Gay Phoenix

by Michael Innes

  Copyright & Information

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  The Gay Phoenix

  First published in 1976

  © Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1976-2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  1842327356 9781842327357 Print

  0755118081 9780755118083 Pdf

  0755119770 9780755119776 Kindle

  0755120965 9780755120963 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.

  After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel, Death at the President's Lodging. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.

  After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen's University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature.

  Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.

  PROLOGUE

  Sundry Persons at Sea

  1

  The Povey brothers eyed one another. Charles Povey’s gaze was more fixed than Arthur Povey’s – which was in the nature of things, since Charles was dead. Arthur found he greatly disliked being stared at by a corpse. As with Banquo’s ghost when it had obeyed Macbeth’s summons to the feast, there was no speculation in the eyes that it did glare with. But there was no reason for Arthur to suppose that there was anything particularly unusual about his feelings. Most people probably found such an experience disagreeable, and that was why it was customary to close the eyes of deceased persons. You put out a finger – Arthur Povey supposed – and edged down first one lid and then the other, rather as if coping with some defect in the mechanism of a ‘sleeping’ doll.

  For some moments, Arthur found he lacked courage to perform this office for Charles. He sat back and imagined – for he had a lively imagination – a fly crawling slowly across first his brother’s right eye and then his brother’s left eye: sightless and unflinching orbs. Not that there could be many flies around. Not here aboard a small craft tossing uneasily in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

  And Charles – Arthur reflected with what was only a fresh spurt of familiar resentment – had died abruptly and for no good reason at all. He had simply not hopped out of the way quick enough. And as a consequence of his lethargic behaviour his younger brother had been left in a more desperate hole than ever. It was absolutely like Charles to fix things that way.

  Still, one had to be fair. Arthur’s hole, with Charles dead, was not quite so desperate as Charles’ hole would have been, had it been Arthur who had incontinently got himself killed. This was because it was Arthur who really knew the sea. That was why he had been dragged into this ‘adventure’ in the first place. Charles had recruited him without ceremony, and in exchange for nothing more than his keep, precisely as if he had been some adequately qualified lounger of the sort to be picked up on any waterfront. Damn Charles and his adventures. They had always been idiotic and gratuitous. There wasn’t even money in them.

  Not that this one had looked particularly hazardous. The yacht had been – it still mostly was – uncommonly well found. You could advertise it in a journal for freshwater sailors as owning all mod cons. It was true that – now, and since the sizable storm which had just blown itself out – the yacht lacked one or two rather important bits and pieces. Notably, it lacked its mainmast. That was what Charles had failed to get out of the way of as it came crashing down – with the consequence that the up-flying butt of the thing, lethally jagged, had gone through the back of his head like a knife. The moment had been one of sheer nightmare – particularly as Arthur’s own head hadn’t escaped scot-free. Something, he didn’t know quite what, had given it a flip or blip which had landed him with a filthy headache now.

  Cautiously, and for the third or fourth time, Arthur Povey felt his skull. You could fracture your skull, he supposed, without its then positively wobbling under your fingers. But there couldn’t be so much as a cut on his, since with the slightest scalp wound you bled like a pig. And he certainly wasn’t concussed. So he had been lucky. Lucky so far.

  As for the yacht, he could continue to make do with it. Once back in a trade route, his job would be simply not to fall fatally asleep in the path of an unstoppable tanker before hailing something more likely to be charitably interested in him. Eventually he would collect a certain amount of credit and publicity (but not, unfortunately, remunerative publicity) for managing to turn up alive. Of course, a Sunday paper might buy his ‘story’. There would be a small something in that.

  Hunched by the idle wheel, Arthur Povey brooded. Alone on a wide wide sea, he brooded for a long time. Not that he was unconscious of some action as being required of him fairly quickly. The bloody sun at noon – and here his sole working capital, his imagination, was at work again – would very soon operate on his brother’s body in an undesirable way. The sun breeds maggots in a dead dog, being a god kissing carrion. (Or a good kissing-carrion, Arthur crazily told himself – recalling some fragment of his expensive and useless education.) Hygiene called for the rapid disposal of Charles. Decency and piety required the rummaging out of some scrap of sailcloth and the stitching of the body into it before consignment to the deep. There was even something in the Book o
f Common Prayer that one ought to read aloud first. (The Poveys were English gentlemen, and had been well brought up.) It seemed doubtful, however, whether the mod cons ran to such a volume. Nautical manuals and a few mildly erotic paperbacks constituted, so far as he could remember, the entire library the Gay Phoenix boasted.

  Arthur Povey scowled. The contracting of his forehead brought on an extra stab of pain, and again his fingers went to the back of his head – to the spot which, on his brother’s head, he didn’t propose, if he could help it, to look at again. A less uncultivated man than Charles, he was always irritated when he remembered that Charles’ trim craft bore that peculiarly idiotic name. The Gay Phoenix! There had been a time when Charles had indulged a rich man’s fancy for owning racehorses, and it seemed to be a convention that you could call such brutes any nonsensical thing you pleased. Yachts ought to be different. Arthur Povey, being a person of exact sensibility, was very clear about that.

  This trivial displeasure was scarcely one to take up much time, and he was therefore startled when he suddenly noticed what was happening to the now swiftly moderating sea. That vast unharvested deep had taken to sliding up to and beneath the Gay Phoenix in a tumble of molten golden guineas – a perfectly familiar phenomenon, but one declaring that the sun had dropped almost to the horizon. He had been sitting immobile and paralysed for hours! The discovery frightened him. It frightened him because it told him he was frightened; that shock had been succeeded by blind terror. Charles had died. Charles had suffered death by misadventure – something the possibility of which one was always theoretically aware of, but the actual enactment of which before one’s eyes appeared a brute and incredible thing. It was, after a fashion, a natural death, yet it now seemed unnatural in the highest degree: a stroke so arbitrary as to induce ungovernable fear when one tried to focus it. Why had the Dark Angel chosen Charles? Equally it might have chosen him! He felt like a man who had been playing Russian roulette with a revolver every second chamber of which held a live bullet. He had pulled the trigger and there had been nothing but a click. The issue might have been a shattering oblivion.

  But he was also paralysed like this because he was in the grip of two contradictory impulses before the problem of Charles’ body. He loathed it – so that he wanted to jump up, seize it cruelly by the heels, and pitch it without more ado to the sharks. At the same time, he couldn’t bear even to think of parting with it. Inert matter though it was, it yet seemed all that was left to him of the breathing world. With Charles gone, loneliness would be his sole companion.

  Yet these were unmanly thoughts and emotions. They just wouldn’t do. Arthur Povey managed to take a deep breath. His lungs were still in working order. It was his duty to keep them that way. It was even his duty to find them, if possible, a larger air. In life, his brother Charles had been disposed to do precious little for him. Could Charles – the speculation began to stir dimly in his numbed brain – be made to do rather more for him in death?

  The headache was going away, and the relief of this was immense. Only, he had an odd sensation as if what he was thus parting with had owned some physical dimension within his skull, in which there was now as a consequence a small vacant space waiting to be filled up with something else. He wondered whether he had suffered some mild concussion after all. Fleetingly he was aware of the vague visual image of a football field, and of a boy – who might be himself – scrambling out of a messy confusion of flailing limbs and wandering round in disconcerting circles until led off to the pavilion. He wondered whether, if set in the middle of a large open space now, he would begin to behave in this way. What had thus drifted into his mind so inconsequently had the feel of a memory rather than of a random creation of the mind, yet he could provide it with no context in his own experience. For some minutes after the picture faded, he continued to be unreasonably worried by this. He had to pull himself together in order to take hold of his present situation.

  A spectator – but even the Dark Angel had departed – might have found something a shade macabre in the first action that Arthur Povey then bestirred himself to perform. His brother’s body was lightly clad in shorts and a singlet, and there were only plimsolls on his feet. Arthur stripped off the lot and threw everything into the sea. The small operation was surprisingly difficult. Charles’ limbs were like those of a sulky and uncooperative child, resentful of being undressed and put to bed. For a full minute Arthur stood panting slightly, his own legs, braced and sentient, responding to the sway of the yacht. The body thus spoiled was lean, strong, strangely young. It ought obviously to have gone on living for years and years – as he himself, by two years Charles’ junior, would certainly do.

  A wave thudded, and the dead man helplessly lurched a little against the bulwark. Even so, it was without indignity. Arthur looked at his brother’s broad shoulders and narrow hips, at his flat belly, the fine hairs glinting golden on his chest, the dark curled abundant hair below. Charles had been a proper man. But Arthur himself, for that matter, was a proper man too. They were alike in physique and features, although they had not been very alike in temperament or in the course of their lives. Beset by a sudden irrational doubt, and still reluctant to raise that head and accept the verdict it gave, Arthur put a hand on Charles’ heart. It was still, and the body it had served was cold. He let his living right hand touch Charles’ dead left hand – and for a moment pause there, as if some message had been transmitted to him. He felt down Charles’ side: the taut rib cage, the hollow thigh, the moulded knee. Charles’ sex, exposed before him in a manner suggesting the drunkenness of Noah, made him momentarily frown. He hadn’t known much about that part of his brother’s life.

  He began to think about what he did know – both in this regard and others. His mind moved into the past – but gropingly, as if even its salient landmarks lay in darkness or were farther away than they ought to be. Family history flickered inside his head jerkily and uncertainly, like images projected there by an amateur and incompetent cinematographer. Then, quite suddenly, memories came fluently and at an accelerating pace, rather after the fashion in which this is supposed to happen within the consciousness of a drowning man. Not that he was going to drown. It was Charles who – posthumously, as it were – was presently going to do that. He himself was going to tread dry land again; was infallibly going to do so, even although the wheel against which he was now leaning had, several days ago, abruptly ceased to have a rudder at its command. Everything of that kind would sort itself out. He had no problems he couldn’t confidently handle – not until that landfall came and he was among his own kind again. It was then would come the tug-of-war.

  The direction Arthur Povey’s thoughts now took was such as to make him pause at one point and ask himself whether he was in at all a normal state of mind. If he were not protected by the solitude of ocean might he possibly be saying and doing things which would constrain people to come and lock him up? Might he not, at least, be taking some first and irretrievable step in a rash and insufficiently considered direction? His present situation – although he firmly repeated to himself that it fell a long way short of the desperate – was not of a kind a man would willingly confront himself with. Still, it did seem likely to afford ample opportunity for reflection.

  And now he noticed that his dead brother was still not quite reduced to anonymity. Round Charles’ neck there hung a fine silver chain carrying what, in time of war, had been called an identity disk. In certain services it had been worn on the wrist, and been so constructed that, like a handcuff, it wouldn’t come off. That had been so that they couldn’t too swiftly make you anonymous. Nowadays, people who went adventuring (and poor old Charles had been convinced he did precisely that) frequently provided themselves with such a possession – envisaging situations in which it might be beyond their power to name themselves, to remember their blood group, to announce their having this or that physiological idiosyncrasy which meant that one or another rashly injecte
d drug would kill them. Charles had even obliged Arthur too to wear one of these things – much as some men thus secretly wear a cross, an image of St Christopher, even a piece of sheer cabbalistic nonsense.

  Indulgently, almost absently, Arthur Povey removed the chain and its graven legends from Charles Povey’s neck. Charles was going to need nothing of that sort now – so let him go out of the world precisely as he had entered it. And not even ineffectively and impermanently swathed in canvas. The vast powers of working nature, embodied in that unslumbering oceanic swell, would contemptuously rip away anything of the sort swiftly enough. Let Charles descend stark into the deep, and the currents set about the trivial task of picking his bones to whispers.

  The moment, in fact, had come. Arthur gripped Charles by the ankles. He did this – and then he looked about him, scanning the surface of the void waters guiltily, as if to make certain of being unobserved. The heave, the shove, required unexpected and surprising effort. It was only a matter of the inert weight a dead man presents. But the effect was as if Charles – unreasonable and recalcitrant now as always – was reluctant to go. But go he must. And he went finally with a very small splash. It might have been no more than a pebble that made those rather beautiful spreading concentric rings on the water.

  Arthur Povey made his way below. He got out the first-aid kit. There were bandages, swabs, even sutures and needles. He boiled water. Taking the greatest care, he sterilized a knife.