The Oracles Page 4

  ‘Why! What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong with it. That’s the point. Not like mine. What do you make of mine, by the way? Don’t blush. A lot of people make the same mistake, but it isn’t cockney, as a matter of fact. Go on about Swann’s ilks.’

  ‘In Venice, last year …’ began Nell.

  ‘He won a prize for an outsize egg. I know.’

  ‘It was a Form,’ she told him in shocked tones. ‘But he’s getting rather out of that stage now.…’

  She rummaged in the ragbag of her mind for a phrase and went on glibly:

  ‘He used to entirely surrender himself to his material and let it do things to him. Now he’s got much more dynamic.’

  ‘Loud cheers!’

  ‘He imposes himself on it now,’ put in Rhona. ‘There’s a sort of loving brutality …’

  She broke off, uncertain whether Don Rawson had said this about Conrad, or whether someone else said it about someone else. Neither of them would have used such a phrase in Martha’s presence.

  ‘How come?’ asked their host. ‘What’s changed him?’

  ‘A more congenial atmosphere. He used to have a very stupid wife and a lot of children. But she’s dead. And now …’

  Nell kicked Rhona under the table. Rhona shut up.

  ‘Children dead too?’ he asked with interest.

  ‘I mean he has friends now who really appreciate him.’

  ‘Meaning the ilks. Who are they? Give!’

  They would have liked to give, but whisky had clouded their ideas and impeded their powers of description. They boasted a little about Alan Wetherby and his Marine Pavilion, and quoted Martha extensively.

  ‘This Martha,’ he said at last, ‘is, I take it, Head Ilk. Money?’

  ‘Why, yes,’ said Nell, surprised. ‘She has got a great deal of money. How did you guess?’

  ‘Money talks and so does she, apparently. Is it from her you got this line about Conrad’s loving brutality?’

  ‘Couldn’t I have thought of it myself?’ asked Rhona.

  ‘No, Gertie. You never!’

  ‘Why do you call us Gertie?’

  ‘Always call girls Gertie when I don’t know their names.’

  A face appeared in the doorway and stared round the cellar. He seemed to be aware of this, although his back was turned to it.

  ‘That’s my car come, I think,’ he said. ‘They’ve taken their time finding one. Come along. I’ll drive you there.’

  They rose and Nell swayed unsteadily. He glanced at her, put a hand under her elbow, and steered her out of the bar. His skill in doing so was remarkable; it looked like gallantry and masked the fact that she really needed support.

  A large hired car was waiting outside, in the flickering street. The girls flinched; they had forgotten the storm. He pushed them into the car, sat down between them, and put an arm round each of their waists. As they set off through the crackling glare he advised them to hide their heads on his shoulders.

  ‘I can’t make out,’ complained Nell, as she did so, ‘whether you’re a gentleman or not.’

  ‘I’m what your old man probably calls a bounder, as you’ll find out before you’re much older. But don’t worry. I don’t take advantage of mysteries in taxis, especially when they come in pairs. Are you quite sure, now, that you’ve mentioned everyone who’ll be at this party?’

  ‘There’s a local yokel coming,’ said Rhona, ‘whom Conrad insisted on asking. Conrad does like the most ghastly people sometimes. He’s such a simple person. But Martha is quite glad to ask him. She means to bend him to her will.’

  ‘Convert him to loving brutality, you mean?’

  ‘He’s just a little local solicitor—an utterly provincial type. Complete satisfied with himself and East Head and has no outside interests. But he’s on a committee with Martha, for buying a work of art with some money that was left over from the War Memorial Fund, because the site was presented, so they didn’t have to buy it. The committee eats out of his hand, so Martha thinks it’s just as well to butter him up a bit.’

  ‘Unfortunately his wife is coming too,’ put in Nell. ‘Martha didn’t mean to ask her, but found that she had.’

  ‘We’ve all got to take turns to talk to her in words of one syllable,’ said Rhona. ‘She’s got a baby and we can ask if it has any teeth, you know. People like that! They don’t live. They merely exist.’

  ‘And that’s everybody?’

  ‘That’s everybody.’

  ‘Swann lives all alone, does he?’

  There was a pause. Nell said icily that they were not discussing Conrad’s private life.

  ‘So I’ve noticed. What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Nothing. But … he’s a very simple person.…’

  ‘Is that the theme song of the ilks? Too right! He must be. Very, very, very simple, poor chap. Now open your eyes, because I think we’re there. We’ve stopped at a gate and there’s a lot of cars outside it.’

  He helped them out into the dangerous night. A flash revealed the house and the garden path. They felt their way towards the door.

  ‘It’s all dark!’ exclaimed Rhona.

  ‘Lights off everywhere,’ he explained. ‘The street lighting went off just as we started. You’d have seen if you hadn’t had your eyes shut.’

  ‘But it’s quiet,’ said Nell. ‘Perhaps the party has been put off. But then … all those cars are there!’

  A faint glow from a ground-floor window was now visible. He took a few steps that way, looked into the room, and then returned to the girls with his report.

  ‘A party all right. All sitting round a solitary candle. Come along. We don’t knock, or don’t we? Walk in, I should think.’

  ‘Oh no,’ cried Nell, drawing back. ‘You can’t.’

  He insisted that he was coming too, and ignored their flustered protests, declaring at last that he had been invited.

  ‘But you don’t know Martha!’ they both exclaimed.

  ‘I know Conrad. I’m his oldest friend. Honest I am. I’ve known him since he was a babby. Don’t you notice the accent? I’d have thought you would. He’s “Austrilian” too.’

  ‘Oh! Oh!’ shrieked Nell. ‘Now I know what you meant.…’

  ‘When I said I was no gent? Too right! But don’t worry. You’ve told me everything I came to find out, and saved me a lot of trouble.’

  ‘You gave us drink,’ stormed Rhona, ‘and made us talk.…’

  A head was suddenly thrust through the lighted window, and a voice demanded:

  ‘Who is that? Who is yelling out there?’

  It was a hauntingly beautiful voice, but its exquisite diction was a little blurred.

  ‘It’s Rhona and me … and … and a friend of Conrad’s.…’

  ‘Go away! I don’t want you. I don’t want anybody. The party is off, I tell you. Conrad isn’t here. He’s in Mexico. Walked out on me and gone to Mexico,’ sang the lovely voice. ‘If it’s a surprise to me, why shouldn’t it be a surprise to you? No need for a lot of people coming and insisting, and insisting, and sitting here, and sitting, and insisting. I never asked them. But they won’t go away. If they insist, then I insist. We’ll see who can insist the longest.’

  The stranger moved quietly into the ring of light outside the window, and asked if Conrad had left an address.

  ‘No. I told you. He’s walked out. Left me cold. After I’d given up everything for him. My career … stuck in this lousy dump … sacrificing my career.…’

  ‘Why do you think he’s gone to Mexico?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t he? Mexico is a place, isn’t it? People go there, don’t they? Conrad’s gone there. Why … Frank!’

  ‘Hullo, Liz,’ he said equably.

  The head turned and announced to the room behind:

  ‘It was Frank yelling out there. Frank Archer. My husband.’

  Then, turning again, it said:

  ‘It’s no use, Frank. I’m not coming back to you.’

&nbs
p; ‘I wouldn’t have anywhere to put you if you did, Liz. I’m living in two rooms over the shop.’

  ‘Why! What’s happened to Cheyne Walk?’

  ‘Up for sale.’

  ‘For sale? No! Not Cheyne Walk! Not my home! Frank! You can’t do that to me. Sell my lovely home! It’s not like you. It’s mean and petty. You’re a horror, but you were never mean.’

  ‘All right. Just as you like. I’ve come to see Conrad’s Apollo. Where is it?’

  There was a short silence. Inside the room somebody coughed nervously.

  ‘You can’t,’ said the voice. ‘That’s what I keep insisting and they keep insisting. It’s in the shed, down by the garage, and there’s no light. Do come in, Frank, and make all these bloody people go away.’

  He turned to the girls and said:

  ‘Come along!’

  This time they followed him without protest. Curiosity had prevailed over any fear of what Martha might say.

  5

  IT was only by prodigious determination that Martha had kept the party assembled. Upon learning of Conrad’s truancy she had, after a rapid interchange with Don in French, forbidden the guests to disperse. Conrad, she said, could not possibly have gone to Mexico. He had no money and no passport. He might have told Elizabeth that he wished to go there, but this was no proof that he had gone. In all probability he had taken one of his long walks and had forgotten the time, as very simple people are apt to do. He might turn up at any moment, whatever Elizabeth might say to the contrary.

  Between Martha and Elizabeth little love had ever been lost. Their smouldering feud now broke into an open contest, in which most of the party took Martha’s side, since Elizabeth had always been extremely uncivil to all of them. There was only one rebel, an obscure disciple from Porlock, who, after waiting for a little while, insisted upon going home. Dickie Pattison tried to go with him, but was sharply called to order by Martha.

  ‘No, Mr. Pattison! Sit down! Wait. We haven’t seen the Apollo yet. I don’t believe it can be in the shed. He would never have put it there when he knows …’

  ‘He put it there on Thursday,’ snapped Elizabeth.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Alan Wetherby. ‘You don’t often take that much interest in what Conrad does.’

  ‘He got Lobster Charlie to help him carry it down there. He came and asked me for half a crown to give to Lobster Charlie.’

  This was convincing evidence. Lobster Charlie was known to hawk his wares in Summersdown on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

  ‘Half a crown!’ exclaimed Martha. ‘A shilling would have been ample.’

  ‘I hadn’t half a crown or a shilling either,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I should think it’s very heavy. If you like to rupture yourselves, lugging it up from there, I couldn’t care less.’

  Dickie inwardly thanked heaven that Christina had decided not to come. She would not have liked this sort of thing. She would not have understood it. He neither liked nor understood it himself, but his disappointment at Swann’s absence had been so great that he had, for some time, taken very little notice of anything else. Christina would have been quicker than he to perceive the truth about the Cucumber, whose condition he had at first ascribed to natural distress and anxiety. For a short time he was sorry for her, bewitched by her beauty and her haunting voice, as once, long ago, he had been bewitched when he saw her upon the London stage. For a scene or two he had thought her the most wonderful actress in the world. And then, as now, disillusionment had stolen upon him. The face and the voice were cheats; she was giving a bad performance. He tried in vain to blame the play. Before the final curtain he had been obliged to think that she could not act. She was no artist. And now, as the evening wore on, he found himself once again turning against her. Moreover, he began to connect her frequent absences from the room, her unsteady returns, with his own thirst—with a craving for that refreshment which had not been offered to her guests. The night was torrid and he could have done with a drink when he arrived. He grew quite parched at the thought of all that Elizabeth must be putting back.

  Martha kept him beside her and talked to him about sewage disposal, a subject which she evidently imagined would not alarm him. Whenever he grew restive she promised to show him the Apollo, if he would only wait a little longer, and he did not know how to explain, without incivility, that he had no wish to see it. Besides, he was afraid that Christina would laugh at him if he went home without seeing anything at all. So he sat on grimly, thankful at least that the width of the room divided him from Wetherby’s vitriolic ill nature, of which he had seen quite enough, although their acquaintance was very slight.

  Suddenly all the lights went out. In the subsequent confusion he got away from Martha and went to look out of the window with a poetess whom everybody called Carter, although her name was Mrs. Hobhouse. His previous dealings with this lady had been purely professional. She had thought that her agent was cheating her, and had asked his advice. Dickie thought that the boot was on the other leg and that she owed the disputed commission, but he could not persuade her of it. All ‘business men’ were rogues, in her view, and all artists helpless, unworldly victims. She kept an agent to foil her publisher, wished Dickie to foil her agent, and would doubtless someday ask somebody else to foil Dickie. Her integrity, of which she had a good deal to say, by no means obliged her to come across with a 10 per cent which she had previously agreed to pay, and she had been very much disgusted with Dickie for telling her that she was in the wrong. A really competent lawyer would, she obviously believed, have helped her to avoid her obligations. But the first-rate could not, of course, be demanded in East Head.

  She did not seem to have forgiven him. She took no notice when he joined her at the window, but talked to herself in a rapid whisper while they watched the storm. From Summersdown there was a fine view of the Channel and the distant mountains of South Wales. Every few seconds a scribble of lightning raced across the heavens, outlining that distant coast and tinting the water between to a strange shade of pale lilac.

  ‘Newport seems to be getting it,’ he ventured. ‘I think I see a red glow. It must be a fire.’

  ‘A fire‚’ chanted Carter. ‘Lovely, lovely fire!’

  She continued her muttered chant. He heard something about wretched little people, in their smug little bungalows with their lounge suites and television sets. She appeared to have a strong prejudice against them. The flashes revealed her freckles and the petulant sag of her mouth.

  ‘There!’ she said suddenly. ‘That must have hit something. Oh, this is meat and drink to me!’

  Drink! thought Dickie. She’s lucky.

  He looked at his watch. The gesture was observed by Martha, who immediately despatched Don to question him, in English, about the rules of cricket. The evening took on the compulsion of a nightmare, from which he could not free himself. All sorts of strange things began to happen. Elizabeth, after shouting to somebody in the garden, announced that her husband had arrived. On the heels of a particularly loud thunder-clap, this husband appeared in their midst, looking like the demon king in a pantomime, and demanding something to drink.

  ‘There aren’t any drinks‚’ snapped Elizabeth. ‘You take them all away to your house, Martha, and give them drinks there, if they’re thirsty.’

  ‘There is plenty,’ protested Martha. ‘I had a lot sent up yesterday, and I believe some cases of brandy were sent here which ought to have gone to my house.’

  ‘We can guess where it’s gone by now,’ muttered Wetherby.

  ‘Billy. You go and find it, and bring glasses.’

  Billy uncoiled his long limbs from the floor:

  ‘W-w-w-w …’

  ‘Where? Look in the kitchen. Nell! You go with him.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Dickie, hastily following Billy from the room.

  The house was in darkness, but the resourceful Billy had a torch. He led the way into an evil-smelling cavern haunted by voices, high and far off, raised in a kind of piping drone,
like the drip of a gutter. Billy’s torch finally came to rest on a sink filled with dirty glasses. He sighed and began to rinse them one by one under the faucet, but had nowhere to put them save back into the sink, since the draining-board was stacked high with unwashed dishes.

  ‘You l-l-l-look for the d-d-d …’

  He vaguely indicated a door and proffered his torch.

  ‘But you can’t wash glasses in the dark,’ said Dickie.

  Billy nodded. It was obviously easier to do so than to look for drink in the dark. Dickie took the torch and opened the door. He seemed to be in another passage. The voices, which had droned on ceaselessly, became much louder. Sometimes it was a single voice, sometimes a piping chorus, and the chant seemed to be coming from behind a small door on his left. He listened but could not at first distinguish words. Then he recognised a phrase in the soft Latin which he had heard in Italian churches. Gratia ple-e-ena …

  ‘Look outside the back door‚’ said the demon husband, coming from the kitchen. ‘It’s thought that the cases have never been brought in.’

  ‘In mulieribus et benedictus …’

  ‘Godalmighty! What’s that?’

  The demon flung open the little door. Dickie’s torch revealed some kind of broom cupboard with a squirming mass of humanity at the bottom of it. The chant broke off. A cluster of small faces blinked up at the light.

  ‘Scared of the thunder?’ suggested the demon.

  ‘No, thank you,’ replied a voice from the cupboard.

  ‘Oh? Just here for a lark?’

  ‘Nobody in this cupboard is frightened.’ The voice was beautiful but distinctly bossy. ‘This is a Holy Cupboard. People in this cupboard are protected by St. Rose of Lima. She saved a whole town out of an earthquake, and she won’t let the thunder come in here. Only inreligious people are frightened.’

  At this moment all the lights came on again.

  Everybody said: Oh! A grimy passage was revealed. It was also possible for the inhabitants of the cupboard to see something of their visitors. A fresh voice piped:

  ‘That’s my daddy.’