‘No, no; I tell ’ee, that schooner, ’er’s luffin’ on the lee shore.’
‘What about the brig, then? What about the brig?’
‘That’s no brig, Fred, ’er’s a ketch.’
‘’Er wouldn’t be fully rigged, not if ’er was luffing.’
‘Look ’ere, take that direction as north, see, and that means the wind’s nor’-nor’-east.’
‘Then ’ow the ’ell d’you account for that wave breaking over the mole?’
‘That’s a current.’
‘Current, ’e says. Don’t be bloody daft, Bert, ’ow can a wave be a current?’
‘Current. That’s a good one.’
At the moment when Fen first set eyes on this object, however, it had temporarily lost its hold on the interest of the inn’s clients. This was due to the presence of an elderly lady in a ginger wig who, surrounded by a circle of listeners, was sitting in a collapsed posture on a chair, engaged, between sips of brandy, in vehement and imprecise narration.
‘Frightened?’ she was saying. ‘Nearly fell dead in me tracks, I did. There ’e were, all white and nekked, lurking be’ind that clump of gorse by Sweeting’s Farm. And jist as I passes by, out’e jumps at me and “Boo!” ’e says, “Boo!”’
At this, an oafish youth giggled feebly.
‘And what ’appened then?’ someone demanded.
‘I struck at ’im,’ the elderly lady replied, striking illustratively at the air, ‘with me brolly.’
‘Did you ’it ’im?’
‘No,’ she admitted with evident reluctance. ‘’E slipped away from me reach, and off ’e went before you could say “knife”. And ’ow I staggered ’ere I shall never know, not to me dying day. Yes, thank you, Mrs ’Erbert, I’ll ’ave another, if you please.’
‘’E must ’a’ bin a exhibitor,’ someone volunteered. ‘People as goes about showing thesselves in the altogether is called exhibitors.’
But this information, savouring as it did of intellectual snobbery, failed to provoke much interest. A middle-aged, bovine, nervous-looking man in the uniform of a police constable, who was standing by with a note-book in his hand, said:
‘Well, us all knows what ’tis, I s’pose. ’Tis one o’ they loonies escaped from up at ’all.’
‘These ten years,’ said a gloomy-looking old man, ‘I’ve known that’d ’appen. ’Aven’t I said it, time and time again?’
The disgusted silence with which this rhetorical question was received indicated forcibly that he had; with just such repugnance must Cassandra have been regarded at the fall of Troy, for there is something distinctly irritating about a person with an obsession who turns out in the face of all reason to have been right.
The adept in psychological terminology said: ‘Us ought to organize a search-party, that’s what us ought to do. ’E’m likely dangerous.’
But the constable shook his head. ‘Dr Boysenberry’ll be seeing to that, I reckon. I’ll telephone ’im now, though I’ve no doubt ’e knows all about it already.’ He cleared his throat and spoke more loudly. ‘There is no cause for alarm,’ he announced. ‘No cause for alarm at all.’
The inn’s clients, who had shown not the smallest evidence of such an emotion, received this statement apathetically, with the single exception of the elderly lady in the wig, who by now was slightly contumelious from brandy.
‘Tcha!’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s just like ’ee, Will Sly. An ostrich, that’s what you are, with your ’ead buried in sand. “No cause for alarm,” indeed! If it’d bin you ’e’d jumped out at, you’d not go about saying there was “no cause for alarm”. There ’e were, white and nekked like an evil sperrit. . . .’
Her audience, however, was clearly not anxious for a repetition of the history; it began to disperse, resuming abandoned glasses and tankards. The gloomy-looking old man buttonholed people with complacent iterations of his own foresight. The psychologist embarked on a detailed and scabrous account, in low tones, and to an exclusively male circle, of the habits of exhibitors. And Constable Sly, on the point of commandeering the inn’s telephone, caught the eye of the girl from the taxi for the first time since she and Fen had entered the bar.
‘’Ullo, Miss Diana,’ he said, grinning awkwardly. ‘You’ve ’eard what’s ’appened, I s’pose?’
‘I have, Will,’ said Diana, ‘and I think I may be able to help you a bit.’ She related their encounter with the lunatic.
‘Ah,’ said Sly. ‘That may be very useful, Miss Diana. ’E were making for Sanford Condover, you say?’
‘As far as I could tell, yes.’
‘I will inform Dr Boysenberry of that fact,’ said Sly laboriously. He turned to the woman who was serving behind the bar. ‘All right for I to use phone, Myra?’
‘You can use the phone, my dear,’ Myra Herbert said, ‘if you put tuppence in the box.’ She was a vivacious and attractive Cockney woman in the middle thirties, with black hair, a shrewd but slightly sensual mouth, and green eyes, unusually but beautifully shaped.
‘Official call,’ Sly explained with hauteur.
Myra registered disgust. ‘You and your official ruddy calls,’ she said. ‘My God!’
Sly ignored this and turned away; at which the lunatic’s first victim, becoming suddenly aware of his impending departure, roused herself from an access of lethargy to say:
‘And what about me, Will Sly?’
Sly grew harassed. ‘Well, Mrs ’Ennessy, what about you?’
‘You’re not going to leave me to walk ’ome by meself, I should ’ope.’
‘I’ve already explained to you, Mrs ’Ennessy,’ said Sly with painful dignity, ‘that there is no cause for alarm.’
Mrs Hennessy emitted a shriek of stage laughter.
‘Listen to ’im,’ she adjured Fen, who was contemplating his potential constituents with a hypnotized air: ‘Listen to Mr Knowall Sly!’ Her manner changed abruptly to one of menace. ‘For all you knows, Will Sly, I might be murdered on me own doorstep, and then where’d you be? Eh? Tell me that. And what’s me ’usband pay ’is rates for, that’s what I asks. I got a right to pertection, ’aven’t I? I got – –’
‘Now, look ’ere, Mrs ’Ennessy, I’ve me duty to do.’
‘Duty!’ Mrs Hennessy repeated with scorn. ‘’E says’ – and here she again addressed Fen, this time with the air of one imparting a valuable confidence – ‘’e says ’e’s got ’is duty to do. . . . Fat lot of duty you do, Will Sly. What about the time Alf Braddock’s apples was stolen? Eh? What about that? Duty!’
‘Yes, duty,’ said Sly, much aggrieved at this unsportsmanlike allusion. ‘And what’s more, the next time I catch you trying to buy Guinness ’ere out of hours – –’
Diana interrupted these indiscretions.
‘It’s all right, Will,’ she said. ‘I’ll take Mrs Hennessy home. It’s not far out of my way.’
The offer restored peace and a semblance of amity. Sly went to the telephone. Fen paid Diana and retrieved his luggage from the taxi. Myra called time. The company grudgingly finished its drinks and departed, Diana enduring with angelic patience a new and more highly-coloured account of Mrs Hennessy’s adventure.
Fen introduced himself to Myra, signed a register, and was shown to his room, which was comfortable and scrupulously clean. He ordered, obtained, and consumed beer, coffee, and sandwiches.
‘And I should like,’ he told Myra, ‘to be allowed to sleep on till ten tomorrow morning.’
At this, to his mystification, Myra laughed very happily, and, controlling herself at length, said: ‘Very well, my dear: good night,’ and tripped gracefully from the room, leaving him theorizing gloomily about what her unexpected reaction might mean.
There remained, for that evening, only one further incident which interested him. His visit to the bathroom gave him a glimpse of someone who was vaguely familiar – a thin, auburn-haired man of about his own age whom he saw vanishing in a dressing-gown into one of the other bedrooms. But the associat
ion which was so certainly in his mind refused to reveal itself, and though he pondered the problem while getting into bed, he soon abandoned it for lack of inspiration, and by the time the church clock struck midnight was sound asleep.
CHAPTER 3
HE was horribly awakened, in what seemed about ten minutes, by an outbreak of intensive hammering somewhere in the regions below.
He groped for his watch, focused his eyes with difficulty on its dial, and perceived that the time was only seven. Outside the bedroom windows the sun was shining brilliantly. Fen eyed it with displeasure. He was temperamentally a late riser, and the panache of virgin daylight made little appeal to him.
Meanwhile, the noise below was increasing in volume and variety, as if fresh recruits were arriving momently. And now it became clear to Fen’s fuddled mind that in this lay probably the reason both for Diana’s gnomic warning and for Myra’s irrepressible hilarity of the previous evening, when he had said he wished to sleep late. He uttered a groan of dismay.
It acted like a signal.
There came a tap on his door, and in response to his croak of invitation a girl entered so superlatively beautiful that Fen began to wonder if he were dreaming.
The girl was a natural platinum blonde. Her features were flawless. She had a figure like the quintessence of all pin-up girls. And she moved with an unselfconscious and quite unprovocative placidity, which made it evident that – incredible though it might seem – she was quite unaware of her perfections.
With a radiant smile she deposited a tray of tea on the bedside table; left the room, returned presently with his shoes, beautifully polished; smiled at him again; and the next moment, like a fairytale vision – though he could imagine no princess of the Perilous Realm capable of offering her lover such nuptial joys as this–was gone.
Dazed, Fen lit his early-morning cigarette; and the familiar unpleasantness of smoking it restored him to something like normality. He sipped tea and brooded over the hammering, which continued unabated. Soon it was interrupted by a noise which sounded like a very large scaffolding giving way.
Fen got up hurriedly, washed, shaved, dressed, and went downstairs.
The whole household was astir – as unless heavily drugged it could hardly fail to be. Fen found Myra Herbert out in the yard, contemplating a small, greyish, unalluring pig which seemed to be trying to make up its mind how to employ the day.
‘Good morning, my dear,’ Myra greeted him brightly. ‘Sleep well?’
‘Up to a point,’ said Fen with reserve.
She indicated the pig. ‘Did you ever see anything like him?’ she asked.
‘Well, no, now you mention it I don’t think I have.’
‘I’ve been cheated,’ said Myra, and the pig grunted, apparently in assent. ‘I like a young pig to be nice and pink, you know, and cheerful-like. But him – my God. I feed him and feed him, but he never grows.’
They meditated jointly on this phenomenon. A passing farm-labourer joined them.
‘’E don’t get no bigger, do ’e?’ he observed.
‘What’s the matter with him, Alf?’
The farm-labourer pondered. ‘’E’m a non-doer,’ he diagnosed at last.
‘A what?’
‘Non-doer. You’re wasting your time trying to fatten ’im. ’E’ll never get no larger. Better sell ’im.’
‘Non-doer,’ said Myra with disgust. ‘That’s a nice cheerful ruddy thought to start the day with.’
The farm-labourer departed.
‘I’ll say this for him, though,’ said Myra, referring to the pig, ‘he’s very affectionate, which is a point in his favour, I suppose.’
They turned back to the inn. Myra suggested that Fen might now like to have breakfast, and Fen agreed.
‘But what is happening?’ he demanded, indicating the hammering.
‘Renovations, my dear. They’re renovating the interior.’
‘But workmen never get started as early as this.’
‘Oh, it isn’t workmen,’ said Myra obscurely. ‘That’s to say . . .’
They came to a door in a part of the ground floor with which Fen was not yet acquainted, and from behind which most of the din seemed to be proceeding. ‘Look,’ said Myra.
The opening of the door disclosed a dense cloud of plaster dust in which figures could dimly be discerned engaged, to all appearance, in a labour of unqualified destruction. One of these – a man – loomed up at them suddenly, looking like a whitewash victim in a slapstick comedy.
‘’Morning, Myra,’ he said with disarming heartiness. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Oh, quite, sir.’ Myra was distinctly bland and respectful. ‘This gentleman’s staying here, and he wondered what was going on.’
‘Morning to you, sir,’ said the man. ‘Hope we didn’t get you up too early.’
‘Not a bit,’ Fen replied without cordiality.
‘I feel better already’ – the man spoke, however, more with determination than with conviction – ‘for getting up at six every morning. . . . It’s one of the highroads to health, as I’ve always said.’
He fell into a violent fit of coughing; his face became red, and then blue. Fen banged him prophylactically between the shoulder-blades.
‘Well, back to the grindstone,’ he said when he had recovered a little. ‘I’ll tell you this much, sir, there’s a good deal to be said, when you want a thing done, for doing it yourself.’ Someone caught him a glancing blow on the arm with a small pick. ‘Careful, damn you, that hurt. . . .’
He left them in order to expostulate in more detail. They closed the door and continued on their way.
‘Who was that?’ Fen asked.
‘Mr Beaver, who owns the pub. I only manage it for him. He’s a wholesale draper, really.’
‘I see,’ said Fen, who saw nothing.
‘Have your breakfast now, my dear,’ Myra soothed him, ‘and I’ll explain later.’
She conducted him to a small room where there was a table laid for three. Here, to his elation, she provided him with bacon, eggs, and coffee.
He had finished these, and come to the marmalade stage, when the door opened and he was surprised to see the fair-haired girl who had been his sole fellow-passenger on the train.
He studied her covertly as she sat down at the table. Though she had neither Diana’s fresh, open-air charm nor Myra’s vivacity nor his blonde visitant’s filmic radiance, she was none the less pretty in a shy, quiet fashion; and her features showed what seemed to be a mingling of two distinct strains. The nose, for instance, was markedly patrician, while by contrast the large mouth hinted at vulgarity; the set of the eyebrows was arrogant but the eyes were timid; and it occurred to Fen, in a burst of rather dreary fancifulness which only the unnaturally early hour can excuse, that if a king were to marry a courtesan, a daughter very much like this might be born to them.
It seemed to him, too, that the girl was nervous, rather as if she were about to face some new and testing experience of which the issue was uncertain. And her clothes confirmed this notion. They were good and tasteful, but something in the way she wore them suggested that they were her cared-for best, that she could not always afford to dress thus, that she was wearing them now – yes, that was it – in the hope of making a good impression.
On whom? Fen wondered. A potential employer, perhaps. Her being here to be interviewed for a coveted job would explain her nervousness plausibly enough. . . .
Or, after all, would it? Somehow he sensed that the testing was to be at once more urgent and more intimate than that.
They talked a little, on conventional topics. Fen asked her if she had heard about the lunatic, and on discovering that she had not, explained the situation to her. However, her responses, though polite and intelligent enough, showed that she was too preoccupied to be very much interested in the subject.
He noted that she watched him steadily whenever he spoke, as if trying to assess his character from his expression. And in the fashion of h
er own speech there was further matter for surmise, since she pronounced her words in a slightly foreign fashion, which he found himself unable to identify. She was not – to judge from that – German or Italian or French or Dutch or Spanish; nor was there any immingled trace of dialect which might account for the oddity of the effect. Analysed, it came to this, that while her vowel sounds were pure and accurate, there was a very slight tendency to blur and confuse the individual constituents of each group of consonants – labials, gutturals, sibilants. Thus, ‘p’ was not entirely distinct from ‘b’, nor ‘s’ from ‘z’.
Fen discovered that he was incapable of explaining this, and the effect was to make him slightly peevish.
He finished his coffee and looked at his watch. Half past eight. In three hours he had an appointment with his election agent, but until then he was free to do what he pleased. And since the tumult of renovation made ‘The Fish Inn’ uninhabitable for long at a time, he decided to go out into the sunshine to inspect his constituency at first hand. He therefore took his leave of the girl, suspecting – though without rancour – that she was not sorry to be rid of him.
Outside the door he encountered Myra, and asked for news of the lunatic.
‘Well, they haven’t caught him, my dear,’ she said, ‘though the asylum people have been traipsing about the neighbourhood all night.’
‘It actually was a lunatic, then?’
‘Oh, yes. I didn’t think it was at first. Mrs Hennessy’s just the sort of daft old woman to have – what d’you call them? – sexual delusions about naked men jumping out at her in the dark.’
‘But I saw him, too,’ Fen pointed out.
Myra’s expression suggested that only politeness had prevented her from attributing sexual delusions to Fen also.
‘Anyway, he’s real enough,’ she said, ‘and they’ve put out he’s harmless, though, of course, they couldn’t very well say he was homicidal for fear of creating a panic. And what I say about lunatics is this: they wouldn’t be lunatics if you knew what they were going to be up to next.’
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