Stop Press (14 page)

With a terrific effort of compression Toplady said, ‘Hullo.’

In the circumstances it was perhaps the best thing to say, and deserved better treatment than it received. Patricia dropped on her hands and knees and crawled slowly across the floor; Belinda, once more led, did the same. Searching the carpet inch by inch, they moved steadily from the window towards the bed, leaving a little trail of wet knees and toes behind them. ‘I suppose’, said Toplady, ‘that this is a “rag”?’ There was more nervousness than censure in the inverted commas with which he contrived to surround the last word. He glanced about him rather as if he expected the joke to include an impending jug of cold water or fireworks under the bed.

Belinda jumped up, feeling that strict moderation was necessary when teasing a guest. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said; ‘as a matter of fact we’re searching for something.’ She pushed back wet hair and looked as engaging as she could. But evidently the man was offended. ‘I hope,’ she added, ‘you won’t tell Timmy; he would be frightfully annoyed.’

Toplady thawed at once. To stand between a freakish young woman and the just censure of a male relative was quite in his picture. Patricia, not to spoil the effect by giggling – a universal instinct which the dictionary most unjustly confines to affected or ill-bred girls – buried her nose in the carpet. ‘And we didn’t know’, Belinda went on, ‘that you had this room, or that you went to bed so early.’

With unexpected dash Toplady climbed out of bed. ‘It came to me’, he said cautiously, ‘that a quiet afternoon might ward off an impending chill caught on the way down.’ He looked at Belinda with genuine anxiety. ‘I think you will know that I don’t mean that it was in any degree an uncomfortable journey; it was perfectly comfortable and there was a great deal – really a
great
deal – of interesting conversation. But the junction–’ Judging it injudicious to be specific about the junction he broke off to wrap himself decorously in a dressing-gown. Patricia was still crawling about the floor, now quite seriously; he looked at her for a moment as if she were a sort of examination paper in etiquette and then got down on his own hands and knees. ‘I wonder’, he asked, ‘if I can help?’

‘As a matter of fact, we’re looking for traces of red paint. You see, the joker has been out again.’

‘Oh, dear! I do hope it’s not – not another offensive cartoon?’ Toplady peered about the carpet, seemingly expecting to discover horrid libels sketched on its four corners. ‘It had occurred to one to speculate whether the joker mightn’t think to find a not unfavourable moment–’ He broke off. ‘I’m sure I didn’t leave the window as wide open as that.’

Belinda explained. ‘We’ve just been outside. So has the joker with his paint – apparently while you were asleep.’

‘He might’, interjected Patricia, ‘have painted
you
. Red all over, like the reddleman in Thomas Hardy.’

Toplady gave his mind for a moment to Thomas Hardy, marked his utter irrelevance, and returned to the perplexing matter in hand. ‘This deplorable person has been out there?’

‘Yes. But not painting pictures; just recording the fact that this is Folly Hall.’

‘While I was sleeping here he climbed out and painted that – out there on the pediment?’

‘Lower down, as it happens. On the architrave.’

Toplady offered cigarettes. In his hands the process took on the character of a minor diplomatic occasion; perhaps he was admitting that there had been adequate cause for the invasion of his territory. ‘How very strange,’ he said. ‘The joker becomes more interesting – and one hesitates as to whether one should not add a shade less absolutely unattractive – than before.’ He walked the length of the room with an extinguished match, returned, stared thoughtfully into the match-box. ‘First with Mrs Birdwire he is crude, boisterous, and – in the opinion of one or two people at least to whose taste we must a little defer – not without an authentic coarse humour. Then’ – Toplady shut the match-box – ‘he turns subtle. And now’ – he opened it again – ‘he returns to the crude and boisterous. But in doing so he adds a new element: one of marked intrepidity.’

‘It’s a matter’, said Patricia darkly, ‘of habituation.’

‘To begin with,’ continued Toplady, ignoring this enigma, ‘he deserts the complete safety of ground-level for the sake of a slightly enhanced effect up here. Then he deserts the comparative safety of painting on the pediment for the sake of a very slightly enhanced effect indeed. In fact’ – he paused in search of accurate expression – ‘by insisting on achieving his scrawl – as I suppose it is – on the architrave he was accepting a maximum of additional danger for a minimum of additional style. “Style” I think is the only adequate word. He wanted his inscription to go just where in such a building inscriptions should go. This is very interesting indeed. One begins – tentatively of course – to build up some picture of the man.’

They looked at him with respect, momentarily acknowledging the masculine intellect – an abstraction that blows where it will and speaks through strange voices. Patricia contrived to retaliate on the voice – ‘As you say,’ she said, ‘it adds something new’ – but she was aware that Toplady with his conscientious march had arrived at the point before she had: the point that the joker had established himself as a personality – and an odd one. In the face of this reasonable young man she was reminded too that half an hour ago she had telephoned to her more than equally reasonable brother on the strength of a sheer if ingenious intuition. ‘Mr Toplady,’ she said, ‘“This is Folly Hall” – what are we to make of that?’

‘To make of it?’ He glanced at Belinda rather uncomfortably, as if his more instinctive self was prompted to reply that what they might make of it was a shrewd thrust. ‘We must just take it as a piece of silly rudeness.’ He seemed to feel that amplification was required. ‘Based on the fact that at Rust’ – he plunged heroically at the pronoun – ‘we are rather an unconventional party.’

Belinda took this as containing a hint as well as a tactful understatement and made a movement of retreat. ‘We dine at eight, Mr Toplady: I hope–’

Toplady hastened to offer polite reassurances. ‘Of course I shall be down. I do assure you I am perfectly right again. I believe I find a little mystery’ – he looked surprised at the simplicity of his statement – ‘stimulating.’ He turned to his dressing-table and made a brisk grab at a safety-razor and a sponge.

The two girls, conscious of a decidedly ungroomed appearance in themselves, withdrew. ‘If we meddle again’, said Belinda when they were halfway down the corridor, ‘it will be discreetly in the wake of your brother. And what I chiefly see between now and dinner-time is a hot bath. The whole thing is simply stupid and annoying and nothing more. Or would be nothing more if I were certain that my father took it that way too. Patricia, why are
you
rattled?’

Patricia, still conscious of failure as a steeplejack, denied that she was rattled at all, and on this piece of disingenuousness they quarrelled – pausing at the top of the staircase to do so. ‘You are all
most
annoying,’ declared Belinda sweepingly, and with a crossness which might have suggested that she was obscurely rattled herself. ‘You are all conspiring against the peace of this house. To begin with there’s Timmy, mystery-mongering round and bringing down first that awful Chown, who makes a living out of believing that everybody’s cracked, and then this wretched tutor of his–’

‘That wretched tutor seems quite a sensible person to me.’

‘You seem quite a sensible person yourself. But you have just the same air as he has – an appearance of knowing that the thing involves lord knows what. And then there’s the Moule with her higher spookery and her eternal anxious listening for the joker’s sound-effects. There’s André proposing–’ She stopped. Behind them had arisen a disturbance compounded of hurrying feet and inarticulate cries. They turned round. It was Toplady once more, bearing down on them with his dresssing-gown in a disarray rather suggestive of a modern-dress
Hamlet
. He paused before them and his emotion revealed itself as one of abounding manly rage – rage which bereft him for a moment of all power of coherent speech.

‘The bloody fool!’ shouted Toplady magnificently and surprisingly: ‘Oh, the bloody fool!’ He was brandishing some problematical object before him; presently he controlled himself sufficiently to thrust it beneath their noses. It was a shaving-brush and it had been used in the liberal application of red paint.

Driving in the early dusk down Mrs Birdwire’s avenue – scene of so many affecting reconciliations with the animals whose clamour was fading in the middle distance – Dr Bussenschutt turned in his seat and took a final glance at the sprawl of white which represented the citadel he had so successfully stormed. Then he peered at his watch. He had disappointed Mr Shoon at luncheon and was anxious to be in excellent time for dinner. ‘My good fellow,’ he said to his driver, ‘can you make the Abbey within the hour?’

‘I reckon so, sir. Beyond Little Limber we can strike the by-pass and give a miss to the bad road through Low Swaffham.’

The ancient person in the smock had been warmed by Mrs Birdwire’s tea, and this was a longer speech than he had hitherto made. Bussenschutt sat forward in sudden interest. ‘What.’ he asked, ‘is your name?’

‘George Cowthick, sir.’

‘Good Master Cowthick, I would have you talk.’

‘Beg your pardon, sir?’

‘Converse.’ Bussenschutt observed the ancient person to be at a loss. ‘Converse’, he amplified helpfully, ‘on the state of the crops.’ Mr Cowthick was still silent. ‘Oats!’ said Bussenschutt, at once encouragingly and commandingly. ‘Maize! Beans! Hops!’ He was but imperfectly acquainted with the subject of rural economy. ‘
Turnips
,’ said Bussenschutt as a last resort.

‘
Ah-rr
. It be great turnip country round Pigg.’ A chord had been struck; Mr Cowthick abundantly conversed.

Bussenschutt sat back and listened, an expression of intellectual conviction forming itself on his face. ‘Stay!’ he called. ‘I cannot be mistaken. But there is a further test. Master Cowthick, I desire you to repeat certain words after me.
I do wish we might have the ’96
.’

Mr Cowthick, who was past wonder, was eventually prevailed upon to repeat this mysterious phrase. ‘
Eureka
!’ cried Bussenschutt, tumbling headlong into the only adequately expressive languages. ‘
Dies faustus
!’

‘Beg pardon, sir?’

‘I’ll call it’, Bussenschutt translated, ‘a day.’

In the library at Rust Dr Chown was meditating a matter of professional ethics. His position was delicate. He had been brought down by an interested relative in the person of the patient’s son, and this was regular enough. But he was not clear that the patient’s son was of legal age, and he had a feeling that the patient’s daughter, who was somewhat older, disapproved of his presence. It would be better, therefore, that there should be no bill: by this means his position would immediately cease to be delicate. Psychiatrists have the misfortune to work with a sort of invisible slot-machine at their side, and patients are not always able to conceal their awareness that into this they must drop an equally invisible shilling or so a minute; they sometimes even bring dreams in which the matter has been wrapped in an elaborate symbolism. Every professional worker has this slot-machine, but the conditions of the psychiatrist’s labours make his peculiarly noticeable; it is as if the patient had taken a taxi-cab to explore a maze and had his eye now on the meter and now on the constant retreats down blind alleys. To refrain, therefore, from pulling down the flag when chartered is an authentic if expensive pleasure; it converts dignified professional labour into a yet more dignified pursuit of pure science… Pleasingly conscious of the correctness of his own position and the eventual beneficence of his possibly painful ministrations, Dr Chown sat in the library and subjected Mr Eliot opposite to an absorbed scientific scrutiny.

‘It is odd,’ said Dr Chown; ‘odd and disconcerting. But we shall get to the bottom of it without a doubt. We have only’ – he glanced encouragingly across at Mr Eliot – ‘to look about us for the right man.’

‘My dear Chown, it is most kind of you to concern yourself with this unfortunate business.’ Mr Eliot was huddled in a deep leather chair and in the vanishing light would have been almost invisible had not Chown thoughtfully arranged a reading lamp to fall on his face. ‘You think it can be got to the bottom of?’

‘I think’, said Chown, amending cautiously, ‘that we can control it. My experience has been that when such things occur’ – he spoke as if his case-books teemed with ill-conducted Spiders – ‘they can be controlled. A little study, a little analysis, quiet and judicious measures firmly taken: these will resolve the mystery satisfactorily.’

Mr Eliot nodded. His eyes, it seemed to Chown, were straying nervously amid the shadows. ‘As I grow older, Chown, I am confirmed in the commonplace that the consequences of our actions are incalculable. Our deeds and even our unspoken thoughts generate forces which knock at a thousand unknown doors. Our fantasies go out and mould other people’s actuality. So why should they not return upon us again?’

Chown assumed an expression of sympathetic understanding – a branch of theatrical art in which he could have given points to Peter Holme. ‘Very true, Eliot; very true indeed and most lucidly expressed. Nevertheless you and I must take an objective view. We must step right out of this household, get away from the whole familial constellation, and approach the matter as strangers from the outside. Let us put ourselves in the frame of mind of one of your guests – a disinterested guest – who steps on to your terrace and views this display of red paint. I am struck by the dangerousness of the proceeding. The man who applied that paint was surely risking his neck. But I am an amateur on heights and perhaps mistaken. ‘Dr Chown looked sharply at Mr Eliot. ‘You, I believe, have climbing experience?’

‘Yes, I have. We are all fond of it.’

‘What a pity that we could not have held a muster of the household immediately after the event.’