderer approaching Rust Hall in the darkness – warily perhaps and by no other light than that coming from curtained windows – might be a good deal troubled by this fragmentary character in its architecture. The terrace which stretched augustly before the Georgian façade, though it might reasonably be expected either to curve round the house or to end in a leisured flight of steps, terminated precipitously above a small Dutch garden – the legacy of an Eliot who had supported Revolution – and threatened the prowling stranger with the novelty of immersion in a miniature canal. Such a furtive visitor, distinguishing as a likely approach to the house the darkness between two lines of ghostly elms, would be treading an avenue which led only to a doorway long since vanished, and down part of the length of which a fishpond – a project ill-conceived – had in its turn disappeared, leaving only certain pits and trenches ungrateful to the surprised foot. The marauder bent, it might be, on jest or burglary or more sinister design would be at an equal hazard if he once gained the interior of the house. At a dozen points where the centuries clashed the corridors would abruptly contact, so that to hug the wall cautiously in the dark was to run one’s nose hard upon wainscoting or plaster; at a score of others the floor level altered, threatening an abrupt descent down unseen steps from stone to wood or wood to stone. And the topography of Rust was all its own. One could not, certainly, wander endlessly in it – it was scarcely big enough for that – but one could very readily get lost. For the sort of misadventure which befell Mr Pickwick in the Great White Horse at Ipswich Rust Hall was just the place.

  It was convenient, too, for the conduct of any proceedings designed to remain obstinately mysterious. A treasure hunt, hide and seek, or one of those livelier games in which the company progressively accumulates in one recess or cupboard: for the prosecution of any of these in its ideality Rust was precisely framed. Rooms unexpectedly intercommunicated, passages branched and united again, loft ladders and a brace of spiral staircases offered unlooked-for opportunities for reversal and surprise. In the course of years Mr Eliot’s parties had gained a tolerable knowledge of all this, and there were several games expressly designed for the house – elaborate wandering-about affairs in which only the servants’ hall and butler’s pantry were out of bounds. But if it was a good house for playing at mysteries and bewilderments, it was equally a bad one in which to contemplate confronting the real thing. If funny-business were loosed in Rust funny-business would start with a pull.

  Rust lay in darkness streaked by a major and a minor constellation of light; Mr Eliot’s guests digesting and Mr Eliot’s servants washing up. Dr Chown’s observer, if – as is unthinkable – he had been eccentric enough to perch in an elm and contemplate this traditional disposition of things, would have found no change on which to speculate until close on half past ten. At that hour, hard by the lesser and lower constellation, there sprang up in an independent light. Armed with nice knowledge in such things, the observer would know that the silver had been disposed of and that Mr Eliot’s butler had retired to his sanctum. Mr Eliot, the observer might have reflected, had held ghostly communings with innumerable butlers, all of whom were wont to prowl their employers’ homes at midnight, bearing decanters of whisky which rattled and even crashed to the ground as their bearer stumbled upon sprawled or huddled forms in the library. But Mr Eliot’s fleshly butler, because he arranged matters at Rust on some principle established by a grandfather who had been in service with a marquis, was seldo
m out of his bed at eleven o’clock; the hour before that he liked to spend over some decent substitute for the Morning Post: and the only corpse he had discovered in his life was that of his aunt, Thomasina, who had fallen into a chalk-pit when sadly in liquor – an indulgence which had overtaken her when disappointed of a situation as head dairymaid in middle life.

  Dr Chown’s observer, had he been as omniscient as Dr Chown, might have beguiled himself with such trivial reflections while awaiting further developments. These came scantily. Now and then a light flashed on in the bedroom floors; once a short line of uncurtained lights briefly illuminated a billiard-table, as if someone had meditated a game and thought better of it or been dissuaded. Then at eleven o’clock there was a dramatic development: Rust, as once earlier that evening, disappeared into total darkness. Or almost total darkness, for from the portico and from the servants’ quarters came gleams which told that this time there was no complete failure of electric power. The darkness endured for only half a minute; beams, flickering and moving, appeared in the area where the main constellation of light had been; these presently radiated uncertainly and waveringly outward, as if from some central hive a little host of fireflies was spreading in random exploration about the house. This phenomenon lasted some five minutes, at the end of which time the fireflies – apparently with some attempt at sychronization – extinguished their wandering fires. A single light was left; this, stationary for a moment, began a solitary exploration which endured perhaps five minutes more; it was then joined by a second light and the two, dancing on together, presently discovered a third. The process continued accelerando; finally a little army of lights marched back to the spot from which they had first spread; a minute later they had disappeared in the normal illumination of Rust.

  Appleby remembered with some amusement how earlier in the evening he had announced his possession of an electric torch. The living-room was now littered with torches; perhaps two dozen all told had been used in the game. He wondered idly whether they were supplied like the hot water bottles, or whether guests had to bring their own – a doubt presently solved by Rupert Eliot, who appeared with a large bag and industriously stowed them all away. It had been a good game in itself, and all the better because there had been distinguishable a certain element of bravado in the entering on it. Nerves were still not normal at Rust; indeed, the tension could be felt as increasing again – perhaps in proportion to a returning fullness of consciousness in Mr Eliot. The plunge into darkness before the players hurried off with their torches to conceal themselves about the house could hardly have failed to bring back to his mind that earlier plunge into darkness before dinner: so obvious was this that Appleby tried to remember who had first suggested the game. But at this he failed; it was a game familiar to most of the party from previous years, and the impulse to it had seemed to start up from nowhere. Everyone was back now in the living-room, breathless, excited, some a little dusty or crumpled, some obscurely arch, some palpably recovering from the scare, each one perhaps in some degree relieved. There was a pause – a chattering pause but still a pause – and Appleby, removing a cobweb from his hair, sat back to think.

  That first plunge into darkness: there was an oddity about it which, rightly probed, might give a key to whatever was going forward. He had looked at the fuse – plainly burnt out – and had assured Mr Eliot that the thing bore the appearance of mere accident. And to this Mr Eliot had reacted in what seemed quite the wrong way. He had been fearful of malice – nevertheless Appleby’s assurance had been shock sufficient to throw him into a momentary faint. This, just because it didn’t make sense, must be potentially informative.

  Appleby had given no guarantee of accident; he had spoken simply of appearance. And such an appearance could have been engineered easily enough; the mere transposition of a sound and burnt-out fuse would have sufficed. What had upset Mr Eliot, then, was the announcement of apparent absence of malice. He believed, that was to say, that the lights had been tampered with and he was upset on learning that this tampering had been accompanied by a simple trick which gave to the affair a colouring of accident. And not only upset, thought Appleby, but bowled over as by an authentic minor brainstorm. Of this there was surely only one adequate explanation. The elementary piece of hocus-pocus with the fuses must be something which Mr Eliot thought of as among the undelivered fruits of his own mind. ‘Things planned for the Spider but never actually put on paper’: the phrase had occurred in Patricia’s letter and was the fantastic key, perhaps, to that otherwise inexplicably topsy-turvy reaction of Mr Eliot’s before the switchboards. He had seen his creation stirring indeed.

  This interpretation, though strange enough, did fit the facts. It even illuminated Mr Eliot’s first remark about the failure of the lights; that the incident had reminded him of something odd. If one accepted it, then, in what context must it be placed? Of this fantasy of the Spider creeping from the books just what, so far, were the constituent facts?

  There had been a series of broadly conceived practical jokes, ranging from an actual burglary and the recovery of burgled goods by a species of burlesque detection to the contrivance of eerie acoustical effects at Rust. These activities had been roughly related to the character called the Spider in Mr Eliot’s romances; in the main, moreover, they associated themselves with that earlier phase of the creature’s fictional existence in which he had figured as a disturber of the peace. There had been, too, the rather more curious and uncertain business of the manuscripts, Mr Eliot averring that these – particularly that of a novel called Murder at Midnight – had undergone certain changes beyond his control. These changes might be described as pejorative; they represented the Spider feeling the tug of his criminal past and wavering in his recent adherence to the cause of virtue. This matter of the manuscripts was still obscure, but not so obscure as the situation which seemed to be reflected in the incident of the lights. Here Mr Eliot’s vaguest and most startling suggestion came in. The being – man or shade – responsible for the manifestations was endowed with some species of clairvoyance; had the freedom of notions which Mr Eliot believed never to have passed the portals of his own brain. The trick with the fuses was in itself commonplace and unconvincing, but Mr Eliot was said to believe that there had been other, and startling, manifestations of this familiarity with his undiscovered thoughts. For the purpose of discovering who or what was at work this dubious territory was the most important of all, and the first step must be to form plans for exploring it. Unfortunately it was by its nature largely a matter of exploring Mr Eliot’s mind, and for this Appleby scarcely had licence. He had come down justifiably enough in response to Belinda Eliot’s legitimate anxieties. But he could hardly thrust himself upon whatever troubled counsels were taking place in Mr Eliot’s mind. He could only hope that Mr Eliot would presently invite him into his confidence, or – as seemed not unlikely – that the whole matter would be further illuminated by fresh incidents.

  One further line of thought, however, was open. Had the incidents such as they were any discernible coherence and direction – anything analysable in terms of motive?

  They were highly embarrassing to Mr Eliot and his children. Appleby doubted whether at the moment it would be useful to speculate beyond that first plain fact. Perhaps they were embarrassing also to Sir Rupert Eliot and Sir Archibald Eliot and any other Eliots which this capacious household might prove to contain. But Mr Eliot and Timmy and Belinda – Appleby judged on his present information – were peculiarly sufferers. The father had eminently the sort of sensitive and fanciful mind which could be readily played upon by hocus-pocus – in addition to which it appeared that his relations with the common ink-and-paper Spider had been verging on discomfort for some years. And the children appeared sensitive too: Belinda serious and fastidious; Timmy in a stage of puppyhood capable of feeling that Spiders were not quite the thing. The essence of the situation seemed to be a baiting of the Eliots: a baiting now boisterous and now subtle… The word subtle pulled h
im up. It reminded him that the trend of his thought scarcely took account of the disturbing notion formed by Patricia.

  Appleby had got so far in his speculations when he became aware that he was behaving eccentrically. The majority of Mr Eliot’s guests were not in musing mood, and anyone sitting in the midst of them in a brown study was liable to be regarded much as one who should cut capers at a funeral. The fat lady, who had proved to be the authoress of a number of overwhelming books pitched to the key of Wuthering Heights, was a ringleader in jollity; according to Wedge it was only thus that she contrived to support life amid the thronging starkness of her creations. That morning – again according to Wedge – she had spent in evolving a description of her latest heroine’s hanging a litter of puppies in a barn; it was the heroine’s third birthday; there were four puppies; and the incident was going to extend to five thousand words. From this tremendous undertaking the fat lady was now in natural and healthy reaction, and she was urging on her fellow guests in all sorts of fun; she had just arranged a sort of charade – it had been copiously photographed by a professional person who had mysteriously appeared for the purpose – and now she was looking round with the eye of a general about to order some fresh disposition of a battlefield. Her eye fell on the reflective Appleby. The fat lady said, ‘You’ll do.’

  Appleby assumed the air of eager and amused acquiescence proper to such occasion. A voice said, ‘But he must have a partner; it’s always played that way.’ Other voices, all abundantly interested, agreed. Appleby, applying a little analytrical method in a new sphere, concluded that this was to be another of those games in which people hid in the dark. He had got so far when the fat lady extended a pink and proprietary paw. ‘John and I’, said the fat lady – there were no Christian names of which she was not swiftly the master – ‘will hide together.’