The Daffodil Affair Page 9

  Appleby shook his head. ‘The truth is that we have only the most tenuous line on anything criminal so far. Hannah Metcalfe is of age, and at a pinch they could probably square Mrs Rideout. That means that if the girls were free agents and there was no intent to exploit them sexually there just isn’t a case at all. Of course people aren’t allowed to steal houses. But it would be hard to persuade a commonsense jury that a house which may plausibly be held simply to have disintegrated through enemy action has really been found at the other end of the globe. And as for Daffodil – well, everybody knows that a horse is almost as chancy a proposition in a law court as on a racecourse.’

  ‘In other words,’ said Hudspith, ‘this museum may be crazy but can’t be established as criminal. So why fudge up visions? Much better go home and report no go.’

  ‘Not at all. You may find something decidedly criminal if you get yourself favourably established there. And besides’ – Appleby looked shrewdly at his colleague – ‘we don’t in any case know that these girls aren’t getting a raw deal. Even if they were picked up primarily as museum pieces–’

  Literally and figuratively, Hudspith rose. ‘Very well. And as you seem to have brought a good many books on all that–’

  Appleby rummaged in his suitcase, ‘I think I can recommend Gurney and Myers. They describe about seven hundred decidedly queer coves, so you ought to find something to suit your type. I’m inclined to recommend bright lights and voices. They seem to crop up at any time, whereas actual phantasms are inclined to save up for special occasions – like announcing some death at a distance.’

  ‘I see.’ Hudspith, Appleby was pleased to notice, had abandoned his brooding expression for one of much cunning. ‘Well, as it happens, this is a special occasion. It’s your birthday.’

  ‘It is nothing of the sort.’

  ‘Look here, if you say I have visions, can’t I say you have a birthday?’

  Appleby grinned. ‘I suppose that’s fair.’

  ‘Good. It’s your birthday. And Cobdogla never knew such a party as there’s going to be tonight.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Appleby – and went on deck wondering if he had been inclined to underestimate his colleague. Hudspith in his younger days had doubtless been constrained to drink much beer in the interests of criminal investigation, but that he should plump for conviviality as a means of forwarding the present inquiry was a surprise. Perhaps a party would be a good idea in any case, for there was now something decidedly oppressive in the air.

  More than ever the South Atlantic was calm, a sort of channel passenger’s dream. The sun swam copper-coloured in a western sky which had gone strangely olive; it was like a farmer peering through a hedge, only there were no crops visible, nothing but the unharvested sea which lay flaccid and inert about the ship. The ocean, said Appleby to himself, walking aft, is our master symbol of energy. Watching it, we draw into ourselves a pleasing sense of power, as we may do from some vital companion. There is society where none intrudes By the deep seas, and music in its roar. And when it fails to roar there may result comfort for our stomach and semicircular canals, but the society lapses and our spirits feel indefinably let down.

  The conclusion of this marine meditation found Appleby at the after end of the short promenade deck. Here there was a sort of open-air extension of the smoke-room, glassed in on either side, with a hatch for obtaining drinks behind, and having, as if by way of diversion, a frontwise and elevated view of the little sundeck provided for third-class passengers. Here one could sit before dinner, sip sherry or cocktails and scrutinize the unimportant proceedings of these obscure persons below. The dispositions of the human species are frequently extremely odd, and the curiosity of this instance was perhaps enhanced by the fact that the third-class passengers, like their elevated fellow voyagers, could number no more than some half-dozen. One got to know them quite well; it was like owning an aquarium or a small zoological park. For instance, thought Appleby, settling down without a drink – for the coming party was something to approach with caution – for instance there below him at the moment was the Italian girl. One could see that she was handsome; that she was dirty it was at this distance necessary only to suspect. And in a peasant girl who has beauty a little dirt is of small moment to a well-balanced mind.

  Appleby watched the girl. Without positively removing his mind from conscientious reflection on the mysterious proceedings of Mr Emery Wine he watched the girl below him, and rather regretted that daylight was beginning to fail. Eusapia – he knew that her name was Eusapia Something – was alone on the little deck, and she paced it with a lithe restlessness which in this relaxed steamship environment, was extremely fetching. A gluteal type, such as would offend one’s taste in a ball dress. But that was the tyranny of the fashion plate; Eusapia as she was, and with all Calabria behind her, was very well. Would the wife of the Italian servant of Colonel Morell – speculated Appleby, dutifully veering towards business – have been as attractive? And what would the colonel have thought in 1772? And what was Colonel Morell to Mr Wine – or he to the wraith of Mr Smart, who had so amiably sported with his children on the sands at Yarmouth? These were questions more than speculative – they were questions demonstrably meaningless – but meanwhile Eusapia there was a palpable physical fact.

  She paced the deck in a white tunic cut low and tight across the breasts and a black skirt that swung to her ankles; she paced the deck with a strange restlessness and a glance that went impatiently now out to sea and now among the shadows that were losing definition and merging at her feet. It was chilly; somewhere on the starboard quarter the great bronze sun had dropped below the horizon, reddening the while; its last segment, as if suddenly molten and flowing, had spread out in a momentary line of fire that heralded the dark. This Appleby knew without turning. He was watching Eusapia still. She had moved to the side, and sat on a bollard with her back to the rail. She sat in the swiftly gathering dusk, still and isolated. Behind her was the bare rail and a sheer drop to the sea; the empty deck was all about her; and above stretched infinite space. She sat very still, and it grew darker, and she was a silhouette against the yet faintly luminous sea. Her hands lay side by side on the darkness of her lap. And Appleby saw that there was something hovering above her head.

  It was white and faint, like a puff of vapour; it took more substance and might have been a dove; it circled above Eusapia’s head and poised itself as no bird could do. The thing trembled, vibrated, rose and fell like a ball held in the jet of an invisible fountain. It spiralled upwards and outwards, dropped like a stone and disappeared, showed itself again motionless in air some three feet before Eusapia’s knees; it rose in an arc and hung at the same distance above her head. Again it circled. Eusapia’s hands, pale as acacia flowers, lay motionless on the black stuff of her dress.

  Appleby sat as still as the girl below him. His pulse was not quite normal; there was an unusual sensation in the scalp; almost certainly a chemist would find in his bloodstream elements not present a few moments before. Which was interesting – for he had fallen to watching the girl with nothing more perhaps than a fleeting sexual interest; certainly with no expectation of the uncanny. And yet the performance – this performance in a strangely empty theatre – had instantaneously worked. It is strangely easy to penetrate to magical levels of the mind.

  The cities of Rome, thought Appleby – keeping his eye steadily on this now so-interesting young woman the while – the cities of Rome – all the cities that ever stood where modern Rome now stands – existing still in perfect preservation, each simply superimposed upon the one preceding it: Freud had said that the human mind was like that. Well, it was possible at times to shoot right down through them like a miner plunging to his seam… Now he could only just see Eusapia by straining his eyes. The thing was circling and hovering still.

  It circled and hovered perhaps three feet above her head, and her hands were on her lap. Suddenly, and for a second only, one hand disappeared; and simultan
eously the thing rose some three or four feet higher – it would now be touching, perhaps tapping at, the ceiling of a moderately lofty room. Appleby waited for no more; he rose and made his way cautiously forward between the deckchairs and the davits. Perhaps the weather had helped to give Eusapia’s flummery effectiveness. The atmosphere was at once chill, dry and heavy; something was in the air.

  From the smoke-room came voices. People were assembling for dinner. But Appleby wanted a few minutes more of solitude, and he slipped into the deck pantry, where he could light a cigarette. It was a cubbyhole of a place, and he paced it restlessly – up and down and a step sideways to avoid the weighing-machine… He stopped. About the weighing-machine there was something suggestive. The man Home again – that was it. When Home had made tables rise in the air without apparently touching them it had been shown that his own weight nevertheless went up by the weight of the table. In fact for all that side of the business there was always a simple physical explanation. Of course the machinery of Eusapia’s little show was of the slenderest importance: still, it would be nice to know.

  The bugle sounded and he went below – but still so preoccupied that Beaglehole had to speak to him twice on the stairway. And this pleased Beaglehole, for it opened the way to a joke. ‘Wool-gathering, Mr Appleby? You know, I’ve seldom met a man more devoted to his profession.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Appleby, remembering Cobdogla.

  There can be great power in this word, rightly inflected – and Beaglehole laughed rather uncertainly. ‘But, seriously, it has been a sleepy sort of afternoon, don’t you think? I havetn’t felt so lazy for a long time.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I said I haven’t felt so lazy–’

  Appleby slapped an open palm with a clenched fist. ‘There!’ he said. ‘I’ve got it.’

  ‘Got it?’

  ‘Only the particular wisp of wool I’ve been groping for.’ Appleby smiled cheerfully. ‘Did Hudspith tell you it was my birthday?’

  5

  It is very easy to pretend to be more drunk than one is; at one time or another most undergraduates have managed it. There is no great difficulty in simulating extreme drunkenness when one is entirely sober. But to pretend to all the successive stages of tipsiness and intoxication on no basis of fact is a task requiring considerable virtuosity. And it was this task that Hudspith, for reasons best known to himself, had undertaken. As dinner progressed he appeared to be getting drunker and drunker on the ship’s much-tossed and shaken wines.

  Appleby, in whose honour this exhibition was taking place, watched it with admiration and some trepidation. The performance was, in its way, as finished as Eusapia’s, and it was clear that Hudspith had been at it before. In fact he was reviving some star turn of his earlier career and packing a great deal of science into the show. The drink was disappearing undeniably fast, and almost certainly into Hudspith’s stomach. Perhaps as the level rose so too did that of some half a pint of salad oil that he had swallowed off-stage. Or perhaps he carried round some dis-intoxicant drug for use on just such occasions. You didn’t know where you had Hudspith – or not once you succeeded in pushing back the cheated girls to the frontiers of his mind. For then his youth returned to him and he became a police officer with a positively alarming imaginative technique. Appleby had conjured up Cobdogla, which was probably really on the map; Hudspith was now having a great deal to say about a township called Misery, which almost certainly was not. Misery was an altogether more go-ahead place than the neighbouring Eden. Hudspith doubted if there was a rival to it short of Pimpingie or Dirty Flat. And these were a hundred miles away and over the range.

  ‘The range?’ said Beaglehole, mildly curious. ‘What range is that, Mr Hudspith?’

  Hudspith put down his glass. ‘My range,’ he said carefully. ‘Mine and Uncle Len’s.’

  ‘Oh – I see.’

  ‘But it’s all mine now,’ Hudspith made a wavering gesture which embraced vast distances and at the same time contrived almost to brush the nose of the intense Miss Mood. ‘And I can put a sheep on every tenth acre.’

  ‘Isn’t it difficult,’ Mrs Nurse asked comfortably, ‘to pick them up again? Such long runs for the dogs.’

  Hudspith merely breathed heavily.

  ‘Your Uncle – ah – Len died?’ asked Beaglehole.

  ‘He didn’t die,’ said Hudspith. ‘He perished.’

  ‘He did a perish,’ said Appleby corroboratively and idiomatically. It was he, after all, who had started this desperate masquerade, and he must in fairness back Hudspith up. ‘Ron found his bones.’

  ‘Some of them,’ said Ron with heavy drunken accuracy.

  Miss Mood made a sound as agonized as if her own bones were being picked in whispers. ‘Which?’ she asked huskily.

  ‘The troopers,’ said Hudspith, ignoring this, ‘wanted to have it that Uncle Len had been murdered. But it was just a perish, all right. You see, the blacks won’t go into the range. It’s haunted.’

  ‘What by?’ Wine spoke, sharply and for the first time.

  There was a moment’s silence, Hudspith at this juncture finding it necessary to drink deeply. ‘The Bunyip,’ said Appleby. ‘Haunted by the Bunyip.’

  ‘That’s right, the Bunyip,’ said Hudspith.

  ‘And what is the Bunyip, Mr Hudspith?’ Wine’s question was directed uncompromisingly at the late Len’s nephew.

  Hudspith set his glass down slowly. ‘The Bunyip is something not many white people can see,’ he said. His tone held a momentary sobriety which was effective in the extreme.

  Miss Mood, at least, rose to it. ‘And you, Mr Hudspith?’ she breathed.

  The answer was a loud bang and rattle. Everybody – except perhaps the monumentally placid Mrs Nurse – jumped. Hudspith had outrageously thumped the table and was roaring at the steward for a fresh bottle of wine. It was fortunate, Appleby reflected, that the captain appeared to prefer the company of his officers and was not dining in the saloon that night. Hudspith banged again, and there was nobody to stop him; he banged a third time and shouted, so that even Mrs Nurse looked about for her bag. But before the company could break up he had suddenly turned quiet and maudlin. ‘Shame to spoil John’s birthday. Man only has one birthday in the year.’

  ‘Too right,’ said Appleby, who felt that he ought not now to be quite sober himself.

  ‘Never mind about seeing things,’ Hudspith flapped a hand at Miss Mood rather as if she were a fly. ‘Much better have a song. All join in song. All join in–’

  ‘All join in “Waltzing Matilda”,’ said Appleby, fairly confident that this particular piece of antipodean local colour was correct. And he struck up by himself:

  ‘Once a jolly swagman camped beside a billabong,

  Under the shade of a coolibah tree;

  And he sang as he sat and waited while his billy boiled,

  “Who’ll come a-waltzin’ Matilda with me?”

  ‘Up came a jumbuck to drink at the billabong;

  Up jumped the swagman and grabbed it with glee;

  And he sang as he shoved that jumbuck in his tucker-bag,

  “You’ll come a-waltzin’ Matilda with me.”

  ‘Up came the Squatter, mounted on his thoroughbred.

  Up came the troopers – one, two, three!

  “Where’d you get that jumbuck you’ve got in your tucker-bag?

  You’ll come a-waltzin’ Matilda with me.”

  ‘Rather a sinister song,’ said Wine. ‘Or at least with a suggestion of developing that way.’

  ‘Is the billabong the same as the Bunyip?’ asked Miss Mood.

  Appleby, who was not prepared to venture an answer to this, embarked on another verse. Hudspith joined in – not very articulately, but that was explicable.

  ‘Up jumped the swagman and dived into the billabong.

  “You’ll never take me alive!” cried he.

  And his ghost may be heard if you camp beside the billabong.

  Singing, “Who�
�ll come a-waltzin’ Matilda with me?”

  “Waltzin’ Matilda, waltzin’ Matilda,

  Who’ll come a-waltzin’ Matilda with me?”

  And his voice may be heard if you camp beside the billabong,

  Singing – “Who’ll come a-waltzin’ Matilda with me?”

  Hudspith applauded vigorously – so vigorously that the general attention became focused on him once more. ‘Bravo!’ he bawled. ‘Bra–’ The word died oddly on his lips. His hands, which had been gesticulating, dropped limply to his sides. It seemed uncomfortably probable that he was going to be suddenly sick. Presently, however, it was clear that he was in the grip of some other sensation. His features worked, but it was in perplexity rather than physical distress. Expectant, troubled and oddly absent, he was staring at the stairs of the saloon.

  Appleby again thought the performance tip-top. But one had to remember that the audience consisted of something like a panel of experts. Perhaps it would be best to take the part of Lady Macbeth recalling her hallucinated thane to the proprieties of the banquet. ‘Ron,’ he said loudly, ‘how does Matilda go on?’

  With a perceptible but unexaggerated jerk Hudspith returned from whatever experience had befallen him. ‘Matilda?’ he asked blankly. And then he smiled expansively at the company. ‘Once knew a smart girl called Matilda.’ He leered drunkenly. ‘Once took a little girl called Matilda across to–’

  This time Mrs Nurse gathered up her bag and rose. ‘It has been a very nice party,’ she said. ‘And now Miss Mood and I are going into the little drawing-room to have our coffee. Good night.’ Mrs Nurse put much placid decision into these last words, and Miss Mood followed her – perhaps not without a shade of reluctance – from the saloon.

  Hudspith filled his glass, unbuttoned his waistcoat, lowered his voice. ‘Once knew a little girl called Gladys…’

  It was past ten o’clock. Appleby drained his coffee, put out his cigarette and left the smoke-room for a breath of air. Matilda and Gladys, girls not without interesting idiosyncrasy, were now points remote on Hudspith’s amatory pilgrimage, and he was regaling Wine and Beaglehole with the fruits of more recent researches. In these matters Hudspith had, after all, a great deal of vicarious experience: more than enough to stock all the smoke-rooms of all the liners afloat. And Wine and Beaglehole were passive listeners – Beaglehole because he liked it, and Wine – conceivably – because he had designs of his own. Wine was a person who had as yet not at all emerged; he was an unpredictable quantity; and that he was really in process of being outflanked by the present fantastic procedures it would be hazardous to assert.