A Man Over Forty (34 page)

‘I've already told you—'

‘No, no. There's a stiffer reason than that. And my belief – it's always been my belief – is that the Commander murdered her, and bribed you to keep your mouth shut, if you suspected anything.'

‘Why should he want to murder her?'

‘She left £22,000 and that fine house in Eton Terrace. And he got it all.'

‘But how,' asked Palladis, ‘could he murder her when she was in Edinburgh and he was fishing on Lock Leven?'

‘She was a diabetic,' said Ricci, ‘and had to take a big dose of insulin every day. I know, because the insulin came from
our shop, and my father was a friend of old Dr Ogilvie – he must have been near eighty – who was her doctor. Well, then, what happened was this: Mrs Balintore, or Mrs Patch as she had become, had her proper supply of insulin when the Commander went away. You get insulin, if you need it, in wee bottles with a thin rubber top, and when you want to give yourself a dose you poke a syringe through the rubber, suck up the dose, and shoot it into your arm. It's easy enough, anyone can do it.'

‘I still don't see—'

‘Just a minute,' said Ricci. ‘Now another thing that's easy to do is to take a syringe, and empty three or four of those wee bottles, and then – still using the syringe – refill them with water from the tap. Then you go off to Loch Leven, and your wife gives herself a dose, not of insulin, but plain water. What happens then? She begins to feel ill. Miserable and drowsy and ill. So she gives herself another dose, and that does no good either. She tries again, with a bigger dose, and maybe the following day, when she's really ill, and worse than she thinks, she rings old Dr Ogilvie, and tells him she can't understand what's wrong with her, for she's taken twice or three times her ordinary doses, and it's done her no good at all.

‘Well, by the time Dr Ogilvie goes round to see her, she's in a coma, and from what she's told him he concludes she's in insulin coma, due to over-dosing. So what does he do? He injects a solution of sugar, and the poor lady – who's had no insulin at all – dies in diabetic coma. And no one has any reason to suspect foul play.'

‘So it was the doctor who killed her,' said Balintore.

‘Put it that way if you like. But the man to blame was him who emptied the wee bottles and filled them with plain water.'

‘But did that happen?' asked Palladis. ‘You don't know, do you? You're only guessing.'

‘The day before he went to Loch Leven the Commander came into the shop and bought a new syringe. And when he came home and found his wife dead, he gave Ned a valuable stamp-collection. Well, why? To keep his mouth shut.'

‘No,' said Balintore. ‘I didn't like the man, but he wasn't a murderer, and you mustn't blacken his name. All that you've
said is true, but it wasn't Commander Patch who filled the bottles with water.'

‘How do you know that?'

‘Because that's what I did. And now I'm going on deck for a breath of fresh air. It's very stuffy down here.'

When They followed him, perhaps ten minutes later, he had gone. Somewhere down below the crew were sound asleep, and the deck was empty.

‘I heard a splash,' said Myrtle. ‘I'm sure I did!'

‘I heard nothing.'

‘The dinghy's alongside,' said Palladis. ‘We can look for him.'

‘There!' cried Myrtle. ‘There!'

She pointed to something which she alone could see in the darkness, and kicked off her slippers. She stood on the low rail and went overboard in a long, shallow dive. She was wearing only a shirt and narrow trousers, and her long legs thrashed the dark sea, that now a fresh breeze ruffled, to a diamond of dancing phosphorescence.

Ricci and Palladis got into the dinghy and rowed after her. They found her, some forty yards away, supporting Balintore, who was unconscious.

‘He was on his face,' she said, ‘but he's still alive.'

They pulled him in over the stern of the dinghy, and went back to the caique; whose skipper and engineer were now awake and on deck. Balintore was lifted on board. They laid him down with a folded coat under his chest, and Ricci, kneeling astride of him, pushed against his lower ribs and rocked to and fro. Balintore vomited sea-water, and within a few minutes regained consciousness. He muttered something which could not be heard. Then, more loudly, repeated, ‘I fell. I fell and hit my head.' There was, indeed, a bruise on his right temple.

They took him down to his cabin, undressed him, and put
him to bed. He said again, ‘I fell. When I went on deck the cooler air made me dizzy. Perhaps I had drunk too much. It wasn't suicide.'

‘Are you all right now?' asked Palladis.

‘Give me some brandy and I shall be.'

Myrtle had taken off her wet clothes and put on a dressing-gown. ‘I'll sit with him till he goes to sleep,' she said.

Ricci and Palladis went on deck again, and Ricci asked, ‘Do you think he was telling the truth?'

‘It's hard to say.'

‘If it was suicide, or attempted suicide, then I'm to blame.'

‘That's going too far. Much too far.'

‘It was me that made him tell the truth about his mother's death. Though she wasn't his mother; it's bad enough, but no so bad as that.'

‘Had it never occurred to you that he might have killed her?'

‘Never! As I saw it, the guilty man was the Commander, and proof of that was the stamp-album.'

‘But surely you spoke about it? When you were boys together in that ship?'

‘Never,' said Ricci again. ‘At the age of sixteen, which was our age, there's a sort of reluctance – or is a sort of delicacy? – that disappears as we get older. A delicacy about our parents, or the older members of the family. We don't think too much about what goes on in their minds; or in their bedrooms either. Would you call that delicacy, or tact? Or maybe a natural prudence?'

‘A mixture of all three.'

‘Well, whatever it is, it kept me from asking questions, and after we'd flogged the album Ned never spoke of it again. Nor of the Commander. Never a word till now. And what made him tell the truth after all these years?'

‘Honesty,' said Palladis. ‘At the very root of his mind there's a respect for honesty. He couldn't sit quiet and let you blacken the Commander's name: those were his own words. Well, give him credit for that.'

‘I'm not blaming him! To my mind she deserved what she got. But I blame myself, for what I've done – though I did it
in all innocence – has finally exposed him. To you and me, and Myrtle too.'

‘And to himself,' said Palladis.

‘Do you mean that he'd put it out of his mind?'

‘Out of his conscious mind, certainly. I've known him intimately for over four years, and he had a remarkable faculty for putting everything out of his mind that he didn't want to keep in it. But this, of course, was a more absolute expulsion – a much more serious and deliberate expulsion – than forgetting small, unpleasant things. In the ordinary way his memory worked like a healthy metabolism: it got rid of what it couldn't assimilate.'

‘As a boy,' said Ricci, ‘he was damned clever. The cleverest boy at school. But he wouldna work, and he didna take kindly to discipline. He used to say, “I know what I want, and some day I'll get it. And get it on my own terms. I believe in my destiny.” And when I began to read stories in the newspapers about the appearance of a new personality in Britain – a man called Balintore – I just said to myself, “You were the first to hear of him. Long years ago in Edinburgh he told you this would happen.'

‘From the beginning of this year,' said Palladis, ‘he hasn't been following his destiny, but running away from it. He's been looking for sanctuary.'

Myrtle came on deck to say that Balintore was sleeping soundly, and she thought it safe to leave him.

Ricci said, ‘An hour ago I was beginning to feel sleepy, but now I'm wide awake again.'

‘So am I,' said Palladis.

‘We'll give ourselves a small drink, and you'll tell me what's been happening these last six months.'

He went down with Myrtle, kissed her good-night, and came on deck again with glasses, a bottle of whisky, and a siphon of soda water.

For an hour they walked to and fro in the starlit darkness – the breeze freshening, falling away, and freshening again – and Palladis told the tale of their wanderings, from London to Jamaica, to New York and London again, to Ireland and at last to Greece. ‘And from the beginning,' he said, ‘though in
the beginning it wasn't quite explicit – or perhaps I didn't recognize it as quickly as I should have done – his motive, his purpose, was to find sanctuary. I knew he was running away from something, but I thought the mere act of flight would exhaust the impulse. I thought he was running from some temporary fear – he had made a fool of himself in public, with gross publicity: perhaps he was in flight from that image of collapse – or some haphazard memory that had prompted it: a trivial, passing fear. But after a few weeks, after the healthy exercise of flight, I thought he would go back to London and back to work, like any ordinary convalescent after a month in Switzerland. It's only lately that I've begun to realize his fear is permanent, and his flight will be permanent unless he finds sanctuary.'

‘And where will he find that?' asked Ricci.

‘Not in himself.'

They decided it was time to go to bed, and slept late into the morning. When they went to see Balintore they found him apparently calm, and none the worse for his accident. With some formality he thanked Myrtle for having saved his life.

‘I only turned you over,' she said. ‘You were floating face down, and I turned you over: that's all I did.'

‘But for you, I shouldn't be alive today,' said Balintore.

Myrtle flushed, very prettily, and looked shyly at her husband as if to assure herself that he had heard. ‘Well,' she said, ‘well, in that case I'd better go and see about your breakfast.'

‘Are you going to get up?' said Palladis.

‘No,' said Balintore. ‘I think I'll stay in bed. I'm very comfortable here.'

Later in the morning Palladis and the Riccis rowed to the beach, and swam or idled for an hour. When they returned to the caique Balintore was still in bed, and wanted something to read. There were few books on board, other than Myrtle's
Living World of Literature
, and a couple of Admiralty Pilot books. Balintore was given the larger volume, and Ricci came on deck with the Mediterranean
Pilot
.

He said to Palladis, ‘Do you know anything about Mount Athos?'

‘Not very much,' said Palladis, ‘but I have an uncle who lives there. My mother's younger brother.'

‘What had he done?'

‘Nothing criminal, so far as I know. He lived a rather fashionable life in the 1930's. He was what used to be called, in simpler times, “a man about town”. Then he went into the Army in 1939, and by all accounts fought a very good war. He was in Greece, in the latter part of it, and became very fond of the country and the people. About 1948, or ‘49, after his wife had left him – I don't blame her, he can't have been easy to live with – he decided to go back. And when my mother next heard of him he was living in a monastery on Mount Athos, where he has been ever since. And apparently quite contented.'

‘Was he a religious man?'

‘I should have thought not. But he used to fast, often for a week at a time – that was after the war: the war changed him quite a lot – and I remember my mother saying, with some disgust, “Harry now pretends that he has acquired a personal relationship with God by the simple process of giving his bowels a rest.” She herself approaches God with the help of a very elaborate ritual.'

‘Do they insist on fasting in Mount Athos?' asked Ricci.

‘I'm not quite sure. What I do know is that their monasteries are of two different sorts. There are those that are called coenobitic, where the monks live very plainly and simply, and are subject to a pretty severe discipline: they probably go in for fasting, and never eat very much. But in the other sort of monastery – they're called idiorrhythmic – the monks have their own quarters, and within limits – I imagine they're fairly narrow limits – live as they feel inclined. No women are allowed, nor anything female: they can't keep hens, they're not even allowed milk. But I'm told they produce some very good wine.'

‘This uncle of yours—'

‘He's an idiorrhythmic, of course.'

‘He lives quite comfortably, does he?'

‘He has his own books and his own furniture; but his notion of what's comfortable is probably more restricted than yours.'

‘I wasn't thinking of going to live there myself,' said Ricci.

The dawn of understanding lighted Palladis' face. ‘But for Ned—'

‘It just crossed my mind. I was looking at the
Pilot
, and the port of entry is called Daphne.'

‘I believe,' said Palladis slowly, ‘that you've hit on the very place.'

‘As a boy,' said Ricci, ‘he was brought up in the Scotch way to go to church, and Sunday school too. There's a difference, of course, between the Kirk of Scotland and what they call Greek Orthodox, but how big a difference it is I just don't know.'

‘ “I fled Him down the nights and down the days.” '

‘Who's that you're talking of?'

‘Ned. Ned quoting poetry. He's fond of quoting poetry. And once – I can't remember where or when – he was talking to me, about himself, and he quoted that line. I think you've solved the problem.'

‘Well,' said Ricci modestly, ‘it just occurred to me, looking at the
Pilot
, that Mount Athos might come in useful.'

‘Can you take us there? In this boat?'