The Oracles (5 page)

The stranger moved quietly into the ring of light outside the window, and asked if Conrad had left an address.

‘No. I told you. He’s walked out. Left me cold. After I’d given up everything for him. My career … stuck in this lousy dump … sacrificing my career.…’

‘Why do you think he’s gone to Mexico?’

‘Why shouldn’t he? Mexico is a place, isn’t it? People go there, don’t they? Conrad’s gone there. Why …
Frank
!’

‘Hullo, Liz,’ he said equably.

The head turned and announced to the room behind:

‘It was Frank yelling out there. Frank Archer. My husband.’

Then, turning again, it said:

‘It’s no use, Frank. I’m not coming back to you.’

‘I wouldn’t have anywhere to put you if you did, Liz. I’m living in two rooms over the shop.’

‘Why! What’s happened to Cheyne Walk?’

‘Up for sale.’

‘For sale? No! Not Cheyne Walk! Not my home! Frank! You can’t do that to me. Sell my lovely home! It’s not like you. It’s mean and petty. You’re a horror, but you were never mean.’

‘All right. Just as you like. I’ve come to see Conrad’s Apollo. Where is it?’

There was a short silence. Inside the room somebody coughed nervously.

‘You can’t,’ said the voice. ‘That’s what I keep insisting and they keep insisting. It’s in the shed, down
by the garage, and there’s no light. Do come in, Frank, and make all these bloody people go away.’

He turned to the girls and said:

‘Come along!’

This time they followed him without protest. Curiosity had prevailed over any fear of what Martha might say.

I
T
was only by prodigious determination that Martha had kept the party assembled. Upon learning of Conrad’s truancy she had, after a rapid interchange with Don in French, forbidden the guests to disperse. Conrad, she said, could not possibly have gone to Mexico. He had no money and no passport. He might have told Elizabeth that he wished to go there, but this was no proof that he had gone. In all probability he had taken one of his long walks and had forgotten the time, as very simple people are apt to do. He might turn up at any moment, whatever Elizabeth might say to the contrary.

Between Martha and Elizabeth little love had ever been lost. Their smouldering feud now broke into an open contest, in which most of the party took Martha’s side, since Elizabeth had always been extremely uncivil to all of them. There was only one rebel, an obscure disciple from Porlock, who, after waiting for a little while, insisted upon going home. Dickie Pattison tried to go with him, but was sharply called to order by Martha.

‘No, Mr. Pattison! Sit down! Wait. We haven’t seen the Apollo yet. I don’t believe it can be in the shed. He would never have put it there when he knows …’

‘He put it there on Thursday,’ snapped Elizabeth.

‘Are you sure?’ asked Alan Wetherby. ‘You don’t often take that much interest in what Conrad does.’

‘He got Lobster Charlie to help him carry it down
there. He came and asked me for half a crown to give to Lobster Charlie.’

This was convincing evidence. Lobster Charlie was known to hawk his wares in Summersdown on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

‘Half a crown!’ exclaimed Martha. ‘A shilling would have been ample.’

‘I hadn’t half a crown or a shilling either,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I should think it’s very heavy. If you like to rupture yourselves, lugging it up from there, I couldn’t care less.’

Dickie inwardly thanked heaven that Christina had decided not to come. She would not have liked this sort of thing. She would not have understood it. He neither liked nor understood it himself, but his disappointment at Swann’s absence had been so great that he had, for some time, taken very little notice of anything else. Christina would have been quicker than he to perceive the truth about the Cucumber, whose condition he had at first ascribed to natural distress and anxiety. For a short time he was sorry for her, bewitched by her beauty and her haunting voice, as once, long ago, he had been bewitched when he saw her upon the London stage. For a scene or two he had thought her the most wonderful actress in the world. And then, as now,
disillusionment
had stolen upon him. The face and the voice were cheats; she was giving a bad performance. He tried in vain to blame the play. Before the final curtain he had been obliged to think that she could not act. She was no artist. And now, as the evening wore on, he found himself once again turning against her. Moreover, he began to connect her frequent absences from the room, her unsteady returns, with his own thirst—with a craving for that refreshment which had not
been offered to her guests. The night was torrid and he could have done with a drink when he arrived. He grew quite parched at the thought of all that Elizabeth must be putting back.

Martha kept him beside her and talked to him about sewage disposal, a subject which she evidently imagined would not alarm him. Whenever he grew restive she promised to show him the Apollo, if he would only wait a little longer, and he did not know how to explain, without incivility, that he had no wish to see it. Besides, he was afraid that Christina would laugh at him if he went home without seeing anything at all. So he sat on grimly, thankful at least that the width of the room divided him from Wetherby’s vitriolic ill nature, of which he had seen quite enough, although their
acquaintance
was very slight.

Suddenly all the lights went out. In the subsequent confusion he got away from Martha and went to look out of the window with a poetess whom everybody called Carter, although her name was Mrs. Hobhouse. His previous dealings with this lady had been purely
professional
. She had thought that her agent was cheating her, and had asked his advice. Dickie thought that the boot was on the other leg and that she owed the disputed commission, but he could not persuade her of it. All ‘business men’ were rogues, in her view, and all artists helpless, unworldly victims. She kept an agent to foil her publisher, wished Dickie to foil her agent, and would doubtless someday ask somebody else to foil Dickie. Her integrity, of which she had a good deal to say, by no means obliged her to come across with a 10 per cent which she had previously agreed to pay, and she had been very much disgusted with Dickie for telling her that she was in the wrong. A really competent lawyer
would, she obviously believed, have helped her to avoid her obligations. But the first-rate could not, of course, be demanded in East Head.

She did not seem to have forgiven him. She took no notice when he joined her at the window, but talked to herself in a rapid whisper while they watched the storm. From Summersdown there was a fine view of the Channel and the distant mountains of South Wales. Every few seconds a scribble of lightning raced across the heavens, outlining that distant coast and tinting the water between to a strange shade of pale lilac.

‘Newport seems to be getting it,’ he ventured. ‘I think I see a red glow. It must be a fire.’

‘A fire‚’ chanted Carter. ‘Lovely, lovely fire!’

She continued her muttered chant. He heard
something
about wretched little people, in their smug little bungalows with their lounge suites and television sets. She appeared to have a strong prejudice against them. The flashes revealed her freckles and the petulant sag of her mouth.

‘There!’ she said suddenly. ‘That must have hit something. Oh, this is meat and drink to me!’

Drink! thought Dickie. She’s lucky.

He looked at his watch. The gesture was observed by Martha, who immediately despatched Don to
question
him, in English, about the rules of cricket. The evening took on the compulsion of a nightmare, from which he could not free himself. All sorts of strange things began to happen. Elizabeth, after shouting to somebody in the garden, announced that her husband had arrived. On the heels of a particularly loud
thunder-clap
, this husband appeared in their midst, looking like the demon king in a pantomime, and demanding something to drink.

‘There aren’t any drinks‚’ snapped Elizabeth. ‘You take them all away to your house, Martha, and give them drinks there, if they’re thirsty.’

‘There is plenty,’ protested Martha. ‘I had a lot sent up yesterday, and I believe some cases of brandy were sent here which ought to have gone to my house.’

‘We can guess where it’s gone by now,’ muttered Wetherby.

‘Billy. You go and find it, and bring glasses.’

Billy uncoiled his long limbs from the floor:

‘W-w-w-w …’

‘Where? Look in the kitchen. Nell! You go with him.’

‘I’ll go,’ said Dickie, hastily following Billy from the room.

The house was in darkness, but the resourceful Billy had a torch. He led the way into an evil-smelling cavern haunted by voices, high and far off, raised in a kind of piping drone, like the drip of a gutter. Billy’s torch finally came to rest on a sink filled with dirty glasses. He sighed and began to rinse them one by one under the faucet, but had nowhere to put them save back into the sink, since the draining-board was stacked high with unwashed dishes.

‘You l-l-l-look for the d-d-d …’

He vaguely indicated a door and proffered his torch.

‘But you can’t wash glasses in the dark,’ said Dickie.

Billy nodded. It was obviously easier to do so than to look for drink in the dark. Dickie took the torch and opened the door. He seemed to be in another passage. The voices, which had droned on ceaselessly, became much louder. Sometimes it was a single voice,
sometimes
a piping chorus, and the chant seemed to be coming from behind a small door on his left. He
listened but could not at first distinguish words. Then he recognised a phrase in the soft Latin which he had heard in Italian churches.
Gratia
ple-e-ena
…

‘Look outside the back door‚’ said the demon
husband
, coming from the kitchen. ‘It’s thought that the cases have never been brought in.’

‘
In
mulieribus
et
benedictus
…’

‘Godalmighty! What’s that?’

The demon flung open the little door. Dickie’s torch revealed some kind of broom cupboard with a squirming mass of humanity at the bottom of it. The chant broke off. A cluster of small faces blinked up at the light.

‘Scared of the thunder?’ suggested the demon.

‘No, thank you,’ replied a voice from the cupboard.

‘Oh? Just here for a lark?’

‘Nobody in this cupboard is frightened.’ The voice was beautiful but distinctly bossy. ‘This is a Holy Cupboard. People in this cupboard are protected by St. Rose of Lima. She saved a whole town out of an earthquake, and she won’t let the thunder come in here. Only inreligious people are frightened.’

At this moment all the lights came on again.

Everybody said: Oh! A grimy passage was revealed. It was also possible for the inhabitants of the cupboard to see something of their visitors. A fresh voice piped:

‘That’s my daddy.’

‘Could be. Which of you is it? Polly?’

‘Did you come in a train?’

‘I did. Is Mike there?’

‘Serafina’s sitting on his head. He’s frightened.’

After some fresh squirming another face appeared. It was, like the others, dirty and tear-stained. But they were pale and this one was purple with the effects of near-suffocation.

‘Hullo, Mike.’

‘Hullo,’ gasped Mike faintly, and vanished again with a squeal as a fresh roll of thunder shook the house.

‘Kindly shut the door‚’ commanded the bossy child. ‘You’re letting a lot of unholiness get in.’

The demon shut the door and the chant instantly began again.

‘Godalmighty!’ he repeated. ‘Must be one of Swann’s kids. Of course, poor Maddy was a Holy Roman. Their mother. But I never knew they were here. They were living with a friend or somebody when … could this be the back door, do you suppose?’

He opened a door at the end of the passage. The storm flickered and blazed upon several cases of bottles which lay grouped about the back doorstep. He and Dickie picked one up and carried it into the kitchen, where they found Billy very little further on with his glass-washing. In the dark he had been rinsing the same glass over and over again. He was sent out to collect the rest of the bottles, Dickie was put to work at the sink, while the demon mixed the drinks.

Dickie was rearranging his ideas about the children. He had supposed them all to be Swann’s when they were pointed out to him on the beach one day. Such an exhibition of infant squalor he never wished to see at closer quarters. But it now appeared that four parents might be involved: Swann, ‘poor Maddy’, the demon and the Cucumber? Yet the children seemed to be all pretty much of a size and age. The whole thing sounded very complicated, and the less said to Christina about it the better.

‘You know Conrad well?’ demanded the demon suddenly.

‘No. I never was in this house before.’

‘Ah … You’re a solicitor, then?’

‘Yes,’ said Dickie, in some surprise.

The demon paused in his drink-mixing to stare at Dickie, and then he said:

‘I’m exceedingly fond of Conrad. You may think that strange, but I am.’

‘I don’t,’ said Dickie, on a sudden impulse. ‘I like him tremendously myself.’

‘You do?’

‘I don’t know him at all well,’ amended Dickie. ‘I don’t understand his work. But …’

The two men exchanged a glance and understood one another immediately. Each had an instant belief in the other’s regard for Conrad. It did not seem strange at all.

‘I’ve known him all my life,’ said the demon. ‘Though I’ve not been in touch with him lately. He’s ninepence in the shilling about looking after himself, unfortunately. Always has been. All this …’ He gestured round the filthy kitchen. ‘… he was quite all right till Maddy died. Snug as a bug in a rug. But she got appendicitis and they didn’t catch it in time. Died on the table. Knocked poor Conrad all to pieces, that did.’

‘I know nothing of his family affairs,’ said Dickie.

‘I’d better tell you. When Maddy died he came to us for a bit, in Cheyne Walk. He has a weak digestion, you know, and we had a good cook. I thought it the best idea, till he’d fixed up some way to live. The kids were boarded out somewhere. But then … if he hadn’t been all in pieces it wouldn’t have happened … he bolted with my wife. He must have been
non
compos.
Maddy hadn’t been dead three weeks. A man does very odd things sometimes when he’s lost his woman. I’ve known other cases. I don’t blame him in the least. But it doesn’t seem to be working out, does it?’

Dickie’s astonishment at these confidences was
distracted
by interest in the drink-mixing. He broke in to say:

‘You’ve put one bottle of brandy into that jug already.’

‘I know. There’s plenty of room for more. What we want to do, we want to make this party a howling success. We want to send ’em home so happy they don’t remember if Conrad was here or not. These Rawsons … they’re doing a lot for him, I gather? Mustn’t let him quarrel with his bread and butter till we find out what’s happened. You take this tray of glasses in there and start pouring it into them.’

‘I really think,’ protested Dickie, ‘that I ought to be going home. It’s nearly …’

‘Help me to start ’em drinking and then you can go. They’re all in filthy tempers and we don’t want them to get sore with Conrad. Besides, you could do with a drink yourself.’

Dickie felt that he could.

*

Later, much later, he realised that he had not yet told anybody what he felt about Conrad. This should be set right, since it was Conrad’s party, although
Conrad
had gone to Mexico. Everybody was saying what a splendid fellow Conrad was. But it was difficult to secure attention. Carter and Elizabeth were quarrelling. Billy was asleep. Nell Manders was sobbing bitterly, after some savage snub from Martha. Don Rawson, with most of the party gathered round him, was at the piano, playing and singing the same song over and over again. Martha and Mr. Wetherby sometimes joined in the chorus and sometimes argued angrily about
existentialism
. Frank (they had been Dickie and Frank for
the last halt-hour) was still busy filling glasses. When Dickie approached him he said: