by M. M. Kaye
‘— and there’s a tablet in the Ross church to the one who tried to get help. You can see it next time you go there,’ added Amabel. ‘I expect the sharks got him. Or perhaps barracudas; they’re worse than sharks. A dreadful thing to happen, I always think.’
Her fellow-passengers eyed her with distaste, and it was obvious from their bleak expressions that including the padre and with the exception of George, they could all of them have thought up several equally dreadful things that they would have liked to happen, immediately, to Miss Withers. Presently Valerie began to turn a delicate and unbecoming shade of green, and Copper shut her eyes and began to think more kindly of drowning. The Reverend Dobbie embarked on a mental recitation of the ‘Prayer for Those at Sea’, and Charles said: ‘By God, we’ve made it!’ as the ferry crashed inexpertly against the pontoon off Ross jetty …
Five minutes later, soaked and shaken, they were safe ashore and being packed into the three big Government House rickshaws, known on the island as ‘buggies’ — a survival of the days when they were drawn by ponies — that had been waiting under the shelter of the sheds by the jetty, Valerie and Copper to return to Government House, Mrs Purvis and Amabel, with George trotting alongside, to the Purvises’, the Dobbies to the Vicarage, and Charles and Dan, on foot, to Charles’s quarters in the Mess.
But half an hour later there was still no news of the boats, the telephone wires were down and the ferry, having broken its moorings, had made the perilous trip to Chatham and succeeded in reaching anchorage there.
Sir Lionel Masson, who had returned, wet and disinclined for conversation, some few minutes after the arrival of his daughter, had had a hot bath and changed, and on hearing that the telephone had ceased functioning, had donned a mackintosh and gone out into the streaming darkness to get what information he could, while his daughter and her friend, dry and newly clothed though still somewhat damp as to hair, made a gloomy pretence of decorating the dinner table with crackers and artificial holly.
‘I can’t think why we’re doing this,’ said Valerie, looping a tinsel ribbon half-heartedly between the tall silver candlesticks. ‘I don’t imagine that more than three people will turn up, as the forest-launch is sure to land the sailing crowd on Chatham when it’s rounded them up, and they’ll never get the ferry or anything else across here tonight.’
Copper turned away without answering, and for perhaps the tenth time in as many minutes crossed to the windows and attempted to peer through their rain-streaked surface into the wet darkness beyond. The big clock in the lower hall struck eight as she flattened her nose against a pane, and presently she cupped her hands about her eyes to shut out the light from the room, for she thought she had caught the faint flicker of a rickshaw lamp gleaming through the wild darkness below the house where the drive wound up through an avenue of tossing flame trees. The gleam showed again, more distinctly this time, and a rickshaw drew out from the shelter of the trees.
Valerie dumped a heap of gaudily coloured crackers on to the dining-table and said: ‘“Sister Anne, Sister Anne, do you see anyone coming?”’
‘Yes … I think it must be your father coming back. There’s a rickshaw coming up the drive. Let’s go down.’
They ran across the ballroom which formed the upper hall of the house, and down the stairs to the front door, arriving anxious and breathless as a rickshaw drew up under the wide, covered porch and Sir Lionel descended from it, shaking the wet off his coat. ‘They’ve got back,’ he stated briefly in answer to Valerie’s urgent query. But there was that in his face which gave her a sudden stab of renewed anxiety. Something horrid has happened, she thought. Aloud she said: ‘Come upstairs and tell us about it while I mix you a drink, Dad. And do take off that sopping coat. You’ll catch an appalling cold.’ She preceded him upstairs to the big glassed-in verandah that was furnished as a lounge, and mixed him a stiff brandy and soda as he sank tiredly into an easy chair.
He sat silent for several minutes, watching the bubbles rise through the amber liquid to burst at the glass’s rim, until at last Copper said, sharply anxious: ‘What’s happened? Are they all safe?’ and Sir Lionel appeared to pull himself together. He drank off half the contents of the tumbler before replying and then spoke heavily.
‘They were in the water for well over half an hour and the forest-launch had the devil of a time finding them. Apparently all three dinghies were swamped in the first five minutes, but fortunately they were all within yards of each other when it happened — which was just as well, for if they’d been some distance apart, the launch might have been hours rounding them up. They were picked up just this side of North Bay and were landed here. Some of them will be along in a moment. I came on ahead to tell you.’
He paused for a moment, his eyes once again following the streaming line of bubbles in his glass, and suddenly he looked very old and tired. At last: ‘They didn’t find them all,’ he said. ‘Ferrers Shilto was missing.’
Valerie drew in her breath sharply. ‘You mean he was drowned?’
‘Not necessarily. He may have been swept away from the others and caught in a current, and managed to get ashore on North Bay. Or even somewhere on the Aberdeen side.’
Valerie said: ‘But you don’t think it’s likely. And – and anyway, there are sharks,’ she added with a shudder.
‘Don’t!’ besought Copper. ‘What about the others, Sir Lionel?’
The Commissioner turned to her with relief: ‘Oh, they’re all right — except for Mrs Stock, who seems to be suffering from shock more than exposure. She was rather hysterical, I’m afraid. I have arranged for John Shilto and Tarrent and that young doctor off the ship — what is his name? Oh yes, Harcourt — to sleep here tonight. I hope we have enough bedding. Of course the whole affair is disgraceful. There was a stupid bungle at the wireless station. We should have had a storm warning this morning, and instead of that it was only received about four-thirty. But luckily ships in this harbour have to keep up a reasonable head of steam: otherwise that cruiser would never have got clear in time. As it was, she cut it rather fine.’
‘Why did she have to go out?’ demanded Copper. ‘I thought ships tried to get in to harbours in a storm?’
‘Not this one. There is not enough deep water. And far too many rocks. Besides, this is only the beginning of the storm. There’s a lot more to come, and if the Sapphire had stayed here she would have been driven on the rocks like the old Enterprise. Her only chance was to make for the open sea and____’ He broke off as voices sounded from the lower hall, and putting down his unfinished drink rose and walked over to the banisters.
Mr Stock, oozing water like a leaking sponge, was coming up the stairs, rain squelching from his soaked shoes on to the polished treads and leaving little gleaming puddles at his every step. He checked his ascent on seeing the Commissioner, and stood looking upwards from the well of the stairs, one hand clutching the banisters and the light from the hall below him blackly silhouetting his weedy figure.
‘Well, Stock?’ inquired the Commissioner.
Mr Stock shuffled his feet and cleared his throat nervously. As ever there was about him a faint, servile suggestion of cringing, as in a habitually ill-treated mongrel dog, but in the present instance it appeared more apparent than usual.
‘Well, what is it?’ The Commissioner’s voice was unexpectedly tinged with nervous exasperation: ‘Have they found him?’
‘Yes — er — no. You mean Ferrers Shilto? No. I only came to inquire if you would be so good as to give my wife a bed for the night. You see — er — our roof has gone.’
‘Your what?’
Mr Stock let go of the banister, swayed dangerously, and clutched at it again to steady himself: ‘Our roof. The storm — the storm has blown away a large portion of it, and part of the house is quite — er — quite uninhabitable. So I thought that if you would very kindly allow Ruby — my wife — to sleep here tonight … I — she suffers severely from insomnia you know, and she says that her fear of the
rest of the roof falling would aggravate it. So I thought…’ His voice trailed away and his teeth chattered with cold and fatigue.
Valerie said: ‘Why, of course we can! Can’t we, Dad? And of course you must sleep here too, Leonard. You two can share the big spare room and Nick and Dan can double up in the other one, and we’ll make up a bed for Mr Shilto in the turret room.’
Mr Stock muttered profuse thanks, refused a drink, and stumbled out into the night leaving behind him a snail-like trail of dampness. ‘Poor little man,’ said Copper. ‘He looks simply green. It must be a particularly nasty jar after capsizing in a storm and being in the water for hours, to arrive home and find no roof on your house.’
‘Not to mention a wife in the last stages of hysteria!’ said Valerie. ‘If there is one thing dear Ruby really revels in it’s a spot of drama, and I bet she’ll extract the last ounce of it from the present situation or die in the attempt. Poor Leonard! Come and help me get the rooms ready, Coppy.’
7
Government House was a large, old, two-storeyed and rather gloomy building, full of bats and curious echoes. At sundown the bats swooped through the tall, dim rooms, and once the lights were lit a host of little semi-transparent lizards would appear out of holes and crannies in the high ceilings, to pursue with shrill chirruping cries the moths and night-flying insects that were attracted in by the lamps.
The ground floor was entirely taken up by offices and a guard room, and a wide, shallow-stepped staircase led from the entrance hall to the living rooms above. The upper storey of the house centred about the ballroom; a huge, dim room with a floor of polished boards, into which the staircase emerged, and from which almost every other room in the house led off. A wide, glassed-in verandah ran the length of the house and along part of one end, cutting off most of the light from the drawing-room which was, for this reason, seldom used except by night, and behind the ballroom, separated from it by a couple of pillars and a small section of wall that formed a sketchy passageway, were five bedrooms; one of which, the turret room, was normally used as a morning-room, but was now being pressed into service again as a bedroom for Mr Shilto.
Valerie collected an armful of sheets and pillow-cases from the linen cupboard and set about preparing for the unexpected influx of guests. ‘I expect the mattresses are all damp and that everyone will get pneumonia,’ she said lightly, ‘but there isn’t time to air them. Come on, Coppy; it’s no use trying to dodge those bats. They’ll never hit you, anyway!’
‘That’s what you think! But then you’re used to them, and I’m not. You know, Val, there really is something very odd about this house. It’s quite cheerful in the daylight, but have you ever noticed how – how unfriendly it gets the moment the sun goes down? And at night it’s sometimes positively hostile. Or am I being over-imaginative?’
Valerie straightened up from tucking in a blanket and said slowly, ‘No. Even I have noticed it sometimes, and I wouldn’t call myself particularly imaginative. Perhaps it’s because most of the walls are hollow. Those funny things like portholes, half-way up some of them, are something to do with ventilation I believe. But it means that bats and rats and lizards, and goodness only knows what else, can get between them and run about inside and make odd noises. And then draughts blow through them and make even odder ones. Not to mention several families of wild cats who live in the roof and creep about overhead at night!’
‘Perhaps it’s that,’ said Copper doubtfully. ‘That, and the fact that most of the rooms have no doors, but only those funny little swinging shutters across the middle instead. They may stop people seeing into a large part of the room, but you can’t lock them. And even if you could, anything and anyone could get in underneath them just as easily as the bats fly in over the top of them.’
‘Oh well, nothing is ever likely to come in,’ said Valerie comfortably. ‘Although I must say it would be nice to be able to shut a door on oneself at night. But then I’m used to it by now, and this “no doors” system does help to keep the place cool. It lets every scrap of breeze there is blow right through the house. And you mustn’t worry about this being an unfriendly sort of house at night, Coppy, because it’s much too well guarded.’
That last was certainly true, for the house had a guard from the British Detachment on duty day and night, as well as a permanent guard of Indian Police. Every bathroom in the house had a small outside staircase leading to the ground for the use of servants and sweepers, and at night one of the police guard slept at the foot of each staircase, while as an additional precaution, electric lights burned from dusk to dawn in the garden; one at each corner of the house. But Copper did not feel capable of explaining that the sense of unease that the house gave her was in no way connected with anything that might make its way in from outside, but rather with an almost tangible unfriendliness that the big rooms held in themselves.
They had barely finished making the beds when Mrs Stock arrived, muffled in a dripping mackintosh and supported by the anxious Leonard. Valerie led the way into the spare bedroom, and Mrs Stock, waving aside Copper’s proffered arm, tottered across the room and collapsed in a damp heap upon one of the newly made beds. ‘Leave me alone!’ she commanded fretfully. ‘I don’t want anything. I only want to go to bed. And don’t fuss me, Leonard! I shall be quite all right if I’m left alone!’
A belated remnant of social poise returned to her, and she turned to Valerie: ‘So good of you to have me, dear. I don’t know what I should have done. The house is in ruins, and Leonard has done nothing … and after that terrible, terrible experience…! I shall never be the same again. Never! No — I’d rather have dinner in bed. Please go!’ This last was nearer an order than a request, and Copper and Valerie, murmuring helpful suggestions about sending in hot soup and brandy, backed hastily out of the room.
‘That’s odd,’ commented Valerie, surprised. ‘I imagined that we were in for the dramatic story of her sufferings, told in minute detail. Oh well, I expect we shall get it tomorrow.’
‘There’s Nick,’ cried Copper suddenly, hearing a voice in the lower hall. She ran across the ballroom and leant over the banisters, listening.
The stairhead posts in the upper hall had been carved by some long-dead Burmese convict, once an artist at the bloodstained court of Thebaw, into the form of gigantic slant-eyed faces with wide, grinning mouths, like the masks of Burmese devil-dancers, one of which, at the top of the stairs, Valerie had christened ‘Hindenburg’. Copper had slipped one arm about it as she peered below, and Nick Tarrent, standing in the lower hall, glanced up and for a brief second suffered a savage shock of fear, for it seemed to him as he looked upward into Copper’s white, anxious face that someone stood beside her. Someone whose dark, malignant features peered out of the shadows over her shoulder and grinned in evil anticipation.
The impression was so vivid that he had opened his mouth to cry a warning when he realized that the lurking terror was nothing more than a carved block of Burmese teak. But the momentary stab of fear had shown in his face, and Copper’s voice held an added edge of alarm: ‘Nick! — are you all right?’
Nick’s relief made him laugh. ‘Yes, of course. A bit damp, but still in possession of life and limb. Charles took us along to his quarters to have a bath and a change. Luckily he and I are about the same size. Dan shoved himself comfortably into a suit of George’s, but you should see old Shilto! — every button and seam working overtime.’
‘Where’s Charles?’ inquired Valerie, joining Copper by the banisters.
‘Just arriving. In fact, here’s the rearguard now. George and I got off to a flying start.’
Charles, Dan Harcourt, John Shilto and Hamish Rattigan, followed shortly afterwards by the Purvises and Amabel, came in from the wet, wild night, and mounting the stairs, joined Valerie and Copper in the verandah where drinks and salted nuts had been set out. ‘The Dobbies aren’t coming,’ announced Charles. ‘Mrs Dobbie is still feeling seasick. They sent their apologies.’
Th
e verandah looked cheerful enough with its gay, chintz-covered chairs and sofas. But outside the rain lashed savagely against the big glass windows that closed it in, while sudden vicious gusts of wind rattled at the hinges and wailed about the house; moaning, whispering, tapping to be let in; screaming like a host of banshees or sighing like a small, lost, lonely ghost …
Valerie stopped mixing short drinks and put down the cocktail-shaker with a thump: ‘This is too miserable for words,’ she said. ‘Charles, help me move these things into the drawing-room. The further away we are from the wind and the windows, the cosier we’ll be. All those black, wet panes of glass give me the shivers.’
Charles and John Shilto carried the table of drinks between them, and the party moved gratefully into the more cheerful atmosphere of the drawing-room where the sound of rain and wind was less obtrusive. But Copper laid a hand on Nick’s sleeve and stopped him as he was about to follow them: ‘Nick … what happened? We were terribly worried about you.’
‘We?’ inquired Nick with the ghost of a grin.
‘I,’ corrected Copper gravely. ‘We were only half-way home when the storm hit us, and I was convinced you’d be drowned.’
‘Your conviction was shared,’ said Nick lightly. ‘To tell you the truth, Coppy, I thought we were done for, and I still can’t make out how we all managed to get away with it.’
‘Not all,’ said Copper with a shiver.
‘You mean Ferrers? Oh, he’ll be all right. Probably been picked up by now, if he hasn’t swum ashore.’
His tone was light enough, but he avoided Copper’s eyes and she flushed resentfully: ‘Don’t talk to me as if I was in the kindergarten, Nick! You know he hasn’t got a chance, don’t you?’