‘Very good, Lord Southend.’
‘Ouch,’ I said.
The others arrived at intervals during the next two hours. Those who came before eight were bled.
At dinner Roy was mysterious. All we learnt was that Nicholas was on to a stupendous thing, and would be in tonight to tell us about it.
About eleven Roy took a call from the airport and announced that Nicholas was on his way and should reach Purlingford before midnight. We could spend the time until he came in learning about the scheme.
We did. We adjourned to the Conference room and yawned and doodled over the blotting paper while Roy discoursed on the newborn Atomic Age, and the role the Daily Extreme should play in weaning the infant. We had heard this many times before. It was a new thing though to discover that Nicholas was arranging on certain conditions to supply Atom By-Products Ltd. with more than the present world supply of uranium and plutonium. We stopped doodling and prepared to ask discreet questions. But Roy was in spate: there was no damming the flow of words.
‘You may ask, my lords and gentlemen . . . you may well ask where these minerals are to be found in the quantities I have just quoted. That for the present must remain unanswered. But I take it we have all known for a considerable time that Nicholas conceals under a pseudonym a more distinguished title. A few of us have guessed that exiled Royalty has sat at the vacant place at this table. I can disclose this much, gentlemen, that Mr Nicholas is Pretender to the Throne of one of the greatest powers in the world today. Professor Doggett, the world renowned scientist who as some of you will know is on the advisory staff of the Extreme is investigating at present the resources of this state, which must for obvious reasons remain anonymous; and recent reports from him show that Mr Nicholas has not exaggerated by a tittle the resources of his potential kingdom. In return for the support of the Extreme in furthering his claims Nicholas is prepared to establish us, each one of us, gentlemen, as the unrivalled inheritors and masters of the era of Atomic Power.’
While Roy was clearing his throat for further peroration Simon St Cross said:
‘Why shouldn’t the Board have the name of this kingdom?’
‘My dear St Cross, surely it is obvious when war or peace may hinge on the speed and secrecy of our coup d’état . . .’
‘You know what country it is, I suppose?’
‘Of course,’ said Roy, pettishly. ‘I arranged personally for Doggett’s visit . . .’
This was not a satisfactory answer, because Roy once arranged personally for a writer of musical comedy to cover at four hundred a week a revolution in Cappadocia by dispatching him to Caracas. I could see that Simon was preparing to ask more questions, but just then Nicholas arrived.
He seemed rather paler than usual—but he had all his normal self-possession.
‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘No, no, St Cross, please sit down. I am not standing on ceremony yet.’ Roy pushed back his chair and half rose in a species of courtesy.
‘Ah, Nicky. I’ve been sounding the Board on your proposals, and we are quite unanimous in our desire to give every support to them. You have the agreement?’
‘I have the draft contract here, Roy.’
Nicholas pulled a sheet of parchment from his dispatch case and tossed it up to the head of the table. ‘There’s a dotted line for your autograph.’
‘I take it I can sign on behalf of you all, gentlemen?’ said Roy, feeling for his pen. ‘Will those consenting raise their hands?’
We all lifted a hand: it was what we were paid to do. As Roy slowly unscrewed the platinum top of his pen he looked over the agreement—but he did not attempt to read out any of the clauses. With the same deliberation with which he had produced the pen, Roy now returned it to his pocket.
‘I think you’d better let me glance at this overnight, Nicky,’ he said.
‘But we’ve been over it before together.’ A faint note of resentment sounded in Nicholas’s voice: it was the first emotion I had ever noticed in him, and it jarred a little.
‘There are one or two new things,’ said Roy, cautiously, ‘all this about bodies and souls, for instance.’
‘More legal jargon. Our lawyers are rather more melodramatic than your English solicitors, you know. There’s the question of the ink . . .’
‘Ink?’
‘Agreements are not legal in my kingdom unless the signatory employs a specially prepared ink. I’ve a sample here.’ He produced a bottle from his dispatch case and pushed it along to Roy. ‘Just dip your nib in the bottle . . .’
There was something in the shape of the bottle that was familiar. I couldn’t place it. It reminded me a little of Susie’s plasma flasks, I thought, and found the thought absurd.
‘I’ll keep it by me,’ Roy was saying. ‘Thank you, Nicky . . . I’ll let you have the contract all signed up in the morning.’
‘Take your time,’ said Nicholas. ‘I promised you first option. I won’t take the offer anywhere else . . . yet.’
Roy turned to his secretary. ‘Make a note Bettenson. Number Four.’
Next day we heard that Roy had found the contract satisfactory and had signed up on behalf of the Daily Extreme, its allied papers and interests.
During the following week Nicholas, as some of us had feared he might, began showing symptoms of a swelled head. He was arrogant with us all. In policy meetings he showed his hand openly: all opposition to his plans was quashed quite ruthlessly by methods that smacked more of blackmail than of Divine Right. It was unpleasant to realise that Nicholas had been checking up on the shadier aspect of our lives; the things he had discovered about myself and Harriet Vail were positively disconcerting. None of us cared to stand up to the chill menace of Mr Nicholas’s reminiscent moods. Even Roy was now and then rendered speechless by some esoteric hint, a whispered personality, that Nicholas would let fall at any show of opposition to his whims.
Things could not go on like this. Roy is not the most patient of men, and before very long the inevitable collision came.
Roy had called an emergency meeting ‘to end once and for all the Government’s vacillating foreign policy.’ He was elaborating on the necessity for preparing the public mind for a protective war against some totalitarian empire or other when Nicholas remarked:
‘I have some very good friends there, Roy. War doesn’t suit my purpose at all just now. The effects of peace are much more insidious and rewarding. Peace is essential at present for the welfare of my kingdom.’
‘I would remind you, Mr Nicholas,’ said Roy in his most pompous tone, ‘that you are not yet established in your kingdom. The Daily Extreme, though committed to a policy of collaboration with you in the matter of a future coup d’état, is not, I am happy to say, bound by any individual interest. It is an independent British journal whose policy is controlled absolutely by myself. Though I am glad to have other people’s opinions and am prepared to consider any proposal my directors care to make, the final decision rests with myself alone.’
‘You signed the contract,’ said Nicholas, ‘you’ll get all the plutonium and uranium you need, but there were conditions . . .’
‘As soon as Atom By-Products receives deliveries we can consider the conditions. And we shall want them soon for our protective war.’
‘There will be no protective war,’ said Nicholas, ‘not yet.’
‘If I want a protective war,’ said Roy with ineffable dignity, ‘I shall have a protective war.’
‘Fool,’ said Mr Nicholas in a stage whisper, ‘do you want everyone to know that you paid Hetty’s doctor’s bills?’
The mention of this mysterious ‘Hetty’ had on earlier occasions driven Roy to pasty and blubber-lipped silence. But now, ‘You have no evidence,’ he said, ‘I’ve looked the matter up and find I used my Number Six autograph on the cheque.’
‘Number Six autograph?’
‘That’s what I said. . . . Now that we have met Mr Nicholas’s objections to our strong arm policy I think we may p
roceed . . .’
Nicholas was still standing. I could see his hands clawing at the table edge. He was very pale—and his eyes, hot and angry, smouldered in their sockets like bad quality coal.
‘Don’t you understand, you fool,’ he said, very quietly, ‘don’t you understand you’re mine—to do what I like with? Oh, I know the contract gives you five years and a scratch of uranium—but what is that in Eternity? You’re mine—all of you, body and soul—mine! You must learn to obey. You have already acknowledged my sovereignty in the contract.’
‘Ah, the contract.’ said Roy. ‘I took the precaution of using my Number Four Autograph for the contract.’
‘Your Number Four Autograph?’
‘Yes, my secretary will explain. Bettenson, tell this gentleman what my Number Four is worth.’
The secretary perched a pair of rimless spectacles on the thin bridge of his nose and said nervously: ‘I’m afraid, Mr Nicholas, sir—if you were to try and establish Lord Southend’s Number Four Autograph in a Court of Law, you wouldn’t succeed. The Number Four, sir, is a forgery: a very good forgery, but detectable as such by the experts. It’s an autograph His Lordship invariably employs for dubious agreements, sir.’
‘But it’s written in his blood,’ said Nicholas, in a sort of whoop.
‘Danchester’s,’ said Roy, ‘I got Susie to change the bottles.’
Everyone was staring at me. I didn’t like the look in Nicholas’s eyes. I began playing noughts and crosses on my blotting pad—particularly crosses, lots of crosses.
‘I thought,’ said Nicholas—and his voice was tense—‘I thought I was dealing with gentlemen.’
‘I knew very well I wasn’t,’ said Roy, ‘that’s why I used my Number Four—and Danchester’s plasma.’
I tried to speak, to vent a protest—but it turned to a squeak in my throat. I heard Nicholas making a funny noise in his throat too—and I went on drawing crosses. At least Roy was at no loss for words:
‘Between you and me, Nicholas’—the cigar smoke curled towards us over the table—‘between you and me, I can’t think of any public man who would be rash enough to use his own signature for every scrap of paper people would like him to sign. As a man of the world I should have thought you’d be aware of this. My Number One Autograph is a rubber stamp; Two to Eight are all forgeries of varying degrees of excellence. Perhaps we could find basis for another agreement sometime? Soul and body was a bit steep, you know. No, I’m afraid the contract’s a washout, Nicky. Of course, if you care to call for Danchester in five years’ time you can have him with pleasure. We still need that uranium; how will Danchester suit?’
Then it was that Nicholas lost control. I clung desperately to the table. I did not know what might not happen to me if I slipped under it. Nicholas was in a frenzy—and the earth gaped at his feet.
‘I don’t want him,’ he screamed, ‘I don’t want any of you, d’you hear? Not on the end of a pitchfork, I don’t. Not if you went on your knees and begged me to take you in. I’m through with you, finished. You can all go to . . . to Heaven for all I care. The way you’re going, they’ll send you down to me in the end—they send me all the rubbish—but I won’t take you in. I’ll have you pushed into space—anywhere so long as you don’t get a foot in my kingdom with your Number Fours and Danchester’s plasma.’
Nicholas was sinking slowly through the floor. A loathsome crimson light surrounded him. His Savile Row clothes had shrivelled off him like a snake’s skin, and he swished his barbed tail to and fro like an angry cat. ‘You’re all of you rotten through and through, but Southend’s the outsize bounder. . . .’ He stamped a cloven foot for emphasis. ‘You’re repulsive, Southend—and your cluster of parasites is almost as nauseating. I’ve given you some ideas—but Saints in Heaven, imagination boggles at the way you’ve twisted them for your own purposes. If I give you a visa, Hell will no longer be fit for a gentlemen to live in. Go on with your euthanasia and your atomic wars. Blow yourselves to dust, you abominable little cads—and whirl off into space. But don’t come whining to me for your brimstone and black fire. It takes a good deal to shock me—but I never want to live again the time I’ve spent in your company.’ His teeth gnashed hideously. Only his head, haloed with infernal fires, now remained above the floor.
‘Goodbye for ever, you miserable little shockers,’ he roared—and the floorboards heaved together and subsided over his head.
No one spoke. We were all looking for Roy to say something first. But for some moments he sat with his head in his hands, quite silent, his eyes goggling at Nicholas’s vacant chair. Then he gave a kind of whimpering laugh—and for an instant we thought he had lost his reason. When he spoke it was very huskily, and we leant across the table to catch his words.
‘What a story!’ Roy whispered, ‘and we can’t handle it. What a headline! It’s the greatest thing since the Resurrection—and no one would believe it . . . no one . . .’ And two great tears crept cautiously down the upper slope of his chops, lost balance, and fell to oblivion on his blotting pad.
The Yew Tree
WHEN MARTIN WAS passing through Singapore last week en route to Australia, I took him to the Botanical Gardens. It is a practice of mine to show off the Botanical Gardens to visitors from England; they feel at home there. It is Kew all over again without the glass.
But in Martin’s case our visit was very far from being a success. At first I put his queer behaviour down to fear of snakes. When we were skirting the top end of the lake he kept to the centre of the narrow path, glancing uneasily at the great tongues of foliage that fringe the borders and treading as delicately as Agag. Once he shied at a root that lay twisted like a snake across his path.
‘I’ve been here a hundred times,’ I said, ‘and I’ve never seen a snake yet. It’s as safe as Ireland.’ He pulled himself together and stepped over the root, but I noticed his hands were shaking and his face had the look of a cheap soap-stone carving—a greenish pallor on which the features seemed tenuously and grotesquely scratched.
You know that great banyan tree by the wooden bridge at the farther end of the lake—a grotto of knolled roots and python thick columns formed by the fibres coiling down from the branches like Rapunzel’s hair to root in the soil? Well, nothing could induce Martin to go past that tree. He stuck on the edge of the lake, looking ghastly. We had in the end to retrace our steps.
If only I’d not thought of bringing him up by the terraced pergola, the evening might have ended less embarrassingly for us both—but at the same time I should possibly have missed a very strange story.
We were going up the steps under the arch of creepers when I heard a gasp from Martin. ‘Good God!’ he cried. ‘Don’t tell me there are yew trees in Malaya.’ He was looking at a tree on the terrace a few yards to our left—a tree which does, in fact, bear some resemblance to the yew.
‘I think that’s a sintada,’ I said. ‘There’s certainly a likeness . . .’ Then I noticed Martin’s expression. He was staring in horror at that sintada tree, and he was positively tottering on the edge of the steps as if he were going to faint. I caught him by the arm, helped him down the last flight of steps, and steered him to the car. He was pale and dazed as a zombie, and I half feared he was suffering from heat-stroke.
By the time we reached home he had recovered—more or less; but his teeth clinked like ice against the rim of the tumbler as he drank off the double whisky I poured for him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last. ‘I made an awful ass of myself just now. I ought never to have gone into the beastly place. But I didn’t expect. . . . You see, though it happened a good many years ago, I suppose I’ve not got over it yet. I wonder if I ever shall.’
‘Don’t tell me if it’ll upset you again,’ I said with revolting hypocrisy—for I am curious by nature, and nothing is more distasteful to me than unresolved mysteries.
He was silent for a while, and I thought he was going to take me at my word. I poured him a stiffer drink.
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‘They do say these things are sometimes better for a father confessor,’ I said. A sudden sigh of wind stirred a rustling from the trees in the garden, and Martin shivered and pulled his chair round with a creak to face the sound.
‘You won’t believe the tale,’ he said; ‘nobody does. Sometimes I try to kid myself it was a dream. But that’s no use. It wasn’t, you see.’ He hesitated again. Then he asked, ‘Do you know Darkshire?’
‘I stayed near Doomchester once. It’s a pretty place.’
‘If you like trees . . .’ he said, without any particular expression, ‘there’s the remains of Robin’s forest, and those great feudal estates, the Princedoms.’
‘All sold up now,’ I said.
‘I used to spend holidays there when I was a child,’ said Martin. ‘I loved the place. Trees, too. But I didn’t know the western side until a few years ago, when I was sent up there on a job. Do you know that side at all?’
‘Vaguely. Bleak and hilly—full of limestone caverns and lead-workings and streams spilling over boulders.’
‘It’s an evil place,’ he said, and relapsed into silence.
‘But there are few trees, Martin,’ I said, keeping him to the point.
‘Oh, the forest creeps up into those Pennine valleys. The hills are bare enough, but you get those beastly secretive valleys. Like Hallowvale, for instance.’
‘Never been there.’
‘You can be thankful you won’t have a chance. It lies under several million gallons of water now. I was sent up to report on the place. You know that group of great reservoirs there that feed Sheffield and several of the Yorkshire industrial towns? Well, they were planning an extension of the Tarnthorpe Reservoir, and Hallowvale seemed a likely place to meet requirements. For one thing, no one lived there. No one had lived there for well over a hundred years. So I was sent off to make a preliminary survey.
‘I put up first at Baronsbridge—a pleasant pub there; but it was rather far from the valley, and as the work progressed I looked around for some place nearer at hand.
Where Human Pathways End Page 3
