Carson's Conspiracy (7 page)

On ‘prank', however, he pulled himself up – detecting in the word what scribbling fellows called a hollow ring. You can't fake, any more than you can actually effect, a robustly sensational kidnapping and holding to ransom without prompting a good deal of activity by the police. Extensive police operations in such a field cost money, and – at least in the pious sort of theory that would be advanced – divert the forces of the law from more fruitful activities. If on nothing else, they'd get you on that.

So this whole line of thought was a waste of time, and it would be better to acknowledge the risks and get on with the job. He had merely sketched his rough idea to Pluckworthy at that rather heavy (and wickedly expensive) lunch. No doubt Pluckworthy's own brains – which were by no means to be despised – would now be at work on it. But the main burden of the thing, what might be called the intellectual labour, remained with him. And he had to admit that there was still a good deal of mere groping in front of him. He was rather in the position, he reflected, of some poor devil churning out a whodunit – pushing along, he didn't know quite where. He did, of course, command that beautiful main thought: that for an hour or thereabout Robin Carson would come into existence and then again cease to be. (Henry James himself – of whom Carson hadn't heard – could not have been more overcome by the ‘beauty' of an idea than was our hero when confronted by this one.) Of course the imagined Robin would simply have become the quite real Pluckworthy again, and this meant that Pluckworthy would thereafter be something of an inconvenience. He would know far too much. But what he wouldn't know was the destination – some highly agreeable destination, it was to be hoped – for which his late employer had departed.

Would there have to be other inconvenient persons? Cynthia had perhaps to be reckoned as in that category. Knowing her dream-son to have been kidnapped and subsequently killed (for that, Carson quite understood, would have to be the implication) would she not be drastically cured of her delusion, and announce Robin to have been a fiction? He had dimly foreseen this risk already; now it became enhancedly formidable. Of course, it was true here, too, that nothing of the kind could happen until he was over the hills and far away. But it might mean that he would be hunted for. Unless, that was, he had himself joined Robin among the reputedly slain. Of that, also, he had thought already, but so imprecisely that he had almost forgotten about it. And yet it was the crown of the whole thing! Decidedly, he must now hold on to it, fit it in as he could. Wheels within wheels, he told himself rather desperately. The beauty of the idea wasn't exactly going to be the beauty of simplicity, after all.

Kidnappings are usually perpetrated by gangs. On the continent, where they have been chiefly fashionable, the gangs may be suddenly-assembled small armies, sufficiently equipped with automatic weapons to overpower even substantial opposition from security police, private bodyguards and the like. Nothing of the sort was in question for the projected operation. But wouldn't at least two or three accomplices be required? Carson was surprised and displeased to notice the term ‘accomplices' coming into his head. ‘Assistants' might be better. But, whatever they might be called, where were they to be found? A citizen as blameless as himself naturally had no connections with anything that could be called an underworld. If suddenly required, for instance, to find what was known as a hired gun, he would be as stumped as the local vicar or GP. For a moment, and surprisingly, he found his mind turning to Punter. Perhaps because of the mask-like effect achieved by Punter's perpetual ‘Thank you, sir', and the like, he had several times extended his doubts about Punter beyond the bugging business to wondering whether the man might not be the kind of villain that gets along on sudden and ruthless violence; whether, in fact, Punter might not any night tie him up with his own pyjama cord and depart with the spoons.

This was an extravagant apprehension, but it did set Carson wondering whether it mightn't be possible to enlist Punter for the task ahead. Eventually, however, he dismissed this as a messy idea. And, even as he did so, he remembered that he had already formulated, if only in a hazy way, a much more elegant proposal. Pluckworthy had been on to it with his talk of non-persons. Work it out properly – make it, for example, a nocturnal affair – and no bogus kidnappers need be brought in. The captors
could
be as phantasmal as their supposed captive. Pluckworthy was going to be kidnapped. Let Pluckworthy also do the kidnapping.

A choreographer, supposing Carson to have had so unlikely an acquaintance, might have told him that he was here setting himself a pretty stiff problem in the contriving of a
pas de deux
. But Carson's confidence was growing. What has been called by a poet the fascination of the difficult can – one has to suppose – beset quite other than poetic characters. Those are perhaps particularly vulnerable to it who have, in the old phrase, a good conceit of themselves.

 

Then, quite suddenly, Cynthia became a problem again. He had got home from a long day in town, and was applying himself rather fretfully to the cocktail cabinet in the drawing-room. It was an elaborate affair, the cocktail cabinet – all chrome and perspex and funny little concealed lights – and he had come to be a shade doubtful about it, and particularly about its location. There were plenty of advertisements – in the colour-supplements and such places – which showed prosperous and persuasively top people standing beside, or in the more elaborate examples even within, this particular prestige possession. But Pluckworthy had recently referred to the Garford one as the ‘bar', and made fun of the natty little stools that had come along with it for free. Punter, too, could be detected at times as casting upon it a supercilious eye, as if it had never been his demeaning lot to keep company with such an object in all that long career in the best service which it had been his good fortune to share with his wife. This social dubiety could mar Carson's pleasure in concocting himself even an unassuming Bloody Mary. He was concocting one when Cynthia came into the room.

‘Do you know?' she asked. ‘You'll never guess!'

‘I don't want to. Have a drink.'

‘Just the plain tomato juice, dear. Only fancy! I've discovered who it is.'

‘Who who is?' Carson moodily poured Cynthia her dismal draught. ‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘That's what I say. You'll
never
guess.'

Carson was, of course, used to this sort of conversation with his wife. It frequently veered into something fairly mad. And that was the way of it now.

‘Robin's friend,' Cynthia said.

‘Robin's friend?' Carson's heart already foreboded ill as he repeated this. ‘Just what do you mean: Robin's friend?'

‘The romance, dear. We must be clear-sighted, you know. We must be realistic. Robin will love to be with us again, of course. But the main attraction is Mary Watling.'

‘Mary Watling! You're off your…' Carson checked himself. He needn't enunciate the obvious. ‘The daughter of those stuck-up people at the Grange?'

‘The Watlings aren't stuck-up, dear. Only very well-connected – which will be nice for Robin. Robin is just a
little
fastidious, don't you think?'

‘No doubt.' Carson had never heard of Betsey Prig and her final courageous assertion that Mrs Harris existed only in Mrs Gamp's mind. Nor, had he done so, would it any longer be feasible to emulate her now. He was stuck with a real Robin. ‘But why should you imagine…'

‘Quite a long time ago, Mary had let something slip about Robin. Almost as if there were a secret! This time, she was a little evasive, and it was almost as if she didn't know what to say. When I
taxed
her with it, that is. Of course, I oughtn't to say taxed. I think
congratulate
would be right. Dear Robin will make such a
very
good husband.'

‘Just how did she confess?' Although all this belonged, surely, to the larger lunacy, Carson felt that a little probing into it would he only prudent. ‘What were her exact words?'

‘She said, “I shall look forward to meeting your son again.” Just like that.'

At this – at least metaphorically – Carson breathed more freely. Then he suddenly frowned.

‘Again?' he said. ‘You're sure she said
again
?'

‘But of course, dear. That's the whole point, isn't it?'

‘I don't see any point at all.' Carson made to pour the vodka for a second Bloody Mary, but then thought better of it. He also thought better of continuing to betray impatience. ‘But, of course,' he said, ‘I'm terribly interested, darling. So tell me about your whole talk with Mary Watling. Right from the start.'

‘It was because she was standing in for her mother at the meeting about the bazaar. Such a
nice
girl, and so willing. We came away together, and were just passing the church when I realized the truth. Maryland, you see.'

‘Maryland?'

‘Robin was there for ever so long a time. Maryland, Mary Watling. You see how the truth came to me in a flash.'

Carson was silent. He didn't know that his wife had produced – and for the first time – a classical symptom of real madness. But he did realize that here, all-obscurely, was possibly a crisis on his doorstep.

‘Well,' he said, ‘then what? You broached the thing – is that right?'

‘I said, “I'm so glad about Robin”. Mary asked, “Is he coming home?” You see, I've naturally mentioned him to her before.'

‘Naturally. And then?'

‘I said, “Yes, of course. But what I'm really so glad about is Robin and you. Carl has always hoped that his son would marry.” Mary seemed surprised. I think she was upset. She said something like, “I'm afraid I don't quite understand you.”'

‘Did she, indeed? Has she ever been in America?'

‘Oh, yes – I knew that. She was visiting friends in Washington last year. You can ask her.'

‘I don't think I'm likely to do anything of the kind.'

‘Is Maryland in Washington, dear?'

‘It isn't quite like that. But go on.'

‘That's about all, really. Mary didn't seem anxious to announce the engagement, and I felt that perhaps I'd been tactless about it. Then she did say that about how she'd be glad to meet my son again. And then she rather hurried away.'

 

No doubt other people hurried away from Cynthia Carson from time to time – for example, at parties when her conversation became too perplexing to cope with. And her husband himself hurried away now. He gulped a second drink, after all, muttered something about having letters to write before dinner, slipped out of doors, and lit a cigar.

What, in heaven's name, was to be made of this development? What was the truth about it, if any truth there was, and where did Cynthia's imaginings begin? But
was
it a development? Was there any need to treat it as other than his wife's quite familiar nonsense? He saw that the answer to both these questions was, unfortunately, ‘Yes'. The odd thing about the Robin business hitherto – he had to remind himself – was that Cynthia had always been so rationally persuasive about it. To what was, in fact, a tissue of untruths she customarily gave – and seemingly without effort – a convincing garment of commonplace family fact. People mightn't particularly attend to her as she chattered about her son, but neither did they ever suspect that it was a pack of lies. It was unmemorable chit-chat, but nevertheless it had built up over the years, rather in the manner of regular small payments into a deposit account, quite a substantial capital in the way of unconsidered acceptance of fantasy as fact. Carson himself – to continue the metaphor – was banking on this (or proposing so to do in just a few days' time). And now, in that luckless encounter with the Watlings' girl, Cynthia had breached this defence by extending her detectable nonsense to their nebulous son.

Or had she? It was perfectly possible to suppose that she had made up on the spur of the moment the entire conversation she had reported herself as holding with Mary Watling.

But that wasn't to be relied on. Prowling the grounds that he was so fond of recommending to the perambulations of his guests, pausing unconsciously here and there to puff cigar smoke at the greenfly on Lockett's endless rows of roses, Carson saw this clearly enough. The encounter with Miss Watling had quite probably taken place. And Cynthia, with her head already full of the imagined home-coming of her imaginary boy, had with an equal probability embarked upon it. But there was at least one plain impossibility in her account of the conversation. Mary, Cynthia asserted, had ‘confessed'. But nobody can confess to being engaged to, or enamoured of, somebody who doesn't exist.

But what else was Mary asserted to have said? The answer – a vaguely reassuring one – was, ‘very little'. ‘I shall look forward to meeting your son again' had been the total substance of it. This needn't have been anything more than social tact. Finding herself suddenly confronted by an embarrassing delusion on the part of a woman known to be a little odd, the girl had offered this noncommittal but composing remark and then hurried away. Nothing had occurred to make her doubt the existence of Robin Carson. It was only the notion of his knowing her and being in love with her that was plainly moonshine.

So things were still not too bad. One ominous fact, nevertheless, remained. For the first time at least to his certain knowledge, Cynthia
had
talked detectable nonsense about their supposed progeny. She had only to get into the habit of doing so and Robin's entire credibility would vanish. He would become dead as a doornail in a disastrously premature fashion.

Still pacing among the roses, but now expecting at any moment to be called to dine tête-à-tête with his wife, Carson was inclined to see the woman as a viper nurtured in his bosom. This was scarcely fair. A hazard Cynthia now undeniably was. But of Robin Carson she had been, after all, the sole begetter. And without this gift to him, where would have been his marvellous plan? As a reasonable and dispassionate man, Carl Carson saw this ironic paradox clearly enough.