by Ngaio Marsh
“English understatement. Typical example of.”
He gave her a light smack on the seat.
“When I think,” Jenny continued working herself into a rage, “of how that brute winkled the school group out of the Treherns, and when I think how he had the damned impertinence to put a ring round me—”
“ ‘Redheaded Jennifer Williams says warts were frightful,’ ” Patrick quoted.
“How he dared!”
“It’s not red, actually. In the sun it’s copper. No, gold almost.”
“Never you mind what it is. Oh, Patrick!”
“Don’t say ‘Ow, Pettruck!’ ”
“Shut up.”
“Well, you asked me to stop you. And it is my name.”
“All right. Ae-oh, Pe-ah-trick, then.”
“What?”
“Do you suppose it might lead to a ghastly invasion? People smothered in warts and whistling with asthma bearing down from all points of the compass?”
“Charabancs.”
“A Gifte Shoppe.”
“Wire netting round the spring.”
“And a bob to get in.”
“It’s a daunting picture,” Patrick said. He picked up a stone and hurled it into the English Channel. “I suppose,” he muttered, “it would be profitable.”
“No doubt.” Jenny turned to look at him and sat up. “Oh, no doubt,” she repeated. “If that’s a consideration.”
“My dear, virtuous Jenny, of course it’s a consideration. I don’t know whether, in your idyllic antipodes, you’ve come across the problem of constant hardupness. If you haven’t I can assure you it’s not much cop.”
“Well, but I have. And, Patrick, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“I’ll forgive you. I’ll go further and tell you that unless things look up a bit at the Boy-and-Lobster or, alternatively, unless my stepfather can be moved to close his account with his bookmaker and keep his hands off the whisky bottle, you’ll be outstaying us on the Island.”
“Patrick!”
“I’m afraid so. And the gentlemen of the Inns of Court will be able to offer their dinners to some more worthy candidate. I shan’t eat them. I shall come down from Oxford and sell plastic combs from door to door. Will you buy one for your red-gold hair?” Patrick began to throw stones as fast as he could pick them up. “It’s not only that,” he said presently. “It’s my mama. She’s in a pretty dim situation, anyway, but here, at least, she’s—” He stood up. “Well, Jenny,” he said, “there’s a sample of the English reticence that strikes you as being so comical.” He walked down to the boat and hauled it an unnecessary inch or two up the beach.
Jenny felt helpless. She watched him and thought that he made a pleasing figure against the sea as he tugged back in the classic posture of controlled energy.
What am I to say to him? she wondered. And does it matter what I say?
He took their luncheon basket out of the boat and returned to her.
“Sorry about all that,” he said. “Shall we bathe before the tide changes and then eat? Come on.”
She followed him down to the sea and lost her sensation of inadequacy as she battled against incoming tide. They swam, together and apart, until they were tired, and then returned to the beach and had their luncheon. Patrick was well-mannered and attentive, and asked her a great many questions about New Zealand and the job she hoped to get, teaching English in Paris. It was not until they had decided to row back to their own side of the Island, and he had shipped his oars, that he returned to the subject that waited, Jenny felt sure, at the backs of both their minds.
“There’s the brow of the hill,” he said. “Just above our beach. And below it, on the far side, is the spring. Did you notice that Miss Cost, in her interview, talked about ‘Pixie Falls’?”
“I did. With nausea.”
He rowed round the point into Fisherman’s Bay.
“Sentiment and expediency,” he said, “are uneasy bedfellows. But, of course, it doesn’t arise. It’s quite safe to strike an attitude and say you’d rather sell plastic combs than see the prostitution of the place you love. There won’t be any upsurge of an affluent society on Portcarrow Island. It will stay like this — as we both admire it, Jenny. Only we shan’t be here to see. Two years from now everybody will have forgotten about Wally Trehern’s warts.”
He could scarcely have been more mistaken. Before two years had passed, everybody in Great Britain who could read a newspaper knew all about Wally Trehern’s warts, and because of them the Island had been transformed.
II
Miss Emily
“The trouble with my family,” said Miss Emily Pride, speaking in exquisite French and transferring her gaze from Superintendent Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard to some distant object, “is that they go too far.”
Her voice was pitched on the high didactic note she liked to employ for sustained narrative. The sound of it carried Alleyn back through time on a wave of nostalgia. Here he had sat, in this very room that was so much less changed than he or Miss Emily — here, a candidate for the Diplomatic Service, he had pounded away at French irregular verbs and listened to entrancing scandals of the days when Miss Emily’s papa had been chaplain at “our Embassy” in Paris. How old could she be now? Eighty? He pulled himself together and gave her his full attention.
“My sister, Fanny Winterbottom,” Miss Emily announced, “was not free from this fault. I recall an informal entertainment at our Embassy in which she was invited to take part. It was a burlesque. Fanny was grotesquely attired and carried a vegetable bouquet She was not without talent of a farouche sort and made something of a hit. Verb sap—as you shall hear. Inflamed by success, she improvised a short equivocal speech at the end of which she flung her bouquet at H.E. It struck him in the diaphragm and might well have led to an incident.”
Miss Emily recalled her distant gaze and focussed it upon Alleyn. “We are none of us free from this wild strain,” she said, “but in my sister Fanny its manifestations were extreme. I cannot help but think there is a connection.”
“Miss Emily, I don’t quite see what you mean.”
“Then you are duller than your early promise led me to expect. Let me elaborate.” This had always been an ominous threat from Miss Emily. She resumed her narrative style.
“My sister Fanny,” she said, “married. A Mr. George Winterbottom, who was profitably engaged in Trade. So much for him. He died, leaving her a childless widow with a more than respectable fortune. Included in her inheritance was the soi-disant Island, which I mentioned in my letter.”
“Portcarrow?”
“Precisely. You cannot be unaware of recent events on this otherwise characterless promontory.”
“No, indeed.”
“In that case I shall not elaborate. Suffice it to remind you that within the last two years there has arisen, fructified and flourished a cult of which I entirely disapprove and which is the cause of my present concern and of my calling upon your advice.” She paused.
“Anything I can do, of course—” Alleyn said.
“Thank you. Your accent has deteriorated. To continue, Fanny, intemperate as ever, encouraged her tenants in their wart claims. She visited the Island, interviewed the child in question, and, having at the time an infected outbreak on her thumb, plunged it in the spring, whose extreme coldness possibly caused it to burst. It was no doubt ripe to do so, but Fanny darted about talking of miracles. There were other cases of an equally hysterical character. The thing had caught on, and my sister exploited it. The inn was enlarged, the spring was enclosed, advertisements appeared in the papers. A shop was erected on the Island. The residents, I understand, are making money hand over fist.”
“I should imagine so.”
“Very well. My sister Fanny (at the age of eighty-seven) has died. I have inherited her estates. I needed hardly tell you that I refuse to countenance this unseemly charade, still less to profit by it.”
“You propose to sell the plac
e?”
“Certainly not. Do,” said Miss Emily sharply, “pull yourself together, Rodrigue. This is not what I expect of you.”
“I beg your pardon, Miss Emily.”
She waved her hand. “To sell would be to profit by its spurious fame and allow this nonsense full play. No, I intend to restore the Island to its former state. I have instructed my solicitors to acquaint the persons concerned.”
“I see,” said Alleyn. He got up and stood looking down at his old tutoress. How completely Miss Emily had taken on the character of a certain type of elderly Frenchwoman. Her black clothes seemed to disclaim, clear-sightedly, all pretense to allure. Her complexion was grey; her jewelry of jet and gold. She wore a general air of disassociated fustiness. Her composure was absolute. The setting was perfectly consonant with the person: pieces of buhl; formal, upholstered, and therefore dingy, chairs; yellowing photographs, among which his own young, thin face stared back at him, and an unalterable arrangement of dyed pampas plumes in an elaborate vase. For Miss Emily, her room was absolutely comme il faut. Yes, after all, she must be…
“At the age of eighty-three,” she said, with uncanny prescience, “I am not to be moved. If that is in your mind, Rodrigue.”
“I’m much too frightened of you, Miss Emily, to attempt any such task.”
“Ah, no!” she said in English. “Don’t say that! I hope not.”
He kissed her dry little hand as she had taught him to do. “Well,” he said, “tell me more about it. What is your plan?”
Miss Emily reverted to the French language. “In effect, as I have told you, to restore the status quo. Ultimately I shall remove the enclosure, shut the shop and issue a general announcement disclaiming and exposing the entire affair.”
Alleyn said: “I’ve never been able to make up my mind about these matters. The cure of warts by apparently irrational means is too well established to be questioned. And even when you admit the vast number of failures, there is a pretty substantial case to be made out for certain types of faith healing. Or so I understand. I can’t help wondering why you are so fierce about it all, Miss Emily. If you are repelled by the inevitable vulgarities, of course—”
“As, of course, I am. Still more, by the exploitation of the spring as a business concern. But most of all by personal experience of a case that failed: a very dear friend who suffered from a malignancy and who was absolutely — but, I assure you, absolutely—persuaded it would be cured by such means. The utter cruelty of her disillusionment, her incredulity, her agonized disappointment and her death — these made a bitter impression upon me. I would sooner die myself,” Miss Emily said with the utmost vigour, “than profit in the smallest degree from such another tragedy.”
There was a brief silence. “Yes,” Alleyn said. “That does, indeed, explain your attitude.”
“But not my reason for soliciting your help. I must tell you that I have written to Major Barrimore, who is the incumbent of the inn, and informed him of my decision. I have announced my intention of visiting the Island to see that this decision is carried out. And, since she will no doubt wish to provide for herself, I have also written to the proprietress of the shop, a Miss Elspeth Cost. I have given her three months’ notice, unless she choses to maintain the place as a normal establishment and refrain from exploiting the spring or mounting a preposterous anniversary festival which, I am informed, she has put in hand and which has been widely advertised in the press.”
“Major Barrimore and Miss Cost must have been startled by your letters.”
“So much so, perhaps, that they have lost the power of communication. I wrote a week ago. There has been no formal acknowledgment.”
She said this with such a meaning air that he felt he was expected to take it up. “Has there been an informal one?” he ventured,
“Judge for yourself,” said Miss Emily, crisply.
She went to her desk and returned with several sheets of paper which she handed to him.
Alleyn glanced at the first, paused, and then laid them all in a row on an occasional table. There were five…Hell! he thought. This means a go with Miss Emily…They were in the familiar form of newsprint pasted on ruled paper which had been wrenched from an exercise book. The first presented an account of several cures effected by the springs and was headed, with unintentional ambiguity, Pixie Falls Again. It was, he recognized, from the London Sun. Underneath the cutting was an irregular assembled sentence of separated words, all in newsprint:
Do not Attempt threat to close you are warned
The second read simply danger keep out; the third, Desecration will be prevented all costs; the fourth, Residents are prepared interference will prove fatal; and the last, in one strip, death of elderly woman with a piecemeal addendum: this could be YOU.
“Well,” Alleyn said, “that’s a pretty collection, I must say. When did they come?”
“One by one, over the last five days. The first must have been posted immediately after the arrival of my letter.”
“Have you kept the envelopes?”
“Yes. The postmark is Portcarrow.”
“May I see them?”
She produced them: five cheap envelopes. The address had been built up from newsprint.
“Will you let me keep these? And the letters?”
“Certainly.”
“Any idea who sent them?” he asked.
“None.”
“Who has your address?”
“The landlord. Major Barrimore.”
“It’s an easy one to assemble from any paper: 37 Forecast Street. Wait a moment, though. This one wasn’t built up piecemeal. It’s all in one. I don’t recognize the type.”
“Possibly a local paper. At the time of my inheritance.”
“Yes. Almost certainly.”
He asked her for a larger envelope and put the collection into it.
“When do you plan to go to Portcarrow?”
“On Monday,” said Miss Emily composedly. “Without fail.”
Alleyn thought for a moment, and then sat down and took her hands in his. “Now, my dear Miss Emily,” he said. “Please do listen to what I’m going to say — in English, if you don’t mind.”
“Naturally, I shall listen carefully, since I have invited your professional opinion. As to speaking in English — very well, if you prefer it. Enfin, en ce moment on ne donne pas une leçon de français.”
“No. One gives, if you’ll forgive me, a lesson in sensible behaviour. Now, I don’t suggest for a minute that these messages mean, literally, what they seem to threaten. Possibly they are simply intended to put you off and if they fail to do that, you may hear no more about it. On the other hand they do suggest that you have an enemy at Portcarrow. If you go there you will invite unpleasant reactions.”
“I am perfectly well aware of that. Obviously. And,” said Miss Emily on a rising note, “if this person imagines that I am to be frightened off—”
“Now, wait a bit. There’s no real need for you to go, is there? The whole thing can be done, and done efficiently, by your solicitors. It would be a — a dignified and reasonable way of settling.”
“Until I have seen for myself what goes on, on the Island, I cannot give explicit instructions.”
“But you can. You can get a report.”
“That,” said Miss Emily, “would not be satisfactory.”
He could have shaken her.
“Have you,” he asked, “shown these things to your solicitors?”
“I have not.”
“I’m sure they would give you the same advice.”
“I should not take it.”
“Suppose this person means to do exactly what the messages threaten — offer violence? It might well be, you know.”
“That is precisely why I have sought your advice. I am aware that I should take steps to protect myself. What are they? I am not,” Miss Emily said, “proficient in the use of small-arms, and I understand that, in any case, one requires a permit. No doubt
, in your position, you could obtain one and might possibly be so very kind as to give me a little instruction.”
“I shall not fiddle a small-arms permit for you nor shall I teach you to be quick on the draw. The suggestion is ridiculous.”
“There are, perhaps, other precautions,” she conceded, “such as walking down the centre of the road, remaining indoors after dark and making no assignations at unfrequented rendezvous.”
Alleyn contemplated his old instructress. Was there or was there not a remote twinkle in that dead-pan eye?
“I think,” he said, “you are making a nonsense of me.”
“Who’s being ridiculous, now?” asked Miss Emily tartly.
He stood up. “All right,” he said. “As a police officer it’s my duty to tell you that I think it extremely unwise for you to go to Portcarrow. As a grateful, elderly ex-pupil, I assure you that I shall be extremely fussed about you if you’re obstinate enough to persist in your plan…Dear Miss Emily,” said Alleyn, with a change of tone, “do, for the love of Mike, pipe down and stay where you are.”
“You would have been successful,” she said, “if you had continued in the Corps Diplomatique. I have never comprehended why you elected to change.”
“Obviously, I’ve had no success in this instance.”
“No. I shall go. But I am infinitely obliged to you, Rodrigue.”
“I suppose this must be put down to the wild strain in your blood.”
“Possibly.” Indicating that the audience was concluded, she rose and reverted to French. “You will give my fondest salutations to your wife and son?”
“Thank you. Troy sent all sorts of messages to you.”
“You appear to be a little fatigued. When is your vacation?”
“When I can snatch it. I hope quite soon,” Alleyn said, and was at once alarmed by a look of low cunning in Miss Emily. “Please don’t go,” he begged her.
She placed her hand in the correct position to be kissed. “Au revoir,” she said, “et mille remerciements.”
“Mes hommages, madame,” said Alleyn crossly. With the profoundest misgivings he took his leave of Miss Emily.
