EDMUND CRISPIN

Holy Disorders

Ther saugh I first the derke ymaginyng

Of felonye, and al the compassyng;

The crueel ire, reed as any gleede;

The pykepurs, and eke the pale drede;

The smylere, with the knyfe under the cloke;

The shepne, brennynge with the blake smoke;

The tresoun of the mordrynge in the bedde;

The open werre, with woundes al bibledde…

The nayl y-driven in the shode a-nyght;

The colde deeth, with mouth gapyng upright…’

Chaucer

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by

Victor Gollancz 1946

Copyright © Rights Limited,

1946. All rights reserved

Edmund Crispin has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover image © Shutterstock.com

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008124182

Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9780008124199

Version: 2017-10-26

To my parents

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1: Invitation and Warning

Chapter 2: Do not Travel for Pleasure

Chapter 3: Gibbering Corse

Chapter 4: Teeth of Traps

Chapter 5: Conjectures

Chapter 6: Murder in the Cathedral

Chapter 7: Motive

Chapter 8: Two Canons

Chapter 9: Three Suspects and a Witch

Chapter 10: Night Thoughts

Chapter 11: Whale and Coffin

Chapter 12: Love’s Lute

Chapter 13: Another Dead

Chapter 14: In the Last Analysis

Chapter 15: Reassurance and Farewell

About the Author

Also in this series

About the Publisher

Footnotes

1
Invitation and Warning

Continually at my bed’s head

A hearse doth hang, which doth me tell

That I ere morning may be dead…

SOUTHWELL

As his taxi burrowed its way through the traffic outside Waterloo Station, like an over-zealous bee barging to the front of a dilatory swarm, Geoffrey Vintner re-read the letter and telegram which he had found on his breakfast table that morning.

He felt as unhappy as any man without pretension to the spirit of adventure might feel who has received a threatening letter accompanied by sufficient evidence to suggest that the threats contained in it will probably be carried out. Not for the first time that morning, he regretted that he had ever persuaded himself to set out on his uncomfortable errand, to leave his cottage in Surrey, his cats, his garden (whose disposition he changed almost daily in accordance with some new and generally impracticable fancy), and his estimable and long-suffering housekeeper, Mrs Body. He was not, he considered (and the thought recurred with gloomy frequency as the series of adventures on which he was about to embark went its way), of a mould which engages very successfully in physical violence. Once one is over forty one cannot, even in moments of high enthusiasm, throw oneself heartily into anonymous and mortal battles against unscrupulous men. And when, moreover, one is a finical bachelor, moderately well-off, bred in a secluded country rectory, and with a mind undisturbed by sordid cares and overmastering passions, the thing begins to appear not only impossible but frankly ludicrous. It was no consolation to reflect that men like himself had fought with the courage and tenacity of bears all the way back to the Dunkirk beaches; they at least knew what they were up against.

Threats.

He groped in his coat pocket, pulled out a large, ancient revolver, and looked at it with that mixture of alarm and affection which dog-lovers bestow on a particularly ferocious animal. The driver regarded this proceeding bleakly in the driving-mirror as they entered upon the expanses of Waterloo Bridge. And a new thought entered Geoffrey Vintner’s head as, observing this deprecatory glare, he hastily put the gun away again: people had been known to be abducted in taxis, which hovered about their houses until they emerged, and then conveyed them resistlessly away to some place like Limehouse, where they were dealt with by gangs of armed thugs. He gazed dubiously at the short, stocky figure which sat with rock-like immobility in front of him, dexterously skirting the roundabout at the north end of the bridge. Certainly there was only one train which he could have caught from Surrey that morning, in time to get his connexion from Paddington, so his enemies, whoever they were, would have known when to meet him; on the other hand, he had had some considerable difficulty in finding a taxi at all, and without exception they had all seemed concerned more with eluding his attention than with trying to attract it. So that was probably all right.

He turned and looked with distaste at the traffic which pursued behind, with the erratic movements of topers following a leader from pub to pub. How people knew when they were being trailed he found himself unable to imagine. Moreover, he was not trained to the habit of observation; the outside world normally impressed itself on him as a vague and unmemorable succession of phantasms – a Red Indian could have walked through London by his side without his noticing anything untoward. He contemplated for a moment asking the driver to make a detour, in order to throw possible pursuers off the scent, but suspected that this would be unkindly received. And in any case, the whole thing was too preposterous; it would do no one any good to follow him publicly through the London crowds on a hot summer’s midday.

In this, as it happened, he was wrong.

Any visit which you make to Tolnbridge you will regret.

Nothing explicit about it, of course, but it had a business-like air which was far from inspiring confidence. He noticed with that peculiarly galling sense of annoyance which comes from the shattering of some unimportant illusion that the paper and envelope were distinctive and expensive and the typewriter, to judge from its many typographical eccentricities, easily identifiable – provided one knew where to start looking for it. He abandoned himself to aggrievedness. Criminals should at least try to preserve the pretence of anonymity, and not flaunt unsolvable clues before their victims. The postmark, too – thanks to the conscientiousness of some employee of the GPO – read quite legibly as Tolnbridge; which was what one would expect.

The telegram, loosely held in his left hand, fluttered to the floor. He picked it up, shook it fastidiously free of dirt, and read it through automatically, perhaps hoping to extract from the spidery, insubstantial capitals of the British telegraph system some shred of significance which had previously escaped him. That air of callous gaiety, he reflected bitterly, could have emanated from no one but the sender. It ran:

I AM AT TOLNBRIDGE STAYING AT THE CLERGY HOUSE PRIESTS PRIESTS PRIESTS THE PLACE IS BLACK WITH THEM COME AND PLAY THE CATHEDRAL SERVICES ALL THE ORGANISTS HAVE BEEN SHOT UP DISMAL BUSINESS THE MUSIC WASN’T AS BAD AS ALL THAT EITHER YOU’D BETTER COME AT ONCE BRING ME A BUTTERFLY NET I NEED ONE WIRE BACK COMING NOT COMING PREPARE FOR LONG STAY GERVASE FEN

Accompanying this had been a reply-paid form allowing for a reply of fifty words. It was with a sense of some satisfaction that Geoffrey had filled it in: COMING VINTNER – a satisfaction, however, tempered by the suspicion that Fen would not even notice the sarcasm. Fen was like that.

And now he doubted whether he would have sent that reply at all had it not been for the telegraph-boy hovering about outside the door and his own natural reluctance to take it to the post office later on. Most of our decisions, he reflected, are forced on us by laziness. And, of course, at that stage he had not yet opened his letters.… There were compensations. The Tolnbridge choir was a good one, and the organ, a four-manual Willis, one of the finest in the country. He remembered idly that it had a horn stop which really sounded like a horn, a lovely stopped diapason on the choir, a noble tuba, a thirty-two-foot on the pedals which in its lower register sent a rhythmic pulse of vibration through the whole building, unnerving the faithful…But were these things compensation enough?

In any case – his mental homily prolonged itself as the taxi shot round Trafalgar Square – here he was, involved against his will in some sordid conflict of law and disorder, and in some considerable personal danger. The letter and the telegram in conjunction were proof enough of that. What it was all about was another matter. The telegram, suitably punctuated, suggested that some enemy was engaged in a determined attempt to abolish, by attrition, the church-music of Tolnbridge – the reason, presumably, why his own proximate arrival was so much resented. But this seemed unlikely, not to say fantastic. The organists had been ‘shot up’ – what on earth did that mean? It suggested, ominously, machine-guns – but then Fen was notoriously prone to exaggeration, and cathedral towns in the West of England do not normally harbour gangs. He sighed. Useless to speculate – he was in it, with at least nine-tenths of his boats burnt and the rest manifestly unseaworthy. The only thing to do was to sit back and rely on fate and his own wits if anything happened – neither of which aids, he remembered without satisfaction, had done him any very yeoman service in the past. And what was all this about a butterfly-net…?

The butterfly-net. He hadn’t got it.

He glanced hastily at his watch, and banged on the glass as the taxi rounded Cambridge Circus preparatory to entering the Charing Cross Road.

‘Regent Street,’ he said. The taxi performed a full circle and headed down Shaftesbury Avenue.

A following cab altered its course likewise.

The Regent Street emporium which Geoffrey Vintner eventually selected as being most likely to house a butterfly-net proved to be surprisingly empty, with assistants and customers sweltering in a mid-morning lethargy. It seemed to have been designed with the purpose of evading any overt admission of its function. There were pictures on the walls, and superfluous furnishings, and fat gilt cherubs; while vaguely symbolical figures, standing stiff as Pomeranian grenadiers, supported insouciantly in the small of their backs the ends of the banisters. Before going in, Geoffrey paused to buy a paper, reflecting that any intimations of gang warfare in Tolnbridge would certainly have reached the Press by now. But the Battle of Britain held the headlines, and after crashing into two people while engaged in a search among the smaller items, he postponed further investigation for the time being.

A gigantic placard showing the location of the various departments proved useless from the point of view of butterfly-nets, so he resorted to the inquiry counter. What Fen could want with such a thing as a butterfly-net it was impossible to imagine. Geoffrey had a momentary wild vision of the pair of them pursuing insects across the Devon moors, and looked again, even more doubtfully, at the telegram. But no; it could not by any stretch of the imagination be a mistake; and lepidoptery was as likely to be Fen’s present obsession as anything else.

Butterfly-nets, he learned, were to be had from either the children’s or the sports department; fortunately both were on the same floor. He examined the lift-girl with a professional air of suspicion as she closed the gates on him, and was rewarded with an exaggeratedly indignant stare (‘’aving an eyeful,’ she confided to a friend). Thereupon he retired hastily into his paper, and as he was borne upward through the building, discovered and read the following:

ATTACK ON MUSICIAN

The police have as yet no clue to the assailant of Dr Denis Brooks, Organist of Tolnbridge Cathedral, who was attacked and rendered unconscious while on his way home the evening before last.

Geoffrey cursed the papers for their lack of detail, Fen for his exaggeration, and himself for becoming involved in the business at all. This private ritual of commination concluded, he scratched his nose ruefully; something was going on, anyway. But what had happened to the deputy organist? Presumably he had been banged on the head as well.

The lift came to a shattering stop, and Geoffrey found himself precipitated into the midst of a vast mellay of sports equipment, tenanted only by one plump, pink young assistant, who stood gazing about him with the resignation and despair of Priam amid the ruins of Troy.

‘Have you ever noticed,’ he said gloomily as Geoffrey approached, ‘the way no sports apparatus is ever a decent, symmetrical shape? You can’t pile it up neatly like boxes or books – there are always little bits sticking out on all sides. Roller-skates are the worst.’ His tone deepened, indicating his especial abhorrence of these inconvenient objects. ‘And footballs roll off the shelf as soon as you put them up, and skis you are bound to fall over, and the moment you lean a cricket-bat against the wall it slides down again.’ He looked unhappily at Geoffrey. ‘Is there anything you want? Most people,’ he went on before Geoffrey could reply, ‘have given up sports for the war. I expect they’re better off for it in the end. Muscular development only provides a foothold for fat.’ He sighed.

‘What I really wanted was a butterfly-net,’ said Geoffrey absently; his mind still dwelt on the problem of the organists.

‘A butterfly-net,’ repeated the young man sadly; he seemed to find this information particularly discouraging. ‘It’s the same with them, you see,’ he said, pointing to a row of butterfly-nets propped against a wall. ‘If you stand them on their heads, as it were, the net part sticks out and trips you up; and if you have them as they are now, they look top-heavy and disturb the eye.’ He went over and selected one.

‘Isn’t it rather long?’ said Geoffrey, gazing without enthusiasm at the six feet of bamboo which confronted him.

‘They have to be that,’ said the young man without any perceptible lightening of spirit, ‘or you’d never get near the butterflies at all. Not that you do very often, in any case,’ he added. ‘Most of it’s just blind swiping, really. Would you be wanting a collector’s box?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Ah, well. I don’t blame you. They’re inconvenient things, very heavy to carry about.’ He scrutinized the net again. ‘This will be seventeen-and-six. Ridiculous waste of money, really. I’ll just take the price off.’

The price was attached to the stem of the net with a piece of string that proved impervious to tugging.

‘Won’t it slip off?’ said Geoffrey helpfully; and then, when quite obviously it wouldn’t: ‘Well, it doesn’t matter, anyway.’

‘It’s no bother at all. I’ve got a pair of scissors.’ The pink young man felt helplessly in his pockets: ‘I must have left them in the office. I’m always doing that; and when I do remember, they tear holes in my pockets. Just a minute.’ He had disappeared before Geoffrey could stop him.

The man in the black slouch hat rose from his rather cramped position behind a counter laden with boxing-gloves near the stairhead, and made his way with considerable speed and stealth towards Geoffrey. He carried a blackjack and had the intent expression of one trying to trap a mosquito. The pink young assistant, however, did not stay away as long as he had hoped. Emerging from the office, he took in the situation without apparent surprise, and, acting with commendable presence of mind, put the butterfly-net over the assailant’s head and pulled. The blackjack described an arc through the air and knocked over a pile of roller-skates with a horrifying crash. Geoffrey spun round just in time to see his would-be attacker overbalance backwards and collapse into the middle of a vast medley of sports equipment which stood in the middle of the floor. It expressed its unsymmetrical character by general dissolution. A number of footballs were precipitated to the top of the stairs, down which they careered with increasing momentum to the department below. The Enemy freed himself, cursing noisily, from the butterfly-net, got to his feet, and made for the stairs. The pink young man gave him a resounding crack on the back of his head with one end of a ski, and he fell down again. Geoffrey struggled with his revolver, which had become inextricably involved in the lining of his pocket.

Battle was at once engaged. The Enemy, who was showing remarkable powers of recovery, opened a frontal attack on Geoffrey. The pink young man threw a cricket-ball at him, but it missed and hit Geoffrey instead. Geoffrey fell over and upset a heap of ice-skates, over which the assailant in his turn fell. The pink young man tried to put the net over his head again, but missed his aim and overbalanced. The Enemy regained his feet and threw an ice-skate at Geoffrey, which caught him a windy blow in the stomach as he was still endeavouring to get out his revolver. The pink young man, recovering his balance, smote the Enemy with a cricket-stump. The Enemy subsided, and the pink young man banged inexpertly at his head with a hockey-stick until he became silent. Geoffrey at last succeeded in getting out his revolver, to the accompaniment of an ominous tearing of cloth, and waved it wildly about him.

‘Be careful with that,’ said the pink young man.

‘What happened?’

‘Malicious intent,’ said the other. He picked up the blackjack, tossed it in the air, and nodded sagely. ‘I’m afraid that butterfly-net’s no good now,’ he added, with a relapse into his previous melancholy. ‘Torn to bits. You’d better take another.’ He went over and got one. ‘Seventeen-and-six, I think we said.’ Mechanically Geoffrey produced the money.

A roar of mingled rage and stupefaction from below indicated that the footballs had arrived at their destination. ‘Fielding!’ a voice boomed up at them. ‘What the devil are you doing up there?’

‘I think,’ said the young man pensively, ‘that it would be better if we left – at once.’

‘But your job!’ Geoffrey gazed at him helplessly.

‘I’ve probably lost it, anyway, thanks to this. Something of this sort always seems to happen to me. The last place I was at one of the assistants went mad and took off all her clothes. I wonder if I’ve left anything?’ He buffeted his pockets, as one who searches for matches. ‘I generally do. At least three pairs of gloves a year – in trains.’

‘Come on,’ said Geoffrey urgently. He was feeling unnaturally exhilarated, and obsessed by a primitive desire to escape from the scene of the disturbance. Footsteps clattered up the steps towards them. The lift-girl apocalyptically threw open the doors of the lift, announced, as one ushering in the day of judgement: ‘Sports, children’s, books, ladies’ – shrieked out at the chaos confronting her, and closed the doors again, whence she and her passengers peered out like anxious rabbits awaiting the arrival of green-stuffs. The accidental touch of a button sent the lift shooting earthwards again; from it rapidly diminishing sounds of altercation could be heard.

Geoffrey and the pink young man ran for the stairs.

On their way down, they met a shop-walker and two assistants, pounding grimly upwards.

‘There’s a lunatic up there trying to break up the stock,’ said the young man with a sudden blood-curdling intensity which, by contrast with his normal tones, sounded horrifyingly convincing. ‘Go and see what you can do – I’m off to fetch the police.’

The shop-walker snatched Geoffrey’s gun, which he was still brandishing, and leaped on upwards. Geoffrey engaged in feeble protests.

‘Don’t hang about,’ said the young man, tugging at his sleeve.

They continued their precipitate downward rush to the street.

‘Well, and what was all that about?’ asked the young man, leaning back in his corner of the taxi and stretching out his legs.

Geoffrey deferred replying for a moment. He was engaged in a minute scrutiny of the driver, though obscurely conscious of not knowing what he expected this activity to reveal. No chances must be taken, however; the encounter in the shop indicated that much. He transferred his suspicion to the young man, and prepared to make searching inquiries as to his trustworthiness. It suddenly struck him, however, that this might well appear ungracious, as it certainly would have done.

‘I hardly know,’ he said lamely.

The young man appeared pleased. ‘Then we must go into the matter from the beginning,’ he announced. ‘He nearly got you, you know. Can’t have that sort of thing.’ He proffered his determination to uphold the law a trifle inanely. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Paddington,’ said Geoffrey, and added hastily: ‘That is to say – I mean – possibly.’ The conversation was not going well, and his brief feeling of exhilaration had vanished.

‘I know what it is,’ said the young man. ‘You don’t trust me. And quite right, too. A man in your position oughtn’t to trust anyone. Still, I’m all right, you know; saved you getting a lump on your head the size of an Easter egg.’ He wiped his brow and loosened his collar. ‘My name’s Fielding – Henry Fielding.’

Geoffrey embarked without enthusiasm on a second-rate witticism. ‘Not the author of Tom Jones, I suppose?’ He regretted it the moment it was out.

‘Tom Jones? Never heard of it. A book, is it? Don’t get much time for reading. And you?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I mean, I introduced myself, so I thought you—’

‘Oh, yes, of course, Geoffrey Vintner. And I must thank you for acting as promptly as you did; heaven knows what would have happened to me if you hadn’t interfered.’

‘So do I.’

‘What do you mean – Oh, I see. But it occurs to me now, you know, that we really ought to have stayed and seen the police. It’s all very well dashing off like a couple of schoolboys who’ve been robbing an orchard, but there are certain proprieties to be observed.’ Geoffrey became suddenly bored with this line of thought. ‘Anyway, I had to catch a train.’

‘And our friend,’ said Fielding, ‘was presumably trying to stop you. Which brings us back to the question of what it’s all about.’ He wiped his brow again.

Geoffrey, however, was distracted, idly musing on a Passacaglia and Fugue commissioned from him for the New Year. It had not been going well in any case, and the interruption of his present mission seemed unlikely to prosper it. But not even prospective oblivion will prevent a composer from brooding despondently and maddeningly on his own works. Geoffrey embarked on a mental performance: Ta-ta; ta-ta-ta-ti-ta-ti…

‘I wonder,’ Fielding added, ‘if they’ve anticipated the failure of the first attack, and provided a second line of defence.’

This unexpected confusion of military metaphors shook Geoffrey. The spectral caterwaulings were abruptly stilled. ‘I believe you said that to frighten me,’ he said.

‘Tell me what’s going on. If I’m an enemy, I know already—’

‘I didn’t say—’

‘And if I’m not, I may be able to help.’

So in the end Geoffrey told him. As precise information it amounted to very little.

‘I don’t see that helps much,’ Fielding objected when he had finished. He examined the telegram and letter. ‘And who is this Fen person, anyway?’

‘Professor of English at Oxford. We were up together. I haven’t seen much of him since, though I happened to hear he was going to be in Tolnbridge during the long vac. Why he should send for me—’ Geoffrey made a gesture of humorous resignation, and upset the butterfly-net, which was poised precariously in a transverse position across the interior of the cab. With some acrimony they jerked it into place again.

‘I can’t think,’ said Geoffrey, after contemplating for a moment finishing his previous sentence and deciding against it, ‘why Fen insisted on my bringing that thing.’

‘Rather odd, surely? Is he a collector?’

‘One never quite knows with Fen. In anyone else, though – well, yes, I suppose it would seem odd.’

‘He seems to know something about this Brooks business.’

‘Well, he’s there, of course. And then,’ Geoffrey added as a laborious afterthought, ‘he’s a detective, in a way.’

Fielding looked disconcerted; he had evidently been reserving this rôle for himself and disliked the thought of competition. A little peevishly he asked:

‘Not an official detective, surely?’

‘No, no, amateur. But he’s been very successful.’

‘Gervase Fen – I don’t seem to have heard of him,’ said Fielding. Then after a moment’s thought: ‘What a silly name. Is he in with the police?’ His tone suggested Fen’s complicity in some orgiastic and disgraceful organization.

‘I honestly don’t know. It’s only what I’ve heard.’

‘I wonder if you’d mind my coming with you to Tolnbridge? I’m sick of the store. And with the war on, it seems so remote from anything—’

‘Couldn’t you join up?’

‘No, they won’t have me. I volunteered last November, but they graded me four, I joined the ARP, of course, and I’m thinking of going in for this new LDV racket, but blast it all—’

‘You look healthy enough,’ said Geoffrey.

‘So I am. Nothing wrong with me except shaky eyesight. They don’t grade you four for that, do they?’

‘No. Perhaps,’ Geoffrey suggested encouragingly, ‘you’re suffering from some hidden, fatal disease you haven’t known about.’

Fielding ignored this. ‘I want to do something active about this war – something romantic.’ He mopped his brow again, looking the reverse of romantic. ‘I tried to join the Secret Service, but it was no good. You can’t join the Secret Service in this country. Not just like that.’ And he slapped his hands together to indicate some platonic idea of facility.

Geoffrey considered. In view of what had happened it would almost certainly be very useful to have Fielding with him on his journey, and there was no reason to suspect him of ulterior motive.

‘…After all, war hasn’t become so mechanized that solitary, individual daring no longer matters,’ Fielding was saying; he seemed transported to some Valhalla of Secret Service agents. ‘You’ll laugh at me, of course’ – Geoffrey smiled a hasty and unconvincing negative – ‘but in the long run it is the people who dream of being men of action who are men of action. Admittedly Don Quixote made a fool of himself with the windmills, but when all’s said and done, there probably were giants about.’ He sighed gently as the taxi turned into the Marylebone Road.

‘I should very much like to have you with me,’ said Geoffrey. ‘But look here – what about your job? One must have money.’

‘That’ll be all right. I have some money of my own.’ Fielding assembled his features into a perfunctory expression of surprise. ‘Oh, I ought perhaps to have mentioned it. Debrett, Who’s Who, and such publications, credit me with an earldom.’

Geoffrey summoned up a cheerful laugh, but there was something in Fielding’s assurance which forbade him to utter it.

‘Only very minor, of course,’ the other hastened to explain. ‘And I’ve never done a thing to deserve it, I inherited it.’

‘Then what on earth,’ said Geoffrey, ‘were you doing in that shop?’

‘Store,’ Fielding corrected him solemnly. ‘Well, I heard there was a shortage of people to serve in shops, owing to call-up and so on, so I thought that might be one way I could help. Only temporarily, of course,’ he added warily. ‘Just as a joke,’ he ended feebly.

Geoffrey suppressed his merriment with difficulty.

Fielding suddenly chuckled.

‘I suppose it is rather preposterous, when you come to think of it. By the way’ – a sudden thought struck him – ‘are you Geoffrey Vintner, the composer?’

‘Only very minor, of course.’

They surveyed one another properly for the first time, and found the result pleasing. The taxi clattered into the murk of Paddington. A sudden noise disturbed them.

‘Well, I’m damned,’ said Fielding. ‘The bloody net’s fallen down again.’

2
Do not Travel for Pleasure

A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of

pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal where there is no love.

BACON

After the dim, barn-like vastness of Waterloo, Paddington appeared like an infernal pit. Here there was not the order, the strict division and segregation of mechanical and human which prevailed at the larger station. Inextricably, engines and passengers seethed and milled together, the barriers provided for their separation seeming no more than the inconvenient erections of an obstacle-race. The crowds, turgid, stormy, and densely-packed, appeared more likely to clamber on to the backs of the trains, like children piling on to a donkey at the seaside, than merely to board them in the normal way. The locomotives panted and groaned like expiring hedgehogs prematurely over-run by hordes of predatory ants; any attempt at departure, one felt, must infallibly crush and dissipate these insects in their thousands – it would be impossible for them to disentangle themselves from the buffers and connecting-rods in time.

Amongst the crowds the heat banished comfort, but stimulated the itch to uneasy and purposeless movement. Certain main streams, between the bars, the platform, the ticket-offices, the lavatories, and the main entrances, were perhaps discernible; but they had only the conventional boundaries of currents on a map – they overflowed their banks amongst the merely impassive, who stood at the angles of their confluence in attitudes of melancholy or despair. Observed from ground level, this mass of humanity exhibited, in its efforts to move hither and thither, surprising divergences from the horizontal; people pressed forward to their destinations leaning forward at a dangerous, angle, or, peering round the bodies of those in front of them, presented the appearance of criminals half-decapitated. A great many troops, bearing ponderous white cylinders apparently filled with lead, elbowed their way apologetically about, or sat on kit-bags and allowed themselves to be buffeted from all angles. Railway officials controlled the scene with the uneasy authority of schoolmasters trying to extort courteous recognition from their pupils after term had ended.

‘Good God,’ said Geoffrey as he struggled forward, carrying a suitcase with which he made periodic involuntary assaults on the knees of the passers-by, ‘are we even going to get on this train?’

Fielding, still inappropriately dressed in the morning clothes belonging to his recent occupation, merely grunted; the temperature seemed to overcome him. When they had progressed, clawing and pushing, another two yards, he said:

‘What time is it supposed to go?’

‘Not for three-quarters of an hour yet.’ The relevant part of the sentence was drowned in a sudden demoniac outburst of hooting and whistling. He repeated it at the top of his voice. ‘Three-quarters of an hour,’ he bellowed.

Fielding nodded, and then, surprisingly, vanished, with a shouted explanation of which the only word audible was ‘clothes’. A little bemused, Geoffrey laboured to the ticket-office. The tickets occupied him for some twenty minutes, but in any case the train seemed likely to depart late. He waved his bag in optimistic query at a porter, passing on some nameless, leisurely errand, and was ignored.

Then he went, reflecting a little sadly on the miseries which our indulgences cause us, to get a drink.

The refreshment-room was decorated with gilt and marble; their inappropriate splendours cast a singular gloom over the proceedings. By the forethought of those responsible for getting people on to trains the clock had been put ten minutes fast, a device which led to frequent panics of departure among those who were under the impression that it showed the right time. They were immediately reassured by others, whose watches were slow. Upon discovery of the real hour, a second and more substantial panic occurred. Years of the Defence of the Realm Act had conditioned the British public to remain in bars until the latest possible moment.

Geoffrey deposited his bag by a pillar (someone immediately fell over it), and elbowed his way to the bar, which he clutched with the determination of a shipwrecked sailor who has reached a friendly shore. The sirens lurking behind it, with comparative freedom of movement, were engaged in friendly discourse with regular customers. A barrage of imperative glances and despairing cries for attention failed, for the most part, to move them. Some brandished coins in the hope that this display of affluence and good faith would jerk these figures into motion. Geoffrey found himself next to a dwarfish commercial traveller, who was treating one of the barmaids to a long, rambling fantasy about the disadvantages of early marriage, as freely exemplified by himself and many friends and relations. By pushing him malignantly out of the way, Geoffrey managed eventually to get a drink.

Fielding reappeared as inexplicably as he had gone, dressed in a sports coat and flannels and carrying a suitcase. He explained rather breathlessly that he had been back to his flat, and demanded beer. The ritual of entreaty was again enacted. ‘Travelling,’ said Fielding with deep feeling.

‘I hope we don’t have to get in with any babies,’ said Geoffrey gloomily. ‘If they don’t shriek out and crawl all over me, they’re invariably sick.’

There were babies – one, at least – but the first-class compartment containing it was the only one with two seats vacant – one of them, on to which Geoffrey at once hurled a mass of impedimenta in token of ownership, an outside corner. He then applied himself to getting Fen’s butterfly-net on to the rack, assisted by Fielding, and watched with interest by the other occupants of the compartment. It was just too long. Geoffrey regarded it with hatred: it was growing, in his eyes, into a monstrous symbol of the inconvenience, shame, and absurdity of his preposterous errand.

‘Try standing it up against the window,’ said the man sitting in the corner opposite Geoffrey’s. His plumpness and pinkness outdid Fielding’s. Geoffrey felt, regarding him, like a man who while brandishing an Amati is suddenly confronted with a Strad.

They put this scheme into practice; whenever anyone moved his feet the net fell down again.

‘What a thing to bring on a train,’ said the woman with the baby, sotto voce.

It was eventually decided to lay the net transversely across the carriage, from one rack to the other. The whole compartment rose – not with any enthusiasm, since it was so hot – to do justice to this idea. A woman seated in one of the other corners, with a face white and pock-marked like a plucked chicken’s breast, complainingly shifted her luggage to make room. Then she sat down again and insulated herself unnecessarily against the surrounding humanity with a rug, which made Geoffrey hot even to look at. With a great deal of obscure mutual encouragement and admonition, such as ‘Up she goes’ and ‘Steady, now’, Geoffrey, Fielding, the fat man, and a young clergyman who occupied the remaining corner hoisted the net into position. The baby, hitherto quiescent, awoke and embarked upon a running commentary of snorts and shrieks; it grunted like the pig-baby in Alice, until they expected it to be metamorphosed before their eyes. The mother jogged it ruthlessly up and down, and glared malignantly at the progenitors of the disturbance. People searching for seats peered into the compartment and attempted to assess the number of people engaged in this hullabaloo. One went so far as to open the door and ask if there was any room, but he was ignored, and soon went away again.

‘Disgraceful!’ said the woman with the baby. She bumped it up and down even more furiously than before, and cooed at it, adding to its noises with her own.

The net was by now secured at either end, and more or less conveniently placed, except that anyone rising incautiously or coming into the compartment was liable to bang his head on it. Geoffrey profusely thanked his assistants, who sat down again looking hot but pleased. He turned back to transfer the remainder of his belongings from the seat on to the rack. They were now topped by a letter not his own, but plainly addressed to him. The paper and typing looked uncomfortably familiar. He opened it and read:

There’s still time to get off the train. We have our setbacks, but we can’t go on failing indefinitely.

Ignoring Fielding’s curious glance, he put it thoughtfully in his pocket and heaved the remainder of his things out of the way. In the confusion of a moment before, anyone in the compartment could have dropped that note, and for that matter – since the window was wide open – anyone could have flicked it in from outside. He tried to remember the dispositions of the various persons in the compartment, and failed. He sat down feeling somewhat alarmed.

‘Another?’ said Fielding; he raised his right eyebrow in elaborate query.

Geoffrey nodded dumbly and handed him the note.

He whistled with noisy astonishment as he read it. ‘But who—?’

Geoffrey shook his head, still refusing to utter a sound. He hoped to convey by this means his suspicion of one of the occupants of the compartment. Any open discussion of the matter might, he obscurely felt, convey information of value to the enemy. The others were eyeing unenthusiastically this gnomic interchange.

But Fielding was for the moment oblivious of such innuendoes.

‘Quick work,’ he said. ‘They must have had a second line of defence ready in case the business in the store failed. Simply a matter of phoning someone here while we were on our way. They’re certainly taking no chances.’

‘I wish you’d remember,’ said Geoffrey a trifle peevishly, ‘that I’m the object of all this. It’s no pleasure to me to have you sitting there gloating over the excellence of their arrangements.’

No notice was taken of this. ‘And that means,’ Fielding continued impassively, ‘that the typewriter they used is somewhere in this neighbourhood – damn it, no it doesn’t, though. The wording of that second note is so vague it could easily have been got ready beforehand.’ The failure of his calculation threw him into a profound despondency; he stared dejectedly at his feet.

Geoffrey meanwhile was carrying out an inventory of the other persons in the compartment. The man opposite, who had been so helpful over Fen’s butterfly-net, had a well-to-do professional air. Geoffrey was inclined to put him down as a doctor, or a prosperous broker. His face was amiable, with that underlying shyness and melancholy which seems always to be beneath the surface in fat men; he had sparse straight hair, pale grey eyes with heavy lids like thick shutters of flesh, and very long lashes, like a girl’s. The material of his suit was expensive, and it was competently tailored. He held a thick black book, one of the four volumes, Geoffrey observed with surprise, of Pareto’s monumental The Mind and Society. Did doctors or brokers read such things on railway journeys? Covertly, he regarded his vis-à-vis with renewed interest.

Next door was the woman with the baby. Repeated jogging had now shaken the infant into a state of bemused incomprehension, and it emitted only faint and isolated shrieks. By compensation, it had begun to dribble. Its mother, a small woman vaguely and unanalysably slatternly in appearance, periodically wiped a grubby handkerchief with great force and determination across its face, so that its head almost fell off backwards; while not occupied in this way, she gazed at her companions with great dislike. Probably, Geoffrey reflected, she could be omitted from the list of suspects. The same could not be said for the clergyman sitting in the corner on her right, however. It was true that he looked reedy, young, and ineffectual, but these were too much the characteristics of the stage curate not to be at once suspicious. He was glancing occasionally, with anxious inquiry, at the woman with the rug. She, meanwhile, was engaged in that unnerving examination of the other persons in the compartment which most people seem to regard as necessary at the beginning of a long railway journey. Eventually, feeling apparently that this had now been brought to the point where embarrassment was likely to become active discomfort, she said to the clergyman, looking sternly at a small wrist-watch:

‘What time do we get into Tolnbridge?’

This query aroused some interest in other quarters. Both Geoffrey and Fielding started slightly, with well-drilled uniformity, and shot swift glances at the speaker, while in the Pareto-addict opposite Geoffrey some stirrings of attention were also discernible. All things considered, it was not very surprising that someone else in the compartment should be going to Tolnbridge, even though compared with Taunton and Exeter it was an unimportant stop; but Geoffrey at all events was too alarmed and uneasy to make such a simple deduction.

The clergyman seemed at a loss for an answer. He looked helplessly about him and said:

‘I’m afraid I’m not sure, Mrs Garbin. I could perhaps find out—?’ He half-rose from his seat. The man opposite Geoffrey leaned forward.

‘Five-forty-three,’ he said with decision. ‘But I’m afraid we’re likely to lose time on the way.’ He took a gold watch from his waistcoat pocket. ‘We’re ten minutes late in starting already.’

The woman with the rug nodded briskly. ‘In wartime we must resign ourselves to that sort of thing,’ she said, her tone loaded with stoic resignation. ‘You are getting off there yourself?’ she asked after a moment.

The fat man bowed his head. The reluctant and self- conscious democracy of the railway compartment was set into creaking motion. ‘Have you far to go?’ he inquired of Geoffrey.

Geoffrey started. ‘I am going to Tolnbridge, too,’ he replied a trifle stiffly. ‘The trains are almost always late nowadays,’ he added, feeling his previous remark to be by itself an insufficient contribution to the general entertainment.

‘Inevitably,’ said the clergyman, contributing his mite. ‘We are fortunate in being able to travel at all.’ He turned to the woman with the baby. ‘Have you a long journey, madam? It must be very tiring travelling with a child.’

‘I’m going further west than the rest of you,’ said the mother. ‘Much further west,’ she added. Her tone expressed a determination to remain in her seat as far west as possible, even if the train should be driven over Land’s End and into the sea.

‘Such a good boy,’ said the clergyman, gazing at the child with distaste. It spat ferociously at him.

‘Now, Sally, you mustn’t do that to the gentleman,’ said the mother. She glowered at him with unconcealed malevolence. He smiled unhappily. The fat man returned to his book. Fielding sat morose and silent, scanning an evening paper.

It was at this moment, amidst a shrieking of whistles which advertised immediate departure, that the irruption occurred. A man appeared in the corridor outside, carrying a heavy portmanteau, and peered through the window, bobbing up and down like a marionette in order to see what lay within. He then thrust the door aside and stepped aggressively over the threshold. He wore a shiny black suit with a bedraggled carnation in the buttonhole, bright brown shoes, a pearl tie-pin, a dirty grey trilby hat, and a lemon-coloured handkerchief in his breast-pocket; his hands were nicotine-stained and his nails filthy; his complexion was sanguine, almost apoplectic, and he wiped his nose on the back of his hand as he trampled in over the clergyman’s feet, hauling his case like a reluctant dog after him. It swung forward and struck the woman with the rug a resounding blow on the knee.

‘No room!’ she said as if at a signal. A confused murmur of admonition and discouragement went up in support of this remark. The man stared aggrievedly about him.

‘Wadjer mean, no room?’ he said loudly. ‘Djer think I’m goin-ta stand aht in the bloody corridor the ’ole journey? Because if yer do, yer bloody well wrong, see?’ He warmed to his theme. ‘Just because yer travelling bloody first-clarse, yer needn’t think yer got a right to occupy the ’ole train, see? People like me aren’t goin’ ter stand the ’ole way just so you plutocrats can stretch yer legs in comfort, see?’ He became indignant. ‘I paid for a seat same as you ’ave, ’aven’t I? ’Ere’ – he shot out a finger towards the fat man, who jumped visibly with fright. ‘You put that there arm up, an’ we’ll all ’ave a chance ter sit down, see?’ The fat man hastily put the arm up, and the intruder, with expressions of noisy satisfaction, inserted himself into the gap thus created between the fat man and the mother and child.

‘You mind your language when there are ladies present!’ said the mother indignantly. The baby began to bellow again. ‘There – see what you’ve done to the child!’

The intruder ignored her. He produced a Mirror and Herald, and, after slapping the former down on his knee, opened the latter at full spread, so that his elbows waved within an inch of the noses of those on either side. The woman with the rug, after her first sortie, had recognized defeat in the monotonous stream of blasphemy and become silent. Geoffrey, Fielding, and the clergyman, afflicted by a bourgeois terror of offending this unruly manifestation of the lower classes, sat impotent and disapproving. Only the mother, who maintained her intransigence with scornful glances, and the fat man, whose position was more desperate, still showed resistance.

‘I suppose,’ said the fat man, abandoning his Pareto, ‘that you’ve got a first-class ticket?’

A deathly silence followed this question. The intruder jerked himself slowly up from his paper, like a pugilist who has been unfairly smitten in the belly and is gathering forces ponderously together for retaliation. The others looked on aghast. Even the fat man quailed, unnerved by the ominous delay in answering his query.

‘What’s it got ter do with you?’ asked the intruder at last, slapping his Herald shut. A dramatic hush ensued. ‘Not the bloody ticket-collector, are yer?’ The fat man remained dumb. ‘Just ’cos I ain’t as rich and idle as you, ain’t I got a right ter sit in comfort, eh?’

‘Comfort!’ said the woman with the baby meaningly.

The intruder ignored her, continuing to apostrophize the fat man. ‘Snob, aren’t yer? Too ’igh-and-mighty to ’ave the likes o’ me in the same compartment with yer, are yer? Let me tell you’ – he tapped the fat man abruptly on the waistcoat – ‘one o’ ther things we’re fightin’ this war for is ter get rid o’ the likes o’ you, an’ give the likes er me a chance to spread ourselves a bit.’

He spread himself, illustratively, kicking Fielding on the shin in the process. The baby wailed like a banshee. ‘Caliban,’ said the mother.

‘Nonsense!’ the fat man protested feebly. ‘That’s got nothing to do with whether you’ve got a first-class ticket or not.’

The intruder twisted himself bodily round and thrust his face into that of the fat man. ‘Oh, it ain’t, ain’t it?’ He began to speak very rapidly. ‘When we get socialism, see, which is what we’re fighting for, see, you and yer like’ll ’ave ter show some respect ter me, see, instead of treating me like a lot o’ dirt, see?’ Finding this line of thought exhausted, he transferred his attention to the fat man’s book, removing it, despite faint protests, from his hands. He then inspected it slowly and with care, as a surgeon might some peculiarly loathsome cancer after removal.

‘What’s this?’ he said. ‘Vilfreedo Pareeto,’ he announced to the compartment at large. ‘Ther Mind and Society,’ he read. ‘Oo’s that – some bloody Wop, is it? ’Ere, you,’ he addressed Geoffrey. ‘You ever ’eard of ’im – Vilfreedo Pareeto?’

The fat man looked at Geoffrey appealingly. Treacherously and mendaciously, Geoffrey shook his head. Worlds would not have induced him to admit acquaintance with that sociologist.

The intruder nodded triumphantly, and turned to Fielding. ‘What abaht you?’ he said, waving the volume. ‘You ever ’eard of this?’ As treacherously, but with more truth, Fielding denied it. The fat man turned pale. So solemn were the proceedings, he might have been awaiting sentence from the Inquisition, the only two witnesses for the defence having been suborned against him.

The intruder breathed heavily with satisfaction. Portentously he turned the pages of the book. ‘Listen ter this,’ he commanded. ‘“The principal nu-cle-us in a de-riv-a-tive (a non- log-ico-ex-per-i-ment-al the-ory) is a res-i-due, or a number of res-i-dues, and around it other sec-ond-ar-y res-i-dues cluster.” Does that make sense, I arst yer? Does that make sense?’ He glared at Geoffrey, who feebly shook his head. ‘Sec-ond-ar-y res-i-dues,’ repeated the intruder with scorn. ‘Lot o’ nonsense, if yer arst me. ’Ere’ – he turned back to the fat man again, hurling the book on to his knee – ‘you oughter ’ave something better ter do with yer time than read ’ighbrow books by Wops. And if yer ’aven’t, see, you just mind yer own business, see, and don’t go poking yer nose into other people’s affairs, see?’

He turned back aggressively to the other occupants of the compartment. ‘Anybody got any objection ter my sitting ’ere, first-class or no?’

So successful had been the process of intimidation that no one uttered a sound.

Presently the train started.

All afternoon the train rattled and jolted through the English countryside, towards the red clay of Devon and the slow, immense surge of the Atlantic against the Cornish shore. Geoffrey dozed, gazed automatically out of the window, thought about his fugue, or meditated with growing dismay on the events of the day. The possibility – almost, he decided, the certainty – that he had an enemy within a foot or two of him made Fielding’s company very welcome. Of the why and wherefore of the whole business he thought but briefly; strictly there was nothing to think about. The occurrences which had followed his arriving down to breakfast that morning, in a perfectly normal and peaceable manner, seemed a nightmare phantasmagoria devoid of reason. Almost, he began to wonder if they had taken place at all. The human mind properly assimilates only those things it has become accustomed to; anything out-of-the-way affects it only in a purely superficial and objective sense. Geoffrey contemplated the attack on himself without a shred of real belief.

Fielding and the woman with the rug slept, shaking and jolting like inanimate beings as the train clattered over points. The young clergyman gazed vacantly into the corridor, and the mother rocked her baby, which had fallen into a fitful slumber, beset in all probability with nightmares. The intruder also had gone to sleep, and was snoring, his chin resting painfully on his tie-pin. The fat man eyed Geoffrey warily, and put down the Daily Mirror, which had been forced on him in a spirit of scornful condescension by the intruder, and which he had been reading unhappily ever since the train left Paddington. He grinned conspiratorially.

‘Devil of a journey,’ he said.

Geoffrey grinned back. ‘I’m afraid you’re worse off than I am. But it’s bad enough in any case.’

The fat man appeared to be considering deeply. When he again spoke, it was with some hesitation. ‘You, sir, are obviously an educated man – I wonder if you can help me out of a difficulty?’

Geoffrey looked at him in surprise. ‘If I can.’

‘An intellectual difficulty merely,’ said the fat man hastily. He seemed to think Geoffrey would imagine he was trying to borrow money. ‘However, I ought to introduce myself first. My name is Peace – Justinian Peace.’

‘Delighted to know you,’ said Geoffrey, and murmured his own name.

‘Ah, the composer,’ said Peace amiably. ‘This is a great pleasure. Well now, Mr Vintner – my whole problem can be summed up in three words: I have doubts.’

‘Good heavens,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Not like Mr Prendergast?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘In Decline and Fall.’

‘I’m afraid I’ve never read Gibbon,’ said the other. The admission appeared to irritate him in some obscure way. ‘The fact is that by profession I’m a psycho-analyst – quite a successful one, I suppose; successful certainly as far as money goes. The amount of money,’ he said confidentially, ‘which some people will pay for information which they could get from three hours’ intelligent reading in any public library…However’ – he became conscious that he was getting off the point – ‘there it is. I suppose in London I’m pretty well at the top of my profession. You may think we’re all charlatans, of course – a lot of people do’ – Geoffrey hurriedly shook his head – ‘but as far as I’m concerned, at least, I have tried to go about the business methodically and scientifically, and to do the best for my patients. Well, then—’ He paused and mopped his brow to emphasize the fact that he was now coming to the crux of the matter; Geoffrey nodded encouragingly.

‘As you know, the whole of modern psychology – and psycho-analysis in particular – is based on the idea of the unconscious; the conception that there is a section of the mind in some sense separate from the conscious mind, and which is responsible for our dreams, certain of our impulses, and all the complex manifestations of the irrational in human life.’ His phraseology, Geoffrey thought, was taking on the aspect of a popular text-book. ‘From this concept all the conclusions of analytical psychology are derived. Unfortunately, about a month ago it occurred to me to investigate the origins and rationale of this basic conception. A terrible thing happened, Mr Vintner.’ He leaned forward and tapped Geoffrey impressively on the knee. ‘I could not find one shred of experimental or rational proof that the unconscious existed at all.’

He sat back again; it was evident that he regarded this statement as in some sense a personal triumph.

‘The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that in fact it didn’t exist. We know, after all, nothing at all about the conscious mind, so why postulate, quite arbitrarily, an unconscious, to explain anything we can’t understand? It’s as if,’ he added with some vague recollection of wartime cooking, ‘a man were to say he was eating a mixture of butter and margarine when he had never in his life tasted either.’

Geoffrey regarded Peace with a jaundiced eye. ‘Interesting,’ he muttered. ‘Very interesting,’ he repeated beneath his breath, like a physician who has diagnosed some obscure and offensive complaint. ‘One accepted it, of course, as a thing no longer requiring any investigation, like the movement of the earth round the sun. But I don’t quite see…’

‘But you must see!’ Peace interrupted excitedly. ‘It strikes at the root of my profession, my occupation, my income, my life.’ His voice rose to a squeak. ‘I can’t go on being a psychoanalyst when I don’t believe in the unconscious any longer. It’s as impossible as a vegetarian butcher.’

Geoffrey sighed; his look conveyed that he, at least, could see no way out of the impasse. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘the matter isn’t as serious as all that.’

Peace shook his head. ‘It is, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘And when you come to think of it, isn’t psycho-analysis silly? Anything can mean anything, you know. It’s like that series of sums in which whatever number you start with the answer is always twenty-one.’

‘Well,’ said Geoffrey, ‘couldn’t you start a system of psychoanalysis based only on the conscious mind?’

The other brightened; then his face fell again. ‘I suppose one might,’ he said, ‘but I don’t quite see how it’s possible. Still, I’ll think about it. Thank you for the suggestion.’ He became very despondent; Geoffrey hastened to change the subject.

‘Have you ever been to Tolnbridge before?’

‘Never,’ Peace replied; he seemed to regard this admission of deficiency as the very acme of his troubles. ‘It’s very beautiful, I believe. Are you proposing to stay long?’

Geoffrey, for no very sound reason, became suddenly suspicious. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said.

‘My brother-in-law,’ said Peace didactically, ‘is Precentor at the cathedral there, and I’m going to see my sister – the first time in several years. I confess I’m not looking forward to it. I don’t get on with the clergy’ – he lowered his voice, glancing furtively at its representative in the far corner. ‘I find they regard one as a sort of modern witch-doctor – quite rightly, I suppose,’ he concluded miserably, remembering his doubts.

Geoffrey’s interest was aroused. ‘As it happens,’ he said, ‘I’m going to stay at the clergy-house myself, so we shall probably be seeing something of one another. I shall be playing the services, for a while at all events.’

Peace nodded. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘that organist fellow was knocked out, of course. My sister told me over the phone this morning. Said she wasn’t surprised – fellow drinks like a fish, apparently. I suppose it would have been my brother-in-law who asked you to come down?’

‘It should have been, by rights. Actually it was a friend of mine, Gervase Fen, who’s staying at the clergy-house at the moment. Presumably he was authorized.’ Knowing Fen, Geoffrey was suddenly seized by a horrible doubt. But plainly the Enemy considered him to be authorized, or they wouldn’t be wasting their time on him.

‘Gervase Fen,’ said Peace meditatively. ‘I seem to know the name.’

‘A detective of sorts.’

‘I see – investigating the attack on this fellow Brooks, I suppose. And it was he who sent for you to act as deputy? Extraordinary the things the police take on themselves nowadays.’

‘Not an official detective – amateur.’

‘Oh.’

‘So you’re really just holidaying, then?’

‘Not entirely. I have to see my brother-in-law about…’ Peace suddenly checked himself. ‘A matter of business. Nothing important.’ Geoffrey did not fail to notice the alteration in his tone; and he seemed to think he had said too much in any case, for he leaned back and automatically took up the Daily Mirror again. Geoffrey felt he had been dismissed. There was one more question he wanted to ask, however.

‘Did you by any chance happen to see me pick up a letter from my seat shortly after I came into the compartment?’ he said.

Peace looked at him curiously for a moment. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘As it happens, I did. Nothing alarming, I hope.’

‘No, nothing alarming. You didn’t notice how it got there, I suppose?’

The other paused for some moments before replying. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said at last. ‘No, I’m afraid I didn’t notice at all.’

Geoffrey found himself being pursued with a butterfly-net across the Devon moors. The persons of his pursuers were vague, but they moved with great rapidity. He was not surprised to find Peace running beside him. ‘It is necessary,’ he said to Peace, ‘that we should run the unconscious to ground wherever it may be. We can hide there, and besides, I strongly suspect that Gervase Fen will be somewhere in that neighbourhood too.’ His companion made no reply – he was too much occupied with the baby he was carrying. When they reached the cathedral, the pursuers were a good deal closer, and they ran at full speed to the altar, shouting: ‘Sanctuary! We demand sanctuary!’ They were stopped beneath the rood-screen by a young clergyman. ‘We can’t go on failing indefinitely,’ he said. ‘It is impossible for us to go on failing indefinitely.’ The pursuers were by now very near. Peace dropped the baby. It screamed, and then began to whistle shrilly, like a railway engine. The noise grew in volume, like the swift approach of a tornado…

The engine of a train passing in the opposite direction swept past the compartment, its whistle at full blast, as Geoffrey struggled back to consciousness. Without moving, he opened his eyes and looked about him. Peace slumbered in the opposite comer, the paper dropped from his hands; the intruder still snored; the mother was whispering softly to the baby, which moaned and struggled spasmodically. Fielding sat reading a book – he seemed curiously isolated and strange. Geoffrey felt that if he spoke to him he would turn without recognition in his face, a stranger merely. The clergyman and the woman with the rug were talking together in low tones, their words inaudible above the incessant, monotonous beating of the wheels. Geoffrey sat and stared, first at a disagreeable photograph of Salisbury Cathedral, and then at the ‘Instructions to Passengers in the Event of an Air Raid’, which had been annotated by some passenger with overmuch time on his hands:

DRAW ALL BLINDS AS A PRECAUTION AGAINST – nosey bastards.

DO NOT LEAVE THE CARRIAGE UNLESS REQUESTED BY A – hot bit.

He blinked sleepily about him, and tried to stop thinking about the heat.

The sirens wailed as the train began braking on the stretch into Taunton. All along the coast, the fierce merciless battle against the invading bombers began. The intruder awoke from his long sleep and gazed blearily out of the window. His hasty movements of departure came as a welcome diversion. He got to his feet, scowled round him, and reached up to the rack above Geoffrey’s head, where his heavy portmanteau lay. It was, of course, not entirely surprising, in view of its weight, that he should have let it slip, and if it had fallen directly on to Geoffrey’s head as he leaned forward to talk to Fielding, the consequences would have been serious. Fortunately, Fielding saw it coming, and pushed Geoffrey against the back of the seat with all his force. The portmanteau landed with a sickening thud on his knees.

A confused clamour arose. The agent of this disturbance did not, however, wait to make his apologies, but was out of the compartment and on to Taunton platform before the train had come to a stop. Geoffrey sat doubled up with agony, nursing his thighs; but happily the human thigh-bone is a solid object, and Peace showed himself a fairly expert doctor. As to a pursuit, that was out of the question. By the time order was restored, the train was in any case on the move again.

‘He might have broken your neck!’ said the woman with the baby indignantly.

‘So he might,’ said Geoffrey painfully. Feeling very sick, he turned to Fielding. ‘Thanks – for the second time today.’

Peace had unlocked the case, and was gazing with bewilderment at the medley of old iron it contained. ‘No wonder it was so heavy,’ he said. ‘But what on earth…?’ Abruptly he decided that this was not the time for investigation. ‘You’d better do some walking before stiffness sets in,’ he told Geoffrey. ‘You’ll find it’ll hurt, of course, but it’s really the best thing.’

Geoffrey crawled to his feet, banged his head against the butterfly-net, and cursed noisily; this, he felt, was the last straw.

‘I’ll go and get a wash,’ he said. ‘One gets so filthy on these journeys.’ Actually he was afraid he was going to be sick.

‘Better let me come with you,’ said Fielding, but Geoffrey brushed him impatiently aside; he was consumed by a hatred of all mankind. ‘I’ll be all right,’ he mumbled.

He swayed down the corridor like a drunk on the deck of a storm-tossed ship. The lavatory, when he reached it, was occupied, but just as he was passing on to the next a young man came out, grinned apologetically, and stood aside to let him in. Geoffrey was contemplating his features gloomily in the mirror preparatory to turning round and locking the door when he realized that the young man had followed him in and was doing this for him.

The young man smiled. ‘Now we’re shut in together,’ he said.

‘Third time lucky,’ said Fielding cheerfully.

Geoffrey groaned, and again shook himself free of a nightmare. He was back in the compartment, whose occupants were regarding him with some concern; even the baby gaped inquiringly at him, as though demanding an explanation.

‘What happened?’ Geoffrey asked conventionally.

‘I got the wind up when you didn’t come back,’ said Fielding, ‘and set out to find you. Fortunately, it wasn’t very difficult, and we were able to lug you back here. How do you feel?’

‘Awful.’

‘You’ll be all right,’ said Peace. ‘The blow must have upset you.

‘I should damn well think it did,’ said Geoffrey indignantly. ‘Where are we?’

‘Just coming into Tolnbridge now.’

Geoffrey groaned again. ‘Past Exeter? He must have got off the train there.’

‘My dear fellow, are you all right? He got off the train at Taunton.’

Geoffrey gazed confusedly about him. ‘No, no – the other. Oh, Lord!’ His head was swimming too much to think clearly. He rubbed it ruefully, feeling it all over. ‘Where’s the bruise?’ he asked. ‘There must be a bruise.’

Peace, who was collecting his things from the rack, looked round in surprise.

‘Where he hit me,’ explained Geoffrey peevishly.

‘My dear chap, nobody hit you,’ said Peace amicably. ‘You must be dreaming. You fainted, that’s all. Fainted.’

3
Gibbering Corse

And then the furiously gibbering corse

Shakes, panglessly convulsed, and sightless stares.

PATMORE

Tolnbridge stands on the river after which it is named about four miles above the sandy, treacherous estuary which flows into the English Channel. Up to Hanoverian times it was a port of some significance; but the growth in the size of shipping, together with the progressive silting-up of the river mouth, which is now penetrated only by a fairly narrow channel, pretty rapidly took from it that eminence, and it has fallen back into its pristine status of a small and rather inconvenient market-town for the farm products of that area of South Devon. There is still a fishing industry and (before the war at least) some holidaying, but the bulk of its prosperity has been transferred to Tolnmouth, a little to the east of the estuary, which as a summer resort is second only to Torquay on the Devon coast. Nor is Tolnbridge of much value from the military or naval point of view; it had received a certain amount of sporadic and spiteful attention from the bombers, but the main part of the attack was concentrated further up the coast, and it suffered little damage.

The cathedral was built during the reign of Edward II, when Tolnbridge was enjoying an unexampled prosperity as the staple port for the wines of Bordeaux and Spain; in style it comes, historically, somewhere about the time of the transition from Early English to Decorated; but few traces of the later method are to be found in it, and it is one of the last, as well as one of the finest, examples of that superb artistry which produced Salisbury Cathedral and many lovely parish churches. Comparatively, it is a small building; but it stands in the centre of the town in a position of such eminence that it appears larger than is really the case. The river bank rises to a natural plateau, about a quarter of a mile back, on which the older part of the town is built. Behind this again there is a long and steeply-sloping hill, at the very summit of which the cathedral stands – the hill itself devoid of buildings, except for the clergy-house at the south-western end. So, from the town, there is a magnificent vista up this long slope, planted with cypress, mountain-ash, and larches, to the grey buttresses and slender, tapering spire which overhang the river. The effect would be overpowering were it not for the two smaller churches in the town below, whose spires, lifted in noble, unsuccessful emulation of their greater companion above, a little restore the balance and relieve the eye. Behind the cathedral, the hill slopes more gently down again to the newer part of the town, with the railway station and the paint factory, whose houses stream down on the northern side to join the old town and peter out to the south in a series of expensive and widely-spaced villas overlooking the estuary.

It is perhaps surprising that Tolnbridge did not share the fate of Crediton and succumb to the See of Exeter. But Exeter’s diocese was large enough already, and Tolnbridge was suffered to remain a cathedral town. About seventy years after the erection of the cathedral, a tallow-maker of the town called Ephraim Pentyre, a miser and a notorious usurer, but a man who gave much money to the Church on the understanding that it should reserve him a front seat at the celestial entertainment, set out by the coast road on a pilgrimage to Canterbury (where he might, had he ever reached it, have encountered Chaucer’s pilgrims in person). So niggardly was he, however, that he refused to take servants for his protection, with the consequence that beyond Weymouth he was set upon, murdered, and incontinently robbed of his offering to the shrine of St Thomas. This incompetence and stinginess earned him his canonization, for his bones were returned to Tolnbridge and buried with much ceremony in the cathedral where their miracles of healing attracted pilgrims from all over the country, Edward III himself visiting the shrine in order to be cured of scurvy (his own legendary abilities in that direction having apparently failed); with what success it is not known. This was the heyday of Tolnbridge’s prosperity, none the less welcomed by the inhabitants because they remembered St Ephraim with dislike, or because worse and blacker crimes than usury had been commonly laid to his account.

After that there was a slow but steady decline. Tolnbridge was too isolated to play any part in the great political and ecclesiastical disturbances which spasmodically racked the country up to the end of the eighteenth century, though upon occasion little symbolic wars were fought out on these issues among the townspeople, only too often with violence and atrocities. The transition from Mariolatry to Protestantism was made without fuss, the more so, as some said, because the old religion was allowed to persist and become vile in secret and abominable rituals. Some emphasis was given to these suggestions by a frenetic outburst of witch trials in the early seventeenth century, and by the equally frenetic outburst of witchcraft and devil-worship which provoked them, and in which several clergy of the diocese were disgracefully involved. It is doubtful, indeed, if there was ever such a concentrated, vehement, and (by the standards of the day) well-justified persecution in the history of Europe; there were daily burnings on the cathedral hill, and, that curious feature of most witch trials, free confessions, given without torture, by some hundreds of women that they had had intercourse with the Devil and participated in the Black Mass. After a few years the commotion died down, as these things will, and left nothing behind but the blackened circle cut into the hillside and the iron post to which the women had been tied for burning. There were no further disturbances in Tolnbridge, of any kind; and by 1939 the town seemed to have settled down into a state of permanent inanition.

So at least Geoffrey maintained, in more forcible words, on his failing to get a taxi at the station. What he is actually recorded to have said is ‘What a damned hole!’

Now this was unjust, and Fielding, looking down past the cathedral at the roofs of the old town and the estuary beyond, felt it to be so. However, it was obviously not the time for argument. Geoffrey was smarting not only with physical pain (this had by now considerably abated), but also with a considerable mental irritation. There are limits beyond which human patience must not be tried; after a certain point, the crossword puzzle or cryptogram or riddle ceases to amuse and begins to infuriate. This point, in the present affair, Geoffrey had long since passed, and his last escape, far from leaving him pleased, maddened him with its pointlessness.

‘What I cannot understand,’ he said for the tenth time, ‘is why, when they had me exactly where they wanted me, without a chance to resist or cry out, they didn’t bang me on the head and shove me overboard.’

Fielding regarded gloomily an aged porter who was prodding tentatively at a trunk in the hope, apparently, of provoking it to spontaneous movement. ‘Perhaps they were interrupted,’ was all he said.

‘You can’t be interrupted when you’re locked in a lavatory.’

‘Perhaps they found you were the wrong person and sheered off.’

‘The wrong person!’

Fielding sighed. ‘No, it’s not likely. Their organization seems very good,’ he added with a sort of melancholy satisfaction. ‘Unless you imagined all that.’

‘Imagined it,’ said Geoffrey, nettled. ‘Of course I didn’t.’

‘He wasn’t just asking you the time?’

‘The time! You don’t follow people into lavatories and bolt the door simply in order to ask them the time,’

Fielding sighed again; he breathed out lengthily and noisily. The discussion, he thought, could not profitably be continued. ‘Is it far?’ he asked.

‘Yes; very far,’ said Geoffrey, annoyed at being thus crudely unseated from his hobby-horse; he thought, too, that he perceived the animal being led away. But something else had occurred to Fielding, for he turned abruptly and said:

‘Those letters.’

Geoffrey looked at him in silence for a moment, and then searched his pockets. The letters were gone.

‘Very thorough,’ said Fielding drily. ‘When they found you were coming here despite their warnings, they decided you shouldn’t have any clue to the machine they were typed on.’

‘So that was it. Damn. But it still doesn’t explain why I wasn’t knocked out.’

‘When you’re organizing a thing like this, you can’t give your agents a free hand to do whatever emergency dictates. Besides, this fellow may not even have known what was going on. I expect he was told simply to get the letters from you, and when you fainted there was no need to use violence.’ Fielding whistled gently. ‘They’re fairly thorough.’

The heat had grown somewhat less. Peace had made off, presumably towards the Precentor’s house, in another direction. The woman with the rug and the young clergyman had long since disappeared. Looking at his watch, Geoffrey found that the train had got in only seven minutes late. He and Fielding started off down the station hill, Fielding carrying both bags, and Geoffrey the inescapable butterfly-net. On their right stood the cathedral, serenely beautiful. The great rose window in the south transept glowed momently at them with a rich, red beauty, and the gulls wheeled and screamed about the slender octagonal spire.

The medley of tobacconists and second-rate pubs huddled round the station soon gave place to a rather dreary street of small villas; and this in turn to the squalid, beautiful houses of the old town. A little beyond the boundary of these two worlds they turned off to the right, and shortly arrived at the wrought-iron gates of the clergy-house, which had been built in the eighteenth century to replace the old clergy-house adjoining the north transept; this being now used for storing lumber, holding choir-practices, and other miscellaneous and untidy purposes. The gates, suspended on either side from pillars of soft, lemon-coloured stone, opened upon a depressing vista of shrubs and lawns, bisected by an overgrown gravel drive which curved round to the front-door, skirted the house, and led out beyond the extensive kitchen-gardens on to the cathedral hill itself. Geoffrey entered these regions with circumspection, peering intently at a withered laurel as though he expected it to contain springs, nets, and lime for his discomfort.

In this realm of celibacy, the first thing they heard was a girl’s voice. ‘Josephine!’ it called; then with more force, and a tinge of irritation: ‘Come back!’

There was a sound of running footsteps, and a young girl, plainly the object of these cries, came panting round the side of the house. She could not have been more than fifteen, and she was long, thin, and trembling, with curls of bright gold, tangled and disordered. Her face was red, not only with effort, but also with perceptible anger. She stopped short on seeing the strangers, and after staring at them for a moment, darted off into the shrubbery at one side, whence the diminishing rustle of innumerable graceless plants marked her retreat.

They toiled towards the portico, a little shaken by this welcome, and suspecting, with some dismay, a domestic upheaval. They had not gone more than a few steps before the owner of the voice they had heard appeared also, in unenergetic pursuit. And this at least, Geoffrey thought, was not what one expected to find on cathedral precincts – a girl of about twenty-three, as dark as the other had been blonde, with blue, humorous eyes, a tip-tilted nose, red lips, and a slim, loose-limbed body. Her dress, though rich and sober enough, and her high heels gave, Geoffrey thought, a faint suggestion of the courtesan. Not that he objected to this. Having little experience of women, he classified them, a priori as it were, as either amateur prostitutes or domestic helps, and anyone not fitting snugly into one of these categories left him confused, suspicious, and uncomprehending (this masculine failing is commoner than perhaps women imagine). Certainly in this case a touch of the hetaera, the Lais or Phryne, was present; but there was also a practicality, self-possession, and intelligence which softened and diffused the impression.

Fundamentally, Geoffrey was afraid of women. His endeavours to categorize those he had met as either courtesan or domestic had led to dismal misunderstandings, since he had never known anyone remotely resembling either kind. He also laboured, as a result of reading books, under the delusion that every unmarried woman he met was hunting, with all the tricks and subterfuges of her deadly and mysterious sex, for a husband, and congratulated himself inwardly upon hair-raising escapes from several women who in point of fact had never even considered marrying him, and who had merely used him as a convenient temporary paramour and offered him the honourable courtesy of the sex, a good-night kiss at the end of an evening enjoyed at his expense. Beyond the age of thirty, he had gradually shunned acquaintance with these puzzling beings. Consequently, he approached this new example of the species with a trepidation accentuated by her obvious charm.

‘Damn the child!’ she said, and gave up the pursuit.

‘Has she been naughty?’ said Fielding simply. He asked the question with the ease and authority of one too essentially courteous to need the formal preliminaries of acquaintance.

The girl met him, with equal ease, on his own ground. ‘Do you think children should be spanked?’ she said. ‘Girls of that age, that is? I know I was – but Josephine’s such a proud, headstrong brat she takes it hard.’

‘I think you should avoid it if possible,’ said Fielding with unnecessary seriousness.

The girl laughed – a low, gurgling, infectious chuckle. ‘I see – you think it was me. No, I haven’t got to the stage of walloping children yet. Father did it – and I must say I hardly blame him. Would you believe it, Josephine tore up and burnt the whole of the manuscript of the book he was working on?’ An almost imperceptible chill came into the atmosphere. There are acts of petulance and ill-temper, and there are acts of deliberate malice. Geoffrey changed the subject with painfully obvious intent.

‘We ought to introduce ourselves,’ he said. ‘This is the Earl of – the Earl of – What are you the Earl of?’

‘It’s not of the least importance,’ said Fielding. He had put down the bags and was despairingly towelling his face and neck with an immense white silk handkerchief. ‘Don’t misunderstand me – if I thought that either of you would resent my being an earl, I should give you the full details immediately. But we might just as well say Henry Fielding, and be done with it.’

‘Not,’ the girl said, ‘the author of—?’

Geoffrey interrupted in some haste. ‘And I’m Geoffrey Vintner,’ he said. He made the assertion despondently, as though he scarcely expected anyone to credit it.

‘How nice,’ said the girl with business-like conviction. ‘We often do your Communion Service here. I’m Frances Butler.’

‘Good. So now we all know each other,’ said Fielding. He paused and gazed expectantly at Geoffrey.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Geoffrey. ‘We are looking for Fen – Gervase Fen.’

‘I thought you were,’ said the girl, gazing pointedly at the butterfly-net, which he still brandished like a banner in front of him, ‘because of that.’

Geoffrey regarded her gloomily for a moment. ‘Insects?’ he ventured at last.

She nodded gravely.

‘He’s out at the moment, and I don’t know when he’ll be back again. I gather he’s going to make some experiment tonight with moths, but we told him he couldn’t do it here, because poor little Dutton, the Deputy Organist, is terrified of them at the best of times; and as it’s got something to do with males flying hundreds of miles to get at a female in a darkened room, we thought that a clergy-house was an unsuitable place for such demonstrations. Besides, in the unlikely event of its succeeding, we couldn’t possibly have the place full of moths. So I believe he’s going to do it somewhere else.’

Geoffrey sighed. ‘How characteristic!’ he said. ‘He asks me to come down here, and then at the crucial moment disappears into the blue. I suppose he didn’t mention my arrival?’

‘Not a word.’

‘No.’ Geoffrey sighed; the burden of Atlas seemed to be upon him. ‘No, I might have expected that.’

‘Were you going to stay here?’ asked the girl.

‘Well, I imagined so. But I can’t possibly push myself in if you’re unprepared.’

‘I could manage one of you,’ said the girl dubiously, ‘but not both, by any possible means. There just isn’t a bed.’

‘I can find somewhere in the town to stay,’ said Fielding.

‘You’d better go to the Whale and Coffin,’ said the girl.

‘It sounds terrible.’

‘It is terrible, but there’s nowhere any better. Look, Mr Vintner, leave your bags in the porch. Someone will take them in later, I dare say. And would you like a wash?’

‘What I really want,’ said Geoffrey, ‘is a drink. Several drinks.’

‘All right. We’ll all go down to the Whale and Coffin. It is after six, isn’t it? Then we can talk about things.’

‘I don’t want to drag you away…’

‘Away from what? Don’t be so silly. Come on, both of you. It’s only three minutes from here.’

Geoffrey had nearly arrived before he realized he was still carrying the butterfly-net. He cursed it inwardly, murmuring under his breath.

‘Have a good, rousing swear,’ said the girl. ‘You’ll feel better.’

The Whale and Coffin turned out to be a large, low, rambling building of indefinite date situated in the middle of the old town. It was provided with innumerable bars, labelled variously: Bar, Saloon, Lounge Bar, Public Bar, Private Bar, and so on; these departments being ineffectually presided over by a small shortsighted, elderly man who hurried constantly from one to another, less with any hope of being useful, one felt, than because it had become a habit and he couldn’t stop it. He peered astigmatically at Geoffrey as he ordered drinks.

‘Stranger?’ he said. ‘Not been here before?’

‘No,’ said Geoffrey shortly. He refused to be kept from his beer by well-meaning chatter.

‘I think you’ll like it,’ said the other without particular confidence. ‘It’s a good local brew and we get a nice crowd here.’ From his accent it was evident that he was not a Devon man. ‘Strange name for a pub, isn’t it?’

‘Very.’

‘You’d imagine there’d be some story connected with a name like that, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘There isn’t, though. Someone just thought it up one day.’

Geoffrey looked at him with contempt and moved shakily back to the others, carrying drinks. They had settled in a remote alcove. Frances Butler crossed her legs, smoothed out her skirt with automatic propriety, and said:

‘You needn’t have worried – Harry never talks to anyone for more than a minute at a time. I’ve watched him.’

‘Do you come here often?’ asked Fielding.

‘Oh, so-so. I don’t haunt the place, if that’s what you mean. But it’s the nearest pub to the clergy-house.’

‘I thought,’ said Fielding vaguely, ‘you might have found a lot of silly prejudice about going to pubs at all – your father being Precentor, and so on.’

‘Can’t help that,’ said Frances, and grinned. ‘I expect there is some, but they think I’m a tart as it is. Going to pubs doesn’t affect matters much. And Daddy doesn’t seem to mind – that’s the chief thing. He brought me up terribly strictly till I was eighteen, but since then he’s just given me a lot of money and let me do what I like. Poor old Meg – the housekeeper at the clergy-house – got ill, and one can’t get servants for love or money nowadays, so I gave up living with Daddy and went to housekeep there. I don’t think the men like it very much, though. Each of them’s afraid the others will think he’s got designs on me. You’ve no idea the way they keep clear of my room, and the rumpus they make when they’re going to the bathroom.’

She laughed, and drank pink gin with a theatrical air of wickedness. It occurred to Geoffrey that she probably got an innocent, childish enjoyment out of pretending to be wicked. He greatly doubted, at all events, if she actually was. But he realized that with his present knowledge of her an adequate assessment of her merits and demerits was out of the question. Certainly she was attractive – very attractive, he suddenly felt. And he sighed, recognizing the enormity of his inexperience in love.

‘Tired?’ she asked.

‘No. Just content.’ It was not, he reflected, entirely a lie, at that. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘that I’ve been attacked three times today?’

She laughed. ‘Attacked? What on earth do you mean?’

‘One man tried to knock me on the head in a shop’ – ‘Store,’ said Fielding automatically – ‘another tried to drop a suitcase full of iron on my head, and another locked me in a lavatory on the train. That is to say—’ Geoffrey struggled for a more suitable form of words. Put like that, it didn’t sound nearly as serious as in fact it had been. ‘There were anonymous letters, too,’ he concluded lamely.

‘But how awful,’ said the girl. ‘No – what a stupid thing to say. I mean’ – she gestured helplessly – ‘well, why?’

‘I don’t know. That’s just the point. But I think it’s got something to do with the attack on Brooks here.’

Frances put down her drink rather suddenly. The movement was a slight one, and in itself unimportant, but it brought a curious unease to the atmosphere. There was a long pause before she said:

‘Do you mean that?’ Her voice was suddenly very quiet.

‘That’s all I can think. If it hadn’t been for Fielding, I might now be dead – almost certainly should be, in fact.’

When Frances took up her glass again, her hand was a fraction unsteady. But her voice was calm as she asked:

‘Was Dr Brooks a friend of yours?’ The question seemed to have a greater urgency, a greater importance, than common sense would allow. Geoffrey shook his head.

‘I only knew him slightly – a professional acquaintance.’ He hesitated. ‘You said “was”—’

She laughed again, but there was no humour in it. ‘No, he’s not dead, if that’s what you mean. I –’ She seemed abruptly to make up her mind about something; with intended deliberateness and ostentation the subject was changed. ‘And Daddy asked you to come down here and play the services in his place?’

Geoffrey acquiesced, repressing an almost irrepressible curiosity. ‘Well, no, not exactly. That is to say, I suppose he knew about it. Actually it was Fen who wired me to come.’ He became uncomfortable. ‘If I’m not wanted, it doesn’t matter. I’m glad of the break, and I shall like to see Fen again…’ He stopped, conscious that the words were meaningless.

The girl’s tone was lighter now.’ Oh, I’m sure you’re wanted – I don’t know who else would have played, if you hadn’t turned up.’

‘I was wondering – surely there’s a deputy? In fact, you mentioned one.’

‘Little Dutton – yes. But he’s in the middle of a nervous breakdown. The silly boy overworked himself, trying to get God knows what stupid musical degree. The doctor won’t let him go near an organ at the moment.’

Geoffrey nodded portentously. ‘That explains it,’ he said. In fact, he reflected, it explained very little. Frances had as good as refused to talk about the attack on Brooks – and, confound it, he ought to know the facts if anyone ought. He was summoning up courage to reopen the subject when the landlord hurried past, peering intently at a huge pocket-watch supplied with a magnifying-glass which raised the hands and the figures on the dial to grotesque dimensions. When he was almost out of the door he paused and came back to them.

‘Didn’t recognize you at first, Miss Butler,’ he said. He clipped his words with the nervousness of the very shortsighted. ‘How’s Dr Brooks getting on? Any improvement?’

‘I haven’t heard this evening.’ Frances spoke shortly. ‘Harry, you don’t know if Professor Fen’s in here this evening?’

‘What, that tall, mad fellow?’ There was something like awe in the landlord’s voice. ‘He might be in one of the other bars. I’ll look. But I don’t think so.’

‘If you see him, you might tell him I’m in here. And a friend of his, Mr Vintner.’

The landlord’s reaction to this last piece of news was unexpected. He took a step back and began breathing very quickly. ‘Geoffrey Vintner!’ he exclaimed.

‘Really, Harry. What on earth’s the matter with you? You look as if you’d seen a ghost.’

The landlord hurriedly pulled himself together. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Didn’t quite catch the name. Thought you were referring to a friend of mine, who – who’s dead.’ He stood wavering in front of them for a moment, and then made a little too rapidly for the door.

‘Well, I’m damned!’ said Frances in frank surprise.

‘If it hadn’t been for Fielding, I should have been dead, too,’ said Geoffrey aggrievedly. ‘Who is that man, anyway?’

‘Harry James?’ said Frances. ‘Don’t know anything about him, really. He’s had this pub for about five years – came from up north, I believe. Staunch Presbyterian. Leading light in the local Conservative Club. In fact’ – a thought seemed suddenly to strike her – ‘just the sort of respectable anonymity you’d expect from—’ She checked herself, and added humorously: ‘From what?’

Geoffrey nodded gloomily. ‘Precisely. From what?’

‘I suppose,’ said Fielding mournfully, ‘that beer you’re drinking is all right?’

Geoffrey jumped visibly. It occurred to him that he was not, perhaps, feeling very well. ‘Don’t be absurd,’ he said testily. ‘People don’t go putting poison in people’s beer. Or if they do,’ he added with rising indignation, ‘it’s no use worrying about it until it happens, or we shall all go raving mad and have to be put away.’ He relapsed into sulks. ‘I shall keep an eye on Mr James,’ he mumbled, and then, with sudden irritation: ‘And where the hell is Fen? Really, it’s too bad of him not to be here when I arrive.’ He brooded on his wrongs, cherishing them individually.

‘I don’t quite understand,’ said Fielding cautiously, ‘about these’ – he waved a hand, evoking a myriad phantom butterflies – ‘insects.’

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Geoffrey replied, ‘because you don’t know Fen. My better self persuades me that he’s a normal, sensible, extremely healthy-minded person, but there are times when I wonder if he isn’t a bit cracked. Of course, everyone has these obsessions about some transient hobby or other, but Fen’s personality is so’ – he hesitated over words – ‘large and overwhelming, that when he gets bitten it seems like a cosmic upheaval. Everything’s affected for miles around.’

Frances chuckled. ‘It began,’ she said, ‘when he found a simply gigantic grasshopper on the clergy-house lawn. I must say I’ve never seen anything quite so vast. He put it in a deep cardboard box and brought it in to dinner that night to show us. The Bishop was dining.’ She gurgled, enchanted by the imminent and foreseeable climax. ‘When he took off the lid, poor Dutton nearly fainted. Then he poked at the wretched thing until we were all ready to scream. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s biologically impossible for it to get out.” The first leap landed it in the Bishop’s soup. I’ve never seen a man so pale. Finally it ended up in the hearth, where the dog ate it. “Nature red in tooth and claw,” said the Bishop (we gave him a new plate of soup, but he wasn’t happy about it). “There,” said Fen, “a perfect specimen, and it’s gone. You can stop their noise,” he said, “by pricking them with a pin.” We said we shouldn’t be surprised.’

Fielding rocked with silent laughter. Even Geoffrey giggled absurdly. ‘But I thought,’ he remarked, ‘that Fen was busy investigating this business about Brooks. He…’

The girl got up suddenly. In a moment, as it seemed, the laughter was gone. Just so might a child intent on play run out of her own front door into a garden never seen before, and better not seen. Just so might a man turn with a casual remark to a friend in a darkened train, and see a dead mask. Frances took two short steps and turned. When she spoke, her voice was not as it had been.

‘Sooner or later,’ she said, ‘you’ll have to know. It may as well be now.’ She seemed struggling for utterance. ‘It was kept from the papers, but they would never have printed it in any case. It was – after a choir-practice. Dr Brooks went back to the cathedral for something. They found him next morning, not unconscious, though there was a bruise on his head.’ She stopped, and for a moment covered her face with her hand. ‘Devilry…You’ll think I’m mad, but I’m not. Everything isn’t well here. Things happen that can’t be explained. You – you must –’ She was violently agitated.

Fielding half rose. ‘Look here, Miss Butler –’

But she brushed him aside, and went on speaking more rapidly than before. ‘I’m all right. Thank God it isn’t me. They took him to the hospital – in secrecy. He’s had moments of sanity, but they haven’t been many. He was locked in, and the key was lying outside – they found it on the grass. An empty cathedral isn’t a good place to be in all night. Ever since they brought him away he’s talked and babbled and raved – about the slab of a tomb that moved, and a hanging man.’

4
Teeth of Traps

They were in one of many mouths of Hell

Not seen of seers in visions; only felt

As teeth of traps…

OWEN

The clergy-house drawing-room was a large one, shabby but comfortable, well-lighted, and decorated, not with Pre- Raphaelite Madonnas, but with caricatures by Spy of ecclesiastical dignitaries long dead and awaiting transfiguration, together with one original Rowlandson etching tucked away in a corner. This represented two obese clerics, one throwing bread contemptuously to an equally contemptuous rabble, the other surreptitiously embracing a large and simpering wench, very décolletée; a cathedral which was recognizably Tolnbridge stood in the background. A few scattered books showed tastes not far removed from the worldly: fiction by Huxley, Isherwood, and Katherine Mansfield; plays by Bridie and Congreve; and, in another but still noble sphere, John Dickson Carr, Nicholas Blake, Margery Allingham, and Gladys Mitchell. The cathedral clergy are great readers – they have little else to do.

Geoffrey and Frances had left Fielding at the Whale and Coffin to unpack and were sitting together, talking a little restrainedly. Now they were alone, Geoffrey felt even more attracted by her, and she quieted his bachelor’s misgivings (which she may have suspected) by an almost timorous reserve. The evening sunlight lay green and gold on the broad lawn outside the French windows, glistening on the thickly-clustered yellow roses and the shaggy chrysanthemum blooms. A faint scent of verbena drifted in from a plant which clung to the grey wall outside.

It appeared that since Brooks’ arrival at the hospital little more had been heard of him. The nature and cause of his insanity were still unknown, except perhaps by the doctors who attended him, and no friends had been allowed to see him. Of near relatives he had only a brother, with whom he had been on the worst possible terms. This brother had been summoned by telegram, but had not appeared, and indeed it seemed doubtful whether he would have been the slightest help to anyone if he had. This much Frances knew, and no more.

There was still no sign of Fen.

Geoffrey asked who would be at dinner that night.

‘Well, Daddy’s coming over,’ said Frances. ‘And then there’ll be Canon Garbin and Canon Spitshuker, and little Dutton, of course – the sub-organist. Oh, and Sir John Dallow’s dropping in for coffee – there’s to be some sort of meeting afterwards. Have you heard of him? He’s the big noise on witchcraft in this country.’

Geoffrey shook his head. ‘Is Canon Garbin married?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘There was a Mrs Garbin in the compartment we travelled down in. With a young clergyman.’

‘Oh, that was probably July Savernake. Come to think of it, he did say he’d be back today. I expect he’ll be at dinner too.’

‘What about him?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, what sort of person is he?’

She hesitated. ‘Well…he’s Vicar at Maverley, about twelve miles from here. Got the living almost as soon as he was ordained.’ Geoffrey sensed a deliberate reservation behind the recital of facts, and wondered what its cause might be. ‘He spends half the year buying expensive books and wine and playing the curé bon viveur, and the other half having to economize, and playing the “poore persoun”. A see-saw sort of existence.’ Frances laughed apologetically. ‘That doesn’t tell you much, I’m afraid. But you’ll be meeting him, anyway.’

Fielding came in, and Frances left to supervise the final preparations for dinner. ‘Hideous little room I’ve got,’ said Fielding mournfully as he fell into a chair, ‘but it will do. How are you feeling?’

‘A bit nightmarish.’

‘It is rather like that. Do you know, I’ve been wondering if those attacks on you weren’t bogus from beginning to end – designed to conceal the reason for something else. Probably the attack on Brooks. All those preposterous warnings! That would bring you into the limelight all right – which is just what they wanted. I suppose they didn’t care whether you were killed or just injured. Whoever it is, and whatever they’re after, it seems they can afford to waste lives like water.’

Geoffrey lit a cigarette and sucked at it without pleasure. ‘It sounds plausible, but there might be some other explanation.’

‘There’s only one way of testing it out,’ said Fielding emphatically, ‘and that is by keeping quiet about it. If we once let out that we’ve rumbled it, they’ll abandon the whole business. But if they think it’s taking people in, they’ll probably try something else – try to kill you again, for example.’

Geoffrey sat up in annoyance. ‘A nice thing,’ he exclaimed bitterly, ‘asking me to keep quiet about a beastly theory, so as to encourage somebody to murder me. It’s undoubtedly someone here, by the way. The postmark on that letter was Tolnbridge, and it must have been someone connected with the cathedral to know I’d been sent for…’

He broke off. Footsteps were approaching outside, accompanied by two voices raised in argument, the one shrill and voluble; the other deep and laconic. A touch of acerbity and resentment was audible beneath the tropes of polite discussion.

‘…But my dear Spitshuker, you apparently fail to realize that by taking the universalist view you are, in effect, denying the reality of man’s freedom to choose between good and evil. If we are all to go to heaven anyway, then that choice has no validity. It’s as if one were to say that a guest at a tea-party has freedom to choose between muffins and crumpets when only crumpets are provided.’

‘I hardly think, Garbin, that you have grasped the essential point in all this, if you will forgive my saying so. You would concede, of course, that the Divinity is a god of Love?’

‘Of course, of course. But you haven’t answered –’

‘Well, then. That being so, His aim must be the perfection of every one of His Creation. You will agree that even in the case of the greatest saint, perfection is impossible of attainment in the three-score years and ten which we have at our disposal. I am inclined, therefore, to believe that there must be an intermediate state, a purgatory –’

The door swung open, and Canon Spitshuker came into the room, closely followed by Canon Garbin. Canon Spitshuker was a little, plump, excitable man, with swan-white hair and a pink face. By contrast, Canon Garbin was tall, dark, morose, and normally laconic; he walked soberly, with his large, bony hands plunged deep into his coat pockets, while the other danced and gestured about him like a poodle accompanying a St Bernard. Their juxtaposition as canons of the same cathedral was a luckless one, since Canon Spitshuker was by long conviction a Tractarian, while Canon Garbin was a Low Churchman; furious altercations were constantly in progress between them on points of doctrine and ritual, never resolved. Unlike parallel lines, it was inconceivable that their views should ever meet, even at infinity.

The unexpected presence of Geoffrey and Fielding cut short Canon Spitshuker’s oration. He spluttered for a moment like a faulty petrol-engine, then recovered himself, dashed forward, and wrung Geoffrey by the hand.

‘How do you do?’ he said. ‘I’m Spitshuker, and this’ – he pointed at the other, who stood regarding the scene with a faint but unmistakable disgust – ‘is my colleague, Dr Garbin.’

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