The Man from the Sea (21 page)

George stopped to look at the Admiral that would presently be taking off for London. Was it possible that the law had already been invoked, and that interest in John Day had spread beyond the small band of secret agents who had made all the running so far? Was Richard perhaps too confident that –

She turned away, seeing that it was time to go back to Lord Urquhart’s plane. She was walking rapidly when she happened to turn her glance on the main entrance to the airfield. It was like the crisis when she had first spied the tell-tale cobweb on the door of the Canty Quean. But it was, for the moment, a good deal more bewildering. There was no sense in it. There was no sense in it unless – George found that she had stopped dead in her tracks. She heard a faint hail and turned her head to see her cousin standing by their plane and waving to her. She hurried forward. By the time she reached him her mind was made up. “Richard,” she said, “I’m not coming further.”

“Not coming?” He spoke above the roar of the engine. The plane was ready to take off. He was astonished and dismayed. “Why ever not?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“George!” He made a movement towards her.

“I can’t tell you – yet.”

“You’re not – ?” He paused, confused.

“Do you think I would?” She flashed it at him. “Where can I contact you?”

He saw that she meant it. “At my aunt’s. Malvern Court. It’s a big block of flats off–”

“I know. And now – get in.”

Cranston gave her a single long look and obeyed.

“I’ll be seeing you,” she said – and turned away.

He didn’t see it, she said to herself. For a wonder he didn’t see it. And it sticks out a mile. It would be quite noticeable if it were black or a sober grey. But as it is –

There was only a chauffeur left in the great yellow car. It was drawing away from the low building marked
Departures
. George remembered thankfully that she had a belt – like Day she had a belt – and that there was quite a lot of money in it. Until she knew what was happening she couldn’t afford to let go. She wished she was less absurdly dressed. Probably she was as noticeable as the yellow Cadillac itself.

She glanced quickly at the nearest group of people, with a notion that she would find them staring, and instead found to her astonishment that they were dressed exactly like herself. She drew nearer. They were young men and women of about her own age, talking a foreign language. For a brief moment – such is the power of recent associations – she was suspicious and alarmed. Then she slipped into the middle of them. They were blonde, and most of them were enormous. She guessed that they were Norwegians or Swedes. Certainly they were perfect cover. She stood in the middle of them, amiably smiling, and knew that for the moment she had found a sort of cloak of invisibility.

Not that there was any reason to suppose that Sir Alex Blair would know her from Adam – or Eve. Whatever he was up to – and to discover that was decidedly the point – he was presumably without the advantage of any information derived from the late enemy. From his own lodgekeeper, Patullo, he might vaguely have heard of the incident of the mysterious housemaid – supposing Patullo had in fact noticed anything. But that was the nearest, surely, that he could be to any knowledge of her existence.

And correspondingly she didn’t know him. Her mind worked largely in pictures, and she had indeed invented an Alex Blair. She had invented, for that matter – and with rather more particularity – an image that she called Sally Dalrymple. But neither of these inventions would much serve for the purpose of positive identification… She glanced about the species of assembly hall in which she was standing. There was no great crowd – only, she guessed, the passengers going to London on the Admiral, and an answering group going the other way to Aberdeen. And in a moment this conjecture confirmed itself. With the usual ritual of disembodied voices and lines of coloured lights the Aberdeen contingent was shepherded away. But her Scandinavians were going south – which was so far, so good. And so was she – or ten to one she was. The odds were sufficient to justify her buying a ticket at once. Without much trepidation now, she broke cover to do so. Fortunately the plane wasn’t booked out. She returned to her adopted companions. They received her without surprise, and one or two even appeared to murmur casual words. Presumably their travels were young and they were some of them unknown to one another.

She scanned the remaining people in the hall. None of them answered to anything she could conceive of as a retired scientist turned Scottish country gentleman. She abandoned the men and studied the women. And almost at once she knew she was looking at Sally Dalrymple. Richard’s Sally, she said to herself. Richard’s sound Sally.

She was easy on the eyes. George framed this vulgar description to herself with deliberate relish. A sweetly pretty girl. No – that wouldn’t do. It wasn’t at all fair. Sally Dalrymple was beautiful. She was beautiful and knew how to get herself up to match. But she had told tales.

George took a grip on herself. One wanted a clear head. And to say – or think – a thing like that was less fair still. If the girl had gone straight to her stepfather with the story of John Day one couldn’t honestly and faithfully say that she had done wrong. And the consequence wasn’t any sort of hue and cry. Turnhouse wasn’t swarming with officers from whatever was the Scottish equivalent of Scotland Yard. Sir Alex Blair had acted swiftly – but unobtrusively. If the term didn’t quite fit his Cadillac, George couldn’t blame him for that. Had it not attracted her attention when she was scanning Dinwiddie Castle that morning, its sweeping on to the airfield would have meant nothing to her now.

Again she hunted around – for she couldn’t believe that Sally Dalrymple was here alone. Sir Alex must be somewhere about. Unless indeed – it struck her suddenly as a possibility – the girl’s travelling south to catch a plane was sheer coincidence. But something about the girl herself indefinably insisted that it wasn’t so. She was not only what is called perfectly groomed; she was also perfectly self-possessed. But if you watched her face you saw that it was set and strained. She was here because of John Day.

And she was here because she could identify John Day. Even if only in an imperfect early morning light, she had seen him as he now was. The moment must come at which the girl would have to point and say
There!
It couldn’t be something she was looking forward to, poor kid – and it explained the tension discernible in her now.

The disembodied voice was telling the London passengers to get ready. And still there was no sign of Sir Alex. How, George wondered, did the girl feel about Richard? There was no doubt about how Richard felt towards the girl. Or about the whole story. George looked at the story steadily – much as she had been looking at Sally. There was nothing easy on the eyes about it. Still, her mind didn’t exactly reel before it. Apparently poor Richard’s did. He felt –

She caught herself up. All that wasn’t, at the moment, the point. It was the point that this man Blair had been told of young Richard Cranston’s rash involvement with the returned John Day. And what he was now doing – surely the facts could bear no other interpretation – was acting quickly and quietly to relieve the youth of at least some part of the burden of his folly. Presumably Sir Alex didn’t know about the behaviour – about what newspapers or lawyers called the misconduct – of his wife. He thought of Richard as his step-daughter’s friend and the family doctor’s son. He would do what he could to get the matter briskly settled and effectively hushed up.

The voice was speaking again. They were being exhorted to follow the blue light. George’s Scandinavians shouldered their rucksacks and bundles. The other passengers picked up their hand-baggage. There was a general shuffle across the hall. And then she saw him.

Sir Alex Blair was as unmistakable as Sally Dalrymple had been. He was the only person in the place, George thought, who had Ruling Class written all over him. If there was anything unexpected about him it was perhaps that the writing was a shade too large. He certainly wasn’t showy or obtrusive or arrogant. There was nothing about him that corresponded, so to speak, directly to the colour of his car. Still, what the car spoke in one language the man himself contrived somehow to speak in another. Perhaps, George told herself, it was all to the good. He looked the sort of man who would prize powerful friends and cherish influential contacts. If Richard were threatened with serious trouble – and he might well be – this was the man who would know just where to go and what to say. Like his step-daughter he was beautifully turned out – in admirable clothes that were just not quite new. He was extremely well preserved, but not offensively so. He would smell – very very faintly – of some superb shaving-soap.

George had not much time to remark that these observations and responses fell some way short of enthusiasm. For now they were in the open air and had been taken over by a young lady in uniform. George managed to get right at the tail of her large blonde companions and thus to have Sally Dalrymple immediately behind her. Sir Alex, she realised, had been in a little office, and as he advanced she saw out of the corner of her eye that he was carrying a telegram.

“Just in time.” His voice – pleasant, confident and not exactly subdued – came to her clearly. “It ought to have been waiting for us, but it came in only thirty seconds ago. A near thing. I asked–”

A sudden roar of engines drowned what followed. The Aberdeen plane was off down its runway. When the noise faded the two people behind George had fallen silent. The little ragged procession was nearing its aircraft. Two or three rude persons, having a mind to some favourite seat, began a sort of modified jostling designed to get them to the front. The Scandinavians stood politely aside. George decided to do the same. Without assertiveness – one couldn’t indeed quite see how it was done – Sir Alex was first aboard after all, with his step-daughter beside him. George glimpsing them together as they went past, had an odd sensation of hearing with her inner ear the voice of old Lord Urquhart, repeating something he had already said that afternoon. Then she was on board herself. She didn’t want to sit down beside a conversable Swede, and she moved forward. When she found a seat it was directly in front of the pair from Dinwiddie.

They were still, as far as she could judge, silent. But the engines were now roaring, and in a minute they were moving forward. It was only when they had been airborne for some time that she felt at all confident of being able to catch even fragments of anything that was said. It was years since she had eavesdropped in a serious way. She settled down to it now.

“There are a great many difficulties, you know, still.” It was Sir Alex’s voice. But its quality had changed. The tone matched the words. It was worried and almost sombre. “The biggest is the mere uncertainty.”

“Are you so uncertain?”

“We have this one specific indication. Day is making for his wife. But it may be all lies. Do you think young Cranston realises that?”

“I don’t know. I suppose he would. Wouldn’t he?” Sally Dalrymple’s voice, although distinguishable only with difficulty, came to George as oddly uncomfortable and constrained. It was as if she found talking about Richard difficult. And that, George thought, might well be.

“I know precious little about him.” Sir Alex sounded impatient. “I suppose he’s a fool. Most young people are.”

“Thank you!” Now Sally’s voice seemed to tremble. It might almost have been with anger. George frowned. Probably the impression was no more than a trick of the queer acoustics of the hurtling cylinder in which they were seated.

“Now, don’t go off into idiocy, Sally. And stick to the point. We have this one positive line. Marlow.”

“Marlow?”

“Weren’t you listening? That’s what Mason’s telegram said. For the last twelve months the wretched woman has been living in a cottage at Marlow. So if it’s not lies–”

“Yes – I see.” Sally’s voice sank, and George could only just catch the words. They sounded desperate. “I don’t think I can take it. Dick–” Sir Alex said something that George didn’t catch. Nor did she hear Sally Dalrymple’s reply. She had an impression indeed that it was less an articulate response than a quickly drawn breath or a gasp. And then neither said anything at all. The young lady in uniform had put on a different jacket and was handing out cups of coffee and sandwiches. The sandwiches were so sharply triangular that they might have been the product of precision instruments normally concerned with turning out components for the aircraft itself. Perhaps the people behind were munching them. For their silence continued.

England, slightly tilting from time to time as if it floated on a gently heaving sea, drifted beneath them on a leisurely trip to the North Pole. The Scandinavians, tired of cricking their necks in order to contemplate its dull mottle, buried themselves in guide-books to Cambridge, Oxford, Stoke-upon-Trent and other serious places. George began to think that her eavesdropping was over. At least she already had plenty to think about.

But perhaps half an hour later something more was said. Indeed, the two must have been murmuring inaudibly together for some time, since what she now heard plainly hitched on to other words just spoken.

“And if it is?” Sally’s question seemed to be at once sharp and weary. “If it’s an utterly false cast, is there anything else you can try?”

“Certainly there is. I can think of a good many possibilities. Perhaps Day has deserted his recent friends simply because he has secured a promise of more advantageous employment elsewhere. And he’ll have brought with him on paper everything he can’t carry in his head.”

“But, Alex, where else–”

“My dear girl, plenty of countries are anxious to start up on all that. For instance, some in South America.”

“South America? I don’t see how–”

“You have no idea what I’m talking about.” He was impatient again. “You seldom have. It’s one of the points in which I find you rather like your mother. But you may think comparisons are–” George heard no more. Two Scandinavians across the gangway on her left hand had started a noisy argument. It was earnest and good-humoured and went on interminably. For a long time she sat very still. She found herself wondering why she felt chilly. These things were air-conditioned, surely. And the late-afternoon sunshine was beating in on her right cheek as she sat. She had a queer impulse to look at the people behind her. If she could see them again it might help her to make sense of what she had heard. But she could do nothing by just turning round. The seats were more than head-high. She would have to stand up and deliberately stare.