The Daffodil Affair (8 page)

‘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 briefly. ‘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.

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 rational 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.

‘In Ron Hudspith? Well, that’s quite right.’ Appleby’s slow and easy colonial manner dated from a careful study of Rhodes scholars long ago. ‘Too right, Mr Wine. You couldn’t have a better off-sider than Ron.’

‘You are close friends?’

‘Cobbers,’ said Appleby solemnly. ‘And our dads before us. Ron’s dad was a well-known identity Cobdogla-way. You know Cobdogla, Mr Wine?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Ah.’ Appleby contrived the kindly, if quizzical and slightly contemptuous, stare merited by one to whom Cobdogla is but a name.

‘What interests me is that your friend appears to be of an unusually intense and brooding nature. To a stranger it would seem to suggest – well, almost a mild mania. I hope I don’t offend you.’

‘Yes?’ Hearing his own richly ironical voice Appleby recalled that a pose too was necessary; he strolled forward and contrived to offer an iron pillar support. ‘Ron saw a good deal of the back-blocks as a lad. He was a jackeroo on his uncle’s station for years.’

‘Indeed.’ Mr Wine’s was a civil convention of understanding.

‘Boundary riding most of the time. It marks them, you know. Don’t see a soul for weeks on end.’

‘Ah, I see.’ Mr Wine was enlightened. ‘The Bush.’

‘The Malee,’ said Appleby severely. ‘And sometimes the Spinifex.’ As he offered this refinement of fancy his glance went rather anxiously towards the companionway from the saloon. The appearance of his cobber Ron at this moment might be unfortunate. ‘You ought to meet some of the old-timers there, Mr Wine. They’re so used to solitude and silence that two of them will meet and pass a night together in a humpy without exchanging a word.’

‘Dear me!’ said Mr Wine, and added, ‘–in a what?’

‘A humpy,’ Appleby repeated firmly. ‘Sometimes they go a bit strange. Visions – that sort of thing.’

‘Indeed! And is your friend at all affected in that way?’

‘You’re telling me.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Too right, he is. You’ve seen him up there by the bows, Mr Wine? That’s where he goes when it takes him.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear it.’ Mr Wine was now leaning forward attentively. ‘And his visions are about–?’

‘Ah,’ said Appleby, suddenly ironical and reticent.

Mr Wine relaxed and offered some observation on the course of the steamer. Appleby, still supporting that steamer’s superstructure with his shoulders, had leisure to reflect on his own rashness of the past few minutes. He had hurled the unwitting Hudspith into a fantastic role – and this was far from being the less reckless because Hudspith at present really had a loopy side to him. He had taken upon himself the burden of an impersonation far trickier than was required to support a vague association with Australian wool. And he had done all this partly out of boredom and the residual sense of the Daffodil affair’s being something of a holiday; and partly as the consequence of a sudden and extravagant plan. If Beaglehole was a buyer, then Wine was a talent scout – perhaps his own talent scout. And to have a friend who would score high marks in the psychic circus might be the quickest way of getting there. Hudspith, if his mind was set on tracing Hannah and Lucy, must be prepared to put an antic disposition on. And Cobdogla would be his kindly nurse.