Stop Press

by Michael Innes

  Belinda stood up briskly. ‘I see. Well, let’s not meet foolery half-way.’

  ‘The romantic element, Timmy? Toplady raised his eyebrows in solid and fatal inquiry. ‘I understood the books to be romances through and through?’

  ‘Luv,’ said Timmy with inexpressible violence; ‘ruddy luv. “Henry,” she faltered, “you know I love you, but we cannot marry until this cloud is removed from my father’s name.”’

  There was a moment’s baffled silence. Then Patricia with perfect simplicity laughed. ‘Do your father’s books’, she asked, ‘run to that sort of thing? I didn’t know.’

  Winter sighed – for the fraility of his own sex. There are whole tracts of tommy rot, he told himself, which women just cut out. Aloud he said, ‘Luv – an awful theme indeed.’ But Patricia continued amused. He felt the irritation of a motorist who toots restrainedly and in vain.

  And Timmy – fantastic to what crannies the tiresome Spider could reach – was hurt. Wallowing in new and beautiful sensations, which had Patricia as their centre, thought Winter, he was outraged that, even remotely, his wallow should be mocked. And nobody minded – least of all the girl. Only Winter – indeed because his knowledge was objective, theoretical, and drawn from the best printed sources – fully saw the point. Or Winter and, presumably, André. Likely enough, the evening’s entertainment was not to be like this at all; likely enough André was simply playing up Timmy as he and Archie had played up Miss Cavey. It was ingenious and – thought Winter glancing at Timmy again – unkind; it was also liable to be immediately embarrassing if not controlled. ‘I don’t know’, he said, ‘if your father will want any sort of elaborate entertainment tonight? The party might do better to set to and repair the clocks. I suppose you know that they’ve been striking what must be called a definitely sinister note.’

  This nicely phrased diversion was unsuccessful. ‘Eleanor,’ said Timmy at once – Webster’s Dictionary seemed to lie open before him at its most appalling page – ‘can you hear those happy bells? I want to tell you that they find an echo in my heart.’ He gave his companions a horrid and masochistic grin.

  Belinda felt it necessary to explain. ‘I don’t think’, she said prosaically, ‘that daddy was ever much interested in that sort of thing. But when his circulation grew he felt it fair to the expectations of his readers to put it in. His luv’s very old-fashioned, and quite unreal at that, but we’re told it’s a great success. There’s always a hero and heroine, and a conflict between love and duty develops after about thirty thousand words. I think daddy got the formula from Corneille.’

  ‘All’, chimed in Timmy, ‘on the nicest plane. Nothing physical until just after that last chapter.’

  Toplady was looking disapproving; Patricia, faintly puzzled. Winter said dismissively, ‘And we’re to have Henry and Eleanor tonight? Well, it might be worse, after all. Henry and Eleanor might come alive on us too.’

  ‘As a matter of fact’, said Appleby’s voice from the door, ‘they have.’

  They all swung round.

  ‘Mrs Birdwire’, said Appleby, ‘has come – in interesting company – to complain. Or rather not to complain. As dear Lucy Pike says, she says, she is not that sort of person. She has come rather to exult in insult, slapping heartily round at all available backs meanwhile. Mrs Birdwire has been receiving amatory excerpts from the books – a little old-fashioned in phrasing, as Belinda says. Irritating, no doubt, to a woman of that robust temper. Victorian erotica murmured over the telephone at dead of night. Incidentally a vile woman, one agrees. Out there on the terrace I thought how nice it would be to be able to summon Circe.’

  ‘Circe?’ said Winter, bewildered.

  ‘Circe Aeae, that knowing dame. But that’s another story and connected with pigs.’

  Once more perambulating a dripping terrace with Appleby, Winter paused and looked at his watch. This action, prompted by his stomach, brought his mind sharply to something else. ‘Timing,’ he said. ‘The joker has pace. Timmy falls in love with your sister overnight; Henry and Eleanor immediately begin to stir. The thing has subtlety and speed combined. Timmy becomes vulnerable and Timmy is at once attacked. And you were right in prophesying that the plot would ramify.’

  ‘Plots don’t ramify; they thicken.’ Appleby stopped in his tracks. ‘This plot thickens. To an improbable, fatiguing and almost Eliotic-Spideresque degree. I suspect – I admit it’s only suspicion – that so far we’ve been going round the side-shows. The main entertainment is elsewhere.’

  There was a pause. Appleby produced and filled a pipe, lit it, puffed – all with the deliberation which hinted at a lurking dramatic sense. ‘Tell me’, he said – and tossed a match-box into the air – ‘what you can’ – the box fell and he caught it – ‘about Bussenschutt and the Birdwire.’

  ‘About what?’ Winter’s eyes opened wide.

  ‘Before these people went away a few minutes ago I got an outline of how they hang together. Bussenschutt is stopping with Shoon, apparently for the first time. On his way to the Abbey yesterday he called on the Birdwire, again for the first time. He showed himself – if one is to believe the lady – a devoted student of her works. And this morning he persuaded Shoon to call there with him. They all came on here; Shoon to issue his grand invitation for tomorrow and the Birdwire to bawl her indignant pleasantries. And it’s true that Bussenschutt is losing no opportunity of saying an admiring and knowledgeable word on the Birdwire travels. I’m asking you what’s the meaning of it.’

  ‘I’ve no notion; something, presumably, that is entirely not our pigeon.’ Winter stopped, stared. ‘The smart, laborious old devil!’

  Appleby grinned delightedly. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Something clicks. Tell me.’

  ‘You’re welcome. It’s the padding – the under-plot. Or what I was calling to myself yesterday the subsidiary mystery.’ He chuckled. ‘And it’s Bussenschutt through and through… Have you ever heard of my colleague Horace Benton?’

  ‘Yes.’ Once more Appleby’s match-box made a voyage in air. ‘He used to sell illicit small-arms in the Near East.’

  ‘What!’ Winter had sprung to his feet as if at an electrical discharge.

  ‘For Shoon. In fact he was a Friend of the Venerable Bede.’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘I wish’, said Winter dully, ‘I knew Shoon. I wish I knew Shoon. Benton said that. Little Benton.’ He glanced up in sudden utter doubt. ‘I don’t know much about Benton’s curriculum vitae. He was elected to one of our Fellowships before I was. But he must have an orthodox and unimpeachable academic record. How could he be in an arms racket?… And – heaven help us – how far is all this from Eliot and his absurd Spider!’

  Appleby was grinning like a child. ‘The hopeful apprentice’, he said, ‘never loses his head. Keep calm. Soon it will all analyse out. I see, to begin with, that you don’t know about the Friends. Jasper Shoon isn’t a devoted curioso just for nothing. This society he runs – the Friends of the Venerable Bede – is supposed to do lord knows what; search European archives, I think, for matter bearing on English antiquities. It employs a few genuine scholars – the stupider and less observant the better – but in the main it’s a neat organization for running about doing and selling mischief. Your friend Benton was in on both wings.’

  Winter shook his head. ‘I shall enjoy’, he said dryly, ‘watching you analyse it out. I see only hopeless muddle. If this stuff you’re springing on me takes the centre of the picture – and there seems to be only your instinct for that – we’re into another world. We’ve been looking for some sneaking domestic or professional enemy of Eliot’s. You’ve just assured me that this deplorable domestic persecution is beginning to ramify to other members of the family – as it does seem to be doing in this petty but subtle baiting of Timmy inamorato. And now, because I mention a dim and scared person called Benton you take a jump at roaring gun-running melodrama. It’s not sense.’ Winter made an impatient gesture. ‘It defies the unitie
s. If Eliot were concocting all this for his public he wouldn’t look at it.’

  ‘Tell me’ – Appleby reiterated and amplified – ‘about Bussenschutt, Benton, Shoon, and the Birdwire.’

  Winter reflected.

  ‘The night before last I had to get Timmy his exeat to come down here. That involved Benton’s permission. In the common-room Bussenschutt mentioned that he was coming down to see Shoon and be shown a papyrus. That led to a manuscript of Benton’s which he had found in the Levant. And that gave me a chance to mention the Birdwire and her being burgled; I wanted to explain why Timmy felt he should go home. Benton was thrown into an inexplicable flurry at the good lady’s name and Bussenschutt, who misses nothing, was intrigued. One of his milder employments is persecuting Benton as he can. He must have decided that the Birdwire had something on Benton and being, as I say, laborious, must have proceeded to nail her. I invite you to link up these facts with, say, the statement that this is Folly Hall.’

  ‘I think’, said Appleby placidly, ‘that we might get ready for luncheon.’

  Winter remembered that he was hungry and heaved himself out of his chair. Presumably Appleby must be believed: nevertheless he could still hear Benton’s murmur, ‘I wish I knew Shoon.’ He was – and shortly after his rash arrival at Rust he had felt forebodings of it – sadly out of his depth. He thought of his laborious examinations of Miss Cavey and Wedge and cursed himself for a meddlesome fool. To his understanding of the bothersome and possibly sinister affair of the Spider he had added, as a result of this expedition, just nothing at all.

  Nothing. Winer, the amateur in opposition, looked at Appleby and suddenly felt clumsy and tired – involved in futility. And a familiar futility: in just this situation, surely, he had found himself long ago…

  ‘I’ve got it!’

  Appleby stared in astonishment.

  ‘The crux of the whole thing. The joker’s ability to peer into Eliot’s mind. I’ve’ – Winter was abruptly cautious – ‘seen a possible solution.’

  ‘If you’ve done that we may pack up to go home. Solve that and the mystery fades into the light of common day.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Winter, ‘Wordsworth too.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve just quoted Wordsworth. And my explanation explains Wordsworth too. And Plato.’

  The professional Appleby was looking pleasingly puzzled. ‘I’ll be abundantly satisfied’, he said, ‘with an explanation of Eliot.’

  ‘It’s not so much an explaining as an explaining away. But I think it must be the truth. And it came to me, really, before I had been ten minutes at Rust.’

  ‘Dear me.’

  Winter looked a shade uncertainly at his companion. ‘It’s in the nature of the thing that the evidences exist only in Eliot’s own mind – the evidences, I mean, of the joker’s clairvoyance. The secretary who was killed in that air crash could have corroborated the fact of the manuscripts’ having been tampered with, but the clairvoyance-theme is entirely a matter of Eliot’s own belief. And Eliot is mistaken. Paramnesia.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘The feeling that this has happened before. It is at the bottom of doctrines of reincarnation, of the Platonic theory of Reminiscence, of natural mysticism like Wordsworth’s… And it came on me here yesterday as I sat down to luncheon. This has happened before.’

  ‘And had it?’

  ‘Of course not. There must be a simple psychological explanation. And the best suggestion is, I believe, Havelock Ellis’. The mind is like a two-storey house; above, the sense-impressions of the moment; below, memory. Only sometimes sense-impressions tumble straight downstairs without our being aware of their reception. They tumble straight into the memory. And a moment later – while virtually the same sense-impressions are being received in the normal way – they rise up with the quality of memories and jostle with what is actually happening about us. The result is the uncanny feeling that what is confronting us now has confronted us before.’

  ‘A most lucid explanation of a common phenomenon.’

  ‘It’s a phenomenon to which some people are more susceptible than others. I suggest that Eliot is peculiarly subject to paramnesia. A situation confronts him and he is suddenly convinced that–’

  ‘My dear Winter, that what?’

  ‘That it has occurred before – in his own mind.’

  ‘Exactly. In his own mind. The qualification seems to me to be important. If it’s paramnesia it’s a special case of the phenomenon. He doesn’t think: this has happened before. He thinks: this once existed as a project in my own mind. He believes that something which he remembers as a fantasy is now actualizing itself. Whether the mechanisms of paramnesia would cover that I rather doubt. Your suggestion’ – Appleby looked thoughtfully at Winter – ‘is quite first-class all the same.’

  ‘Thanks. It might be put to Chown.’

  ‘Certainly there is matter to put to Chown.’ Appleby said.

  5

  Nearly everyone knew that Miss Cavey had had an Experience. Shortly after her conversation with Winter she had walked into the hamlet of Rust and there a man had hanged her a couple of puppies for half-a-crown. Miss Cavey balanced an eager and eloquent account of this proceeding by eating a decently abstinent luncheon. She added water to claret which was not that sort of claret at all, and over an omelette specially prepared without the kidneys reiterated her tale to whosoever would listen.

  Miss Cavey, who like all imaginative persons courted the desire rather than the reality, had not wanted the puppies to be hanged. She had not known that it was this that was in the man’s head. He was a young man – the best type of countryman, Miss Cavey said – and she had spoken to him with only the most general notion of professional improvement in mind. Rustics – warm-blooded, slow of speech, and rather vaguely involved with the procession of the seasons – were part of her equipment, and she was conscientious in her field work. Sometimes she sought out the elderly, whom she took to pieces and reassembled on her typewriter against a background of inn parlours and ingle-nooks: the spirit of George Eliot, no doubt, hovering at her side as she tapped. But by preference she frequented the young, subsequently evolving from her notes figures which the curious found interestingly in the tradition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover – only with the words to which the circulating libraries so prudishly object left out. It was in pursuit of contacts in this direction that Miss Cavey had solicited the conversation of this particular young man. It had been a friendly and finally confidential conversation, and in the course of it – as was inevitable – she had spoken of the problem at present confronting her. The young man had asked her to climb up a ladder and into a barn. Miss Cavey climbed. It had, she explained, begun to rain.

  The young man, Miss Cavey thought afterwards, must have been spoilt by urban contacts. The barn achieved, he went away at once and returned with the two puppies, a length of rope and a hook of the sort on which butchers hang meat. One puppy he strung up on a noose and the other he impaled on the hook: fortunately something vital was pierced and the creature died almost at once. But it was messy and Miss Cavey felt ill; so ill – and this was the irony of it – that she could recall nothing of the noises of the puppies, and had thus undergone a harrowing experience in vain. She had tried to escape, but the downward trip on the ladder was something which she could not, in her distressed condition, face unassisted. The half-crown appeared to have been a sort of ransom money.

  Miss Cavey spoke, unconvincingly, of a resolution to inform the police.

  This deplorable incident – Gerald Winter reflected – is just the sort of inconsequential thing that really does happen. For life has no need of the unities. The yokel appears, without significant cause; arbitrarily, he indulges his gruesome freak; he vanishes again into the shades, his action writ in water. Within a week the Cavey and the world have forgotten him: yet another thing has happened that will never, never do for art.

  Winter turned from these barren reflections to his friend
Mrs Moule, and noticed that she was again eating meringue. ‘That’, he said obscurely, ‘is art.’

  ‘Art, Mr Winter?’

  ‘Meringue, a tolerably crowded twenty-four hours, once more meringue. Because our mind acknowledges pattern, that is the type of everything we invent.’

  ‘And what we actually experience?’

  ‘What we would experience is easier. Meringue, meringue, meringue. But we seldom get it. Consider Miss Cavey and how she has had thistles and sea holly all day. Refined malice, if rumour be true, at breakfast, followed by rustic malice instead of elevenses. This house stuffs with malice, we know. But it seems a little hard that it should exude from the neighbouring countryside as well.’

  ‘It’s an aura,’ said Mrs Moule.

  ‘Yes, I didn’t think of that. These twenty-four hours have converted me to all your opinions.’

  Mrs Moule did not trouble to look suspicious. ‘You know’, she said, ‘I’m not gullible – not even when tackled on my hobbyhorse. Sir Rupert’s malice now, didn’t catch me at all.’

  ‘Sir Rupert’s malice?’

  ‘During that tiresome – Dear Belinda! I think she has more colour today… During that tiresome hiding game. We were paired. He took me up to some dreadfully dark place – a secret passage, I believe – and pretended to be a ghost.’

  ‘Dear me. I understood Rupert to be very correct. It sounds much more like Archie. What sort of ghost?’

  ‘Rather’ – Mrs Moule blushed – ‘rather a fresh ghost.’

  ‘Oh!’ Detection, the apprentice was learning, had its embarrassments.

  ‘And at the same time… well, ghostly. I was really very confused, and a teeny bit scared… I believe that is why the odd business of Sir Archie went out of my head. I am wondering if I might venture to speak to that nice Mr Appleby about it.’

  ‘Speak about it’, said Winter emphatically, ‘to me.’