The Man from the Sea (3 page)

“But surely–” He stopped – having caught suddenly at a fantastic truth. In her incredible head Caryl had fudged up some crazy suspicion. Perhaps it was to the effect that he had been prompted to conceal a second mistress at the other end of the beach. More probably what had peered out in her was without definable content – a mere irresistible wash of undifferentiated sexual jealousy. And at this, under a sort of cold inner light flicked on by the absurd discovery, Cranston starkly realised the simple truth over whose contours his mind had been intermittently groping for days and nights. It was as if his fingers had slid beneath a delusively seductive garment and come on ice.

He was crazy himself. For weeks he had been indulging in a bout of madness. A casual observer – and now there was one – would see in it no more than a run-of-the-mill indignity of late adolescence. But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t remotely just what one might feel elated about or ashamed of according to one’s mood. It was entirely different. He wondered if it was unwittingly that Caryl had touched the unbearable quick of the matter only a minute before…

He caught himself up. Their situation demanded action and not reverie. Something prompted him to turn his glance back along the beach. “Well,” he said, “it’s too late, anyway.”

“Too late, Dicky?”

“He’s grown tired of waiting. Here he is.”

“But he’s naked!”

She spoke in a quick prudish alarm which ought to have been funny. But again what Cranston felt was impatience. “He’s not – for what it’s worth. But he certainly can’t get far dressed only in the ghost of a pair of pants.” He paused, perplexed. “What can his plan have been, going overboard like that?”

“He hadn’t one, I suppose. He was just escaping from some foreign ship. They do often pass quite close.”

Cranston was silent. The man from the sea would never be without a plan. His mind was of a sort that made such a state of affairs impossible. Cranston was sure of this, even while realising that he could give no rational account of his certainty. He watched the man come straight across the beach, and it occurred to him that in this light he ought to look slightly unreal, uncanny. For the moon takes the weight and substance out of things, and relieves them of intent and relatedness. But the man was quite real and very purposive. He might have been a golfer – a professional golfer – marching after his ball in the cold concentration of an important match. And now he was up with them and speaking.

“I thought it better to come across. It can’t be very long till dawn. And you are probably anxious to get home.” He had looked first at Cranston, as if to an acquaintance by whom some ceremony of introduction should be performed. But when nothing came of this he turned with brisk ease – with what might have been an acknowledgement of the happy propriety of a less formal note – to Cranston’s companion. “Although,” he added, “it’s a perfect night on which to be out.”

For a moment Caryl Blair said nothing, puzzled by the flat conventionality of his tone – by its lack of the impertinence or urgency she had expected. But she was still afraid, and when she did speak fear made her forthright. “Who are you? Why are you here? Why were they hunting you?”

“These are very reasonable questions.” He was looking at her steadily. “And the first brings me at once to something rather astonishing. We have, as a matter of fact, met before.”

“Oh no! I’m sure we haven’t.” Caryl’s voice came to Cranston as pitiably scared. “There’s no possibility–”

“But indeed we have…Lady Blair.”

She gave a gasp and shrank towards her lover. “Dicky,” she whispered, “take me away…take me away!”

“But not in circumstances which would cause
you
to remember
me
.” As if unaware of her reaction, the man from the sea continued on the note of polite talk. “A mere introduction – but I was far from likely to forget it.” He looked at her directly again, and his voice carried the precise intonation that the urbane compliment required. “And I met your husband too on the same occasion. But not, I think” – and he turned to Cranston–“your son.”

There was a blank silence, and then Cranston heard Caryl draw a long shuddering breath. It was oddly echoed by a tiny wave breaking on the beach. The man had hit upon a pretence at once deft and cruel – something before which she was helpless, like one suddenly offered an insulting charity. And Cranston, determined that this make-believe should get no further, broke in. “You may as well know–”

“At something of the Royal Society’s, would it have been?” The man from the sea ignored the interruption. “Certainly it was some rather grand affair, at which I was surprised to find myself. You were wearing diamonds. That interested me, I need hardly say.”

“My diamonds interested you?” Caryl had sufficiently recovered her nerve to tumble into vacuous curiosity. “I don’t see why they should.”

The man from the sea smiled. It was not, Cranston thought, a real smile. Indeed, nothing that he said or did was quite real; only his presence – his enigmatical presence – was that. And now for a fraction of a second he seemed to hesitate, as if debating some disclosure that it might, or might not, be expedient to make. When he spoke again, there was for the first time the hint of some concession to the dramatic in his voice.

“You were wearing uncommonly fine diamonds. But nothing like so fine, Lady Blair, as I am wearing now.”

Again it should have been a funny moment. Caryl Blair, although she had all the careful modesty of an unchaste woman, looked the almost naked man up and down, round-eyed. “
Wearing
diamonds?”

He tapped his waist, and Cranston was once more aware of the belt he had first noticed as the man rose from the sea. The belt was bulkier – and the man himself more youthfully slim about the tummy – than had become apparent before. “You mean you
carry
diamonds?” Cranston asked.

The man from the sea nodded. “It’s my trade. I work at this end of some rather large-scale IDB.”

Cranston could see Caryl’s eyes grow yet rounder. It struck him – and simply as one further confounding revelation – that her facial expressions were all conventional muscular manoeuvres, picked up from plays and films, imagined from books. But her interest was genuine, and it was clear that this mysterious talk of diamonds held for her the same sort of fascination that an actual outpouring of gems themselves would have, were the stranger to tumble them out before her, all ice and fire beneath this ghastly moon. “IDB?” she asked.

“Illicit diamond buying.” The man from the sea, it seemed to Cranston, might have been saying “I work at the FO” or even “My job’s with ICI – no reason why you should have heard of it, but it has to do with chemicals and things of that sort.” He was entirely bland. And now he spoke again. “I’m afraid that tonight you’ve come up with – well, somebody doing what’s scarcely expected of him.” He gave Cranston a swift sardonic glance. “You mightn’t believe it – but it does happen from time to time.”

There was another silence – but not because Caryl made anything of this. Chinese would have meant no less to her. She turned to Cranston. “Then it is just smuggling? Not anything criminal?”

“Perhaps it can be put that way. But, if we help our friend here, we are certainly liable to be put in gaol – and after a picturesque joint trial. Can’t you see us side by side in the dock?” He stopped – astonished at himself and suddenly ashamed. He had never before spoken to her meaning to hurt, and it seemed to him incredibly mean. For he was clinging to the cloudy notion that she had made for him some enormous sacrifice, and that he ought to be her man to the death. Yet there she was, a woman of about the same age as the stranger beside her, dressed in a sweater and slacks, and with an empty head. He glimpsed the terrifying fact that one creates and uncreates as one goes along; that one cannot help it; that fatuities and disenchantments and treacheries are regular by-products in the queer chemistry of living.

“I’m afraid that is perfectly true.” The man from the sea struck smoothly in, like a skilled family friend sensing domestic friction and unobstrusively pouring oil. “Fortunately, detection is unlikely. Indeed, it’s scarcely an exaggeration to say that it hardly ever happens – at least as long as one’s brains continue to work.” He was mildly humorous. “And I think ours will do that.”

“Was your brain working when you jumped overboard in your skin?” Cranston turned on him swiftly. “Is it your regular technique? Do you reckon to crawl gasping from the sea and stumble straight upon people like – like ourselves, every time?”

“That would be to expect too much altogether.” The stranger’s humour was a shade broader. “You weren’t in my mind at all.”

“Then what was in your mind? You seem to me to have done something quite desperate.”

“There was a decided emergency. A matter of three or four friends of mine being suddenly prompted to cut my throat. It happens – in IDB. I jumped.”

“With any plan?”

“Dear me, yes. One can’t set out to swim an unknown number of miles in a lounge suit or a dinner jacket. But, once ashore, I was sure I could find a bathing-beach in time. And there I could lie about unregarded all day in next to nothing – and until somebody proved a little careless of their clothes. Everything would be simple after that. I have plenty of money.”

“Then you had better carry on. We won’t stop you.” Cranston hesitated. “Or say anything, either.”

“That’s right.” Caryl joined in eagerly. “Go at once. And we’ll say nothing. On our honour.”

“Ah – on that.” The man from the sea looked at Cranston inscrutably. “I wonder whether you – or your mother – can think of a better way in which I might get hold of some clothes?”

“I’ll get you clothes.” Cranston spoke coldly. He knew the man from the sea to be under no misconception about his relationship with Caryl, and his continued affectation in the matter was part of what appeared his pervasive falsity. Even his diamonds were surely false – and whether false or real they belonged to some small world of low criminality. Cranston felt that the man from the sea had in an indefinable way let him down. Nevertheless – if yet more indefinably still – there remained between them something that Cranston felt as a bond. He would have liked to break it – and now he was trying to see it as some sort of measurable obligation. Let him hand over so much, and he would be quits. Let him get the man from the sea inside a suit and walking upon leather – and that would be the end of him. “I’ll get you clothes,” he repeated. “I’ll take you home and fit you out at once.”

“But Dicky – you can’t!” Caryl had grabbed him by the arm – and now, absurdly dragging him a few paces away, she fiercely whispered. “Dicky, it’s too risky…the village…your people…you mustn’t.”

“It can’t be helped, I’m afraid.”

“We must take him the other way – mine. It’s far safer. I can go ahead and get some of Alex’s things. He’ll never miss them. I’ll leave them in the summerhouse – the one by the cliff. Follow with him – and when he’s dressed get him away. And meet me, Dicky – meet me tomorrow night.”

“Very well.” He knew it at once to be the better plan; that on a sober calculation it involved her in less ultimate risk than did his own. And he turned to the man from the sea. “We’ve fixed it up. Within an hour you’ll be clothed – and gone.”

“I mean to go ahead – but only to get things ready.” Caryl added her explanations. “And I’m quite good at men’s clothes. You can trust me.”

“I’m sure I can, Lady Blair.”

“Then I’ll go.” She had winced again at his knowledge of her name, as if feeling that it vastly increased his power to harm. “And we won’t breathe a word. Only there must be a bargain.”

“A bargain, Lady Blair?”

“Never mind.” Before his polite blankness she was confused. By tomorrow, Cranston thought, she might be believing that they really had been taken for mother and son out on some innocent nocturnal skylarking; that no bargain had been in question; that they had helped the fugitive out of the bounty of their own romantic feelings… And now she was still lingering. She still had something to say – and such was his pained sense of a large new knowledge of her that he was surprised at having no notion of what it could be. She was looking almost shyly at the man from the sea. “Will you show them to me?” she asked.

For a second it left Cranston merely wondering. The stranger was not at a loss. “I wish I could. But they are rather particularly sewn up, you know.” Once more he tapped his belt. “And you couldn’t tell them from pebbles.”

“Pebbles?” She was naïvely astonished.

“They look no more than that – until they’re cut.”

“I see.” She was like a child whom some prosaic fact betrays in the legitimate expectation of pleasure. “Where do you take them to?”

“Hatton Garden. All diamonds go there.”

“So they do.” She accepted this sagely. “But they will come back to you later – I mean the same ones?”

“Yes, I shall have further dealings with them later on.”

“They’ll be for sale?” She hesitated. “I could perhaps buy one or two – just by way of remembering this funny night?”

“It could be managed. Perhaps we might meet and discuss it some time.” The stranger’s tone continued to be conventional – so that Cranston supposed him quite unsurprised. Cranston himself felt his head swimming. He had good reason to know that Caryl’s mind could very queerly veer about. But this freak was unbelievable. Or was it? She was silly about gems, and there was a bit of an explanation in that. Perhaps – he found himself considering this quite dispassionately – she was inevitably silly about men who rose gleaming from the sea in the small hours or presented any similar bizarre interest. But of more certain relevance was the fascination she found in funk. The man from the sea was frightening, and there was a good nine-tenths of her which this whole encounter prompted to mere flight. But some tiny remaining component wanted to stay and dabble…like this. Here on the familiar beach she had enjoyed her fill of one sort of delicious apprehensiveness. And now – perhaps without awareness of what drove her – she was reaching out to the man from the sea for another.