Spinsters in Jeopardy
Ngaio Marsh
A classic Ngaio Marsh mystery thriller combining drugs and sacrifice.High in mountains stands the magnificent Saracen fortress, home of the mysterious Mr Oberon, leader of a coven of witches. It is not the historic castle, however, that intrigues Roderick Alleyn, on holiday with his family, but the suspicion that a huge drugs ring operates from within its ancient portals.But before the holiday is over, someone else has stumbled upon the secret. And Mr Oberon decides his strange and terrible rituals require a human sacrifice…
NGAIO MARSH
Spinsters in Jeopardy
DEDICATION (#ulink_5b64769c-5ac4-5b91-bfcd-8b2b962a3b34)
For Anita and Val Muling with my thanks
CONTENTS
Cover (#u425863fc-9e39-5aa7-9aeb-ea8e05bf91b1)
Title Page (#u4eb62566-1517-56f4-bfd9-cb0b36c4469f)
Dedication (#u2f5f7b1d-32a6-5135-a08e-46308520a49e)
Cast of Characters (#uc8ef38f1-3fb5-53e7-83e4-857de653492c)
Prologue (#u18923464-6e36-5c69-bc16-d9ed5c8dbed9)
1. Journey to the South (#u6fffe6f0-c57e-58ea-ae09-fa46fdd8af05)
2. Operation Truebody (#u8a67ba7a-35fe-50c3-b179-ee4e681906d7)
3. Morning with Mr Oberon (#uf043b631-839d-5192-b264-179df3887065)
4. The Elusiveness of Mr Garbel (#litres_trial_promo)
5. Ricky in Roqueville (#litres_trial_promo)
6. Consultation (#litres_trial_promo)
7. Sound of Ricky (#litres_trial_promo)
8. Ricky Regained (#litres_trial_promo)
9. Dinner in Roqueville (#litres_trial_promo)
10. Thunder in the Air (#litres_trial_promo)
11. P.E. Garbel (#litres_trial_promo)
12. Eclipse of the Sun (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CAST OF CHARACTERS (#ulink_e9863ca5-b27c-5a16-b63a-1a09bc5f959e)
Prologue (#ulink_d82d457a-f718-5f69-9cb7-4b5e8c6e01bb)
Without moving his head, Ricky slewed his eyes round until he was able to look slantways at the back of his mother’s easel.
‘I’m getting pretty bored, however,’ he announced.
‘Stick it a bit longer, darling, I implore you, and look at Daddy.’
‘Well, because it’s just about as boring a thing as a person can have to do. Isn’t it Daddy?’
‘When I did it,’ said his father, ‘I was allowed to look at your mama, so I wasn’t bored. But as there are degrees of boredom,’ he continued, ‘so there are different kinds of bores. You might almost say there are recognizable schools.’
‘To which school,’ said his wife, stepping back from her easel, ‘would you say Mr Garbel belonged? Ricky, look at Daddy for five minutes more and then I promise we’ll stop.’
Ricky sighed ostentatiously and contemplated his father.
‘Well, as far as we know him,’ Alleyn said, ‘to the epistolatory school. There, he’s a classic. In person he’s undoubtedly the sort of bore that shows you things you don’t want to see. Snapshots in envelopes. Barren conservatories. Newspaper cuttings. He’s relentless in this. I think he carries things on his person and puts them in front of you without giving you the smallest clue about what you’re meant to say. You’re moving, Ricky.’
‘Isn’t it five minutes yet?’
‘No, and it never will be if you fidget. How long is it, Troy, since you first heard from Mr Garbel?’
‘About eighteen months. He wrote for Christmas. All told I’ve had six letters and five postcards from Mr Garbel. This last arrived this morning. That’s what put him into my head.’
‘Daddy, who is Mr Garbel?’
‘One of Mummy’s admirers. He lives in the Maritime Alps and writes love letters to her.’
‘Why?’
‘He says it’s because he’s her third cousin once removed, but I know better.’
‘What do you know better?’
With a spare paint-brush clenched between her teeth, Troy said indistinctly:‘Keep like that, Ricky darling, I implore you.’
‘OK. Tell me properly, Daddy, about Mr Garbel.’
‘Well, he suddenly wrote to Mummy and said Mummy’s great-aunt’s daughter was his second cousin, and that he thought Mummy would like to know that he lived at a place called Roqueville in the Maritime Alps. He sent a map of Roqueville, marking the place where the road he lived in ought to be shown, but wasn’t, and he told Mummy how he didn’t go out much or meet many people.’
‘Pretty dull, however.’
‘He told her about all the food you can buy there that you can’t buy here and he sent her copies of newspapers with bus timetables marked and messages at the side saying: ‘I find this bus convenient and often take it. It leaves the corner by the principal hotel every half-hour.’ Do you still want to hear about Mr Garbel?’
‘Unless it’s time to stop, I might as well.’
‘Mummy wrote to Mr Garbel and said how interesting she found his letter.’
‘Did you, Mummy?’
‘One has to be polite,’ Troy muttered and laid a thin stroke of rose on the mouth of Ricky’s portrait.
‘And he wrote back sending her three used bus tickets and a used train ticket.’
‘Does she collect them?’
‘Mr Garbel thought she would like to know that they were his tickets punched by guards and conductors all for him. He also sends her beautifully coloured postcards of the Maritime Alps.’
‘What’s that? May I have them?’
‘… with arrows pointing to where his house would be if you could see it and to where the road goes to a house he sometimes visits, only the house is off the postcard.’
‘Like a picture puzzle, sort of?’
‘Sort of. And he tells Mummy how, when he was young and doing chemistry at Cambridge, he almost met her great-aunt who was his second cousin, once removed.’
‘Did he have a shop?’
‘No, he’s a special kind of chemist without a shop. When he sends Mummy presents of used tickets and old newspapers he writes on them: ‘Sent by P.E. Garbel, 16 Rue des Violettes, Roqueville, to Mrs Agatha Alleyn (née Troy) daughter of Stephen and Harriet Troy (née Baynton.)”
‘That’s you, isn’t it, Mummy? What else?’
‘Is it possible, Ricky,’ asked his wondering father, ‘that you find this interesting?’
‘Yes,’ said Ricky. ‘I like it. Does he mention me?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Or you?’
‘He suggests that Mummy might care to read parts of his letter to me.’
‘May we go and see him?’
‘Yes,’ said Alleyn. ‘As a matter of fact I think we may.’
Troy turned from her work and gaped at her husband. ‘What can you mean?’ she exclaimed.
‘Is it time, Mummy? Because it must be, so may I get down?’
‘Yes, thank you, my sweet. You have been terribly good and I must think of some exciting reward.’
‘Going to see Mr Garbel, frinstance?’
‘I’m afraid,’ Troy said, ‘that Daddy, poor thing, was being rather silly.’
‘Well then – ride to Babylon?’ Ricky suggested and looked out of the corners of his eyes at his father.
‘All right,’ Alleyn groaned, parodying despair, ‘OK. All right. Here we go!’
He swung the excitedly squealing Ricky up to his shoulders and grasped his ankles.
‘Good old horse,’ Ricky shouted and patted his father’s cheek. ‘Non-stop to Babylon. Good old horse.’
Troy looked dotingly at him. ‘Say to Nanny that I said you could ask for an extra high tea.’
‘Top highest with strawberry jam?’
‘If there is any.’
‘Lavish!’ said Ricky and gave a cry of primitive food-lust. ‘Giddy-up horse,’ he shouted. The family of Alleyn broke into a chant:
How many miles to Babylon?
Five score and ten.
Can I get there by candle-light?
‘Yes! and back again!’ Ricky yelled and was carried at a canter from the room.
Troy listened to the diminishing rumpus on the stairs and looked at her work.
‘How happy we are!’ she thought and then, foolishly, ‘touch wood!’ And she picked up a brush and dragged a touch of colour from the hair across the brow. ‘How lucky I am,’ she thought, more soberly and her mood persisted when Alleyn came back with his hair tousled like Ricky’s and his tie under his ear.
He said: ‘May I look?’
‘All right,’ Troy agreed, wiping her brushes, ‘but don’t say anything.’
He grinned and walked round to the front of the easel. Troy had painted a head that seemed to have light as its substance. Even the locks of dark hair might have been spun from sunshine. It was a work in line rather than in mass but the line flowed and turned with a subtlety that made any further elaboration unnecessary. ‘It needs another hour,’ Troy muttered.
‘In that case,’ Alleyn said, ‘I can at least touch wood.’
She gave him a quick grateful look and said, ‘What is all this about Mr Garbel?’
‘I saw the A.C. this morning. He was particularly nice, which generally means he’s got you pricked down for a particularly nasty job. On the face of it this one doesn’t sound so bad. It seems MI5 and the Sureté are having a bit of a party with the Narcotics Bureau, and our people want somebody with fairly fluent French to go over for talks and a bit of field-work. As it is MI5 we’d better observe the usual rule of airy tact on your part and phony inscrutability on mine. But it turns out that the field-work lies, to coin a coy phrase, not a hundred miles from Roqueville.’
‘Never!’ Troy ejaculated. ‘In the Garbel country?’
‘Precisely. Now it occurs to me that what with war, Ricky and the atrocious nature of my job, we’ve never had a holiday abroad together. Nanny is due for a fortnight at Reading. Why shouldn’t you and Ricky come with me to Roqueville and call on Mr Garbel?’
Troy looked delighted but she said: ‘You can’t go round doing top-secret jobs for MI5 trailing your wife and child. It would look so amateurish. Besides, we agreed never to mix business with pleasure, Rory.’
‘In this case the more amateurish I look, the better. And I should only be based on Roqueville. The job lies outside it, so we wouldn’t really be mixing business with pleasure.’
He looked at her for a moment. ‘Do come,’ he said, ‘you know you’re dying to meet Mr Garbel.’
Troy scraped her palette. ‘I’m dying to come,’ she amended, ‘but not to meet Mr Garbel. And yet: I don’t know. There’s a sort of itch, I confess it, to find out just how deadly dull he is. Like a suicidal tendency.’
‘You must yield to it. Write to him and tell him you’re coming. You might enclose a bus ticket from Putney to the Fulham Road. How do you address him: ‘Dear Cousin –’ but what is his Christian name?’
‘I’ve no idea. He’s just P.E. Garbel. To his intimates, he tells me, he is known as Peg. He adds inevitably, a quip about being square in a round hole.’
‘Roqueville being the hole?’
‘Presumably.’
‘Has he a job, do you think?’
‘For all I know he may be writing a monograph on bicarbonate of soda. If he is he’ll probably ask us to read the manuscript.’
‘At all events we must meet him. Put down that damn’ palette and tell me you’re coming.’
Troy wiped her hands on her smock. ‘We’re coming,’ she said.
II
In his château outside Roqueville Mr Oberon looked across the nighted Mediterranean towards North Africa and then smiled gently upon his assembled guests.
‘How fortunate we are,’ he said. ‘Not a jarring note. All gathered together with one pure object in mind.’ He ran over their names as if they composed a sort of celestial roll-call. ‘Our youngest disciple,’ he said beaming on Ginny Taylor. ‘A wonderful field of experience awaits her. She stands on the threshold of ecstasy. It is not too much to say, of ecstasy. And Robin too.’ Robin Herrington, who had been watching Ginny Taylor, looked up sharply. ‘Ah, youth, youth,’ sighed Mr Oberon ambiguously and turned to the remaining guests, two men and a woman. ‘Do we envy them?’ he asked and answered himself. ‘No! No, for ours is the richer tilth. We are the husbandmen, are we not?’
Dr Baradi lifted his dark, fleshy and intelligent head. He looked at his host. ‘Yes, indeed,’ he said. ‘We are precisely that. And when Annabella arrives – I think you said she was coming?’
‘Dear Annabella!’ Mr Oberon exclaimed. ‘Yes. On Tuesday. Unexpectedly.’
‘Ah!’ said Carbury Glande, looking at his paint-stained finger-nails. ‘On Tuesday. Then she will be rested and ready for our Thursday rites.’
‘Dear Annabella!’ Dr Baradi echoed sumptuously.
The sixth guest turned her ravaged face and short-sighted eyes towards Ginny Taylor.
‘Is this your first visit?’ she asked.
Ginny was looking at Mr Oberon. She wore an expression that was unbecoming to her youth, a look of uncertainty, excitement and perhaps fear.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘My first.’
‘A neophyte,’ Baradi murmured richly.
‘Soon to be so young a priestess,’ Mr Oberon added. ‘It is very touching.’ He smiled at Ginny with parted lips.
A tinkling crash broke across the conversation. Robin Herrington had dropped his glass on the tessellated floor. The remains of his cocktail ran into a little pool near Mr Oberon’s feet.
Mr Oberon cut across his apologies. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It is a happy symbol. Perhaps a promise. Let us call it a libation,’ he said. ‘Shall we dine?’
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_d8319025-99b5-5689-bbc4-06148379ea5c)
Journey to the South (#ulink_d8319025-99b5-5689-bbc4-06148379ea5c)
Alleyn lifted himself on his elbow and turned his watch to the blue light above his pillow. Twenty minutes past five. In another hour they would be in Roqueville.
The abrupt fall of silence when the train stopped must have woken him. He listened intently but, apart from the hiss of escaping steam and the slam of a door in a distant carriage, everything was quiet and still.
He heard the men in the double sleeper next to his own exchange desultory remarks. One of them yawned loudly.
Alleyn thought the station must be Douceville. Sure enough, someone walked past the window and a lonely voice announced to the night: ‘Douce-v-i-ll-e.’
The engine hissed again. The same voice, apparently continuing a broken conversation, called out: ‘Pas ce soir, par exemple!’ Someone else laughed distantly. The voices receded to be followed by the most characteristic of all stationary-train noises, the tap of steel on steel. The taps tinkered away into the distance.
Alleyn manoeuvred himself to the bottom of his bunk, dangled his long legs in space for a moment and then slithered to the floor. The window was not completely shuttered. He peered through the gap and was confronted by the bottom of a poster for Dubonnet and the lower half of a porter carrying a lamp. The lamp swung to and fro, a bell rang and the train clanked discreetly. The lamp and poster were replaced by the lower halves of two discharged passengers, a pile of luggage, a stretch of empty platform and a succession of swiftly moving pools of light. Then there was only the night hurrying past with blurred suggestions of rocks and olive trees.
The train gathered speed and settled down to its perpetual choriambic statement: ‘What a to-do. What a to-do.’
Alleyn cautiously lowered the window-blind. The train was crossing the seaward end of a valley and the moon in its third quarter was riding the westward heavens. Its radiance emphasized the natural pallor of hills and trees and dramatized the shapes of rocks and mountains. With the immediate gesture of a shutter, a high bank obliterated this landscape. The train passed through a village and for two seconds Alleyn looked into a lamplit room where a woman watched a man intent over an early breakfast. What occupation got them up so soon? They were there, sharp in his vision, and were gone.
He turned from the window wondering if Troy, who shared his pleasure in train journeys, was awake in her single berth next door. In twenty minutes he would go and see. In the meantime he hoped that, in the almost complete darkness, he could dress himself without making a disturbance. He began to do so, steadying himself against the lurch and swing of this small, noisy and unstable world.
‘Hallo.’ A treble voice ventured from the blackness of the lower bunk. ‘Are we getting out soon?’
‘Hallo,’ Alleyn rejoined. ‘No, go to sleep.’
‘I couldn’t be wakier. Matter of fac’ I’ve been awake pretty well all night.’
Alleyn groped for his shirt, staggered, barked his shin on the edge of his suitcase and swore under his breath.
‘Because,’ the treble voice continued, ‘if we aren’t getting out why are you dressing yourself?’
‘To be ready for when we are.’
‘I see,’ said the voice. ‘Is Mummy getting ready for getting out too?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s not time.’
‘Is she asleep?’
‘I don’t know, old boy.’
‘Then how do you know she’s not getting ready?’
‘I don’t know, really. I just hope she’s not.’
‘Why?’
‘I want her to rest, and if you say why again I won’t answer.’
‘I see.’ There was a pause. The voice chuckled. ‘Why?’ it asked.
Alleyn had found his shirt. He now discovered that he had put it on inside out. He took it off.
‘If,’ the voice pursued, ‘I said a sensible why, would you answer, Daddy?’
‘It would have to be entirely sensible.’
‘Why are you getting up in the dark?’
‘I had hoped,’ Alleyn said bitterly, ‘that all little boys were fast asleep and I didn’t want to wake them.’
‘Because now you know, they aren’t asleep so why – ?’
‘You’re perfectly right,’ Alleyn said. The train rounded a curve and he ran with some violence against the door. He switched on the light and contemplated his son.
Ricky had the newly-made look peculiar to little boys in bed. His dark hair hung sweetly over his forehead, his eyes shone and his cheeks and lips were brilliant. One would have said he was so new that his colours had not yet dried.
‘I like being in a train,’ he said, ‘more lavishly than anything that’s ever happened so far. Do you like being in a train, Daddy?’
‘Yes,’ said Alleyn. He opened the door of the washing-cabinet which lit itself up. Ricky watched his father shave.
‘Where are we now?’ he said presently.
‘By a sea. It’s called the Mediterranean and it’s just out there on the other side of the train. We shall see it when it’s daytime.’
‘Are we in the middle of the night?’
‘Not quite. We’re in the very early morning. Out there everybody is fast asleep,’ Alleyn suggested, not very hopefully.
‘Everybody?’
‘Almost everybody. Fast asleep and snoring.’
‘All except us,’ Ricky said with rich satisfaction, ‘because we are lavishly wide awake in the very early morning in a train. Aren’t we Daddy?’
‘That’s it. Soon we’ll pass the house where I’m going tomorrow. The train doesn’t stop there, so I have to go on with you to Roqueville and drive back. You and Mummy will stay in Roqueville.’
‘Where will you be most of the time?’
‘Sometimes with you and sometimes at this house. It’s called the Château de la Chèvre d’Argent. That means the House of the Silver Goat.’
‘Pretty funny name, however,’ said Ricky.
A stream of sparks ran past the window. The light from the carriage flew across the surface of a stone wall. The train had begun to climb steeply. It gradually slowed down until there was time to see nearby objects lamplit, in the world outside: a giant cactus, a flight of steps, part of an olive grove. The engine laboured almost to a standstill. Outside their window, perhaps a hundred yards away, there was a vast house that seemed to grow out of the cliff. It stood full in the moonlight and shadows, black as ink, were thrown by buttresses across its recessed face. A solitary window, veiled by a patterned blind, glowed dully yellow.
‘Somebody is awake out there,’ Ricky observed. ‘ “Out” “In”?’ he speculated. ‘Daddy, what are those people? “Out” or “In”?’
‘Outside for us, I suppose, and inside for them.’
‘Ouside the train and inside the house,’ Ricky agreed. ‘Suppose the train ran through the house, would they be “in” for us?’
‘I hope,’ his father observed glumly, ‘that you won’t grow up a metaphysician.’
‘What’s that? Look, there they are in their house. We’ve stopped, haven’t we?’
The carriage window was exactly opposite the lighted one in the cliff-like wall of the house. A blurred shape moved in the room on the other side of the blind. It swelled and became a black body pressed against the window.
Allyen made a sharp ejaculation and a swift movement.
‘Because you’re standing right in front of the window,’ Ricky said politely, ‘and it would be rather nice to see out.’
The train jerked galvanically and with a compound racketing noise, slowly entered a tunnel, emerged, and gathering pace, began a descent to sea-level.
The door of the compartment opened and Troy stood there in a woollen dressing-gown. Her short hair was rumpled and hung over her forehead like her son’s. Her face was white and her eyes dark with perturbation. Alleyn turned quickly. She looked from him to Ricky. ‘Have you seen out of the window?’ she asked.
‘I have,’ said Alleyn. ‘And so, by the look of you, have you.’
Troy said, ‘Can you help me with my suitcase?’ and to Ricky: ‘I’ll come back and get you up soon, darling.’
‘Are you both going?’
‘We’ll be just next door. We shan’t be long,’ Alleyn said.
‘It’s only because it’s in a train.’
‘We know,’ Troy reassured him. ‘But it’s all right. Honestly. OK?’
‘OK,’ Ricky said in a small voice and Troy touched his cheek.
Alleyn followed her into her own compartment. She sat down on her bunk and stared at him. ‘I can’t believe that was true,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry you saw it.’
‘Then it was true. Ought we to do anything? Rory, ought you to do anything? Oh dear, how tiresome.’
‘Well, I can’t do much while moving away at sixty miles an hour. I suppose I’d better ring up the Préfecture when we get to Roqueville.’
He sat down beside her. ‘Never mind, darling,’ he said, ‘there may be another explanation.’
‘I don’t see how there can be, unless – Do you mind telling me what you saw?’
Alleyn said carefully. ‘A lighted window, masked by a spring blind. A woman falling against the blind and releasing it. Beyond the woman, but out of sight to us, there must have been a brilliant lamp and in its light, farther back in the room and on our right, stood a man in a white garment. His face, oddly enough, was in shadow. There was something that looked like a wheel, beyond his right shoulder. His right arm was raised.’
‘And in his hand – ?’
‘Yes,’ Alleyn said, ‘that’s the tricky bit, isn’t it?’
‘And then the tunnel. It was like one of those sudden breaks in an old-fashioned film, too abrupt to be really dramatic. It was there and then it didn’t exist. No,’ said Troy, ‘I won’t believe it was true. I won’t believe something is still going on inside that house. And what a house too! It looked like a Gastave Doré, really bad romantic’
Alleyn said: ‘Are you all right to get dressed? I’ll just have a word with the car attendant. He may have seen it, too. After all, we may not be the only people awake and looking out, though I fancy mine was the only compartment with the light on. Yours was in darkness, by the way.’
‘I had the window shutter down, though. I’d been thinking how strange it is to see into other people’s lives through a train window.’
‘I know,’ Alleyn said. ‘There’s a touch of magic in it.’
‘And then – to see that! Not so magical.’
‘Never mind. I’ll talk to the attendant and then I’ll come back and get Ricky up. He’ll be getting train-fever. We should reach Roqueville in about twenty minutes. All right?’
‘Oh, I’m right as a bank,’ said Troy.
‘Nothing like the Golden South for a carefree holiday,’ Alleyn said. He grinned at her, went out into the corridor and opened the door of his own sleeper.
Ricky was still sitting up in his bunk. His hands were clenched and his eyes wide open. ‘You’re being a pretty long time, however,’ he said.
‘Mummy’s coming in a minute. I’m just going to have a word with the chap outside. Stick it out, old boy.’
‘OK,’ said Ricky.
The attendant, a pale man with a dimple in his chin, was dozing on his stool at the forward end of the carriage. Alleyn, who had already discovered that he spoke very little English, addressed him in diplomatic French that had become only slightly hesitant through disuse. Had the attendant, he asked, happened to be awake when the train paused outside a tunnel a few minutes ago? The man seemed to be in some doubt as to whether Alleyn was about to complain because he was asleep or because the train had halted. It took a minute or two to clear up this difficulty and to discover that he had, in point of fact, been asleep for some time.
‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ Alleyn said, ‘but can you, by any chance tell me the name of the large building near the entrance to the tunnel?’
‘Ah, yes, yes,’ the attendant said. ‘Certainly, monsieur, since I am a native of these parts. It is known to everybody, this house, on account of its great antiquity. It is the Château de la Chèvre d’Argent.’
‘I thought it might be,’ said Alleyn.
II
Alleyn reminded the sleepy attendant that they were leaving the train at Roqueville and tipped him generously. The man thanked him with that peculiarly Gallic effusiveness that is at once too logical and too adroit to be offensive.
‘Do you know,’ Alleyn said, as if on an afterthought, ‘who lives in the Château de la Chèvre d’Argent?’
The attendant believed it was leased to an extremely wealthy gentleman, possibly an American, possibly an Englishman, who entertained very exclusively. He believed the ménage to be an excessively distinguished one.
Alleyn waited for a moment and then said, ‘I think there was a little trouble there tonight. One saw a scene through a lighted window when the train halted.’
The attendant’s shoulders suggested that all things are possible and that speculation is vain. His eyes were as blank as boot buttons in his pallid face. Should he not perhaps fetch the baggage of Monsieur and Madame and the little one in readiness for their descent at Roqueville. He had his hand on the door of Alleyn’s compartment when from somewhere towards the rear of the carriage, a woman screamed twice.
They were short screams, ejaculatory in character, as if they had been wrenched out of her, and very shrill. The attendant wagged his head from side to side in exasperation, begged Alleyn to excuse him, and went off down the corridor to the rearmost compartment. He tapped. Alleyn guessed at an agitated response. The attendant went in and Troy put her head out of her own door.
‘What now, for pity’s sake?’ she asked.
‘Somebody having a nightmare or something. Are you ready?’
‘Yes. But what a rum journey we’re having!’
The attendant came back at a jog-trot. Was Alleyn perhaps a doctor? An English lady had been taken ill. She was in great pain: the abdomen, the attendant elaborated, clutching his own in pantomime. It was evidently a formidable seizure. If Monsieur, by any chance –
Alleyn said he was not a doctor. Troy said, ‘I’ll go and see the poor thing, shall I? Perhaps there’s a doctor somewhere in the train. You get Ricky up, darling.’
She made off down the swaying corridor. The attendant began to tap on doors and to inquire fruitlessly of his passengers if they were doctors. ‘I shall see my comrades of the other voitures,’ he said importantly. ‘Evidently one must organize.’
Alleyn found Ricky sketchily half-dressed and in a child’s panic.
‘Where have you been, however?’ he demanded. ‘Because I didn’t know where everyone was. We’re going to be late for getting out. I can’t find my pants. Where’s Mummy?’
Alleyn calmed him, got him ready and packed their luggage. Ricky, white-faced, sat on the lower bunk with his gaze turned on the door. He liked, when travelling, to have his family under his eye. Alleyn, remembering his own childhood, knew his little son was racked with an illogical and bottomless anxiety, an anxiety that vanished when the door opened and Troy came in.
‘Oh golly, Mum!’ Ricky said and his lip trembled.
‘Hallo, there,’ Troy said in the especially calm voice she kept for Ricky’s panics. She sat down beside him, putting her arm where he could lean back against it and looked at her husband.
‘I think that woman’s very ill,’ she said. ‘She looks frightful. She had what she thought was some kind of food poisoning this morning and dosed herself with castor-oil. And then, just now she had a violent pain, really awful, she says, in the appendix place and now she hasn’t any pain at all and looks ghastly. Wouldn’t that be a perforation, perhaps?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine, my love.’
‘Rory, she’s about fifty and she comes from the Bermudas and has no relations in the world and wears a string bag on her head and she’s never been abroad before and we can’t just let her be whisked on into the Italian Riviera with a perforated appendix if that’s what it is.’
‘Oh, damn!’
‘Well, can we? I said,’ Troy went on, looking sideways at her husband, ‘that you’d come and talk to her.’
‘Darling, what the hell can I do?’
‘You’re calming in a panic, isn’t he, Rick?’
‘Yes,’ said Ricky, again turning white. ‘I don’t suppose you’re both going away, are you, Mummy?’
‘You can come with us. You could look through the corridor window at the sea. It’s shiny with moonlight and Daddy and I will be just on the other side of the poor thing’s door. Her name’s Miss Truebody and she knows Daddy’s a policeman.’
‘Well, I must say …’ Alleyn began indignantly.
‘We’d better hurry, hadn’t we?’ Troy stood up holding Ricky’s hand. He clung to her like a limpet.
At the far end of the corridor their own car attendant stood with two of his colleagues outside Miss Truebody’s door. They made dubious grimaces at one another and spoke in voices that were drowned by the racket of the train. When they saw Troy, they all took off their silver-braided caps and bowed to her. A doctor, they said, had been discovered in the troisième voiture and was now with the unfortunate lady. Perhaps Madame would join him. Their own attendant tapped on the door and with an ineffable smirk at Troy, opened it. ‘Madame!’ he invited.
Troy went in and Ricky feverishly transferred his hold to Alleyn’s hand. Together, they looked out of the corridor window.
The railway, on this part of the coast, followed an embankment a few feet above sea level and as Troy had said, the moon shone on the Mediterranean. A long cape ran out over the glossy water and near its tip a few points of yellow light showed in early-rising households. The stars were beginning to pale.
‘That’s Cap St Gilles,’ Alleyn said. ‘Lovely, isn’t it, Rick?’
Ricky nodded. He had one ear tuned to his mother’s voice which could just be heard beyond Miss Truebody’s door.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is lovely.’ Alleyn wondered if Ricky was really as pedantically-mannered a child as some of their friends seemed to think.
‘Aren’t we getting a bit near?’ Ricky asked. ‘Bettern’t Mummy come now?’
‘It’s all right. We’ve ten minutes yet and the train people know we’re getting off. I promise it’s all right. Here’s Mummy now.’
She came out followed by a small bald gentleman with waxed moustaches, wearing striped professional trousers, patent leather boots and a frogged dressing-gown.
‘Your French is badly needed. This is the doctor,’ Troy said and haltingly introduced her husband.
The doctor was formally enchanted. He said crisply that he had examined the patient who almost certainly suffered from a perforated appendix and should undoubtedly be operated upon as soon as possible. He regretted extremely that he himself had an urgent professional appointment in St Celeste and could not, therefore, accept responsibility. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to discharge Miss Truebody at Roqueville and send her back by the evening train to St Christophe where she could go to hospital. Of course, if there was a surgeon in Roqueville the operation might be performed there. In any case he would give Miss Truebody an injection of morphine. His shoulders rose. It was a position of extreme difficulty. They must hope, must they not, that there would be a medical man and suitable accommodation available at Roqueville? He believed he had understood Madame to say that she and Monsieur l’Inspecteur-en-Chef would be good enough to assist their compatriot.
Monsieur l’Inspecteur-en-Chef glared at his wife and said they would, of course, be enchanted. Troy said in English that it had obviously comforted Miss Truebody and impressed the doctor to learn of her husband’s rank. The doctor bowed, delivered a few definitive compliments and lurching in a still dignified manner down the swinging corridor, made for his own carriage, followed by his own attendant.
Troy said: ‘Come and speak to her, Rory. It’ll help.’
‘Daddy?’ Ricky said in a small voice.
‘We won’t be a minute,’ Troy and Alleyn answered together, and Alleyn added, ‘We know how it feels, Rick, but one has got to get used to these things.’ Ricky nodded and swallowed.
Alleyn followed Troy into Miss Truebody’s compartment. ‘This is my husband, Miss Truebody,’ Troy said. ‘He’s had a word with the doctor and he’ll tell you all about it.’
Miss Truebody lay on her back with her knees a little drawn up and her sick hands closed vice-like over the sheet. She had a rather blunt face that in health probably was rosy but now was ominously blotched and looked as if it had shrunk away from her nose. This effect was heightened by the circumstance of her having removed her teeth. There were beads of sweat along the margin of her grey hair and her upper lip and the ridges where her eyebrows would have been if she had possessed any; the face was singularly smooth and showed none of the minor blemishes characteristic of her age. Over her head she wore, as Troy had noticed, a sort of net bag made of pink string. She looked terrified. Something in her eyes reminded Alleyn of Ricky in one of his travel-panics.
He told her, as reassuringly as might be, of the doctor’s pronouncement. Her expression did not change and he wondered if she had understood him. When he had finished she gave a little gasp and whispered indistinctly: Too awkward, so inconvenient. Disappointing.’ And her mottled hands clutched at the sheet.
‘Don’t worry,’ Alleyn said, ‘don’t worry about anything. We’ll look after you.’
Like a sick animal, she gave him a heart-rending look of gratitude and shut her eyes. For a moment Troy and Alleyn watched her being slightly but inexorably jolted by the train and then stole uneasily from the compartment. They found their son dithering with agitation in the corridor and the attendant bringing out the last of their luggage.
Troy said hurriedly: ‘This is frightful. We can’t take the responsibility. Or must we?’
‘I’m afraid we must. There’s no time to do anything else. I’ve got a card of sorts up my sleeve in Roqueville. If it’s no good we’ll get her back to St Christophe.’
‘What’s your card? Not,’ Troy ejaculated, ‘Mr Garbel?’
‘No, no, it’s – hi – look! We’re there.’
The little town of Roqueville, wan in the first thin wash of dawnlight, slid past the windows and the train drew into the station.
Fortified by a further tip from Troy and in evident relief at the prospect of losing Miss Truebody, the attendant enthusiastically piled the Alleyns’ luggage on the platform while the guard plunged into earnest conversation with Alleyn and the Roqueville station-master. The doctor reappeared fully clad and gave Miss Truebody a shot of morphine. He and Troy, in incredible association, got her into a magenta dressing-gown in which she looked like death itself. Troy hurriedly packed Miss Truebody’s possessions, uttered a few words of encouragement, and with Ricky and the doctor joined Alleyn on the platform.
Ricky, his parents once deposited on firm ground and fully accessible, forgot his terrors and contemplated the train with the hardboiled air of an experienced traveller.
The station-master with the guard and three attendants in support was saying to the doctor: ‘One is perfectly conscious Monsieur le Docteur, of the extraordinary circumstances. Nevertheless, the schedule of the Chemin de Fer des Alpes Maritimes cannot be indefinitely protracted.’
The doctor said: ‘One may, however, in the few moments that are being squandered in this unproductive conversation, M. le Chef de Gare, consult the telephone directory and ascertain if there is a doctor in Roqueville.’
‘One may do so undoubtedly, but I can assure M. le Docteur that such a search will be fruitless. Our only doctor is at a conference in St Christophe. Therefore, since the train is already delayed one minute and forty seconds …’
He glanced superbly at the guard who began to survey the train like a sergeant-major. A whistle was produced. The attendants walked towards their several cars.
‘Rory!’ Troy cried out. ‘We can’t …’
Alleyn said: ‘All right,’ and spoke to the station-master. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, M. le Chef de Gare, you are aware of the presence of a surgeon – I believe his name is Dr Baradi – among the guests of M. Oberon some twenty kilometres back at the Château de la Chèvre d’Argent. He is an Egyptian gentleman. I understand he arrived two weeks ago.’
‘Alors, M. l’Inspecteur-en-Chef …’ the doctor began but the station-master, after a sharp glance at Alleyn, became alert and neatly deferential. He remembered the arrival of the Egyptian gentleman for whom he had caused a taxi to be produced. If the gentleman should be – he bowed – as M. l’Inspecteur-en-Chef evidently was informed, a surgeon, all their problems were solved, were they not? He began to order the sleeping-car attendants about and was briskly supported by the guard. Troy, to the renewed agitation of her son, and with the assistance of their attendant, returned to the sleeping-car and supported Miss Truebody out of it, down to the platform and into the waiting-room, where she was laid out, horribly corpse-like, on a bench. Her luggage followed. Troy, on an afterthought, darted back and retrieved from a tumbler in the washing cabinet, Miss Truebody’s false teeth, dropping them with a shudder into a tartan sponge-bag. On the platform the doctor held a private conversation with Alleyn. He wrote in his notebook, tore out the page and gave it to Alleyn with his card. Alleyn, in the interests of Franco-British relationships, insisted on paying the doctor’s fee and the train finally drew out of Roqueville in an atmosphere of the liveliest cordiality. On the strangely quiet platform Alleyn and Troy looked at each other.
‘This,’ Alleyn said, ‘is not your holiday as I had planned it.’
‘What do we do now?’
‘Ring up the Chèvre d’Argent and ask for Dr Baradi, who, I have reason to suppose, is an admirable surgeon and an unmitigated blackguard.’
They could hear the dawn cocks crowing in the hills above Roqueville.
III
In the waiting-room Ricky fell fast asleep on his mother’s lap. Troy was glad of this as Miss Truebody had begun to look quite dreadful. She too had drifted into a kind of sleep. She breathed unevenly, puffing out her unsupported lips, and made unearthly noises in her throat. Troy could hear her husband and the station-master talking in the office next door and then Alleyn’s voice only, speaking on the telephone and in French! There were longish pauses during which Alleyn said: ‘Allô! Allô!’ and ‘Ne coupez pas, je vous en prie, Mademoiselle,’ which Troy felt rather proud of understanding. A grey light filtered into the waiting-room; Ricky made a touching little sound, rearranged his lips, sighed, and turned his face against her breast in an abandonment of relaxation. Alleyn began to speak at length, first in French, and then in English. Troy heard fragments of sentences.
‘… I wouldn’t have roused you up like this if it hadn’t been so urgent … Dr Claudel said definitely that it was really a matter of the most extreme urgency … He will telephone from St Celeste. I am merely a fellow passenger … yes: yes, I have a car here … Good … Very well … Yes, I understand. Thank you.’ A bell tinkled.
There was a further conversation and then Alleyn came into the waiting-room. Troy, with her chin on the top of Ricky’s silken head, gave him a nod and an intimate familiar look: her comment on Ricky’s sleep. He said: ‘It’s not fair.’
‘What?’
‘Your talent for turning my heart over.’
‘I thought,’ Troy said, ‘you meant about our holiday. What’s happened?’
‘Baradi says he’ll operate if it’s necessary.’ Alleyn looked at Miss Truebody. ‘Asleep?’
‘Yes. So, what are we do do?’
‘We’ve got a car. The Sûreté rang up the local Commissioner yesterday and told him I was on the way. He’s actually one of their experts who’s been sent down here on a special job, superseding the local chap for the time being. He’s turned on an elderly Mercedes and a driver. Damn’ civil of him. I’ve just been talking to him. Full of apologies for not coming down himself but he thought, very wisely, that we’d better not be seen together. He says our chauffeur is a reliable chap with an admirable record. He and the car are on tap outside the station now and our luggage will be collected by the hotel wagon. Baradi suggests I take Miss Truebody straight to the Chèvre d’Argent. While we’re on the way he will make what preparations he can. Luckily he’s got his instruments and Claudel has given me some pipkins of anaesthetic. Baradi asked if I could give the anaesthetic.’
‘Can you?’
‘I did once, in a ship. As long as nothing goes very wrong, it’s fairly simple. If Baradi thinks it is safe to wait he’ll try to get an anaesthetist from Douceville or somewhere. But it seems there’s some sort of doctors’ jamboree on today at St Christophe and they’ve all cleared off to it. It’s only ten kilometres from here to the Chèvre d’Argent by the inland road. I’ll drop you and Ricky at the hotel here, darling, and take Miss Truebody on.’
‘Are there any women in the house?’
‘I don’t know.’ Alleyn stopped short and then said: ‘Yes. Yes I do. There are women.’
Troy watched him for a moment and then said: ‘All right. Let’s get her aboard. You take Ricky.’
Alleyn lifted him from her lap and she went to Miss Truebody. ‘She’s tiny,’ Troy said under her breath. ‘Could she be carried?’
‘I think so. Wait a moment.’
He took Ricky out and was back in a few seconds with the stationmaster and a man wearing a chauffeur’s cap over a mop of glossy curls.
He was a handsome little fellow with an air of readiness. He saluted Troy gallantly, taking off his peaked cap and smiling at her. Then he saw Miss Truebody and made a clucking sound. Troy had put a travelling rug on the bench and they made a sort of stretcher of it and carried Miss Truebody out to a large car in the station yard. Ricky was curled up on the front seat. They managed to fit Miss Truebody into the back one. The driver pulled down a tip-up seat and Troy sat on that. Miss Truebody had opened her eyes. She said in a quite clear voice: ‘Too kind,’ and Troy took her hand. Alleyn, in the front, held Ricky on his lap and they started off up a steep little street through Roqueville. The thin dawnlight gave promise of a glaring day. It was already very warm.
‘To the Hôtel Royal, Monsieur?’ asked the driver.
‘No,’ said Troy with Miss Truebody’s little claw clutching at her fingers. ‘No, please, Rory. I’ll come with her. Ricky won’t wake for hours. We can wait in the car or he can drive us back. I might be of some use.’
‘To the Château de la Chèvre d’Argent,’ Alleyn said, ‘and gently.’
‘Perfectly, Monsieur,’ said the driver. ‘Always, always gently.’
Roqueville was a very small town. It climbed briefly up the hill and petered out in a string of bleached villas. The road mounted between groves of olive trees and the air was like a benison, soft and clean. The sea extended itself beneath them and enriched itself with a blueness of incredible intensity.
Alleyn turned to look at Troy. They were quite close to each other and spoke over their shoulders like people in a Victorian ‘Conversation’ chair. It was clear that Miss Truebody, even if she could hear them, was not able to concentrate or indeed to listen. ‘Dr Claudel,’ Alleyn said, ‘thought it was the least risky thing to do. I half expected Baradi would refuse but he was surprisingly cooperative. He’s supposed to be a good man at his job.’ He made a movement of his head to indicate the driver. ‘This chap doesn’t speak English,’ he said. ‘And, by the way, darling, no more chat about my being a policeman.’
Troy said: ‘Have I been a nuisance?’
‘It’s all right. I asked Claudel to forget it and I don’t suppose Miss Truebody will say anything or that anybody will pay much attention if she does. It’s just that I don’t want to brandish my job at the Chèvre d’Argent.’ He turned and looked into her troubled face. ‘Never mind, my darling. We’ll buy false beards and hammers in Roqueville and let on we’re archaeologists. Or load ourselves down with your painting-gear.’ He paused for a moment. ‘That, by the way, is not a bad idea at all. Distinguished painter visits Côte d’Azur with obscure husband and child. We’ll keep it in reserve.’
‘But honestly, Rory. How’s this debacle going to affect your job at the Chèvre d’Argent?’
‘In a way it’s a useful entrée. The Sûreté suggested that I called there representing myself either to be an antiquarian captivated by the place itself … it’s an old Saracen stronghold … or else I was to be a seeker after esoteric knowledge and offer myself as a disciple. If both failed I could use my own judgment about being a heroin addict in search of fuel. Thanks to Miss Truebody, however, I shall turn up as a reluctant Good Samaritan. All the same,’ Alleyn said, rubbing his nose, ‘I wish Dr Claudel could have risked taking her on to St Céleste or else waiting for the evening train back to St Christophe. I don’t much like this party, and that’s a fact. This’ll larn the Alleyn family to try combining business with pleasure, won’t it?’
‘Ah, well’ said Troy, looking compassionately at Miss Truebody, ‘we’re doing our blasted best and no fool can do more.’
They were silent for some time. The driver sang to himself in a light tenor voice. The road climbed the Maritime Alps into early sunlight. They traversed a tilted landscape compounded of earth and heat, of opaque clay colours – ochres and pinks – splashed with magenta, tempered with olive-grey and severed horizontally at its base by the ultramarine blade of the Mediterranean. They turned inland. Villages emerged as logical growths out of rock and earth. A monastery safely folded among protective hills spoke of some tranquil adjustment of man’s spirit to the quiet rhythm of soil and sky.
‘It’s impossible,’ Troy said, ‘to think that anything could go very much amiss in these hills.’
A distant valley came into view. Far up it, a strange anachronism in that landscape, was a long modern building with glittering roofs and a great display of plate glass.
‘The factory,’ the driver told them, ‘of the Compagnie Chimique des Alpes Maritimes.’
Alleyn made a little affirmative sound as if he saw something that he had expected and for as long as it remained in sight he looked at the glittering building.
They drove on in silence. Miss Truebody turned her head from side to side and Troy bent over her. ‘Hot,’ she whispered, ‘such an oppressive climate. Oh, dear!’
‘One approaches the objective,’ the driver announced and changed gears. The road tipped downwards and turned the flank of a hill. They had crossed the headland and were high above the sea again. Immediately below them the railroad emerged from a tunnel. On their right was a cliff that mounted into a stone face pierced irregularly with windows. This in turn broke against the skyline into fabulous turrets and parapets. Troy gave a sharp ejaculation, ‘Oh, no!’ she said. ‘It’s not that! No, ‘It’s too much!’
‘Well, darling,’ Alleyn said, ‘I’m afraid that’s what it is.’
‘La Chèvre d’Argent,’ said the driver and turned up a steep and exceedingly narrow way that ended in a walled platform from which one looked down at the railway and beyond it sheer down again to the sea. ‘Here one stops, Monsieur,’ said the driver. ‘This is the entrance.’
He pointed to a dark passage between two masses of rock from which walls emerged as if by some process of evolution. He got out and opened the doors of the car. ‘It appears,’ he said, ‘that Mademoiselle is unable to walk.’
‘Yes,’ Alleyn said. ‘I shall go and fetch the doctor. Madame will remain with Mademoiselle and the little boy.’ He settled the sleeping Ricky into the front seat and got out. ‘You stay here, Troy,’ he said. ‘I shan’t be long.’
‘Rory, we shouldn’t have brought her to this place.’
‘There was no alternative that we could honestly take.’
‘Look!’ said Troy.
A man in white was coming through the passage. He wore a Panama hat. His hands and face were so much the colour of the shadows that he looked like a white suit walking of its own accord towards them. He moved out into the sunlight and they saw that he was olive-coloured with a large nose, full lips and a black moustache. He wore dark glasses. The white suit was made of sharkskin and beautifully cut. His sandals were white suède. His shirt was pink and his tie green. When he saw Troy he took off his hat and the corrugations of his oiled hair shone in the sunlight.
‘Dr Baradi?’ Alleyn said.
Dr Baradi smiled brilliantly and held out a long dark hand. ‘So you bring my patient?’ he said. ‘Mr Allen, is it not?’ He turned to Troy. ‘My wife,’ Alleyn said and saw Troy’s hand lifted to the full lips. ‘Here is your patient,’ he added. ‘Miss Truebody.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Dr Baradi went to the car and bent over Miss Truebody. Troy, rather pink in the face, moved to the other side. ‘Miss Truebody,’ she said, ‘here is the doctor.’
Miss Truebody opened her eyes, looked into the dark face and cried out: ‘Oh! No. No!’
Dr Baradi smiled at her. ‘You must not trouble yourself about anything,’ they heard him say. He had a padded voice. ‘We are going to make everything much more comfortable for you, isn’t it? You must not be frightened of my dark face, I assure you I am quite a good doctor.’
Miss Truebody said: ‘Please excuse me. Not at all. Thank you.’
‘Now, without moving you, if I may just – that will do very nicely. You must tell me if I hurt you.’ A pause. Cicadas had broken out in a chittering so high-pitched that it shrilled almost above the limit of human hearing. The driver moved away tactfully. Miss Truebody moaned a little. Dr Baradi straightened up, walked to the edge of the platform and waited there for Troy and Alleyn. ‘It is a perforated appendix undoubtedly,’ he said. ‘She is very ill. I should tell you that I am the guest of Mr Oberon, who places a room at our disposal. We have an improvised stretcher in readiness.’ He turned towards the passage-way: ‘And here it comes!’ he said looking at Troy with an air of joyousness which she felt to be entirely out of place.
Two men walked out of the shadowed way on to the platform carrying between them a gaily striped object, evidently part of a garden seat. Both the men wore aprons. ‘The gardener,’ Dr Baradi explained, ‘and one of the indoor servants, strong fellows both and accustomed to the exigencies of our entrance. She has been given morphine, I think.’
‘Yes,’Alleyn said. ‘Dr Claudel gave it. He has sent you an adequate amount of something called, I think, pentothal. He was taking a supply of it to a brother-medico, an anaesthetist, in St Céleste and said that you would probably need some and that the local chemist would not be likely to have it.’
‘I am obliged to him. I have already telephoned to the pharmacist in Roqueville who can supply ether. Fortunately he lives above his establishment. He is sending it up here by car. It is fortunate also that I have my instruments with me.’ He beamed and glittered at Troy. ‘And now, I think …’
He spoke in French to the two men, directing them to stand near the car. For the first time apparently he noticed the sleeping Ricky and leant over the door to look at him.
‘Enchanting,’ he murmured and his teeth flashed at Troy. ‘Our household is also still asleep,’ he said, ‘but I have Mr Oberon’s warmest invitation that you, Madame, and the small one join us for petit-déjeuner. As you know, your husband is to assist me. There will be a little delay before we are ready and coffee is prepared.’
He stood over Troy. He was really extremely large: his size and his padded voice and his smell, which was compounded of hair-lotion, scent and something that reminded her of the impure land-breeze from an eastern port, all flowed over her.
She moved back and said quickly: ‘It’s very nice of you but I think Ricky and I must find our hotel.’
Alleyn said: Thank you so much, Dr Baradi. It’s extremely kind of Mr Oberon and I hope I shall have a chance to thank him for all of us. What with one thing and another, we’ve had an exhausting journey and I think my wife and Ricky are in rather desperate need of a bath and a rest. The man will drive them down to the hotel and come back for me.’
Dr Baradi bowed, took off his hat and would have possibly kissed Troy’s hand again if Alleyn had not somehow been in the way.
‘In that case,’ Dr Baradi said, ‘we must not insist.’
He opened the door of the car. ‘And now, dear lady,’ he said to Miss Truebody, ‘we make a little journey, isn’t it? Don’t move. There is no need.’
With great dexterity and no apparent expenditure of energy he lifted her from the car and laid her on the improvised stretcher. The sun beat down on her glistening face. Her eyes were open, her lips drawn back a little from her gums. She said: ‘But where is … You’re not taking me away from …? I don’t know her name.’
Troy went to her. ‘Here I am, Miss Truebody,’ she said. ‘I’ll come and see you quite soon. I promise.’
‘But I don’t know where I’m going. It’s so unsuitable … Unseemly really … Somehow with another lady … English … I don’t know what they’ll do to me … I’m afraid I’m nervous … I had hoped …’
Her jaw trembled. She made a thin shrill sound, shocking in its nakedness. ‘No,’ she stammered, ‘no … no … no.’ Her arm shot out and her hand closed on Troy’s skirt. The two bearers staggered a little and looked agitatedly at Dr Baradi.
‘She should not be upset,’ he murmured to Troy. ‘It is most undesirable. Perhaps, for a little while, you’ll be kind …’
‘But of course,’ Troy said, and in answer to a look from her husband. ‘Of course, Rory, I must.’
And she bent over Miss Truebody and told her she wouldn’t go away. She felt as though she herself was trapped in the kind of dream that, without being a positive nightmare, threatens to become one. Baradi released Miss Truebody’s hand and as he did so, his own brushed against Troy’s skirt.
‘You’re so kind,’ he said. ‘Perhaps Mr Allen will bring the little boy. It is not well for such tender ones to sleep overlong in the sun on the Côte d’Azur.’
Without a word Alleyn lifted Ricky out of the car. Ricky made a small questioning sound, stirred and slept again.
The men walked off with the stretcher. Dr Baradi followed them. Troy, Alleyn and Ricky brought up the rear.
In this order the odd little procession moved out of the glare into the shadowed passage that was the entrance to the Château de la Chèvre d’Argent.
The driver watched them go, his lips pursed in a soundless whistle and an expression of concern darkening his eyes. Then he drove the car into the shade of the hill and composed himself for a long wait.
CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_00acc64e-36b2-5d0a-8061-b6428d7351b6)
Operation Truebody (#ulink_00acc64e-36b2-5d0a-8061-b6428d7351b6)
At first their eyes were sun-dazzled so that they could scarcely see their way. Dr Baradi paused to guide them. Alleyn, encumbered with Ricky and groping up a number of wide, shallow and irregular steps, was aware of Baradi’s hand piloting Troy by the elbow. The blotches of nonexistent light that danced across their vision faded and they saw that they were in a sort of hewn passageway between walls that were incorporated in rock, separated by outcrops of stone and pierced by stairways, windows and occasional doors. At intervals they went through double archways supporting buildings that straddled the passage and darkened it. They passed an open doorway and saw into a cave-like room where an old woman sat among shelves filled with small gaily-painted figures. As Troy passed, the woman smiled at her and gestured invitingly, holding up a little clay goat.
Dr Baradi was telling them about the Chèvre d’Argent.
‘It is a fortress built originally by the Saracens. One might almost say it was sculptured out of the mountain, isn’t it? The Normans stormed it on several occasions. There are legends of atrocities and so on. The fortress is, in effect, a village since the many caves beneath and around it have been shaped into dwellings and house a number of peasants, some dependent on the château and some, like the woman you have noticed, upon their own industry. The château itself is most interesting, indeed unique. But not inconvenient. Mr Oberon has, with perfect tact, introduced the amenities. We are civilized, as you shall see.
They arrived at a double gate of wrought iron let into the wall on their left. An iron bell hung beside it. A butler appeared beyond the doors and opened them. They passed through a courtyard into a wide hall with deep-set windows through which a cool ineffectual light was admitted.
Without, at first, taking in any details of this shadowed interior, Troy received an impression of that particular kind of suavity that is associated with costliness. The rug under her feet, the texture and colour of the curtains, the shape of cabinets and chairs and, above all, a smell which she thought must arise from the burning of sweet-scented oils, all united to give this immediate reaction. ‘Mr Oberon,’ she thought, ‘must be immensely rich.’ Almost at the same time, she saw above the great fireplace a famous Breughel which, she remembered, had been sold privately some years ago. It was called: ‘Consultation of Sorceresses.’ An open door showed a stone stairway built inside the thickness of the wall.
‘The stairs,’ Mr Baradi said, ‘are a little difficult. Therefore we have prepared rooms on this floor.’
He pulled back a leather curtain. The men carried Miss Truebody into a heavily carpeted stone passage hung at intervals with rugs and lit with electric lights fitted into ancient hanging lamps, witnesses, Troy supposed, of Mr Oberon’s tact in modernization. She heard Miss Truebody raise her piping cry of distress.
Dr Baradi said: ‘Perhaps you would be so kind as to assist her into bed?’
Troy hurried after the stretcher and followed it into a small bedroom charmingly furnished and provided, she noticed, with an adjoining bathroom. The two bearers waited with an obliging air for further instructions. As Baradi had not accompanied them, Troy supposed that she herself was for the moment in command. She got Miss Truebody off the stretcher and on to the bed. The bearers hovered solicitously. She thanked them in her schoolgirl French and managed to get them out of the room, but not before they had persuaded her into the passage, opened a further door, and exhibited with evident pride a bare freshly-scrubbed room with a bare fresh-ly-scrubbed table near its window. A woman rose from her knees as the door opened, a scrubbing brush in her hand and a pail beside her. The room reeked of disinfectant. The indoor servant said something about it being ‘convenable’ and the gardener said something about somebody, she thought himself, being ‘bien fatigué’, ‘infiniment fatigué’. It dawned upon her that they wanted a tip. Poor Troy scuffled in her bag, produced a 500 fr. note and gave it to the indoor servant, indicating that they were to share it. They thanked her and, effulgent with smiles, went back to get the luggage. She hurried to Miss Truebody and found her crying feverishly.
Remembering what she could of hospital routine, Troy washed the patient, found a clean nightdress (Miss Truebody wore white locknit nightdresses, sprigged with posies, and got her into bed. It was difficult to make out how much she understood of her situation. Troy wondered if it was the injection of morphine or her condition or her normal habit of mind or all three, that made her so confused and vague. When she was settled in bed she began to talk with hectic fluency about herself. It was difficult to understand her as she had frantically waved away the offer of her false teeth. Her father, it seemed, had been a doctor, a widower, living in the Bermudas. She was his only child and had spent her life with him until, a year ago, he had died leaving her, as she put it, quite comfortably though not well off. She had decided that she could just afford a trip to England and the Continent. Her father, she muttered distractedly, had ‘not kept up,’ had ‘lost touch.’ There had been an unhappy break in the past, she believed, and their relations were never mentioned. Of course there were friends in the Bermudas but not, it appeared, very many or very intimate friends. She rambled on for a little while, continually losing the thread of her narrative and frowning incomprehensibly at nothing. The pupils of her eyes were contracted and her vision seemed to be confused. Presently her voice died away and she dozed uneasily.
Troy stole out and returned to the hall. Alleyn, Ricky and Baradi had gone but the butler was waiting for her and showed her up the steep flight of stairs in the wall. It seemed to turn about a tower and they passed two landings with doors leading off them. Finally the man opened a larger and heavier door and Troy was out in the glare of full morning on a canopied roof-garden hung, as it seemed, in blue space where sky and sea met in a wide crescent. Not till she had advanced some way towards the balustrade did Cap St Gilles appear, a sliver of earth pointing south.
Alleyn and Baradi rose from a breakfast-table near the balustrade. Ricky lay, fast asleep, on a suspended seat under a gay canopy. The smell of freshly ground coffee and of brioches and croissants reminded Troy that she was hungry.
They sat at the table. It was long, spread with a white cloth and set for a number of places. Troy was foolishly reminded of the Mad Hatter’s Tea-party. She looked over the parapet and saw the railroad about eighty feet below her and perhaps a hundred feet from the base of the Chèvre d’Argent. The walls, buttressed and pierced with windows, fell away beneath her in a sickening perspective. Troy had a hatred of heights and drew back quickly. ‘Last night,’ she thought, ‘I looked into one of those windows.’
Dr Baradi was assiduous in his attentions and plied her with coffee. He gazed upon her remorselessly and she sensed Alleyn’s annoyance rising with her own embarrassment. For a moment she felt weakly inclined to giggle.
Alleyn said: ‘See here, darling, Dr Baradi thinks that Miss Truebody is extremely ill, dangerously so. He thinks we should let her people know at once.’
‘She has no people. She’s only got acquaintances in the Bermudas; I asked. There seems to be nobody at all.’
Baradi said: in that case …’ and moved his head from side to side. He turned to Troy and parodied helplessness with his hands. ‘So, in that direction, we can do nothing.’
‘The next thing,’ Alleyn said, speaking directly to his wife, ‘is the business of giving an anaesthetic. We could telephone to a hospital in St Christophe and try to get someone but there’s this medical jamboree and in any case it’ll mean a delay of some hours. Or Dr Baradi can try to get his own anaesthetist to fly from Paris to the nearest airport. More delay and considerable expense. The other way is for me to have a shot at it. Should we take the risk?’
‘What,’ Troy asked, making herself look at him, ‘do you think, Dr Baradi?’
He sat near and a little behind her on the balustrade. His thighs bulged in their sharkskin trousers. ‘I think it will be less risky if your husband, who is not unfamiliar with the procedure, gives the anaesthetic. Her condition is not good.’
His voice flowed over her shoulder. It was really extraordinary, she thought, how he could invest information about peritonitis and ruptured abscesses with such a gross suggestion of flattery. He might have been paying her the most objectionable compliments imaginable.
‘Very well,’ Alleyn said, ‘that’s decided, then. But you’ll need other help, won’t you?’
‘If possible, two persons. And here we encounter a difficulty.’ He moved round behind Troy but spoke to Alleyn. His manner was now authoritative. ‘I doubt,’ he said, ‘if there is anyone in the house-party who could assist me. It is not every layman who enjoys a visit to an operating theatre. Surgery is not everybody’s cup of tea.’ The colloquialism came oddly from him. ‘I have spoken to our host, of course. He is not yet stirring. He offers every possible assistance and all the amenities of the château with the reservation that he himself shall not be asked to perform an active part. He is,’ said Dr Baradi, putting on his sunglasses, ‘allergic to blood.’
‘Indeed,’ said Alleyn politely.
‘The rest of our household – we are seven –’ Dr Baradi explained playfully to Troy, ‘is not yet awake. Mr Oberon gave a party here last night. Some friends with a yacht in port. We were immeasurably gay and kept going till five o’clock. Mr Oberon has a genius for parties and a passion for charades. They were quite wonderful, our charades.’ Troy gave a little ejaculation which she immediately checked. He beamed at her. ‘I was cast for one of King Solomon’s concubines. And we had the Queen of Sheba, you know. She stabbed Solomon’s favourite wife. It was all a little strenuous. I don’t think any of my friends will be in good enough form to help us. Indeed, I doubt if any of them even at the top of his or her form, would care to offer for the role. I don’t know if you have met any of them. Grizel Locke, perhaps? The Hon. Grizel Locke?’
The Alleyns said they did not know Miss Locke.
‘What about the servants?’ Alleyn suggested. Troy was all too easily envisaging Dr Baradi as one of King Solomon’s concubines.
‘One of the men is a possibility. He is my personal attendant and valet and is not quite unfamiliar with surgical routine. He will not lose his head. Any of the others would almost certainly be worse than useless. So we need one other, you see.’
A silence fell upon them, broken at last by Troy.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘what Dr Baradi is going to suggest.’
Alleyn looked fixedly at her and raised his left eyebrow.
‘It’s quite out of the question. You well know that you’re punctually sick at the sight of blood, my darling.’
Troy, who was nothing of the sort said: ‘In that case I’ve no suggestions. Unless you like to appeal to cousin Garbel.’
There was a moment of silence.
‘Too whom?’ said Baradi softly.
‘I’m afraid I was being facetious,’ Troy mumbled.
Alleyn said: ‘What about our driver? He seems a hardy, intelligent sort of chap. What would he have to do?’
‘Fetch and carry,’ Dr Baradi said. He was looking thoughtfully at Troy. ‘Count sponges. Hand instruments. Clean up. Possibly, in an emergency, play a minor role as unqualified assistant.’
‘I’ll speak to him. If he seems at all possible I’ll bring him in to see you. Would you like to stroll back to the car with me, darling?’
‘Please don’t disturb yourselves,’ Dr Baradi begged them. ‘One of the servants will fetch your man.’
Troy knew that her husband was in two minds about this suggestion and also about leaving her to cope with Dr Baradi. She said: ‘You go, Rory, will you? I’m longing for my sun-glasses and they’re locked away in my dressing-case.’
She gave him her keys and a ferocious smile. ‘I think, perhaps, I’ll have a look at Miss Truebody,’ she added.
He grimaced at her and walked out quickly.
Troy went to Ricky. She touched his forehead and found it moist. His sleep was profound and when she opened the front of his shirt he did not stir. She stayed, lightly swinging the seat, and watched him, and she thought with tenderness that he was her defence in a stupid situation which fatigue and a confusion of spirit, brought about by many untoward events, had perhaps created in her imagination. It was ridiculous, she thought, to feel anything but amused by her embarrassment. She knew that Baradi watched her and she turned and faced him.
‘If there is anything I can do before I go,’ she said and kept her voice down because of Ricky, ‘I hope you’ll tell me.’
It was a mistake to speak softly. He at once moved towards her and with an assumption of intimacy, lowered his own voice. ‘But how helpful!’ he said, ‘so we shall have you with us for a little longer? That is good; though it should not be to perform these unlovely tasks.’
‘I hope I’m equal to them.’ She moved away from Ricky and raised her voice. ‘What are they?’
‘She must be prepared for the operation.’
He told her what should be done and explained that she would find everything she needed for her purpose in Miss Truebody’s bathroom. In giving these specifically clinical instructions, he reverted to his professional manner, but with an air of amusement that she found distasteful. When he had finished she said: ‘Then I’ll get her fixed up now, shall I?’
‘Yes,’ he agreed, more to himself than to her. ‘Yes, certainly, we shouldn’t delay too long.’ And seeing a look of preoccupation and responsibility on his face, she left him, disliking him less in that one moment than at any time since they had met. As she went down the stone stairway she thought: ‘Thank heaven, at least, for the Queen of Sheba.’
II
Alleyn found their driver in his vest and trousers on the running-board of the car. A medallion of St Christopher dangled from a steel chain above the mat of hair on his chest. He was exchanging improper jokes with a young woman and two small boys who, when he rose to salute his employer, drifted away without embarrassment. He gave Alleyn a look that implied a common understanding of women, and opened the car door.
Alleyn said: ‘We’re not going yet. What is your name?’
‘Raoul, Monsieur. Raoul Milano.’
‘You’ve been a soldier, perhaps?’
‘Yes, Monsieur. I am thirty-three and therefore I have seen some service.’
‘So your stomach is not easily outraged; then; by a show of blood, for instance? By a formidable wound, shall we say?’
‘I was a medical orderly, Monsieur. My stomach also, is an old campaigner.’
‘Excellent! I have a job for you, Raoul. It is to assist Dr Baradi, the gentleman you have already seen. He is about to remove Mademoiselle’s appendix and since we cannot find a second doctor, we must provide unqualified assistants. If you will help us there may be a little reward and certainly there will be much grace in performing this service. What do you say?’
Raoul looked down at his blunt hands and then up at Alleyn:
‘I say yes, M’sieur. As you suggest, it is an act of grace and in any case one may as well do something.’
‘Good. Come along then.’ Alleyn had found Troy’s sunglasses. He and Raoul turned towards the passage, Raoul slinging his coat across his shoulders with the grace of a ballet-dancer.
‘So you live in Roqueville?’ Alleyn asked.
‘In Roqueville, M’sieur. My parents have a little café, not at all smart, but the food is good and I also hire myself out in my car, as you see.’
‘You’ve been up to the château before, of course?’
‘Certainly. For little expeditions and also to drive guests and sometimes tourists. As a rule Mr Oberon sends a car for his guests.’ He waved a hand at a row of garage-doors, incongruously set in a rocky face at the back of the platform. ‘His cars are magnificent.’
Alleyn said: ‘The Commissaire at the Préfecture sent you to meet us, I think?’
‘That is so, M’sieur.’
‘Did he give you my name?’
‘Yes, M’sieur L’Inspecteur-en-Chef. It is Ahrr-lin. But he said that M’sieur L’Inspecteur-en-Chef would prefer, perhaps, that I did not use his rank.’
‘I would greatly prefer it, Raoul.’
‘It is already forgotten, M’sieur.’
‘Again, good.’
They passed the cave-like room, where the woman sat among her figurines. Raoul hailed her in a cheerful manner and she returned his greeting. ‘You must bring your gentleman in to see my statues,’ she shouted. He called back over his shoulder: ‘All in good time, Marie,’ and added, ‘she is an artist, that one. Her saints are pretty and of assistance in one’s devotions; but then she overcharges ridiculously, which is not so amusing.’
He sang a stylish little cadence and tilted up his head. They were walking beneath a part of the Château de la Chèvre d’Argent that straddled the passageway. ‘It goes everywhere, this house,’ he remarked. ‘One would need a map to find one’s way from the kitchen to the best bedroom. Anything might happen.’
When they reached the entrance he stood aside and took off his chauffeur’s cap. They found Dr Baradi in the hall. Alleyn told him that Raoul had been a medical orderly and Baradi at once described the duties he would be expected to perform. His manner was cold and uncompromising. Raoul gave him his full attention. He stood easily, his thumbs crooked in his belt. He retained at once his courtesy, his natural grace of posture and his air of independence.
‘Well,’ Baradi said sharply when he had finished: ‘Are you capable of this work?’
‘I believe so, M’sieur le Docteur.’
‘If you prove to be satisfactory, you will be given 500 francs. That is extremely generous payment for unskilled work.’
‘As to payment M’sieur le Docteur,’ Raoul said, ‘I am already employed by this gentleman and consider myself entirely at his disposal. It is at his request that I engaged myself in this task.’
Baradi raised his eyebrows and looked at Alleyn. ‘Evidently an original,’ he said in English. ‘He seems tolerably intelligent but one never knows. Let us hope that he is at least not too stupid. My man will give him suitable clothes and see that he is clean’
He went to the fireplace and pulled a tapestry bell-rope. ‘Mrs Allen;’ he said, ‘is most kindly preparing our patient. There is a room at your disposal and I venture to lend you one of my gowns. It will, I’m afraid, be terribly voluminous but perhaps some adjustment can be made. We are involved in compromise, isn’t it?’
A man wearing the dress of an Egyptian house-servant came in. Baradi spoke to him in his own language, and then to Raoul in French: ‘Go with Mahomet and prepare yourself in accordance with his instructions. He speaks French.’ Raoul acknowledged this direction with something between a bow and a nod. He said to Alleyn: ‘Monsieur will perhaps excuse me?’ and followed the servant, looking about the room with interest as he left it.
Baradi said: ‘Italian blood there, I think. One comes across these hybrids along the coast. May I show you to my room?’
It was in the same passage as Miss Truebody’s but a little farther along it. In Alleyn the trick of quick observation was a professional habit. He saw not only the general sumptuousness of the room but the details also: the Chinese wallpaper, a Wu Tao-tzu scroll, a Ming vase.
‘This,’ Dr Baradi needlessly explained, ‘is known as the Chinese room but, as you will observe, Mr Oberon does not hesitate to introduce modulation. The bureau is by Vernis-Martin.’
‘A modulation, as you say, but an enchanting one. The cabinet there is a bolder departure. It looks like a Mussonier.’
‘One of his pupils, I understand. You have a discerning eye. Mr Oberon will be delighted.’
A gown was laid out on the bed. Baradi took it up. ‘Will you try this? There is an unoccupied room next door with access to a bathroom. You have time for a bath and will, no doubt, be glad to take one. Since morphine has been given there is no immediate urgency but I should prefer all the same to operate as soon as possible. When you are ready, my own preparations will be complete and we can discuss final arrangements.’
Alleyn said: ‘Dr Baradi, we haven’t said anything about your fee for the operation: indeed, it is neither my business nor my wife’s, but I do feel some concern about it. I imagine Miss Truebody will at least be able …’
Baradi held up his hand. ‘Let us not discuss it,’ he said. ‘Let us assume that it is of no great moment.’
‘If you prefer to do so.’ Alleyn hesitated and then added: ‘This is an extraordinary situation. You will, I’m sure, realize that we are reluctant to take such a grave responsibility. Miss Truebody is a complete stranger to us. You yourself must feel it would be much more satisfactory if there was a relation or friend from whom we could get some kind of authority. Especially as her illness is so serious.’
‘I agree. However, she would undoubtedly die if the operation was not performed and, in my opinion, would be in the gravest danger if it was unduly postponed. As it is, I’m afraid there is a risk, a great risk, that she will not recover. We can,’ Baradi added with what Alleyn felt was a genuine, if controlled, anxiety, ‘only do our best and hope that all may be well.’
And on this note Alleyn turned to go. As he was in the doorway Baradi, with a complete change of manner, said: ‘Your enchanting wife is with her. Third door on the left. Quite enchanting. Delicious, if you will permit me.’
Alleyn looked at him and found what he saw offensive.
‘Under these unfortunate circumstances,’ he said politely, ‘I can’t do anything else.’
Evidently Dr Baradi chose to regard this observation as a pleasantry. He laughed richly. ‘Delicious!’ he repeated, but whether in reference to Alleyn’s comment or as a reiterated observation upon Troy it was impossible to determine. Alleyn, who had every reason and no inclination for keeping his temper, walked into the next room.
III
Troy had carried out her instructions and Miss Truebody had slipped again into sleep. The sound of her breathing cut the silence into irregular intervals. Her eyes were not quite closed. Segments of the eyeballs appeared under the pathetic insufficiency of her lashes. Troy was at once unwilling to leave her and anxious to return to Ricky. She heard Alleyn and Dr Baradi in the passage. Their voices were broken off by a door slam and again there was only Miss Truebody’s breathing. Troy waited, hoping that Alleyn knew where she was and would come to her. After what seemed an interminable interval there was a tap at the door. She opened it and he was there in a white gown looking tall, elegant and angry. Troy shut the door behind her and they whispered together in the passage.
‘Rum go,’ he said, ‘isn’t it?’
‘Not ’alf. When do you begin?’
‘Soon. He’s trying to make himself aseptic. A losing battle, I should think.’
‘Frightful, isn’t he?’
The bottom. I’m so sorry, darling, you have to suffer his atrocious gallantries.’
‘Well, I dare say they’re just elaborate oriental courtesy, or something.’
‘Elaborate bloody impertinence.’
‘Never mind, Rory. I’ll skip out of his way.’
‘I shouldn’t have brought you to this damn’ place.’
‘Fiddle! In any case he’s going to be too busy.’
‘Is she asleep?’
‘Sort of. I don’t like to leave her but suppose Ricky should wake?’
‘Go up to him. I’ll stay with her. Baradi’s going to give her an injection before I get going with the ether. And, Troy –’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s important these people don’t get a line on who I am.’
‘I know.’
‘I haven’t told you anything about them but I think I’ll have to come moderately clean when there’s a chance. It’s a rum set up. I’ll get you out of it as soon as possible.’
‘I’m not worrying now we know about the charades. Funny! You said there might be an explanation but we never thought of charades, did we?’
‘No,’ Alleyn said, ‘we didn’t, did we?’ and suddenly kissed her. ‘Now, I suppose I’ll have to wash again,’ he added.
Raoul came down the passage with Baradi’s servant. They were carrying the improvised stretcher and were dressed in white overalls.
Raoul said: ‘Madame!’ to Troy and to Alleyn, ‘it appears, Monsieur, that M. le Docteur orders Mademoiselle to be taken to the operating room. Is that convenient for Monsieur?’
‘Of course. We are under Dr Baradi’s orders.’
‘Authority,’ Raoul observed, ‘comes to roost on strange perches, Monsieur.’
‘That,’ Alleyn said, ‘will do.’
Raoul grinned and opened the door. They took the stretcher in and laid it on the floor by the bed. When they lifted her down to it, Miss Truebody opened her eyes and said distinctly: ‘But I would prefer to stay in bed.’ Raoul deftly tucked blankets under her. She began to wail dismally.
Troy said: ‘It’s all right, dear. You’ll be all right,’ and thought: ‘But I never call people dear!’
They carried Miss Truebody into the room across the passage and put her on the table by the window. Troy went with them, holding her hand. The window coverings had been removed and a hard glare beat down on the table. The room still reeked of disinfectant. There was a second table on which a number of objects were now laid out. Troy, after one glance, did not look at them again. She held Miss Truebody’s hand and stood between her and the instrument table. A door in the wall facing her opened and Baradi appeared against a background of bathroom. He wore his gown and a white cap. Their austerity of design emphasized the opulence of his nose and eyes and teeth. He had a hypodermic syringe in his left hand.
‘So, after all, you are to assist me?’ he murmured to Troy. But it was obvious that he didn’t entertain any such notion.
Still holding the flaccid hand, she said: ‘I thought perhaps I should stay with her until …’
‘But of course! Please remain a little longer.’ He began to give instructions to Alleyn and the two men. He spoke in French presumably, Troy thought, to spare Miss Truebody’s feelings. ‘I am left-handed,’ he said. ‘If I should ask for anything to be handed to me you will please remember that. Now, Mr Allen, we will show you your equipment, isn’t it? Milano!’ Raoul brought a china dish from the instrument table. It had a bottle and a hand towel on it. Alleyn looked at it and nodded. ‘Parfaitement,’ he said.
Baradi took Miss Truebody’s other hand and pushed up the long sleeve of her nightgown. She stared at him and her mouth worked soundlessly.
Troy saw the needle slide in. The hand she held flickered momentarily and relaxed.
‘It is fortunate,’ Baradi said as he withdrew the needle, ‘that this little Dr Claudel had pentothal. A happy coincidence.’
He raised Miss Truebody’s eyelid. The pupil was out of sight. ‘Admirable,’ he said. ‘Now, Mr Allen, we will, in a moment or two, induce a more profound anaesthesia which you will continue. I shall scrub up and in a few minutes more we begin operations.’ He smiled at Troy who was already on the way to the door. ‘One of our party will join you presently on the roof-garden. Miss Locke; the Honourable Grizel Locke. I believe she has a vogue in England. Quite mad but utterly charming.’
Troy’s last impression of the room, a vivid one, was of Baradi, enormous in his white gown and cap, of Alleyn standing near the table and smiling at her, of Raoul and the Egyptian servant waiting near the instruments and of Miss Truebody’s wide-open mouth and of the sound of her breathing. Then the door shut off the picture as abruptly as the tunnel had shut off her earlier glimpse into a room in the Chèvre d’Argent.
‘Only that time,’ Troy told herself, as she made her way back to the roof-garden, ‘it was only a charade.’
CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_1f532554-d674-5814-9ea9-8e1842de4255)
Morning with Mr Oberon (#ulink_1f532554-d674-5814-9ea9-8e1842de4255)
The sun shone full on the roof-garden now, but Ricky was shielded from it by the canopy of his swinging couch. He was, as he himself might have said, lavishly asleep. Troy knew he would stay so for a long time.
The breakfast-table had been cleared and moved to one side and several more seats like Ricky’s had been set out. Troy took the one nearest to his. When she lifted her feet it swayed gently. Her head sank back into a heap of cushions. She had slept very little in the train.
It was quiet on the roof-garden. A few cicadas chittered far below and once, somewhere a long way away, a car hooted. The sky, as she looked into it, intensified itself in blueness and bemused her drowsy senses. Her eyes closed and she felt again the movement of the train. The sound of the cicadas became a dismal chattering from Miss Truebody and soared up into nothingness. Presently, she too, was fast asleep.
When she awoke, it was to see a strange lady perched, like some fantastic fowl, on the balustrade near Ricky’s seat. Her legs, clad in scarlet pedal-pushers, were drawn up to her chin which was sunk between her knees. Her hands, jewelled and claw-like, with vermilion talons, clasped her shins, and her toes protruded from her sandals like branched corals. A scarf was wound around her skull and her eyes were hidden by sun-glasses in an enormous frame below which a formidable nose jutted over a mouth whose natural shape could only be conjectured. When she saw Troy was awake and on her feet she unfolded herself, dropped to the floor and advanced with a hand extended. She was six feet tall and about forty-five to fifty years old.
‘How do you do?’ she whispered. ‘I’m Grizel Locke. I like to be called Sati, though. The Queen of Heaven, you will remember. Please call me Sati. Had a good nap, I hope? I’ve been looking at your son and wondering if I’d like to have one for myself.’
‘How do you do?’ Troy said without whispering and greatly taken aback. ‘Do you think you would?’
‘Won’t he wake? I’ve got such a voice as you can hear when I speak up.’ Her voice was indeed deep and uncertain like an adolescent boy’s. ‘It’s hard to say,’ she went on. ‘One might go all possessive and peculiar and, on the other hand, one might get bored and off-load him on repressed governesses. I was off-loaded as a child which, I am told, accounts for almost everything. Do lie down again. You must feel like a boiled owl. So do I. Would you like a drink?’
‘No, thank you,’ Troy said, running her fingers through her short hair.
‘Nor would I. What a poor way to begin your holiday. Do you know anyone here?’
‘Not really. I’ve got a distant relation somewhere in the offing but we’ve never met.’
‘Perhaps we know them. What name?’
‘Garbel. Something to do with a rather rarified kind of chemistry. I don’t suppose you, – ?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ she said quickly. ‘Has Baradi started on your friend?’
‘She’s not a friend or even an acquaintance. She’s a fellow-traveller.’
‘How sickening for you,’ said the lady earnestly.
‘I mean, literally,’ Troy explained. She was indeed feeling like a boiled owl and longed for nothing so much as a bath and solitude.
‘Lie down,’ the lady urged. ‘Put your boots up. Go to sleep again if you like. I was just going to push ahead with my tanning, only your son distracted my attention.’
Troy sat down and as her companion was so insistent she did put her feet up.
‘That’s right,’ the lady observed. ‘I’ll blow up my Li-lo. The servants, alas, have lost the puffer.’
She dragged forward a flat rubber mattress. Sitting on the floor she applied her painted mouth to the valve and began to blow. ‘Uphill work,’ she gasped a little later, ‘still, it’s an exercise in itself and I daresay will count as such.’
When the Li-lo was inflated she lay face down upon it and untied the painted scarf that was her sole upper garment. It fell away from a back so thin that it presented, Troy thought, an anatomical subject of considerable interest. The margins of the scapulae shone like ploughshares and the spinal vertebrae looked like those of a flayed snake.
‘I’ve given up oil,’ the submerged voice explained, ‘since I became a Child of the Sun. Is there any particular bit that seems underdone, do you consider?’
Troy, looking down upon a uniformly dun-coloured expanse, could make no suggestions and said so.
‘I’ll give it ten minutes for luck and then toss over the bod.,’ said the voice. ‘I must say I feel ghastly.’
‘You had a late night, Dr Baradi tells us,’ said Troy, who was making a desperate effort to pull herself together.
‘Did we?’ the voice became more indistinct and added something like: ‘I forget.’
‘Charades and everything, he said.’
‘Did he? Oh. Was I in them?’
‘He didn’t say particularly,’ Troy answered.
‘I passed,’ the voice muttered, ‘utterly and definitely out.’ Troy had just thought how unattractive such statements always were when she noticed with astonishment that the shoulder blades were quivering as if their owner was convulsed. ‘I suppose you might call it charades,’ the lady was heard to say.
Troy was conscious of a rising sense of uneasiness.
‘How do you mean?’ she asked.
Her companion rolled over. She had taken off her sunglasses. Her eyes were green with pale irises and small pupils. They were singularly blank in expression. Clad only in her scarlet pedal-pushers and head-scarf, she was an uncomfortable spectacle.
‘The whole thing is,’ she said rapidly, ‘I wasn’t at the party. I began one of my headaches after luncheon which was a party in itself and I passed, as I mentioned a moment ago, out. That must have been at about four o’clock, I should think, which is why I am up so early, you know.’ She yawned suddenly and with gross exaggeration as if her jaws would crack.
‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘here I go again!’
Troy’s jaws quivered in imitation. ‘I hope your headache is better,’ she said.
‘Sweet of you. In point of fact it’s hideous.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘I’ll have to find Baradi if it goes on. And it will, of course. How long will he be over your fellow-traveller’s appendix? Have you seen Ra?’
‘I don’t think so. I’ve only seen Dr Baradi.’
‘Yes, yes,’ she said restlessly and added, ‘you wouldn’t know, of course. I mean Oberon, our Teacher, your know. That’s our name for him – Ra. Are you interested in The Truth?’
Troy was too addled with unseasonable sleep and a surfeit of anxiety to hear the capital letters. ‘I really don’t know,’ she stammered. ‘In the truth – ?’
‘Poor sweet, I’m muddling you.’ She sat up. Troy had a painter’s attitude towards the nude but the aspect of this lady, so wildly and so unpleasingly displayed, was distressing, and doubly so because Troy couldn’t escape the impression that the lady herself was far from unselfconscious. Indeed she kept making tentative clutches at her scarf and looking at Troy as if she felt she ought to apologize for herself. In her embarrassment Troy turned away and looked vaguely at the tower wall which rose above the roof-garden not far from where she sat. It was pierced at ascending intervals by narrow slits. Troy’s eyes, glazed with fatigue, stared in aimless fixation at the third slit from the floor level. She listened to a strange exposition on The Truth as understood and venerated by the guests of Mr Oberon.
‘… just a tiny group of Seekers … Children of the Sun in the Outer … Evil exists only in the minds of the earth-bound … goodness is oneness … the great Dark co-exists with the great Light …’ The phrases disjointed and eked out by ineloquent and uncoordinated gestures, tripped each other up by the heels. Clichés and aphorisms were tumbled together from the most unlikely sources. One must live dangerously, it appeared, in order to attain merit. Only by encompassing the gamut of earthly experience could one return to the oneness of universal good. One ascended through countless ages by something which the disciple, corkscrewing an unsteady finger in illustration, called the mystic navel spiral. It all sounded the most dreadful nonsense to poor Troy but she listened politely and, because her companion so clearly expected them, tried to ask one or two intelligent questions. This was a mistake. The lady, squinting earnestly up at her, said abruptly: ‘You’re fey, of course. But you know that, don’t you?’
‘Indeed, I don’t.’
‘Yes, yes,’ she persisted, nodding like a mandarin. ‘Unawakened perhaps, but it’s there, oh! so richly. Fey as fey can be.’
She yawned again with the same unnatural exaggeration and twisted round to look at the door into the tower.
‘He won’t be long appearing,’ she whispered. ‘It isn’t as if he ever touched anything and he’s always up for the rites of Ushas. What’s the time?’
‘Just after ten,’ said Troy, astonished that it was no later. Ricky, she thought, would sleep for at least another hour, perhaps for two hours. She tried to remember if she had ever heard how long an appendicectomy took to perform. She tried to console herself with the thought that there must be a limit to this vigil, that she would not have to listen forever to Grizel Locke’s esoteric small-talk, that somewhere down at the Hôtel Royal in Roqueville there was a tiled bathroom and a cool bed, that perhaps Miss Locke would go in search of whoever it was she seemed to await with such impatience and finally that she herself might, if left alone, sleep away the remainder of this muddled and distressing interlude.
It was at this juncture that something moved behind the slit in the tower wall. Something that tweaked at her attention. She had an impression of hair or fur and thought at first that it was an animal, perhaps a cat. It moved again and was gone but not before she recognized a human head. She came to the disagreeable conclusion that someone had stood at the slit and listened to their conversation. At that moment she heard steps inside the tower. The door moved.
‘Someone’s coming!’ she cried out in warning. Her companion gave an ejaculation of relief but made no attempt to resume her garment. ‘Miss Locke! Do look out!’
‘What? Oh! Oh, all right. Only, do call me Sati.’ She picked up the square of printed silk. Perhaps, Troy thought, there was something in her own face that awakened in Miss Locke a dormant regard for the conventions. She blushed and began clumsily to knot the scarf behind her.
But Troy’s gaze was upon the man who had come through the tower door on to the roof-garden and was walking towards them. The confusion of spirit that had irked her throughout the morning clarified into one recognizable emotion.
She was frightened.
II
Troy would have been unable to say at that moment why she was afraid of Mr Oberon. There was nothing in his appearance, one would have thought, to inspire fear. Rather, he had, at first sight, a look of mildness.
Beards, in general, are not rare nowadays though beards like his are perhaps unusual. It was blond, sparse and silky and divided at the chin, which was almost bare. The moustache was a mere shadow at the corners of his mouth which was fresh in colour. The nose was straight and delicate and the light eyes abnormally large. His hair was parted in the middle and so long that it overhung the collar of his gown. This, and a sort of fragility in the general structure of his head, gave him an air of effeminacy. What was startling and to Troy quite shocking, was the resemblance to Roman Catholic devotional prints such as the ‘Sacred Heart.’ She was to learn that this resemblance was deliberately cultivated. He wore a white dressing-gown to which his extraordinary appearance gave the air of a ceremonial robe.
It seemed incredible that such a being could make normal conversation. Troy would not have been surprised if he had acknowledged the introduction in Sanskrit. However, be gave her his hand, which was small and well-formed, and a conventional greeting. He had a singularly musical voice, and spoke without any marked accent though Troy fancied she heard a faint American inflection. She said something about his kindness in offering harbourage to Miss Truebody. He smiled gently, sank on to an Algerian leather seat, drew his feet up under his gown and placed them, apparently, against his thighs. His hands fell softly to his lap.
‘You have brought,’ he said, ‘a gift of great price. We are grateful.’
From the time they had confronted each other he had looked fully into Troy’s eyes and he continued to do so. It was not the half-unseeing attention of ordinary courtesy but an unswerving fixed regard. He seemed to blink less than most people.
His disciple said: ‘Dearest Ra, I’ve got the most monstrous headache.’
‘It will pass,’ he said, still looking at Troy. ‘You know what you should do, dear Sati.’
‘Yes, I do, don’t I! But it’s so hard sometimes to feel the light. One gropes and gropes.’
‘Patience, dear Sati. It will come.’
She sat up on her Li-lo, seized her ankles and with a grunt of discomfort adjusted the soles of her feet to the inside surface of her thighs. ‘Om,’ she said discontentedly.
Mr Oberon said to Troy: ‘We speak of things that are a little strange to you. Or perhaps they are not altogether strange.’
‘Just what I thought.’ The lady began eagerly. ‘Isn’t she fey?’
He disregarded her.
‘Should I explain that we – my guests here and I – follow what we believe to be the true Way of Life? Perhaps, up here, in this ancient house, we have created an atmosphere that to a visitor is a little overwhelming. Do you feel it so?’
Troy said: ‘I’m afraid I’m just rather addled with a long journey, not much sleep and an anxious time with Miss Truebody.’
‘I have been helping her. And, I hope, our friend Baradi.’
‘Have you?’ Troy exclaimed in great surprise. ‘I thought … but how kind of you … is … is the operation going well?’
He smiled, showing perfect teeth. ‘Again, I do not make myself clear. I have been with them, not in the body but in the spirit.’
‘Oh,’ mumbled Troy. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Particularly with your friend. This was easy because when by the will, or, as with her, by the agency of an anaesthetic, the soul is set free of the body, it may be greatly helped. Hers is a pure soul. She should be called Miss Truesoul instead of Miss Truebody.’ He laughed, a light breathy sound, and showed the pink interior of his mouth. ‘But we must not despise the body,’ he said, apparently as an afterthought.
His disciple whispered: ‘Oh no! No, indeed! No,’ and started to breathe deeply, stopping one nostril with a finger and expelling her breath with a hissing sound. Troy began to wonder if she was, perhaps, a little mad.
Oberon had shifted his gaze from Troy. His eyes were still very wide open and quite without expression. He had seen the sleeping Ricky.
It was with the greatest difficulty that Troy gave her movement towards Ricky a semblance of casualness. Her instinct, she afterwards told Alleyn, was entirely that of a mother-cat. She leant over her small son and made a pretence of adjusting the cushion behind him. She heard Oberon say: ‘A beautiful child,’ and thought that no matter how odd it might look, she would stand between Ricky and his eyes until something else diverted their gaze. But Ricky himself stirred a little, flinging out his arm. She moved him over with his face away from Oberon. He murmured: ‘Mummy?’ and she answered: ‘Yes,’ and kept her hand on him until he had fallen back to sleep.
She turned and looked past the ridiculous back of the deep-breathing disciple to the figure in the glare of the sun, and, being a painter, she recognized, in the midst of her alarm a remarkable object. At the same time it seemed to her that Oberon and she acknowledged each other as enemies.
This engagement, if it was one, was broken off by the appearance of two more of Mr Oberon’s guests: a tall girl and a lame young man who were introduced as Ginny Taylor and Robin Herrington. Both their names were familiar to Troy, the girl’s as that of a regular sacrifice on the altars of the glossy weeklies and the man’s as that of the reputably wildish son of a famous brewer who was also an indefatigable patron of the fine arts. To Troy their comparative normality was as a freshening breeze and she was ready to overlook the shadows under their eyes and their air of unease. They greeted her politely, lowered their voices when they saw Ricky and sat together on one seat, screening him from Mr Oberon. Troy returned to her former place.
Mr Oberon was talking. It seemed that he had bought a book in Paris, a newly-discovered manuscript, one of those assembled by Roger de Gaignières. Troy knew that he must have paid a fabulous sum for it and, in spite of herself, listened eagerly to a description of the illuminations. He went on to speak of other works; of the calendar of Charles d’Angoulême, of Indian art, and finally of the moderns – Rouault, Picasso and André Derain. ‘But, of course, André is not a modern. He derives quite blatantly from Rubens. Ask Carbury, when he comes, if I am not right.’
Troy’s nerves jumped. Could he mean Carbury Glande, a painter whom she knew perfectly well who would certainly, if he appeared, greet her with feverish effusiveness? Mr Oberon no longer looked at her or at anyone in particular, yet she had the feeling that he talked at her and he was talking very well. Yes, here was a description of one of Glande’s works. ‘He painted it yesterday from the Saracens’ Watchtower: the favourite interplay of lemon and lacquer-red with a single note of magenta, and everything arranged about a central point. The esoteric significance was eloquent and the whole thing quite beautiful.’ It was undoubtedly Carbury Glande. Surely, surely, the operation must be over and if so, why didn’t Alleyn come and take them away? She tried to remember if Carbury Glande knew she was married to a policeman.
Ginny Taylor said: ‘I wish I knew about Carbury. I can’t get anything from his works. I can only say awful philistinish things such as they look as if they were too easy to do.’ She glanced in a friendly manner at Troy. ‘Do you know about modern art?’ she asked.
‘I’m always ready to learn,’ Troy hedged with a dexterity born of fright.
‘I shall never learn however much I try,’ sighed Ginny Taylor and suddenly yawned.
The jaws of everyone except Mr Oberon quivered responsively.
‘Lord, I’m sorry,’ said Ginny and for some unaccountable reason looked frightened. Robin Herrington touched her hand with the tip of his fingers. ‘I wonder why they’re so infectious,’ he said. ‘Sneezes, coughs and yawns. Yawns worst of all. To read about them’s enough to set one going.’
‘Perhaps,’ Mr Oberon suggested, ‘it’s another piece of evidence, if a homely one, that separateness is an illusion. Our bodies as well as our souls have reflex actions.’ And while Troy was still wondering what on earth this might mean his Sati gave a little yelp of agreement.
‘True! True!’ she cried. She dived, stretched out with her right arm and grasped her toes. At the same time she wound her left arm behind her head and seized her right ear. Having achieved this unlikely posture, she gazed devotedly upon Mr Oberon. ‘Is it all right, dearest Ra,’ she asked, ‘for me to press quietly on with my Prana and Pranayama?’
‘It is well at all times, dear Sati, if the spirit also is attuned.’
Troy couldn’t resist stealing a glance at Ginny Taylor and Robin Herrington. Was it possible that they found nothing to marvel at in these antics? Ginny was looking doubtfully at Sati and young Herrington was looking at Ginny as if, Troy thought with relief, he invited her to be amused with him.
‘Ginny?’ Mr Oberon said quietly.
The beginning of a smile died on Ginny’s lips. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly. ‘Yes, Ra?’
‘Have you formed a design for today?’
‘No. At least … this afternoon …’
‘I thought, if it suited general arrangements,’ Robin Herrington said, ‘that I might ask Ginny to come into Douceville this afternoon. I want her to tell me what colour I should have for new awnings on the afterdeck.’
But Ginny had got up and walked past Troy to Mr Oberon. She stood before him white-faced with the dark marks showing under her eyes.
‘Are you going, then, to Douceville?’ he asked. ‘You look a little pale, my child. We were so late with our gaities last night. Should you rest this afternoon?’
He was looking at her as he had looked at Troy.
‘I think perhaps I should,’ she said in a flat voice.
‘I, too. The colour of the awnings can wait until the colour of the cheeks is restored. Perhaps Annabella would enjoy a drive to Douceville. Annabella Wells,’ he explained to Troy, ‘is with us. Her latest picture is completed and she is to make a film for Durant Frères in the spring.’
Troy was not much interested in the presence of a notoriously erratic, if brilliant actress. She had been watching young Herrington, whose brows were drawn together in a scowl. He got up and stood behind Ginny looking at Oberon over the top of her head. His hands closed and he thrust them into his pockets.
‘I thought a drive might be a good idea for Ginny,’ he said.
But Ginny had sunk down on the end of the Li-lo at Mr Oberon’s feet. She settled herself there quietly, with an air of obedience. Mr Oberon said to Troy: ‘Robin has a most wonderful yacht. You must ask him to show it to you.’ He put his hand on Ginny’s head.
‘I should be delighted,’ said Robin and sounded furious. He had turned aside and now added in a loud voice: ‘Why not this afternoon? I still think Ginny should come to Douceville.’
Troy knew that something had happened that was unusual between Mr Oberon and his guests and that Robin Herrington was frightened as well as angry. She wanted to give him courage. Her heart thumped against her ribs.
In the dead silence they all heard someone come quickly up the stone stairway. When Alleyn opened the door their heads were already turned towards him.
III
He waited for a moment to accustom his eyes to the glare and during that moment he and the five people whose faces were turned towards him were motionless.
One grows scarcely to see one’s lifelong companions and it is more difficult to call up the face of one’s beloved than that of a mere acquaintance. Troy had never been able to make a memory-drawing of her husband. Yet, at that moment, it was as if a veil of familiarity was withdrawn and she looked at him with fresh perception.
She thought: ‘I’ve never been gladder to see him.’
‘This is my husband,’ she said.
Mr Oberon had risen and came forward. He was five inches shorter than Alleyn. For the first time Troy thought him ridiculous as well as disgusting.
He held out his hand. ‘We’re so glad to meet you at last. The news is good?’
‘Dr Baradi will be able to tell you better than I,’ Alleyn said. ‘Her condition was pretty bad. He says she will be very ill.’
‘We shall all help her,’ Mr Oberon said, indicating the antic Sati, the bemused Ginny Taylor and the angry-looking Robin Herrington. ‘We can do so much.’
He put his hand on Alleyn’s arm and led him forward. The reek of ether accompanied them. Alleyn was introduced to the guests and offered a seat but he said: ‘If we may, I think perhaps I should see my wife and Ricky on their way back to Roqueville. Our driver is free now and can take them. He will come back for me. We’re expecting a rather urgent telephone call at our hotel.’
Troy, who dreaded the appearance of Carbury Glande, knew Alleyn had said ‘my wife,’ because he didn’t want Oberon to learn her name. He had an air of authority that was in itself, she thought, almost a betrayal. She got up quickly and went to Ricky.
‘Perhaps,’ Alleyn said, ‘I should stay a little longer in case there’s any change in her condition. Baradi is going to telephone to St Christophe for a nurse and, in the meantime, two of your maids will take turns sitting in the room. I’m sure, sir, that if she were able, Miss Truebody would tell you how grateful she is for your hospitality.’
‘There is no need. She is with us in a very special sense. She is in safe hands. We must send a car for the nurse. There is no train until the evening.’
‘I’ll go,’ Robin Herrington said. ‘I’ll be there in an hour.’
‘Robin,’ Oberon explained lightly, ‘has driven in the Monte Carlo rally. We must hope that the nurse has iron nerves.’
Alleyn said to Robin: ‘It sounds an admirable idea. Will you suggest it to Dr Baradi?’
He went to Ricky and lifted him in his arms. Troy gave her hand to Mr Oberon. His own wrapped itself round hers, tightened, and was suddenly withdrawn. ‘You must visit us again,’ he said. ‘If you are a voyager of the spirit, and I think you are, it might interest you to come to one of our meditations.’
‘Yes, do come,’ urged his Sati, who had abandoned her exercises on Alleyn’s entrance. ‘It’s madly wonderful. You must. Where are you staying?’
‘At the Royal.’
‘Couldn’t be easier. No need to hire a car. The Douceville bus leaves from the corner. Every half-hour. You’ll find it perfectly convenient.’
Troy was reminded vividly of Mr Garbel’s letters. She murmured something non-committal, said goodbye and went to the door.
‘I’ll see you out,’ Robin Herrington offered and took up his heavy walking-stick.
As she groped down the darkened stairway she heard their voices rumbling above her. They came slowly; Alleyn because of Ricky and Herrington because of his stiff leg. The sensation of nightmare that threatened without declaring itself, mounted in intensity. The stairs seemed endless yet when she reached the door into the hall she was half-scared of opening it because Carbury Glande might be on the other side. But the hall was untenanted. She hurried through it and out to the courtyard. The iron gates had an elaborate fastening. Troy fumbled with it, dazzled by the glare of sunlight beyond. She pulled at the heavy latch, bruising her fingers. A voice behind her and at her feet said: ‘Do let me help you.’
Carbury Glande must have come up the stairs from beneath the courtyard. His face, on a level with her knees, peered through the interstices of the wrought-iron banister. Recognition dawned on it.
‘Can it be Troy?’ he ejaculated hoarsely. ‘But it is!’ Dear heart, how magical and how peculiar. Where have you sprung from? And why are you scrabbling away at doors? Has Oberon alarmed you? I may say he petrifies me. What are you up to?’
He had arrived at her level, a short gnarled man whose hair and beard were red and whose face, at the moment, was a dreadful grey. He blinked up at Troy as if he couldn’t get her into focus. He was wearing a pair of floral shorts and a magenta shirt.
‘I’m not up to anything,’ said Troy. ‘In fact, I’m scarcely here at all. We’ve brought your host a middle-aged spinster with a perforated appendix and now we’re on our way.’
‘Ah, yes. I heard about the spinster. Ali Baradi woke me at cockcrow, full of professional zeal, and asked me if I’d like to thread needles and count sponges. How he dared! Are you going?’
‘I must,’ Troy said. ‘Do open this damned door for me.’
She could hear Alleyn’s and Herrington’s voices in the hall and the thump of Herrington’s stick.
Glande reached for the latch. His hand, stained round the nails with paint, was tremulous. ‘I am, as you can see, a wreck,’ he said. ‘A Homeric party and only four hours’ sottish insensitivity in which to recover. Imagine it! There you are.’
He opened the doors and winced at the glare outside. ‘Oberon will be thrilled you’re here,’ he said. ‘Did you know he bought a thing of yours at the Rond-Point show? It’s in the library. ‘Boy with a Kite.’ He adores it.’
‘Look here,’ Troy said hurriedly, ‘be a good chap and don’t tell him I’m me. I’ve come here for a holiday and I’d so much rather …’
‘Well, if you like. Yes, of course. Yes, I understand. And on mature consideration I fancy this ménage is not entirely your cup of tea. You’re almost pathologically normal, aren’t you? Forgive me if I bolt back to my burrow, the glare is really more than I can endure. God, somebody’s coming!’
He stumbled away from the door. Alleyn with Ricky in his arms, came out of the hall followed by Robin Herrington. Glande ejaculated: ‘Oh, sorry!’ and bolted down the stairs. Herrington scowled after him and said: ‘That’s our tame genius. I’ll come to the car, if I may.’
As they walked in single file down the steps and past the maker of figurines, Troy had the feeling that Robin wanted to say something to them and didn’t know how to begin. They had reached the open platform where Raoul waited by the car before he blurted out:
‘I do hope you will let me drive you down, to see the yacht. Both of you, I mean. I mean …’ he stopped short.
Alleyn said: ‘That’s very nice of you. I hadn’t heard about a yacht.’
‘She’s quite fun.’ He stood there, still with an air of hesitancy. Alleyn shifted Ricky and looked at Troy, who held out her hand to Robin.
‘Don’t come any farther,’ she said. ‘Goodbye and thank you.’
‘Goodbye. If we may, Ginny and I will call at the hotel. It’s the Royal, I suppose. I mean, it might amuse you to come for a drive. I mean, if you don’t know anybody here …’
‘It’d be lovely,’ Troy temporized, wondering if Alleyn wanted her to accept.
‘As a matter of fact,’ Alleyn said, ‘we have got someone we ought to look up in Roqueville. Do you know anybody about here with the unlikely name of Garbel?’
Robin’s jaw dropped. He stared at them with an expression of extraordinary consternation. ‘I … no. No. We haven’t really met any of the local people. No. Well I mustn’t keep you standing in the sun. Goodbye.’
And with a precipitancy as marked as his former hesitation, he turned and limped off down the passageway.
‘Now what,’ Troy asked her husband, ‘in a crazy world, is the significance of that particular bit of lunacy?’
‘I’ve not the beginning of a notion,’ he said. ‘But I suggest that when we’ve got time to think, we call on Mr Garbel.’
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