‘I told you to cut all that out,’ she said. ‘Listen, what we need is a little plain common sense, just that. No Zen. No Zen at all.’
Mr Utamaro looked up at her. His forceful eyes beneath the shaggy black eyebrows.
‘I know why you came here,’ he said.
‘Why I came here?’
‘Why you came here.’
‘What’s this now? Can’t you concentrate on the matter in hand? Always some new tack. If this is the working of a trained Zen mind, give me a trained sea lion.’
‘But do you know what is the matter in hand?’
Mr Utamaro smiled.
‘The matter in hand,’ said Honor, ‘is finding out who stole the sword.’
‘We have other things to find,’ said Mr Utamaro. ‘Let me remind you, I know why you are here.’
‘I’m here to write up this place, and when I think I’ve got on to a story worth having, you start all this fun and games.’
‘To write up,’ said Mr Utamaro. ‘I have heard the expression. Do you know that to the Zen mind up is down.’
‘Up is down? Oh, go on, let’s hear the lot. I give in.’
Honor sprawled into her hard chair again.
‘To write up is to write down,’ said Mr Utamaro.
‘To write down?’
‘Yes. To place in a poor light, make fun of.’
‘So that’s what you think I came here to do.’
‘Am I not right?’
Honor looked at her hands. The long, thin, nervous fingers.
‘You are right as a matter of fact,’ she said. ‘There’s no point in trying to disguise it. You can’t very well send a letter to a place and ask if you can come down and make them look a fool, so I always ask if I can do an article about them. Write them up. But, fair enough, I came here to raise a laugh at your expense.’
‘Perhaps we disappointed you?’ said Mr Utamaro.
He smiled.
‘Disappointed me?’ Honor said. ‘I hadn’t really thought. None of these jobs is as good as it looks when you first get the idea. Otherwise I wouldn’t be paid what I am for my column. It’s a matter of knowing how to cut out the stuff which won’t really go down, what you don’t want for your purpose.’
‘And sometimes how to improve a situation?’
‘I never write anything libellous. I know better than that.’
‘But if a place would look dull for your readers, you make some excitement? What is called a stunt? Yes?’
‘A stunt.’
Honor jumped up again and went to the bare window. Long strides. She stood looking out.
In the empty room without so much as a clock on the mantelpiece, time passing.
‘That tree out there must be pretty high.’
‘The cedar of Lebanon,’ said Mr Utamaro. ‘It is very high. A noble tree.’
Honor swung round.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I started thinking of something else.’
‘Or perhaps the same thing,’ said Mr Utamaro. ‘Mr Stuart was telling me just now that you had persuaded him to do something against his better judgement.’
‘I wouldn’t give a tinker’s cuss for that young man’s judgement. But what did I persuade him to do, for heaven’s sake? I’ve hardly spoken to him.’
‘You persuaded him that it was right not to tell the police about the sword.’
‘Did I? I suppose I did. And now he’s changing his mind, eh?’
‘He told me he thought it was a very dangerous thing for such a sharp weapon not to be in its proper place.’
‘Dangerous?’
‘You think it is not dangerous?’
‘I hadn’t thought of it as a dangerous weapon,’ said Honor. ‘Why should it be dangerous? None of the people who could have possibly taken it is likely to want to use it as a weapon. Who would they use it on? This isn’t a congress of sworn enemies. We’re all strangers to each other, aren’t we? You don’t kill people you don’t know. It’s a fantastic suggestion, absolutely fantastic. What on earth put it into his head to say a thing like that?’
‘You don’t think your husband stole the sword, then?’
Mr Utamaro’s stubby teeth flashing in a broad grin.
‘My husband? Why should he -? Oh, because he does know me. I can see you haven’t really worked out what makes Gerry tick.’
She padded round the little room. The high ornamented ceiling.
‘Gerry isn’t exactly the murdering kind,’ she said. ‘I must make him want to murder me at times. Or at least I try to make him want to. But with Gerry it doesn’t come off. He doesn’t care enough. Gerry’s got no feelings, no feelings at all. Can you understand that? Can you imagine it? A man without feelings. Because that’s what Gerry is. He’s cold. Icy, icy cold. He doesn’t care a damn about anyone, except Gerry Manvers.’
She stopped her abrupt walk, and turned to look at Mr Utamaro.
‘But don’t get the idea that I don’t love him,’ she said. ‘I’m obsessed with him. Obsessed. That’s the word, the only word. I never fell for anyone before. Honor Brentt was too clever, too busy to fall for anyone. And then I met Gerry. We’ve got nothing in common. Nothing. Except a few people we both happen to know.’
She walked rapidly over to the window.
‘That’s a fine basis for marriage, isn’t it?’ she went on. ‘To know half a dozen of the same people. That and the fact that I can’t let him go. I tried. I tried once. Only once. I told him to get out. And he went. He knew he had only to wait. He just said “Leave a message at the club” and he walked out – cheerfully. It didn’t shake him an inch. I was at the end of my tether, and he couldn’t have cared less.’
‘And sometimes you’d like to kill him,’ said Mr Utamaro.
A cheerful remark.
‘And sometimes I want to kill him,’ said Honor. ‘Sometimes –’
She wheeled round.
‘Don’t you know me by now?’ she said. ‘Do you really think that if I wanted to kill someone I would steal a sword one day to use it the next? Don’t be a fool. If I ever kill Gerry it’ll be with something I’ve picked up just that moment. But I won’t do that. Do you know why? No, not because I love him too much. My sort of love is hate half the time. No, I won’t kill Gerry, because he knows just when to run. To run away from his wife. And he’s not ashamed to do it. He’d do anything to save his own skin.’
‘Does he do any work?’ asked Mr Utamaro.
Placidity.
‘Work? Yes, he’s got a job in public relations. It consists mostly of standing people drinks on the clients’ money. He generally has some sort of a job like that, though they never last long. But he likes to have one: it gives him an excuse to go out on his own and enjoy himself, and a chance to pick up a popsy.’
Honor turned on her heel.
‘The sort of women he really likes,’ she said, ‘are brainless little fools. He married me for my money, for what I can earn. And he spends it too. Every last penny.’
She marched back to the window and stood, her forehead resting against the pane, looking out.
‘How high is that tree anyhow?’ she said.
‘It is higher than the house,’ said Mr Utamaro.
Honor did not move.
Mr Utamaro sat motionless on his chair looking at the door facing him.
Honor started to drum her fingers on the frame of the window.
‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ said Mr Utamaro.
The gentle question dropping into the silence.
Honor sighed.
‘You can’t always answer every question,’ she said. ‘I try to.’
Silence again.
‘That’s the principle of my life,’ Honor went on. ‘I try to answer every question as soon as it comes up, and to answer it out to the end. But you can’t do it all the time. Sometimes, just sometimes’ – the quiet voice – ‘I daren’t find out the answer. That’s when I behave the way the people I despise do. I don’t go probing on
till I get right to the bottom, and into the false bottom. I stop. And I hope.’
She went on looking out of the window.
Then suddenly she turned round, went to her chair, adjusted it till it was facing Mr Utamaro’s, and sat down.
‘What was that question?’ she said. ‘The sound of one hand clapping. Do you ask me again, or what happens?’
Mr Utamaro got up and walked out of the room.
He left the door open behind him.
Honor blinked, laughed abruptly, and followed him out.
Mr Utamaro did not go back into the meditation hall, but opened the doors, stood at them, and said:
‘Now it is time for a lecture.’
He went on down the corridor and down the wide stairs without waiting for the others. They came out of the meditation hail and trailed after him.
At the head of the stairs there was a movement to separate.
Honor said to Gerry:
‘No, you don’t.’
Gerry, who had begun to walk along the corridor with Miss Rohan and Flaveen, turned and went down the stairs with Honor.
Sheepishly.
In the hall the grandfather clock ticked loudly. Both its hands were stuck at six.
Mr Utamaro was sitting in the common room when the others arrived. On the trestle table in front of him were a small dull brown pottery vase, a spray of cherry blossom and a pair of scissors.
‘Please be seated,’ he said.
They trooped to the semicircle of canvas chairs and sat down.
‘The warden was most insistent that during the course there should be at least one formal lecture a day,’ said Mr Utamaro. ‘He told me to call the roll. But I have left the little notebook he provided somewhere and I can’t think where.’
He looked at them.
‘Miss Rohan and Miss Mills are absent,’ he said.
‘They didn’t come downstairs with us,’ Alasdair said. ‘Miss Mills didn’t seem to be very interested in flower arrangement.’
‘And the old battle-axe made out she had a headache,’ said Gerry. ‘If you ask me she was a bit put out because she thought she’d made a fool of herself over that ring. All during the last bit of meditation she was twisting about like she’d got – Oh, what was I going to say? Spare my blushes.’
‘Sit down, Gerry, and stop making a bloody fool of yourself,’ said Honor.
‘All the same,’ Gerry said, ‘fancy the old trout turning out to have had the big romantic love affair. Not that that duty lark was all there was to it. I bet the old haybag was afraid of it when it came to the point.’
He looked at Honor. But she refused to react and he settled back on his chair.
‘Zen and the Art of Flower Arrangement,’ said Mr Utamaro.
He picked up the vase.
‘Let us look first at this,’ he said.
He handed it to Jim Henderson, who gave it a quick scrutiny and handed it on to Mr Applecheek.
Mr Applecheek looked carefully at the vase, holding it at the tips of his long, fine fingers. He shook his head sadly and passed it to Gerry.
Gerry made a play of poking his nose into the mouth of the vase, and gave it to Honor. A shrug.
Honor looked at it quickly.
‘Japanese?’ she said.
‘It came from Japan,’ said Mr Utamaro. ‘There are many such vases made there, but they are too crude to be exported, so they are not often seen outside the country.’
Honor passed the vase on to Alasdair.
‘I’m very doubtful about all this,’ Alasdair said.
He put the vase back on the table without looking at it.
‘You will have observed without doubt, Mr Stuart,’ said Mr Utamaro, ‘that the glaze on the vase has been allowed to run . Nature has been allowed her share in the making of this simple object.’
‘I didn’t observe it as a matter of fact,’ Alasdair said. ‘My attention was directed to something a little more important than a cheap vase.’
Mr Utamaro handed the vase back to Alasdair.
Alasdair held it in front of him. Pouting mouth.
‘The glaze has been allowed to run,’ said Mr Utamaro, ‘in what might be called a controlled accidental fashion.’
‘Very interesting.’ said Alasdair.
‘That is why we prize such an object,’ Mr Utamaro went on. ‘They remind us that we are not the One, that we depend on the Other, that the two are one and the one two.’
‘So you admit the existence of the world,’ said Jim.
The teeth clenched. The words allowed to escape.
‘Zen admits nothing else,’ Mr Utamaro said. ‘But it is a pity Miss Rohan is not here, because it is this aspect of Zen that has attracted the artists of the west. It is the intentionless intention of Zen art, or of objects like this vase, which has been seized on by the action painters, with their use of the accidents that occur as they work. Reality, we say, is not the one mind working alone but the fusion of the mind and all that is outside it.’
Alasdair got up and put the vase back on the table in front of Mr Utamaro. With a thump.
‘The moon shines on the water,’ said Mr Utamaro, ‘the water reflects the moon. What is exactly there? The-moon-in- the-water. Without the moon it is not, without the water it is not. Together it is the moon in the water.’
‘All right,’ said Alasdair.
The loud voice. Aggression.
‘All right, let’s look at it from your point of view. You want to take into account the facts outside your mind, is that it?’
He leant forward glaring at Mr Utamaro. From his waistcoat pocket he produced a peppermint tablet, slipped it into his mouth, and began to chew at it. Champing.
‘That is an aspect of Zen,’ said Mr Utamaro. ‘It is a way of trying to teach the unteachable.’
Alasdair swallowed the last of his peppermint with a gulp.
‘Very well then,’ he said. ‘There’s your mind.’
He pointed at Mr Utamaro.
‘And here’s a fact.’
He looked round at the others.
‘Here’s a fact,’ he repeated. ‘Somebody has stolen a very unpleasant weapon from this very house. Somebody in this very room.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Honor.
Snapping.
‘All right,’ said Alasdair, ‘two of us are absent. Include them if you like. But it doesn’t alter the facts. And that’s what you’re trying to do. To alter the facts so that you can pretend that this extremely serious incident is something that you can use for your own childish purposes. Well, just don’t be too clever. Something very far from childish may happen with that sword before we see the end of it.’
‘Now what exactly makes you say that?’ said Honor.
A pounce.
‘I’ll tell you what makes me say that.’
Alasdair stood up and looked down at Honor.
‘I say that because I was brought up to obey a few very simple rules. Very simple but eminently practical. And one of them was: always keep weapons in a place of absolute safety. Whether it’s guns or a sword the rule applies.’
‘We don’t all of us have the advantage of being brought up in the murky Highlands, Mr Stuart,’ said Honor.
She jumped to her feet and faced him.
‘For some of us,’ she said, ‘the sword is simply a civilized objet d’art. We don’t all go about sticking things into each other.’
‘That’s not particularly funny,’ said Alasdair. ‘And as a matter of fact I happened to be brought up in a part of the world where people were only too ready to use weapons. It’s easy to make fun, but I happen to know the sort of thing people can do to each other when weapons get into the wrong hands. And that’s why I ask once more: does anybody intend reporting the theft of the sword to the proper authorities?’
‘At the end of the morning,’ said Mr Utamaro, ‘everyone will have submitted to the sanzen interview. Then we shall see.’
‘If you think you’re dealing with peop
le who will succumb to mystical third degree of that sort, you’ve got another think coming,’ said Alasdair.
‘It’s one way of solving the problem,’ Honor said. ‘And a better way than you might think. Nor, may I remind you, is it the only step we are taking.’
‘No,’ said Alasdair, ‘we’re in the hands of the great Honor Brentt, we all know that. Well, I for one don’t have any great faith in those hands. Does anybody agree with me? Let’s put it to the vote. Which is it to be? Honor Brentt or the properly qualified police?’
‘Do you know,’ said Mr Applecheek, ‘I am going to be thoroughly irresponsible and vote for Miss Brentt. To tell you the truth, Stuart, I rather resented your remarks about your fellow students. Surely I am just the person to succumb to mystical third degree? I dislike the imputation that there is too little in me of the otherworldly, indeed I do.’
‘Is anybody in favour of fetching in the police?’ said Alasdair.
Almost a shout.
No replies.
‘Then I leave you to it,’ Alasdair said. ‘And when someone gets hurt don’t come crying to me.’
The solid door did not quiver after the slam.
‘Plastered, if you ask me,’ said Gerry. ‘Stinko from the neck up.’
‘Not at all,’ said Jim. ‘Your man is the sort who would pride himself on not touching drink before sundown. It’s simply a case of inflated arrogance.’
The trap mouth.
Gerry got up and took the squirt flower from his pocket. Carefully he tried its effect entwined with Mr Utamaro’s cherry bough. Sadly he shook his head, untangled the rubber tube and put the flower back in his pocket.
‘All the same,’ he said, ‘I wonder what has happened to that sword. It would hurt if you sat on it.’
Chapter 7
Flaxen plaits flying. The blonde girl running down the winding drive towards the village. Eyes alight.
‘Quick, quick, come quick,’ she said.
‘Was ist das? Is it the sword?’
The dark girl stopped in her walk towards the house. The blonde one ran up to her, leant against her shoulders with her arms round her neck, panting. Giggling.
‘Mr Gerry.’
The dark one threw off the other’s arms.
‘Mr Gerry. Mr Gerry. Mr Gerry,’ she said. ‘Always Mr Gerry.’
Zen there was Murder Page 7