Stop Press (6 page)

Timmy had got so far when Winter raised a protesting hand. ‘Young man, it is you who talk far, far too well. You ought to go into the family business. Do you realize how much you are dramatizing these absurd occurrences? The manuscripts were mysteriously rewriting themselves, indeed!’

Timmy, who had certainly been doing his best to present a dramatic narrative, opened innocent round eyes. ‘But it was just so! The manuscripts had been rewriting themselves in the dark. When the Spider was being taken in a direction he didn’t want to go he simply cancelled a sentence or a paragraph or a page and inserted one according to his own ideas.’

For a moment Winter looked blankly incredulous. Then he shook his head. ‘I repeat, you have the family talent for a yarn. And it makes you a thoroughly annoying witness. What form were these manuscripts in? Where were they kept? How often were they tampered with? And, above all, how could your father not see at once what was happening?’

‘One question at a time, please. And I’m trying to give you the thing somewhat as it affected daddy. I think that’s important; don’t you?’

‘No doubt. What form were these manuscripts in?’

Disconcertingly and for a split second the smooth projectile in which they were travelling moved in two directions at once; steadying itself, it rattled comfortably over a maze of points. ‘Paddington’, said Timmy. ‘All change.’

The people whom one has successfully dodged getting in one often bumps into getting out. On the platform, and while Timmy was looking for a porter to carry his unnecessarily bulky suitcase, Winter bumped into Bussenschutt.

‘Ah, my dear fellow: off again?’ Bussenschutt’s eye, beaming its horrid geniality, turned towards Timmy. ‘Is not that the young Eliot of whom we were speaking?’

‘Yes; I am spending the weekend at his home.’

‘And catching the Spider?’ Bussenschutt deftly gestured amused tolerance. ‘
Soyez heureux, mes enfants; vous êtes encore jeunes
.’

Winter, whose doubts about his expedition were not decreasing, smiled without friendliness. ‘You are up for a night in town, Master?’ He sunk his voice in outrageous simulation of confidence. ‘My great-uncle Edward tells me that at the Vanity what he calls the beauty-chorus is better than ever.’

Bussenschutt smiled in turn – with the indulgence of one who will acknowledge even a feeble thrust. ‘I am going down’, he said, ‘to see Shoon. This interesting matter of his papyrus. I hope he may favour me with a photostat. My generation, my dear Winter, is not sufficiently talented to square scholarship with the forty hour week. Have a care in walking into that Parlour. And now I must pick up a taxi.
Au revoir
.’

Winter took off his hat. ‘
Au revoir
, Master,’ he said cheerfully. ‘See that it’s a taxi.’ He retreated feeling that in this deplorable encounter the last round was his.

Timmy, now farther down the platform, was revolving about a tall young man in the most inflexible uniform of travel: bowler, umbrella, and the yellowest of gloves. Timmy was evidently in a quiet ecstasy. ‘I say, Winter – do you know Hugo Toplady? Hugo, this is Gerald Winter.’

Toplady, with the air of one who makes an important decision with practised rapidity, said, ‘How do you do.’ Amid vague remarks all three bundled into a cab. They jerked out of the station into the recurrently astounding uproar of London.

‘I’ve been telling Winter’, said Timmy, ‘about the Spider affair. He is confident he can solve it.’

Winter opened his mouth and was forestalled by Toplady. ‘A horrid foolery,’ he said. ‘One sees that it is a joke, but decidedly not the sort of joke one sees.’ He tapped the floor of the taxi with the attenuated ferrule of his umbrella.

‘Not the sort of joke one sees.’ Timmy, repeating the words as he might repeat a particularly precious line of Dante, contrived to tread deftly and cruelly on Winter’s toes. Timmy’s loves were always fortified by irony. One day, Winter reflected, he might be a great lover; he had the not common ability of adoring what was actually there.

‘I think’, pursued Toplady, evidently encouraged by his admirer’s approbation, ‘that what your father might usefully think of is making a call. That would be the best course to my mind: a call.’ He turned to Winter, appeared to make a brief calculation of his age, and said conscientiously: ‘Mr Winter, you agree?’

Winter tucked his feet under him. ‘But – er – on whom is the call to be made?’

Toplady frowned. ‘That’, he said, ‘is the next thing to consider.’

Gently the taxi bumped into another taxi in front.

Over the river the train runs from the London of landmarks and unique statements to the London of remorseless repetitions and submerged identities, the London of a million chimney-pots, each assertive only of the uselessness of assertion. Rapidly traversed, this region demonstrates that things in general are without an objective and without a plan. How fortunate, thought Winter, that in the train we are of another world, in which life is a matter of efficiently accomplished journeys in pursuit of rational ends! He frowned and stood up to reach himself
The Times
. The unread obituaries were still a refuge between himself and the advancing perplexities of the Eliots.

‘I think’, said Toplady, leaning back in somewhat apprehensive experiment in the third-class carriage, ‘the chief constable.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Mr Eliot’s call. The chief constable – or a person of that sort.’

Timmy, who was curled in a corner making a brazenly childish assault on a large square of chocolate, interrupted. ‘By the way, Winter, we are discovered – did you know? I saw the Master climbing in at the back.’

‘Bussenschutt? He’s off to see an old party called Shoon.’

‘Shoon? Why, that’s–’

‘The chief constable’, said Toplady politely but firmly. ‘Or a person of that sort.’

Timmy, busy stripping the last shred of tinfoil from his refection, shook his head. ‘Chief constables or such-like did come in over the Birdwire burglary. But daddy didn’t like them. You see, the books are full of policemen. It used to be the Spider’s regular business to outwit them. Now he simply outpaces them. In either case they have to be pretty painfully stupid. So when it proves necessary for real police to come in and investigate us – investigate something that seems actually to spring from the books – naturally daddy finds it a bit–’

‘Embarrassing.’ Toplady helpfully supplied what appeared to be the key word in description of Mr Eliot’s position. ‘We must look elsewhere.’ He took off his bowler and peered into that.

‘It is’, said Timmy, ‘a bit difficult to know how to move. You’ll both realize that when you get a whiff of our household. Daddy’s very shy.’

Winter rather wondered if the very shy Mr Eliot was going greatly to relish either an inquisition by a strange don or the diplomatic counsels of the admired Toplady. ‘Does your father’, he asked with sudden suspicion, ‘know that we’re coming down?’

‘Yes, indeed, Winter. I sent him a telegram just before we set off.’

‘I see.’

‘You needn’t be alarmed. He doesn’t a bit mind whom we bring down.’

Toplady, who was brushing his bowler in an elderly way with the sleeve of his overcoat, desisted as if aware that this last remark of his friend’s required analysis. Winter said: ‘We are relieved.’

‘Of course I haven’t told him about Chown.’

‘About
Chown
?’

‘Yes: the psychiatrist. I’ve asked him down too. I thought he might penetrate to the mind and motive of the joker. Will he be expensive?’

‘Very.’ Winter nodded emphatically. ‘And I may say I’m thinking of putting in a bill myself.’

Toplady directed upon Winter a glance of restrained social censure. ‘I have it in mind’, he said carefully, ‘that a friend has told me of his impression, gained perhaps indirectly, that in more than one family Herbert Chown has been helpful; indeed, very helpful indeed. But I do think, Timmy – and I not only think but I say – that it would have been wiser, and indeed more the thing, if a friend may go as far as to say that too, to let your father judge for himself if Chown’s help is needed, and if needed desired.’

Timmy was quite abashed – a state of feeling, Winter reflected, which he himself had never been able to induce in his pupil. ‘But, Hugo, please–’

‘And if’, continued Toplady, ‘you have – as I think I may say I suspect you have, as you have said you have mentioned something of it to Mr Winter – called in Chown because of a feeling of anxiety as to how your father is taking the thing, that, though another matter, is also a graver one which I hope you have thought to discuss with some older member of your family. Have you?’

Into the serious Toplady, Winter was thinking, it would be nice to stick a pin. Nevertheless there was sense in his laborious precision and it seemed possible moreover that he might elicit from Timmy a less fragmentary account of the Eliot mystery than he had hitherto given. So Winter chorused approvingly: ‘Have you?’

Timmy slid back the corridor door and pitched his chocolate paper not very tidily through it. ‘Well, no. Chown is a slight acquaintance of the family and I thought he might be brought down without remark. And I did think he might calm daddy down a bit; they’ve had dealings before. But chiefly I hoped he could tell us what sort of brain was at work.’

‘Is it’, asked Winter, ‘calming down your father to bring home a whole’ – he looked blandly at the sedate Toplady – ‘circus?’

‘I thought the problem might be tackled from several sides at once. It was as soon as I heard that Chown would come that I ran up to collar you. And then I went round and collected Hugo. Perhaps it is all rather on a grand scale. But I assure you we shall hardly be noticed in the crowd.’

‘The crowd?’

‘The Spider’s twenty-firster,’ said Timmy. ‘Ever such a big party.’ Delicately he licked a chocolate-coated thumb and produced his clamantly thoroughbred pipe. ‘Winter, might I have those matches again, please?’

There was a heavy silence. What a tangled web, thought Winter sadly regarding Timmy, we weave when once we practise to deceive. ‘I understood’, he said, ‘that these pointless and elaborate jokes had thrown your father into considerable distress of mind. Do you mean to say that he has chosen this moment to hold a junketing in the Spider’s honour?’

‘Surely’, said Toplady, acting chorus in his turn, ‘he hasn’t done that?’

‘It’s not really daddy; it’s his publisher – chap called Wedge. He arranges the birthday-party every year, and then he puts it in his house journal and even gets bits into the illustrated weeklies. And this particular year daddy didn’t like to put him off.’

Toplady looked at the communication cord and made a tentative movement to grab his hat. Then he sank back in his seat and said, ‘Publicity.’ Just so, Winter thought, might medieval man have said, ‘Plague.’

‘Daddy sent me a note who’s coming. I expect there are quite a number travelling down now.’ Timmy stood up to reach for his coat. ‘Oh, bother; they always get the lights wrong on this futile line.’ For with a hoot the train had plunged abruptly into darkness. ‘It’s the only tunnel and they often forget–’

Timmy’s voice and the rattle of the train’s subterraneous plunge were alike drowned in awful and bewildering clamour. A pandemonium of sound, latrant, mugient, reboatory, and beyond all words, reverberated between the walls of the tunnel. The multitude of the damned, vocal with all the sad variety of hell, could scarcely have surpassed the momentary effect of horror. It was only momentary; then the unknown identified itself as dogs – a disgracefully large number of dogs in a neighbouring compartment. Toplady was heard saying ‘Dogs!’; there were bumping noises in the corridor; a strident female voice said, ‘Guard!’; the tardy lights switched on overhead; seconds later the train ran into daylight.

Timmy, still standing up, thrust his head into the corridor – as a number of disturbed passengers were doing. ‘What a filthy – oh, lord!’

The strident female voice had drawn nearer. Raised above the continued ululations of the dogs, it expressed the brisk and authoritative displeasure of the propertied classes. ‘These’, it said, ‘are most sensitive animals –
most
sensitive. It is disgraceful that they should be exposed to such carelessness. Can’t you hear how upset they are?’

‘Yes, ma’am. The whole train can do that.’ That man’s voice was that of one who remembers and resents that he has been bribed. ‘But the dogs oughtn’t rightly to be in the compartment at all. Look at their tickets and you’ll see it says the van.’

Timmy leant forward and whispered to his companions. ‘If we’re not all getting together! It’s the Birdwire outfit
en route
.’

At this Winter warily thrust out his head in turn. A little way off, and outside a first-class compartment, an aggressively tweeded female, of the sort whose characteristic accoutrements are binoculars, a shooting-stick, and a large cardboard label, was rebuking a uniformed attendant. What they call a stone-in-the-rain, thought Winter – and let his glance travel farther down the corridor. Beyond a vista of indignant faces, and from the last compartment of all, protruded the supremely indignant face of Bussenschutt. Winter bowed politely to this ultimate appearance and withdrew his head. Still supported by a swelling canine diapason, the strident voice continued. ‘We shall
not
make a complaint. Mrs Birdwire is
not
that sort of person. But please be more careful about the lights another time. It is bad for the dogs. And might lead to immorality as well. And now please see that we are brought coffee and biscuits.’ There was the sound of a door slid to and for a moment the doggy din was muted. Then it rose again as the door was reopened and the stone-in-the-rain, more stridently yet to catch the retreating attendant, called: ‘Mrs Birdwire must have
ginger
biscuits.’

‘The woman’, said Timmy, ‘is the Birdwire’s familiar. Name of Pike. Lady Pike. The Pike is awfully wealthy – much wealthier than the Birdwire. But being God’s own hanger-on she lives with the Birdwire and manages for her.
Anima naturaliter toady
.’ Timmy smiled complacently, apparently in tribute to his own skill in character-drawing. ‘If you meet her’, he added as an afterthought, ‘she’ll ask you if you have a garden of character.’