Clutch of Constables Page 4

  ‘“Oh, look—The place is swarming with Constables! Everywhere you look. A perfect clutch of them!”

  ‘Rory, it was as if someone had plopped a dirty great weight overboard into the lock. Everybody went dead still and listened. At least—this is hard to describe—someone did in particular but I don’t know which because nobody moved. Then Dr Natouche in mild surprise said: “The Police, Mrs Alleyn? Where? I don’t see them,” and I explained and he, for the first time, gave a wonderful roar of laughter. Pollock gaped at me, Caley Bard said he’d thought for a moment his sins had caught up with him, Mr Lazenby said what a droll mistake to be sure and the Hewsons looked baffled. Miss Rickerby-C. (her friends call her, for God’s sake, Hay) waited for the penny to drop and then laughed like a hyena. I still don’t know which of them (or whether it was more than one of them) went so very quiet and still and what’s more I got the idiotic notion that my explanation had been for—someone—more disturbing than the original remark. And on top of all this, I can not get rid of the feeling that I’m involved in some kind of performance. Like one of those dreams actors say they get when they find themselves on an unknown stage where a play they’ve never heard of is in action.

  ‘Silly? Or not silly? Rum? Or not rum?

  ‘I’ll write again at Tollardwark. The show looked all right: well hung and lit. The Gallery bought the black and pink thing and seven smaller ones sold the first night. Paris on the 31st and New York in November. Darling, if, and only if, you have a moment I would be glad if you could bear to call at the Guggenheim just to say—’

  II

  Troy enjoyed coming into the locks. Ramsdyke, as she observed in her letter, was a charming one: a seemly house, a modest plot, the tow-path, a bridge over The River and the Ramsdyke itself, a neat wet line, Roman-ruled across the fens. On the farther side was the ‘Constable’ view and farther downstream a weir. The Zodiac moved quietly into the lock but before she sank with its waters Troy jumped ashore, posted her letter and followed the direction indicated by the Skipper’s tattooed arm and pointed finger. He called after her ‘Twenty minutes’ and she waved her understanding, crossed the tow-path, and climbed a grassy embankment.

  She came into a field bordered by sod and stone walls and, on the left, beyond the wall, by what seemed to be a narrow road leading down to the bridge. This was the Dyke Way of the brochures. Troy remembered that it came from the village of Wapentake, which her map showed as lying about a mile and a half from the lock. She walked up the field. It rose gently and showed, above its crest, trees and a distant spire.

  The air smelt of earth and grass and, delicately, of wood-smoke. It seemed lovely to Troy. She felt a great uplift of spirit and was so preoccupied with her own happiness that she came upon the meeting place of the wapentake, just where the Skipper had said it would be, before she was aware of it.

  It was a circular hollow, sometimes called, the brochure said, a Pot, and it was lined with grass, mosses and fern. Here the Plantagenet knights-of-the-shire had sat at their fortnightly Hundreds, dealing out justice as they saw it in those days and as the growing laws directed them. Troy wondered if, when the list was a heavy one, they stayed on into the evening and night and if torches were lit.

  Below the wapentake hollow and quite close to the lock, another, but a comparatively recent depression had been cut into the hillside: perhaps to get a load of gravel of which there seemed to be a quantity in the soil, or perhaps by archaeological amateurs. An overhanging shelf above this excavation had been roughly shored up by poles with an old door for roof. The wood had weathered and looked to be rotting. ‘A bit of an eyesore,’ thought Troy.

  She went into the wapentake and sat there, and fancied she felt beneath her some indication of a kind of bench that must have been chopped out of the soil, she supposed, seven centuries ago. ‘I’m an ignoramus about history,’ Troy thought, ‘but I do like to feel it in my bones,’ and she peopled the wapentake with heads like carven effigies, with robes in the colours of stained glass and with glints of polished steel.

  She began to wonder if it would be possible to make a very formalized drawing—dark and thronged with seated, lawgiving shapes. A puff of warm air moved the grass and the hair of her head and up the sloping field came Dr Natouche.

  He was bareheaded and had changed his tweed jacket for a yellow sweater. When he saw Troy he checked and stood still, formidable because of his height and colour against the mild background of the waterways. Troy waved to him. ‘Come up,’ she called. ‘Here’s the wapentake.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He came up quickly, entered the hollow and looked about him. ‘I have read the excellent account in our little book,’ he said. ‘So here they sat, those old chaps.’ The colloquialism came oddly from him.

  ‘You sit here, too,’ Troy suggested, wanting to see his head and his torso, in its yellow sweater, against the moss and fern.

  He did so, squaring himself and resting his hands on his knees. His teeth and the whites of his eyes were high accents in the picture he presented for Troy. ‘You ask for the illustration of an incongruity,’ he said.

  ‘You would be nice to paint. Do you really feel incongruous? I mean is this sort of thing quite foreign to you?’

  ‘Not altogether. No.’

  They said nothing for a time and Troy did not think there was any awkwardness in their silence.

  A lark sang madly overhead and the sound of quiet voices floated up from the lock. Above the embankment they could see the top of Zodiac’s wheelhouse. Now it began very slowly to sink. They heard Miss Rickerby-Carrick shout and laugh.

  A motorcycle engine crescendoed out of the distance, clattered and exploded down the lane and then reduced its speed and noise and stopped.

  ‘One would think it was those two again,’ said Troy.

  Dr Natouche rose. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘I can see them. Actually, it is those two. They are raising their hands.’

  ‘How extraordinary,’ she said idly. ‘Why should they turn up?’

  ‘They may be staying in the district. We haven’t come very far, you know.’

  ‘I keep forgetting. One’s values change on The River.’

  Troy broke off a fern frond and turned it between her fingers. Dr Natouche sat down again.

  ‘My father was an Ethiopian,’ he said presently. ‘He came to this country with a Mission fifty years ago and married an Englishwoman. I was born and educated in England.’

  ‘Have you never been to your own country?’

  ‘Once. But I was alien there. And like my father, I married an Englishwoman. I am a widower. My wife died two months ago.’

  ‘Was that why you came on this cruise?’

  ‘We were to have come together.’

  ‘I see,’ Troy said.

  ‘She would have enjoyed it. It was something we could have done,’ he said.

  ‘Have you found many difficulties about being as you are? Black?’

  ‘Of course. How sensible of you to ask, Mrs Alleyn. One knows everybody thinks such questions.’

  ‘Well,’ Troy said, ‘I’m glad it was all right to ask.’

  ‘I am perfectly at ease with you,’ Dr Natouche stated rather, Troy felt, as he might have told a patient there was nothing the matter with her and really almost arousing a comparable pleasure. ‘Perfectly,’ he repeated after a pause: ‘I don’t think, Mrs Alleyn, you could ever say anything to me that would change that condition.’

  Miss Rickerby-Carrick appeared at the top of the embankment. ‘Hoo-hoo!’ she shouted. ‘What’s it like up there?’

  ‘Very pleasant,’ Troy said.

  ‘Jolly good.’

  She floundered up the field towards them, blowing her nose as she came. Troy was suddenly very sorry for her. Were there, she asked herself, in Birmingham, where Miss Rickerby-Carrick lived, people, apart from Mavis, who actually welcomed her company?

  Dr Natouche fetched a sigh and stood up. ‘I see a gate over there into the lane,’ he said.
‘I think there is time to walk back that way if you would care to do so.’

  ‘You go,’ Troy muttered. ‘I’d better wait for her.’

  ‘Really? Very well.’

  He stayed for a moment or two, politely greeted Miss Rickerby-Carrick and then strode away.

  ‘Isn’t he a dear?’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick panted. ‘Don’t you feel he’s somebody awfully special?’

  ‘He seems a nice man,’ Troy answered and try as she might, she couldn’t help flattening her voice.

  ‘I do think we all ought to make a special effort. I get awfully worked-up about it. When people go on like Mr Pollock, you know. I tackled Mr Pollock about his attitude. I do that, you know, I do tackle people. I said: “Just because he’s got another pigmentation,” I said, “why should you think he’s different.” They’re not different. You do agree, don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ Troy said. ‘I don’t. They are different. Profoundly.’

  ‘Oh! How can you say so?’

  ‘Because I think it’s true. They are different in depth from Anglo-Saxons. So are Slavs. So are Latins.’

  ‘Oh! If you mean like that,’ she said, and broke into ungainly laughter. ‘Oh, I see. Oh, yes. Then you do agree that we should make a special effort.’

  ‘Look, Miss Rickerby-Carrick—’

  ‘I say, do call me Hay.’

  ‘Yes—well—thank you. I was going to say that I don’t think Dr Natouche would enjoy special efforts. Really, I don’t.’

  ‘You seem to get on with him like a house on fire,’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick pointed out discontentedly.

  ‘Do I? Well, I find him an interesting man.’

  ‘There you are, you see!’ she cried, proclaiming some completely inscrutable triumph, and a longish silence ensued.

  They heard the motorcycle start up and cross the bridge and listened to the diminishment of sound as it made off in the direction of Norminster.

  One by one the other passengers straggled up the field. Mr Pollock behind the rest, swinging his built-up boot. The Hewsons were all set-about with cameras while Caley Bard had a box slung from his shoulder and carried a lepidopterist’s net.

  So that, Troy thought, was what it was. When everybody was assembled the Hewsons took photographs of the wapentake by itself and with their fellow-travellers sitting self-consciously round it. Mr Lazenby compared it without, Troy felt, perceptible validity, to an aboriginal place of assembly in the Australian outback. Mr Pollock read his brochure and then stared with a faint look of disgust at the original.

  Caley Bard joined Troy. ‘So this is where you lit off to,’ he murmured. ‘I got bailed up by that extraordinary lady. She wants to get up a let’s-be-sweet-to-Natouche movement.’

  ‘I know. What did you say?’

  ‘I said that as far as I am concerned, I consider I’m as sweet to Natouche as he can readily stomach. Now, tell me all about the wapentake. I’m allergic to leaflets and I’ve forgotten what the Skipper said. Speak up, do.’

  Troy did not bother to react to this piece of cheek. She said: ‘So you’re a lepidopterist?’

  ‘That’s right. An amateur. Do you find it a sinister hobby? It has rather a sinister reputation, I fear. There was that terrifying film and then didn’t somebody in The Hound of the Baskervilles flit about Dartmoor with a deceiving net and killing-bottle?’

  ‘There’s Nabokov on the credit side.’

  ‘True. But you don’t fancy it, all the same,’ he said. ‘That I can see, very clearly.’

  ‘I like them better alive and on the wing. Did you notice those two motorcyclists? They seem to be haunting us.’

  ‘Friends of young Tom, it appears. They come from Tollardwark where we stay tonight. Did you know it’s pronounced Toll’ark? It will take us an hour or more to get there by water but by road it’s only a short walk from Ramsdyke. There’s confusion for you!’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to walk: I’ve settled into the River-time-space-dimension.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it would be rather spoiling to break out of it. Hallo, that’ll be for us.’

  The Zodiac had given three short hoots. They returned hurriedly and found her waiting downstream from the lock.

  There was a weir at Ramsdyke, standing off on their port side. Below the green slide of the fall, the whole surface of the river was smothered in foam: foam in islands and in pinnacles, iridescent foam that twinkled and glinted in the late afternoon sunlight, that shredded away from its own crests, floated like gossamer and broke into nothing.

  ‘Oh!’ cried Miss Rickerby-Carrick in ecstasy. ‘Isn’t it lovely! Oh, do look! Look, look, look!’ she insisted, first to one and then to another of her fellow-passengers. ‘Who would have thought our quiet old river could froth up and behave like a fairytale? Like a dream isn’t it? Isn’t it?’

  ‘More like washing-day I’m afraid, Miss Rickerby-Carrick,’ said Mrs Tretheway looking over the half-door. ‘It’s detergent. There’s a factory beyond those trees. Tea is ready in the saloon,’ she added.

  ‘Oh, no!’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick lamented. A flying wisp of detergent settled on her nose. ‘Oh, dear!’ she said crossly and went down to the saloon, followed by the others.

  ‘How true it is,’ Caley Bard remarked, ‘that beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder.’

  He spoke to Troy but Dr Natouche, who was behind her, answered him.

  ‘Surely,’ Dr Natouche said, ‘not so much in the eye as in the mind. I remember that on a walk—through a wood, you know—I looked into a dell and saw, deep down, an astonishing spot of scarlet. I thought: Ah! A superb fungus secretly devouring the earth and the air. You know? One of those savage fungi that one thinks of as devils? I went down to look more closely at it and found it was a discarded fish-tin with a red label. Was it the less beautiful for my discovery?’

  He had turned to Troy. ‘Not to my way of looking,’ she said. ‘It was a good colour and it had made its effect.’

  ‘We are back aren’t we,’ Caley Bard said, ‘at that old Florentine person with the bubucular nose. We are to assume that the painter doted on every blackhead, crevasse and bump.’

  ‘Yes,’ Troy said. ‘You are.’

  ‘So that if a dead something—a fish or a cat—popped up through that foam, for instance, and its colour and shape made a pleasing mélange with its surroundings, it would be a paintable subject and therefore beautiful?’

  ‘You take,’ she said dryly, ‘the very words from my mouth.’

  Mr Bard looked at her mouth for a second or two.

  ‘And what satisfaction,’ he said under his breath, ‘is there in that?’ He turned away and Troy thought, almost at once, that she must have misheard him.

  Miss Rickerby-Carrick flapped into the conversation like a wet sheet. ‘Oh don’t stop. Go on. Do, do, go on. I don’t want to lose a word of this,’ she cried. ‘Because it makes a point that I’m most awfully keen on. Beauty is everywhere. In everything,’ she shouted and swept her arm past Mr Lazenby’s spectacles. ‘“Beauty is Truth; Truth, Beauty”,’ she quoted. ‘That’s all we need to know.’

  ‘That’s a very, very profound observation, Miss Rickerby-Carrick,’ Mr Hewson observed kindly.

  ‘I just don’t go along with it,’ his sister said. ‘I’ve seen a whole lot of Truth that wasn’t beautiful. A whole heap of it.’

  Mr Pollock, who had been utterly silent for a very long time now heaved an enormous sigh and as if infected by his gloom the other passengers also fell silent.

  Somebody—Mr Lazenby?—had left the morning’s newspaper on the settle, the paper in which her own photograph had appeared. Troy, who did not eat with her tea, picked it up and seeing nothing to interest her, idly turned over a page.

  ‘Man found strangled.

  ‘The body of a man who had been strangled was found at 8 p.m. last night in a flat in Cyprus Street, Soho. He is believed to have been a picture-dealer and the police who are making inquiries give his name as K.G.Z. Andropulos.’

  The pas
senger list was still on the table. Troy looked at the name Caley Bard had crossed out in favour of her own.

  She rose with so abrupt a movement that one or two of her companions glanced up at her. She dropped the newspaper on the seat and went down to her cabin. After some thought, she said to herself: ‘If nobody has read it there’s no reason why I should point it out. It’s a horrible bit of news.’

  And then she thought that if, as seemed probable, the paragraph had in fact not been noticed, it might be as well to get rid of the paper, the more especially since she would like to repress her own photograph before it went into general circulation. She could imagine Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s ejaculations: ‘And there you both are, you and the murdered man who was to have your berth. Fancy!’ She hunted out her sketchbook and returned to the saloon.

  The newspaper was nowhere to be seen.

  III

  Troy waited for a minute or two in the saloon to collect her thoughts. Her fellow-passengers were still at tea and apparently quite undisturbed. She went up on deck. The Skipper was at the wheel.

  ‘Everything all right, Mrs Alleyn?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, thank you. Yes. Everything,’ said Troy and found herself a chair.

  Most of the detergent foam had been left behind by now. The Zodiac sailed towards evening through clear waters, low fields and occasional groups of trees.

  Troy began to draw the Signs of the Zodiac, placing them in a ring and giving them a wonderfully strange character. Mrs Tretheway’s rhyme could go in the middle and later on there would be washes of colour.

  She was vaguely aware of a sudden burst of conversation in the saloon. After a time a shadow fell across her hand and there was Caley Bard again. Troy didn’t look up. He moved to the opposite side and stood with his back towards her, leaning on the taffrail.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ he said presently, ‘that they’ve rumbled you. Lazenby spotted the photograph in this morning’s paper. I wouldn’t have told them.’