The Paper Chase (15 page)

“There were six hundred and twenty of us on the
Zaline
, on a boat meant for perhaps fifty people. It was twenty-five yards long, its engines were no good, it leaked. There were no maps, no navigator. Not that it mattered, because the
Zaline
sank in the Black Sea. Of old age, you might say.”

“And your father and mother?”

“There were just three lifeboats, and I was able to get them into one. Myself I am a strong swimmer, I took my chance in the water.”

“You had a lifebelt?”

Shalson’s laugh was like a bark. “Lifebelts, what do you think it was, the
Queen Elizabeth
? There were no lifebelts. I was picked up after an hour, by a British cargo boat. My mother and father were drowned. Their boat was hopelessly overcrowded. I was lucky. I got a job, and it was not in the Pioneer Corps, but with Tarboe. And I found out about the
Zaline
, and Bogue’s connection with it. As the war went on I found out a lot about Bogue. Tarboe knew what he was doing when he picked me as Bogue’s escort.”

“How well did you know him, Bogue, I mean?”

“I saw him twenty times, perhaps.”

“Was he as persuasive as people say?”

Shalson knocked out his pipe and put it in his pocket. The burst of passion had gone, and again he looked simply solid and reliable. “I’ll tell you the thing about Bogue. You listened to him with two parts of yourself. One part knew that he was simply a liar and a cheat, and that everything he said was some kind of a trick. The other part just heard and believed. I don’t know why. Because it wanted to believe, I suppose. I just know that’s the way it was.”

“For you as well?”

“For everybody. While you were listening to him.”

The train stopped with an expiring puff. They were just outside Bramley. Applegate put his head out of the window into a cold, starless night, and withdrew it suddenly as a train whistled by him, a snake whose dark coils were broken by small patches of light. They started again with a jolt. He remembered something.

“One more thing. There’s somebody else involved, a man who has the lobe of his left ear missing. Do you know anything about him?”

“I think so.” Shalson’s hand went up to his left ear and pulled. The lower part of the ear came away, revealing jagged flesh and an old scar. “This is plastic. Pretty good match, don’t you agree? I haven’t worried about wearing it for a long time, but when I learned that Eileen and Barney Craigen were down here I thought it might be useful.”

Applegate stared at him, obscurely troubled. The train ran into Bramley Station.

“I’m staying at the Bramley Arms,” Shalson said. Applegate looked round for Hedda’s old car, but it was not in the yard. They walked up the slope into the country road.

“What’s your interest in all this?” Applegate asked abruptly. “Tarboe said you’d retired.”

A beam of light directed from the opposite side of the road played deliberately first on Shalson, then on Applegate. “
Down,
” Shalson shouted, and flung himself towards the hedge beside which they were walking. Applegate dived the other way and found himself in a shallow and, fortunately, fairly dry ditch. There were two sharp cracks. Then the torch beam played again over the part of the road where they had been walking. Applegate wriggled a little farther along the ditch and looked for a gap in the hedge. Now came an answering crack from his own side. That would be Shalson. The torch went out.

Silence. And, behind the silence, uncustomary night sounds, a body moving cautiously but clumsily on the other side of the road. Then four shots. Applegate, head poked up just above his ditch, saw the spurts of flame. Wild firing. From his own side two shots and a yelp, quickly cut off. A body crashing along, elephantine. The sound of a car starting, farther up the road. Encounters that can mean death are rarely more personal than this, spurts of flame in the dark.

Applegate heard a whistle behind him on two notes, high and low. He whistled back. Shalson’s voice said: “Here.” They met on the road.

“Winged him,” Shalson said. His voice was as calm as if their conversation in the train had gone uninterrupted.

“Who was it?”

“Barney, I should guess. He was always a fool with a gun.”

“You use one yourself, I see.”

“Haven’t had occasion to use it for years.” With no perceptible change of tone he said: “Take a little advice. If you’re not on business, leave this thing alone. People are going to get hurt before it’s finished.”

Hedda’s car was approaching along the road. Applegate would not have thought it possible that he could be so glad to recognise its characteristic sound, something between a furious knock and an asthmatic wheeze. It came thundering on them and shrieked to a stop as Applegate shouted: “Hedda.”

She leaned out of the car. “Sorry I’m late.”

“We’ve been shot at. This is Mr Shalson. He hit whoever it was and they went off in a car. Did you pass one a couple of minutes ago?”

“Yes, going pretty fast. Didn’t see who was in it. Good shooting, Mr Shalson.”

“We were never in much danger if it was Barney,” Shalson said. “Can you give me a lift to the Bramley Arms?”

At the pub they rejected his suggestion that they should come in for a drink. He lingered with his hand on the door. “You don’t carry a gun, Applegate?”

“No.”

“They’re professionals, you know, Barney and Eileen, even if they’re not very good ones. You’re an amateur.”

“I’m in this too,” Hedda said.

“With all respect, another amateur. But it’s your affair I suppose.” Shalson appeared under the pub lantern, burly and mild. “Good night.”

He disappeared, leaving half a dozen unanswered questions chasing each other in Applegate’s mind.

The answers to these questions, and even the exact nature of the questions themselves, remained unresolved at breakfast the next morning. Applegate stuffed scrambled egg into his mouth and brooded upon the exact purposes of all the people involved, and the nature of Johnny Bogue and his fortune. Hedda appeared from the kitchen, wearing a ridiculously small black and white check apron. She carried a saucepan. “More scrambled egg?”

“I’ve had enough,” Applegate said absently. He held out his plate for more, and at once began eating it. Maureen Gardner, across the table from him, giggled.

“I say, you are scoffing it. Hedda’s a smashing cook, isn’t she?”

“Smashing.”

Deverell sat at the top of the long table. “Miss Pont is a lady of many accomplishments,” he said politely.

Applegate frowned. “What do you mean?”

“She is an accomplished cook. Also a singer.” He held up a finger and from the kitchen they heard her singing “See the pretty lady up on the tree.”

Applegate frowned again. “You’re moving out today, aren’t you?”

“To the Bramley Arms. It is all part of my education, no doubt.” About Deverell’s speech, smooth and classless, there was something un-English.

“And when are you off to the Anarchists?”

“At the end of the week, I hope,” Maureen said. “I’ve written to Enid Klug, she really runs the Community. Of course I could just go.”

“That would be the Anarchist thing to do,” Applegate agreed. “And if I’d been you I wouldn’t have stuck a stamp on the letter, because buying stamps means supporting the state. Then if I’d been Enid Klug I wouldn’t have accepted the letter because of the fivepence to pay on it.”

Maureen said severely: “Anarchists have got manners. That’s why I’ve written to Enid Klug. And they don’t make feeble jokes like yours, either.”

Hedda came in with a tray piled high with scrambled egg and toast. “I’m ravenous. Thank God to get away from Brooker-Timla. And shall I tell you something else? This is shop bread, not our filthy homemade stuff.” She sat down and began to eat greedily.

“Good morning, good morning.” Pont appeared, beaming. He looked no longer the frantic creature of two nights earlier, but the Jeremy Pont originally seen by Applegate, pink-skinned and clear-eyed, wrapped in his euphoric dream. If he had heard Hedda’s last words, if he disapproved of the scrambled egg rapidly disappearing into her mouth, he gave no sign of it. The bright beam of his glance, radiating almost tangible warmth, moved from one to another of them and settled on Applegate, who was dazzled by his smile.

“Charles, my dear Charles. Don’t let me interrupt, but when you are finished might I have a word?”

“I’ve finished now.”

“Are you sure? A little more…” His radiant eye swept the table in search presumably of Brooker-Timla food, but failed to find it. “Shall we have our word then, my dear fellow?” An arm was placed round Applegate’s shoulders as they made their way to Pont’s office.

“Let me be frank,” Pont said when Applegate was seated in a chair overlooking the neglected garden. “For the last day or two I have not been myself. I am like other children of nature, I need freedom in which to stretch my wings. Lowering skies, the fury of tempests, these have more effect on me perhaps than upon those less finely constituted. However that may be, I have not been myself. I admit it and apologise.”

“Really, that’s not at all necessary.” Applegate was embarrassed. “The circumstances – enough to upset anybody –”

“Not at all,” Pont beamed. “They did not upset
you.
I may not have shown it, but I have been impressed, in the highest degree impressed, by your imperturbable calm. Too often I have found fine-grained assistants who flinched from the hard facts of life. Frankly, I often felt they should have been pupils rather than teachers. Your own emotional balance has been wonderful.”

“Thank you.”

“Now we must look to the future.” The light in his blue eye was martial. “You have seen enough to know that a great educational experiment is being conducted here. Must it end because of one unhappy incident? Never! I will not permit it. Janine will not permit it.” At mention of his wife he looked thoughtful for a moment, then brightened again. “Last night I received a telephone call from Leo Gaggleswick, secretary of the Jacob Reitz Foundation. You know the Foundation, of course.”

“No.”

For a moment Pont looked mildly shocked. Then euphoria regained control. “A wonderful organisation. Devoted to the cause of experiment in education. They have a large sum of money donated by Reitz, the armaments manufacturer, for that purpose. If at times in the past I have seemed to criticise them…” He left that sentence where it was, and began a new one. “Gaggleswick had read all about the – ah – Montague incident in the papers. He wanted to know where we stood. I told him without equivocation. ‘Gaggleswick,’ I said. ‘An experiment in freedom is ending, in freedom under law. I have given fifty years of my life to the cause of…’” Perhaps Pont perceived a certain restlessness in Applegate, for he gave up this sentence too. “So Gaggleswick has promised support, substantial support. Janine and I are going up to London this morning for a meeting with him. There is only one condition which, apparently, has to be observed under the administration of the Fund. A certain sum has to be put down by – ah – by…”

Applegate began to see the conversation’s drift. “By you.”

“Or by somebody connected with me.”
Pont put his head slightly on one side and looked at Applegate. “I have the very highest opinion of your practical abilities.”

“Thank you.”

“And it seems to me there is a bond of sympathy between us. I could offer you a partnership.”

“I’m afraid–”

“The sum required would not be large. A mere thousand pounds.”

“A thousand pounds.”

“And you would have the privilege of playing a leading rôle in something that is no longer an experiment, but has behind it…”

The door opened. Maureen Gardner put her head inside. Applegate had never been more pleased to see anybody. “Telephone for you,” she said to him. “In the hall.”

“–a great tradition,” Pont finished rather lamely.

“There’s nothing I should like more,” Applegate said insincerely. “But I just haven’t the money.”

Pont began to deflate slowly. “Come now, my dear Charles. You can’t have taken this job for the money attached to it.” He laughed feebly. “You must be a man of substance.”

“I wish I were. That isn’t the case at all, I’m afraid.” Applegate edged towards the door.

The old face sagged, the bright eyes dulled. “If you were able to give a guarantee, even, it might be acceptable.”

“Absolutely impossible.” His fingers were on the handle. “I deeply appreciate the honour. Sure you will find many more worthy who are eager to…” Applegate left a sentence of his own unfinished as he closed the door on Pont’s stricken face. Just like an old baby, he told himself angrily, building up a whole fantasy out of a casual conversation. When he reached the telephone he shouted a “Hallo” into it.

“Hallo, Charles. This is Henry.”

The agelessness and sexlessness of the voice baffled him. “Henry who?”

“Henry Jenks.” The voice was reproachful now. “Surely you haven’t forgotten?”

He responded with a short sea-lionish bark. “Is that likely? After one of your pet thugs shot at me last night.”

“Dear, oh, dear. That was a most regrettable mistake.”

“It might have been if he’d been able to shoot straight.”

“Barney is hasty. And foolish.” The voice now had a slight nasal whine. “If I were in control of affairs I would have nothing to do with him. He is not a gentleman.” This seemed too self-evident to need reply. “I hoped you would be free to have lunch with me today. At the hotel. I do feel that we should have a little talk together to clear things up.”

“Our last little talk didn’t seem to help.”

“That was Eileen. She is really impossible.”

“I’m fairly impossible too. I don’t see that we have much to talk about. Will Arthur be there?”

The voice said meekly: “Not if you don’t wish it. I hope you will bring your Egeria with you.”

“My Egeria?”

“Miss Pont. It would be a great pleasure to meet her.”

After all, he thought, what have we got to lose? At least it shouldn’t be dull. “All right. But we shall leave a note of where we’ve gone, and in whose company. No funny business.”

“Of course not.” Jenks sounded quite shocked. “You really have got, what shall I say, the wrong impression. Can you and Miss Pont meet me in the cocktail bar at a quarter to one? I shall look forward to it very greatly.”