Stop Press (38 page)

Appleby nodded – soberly once more. ‘Yes, there’s a plan… Do you read much of Chown’s sort of stuff?’

‘Very little.’ Winter, who had been listening for the chatter that would assure him there had as yet been no summons to dinner, was divided between bewilderment and impatience.

‘Have you a psychologist in your college – the learned Benton, for instance?’

‘You have a mind like an antelope. We have nothing remotely like a medical psychologist, if that’s what you mean. And certainly not Benton. Incidentally, you’re back on all that? Isn’t it likely to be a will-o’-the-wisp?’

‘Very likely indeed. But Benton was bowled over by a chance mention of the Birdwire burglary and he was in with Shoon and now here is your other acute friend Bussenschutt poking round that whole complex. It’s interesting.’

‘I agree. But what has Chown’s psychology–’

Appleby interrupted with a brisk move indoors. ‘When
I
have a wild theory’, he said with genial unkindness, ‘I sit on it… By the way, what of your investigations into the alibis?’

‘Abruptly terminated; the thing’s not my line. But I did get to the end of what might be called the principals. Your sister, as you no doubt know, was hiding with Chown. Kermode was with Overall. And Timmy was with Toplady – incidentally, they quarrelled. Timmy asked Toplady to return some poems. Toplady, who doesn’t understand being given poems, had handed them on for an opinion to his grandmother, an old lady with literary tastes. Timmy was annoyed.’

Appleby sighed. ‘After all,’ he said absently, ‘this is Folly Hall.’ He halted again by the window as if a thought had struck him. ‘
Murder at Midnight
is torn up. The monkey-tricks upset Eliot so much that he destroyed it. And last night we were guessing that there would be no episode thirty-eight; the thing had got him on the run and the Spider was in liquidation. But now? One rather feels there will be the regular new Spider story in the Spring lists.’

‘And a Spider story
by Eliot
,’ said Winter. ‘Has all this haunting of Rust really been – by a ghost?’

‘And will the plan fail if Eliot carries on?’

‘Just that. If Kermode–’

‘Don’t forget the Renoir alibi.’

‘If Kermode
and
Overall–’ Winter paused and his face lit up with excitement. ‘
Two
writers of just this sort of thing,’ he said. ‘May there not be something there? Eliot is bothered because he thinks that private stock-in-trade of his own has been actualizing itself. But aren’t the dodges of all these people strictly limited? With two keen brains – students of the thirty-seven published books – putting their heads together–’ He stopped as he saw Appleby’s smile.

‘Winter, I can’t think why you haven’t published thirty-seven books yourself. You have an extraordinary fertile mind. And talking of minds – doesn’t this latest theory rather under-estimate Eliot’s?’ He’s an able creature.’ Appleby shook his head. ‘An idle, fanciful, slightly irresponsible creature. In fact not at all unlike his son.’ He chuckled. ‘Only Timmy, of course, is a little more grown up.’

They turned to go into the house. As they did so the scene changed. Like the pale face of a diver rising from inky waves, the moon appeared from amid dark clouds to the east. Behind a curtain of gently spiralling snow a whole landscape built itself up uncertainly before them as they looked. The effect was bizarre, momentarily improbable, and powerfully evocative of Mr Eliot’s little theatre with Sir Archie playing tricks with the lights. Appleby surveyed the scene carefully. ‘A bad night for reconnoitring,’ he said.

‘Are you going to reconnoitre?’

‘No; merely to lurk about the house and see that nobody gets hit on the head.’

They were back in the living-room and the party was eddying and exclaiming around them. ‘My dear Appleby’, said Winter, ‘I have developed something like mild affection for you. Don’t get hit on the head yourself.’

In theatrical histories nothing is more forbidding than the cuts which illustrate private performances given before the courts of Europe in their more domestic and exclusive moods. The royal family, disposed in a roughly pyramidal formation and surrounded by respectful vacancy, contemplate the stage as if it were a sort of gigantic fireside: the play can be felt as perishing beneath their gaze. There is something in the condition of drama which demands beyond the footlights at least the convention of a crowd. As Mark Anthony’s speech falls flat if the management has failed to pay for the presence – or better the illusion – of a sizable assembly of Romans, so the whole play may fail if the public has declined to pay for a sufficient number of seats. Thus it is that in the conduct of amateur theatricals the main difficulty is in the provision of the necessary audience. Here too nothing is more depressing than no audience at all, or an audience consisting of a single row of elderly or infirm persons, eked out with children kept unkindly from their sleep. If the majority of people in the house are performing it is well to ask the neighbours to drop in. This is what Mr Eliot was in the habit of doing. And this is why Gib Overall and Miss Cavey, André and the young women from Chelsea – why these and another actor, undesired if not wholly unheralded – played their parts on Saturday night before a gathering of all but the grandest folk of half a county.

The arrangement was fostered by Wedge; it helped him with his church parade the next day. He liked to send certain of his authors – those particularly, like Miss Cavey, who dealt in rural and traditional themes – to church; going or coming, they would be photographed walking the country lanes in moods of anticipatory or reminiscent devotion. It helped if they could be photographed in the company of well-sounding people who made a less factitious practice of the same thing, and for this procedure on the Sunday preliminary contacts were made on the Saturday night. This year a select company of authors was to be carried to Shoon Abbey instead: a place with at least a devotional ring to it. But the neighbours had been bidden to the party just the same. A good many – those who lived farthest away or closest to real grandeur – had to be asked to dinner, a necessity which regularly threatened to be a last straw upon the Rust domestic camel. Commonly there was something of crisis with Bowles. The supplementary arrangements which had to be made, though strictly subordinated to his control, had a horrid appearance of catering. And it was the faith of Bowles that – short of the infrequent emergency of a wedding breakfast – catering was something not to be admitted to a country house. Before dinner on Saturday was Belinda’s most awful hour.

Colonel and Mrs Dethleps of Warter, the Stitts, the Stitt-Plapps, old Lady Bootomley of Wing Manor, the Ffords of Findon Hall, the Misses Unkles and their niece Angela, Lady Ladey: the names have no significance for Mr Eliot’s history, but they give the tone of the infusion which the party prescriptively suffered at this time. The new force, so solidly stone-in-the-rain, liked Mr Eliot’s party well enough. Mr Eliot himself had a background of unimpeachable orthodoxy; his curious friends were amusing for four hours in the year and their jests were seldom objectionable without being savingly unintelligible as well. The stones-in-the-rain were moreover quiet stones, little publicized on the whole, and they secretly looked forward to seeing themselves posing amid exotic company in the illustrated papers the following week. They even remembered to put some of Wedge’s book down on their next library list, or to buy one or two in cheap editions when faced with the boredom of the Flying Scotsman or the Blue Train. Normally, everyone was tolerably pleased – except conceivably the owner of Rust.

But dinner itself was apt to be difficult. The stones like their feed. The photographs reveal a tendency to expand in generous curves at night combined with an astonishing ability to contract again to hardness and angularity in the open air the next morning: a power said to come from careful nurture in infancy. Mr Eliot’s stones looked forward to their dinner, and to wines which – having the purchasing power of the Spider behind them – operated more subtly than those at home. The party proper had the same feelings, but at this particular meal their thoughts were ranging ahead. There were thus two tempos at Mr Eliot’s monstrously extended table and it was the business of such as were of disinterested mind to effect some sort of gearing system in between. At this petty social duty Winter was more successful than anybody else. Down quite a stretch of table on either side of him he ensured an even march.

It was a consequence of this – unfortunate in the light of what was to happen – that Winter’s manner and mannerisms, already familiar to the party, became impressed on the stones as well.

Looking back on the evening’s appalling climax, Patricia Appleby was chiefly to remark the gradualness with which it accomplished itself. The company in the theatre passed from discomfort through mounting strain to crisis. It was like a fated progress; nor was the effect the less oppressive for being in detail demonstrably unpremeditated and impromptu. The stones, apprehending least, had perhaps the worst of it. Their minds, moving towards social censure, were unprepared for primitive dismay. More than anything else it was the tragi-comical inadequacy of their expectations which gave edge to the issue of the night.

Had Winter not been such a success at dinner; had Miss Cavey not contrived to give old Lady Bootomley an account of her morning’s adventure in the barn and had Lady Bootomley not chanced some time before to consider herself pleased and edified by
Frenzied May
; above all, had the heating in the theatre been turned on a little sooner: had these things been and not been, the
milieu
, if not the brute fact, would have been different. As it was, it was upon cross-currents of irritation that the final situation broke.

The theatre was undoubtedly chilly. The thermometer may have been right while the lurking damp in the place made the skin temperature wrong. Mrs Dethleps went firmly upstairs for her cloak; Lady Bootomley, more firmly and to an effect of much greater confusion, sent out to her car for a foot muff. In the little audience as it settled down at about ten o’clock Patricia could already discern something fatal to the success of improvised and rather esoteric mumming: on the fringe of many minds an obstinate consciousness that it might be two hours until the comforts of supper. A further appreciable depression arose when it had to be explained that the entertainment would not be of the usual kind. The new guests were variously familiar with the long episodic life of the Spider and they liked the little fantasy annually built up on his adventures; moreover it was the sufficient life’s work of some of them to take a dark view of all novelty. The change made the entertainment a coterie affair. It was, in fact, a mistake. It was a mistake because it served to rekindle in the house-party itself an awareness that life at Rust had been treacherous of late. Patricia found it difficult to gauge the extent to which there was anticipation or apprehension of some further stroke by the joker. Probably few people noticed how close her brother contrived to keep to Mr Eliot. But nearly everybody was aware that Mr Eliot’s chauffeur was mounting guard in the little room with the switch-boxes, and the fact hinted at possible discomfort to come. There were thus two streams of anxiety in the theatre: the fear that the entertainment might fall flat of itself, and the fear that some extraneous force might intervene and contrive to break it up.

Anxiety is the most fluid of emotions and will flow readily from one centre to another, a trick of transference which makes us often irrationally concerned over trivial things. Patricia found herself hoping, and hoping with violence, that the evening’s programme would go over well. She was not assisted to confidence by Timmy, who was still sunk in concealed apprehensions of the appearance of Henry and Eleanor, nor by Belinda, who had directed a more massive anxiety into the inadequate channel of speculation on the sufficiency of the supper to come. Only Mr Eliot was a stay. He went briskly about assuring himself of the comfort of his guests, remarking cheerfully and on all hands that the stage was set and the curtain to rise very shortly. He was seconded by Sir Rupert Eliot, who appeared to draw considerable refreshment from the society of Unkles, Stitts, and Stitt-Plapps.

The first and most considerable part of the entertainment was a play put on by certain of the obscurer and therefore more conscientious of Wedge’s following. Patricia watched its progress with respect and dismay. Distinctly from the experimental theatre, it was a comedy of the neo-academic kind and might have served Winter as text for a discourse on memory. There were three characters, husband, wife, and lover. The substance of the play was their attempt to talk their problem out. The first scene gave this discussion as they anticipated it would take place. In the second the actors went through identical movements but spoke different words: this was the discussion as they came afterwards to believe it had been. In the third there were again the same gestures and a different set of words: this was what actually took place. There was a fourth scene which the author had written as an alternative to the second, and as a matter of technical interest this was played as well. By the clock the whole thing did not take long; it was peculiarly paralysing nevertheless. Colonel Dethleps said the thing was clever and the Stitts said in chorus that it was very clever indeed: stones-in-the-rain acknowledge no more damning expression. Lady Bootomley dug her toes into the foot muff and Mrs Dethleps buttoned up her cloak to the throat; the temperature of the theatre, though probably rising physically, fell a psychological ten degrees. Patricia confronted the ominous fact that the respectable part of the programme was now over.

And worse was indeed to come. Peter Holme, whom amateur acting made slightly sick and who knew himself as the only person present who could command an audience, determined to snatch the show from the abyss. He had – what actors commonly have not – an abundant and exact impromptu fancy; he had also a grudge which was the more dangerous because he could regard it as playful. After a trying interval in which conversation pattered about the theatre as sparingly as the first slow drops of a thunder-shower on a tin roof the curtain went up on a Holme who was holding the stage alone. His performance lasted four and a quarter minutes and was afterwards adjudged by Wedge the most incomparable thing he had ever done… It was a deadly travesty of the manner and conversation of an Oxford archaeologist.