Pibble shut his mouth, shuddered and managed at last to swallow.
“Can you prove it?” he whispered.
“I’ve still got the damned envelope, with the postmark on it, but what the devil has it to do with you?”
“No,” said Pibble, his throat still so constricted that it would only whisper, “no, I’m sorry, it’s very impertinent, but I meant can you prove my father worked for you until the war and left on good terms?”
The old man laid his ears back in the involuntary spasm of his rage. Hair and whiskers seemed to bristle like hackles. His cheeks puffed in and out. Suddenly he barked.
But the bark was laughter, the hackles fell back and he tugged the other end of his watch-chain out of his waistcoat pocket. It ended in an ordinary jeweller’s catch which held a large, ornate gold seal whose die-surface was a purple stone cut with a crest. A curlicue of gold wire hung beside it.
“That’s all I inherited from my dad,” said Sir Francis, tapping the seal. “Sent it to me from Vichy. No letter, o’course. This is what I got from yours.”
He scrabbled at the catch with shivering claws, released the gold wire and passed it to Pibble. It was a simple semi-circle, with an eye in one end by which it had been threaded to the catch. The eye was tidily shaped, but looked as though it hadn’t been there when the semi-circle had first been shaped and polished.
“It looks like half a wedding-ring,” said Pibble, getting his voice back.
“Damned sharp you think yourself,” said Sir Francis. “Eighteen carats— I had it analysed.”
“I knew they had to postpone their wedding,” said Pibble slowly.
“Premature were you, hey?”
“No. It was just a remark I overheard.”
“O’course, o’course. Will Pibble was a damned honourable nincompoop, and it sounds as though your mum was worse. But he never had the grace to tell me he had a girl. Said he’d needed the gold for metal-to-glass seals—ingenious lad your dad was, in some ways—damned early on to that trick. No use to me, o’course. Gold melts.”
“Why did you keep it?”
“Because I’m a sentimental old dodderer, that’s why. Put it on my chain when he gave it to me, never took it off. Suppose it expressed our relationship in a rum way. That damned chatterer Servitude talks about the noise of one hand clapping: half a ring’s a good symbol, hey? First thing your dad looked for when … Tchah! Don’t you brood on it, you idiot. If they’d gotten you earlier you would have been someone else.”
And that was true.
“Now look here,” said Sir Francis. “I’m an old man, a’n’ I? Damned old by any ordinary standards. Old men have fancies, hey? Everybody knows that. I had a fancy to bring you up here and now I’ve a fancy to know about your fool of a father. You talk, I’ll listen. Don’t signify what you say—I’ll get the bits I need.”
Pibble nodded and put the semi-circle of gold on the table. He touched his watch, held up the fingers of one hand and raised querying eyebrows. Sir Francis brooded a moment, shook his head, opened and closed one claw three times and then at the same time touched his temple and turned down the corners of his mouth in a harsh grimace. Fifteen minutes before he “went soft”. So Pibble had ten minutes to fill with Reminiscences of a Clapham Childhood.
Sir Francis had his pad on his knee, but he wrote only once or twice while Pibble talked. Sometimes he snorted in derision, as when Pibble spoke of the non-flying kite. He nodded, unmoved, when Pibble described the Bartons’ ailing lodger. Once or twice the eyes shifted up and sideways to where the microphone hung. Pibble himself spoke drably, telling the truth but toning down colours and blurring vivid edges. This was his own and private world, which only he should inhabit; why should this grisly old lizard be allowed to pry round it, just to provide pap for the ears of the holy spies? His voice dragged, reluctant.
Suddenly, while he was describing Father’s experiments with dog-repellent in which to steep the trousers of their friend Cyril, the postman, Sir Francis made a sharp horizontal gesture, palm down, like a conductor cutting a fortissimo short. Pibble hurried the postman episode to its close.
“That’s as much as I can remember for the moment,” he said. “If you thought of anything which might open up other areas we could try again next time, perhaps.”
Sir Francis glared at him and said nothing. Pibble jerked his thumb towards the lurking mike to indicate that he was now wearing his conspirator’s mask again.
“I imagine you’ll be having your Gaelic lesson this afternoon,” he said. “About three o’clock it’ll be, won’t it?”
Difficult to keep all the meaningfulness out of his voice while suggesting this further plunge into melodrama. But it was the best place he could think of, supposing his interview with Brother Providence went badly, where they could settle their next move without this time-wasting code. Sir Francis nodded.
“I get old Dorrie to trot me out before my damned brain’s properly clear,” he said. “She gets her kicks out of babying me, and it gives me more time to make sense when I’m there.”
“So I’ll come and look for you soon after seven, shall I?” said Pibble, shaking his head.
“Do what you damned well like,” said the old man tiredly. Only his eyes showed that the huge and selfish mind was still toiling in its office.
“I wish I could have been more help to you,” said Pibble. “But I’m sure I will have come up with something by our next meeting.”
“You’re a damned useless layabout if you haven’t. Get out. Send Dorrie in.”
“Good-bye for now, sir.”
Sister Dorothy was still sitting on the step. No one else was in sight, but Brother Hope was probably at his niche below. Pibble squatted beside her in order to be able to whisper. At once she slumped her head on to his shoulder and moved it about like a dog nuzzling to have its ears scratched.
“Wake up!” he hissed. “This is important.”
Her head came up and she looked at him with quick loathing.
“Get him out to the Macdonalds’ as early as you can,” he whispered.
The loathing changed, and the same sly and secretive look that he had seen when she brought the breakfast in slid over her face. She nodded, staggered to her feet and through the door, and began shouting. Pibble heard the words. “Now I’m going to tell you what I think of you, you bloody bastard.” The door shut off the rest of the tirade.
He stood on the stairs, the echo of his own farewell running through his mind. He’d called the bloody bastard “sir”. A change had come over their relationship and had now been formalised by his subconscious. At least at the rational level it made life easier, as he now had written authority, in the unmistakable handwriting, to do what he was going to do. Pity it contained that phrase about the pill—that was dangerous knowledge. He took the unfinished note from the pouch of his habit, folded it and tucked it into the elastic of his pants. As he let the orange cloth fall back into place he remembered that he’d left the half-ring on the table. He’d kept the paper but left the gold.
Ah well, that was a symbol too. First things first. Nothing mattered for the moment beside getting the old man to a fresh supply of cortisone in the next twenty-four hours, or possibly persuading the monks to resume the proper treatment. Pibble paced the cloisters, hoping that the peaceful rhythm would calm his churning mind. (A) There was this bloody old man, worthless apart from his genius, who had sent Father off to be gassed. And who, under the shock of the forged pill and the blatant microphone, had said all sorts of teasing little things, which would have to wait for thinking about. And who had kept for over fifty years half a wedding-ring given him by his victim. Without Sir Francis, young Jamie would have been some other child, growing up in some other town, perhaps with a well father. And that must wait, too.
(B) There was the Community, just as hateful, just as treacherous. At least
there was no doubt now that Brother Patience hadn’t been improvising placebos out of the school-room chalk. Pibble had never been happy with lawyer’s law—the splitting of hairs long fallen from the scalp of justice—but this must be a deliberate attempt at murder, negative in its means but as sure and nasty as a sawn-off shot-gun. It forced Pibble to choose between his enemies, by giving him no choice.
There was no escape, and it wasn’t going to be easy, either. Brother Providence would be a hard man to blackmail, bully, cajole, or even argue with on the rational level. And the first problem would be to save his face, and the Community’s. Or seem to.
There were various threats he could wheel up, but fewer promises. So the threats would have to be carefully graded.
No mention of the book, at first. Certainly none of the murder. Assuming he won, were there any practical steps to take? Ambulance at Oban, in case Sir Francis stood the trip badly? Um. Supposing he didn’t win, then it’d be a matter of stealing the boat, somehow, and in that case an ambulance might be a life-saver. If he won, they could lay it on by radio. If he didn’t, they wouldn’t let him. No chance of asking for it before negotiating—that’d queer his sales-pitch all right. But suppose. . .it’d be natural to telephone Mary, get her to pass on a piece of easy code to Tim: then, when the whole dicey charade was over, she could learn how essential she had been for the rescue of the finest brain in Europe … why, she might stay content with her lot for two whole weeks together!
Temptation comes in improbable shapes, but they have a family characteristic: the risks always seem smaller than they are.
Pibble stopped pacing, mind made up. Time to change into official-looking serge for the interview? No, he had paced too long, and if he didn’t go to the office at once it’d be time for dinner. With mild surprise he realised that he hadn’t been shown the office during the morning’s tour. Why? Because it contained the photocopier, the one that had been mentioned after the reading of Father Bountiful’s idiot postcard, the other gadget they needed a generator for. And why keep it secret? Because it had been used to copy Sir Francis’s manuscript. Odd the way illumination comes, thought Pibble; not in steady drips, but in sudden spoutings after long drought. He wondered whether the process of scientific discovery was similar—toiling and toiling and getting no further, and then, almost in a dread, seeing a whole sequence of ideas like angels ascending and descending the ladder of logic.
He asked his way from the leader of a gang who now passed him, their pace subtly different, as though their limbs knew that the morning’s hauling and lifting was over and that a meal, however dreary, awaited them.
A spiral staircase led up inside the wall of the Refectory to a large, light room, less plain than the ones he’d been shown, but only because of the amount of brutalist office furniture in it: filing cabinet, steel desk, safe, steel and plastic chairs, radio equipment winking on a steel table against one wall, steel book-case against another, typewriter (a glossy electric toy and not the expected Imperial), and in the corner behind the door a shrouded object—the photocopier?
Three of the Virtues were in the room, and their attitudes showed that he had not interrupted anything, neither prayer nor gossip. Providence and Hope and the helicopter pilot had been waiting for him.
“Come in, come in,” said Brother Providence, rubbing his loose-skinned hands together with a noise like leaves swirling in the corner of a paved courtyard. “I trust all went well at your interview.”
“Not too well,” said Pibble. “I can’t remember enough about the kind of things he wants to know. May I use your radio to send a telegram to my wife? She doesn’t know when to expect me back.”
“You can ring her up if you wish. Father Bountiful saw fit to equip us with a radio telephone. Give Hope the number.”
Well, that’d make it easier still. And Mary would be home from her morning’s bridge-school now, and setting out her ritual lunch of prunes and Fruti-Fort.
“You must let me pay, of course,” said Pibble.
Brother Providence looked at him coldly.
“Our style of life may have persuaded you that we are beggars,” he said. “We are not.”
“I didn’t mean that,” said Pibble, and wrote the number on the pad by the radio. Odd reaction from a man who had no feelings to hurt. Brother Hope settled down before the switches and indicator-lights and began to speak patiently with the mainland operator, his accent more Canadian than ever.
“Shall I have to explain to her about saying ‘over’ and ‘out’?” said Pibble.
“Oh no, my dear lad,” said the pilot. “This is a very fancy doofer indeed, just like Clore has in his Rollses. It transmits along one wavelength and receives along another, and the other way round at Glasgow, where it connects with mere vulgar telephone wires. You chat away like you do in your own lounge.”
“I understand,” lied Pibble.
Brother Hope seemed to have met an operator who spoke pure Gorbals; the combination of accents was making for misapprehensions. Pibble was nervy. To distract himself he watched the movements of gulls through a cracked pane; they were like blips on a radar screen, tiny in themselves but telling the eye significant things about the track of the enormous air.
“Is the wind always like this?” he said.
“It usually blows for a week when we get a good westerly,” said Brother Providence. “But we do not talk or think about the weather as much as men do in Babylon. Did you listen to the forecast this morning, Tolerance?”
“No change, Prov,” said the pilot. “And am I glad I’m not boating? Truth’s a sod in this kind of sea.”
“Ringing for you now,” said Brother Hope.
Pibble sat into the still-warm chair, and instantly crouched forwards to take his weight off his scraped buttocks. The purr of the ringing tone seemed strangely loud. It stopped with a click and the stolid voice answered. Pibble prattled gamely away.
“Hello, pigeon, it’s me—I hoped I’d catch you. No, I’m still up here for at least a day more. It’s a wireless joined to a telephone, but it’s got two wavelengths so that you can speak and listen at the same time. Nor do I. Fascinating of course, but damned difficult too, that’s what’s holding me up. Of course I know he’s old, ten years older than Father would have been—he doesn’t pay attention for very long at a time, but he’s astonishing while he does. It might be on the AA map, but it’ll only be a dot, south of an island called Tiree. Cold wind, but very bracing. Of course I’m wearing them. Look, pigeon, this is very expensive—there are two important things. First, I won’t be home till Friday evening. I’ll ring again if I’m going to be later than that. OK, I’ll write him out a cheque first thing on Saturday. Second, there’s something I forgot to tell Tim Rackham at the office. Could you give him a ring? Got a pencil and paper? Fine. Just tell him there’s no ban on ambulances at the harbour. Got that? Yes, that’s right. Today, if possible. OK. I love you too. Bye.”
As he put the receiver down his chair was flipped round as if it had been caught in a whirlpool. He tried to yank himself into the room, towards the pilot who was sitting at the desk studying a scribbling pad, but his arms were twisted down behind the chair-back in an unbudgeable grip. His buttocks screamed with pain as he threshed. Straps bit into his wrists. Now he could see their heads and shoulders as his ankles were tamed. When they stood up Hope was perfectly unflurried, but Providence’s beard rose and fell on his heaving chest.
“Was that enough for you, Tolerance?” he said.
“It’ll have to be, won’t it?” grumbled the pilot. “If only Pa Bountiful had buzzed us a tape-recorder. Keep quiet, duckies, and listen to great art.”
He studied the pad and contorted his lips. An extraordinary, mincing, genteel series of syllables came from between them.
“Hello, pigeon, it’s me—I hoped I’d catch you. No, I’m still up here for at least a day more. It’s a wireless joined
to a telephone, but it’s got …”
“That sounds moderately convincing,” said Providence.
“It’s only on the phone, mind,” said the pilot.
Providence twirled his bulk round to the chair, the drapery of his habit floating behind in coarse swatches.
“In Babylon,” said Brother Providence mildly, “I used to give up Ximenes if I hadn’t finished it in half an hour. An ambulance in Oban Harbour, Brother James?”
5
Let me go,” said Pibble furiously.
The pilot immediately made another note on his pad.
Pibble tried to stand, achieved a quarter of an inch, and then had to endure the renewed agony as he sank back on to his ravaged buttocks.
“An ambulance in Oban Harbour?” prompted Providence.
Pibble said nothing. He knew now, and cursed himself for not knowing before—it should have been obvious—who the pilot was. Fish Benson, three-year escapee from the Scrubs, famed among the tall-tale-tellers of the Yard as the world’s worst con-man. Providence had only told half the story: Fish had won his talent contest with imitations of TV personalities; and the ill company which he had been willed into was Farson’s mob. Why, if he’d served his time he’d have been out last year, and very likely convicted and in again for some fresh outburst of naive ingenuity. So here was another threat, maybe, in Pibble’s strapped hands. And he’d never get anywhere if he didn’t talk—no matter what raw material the pilot could mine from his arguments.
“I need an ambulance in Oban Harbour,” he said, “in case Sir Francis doesn’t stand the crossing very well.”
“It seems we have much to talk about, Brother James,” said Providence quietly. Hope nodded. Pibble felt a prickle of terror at the form of address, and squirmed.
“I’m sorry that in the circumstances we cannot make you more comfortable,” said Providence.
“I don’t see why not,” said Pibble. “You must know that my arse is bloody sore.”
The Sinful Stones Page 10