Catching sight of her gesture as he entered, Johnny said politely, ‘I hope I haven’t disturbed you. I came in for a nightcap.’
‘No; not a bit.’ Her voice held a slight quaver, but I don’t think he noticed it, as he was looking somewhat distrait; and she added quickly, ‘Do help yourself. I only came down to hunt out an address that Giff said I would find here; and I’ve just come across it.’
With a word of thanks he walked over to the drink cabinet, fixed himself a large whisky and soda, and plumped down into the arm-chair near it, as she remarked:
‘You don’t usually get home from your evenings with Sue Waldron as early as this.’
‘No,’ he replied non-committally; and, stretching out his long legs, he stared with a worried frown at his feet.
Having recovered from her fright she gave him a puzzled look and asked: ‘What’s the matter? Have you quarrelled with Sue?’
‘No,’ he repeated, and I formed the impression that although he was in some sort of trouble he had no intention of telling her what it was. Until the previous autumn he and Ankaret had been on excellent terms, but from the beginning of last winter, while her attitude to him had not changed, I had thought on several occasions that he had become a trifle stand-offish with her. His present uncommunicativeness confirmed the change that I had noticed and I wondered what could have caused it. In due course I was to learn.
After knocking back a good half of his drink, he asked:
‘Where’s Giff?’
‘Up in the lab with the Prof,’ she replied promptly. ‘They are trying out some new gadget. It’s something to do with photography, I think. Anyhow he said that it might be a long session, and that if anyone rang up they were not to be disturbed, as if the door was opened the light would get in and ruin everything.’
Again I metaphorically took off my hat to her for producing such a fast one, while Johnny said: ‘I see,’ in a disappointed tone. Then, finishing his drink, he asked: ‘May I have another?’
She nodded. ‘Of course; finish the bottle if you like. But Johnny, dear, what is wrong? You seem to be frightfully upset about something. Won’t you tell me what it is; then perhaps we’ll find some way in which I can help you.’
That was typical of Ankaret and the sort of thing that, despite her faults, made her so lovable. No woman could conceivably have had more on her mind than she had at the moment, yet she would not allow it to prevent her trying to comfort a friend who was in trouble.
Johnny helped himself again, gave her rather a shame-faced look, and said: ‘Well, I haven’t exactly quarrelled with Sue but I’ve had one hell of a row with her father.’
‘What about?’ Ankaret enquired.
He passed a hand worriedly over his fair, rather rebellious, hair. ‘It arose out of the Board Meeting that we held this afternoon. Giff sprang a pretty startling piece of policy on us, and in support of it he produced a mass of facts and figures connected with Defence. After dinner, over the port, the Admiral tackled me about it, and as good as accused me of having put Giff up to this idea then briefed him for the meeting.’
‘And you hadn’t?’
Johnny’s blue eyes opened wide. ‘Good Lord, no! This stuff is dynamite—Top Secret and known only to a few dozen people outside the high-ups. But the devil of it is that I might have, because as a member of the Joint Planning Staff I am one of those few dozen. It’s our job to do the spade-work for the Chiefs of Staff, so we have to be in on all their secrets.’
‘Where did Giff get it, then?’
‘I haven’t a notion. There must have been a colossal leak somewhere; and to let half the things he said out of the bag would mean cashiering if it could be brought home to whoever did brief him. It is owing to the field being such a narrow one that makes the Admiral suspect me; and the old boy was hopping mad about it.’
Ankaret nodded. ‘One can hardly be surprised about that, seeing that if Giff’s proposal was adopted it might lead to the dissolution of the Navy.’
‘You know what took place at the Board Meeting, then?’ Johnny said, raising his eyebrows.
‘Yes. Giff told me about it before dinner.’
‘Then you’ll appreciate what a jam I’m in with the Admiral. He knows that, whether I briefed Giff or not, as an airman I am one hundred per cent behind what he plans to do. To the old boy that is little better than High Treason. After saying that he had half a mind to put the Security people on to enquiring into my reliability, he ordered me out of the house and forbade me ever to enter it again.’
‘Poor you. What rotten luck,’ said Ankaret sympathetically. ‘Does Sue know about this yet?’
‘Yes. Before leaving I collected her and we went out and sat in my car. We spent well over an hour together while I tried to explain matters. She accepted my word for it that I knew nothing of Giff’s intentions, but the Navy means nearly as much to her as it does to her old man; so she took mighty badly my admission that I would help to get it scrapped if I could. She just wouldn’t listen to reason, and before we parted she told me that she would prefer not to see me again until I was willing to leave Navy matters to men like her father, who understood them.’
‘Don’t worry too much,’ Ankaret endeavoured to console him. ‘That she believes you is what really matters. The woman isn’t born yet who would sacrifice her lover for a question of strategy. I’m sure she’ll come round before long. Anyhow, you can talk it over with …’
I felt sure that now submerged in his problem her mind had temporarily blacked out about the events of the past two hours, and that she had been about to say ‘talk it over with Giff in the morning’. As it was she suddenly went deathly white and substituted’… we can talk it over again tomorrow.’
Fortunately he was once more staring unhappily at his feet, so he did not see the blood drain from her face; but when she added quickly: ‘Now, what about getting to bed,’ he looked up again, and replied:
‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather accept your offer of a third noggin of Scotch, and sit here for a while. I want to try to think out if there is not some way by which, without letting my side down, I could patch matters up with old Waldron.’
Ankaret glanced at the locked desk. It was evident to me that she was most reluctant to leave the room without retrieving the evidence of her forgery; but I could also see that she was just about all in. Forcing a smile, she said: ‘Good night’ to Johnny and walked through the drawingroom to the hall.
There she took the forged letter from her pocket and looked about her uncertainly. Perhaps she had momentarily forgotten the original plan to put it in the pocket of my smoking jacket and leave that, as though I had thrown it off before jumping into the water, on the end of the pier. Or perhaps she decided that with Johnny about it was too great a risk for her to leave the house again. Anyhow, after a moment’s hesitation she walked to the front door and put the letter in the letterbox.
Slowly and wearily she went upstairs. On the landing she paused for a moment to stare at the closed door leading to the laboratory; but she did not go in to collect my jacket, and had she done so I hardly know where she could have left it to better advantage, short of taking it down to the pier. After all, I would not have been likely to have thrown it off in the house before going out to commit suicide, but I just might have done so before attacking Evans.
At last the terrible strain that Ankaret had been through was taking its toll of her. The effort required to appear normal during her ten minutes’ talk with Johnny, had exhausted her last reserves of will-power and control. Within a few moments her face had become drawn and haggard. Her steps were faltering as she reached her room and closed the door behind her. Still fully dressed she flung herself face down on the bed. For a while she remained silent and motionless. Then she stretched up a hand and switched out the light; but the blessed forgetfulness of sleep was as yet a long way from being granted to her. In an agony of distress she moaned:
‘Oh Giff, darling Giff; what shall I do without you?’ And after that a
nguished cry she began to choke with such awful rending sobs as one could expect to hear only from a woman whose heart is broken.
My own heart, or rather its spiritual counterpart, was so wrung that, since I was debarred from comforting her, I could not bear to remain in the room any longer. Withdrawing from it I passed downstairs and through the garden door out into the night.
At last I was alone. Now that the actions of others, fraught with such potent possibilities, and anxious speculations about the way their minds were working, no longer fully occupied my attention, I had become free to consider my own situation.
There could be no escaping the fact that I was dead, and although a witness to all that had passed, a silent and unseen one. There was no way in which I could help Ankaret during the ordeal which she must still go through when the deaths of myself and Evans were discovered. I could only pray for her. I now had no more power to influence the lives of the living than the stones of the terrace a few feet above which I floated; yet for some reason that I had no means of guessing, apart from the fact that I no longer had a body, I felt no more dead than I had two hours before.
The moon was now up and by it I could see the silent prospect of the Solent as clearly as if I had still been living. Like most people, I had always assumed that to die was to solve the great mystery, yet to me death had so far revealed nothing. All the same, I found it impossible to believe that I should continue in my present state for long; and as I heard the grandfather clock in the hall strike midnight, I wondered a little grimly what strange experience the new day would hold for me.
5
Saturday 10th September
In the Age of Faith, when religion played a major part in everybody’s life, and a belief in the powers of saints and devils was accepted as naturally as the fact of life itself, ninety-nine people out of every hundred had fixed convictions about death. They accepted without question the teaching that at the moment of dissolution their souls were either carried triumphantly away by waiting angels or dragged off to eternal torment by remorseless fiends. In consequence those who led godly lives could meet their end with complacency and sinners generally had the opportunity of making a deathbed repentance which enabled them to rely with some confidence on forgiveness and mercy.
But, apart from the few who still faithfully follow the Christian precepts, the Age of Reason has deprived us of this happy certainty of our fate in the hereafter. Even so, the idea has become pretty generally accepted that while we need no longer fear hell-fire, and that punishment for our shortcomings will probably be no more drastic than having to suffer a certain period of distressing remorse, our personalities will continue after death and we shall be received on the other side by loved ones who have preceded us.
I was, of course, brought up in the Christian faith, but from the time of leaving school had never been a regular churchgoer and, like most men of this bustling, highly competitive modern age, had given little thought to religion. In consequence, had I been told the previous morning that I was to die that night I should certainly not have expected to be wafted away either by angels or devils; but I should have expected somebody or some power to do something about me. Could I have reconciled myself to being so suddenly snatched from those I loved on earth, I think I might even have looked forward to death as a great adventure, and I should certainly have counted on meeting again friends who had gone before me.
Yet here I was, a ghost—even if an invisible one—a wraith, a spirit, utterly alone, with no means of communicating with either the living or the dead, and no indication whatever that I might shortly be taken care of.
It was a most unhappy situation and there came into my mind a frightening thought. What if the God in whom I had been taught to believe at my mother’s knee watched over only those who proved faithful to Him? As I had abandoned Him perhaps He had abandoned me, and I was condemned to wander the earth alone until some far distant day when there was a final judgement. Such a possibility was utterly appalling.
Bordering on panic, I took refuge in the Christian teaching that the Mercy of God was infinite. Although I could lay no claim to having led a saintly life mine had certainly not been an evil one. My neglect of religion was not a sin of commission but omission; so surely He would not inflict such a drastic punishment upon me.
Yet of that hope I was promptly robbed by the beliefs I had formed since becoming adult. It had seemed to me highly questionable that the Christian teaching was a reliable guide to the hereafter. What of the millions who placed their faith in Mahomet and Krishna? And to me, the impersonal philosophies of the Buddhists and Confucians appeared much more plausible. Admittedly I had never thought about the matter really seriously, but I had more or less subconsciously come to the conclusion that God in the image of Man did not exist at all, and that the affairs of mankind were directed by some remote power, who left it to each individual to create his own place in some future existence.
Again I was chilled by the possibility that I had been right; for, if so, I could not hope to be pardoned and rescued by a merciful God who was aware of all things, even to the fall of a sparrow; but must somehow work out my own salvation, despite the fact that I had not the faintest idea how to set about it.
One comforting thought came to me; there must be countless thousands of people in the same boat as myself. In Europe and America and in every part of the world in which white communities of some size were established people must be dying every minute; and a high proportion of them, although brought up as Christians, must have died with the same lack of positive faith in the Church’s teachings as I had. Therefore it could be only a matter of hours before I should meet some kindred spirit in a like state of puzzlement who, for lack of a better phrase, had also recently ‘passed over’.
That theory seemed sound and reassuring until I suddenly remembered that I had actually been present at Evans’s death. Although I had never discussed these matters with him, at odd times during general conversations he had let drop enough for me to be quite certain that he was an agnostic. That being the case, our spirits should have had enough in common to meet with more or less similar treatment in the ‘great beyond’.
Therefore it was only reasonable to suppose that as his left his body he would have been aware of my presence, and that I should have realised that he too, although now invisible, was still in the lab and also watching with the keenest interest what Ankaret would do next. The different backgrounds which had given us so little in common while alive, and even any antipathy we felt for one another owing to each of us, in a sense, having been the cause of the other’s death, should surely have been submerged in mutual concern for our futures, and an instinctive urge to get together and compare notes about our sensations.
But nothing of that kind had occurred. When Ankaret had finished with Evans I had regarded him only as a repulsive and bloody mess. Not a whisper, or even a thought, had impinged on my consciousness to suggest his spritual survival and arrival on this same ‘plane’ as myself. And that having been so in the case of a person with whom I was at least well acquainted, there did not seem any great hope that I would shortly run into some elderly person who had just died in a neighbouring village, or one of the several people who during the past twenty-four hours must have given up the ghost in so large a city as Southampton.
While I was gloomily pondering this—no doubt because certain terms used by spiritualists, such as ‘passed over’ and the ‘great beyond’, had recently drifted through my mind—another idea occurred to me. From the little I had read of such matters, most occultists were of the opinion that on leaving the body a spirit rarely sped direct to its new field of activity. Some even failed for a time to comprehend fully that they were dead, while the majority were still so deeply concerned with the people or projects and possessions that they had left behind that, for varying periods, they remained earthbound. The period, according to this belief, depended on the strength of the emotional ties, and it was only when these had weakene
d to a point at which the craving of the spirit for fresh interests submerged the old ones that it could move onward to a higher sphere.
Unquestionably from the moment of my own death until midnight I had been entirely absorbed by happenings connected with my past life; so there seemed fair grounds for supposing that the reason why I had so far made no contact with the spirit world was because I was still earthbound. At least such a premise had logic to recommend it, and with a slightly more optimistic outlook I began to contemplate its implications.
For Ankaret and Johnny I could do nothing; so, should I have the ability to leave their vicinity, there was really no point in remaining longer in it. On the other hand, my love for her and affection for him still filled me with deep concern for their future. Before ‘going on’ I was most anxious to know if she would escape being implicated in the crimes committed at Longshot Hall that night, and if he would succeed in persuading Admiral Waldron of his innocence concerning the leakage of those Top Secret matters to which I had been made privy by Sir Charles.
Personally, I have never believed in the old adage that ‘One cannot have one’s cake and eat it’. Like most successful men, by the tactful handling of affairs I have, on most occasions during my life, succeeded in deriving benefit and enjoyment from the things I won without having to surrender them later. Now my personality having in no way altered on account of the loss of my body, I saw no reason why I should not attempt—literally in this case—to have the best of both worlds.
Tomorrow, unless prevented by some cosmic law that was still outside my comprehension, I would return to Longshot Hall and again become a silent witness of all that took place there. But the night was still young; and during it I would do my utmost to leave earth and penetrate the higher plane of existence on which I now felt that a future of some kind must be awaiting me.
Since I was no longer subject to the physical limitations imposed by a body, my first thought was to make my way towards the stars. Willing myself to rise, I managed to force my consciousness up to the level of the roof of the house; but there the effort to ascend further proved such an intolerable strain that I had to give up and on abandoning the attempt I slowly sank back to my previous level, some six feet above the terrace.
The Ka of Gifford Hillary Page 12