Stop Press (12 page)

There had been some hitch about the game with ever so many balls and they played billiards again instead, their attention centred for a while on the slightly hypnoidal green cloth. Patricia, from the semi-darkness beyond, occasionally called the score; Timmy, when not in play, contrived to retreat always to the other side of the room; at one point Patricia found his chocolate and he was furious at the resulting amusement. The two games, billiards and that immemorial one of which Belinda appeared to be the promoter, went forward together. A typical winter afternoon, thought Winter, among the substantial classes of England – with the children growing up, papa looking at bills in the library, tea-things beginning to chink near by, and a sizable dinner already on the march in the kitchens. Only here the bills and the dinner were all mixed up with a mob of people drifting about the house.

‘He could retire’, said Belinda, who had the trick of catching at a train of thought, ‘if he wanted to. Mr Winter, I’m afraid you are up to the neck in the family complexes. We’re glad. But do you mind?’

‘Not at all,’ said Winter uncomfortably and inadequately. Nature had not cast him, he felt, for the role of family friend.

‘Timmy will certainly have told you of the foolish and laborious business of Mrs Birdwire. It would attract him.’

‘It attracts Winter,’ said Timmy.

‘It does strike me’, explained Winter apologetically, ‘as having its funny side. Annoying, of course.’

‘She’s a most objectionable woman’ – Belinda was uncompromisingly severe – ‘and the thing was a most frightfully humiliating let-down. The funny business about the vicar and the little schoolteacher wasn’t half so bad. They are more or less reasonable beings and after a bit we got them to sit in on it and see it from our point of view. But the Birdwire! And now André wants to make a sort of charade of it. For of course it’s the loud and silly jokes that catch his fancy; not the quiet and deadly ones.’ Belinda, stabbing low at her ball, nearly cut the cloth.

‘If there have been quiet and deadly jokes’, said Winter, ‘I really would like to hear about them soberly. I think they would interest me more than the others. That music interests me. It sounds – dangerous. The Birdwire affair hurt nobody.’

‘Daddy dictates.’ Belinda had plunged abruptly. ‘He dictates, the stuff is typed and brought to him, he scribbles over it, it is retyped and he reads it through. And that’s generally the end of it, although he strikes patches where several revisions are required. Everything is kept in an enormous cupboard, unlocked, in the secretary’s room. A long shelf for each of the current novels, another for short stories, and another – a bit dusty – for Pope. All these things, I say, live snug in that cupboard or did until a few weeks ago. Then they began stirring gently in the darkness.’

Impossible, thought Winter, for any Eliot to resist an alluring metaphor. Parent and children, they went out to meet the dramatic halfway. ‘Stirring?’ he said mildly.

‘Somebody began slipping out sheets from the fair copies and substituting slightly different versions of his own.’

‘His or her own,’ said Timmy. ‘There’s a perfectly open field.’

‘If we must be meticulous’ – it was the voice of Patricia – ‘we had better notice that Belinda has already got away from the facts and is giving a rationalistic interpretation of them; I suppose’ – the voice hesitated for a moment – ‘the only rationalistic interpretation possible. But all we really have is Mr Eliot’s and the secretary’s assertion that what came out of the cupboard wasn’t quite the same as what went in. If you think there are no other sorts of interpretation – well, ask Mrs Moule.’

‘As a matter of fact and more or less – I have.’ Winter, missing a cannon, peered into the darkness. Miss Appleby interested him.

‘I’m afraid’, said Belinda, ‘that I’m wholly rational. And so’ – the significant irrelevance seemed to slip from her – ‘is daddy, really.’

‘Or ought to be’, Holme interjected, ‘if he’s an admirer of that chap Pope. I like his verse. But it had no mystic twilight at all.’

‘Let me get on. Somebody started monkeying with the typescripts in the cupboard, ever so cautiously at first. Which suggests, when you think it out, what was being aimed at. Not just a jape or a brief nuisance but something – well, undermining. If the unknown had suddenly slipped in some considerable perversion of what daddy was writing, the thing would have declared itself as a practical joke at once. But it was so done that for a long time daddy didn’t realize. If you actually come to grips with the business’ – Belinda looked at Winter – ‘you will think us an incredibly vague lot. Things happen – like these noises off; they worry people; but nobody really sets about putting a check on them. I don’t if you’ve noticed, but my father is as vague as vague can be.’

‘In patches,’ said Patricia’s voice.

‘Perhaps so. Certainly he’s vague about his writing; it’s important to get that. It’s important to get this whole attitude to his writing. You’ll have gathered that it’s a slightly uncomfortable attitude. He isn’t ashamed of the Spider; indeed, he’s really uncommonly proud of him. Have a good look at daddy, his taste and his tempo, and you’ll see that the thing is an odd and unique achievement.’

‘You will also wonder’, said the voice, ‘where the Spider comes from.’

‘From hiding-places ten years deep,’ murmured Holme. His mind seemed to be running on the English poets.

‘But the point’, Belinda went on, ‘is how he writes. The stuff is wholly divorced from the waking world, and while he’s at it I doubt if he can be called awake himself. But when he revises he’s quite awake; that’s where the critical control comes in. And in that lies the basis of these operations by the unknown. Daddy read his fair copies and was surprised by an unexpected turn here and there; a forgotten turn, he would have thought it. It was only gradually that he got a sense of – of something happening. For a time he kept mum. It was because he kept mum, I think, that the thing took – well, a somewhat oblique turn in his mind. Because of that and – somehow – Herbert Chown. And now Chown’s here again. If Timmy can bring a rank nuisance to Rust he will.’

Timmy giggled nervously. Winter, who felt the unwitting shaft, stepped back abruptly into the half-darkness and tripped over an unseen obstacle. He grabbed and found himself clutching a pair of unnaturally long human legs which were sprawled outwards from a settee. There was a moment of confusion and somebody snapped on lights.

‘Why,’ cried Belinda in evident relief, ‘it’s only Rupert!’

‘Nothing but that,’ agreed a dry voice. ‘Please carry on.’

‘Or rather,’ said the lanky man called Rupert, ‘don’t carry on but listen to me. Long experience of this household tells me that you have been talking about it and about, and probably without all the facts. Incidentally there is a new fact. While you have been talking something has happened.’

‘If you mean’, said Timmy, ‘another exhibition on the clarinet–’

‘I don’t.’

Holme climbed off the table, Timmy thrust his cue in the rack. Winter looked curiously at this latest of the Eliots to appear. A man of about Mr Eliot’s age, Rupert contrived to look considerably older. His unusual height and reach, which an erect carriage would have established as a presence, had gone to seed in something between a lounge and a shamble; belying his air of brisk competence in the present was an eye which seemed to hold too much commerce with the past – not the impersonal and liberating past of the scholar, nor the scientist’s sobering past in geological time, but that little past of the man, thronged with deprivation and missed chances, which devours that which feeds upon it. The gentleman who ironically agreed that he was nothing but Rupert was – it came to Winter with unacademic penetration – of the species of professional failures; once upon a time his sort had been kept safely in Canada on two pounds a week.

‘The truth is’, said Rupert Eliot with veiled contempt, ‘that you are all specimens of the literary mind. You can’t get through with a thing without stepping back to meditate upon your interesting selves. Whereas I have always been a man of action and can be trusted to stick to the point. But first, and since this gathering appears to be so distinctly in the family’s confidence, a moment had better be given to introductions.’

‘Gerald Winter,’ said Belinda; ‘our cousin Rupert Eliot.’

The man of action among the Eliots gave a cold bow – a bow so dramatically cold, Winter thought, as to show the true Eliot flair once more; the sort of bow one might picture Mr Dombey offering to a particularly uncongenial intruder upon the sanctity of the home. ‘Timmy’, this frigid person said, ‘– a word of advice. It is far from discreet to discuss this delicate matter in a darkened billiard-room into which anyone might creep and eavesdrop at will.’

This was too much for Winter. ‘After all, Mr Eliot–’

‘As a matter of fact,’ said Timmy dreamily, ‘Rupert’s a baronet. Head of the family. Honoured name.’ Timmy seemed to have plunged himself in abstraction and gloom.

‘After all, Sir Rupert, you are the only person who did – er – drop in, so there’s no harm done.’

‘And now’, said Rupert, ignoring this, ‘the particular papers with which this impertinent joker has meddled–’

Belinda exclaimed impatiently. ‘But what has happened?’

‘I understand that you want our friend Mr Winter to be seized of the facts. These papers are the manuscript – or typescript, if there be such a word – of a novel called
Murder at Midnight
. You will not need to be told that its principal personage is the Spider. Incidentally, I may say that I regard the Spider, and not myself, as the head of our house.’

There was a pained silence.

‘At least our fortunes are founded upon him. But to go forward. In this novel it appears that the Spider is cast in a blameless and indeed laudable role – that of a private detective of ample means, beautiful manners, and outstanding intelligence.’ Rupert paused on this; he had all the family sense of words and it somewhat spoilt his pose as the practical man. ‘This, of course, is at it has been for some time. Only the Spider has that most unfortunate thing’ – Rupert squared himself a little on his settee – ‘a past. And in these manipulations of the manuscript he is regressing on it. You have heard of the joke played on the Birdwire woman – as vulgar and stupid a joke as a man could imagine. She was burgled and so forth by a Spider who had retreated on his old, bad self. In this tampering with the manuscript – though it must be admitted as an altogether subtler affair – something of a similar sort, I understand, occurred. The general effect was of backsliding. The creature developed, one might put it, a suspicious moral wriggle. It almost appeared, when one read closely, that in the final pages he might turn out to have been the villain of the piece.’

‘Like the chief constables’, interrupted Holme, ‘who turn out to have been the murderers all the time.’

‘No doubt; I have little time to study that sort of thing.’

Timmy was softly whistling a melancholy stave; Belinda was drawing on the floor with a piece of billiard chalk. Winter, thoughtfully studying Sir Rupert across the billiard-table, asked a question. ‘Why that past tense? Have the manuscripts–?’

‘They have. When my cousin became convinced that something untoward had occurred he tore them up. A great pity; they might have yielded something. Richard is sensitive and unpractical – damned unpractical.
We
have to be practical and ask practical questions. And one of them I don’t doubt you have on the tip of your tongue. Did anyone see these adulterated typescripts except my cousin? And the answer is: yes, his secretary.’ Again Rupert paused. Timmy, at a corner of the table, was fidgeting with a pocket; Belinda was sitting quite still. ‘Only, of course, the secretary is dead.’

Yet again Rupert paused – perhaps for effect, perhaps because the door had opened to admit a servant. Belinda got up. ‘Tea,’ she said briefly. ‘I’d better help push it round. And send you some here.’ She went quickly out.

‘Dead,’ repeated Rupert; ‘suddenly and violently dead.’ He chuckled. ‘There you go’ – Winter had certainly given a decided start – ‘the literary mind once more. In a business like this you must have a relevant corpse. But this corpse is strictly irrelevant. The fellow just happened to get in an airliner which collided with another plane. The whole incident has been vetted and guaranteed above board – by about four thousand feet.’ Rupert chuckled again, this time in tribute to his own wit – a trick that made him momentarily a horrid caricature of Timmy. ‘It just so happens that the secretary is out of it. You ask, therefore, if there is other independent testimony.’

‘I certainly don’t conceive it my business’ – Winter spoke with asperity – ‘to ask anything of the sort.’

‘But you want to know. And there is. There is the evidence of my cousin Archie Eliot.’

‘I see. You mean that Mr Eliot showed the papers to this Mr Archie Eliot?’

‘As a matter of fact,’ interposed Timmy, ‘cousin Archie is a knight. Donkey’s years ago he built a bridge – he’s an engineer – and was knighted. The bridge fell down shortly afterwards. Cousin Archie lives with us too.’ He relapsed into significant silence.

‘Mr Eliot showed Sir – ah – Archibald Eliot the papers?’

‘I think it more likely’, said Rupert easily, ‘that Archie had a look at them on the quiet.’ He glanced towards the door. ‘Belinda – reliable girl – has been as good as her promise about the tea.’

The tea-service was authentic Queen Anne; the tea had journeyed from China owning no more commerce with the sea than is enforced by the English Channel. Winter, who had a foreboding that the leisurely declivities of the Eliot affair were presently going to carry him beyond his depth, found these evidences of judicious living grateful. ‘A true caravan’ – he spoke with something of the connoisseur’s air of Dr Bussenschutt – ‘is becoming rarer and rarer.’ He poured himself out another cup. ‘How comforting that Belinda is, as you say, reliable.’

Rupert snorted – an authentic snort that shook a little shower of crumbs from his Edwardian moustache. ‘Within limits,’ he said; ‘strictly within limits. The truth is’ – he gestured at Timmy – ‘they are a dreamy lot; talented in their way – but dreamy and no nous. Now I daresay you’re a man like myself’ – Rupert appeared to have forgotten that Winter was an intruder to be treated with cold reserve – ‘who has knocked about the world and knows what’s what. I daresay you know that a damned impertinent joke isn’t an act of God but simply a damned impertinent joke. And that you have to get the joker and smash him. Action’ – Rupert took another piece of buttered toast and edged a cushion comfortably beneath his head – ‘action before debate is my principle and I may tell you it has brought me through a lot. Have you seen the bull out there on the terrace? If I had my way I’d show this awful bohemian mob the door in double quick time. Do you know that there are twelve male guests in this house at present and that nine of them’ – he looked thoughtfully at Winter – ‘or perhaps it
may
be eight, are absolute bounders? I mean to say that a man of the world would ask at once, What do you expect? And now’ – Rupert stirred reluctantly – ‘I suppose we had better be having a look at that red paint.’