The Oracles (24 page)

‘Mr. Swann did it,’ explained Christina, joining her. ‘Mr. Pethwick gave it to Dickie.’

‘What’s it supposed to be, then?’

‘Nothing. Just what it is.’

Allie shook her head and turned up her eyes.

‘Weird,’ she commented. ‘Still and all, I like it better than the one we’ve got in the Pavilion.’

‘Yes. I wish they’d take it away.’

‘My dear! Haven’t you heard? It’s never going away. It’s there for good. We’re going to buy it.’

‘What! Buy it? Who’s going to?’

‘Town’s going to. With the war-memorial money.’

‘Allie! No! They can’t! They can’t!’

‘They’re going to. Aren’t they crackers?’

‘But who? The committee? Why, Dickie’s on the committee! He’s never said a word about it.’

‘So’s Mummie on the committee, and she ought to know. You know how she goes on about the younger generation?’

‘But nobody else! Nobody else.…’

‘Oh yes, lots of people are very keen. Mr. Dale says it will give a big boost to East Head to be so modern. And then Sir Gregory interfering got into a lot of people’s hair.’

‘Oh dear! I’ve been so busy. I’ve hardly seen
anyone
these last few days. I’d no idea …’

‘Funny Dickie never mentioned it. Mummie says he’s written to Mr. Swann about it, to ask if it’s for sale. The committee asked Dickie to write.’

‘When? When?’ cried Christina. ‘Oh, I remember Wednesday. They met on Wednesday. But … but what does Mr. Swann say, then?’

‘Why ask me? You’re married to a member of the committee. You ought to know more about it than I do.’

‘Mr. Swann mayn’t realise … mayn’t know … what it is.’

‘Ha! ha! ha! That’s good. Even Mr. Swann!’

Christina had rushed off to meet Dickie, who was coming up the path with an armfull of records.

‘Dickie! Dickie! What’s this about the town buying that thing in the Pavilion? Is it true?’

‘It’s been proposed,’ said Dickie. ‘But I don’t know if it will go through. I haven’t heard from Swann yet.’

‘But he can’t. You mustn’t. It must be stopped. You don’t like it yourself, Dickie. You know you don’t.’

‘My dear Tina, I can’t prevent the rest of the
committee
from buying what they want.’

‘You could. You stopped them buying the portrait.’

‘I had grounds. But this is a work of art.…’

‘Not it’s not. It’s rubbish! Ridiculous rubbish.’

‘If you want these records brought in you must please let me get on with it.’

She stood aside and let him go on to the house.

The shock quite confused her. She had been so busy lately that she had seen few people and heard very little news. Such an item would not, in any case, have excited great interest in her circle, and nobody had thought of mentioning it. They naturally supposed that Dickie had done so. She had believed all danger to be at an end; weeks had gone by without any discovery or exposure, and Swann’s effects were shortly to be removed to Coombe Bassett. Frank Archer was helping him to find a house there. Now it was upon them.

And Mr. Swann, she thought, when he gets that letter won’t know what Dickie is talking about. He’ll suppose it’s the statue he really did. He may say yes. He doesn’t know about that Thing, that wicked dangerous Thing!

She knew what it really was, yet she feared and hated it so much, it had been the agent of such double dealing, that she almost felt it to be deliberately malign. Ever since it appeared it had worked on people, causing them to deceive themselves and each other, to quarrel, to lie, to desert one another, to pile betrayal upon betrayal. She was sure that some discovery of the truth had caused Martha to fly, leaving her friends in the lurch. Conrad Swann would inevitably suffer when it all came out, as it was now bound to do. Everybody would laugh at him and nobody would buy his work any more. His other
supporters
, Dickie, Nigel Meadowes, would, unawares, do him a great injury. Good, innocent citizens, like Mrs. Hughes, would be blamed for making a laughing-stock
of their town. Several people had undoubtedly done wrong, but she herself was worse than any, for she could have prevented the whole calamity had she spoken in time. She could have stopped the exhibition. By her silence she had brought this trouble upon everybody and Dickie would never forgive her.

For a moment she glanced at the fact that she need not be involved. She could hold her tongue, allow things to take their course, and nobody need ever know that she had been to blame. But that would be to abandon all of them—Swann, Dickie, Mrs. Hughes—to a disaster which might still be prevented. If Swann were warned, he could turn down the offer, and the whole mistake might be hushed up.

Dickie would never forgive her if he knew. She could hold her tongue, but in that case she was not sure that she would ever be able to forgive herself. She felt quite unable to decide which was the worse alternative.

When he came out of the house again she was still standing on the path where he had left her. He was looking rather black; that she should follow up their reconciliation with a fresh squabble over Swann augured badly for the future. She would seem to have learnt nothing.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she demanded. ‘Why did you say nothing about it?’

‘Because,’ he said coldly, ‘it’s not a subject upon which we can ever agree, is it? We’ve found that out by experience. We can’t discuss it without getting angry, so we’d much better not discuss it, I think.’

‘But Dickie …’

‘I’m not going to talk about it. What do you think you’re doing? Raking all this up just when we … just when …’

‘I didn’t know anything about it till Allie told me.’

‘It’s no business of yours. I don’t want to hear a word more from you about it.’

‘All right. All right. You shan’t.’

‘That’s a good girl!’

He smiled, relenting, and went on for the last stack of records.

A
ND
now he is happy listening to the radio. Just because he is listening to his favourite music he is quite out of this world, and has managed to forget everything for a little while. He has to forget everything before he can be happy, because nothing in his life makes any sense to him. That is not happiness. He is not a happy man.

This
afternoon
. And immediately afterwards I made him angry because I started to argue again, and he was very gloomy all through supper. But now, for a little while, he is quite in a rapture. That is how he lives his life: either miserable or quite in a rapture. Sitting there and listening, and seeing it all in his mind, because he knows it so well he can imagine it on the stage. And he smiles at me sometimes, because he knows I’m fond of Mozart too. He’s thinking it pays to be firm. He was firm with me, so I shut up, and now we are happily listening to Mozart together.

I shall never be able to hear this music again without feeling sick. It will remind me of this terrible night when we were sitting here, and he was listening, and I was trying to find the courage to tell him.

But I’ll let him enjoy it all to the end before I do. So now he is happy, looking at the score. He is listening to all those jokes and laughing at them. I never can like those bits where they just jabber, with little chords from the piano. Which bit is it? Those two men in a
graveyard
… I never know what it’s all about, jabbering away
in Italian, but they seem to have to have it. Does
anybody
know what it’s about?

There is no escape. Nothing can stop it. Nothing! Nothing!

Whether I speak, or whether I don’t, this blow must fall on him now he’s written that letter. Nothing can save him. I can save the others. I can stop it from getting worse. But I can’t save Dickie.

This
afternoon.
He was so pleased when he found it in his study. Now he will never be able to enjoy it again, or take a pride in it. He will never be able to think of Conrad Swann again without feeling humiliated.

*

Dickie sat up, his eyes bright. He was waiting for some special moment. He smiled across at Christina.

A tremendous voice rang through the room, like the tolling of a great bell:

Oh, that awful voice! It speaks suddenly in the
graveyard
. You won’t laugh tomorrow, it says, or something like that.

Why couldn’t we laugh? Why couldn’t everybody laugh about it? Why should that rubbishy Thing have the power to bring such misery? Who is behind it? Is there some cruel person who has done it all on purpose? No! How could there be? Nobody. All an accident.

It’s so unfair. Dickie never liked it. He saw through it. How could I know Martha would run away and leave poor Dickie to write her idiotic mistake in a letter to Mr. Swann?

Perhaps Mr. Swann will forgive him. But he will
never forgive himself for supposing that silly object was the work of a great artist—a man he thinks the world of. He never liked it, but that won’t make any difference. He will feel he ought to have known.

Why is he smiling now? It must be another of our favourites … he remembers it all so much better than I do. A man and a woman.…

Crudele!
Ah
no,
mio
bene!

Oh yes! Yes! His favourite song of all, and mine too. He tells her she is cruel, and she says no, she is not. And it keeps breaking in all the time while she is arguing and making excuses for her behaviour, that lovely tune keeps breaking in, the tune she is going to have to sing to him. So at last she has to sing it because there is nothing else to say. So lovely! So lovely! He is in a dream listening to it.

Tu
ben
sai
quanto
t’amai.

You know, she says, you know how much I love you. Just that. She need say nothing else but that. She sings and he listens, and everything is all right.

He will never forgive me. I should have thought that would be the worst. But it’s not. I wouldn’t mind what I had to bear if I could protect him from this.

I understand him better now. Better than I did when we were happy. It isn’t that he will mind having made a stupid mistake. He is not conceited. But he is always searching for something. He is disappointed in his life. So he’s always searching for something that he can feel is more important than just his little life. He wants something that he can admire so much that it will make living worth while. And this … this will make a mockery of something he admires. He will feel it’s no use; there is no difference between true and false.

Not even God can help, unless it’s to change Dickie
into somebody different: somebody who wouldn’t mind so much. God can’t do that. It may be foolish of Dickie to mind so much, but that is the way he is made. Oh, you know, you know how much I love you.

He never will. He doesn’t want to know. It would make him too sad if he knew. Everything is too late.

*

The music stopped for a moment. The great aria was over. For a few seconds, before the finale, there was no sound in the room save a faint humming from the radio.

‘Very fine,’ said Dickie. ‘But she wasn’t quite up to the second half, was she?’

‘No,’ said Christina, who had not heard a note of the second half.

‘We’ve got a terrific Commendatore, though. It’s going to be a wonderful finale. I’m feeling cold already, waiting for the moment when he comes in.’

She jumped up and rushed upstairs to their bedroom. Even there the music pursued her faintly, as it poured from the radio in the room below. She flung herself down on the bed, her hands over her ears, lost in panic and desolation.

The statue! she cried wildly to herself. The statue! Cowering as though she could hear it coming up the stairs. It was no accident. Something had been let loose; somebody was making use of this inane thing, this innocent bit of rubbish, which had already done so much harm and was bound to do more, because it was a
fragment
of falsity, and ought not to exist in the world for a single moment longer. To take it away, to destroy it, was the only remedy, but nobody would ever do such a thing unless she did it herself. Nothing could repair the damage already done, but the weapon could still be snatched from that mysterious, hostile hand.

She ran downstairs and out to the garage, with no clear notion of what she meant to do. That might be manifest when she reached the Pavilion. The doors would be shut at eleven o’clock, but she still had twenty minutes.

As she got the car out a scheme solidified. She would tell Mr. Beccles that Dickie had sent her to take it away. He would probably give it up; everybody seemed to think that Dickie had power to act for Conrad Swann. And then she would contrive to destroy it—bury it perhaps in some place where nobody would ever find it. To Dickie, to the world, she would announce that she had done this because she did not happen to like it; other people did such things, for she had read about them in the newspapers. They went into galleries and destroyed statues or pictures which they did not happen to like. They were mad people and everybody was shocked at them. Prison or a lunatic asylum was
probably
their lot, and might be hers. The whole town would condemn her; they would pity Dickie because he had a mad wife. Her life was in ruins but by doing this thing she felt as though she might draw all the retribution down upon herself and be the only one to pay, as she deserved to pay. The Thing would be no more; they should never find it or discover what she knew.

The streets were nearly empty as she drove down to the Pavilion, for most of the cinemas finished their last houses soon after ten. In Market Square the country buses, brilliantly lighted oblongs, were drawn up in rows. Long queues were filling them before they set off, up and down the coast, or inland, over the dark hills. The wind was getting up; the first autumn gales were
beginning
, and ragged clouds sailed across the moon. Upon the deserted Parade an endless line of lamps stretched
away beside the sea-wall. A high tide boomed and dragged at the screaming shingle.

She parked the car and went towards the Pavilion, which stood up, rectangular and aggressive, under the hurrying clouds. It was not yet shut. An unpleasant greenish light glowed through the ranks of Perspex doors. These vestibule lights had always caused
controvers
y
; they poured down from some concealed source, pervasively bright but unflattering to the faces of people coming out of the theatre hall.

If Mr. Wetherby was a woman and had to make up, she thought, as she hurried toward the doors, he wouldn’t like having to look like a corpse.

Alan Wetherby!

An unidentified figure took a step out of the shadows in her mind. Whose name was invariably quoted as warrant for the Thing? Who had encouraged Martha to believe that it was wonderful? Did he know? He, of all people, was the best qualified to guess the truth. What part had he played in all this, and why had she not thought of him before?

Now that she had thought of him, she knew. He was the person behind it all; he had let it happen deliberately. And she knew why: it was his idea of a joke, his way of enjoying himself. He liked to make people feel small and foolish. He was looking forward to a grand spectacle of general humiliation.

But he should not have it. For all his cleverness he had not reckoned with mad Mrs. Pattison.

She went slowly through the doors. There had been a picture shown in the hall, but the audience had all departed a quarter of an hour before. The vestibule was empty, its glassy blue floor streaming away to that transparent north wall and gleams of moonlight on
tossing waves. She had never seen it thus before, and was, for the first time, impressed by its beauty. Even the strange light, emanating stealthily from the fabric, was beautiful in a cruel way; nobody else was there, no corpse face looked at her, and this light was at peace with emptiness.

Treading with fearful steps over her own reflection, soaring walls and arched roof below and above her, she approached the space at the head of the stairs. The light revealed dahlias and chrysanthemums and a square block of marble in the middle of them. It was the pedestal upon which the Thing had stood.

She stared, blinked, looked away, and stared again. The pedestal was empty. The Thing had gone.

In that merciless light, amidst so many deceiving
reflections
, she could not immediately believe her own eyes. It was some seconds before her brains received the message.

Gone.

The vestibule echoed with a series of clangs. A young man had come out of the hall and was shutting its doors. He said a word or two to an usherette who came out with him, and they laughed before she hurried off into the wind and the night. Their laughter rang away under the roof as Christina hurried down towards the hall doors. These echoes were also only apparent when the place was empty.

The young man was Mr. Beccles’ factotum and his name was Ernest. Nobody knew his surname. He looked a little startled when she came up to him, for he had thought the vestibule to be empty.

‘Where’s that thing gone?’ she demanded. ‘That thing they had in the middle of the flowers?’

‘Why, it’s there still,’ he said, with a glance toward the stairhead.

‘No it’s not. The stone is there. The statue has gone.’

He took a step or two in that direction, gaped, and exclaimed:

‘That’s funny! It was there this afternoon.’

‘When?’

‘Between five and six it was there still.’

‘Are you sure?’

He reflected and declared:

‘S’matter of fact, I am. There was a coach party in, and one feller was there taking pictures with this little camera, size of a button. I noticed that.’

After further reflection he gave judgment:

‘Somebody must’ve taken it away.’

‘How could they? Without you seeing?’

‘That’s right. They couldn’t.’

‘You’ve been out here all the time since six?’

‘Naw. Seven to eight I was getting me supper in the canteen. But Mr. Beccles, he was out here then. P’raps he knows.’

She glanced at the glass door into Mr. Beccles’ office. It was locked and dark.

‘He’s gone home this half-hour,’ said Ernest. ‘But it must of happened when I was off, see? Funny I didn’t notice.’

‘Who could it have been?’

‘I couldn’t say, Mrs. Pattison. But it must of been somebody entitled to take it, or Mr. Beccles, he wouldn’t of let it go.’

Ernest glanced meaningly at the clock over the café entrance. Nobody could ever read this clock, which had no hands and no numerals, but the glance signified that he wanted to shut the main doors and go home.

‘Very queer,’ said Christina. ‘Good night, Ernest.’

‘Good night, Mrs. Pattison.’

They both took another stare at the empty
flowerbed
. Then she went out into the darkness. The rising gale caught and buffeted her as she emerged from the shelter of the building. A light mist of spray blew over the sea-wall into her face.