Appleby's End

by Michael Innes

  “Surely Mark will have that.”

  “Not a marrying sort – and certainly won’t want to live as the bachelor country squire. I’d advise you, by the way, to see to the drains. And talking of drains” – Robert picked up another paper – “can anything be done about all this?”

  “I’m afraid not. You see, this is a mere mild beginning; just what rather conservative local journalists were able to get off this morning. The people camped outside now are the experts, and in the morning papers you’ll see them really begin to exploit the business.” Appleby glanced rapidly down another column. “So far, the really sensational element hasn’t been tapped. The local people haven’t got on to it. When the odd connections with your father’s stories begin to emerge the Dream affair will inevitably be raised to the rank of a first-class sensation. I’ve had some experience in these matters, and I’m afraid there’s no avoiding it. Not even if, like the Farmers over at Tiffin Place, you were pals with half the newspaper proprietors in England. And I suppose you’re not?”

  “Newspaper people?” Robert was horrified. “Dear me, no. Everard’s publishing people are bad enough. Except for their cigars.”

  “Cigars?” It was Everard Raven’s voice, and a moment later the harassed owner of Dream stepped from amid a congeries of Kurds at the foot of the Regency staircase. “Cigars?” Everard threaded his way forward, rather like somebody with a minor speaking part advancing through a crowd of supers. “My dear fellow – my dear John – I’m extremely glad to see you back. This is a very sudden decision of Judith’s, but I assure you we are all very pleased – though Clarissa may take a little humouring, I think I ought to say.” And Everard shook hands with evident warmth. “In addition to which, it has its providential aspect. I mean that you are just the person to advise us in this very embarrassing situation in which we find ourselves. Now, what was I saying?”

  “You were saying ‘cigars’,” said Robert helpfully.

  “That’s it! D’you know, one of these reporter fellows offered me a cigar? In my own house – and a person I’d never seen in my life before! It is very difficult to know what to do in such untoward situations.”

  “And what, in fact, did you do?” Robert asked.

  “I bowed formally, and rang for Rainbird. Unfortunately, Rainbird didn’t come. And the fellow didn’t in the least understand that I was displeased by his lack of breeding. So I took the cigar. It seemed the simplest thing to do.” Everard looked from Robert to Appleby, vaguely troubled. “An entirely trivial incident, of course. But this sort of thing takes one sadly out of one’s depth. And – do you know? – one of Adolphus’ waxworks is missing. Apparently it has been gone for quite a while. Rainbird says he thought it had gone to be repaired. Who ever heard of repairing a waxwork? Particularly one of Adolphus’.” Everard checked himself in this rambling and looked about him in a pathetically bemused way. “But I am altogether forgetting more important things. A suitcase has arrived for you, my dear fellow, and dinner is at half past eight. And, most important of all” – and Everard beamed with sudden and complete cheerfulness – “here is Mark, who will no doubt find Judith for you. Mark, my dear chap, here is your brother-in-law waiting for you to say the right thing.”

  Mark Raven had appeared from somewhere beneath the staircase; his yellow locks were filmed with cobweb and he was clutching several dusty bottles. “I’ve found some of Herbert’s Mouton Rothschild,” he said, “and a stray case of Bristol Cream. So we can look on the bright side, after all.” He came forward, shook hands, and stood contemplating Appleby with a sort of malicious remorse. “At the best of times I should say there was only one tolerable way of looking at a projected marriage, and that’s through the virtual opacity of a glass of decent claret.” Mark glanced from Appleby to his cousins, tossed his head violently, and suddenly ferociously scowled. “Confound it all,” he said.. “It’s a bit thick.”

  Everard was distressed. “Really, Mark, I’m sure we ought to be extremely pleased. The acquaintance may be short, but if Judith–”

  “Don’t be silly.” Obscurely furious, Mark banged down the Mouton Rothschild in a spine-chilling way on a table. “I knew this was going to happen, the way she looked at him in that railway carriage.”

  Appleby smiled. “But I felt,” he interrupted, “that I was being looked at rather like an unhewn block of soapstone.”

  Precisely. That was exactly it.” Mark’s malicious grin momentarily returned; then he scowled again. “Let them marry, by all means. He seems quite a decent chap–”

  Robert Raven, who had been peering at the claret, turned round again with the air of one who has a decisive card to play. “And he’s going to farm,” he announced.

  “–quite a decent chap; and I should say that in Judith he gets a bargain as women go. So far, so good. But what I’m saying is–”

  “And here is Luke.” Everard turned to where his melancholic brother, in a dinner jacket and a frayed boiled shirt obscured behind an enormous tie, was descending the staircase with a gloomy deliberation suggestive of a skeleton about to keep a date with a feast. “Luke, my dear fellow, you will be delighted to welcome John, I am sure. And, Mark, if there is to be claret – and I wholly approve – it ought to have been brought up hours ago. How upsetting a state of siege is! Do you know, those people were climbing in by the servants’ hall, so that I had to order that the shutters be put up? Now, what was I saying?”

  “The claret,” said Robert.

  “To be sure – the claret. Mark, take it to Rainbird and see what he can do.” He turned to Appleby. “And Robert will take you along to the studio. Judith has been working quite steadily all day.”

  “Except” – Luke Raven spoke for the first time, and in sepulchral tones – “when being subjected to the indignity of interview by the police.”

  “But it might have been very much worse.” Everard, harassed as he was, seemed determined to see the bright side of things. “This fantastic publicity” – he waved a hand as if to indicate the present strange assemblage on the lawns outside – “is very distressing, of course. But think how much more upsetting it would be for Clarissa and Judith if the first dreadful suspicions had proved true!” Everard turned to Appleby. “Perhaps you haven’t yet heard? The affair of Heyhoe has grown even more unaccountable, but at the same time rather less grim. We were much shocked by the tenor of the police enquiries this morning. There was minute questioning as to what had happened to each of us after the accident at the ford. As it chanced, we had all separated in quest of assistance, and finally made our journeys home independently. We could not, therefore, render any account of one another’s movements. Judge of our horror, then, when it began plainly to appear that some of us were being held suspect of a most atrocious crime!” Everard Raven paused, glanced about him, and shook his head in sudden vexation. “Mark has taken the claret,” he said, “but quite forgotten the sherry. And I do like to see sherry in a decanter. But – dear me! – I fear I have quite lost the thread of what I was saying.”

  “Suspect of a most atrocious crime,” said Robert.

  “Precisely! It was plainly in these people’s mind that some of us had wantonly seized upon this faithful old fellow and buried him in the snow, there to await–”

  “But the doctors turned it down.” Robert Raven, hitherto extremely patient, seemed to feel that Heyhoe’s death was occasion for more matter and less words. “We got a couple of competent ones over later in the morning. And they’re quite sure for reasons of their own that the old man died first and was forced into the snowdrift afterwards. He had a bottle of gin, it seems; and he went wandering about in the snow, and the gin was too much for him. Then somebody found him, dead as a doornail, and played this queer trick. As Everard says, it makes the whole affair more unaccountable than ever.”

  “I think not.” Appleby shook his head decidedly. “There are one or two rather
puzzling elements in the whole matter, it can’t be denied. For instance, there is a little affair of a piece of cake which is at present worrying me a good deal. But if there was reason to suppose that Heyhoe had been murdered, I should be very puzzled and worried indeed.”

  Everard Raven looked bewildered. “I’m afraid I don’t at all follow you. Can you tell us why?”

  “Because Murder and the Fine Arts are never bedfellows – whatever De Quincey may say.”

  But for once even a literary allusion appeared to give no pleasure to the editor of the New Millennium. He passed his hand over his brow. “How much I wish,” he exclaimed, “that this was all over! Coming upon the usual quiet tenor of our life at Dream, it is really very disturbing – very disturbing indeed.”

  Luke Raven, who had been communing quietly with a Kurd in a corner, raised first his eyes and then his long and beautiful hands. Broodingly he gazed at these, as if taking satisfaction in penetrating to their enduring skeleton. “Disturbing?” he echoed. “Know that what disturbs our blood is but its longing for the tomb.” He took out his watch and gazed at it as one who knows that every second spans out man’s mortality. “I wonder,” he said, “if they managed to get any potatoes? There arc few things so good as a roast potato for allaying the fever of the bone.”

  17

  Judith Raven put down her mallet. “Well?” she said presently.

  “Appleby’s End.” Appleby looked at his affianced bride with a good deal of natural curiosity. “I think we might begin with that. Is there a story of Ranulph’s called Appleby’s End?”

  “Yes. The place had that name before there was a railway station. And I suppose it caught his eye.”

  “I see. And is it about a man who is invited to stay at a strange house with sinister consequences?”

  “He doesn’t get married.” On Judith’s face there was a faint replica of Mark’s malicious smile. “But sinister is the word. Spooky doings in long, gusty corridors, with the carpets rising on the floors and the rain driving and the ivy tapping on the window panes. And madness ending all.”

  “You’re not mildly apprehensive? You won’t mind being tied for life to a madman?”

  “I’m not apprehensive.”

  “Or annoyed?”

  Judith frowned. “That’s very hard to answer. If Ranulph’s ghost brought you here for sinister purposes – ineffective, mind you, so I’m not apprehensive – he at least did bring you here. I’m not quarrelling with him. Come and look at the Appleby Memorial.”

  They turned round and faced the long studio, which occupied the ground floor of an entire wing of the house. Now somewhat ineffectively lit by lamps slung near the ceiling, it showed as vast and cavernous; and its chilliness on this winter evening was accentuated by the familiar marmoreal glitter of Theodore Raven’s massive statuary. Colossal torsos, involved figure compositions, prowling or crouching animals lay about without care of disposition as in some Cyclopean fantasy; near at hand they writhed and contorted themselves in an ecstasy of eternally thwarted muscular effort; farther off, shadows compassionately enfolded them until in the recesses of the studio they lost distinguishable form and showed like icebergs looming in a mist, their cold breath going out before them. But what lent strangeness to the scene was the fact that these inferior productions of Theodore’s genius had become a quarry for the exploring chisel of his descendant. Some had radically changed their very mode of being. Of Thusnelda in Chains only a pair of manacled limbs remained; the rest of her had been worked over with a cunningly obliterating hand until she showed like a vast pebble long polished by an infinite sea – a pebble deep within which slumbered some rudimentary vital form. Others had undergone a metamorphosis startlingly partial. General Wolfe reading Gray’s Elegy before Quebec displayed the musing soldier unconscious that his legs were turned to gnarled roots and his arms to branches – while behind him stood an untouched aide-de-camp, stolidly regardless of this martial Daphne’s leafy change. Stout Cortez stared at the Pacific as intently as was possible to one whose head had turned to a flaming torch, and Xerxes as he wrote his Cartel of Defiance to Mount Athos was ignorant that his broad back had taken on the form of a chest of drawers. But these surrealist flights were in a minority; on stands and trestles all about the room were Judith’s Objects: spheres and cubes and ovals in groups of two and three and four – conversation pieces from some private universe in which the abstractions of solid geometry owned a mysterious life of their own.

  For a time Appleby moved silently and attentively from composition to composition. It was an austere world and markedly superior to Gaffer Odgers’; even its nightmares – and he glanced back at Xerxes – had their lurking meaning – which Gaffer Odgers assuredly never had… He stopped before an effort of Theodore’s which appeared to represent a charging buffalo. “Have you,” he asked, “missed a cow, and a boar, and a dog?”

  Judith puffed dust from the buffalo’s threatening horns. “There’s a cow and a boar and a dog missing,” she said carefully.

  Appleby moved on, and paused again before one of Theodore’s vainly soliciting goddesses. “Mark said it was a bit thick,” he said.

  “A bit thick? One has to thicken the neck and the ankles and so on, so as not to break the line.” And Judith stared at Theodore’s goddess with a grave innocence.

  “But then you said just the same last night. That it was a bit thick, and a false position. And do you remember how you told me that you have a compact with Mark not to tell each other fibs? Is that going to apply to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then isn’t it going to be–”

  “I’m marrying you for your wits – partly.” Judith, who had appeared troubled, was now looking at him again in simple mischief. “I expect to see you work it out for yourself. And I don’t need to tell you either fibs or otherwise. I can just keep mum.”

  “But can you keep mum – for instance, about last night? That Heyhoe business gave you a bit of a shock?”

  They were now standing before one of Theodore’s works in a sentimental mode: a mother with a child in her arms. But the child had been chiselled down to represent a skeleton, and the mother’s head had become a skull. “The Heyhoe business?” said Judith gravely. “Well, I did find it rather macabre.”

  “And disconcerting in that it didn’t hitch on to any Ranulph story?”

  “Quite so.”

  “I’ve discovered it hitches on to what might well be a Ranulph story – only he doesn’t seem to have written it. Billy Bidewell–”

  “Ranulph did write it.” For a moment Judith seemed tired and impatient. “Only it was never published. Everard told me this morning.” She looked at the statue before them in evident distaste and ran a finger cautiously along one of the child’s ribs. “My salad days,” she said, “when I was green in judgement. But whatever shall I do when Theodore is all used up?” She paused. “John, what first struck you about this whole business?”

  “That it was the work of an artist – and therefore quite probably of somebody with Raven blood. Perhaps of somebody interested in dreams because brought up at a place called Dream. For dreams, you know, use whatever is lying about. A dream takes up a hundred hints from the common business of the day and weaves them into whatever structure it has on hand. A man called Appleby and a place called Appleby’s End: there’s pure dream material in that – and it’s not been missed.” He paused and looked seriously at Judith. “Only, of course, this is a thoroughly practical and businesslike dream – or was meant to be.”

  “And you seem to be a thoroughly businesslike analyst.” Judith looked at her watch. “Only ten minutes to get into other clothes.” She moved towards the door, and then halted. “If I were marrying you for your wits it looks as if I should be getting a bargain. For I take it you have the whole affair taped?”

  “I don’t understand it all, by any means.
And – what’s more – I doubt if anybody does.”

  Judith looked at him, open-eyed. “Is that just being oracular? Is it the professional manner?”

  “It is not. I’m not bringing anything professional into all this. You see, there’s enough trouble been brought in already. Heyhoe’s death, chiefly – which is what has brought down all that mob of journalists and reporters. It’s exciting, no doubt. Quite wakes the place up, doesn’t it? Heyhoe died, and there was his body lying in some lane, and the dream-artificer promptly exploited the fact and made the correct move. It was a bit macabre, as you were pleased to say. It was also a mistake. This ingenious dreamer overreached himself. In England one can’t do that with a body – however dead – and get away with it. The explanation will be demanded – and will continue to be demanded, even if half a dozen of my colleagues are sent down from the Yard in turn and fail. Not that they would fail, for there are lots of them a good deal smarter than I am.”

  Appleby was now pacing up and down the chill studio with a vigour that sent little clouds of marble dust eddying round his feet. Judith had sat down on the stomach of a Dying Gaul and was eyeing him warily – and at the same time with rather more satisfaction than wariness.

  “That’s the first spot of trouble, Judith Raven. It’s either awkwardness at the next Assizes or compounding a felony – if it can be done.”

  “But in Sherlock Holmes there’s a man who conceals the body of his wife after she dies in a vault or something until he can meet his creditors by winning a horse-race. He even gets somebody to impersonate her – and nobody has impersonated Heyhoe, have they? And he doesn’t get into any trouble at all. The coroner is most sympathetic.”

  “Bother Sherlock Holmes. And you may take it from me that the judge won’t be sympathetic – quite contrariwise. And that’s only trouble number one. Trouble number two concerns the habits of hares.”