The Daffodil Affair (16 page)

‘Nothing,’ said sick Lucy in a low voice. ‘Back into nothing. Into not being there. I have to fight. And it is difficult. With me it is
amo
and
moneo
. But with her it is flamingos, an alligator – things felt, seen. She is young and does not know things. But she has life. I am afraid sometimes that she will win. You understand?’

‘I think I understand a little.’ Appleby’s voice was almost as low as Lucy’s. ‘And–’ He hesitated, for it seemed inhumane to speak of another of the Lucys as real. ‘And besides young Lucy…?’

‘There is real Lucy. I do not wish to speak of her. She is bad.’

‘Bad?’ said Appleby gravely.

‘With her it is men.’

‘I see.’ Appleby found that his eye was avoiding the physical presence before him. For one who was not a professional psychiatrist the thing had its occasional extreme discomforts. ‘But I don’t think–’

‘I mean that she might go bad. It is a great anxiety. Will you – will you be careful?’

There was no more than a monosyllable in which to reply to this. But there was a great deal to find out. Mrs Nurse and Miss Mood and the beguiling Eusapia had been spirited away, and it was problematical when they would be encountered again. At the moment only the Lucys were available for interrogation. And which was the one on which to concentrate – which was the most likely to have gained any inkling of the real purposes of Wine? Not that Appleby had the technique to conjure up one particular Lucy; he must take them as they offered. And so he tried now. ‘Miss Rideout, what do you recall of how this journey began? Who first suggested it? And – and to whom?’

‘I do not wish to speak of it.’ Sick Lucy drew the rug about her closer still. ‘Mr Appleby, will you please tell me about the Golden Sayings of Marcus Aurelius?’

‘…and that the fountain of good is inside us, and that with a little digging–’

Lucy Rideout stirred sharply. ‘Hoy!’ she said, ‘you’re not talking to
her
, you know.’

‘My dear, I thought I was.’ Appleby spoke gently but warily. ‘It’s rather an easy mistake to make. She
was
there, I promise you, only a few seconds ago.’

‘Bother her.’ Real Lucy’s accents were unrefined but not displeasing. ‘And bother the little nipper. Not that she’s a bad ’un; we used to have high old times together until that prig came along. But listen. Have they been saying things about me and you?’

‘Well – yes, they have.’

‘You needn’t kid yourself, Jacko.’ Real Lucy was robustly cheerful. ‘Even in the present restricted society.’

‘You may call me John if you will. But if you call me Jacko I will not speak to you again.’

‘John, John, whose side are you on? Shades of the prig! That’s poetry.’

‘I’m not on any side. I think you should all get together.’

‘And the more we are together the happier we shall be? No, thanks. Do you know why I came away?’

Appleby shook his head. ‘No – but I want to. Why?’

Real Lucy thought this a favourable moment for a move; she came over and sat on the arm of Appleby’s chair. ‘Probably you think it was for a bit of fun?’

‘That has occurred to me.’

‘Well, it wasn’t. I know a thing or two about girls who have gone off like that. And at first it seemed that it
was
just that – as long as it was the foreign-looking young man, you know. But then Mr Wine turned up, John, he’s a wrong ’un.’

‘I know he is. But why–’

‘But not that sort of wrong ’un. You see, a girl that likes a bit of life and fun has to look out for herself. And know about people. And here was Mr Wine wanting to carry me away to the isle of Capri, and yet he wasn’t after – well, you know what I mean. He was after something deep of his own.’

‘You were quite right, Lucy. He’s after something very deep – and rather horrible. But it has nothing to do with trafficking in girls.’ Real Lucy, Appleby saw, was more intelligent by a long way than her sisters; in fact she was a possible ally. ‘So you saw it was something pretty deep and the mystery interested and excited you. Life was rather dull, and then here suddenly was an adventure. Was that it?’

Real Lucy laughed softly and began to stroke Appleby’s hair. ‘I wish we could dance,’ she said.

‘Stick to the point, my dear.’

‘I am.’ Suddenly she bent down and kissed him on the top of the head. ‘I was just thinking that you are clever and rather nice, and that you would never think of me as a girlfriend because of the young ’un perhaps turning up.’

‘You’re quite right again. But go on.’

‘Then listen. I came away because I thought I might leave those two behind. I’m tired of them, I can tell you – that silly kid and the prig. Perhaps they’re good sorts in their way, but one does like a little place to oneself. I thought that if I came somewhere and did things they’d both hate that, then they might get sort of discouraged and go away. But it hasn’t worked yet, has it? Young Lucy just thinks it no end fun, and the prig is having a high old time with Kennedy’s
Shorter Latin Grammar
.’ Into this last statement real Lucy put a sort of whimsical venom which was not unattractive. ‘No cinema, no radio, no boys – I mean, hardly any boys.’

‘No need to apologize.’

‘In fact this boat is a prig’s paradise, and for a kid it’s better than a free pass to the zoo. So not much seems to have come so far of the plan for a change of – of–’

‘Environment. I think it was a clever plan, Lucy. But rather a leap in the dark. The new environment might be all in favour of one of the others. And then where would you be?’

‘Nowhere, I’d be nowhere, as likely as not. But you have to take a chance. And I’m the real one, after all. I think I’ve got most chance in the end. If I didn’t feel that I’d drown myself – and them.’

‘You mustn’t do that. Nor that either; Mr. Hudspith wouldn’t like it’ – and Appleby removed her hand from under his chin. ‘Tell me, Lucy – why did you never go to a doctor?’

‘A doctor?’ She stared at him. ‘I’m never ill.’

‘I see.’ Real Lucy was so intelligent and so competently spoken that one could forget the absolute and crippling ignorance general in the Rideout world. ‘It will be dinner time in five minutes.’ He had looked at his watch by the gently swaying lamp. ‘Lucy, what do you think is Wine’s game? Has anything ever happened that has given you any idea of what he’s really about?’

She looked serious – so serious that Appleby thought for a moment that sick Lucy had returned. ‘He gets together other people who – who are different.’

‘I know that.’

‘And also–’ She broke off. ‘Jacko – John, I mean – did you meet a man called Beaglehole? Yes? Well, he’s one sort of man I understand – though it’s not the sort that my sort of girl sees much of. Beaglehole is money. He does everything for money – just for the sake of the idea of having it. Wine is different. I expect he wants money too. But he wants something else much more. He’s the kind that takes hold of you hard and pushes you about until you’re just how he wants you. But also he’s not.’

‘Not?’

‘Not that. I’ve said he’s not that. He’s that and different.’ Real Lucy was struggling with some difficult abstract conception. ‘It’s as if’ – she paused over this unusual piece of syntax – ‘it’s as if he felt like that not about a girl, or about girls, but – well about everything.’

‘You mean that he has a terrific desire for power.’

‘Oh, John, I knew you were clever.’ She touched him on the ear. ‘If only–’

Above the plash of the paddles there sounded the chime of a little silver bell. And Lucy Rideout sprang to her feet. ‘Oh, Mr Appleby, isn’t it fun having dinner so late! When it’s dark! And will there be melon?’ She clapped her hands. ‘The little, round, baby melons?’

And Appleby followed young Lucy below.

Like a paradox tiresomely sustained, the river widened day after day as the little steamer puffed and paddled towards its source. The river widened, but was filled with treacherous shoals; they kept now to mid-channel, and sometimes there was a water horizon on either bow. Once they passed a canoe with fishermen – men brown and naked and lean – and once so many canoes that Mr Wine had a case of rifles brought on deck. But it was an uneventful voyage.

The days were hot, and by night there was a soft warmth under brilliant stars. Mosquitoes did not come out so far; the decks were clear of curtains and the awnings disappeared at dinner time; later the crew assembled on the fo’c’sle deck and chanted to the sound of a sinister little drum. Hudspith more than once remarked that the alligators were becoming sparser – but without appearing to derive much comfort from the fact. Perhaps his melancholy was coming upon him again. As he had spent much time on the liner staring out over the prow, so now he would gaze fixedly over the stern and down the double wake of the steamer. Appleby supposed that the old Sirens were operating. In Buenos Aires Hudspith had once been on terms of most profitable co-operation with the chief of police; in Rio there had occurred a notable sequel to his most famous clean-up in Cardiff. And he was growing thinner, Appleby thought; so that the alligators stood to lose by further delay.

And other things might be suspected to be growing thinner: notably the story about Radbone, the rival scientist. Not through want of the sort of sustenance which one might conceive to be afforded by the steady accumulation of circumstantial detail. Wine had quite fallen into the habit of embroidering on Radbone. There was a regular saga about the man, and one with sufficient interior consistency to speak much for the intellectual powers of the story-teller who lazily and extemporaneously produced it. Unfortunately Appleby and Hudspith were scarcely in a position to give it the dispassionate appraisal of literary critics; the saga had a sort of aura of alligator which made it uncomfortable hearing. Nevertheless something useful emerged. Emery Wine was a conceited man.

He had trapped them. He knew that they were policemen concerned with Lucy Rideout and Hannah Metcalfe and perhaps other aspects of his affairs; he believed that he had dissimulated this knowledge and convinced them of his conviction that they were emissaries of a rival scientist – a rival scientist whom he had invented for the purpose of his trap. He was unaware that his explanations were a little too bland and his stories a little too tall. In fact he had underestimated the perspicacity of his opponents. But then he could afford to neglect the possibility that this was so. Duped or aware, they were caught. His own problematical stronghold was in front, and behind were hundreds and hundreds of miles of the alligator-infested river.

But Wine was conceited; and the fact was interesting even if not helpful. If he was a wrong ’un he was a wrong ’un on a large scale – on the largest scale that wrong ’uns can achieve, it might be. But he was not, as the largest wrong ’uns commonly are, of the double-guarded, cautious and invulnerable sort. He gave rein to an imagination in the matter of Radbone. And imagination might destroy him yet.

There would be something of imagination in a plan for building up here, in some fastness remote from global warfare, a great organization for the study of the teasing borders of natural knowledge. The voices speaking through Mrs Nurse, the roguery and hypothetical something else in Eusapia, the ancient business of Mr Smart and the yet more ancient business of Colonel Morell: these were all but scattered examples of that class of phenomena commonly called supernatural – phenomena never perhaps convincingly and massively demonstrated but yet clinging obstinately to the fringes of human belief in almost every country and age. A spiritualist ‘seance’ behind the closed curtains of a modern drawing room has very little to commend itself to an educated mind: the spirits communicate only a nauseous twaddle, and the physical manifestations have constantly the air of – and frequently a proved source in – a trivial if ingenious conjuring. It is only when the student or investigator takes wider ground, when he finds amid remote times and cultures startlingly analogous performances with the identical residuum of stubbornly unaccountable fact, that he may come to be impressed. A group of scientists, puzzled by some ‘paranormal’ manifestation in twentieth-century London, finds that in seventeenth-century Africa this identical quirk or quiddity in nature has puzzled Jesuit missionaries as intelligent, as acute and as sceptical as themselves. The rub is there. The rub is there, thought Appleby – and from this pervasiveness of the thing rather than from any impressiveness in individual instances does it maintain its status as a legitimate field for scientific inquiry. And there would be something of imagination in a plan for large-scale assault upon this shadowy corner of the universe.

It had never been done. Rather oddly if one considered the momentous issues which could conceivably be held involved, it had never been done. Here and there had come an endowment for such hitherto irregular investigations – but always, it would appear, there had been mismanagement or ineptitude, and the effort had faded out. Telepathy, for instance, had been studied experimentally and at considerable expense. But the investigators – Radbones of a sort, as it would seem – had inadequately meditated the terms of their problem, so that the results presented merely a new field for dispute. And yet in this strange and baffling branch of knowledge the time was probably ripe for some major clarification, and there would be imagination in a really big drive on it.

Yet all this was nothing – or was little – to Emery Wine.

Big industrialists, Appleby said to himself as he looked out across the unending river, are accustomed to keep a few ‘pure’ scientists in a back room. In their private and cultivated capacities they may even patronize them a little from time to time. Nevertheless the status of these workers is low; they are kept for the purpose of rounding an occasional awkward technical corner, and if they make a ‘discovery’ they are likely to see it promptly locked up in their cultivated patron’s safe – ‘discoveries’ being as likely as not to jar the wheels of industry. And so perhaps it might be with Wine and any genuine science which his industry might support. For Wine had – or was going to have – an industry. That was the point. And the men in the back room were not going to be very important. Unless, perhaps, some unforeseen crisis came. There was that to be said for a world in the melting-pot. It sometimes turned the back room into the first-floor front.