He swept Amanda out with him, and Geoffrey, hesitating, turned and kissed the girl. He was not often demonstrative and she was taken by surprise.
‘Darling, how very nice.’
‘Are you going to be all right?’
‘Don’t be silly. Hurry back and we’ll see what it is.’
‘Right. Twenty minutes. Don’t go too near the hole in the wall.’
‘I won’t.’
Meg sat down on the deserted plinth and put her fur-lined sleeve on the base of the statue. It was exquisitely quiet. She heard the car start quite distinctly and listened to the sound of the engine dying gently away until it was lost in the deeper and more caressing growl that was the sea. The sun was still shining and the tinsel streaks on the water so far below had become a deeper gold. The little boat was still there but a sail had altered slightly. She watched it with eyes narrowed hopefully. Perhaps it was going to open out like a red butterfly.
There was another boat, too, far away as yet and beetle-sized. It was dark, with a long white tail of foam which showed its speed.
The roar of a plane passing very low over the garden spoiled the peace and she resented it mildly.
She ran an exploring finger round the plaster filling of the cast and thought of Martin with great tenderness but no sorrow. The process of her mourning was complete. He had been gay, he had been kind, he had been brave, and he had been absorbed into the fabric of her life which was the richer for him.
She was very anxious to see her new responsibility, and as she rubbed the plaster idly a shallow disc of it flaked away, exposing a deep rift in the packing. She was so interested in its possibilities that she did not hear the soft rustle of the box bushes outside in the garden, and by the time she had opened her bag and unearthed a long nail-file nothing could have disturbed her.
Her fragile steel wand probed the weak spot cautiously and unexpectedly a whole chunk of the dry, powdery composition came away, disclosing a dusty bulge covered with something which must at one time have been a blanket. Feeling very guilty, but incapable of resisting the temptation, she worked on and very soon had a cavity nearly a foot deep and wide enough to take her hand.
She was so excited that the step on the stone behind her was purely welcome and she turned her head briefly to catch a glimpse of a blue jersey and beret dark against the bright doorway.
‘Bonjour,’ she said politely, and returning to the work went on without looking at him. ‘Qu’il fait beau. Est-ce que – ?’
‘Speak English.’
‘English?’ she said. ‘What luck. I wish you’d appeared before.’
Another piece of plaster had broken away and she was absorbed in edging it gently out. His voice had sounded husky, but it had made no deep impression on her. No dominant force had been revealed in it.
‘Do you work here? Or no, I suppose you’re fishing. Is that your boat?’
Another lump of plaster came away as she spoke. She set it down carefully beside her and put in her hand for more, still chatting with the easy friendliness of her age.
‘Doesn’t it all look wonderful from here?’
Havoc did not move. He had slept for an hour on the boat but no more, and now he could feel the earth heaving under his feet like the sides of some vast animal, alive and uncertain. He was nearly done, nearly exhausted. The final effort up the cliff had drained the barrel of his resources, but he had made it.
He put one hand on the doorpost, spoke, and was frightened by the lifelessness of his own voice.
‘What are you doing?’ The question was ridiculous. He could see what she did, and none of its significance was lost on him. He did not expect her to answer. Her appearance there was as unreal to him as every other fortuitous happening had been ever since he had gone back to the church at night and the old man had told him without even the asking the one thing he wanted to know.
From that moment the Science of Luck had ceased to be a cult which he followed painfully, a mere series of opportunities which he could seize or miss. From then on it had revealed itself as a force which had swept him on without even his connivance. It had been a whirlwind nightmare in which everything went right without once losing the essential nightmare quality which is fear. The sequence of events had been dreamlike and in his exhaustion had seemed one. He remembered the old woman at the bakery, hiding them in the shed where the van stood. He remembered Roly knowing the way, the deserted roads where no one stepped out to haIt them, the dinghy already afloat at the lapping water’s edge. It all passed through his mind like the slow-motion details of a fall, or a car smash, smooth, irrevocable, and a finality.
The moment of lunacy had occurred when Tom greeted the Marlene Doreen with a cry of recognition, a crazy belief in which he had persisted despite all his brother’s angry arguments. She was the same sort of boat as their old man’s, that was all, but Tom thought he knew her and the brothers could handle her, and on her smooth planks they stood taller and became different men.
They were on her now, still sitting there expecting him to return, the blamed fools; blissfully trusting him, even though Bill, who was lying sick as a dog in the bows, was swearing pitiably at them for their idiocy.
They would still be sitting there when the police launch came up. By all he had heard, the French coppers carried rifles on a job like this. However, one way and another they would all be busy for quite a reasonable time. The old Science was certainly holding. The Luck was more than just with him: he couldn’t go wrong.
There was only Doll even to be considered. Havoc had seen him drop into the water while he himself was still lying panting on the cliff after the climb which had become so much more gruelling since he had achieved it last. Doll had seen the red light and come after him. The old brute was shrewd and he was game, and the Treasure had got him. But he’d never make the cliff. He must be somewhere on the face now, just under that second overhang perhaps, clinging there, looking like a white slug with a black head. Tiddy Doll with one eye working and patent dancing pumps.
Meg’s reply to his question took him utterly by surprise. As an obstacle she was so negligible he had forgotten her existence. Sex had long ceased to interest him, and her fragile beauty, graceful in the flowing fur and wool, made no impression upon him. She might have been a grasshopper sitting there at the mouth of his treasure cave.
But her voice when he heard it reminded him of itself when she was a child, clear and kiddish and with an irritatingly better accent than his own. He remembered that absorption in her, too, which had hurt his pride then and struck him as fantastically ridiculous now when at least she should have seen her danger.
‘I’m trying to get something very fragile out of here without breaking it,’ she was saying. ‘It’s something which has been left to me and I don’t know quite what it is. I’ve got to get all this packing out, you see. It’s still held quite fast, or it may be just very heavy. You wouldn’t care to have a go at it, would you? Be very careful.’
He lurched forward, stumbling as he let go the post. He was much weaker than he had thought. But what did that matter? It was all being done for him, wasn’t it?
He saw her horrified look as the light from the breach in the wall fell upon him and his first thought was that she had recognized him from their childhood. But her exclamation dispelled that flattering illusion.
‘Good heavens, are you all right?’
Her concern reminded him infuriatingly of Avril.
‘You look most terribly ill. Please don’t bother about this. The others will be back in a minute, anyhow. This doesn’t matter in the least. I’m awfully sorry. I didn’t realize. Can I do anything for you?’
‘Get out of the way.’ There was no power in him. He noticed it and thrust the thought aside just as he thrust aside the hand she put out to steady him.
As for Meg, he looked so ghastly, his skin so pallid under the three-day beard, his bones sticking up through the shoulders of his jersey and his eyes so dull within their caked r
ims, that she saw no tiger there.
She rose from the plinth and he dropped on to it and thrust his hand into the cavity she had made. He worked feverishly, his powerful fingers breaking away the plaster and clawing it out into the gully. The stimulus of touching the long-sought hiding-place fanned the ashes of his energy, and she watched him, fascinated, misled by the show of strength.
The hard core of the discovery, a bundle wrapped in several thicknesses of cement-soaked blanket, began gradually to take shape. It appeared to be roughly cylindrical, about five feet long and the base not quite two in diameter. Twice before he had cleared the inner end of it he made attempts to drag it out bodily, but it resisted him and he went back feverishly to his scraping and shovelling. The white dust covered him, turning his hair and the blue jersey he had found in the Marlene Doreen’s locker to matted grey.
Meg eyed him dubiously. She was not afraid of him, but for him, and she was relieved to hear the vague buzz of activity which was becoming slowly more and more noticeable both from inland and the sea. She was inexperienced in illness, but he looked very bad, she thought.
A plume of spray streaking across her living seascape caught the corner of her eye and she turned just too late to see the craft whose wake it had been. The little boat with the red sails was no longer visible either. Its wings must have opened after all.
‘Your boat has moved,’ she said. ‘Did you know ? Perhaps I can see it if I come round here.’
‘It’s not mine. Pull the side of this thing.’
The command had come back into his voice and it surprised her into immediate obedience. She stepped down into the gully and took hold where he indicated.
As she moved, there sounded very faint and far away from the sea below a splatter of sharp little noises, followed by a long bodiless cry like a seabird’s. It was only just audible and barely a tone higher than the ceaseless soporific soughing of the waves. Havoc heard, but his busy hands did not falter. Rifles. He thought so. Doll’s pallid torso must have made a wonderful target.
The whole incident had passed clean over the girl’s head, he noticed. The Science was not faltering, the Luck was holding. He could feel it sweeping him on.
At last the bundle moved. ‘Pull,’ he commanded, ‘now.’ And again, ‘Pull.’
She had as much strength as he had, he realized, and it bothered him fleetingly. It was queer to find it in a girl. The flaking mass slid forward on the slippery powder.
‘Pull,’ he repeated, unaware that he whispered. ‘Pull.’
‘No. Look, it’s caught. There. See?’
She touched the side of the original opening.
‘This stuff on the base is harder than the rest. It’s this jagged bit here, that’s what’s stopping us. Wait a minute.’
She tried to dislodge it with her ridiculous file.
‘What we need,’ she said, splitting the words as she made her futile efforts, ‘what we really need is a good – strong – knife.’
She was not looking at him and anyway, even under his mask of plaster, his face did not change. He felt under his jersey. His fingers found the familiar sheath, and he sighed as the knife handle slid comfortably into his palm.
Meg laughed aloud as she saw the blade on the cement.
‘I said you were lucky.’ Her voice sounded joyful, like a child’s.
‘I am lucky,’ he said, and struck.
The fang of plaster and the bright steel blade split together and together fell to join the other débris.
‘Oh!’ She was concerned at his loss. ‘I’m so sorry.’
He did not hear her. He was listening to the rhythm of petrol engines, still too far away to be anything but an undercurrent to the breeze blowing up from the valley. He flicked the useless shaft over his shoulder and caught the bundle with both hands.
‘Take care, oh, please take care! It’s very, very delicate.’
She bent forward to help him and he permitted it, because he knew the thing must surely be too heavy for him to lift alone. Together they set it down softly on the moss-padded stones.
The roar of an aeroplane engine, heavier than the one belonging to the little silver scout of earlier in the afternoon, swooped down through all the other noises which were converging on the ice-house. Its proud clamour as it began to circle over the smooth pasture on the cliff top drowned the revving engines in the valley and the shouting from the sea. Neither of the two in the house in the garden heard it at all. The stiffened blankets round the bundle had rotted and they fell away easily from the main structure, which lay solid and uncompromising before them.
It was a wooden chest hollowed from a section of a single elm bole, white and seared with age and worm but hooped like a barrel with iron. For a moment its impregnability was too much for the man and his hands flickered over the gnarled surface with awful helplessness.
‘It opens here. Look, there’s a hinge and a catch.’ Her voice reached him without any personality, as if it were the voice of the Science itself, and in the same unreal way he saw her stoop across the box and heard the gentle whine of the dry hinges.
The rounded lid fell back, disclosing a lining of fine embroidery and stump work on silk so old and fragile that a breath must rend and destroy it.
Inside there was a mound, covered prosaically with modern cotton-wool, pounds of it rising up absurdly like whipped cream on a cake.
Suddenly he was so frightened that his outstretched hand paused in mid-air and Meg was before him.
Very cautiously she drew back the covering and the Sainte-Odile Treasure lay regarding them with the same sweet innocent solemnity with which it had regarded all the cruelties, the bawdinesses, and the unconquerable hope of six hundred years.
It was a Virgin and Child in ivory, fourteenth-century work, and carved out of a single curving tusk so that the main figure bent slightly as if the better to support its gentle load.
It was not quite the twin of its more famous sister at Villeneuve lès-Avignon. That exquisite work of art has been damaged and there is a strange sense of pain, as well as a trace of Oriental over-subtlety, in some of its detail. But this, the unknown master’s other surviving work, was perfect and without blemish. It was a later product by a man who, though still a prisoner in a strange land, had known the mercy of his inspiration. The work’s serenity flowed up naturally from the breath-taking drapery at knee and hem to the medieval face, not quite a saint’s nor yet a child’s.
For a full minute the two stared at it in a silence which nothing could penetrate. Meg sank down on her heels in the dust and her eyes grew slowly wider and wider until the tears formed in them. It was the time-honoured reaction, the Sacred Mystery which had given the treasure its name. Honest women wept when they saw it first. It was a phenomenon which had been noticed during eighteen generations.
As the drop fell on her hand she started, coloured, and turned apologetically to the man who had helped her.
‘I didn’t expect it,’ she said huskily. ‘I didn’t expect anything like it. It must be the most beautiful thing in the world.’
He did not move and she was spared the sight of his face.
It was typical of him that in that moment of disaster Havoc remained realistic, as it was his pride to be. He was a modern. He kept his feet on the ground. He had inherited at least that much grace from civilization’s hard-won store. He made no attempt to humanize his Science of Luck and so to credit it with cruelty or deliberated deception. The self-discipline which had rendered him capable of discerning the reality at all had made that mental escape impossible.
He saw the position immediately and with perfect clarity. The mistake was his own. The Science of Luck was an impersonal force, vast as the slipstream of the planets, relentless as a river winding down a hill. He had realized that from the beginning. That was why Avril had frightened him so when he had appeared to say the same thing. He was sorry to have had to put the old chap out before he could part up with a bit more information. He had no comforting
illusions. The only human, and therefore blameable, element in this whole catastrophic mistake was himself.
As he crouched by the open box his body seemed to contract and grow smaller as a corpse does when the life leaves it.
There was no other mystery about the Treasure save the little miracle which it had already performed when Meg had wept. The figure filled each crevice of the ancient case, which had been hewn to fit it. There was no space left for a secret cache of jewels or other lesser trove. All there was lay before him, open to his hand.
Overhead, the pilot of the police plane shut off his engine and prepared to land. Where the road forked eastward a car full of men in uniform hooted violently at the Talbot which had passed it on the corner.
Havoc scrambled to his feet and swayed over the girl.
‘What will it fetch?’ He was clutching at a straw, as he knew better than anybody. Even supposing the wretched thing could be moved without busting, then what was it? A few shillings’ worth of junk.
Her reply only just reached him.
‘Who could possibly buy it?’
That was the answer. He could hear any of the dealers giving him that one. He let a fantasy which he knew was moonshine creep into his mind. Didn’t they hide things in images in the old days? Perhaps there was something worth having buried inside it.
‘I’ll smash it,’ he said aloud.
He saw her swift upward glance in which there was no fear, only a deepening of the concern which had so infuriated him earlier. Then, very smoothly and with much more certainty than he possessed himself over his movements, she closed the lid of the chest and quite calmly sat down upon it.
‘You’re ill,’ she said, and the authority in her voice was frightening because she sounded so strong, like a nurse or someone long ago. ‘You listen to me. You may not know it, but you’re out on your feet. You’ve helped me and I’m very grateful to you and I’m going to pay you back. I feel guilty because now I look at you I don’t think I ought to have let you exhaust yourself.’
The Tiger In the Smoke Page 28
