Clutch of Constables (5 page)

A motor-cycle engine crescendoed out of the distance, clattered and exploded down the lane and then reduced its speed and noise and stopped.

“One would think it was those two again,” said Troy.

Dr Natouche rose. “It is,” he said, “I can see them. Actually, it is those two. They are raising their hands.”

“How extraordinary,” she said idly. “Why should they turn up?”

“They may be staying in the district. We haven’t come very far, you know.”

“I keep forgetting. One’s values change on The River.” Troy broke of a fern frond and turned it between her fingers. Dr Natouche sat down again.

“My father was an Ethiopian,” he said presently. “He came to this country with a Mission fifty years ago and married an Englishwoman. I was born and educated in England.”

“Have you never been to your own country?”

“Once. But I was alien there. And like my father, I married an Englishwoman. I am a widower. My wife died two months ago.”

“Was that why you came on this cruise?”

“We were to have come together.”

“I see,” Troy said.

“She would have enjoyed it. It was something we could have done,” he said.

“Have you found many difficulties about being as you are? Black?”

“Of course. How sensible of you to ask, Mrs Alleyn. One knows everybody thinks such questions.”

“Well,” Troy said, “I’m glad it was all right to ask.”

“I am perfectly at ease with you,” Dr Natouche stated rather, Troy felt, as he might have told a patient there was nothing the matter with her and really almost arousing a comparable pleasure. “Perfectly,” he repeated after a pause: “I don’t think, Mrs Alleyn, you could ever say anything to me that would change that condition.”

Miss Rickerby-Carrick appeared at the top of the embankment. “Hoo-hoo!” she shouted. “What’s it like up there?”

“Very pleasant,” Troy said.

“Jolly good.” She floundered up the field towards them, blowing her nose as she came. Troy was suddenly very sorry for her. Were there, she asked herself, in Birmingham, where Miss Rickerby-Carrick lived, people, apart from Mavis, who actually welcomed her company?

Dr Natouche fetched a sigh and stood up. “I see a gate over there into the lane,” he said. “I think there is time to walk back that way if you would care to do so.”

“You go,” Troy muttered. “I’d better wait for her.”

“Really? Very well.”

He stayed for a moment or two, politely greeted Miss Rickerby-Carrick and then strode away. “
Isn’t
he a dear?” Miss Rickerby-Carrick panted. “
Don’t
you feel he’s somebody awfully special?”

“He seems a nice man,” Troy answered and try as she might, she couldn’t help flattening her voice.

“I do think we all ought to make a special effort. I get awfully worked-up about it. When people go on like Mr Pollock, you know. I tackled Mr Pollock about his attitude. I do that, you know, I do tackle people. I said: ‘Just because he’s got another pigmentation,’ I said, ‘why should you think he’s different.’ They’re
not
different. You do agree, don’t you?”

“No,” Troy said. “I don’t. They are different. Profoundly.”

“Oh! How
can
you say so?”

“Because I think it’s true. They are different in depth from Anglo-Saxons. So are Slavs. So are Latins.”

“Oh! If you mean like
that
,” she said and broke into ungainly laughter. “Oh, I see. Oh, yes. Then you
do
agree that we should make a special effort.”

“Look, Miss Rickerby-Carrick—”

“I say, do call me Hay.”

“Yes—well—thank you. I was going to say that I don’t think Dr Natouche would enjoy special efforts. Really, I don’t.”

“
You
seem to get on with him like a house on fire,” Miss Rickerby-Carrick pointed out discontentedly.

“Do I? Well, I find him an interesting man.”

“There you are, you see!” she cried, proclaiming some completely inscrutable triumph, and a longish silence ensued. They heard the motor-cycle start up and cross the bridge and listened to the diminishment of sound as it made off in the direction of Norminster.

One by one the other passengers straggled up the field. Mr Pollock behind the rest, swinging his built-up boot. The Hewsons were all set-about with cameras while Caley Bard had a box slung from his shoulder and carried a lepidopterist’s net.

So
that
, Troy thought, was what it was. When everybody was assembled the Hewsons took photographs of the wapentake by itself and with their fellow-travellers sitting self-consciously round it. Mr Lazenby compared it without, Troy felt, perceptible validity, to an aboriginal place of assembly in the Australian out-back. Mr Pollock read his brochure and then stared with a faint look of disgust at the original.

Caley Bard joined Troy. “So this is where you lit off to,” he murmured. “I got bailed up by that extraordinary lady. She wants to get up a let’s-be-sweet-to-Natouche movement.”

“I know. What did you say?”

“I said that as far as I am concerned, I consider I’m as sweet to Natouche as he can readily stomach. Now, tell me all about the wapentake. I’m allergic to leaflets and I’ve forgotten what the Skipper said. Speak up, do.”

Troy did not bother to react to this piece of cheek. She said: “So you’re a lepidopterist?”

“That’s right. An amateur. Do you find it a sinister hobby? It has rather a sinister reputation, I fear. There was that terrifying film and then didn’t somebody in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
flit about Dartmoor with a deceiving net and killing-bottle?”

“There’s Nabokov on the credit side.”

“True. But
you
don’t fancy it, all the same,” he said. “That I can see, very clearly.”

“I like them better alive and on the wing. Did you notice those two motor-cyclists? They seem to be haunting us.”

“Friends of young Tom, it appears. They come from Tollardwark where we stay tonight. Did you know it’s pronounced Toll’ark? It will take us an hour or more to get there by water but by road it’s only a short walk from Ramsdyke. There’s confusion for you!”

“I wouldn’t want to walk: I’ve settled into the River—time—space—dimension.”

“Yes, I suppose it would be rather spoiling to break out of it. Hallo, that’ll be for us.” The
Zodiac
had given three short hoots. They returned hurriedly and found her waiting downstream from the lock.

There was a weir at Ramsdyke, standing off on their port side. Below the green slide of the fall, the whole surface of the river was smothered in foam: foam in islands and in pinnacles, iridescent foam that twinkled and glinted in the late afternoon sunlight, that shredded away from its own crests, floated like gossamer and broke into nothing.

“Oh!” cried Miss Rickerby-Carrick in ecstasy. “
Isn’t
it lovely! Oh,
do
look! Look, look,
look
!” she insisted, first to one and then to another of her fellow-passengers. “Who would have thought our quiet old river could froth up and behave like a fairytale? Like a dream isn’t it?
Isn’t it
?”

“More like washing-day I’m afraid, Miss Rickerby-Carrick,” said Mrs Tretheway looking over the half-door. “It’s detergent. There’s a factory beyond those trees. Tea is ready in the saloon,” she added.

“Oh,
no
!” Miss Rickerby-Carrick lamented. A flying wisp of detergent settled on her nose. “Oh,
dear
!” she said crossly and went down to the saloon, followed by the others.

“How true it is,” Caley Bard remarked, “that beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder.” He spoke to Troy but Dr Natouche, who was behind her, answered him.

“Surely,” Dr Natouche said, “not so much in the eye as in the mind. I remember that on a walk—through a wood, you know—I looked into a dell and saw, deep down, an astonishing spot of scarlet. I thought: Ah! A superb fungus secretly devouring the earth and the air. You know? One of those savage fungi that one thinks of as devils? I went down to look more closely at it and found it was a discarded fish-tin with a red label. Was it the less beautiful for my discovery?”

He had turned to Troy. “Not to my way of looking,” she said. “It was a good colour and it had made its effect.”

“We are back aren’t we,” Caley Bard said, “at that old Florentine person with the bubucular nose. We are to assume that the painter doted on every blackhead, crevasse and bump.”

“Yes,” Troy said. “You are.”

“So that if a dead something—a fish or a cat—popped up through that foam, for instance, and its colour and shape made a pleasing mélange with its surroundings, it would be a paintable subject and therefore beautiful?”

“You take,” she said dryly, “the very words from my mouth.”

Mr Bard looked at her mouth for a second or two.

“And what satisfaction,” he said under his breath, “is there in that?” He turned away and Troy thought, almost at once, that she must have misheard him.

Miss Rickerby-Carrick flapped into the conversation like a wet sheet. “Oh
don’t
stop. Go on. Do, do, go on. I don’t want to lose a word of this,” she cried. “Because it makes a point that I’m most awfully keen on. Beauty is everywhere. In everything,” she shouted and swept her arm past Mr Lazenby’s spectacles. “ ‘Beauty is Truth; Truth, Beauty’,” she quoted. “That’s all we need to know.”

“That’s a very, very profound observation, Miss Rickerby-Carrick,” Mr Hewson observed kindly.

“I just don’t go along with it,” his sister said. “I’ve seen a whole lot of Truth that wasn’t beautiful. A whole heap of it.”

Mr Pollock, who had been utterly silent for a very long time now heaved an enormous sigh and as if infected by his gloom the other passengers also fell silent.

Somebody — Mr Lazenby? — had left the morning’s newspaper on the settle, the paper in which her own photograph had appeared. Troy, who did not eat with her tea, picked it up and seeing nothing to interest her, idly turned over a page.

“Man found strangled.

“The body of a man who had been strangled was found at 8pm last night in a flat in Cyprus Street, Soho. He is believed to have been a picture-dealer and the police who are making inquiries give his name as K. G. Z. Andropulos.”

The passenger list was still on the table. Troy looked at the name Caley Bard had crossed out in favour of her own.

She rose with so abrupt a movement that one or two of her companions glanced up at her. She dropped the newspaper on the seat and went down to her cabin. After some thought, she said to herself: “If nobody has read it there’s no reason why I should point it out. It’s a horrible bit of news.”

And then she thought that if, as seemed probable, the paragraph had in fact not been noticed, it might be as well to get rid of the paper, the more especially since she would like to repress her own photograph before it went into general circulation. She could imagine Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s ejaculations: “And there you both are, you and the murdered man who was to have your berth. Fancy!” She hunted out her sketchbook and returned to the saloon.

The newspaper was nowhere to be seen.

-3-

Troy waited for a minute or two in the saloon to collect her thoughts. Her fellow-passengers were still at tea and apparently quite undisturbed. She went up on deck. The Skipper was at the wheel.

“Everything all right, Mrs Alleyn?” he asked.

“Yes, thank you. Yes. Everything,” said Troy and found herself a chair.

Most of the detergent foam had been left behind by now. The
Zodiac
sailed towards evening through clear waters, low fields and occasional groups of trees.

Troy began to draw the Signs of the
Zodiac
, placing them in a ring and giving them a wonderfully strange character. Mrs Tretheway’s rhyme could go in the middle and later on there would be washes of colour.

She was vaguely aware of a sudden burst of conversation in the saloon. After a time a shadow fell across her hand and there was Caley Bard again. Troy didn’t look up. He moved to the opposite side and stood with his back towards her, leaning on the taffrail.

“I’m afraid,” he said presently, “that they’ve rumbled you. Lazenby spotted the photograph in this morning’s paper. I wouldn’t have told them.”

“I believe you.”

“The Rickerby-Carrick is stimulated, I fear.”

“Hell.”

“And the Hewsons are gratified because they’ve read an article about you in
Life
magazine so they know you’re O.K. and famous. They just can’t think how they missed recognising you.”

“Too bad.”

“Pollock, surprisingly, seemed to be not unaware of your great distinction. Lazenby himself says you are regarded in Australia as being the equal of Drysdale and Dobell.”

“Nice of him.”

“There’s this about it: you’ll be able to do what you are doing now, without everybody exclaiming and breathing down your neck. Or I hope you will.”

“I won’t be doing anything that matters,” Troy mumbled.

“How extraordinary!” he said lightly.

“What?”

“That you should be so shy about your work. You!”

“Well, I can’t help it. Do pipe down like a good chap.”

She heard him chuckle and drag a deck chair into position. Presently she smelt his pipe. “Evidently,” she thought, “they haven’t spotted the Andropulos bit in the paper.” She considered this for a moment and then added: “Or have they?”

The River now described a series of loops so extreme, and so close together that the landscape seemed to turn about the
Zodiac
like a diorama. Wapentake church spire advanced and retreated and set to partners with a taller spire in the market town of Tollardwark which they approached with the utmost slyness, now leaving it astern and now coming round a bend and making straight for it. The water darkened with the changing sky. Along its banks and in its backwaters and eddies the creatures that belonged to The River began to come out on their evening business: water-rats, voles, toads and leaping fish as well as the insects: dragon-flies in particular. Once, looking up from her drawing, Troy caught sight of a pair of ears against the sky and thought: “There goes Wat, the hare.” A company of ducks in close formation paddled past the
Zodiac
. Where trees stood along the banks the air pulsated with high, formless, reiterative bird-chattering.