The Satan Sampler

by Victor Canning

  “That’s very generous of you.”

  “More than that. You see, my family had a small manor house in Dorset for two hundred years. When I was at school my father had to sell it as a result of stupid speculations. A nice man, but very gullible. It broke his heart——” he grinned, “——and considerably bruised mine.”

  “Well, that’s the way it goes. But I suppose I’m luckier than you. I only have to sit out the term of the lease and then I shall have the Hall back. Tedious, but inevitable.”

  With Shanklin gone, he sat with a drink, and wondered whether Shanklin’s visit had been genuine, and his words equally sincere, or if the visit had been designed to explore in the obliquest of ways his own feelings. Probably the latter, he thought. But if so, why bother? Unless—as he knew now through Punch’s letter—they knew, too, that there was something which did exist to give him cause for breaking the lease and, remote though the possibility might seem to them, they were taking no chances. Shanklin could well have come looking to catch straws in the wind. From his own business experience he knew well how the most astute of men could betray themselves with a word or a smile and never know it. And he was prepared to bet now that Punch’s turning against them, undisguised, had had them worried. What they wanted to know now could be whether he had come into the same category. Going to the Hall tonight would be nothing. Punch had done all that. The real problem was to find the proof and all he had to help him there were Punch’s last written words . . . all you have to do is to look in that place where we used to each . . .

  What place? God knows he had searched around enough. A place where they used to—what? Hide things. And the little word—each. Where they used each to hide things? Well, there had been plenty but from all he had drawn a blank. For a moment or two—since he had not asked either of them about this—he wondered if Punch had confided in Mrs Shipley or old Shipley when he hid his stuff and they were now waiting for a word from him. But immediately he had to discount this. Punch would never have involved them in anything like this. It could be a bloody dangerous business . . . Punch had written. Then he certainly would never have put either of the Shipleys at risk.

  Out loud, he said, “Sod it!” Thinking of Nancy and the old boy turning up just at the wrong moment. Well, in a few hours’ time he might be a wiser man.

  * * * *

  When Quint had telephoned Kerslake that day to recall him to London, he had also invited him, no matter how late he got back, to come to dinner. An invitation in view of the ‘no matter how late’ Kerslake had interpreted as an order. But it was one which he was glad to accept and obey, one because he liked and respected Quint and was over-indebted to him, and two because it would save him from the bleak foraging with eggs and bacon and baked beans in his own flat or the bleaker interval of a service station meal on the motor-way.

  Sitting now with brandy before them, and behind them a fresh salmon mousse and then fillets of sole a la panetiere followed by dry biscuits and Camembert cheese, the whole accompanied by a bottle of Chablis, Quint said, “Well, all that was very enjoyable, though I say it myself. But, of course, as you realize, the invitation was not without a purpose.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “We can forget the sir for a while.”

  “As you wish.” Kerslake spoke lightly, sensing that he was to be allowed some limited licences—rare concessions but always welcome to him.

  “It is five years, almost to the day, since we first met at the Imperial Hotel in Barnstaple, and you became—you will understand my correct meaning—my man. Not the first by any means. Long years ago Georgina’s father was one. Others too. Some now dead, alas. The pleasant thing is that—since recruitment is mostly brought about by personal contact at some propitious moment—there usually is formed a highly loyal, not to say esoteric, bond.”

  “Father and son?”

  “Or brother and brother. Some family tie within a larger bond. Warboys, for instance, and Grandison—younger and elder brother.”

  “And you—to whom were you son or brother?” He spoke knowing quite well that this preliminary—typical of Quint—was merely a sentimental, good-natured gambit. Something—for which he was well content to wait—had to follow.

  “Long dead, my dear Kerslake, and much regretted. Dying I may say peacefully and in retirement. One day, I hope, you will stand in relationship to someone in the same way as I do now to you. A minor—but often invaluable—loyalty within a loyalty. You follow me, of course?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So I speak frankly without need to say for your ears only. One’s absolute loyalty, of course, is to Birdcage, not to any individual in it. To the service, no matter how much justly or unjustly maligned or praised, condemned or commended. The state of nations is such that none can safely exist without their Birdcages. Deplorable—but without them open barbarism would flower grotesquely. One could draw a parallel between a king and his country. If he takes his people’s loyalty for granted and abuses his own to them then hell is only a few steps away. L’état, c’est moi—said Louis the Fourteenth. He could not have been more mistaken. The State is an intellectual and metaphysical conception. Abstract. Unable to exist if a body of people inhabiting physical or political boundaries reject their true obligations to such a necessary idea. Are you following me?”

  “Rather more than less. But far from feeling that you are just entertaining me. I’m happy to wait until you put it in plainer words. Or perhaps as a simple instruction.”

  Quint put his head back and laughed delightedly, and then said, “And to think that—with all respect to you, my dear Kerslake—I once thought that you would perhaps only turn out to be a solid, plodding leg-man, exchanging a monotonous beat in Barnstaple for an equally boring one—since you could aspire to no more—in Birdcage. So you would have it in simple words? Why not try to formulate them for yourself—and aloud to me. The night is reasonably young, the brandy decanter three-quarters full and you can leave your car outside and take a taxi back to your place.”

  Kerslake was silent while Quint replenished their brandy glasses, relishing the move to a closer relationship with this man—for whom he already bore deep affection and gratitude, despite the fact that on him he could have blamed his own present impotence—a disability not, he now suspected, likely to be permanent. As he raised his glass slightly to Quint’s to mark with an almost symbolical flourish the onset of a possibly dangerous and deeper loyalty, he had a picture in his mind of a sloppy, untied tennis shoe, a long smock making a body shapeless, and bright April sunshine streaking auburn hair with moving fire. He made a passing attempt to imagine her naked and failed.

  He said slowly—reaching for the words and ideas as deliberately as he would have reached with care to pluck a raspberry cane to avoid clumsy fingers crushing the soft fruit—and with his eyes never leaving Quint’s to mark any signal of trespass or over-boldness, “The G.I.A. did it—almost. L’état, c’est moi—or should be. That was the thought with them. One has seen other organizations in other countries appear to have achieved it. Iran? Power doesn’t only corrupt. It just gives an insatiable appetite for more power. I think you have in mind that, whereas in past days all the best things were exported from this country to keep the globe coloured red practically all over, now . . . well, we import a lot of the bad things. My mother was always talking to me about being a good example. All dogs have fleas. What happens when all fleas think they should have dogs? No, Christ, that’s not what I mean, but——”

  “Don’t worry. I’m receiving you loud and clear despite the occasional static. And I’m very pleased with you. Go on.”

  “All right. True stability is sanity. Law and order, no matter how debased, must be kept. You can’t have the night-watchman robbing the bank.” He paused for a moment or two, genuinely confused by the flux of his own thoughts and his effort to reach Quint with a far from adequate stock of presentable, yet subtle, verbal felicities. Then—throwing caution from him, he said blun
tly, “I think you are trying to tell me that something is wrong with us. With Birdcage—and you bloody well—and maybe others with you—aren’t going to bloody well stand for it.”

  Quint beamed and said softly, “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. Oh, dear Kerslake . . . much tried and tortured in your training . . . you and I have sinned against God—but that doesn’t put us in outer darkness without hope. God by now will have learnt that the sermon on the Mount needs some rewriting. Or perhaps He has turned mathematician and gives due weight to the proposition that a smaller evil is justified to prevent the larger.”

  “And where does that leave me, sir?”

  “It leaves you saying ‘sir’ again occasionally and with this preliminary comment. It is not a question of the night-watchman robbing the bank. It is the danger of the bank manager wanting to manipulate the bank for his own . . . well, for his own self-aggrandizement. Are you with me?”

  Kerslake said, “I get the pun. But—surely that’s an impossibility?”

  “Annus mirabilis? And wonders will never cease. Men have walked on the moon. Nothing is impossible. Just give man the time and the will. From these he will breed miracles. Let me add that there is a large element of speculation in all this. No hard proof. Just unseasonably a rare and unexpected touch of spring in the air that makes the winter-thin robin charm the frosty day with a rusty scrap of love call. If we wait for hard facts we sometimes wait too long.” Quint shrugged his shoulders. “I’m sorry. You asked for simple guidance. You have in the past received direct instructions from others superior to myself in this organization. Carried out their orders without reference to me—which was right and proper. But now—which has been the main burden of our talk—I want it differently. Any instruction you receive from anyone else, higher or lower in our establishment, I wish to be made privy to before you act. And I promise you full protection, unfailing protection. An honest promise because I should never ask of you, or maybe never need to ask of you, anything which in any way outrages or contravenes the dark ethics of our profession. Do I need to say more?”

  “No, sir. Not as far as your plain instruction is concerned. But am I allowed to ask a few questions?”

  “Ask. But I may not answer.”

  “Is all that has been said in this room private to us alone?”

  “At the moment, yes. But given certain remote shifts of circumstance, it may not remain so. But that would not jeopardize your standing in Birdcage.”

  “I see. And now, strictly between ourselves, am I allowed to ask whether all this accounts for my being recalled from Herefordshire?”

  “Partly.”

  “And has something to do with this Seyton business?”

  “It could have. But only as humbly as the flare of a match lighting the touch-paper of a rocket is compared with the high burst and fiery splendour of the rocket’s apotheosis, a lowly, but vital servitor, a peasant without whom the Fire King can never rise to royal exaltation. Gloria in excelsis.” He leaned forward and served Kerslake with more brandy, and then beaming with good humour, went on, “It is sad when Time’s chafing proves that what one thought was gold is no more than gilt. Now, while you finish your brandy, my dear Kerslake, I shall play you a little Handel.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE FIRST CUCKOO he had heard that year was calling, the echoes of its notes coming back from the high river bluff making it hard to decide exactly where the bird might be. Not that he cared. He had gone through the day withdrawn into an almost surliness of manner so that Mrs Shipley had said after lunch to her husband, “You watch your Ps and Qs. He’s in one of those states. Like when he was a young man and something hadn’t gone right for him.”

  He sat now on a large drift log close to the edge of the river, his salmon rod propped against its end and lying on the grass a fresh run springer around the twenty-pound mark. Not that he had deserved the fish, he thought. Today he deserved nothing because he knew that he was letting his mood master him as long ago it had used to do until with manhood he had learnt to meet and check it soon after birth. He had fished without finesse or wisdom, not caring whether he was covering a known lie or not. . . just slinging the yellow-bellied Devon out and then working it back without regard to current or river depth. Punch, he told himself, would have kicked his arse. And at the moment, metaphorically, he could have kicked Punch’s arse. Other people, too, deserved, though still alive could never receive, some sort of castigation. Nancy and her old man for cutting Punch’s letter short. The fish had run like a young colt and, instead of playing it, he had just held on to it. He should have had a line break and lost it in the first few seconds. Instead he had manhandled it to the bank, tailed it by hand, since he had brought neither gaff nor tailer, and killed it with two smart raps of a stone.

  He sat with disappointment sharp in him like heartburn. He had gone in through the chapel at one o’clock that night and had made his way by torch easily to the cellar. Hooding his torch he had found that the stairway door—once a sliding panel, but replaced before his time on account of dry rot—was bolted shut on the cellar side and easily opened. He had made his way up the whole system of uneven stairs and narrow passages until he had reached the end in the small roof space which abutted on to the run of maids’ rooms. Nowhere had he found any signs of disturbance or recent use—except by rats, mice and bats. Going back to the cellar he had tried the door which led into the Hall and, as he had expected, had found it locked from the far side and had found no flicker of nostalgia or amusement as he remembered his and Punch’s delight when they had discovered where his father had kept the key which they had imagined would open the vicarious delights of venery to them, their youth precluding any thoughts of Bacchic pleasures which lay readier to hand.

  Not that he had expected to find anything more than he could guess Punch must have found . . . some place where his brother could have, unobserved, filmed and taped the movements and talk of people in one of the Hall’s above floor-level rooms. But so far as he could tell by torchlight none of the brickwork or rough boarding on the walls of the stairway had been disturbed. And if he had found evidence, he told himself now morosely, there would have been no advancement to his advantage because what he really had to find were Punch’s tapes and films. Still . . .

  The cuckoo stopped calling. A shoal of minnows in shallow water broke surface in panic as a young pike chased them. A high flying jet drew a great vapour trail across the far hills. Suddenly his own surliness—which he knew Mrs Shipley must already have noticed—riled him. Men gave themselves away too easily by not being able to suppress or mask their moods. Business life had long ago put the final polish to that by no means easy performance. He reached for a cigarette and told himself not to be a fool. Whatever there might have been to find in the Hall was of no importance. Punch had been there long before him. What he just had to find was where Punch——

  A voice from behind broke into his thoughts.

  “Is it Patience on a monument, or Rodin’s thinker?”

  He knew the voice and, turning, let a smile mask his face. He said easily, “I’m not sure. Perhaps a combination of the two.” Because of the fineness of the day she was not bundled up in anorak and waterproof trousers as she so often was, but wore a high-necked green sweater, a silly scrap of a green cap on her head, and a tartan skirt with two or three of last year’s burdock heads clinging to it.

  “You’ve been fishing?”

  “You could call it that.”

  “No luck?”

  He pointed to the far end of the log and she moved so that the fish came into her view.

  For a moment or two she said nothing, but he caught her sharp intake of breath and then she said, “My God . . . what an absolutely beautiful thing. Would you mind if I . . She hauled the haversack slung round her back to the front and began to open it to take out her large sketch pad and then paused. “I may, mightn’t I?”

  He laughed. “Of course. Perhaps you’d like to have it? For eating
, I mean. Sketch first—eat later.”

  “I could never eat all that.”

  “Put it in the deep freeze.”

  “All I’ve got is a refrigerator the size of a matchbox.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. When you’ve finished your sketch, you can come back to the house with me and I’ll cut you off a piece.”

  “You’re very kind. Thank you.” She moved past him and sitting on the end of the tree trunk began to sketch, and asked, “Is it a cock or hen?”

  “Hen.”

  He sat watching her as she worked and was amused as well as impressed by the way she had now switched to a total absorption in her task. It was quite clear to him that for the time being he had been forgotten. When she had finished they walked together back to the Dower House. She came with him into the kitchen where Mrs Shipley was busy preparing his meal, and stood by him while he gutted the salmon and then cut her off a generous portion behind the shoulder which Mrs Shipley wrapped for her to take away, a not very talkative Mrs Shipley but quite content to abide with her private thoughts. He had gone out one man and come back another. And it was no surprise to her when she heard him ask her to have a drink before she left. Both he and Mister Punch had ever been ones with eyes for pretty girls. One day, she thought, might well bring a sad day for Miss Nancy Hope—he would fall for some young woman like this—and the sooner the better if he were to start having the kind of moods which she had known in him early after his wife had died.

  Over their drinks, he said, “What do you do with yourself every evening in that bungalow?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. Cook my dinner. Work a little perhaps. Read. Listen to music. And sometimes I just sit.”

  Following a thought which had begun to stir in his mind, not simply at random but born out of his own present frustration and nurtured by the sight of her relaxed in her chair, legs crossed, all woman and—he supposed—as unattached and subject to the same moods and emotions as himself, he said, “Would you like to go somewhere with me where I can show you a couple more Hatton paintings?”