The rivals of Sherlock Holmes : early detective stories (19 page)

“It doesn’t sound that way,” said Awdry.

“You should talk to Emma,” said Munday. “She’s well up on it.”

“Oh?” Anne inquired. “And does she have a personal interest in it?”

“Well, she has family there, you see,” said Munday, and he smoked and watched their faces register shame, the ungainly muteness that had fallen like a curse on Alec’s cronies when in full cry against Africans they remembered his mistress was black. Before they could become conciliatory, Munday said, “It will be midnight soon.”

The guests looked sheepishly at their watches.

“Has everyone got a drink?” asked Awdry.

The empty glasses were filled. They sat in silence, waiting for the hour to strike. Just before midnight,

Anne said, “I loathe New Year’s Eve. You look over the past year and you can’t remember a blessed thing that matters.”

Awdry rose, and with his back to the fire he said, “I’m not going to bore you with a speech. I just want to say how pleased I am that you’re here tonight, and may I wish you all a happy and prosperous New Year.” He lowered his head and began to sing “Auld Lang Syne.” The others stood up and joined in the song. When it was over Awdry said, “Listen.”

Church bells were pealing at the windows, faintly, but the unusual sounds at that hour of the night captured their attention; the muted clangs had no rhythm, they continuously rose and fell, in an irregular tolling, one tone drowning another. Awdry walked through the guests to the front door and threw it open. The bells were louder now and resonant, pealing at various distances in the darkness, their clappers striking like hammers against an anvil.

“I can hear St. Alban’s,” said the vicar. “And there, that tinkling, that’s All Saints.”

They rang and rang in different voices, dismay, joy, male and female, coming together and then chiming separately, descending and growing more rapid, and after a few moments competing, like bell buoys in a storm on a dangerous shore, signaling alarm with despairing insistence.

“It’s a beautiful sound,” said Caroline.

Munday walked away from the others, into the drive, then onto the lawn behind the boxwood hedge. The night was cold, but the chill, after that hot brightly-lit room, composed him. The guests’ voices echoed, traveling to him from the very end of the garden where there was only darkness. Gray and black tissues of clouds hung in the sky above the high branches of bare trees, which stood out clearly. Here and there in the tangle of trees he saw the dark slanting shapes of firs. He walked to a white fountain which materialized in the garden as he studied the darkness. He touched the cold marble. Details came slowly to his eye, nest-clusters in some trees and others heavily bundled with ivy, the bulges reaching to the upper branches; he saw nothing hostile in these densely wrapped trees. As he watched, the church bells diminished in volume and number, and those that remained were like lonely voices sounding distantly in different parts of a nearly deserted land, calling out to all those still trees. Then they ceased altogether. But the silence and the darkness he had imagined hunting him at the Black House no longer frightened him. He welcomed and celebrated it as more subtle than jungle. There was no terror in the dark garden, only an inviting shadow, the vague unfinished shapes of hedge, the suggestions of pathways in the blur of lawn, and the dark so dark it had motion.

“In the summer this garden is full of flowers.” Caroline’s voice was just behind him. But he did not turn.

“I prefer it this way,” said Munday. “The dark. Look, that shroud or hood there. In the daylight it’s probably something terribly ordinary.”

“You must be very lonely to say that”

“No,” he said, “I just like things that can’t be photographed.”

“That’s an odd statement from a scientist.”

“Fm not a scientist,” he said. He turned to her and said, “Why did you ask me at the lecture if I ever got depressed?”    .

She said, “Why did you remember that?” She was beside him now, and she spoke again with a suddenness that jerked at his heart, “Do you know Pilsdon Pen?”

“That hill outside Broadwindsor?”

“Right,” she said. “It’s not far from here. It’s a sharp left, just as you enter the square. The road to Birdsmoor Gate goes around the hill, but quite high. It’s a beauty spot, so there’s a small parking lot for the view.”

“I’ve driven past it,” said Munday.

Caroline glanced behind her and then at Munday, and he saw her teeth when she said quickly, “Meet me there in half an hour.”

She left him and walked towards the doorway where the others were still standing under the bright carriage-lamp. He heard her call out in a new voice, “Doctor Munday’s been showing me the Dog Star!”

So all the moves were hers; but it excited him to hear her conceal them—that disguise was proof of her sincerity. Munday looked at his watch and then followed her across the vapor that lay on the grass.

It was a high windy spot, on the crest of a hill, with room for a dozen cars, and it was empty. Though Caroline had left the party before he did, and Munday was delayed for what seemed to him a long while at the door by Awdry urging him to explain what he meant by his letter to The Times (Awdry knew the letter by heart and kept repeating, “But why misfits?”), she was not at the parking lot when he arrived. A light rain began to fall, making a pattering like sand grains on the car roof; the sound of the rain isolated him and made him think she wouldn’t show up.

Past the gorse bushes, shaking stiffly at the front of the car, was the valley, some lighted windows which were only pinpricks, and a glow at the horizon, the yellow flare of Bridport. He saw through the dribbling side window an arrow-shaped sign lettered To Trail. He sat in the car with his gloves on wondering if he was being made a fool of: he was not used to acting with such haste. He knew the risk, but it would be far worse if she didn’t meet him. The wind sucked at the windows—he wanted relief. But the moments of his suspense, instead of provoking in him calm, only recalled similar suspense in Africa, Claudia’s eye orbiting his unease, her saying in a tone her clumsiness vulgarized into a threat, “Why don’t you ever come over and see me when you’re in town?” The first night at her house while he was talking she had got up from the sofa and left the room, just like that, and called to him. He found her naked, smoking in bed: “Are you very shocked?”

“I think it’s ill-advised to smoke in bed.”

Later, she had wanted to know what African girls were like in bed. Munday said, “Fairly straightforward, one would guess—I don’t really know. I’ve never had one.”

She said, “You’re lying. Martin’s always screwing them.”

“I’m not Martin, thank God.”

“Are you trying to get at me?”

He had made love to Claudia on three occasions; the first time it was her desire, the second his curiosity, the third time routine—the unchanged circumstances of time and place made it so—and that last time was disappointing for both of them, though only she said it. Those nights returned to him now with horrible clarity: how she had stubbed out her cigarette and then rolled onto her back and lifted and spread her legs, holding her buttocks up with the hands, waiting with a kind of anonymous patience for him to enter her. And he had thought: it was this that troubled women most, it gave them fear, the position that made them most vulnerable, the lifted cunt opened and exposed like a smarting valve the slightest force could injure. Pity killed his desire, but he knew that any hesitation on his part would have ridiculed her surrender. “No, don’t stop,” she had said when he finished, and she had reached down and held him inside her and chafed his penis against her with her hand, finally dropping it and crying out—the cry that reached Alice. “Never mind her,” Claudia had said, but she had changed the bottom sheet so the houseboy wouldn’t see the stain. The next time she didn’t stub out her cigarette, but rested it in the ashtray next to the bed, as if she would return to it shortly. It was a rebuke Munday turned into a challenge, and he had made love to her until the cigarette had burned to ashes.

Ten minutes passed like this. The rain was hitting the car with force now. He was sure Caroline wasn’t coming, and he prepared to leave, but slowly, hoping that in his delay she would appear. The road was dark, there was only the rain and wind; his face was against the glass- and he was peering down the road when the offside door opened. Caroline got in—the overhead light had gone on and off, but he saw only her hands and a wet unfamiliar coat.

“I thought you weren’t coming,” he said.

“I’m glad you waited,” she said. “I was parking my car.”

“It’s windy up here.”

She did not reply to that. She said, “Back up and drive a little further on. But don’t go too fast or you’ll miss the turning.”

He reversed and started slowly down the road, commenting on the rain and the fogged windows. But she said nothing, and it seemed wonderful to him that so little had been spoken and yet they knew so much: they carried directions within them, the wordless sex-wish beneath fixed circuits of hinting talk. Caroline leaned forward and wiped at the window. She said, “There, turn left.”

Munday swung the wheel and they descended a steep curving lane, wetter than the other road had been, and in parts awash with streams of water spilling from the bank, and rivulets that drained from the road they had left. This water coursed over stones by the roadside and cleaned them bone-white, and the falling rain gave motion to the loose briars that hung in bunches at the top of the partially eroded banks.

The storm was more intense in this valley, which seemed at times a flooding cavern riotous with wind.

They traveled on the lane for some minutes, came to a junction and, at Caroline’s word, turned again into a straighter lane; narrowing, the lane led downward. Their slow speed made it hard for Munday to judge how far they had gone; he knew they were in Marshwood Vale, but he had lost his bearings—they might be going in circles, they might easily have been in Bwamba, at night on the forest road in a cold April downpour. It was an unusual feeling, for the size of the lanes and their continuous winding, promising arrival at every curve, suggested to Munday progress through the layout of a gigantic game, crisscrossed with routes. They were players, bluffing their way along, and there was a hopeless comedy in making so many turns. The lanes were walled with earthen banks, from which in places clods had fallen and broken in the road, and just a car’s width, the lane passages were deep square grooves cut in the valley slope. The car splashed round another bend, the engine surging and Caroline spoke up: “Look, a badger.”

The creature was caught in the headlights, amid shooting white flecks of rain. Munday slowed the car. The pinched black and white head faced them, the bright eyes flashed, and then it was off, bounding away from the car. Munday picked up speed but stayed well behind the animal, and as if being chased, it leaped onto the bank, sniffing for refuge. Then it blundered down and scrambled to the opposite bank, keeping ahead of the car. Munday continued on, fascinated by the sleek dark thing darting from bank to bank, nosing for a burrow and finally shooting straight along the roadside for some distance, pursued by the moving lights, running in a low glide, its head down, its damp tail switching.

“He’s scared, poor thing,” said Caroline. “Your lights are blinding him.”

Munday flicked off the headlights and stopped the car. They were in complete darkness: the rain was loud, drumming on the roof. Munday said, “We’ll give him a chance,” and pulled off one glove and reached for Caroline’s thigh. He fumbled under her coat and felt her dress, warmed by her leg, and then a pouch of softness he pushed with his excited hand. She parted her legs and helped with her hips, and his hand found the satin-covered jowls of her cunt At once he was aroused; and the dark, the rain, the road, the badger in flight only provoked a greater fury in him. But she said gentiy, “No,” and she stretched out her arm, reached forward, not so much directing him as seeming to grasp for something that remained invisible to him.

Munday turned on the headlights and the badger’s lighted eyes appeared up the road, beyond her hand. The badger had stopped when they had, and for the moment after the lights were switched on it held its look of curiosity on its striped face. It began again to run, and after twenty feet frisked wildly at the bank. Caroline said, “They kill them.”

As she spoke the badger flung itself up the wet gleaming bank and slid into an opening at the top, disappearing through a tangle of brambles.

She said, “They eat their haunches.”

Concentrating on the badger’s flight and distracted by his touching Caroline (it seemed a swift and crazy memory already—had he done it?—he wore only his left glove), Munday had not noticed that the car was climbing. He crossed a stone bridge; he changed gears and the car labored up a grade. They made their way upward now, along a curving lane, the rain falling in bright beaded screens, slanting against their headlights, passed into the road.

“Don’t tell me you walked all this way.”

“I’m not taking you to my house,” she said.

The sentence captivated him and made that circuitous passage through the wet lanes of the valley an extraordinary event: he was lost, she was showing him the way, directing him through a landscape she knew. The route was hers, a surprise, the suspense her doing; he was in her hands.

The road widened and led to another, even wider; there was a cottage, its front door flush with the roadside, and further on a new turning, The Yew Tree’s hanging sign with its motto on a painted pennant, Be Bold—Be Wyse, the lighted telephone booth, the pillar box, the long row of massive oaks, the bend in the road where he had once panicked— now he drove slowly—the telephone pole, and at last a thick rose-bush beating against a fence. Munday parked. He said, “No—not here.”

“Yes,” she said.

“We can’t,” he said. “Emma, she’s—”

“She’s asleep,” said Caroline. “It’s late.” She spoke with a persuasive kindness; but Munday was pleading.

“No, she never sleeps. She’s wakeful.” Munday leaned towards Caroline. “She’s not well. You don’t know.”