Appleby's End (8 page)

“I see. And did he, in fact, make this special talent of his available to all comers?”

“He was affable and conversable – that's what the housekeeper said. Actually I think he just supposed it a chance to suck up copy – or material, if that sounds less journalistic. You see, his method, as I've told you, was to worm people's stories out of them and then splash them over with his own bright colours. It doesn't really seem promising to me. So few people have stories worth speaking of, after all. I'm sure I haven't. A woman without a past and without a future, whom no novelist could muscle in on.” Judith's voice was muffled and Appleby had the impression that she was scrambling into a garment. “But perhaps people who are anxious enough about the future to consult the local squire as if he were a black and midnight hag are likelier to have had a past worth writing up. Though I don't exactly see why.”

“It wasn't their past and it wasn't their future either – except now and then.” Appleby, suddenly incisive, had scrambled from his burrow and was sitting in the icy air, staring across what was now again a moon- and snow-blanched country. “Yours is a forty-year-old story or more – but uncommonly fascinating, I'm bound to say. And, very likely, you would have supplied Ranulph with excellent copy, despite your blameless past and empty future. You're quite sure it will be empty, by the way?”

“I shall have one or two one-man shows.” Judith Raven too had emerged. “Friends will praise the stuff in sixpenny papers. And before I settle down to my later spinsterhood at Dream there will be several love affairs with practised but chronically inept intellectuals, and perhaps an episode of farcical but painful bewilderment with a dumb and passionate D H Lawrencian yeoman. Or possibly all that is just girlish fantasy.”

“I suspect it is. In fact, your actual future is going to be quite different, I should say. Still, there's the point.”

“What point?”

“There's what Ranulph was interested in – and what explains your blind, tappity-tappity companion of childhood. Of course people's pasts aren't of much utility to manufacturers of sensational fiction – nor their actual futures either. But their fantasies are.”

“I don't understand.” Judith was visible now, a slim silhouette against a silver-grey infinity. “Or do you mean…?”

“Yes! That was what Ranulph in his snooping round must have developed a technique for eliciting. Perhaps he just took tea with the women and poured beer down the men – that and had rather a subtle way of leading them on. He made stories out of people's daydreams – out of good, current Victorian daydreams. No wonder his books sold in their time. Of course he had his flair for writing up and heightening actual sensations too – putting the knobs on, as you expressed it. But he had a tap-root on all the eccentric and lurid and scandalous things people saw themselves doing. And sometimes, of course – and perhaps years later –
they would really do them
, or something tolerably like. And there it would all be already in one of Ranulph Raven's stories.”

“So the blind man–”

“Even among illiterate people” – Appleby went on unheeding – “this would sometimes seep out – and the result would be a popular notion that his stories were really a species of prophetic books, crammed with the future. Occasionally, no doubt, people would recall letting slip their less presentable projects to Ranulph. But they'd keep quiet about it. And – yes – now you see the explanation of your blind man. As a lad he cherished a nasty plan to liquidate his brother. He continued to cherish it. But he remembered having let it out to Ranulph. And he had heard the legend and how Ranulph's stories were all mixed up with actual events. So he had a fear – probably pretty baseless – that it would be risky to commit a crime certain cardinal features of which might have been put into a book donkey's years before. Hence his fury on being told by your brother that there
was
such a yarn of Ranulph's. If he had been
scared
that would mean he was afraid the published story might lead to the detection of something
he had once done
. But he wasn't scared; he was disappointed and angry. He was disappointed and angry because he judged that in the circumstances it would be unsafe – now, years later –
to go ahead
.”

“I must say you have quite the professional touch.” There was a rustling and Appleby saw that Judith had slithered down the ladder and was standing in clear moonlight below. “A calculating machine couldn't do better,” she called up mockingly. “One just slips in the facts at one side and out comes the solution at the other. Not even a handle to turn or a lever to pull. Can you jump? Or would it upset the delicate mechanisms?”

Appleby jumped. “Don't you think it a likely explanation?” he asked as he scrambled to his feet.

“I rather think it is. But it means that the blind man whom Mark and I met when we were kids was meditating putting into effect against his brother some murderous plan he had been cherishing for thirty or forty years. That's pretty stiff.”

“I would call it extremely nasty.” Appleby took Judith's arm and helped her over the fence. “Listen,” he said. “It so happens that I want to know whether this story of yours is all fibs. Yes or no?”

“No.” She looked at him doubtfully, her brow puckered. “The whole story of the blind man is gospel. Why?”

“Because for some reason you don't seem very proud of it.” Appleby hesitated. “In fact, you seem less pleased with it every time we look at each other.”

“What rot.” Judith was stuffing her battered hat viciously in a pocket. “It's just that the Ranulph business is tiresome, I suppose.”

“But the Ranulph business is surely all past history now.”

“Is it? Well, yes – I suppose it is.” They trudged on in silence. Suddenly Judith stopped in her tracks. “Appleby's End!” she said. “Surely they couldn't–”

“Whatever are you talking about?”

“Nothing.” Judith Raven plunged forward again, ankle-deep in snow. “Nothing at all.”

 

 

There was clear moonlight now and the only trouble was the snowdrifts; in places these were deep and they floundered. But Judith had found her bearings again and led the way confidently uphill to where a great elm stood dimly silhouetted against the sky. Here was a lane and they went ahead steadily.

Midwinter and midnight lay about them; their clothes were for the most part soaked in river water; a thin and biting wind blew. But the landscape, softened and withdrawn beneath the snow, was as beautiful as it was still and cold. The Comic Spirit, hitherto so decisively in charge of the wanderers, slipped quietly away and Poetry, stealthy of approach as always, dominated and enfolded the scene. It was mysterious – the more so as their proceedings were now directed to so rational a goal. Bacon, eggs and coffee were the forces beckoning them on. But they followed as to a trumpet of silver.

Appleby's trousers clung wetly to his legs. “
Sed iacet
,” he chanted,

 

“Sed iacet aggeribus niveis informis et alto

Terra gelu…”

 

“Is that the beginning of the story about the Spanish anarchist sculptor?” Judith, her wet hair flattened round her head like a boy, was glancing at him with an obscure new wariness in the moonlight.

“No, we haven't got to that yet. Still some of this Raven business to clear up. What about a race?”

“Not in this overcoat.”

“I'll carry it.”

“I thought I was wearing it to satisfy your sense of decorum.”

“Ready, get set–”

They raced wildly through the snow and fetched up at a bend in the lane, panting. Judith once more huddled into the overcoat. “We might even,” she said, “be home before the family. They would all go ploutering round, you know, knocking up the countryside and saying we must be searched for. I'm surprised we haven't met strings of angry rural bobbies already. Is ‘bobbies' disrespectful?”

“It's not really so many hours since we drifted away from the ford. Your man Heyhoe would scarcely have crawled the length of his own shadow. Not that there isn't a likelihood of our being searched for by now. Do you know, I once or twice thought I saw lanterns moving when we were up in that haystack? But about those Raven skeletons.”

Appleby paused. Pertinacity is among the attributes that the human male instinctively supposes the female to prize. Conceivably it was this, rather than any sharply awakened interest in remoter Ravens, that was now inducing him to pursue the shadowy Ranulph mystery.

“The facts, so far, are these: Ranulph Raven went about collecting other people's skeletons and storing them in his own cupboards at Dream. Every now and then he would select a likely one, clothe it in abundant and flamboyant flesh of his own manufacture, and – lo and behold – there was a new Raven sensational novel or story. A great deal of labour in the way of invention was saved, and there wasn't much danger in the matter of libel for the simple reason that the skeletons he collected were fantasy skeletons: the awful things people would
like
to do. Perhaps he had some abnormal hypnotic power. He wormed his way into the confidence of the rector's wife until she whispered to him how she loved to imagine herself pushing the doctor's lady down a well.”

“For that matter,” Judith interrupted, “not long ago there was an old woman called Mrs Grope–”

“I know, I know. And I know too about Hannah Hoobin's boy. Am I not a detective? And these are just the sort of affairs Ranulph would like were he alive today. But Ranulph never saw the twentieth century. These queer activities of his go back from forty to eighty years. It's past history, as I said before. So what did you mean by saying or believing that I had come down to clear up a family mystery? Explain yourself. And briefly. For presently we must have another race.”

“No more races.”

“Another long race. I find it necessary to make sure that you don't catch pneumonia. Do you think I want to explain to the local coroner how the deceased and I went burrowing in a haystack?”

“I think you would do it austerely and well. Not a blush would be brought to the cheek of the young person. And if it's
you
who gets the pneumonia I'll do a memorial to you to be set up in the yard of Scotland Yard – if Scotland Yard has a yard. It will be called Object.”

“Object?”

“All my carvings are called Object now. It seems to be the thing. Would you mind the–” Judith broke off. “What's your Christian name?”

“John.”

“Would you mind the John Appleby Memorial being called Object? It
could
be called
Objet trouvé
. But that would mean something I'd found lying about and thought interesting – which seems a bit mingy for a Memorial. Perhaps–”

“You told me that you had felt for some time that the whole business ought to be cleared up. You believed, or affected to believe, that I had come to do the job. I'm rather curious to know why. But, of course, you can make a secret of it if you like. Possibly it was just a nervous joke.”

Judith stopped short. “It was nothing of the sort. You know very well I'm not the sort of person to entertain strangers with nervous jokes. Or to believe in bulls–”

“Look out!” Appleby made a dive at his companion, lifted her in air and dropped her over the fence; then he vaulted over himself. “By Jove,” he said, “that was a narrow shave. Did you see him?”

“See what?” Judith picked herself up, a good deal bewildered.

“The bull, of course. And didn't you feel its hot breath down the nape of your neck?”

“I think you're ghastly.” Judith climbed back over the fence. “I think you're the absolute End. What is the absolute End? Mr Appleby's End.” Momentarily she clutched his hand. “What nonsense.”

“Listen.” Appleby was trudging ahead again. “What's really ghastly is the night I'm having. Carriages float away beneath me. Girls conceal me in haystacks. The delusive hospitality of your cousin mocks me across vast frozen distances like the banquets of the Barmecide. The local peasantry are ridiculously hunting me with hurricane lanterns. And my only consolation–”

“Rubbish.”

“–one of my only consolations is the possibility of satisfying a little harmless intellectual curiosity. And perhaps you're curious yourself. Well, feed the machine. Slip in a few more of the facts.”

“Look here, it's a bit thick.” The self-possessed Judith Raven was unaccountably confused. “I mean, it's becoming a false position–”

“Just what
do
you mean?”

“That it's embarrassing talking this rot about Ranulph's ghost. You'll laugh at it.” Judith was assured again. “But the fact is this: that every now and then Ranulph's ghost pops up and does something rather ineffective by way of vindicating Ranulph's character as a seer.”

“Am I laughing?”

“Apparently not. But I expect your intellectual curiosity has abruptly ceased.”

“I don't think it has. For instance, here's a question. That blind-man business ten or twelve years ago: did you or your brother tell anybody about it?”

They were skirting a plantation and the moonlight lay in chequered pools about them. Judith glanced doubtfully at Appleby. “We're sure to have told everybody. Why?”

“That's what we call a routine enquiry. Now tell me about the operations of Ranulph's ghost.”

“Very well. But the trouble is–” Judith broke off, halted and stared into the darkness of the plantation on their right hand. The little, cold wind had died. Everything was utterly still.

“Mr Appleby – John – didn't you hear a shout – or a cry?”