Читать книгу: «Holy Disorders»

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Invitation and Warning

As his taxi burrowed its way through the traffic outside Waterloo Station, like an over-zealous bee barging to the front of a dilatory swarm, Geoffrey Vintner re-read the letter and telegram which he had found on his breakfast table that morning.

He felt as unhappy as any man without pretension to the spirit of adventure might feel who has received a threatening letter accompanied by sufficient evidence to suggest that the threats contained in it will probably be carried out. Not for the first time that morning, he regretted that he had ever persuaded himself to set out on his uncomfortable errand, to leave his cottage in Surrey, his cats, his garden (whose disposition he changed almost daily in accordance with some new and generally impracticable fancy), and his estimable and long-suffering housekeeper, Mrs Body. He was not, he considered (and the thought recurred with gloomy frequency as the series of adventures on which he was about to embark went its way), of a mould which engages very successfully in physical violence. Once one is over forty one cannot, even in moments of high enthusiasm, throw oneself heartily into anonymous and mortal battles against unscrupulous men. And when, moreover, one is a finical bachelor, moderately well-off, bred in a secluded country rectory, and with a mind undisturbed by sordid cares and overmastering passions, the thing begins to appear not only impossible but frankly ludicrous. It was no consolation to reflect that men like himself had fought with the courage and tenacity of bears all the way back to the Dunkirk beaches; they at least knew what they were up against.

Threats.

He groped in his coat pocket, pulled out a large, ancient revolver, and looked at it with that mixture of alarm and affection which dog-lovers bestow on a particularly ferocious animal. The driver regarded this proceeding bleakly in the driving-mirror as they entered upon the expanses of Waterloo Bridge. And a new thought entered Geoffrey Vintner’s head as, observing this deprecatory glare, he hastily put the gun away again: people had been known to be abducted in taxis, which hovered about their houses until they emerged, and then conveyed them resistlessly away to some place like Limehouse, where they were dealt with by gangs of armed thugs. He gazed dubiously at the short, stocky figure which sat with rock-like immobility in front of him, dexterously skirting the roundabout at the north end of the bridge. Certainly there was only one train which he could have caught from Surrey that morning, in time to get his connexion from Paddington, so his enemies, whoever they were, would have known when to meet him; on the other hand, he had had some considerable difficulty in finding a taxi at all, and without exception they had all seemed concerned more with eluding his attention than with trying to attract it. So that was probably all right.

He turned and looked with distaste at the traffic which pursued behind, with the erratic movements of topers following a leader from pub to pub. How people knew when they were being trailed he found himself unable to imagine. Moreover, he was not trained to the habit of observation; the outside world normally impressed itself on him as a vague and unmemorable succession of phantasms – a Red Indian could have walked through London by his side without his noticing anything untoward. He contemplated for a moment asking the driver to make a detour, in order to throw possible pursuers off the scent, but suspected that this would be unkindly received. And in any case, the whole thing was too preposterous; it would do no one any good to follow him publicly through the London crowds on a hot summer’s midday.

In this, as it happened, he was wrong.

Any visit which you make to Tolnbridge you will regret.

Nothing explicit about it, of course, but it had a business-like air which was far from inspiring confidence. He noticed with that peculiarly galling sense of annoyance which comes from the shattering of some unimportant illusion that the paper and envelope were distinctive and expensive and the typewriter, to judge from its many typographical eccentricities, easily identifiable – provided one knew where to start looking for it. He abandoned himself to aggrievedness. Criminals should at least try to preserve the pretence of anonymity, and not flaunt unsolvable clues before their victims. The postmark, too – thanks to the conscientiousness of some employee of the GPO – read quite legibly as Tolnbridge; which was what one would expect.

The telegram, loosely held in his left hand, fluttered to the floor. He picked it up, shook it fastidiously free of dirt, and read it through automatically, perhaps hoping to extract from the spidery, insubstantial capitals of the British telegraph system some shred of significance which had previously escaped him. That air of callous gaiety, he reflected bitterly, could have emanated from no one but the sender. It ran:

I AM AT TOLNBRIDGE STAYING AT THE CLERGY HOUSE PRIESTS PRIESTS PRIESTS THE PLACE IS BLACK WITH THEM COME AND PLAY THE CATHEDRAL SERVICES ALL THE ORGANISTS HAVE BEEN SHOT UP DISMAL BUSINESS THE MUSIC WASN’T AS BAD AS ALL THAT EITHER YOU’D BETTER COME AT ONCE BRING ME A BUTTERFLY NET I NEED ONE WIRE BACK COMING NOT COMING PREPARE FOR LONG STAY GERVASE FEN

Accompanying this had been a reply-paid form allowing for a reply of fifty words. It was with a sense of some satisfaction that Geoffrey had filled it in: COMING VINTNER – a satisfaction, however, tempered by the suspicion that Fen would not even notice the sarcasm. Fen was like that.

And now he doubted whether he would have sent that reply at all had it not been for the telegraph-boy hovering about outside the door and his own natural reluctance to take it to the post office later on. Most of our decisions, he reflected, are forced on us by laziness. And, of course, at that stage he had not yet opened his letters.… There were compensations. The Tolnbridge choir was a good one, and the organ, a four-manual Willis, one of the finest in the country. He remembered idly that it had a horn stop which really sounded like a horn, a lovely stopped diapason on the choir, a noble tuba, a thirty-two-foot on the pedals which in its lower register sent a rhythmic pulse of vibration through the whole building, unnerving the faithful…But were these things compensation enough?

In any case – his mental homily prolonged itself as the taxi shot round Trafalgar Square – here he was, involved against his will in some sordid conflict of law and disorder, and in some considerable personal danger. The letter and the telegram in conjunction were proof enough of that. What it was all about was another matter. The telegram, suitably punctuated, suggested that some enemy was engaged in a determined attempt to abolish, by attrition, the church-music of Tolnbridge – the reason, presumably, why his own proximate arrival was so much resented. But this seemed unlikely, not to say fantastic. The organists had been ‘shot up’ – what on earth did that mean? It suggested, ominously, machine-guns – but then Fen was notoriously prone to exaggeration, and cathedral towns in the West of England do not normally harbour gangs. He sighed. Useless to speculate – he was in it, with at least nine-tenths of his boats burnt and the rest manifestly unseaworthy. The only thing to do was to sit back and rely on fate and his own wits if anything happened – neither of which aids, he remembered without satisfaction, had done him any very yeoman service in the past. And what was all this about a butterfly-net…?

The butterfly-net. He hadn’t got it.

He glanced hastily at his watch, and banged on the glass as the taxi rounded Cambridge Circus preparatory to entering the Charing Cross Road.

‘Regent Street,’ he said. The taxi performed a full circle and headed down Shaftesbury Avenue.

A following cab altered its course likewise.

The Regent Street emporium which Geoffrey Vintner eventually selected as being most likely to house a butterfly-net proved to be surprisingly empty, with assistants and customers sweltering in a mid-morning lethargy. It seemed to have been designed with the purpose of evading any overt admission of its function. There were pictures on the walls, and superfluous furnishings, and fat gilt cherubs; while vaguely symbolical figures, standing stiff as Pomeranian grenadiers, supported insouciantly in the small of their backs the ends of the banisters. Before going in, Geoffrey paused to buy a paper, reflecting that any intimations of gang warfare in Tolnbridge would certainly have reached the Press by now. But the Battle of Britain held the headlines, and after crashing into two people while engaged in a search among the smaller items, he postponed further investigation for the time being.

A gigantic placard showing the location of the various departments proved useless from the point of view of butterfly-nets, so he resorted to the inquiry counter. What Fen could want with such a thing as a butterfly-net it was impossible to imagine. Geoffrey had a momentary wild vision of the pair of them pursuing insects across the Devon moors, and looked again, even more doubtfully, at the telegram. But no; it could not by any stretch of the imagination be a mistake; and lepidoptery was as likely to be Fen’s present obsession as anything else.

Butterfly-nets, he learned, were to be had from either the children’s or the sports department; fortunately both were on the same floor. He examined the lift-girl with a professional air of suspicion as she closed the gates on him, and was rewarded with an exaggeratedly indignant stare (‘’aving an eyeful,’ she confided to a friend). Thereupon he retired hastily into his paper, and as he was borne upward through the building, discovered and read the following:

ATTACK ON MUSICIAN

The police have as yet no clue to the assailant of Dr Denis Brooks, Organist of Tolnbridge Cathedral, who was attacked and rendered unconscious while on his way home the evening before last.

Geoffrey cursed the papers for their lack of detail, Fen for his exaggeration, and himself for becoming involved in the business at all. This private ritual of commination concluded, he scratched his nose ruefully; something was going on, anyway. But what had happened to the deputy organist? Presumably he had been banged on the head as well.

The lift came to a shattering stop, and Geoffrey found himself precipitated into the midst of a vast mellay of sports equipment, tenanted only by one plump, pink young assistant, who stood gazing about him with the resignation and despair of Priam amid the ruins of Troy.

‘Have you ever noticed,’ he said gloomily as Geoffrey approached, ‘the way no sports apparatus is ever a decent, symmetrical shape? You can’t pile it up neatly like boxes or books – there are always little bits sticking out on all sides. Roller-skates are the worst.’ His tone deepened, indicating his especial abhorrence of these inconvenient objects. ‘And footballs roll off the shelf as soon as you put them up, and skis you are bound to fall over, and the moment you lean a cricket-bat against the wall it slides down again.’ He looked unhappily at Geoffrey. ‘Is there anything you want? Most people,’ he went on before Geoffrey could reply, ‘have given up sports for the war. I expect they’re better off for it in the end. Muscular development only provides a foothold for fat.’ He sighed.

‘What I really wanted was a butterfly-net,’ said Geoffrey absently; his mind still dwelt on the problem of the organists.

‘A butterfly-net,’ repeated the young man sadly; he seemed to find this information particularly discouraging. ‘It’s the same with them, you see,’ he said, pointing to a row of butterfly-nets propped against a wall. ‘If you stand them on their heads, as it were, the net part sticks out and trips you up; and if you have them as they are now, they look top-heavy and disturb the eye.’ He went over and selected one.

‘Isn’t it rather long?’ said Geoffrey, gazing without enthusiasm at the six feet of bamboo which confronted him.

‘They have to be that,’ said the young man without any perceptible lightening of spirit, ‘or you’d never get near the butterflies at all. Not that you do very often, in any case,’ he added. ‘Most of it’s just blind swiping, really. Would you be wanting a collector’s box?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Ah, well. I don’t blame you. They’re inconvenient things, very heavy to carry about.’ He scrutinized the net again. ‘This will be seventeen-and-six. Ridiculous waste of money, really. I’ll just take the price off.’

The price was attached to the stem of the net with a piece of string that proved impervious to tugging.

‘Won’t it slip off?’ said Geoffrey helpfully; and then, when quite obviously it wouldn’t: ‘Well, it doesn’t matter, anyway.’

‘It’s no bother at all. I’ve got a pair of scissors.’ The pink young man felt helplessly in his pockets: ‘I must have left them in the office. I’m always doing that; and when I do remember, they tear holes in my pockets. Just a minute.’ He had disappeared before Geoffrey could stop him.

The man in the black slouch hat rose from his rather cramped position behind a counter laden with boxing-gloves near the stairhead, and made his way with considerable speed and stealth towards Geoffrey. He carried a blackjack and had the intent expression of one trying to trap a mosquito. The pink young assistant, however, did not stay away as long as he had hoped. Emerging from the office, he took in the situation without apparent surprise, and, acting with commendable presence of mind, put the butterfly-net over the assailant’s head and pulled. The blackjack described an arc through the air and knocked over a pile of roller-skates with a horrifying crash. Geoffrey spun round just in time to see his would-be attacker overbalance backwards and collapse into the middle of a vast medley of sports equipment which stood in the middle of the floor. It expressed its unsymmetrical character by general dissolution. A number of footballs were precipitated to the top of the stairs, down which they careered with increasing momentum to the department below. The Enemy freed himself, cursing noisily, from the butterfly-net, got to his feet, and made for the stairs. The pink young man gave him a resounding crack on the back of his head with one end of a ski, and he fell down again. Geoffrey struggled with his revolver, which had become inextricably involved in the lining of his pocket.

Battle was at once engaged. The Enemy, who was showing remarkable powers of recovery, opened a frontal attack on Geoffrey. The pink young man threw a cricket-ball at him, but it missed and hit Geoffrey instead. Geoffrey fell over and upset a heap of ice-skates, over which the assailant in his turn fell. The pink young man tried to put the net over his head again, but missed his aim and overbalanced. The Enemy regained his feet and threw an ice-skate at Geoffrey, which caught him a windy blow in the stomach as he was still endeavouring to get out his revolver. The pink young man, recovering his balance, smote the Enemy with a cricket-stump. The Enemy subsided, and the pink young man banged inexpertly at his head with a hockey-stick until he became silent. Geoffrey at last succeeded in getting out his revolver, to the accompaniment of an ominous tearing of cloth, and waved it wildly about him.

‘Be careful with that,’ said the pink young man.

‘What happened?’

‘Malicious intent,’ said the other. He picked up the blackjack, tossed it in the air, and nodded sagely. ‘I’m afraid that butterfly-net’s no good now,’ he added, with a relapse into his previous melancholy. ‘Torn to bits. You’d better take another.’ He went over and got one. ‘Seventeen-and-six, I think we said.’ Mechanically Geoffrey produced the money.

A roar of mingled rage and stupefaction from below indicated that the footballs had arrived at their destination. ‘Fielding!’ a voice boomed up at them. ‘What the devil are you doing up there?’

‘I think,’ said the young man pensively, ‘that it would be better if we left – at once.’

‘But your job!’ Geoffrey gazed at him helplessly.

‘I’ve probably lost it, anyway, thanks to this. Something of this sort always seems to happen to me. The last place I was at one of the assistants went mad and took off all her clothes. I wonder if I’ve left anything?’ He buffeted his pockets, as one who searches for matches. ‘I generally do. At least three pairs of gloves a year – in trains.’

‘Come on,’ said Geoffrey urgently. He was feeling unnaturally exhilarated, and obsessed by a primitive desire to escape from the scene of the disturbance. Footsteps clattered up the steps towards them. The lift-girl apocalyptically threw open the doors of the lift, announced, as one ushering in the day of judgement: ‘Sports, children’s, books, ladies’ – shrieked out at the chaos confronting her, and closed the doors again, whence she and her passengers peered out like anxious rabbits awaiting the arrival of green-stuffs. The accidental touch of a button sent the lift shooting earthwards again; from it rapidly diminishing sounds of altercation could be heard.

Geoffrey and the pink young man ran for the stairs.

On their way down, they met a shop-walker and two assistants, pounding grimly upwards.

‘There’s a lunatic up there trying to break up the stock,’ said the young man with a sudden blood-curdling intensity which, by contrast with his normal tones, sounded horrifyingly convincing. ‘Go and see what you can do – I’m off to fetch the police.’

The shop-walker snatched Geoffrey’s gun, which he was still brandishing, and leaped on upwards. Geoffrey engaged in feeble protests.

‘Don’t hang about,’ said the young man, tugging at his sleeve.

They continued their precipitate downward rush to the street.

‘Well, and what was all that about?’ asked the young man, leaning back in his corner of the taxi and stretching out his legs.

Geoffrey deferred replying for a moment. He was engaged in a minute scrutiny of the driver, though obscurely conscious of not knowing what he expected this activity to reveal. No chances must be taken, however; the encounter in the shop indicated that much. He transferred his suspicion to the young man, and prepared to make searching inquiries as to his trustworthiness. It suddenly struck him, however, that this might well appear ungracious, as it certainly would have done.

‘I hardly know,’ he said lamely.

The young man appeared pleased. ‘Then we must go into the matter from the beginning,’ he announced. ‘He nearly got you, you know. Can’t have that sort of thing.’ He proffered his determination to uphold the law a trifle inanely. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Paddington,’ said Geoffrey, and added hastily: ‘That is to say – I mean – possibly.’ The conversation was not going well, and his brief feeling of exhilaration had vanished.

‘I know what it is,’ said the young man. ‘You don’t trust me. And quite right, too. A man in your position oughtn’t to trust anyone. Still, I’m all right, you know; saved you getting a lump on your head the size of an Easter egg.’ He wiped his brow and loosened his collar. ‘My name’s Fielding – Henry Fielding.’

Geoffrey embarked without enthusiasm on a second-rate witticism. ‘Not the author of Tom Jones, I suppose?’ He regretted it the moment it was out.

‘Tom Jones? Never heard of it. A book, is it? Don’t get much time for reading. And you?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I mean, I introduced myself, so I thought you—’

‘Oh, yes, of course, Geoffrey Vintner. And I must thank you for acting as promptly as you did; heaven knows what would have happened to me if you hadn’t interfered.’

‘So do I.’

‘What do you mean – Oh, I see. But it occurs to me now, you know, that we really ought to have stayed and seen the police. It’s all very well dashing off like a couple of schoolboys who’ve been robbing an orchard, but there are certain proprieties to be observed.’ Geoffrey became suddenly bored with this line of thought. ‘Anyway, I had to catch a train.’

‘And our friend,’ said Fielding, ‘was presumably trying to stop you. Which brings us back to the question of what it’s all about.’ He wiped his brow again.

Geoffrey, however, was distracted, idly musing on a Passacaglia and Fugue commissioned from him for the New Year. It had not been going well in any case, and the interruption of his present mission seemed unlikely to prosper it. But not even prospective oblivion will prevent a composer from brooding despondently and maddeningly on his own works. Geoffrey embarked on a mental performance: Ta-ta; ta-ta-ta-ti-ta-ti…

‘I wonder,’ Fielding added, ‘if they’ve anticipated the failure of the first attack, and provided a second line of defence.’

This unexpected confusion of military metaphors shook Geoffrey. The spectral caterwaulings were abruptly stilled. ‘I believe you said that to frighten me,’ he said.

‘Tell me what’s going on. If I’m an enemy, I know already—’

‘I didn’t say—’

‘And if I’m not, I may be able to help.’

So in the end Geoffrey told him. As precise information it amounted to very little.

‘I don’t see that helps much,’ Fielding objected when he had finished. He examined the telegram and letter. ‘And who is this Fen person, anyway?’

‘Professor of English at Oxford. We were up together. I haven’t seen much of him since, though I happened to hear he was going to be in Tolnbridge during the long vac. Why he should send for me—’ Geoffrey made a gesture of humorous resignation, and upset the butterfly-net, which was poised precariously in a transverse position across the interior of the cab. With some acrimony they jerked it into place again.

‘I can’t think,’ said Geoffrey, after contemplating for a moment finishing his previous sentence and deciding against it, ‘why Fen insisted on my bringing that thing.’

‘Rather odd, surely? Is he a collector?’

‘One never quite knows with Fen. In anyone else, though – well, yes, I suppose it would seem odd.’

‘He seems to know something about this Brooks business.’

‘Well, he’s there, of course. And then,’ Geoffrey added as a laborious afterthought, ‘he’s a detective, in a way.’

Fielding looked disconcerted; he had evidently been reserving this rôle for himself and disliked the thought of competition. A little peevishly he asked:

‘Not an official detective, surely?’

‘No, no, amateur. But he’s been very successful.’

‘Gervase Fen – I don’t seem to have heard of him,’ said Fielding. Then after a moment’s thought: ‘What a silly name. Is he in with the police?’ His tone suggested Fen’s complicity in some orgiastic and disgraceful organization.

‘I honestly don’t know. It’s only what I’ve heard.’

‘I wonder if you’d mind my coming with you to Tolnbridge? I’m sick of the store. And with the war on, it seems so remote from anything—’

‘Couldn’t you join up?’

‘No, they won’t have me. I volunteered last November, but they graded me four, I joined the ARP, of course, and I’m thinking of going in for this new LDV racket, but blast it all—’

‘You look healthy enough,’ said Geoffrey.

‘So I am. Nothing wrong with me except shaky eyesight. They don’t grade you four for that, do they?’

‘No. Perhaps,’ Geoffrey suggested encouragingly, ‘you’re suffering from some hidden, fatal disease you haven’t known about.’

Fielding ignored this. ‘I want to do something active about this war – something romantic.’ He mopped his brow again, looking the reverse of romantic. ‘I tried to join the Secret Service, but it was no good. You can’t join the Secret Service in this country. Not just like that.’ And he slapped his hands together to indicate some platonic idea of facility.

Geoffrey considered. In view of what had happened it would almost certainly be very useful to have Fielding with him on his journey, and there was no reason to suspect him of ulterior motive.

‘…After all, war hasn’t become so mechanized that solitary, individual daring no longer matters,’ Fielding was saying; he seemed transported to some Valhalla of Secret Service agents. ‘You’ll laugh at me, of course’ – Geoffrey smiled a hasty and unconvincing negative – ‘but in the long run it is the people who dream of being men of action who are men of action. Admittedly Don Quixote made a fool of himself with the windmills, but when all’s said and done, there probably were giants about.’ He sighed gently as the taxi turned into the Marylebone Road.

‘I should very much like to have you with me,’ said Geoffrey. ‘But look here – what about your job? One must have money.’

‘That’ll be all right. I have some money of my own.’ Fielding assembled his features into a perfunctory expression of surprise. ‘Oh, I ought perhaps to have mentioned it. Debrett, Who’s Who, and such publications, credit me with an earldom.’

Geoffrey summoned up a cheerful laugh, but there was something in Fielding’s assurance which forbade him to utter it.

‘Only very minor, of course,’ the other hastened to explain. ‘And I’ve never done a thing to deserve it, I inherited it.’

‘Then what on earth,’ said Geoffrey, ‘were you doing in that shop?’

‘Store,’ Fielding corrected him solemnly. ‘Well, I heard there was a shortage of people to serve in shops, owing to call-up and so on, so I thought that might be one way I could help. Only temporarily, of course,’ he added warily. ‘Just as a joke,’ he ended feebly.

Geoffrey suppressed his merriment with difficulty.

Fielding suddenly chuckled.

‘I suppose it is rather preposterous, when you come to think of it. By the way’ – a sudden thought struck him – ‘are you Geoffrey Vintner, the composer?’

‘Only very minor, of course.’

They surveyed one another properly for the first time, and found the result pleasing. The taxi clattered into the murk of Paddington. A sudden noise disturbed them.