The Ka of Gifford Hillary (10 page)

Johnny turned away and I walked on towards the firm’s private pier. Lepe lies just outside Southampton Water, a mile or so along the coast to the west, whereas the city is situated near the top of the estuary but on its eastern side. To go round by road entails a twelve-mile run and it is less than half
that distance by water; so, unless the weather is exceptionally bad, I always go back and forth in my motor launch.

Young Belton, who also acts as my chauffeur, usually pilots the launch, as that leaves me free on our trips to and fro to think of what I am going to do, or have been doing, during the day. He is a rather uppish young man, but good with the engines, and one can’t expect everything these days. As I came down the steps he said:

‘We’ve got another passenger this afternoon, Sir. The Prof’s in the cabin.’

It was typical of Belton that he should refer so casually to Professor Evans as ‘the Prof’, although I will admit that Evans has neither the age nor the personality to inspire much respect. He is in his early thirties, a short, dark, hairy little man who buys his clothes off the peg, and without them would be hardly distinguishable from those Celtic ancestors of his who fought the Romans to a standstill in the wild Welsh mountains.

Like many of his race he had a mystic streak and, coupled with genuine brilliance in higher mathematics, it seemed to get him the answers to all sorts of problems; some, but only some, of which had a commercial value. That, of course, was the trouble; he was erratic, pig-headed and only with difficulty could be persuaded to work for his employers’ advantage rather than on the things that suddenly caught his own interest. Had he been more amenable he might have done very much better for himself with some great industrial corporation; but then we could not have afforded to employ him, as the problems connected with boat building are not numerous enough to warrant the retention of a highly paid scientist.

I had come across him eighteen months before in connection with some experiments concerning the resistance of various metals to corrosion by sea-water. He had then been out of a job and, on learning by his own admission the reason, I had offered to take him on at a nominal salary but with quarters and board found. The result, as far as the Company was concerned, had proved moderately satisfactory; as he had produced a paint to which barnacles appeared to be allergic, a solution which lengthened the life of ropes, and several other products which, although expensive, we had
found worth using ourselves, and had also marketed in limited quantities at a profit.

However, I must confess that I had been led to suggest the arrangement in the first place by a private interest. I have already mentioned that out of an income of ten thousand a year seven thousand now goes in taxation; and after having been married to Ankaret for five years I was finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet.

It is not that she was unreasonably extravagant; but I naturally made her a fairly generous allowance and paid for her winter holidays abroad, and I still had to weigh out for my first wife and the children; so running a fair-sized house and doing quite a bit of entertaining there had begun to make me scratch my head when I had to pay the bills. I could, of course, have sold a few hundred of my shares every year without seriously depleting my income, but I am old-fashioned enough to be averse to spending capital, and for some time I had been wondering if I could not put a part of Longshot Hall to a use which would enable me to reduce the cost of its upkeep.

The secrecy with which, in these days, all scientific experiments are conducted fully justified my installing Owen Evans in my home instead of at the Company’s yards; and by making over about a third of the house to his use I was able to save that proportion of rates, heating, light, etc., without having to partition it off or in any way surrender my rights over it. Had he proved a flop I should have felt it incumbent on me to reimburse the Company; but that was a gamble I had taken, and it had come off.

Stepping down into the cabin of the launch, I nodded a greeting and sat down opposite him. A wharf-hand threw the painter down on the forward deck. Belton gave a twist to the wheel and we were nosing our way out into the channel; but it was not until he had the engine going full throttle that Evans leaned towards me and said in a voice that only I could hear:

‘I have got it.’

My mind was still dwelling on the meeting I had just left, and, anyway, for quite a long time I had not given a thought to his activities; so I replied both absently and ungrammatically, ‘Got what?’

The dark eyes beneath his bushy black brows were bright
with excitement, as he answered impatiently: ‘The ray, of course.’

That made me sit up. During the early summer he had been working on a fog-solvent; his theory being, as I understood it, that if certain rays could be projected into fog they would so agitate the mist particles as to cause them to change their structure and disappear. To maintain such a ray for considerable periods over a big area, such as an airfield, would, he had believed, prove too costly; but he thought that it might be developed in a small apparatus with a range of perhaps twenty yards which, if flashed only at intervals, could be brought within the means of the owners of large motor launches and the more expensive makes of car. I had naturally encouraged him to go ahead, as I saw great possibilities in the idea if it could be made a commercial proposition. The public would be certain to demand that buses should be fitted with it, and City Corporations might adopt it for use in beacons at main street crossings.

But, one evening late in June, Evans had told me that, for the time being, he had abandoned work on the fog ray, because the principles involved had given him a line on a much more fascinating problem, and he now hoped to produce a death ray.

I was far from pleased; for whereas I had seen the prospects of a lot of money for my Company out of his first idea, I saw little prospect of making anything out of his second. There is already, I believe, a ray which will form a barrier over an open window and kill any insect that flies into it, and although Evans asserted that his would be powerful enough to kill cattle at a limited range I could think of no practical use for it; except perhaps as a humane killer. It was, of course, just possible that the Ministry of Defence might take it up, but it would obviously be much too dangerous to leave about as a sort of ‘dumb sentry’ and the limitation of its range would render it of little use as an offensive weapon. In consequence, I had tried hard to get him back on to fog dispersal; but he had become sullen, dug his toes in, and flatly refused to be diverted from following up his latest inspiration.

Realising that he must now be referring to his death ray, I was considerably taken aback. After all, it is one of the
things that scientists have been endeavouring to discover for several generations, so a great feather in his cap. Moreover, sub-consciously I had formed the impression that he was only wasting his time and would never achieve practical results; so I exclaimed:

‘D’you really mean you’ve found a way to kill …’

He silenced me with an angry gesture, swivelled his eyes warningly towards Belton, who was at the wheel only some six feet from us, then nodded vigorously.

‘Have I got it, man? No real cause had I to come into Southampton this afternoon; but took the chance to do a bit of shopping, so as to come back with you. All evening I doubt but you’ll be with Lady Ankaret, and I’ve no wish to speak of this in front of her. I thought, though, maybe you’d like to see a demonstration; so this would be as good a way as any to get you alone and ask. Then what about this evening, after dinner, eh?’

‘Fine,’ I agreed at once. ‘It is a great feat to have pulled this off; and I shall be immensely interested. What sort of—er—dish do you propose to cook?’

‘Rabbit,’ he replied tersely.

I nodded. ‘I’ll come through to your lab at about half-past nine, then.’

We fell silent, and soon afterwards the launch was turning west past Calshot Castle. Another five minutes and Belton shut off her engine to glide silently in alongside the jetty that juts out from the private beach below Longshot Hall.

The greater part of the house consists of a solid two-storey block. On the ground floor the principal reception rooms look out over the Solent, and upstairs, in addition to what the Americans term ‘the master suite’, there are two double guest rooms and an extra bathroom. The kitchens and the servants’ quarters are at the back. That is ample accommodation for most people in these days, but there would not have been in the era of large families; so my forebears had built on a wing containing a number of smaller, less lofty rooms, and it was this which I had, more or less, turned over to Owen Evans.

I say ‘more or less’ because I had reserved the right to put up single guests in two of the bedrooms on the ground floor if I wished, and to use another as a store-room; but Evans
had three rooms for his private use and the greater part of the upper floor had been gutted, then roofed over with glass, to make him a laboratory.

Even had he had more in common with Ankaret and me, to have had him with us all the time would have become very irksome; so it had been agreed that he should have his meals sent through to him on a tray from the kitchen and, fearing that he might find such a life lonely, I had also offered to foot the food bill if from time to time he cared to have a friend to stay. But he seemed to be one of those solitary types to whom work is also wife and friends, for he had never made use of his guest room.

On entering the hall we gave one another a vague smile and parted. I got rid of my outdoor things and went into the drawingroom. Ankaret was there curled up on the sofa reading a book. She was wearing a ‘shocking pink’ silk house-coat, and looking very seductive. But she always does; and even after having been married to her for five years there were still times when I felt my pulses quicken at the sight of her.

As I bent over her from behind she tilted back her head, threw an arm round my neck, and pulled my head down. I gave her a long kiss on the mouth, then asked what sort of a day she had had.

‘Oh, all right,’ she shrugged. ‘But I get bored to tears all by myself here.’

‘Now that your leg is no longer painful, you should have asked someone down for the week-end,’ I told her. ‘I did suggest it.’

‘I know you did, Giff, and I ought to have. I’m afraid having done damn all for five weeks has made me terribly lazy.’

‘You can’t have it both ways,’ I said with a smile.

‘No; I suppose not. I really must make an effort and snap out of it now I can get about again. We’ll ask the Wyndhams or the Beddinghams for next week-end. But what about tonight? Let’s ring up Hugh and Margery, or General John, and ask ourselves over for drinks after dinner.’

I shook my head. ‘Sorry, darling, but the Prof has just completed a new toy, and I’ve promised to look into the lab to see him work it. The little man is no end excited about his
success, so I’m afraid he’d be terribly upset if I let him down. But tomorrow and Sunday I’m all yours, so make any arrangements you like.’

Ankaret was never sulky or unreasonable, and she shrugged philosophically. ‘Oh, never mind, then, I’ll fix something for tomorrow. How did your meeting go? From what you said this morning I gathered that it was rather a special one.’

‘It was. It didn’t go too badly. I’ll tell you about it over dinner; but I must leave you now to get down to my Friday chores.’

My Friday chores were the wages, and the payment of bills for the running of the place which lay outside the regular list of Ankaret’s household accounts. The awful spade-work of figuring out tax deductions and proportions of contribution to insurance stamps was done for me by my secretary at the office; so I really had only to see to it that the staff got the wage packets she made up for me by passing them on.

Silvers was my butler-valet, and his wife was our cook. Ankaret had known them since childhood and, hearing that their late mistress had died, had got them to come to us soon after we were married. I had blessed her for it, as it is far from easy to get servants even to consider taking a place at Lepe. The trouble is that this little corner of Hampshire is right off the beaten track. There is not a High Street or a cinema within ten miles of us. But the Silvers were elderly and did not seem to mind that. They adored Ankaret and were dependable old-fashioned servants whom it was a pleasure to have about the house.

Besides them we had only one girl living in, a well-grown eighteen-year-old named Mildred Mallows. She was a local who had not yet found her wings; or perhaps was temporarily enmeshed by the glamour of maiding Ankaret, which was for her the jam on the bread and butter of ordinary housemaid’s work. But, of course, we also had two daily women in to help both her and in the kitchen. There was, too, the outdoor staff: old Eagers, who had once been head gardener of six, but now had to make do with a buxom land-girl and a boy; but the garden produce that was sold paid nearly half their wages. And Belton, of course, was carried by the firm. All the
same it was quite enough to have to pay out every week.

Silvers was in his pantry, and having given him the wage packets for the indoor staff I took the others out to Eagers. In return the old boy handed over to me the week’s takings, which were falling off now that most of the fruit was over; but he told me that he hoped to do quite well with his grapes and chrysanthemums later in the year.

After ten minutes’ chat with him about the garden I returned to the house and went into my library. It hardly justifies the name, as it is quite a small room at the corner of the house and only one of its walls is lined with books; two of the others have windows in them and the fourth a doorway that leads into Ankaret’s drawingroom.

On Saturdays I don’t usually go to the office, but I often bring work home, and if there are people staying in the house I can shut myself up in the library secure from interruption. I have a big old-fashioned roll-topped desk there, which is not a very elegant piece of furniture but highly practical; as I can just slam the top down and lock it at any time without having to tidy up the papers on which I have been working. Opening it up, I put the garden money in the petty-cash box, emptied my brief-case of the papers I had brought back with me, and set to work on the bills.