The Man from the Sea

by Michael Innes

  “But this is capital.” Day took another biscuit. “You are decidedly worth converting.”

  “To those plans?”

  “Precisely.”

  “The plans that you say are so simple?”

  “My dear young man – yes, indeed. My plans are very simple. I am going to die.”

  For a moment the small, bleak statement held the air unchallenged. Then, from somewhere far down the garden, a dog barked and a man’s voice was heard calling. Other dogs joined in. The man’s voice rose again – cheerful, commanding, but of no effect amid the clamour of terriers.

  “It’s Sir Alex.” Cranston had no doubts. “He makes a thorough nuisance of himself at times, I’ve been told – fooling around long before breakfast with the Cairns.”

  “He’ll come up here?”

  “Very probably he will, now that he’s in the garden… What do you mean?”

  “Just what I say – that quite soon I shall be dead. It’s a great simplification of things… But can’t we get away?”

  “There’s nothing behind this summerhouse except a high wall and then the cliff. And if we go down the garden we shall simply walk into him. But need you worry? It must be a simplification in the matter of new acquaintances too. If you are going to be dead, I mean, virtually before you need return Sir Alex’s call.”

  Day laughed – but low and cautiously. “I see you don’t believe me – yet.”

  “How do you know I don’t believe you?”

  “You wouldn’t make just that joke. Your feelings, you know, are at present superior to your morals.”

  “Will he recognise you?”

  “What’s the light like? I get the impression of clear daylight.”

  “It’s pretty well that.”

  “Then I suppose he will.”

  They were now whispering. The voice in the garden was raised in song, and the Cairns were responding with a more frenzied yapping. Cranston moved to the door of the summerhouse. “I’m sure Sally did her best,” he said. “But she over-estimated his laziness and under-estimated his curiosity.”

  “Not, with most scientists, an easy thing to do.” Day, Cranston saw, had got to his feet and was contriving to peer painfully about the table. “Didn’t she say something about dark glasses? Ah – here they are.”

  The singing was quite close, and the terriers could be heard scampering. Sir Alex Blair’s voice broke off in the middle of a stave and then raised itself again in robust speech. No doubt it was what Sally had called his jollying manner. “Dick, my boy, come out and declare yourself! Don’t forget that I’m a magistrate, sir. Come out, I say, or I’ll send the hounds in.”

  Day slipped on the glasses. “The question,” he murmured “was of your resourcefulness. Say, the quickness of your wit.”

  Cranston turned and walked out to the verandah. It was outrageous that he should be thus challenged. He moved to the top of the steps, and as he did so ran a hand through his hair. The gesture told him at once that he was on a stage. It went with an engaging grin. “Hullo, Sir Alex,” he called. “Did Sally peach?”

  “She had no choice, poor wretch. I caught her red-handed.” Blair had at least come to a halt. Clipped and brushed and polished, florid and well-dieted, dressed in a faded kilt and carrying the shepherd’s crook he commonly affected when at Dinwiddie, he was glancing up at Cranston, facetiously severe. “And you too, you young scoundrel – what have you to say for yourself?”

  “Nothing at all, Sir Alex. As usual – nothing at all.”

  “And so I’d suppose. Still – deeds sometimes speak louder than words – eh? What have you brought me for breakfast, my boy? What have you brought the corrupt old capon-justice of Dinwiddie?”

  Cranston grinned – and for good measure again put on the turn with his hair. “I’m sorry to say, sir, we didn’t get a single fish. They were on top of us far too quickly.”

  “Not a single one of Urquhart’s trout?” This time Sir Alex’s severity appeared genuine. “I wouldn’t have thought it of you, Dick – I wouldn’t indeed. And what’s this about the other fellow having to cut and run without his clothes? Guddling for grilse in the deep pools, eh?”

  “It was pretty bad, sir – a thorough rout of the anti-Urquhart forces. The less said about it the better.”

  “Very well, very well – I’ll leave you both to your shame. If you recover face in time, join us at breakfast.” Turning away, Sir Alex fell to whistling up his dogs. Then he turned back. “But – just in case you don’t – I’ll come up and be introduced to the chap now. Only civil, eh?”

  “Steady on, sir.” Cranston discreetly lowered his voice. “Aren’t you taking something for granted?”

  “What’s that, Dick? What d’you mean?”

  “Well, sir, about it’s being…a chap.”

  Sir Alex stared. “But Sally said–”

  “I’m sure Sally would say the right thing, sir.”

  “Well, I’m damned!” Sir Alex lowered his voice. “One of those madcap McGilvrays – eh, Dick?”

  “Tales out of school, sir.”

  “Quite right, quite right. You may rely on me, my dear fellow.” Sir Alex dropped his voice to a robust whisper. “And left in her pelt…? You young dog!” He burst into a loud guffaw, checked himself, and turned away with a quick wave. “Come over and see us soon, my boy. Sally likes it.”

  Cranston watched his retreat down the garden. Once more he had been obliged to choose. And he had chosen instinctively. He knew that he could have taken no other course. He knew too that it had been, this time, a real burning of his boats. Sir Alex represented the established order of things. He was, as he had humorously remarked, a magistrate – and much else besides. And Cranston had stood on his verandah and lied to him. He had lied to him by way of concealing and protecting John Day.

  He turned back into the summerhouse. It was still shadowy there, and for a moment he distinguished little after the clear morning light. And then he saw that Day had sat down again at the table. He was oddly posed, with his hands stretched out before him, palm upwards. Cranston took a couple of steps towards him and stopped. He found himself staring at the palm of Day’s right hand. And Day knew what he was doing. “Look closer,” he said – and after a pause: “You’ve never seen anything like that?”

  “No – I haven’t.” Cranston felt an uncertain sensation in his stomach. “Is it…important? I’m not a – a pathologist.”

  Day closed his fist. “I think I mentioned – didn’t I? – a bad habit of mine?”

  “About your hand slipping?”

  “Yes. This is something that began happening when my hand slipped – not very long ago. It was then, you know, that I decided to come…home.”

  7

  “It’s how you know you’re going to – ?” Cranston hesitated.

  “Yes. It’s as certain as the tokens that used to tell people about the plague. Interesting, don’t you think? Your father would be fascinated. And lucky, too – if he could get hold of me. A unique case, you know. Nothing like me in these islands today. Of course, in Japan–” Day, who had followed Cranston back to the verandah, broke off to stretch himself lazily in the morning warmth that already seemed to be breaking over the garden like a wave. It was a gesture, the young man realised with a shiver, of simple luxury in the sense of being alive. But Day’s tone continued ironical. “Would you be inclined,” he asked, “to see in it the operation of what they used to call poetic justice?”

  “No.” Cranston put out a hand and guided his companion to a seat on the steps. Then he sat down beside him. They might have been two friends on some idle holiday, lucky in the weather, and up at sunrise with no very definite plan in their heads. “It doesn’t prompt me to any fancy thoughts at all. Or even” – he was awkward–“to say anything much.”

  “Then tell me about the view.”

  “The view? Well, there’s a screen of pine trees beyond the garden, and one just gets a glimpse of the battlements and turrets of the c
astle.”

  “It’s a real castle?”

  “Basically. But it’s been cobbled up a great deal, and a lot of Abbotsford Gothic added on. The main turret is quite bogus. Incidentally, there’s a flag being broken from it now. Blair is a great stickler for that sort of thing. He inherited unexpectedly, you know, when he was a professor of physics in some dim university.”

  “Do you notice the scents?” For a moment Day had been inattentive. “They’re changing. They’re no longer those of the night. I suppose it’s the sort of thing one becomes sensitive to when really blind.” He paused. “Any other sights?”

  “The flag is just fluttering. That means there’s a light breeze blowing offshore. And dead above it – I mean what looks dead above it – there’s a kestrel hovering… Is it really – just that?”

  “Just – ?”

  Cranston glanced almost furtively at Day. He was still stripped – experiment with Sir Alex Blair’s clothes was something he appeared willing to defer – and his spare body showed itself in clear daylight as much an athlete’s as it had done when glinting beneath the moon.

  “Is it really true that – that you have come home like a sick animal – ?”

  “To die in my own hole? Perhaps it is – a little. But chiefly I want to see my wife.” Day’s voice had gone suddenly expressionless. “And sons.”

  There was a long silence. It might all be lies. And if it was true, then its background was an experience upon which Cranston could have no proper comment at all. Yet it seemed wrong not to say something – and something as directly relevant as he could reach to. “Are you sure,” he asked, “that they want to see you?”

  “I don’t suppose they do. But I want to apologise. It was rough on them, you know…my doing what I did.”

  “Thoughtless?” Cranston asked the question with what he felt as a sudden irrepressible enormous irony of his own.

  “Yes.”

  Day’s voice was again utterly without expression. It occurred to Cranston to wonder whether his experiences – or perhaps the first working inward of his mortal malady – had unhinged his mind. “You’ll feel better,” he asked, “when forgiven, and assured that bygones are bygones?”

  “Nothing like that. Don’t you remember? Never. Never, never, never.”

  “But you have had to come, all the same?”

  Day answered obliquely. “It was difficult to do.”

  “The escaping?”

  “Yes – and leaving my work. Particularly with only a few more months chance of it.”

  Cranston had an impulse to jump up and run for the castle – the impulse of a small child venturesomely bathing, who suddenly knows that the next breaker may go over his head. “You don’t make things any easier,” he managed to say. “You don’t make it at all clear where you now stand.”

  “Not on any particularly rational ground.” Day had put on the dark glasses, and as he turned his head towards Cranston he had the appearance of scrutinising him seriously. “To come back – through difficulties, as I’ve said – and tell her that I had been wrong: well, it has seemed the only thing to do.”

  “Wrong, as they say, ideologically? You’ve lost faith in – ?”

  “Not particularly.” Day’s voice was indifferent. “But then I don’t know that, particularly, I ever had it.”

  “Then why – ?”

  “I wanted recognition, facilities, a different sort of sense of power.” Day’s voice was suddenly vibrant. “To run my own show. To be clean at the top.”

  “And by going over to them you got there?”

  “No.” With what Cranston obscurely sensed to be an immense effort of will, Day spoke flatly again. “I got higher. But not right up.”

  “Surely you might have guessed as much at the start?”

  “Yes, indeed.” Day was now blandly acquiescent, persuasive. “I was rationalising, no doubt. Indeed, eventually I proved it to myself. I got at a deeper motive – by a sort of auto-analysis. Chiefly, it all had to do with my father.”

  “Your father?”

  “He died when I was twelve – but he remained my great problem, all the same. Acute father-eclipse. That, basically, was what sent me to Russia.”

  “I suppose that’s Freud or somebody? I had a notion your late friends don’t much go in for that sort of mythology.”

  Day shook his head. “No more they do. I had to get it all out of books. And that was partly what made working out the whole thing so difficult. But I got it clear in the end.”

  “I see.” Cranston uttered the words mechanically. For it seemed to him that this was flabby talk, not easily to be reconciled either with that desperate swim or with what he continued to sense of concentrated purpose in the man before him. “It all comes to you as a private matter?”

  “Absolutely. That is where the only real treacheries lie – in the sphere of personal relations. That is where dishonour comes. Don’t you know it?”

  Cranston was silent – somewhat in the fashion that he was silent at home when his father or mother made what he thought of as a completely “period” remark. There was nothing that could usefully be said. But he might ask one further probing question. “You feel that your slip-up was in the shame and so forth you brought on your wife and children? It’s a social response to your action that has made you regret it, and not the emergence of a conviction that it was inherently wrong in itself?”

  “How charming is divine philosophy.” Day was suddenly mocking. “And catching, too. Didn’t your tutor think up questions like that?”

  Cranston stood up. “You can’t escape – a person with your history can’t escape – having a public self. And it’s the only self the world at large is going to bother about. You’re the man who has carried enormously valuable information, I suppose, to a potential enemy. And now you’ve turned up out of the sea, disposed to conversation about your wife and children. It may be true that nothing now seems important to you except getting square with them – except making some sort of symbolic gesture to them and then packing up. But it can be done in gaol. I believe they arrange these things decently enough nowadays. And why shouldn’t you accept that? If what you say about – about your health is true, then it’s no more than an extra penny for you to pay… And there’s another thing–”

  “I hope there are several.” Day smiled, and the smile seemed less artificial than his laughter had done. “Do you know, you make me a little wonder if I’m off my head? And you intoxicate me, too.”

  “Intoxicate you?” Cranston was disconcerted.

  “You see, you’re the first person for a very long time to whom I’ve talked anything but physics or political claptrap. Imagine, my dear chap, spending your life in a lab – certainly a splendid lab – and leaving it only for an eternal Rotarian lunch or Primrose League tea party. Think how delightful, after that, a nice lad from Cambridge must be.” Day paused. “But I interrupted you.”

  “I say there’s another thing. What you carried in one direction, you are now carrying back – and with interest, I don’t doubt – in the other. Willy-nilly you are doing that, since the stuff must all be there in your head. I believe everything you say now about the chap who came at us with that gun. He’s rousing every fellow-spy in the country. And that ship is sending out coded signals like billyho. And here you are, stranded and helpless in Scotland, with no resources but a nice lad from Cambridge – if you can catch him.” Cranston allowed himself to pause briefly on this shaft. “Hours are slipping by – and you’re getting nowhere. But those people certainly are. It seems to me that if you want that meeting with your wife – and I don’t pretend to comment on it or on what it means to you – your only real chance of it is to send me to find a copper. Or Blair. He’ll call out a territorial regiment, or raise the clan if you’ve a fancy for it. That’s where security lies – not in a crazy dash for London.”

  “Your security?”

  Cranston felt himself flush. “Yes, damn it – my security. And my country’s
, if that’s not something too unimportant to mention.”

  “It’s a reasonable point of view – at least in a layman. But one of the troubles, you know, of my line of business is the melodramatic light in which the public is inclined to regard it. Still, I wish I could fall in with your plan. Unfortunately it wouldn’t be at all the same thing. My wife coming and taking a peep at me – no doubt after having my arrival and arrest tactfully broken to her by a smooth old person from the Home Office? No, no – it’s just not what I see.”

  “Isn’t what you see itself a bit of melodrama – and not perhaps very considerate of the other people involved? The essence of it is walking in – just freely walking in – on your family?”

  Day nodded. “Yes. Is it very queer? It may be – as I’ve said – that I’m a bit off my head. On the other hand, it might seem less queer – mightn’t it – to somebody–”

  “Less immature and inexperienced and so forth than myself?” Cranston took this up quite seriously. “I suppose so. And yet it isn’t just a blank to me. You are telling me about a sort of idée fixe. And I can see a person in your situation genuinely having it. There isn’t really any return to that domestic past of yours. It’s a matter of never-never-never, all right. And so there is only this gesture. It doesn’t at all make nonsense to me. But whether it’s genuine in you remains rather an open question.” Cranston rose. “I’ll think about it as I walk home.”

  “That’s what you’re going to do?”

  “Yes. You’ll be all right here – and conversely, I don’t see that you can take matters much into your own hands at present. And I’ll be back.”

  “With your mind made up?” Day, too, got to his feet. “Very well. But perhaps you’ll give me a hand into some of those clothes before you go.”

  “Certainly.” Cranston moved back into the summerhouse. “Not that you’re likely to have visitors.”

  “You don’t think Blair will come back?”

  Cranston shook his head. “I’m pretty sure he will keep tactfully away – and tactfully mum. He really does believe that I’ve been fooling around with some–” Cranston broke off, confused.