Stop Press (36 page)

‘Dear me. That looks like another metaphysical problem.’

‘No doubt, my dear John. But you must not poke fun at me. I assure you it is really upsetting to discover that one is the subject of speculations of that sort. I am bound to say that Chown himself appears to have met these attempts at prognosis in a soundly sceptical spirit; he seems to have maintained that there is not sufficient evidence for a valid scientific opinion. He would only say – in a very happy phrase, for he is quite a literary fellow – that I was indeed in some measure entangled in my own web. To what issue, time would show.’ Mr Eliot’s smile was suddenly brilliant. ‘And time, he seems to think, has now delivered the goods.’

The piano was strumming persistently and on the stage somebody was tap dancing. Lights had been turned on and the theatre, hitherto faintly mysterious, was one rather shoddy glare. Appleby, although he had so far heard little on which he had not at least briefly meditated, was disturbed. It was partly the effect of the setting again. He supposed that in Mr Eliot’s mind the matters under debate were associated with the uneasy privacy of Dr Chown’s consulting-room, and that he was deriving satisfaction from airing them in a different environment… The lights snapped off; they were trying out spotlights; a greenish beam swept down on them and threw Mr Eliot into momentary brilliant isolation; Appleby’s discomfort grew.

‘As I was saying, the split personality is Chown’s special field. He once lent me a very fascinating book about it. You must not think that he has ever openly associated me with the subject; nevertheless I have been able at times to read his thoughts. So you will see how very disturbed I was when these odd things began to happen. Such odd things, it seems,
can
happen. One may develop a subsidiary personality
and never be aware either of it or of one’s connexion with its operations
. There was a girl – a very orderly girl – who woke up every morning to find her room in frantic confusion and her yesterday’s knitting unravelled. It was herself all the time. A personality of whose existence she had no inkling used to get control and say the most awful things to people on trams.’

Appleby chuckled as cheerfully as he could. ‘Morton Prince’s Miss
A
? If I remember aright one personality used to baffle another by keeping a diary in a language which only the diarist-personality knew. Something you would never dare to put in a novel. What Aristotle called an improbable possibility.’

Mr Eliot gave fleeting recognition to this literary critical excursus. ‘All that sort of thing. So you see how possible it was for me to be alarmed when I connected it with these speculations of the learned on the Spider and myself – with that and these fantastic things which had actually begun to happen. My metaphysical explanation was plainly a way of sidetracking this disturbing possibility. It was only when the picture turned up as it did that I saw both ideas to be ruled out equally. No personality of mine could behave in that way… Holme, my dear chap, don’t let them burden you with too much tonight.’

It was distressingly evident that Mr Eliot’s new confidence was as tenuous as it was unsound. The Miss
A
who awoke in her disordered room was likely to have had just the same supra-rational conviction that no personality of hers could do
that
. But this was scarcely a point to put to Mr Eliot: Appleby was about to pass rapidly to something else when his host again took the initiative. ‘I don’t know if you will understand me when I say that Chown’s line of thought was chiefly distressing because it attracted me. It caught my fancy; and my fancy, you know, is like a wrestler’s muscles – dangerously over-developed. I found myself supposing the thing to be true and then working out various resulting predicaments, just as I might work out a book. Fascinating – but depressing in the end – particularly when Chown came down again with the evident conviction that I was obscurely play-acting.’

Appleby smiled. ‘I don’t know if I should mention it, but I believe he consulted Holme.’

‘Consulted Holme?’ Mr Eliot was startled.

‘Chown seems to think’ – Appleby had abruptly decided to test Mr Eliot’s new confidence out – ‘that you are not wholly unconscious of your secondary personality. An awareness of your extraordinary conduct is lurking somewhere on the threshold of your mind. You have a sort of groping understanding of what’s happening. As a result, when you profess complete bewilderment about the tricks you are in some degree acting. I believe Chown sought the professional opinion of Holme on the subject.’

‘I am sure’, said Mr Eliot cheerfully, ‘that it is very kind of him to take so much trouble. Have you gathered what Holme’s opinion was?’

‘At a guess – that you weren’t in the least acting.’

‘And that made Chown feel–?’

‘That – well, that you were more of a case.’

Frankly and boisterously Mr Eliot laughed. ‘Rupert, my dear fellow’ – his cousin was going past with a pile of chairs on his trolley – ‘you look like a
Punch
picture of the propertied classes buckling to in a general strike.’ He turned back to Appleby, his face suddenly rueful. ‘There, I’ve said the wrong thing. About the propertied classes. Rupert
hasn’t
any property. And I fear that – perfectly reasonably – he is resentful. A good fellow, Rupert. But you have to understand him, of course… What a beautiful mask!’ The young woman from Chelsea had come up with a grotesque shell from within which Gib Overall was to give his rendering of Wedge’s poems. ‘But just a little cruel. I do hope that nobody’s feelings are going to be hurt. These foolish jokes may have made people touchy.’

Appleby had an impulse to take Mr Eliot by the shoulders and give him a gentle shake. He was contriving to be irritatingly remote – as remote as an author behind a solidly constructed book. There was about him too the suggestion of some tour de force achieved, as if – again – he were contriving the final chapter of one of his own puzzles. Appleby decided to bring up what artillery he had. ‘Folly Hall,’ he said. ‘A good many people think – and my sister was the first to guess – that Folly Hall was the name you gave to the house in
Murder at Midnight
.’

‘Patricia was quite right.’

‘How many people knew?’

‘Well, anybody
might
know. My manuscripts are always there in the cupboard for anybody to look at. I have always preferred that nobody
should
; and as a matter of fact’ – Mr Eliot looked uncomfortable – ‘only Archie is in the habit of taking a quiet glance over them, as far as I know. He takes a friendly interest, I suppose, in how things are getting on.’ Mr Eliot, determinedly charitable, brightened again as he made this suggestion.

‘A murder was to take place in Folly Hall at midnight? Just how?’

Mr Eliot shook an amiable head. ‘My dear John, I have no idea. I tore up the manuscript shortly after it began to misbehave, and before I had in the least thought the murder out. I find, you know, that I put off the murders more and more; they haven’t quite the old kick – at least not for me.’

‘I see. Now, do you mind if we take up the crux of the whole matter – the joker’s clairvoyance, or whatever we are to call it? He might have got the name, Folly Hall, from your manuscript. Has he, in fact, shown any awareness of anything which you had projected for
Murder at Midnight
but not actually put down on paper? Anything, I mean, like the knowledge he seems to have had of the unwritten story,
The Birthday Party
?’

‘Oh, dear me, yes.’ Mr Eliot’s placid cheerfulness – slightly reminiscent of Sir Archie – was taking on a mildly infuriating quality. ‘Several of the changes which I discovered in the manuscript implied knowledge of ideas I had entertained but abandoned in the Spider’s earlier period.’

‘Ideas you are certain you never wrote down – not even in a rough note? Ideas you are
certain
you never mentioned in casual conversation; never mentioned to
anybody
?’ Appleby, feeling that at any moment Mr Eliot might slip from his grasp, was remorselessly urgent.

‘Exactly that. I never discuss my plans for the books with anybody; so many things are better worth talking about.’ Mr Eliot smiled in what might so easily – it struck Appleby – be considered his superior amateur way. ‘I never even discussed them with my secretary. And I never make notes; no note that I could make would do other than fill me with dismay a week later. Except of course’ – Mr Eliot was suddenly wistful – ‘my notes on Pope. I really think they are beginning to come together.’ Mr Eliot’s sigh belied this confidence.

‘Ideas’, said Appleby carefully, ‘sufficiently distinctive not to be mere shots in the dark?’

‘Definitely so. Tolerably original ideas come to me, for some reason, readily enough. I assure you it would all be too great a bore if they did not. The ideas the joker showed command of simply come into my head and stay in storage there. When I need them I use them… We must really try to make this theatre a little more attractive for next year. It seems only fair when all these people are good enough to come down.’

‘You are familiar’ – Appleby fired off Winter’s idea – ‘with the phenomenon which psychologists call paramnesia?’

‘Oh,
that
, I thought of that very early on. It won’t at all do.’

Appleby’s impulse to shake him became very pronounced indeed. ‘And having abandoned metaphysics and rejected morbid psychology’, he said, ‘have you
any
explanation of this extraordinary state of affairs?’

Mr Eliot opened his eyes in exaggerated surprise; just such a prep-school trick in Timmy, Appleby reflected, must have infuriated Winter often enough. ‘Dear me, yes. I can’t think how it escaped me before. It is perfectly simply explained by a scientifically attested fact. Wedges published a book about it only the other day by a Fellow of the Royal Society. What the joker has command of is plainly telepathy. Mind-reading. The thing has been proved… I must really go round and say a civil word to some of these excellent souls.’

And as casually but irresistibly as a piece of pack-ice Mr Eliot broke away. He paused, however, at a couple of paces. ‘I
think
the Royal Society,’ he said. ‘And
virtually
proved.’

Mr Eliot, in fact, did not believe in telepathy and he could be quite as irritating as his son. Yet by this odd interview in the theatre Appleby was finally less irritated than impressed. It was as if Mr Eliot, hitherto amiably shuttlecocked hither and thither, had subtly taken to himself an impetus and an objective of his own. Perhaps it was only his natural resilience once more; perhaps he was simply deriving momentum from the party, now briskly moving towards its crowning fun. But Appleby felt that Mr Eliot’s confidence, so unexpectedly begotten by Joseph out of the Renoir, was something other than this. The creator of the Spider, for reasons unknown, had come to feel that he was on his game; that the problematical situation at Rust had fallen under his control. Appleby tried to think of anything besides the history of Belinda’s picture which might have contributed to this result. The clocks, the visitors from the Abbey, the pigs; these had been the principal incidents of the day and there was obvious illumination in none of them. Mr Eliot, again, had repudiated with urbanity and lucidity the disturbing convictions of Dr Chown: was he simply the lighter for having disburdened himself of this perilous stuff? Or did he feel that he had thereby turned the flank of what might be substantially the truth?

For more than one reason now, Appleby wanted to tackle Chown. Chown’s reading of the situation – even in the sketch of it offered by Mr Eliot – was at least the most economical and convincing in the field. It was conceivable that Mr Eliot was being pursued by the persistent malice of nobody; it was conceivable that he was persecuting himself. It seemed at first glance an unlikely form of madness, but Appleby knew that in the experience of one like Chown such antics of the bewildered spirit must be common enough. In every asylum there are people whose right hand knows not what their left hand does. Indeed the sanest of us, if his habit be introspective, may sometimes detect strange games of hide-and-seek conducting themselves within the confines of his own personality. Was a Mr Eliot who was doomed to the bin persecuting himself? Or – conceivably – was a perfectly sane Mr Eliot laying obscure foundations for the persecuting of somebody else?

Confronted by this latter question, Appleby found that he had a curious confidence in Mr Eliot’s veracity. Or in the veracity, at least, of the familiar Mr Eliot – and there was no real evidence that another existed. His host’s belief in telepathy had been distinguishably enough a sport of fancy; nevertheless an instinct for veracity had made him underline the point in an ironical addendum. Appleby believed in the substantial truthfulness of any but a morbid, subliminal, and merely hypothetical Mr Eliot; he also believed, he found, in the essential rationality of the same conscious man. He believed in short – and here was the inescapable point – that Mr Eliot had bewilderingly encountered, both in the adulterated manuscript of
Murder at Midnight
and in last night’s incident of the Birthday Party, matter which he had thought of as never having passed the boundaries of his own unspoken and unwritten thought.

Amid all the huddle of incidents at Rust, and amid the advancing shadows of complications which Appleby suspected as yet to come, this single problem stood out clear. If Mr Eliot was speaking not merely what he believed to be the truth but the truth itself – then how could the trick be worked? It was a speculative question. And Appleby found the contemplation of it interfering with a practical duty.

Confident and quizzical, Mr Eliot had revealed himself as in a state of mild exhilaration. And in this Appleby had felt the stir of something known to himself: the sense of danger and the quickened consciousness which follows. Mr Eliot was backing himself to get the whip hand in a tight place.

Murder at Midnight
. It was still likely that Patricia had been right; that the situation at Rust was perilous as well as mysterious; and that Mr Eliot was chiefly endangered. Appleby’s confidence in this issue was far from absolute; the thing might continue at a level of rather futile malice. But he was at least more confident of the reality of the danger than of Mr Eliot’s ability to counter it. The author of thirty-seven mysterious thrills might so easily bank too heavily on what were only a literary resourceful and a theoretical guile. In short, Mr Eliot had to be guarded.