Stop Press (35 page)

‘
Lord
,’ said Patricia. It was absurd and utterly unreasonable. But she found that she liked Timmy better than she had ever done; it was as if his mind had tumbled out and proved to be just like the back of his neck where it emerged above his elegantly untidy collar. She stood up, suddenly dangerous, and glanced round the theatre. ‘When I show you the Abbey’, she said, ‘we shall have much more fun.’

As the afternoon wore on the theatre became increasingly the centre of activity at Rust. Dr Chown’s observer, had he been modish enough to play at anthropologizing an unknown culture, would have discerned something of the muddled concentration that goes before totemic ceremony or corroboree. Social consciousness, struggling against the over-developed individual consciousness which the party represented, achieved intermittent and ramshackle organization. People whose energies had hitherto been expended on impressing themselves by soliloquy and disquisition now harassed each other with orders and suggestions. Movement, so far a matter of gesture and of forming and reforming in knots and eddies, became more purposive; in straight lines, or threading themselves through contrary streams like ants, both sexes went to and fro with burdens and messages. Diffused through the house was the pleasant consciousness that by each his bit was being done. This made it exceedingly difficult for anyone to hold aloof. Winter found himself – on the strength of some acquaintance with the Attic stage – directing in the construction of masks those two young women from Chelsea who had once proposed to paint the Spider on soup tureens and egg-cups. Sir Rupert Eliot was to be seen – amazingly – going about with a contrivance like a small porter’s barrow. Sir Archie – whose placidity, unnerving courtesy and power of leisured quotation seemed to grow with the excitement – had bent his professional skill to what looked like preparations for a trapeze act or the descent of a god: Winter found himself hoping that his knowledge of that prosaic branch of engineering known as Strength of Materials would bear him out on this occasion. About tea-time the sense of preparation was intensified by the return of André with four enormous brown paper parcels. And at this point it became plain that the party was less a single organism preparing for ritual than a number of factions preparing for tournament – possibly for almost gladiatorial encounter.

Among a few André’s parcels were a whispered triumph; to others mystification which might mean discomfort as well. Appleby, apparently absorbed in tinkering with a switchboard in the wings, was moved to reflect on the brute dimensions of the party; on this and on its hopeless fluidity. There were facets which he could not remember as present the night before; there was an answering absence of faces which had fixed themselves in his memory shortly after his arrival. Mr Eliot’s was distinctly not a mystery of the sealed-room type, nor was it even a mystery with a decently circumscribed
dramatis
personae
. Appleby beguiled himself by deciding on the dimmest person present and picked on a nervous young man whose business it was to wander about taking notes for Mr Wedge. The young man appeared sub-acutely aware of the appallingness of his employment, and this gave him a vaguely criminal air: might he not be the lurking joker who was disturbing the peace of Rust?

This was not a method of thinking which could be described as analysing things out. It occurred to Appleby – perhaps because he was bent on an interview with Dr Chown – that it was a species of dream analysis which was required. For again he had the sense that the Spider’s party was taking on the quality of dream; it had at once the unreality and the baffling urgency of a dream from which one is just about to wake up. It was partly this dreary and yet obscurely dramatic setting to which Mr Eliot’s guests had removed themselves. The high pale panels, chill and flaking; the sea-green light percolating faintly from above; the gloom and the grey tones strangely shot with harsh blacks: all these made a composition which was at once vibrant and repelling, like one of those pictures of the Spanish School in which dwarfish figures, sinisterly employed, are posed in Baroque agitation between imprisoning, blindly towering walls. Or the dream was monstrous – one in which human fish moved in the depths of an aquarium: Sir Archibald Eliot a globular creature formed by nature to anticipate the bathysphere; Miss Cavey, involving herself in a length of green silk, like some giant cod peering with clammy intelligence through the algae. Only the silence of the aquarium was lacking. Nearly everyone was talking, and talking in an unnaturally brisk and directive manner. It was, Timmy darkly said in passing, like a congeries of lunatics loosed on a quarter-deck.

From somewhere behind the scenes came a series of loud blurred thwacks, as if a child without feeling for tools had taken a hammer to thump an inadequately supported board. Voices were pitched higher by way of reply and Appleby wondered whether in any ear but his own there continued to sound above this din the remembered stroke of clocks untimely tolling twelve. Seeping through Rust the night before had been an anticipation of the untoward, a widely diffused apprehension of malice yet to come. With Mr Eliot’s rally the campaign had stumbled; the affair of the clocks had not quite come off with the majority; there was conceivably something like humorous admission of defeat in the final and almost light-hearted episode of the middle blacks. Either all this, thought Appleby – the plot taking the license of dream to dissolve and vanish – either this or the plotter was taking a bold dip into a species of dramatic relief. Or again – and with still more of the inconsequence of sleep – the malice which had hitherto been concentrated in a single unknown had been diffused and watered down amid the company; it was plain that the party was dividing into camps for the purpose of contriving mutual annoyance. It was plain, too, that this made everybody very gay. Miss Cavey had recovered from her misadventures and was preparing to give a little sketch called
A Haworth Saturday Night
. Even Gib Overall was morosely animated. He had discovered some time before that Wedge in his unwary youth had published a volume of poems: he was getting up some of the nicest of these for sudden and devastating recitation. The party, in fact, was drawing pleasantly to its climax and there seemed only Appleby to wonder what that climax would be.

‘Kids,’ said a powerful voice in Appleby’s ear; ‘just kids – the secret’s in that. Will you have a doughnut? I pocketed some at tea.’ Appleby turned round and discovered that this friendly offer came from Kermode; he was holding out a hand in which three doughnuts nestled like marbles. ‘I find them settling after brandy. Have you been drinking, Tommy, old boy? I have.’ Kermode nodded a solemn and candid head.

‘John,’ said Appleby.

‘John?’ Kermode scowled threateningly round.

‘Not Tommy: John.’

Kermode looked puzzled; then his face cleared. ‘I get you,’ he said. ‘How do you do?’

The smell of brandy was unescapable. Appleby fleetingly wondered if it had simply been dabbed on Kermode’s lapels; it was impossible to be his sort of policeman and remain simple-minded. He thought Kermode possibly the ablest man at Rust, and abundantly capable of presenting himself as a stage drunk. ‘The secret?’ he asked. ‘It’s the secret that they’re just kids?’

Kermode nodded. ‘If you grow up’, he said, ‘you find that the simplest solution’s the booze. But if you stick at the age of ginger-pop – well, there’s nothing much for it but scribble away.’ He surveyed the room, momentarily deflected the passage of a doughnut to his mouth to gesture in the direction of Gerald Winter. ‘And that goes for his sort, too; only with him it’s chat… Kids. The trouble with me, Jack, old man, is that I’m too old. Too old at ten; that’s the truth about authors. Do you know Wedge’s
Gateways of Literature?
The only real gateway is the nursery door. Now mine’ – Kermode’s gnomic seemed to Appleby full of a covert logic which made it all part of the dream – ‘mine’s been the tradesman’s entrance. You see most from there: valets, the backstairs view. And I tell you they’re not an adult profession; nobody employs or consults them – do they? They just shove forward. Juvenile entertainers – they’re successful if they’re that.’

‘Heaven preserve me’, said Appleby, ‘from that sort of success.’

For a moment Kermode’s eyes sought after a memory. ‘Kids,’ he said, ‘but fancying themselves as babes and sucklings. Liking to throw in a spot of prophecy as they perform. Mature societies didn’t allow it. They guarded art as mere entertainment by the kids – no little voices piping of the infinite. Aren’t I right?’ He took a doughnut at a gulp.

‘Right’, said Appleby, ‘as a rivet.’

The doughnut took a plunge down Kermode’s gullet. His eyes – the eyes of a perfectly sober or sobered man – narrowed on Appleby; opened again luminously amused. ‘The keyhole’s the great place for secrets,’ he said. ‘So long, Jack.’

Appleby watched him across the theatre. The keyhole for secrets; it was the simple and obvious rebuke… But obscurely he felt that in all the chatter at Rust the first thing of consequence had been said.

Hard upon this Appleby had his conversation with Mr Eliot. It was a disturbed conversation, without privacy and punctuated by bumps and bangs. And because they had repeated to dodge people coming and going about the theatre it took on something of the quality of primitive dance – a vis-à-vis dodging and ducking as of savages miming combat. The setting was Mr Eliot’s choice; it was an example of his sense of style – that faintly ironic sense which must get him into trouble, as often as not, in his writing. Mr Eliot was not a big man, like the looming Shoon; nor a powerful man, like the glimpsed Bussenschutt; one could feel him at times as a small man – this perhaps because only a fragment of him was present at once. Certainly he was vital, with as many lives as a cat. He was even – Appleby thought of the thirty-seven books, of Pope, and of the leisured and piggy life of Rust – a shade uncanny if one contemplated him for long. But of this there was no danger at the moment; it was a fugitive, if significant, encounter.

‘So we are all’, said Mr Eliot, passing and pausing as if only for a moment, ‘bound for the Abbey tomorrow. Do you know it? Except for the Collection, which one knows to be really remarkable, I have a lurking feeling that it would all be better blown sky-high.’

Appleby nodded. ‘My feelings don’t lurk. It would certainly be better in ruins – real ruins.’

‘How quickly’, said Mr Eliot inconsequently, ‘everything is going forward. Wedge, my dear fellow’ – the publisher was prowling past – ‘they are hatching some plot against you: don’t take it ill. And what’ – he had turned again to Appleby – ‘is going to happen at midnight? Really and truly murder, do you think?’

Appleby looked hard at his host; he appeared to be in genuinely high spirits. ‘Heaven forbid,’ he said quietly. ‘Another irksome trick, perhaps.’

‘I agree with you.’ Mr Eliot stepped back to avoid a group of perspiring people who were bringing in a piano. ‘It is a most annoying series of jokes.’

‘You’ve given up the idea that it’s a sort of raid from another world of your own creating?’ Mr Eliot, Appleby rather desperately felt, must somehow be pinned down.

His host nodded with simplicity and conviction. ‘I sometimes get such fancies.’ He spoke as if in light but genuine apology. ‘I’m afraid it worried the children. For a time I was scared and the notion was a sort of refuge.’

This, thought Appleby, might be accurate enough. He waited until somebody had ceased striking chords on the piano and said firmly, ‘Scared?’

‘My dear John’ – though light-hearted, Mr Eliot was not in the least flippant – ‘I was
really
scared by certain ideas which were put into my head some time ago by Chown. I have not cared to speak about it to the children, but I know I may talk about it confidentially to Patricia’s brother. I was a patient of Chown’s for some time. I had become obsessed with the books and couldn’t put them out of my head – a matter of overwork. He is a capital fellow really and most competent; he put the matter entirely right. Only’ – Mr Eliot looked for a moment as if the scare of which he had spoken was not entirely a matter of the past – ‘he rides a hobby, as so many of them do. He has his own favourite explanation of things… Miss Cavey, how much we are all looking forward to Haworth tonight.’

Appleby treated Miss Cavey to what was probably a ferocious glare. He gave a moment to calculation. What he wanted to put to Mr Eliot might be dangerous.

‘Chown’, he said boldly, ‘being interested in split personalities?’

Mr Eliot was unperturbed.

‘Exactly. It’s very nice, if I may say so, to discuss the matter with an acute mind. It appears – and it came to me with something of a shock – that my books are studied with a good deal of interest by people like Chown. They are interested’ – Mr Eliot, standing in the middle of his eddying theatre, was taking on something of the air of subdued showmanship with which he had discoursed on the Birthday Party the night before – ‘
in me
… Mind your head.’

Not very alertly, Appleby minded his head. A rope and pulley-block had come clattering down from where Archie Eliot was tapping and screwing above the stage, ‘You gathered that psychiatrists are interested in you as – as a case?’

‘Just that. They are interested in myself and the Spider. It is odd to think of Harley Street and Wimpole Street intriguing themselves with that hoary old automaton.’ Mr Eliot gave a smile which might have been either the irony again or ingenuous pride. ‘What is likely to happen to a person who spends half a lifetime in the company for a single imaginative creation? That is the question which attracts them. And it appears that there are several schools. Some of Chown’s colleagues believe that I and my creature the Spider may finally become integrated in a single stable personality, animating equally myself and the books. Others declare that I shall become progressively unable to distinguish between my own ego and the more powerful ego I have called into being, and that as a result I must inevitably be destroyed. Nothing, I suppose, but Spider left.’