From London Far (29 page)

For a moment Jean held her breath, the illusion completely mastering her. And then she realized the simple truth. Once more, it was the Flying Foxes of Moila. Out there in the darkness, and at this late hour of the night, the whole system had begun to move.

In the darkness, Meredith knew, two cars of a sort were prowling nearer, and just overhead one of the Flying Foxes was beginning its long journey to Inchfarr. It was demonstrable, therefore, that the high square crag which had appeared before him was nothing other than that displeasing structure of corrugated iron which housed the controlling mechanism of the system and served to conceal whatever operations were carried on at this end of the line. Was there an authentic commerce in guano? Meredith thought it quite likely that there was. With the present needs of agriculture it was even possible that it paid for itself, and thus cut down the overheads of the International Society.

And ‘overheads’ was the word. In that roomy contraption which had a minute before lunged menacingly at him and then passed on harmlessly through the middle air there might well be concealed the Horton
Venus
itself. And how – it suddenly occurred to him to wonder – had the rascally Don Perez possessed himself not only of this but of the Duke of Horton’s other treasure, Vermeer’s
Aquarium
– the painting which had graced his glorified thieves’ kitchen on the other side of the burn? It could not be denied that the Diffusion of Cultural Objects was being prosecuted with considerable success. And if Meredith himself was a cultural object – and he had, after all, a reasonable claim to that title – it seemed likely that he would soon be very effectively diffused himself. For now something altogether menacing had happened. The searchlights were at play again – and this time there were three of them disposed in a triangle of which he was roughly the centre.

Do triangles have centres? As he questioned himself on this point Meredith dropped to the heather and burrowed in it. What had happened was clear enough. The enemy had never been in substantial doubt as to his route, and by bringing up two cars with three searchlights between them they had contrived what was this time, not a cone, but a veritable cage. And the heather here was not really first-class for burrowing in; in fact, it was decidedly scrubby. Only one factor in the situation suggested the slightest comfort. Not only Meredith himself, but that tall and sinister shed lay within the three intersecting beams of light. By making for that and what lurking places it might afford, he could at least prolong the chase for a time. And one never knew. In adventures of this sort, after all, it was always at the last moment that unexpected but conclusive succour arrived. The lower slopes of Ben Carron appeared an unlikely trysting place with the Flying Squad. But there was nothing in favour of giving up. So Meredith ran.

Meredith running – Meredith thought – was becoming decidedly
vieux jeu
. Meredith swimming or Meredith flying – or even Meredith crawling painfully through some tunnel of the sort delighted in by Miss Dorcas Macleod – would surely constitute a welcome variation. Nevertheless, Meredith continued to run, with the result that a blank cliff of corrugated iron was presently directly before his nose. From beyond it came the deep throb of a powerful engine, but this did not obscure the fact that there were now shouts in the darkness behind him. Shouts also were in the
vieux jeu
category – despite which Meredith did not at all contrive to feel bored. He ran round the building as fast as he could, and found nothing but a pair of vast double doors, forbiddingly closed. Whereupon he ran round again – in this being about as rational as a mouse attempting to escape into a closed biscuit tin – and did in fact find an entrance after all. This was no more than a place where a corrugated iron panel had been forced back, perhaps by some heavy accidental pressure from within. Meredith bolted through the gap. In this, no doubt, there was not much rational plan either. He was simply resolved to keep going to the end. But it so happened that as a means of keeping going the move could by no conceivable resource have been surpassed. For he had taken no more than two steps forward in an uncertain light when he felt himself hit by something like a cyclone rapidly developing from below, and this was followed by a powerful impression of being carried obliquely upwards through the air.

The moment was bewildering. Meredith’s heels were higher than his head, and he was pervasively bruised. It must therefore be accounted considerably to the credit of his intellectual capacities that he solved the problem of this involuntary levitation as rapidly as if it had been some elementary issue of textual science encountered in the security of the British Museum or the Bodleian.

The Flying Foxes formed an endless chain. From this it followed that at one terminal point they must move obliquely upwards and at the other obliquely downwards – in this being like the cars on a giant wheel in a fair. If it were at the mainland end that the upward motion occurred, and if it were to be supposed that he, Meredith, had tumbled into a Fox thus rising, an adequate explanation of the phenomena about him would be attained.

In other words, he was now on his way to Inchfarr.

As if to confirm this startling but cogent hypothesis, the metal surface upon which he reposed momentarily quivered and swayed, and then perceptibly changed direction. It had reached the limit of the arc upon which it turned, and after travelling upwards and outwards it was now travelling upwards and inwards instead. Presently it would level out and begin its long trundle to the sea. But for the moment Meredith and his conveyance were still within the shelter of the tall shed into which he had bolted with so surprising a result. Looking upwards, he could see a criss-cross of girders, amid which burnt a single and crudely brilliant electric lamp. The light from this grew as he mounted upwards. His immediate surroundings became distinguishable and he was surprised to find himself a centre of interest for four deeply sunburnt small boys.

The boys were naked – which was absurd in such a climate – and they regarded him fixedly and (he suddenly felt) very much as if about to commit some mild nuisance against his person. Alarmed by this, Meredith abruptly changed his position – and thereby discovered himself to be slithering in a shallow trough or basin of bronze. The Flying Fox swung higher to a fleeting point of maximum visibility. And Meredith saw that he was sitting in the middle of a fountain – mercifully dismantled – and that the four sunburnt boys were in fact so many bronze
putti
curiously cast in the Baroque taste. He had tumbled, not only into a Flying Fox, but into a Cultural Object as well.

Nervously – and rather like a naiad exploring the limits of her domain – Meredith clambered to the lip of the fountain and glanced about him. Undoubtedly he was in a Flying Fox – one which contained not only this elaborate waterwork, but a number of small packing cases also. Loading, presumably, must proceed on the lower level. At the mainland end this particular Fox was dealt with and dismissed; just how it would be received at the termination of its journey was a matter impossible to conceive. Meredith, now at ease with the four
putti
much as, on a previous occasion, he had been at ease with Titian’s
Venus
, settled himself comfortably in the curve of the fountain and felt for his pipe. Unless – as was wildly improbable – the fantastic truth occurred to his enemies, he was pleasantly secure for a good twenty minutes or half an hour. And to one whose habit has become running like a hare before closely pursuing hounds such a space is as infinity held in the palm of the hand. So Meredith stuffed his pipe with tobacco – the fateful tobacco still – and as he did so the
putti
departed into shadow, the light overhead vanished, and a draught of cold air told him that his skyey progress had begun.

The motion – except for certain jerks when the Fox negotiated a pylon – was rhythmical and not displeasing. By clambering from his fountain and mounting a packing case, Meredith found that he was just able to peer out upon the world like a baby first getting to grips with the sides of its crib. The moon was up and the sky was clearing; he could see Carron Lodge gleaming behind its larches, and in the west Venus was sinking towards the sea. It was extremely peaceful. The moon rose higher and its beams, lipping the edges of the Fox, caught the topmost curls on the heads of his bronze companions. Meredith smoked on. The moonlight crept down the finely modelled noses of the
putti
and caught their delicately dimpled cheeks – so that one by one the naked little boys seemed to break into an enigmatic smile. Their own position was certainly untoward, but even more so was their human companion’s. Meredith, however, was not disturbed. The faint creaking of the Flying Fox held its own sufficient music for one who had suffered so long the cultivated conversation of Don Perez Sierra y Campo. And only once during its dream progress down the line of the Carron could another sound have been heard. It was a long deep chuckle. Meredith was thinking of Shamus and the maenad maids.

At least there was a fire in the solar, and after the chill solemnities of the banqueting hall it was cosiness itself. Jean sat on a low stool directly before the flames, the Raeburn looking dispassionately down on her through flickering shadow. On her right Miss Isabella sat bolt upright in a high-backed chair, listening to whatever the constant drift of the centuries through her mind suggested to her ear. On her left Miss Dorcas was murmuring over the encyclopaedia once more, wholly absorbed in the pioneer construction of the Waterloo and City Railway. Had Mr Properjohn proposed to convey guano from Inchfarr, not by an extended telpher span, but by a submarine tube, life at Moila would have taken on an altogether different emotional colouring for this wistfully troglodyte lady.

But Mr Properjohn had chosen Flying Foxes – and these were moving now. Jean’s ear, strained to catch some distant sound which might suggest Tammas or Mrs Cameron welcoming back Richard Meredith, could hear at long intervals the creak of one of these contrivances making its sinister way through the darkness. To Miss Isabella the sound was sometimes from the oars of the Vikings as their long ships crept into the anchorage below, and sometimes from the rude axle-tree of some primitive piece of ordnance which this or that early king of Scotland was bringing to bear against the recalcitrant chiefs of Moila. To Jean herself the sound spoke of a problem solved, but solved too late. She looked from one to the other of her hostesses, wishing to speak of Meredith – to suggest that with Tammas or alone she make her way to the mainland and find what help she could. But Shamus and Meredith, she knew, had taken the only boat harbouring on this side of the Sound – which meant that at least until morning she was marooned as effectively as ever was Ben Gunn or Robinson Crusoe.

And the hereditary Captain, reasonably approachable by day, by night plainly departed down the long corridors of history. Her sister, too, departed down corridors of her own, fading away into obscure intestinal explorations with the St Gotthard or the Mont Cenis for guide. Neither of these old ladies, she guessed, was any longer aware of her presence. To test this Jean slipped from her stool and tiptoed from the solar. Neither stirred.

But solitude she did not want, and Tammas she unreasonably distrusted. There remained Mrs Cameron. Jean made her way to the kitchen.

Mrs Cameron had finished her labours and was sitting, comfortably enough, before the opened range. Behind her Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego showed equally comfortable in their burning fiery furnace. Open on her lap was a large volume seemingly of a devotional character. And she was drinking claret and hot water.

‘I hope’, said Jean, ‘that I’m not disturbing you too much?’ Mrs Cameron was looking so devout that she was apprehensive of being asked to join in extemporaneous prayer.

‘Nay, you’re very welcome.’ And Mrs Cameron tapped the open page before her. ‘Might I be asking if you ever read the general observations on vegetables?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ And then Jean, glancing down, saw that Mrs Cameron’s devotional book was nothing less than Mrs Beeton’s monumental work on household management. ‘Well, no – I don’t think I ever read that bit.’

‘Are you telling me that?’ Mrs Cameron, much pleased, drew up a chair for her guest, set a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles on her nose, and began to read aloud with serious emphasis.
‘The Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms’
, read Mrs Cameron,
‘may be aptly compared to the primary colours of the prismatic spectrum, which are so gradually and intimately blended, that we fail to discover where the one terminates and where the other begins.’
Mrs Cameron paused. ‘Perhaps’, she said, ‘you would be taking another drop of the claret?’

‘No, thank you.’ Jean looked at the clock ticking on the mantelpiece and stirred restlessly on her chair. ‘Mrs Cameron, do the Flying Foxes often work at night?’

‘So far as is at present known, the vegetable kingdom is composed of upwards of 92,000 species of plants
.’ Mrs Cameron sipped her claret. ‘The Foxes? About once a month, Miss, this year or more.’

‘Would it have something to do with the tides?’

‘And very likely it would.’ Mrs Cameron spoke absently; she was running her eye appreciatively down Mrs Beeton’s erudite page.
‘Birds, as well as Quadrupeds, are likewise the means of dispersing the seeds of plants. Among the latter is the squirrel, which is an extensive planter of oaks; nay, it may be regarded as having, in some measure, been one of the creators of the British Navy.
’ Mrs Cameron glanced over the tops of her spectacles. ‘Now, if that isn’t a wonderful thing!’

Jean nodded. ‘Talking of navies,’ she said hastily, ‘has Miss Isabella been imagining those Viking ships for long?’

‘Creeping into the anchorage?’ Mrs Cameron considered. ‘Only since she took to wandering.’ She settled her spectacles more firmly on her nose.
‘In the Vascular System of a Plant we at once see the great analogy which it bears to the veins and arteries in the human system–’