The Man from the Sea
The Man From The Sea
First published in 1955
© Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1955-2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 0755121031 EAN: 9780755121038
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
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Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.
After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of
Florio’s
translation of
Montaigne’s Essays
and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.
By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel,
Death at the President’s Lodging
. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.
After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen’s University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the
Oxford History of English Literature
.
Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.
His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.
The beginning of Cranston’s adventure – the real adventure, not the intrigue – seemed as sudden and grotesque as a queer twist in a dream. The night was very still, and the empty sea as it rose and fell gently under a great low moon sighed like a woman half-awake – sighed and then stretched out cold fingers of surf to the young man’s naked body sprawled on the cold sand. He told himself that he wanted to be very cold; that this was why he lingered. Lady Blair – for in his own mind he still involuntarily called her that – had disappeared among the rocks, so the hide-and-seek which was now prescriptively the next phase of the affair was due to begin. She had a childish love of it, and part of the two nocturnal hours they could risk together went regularly to a sort of ritual enactment of the game. Tonight these hours were already running out. But Cranston still lingered. Prompted to give himself a reason, he recalled – conscientiously and from all the luxury of his large new knowledge – that to start with chilled limbs was additional fun. Lingering still, he turned over on his belly in the last feeble ripple of a wave. But the movement plucked obscurely and disturbingly at his mind, edging towards the light a very different reason for delay. And at that moment the thing happened.
What had appeared to be a clot of seaweed floating in with the tide became the head of a swimmer. The swimmer dropped his feet to the seabed and started to wade ashore. He was stripped except for a belt about his middle and a wisp of fabric round his loins. Under the sudden unnatural weight of a body long supported in water, and with the staggering movement of a clumsily constructed ambulatory toy, he lurched forward foot by foot. Seeing that he was exhausted – that he might fall on his still streaming face at any moment and drown in eighteen inches of water – Cranston scrambled up and ran towards him. The man from the sea stopped dead. It was a reaction which for some reason made Cranston stop too. On this unfrequented strip of Scottish coast in the small hours, the two confronted each other like wary savages. And then the man from the sea turned his head – turned it in the direction from which he had come. He was listening.
What the man from the sea had heard Cranston caught a moment later. It was the throb of an engine. Already that night he had heard something of the sort. Lady Blair – Caryl Blair – had been frightened by it. She enjoyed fear in a way that fascinated and repelled him. It was at its prompting that she had made this the manner of their meeting; it was what lay perhaps at the bottom of their relationship. She had insisted that the sound was from a car on the coast road; that it was her husband; that it meant discovery, confusion. And she had clung to him. He had known very well that the sound came from offshore, that it was the pulse of turbines in some steamer moving down the coast. And then it had stopped and she had been reassured. It had seemed to
stop
– he now remembered – rather than to fade into distance. This new sound, although also from the sea, was very different. It was the rapid throb of a motorboat. And it was coming nearer.
The man from the sea took a great breath and stumbled forward once more. It was when only his ankles remained in water that Cranston hit on the truth about him. He was a fugitive.
He was a fugitive. That was why the engines had ceased. The man had swum from a steamer out at sea, and it had stopped and sent a launch in pursuit of him. The discovery drew from Cranston a confusion of responses. Here was something vexatious, frustrating – perhaps dangerous. His meeting with Caryl – their assignation, in the dark word that still excited him – was suddenly a mess. This encounter had ruined it, and presently they must manage to scramble out of its mere embarrassment and indecency as he himself must scramble into his shorts. For a moment he was aware only of what he was going to miss, and he felt his body tremble in what he took to be indignation or rage. But it wasn’t that – or not wholly. Even as he stared at the other naked man he recognised within his own physical response a thrill of pleasure. What had risen from the sea was some harsh male predicament to which he responded as to a release.
The throb of the motorboat was louder, as if the craft had rounded some point near at hand. And the man from the sea turned upon Cranston with an urgent and commanding gesture. The little sandy bay, pale as a bleached bone tossed against the dark cliff, was flanked at either end by a tumble of dark broken rock, and into gaining the shelter of the nearer of these refuges the man was now throwing his last energies. But he had also managed this imperious wave. Cranston was to go into hiding too. The motorboat, if it appeared, must find only an empty beach.
This much was clear – and so was the proper immediate response to make. As Cranston ran for the rocks he felt again the flush of unreasonable pleasure. A problem had bobbed up from the blue – literally from that – and this time he knew the answer. Of course the man must be given a chance to explain himself. Even if some lurking risk were involved, he must be given a chance. To wait for the motorboat, to haloo at it, would be treachery. It was surprising to Cranston that he should have this clear bit of knowledge, and surprising too that in the hurry and huddle of this strange flight it should rise up in his mind as a fact that was lucid and important. Moreover, it had so risen up without any visible basis in reason. The fellow now by chance at his side had no conceivable claim on him – and it was long odds, too, that he was simply some sort of commonplace wrongdoer. Treachery meant the breaking of a bond, and here no bond could possibly exist. Then why…?
They had made it. Their feet lost the firm sand and slipped on slime, trod painfully on barnacled rock. It was necessary to climb, but even some way up there was no more than bare cover for the two of them, and as they crouched down together in a shallow cup of darkness they had to press so close that each for a moment could hear the other’s heart. Then the sound of the motorboat drowned this and their rapid breathing. Cautiously Cranston moved his head a couple of inches to peer round a boulder. At the same moment the engine stopped. The boat had entered the bay on a long curve and was coming directly towards them now. As many as three or four men were crouched aft, and another man stood poised in the bows, sweeping the shore through night-glasses. For perhaps half a minute he scanned the farther rocks. Cranston remembered Caryl. She must have heard the engine, and presumably she was lying low there at the other end of the beach. He wondered what would happen if she lost her head and made a dash for his protection. He wondered what this boatload of mysterious searchers would make of that surprising appearance.
The man with the glasses swung them round and appeared to focus straight on Cranston. Instinctively the young man drew back his head and shoulders, and the movement caused him to jostle his companion. Caught off balance, the man from the sea swayed and was about to tumble over the lip of the narrow depression in which they cowered. Cranston grabbed at him and caught first a naked shoulder and then an arm. For a moment the two men clung together, steadying themselves, and for the first time their eyes met directly. Here in the rocks they were in near-darkness, and what Cranston was aware of was no more than a fleeting intent gaze in a featureless face – a mere glint of light, no more, upon dilated pupils. But he knew that a signal, a sort of recognition, had passed. It declared a union which, if quite impermanent, was for the moment primitive and absolute. Neither had spoken a word, had so much as attempted to whisper. The whole adventure, so far, had happened in silence. But now there were voices. They came from the boat.
