The Man from the Sea (8 page)

“We can all get things wrong.”

They were back, Cranston felt, where they had started. He went again to the door and listened. Sally’s absence was now alarming. He turned round. “It would be easier, wouldn’t it, if you could bribe me?”

“Very much easier.” Day spoke whimsically. “But of course you are incorruptible – in matters of this sort. And I don’t think you are to be blackmailed either – which is a suggestion I rather carelessly made to you. It is awkward about Lady Blair and so on. But it would no longer count with you.”

“It certainly wouldn’t. Not now that I know who you are.”

“But what does still count is the fact that we’ve both mucked it. My chance seems to be to trade on that.” The words came softly to Cranston with the effect of cards dropped deliberately on a table. “Each of us has let himself down.” Day broke off. “Surely it’s growing light? What’s the time?”

“Dawn is certainly coming. But I can’t tell you the time. I haven’t–”

“You haven’t got a watch either. And your word for the condition is the precise one. Dishonour. And, just because you have let yourself down, you won’t now let me down – until you’re certain that I’m no good. Until you’re certain that my deep, deep dive is bogus. Isn’t it queer? Isn’t it extraordinary that, staggering at random from the sea, I should run straight into a full-blown young romantic idealist?”

“She’s coming!” Cranston had moved swiftly to the door. Now he was back again. “Can’t you speak out – straight? What are you going to do? What’s this plan you talk about?”

It was perhaps because Sally’s footsteps could already be heard on the path that Day replied in the softest voice he had yet used. “I’ve told you that my plan is very simple. It’s the simplest of all plans.”

“The simplest – ?”

“Ssh!”

The girl was in the doorway. She carried a bowl and a large jug, and there was a basket over her arm. “It’s no good,” she said, “trying to beat the dawn at this time of year.”

Cranston took the jug from her. “As a matter of fact, you’ve been rather a long time. It wasn’t…your mother again?”

“I’ve no doubt Mother is asleep – ankle and all.” Sally put down the bowl and basket composedly. “Alex.”

“Alex!” He was startled.

“I thought your friend would at least be dressed.” She turned to Day. “You’re not a doctor – or anything like that? You have no special knowledge of what to do? The water’s warm, and with boracic. I’d simply try opening your eyes in it. And I’ve brought some of the dark stuff – argyrol, isn’t it? – and a dropper. Will you come over here?”

She was as impersonal as a nurse, and Day submitted to her. Cranston watched from a corner. There was still no more than a pale grey light in the summerhouse, but objects and actions could be distinguished. Certainly there could now be no question of getting away under cover of any approximation to darkness.

“Sally,” he said, “you mean that Sir Alex knows?”

“Knows what, Dick?”

The cool question seemed to him like a flash of lightning on what Sally herself must now know. But he went through with answering steadily. “About this chap – and what we’re up to.”

“I’ll empty out this water. And then you can try again. Do you want a towel?” Sally made various dispositions at the table before she turned again to Cranston. “I’d just got into the house when there was – Alex. He was up and prowling. I can’t think why.”

“The shots, perhaps. If he heard them he’d know at once it wasn’t aircraft practising.”

“No doubt. It was awkward.”

“I’m frightfully sorry, Sally.”

“Really?” For a second she was rather coldly mocking. “It was one of those occasions on which one has to risk a great deal of the truth in order not to give away the whole of it.”

There was a little silence. The words, quietly uttered in the fresh young voice, seemed to hang oddly in the air. It was Day who spoke. “Did you feel that you had so much truth at your disposal?”

She made no reply to this. It was as if she was determined to have only the most businesslike relations with him. Instead she turned again to Cranston. “I told him that it was you – here in the summerhouse, Dick. I told him that you had wakened me by throwing gravel at my window, and that it was a question of some poaching exploit gone wrong. You and a friend had been guddling Lord Urquhart’s trout – and had lost nearly all your clothes and come by a great many scratches. Of course I’m sorry to have represented you in rather a juvenile light. You’re the last person I’d really think of as – getting into mischief. But I had to consider what would amuse Alex – amuse him without really interesting him. I gather you don’t want him out here.”

“I don’t think we do.”

“If he does come out it will be in the most good-natured way in the world – a matter of what he calls jollying you up.” She spoke with her flicker of fastidious disdain. “But you can bank on his laziness, no doubt.”

Day raised his head from the big bowl. “Is Sir Alex Blair so very lazy?”

“If he weren’t wealthy and lazy he’d be in the very top flight of British scientists today. And he knows it, I imagine.” Her voice was indifferent. “Has all this helped?”

“It has made me much more comfortable. But I still can’t really see.”

“Hadn’t we better get a doctor?”

Day shook his head. “My guess is that time, and only time, will clear it up. A doctor would do no more than produce reassuring talk and a roll of bandages.”

“I haven’t any talk. But I can produce dark glasses. I slipped some into the basket. Also a flask of brandy, a packet of biscuits and a block of chocolate. And, Dick, here’s the pullover. Canary, I’m afraid – but it won’t go too badly with your tan. I shall go in now – and leave you to evolve whatever further adventure you have a mind to.”

She was gone – before Cranston could speak. But he strode after her and caught her on the verandah. “Sally–” He broke off, confused and finding himself without words.

They were facing each other. He had a sense that – inexplicably – she was trembling all over. But for the moment they stood confronted, her gaze at least was perfectly steady. “I know how you feel,” she said. “At least… I know how you feel.”

She had turned, run down the little flight of steps, and was hurrying through the dimness of the garden. He found himself repeating the banal words as if they had come to him charged with impenetrable mystery.

“A capable girl.” Day was opening the brandy flask.

“Yes.”

“Knows just what she is about.”

For a moment Cranston was silent. These last words – he strangely and intuitively knew – were not true. Perhaps Day was deceived. But Day was a liar. He had to remember that. All the stuff about diamonds: the fellow would have persisted in it if there had been a chance of sustaining that particular deception… “Shall we get back to business?” Cranston asked.

“Brandy, biscuits and chocolate are decidedly part of our business at present. Would you pour out? It’s a thing the blind find tricky.” Day paused only for a moment. “Do you play rugger?”

“Yes.” Cranston poured – and drank.

“Three-quarter?”

“Yes. But I don’t see–”

“That we’re getting back to business? But we are, you know. You had fumbled a pass. How unforgivably, you were just coming to realise. And you remember the next stage? An absolute determination to take the ball cleanly next time. Well – I’m the ball. I think that was about as far as we had got.”

“And I think you’ve laboured all that long enough. I’m prepared to admit that it’s not precisely nonsense. But taking the ball cleanly mayn’t at all mean anything that you greatly fancy.” Cranston reached for a biscuit and paused to munch it. “Your story may be full of psychological interest. Your wanderings – physical and spiritual – among the nations may open up all sorts of fascinating vistas upon the dilemma of modern man. Everything of that sort. High-class thriller stuff, in which recurrent chapters are devoted to an anatomy of the soul.” The small swig of brandy, Cranston realised, had gone straight to his head. “But the fact remains that you are almost certainly even more dangerous than you are interesting. Taking
you
cleanly ought perhaps to mean putting you inside as fast as the job can be done… I’ve halved the chocolate.”

“Thank you – and of course you’re right. There’s a presumption, I mean, that I’m far too dangerous not to jump on. But suppose it’s otherwise. Suppose I can convince you that – well, that all that’s over and done with. Suppose you wanted to help me – to go on helping me, I ought to say. Could you do it?”

“Could I help you?” Cranston was disconcerted at being thus abruptly placed once more in the position of the challenged party.

“Just that. For there’s not much point in my telling you anything more – opening any of those fascinating vistas you’re so neatly ironic about – if in fact your neat undergraduate wit is altogether in excess of your practical capacities. I’ll admit you cut a pretty good figure, my dear young man, in the matter of the fellow with the gun. But are you resourceful? And are you your own master at present from day to day? Could you get a blinded man from here to London – perhaps against desperate opposition? There’s more to a good wing-three-quarter, you’ll agree, than just taking the ball cleanly. He has to carry it over the line.”

“I think you have the most frightful cheek.” Reduced to this rather juvenile sentiment, Cranston picked up another square of chocolate. Brandy, he had decided, was an unsuitable sort of refreshment at dawn.

“Alex Blair, I take it, is the grand person hereabouts – the laird, and all that. We’re now in the grounds of the big house.”

“It’s a castle, as a matter of fact – Dinwiddie Castle. And I’m not sure that ‘laird’ is quite grand enough for our host. Not that he wouldn’t be perfectly pleased with it.”

“And you? It’s plain that you are on terms of intimacy – varying degrees of intimacy, shall we say? – with the grand folk. But who are you? And where do you come from?”

“I’m the doctor’s son – and from three miles away. But my parents are very respectable.” No doubt because of the brandy, Cranston was unable to refrain from further sarcasm. “Our family connections are, if anything, superior to the Blairs’. So if you’re wondering if I qualify for your–”

“And you can come and go as you please during your holidays – your vacation? You can go home this morning and simply announce that you will be away for a week?”

Cranston flushed. “Of course I can.”

“Borrowing a car?”

“I’ve got a car.”

“But this is capital.” Day took another biscuit. “You are decidedly worth converting.”

“To those plans?”

“Precisely.”

“The plans that you say are so simple?”

“My dear young man – yes, indeed. My plans
are
very simple. I am going to die.”

For a moment the small, bleak statement held the air unchallenged. Then, from somewhere far down the garden, a dog barked and a man’s voice was heard calling. Other dogs joined in. The man’s voice rose again – cheerful, commanding, but of no effect amid the clamour of terriers.

“It’s Sir Alex.” Cranston had no doubts. “He makes a thorough nuisance of himself at times, I’ve been told – fooling around long before breakfast with the Cairns.”

“He’ll come up here?”

“Very probably he will, now that he’s in the garden… What do you mean?”

“Just what I say – that quite soon I shall be dead. It’s a great simplification of things… But can’t we get away?”

“There’s nothing behind this summerhouse except a high wall and then the cliff. And if we go down the garden we shall simply walk into him. But need you worry? It must be a simplification in the matter of new acquaintances too. If you are going to be dead, I mean, virtually before you need return Sir Alex’s call.”

Day laughed – but low and cautiously. “I see you don’t believe me – yet.”

“How do you know I don’t believe you?”

“You wouldn’t make just that joke. Your feelings, you know, are at present superior to your morals.”

“Will he recognise you?”

“What’s the light like? I get the impression of clear daylight.”

“It’s pretty well that.”

“Then I suppose he will.”

They were now whispering. The voice in the garden was raised in song, and the Cairns were responding with a more frenzied yapping. Cranston moved to the door of the summerhouse. “I’m sure Sally did her best,” he said. “But she over-estimated his laziness and under-estimated his curiosity.”

“Not, with most scientists, an easy thing to do.” Day, Cranston saw, had got to his feet and was contriving to peer painfully about the table. “Didn’t she say something about dark glasses? Ah – here they are.”

The singing was quite close, and the terriers could be heard scampering. Sir Alex Blair’s voice broke off in the middle of a stave and then raised itself again in robust speech. No doubt it was what Sally had called his jollying manner. “Dick, my boy, come out and declare yourself! Don’t forget that I’m a magistrate, sir. Come out, I say, or I’ll send the hounds in.”

Day slipped on the glasses. “The question,” he murmured “was of your resourcefulness. Say, the quickness of your wit.”

Cranston turned and walked out to the verandah. It was outrageous that he should be thus challenged. He moved to the top of the steps, and as he did so ran a hand through his hair. The gesture told him at once that he was on a stage. It went with an engaging grin. “Hullo, Sir Alex,” he called. “Did Sally peach?”

“She had no choice, poor wretch. I caught her red-handed.” Blair had at least come to a halt. Clipped and brushed and polished, florid and well-dieted, dressed in a faded kilt and carrying the shepherd’s crook he commonly affected when at Dinwiddie, he was glancing up at Cranston, facetiously severe. “And you too, you young scoundrel – what have you to say for yourself?”

“Nothing at all, Sir Alex. As usual – nothing at all.”

“And so I’d suppose. Still – deeds sometimes speak louder than words – eh? What have you brought me for breakfast, my boy? What have you brought the corrupt old capon-justice of Dinwiddie?”

Cranston grinned – and for good measure again put on the turn with his hair. “I’m sorry to say, sir, we didn’t get a single fish. They were on top of us far too quickly.”