Stop Press (17 page)

Patricia accepted the sherry with caution. She felt Timmy’s attitude to be indeed compounded chiefly of Toplady’s correctitude, together with something of the elder Mr Eliots kind-heartedness and a certain genuine if fleeting interest of his own. Were it not that he was distinguishably scared as well she could almost have seen herself as a sort of well-preserved old lady who has spirit enough to earn the impersonal interest of the young, and who is really grateful for their passing, friendly, patronizing words. Because Timmy made her feel like this she detested him for an intolerable puppy, for another damned Barbary ape – the evening’s adventure was still horridly in her head – and for a youth far from improved since the period when he had given much ingenuity to the construction of ink bombs. At the same time she liked exceedingly certain random things about him: notably his ears and his neck and the backs of his hands. And this seemed to Patricia a system of feeling so capricious and irrational that she too was scared. So she put her knees and her heels and her toes together and contemplated the largely conversing Timmy in a particularly cool and level way.

‘And how’, asked Timmy amiably, ‘is Run-girls-run? Still time for all that?’

Patricia digested this ancient and objectionable description of female athletics and struggled against a feeling that her very presentable legs were growing gawky and aggressively muscular beneath her trailing frock. ‘There’s real tennis at the Abbey,’ she said. ‘It’s a tremendous place. Have you ever been?’

‘Never. And Belinda doesn’t even bring home all the fun: Shoon buys this and Shoon presents that. Daddy is eager to see the Collection; he collects Pope himself, you know – only a Pope collection doesn’t look at all brassy. It seems that the little man did most of his writing on the other side of the weekly bills, and the general layout is quite without dignity. Compendious, though – litterateurs can browse on the one side and economists and social historians on the other. No laborious hunting for the laundry bills as with Shelley. There they are on the other side of the poems. Incidentally, the showiest collection here is my butterflies. Come and look.’

Timmy’s chatter was losing breadth and becoming disjointed, as if his mind were turning half to other things. But he led Patricia across the room and amid the eddy of Mr Eliot’s guests they inspected the butterflies. Timmy expatiated on them at random – it was plain that on the whole subject of diurnal insects his mind had been long a blank – and Patricia had leisure to remember that a few minutes before she had been visited by some pleasurable reflection which now escaped her. A brief chase backwards and she caught it; it was the feeling that in Timmy there were frequent flashes of his father. A moment’s consultation of her opinions of Mr Eliot senior assured her that he stood in her head as among the most charming of men. She looked again at the backs of Timmy’s hands as they lay on the show-case and felt that the drift of her thoughts gave good cause for alarm; she listened to Timmy airily entertaining the well-preserved old lady and felt that the outlook was even bleak. She and this particular Barbary ape had better part. ‘Would you really like to see the Abbey?’ she heard herself saying. ‘I have an idea there’s going to be a sort of mass invitation presently, and if so I rather hope you’ll come. It’s amusing – a huge and improbable fantasy from top to bottom.’

‘I’m tired of fantasies.’ Timmy had turned towards her, moody and increasingly scared. Their eyes met. ‘Why Patricia! I’m so sorry: it was rude. And I really would like to see the Abbey. I was thinking of this chronic fantasy at home. When do you think the invite will be?’

They looked at each other for a moment in an informed silence – booked for prolonged encounter. ‘What about the chronic fantasy at home?’ Patricia asked abruptly.

‘This series of foolish jokes and dismal ditties merely puts the lid on it. The deplorable Spider has outstayed his welcome and it’s more than time that he was led into the wings. Sometimes I feel it’s my business to usher him off.’

‘Why ever should you feel that?’

‘Because I ushered him on. The Spider was my first birthday present. Daddy felt that a son was going to be a frightfully costly luxury.’

Patricia looked Timmy critically up and down. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘wasn’t he right? I imagine your running costs aren’t particularly low.’

‘No doubt. But nowadays the family is absolutely affluent and the stories go on just because there are so many people shoving. It’s intolerable. I think that daddy and everyone would be better with the Spider killed off. Perhaps this funny-business will do the trick. Perhaps that’s the idea.’

Patricia put down her glass. Timmy was wilful. There were qualities in his father which had been wilfulness thirty years ago; the mood was something born in him. ‘To kill off the Spider?’ she said. ‘Let’s hope that the idea isn’t to kill off his inventor – at midnight.’

Timmy looked momentarily startled; then he smiled with an effect of intolerable confidence in his own judgement. ‘I’ve had one or two uneasy moments. But daddy is astonishingly resilient. You know’ – he stretched himself slowly as if tugging at an oar – ‘I’m not sure that I’m not the joker myself.’

‘I don’t think that at all a good idea.’

‘Or it may very well be Belinda.’

‘Worse.’

‘Don’t you know that Belinda is absolutely ruthless?’

‘Yes.’

‘I wonder’ – Timmy went off at a tangent – ‘if
you
are? How awful if sisters give one the whole truth about women. The theory is that there’s another side.’

‘Timmy’ – inexplicably Patricia was really cross – ‘it couldn’t be you. The thing began with a telephone call to your father while you were in the room with him.’

‘That’, said Timmy gravely, ‘gave me the idea. Will you have another glass of sherry?’ She shook her head, angry and almost frightened. ‘That was just an isolated joke of the sort that does from time to time occur. And it gave me or Belinda of course the idea. Do you think we shall bring it off?’

Everybody’s nerves were strained. Patricia seized upon this fact as a working basis and looked at Timmy anew. He was lazily proposing to try out on her the role of magnetic young criminal such as might be conceived by Peter Holme. Partly it was the family taste for dramatics; partly it was something real in him, however fragmentary. This was a new – or an enlarged – view of Timmy. But his ears and his hands remained the same.

Patricia, seemingly doomed to double disgrace that day, felt tears coming into her eyes. She made another grab at the larger proportions of the situation and said calmly, ‘I’m sure I wish it were. You, I mean.’

Timmy’s pose slid from him. He looked at her uncertainly. ‘
Spiderismus
bores you too?’

‘Not at all. If it’s you I wish you thoroughly bad luck. I say I rather hope it is because then I shall be barking up a wrong tree myself.’

He uncoiled like a spring and stood looking down at her in her low chair from a comical height. ‘Patricia – you bark up trees?’ He swayed his arms like branches in a wind.

They laughed – but Patricia felt that the momentary tension had left uncomfortable pressure ridges on her mind. ‘Barking up trees is in my family, as romancing and posing is in yours. If you – or Belinda – are the joker you are unlikely to go to certain extremes I’ve had in my head.’

‘Whatever do you mean?’

‘Do you know that Belinda has asked down my brother?’

‘I don’t know – but how nice.’

‘Belinda has asked him and I’ve hurried him up. He’ll be here for dinner. He’s a policeman.’

‘He’s
what
?’

‘A policeman. I’m afraid Mr Toplady will find it very strange. But the unfortunate Applebys have had to get along on their brains.’

Timmy blushed and for a moment was reduced to a mumble. ‘I say, you don’t really think that – well, the joker is going to do something extreme?’

‘I think’ – Patricia glanced round the room – ‘that at the moment something quite moderate would have a considerable effect.’

‘I rather think it would. Did you say your brother was coming for dinner?’ He glanced at his watch. ‘If so, they’re both late. Do you see Belinda over there? Her inner eye is on the kitchen. The resources of Rust are a bit overtaxed, as they say, and disaster is only too probable. I think’ – he began to sidle positively awkwardly away – ‘I’ll go out and see what’s doing.’

She watched him out of the room. Her feelings were confused. Perhaps they might have been sorted out into a realization that there are no fairy princes in this world, but only young men with necks and hands which emerge beautifully from their clothes, and characters which emerge much more problematically from their conversation. From all this she tilted away her chin – and then she remembered that John, as well as the dinner, was fifteen minutes late. Probably it was a puncture; perhaps it was an accident. She tilted up her chin farther and found herself contemplating a cluster of soft electric globes concealed in a large chandelier. Her eye was following the line of this when it vanished. For a moment a ghostly simulacrum of the room – Timmy’s butterflies, Rupert’s fish, Archie’s bridge, Belinda’s Renoir, and Mr Eliot’s guests – flickered on her retina. Then that vanished too. In the living-room at Rust a universal darkness had buried all.

The shock produced absolute silence – a silence which was instantly caught and held on a chain of remote, sinister sound. From above, from outside – impossible to tell – came the faint tap-tap of a stick falling at measured paces on a hard surface. As if the listeners were hurtling at an incredible speed towards some enormous ticking clock, the sound grew in volume stroke by stroke, rose unbearably to a climax no louder than the fall of an axe across a broad field, ebbed away.

Patricia heard Belinda’s voice, cold with anger, at her ear.

‘The tap’, said Belinda, ‘of the stick of the blind secretary of the Spider.’

A murmur, a babel of voices mounting swiftly through surprise, anxiety, fright towards the lower reaches of panic, filled the living-room at Rust. When light came it came bewilderingly, an arc sweeping diagonally from the skirting board to halt by the ceiling, and falling, the more collected could discern, through a lightly curtained french window from the terrace without. The babel of mere exclamations and cries was cut by a scream – it was Kermode’s fat lady; and by one of the odd tricks of communication which crisis brings the eyes of the company were drawn to the window. The curtain, now a sort of illuminated canvas like a cinematographic screen, showed the lurching silhouette of a man. The silhouette advanced, grew colossal, diminished again. There was a crack as of a window wrenched roughly open; the curtain was flung back; the light grew to a blaze and revealed itself as from the headlights of a car. A voice – ordinary, but combining volume with calm to an extent which constituted an elocutionary feat – said, ‘Be quiet. There is no danger.’ And, as if great valves had been closed, everything was still.

Patricia, who had sprung to her feet with the darkness, found Belinda still standing beside her. ‘If the joker’, she said in a slightly unsteady voice, ‘hasn’t built up a stunning entrance for John.’

‘No danger at all,’ reiterated John Appleby. He spoke with the advancing briskness of a physician who is consolidating his hold on anxious relatives. ‘As far as I could see, the whole house went into darkness at once, so it may be a matter of a main fuse. I have a torch here, if anyone cares to investigate.’ He stepped into the room.

It was like an amateur stage on which something has gone badly wrong with the lighting and the rehearsing simultaneously. In the tunnel of prickling illumination from the car the guests moved uneasily, conscious that they had been on the verge of participating in an embarrassing scene. The amenities of civilization will sometimes let us down with a bump, and the normally tuned mind is prepared for the isolated occasions on which the machine fails. It had failed at Rust now, and the effect, as Patricia had half prophesied, was considerable. For an atmosphere – the sort of atmosphere which Mr Eliot liked to build up in his romances – was building itself up in the house; Appleby, contemplating the scene from the window, was instructed by glances which were going sidelong over nervous shoulders. On this miscellaneous crowd funny-business was getting a grip.

Mr Eliot emerged and there were brief introductions. ‘Patricia’s brother?’ he said. ‘Dear me, the day is full of surprises, and this is a most pleasant one. Your arrival was most opportune, as well as a capital thing in itself. I am afraid I failed badly in not immediately calling out a reassuring word. But the fact is that I was reminded of something odd and taken, I fear, rather by surprise. The
deus ex machina
is a much abused phrase, but on this occasion not inappropriate. And you are happy’ – when Mr Eliot let himself quote Pope he usually did so with the utmost unobtusiveness – ‘to catch us just at dinner-time. But to examine the fuses is, as you say, an excellent idea. I must apologize to everybody for this discomfort. Please all stay here while Mr Appleby and I go and investigate.’

If Timmy, Patricia reflected, had flashes of Mr Eliot, Mr Eliot had his moments of being like Timmy. Disturbed, his conversation would break down into chatter – and certainly he was disturbed now. He gave the impression of having drifted farther away. From absence of mind and mild distraction he had passed earlier in the evening to a phase of strenuous concentration on the world immediately about him. Now he was gay. The trick of illumination from within was on him again, but it might have been fancied as an almost fevered light, with a hectic rather than its old lambent quality. Patricia looked at John and John looked at Patricia. And John’s glance said, Yes, that it was curious enough, and that he forgave her for hauling him down. A moment later he flicked on his torch and followed his host through the door. The room had fallen silent again; their steps and the ever so slightly too rapid voice of Mr Eliot faded down the corridor.

Mr Eliot’s butler held the torch – nervously, for he had left Mr Eliot’s cook groping in the last distraction in the kitchen. The lad who was promoted on party occasions to the position of a sort of untwinned footman held the steps – unnecessarily, for Appleby’s balance was secure enough. Two palourmaids whom nobody had thought to dismiss held something like their peace. Mr Eliot himself held a candle which he waved to an effect of slight confusion above his head. Perhaps because of the complicated electric pipes, the wall was a maze of metres, switches, and fuse-boxes.