The Man from the Sea

by Michael Innes

  “I’m sorry about Lady Blair’s ankle.” Cranston spoke these words simply as being no worse than any others. Anything he said to Sally must be abominable. He realised – and his realisation was like a further turn of the screw – that he had no notion what Sally felt or believed. It seemed incredible that she shouldn’t know the truth. But perhaps a girl like Sally was like that – incapable of conceiving evil, or that sort of evil. At least she must be on the brink of knowledge. And Caryl had put her there deliberately; had put her there with the particularly ugly deliberation of the unconscious mind. No doubt Caryl had sprained an ankle. But it was, at this moment, the ingenious thing to do. It had enabled her to play what he now understood to be her morbidly compulsive fear-game; to wake Sally with a story as thin as paper. Perhaps – for he felt his new view of Caryl becoming fuller and fuller – perhaps there was a sort of cruelty in it. Perhaps she enjoyed the thought of constraining her daughter desperately to repel what could be to her only a vile suspicion.

  “Can I do anything more for your friend?” The girl asked the question carefully as if she were an agent only, involved in this nocturnal hugger-mugger simply because of an order that had come to her.

  “He isn’t a friend.” Cranston swiftly spoke the truth where it could be spoken. “He’s a stranger straight out of the sea, and he has a cock-and-bull story about smuggling diamonds.”

  “But I’m not sticking to it.” The man from the sea spoke with an air of easy candour. “I don’t smuggle diamonds.”

  “Then is it some sort of joke?” Sally turned towards Cranston in the darkness. “Or is he mad?”

  “If he’s mad then others are mad too. You didn’t hear a racket?”

  “Not that firing?” Sally spoke swiftly, so that he remembered with ignoble fear how intelligent she was. “It didn’t sound like the usual stuff out at sea.”

  “It wasn’t. It was a chap with a gun. And he tried it out on us.”

  For a moment she was silent. “Honour bright?”

  It was an old challenge between them, and now he hated it. “Honour bright,” he answered. “He ended by losing his gun. But he did some damage first.”

  “To you?”

  His heart leapt in a sort of dreadful joy at something in her voice. “Not me.”

  “He got my eyes.” The man from the sea had been very still in the darkness, and Cranston knew that he was making it his business to gather all he could of the relationship at play before him. But his speech was almost casual. “Only, I think, to the extent of bunging them up with sand. I hope I can get rid of it. For I have to get south, you see – and it will have to be done unobtrusively. Is there any water here?”

  “I’ll fetch water – and an eye-bath and lotion if I can find them.” Sally became brisk and moved at once towards the door. She had her sex’s instinct for practical action in any obscure exigency. “But I shall be at least a quarter of an hour. You can work out your plans together.” She had given an edge to this – but now as she passed Cranston she whispered to him on another note. “Dick – are you really involved with him?”

  “In a limited way, yes.” This time he felt merely awkward. “But I know absolutely nothing about him.”

  “Then I don’t see–” She checked herself. “And it’s something that has to be kept from… Alex?”

  She had made the little pause before her stepfather’s name by which she commonly seemed to distance him. He knew that for some reason she didn’t find Alex Blair easy to take. “Yes,” he said. “I think it better had be.”

  “Very well.” She was suddenly indifferent. “There are cigarettes and matches on the table, if you want them. Although I can’t think who put them there.”

  He was silent. Caryl and he had smoked three or four. It was a small squalid moment as in some low stage-play of adultery.

  She turned away. And then suddenly she had turned back again and put out a hand. It touched his arm, his chest, and then without haste withdrew. She was laughing – innocently and genuinely amused. “Dick – have you no clothes on either?”

  “Precious few.”

  “I’ll bring something – a pullover.”

  “Alex’s?”

  “No!” He was startled, bewildered by the sudden passion in her voice. But she laughed again. “Something of my own. It won’t be too bad a fit.”

  She was gone. For a moment he saw her as a mere white blur in the last faint moonlight filtering into the garden. But he saw her too in a sharp interior image, dressed for the moors – wholesomely broad at shoulders as well as hips. It was true that she could bring something that would fit well enough.

  From behind him in the summerhouse the man from the sea spoke composedly. “So far, so good. For me – and, I hope, for you.”

  “I’d have thought your chances were pretty thin.” Cranston spoke more from irritation than from any sense of a secure grasp of the affair. “You must be some sort of outlaw, I suppose, or you would already be taking steps to contact the police. And a helpless outlaw, too, as long as your eyes are out of action. What you have found, for the moment, is a very insecure refuge, indeed.”

  “One must look on the bright side.” The man from the sea was quite invisible, but he appeared to have found somewhere to sit down in the darkness. “Not that realistic appraisal is not always valuable. Were you ever under fire before?”

  “No – except for field-days. And with blanks.”

  The man from the sea laughed. “Then you did uncommonly well. But so, for that matter, did I.”

  “Have you never been under fire?”

  “Decidedly not. You mustn’t form, you know, too romantic a picture of me.”

  “I don’t find you in the least romantic.” Cranston spoke with conviction. “My guess is that you’re some sort of paid spy.”

  “It sounds ugly. And yet I suppose all spies get pay. Is it your idea that the chap with the gun was from – what is it called? – MI5?”

  “I don’t know. And I don’t know why he went off in that commonplace fashion.”

  “Because he wasn’t – for him – doing anything very out of the way. He could take no further effective action against us. So he simply passed on to the next thing.”

  “Which would be reporting failure? Would he go back to that ship?”

  For a moment the man from the sea made no reply. When he spoke again his voice was slightly muffled, and Cranston caught a gleam from his naked shoulders unexpectedly near the floor. He must be sitting on some low bench or stool, with his head buried in his arms, and probably his eyes were hurting him badly. “The ship? I don’t think so. It wouldn’t linger. He was simply shoved ashore from the motorboat before it went back to the ship, and told to do what he could. The people he will have to contact are now in this country.”

  “Doesn’t that give you time?” Cranston felt for something on which to sit down himself. “I find it hard to believe that he can whistle up a whole like-minded gang out of the Highlands.”

  “It’s an encouraging point.” For the first time, the man from the sea let something like weariness tinge his irony. “But how boring this is. All about me. Let’s talk about you – and the girl.”

  “Let’s do nothing of the sort – and damn your impertinence.”

  Cranston took some satisfaction in coming roundly out with this. But the response of the man from the sea disconcerted him. “I’m sorry. I oughtn’t to have approached it – or not in that way. But you’ve been rather a good show, you know, so far as I’m concerned. You’ve given me the deuce of a leg up – and for no earthly reason that I can see. So I didn’t mean impertinence – only sympathy.”

  “I don’t want sympathy.”

  “No more you do. I talk like an idiot. All long-distance swimmers are probably idiots.” The man from the sea produced his phonetically perfect laugh. “But I think you might want – well, an objective appraisal. Are you in a mess?”

  “You can see that I’m in a mess.”

  “Talked
to anyone?”

  “No.”

  “You love the girl?”

  There was a silence. “Yes.” Incredulously, Cranston heard his own voice ring out the word. “Yes. I do.”

  “She turned you down?”

  “She turned me down. She had a right to, hadn’t she?” He spoke savagely. “As a matter of fact, she was horrified.”

  “My dear lad!” The man from the sea appeared to be soberly unbelieving. “You can’t mean horrified. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It had to make sense – to me. There it was. I’d thought – I’d thought it might be all right. And there it was – a ghastly flop. It must have been the last way she was prepared to think of me. And yet it wasn’t…or I thought not.” Cranston stopped, aware of his own incoherence. “That gun shook me, I suppose. I’m crazy to tell you this.”

  “Did you ever think to make love to a girl before?”

  “No – I didn’t.”

  In the darkness the man from the sea laughed softly, so that Cranston felt his cheeks suddenly burn. “My dear boy, I won’t say of the virgin approach that it’s a terrible mistake. But it invites disasters – and it’s a matter of luck whether they turn out comic or tragic. You were utterly at sea. You hadn’t a clue. And you missed out whole volumes in folio.”

  “I don’t believe a healthy girl wants volumes in folio. But I expect I was” – Cranston hesitated – “clumsy enough.”

  “That was the whole thing.” The man from the sea spoke with unemphatic conviction. “Think about her here – about her tone to you – a few minutes ago.”

  “I can’t – I won’t.” It came from Cranston like a cry. “There can’t have been a mistake – a misunderstanding. There mustn’t. It would make it worse, far worse, unbearable.”

  “About the mother?”

  “Yes.” It took Cranston seconds to utter the word, and he did so tonelessly. “I turned cynical, vicious, crazy – and I went for her.”

  “What utter nonsense.”

  It was the man from the sea at his quietest, and it pulled Cranston up. “What do you mean? Do you think we haven’t – ? Do you think I’m boasting, telling some filthy lie?”

  “I think you’re flattering yourself.” The man from the sea was amused. “About that access, I mean, of vicious, cynical activity. You were thrown off balance and the mother seduced you. It came to no more than that. You’re about the age she goes for, I’d say. And if she virtually raped you from her own daughter – well, that was additional fun.” He paused. “You know all this. You possess an active intelligence which has certainly got you straight about it by this time.”

  “Do you think you’re being comforting?”

  “I certainly hope so.” The man from the sea sounded genuinely surprised. “It’s the first stage with a problem – isn’t it? – to get the terms of it clear. And yours is not a very complex problem, you know. Ten minutes has served to see it as it is. Now you work out the solution. I wish my own conundrum were as simple.”

  “You talk as if it was all science.”

  “Of course it’s all science. Anything in which the mind can establish causality is science – and nothing but science. And the solution of your problem is simple – as simple as a right-about turn.”

  “I just have to try again – and on some convenient future occasion tell Sally that once upon a time I was an ass?”

  “In essence – yes.” The man from the sea was still confident. “Of course, I’m not discounting emotional complications in what is itself an emotional matter. You must work out how to deal with them. Particularly the magical side.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “The really primitive response in your situation, I imagine, is a kind of taboo response. You are inclined to imagine an absolute inhibition. The idea of first the mother–”

  “For God’s sake shut up!” Cranston found that he had been crouched on a wicker chair, and that now he had sprung up and was pacing the summerhouse. A faint grey light was seeping into it, and he could distinguish the few pieces of neglected furniture scattered about. “Didn’t Sally say there were cigarettes?” He fumbled at a table. “You can say that a feeling like that is magical, primitive, pagan, uncivilised. It’s probably unchristian too, for all I know.”

  “It’s certainly that.” The man from the sea spoke with undisturbed authority. “Although there other and difficult concepts come in. Repentance, penance, expiation–”

  “But that’s not how my mind works.”

  “Isn’t it? It’s not always easy to be sure. But I think I know the ideas your mind does feed on. Cheapness, humiliation, disgrace.”

  “Nothing of the sort.” Cranston was impatient. He had found the cigarettes and was about to light one. But before he could strike a match, something further burst from him. “The dishonour!”

  The man from the sea had been fumbling for the cigarette packet in his turn. But at this he stopped and was strangely still. “Dishonour?” he asked unemotionally. “It’s the same as disgrace, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  The man from the sea laughed – but his laughter had no effect upon an indefinable sense of crisis that had built itself up in the summerhouse. “I should have thought that it was only in rather deeper waters that one learned that.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “Didn’t I come from them – before your eyes? Let me have the matches, will you?”

  Cranston pushed the box across the table. “It’s dishonour when you have to say never. Never, never, never.”

  “When I was stripping for that swim, I lost my watch. I took it from a pocket, meaning to transfer it to this belt. But I was at the rail, and my hand slipped.” The man from the sea paused. “It’s a habit it has.”

  “Your hand?” Cranston was puzzled.

  “Never mind. That’s another story. My hand slipped, I say – and the watch had vanished in an instant. Honour – dishonour: is that how you see them?”

  “Yes. Never, never, never… You are going to say one can dive.”

  “I am. But – my dear boy – it has to be to the very bottom of the deep… My eyes are still smarting like the devil, but I don’t see that I need deny myself a cigarette.”

  There was a moment’s silence in the summerhouse, and somewhere in the distance Cranston heard a cock crow. Sally had been longer than she reckoned. He tried to remember the time of the single early-morning train down the branch line. Then, at the spurt of the match, he glanced at his companion. The small intense flame lit up the face of the man from the sea. It was evident that he could see nothing. But his attitude was of one glancing downward. Once already – but less clearly – Cranston had glimpsed him in that pose, and had felt his memory obscurely stir. It stirred again now – and to such an effect that he cried out.

  The man from the sea raised his head. His eyes, horribly bloodshot and almost closed, were directed for a moment sightlessly before him. And then he blew out the match. “Did you speak?” he said.

  “I know you.” Cranston took a deep breath. “You’re Day.”

  5

  “Yes – I’m Day.” The man from the sea struck another match and lit his cigarette. “But we never met before tonight?”

  “Photographs. There were no end of photographs when – when it happened. No wonder you know about Alex Blair – and remembered meeting his wife at some grand scientific do.”

  “If you recognise me from a photograph, other people will be capable of doing the same thing. It’s part of my problem, as you can guess.”

  “No doubt.” Cranston had gone to the door of the summerhouse and was peering into the garden, the nearer outlines of which were becoming faintly visible. “As I now know that you’re John Day I’d better say that my name is Richard Cranston. But it’s not a very equal exchange of information.” He swung round. “What made you do it?”

  “Go – or come back?” The man called John Day got to his feet, and as he did so put bot
h hands across his eyes. “Curse this stuff! Has something gone wrong, do you think? The girl ought to be back by now.”

  “I think she ought. But we can give her a few more minutes before worrying.”

  “And go on talking? Now, what was it about? Honour and dishonour, I think – and diving to the very bottom of the deep. That’s why I’ve come back. It’s my dive. As for why I went – well, I believe people have written books about it.”

  Cranston was silent. The dimensions of what he was involved with were coming home to him. When John Day had taken a holiday in Switzerland, vanished, been glimpsed in Vienna and vanished again, Cranston had still been at school. He remembered hysterical stuff in newspapers. And he remembered his senior physics master, uncommunicative but grim. Two years later there had been a particular sort of explosion in the heart of the Asiatic land-mass. Instruments in North Africa, in California, in New South Wales had recorded it. One man’s deciding to differ from his immediate fellows could mean that – could even sway the balance, perhaps, in which hung the fate of nations. And now here was John Day in the Blairs’ summerhouse. He had just conducted a good-humoured inquisition into the momentous matter of a young man’s having developed a morbid sense of guilt in consequence of mucking a love-affair.

  Day had found his way across the summerhouse and was fingering – like the blind man that he momentarily was – the heap of clothes which Sally had left on a bench. “Let me be quite plain,” he said, “that what I called a moment ago my problem is a purely practical one. The larger issues, you see, I have got entirely clear.”

  “Was the solution as simple as you say mine is – as simple as a right-about turn? Is that what you’re doing – turning?”