The joke – if it was meant as that – held for Cranston no reassurance. For the first time there came home to him what the pitch of the fugitive’s desperation must have been. The channel was a long way out. Even from the cliff, steamers following it were hull-down on the horizon. The man had done a terrific swim. And he was next to naked. Clothes were his first necessity. And in the pool of shadow in which he still stood there was probably quite a number of small handy boulders lying about. Cranston realised a sober chance that, when he turned away, the man from the sea would grab one of these and hit him on the head.
“If you want clothes, we’ll have to do some talking.” Cranston heard himself with surprise – both for the words, which he had not premeditated, and for the tone, which was calm. The discovery that he could command a decent poise before a man who was disclosing himself as formidable brought back to Cranston the start of pleasure which had been his first response on tumbling to the stranger’s plight. “But you’ll have to wait a bit.” The better to assure himself that he really had some grip of the situation, Cranston for the second time looked straight into the stranger’s eyes. This time, the features surrounding them were distinguishable, and for an instant he imagined that they stirred at something in his memory. “You’ll have to wait.” He repeated it briskly. “I’m going across to those other rocks. There are things you’ve rather upset.”
“So I gather.” The man from the sea was impassive. “But you should get them straight, I think, inside ten minutes. I’ll expect you back then.”
“I’ll come back when I can.” Cranston stiffened under what seemed a threat.
“Thank you. I realise I’m not your only pebble on the beach.” The voice was ironic. “But don’t forget me altogether and clear out. It would be disconcerting if I had to follow you like this…back to civilisation.”
Cranston, without replying, began to climb down to the beach. He did so slowly, since he felt it prudent to keep an eye on the other man still. “Stay just where you are,” he called back.
“Certainly – for a few minutes.” The torso of the man from the sea slipped down into darkness until only his head and shoulders showed in the moonlight. He had found something to sit on. “But you needn’t, my dear young man, think I’m going to slug you. I value you too highly for that. And doesn’t the mere suspicion make you out a rather fickle fellow? We were like blood-brothers, you know, only five minutes ago.”
Again Cranston said nothing. But he felt irritated – partly at having his years condescended to, and partly from acknowledging the truth of what the man from the sea had divined. He completed his scramble, and felt his feet on the sand.
“I wonder why?” The voice of the man from the sea came to him now from above only as a meditative murmur.
“I wonder…can you be getting away with something too?”
The last throb of the motorboat had faded, and the sea lay dim and empty on either side of the broad bright causeway thrown across it by the moon. When halfway down the beach Cranston swerved and ran for the cliff. The shorts and gym shoes which were all he had set out in on this warm night lay at an easily identified spot; within seconds he had them on and was running to the farthest rocks. “Caryl?” His voice was carefully without anxiety. “Come out…it’s quite all right.”
She appeared instantly – jumping a small rock-pool in her urgency and tumbling into his arms. “Dicky, Dicky – what is it? I don’t understand. It isn’t Alex?”
“Of course not. Nothing like that.” He took her in a quick embrace. Her body, slim beneath the slacks and thick sweater into which it was huddled, trembled not with the excitement familiar to him but in simple terror. He felt for her a sudden enormous pity and compassion, holding no proportion either with the degree or occasion of her distress. He held, caressed, soothed her – murmuring all his private endearments, secret names. It was something he had been constrained to do before, and he had skill at it. Out of the force of his solicitude he strained that skill now, exploited it with all the resource of his quick brain. And suddenly the very effort of this produced, without a single premonitory flicker in consciousness, a complete revolution.
He was so skilful only because it was all – the whole damned thing – happening through his brain. In this infernal theatrical moonlight he was like an actor who has been sunk for a space in his part, but to whom detached consciousness has returned, so that he must simply get through his scene with what deftness rests in him. The very largeness of his emotion of seconds before had spoken of its instability; and all that he now felt was a sharp impatience. That – and the shocked sense of everything being in process of becoming different, as if experience had incontinently, treacherously turned upon him its other face. But for the moment at least he could shut out its new enigmatical lineaments and look only at the practical problem confronting him. “It’s all right,” he whispered, “ – quite all right. Only something’s happened that rather ditches us for tonight. A man from the sea.”
“A man from the sea?” She was bewildered.
“Escaped from a ship – and swum ashore. That motorboat was after him. It’s gone. But the man’s on my hands still. He’s over there in the other rocks.”
“What sort of a man? What’s it about?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Smuggling, perhaps. I believe various up-to-date varieties exist.”
“But how stupid!” Her confidence was returning. “He must go away. You must send him away.”
“I don’t know if I can.” He hesitated. “And I want to know about him.”
“But he has nothing to do with us!” It came from her as if proving that he had said something strictly nonsensical. “Please, please, Dicky, go and get rid of him… I’ve only a little time. I must be going back.” Her voice had gone husky, and she moved in his arms – with calculation, some new perception told him, so that through the thick wool her skin slid beneath his fingers. “Or can’t we just slip away – into the field above the cliff?”
“I’ve got to find out about him.” He saw that she was surprised as well as puzzled, and it came to him humiliatingly that here was the first indication she had ever received that he had a will of his own. He was prompted to add: “And get him clothes.”
“But he may be a criminal!” Caryl was horrified. “And you would be breaking the law. Dicky – do, do let us clear out.”
Cranston let go of her and stepped back. She was at least tolerably secure again on her own pins. “I don’t know that we could if we would. He’s keeping an eye on us, I suspect. And he’s prepared to make trouble if we don’t toe the line.”
“Make trouble?”
She was scared again – so that instinctively he put out a hand to her once more. “He’s an educated man, and nothing escapes him. He sees that we wouldn’t care for a lot of shouting.”
“Why should we be afraid of it?” Abruptly, as if to enhance his sense of some horrible disintegration, she was spuriously bold – dramatic on a note that was wholly false. “I’d take it – with you, Dicky. I’d take anything with you. But I have to think of Sally.”
It was the first time that she had spoken the name in weeks. He said very quietly: “Look – you can clear out. That will be the best thing, and at least it will cramp his style. Slip through the rocks to the cliff-path by the groyne. Then double back along the top to your bike and go home. I’ll stay and deal with the chap.”
For a moment he could see her waver. When she spoke it was with a queer desperation. “No. Not unless you go too.”
“But surely–” He stopped – having caught suddenly at a fantastic truth. In her incredible head Caryl had fudged up some crazy suspicion. Perhaps it was to the effect that he had been prompted to conceal a second mistress at the other end of the beach. More probably what had peered out in her was without definable content – a mere irresistible wash of undifferentiated sexual jealousy. And at this, under a sort of cold inner light flicked on by the absurd discovery, Cranston starkly real
ised the simple truth over whose contours his mind had been intermittently groping for days and nights. It was as if his fingers had slid beneath a delusively seductive garment and come on ice.
He was crazy himself. For weeks he had been indulging in a bout of madness. A casual observer – and now there was one – would see in it no more than a run-of-the-mill indignity of late adolescence. But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t remotely just what one might feel elated about or ashamed of according to one’s mood. It was entirely different. He wondered if it was unwittingly that Caryl had touched the unbearable quick of the matter only a minute before…
He caught himself up. Their situation demanded action and not reverie. Something prompted him to turn his glance back along the beach. “Well,” he said, “it’s too late, anyway.”
“Too late, Dicky?”
“He’s grown tired of waiting. Here he is.”
2
“But he’s naked!”
She spoke in a quick prudish alarm which ought to have been funny. But again what Cranston felt was impatience. “He’s not – for what it’s worth. But he certainly can’t get far dressed only in the ghost of a pair of pants.” He paused, perplexed. “What can his plan have been, going overboard like that?”
“He hadn’t one, I suppose. He was just escaping from some foreign ship. They do often pass quite close.”
Cranston was silent. The man from the sea would never be without a plan. His mind was of a sort that made such a state of affairs impossible. Cranston was sure of this, even while realising that he could give no rational account of his certainty. He watched the man come straight across the beach, and it occurred to him that in this light he ought to look slightly unreal, uncanny. For the moon takes the weight and substance out of things, and relieves them of intent and relatedness. But the man was quite real and very purposive. He might have been a golfer – a professional golfer – marching after his ball in the cold concentration of an important match. And now he was up with them and speaking.
“I thought it better to come across. It can’t be very long till dawn. And you are probably anxious to get home.” He had looked first at Cranston, as if to an acquaintance by whom some ceremony of introduction should be performed. But when nothing came of this he turned with brisk ease – with what might have been an acknowledgement of the happy propriety of a less formal note – to Cranston’s companion. “Although,” he added, “it’s a perfect night on which to be out.”
For a moment Caryl Blair said nothing, puzzled by the flat conventionality of his tone – by its lack of the impertinence or urgency she had expected. But she was still afraid, and when she did speak fear made her forthright. “Who are you? Why are you here? Why were they hunting you?”
“These are very reasonable questions.” He was looking at her steadily. “And the first brings me at once to something rather astonishing. We have, as a matter of fact, met before.”
“Oh no! I’m sure we haven’t.” Caryl’s voice came to Cranston as pitiably scared. “There’s no possibility–”
“But indeed we have…Lady Blair.”
She gave a gasp and shrank towards her lover. “Dicky,” she whispered, “take me away…take me away!”
“But not in circumstances which would cause you to remember me.” As if unaware of her reaction, the man from the sea continued on the note of polite talk. “A mere introduction – but I was far from likely to forget it.” He looked at her directly again, and his voice carried the precise intonation that the urbane compliment required. “And I met your husband too on the same occasion. But not, I think” – and he turned to Cranston–“your son.”
There was a blank silence, and then Cranston heard Caryl draw a long shuddering breath. It was oddly echoed by a tiny wave breaking on the beach. The man had hit upon a pretence at once deft and cruel – something before which she was helpless, like one suddenly offered an insulting charity. And Cranston, determined that this make-believe should get no further, broke in. “You may as well know–”
“At something of the Royal Society’s, would it have been?” The man from the sea ignored the interruption. “Certainly it was some rather grand affair, at which I was surprised to find myself. You were wearing diamonds. That interested me, I need hardly say.”
“My diamonds interested you?” Caryl had sufficiently recovered her nerve to tumble into vacuous curiosity. “I don’t see why they should.”
The man from the sea smiled. It was not, Cranston thought, a real smile. Indeed, nothing that he said or did was quite real; only his presence – his enigmatical presence – was that. And now for a fraction of a second he seemed to hesitate, as if debating some disclosure that it might, or might not, be expedient to make. When he spoke again, there was for the first time the hint of some concession to the dramatic in his voice.
“You were wearing uncommonly fine diamonds. But nothing like so fine, Lady Blair, as I am wearing now.”
Again it should have been a funny moment. Caryl Blair, although she had all the careful modesty of an unchaste woman, looked the almost naked man up and down, round-eyed. “Wearing diamonds?”
He tapped his waist, and Cranston was once more aware of the belt he had first noticed as the man rose from the sea. The belt was bulkier – and the man himself more youthfully slim about the tummy – than had become apparent before. “You mean you carry diamonds?” Cranston asked.
The man from the sea nodded. “It’s my trade. I work at this end of some rather large-scale IDB.”
Cranston could see Caryl’s eyes grow yet rounder. It struck him – and simply as one further confounding revelation – that her facial expressions were all conventional muscular manoeuvres, picked up from plays and films, imagined from books. But her interest was genuine, and it was clear that this mysterious talk of diamonds held for her the same sort of fascination that an actual outpouring of gems themselves would have, were the stranger to tumble them out before her, all ice and fire beneath this ghastly moon. “IDB?” she asked.
“Illicit diamond buying.” The man from the sea, it seemed to Cranston, might have been saying “I work at the FO” or even “My job’s with ICI – no reason why you should have heard of it, but it has to do with chemicals and things of that sort.” He was entirely bland. And now he spoke again. “I’m afraid that tonight you’ve come up with – well, somebody doing what’s scarcely expected of him.” He gave Cranston a swift sardonic glance. “You mightn’t believe it – but it does happen from time to time.”
There was another silence – but not because Caryl made anything of this. Chinese would have meant no less to her. She turned to Cranston. “Then it is just smuggling? Not anything criminal?”
“Perhaps it can be put that way. But, if we help our friend here, we are certainly liable to be put in gaol – and after a picturesque joint trial. Can’t you see us side by side in the dock?” He stopped – astonished at himself and suddenly ashamed. He had never before spoken to her meaning to hurt, and it seemed to him incredibly mean. For he was clinging to the cloudy notion that she had made for him some enormous sacrifice, and that he ought to be her man to the death. Yet there she was, a woman of about the same age as the stranger beside her, dressed in a sweater and slacks, and with an empty head. He glimpsed the terrifying fact that one creates and uncreates as one goes along; that one cannot help it; that fatuities and disenchantments and treacheries are regular by-products in the queer chemistry of living.
“I’m afraid that is perfectly true.” The man from the sea struck smoothly in, like a skilled family friend sensing domestic friction and unobstrusively pouring oil. “Fortunately, detection is unlikely. Indeed, it’s scarcely an exaggeration to say that it hardly ever happens – at least as long as one’s brains continue to work.” He was mildly humorous. “And I think ours will do that.”
“Was your brain working when you jumped overboard in your skin?” Cranston turned on him swiftly. “Is it your regular technique? Do you reckon to crawl gasping from th
e sea and stumble straight upon people like – like ourselves, every time?”
“That would be to expect too much altogether.” The stranger’s humour was a shade broader. “You weren’t in my mind at all.”
“Then what was in your mind? You seem to me to have done something quite desperate.”
“There was a decided emergency. A matter of three or four friends of mine being suddenly prompted to cut my throat. It happens – in IDB. I jumped.”
“With any plan?”
“Dear me, yes. One can’t set out to swim an unknown number of miles in a lounge suit or a dinner jacket. But, once ashore, I was sure I could find a bathing-beach in time. And there I could lie about unregarded all day in next to nothing – and until somebody proved a little careless of their clothes. Everything would be simple after that. I have plenty of money.”
“Then you had better carry on. We won’t stop you.” Cranston hesitated. “Or say anything, either.”
“That’s right.” Caryl joined in eagerly. “Go at once. And we’ll say nothing. On our honour.”
“Ah – on that.” The man from the sea looked at Cranston inscrutably. “I wonder whether you – or your mother – can think of a better way in which I might get hold of some clothes?”
“I’ll get you clothes.” Cranston spoke coldly. He knew the man from the sea to be under no misconception about his relationship with Caryl, and his continued affectation in the matter was part of what appeared his pervasive falsity. Even his diamonds were surely false – and whether false or real they belonged to some small world of low criminality. Cranston felt that the man from the sea had in an indefinable way let him down. Nevertheless – if yet more indefinably still – there remained between them something that Cranston felt as a bond. He would have liked to break it – and now he was trying to see it as some sort of measurable obligation. Let him hand over so much, and he would be quits. Let him get the man from the sea inside a suit and walking upon leather – and that would be the end of him. “I’ll get you clothes,” he repeated. “I’ll take you home and fit you out at once.”
The Man from the Sea Page 2