The Man from the Sea (22 page)

That would never do. For a time the impulse left her and she felt sleepy. It had been a tearing-around sort of day. She must really – at least for minutes or seconds – have dropped off, because presently she had the sensation of starting suddenly awake. And again she wanted to have a look.

She remembered – it was absurd to have forgotten it – that there was some sort of wash-place at the tail of the plane. She had only to stand up and make for that. But now, oddly, she was reluctant. She tried to interest herself in the argumentative Swedes. They had got out some coins and bank-notes. The whole dispute appeared to be about the mysteries of British currency. She wondered whether she should lean across and explain it to them. She could do it in French. But that was stupid. They mightn’t know French, and almost certainly they had a lot of English…

Abruptly George stood up, turned, and began to walk down the gangway. She looked straight at Sally Dalrymple – Richard’s Sally – and Sir Alex Blair. It was only a fleeting glance, and now she was moving steadily on.

But she felt very cold indeed.

Lord Urquhart’s town car turned into the quiet Kensington square, glided smoothly and silently halfway round and stopped. Lord Urquhart’s chauffeur got out and impassively opened the door. Lord Urquhart had said goodbye at the airport and left them to give their own directions. Rather like a man who is careful of the stabling of his horse, he had explained that he had immediate instructions to give about his machine. But his quick withdrawal had been a matter of delicate feeling. Cranston wondered whether the chauffeur, when orders had been telephoned to him from Scotland, had been told that his destination was one of the big London hospitals. If he had, he had shown no surprise at this different destination.

Still sitting in the car, John Day peered intently round the square. Cranston knew that his sight had been clearing steadily all through the afternoon. The effect he gave was myopic, but he was in no difficulty. “It seems all clear,” he said.

Cranston agreed. He was experiencing a sense of mingled relief and anticlimax. The more he thought about this moment, the more he had been inclined to see it in terms of melodrama. The enemy agents had lost their quarry in Urquhart Forest. Their next move – unless they simply decided to give up – would be to man any point where he was likely to reappear. And they would be bound to think of his wife. That they did not know her whereabouts was most improbable. And if they could raise, within a matter of hours, a force of a dozen agents in a remote part of Scotland, it was very clear that they would have no difficulty in finding whatever they required in London.

“But it
would
seem all clear.” Day’s former ironical manner had returned. “They wouldn’t, when you come to think of it, have a couple of machine-guns waiting on the pavement. What one likes about these London squares is the gardens in the middle. Trees and shrubs galore. You could hide a small army in them.” For a moment he sat back in the big limousine. “And, of course, a lot can be done from windows, too.”

“No doubt.” Cranston spoke shortly. Day’s were certainly pertinent observations, but there seemed nothing to be gained by not getting the thing over. The chauffeur, moreover, was listening to these remarks with a wooden expression which Cranston found embarrassing. Cranston had been remembering the bullets spraying about the beach at Dinwiddie. But although it was a recollection which he found thoroughly uncomfortable, it did not exclude from his consciousness the absurdly incongruous discomfort of talking and behaving incomprehensibly before this waiting man. “We must chance it,” he said. “We’ll get out.”

“Are
you
getting out?” Day appeared surprised.

“Of course I am.” Cranston stepped on the pavement. “Thank you very much,” he said to the chauffeur. “We don’t want you to wait.”

“Very good, sir.” The man was looking not at Cranston but at Day, who was now descending from the car. “Good afternoon, sir.” He was about to close the door when he glanced inside and stopped. “Excuse me.” He reached forward to a seat. “I think these are yours, sir?” What he had picked up was Sally Dalrymple’s dark glasses. He was still looking at Day as he handed them over. Perhaps, Cranston thought, he was quartered from time to time at Urquhart, and had on some occasion been more noticing than his employer of the neighbouring Sir Alex Blair’s clothes. But this was unlikely. And now the man had climbed back into his seat. In a moment the car had drawn away from the kerb and was gone.

“Well – thank you very much.” Day, standing on the pavement, had turned to Cranston as a man might do to a friend by whom he has been given a casual lift.

It was the moment, Cranston knew, for which he ought to have been better prepared. He glanced round the square, almost wishing for the missing melodrama. But there was no hint of it. Behind its high iron railings the garden in the centre appeared deserted. The score or so of cars parked round about were all empty. The dusty London summer light was draining away, and sucking the dusk down into the great grey tank of a square. A boy was delivering evening papers, and down a side street a woman with high heels returned from shopping – the superior sort of shopping that declares itself in cartons and band-boxes of modish design. There was no help in this commonplace scene. Cranston turned and looked at the doorway by which they stood. “It’s here?” he asked. “Your…home?”

Day nodded. “The top flat.”

“You’re going to stay?”

“In a sense – yes.”

The man was inscrutable. One could be certain of nothing except that some inflexible purpose drove him. “You want me to go?” Cranston asked.

“To go?” For a moment Day looked at him as at somebody he had forgotten about. “Well – yes. Don’t think me ungrateful. But for the moment – decidedly yes. It’s scarcely an occasion, is it, for outsiders?”

“I suppose not. Shall you be here if I come back tomorrow?”

“That’s difficult to say.” Day fell silent. It might have been because a policeman was going past with a heavy and unhurried tread. Or it might have been in calculation – only by this time, surely, all his calculating had been done. “That’s difficult,” he repeated. “But I think not.”

“Why?” Cranston made the question a challenge.

Day slightly shook his head. It was like a gesture of embarrassment. “Look,” he said, “need we end on any sort of dismal note? We’ve had rather a good show.”

“I want you to tell me, please.”

“It’s the top flat – five storeys up. Don’t ask how I propose to leave it. Say…just rather suddenly.”

“You can’t. It’s abominable!” Cranston suddenly knew that he was revolted. “I can’t criticise the act. I’ve no right to. But you should have done it at once – long before you got yourself on that ship and within hail of this country. Let alone within hail of this house! Go away. Go away, man, and drown yourself. Only, if your wife’s here, spare her this vicious stunt. You once said you wondered if what you’d got in your head was crazy. Well, it is. I see it now as utterly that. I ought never to have brought you.”

Day’s reply to this was to walk up the short flight of steps to the door of the house. There was a row of bells, but the door was open upon a staircase leading to the flats above. He turned. “
If
my wife is here? You don’t believe me? I think you never did.”

“If your story’s true, and if you mean to do as you say, I can’t see that there’s anything I can do.” Looking up at Day from the pavement, Cranston was seeing him rather as he had done during their first exchange of words among the rocks at Dinwiddie. “I urge you to give up this plan. But I can’t do more…
Is
it true?”

“It is true.” Day’s inflamed eyes held his squarely. “I give you my word of honour as a gentleman.”

“Very well.” Cranston turned and walked away.

It seemed to him that he had walked for hours. It was dark by the time that he went into a café and ate something – something tasteless and lumpish, washed down with what was perhaps coffee. He went out and again walked about London. He hadn’t solved his problem; he had simply dropped it. He saw that he must begin with what he really knew – with what he really knew about the man from the sea. But his mind, as it tried to face this, went off elsewhere. Sally looking down at him as he descended the cliff – looking at him as if she never expected to see him again, as if it was all hopeless, as if this was the end… It meant something, he now knew, that he didn’t understand. This enigma worried at his mind. But so did another – and perhaps more keenly. George hadn’t walked out on him. He was certain of that. Almost the only thing he had to hold to was that she was stopping in. But then why – ?

He drove his mind back to Day. He tried to imagine George walking beside him – here in the London dark – and giving him a line on Day. He tried this for a long time. The spectral colloquy seemed fruitless – but presently he noticed the direction he was now walking in. He was going back to Kensington.

He must begin with what he really knew about the man from the sea. And the area of certainty was quite small. When one’s head was clear it could be surveyed at a glance. The man from the sea was John Day – a scientist deeply compromised and immensely dangerous. Cranston found that his pace had quickened. When he reached the square he walked to the house with certainty and mounted the steps. There was a little frame for a card beside each bell, and a light good enough for reading. He looked at the one on top. It was something that he might have done before, he thought. If it said
Day
then his mind could be a little at rest, surely, about the man from the sea. If it didn’t, he was little farther forward. The poor woman might well be prompted to live behind somebody else’s name… There was a printed card in the frame…
DAY
.

For a moment he stared at it fixedly. He heard his own breath going out in a gasp of relief. The business was over – or over so far as he was concerned. Up there the abominable denouement had by this time accomplished itself. Day had made his submission, penance, apology – whatever he conceived it. By this time, perhaps, he was dead. It was to be supposed that he would have the decency to choose a window at the back… Cranston turned, descended the steps and walked away. It wasn’t for him, he supposed, to do anything about the poor devil’s wife – or not now. He didn’t even know how she would feel about it. Perhaps she was not altogether hating that it had happened that way. Perhaps she was proud, happy, exalted. Day in his action might have been absolutely right. Cranston quickened his pace. It was beyond his experience. He just couldn’t know.

He had walked a hundred yards when he suddenly pulled up dead. They wouldn’t, Day had said, have a couple of machine-guns waiting on the pavement. But didn’t that mean that he had left Day – been obliged to leave him – just at the very most dangerous point of all? Would Day’s late employers much consider the feeling, or for that matter the life, of his wife? Had the affair had – or was it even now still having – a denouement quite other than he had lately been imagining?

Cranston turned and walked quickly back. He must know. Even if it was the end of him – and it might be – he must know. He stopped and stared again at the card.
DAY
. It looked, he now saw, oddly new. Perhaps the poor lady lived here no longer, and it was by some trick that Day had been persuaded she did. Perhaps the top flat had been empty – until hastily invaded and transformed into a trap this very afternoon. With his imagination racing and his heart pounding, Cranston walked into the house and hurried upstairs, taking the treads two at a time. There would be another bell at the top. He had only to ring it and he could hardly escape finding out the truth either way.

He reached the top landing without consciousness of physical effort. There was another bell – and another little frame also. But this frame was empty. He could only barely distinguish the fact, because the landing was poorly lit. He paused to let his eyes grow accustomed to the gloom. He thought he heard voices.

Cranston strained his ears. One got odd effects in flats, and these voices might really be coming up from somewhere down below. If not, he thought, he knew where he was. Because they were the voices of men – several men – and they all appeared to be talking together. He put his ear to the door, and at once he was certain that the sound came not from downstairs but from inside. Suddenly the voices were louder, as if some inner door had been opened. And now he could distinguish something of their quality. They were foreign voices.

Some instinct made him draw back. Almost in the same moment the door by which he had been crouching opened. It opened precipitately and a man hurried out. He was thrusting a soft dark hat on his head, and the movement took him past Cranston unheeding. He ran downstairs. The door began to close, as if somebody was shoving it to with a foot from inside. The voices were still talking, and in some sort of mounting excitement. Cranston couldn’t be said to have made up his mind. His body acted for him. He moved up to the door, shoved against it hard, and walked into the flat.

He was confronting a small dark man with frightened eyes. The man began stuttering and stammering in an unknown tongue. As a door-keeper he was distinctly not formidable, but Cranston didn’t delude himself he would find only the same sort inside. He put a hand on the small man’s neck, swept him without much gentleness against the wall, and walked on.

He was making, he supposed, a demonstration – showing his private little Cranston flag. Well, that was how he had begun, and it did seem up to him to carry it through. Once more he recalled the bullets spraying on the beach. And this time he remembered also the voices calling from the quarry. They had been particularly detestable. And presumably it was the same voices – or the same sort of voices – that now came to him from some farther room. Decidedly, Day’s pursuers had won. Day must have known about just this risk. But he had gone ahead. Dead or alive, he was worth some sort of salute… Cranston pushed open another door. “Good evening,” he said.