The Daffodil Affair Page 6

  ‘Houses may not be stolen, dear Miss Appleby. The proposition is absurd.’

  ‘In normal times it would no doubt be so. But at present it is quite feasible to steal a house. This house was stolen in stages. One night it was intact; the next morning the roof had disappeared. In London at present such things are not, it seems, at all out of the way. The next morning much of the upper story had disappeared. And so on. People remarked upon it as an uncommonly unlucky house – it was so regularly hit. But by the time the ground floor was vanishing the thing had begun to excite speculation. There was so remarkably little rubble. Then one night the basement went, and there was nothing but a hole. Inquiries were made and there emerged the indisputable fact that the house had been stolen. It appears that during air raids there is a good deal of noise and confusion. Buildings are falling and lorries are hurrying about and what are called demolition squads are at work. The opportunities for stealing a house are quite unusual. But it must be expensive. The theft of Daffodil becomes a small thing in comparison.’

  ‘Daffodil,’ said Lady Caroline, ‘is a horse.’

  ‘No doubt. But a queer horse. And Lucy Rideout is a queer girl. And this house of which I have been telling you is a queer house. And all of them have been stolen within a few days of each other.’ Miss Appleby put the cuttings away and shut her bag. ‘I am glad to think, John, that you have the matter in hand.’

  ‘Yes, aunt,’ said Appleby.

  Part Two

  Whale Roads

  1

  The ocean was empty and unruffled; it was like the sky but emptier – for sometimes across the sky would pass a small high cloud. The ocean was always empty. Every twenty-four hours, and with startling abruptness, the ship emerged from the long black tunnel of the night into this other and cerulean void; every twenty-four hours, without a glimmer of protesting light, she disappeared again. Just such a monotonous voyaging Appleby remembered in a scenic waterway of his youth; so long in a winding papier mâché tunnel, so long floating beneath some dome-like structure garishly lit from below.

  With closed decks and sealed portholes the ship would nose through the night, a throb in the centre of her and a thud and a swish, a thud and a swish everlastingly at her side. And everlastingly by day the prow rose and fell, rose and fell across the horizon towards which she drove with an energy growing daily more mysterious in its evident transcendence of any merely human scale of effort. The prow rose and fell. And always there were two men watching, their immobile bodies thrown against a background now of sky and now of sea. They were looking for submarines. And now for long stretches of the day Hudspith was there beside them – Hudspith too watching, but with an eye that swept neither to port nor starboard, Hudspith looking straight ahead at the Lord knew what. Buenos Aires, Appleby thought, Rio de Janeiro, phoney social experiments vaguely reported from far up the Parana. Hudspith was one of those people upon whose nervous system the sea had a marked effect. Appleby would be glad to see him on dry land again. One does not want a loopy colleague when embarked upon so distinctly rummy an investigation as the present.

  We have followed a Harrogate cab-horse across the equator, Appleby said to himself, and have no idea where it is leading us. Wohin der Weg? Kein Weg! Ins Unhetretene. That was Mephistopheles, and ought to appeal to Hudspith – before whom it was clear that the Devil might appear in visible shape… Appleby moved to the rail and looked down at the sea. The Whale Road, the Angles had called it. But the road was invisible; there was no road; the ship drove mysteriously towards a goal beyond the present reach of sense. And rather like that was the hue and cry after Daffodil.

  Appleby thought of it chiefly as the Daffodil affair – no doubt because Hudspith so singly saw it as the affair of Hannah Metcalfe and Lucy Rideout. But actually, thought Appleby, it was the Affair of the Haunted House. In that lay the promise of future contact with a somewhat complex mind. For it was not as if the absconding house were a mere decorative flourish or grace note. Its theft must have cost incomparably more than the abductions of Hannah, Lucy and Daffodil put together. Not that it had been particularly difficult. Just expensive.

  It sounded, said Appleby to himself as he paced the deck, like one of the impossible tasks imposed upon the heroes of fairy stories. Steal a large Bloomsbury house and walk out of England with it – this in time of war. But it had been war that made the stealing easy; when whole streets are vanishing, a single house is scarcely missed. And the walking out of the country with it depended on war too. What happens when an English port is blitzed? The rubble is promptly shipped to America as ballast and used there as the foundations of new docks and quays – a sober fact so fantastic that one would hesitate to put it in a magazine story. Your churches are bombed; whereupon they become the causeways across which AA guns are rolled aboard your waiting freighters. It is very odd; and makes it just possible for an ingenious person – or organization, surely – to make off with an edifice once critically inspected by Dr Johnson. But why steal a reputedly haunted house? Appleby could see only one reason. And it cohered with his present view of the matter – or ought he to say his aunt’s view? – no better than with Hudspith’s.

  From somewhere aft a bugle sounded. Hudspith turned and strode across the fo’csle head. At least he still ate. Appleby stared again at the vacant horizon. One could easily lose one’s bearings. All at sea, as they say. Obscurely he wished for a familiar landfall – as if that would help. Table Mountain, hanging in the sky like Swift’s floating island. The litter of gigantic lettering on the quays of Manhattan; Brooklyn Bridge, Liverpool and its monster hotels. The low, dun, saurian ripple of land which Australia rolls into the Indian Ocean. If the ship could only raise one of these, he felt absurdly, then the unaccountable fragments of this business might come together in his mind. But what lay before the ship’s prow was South America, and of South America he knew nothing. Nor was he sure that it was in South America that this chase would end.

  The saloon was empty; he sat down and let the weeks of tedious investigation trickle through his mind. The haunted house had gone to Boston and thence to Port of Spain; after that it had disappeared. Hannah Metcalfe and Daffodil had last been heard of in Montevideo. But Lucy Rideout had been reported – though uncertainly – in Valparaiso, and perhaps there was significance in that. He looked up as Hudspith slumped darkly down beside him. ‘What would you say,’ he asked, ‘to Robinson Crusoe’s island?’

  ‘Roast Hazel Hen,’ said Hudspith sombrely. But this was to the steward.

  ‘Juan Fernandez,’ continued Appleby. ‘Are they particularly immoral there? Because it looks as if our rendezvous may be somewhere in that direction.’

  Hudspith shook his head and said nothing. Bodfish himself, it occurred to Appleby, would be as entertaining a companion. The truth was that Hudspith, learned in the depravities and perversities, had invented a new one – and was foundering beneath the additional burden. The seduction of feeble-minded girls he had supported for years, but the seduction of a plural-minded one was too much for him. Lucy Rideout, he believed, had been carried off for some person so vicious as to relish a mistress who was now one woman and now another. One could probably search all the volumes that booksellers discreetly call ‘Curious’ without coming upon anything quite so odd – and here was Hudspith obsessed by the thing as if it were an ultimate manifestation of evil. Appleby waited until Hudspith’s plate was before him and then tried a little reason. For it is desirable that policemen should be reasonable – and particularly those sent expensively across the world on detective missions.

  ‘Look here, I grant that your hypothesis would be sound and sufficient if Lucy’s affair stood in isolation. But it doesn’t. It’s linked to Hannah Metcalfe – to begin with, by the single word “Capri”. And Hannah Metcalfe is linked to the horse; she travelled with it. Just admit that and then ask yourself: how does the horse fit in with your notion of the vice racket?’

  Hudspith, who was eating with great intentness, paused briefl
y. ‘I could tell you things about horses,’ he said darkly. His eye was far away; it might have been conversing with the shades of Caligula and Heliogabalus.

  Appleby sighed. ‘Lucy and Capri. Capri and Hannah. Hannah and the horse. Hannah has witchcraft in the family. Lucy evidences a morbid psychology of a kind which former ages accounted for in terms of demoniac possession. The horse has some power of hyperaesthesia which can be seen as an uncanny ability to read thoughts. And all these and a haunted house are picked up in England and spirited off in the direction of South America. These are the facts, and I ask you to explain them – particularly the house.’

  Hudspith was studying the menu with a faintly pathological concentration. ‘Of course they hang together,’ he said. ‘Nobody denies it. And I suppose if a man has a taste for demented concubines he may have a taste for a crazy house to keep them in. You don’t know the lengths to which these wealthy degenerates will go. You ought to see the private movies they have made. You ought to see–’ Hudspith broke off and sat glowering at some inward vision. Then he fell to eating with a slow, disconcerting avidity. Loopy, Appleby thought. St Simeon on his pillar, with the phantasmagoria of all the sins of the flesh circling round him. A great mistake to keep Hudspith on that stuff all these years – particularly when he had such a taste for it. Turn him on to forgery. Turn him on to embezzlement. Too late.

  ‘Hudspith–’ he began, and stopped. The other passengers had come in; with bowings and mutterings they were sitting down at the narrow table. The ship belonged to the class of fast cargo vessels that provide for six or eight passengers of retiring disposition – persons disliking floating hotels and averse from dances and sports tournaments. And at present there were Miss Mood, Mrs Nurse, Mr Wine, and Mr Wine’s secretary, Mr Beaglehole.

  ‘Warm,’ said Mr Beaglehole; ‘decidedly warm. Not a day for woollens, Mr Appleby.’

  All the passengers laughed discreetly. In time of war travellers about the world commonly cease to be travellers and become missions. And of these there are two kinds. The first, the confidential mission, everybody knows about – and everybody knew that Appleby and Hudspith were a confidential mission engaged in marketing Australian wool. The second sort of mission is the hush-hush mission. And this is the real thing. The persons here have a mana from which issue absolute and extensive tabus: their whence, their whither and their why may be neither questioned nor mentioned; they must be considered as utterly without a future or a past, as ephemerides of the sheerest sort. This makes conversation difficult and repartee more difficult still. Appleby agreed that it was a warm day.

  Mrs Nurse said that the warm days were nicer than the very hot days.

  Mr Wine, who seldom said anything, said nothing.

  Miss Mood said nothing. She crushed her clasped hands between her knees and looked at Appleby with a penetrating glance. Really with that, Appleby thought. It was as if matter of scientific interest was being detected near the back of one’s skull.

  ‘The very hot days are rather tiring,’ said Mrs Nurse.

  About Mrs Nurse, it occurred to Appleby, there was something slightly peculiar. He frowned, conscious that in this lay the beginning of some obscure train of thought. Only a microscopic proportion of the human race ever crosses the South Atlantic Ocean; to do so is – however faintly – a distinction in itself; commonly this distinction is linked to the possession – however infinitesimally faint – of some specific trait or bent or characteristic in the voyager. But in Mrs Nurse nothing of the sort was detectable. It was impossible to conceive of any reason why she should now be thus floating on the waters. On the other hand it was equally hard to endow her in imagination with any more appropriate habitat. She called for nothing in particular. To posit a middling sort of suburb in a middling sort of English provincial town would be to risk far too positive an assertion about Mrs Nurse. Not that she was in the least enigmatic – that was Miss Mood’s line – or in any way elusive. The apotheosis of the commonplace was a vile phrase. But it was the best that Appleby could find when considering Mrs Nurse.

  ‘It is calm,’ Mrs Nurse said.

  It would be difficult to think of a more neutral remark than that, or of a more colourless way of making it. And she was physically colourless too – the colours one might see in a pool in an uninteresting place on a dull day. She was –

  ‘Calm,’ said Miss Mood tensely, ‘is an illusion – a mere mathematical abstraction. It is simply an axis upon which spins the mortal storm, the great electrical flux which those who live call life.’ She set down a glass of tomato juice and looked at Hudspith. ‘You, I am sure, understand and agree with me.’ Miss Mood’s voice as it delivered itself of this gibberish was husky and glamorous, like something recorded on celluloid. Hudspith humped his shoulders, jabbed with fork and sawed with knife; he hated this awful woman as much as if she had been a celebrated bawd. But Miss Mood had clearly got him wrong; her turning to him had all the lush confidence of a tropical creeper’s spiralling at the sun. ‘Mind-stuff is alone pervasive,’ she said. ‘There is nothing else in the etheric world.’

  Appleby felt a faint jar throughout his system – rather as if he had been pulled up in full career by the sudden recognition of an unexpected short cut. For between two bites of hazel hen he had apprehended the truth about Miss Mood. The woman was going where Hannah and Lucy had gone.

  That was it. She and Hudspith and he were, so to speak, all in the same boat. And this was a thing likely enough – boats not being too plentiful these days. If the traffic to the pseudo-Capri was at all heavy – and already it had the appearance of being so – then parts of it were almost certain to converge quite far out on the Whale Roads. And a woman with that sort of eye and vocabulary – for there had been this sort of etheric-world stuff several times before – was just right for Daffodil’s stable.

  Appleby, chewing on this abrupt intuition, let his glance circle his other companions. If it were logical to suppose this of Miss Mood, then might it not –

  The man called Beaglehole was looking at Miss Mood with disapproval. There was far from being anything out of the way in that. And yet about the manner of Beaglehole’s disapproval it was possible to feel something puzzling. Appleby’s eye travelled forward to Mrs Nurse, the commonplace and pervasively negative Mrs Nurse…and suddenly he perceived the truth about her too. He looked at Mr Wine – there was only Mr Wine left – and as he looked at Mr Wine, Mr Wine looked at him. There are indefinable moments in which one feels that one has dropped the shutters just in time. Appleby felt this. For a second he continued to look at Wine blankly, and then he looked at Hudspith. Hudspith’s eye was more discernibly than ever upon his private whale – the creature blew and spouted in the gravy. And so much for individual inspection. It remained to consider all five of his companions simultaneously and by a coup d’oeil. Tolerably achieving this, Appleby felt that it would be well to go up and get some air.

  2

  Sea and sky were us usual; the prow and its watchers went up and down as before. But Appleby paced a deck mysteriously transformed; he was like an actor who steps from the diffuse and rugged structure of actuality into the economy of a well-made play. For here, all unexpectedly, was the problem – or part of it – neatly under his nose again. Beaglehole had looked at Miss Mood with disapproval, the sort of disapproval with which a shop-walker might regard a counter ineptly piled with demodé goods. That was it. Miss Mood with her particular patter of the etheric world was booked for the bargain basement. Lucy Rideout and Daffodil would be much more catch.

  Beaglehole, in fact, was what in commercial language is called a buyer, and Miss Mood and Mrs Nurse were his latest haul. The case of Mrs Nurse – said Appleby to himself in the sudden illumination that had befallen him – the case of Mrs Nurse was clear. She was a high-class medium – which meant an honest and peculiarly simple woman who was yet capable, in certain abnormal or trance states, of ingenious and sustained deceptions. That was it – or that was it in uncompromisingly ra
tional terms. Mrs Nurse was just the type: a shallow pool until the waters parted and sundry problematical depths were revealed. Mrs Nurse would sit in a darkened room with bereaved mothers and sensation-seekers and inquiring Fellows of the Royal Society. Strange voices would come from her; voices voluble, hesitant, coherent, fragmentary, pathetic, pompous, fishing, shuffling. And people would listen as they had listened ever since the days of the Witch of Endor. One hears his wife speaking. One makes a verbatim report. One weeps. One smuggles a microphone. One offers banknotes. One plans tests with a manometer, a sphygmograph, a thermoscope… In other words, Mrs Nurse was a steady selling line.

  And somewhere over the faintly serrated blue of the horizon the spirit of enterprise was assembling a large-scale psychic circus. No other explanation would quite fit the facts – as Appleby’s aunt, placidly shuffling her press cuttings, had known. The scale was large. There was no sign that Mrs Nurse and Miss Mood were aware of any special relationship with Beaglehole; if Beaglehole was buyer, there were agents in between. Among these passengers, indeed, there was only one overt relationship: Beaglehole was secretary to the gentleman down in the sailing list as Mr Emery Wine. Almost certainly this brought Wine in. In fact the hush-hush mission of these two was odder by a long way than the workaday imagination would readily arrive at… Appleby, rounding a corner of the pilothouse, found Mr Wine regarding him with mild attention from a deckchair. And momentarily his confidence flickered. The man looked so uncommonly like a hush-hush mission of the most respectable sort.

  Hitherto Mr Wine had not been cordial; his attitude was one of polite preoccupation and reserve. He was a slight man, well groomed without preciseness, and his manner at times suggested a tempered gaiety which was no doubt on appropriate occasions his most charming social card. And he smiled charmingly now. ‘I am a good deal interested in your friend,’ he said unexpectedly.