The Man from the Sea (4 page)

And Cranston’s impatience was suddenly acute. A pair of diamond cufflinks would make a nice Christmas present for Alex. He heard the low pleasantry enunciate itself inside his head; and although he had no impulse actually to speak the words he flushed at them. It was true that everything had turned abominable. For a moment he believed that his consciousness of this was affecting him physically – had set a pulse throbbing at his temple. Then he realised that he was hearing, once more, something far away. The throb was from a steamer out in the ocean channel. And it had begun quite suddenly. The engines that had stopped half an hour ago were in action again.

The sound cut Caryl short. Perhaps the image of the invisible ship, variously manned and purposively moving, brought the outer world in its threatening aspect more sharply home to her. She turned away from the man from the sea – and a last quick scrutiny of his stripped body was perhaps only to tell her which of Alex’s clothes would fit. “Dicky,” she whispered, “ – till tomorrow!” Then she vanished among the rocks. A minute later there was a glimpse of her – all tight slacks and voluminous sweater – scrambling clear of them and making for the cliff. The two men were quite silent. Only when the slow sea gave its next soft sigh their eyes met. They might have been acknowledging something appropriate in the sound.

“We’ll give her twenty minutes.” Cranston spoke prosaically. “For time, I think, isn’t a worry. The nearest railway-station is about five miles up the glen. And there will be nothing odd about your strolling up to it in time for the first train.”

The man from the sea nodded. “Nothing at all – provided the clothes are a reasonable fit.”

“Blair’s things will fit you, all right.”

“Blair? Your – ?”

“Drop that, please.” Cranston was surprised to hear his own voice tremble with anger. “You understand what – what you’ve seen, very well.”

“I don’t altogether understand
you
.” The man from the sea spoke soberly. “Are you, I wonder, just a very great young puritan? Or is there something more?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Even as he uttered the words, Cranston realised that they were the first lie he had spoken that night. And on this it came to him, as a linked and answering discovery, that the man from the sea had lied a great deal. “Let’s stick to what’s on hand, please. We’ve already made one slip.”

“A slip?” The man from the sea was curious rather than alarmed.

“Shaving things. You won’t look right in Blair’s classy clothes and a day’s beard. Perhaps–” Cranston stopped. His glance had travelled to the face of the man from the sea. Even by moonlight, it was possible to distinguish it as perfectly smooth.

“That’s all right.” The man was laughing softly. “I shaved before I jumped.”

“While your friends were trying to cut your throat?”

“Precisely.”

Again they were silent. The throb of the engines was fading. From what sounded almost as far away, a gull called and called again. Intermittently the sea, as if tired of a vain whispering in the ear of night, heaved itself into a larger wave which splashed on the pale beach like the smack of a drowsily amorous hand. A light breeze, faintly chill, was now blowing in from the ocean; it could be felt flowing past them – now fading to a breath and now growing to a small wind that would bend Jamieson’s corn and Neil Clark’s barley, that would rustle in the grasses of the old glebe where Sir Alex Blair’s men might be mowing in the morning. It was strange to Cranston that in the familiar terrain he should suddenly be jostled by so much that was alien and inscrutable. The man from the sea was that. He presented indeed a front that was comprehensible enough – that was as dull as greed and as small as cheating. But behind him – Cranston perfectly knew – was some large hinterland of darkness. And it had been Cranston’s immediate intuition of this that had given him the first sick sense of another vista. The affair with Lady Blair – so bewilderingly exciting and yet so finite as to be measurable in terms of mere minutes and inches – had its incalculable hinterland too. To put it bleakly, he had made a shocking mistake.

Cranston shivered – and if it was partly at his own train of thought it was nevertheless substantially because of what the breeze was doing to his skin. The night – all this succession of Scottish nights – had been incredible. His limbs had moved in an unreal medium, more balmy than any actual air, as if he had slipped into some travel advertisement in a glossy American magazine. But in the small hours there came an honest northern chill, and it was licking at him now. He had emerged cold from his short wallow in the sea, and nothing had happened at all to warm him up since. At twenty-two, such sensations resolve themselves into simple and immediate impulse. Cranston knew that he wanted to run. He wanted, if possible, to race. Almost theatrically, his world was darkening round him – but nevertheless he wanted the blood to be moving faster in his veins. He looked at the man from the sea.

He remembered that the man
was
from the sea. He had been in it for a long time – had in fact been very near never coming out of it. He, far more than Cranston, should be shivering now. But if he even felt the chill he gave no sign of it, and his naked poise was that of an athlete, despite his middle years. “What about a run to warm up?” Cranston asked.

“That’s quite an idea.” His idiom was Cranston’s own, and as he turned lightly on his toes and glanced down the beach he might have been an undergraduate lazily ready for physical expression. He pointed to the other end of the beach. “There and back?”

“Yes.” Cranston restrained himself from adding: “And I’ll give you fifteen yards.”

The man slipped off his belt and dropped it carelessly on the sand. “No point,” he said, “in carrying weight. Will you give the word?”

“On your marks, get set, go?”

“Right.”

For a moment more they parleyed over the form of the thing. They were like two boys from different public schools, rather warily meeting in the holidays and making their arrangements with punctilio. Then they were off. Cranston could tell at once that the man had been a sprinter. His own best distance was the half-mile. He gave himself to the serious business of running as fast as he could – thinking about his breathing, trying to avoid spots where the sand looked too soft to thrust from with the ball of the foot. The man from the sea was actually heading him; they were level at the turn by the farther rocks; Cranston led all the way back, but at the finish would scarcely have cancelled the fifteen yards’ handicap he had rashly thought to offer. For some moments they stood panting. For a further second they turned to each other, laughing – as if experiencing again, less tensely, the odd intimacy that had surprised them as they lurked in hiding. And then the man from the sea stooped quickly, picked up his belt and fastened it round his middle. He glanced down as he did so, making sure of the buckle. And something pricked at Cranston’s memory.

Once already he had experienced the sensation of near-recognition. This time it prompted him to speak. “You know,” he said, “I don’t believe a word of your story.”

The man from the sea made one further movement, settling the belt about his waist. And then he stood quite still – and for so long that Cranston had the sense of having uttered unwittingly the words of a potent immobilising spell. They had been words prompted, at least in part, by the obstinate irrational feeling that the man from the sea had something to share with him. They had borne – or been intended to bear – the character of an approach to confidence, an appeal for candour. But they were also the product – Cranston was conscious – of some piece of crucial knowledge hovering just beyond his power of recollection. Perhaps it was the nature of this – he suddenly found himself rather urgently feeling – that now gave them, retrospectively, the sense of being highly injudicious.

“What’s wrong with my story?” When he did speak, the man from the sea spoke gently. At the same time he took a couple of steps away from Cranston, so that the rocks received him partly into their shadow and he became, once more, like a picture cast in bold chiaroscuro. “You interest me,” he said mildly. “Just where does my story strain credulity?”

“It’s not your story; it’s yourself.” The race had not only sent Cranston’s blood coursing more swiftly. It had quickened his brain. He had lately experienced novel pleasures – but now an old one had with unexpected suddenness returned to him. It was the clever schoolboy’s pleasure in his own powers – when only lately discovered and still felt as a wonderful springboard to the world. He remembered that his wits worked well – and at the same time realised that for days, for weeks, they had hardly been working at all. But they were coming back to him now, and with them the power of lucid speech. “Or rather,” he said, “it’s the lack of adequate correspondence between the one and the other – between your story, you know, and you. You’re the wrong man for it – quite the wrong man for that diamond-smuggling yarn. If I’d thought to pick up that belt and hand it to you – and why in the world didn’t I think of it? – there would have been nothing like the feel of gems beneath that webbing. It isn’t even heavy; it didn’t fall as if it were. Papers, perhaps, or banknotes well waterproofed. But
not
diamonds destined for Hatton Garden.” He paused. “That’s one thing.”

“There are others?”

“I don’t think you jumped into the sea because some chaps were then and there going to cut your throat. You jumped on a predetermined plan – and it included the efficient little detail of shaving immediately beforehand.” Cranston paused. He was the schoolboy in the middle of a model construe. “You seem so efficient that I’m surprised you didn’t get overboard more quietly, or in circumstances that would allow you more grace. Being chased up so quickly was, if you ask me, a poor show.”

“It was a very uncomfortable one. Anything else?”

“No. But the point, I think, lies there. This diamond smuggler in a professional way that you conjure up – he might well choose that desperate swim if there was really a knife at his throat. But he wouldn’t plan it, have that tidy shave, and then jump in cold blood. It’s a different order of person who’d do that. It’s other motives that drive men to tricks of that sort.”

“Is that so?” The man from the sea paused. It was something that he, too, knew how to do. “Would it be terribly impertinent to ask your age? This blending of the severities of logic with a ripe human wisdom makes me decidedly curious.”

Cranston flushed. “I’m twenty-two,” he said shortly.

“Twenty-two? So wise so young, they say, do never live long.”

“I beg your pardon?” Cranston was startled.

“Something that an extremely sinister person was prompted to say about a very bright small boy. The story ended in the Tower of London. I hope neither yours nor mine will do that.”

“There you are.” Cranston made a bold bid for recovery. “Diamond smugglers don’t gabble Shakespeare.”

The man from the sea nodded. It was his first movement for what seemed a long time. “It’s not a bad point… Are you just down from Oxford?”

“Cambridge.”

“Then let me say that your intelligence does your college credit. Your morals appear to be another matter.” The man from the sea produced his softest laugh. “And how, my dear boy, you feel it!”

“My affairs aren’t really the question, are they?”

“Do you know – I believe
that
a little remains to be seen?” The man from the sea stepped forward again – and contrived to make the action suggest some marked drop in tension. “By the way,” he said, “isn’t it about time we were going after those clothes?”

“More than time.” Cranston took a last glance at the empty beach and then turned towards the rocks. “It’s a bit of a scramble in places. I’ll go ahead.”

For some seconds they moved in single file through deepening shadows. When the man from the sea spoke again it was on a practical note. “Do they have dogs?”

“The Blairs? They have several. But I don’t think they’ll make a row.”

“I suppose they’re used to a certain amount of nocturnal traffic.”

Cranston said nothing. He hated the joke – and hated himself for having no right to resent it. And he felt that it was not made for its own sake. The man from the sea didn’t really have any humour in him. But he had plenty of subtlety. If he irritated you, it was by design.

“Is it a large household?”

“No – quite small.” Cranston answered without turning his head.

“There isn’t what I so tactfully tried to take you for – a grown-up son?”

“No.” Cranston felt his anger mounting.

“Ah – childless. That’s where to look for a maternal mistress.’’

Cranston stopped and swung round. “She’s not childless, blast you. There’s…a grown-up daughter. Hers – not his.”

They had emerged from the rocks, and the moonlight fell full upon the face of the man from the sea. He said nothing, and his features remained entirely impassive. But after a moment he gave a slight nod – as a person might do who has solved some very simple problem along expected lines. The two men looked at each other – it was another of their odd exchanges – and then turned and walked side by side towards the cliff.

The attack came seconds later and took them both utterly by surprise. Cranston was not to know the man from the sea so caught unawares again. Even so, he acted very quickly – taking Cranston to momentary safety in a rugger tackle as he went down himself. It was in the hollow of dry loose sand immediately below the cliff; they lay prone in it as the second batch of bullets kicked and spat about them or whined over their heads. In the sudden unbelievable crisis Cranston found his mind working fast. Apparently fear was like a wound, and took time to make itself felt. It had got no grip yet. But in a matter of minutes – if he
had
minutes – it would be humiliatingly at work on him. Meanwhile the initiative was his. He knew the ground. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes – but can we get clear?” The voice of the man from the sea was calm. “They must have landed somebody before making off back to the ship. Silly to think there’s magic in British soil. But my guess is that it’s only one chap.”