The Daffodil Affair (12 page)

‘Yes?’ said Appleby, remembering Cobdogla.

There can be great power in this word, rightly inflected – and Beaglehole laughed rather uncertainly. ‘But, seriously, it has been a sleepy sort of afternoon, don’t you think? I havetn’t felt so lazy for a long time.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I said I haven’t felt so lazy–’

Appleby slapped an open palm with a clenched fist. ‘There!’ he said. ‘I’ve got it.’

‘Got it?’

‘Only the particular wisp of wool I’ve been groping for.’ Appleby smiled cheerfully. ‘Did Hudspith tell you it was my birthday?’

It is very easy to pretend to be more drunk than one is; at one time or another most undergraduates have managed it. There is no great difficulty in simulating extreme drunkenness when one is entirely sober. But to pretend to all the successive stages of tipsiness and intoxication on no basis of fact is a task requiring considerable virtuosity. And it was this task that Hudspith, for reasons best known to himself, had undertaken. As dinner progressed he appeared to be getting drunker and drunker on the ship’s much-tossed and shaken wines.

Appleby, in whose honour this exhibition was taking place, watched it with admiration and some trepidation. The performance was, in its way, as finished as Eusapia’s, and it was clear that Hudspith had been at it before. In fact he was reviving some star turn of his earlier career and packing a great deal of science into the show. The drink was disappearing undeniably fast, and almost certainly into Hudspith’s stomach. Perhaps as the level rose so too did that of some half a pint of salad oil that he had swallowed off-stage. Or perhaps he carried round some dis-intoxicant drug for use on just such occasions. You didn’t know where you had Hudspith – or not once you succeeded in pushing back the cheated girls to the frontiers of his mind. For then his youth returned to him and he became a police officer with a positively alarming imaginative technique. Appleby had conjured up Cobdogla, which was probably really on the map; Hudspith was now having a great deal to say about a township called Misery, which almost certainly was not. Misery was an altogether more go-ahead place than the neighbouring Eden. Hudspith doubted if there was a rival to it short of Pimpingie or Dirty Flat. And these were a hundred miles away and over the range.

‘The range?’ said Beaglehole, mildly curious. ‘What range is that, Mr Hudspith?’

Hudspith put down his glass. ‘My range,’ he said carefully. ‘Mine and Uncle Len’s.’

‘Oh – I see.’

‘But it’s all mine now,’ Hudspith made a wavering gesture which embraced vast distances and at the same time contrived almost to brush the nose of the intense Miss Mood. ‘And I can put a sheep on every tenth acre.’

‘Isn’t it difficult,’ Mrs Nurse asked comfortably, ‘to pick them up again? Such long runs for the dogs.’

Hudspith merely breathed heavily.

‘Your Uncle – ah – Len died?’ asked Beaglehole.

‘He didn’t die,’ said Hudspith. ‘He perished.’

‘He did a perish,’ said Appleby corroboratively and idiomatically. It was he, after all, who had started this desperate masquerade, and he must in fairness back Hudspith up. ‘Ron found his bones.’

‘Some of them,’ said Ron with heavy drunken accuracy.

Miss Mood made a sound as agonized as if her own bones were being picked in whispers. ‘
Which?
’ she asked huskily.

‘The troopers,’ said Hudspith, ignoring this, ‘wanted to have it that Uncle Len had been murdered. But it was just a perish, all right. You see, the blacks won’t go into the range. It’s haunted.’

‘What by?’ Wine spoke, sharply and for the first time.

There was a moment’s silence, Hudspith at this juncture finding it necessary to drink deeply. ‘The Bunyip,’ said Appleby. ‘Haunted by the Bunyip.’

‘That’s right, the Bunyip,’ said Hudspith.

‘And what is the Bunyip, Mr Hudspith?’ Wine’s question was directed uncompromisingly at the late Len’s nephew.

Hudspith set his glass down slowly. ‘The Bunyip is something not many white people can see,’ he said. His tone held a momentary sobriety which was effective in the extreme.

Miss Mood, at least, rose to it. ‘And
you
, Mr Hudspith?’ she breathed.

The answer was a loud bang and rattle. Everybody – except perhaps the monumentally placid Mrs Nurse – jumped. Hudspith had outrageously thumped the table and was roaring at the steward for a fresh bottle of wine. It was fortunate, Appleby reflected, that the captain appeared to prefer the company of his officers and was not dining in the saloon that night. Hudspith banged again, and there was nobody to stop him; he banged a third time and shouted, so that even Mrs Nurse looked about for her bag. But before the company could break up he had suddenly turned quiet and maudlin. ‘Shame to spoil John’s birthday. Man only has one birthday in the year.’

‘Too right,’ said Appleby, who felt that he ought not now to be quite sober himself.

‘Never mind about seeing things,’ Hudspith flapped a hand at Miss Mood rather as if she were a fly. ‘Much better have a song. All join in song. All join in–’

‘All join in “Waltzing Matilda”,’ said Appleby, fairly confident that this particular piece of antipodean local colour was correct. And he struck up by himself:

‘Once a jolly swagman camped beside a billabong,

Under the shade of a coolibah tree;

And he sang as he sat and waited while his billy boiled,

“Who’ll come a-waltzin’ Matilda with me?”

‘Up came a jumbuck to drink at the billabong;

Up jumped the swagman and grabbed it with glee;

And he sang as he shoved that jumbuck in his tucker-bag,

“You’ll come a-waltzin’ Matilda with me.”

‘Up came the Squatter, mounted on his thoroughbred.

Up came the troopers – one, two, three!

“Where’d you get that jumbuck you’ve got in your tucker-bag?

You’ll come a-waltzin’ Matilda with me.”

‘Rather a sinister song,’ said Wine. ‘Or at least with a suggestion of developing that way.’

‘Is the billabong the same as the Bunyip?’ asked Miss Mood.

Appleby, who was not prepared to venture an answer to this, embarked on another verse. Hudspith joined in – not very articulately, but that was explicable.

‘Up jumped the swagman and dived into the billabong.

“You’ll never take me alive!” cried he.

And his ghost may be heard if you camp beside the billabong.

Singing, “Who’ll come a-waltzin’ Matilda with me?”

“Waltzin’ Matilda, waltzin’ Matilda,

Who’ll come a-waltzin’ Matilda with me?”

And his voice may be heard if you camp beside the billabong,

Singing – “Who’ll come a-waltzin’ Matilda with me?”

Hudspith applauded vigorously – so vigorously that the general attention became focused on him once more. ‘Bravo!’ he bawled. ‘Bra–’ The word died oddly on his lips. His hands, which had been gesticulating, dropped limply to his sides. It seemed uncomfortably probable that he was going to be suddenly sick. Presently, however, it was clear that he was in the grip of some other sensation. His features worked, but it was in perplexity rather than physical distress. Expectant, troubled and oddly absent, he was staring at the stairs of the saloon.

Appleby again thought the performance tip-top. But one had to remember that the audience consisted of something like a panel of experts. Perhaps it would be best to take the part of Lady Macbeth recalling her hallucinated thane to the proprieties of the banquet. ‘Ron,’ he said loudly, ‘how does Matilda go on?’

With a perceptible but unexaggerated jerk Hudspith returned from whatever experience had befallen him. ‘Matilda?’ he asked blankly. And then he smiled expansively at the company. ‘Once knew a smart girl called Matilda.’ He leered drunkenly. ‘Once took a little girl called Matilda across to–’

This time Mrs Nurse gathered up her bag and rose. ‘It has been a very nice party,’ she said. ‘And now Miss Mood and I are going into the little drawing-room to have our coffee. Good night.’ Mrs Nurse put much placid decision into these last words, and Miss Mood followed her – perhaps not without a shade of reluctance – from the saloon.

Hudspith filled his glass, unbuttoned his waistcoat, lowered his voice. ‘Once knew a little girl called Gladys…’

It was past ten o’clock. Appleby drained his coffee, put out his cigarette and left the smoke-room for a breath of air. Matilda and Gladys, girls not without interesting idiosyncrasy, were now points remote on Hudspith’s amatory pilgrimage, and he was regaling Wine and Beaglehole with the fruits of more recent researches. In these matters Hudspith had, after all, a great deal of vicarious experience: more than enough to stock all the smoke-rooms of all the liners afloat. And Wine and Beaglehole were passive listeners – Beaglehole because he liked it, and Wine – conceivably – because he had designs of his own. Wine was a person who had as yet not at all emerged; he was an unpredictable quantity; and that he was really in process of being outflanked by the present fantastic procedures it would be hazardous to assert.

‘Well, what do you think?’ Hudspith too had come out to breathe, and his voice, disconcertingly sober, came cautiously from the darkness.

‘Absolutely awful. Dirty Flat and those rangers aren’t owned by people at all like you and your Uncle Len. They’re owned by people rather like the lesser country gentry of Shropshire – only there are about six Shropshires to a gent. Still, I must say you do the getting tight rather well.’

‘Wait till you see the getting un-tight. That’s much more tricky.’

‘No doubt. And will you tell me what Matilda and Gladys and the rest are all about? And do you realize that tomorrow, when we’re all sober, I shall have to try to hold up my head as the intimate friend of a self-confessed lecher?’

Hudspith chuckled cheerfully. It was evident that his bogus confessions were having the most beneficial effect on his nervous constitution; he had, in fact, discovered what was virtually a new variety of psycho-therapeutic method. He chuckled again, cheerfully but cautiously still. ‘Wait and see. There’ll be an important moment in about twenty minutes. But the big show is timed for midnight.’

Appleby sighed, for he would have liked to go to bed. ‘Very well. It’s your do.’

Hudspith’s shadow melted into darkness. His voice came floating back from near the smoke-room door. ‘Chin chin,’ it said.

The night was dark, and Appleby blinked into it. Hudspith bubbling with the raffish idiom of the nineteen hundreds was a mildly surprising phenomenon. But then so, and in an equally dated away, were a calculating horse and an Italian medium specializing in materializations. A witch and a girl possesed by demons were exhibits more ‘period’ still. In fact – said Appleby to himself as he paced the blacked-out deck once more – this ship has the nineteen-forties dead astern and is heading for the past at its full economic speed of eighteen knots. The Time Ship: master, Emery Wine. It sounded like H G Wells… He took several turns about the deck and returned to the smoke-room. Hudspith’s voice greeted him as he entered. ‘I like them young,’ it said.

‘I must say I like them young,’ he repeated – and Appleby saw that the process of getting un-tight had begun. For a trace of uneasiness, perhaps of shame, had come into the deplorable saga. Hudspith, though still talking defiantly, was looking at the silent Wine and Beaglehole with an occasional furtive sideways glance – as a man may do who is presently going to realize that he has been making a fool of himself. ‘There was a girl in London,’ said Hudspith, raising his voice with a sort of desperate and fading arrogance. ‘Just a few months ago. Lucy, her name was…’

Rather abruptly Appleby plumped down on a settee. Perhaps he had been dull. Certainly he had not realized it was all heading for this.

‘Lucy?’ said Wine, profoundly uninterested. ‘Do you know, I believe this is the first Lucy you’ve mentioned? Whereas there have been four Marys and three Janes. Beaglehole will correct me if I am wrong.’

‘And you wouldn’t believe’ – Hudspith’s voice went higher as he ignored the sarcasm – ‘you wouldn’t believe how young she was – sometimes.’

Wine laid down his cigar. ‘Sometimes?’ he echoed.

This time Hudspith lowered his voice. ‘Lucy was a damned queer kid. That was what was cute about her. You never knew where you were with her. Sometimes as grave as a judge. And sometimes – well, she might have been twelve. Poor little Lucy Rideout!’

Hudspith was staring mournfully at the ceiling – which meant that he could trust his colleague to make such observations as might appear. And there could be no doubt about the palpable hit: Appleby was instantaneously convinced of that. Between Wine and his assistant there had passed a glance of the most startled intelligence. The nightmarish birthday party had justified itself at last. And the Daffodil affair, lately as ragged and flowing as cirrus clouds, stood now solid before Appleby as he sat – solid too with something of the symmetry of a carefully precipitated crystal.

And now Hudspith was shifting restlessly on his seat. Again he had the look of an uneasy man, but this time his air was not quite that of one dawningly aware that he has carried his liquor singularly ill. He had something of his old brooding appearance, and his eye seemed as if looking half fearfully into distance. ‘And there’s a funny thing about that girl,’ he said. ‘Several times today–’ He broke off, rose and walked fairly steadily round the smoke-room – a rapidly sobering man. ‘I suppose that’s why I’ve been talking,’ he resumed inconsequently.

There was a moment’s silence. Wine was carefully relighting his cigar. ‘You were saying,’ he prompted, ‘that several times today–’

But Hudspith had strode to the farther end of the room, poured himself out a cup of black coffee and drained it. And now when he turned back he was visibly still further chastened. ‘You mustn’t mind my yarns,’ he said. ‘Will get yarning after a party. You know how it is. Too much girl and then this damn long voyage.’ He stood before them, ignoble but rational. ‘Tell you snake stories now, if you like.’ Again he shifted uneasily, was momentarily absent. ‘Or game of cards. Fixes the mind. After a long party nothing like a hand or two before shut-eye. Come ’long, John.’