by M. M. Kaye
Nick shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well — yes. I’m afraid he’s done for all right, poor devil. God, what a jolly Christmas Eve!’
‘Tell me what happened to you,’ commanded Copper, perching on the arm of a verandah chair and clasping her hands about her knees.
Nick hesitated for a moment and jerked his shoulders uncomfortably as if to shrug off an unpleasant memory. Then, ‘It was the queerest thing I’ve ever experienced,’ he said. ‘We heard it coming. It made a noise like an express train in a tunnel, rushing towards us; very faint at first, but getting nearer and quicker and louder. And then it hit us as though it were something solid made of reinforced concrete. We hadn’t time to think and barely time to get the sail down. It caught us broadside on and just flattened us out. One minute we were pegging along in a flat calm, and the next second we were in the water with all hell let loose round us …
‘We tried to count heads, and as far as I know everyone was O.K. Then the rain arrived, and after that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. The boats kept bumping into each other, bottom-side up, and the sky was pitch black and the rain ricocheted off the water in a boiling fury. There wasn’t anything to do but just hang on like grim death. I don’t know where everyone else had got to, but I managed to get Ruby astride the keel of my boat, and I think someone else was hanging on to the other end, though I’ve no idea who it was. And there we stuck for what seemed like an hour or so, until the forest-launch bumped into us and nearly slaughtered the lot of us.’
‘But hadn’t you all drifted apart by then?’ inquired Copper.
‘Oddly enough, no. I’d an idea that we’d be picked up at opposite sides of the bay, but I gather we weren’t more than twenty feet apart when the launch found us. Though even then Hamish’s boat took a bit of finding; we must have passed her a dozen times without spotting her. It was only when we’d got everyone on board that we realized Ferrers was missing.’
‘But didn’t anyone see him go?’
Nick gave a short, mirthless laugh. ‘No. And it’s not surprising, with three boats all barging about in the smother and everyone concentrating on sticking like a limpet to the nearest bit of woodwork. Ronnie Purvis says he thought he was on the end of my boat, but the chap on the launch says he thinks he only pulled in Ruby and myself and that there wasn’t a third person with us. So you can see how easy it would have been to lose sight of Ferrers.’
Copper shivered, and said: ‘He probably got caught under the boat when it turned over, and never came up at all.’
Nick shook his head. ‘He came up all right, because he was one of the first people I remember seeing when I came to the surface. He was hanging on to the next boat, and I remember noticing, in the silly way that one does notice unimportant trifles in moments of stress, that he was wearing a clumsy great garnet ring about the size of a sixpence. His boat bumped into ours just before the rain came, and he was holding on to the centre-board with one hand. I thought for a minute that he’d cut himself. And then I saw that it wasn’t blood but a red stone.’
‘What wasn’t blood?’ inquired an interested voice from behind them.
Nick turned swiftly and smiled into Valerie’s inquiring face: ‘Nothing, Val. Just idle chatter.’
Valerie said: ‘Then for Pete’s sake come and chatter in the drawing-room! The party is being very sticky, and I can’t imagine why anyone turned up. I know if I’d spent an hour or so being soaked in the bay I’d have insisted on going straight to bed. Even Rosamund is looking a bit on edge, and everyone else is frankly bad-tempered. So come in and pull your weight. Hullo, here’s Dad.’
‘I’m sorry to be so late,’ said Sir Lionel, entering upon Valerie’s words: ‘I’m afraid, Val, that none of your other guests will be able to get here. The ferry can’t run, and Norton has gone back with the forest-launch, so he won’t be here either.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Valerie. ‘I realized that no one else would be able to make it. We were really only waiting for you and Dr Vicarjee and Truda and Frank.’
Vicarjee was the Bengali doctor, Miss Truda Gidney the matron and only European nurse in the small hospital on Ross, and Frank Benton the Commissioner’s personal assistant.
‘In that case,’ said Sir Lionel, ‘we can go into dinner, because Vicarjee and Benton went out shooting together and are stranded in Aberdeen and can’t get back, and Miss Gidney sent a message to say that both hospital ayahs had leave today and are in the same predicament, so she doesn’t think she should leave.’
‘Poor old Truda,’ said Valerie. ‘I wouldn’t have her conscience for the world. Fancy having to spend a night like this in an empty hospital, without even a patient to keep you company? No one’s sick just now, so she might just as well have come. But I can see her point. Well, if no one else is coming, we may as well go into dinner. Come on, Rosamund, you must be starving.’
She took Mrs Purvis’s arm and led the way into the dining-room.
8
Dinner that night was not a cheerful meal. There had not been time to order the removal of the superfluous chairs or to rearrange the seating, and the vacant places lent a gloomy air to the long, gaily-decorated table.
Valerie had ruefully bidden her guests to disregard the place cards and to sit where they liked, and the depleted Christmas Eve party huddled together at one end of the table, sitting close to each other as though in need of mutual comfort and support. But in spite of the artificial sprays of holly, the glittering strings of tinsel and the mounds of gaily-coloured crackers that lay piled on the white cloth, a proper Christmas spirit was noticeably lacking, and conversation plodded heavily through a bog of social trivialities with frequent halts in miry patches of silence.
If only, thought Valerie despairingly for at least the fourth time during the meal, Leonard wouldn’t break every silence by saying brightly, ‘It must be twenty past — an angel’s passing!’… I wonder who invented that idiotic saying anyway? If he says it again I shall scream! She sighed heavily, and pushed a piece of plum pudding around her plate with a moody fork, while somewhere behind her in the shadowy depths of the ballroom a monotonous little drip, drip, drip, told her that the rain had discovered a weak joint in the armour of the roof tiles, and that the first of a series of small, gleaming pools was in process of forming on the polished wood floors of the living rooms.
The house leaked abominably in wet weather, and Valerie thought resentfully of the array of bowls and pails that would presently litter the floors and lie in wait to entrap the feet of the unwary, and beckoned reluctantly over her shoulder to a servant who padded forward on noiseless feet and having received a low-voiced order vanished in the direction of the pantry. Presently the dull drip of water on wood changed to the small, metallic plink of water dripping into an enamelled bowl, and on the far side of the table Copper abandoned her methodical manufacture of bread pellets and lifted her head sharply: ‘Listen — the leaks have started. Now I suppose we shall have to go to bed in a swamp. I wonder if Kadera has remembered to move my bed? The last time it rained, a vindictive leak dripped right on to my pillow and I dreamt I was bathing — and woke up to find that I was.’
Valerie laughed and turned to Mr Shilto who was sitting on her right: ‘Is your house as bad as this one, Mr Shilto? The last time it rained we had so many leaks that we might just as well have been living under a sieve.’
But her effort at making light conversation fell on stony ground, for Mr Shilto, who had been staring with blank fixity into the darkness beyond the candlelit table, neither turned his head nor shifted his gaze, and Valerie realized suddenly that he had not spoken since the beginning of the meal and did not know she had spoken to him now. I suppose he’s bound to be a bit distrait, she thought, curbing an unexpectedly strong feeling of irritation, after all, his cousin has just been drowned, and even though they were on bad terms with each other, sudden death is always pretty shocking.
Not, she had to admit, that there was anything to suggest shoc
k in John Shilto’s pale, puffy face. It wore, if anything, a look of gloating excitement, and it flashed into her mind that he had at that moment an odd look of Kioh, her stepfather’s Siamese cat, when she was stalking a bird or a lizard. Becoming aware that she was staring at him, fascinated, she spoke hurriedly and at random: ‘The last time it rained, there were so many leaks that we ran out of pails and basins and had to start on the cups and saucers. The P.W.D. are always promising to get it put right, but you know how it is with them. They talk a lot, but nothing ever happens!’
Mr Shilto did not reply, but the brief spell of embarrassed silence that followed his failure to respond to his hostess’s social efforts was broken with unexpected violence by the repetition of her last statement. Rosamund Purvis, subdued, unemotional Rosamund, who had sat throughout the meal in a silence that had been unobtrusive because she was seldom other than silent, spoke in a queer, high-pitched voice that somehow gave the impression that it did not belong to her:
‘But nothing ever happens!’ she said. And suddenly, shockingly, threw back her head and laughed: a shrill, uncomfortable laugh that held no suggestion of mirth, but was purely hysterical.
‘Rosamund!’ Ronnie Purvis’s voice cut across the discordant sound but did not check it.
‘Nothing ever happens,’ gasped Mrs Purvis. ‘Ha! Ha! Ha! That’s funny! That’s very funny. Nothing ever happens!’
She rocked to and fro, her hands clutching the tablecloth in front of her while the tears of her uncomfortable mirth wet her faded cheeks and Dan Harcourt, standing up swiftly, crossed to the sideboard and poured out a glass of water: the others sitting in stunned silence.
‘Stop that, Rosamund!’ commanded Ronnie Purvis furiously. ‘Stop it at once! You’re making an exhibition of yourself!’ He jumped to his feet and started towards his wife, but Valerie and Copper were before him. Between them they took the still laughing Mrs Purvis by her arms and lifted her almost bodily from her chair. ‘We’ll leave the men to their drinks,’ said Valerie composedly: ‘Come on, Rosamund, let’s go and have our coffee in the drawing-room.’
Mrs Purvis’s mirth subsided as suddenly as it had arisen. She looked round dazedly at the startled circle of faces, and her own pale features flushed painfully: ‘I’m sorry,’ she said uncertainly. ‘I – I thought … It seemed funny; nothing happening____’
‘So it is,’ said Valerie lightly. ‘Dad, don’t let them stay swapping stories too long. Come on, Amabel.’
But as though the incident had not been sufficiently unpleasant in itself, young Miss Withers took it upon herself at this juncture to add a further touch of discomfort to the evening’s festivities. She rose slowly to her feet, her round cheek bulging with some concealed sweetmeat, and let her prominent blue eyes travel about the table. ‘There are thirteen of us,’ she announced with gloomy relish. ‘It’s funny we didn’t notice before that we’d sat down thirteen.’
A smile of satisfaction illumined her round, pink face, and she added smugly: ‘Well anyway, I’m all right. I didn’t get up first, so I shan’t be the one who’ll die.’
With which pleasing reflection she selected a second lump of coconut ice and trailed away in the wake of Valerie, Copper and Mrs Purvis.
* * *
Dan Harcourt, entering the drawing-room some twenty minutes later, noticed with interest that during that interval Mrs Purvis had borrowed some rouge and applied it with an amateur hand. Also that the two uneven patches of pink that now decorated her cheeks merely served to emphasize rather than to conceal the shocking pallor of her face and draw attention to the nervous twitching of her colourless mouth. What on earth’s the matter with the woman? he wondered uneasily; she looks as though she was working up for a bad nervous breakdown and I only hope to God she doesn’t have it here and now!
There appeared to be some justification for this fear, for Mrs Purvis, who had been discussing a forthcoming tennis tournament when the men entered, faltered on seeing them and ceased speaking, leaving a sentence cut short in mid-air. Furthermore, during the next half-hour, while Valerie served coffee and the conversation became general, she sat silent and rigid; occupying herself with a frightened, furtive scrutiny of her fellow-guests that did not pass entirely unobserved, for Copper’s interest too was caught and held by that odd, secretive inspection of Rosamund’s …
Nick was talking about Calcutta where the Sapphire had been before her arrival in Port Blair: ‘We thought we were going to be there for Christmas week,’ he said, ‘and there was a certain amount of sourness when we were suddenly slung off here instead. I remember being fairly outspoken on the subject myself. I’d spent a short leave in Calcutta not long before: stayed at the Grand Hotel, which was a welcome change from stewing on the equator in a two-by-four cabin, and I thought I’d repeat the performance for Christmas. But all things considered this is a decided improvement in programme; hurricanes or no hurricanes. Come on, Copper! take an interest in my laborious social chatter will you, or Stock and Hamish will rope us in to play bridge. They’ve got that predatory Culbertson gleam in their eye and I refuse to be victimized. Try and look absorbed and interested, there’s a good girl.’
Copper said in an undertone: ‘Nick — look at Mrs Purvis.’
‘Why? At the moment I prefer to look at you.’
‘No, seriously Nick. There’s something very odd about her tonight.’
‘Cotton stockings and a touch of la grippe, at a guess,’ suggested Nick. Copper ignored the flippancy and continued as though he had not spoken: ‘… she’s got something on her mind, and if it didn’t seem so absurd, I’d say she was frightened of someone in the room but hadn’t quite made up her mind which one. She keeps looking at everyone in turn as if she was trying to work something out. It’s – it’s almost as though she were playing “Is it you?… Is it you?… Is it you?”’
Nick flung a cursory glance at Mrs Purvis and said: ‘Come off it, Coppy! She’s merely had a bit of a shock — what with being tipped into the harbour and then this Ferrers business. You’d be a bit jumpy yourself if you’d been in her shoes.’
‘Watch her,’ urged Copper, low-voiced, ‘and then tell me that she’s only “a bit jumpy”.’
Nick obediently hitched himself round in his chair and did as he was commanded, and after a moment or two his expression changed from resignation to reluctant interest.
Rosamund Purvis was sitting on the extreme edge of her chair, her thin, clever hands clenched together in her lap and tense rigidity in every line of her nondescript figure. She was sitting so still that her very immobility served to draw attention to her flickering gaze, for though she did not turn her head, her hazel eyes, wide as a frightened cat’s, darted warily, continuously, searchingly, from face to face in an oddly questioning, oddly disturbing scrutiny. And it was only after watching her for several minutes that Nick noticed something which had escaped Copper’s attention: that Mrs Purvis’s disturbing scrutiny did not extend to the entire party, but only to certain members of it. Those members who had made up the sailing party.
He was in the process of digesting this curious fact when Dan Harcourt came up behind them and Copper turned her head and spoke in an undertone: ‘Dan, what’s biting Rosamund Purvis? Look at her…’
‘I’ve been doing so,’ said Dan, leaning on the back of Copper’s chair and continuing to watch Mrs Purvis with detached, professional interest: ‘She looks,’ he said musingly, ‘as though she was wondering who had buried the body.’
‘Cheerful couple, aren’t you?’ observed Nick irritably. ‘Copper has just been propounding a similar enlivening theory. Well, you’re a doctor, Pills — why don’t you take some action? Advise the woman to take a couple of aspirins and shove off home before she springs another of those Ghoulish-Laughter scenes on us. I’m not sure I could take it twice in one evening.’
Copper said seriously, addressing Dan, ‘Nick thinks she’s only edgy because of being upset in the storm. But it doesn’t look like ordinary edginess to me
. She looks — frightened…’
‘So frightened,’ agreed Dan Harcourt thoughtfully, ‘that if anyone came up behind her just now and touched her on the shoulder, she’d probably go off like a bomb and scream the roof off.’
The words were barely out of his mouth when the correctness of that belief was unexpectedly proved. Kioh, the Siamese cat, her tail twitching gently like a miniature panther, appeared in the doorway behind Mrs Purvis’s chair and having glanced about the room with slanting china-blue eyes, leapt lightly on to the arm of the chair, brushing against Mrs Purvis’s bare shoulder. A split second later the languor of that apathetic gathering was as effectively shattered as though a bomb had indeed fallen in its midst, and Valerie’s ill-fated dinner party came to an abrupt and shattering close.
Mrs Purvis was on her feet, screaming.
She did not even look to see what had touched her, but stood there for perhaps the space of ten seconds, her eyes starting from her head in stark and horrifying terror and her mouth wide open. Then, before any of her startled audience could collect their scattered wits or move towards her, she crumpled at the knees like a rag doll and fell forward on to the polished floor in a dead faint.
9
‘Why did I leave my little back room in Blooms-bur-ree, Where I could live on a pound a week in lux-ur-ee?’ crooned Copper gently, applying cold cream to her nose some two hours later.
Valerie laughed.
‘I’m afraid it does look like being a pretty mildewed Christmas for you,’ she apologized. ‘Today couldn’t very well have had a stickier finish, and tomorrow looks like being as bad — if not worse.’
‘Well, at least it hasn’t been dull,’ said Copper, reaching for the hairbrush. ‘In fact it’s been packed with brisk incident. But I’m glad it’s over. A few more fireworks from Rosamund and I swear I’d have started screaming myself.’
‘Wasn’t it hellish?’ sighed Valerie. ‘Poor Dad! I bet it put years on him. He was talking stamps with Hamish when Rosamund exploded, and he rose out of his chair like a rocketing pheasant and his spectacles fell off, and Leonard trod on them.’