NGAIO MARSH
Dead Water

COPYRIGHT

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HARPER

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1973

Copyright © Ngaio Marsh Ltd 1963

Ngaio Marsh asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of these works

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006512493

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2010 ISBN: 9780007344796

Version: 2016–09–08

DEDICATION

for Alister and Doris McIntosh with love

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Cast of Characters

1. Prelude

2. Miss Emily

3. Threats

4. Fiasco

5. Holiday Task

6. Green Lady

7. The Yard

8. The Shop

9. Storm

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Wally Trehern | Of Fisherman’s Bay, Portcarrow Island
Jenny Williams | School-mistress
Mrs Trehern | Wally’s mother
James Trehern | Her husband
Dr Maine | Of the Portcarrow Convalescent Home
The Rev. Mr Adrian Carstairs | Rector of Portcarrow
Mrs Carstairs | His wife
Major Keith Barrimore | Landlord of The Boy-and-Lobster
Mrs Barrimore | His wife
Patrick Ferrier | Her son
Miss Elspeth Cost | A shopkeeper
Kenneth Joyce | A journalist
Mrs Thorpe | A patient
Miss Emily Pride | Suzerain of the Island
Mr Ives Nankivell | Mayor of Portcarrow
Superintendent Coombe | Portcarrow Constabulary
Sergeant Pender | Portcarrow Constabulary
PC Carey | Portcarrow Constabulary
PC Pomeroy | Portcarrow Constabulary
Superintendent Roderick |
Alleyn | CID Scotland Yard
Troy Alleyn | His wife
Detective-Inspector Fox | Scotland Yard
Detective-Sergeant Bailey | Scotland Yard
Detective-Sergeant Thompson | Scotland Yard
Sir James Curtis | Home Office Pathologist
Cissy Pollock | Telephonist
Trethaway | A father

CHAPTER 1

Prelude

A boy stumbled up the hillside, half-blinded by tears. He fell and, for a time, choked and sobbed as he lay in the sun but presently blundered on. A lark sang overhead. Farther up the hill he could hear the multiple chatter of running water. The children down by the jetty still chanted after him:

Warty-hog, warty-hog

Put your puddies in the bog

Warty Walter, Warty Walter

Wash your warties in the water.

The spring was near the top. It began as a bubbling pool, cascaded into a miniature waterfall, dived under pebbles, earth and bracken and at last, loquacious and preoccupied, swirled mysteriously underground and was lost. Above the pool stood a boulder, flanked by briars and fern, and above that the brow of the hill and the sun in a clear sky.

He squatted near the waterfall. His legs ached and a spasm jolted his chest. He gasped for breath, beat his hands on the ground and looked at them. Warty-hog. Warts clustered all over his fingers like those black things that covered the legs of the jetty. Two of them bled where he’d cut them. The other kids were told not to touch him.

He thrust his hands under the cold pressure of the cascade. It beat and stung and numbed them, but he screwed up his blubbered eyes and forced them to stay there. Water spurted icily up his arms and into his face.

‘Don’t cry.’

He opened his eyes directly into the sun or would have done so if she hadn’t stood between: tall and greenish, above the big stone and rimmed about with light like something on the telly so that he couldn’t see her properly.

‘Why are you crying?’

He ducked his head, and stared like an animal that couldn’t make up its mind to bolt. He gave a loud, detached sob and left his hands under the water.

‘What’s the matter? Are you hurt? Tell me.’

‘Me ‘ands.’

‘Show me.’

He shook his head and stared.

‘Show me your hands.’

‘They’m mucky.’

‘The water will clean them.’

‘No, t’won’t, then.’

‘Show me.’

He withdrew them. Between clusters of warts his skin had puckered and turned the colour of dead fish. He broke into a loud wail. His nose and eyes ran salt into his open mouth.

From down below a voice, small and distant, halfheartedly chanted: ‘Warty Walter. Warty Walter. Stick your warties in the water.’ Somebody shouted: ‘Aw come on.’ They were going away.

He held out his desecrated hands towards her as if in explanation. Her voice floated down on the sound of the waterfall.

‘Put them under again. If you believe: they will be clean.’

‘Uh?’

‘They will be clean. Say it. Say ‘Please take away my warts.’ Shut your eyes and do as I tell you. Say it again when you go to bed. Remember. Do it.’

He did as she told him. The sound of the cascade grew very loud in his ears. Blobs of light swam across his eyeballs. He heard his own voice very far away, and then nothing. Ice-cold water was bumping his face on drowned pebbles.

When he lifted his head up there was no one between him and the sun.

He sat there letting himself dry and thinking of nothing in particular until the sun went down behind the hill. Then, feeling cold, he returned to the waterfront and his home in the bay.

II

For about twenty-four hours after the event, the affair of Wally Trehern’s warts made very little impression on the Island. His parents were slugabeds: the father under the excuse that he was engaged in night-fishing and the mother without any excuse at all unless it could be found in the gin bottle. They were not a credit to the Island. Wally, who slept in his clothes, got up at his usual time, and went out to the pump for a wash. He did this because somehow or another his new teacher had fixed the idea in his head and he followed it out with the sort of behaviourism that can be established in a domestic animal. He was still little better than half-awake when he saw what had happened.

Nobody knows what goes on in the mind of a child: least of all in a mind like Wally Trehern’s where the process of thought was so sluggish as to be no more than a reflex of simple emotions: pleasure, fear or pride.

He seemed to be feeling proud when he shambled up to his teacher and, before all the school, held out his hands.

‘Why – !’ she said. ‘Why – why – Wally!’ She took both his hands in hers and looked and pressed and looked again. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘It’s not true.’

‘Be’ant mucky,’ he said. ‘All gone,’ and burst out laughing.

The school was on the mainland but the news about Wally Trehern’s warts returned with him and his teacher to the Island. The Island was incorrectly named: it was merely a rocky blob of land at the end of an extremely brief, narrow and low-lying causeway which disappeared at full tide and whenever the seas along that coast ran high. The Island was thus no more than an extension of the tiny fishing village of Portcarrow and yet the handful of people who lived on it were accorded a separate identity as if centuries of tidal gestures had given them an indefinable status. In those parts they talked of ‘islanders’ and ‘villagers’ making a distinction where none really existed.

The Portcarrow school-mistress was Miss Jenny Williams, a young New Zealander who was doing post graduate research in England, and had taken this temporary job to enrich her experience and augment her bursary. She lodged on the Island at The Boy-and-Lobster, a small Jacobean pub, and wrote home enthusiastically about its inconveniences. She was a glowing, russet-coloured girl and looked her best that afternoon, striding across the causeway with the wind snapping at her hair and moulding her summer dress into the explicit simplicity of a shift. Behind her ran, stumbled and tacked poor Wally, who gave from time to time a squawking cry not unlike that of a seagull.

When they arrived on the Island she told him she would like to see his mother. They turned right at the jetty, round a point and into Fisherman’s Bay. The Treherns lived in the least prepossessing of a group of cottages. Jenny could feel nothing but dismay at its smell and that of Mrs Trehern who sat on the doorstep and made ambiguous sounds of greeting.

‘She’m sozzled,’ said Wally, and indeed, it was so.

Jenny said: ‘Wally: would you be very kind and see if you can find me a shell to keep. A pink one.’ She had to repeat this carefully and was not helped by Mrs Trehern suddenly roaring out that if he didn’t do what his teacher said she’d have the hide off of him.

Wally sank his head between his shoulders, shuffled down to the foreshore and disappeared behind a boat.

‘Mrs Trehern,’ Jenny said, ‘I do hope you don’t mind me coming: I just felt I must say how terribly glad I am about Wally’s warts and – and – I did want to ask about how it’s happened. I mean,’ she went on, growing flurried, ‘it’s so extraordinary. Since yesterday. I mean – well – it’s – Isn’t it?’

Mrs Trehern was smiling broadly. She jerked her head and asked Jenny if she would take a little something.

‘No, thank you.’ She waited for a moment and then said: ‘Mrs Trehern, haven’t you noticed? Wally’s hands? Haven’t you seen?’

‘Takes fits,’ said Mrs Trehern. ‘Our Wally!’ she added with an air of profundity. After several false starts she rose and turned into the house. ‘You come on in,’ she shouted bossily. ‘Come on.’

Jenny was spared this ordeal by the arrival of Mr Trehern who lumbered up from the foreshore where she fancied he had been sitting behind his boat. He was followed at a distance by Wally.

James Trehern was a dark, fat man with pale eyes, a slack mouth and a manner that was both suspicious and placatory. He hired out himself and his boat to visitors, fished and did odd jobs about the village and the Island.

He leered uncertainly at Jenny and said it was an uncommon brave afternoon and he hoped she was feeling pretty clever herself. Jenny at once embarked on the disappearance of the warts and found that Trehern had just become aware of it. Wally had shown him his hands.

‘Isn’t it amazing, Mr Trehern?’

‘Proper flabbergasting,’ he agreed without enthusiasm.

‘When did it happen exactly, do you know? Was it yesterday, after school? Or when? Was it – sudden? – I mean his hands were in such a state, weren’t they? I’ve asked him, of course, and he says – he says it’s because of a lady. And something about washing his hands in the spring up there. I’m sorry to pester you like this but I felt I just had to know.’

It was obvious that he thought she was making an unnecessary to-do about the whole affair, but he stared at her with a sort of covert intensity that was extremely disagreeable. A gust of wind snatched at her dress and she tried to pin it between her knees. Trehern’s mouth widened. Mrs Trehern advanced uncertainly from the interior.

Jenny said quickly: ‘Well, never mind, anyway. It’s grand that they’ve gone, isn’t it? I mustn’t keep you. Good evening.’

Mrs Trehern made an ambiguous sound and extended her clenched hand. ‘See yurr,’ she said. She opened her hand. A cascade of soft black shells dropped on the step.

‘Them’s our Wally’s,’ she said. ‘In ‘is bed.’

‘All gone,’ said Wally.

He had come up from the foreshore. When Jenny turned to him, he offered her a real shell. It was broken and discoloured but it was pink. Jenny knelt down to take it. ‘Thank you very much,’ she said. ‘That’s just what I wanted.’

It seemed awful to go away and leave him there. When she looked back he waved to her.

III

That evening in the private tap at The Boy-and-Lobster Wally Trehern’s warts were the principal topic of conversation. It was a fine evening and low-tide fell at eight o’clock. In addition to the regular Islanders, there were patrons who had strolled across the causeway from the village: Dr Maine of the Portcarrow Convalescent Home; the Rector, the Rev. Mr Adrian Carstairs, who liked to show, as was no more than the case, that he was human; and a visitor to the village, a large pale young man with a restless manner and a general air of being on the look-out for something. He was having a drink with Patrick Ferrier, the step-son of the landlord, down from Oxford for the long vacation. Patrick was an engaging fellow with a sensitive mouth, pleasant manners and a quick eye which dwelt pretty often upon Jenny Williams. There was only one other woman in the private beside Jenny. This was Miss Elspeth Cost, a lady with vague hair and a tentative smile who, like Jenny, was staying at The Boy-and-Lobster and was understood to have a shop somewhere and to be interested in handicrafts and the drama.

The landlord, Major Keith Barrimore, stationed between two bars, served both the public and the private taps: the former being used exclusively by local fishermen. Major Barrimore was well-setup and of florid complexion. He shouted rather than spoke, had any amount of professional bonhomie and harmonized perfectly with his background of horse-brasses, bottles, glasses, tankards and sporting prints. He wore a check coat, a yellow waistcoat and a signet ring and kept his hair very smooth.

‘Look at it whichever way you choose,’ Miss Cost said, ‘it’s astounding. Poor little fellow! To think!’

‘Very dramatic,’ said Patrick Ferrier, smiling at Jenny.

‘Well it was,’ she said. ‘Just that.’

‘One hears of these cases,’ said the restless young man, ‘Gipsies and charms and so on.’

‘Yes, I know one does,’ Jenny said. ‘One hears of them but I’ve never met one before. And who, for heaven’s sake, was the green lady?’

There was a brief silence.

‘Ah,’ said Miss Cost. ‘Now that is the really rather wonderful part. The green lady!’ She tipped her head to one side and looked at the rector. ‘M-m –?’ she invited.

‘Poor Wally!’ Mr Carstairs rejoined. ‘All a fairytale, I daresay. It’s a sad case.’

‘The cure isn’t a fairytale,’ Jenny pointed out.

‘No, no, no. Surely not. Surely not,’ he said in a hurry.

‘A fairytale. I wonder. Still pixies in these yurr parts, Rector, d’y’m reckon?’ asked Miss Cost essaying a roughish burr.

Everyone looked extremely uncomfortable.

‘All in the poor kid’s imagination, I should have thought,’ said Major Barrimore and poured himself a double Scotch. ‘Still: damn’ good show, anyway.’

‘What’s the medical opinion?’ Patrick asked.

‘Don’t ask me!’ Dr Maine ejaculated, throwing up his beautifully kept hands. ‘There is no medical opinion as far as I know.’ But seeing perhaps that they all expected more than this from him, he went on half-impatiently. ‘You do, of course, hear of these cases. They’re quite well-established. I’ve heard of an eminent skin-specialist who actually mugged up an incantation or spell or what have-you and used it on his patients with marked success.’

‘There! You see!’ Miss Cost cried out, gently clapping her hands. She became mysterious. ‘You wait!’ she said. ‘You jolly well wait!’

Dr Maine glanced at her distastefully.

‘The cause of warts is not known,’ he said. ‘Probably viral. The boy’s an epileptic,’ he added. ‘Petit mal.’

‘Would that predispose him to this sort of cure?’ Patrick asked.

‘Might,’ Dr Maine said shortly. ‘Might predispose him to the right kind of suggestibility.’ Without looking at the Rector, he added: ‘There’s one feature that sticks out all through the literature of reputed cures by some allegedly supernatural agency. The authentic cases have emotional or nervous connotations.’

‘Not all, surely,’ the Rector suggested.

Dr Maine shot a glance at him. ‘I shouldn’t talk,’ he said. ‘I really know nothing about such matters. The other half, if you please.’

Jenny thought: ‘The Rector feels he ought to nip in and speak up for miracles and he doesn’t like to because he doesn’t want to be parsonic. How tricky it is for them! Dr Maine’s the same, in his way. He doesn’t like talking shop for fear of showing off. English reticence,’ thought Jenny, resolving to make the point in her next letter home. ‘Incorrigible amateurs.’

The restless young man suddenly said: ‘The next round’s on me,’ and astonished everybody.

‘Handsome offer!’ said Major Barrimore. ‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Tell me,’ said the young man expansively and at large. ‘Where is this spring or pool or whatever it is?’

Patrick explained. ‘Up the hill above the jetty.’

‘And the kid’s story is that some lady in green told him to wash his hands in it? And the warts fell off in the night. Is that it?’

‘As far as I could make out,’ Jenny agreed. ‘He’s not at all eloquent, poor Wally.’

‘Wally Trehern, did you say? Local boy?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Were they bad? The warts?’

‘Frightful.’

‘Mightn’t have been just kind of ripe to fall off? Coincidence?’

‘Most unlikely, I’d have thought,’ said Jenny.

‘I see,’ said the young man, weighing it up. ‘Well, what’s everybody having? Same again, all round?’

Everybody murmured assent and Major Barrimore began to pour the drinks.

Jenny said: ‘I could show you a photograph.’

‘No? Could you, though? I’d very much like to see it. I’d be very interested, indeed. Would you?’

She ran up to her room to get it: a colour-slide of the infant-class with Wally in the foreground, his hands dangling. She put it in the viewer and returned to the bar. The young man looked at it intently, whistling to himself. ‘Quite a thing,’ he said. ‘Quite something. Nice sharp picture, too.’

Everybody wanted to look at it. While they were handing it about, the door from the house opened and Mrs Barrimore came in.

She was a beautiful woman, very fine-drawn with an exquisite head of which the bone-structure was so delicate and the eyes so quiet in expression that the mouth seemed like a vivid accident. It was as if an artist, having started out to paint an ascetic, had changed his mind and laid down the lips of a voluptuary.

With a sort of awkward grace that suggested shyness, she moved into the bar, smiling tentatively at nobody in particular. Dr Maine looked quickly at her and stood up. The Rector gave her good-evening and the restless young man offered her a drink. Her husband, without consulting her, poured a glass of lager.

‘Hallo, Mum. We’ve all been talking about Wally’s warts,’ Patrick said.

Mrs Barrimore sat down by Miss Cost. ‘Have you?’ she said. ‘Isn’t it strange? I can’t get over it.’ Her voice was charming: light and very clear. She had the faintest hesitation in her speech and a trick of winding her fingers together. Her son brought her drink to her and she thanked the restless young man rather awkwardly for it. Jenny, who liked her very much, wondered, not for the first time, if her position at The Boy-and-Lobster was distasteful to her and exactly why she seemed so alien to it.

Her entrance brought a little silence in its wake. Dr Maine turned his glass round and round and stared at the contents. Presently Miss Cost broke out in fresh spate of enthusiasm.

‘… Now, you may all laugh as loud as you please,’ she cried with a reckless air. ‘I shan’t mind. I daresay there’s some clever answer explaining it all away or you can, if you choose, call it coincidence. But I don’t care. I’m going to say my little say.’ She held up her glass of port in a dashing manner and gained their reluctant attention. ‘I’m an asthmatic!’ she declared vaingloriously. ‘Since I came here, I’ve had my usual go, regular as clockwork, every evening at half past eight. I daresay some of you have heard me sneezing and wheezing away in my corner. Very well. Now! This evening, when I’d heard about Wally, I walked up to the spring and while I sat there, it came into my mind. Quite suddenly. ‘I wonder.’ And I dipped my fingers in the waterfall –’ She shut her eyes, raised her brows and smiled. The port slopped over on her hand. She replaced the glass. ‘I wished my wee wish,’ she continued. ‘And I sat up there, feeling ever so light and unburdened, and then I came down.’ She pointed dramatically to the bar clock. ‘Look at the time!’ she exulted. ‘Five past ten!’ She slapped her chest. ‘Clear as a bell! And I know, I just know it’s happened. To ME.’

There was a dead silence during which, Jenny thought, everyone listened nervously for asthmatic manifestations from Miss Cost’s chest. There were none.

‘Miss Cost,’ said Patrick Ferrier at last. ‘How perfectly splendid!’ There were general ambiguous murmurs of congratulation. Major Barrimore, looking as if he would like to exchange a wink with somebody, added: ‘Long may it last!’ They were all rather taken aback by the fervency with which she ejaculated. ‘Amen! Yes, indeed. Amen!’ The Rector looked extremely uncomfortable. Dr Maine asked Miss Cost if she’d seen any green ladies while she was about it.

‘N-n-o!’ she said and darted a very unfriendly glance at him.

‘You sound as if you’re not sure of that, Miss Cost.’

‘My eyes were closed,’ she said quickly.

‘I see,’ said Dr Maine.

The restless young man who had been biting at his nails said loudly: ‘Look!’ and having engaged their general attention, declared himself. ‘Look!’ he repeated, ‘I’d better come clean and explain at once that I take a – well, a professional interest in all this. On holiday: but a news-hound’s job’s never done, is it? It seems to me there’s quite a story here. I’m sure my paper would want our readers to hear about it. The London Sun and I’m Kenneth Joyce. “K.J.’s Column.” You know? “What’s The Answer?” Now, what do you all say? Just a news item. Nothing spectacular.’

‘O, no!’ Mrs Barrimore ejaculated and then added: ‘I’m sorry. It’s simply that I really do so dislike that sort of thing.’

‘Couldn’t agree more,’ said Dr Maine. For a second they looked at each other.

‘I really think,’ the Rector said, ‘not. I’m afraid I dislike it too, Mr Joyce.’

‘So do I,’ Jenny said.

‘Do you?’ asked Mr Joyce. ‘I’m sorry about that. I was going to ask if you’d lend me this picture. It’d blow up quite nicely. My paper would pay –’

‘No,’ said Jenny.

‘Golly, how fierce!’ said Mr Joyce, pretending to shrink. He looked about him. ‘Now why not?’ he asked.

Major Barrimore said: ‘I don’t know why not. I can’t say I see anything wrong with it. The thing’s happened, hasn’t it, and it’s damned interesting. Why shouldn’t people hear about it?’

‘O, I do agree,’ cried Miss Cost. ‘I’m sorry but I do so agree with the Major. When the papers are full of such dreadful things shouldn’t we welcome a lovely, lovely true story like Wally’s. O, yes!’

Patrick said to Mr Joyce: ‘Well, at least you declared yourself,’ and grinned at him.

‘He wanted Jenny’s photograph,’ said Mrs Barrimore quietly. ‘So he had to.’

They looked at her with astonishment. ‘Well, honestly, Mama!’ Patrick ejaculated. ‘What a very crisp remark!’

‘An extremely cogent remark,’ said Dr Maine.

‘I don’t think so,’ Major Barrimore said loudly and Jenny was aware of an antagonism that had nothing to do with the matter under discussion.

‘But, of course I had to,’ Mr Joyce conceded with a wide gesture and an air of candour. ‘You’re dead right. I did want the photograph. All the same, it’s a matter of professional etiquette, you know. My paper doesn’t believe in pulling fast ones. That’s not The Sun’s policy, at all. In proof of which I shall retire gracefully upon a divided house.’

He carried his drink over to Miss Cost and sat beside her. Mrs Barrimore got up and moved away. Dr Maine took her empty glass and put it on the bar.

There was an uncomfortable silence, induced perhaps by the general recollection that they had all drunk at Mr Joyce’s expense and a suspicion that his hospitality had not been offered entirely without motive.

Mrs Barrimore said: ‘Good night, everybody,’ and went out.

Patrick moved over to Jenny. ‘I’m going fishing in the morning if it’s fine,’ he said. ‘Seeing it’s a Saturday, would it amuse you to come? It’s a small, filthy boat and I don’t expect to catch anything.’

‘What time?’

‘Dawn. Or soon after. Say half past four.’

‘Crikey! Well, yes, I’d love to if I can wake myself up.’

‘I’ll scratch on your door like one of the Sun King’s courtiers. Which door is it? Frightening, if I scratched on Miss Cost’s!’

Jenny told him. ‘Look at Miss Cost now,’ she said. ‘She’s having a whale of a time with Mr Joyce.’

‘He’s getting a story from her.’

‘O, no!’

‘O, yes! And tomorrow, betimes, he’ll be hunting up Wally and his unspeakable parents. With a camera.’

‘He won’t!’

‘Of course he will. If they’re sober they’ll be enchanted. Watch out for K.J.’s “What’s The Answer” column in The Sun.’

‘I do think the gutter-press in this country’s the rock bottom.’

‘Don’t you have a gutter-press in New Zealand?’

‘Not as low.’

‘Well done, you. All the same, I don’t see why K.J.’s idea strikes you as being so very low. No sex. No drugs. No crime. It’s as clean as a whistle, like Wally’s hands.’ He was looking rather intently into Jenny’s face. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘You didn’t like that, either, did you?’

‘It’s just – I don’t know, or yes, I think I do. Wally’s so vulnerable. I mean, he’s been jeered at and cowed by the other children. He’s been puzzled and lonely and now he’s a comparatively happy little creature. Quite a hero, in a way. He’s not attractive: his sort aren’t, as a rule, but I’ve got an affection for him. Whatever’s happened ought to be private to him.’

‘But he won’t take it in, will he? All the ballyhoo, if there is any ballyhoo? He may even vaguely enjoy it.’

‘I don’t want him to. All right,’ Jenny said crossly, ‘I’m being bloody-minded. Forget it. P’raps it won’t happen.’

‘I think you may depend upon it,’ Patrick rejoined. ‘It will.’

And, in the event, he turned out to be right.

IV

WHAT’S THE ANSWER?

Do You Believe in Fairies?

Wally Trehern does. Small boy of Portcarrow Island had crop of warts that made life a misery.

Other Kids Shunned Him Because of his Disfigurement. So Wally washed his hands in the Pixie Falls and – you’ve guessed it.

This is what they looked like before.

And here they are now.

Wally, seen above with parents, by Pixie Falls, says mysterious green lady ‘told me to wash them off’.

Parents say no other treatment given.

Miss Elspeth Cost (inset) cured of chronic asthma?

Local doctor declines comment.

(Full story on Page 9.)

Dr Maine read the full story, gave an ambiguous ejaculation and started on his morning round.

The Convalescent Home was a very small one: six single rooms for patients, and living quarters for two nurses and for Dr Maine who was a widower. A veranda at the back of the house looked across a large garden and an adjacent field towards the sea and the Island.

At present he had four patients, all convalescent. One of them, an elderly lady, was already up and taking the air on the veranda. He noticed that she, like the others, had been reading The Sun.

‘Well, Mrs Thorpe,’ he said, bending over her, ‘this is a step forward, isn’t it? If you go on behaving nicely we’ll soon have you taking that little drive.’

Mrs Thorpe wanly smiled and nodded. ‘So unspoiled,’ she said waving a hand at the prospect. ‘Not many places left like it. No horrid trippers.’

He sat down beside her, laid his fingers on her pulse and looked at his watch. ‘This is becoming pure routine,’ he said cheerfully.

It was obvious that Mrs Thorpe had a great deal more to say. She scarcely waited for him to snap his watch shut before she began.

‘Dr Maine, have you seen The Sun?’

‘Very clearly. We’re in for a lovely day.’

She made a little dab at him. ‘Don’t be provoking! You know what I mean. The paper. Our news! The Island!’

‘Oh that. Yes, I saw that.’

‘Now, what do you think? Candidly. Do tell me.’

He answered her as he had answered Patrick Ferrier. One heard of such cases. Medically there could be no comment.

‘But you don’t pooh-pooh?’

No, no. He didn’t altogether do that. And now he really must –

As he moved away she said thoughtfully, ‘My little nephew is dreadfully afflicted. They are such an eyesore, aren’t they? And infectious, it’s thought. One can’t help wondering –’

His other patients were full of the news. One of them had a first cousin who suffered abominably from chronic asthma.

Miss Cost read it over and over again: especially the bit on page nine where it said what a martyr she’d been and how she had perfect faith in the waters. She didn’t remember calling them the Pixie Falls but now she came to think of it, the name was pretty. She wished she’d had time to do her hair before Mr Joyce’s friend had taken the snapshot and it would have been nicer if her mouth had been quite shut. But still. At low tide she strolled over to the newsagent’s shop in the village. All their copies of The Sun, unfortunately, had been sold. There had been quite a demand. Miss Cost looked with a professional and disparaging eye at the shop. Nothing really at all in the way of souvenirs and the postcards were very limited. She bought three of the Island and covered the available space with fine writing. Her friend with arthritic hands would be interested.

V

Major Barrimore finished his coffee and replaced the cup with a slightly unsteady hand. His immaculately shaven jaws wore their morning purple tinge and his eyes were dull.

‘Hasn’t been long about it,’ he said, referring to his copy of The Sun. ‘Don’t waste much time, these paper wallahs. Only happened day-before-yesterday.’

He looked at his wife. ‘Well. Haven’t you read it? ‘he asked.

‘I looked at it.’

‘I don’t know what’s got into you. Why’ve you got your knife into this reporter chap? Decent enough fellah of his type.’

‘Yes, I expect he is.’

‘It’ll create a lot of interest. Enormous circulation. Bring people in, I wouldn’t wonder. Quite a bit about The Boy-and-Lobster.’ She didn’t answer and he suddenly shouted at her. ‘Damn it, Margaret, you’re about as cheerful as a dead fish. You’d think there’d been a death on the Island instead of a cure. God knows we could do with some extra custom.’

‘I’m sorry, Keith. I know.’

He turned his paper to the racing page. ‘Where’s that son of yours?’ he said presently.

‘He and Jenny Williams were going to row round as usual to South Bay.’

‘Getting very thick, aren’t they?’

‘Not alarmingly so. She’s a dear girl.’

‘If you can stomach the accent.’

‘Hers is not so very strong do you think?’

‘P’raps not. She’s a fine strapping filly, I will say. Damn’ good legs. Oughtn’t he to be swotting?’

‘He’s working quite hard, really.’

‘Of course you’d say so.’ He lit a cigarette and returned to the racing notes. The telephone rang.

‘I will,’ said Mrs Barrimore.

She picked up the receiver. ‘Boy-and-Lobster. Yes. Yes.’ There was a loud crackle and she said to her husband, ‘It’s from London.’

‘If it’s Mrs Winterbottom,’ said her husband, referring to his suzerain. ‘I’m out.’

After a moment or two the call came through. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Certainly. Yes, we can. A single room? May I have your name?’

There were two other long-distance calls during the day. By the end of the week the five rooms at The Boy-and-Lobster were all engaged.

A correspondence had got underway in The Sun on the subject of faith-healing and unexplained cures. On Friday there were inquiries from a regular television programme.

The school holidays had started and Jenny Williams had come to the end of her job at Portcarrow.

VI

While the Barrimores were engaged in their breakfast discussion, the Rector and Mrs Carstairs were occupied with the same topic. The tone of their conversation was, however, dissimilar.

‘There!’ Mr Carstairs said, smacking The Sun as it lay by his plate. ‘There! Wretched creature! He’s gone and done it!’

‘’T, yes, so he has. I saw. Now for the butcher,’ said Mrs Carstairs who was worrying through the monthly bills.

‘No, Dulcie, but it’s too much. I’m furious,’ said the Rector uncertainly. ‘I’m livid.’

‘Are you? Why? Because of the vulgarity or what? And what,’ Mrs Carstairs continued, ‘does Nankivell mean by saying “2 lbs bst fil.” when we never order fillet let alone best? Stewing steak at the utmost. He must be mad.’

‘It’s not only the vulgarity, Dulcie. It’s the effect on the village.’

‘What effect? And threepence ha’penny is twelve, two, four. It doesn’t even begin to make sense.’

‘It’s not that I don’t rejoice for the boy. I do. I rejoice like anything and remember it in my prayers.’

‘Of course you do,’ said his wife.

‘That’s my whole point. One should be grateful and not jump to conclusions.’

‘I shall speak to Nankivell. What conclusions?’

‘Some ass,’ said the Rector, ‘has put it into the Treherns’ heads that – O dear! – that there’s been a – a –’

‘Miracle?’

‘Don’t! One shouldn’t. It’s not a word to be bandied about. And they are bandying it about, those two.’

‘So much for Nankivell and his rawhide,’ she said, turning to the next bill. ‘No, dear, I’m sure it’s not. All the same it is rather wonderful.’

‘So are all recoveries. Witnesses to God’s mercy, my love.’

‘Were the Treherns drunk?’

‘Yes,’ he said shortly. ‘As owls. The Romans know how to deal with these things. Much more talk and we’ll be in need of a devil’s advocate.’

‘Don’t fuss,’ said Mrs Carstairs, ‘I expect it’ll all simmer down.’

‘I hae me doots,’ her husband darkly rejoined. ‘Yes, Dulcie. I hae me doots.’

VII

‘How big is the Island?’ Jenny asked, turning on her face to brown her back.

‘Teeny. Not more than fourteen acres, I should think.’

‘Who does it belong to?’

‘To an elderly lady called Mrs Fanny Winterbottom who is the widow of a hairpin king. He changed over to bobby-pins at the right moment and became a millionaire. The Island might be called his Folly.’

‘Pub and all?’

‘Pub and all. My mother,’ Patrick said, ‘has shares in the pub. She took it on when my step-father was axed out of the Army.’

‘It’s Heaven: the Island. Not too pretty. This bay might almost be at home. I’ll be sorry to go.’

‘Do you get homesick, Jenny?’

‘A bit. Sometimes. I miss the mountains and the way people think. All the same, it’s fun trying to get tuned-in. At first, I was all prickles and antipodean prejudice, belly-aching away about living-conditions like the Treherns’ cottage and hidebound attitudes and so on. But now –’ she squinted up at Patrick. ‘It’s funny,’ she said, ‘but I resent that rotten thing in the paper much more than you do and it’s not only because of Wally. It’s a kind of insult to the Island.’

‘It made me quite cross too, you know.’

‘English understatement. Typical example of.’

He gave her a light smack on the seat.

‘When I think,’ Jenny continued, working herself into a rage, ‘of how that brute winkled the school group out of the Treherns and when I think how he had the damned impertinence to put a ring round me –’

‘“Red-headed Jennifer Williams says warts were frightful”,’ Patrick quoted.

‘How he dared!’

‘It’s not red, actually. In the sun it’s copper. No, gold almost.’

‘Never you mind what it is. O Patrick –’

‘Don’t say “Ow Pettruck”.’

‘Shut up.’

‘Well, you asked me to stop you. And it is my name.’

‘All right. Ae-oh, Pe-ah-trick, then.’

‘What?’

‘Do you suppose it might lead to a ghastly invasion? People smothered in warts and whistling with asthma bearing down from all points of the compass?’

‘Charabancs.’

‘A Giffte Shoppe.’

‘Wire-netting round the spring.’

‘And a bob to get in.’

‘It’s a daunting picture,’ Patrick said. He picked up a stone and hurled it into the English Channel. ‘I suppose,’ he muttered, ‘it would be profitable.’

‘No doubt.’ Jenny turned to look at him and sat up. ‘Oh, no doubt,’ she repeated. ‘If that’s a consideration.’

‘My dear, virtuous Jenny, of course it’s a consideration. I don’t know whether, in your idyllic antipodes, you’ve come across the problem of constant hardupness. If you haven’t I can assure you it’s not much cop.’

‘Well, but I have. And, Patrick, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’

‘I’ll forgive you. I’ll go further and tell you that unless things look up a bit at The Boy-and-Lobster or, alternatively, unless my step-father can be moved to close his account with his bookmaker and keep his hands off the whisky bottle you’ll be outstaying us on the Island.’

‘Patrick!’

‘I’m afraid so. And the gentlemen of the Inns of Court will be able to offer their dinners to some more worthy candidate. I shan’t eat them. I shall come down from Oxford and sell plastic combs from door to door. Will you buy one for your red-gold hair?’ Patrick began to throw stones as fast as he could pick them up. ‘It’s not only that,’ he said presently. ‘It’s my Mama. She’s in a pretty dim situation, anyway, but here, at least, she’s –’ He stood up. ‘Well, Jenny,’ he said. ‘There’s a sample of the English reticence that strikes you as being so comical.’ He walked down to the boat and hauled it an unnecessary inch or two up the beach.

Jenny felt helpless. She watched him and thought that he made a pleasing figure against the sea as he tugged back in the classic posture of controlled energy.

‘What am I to say to him?’ she wondered. ‘And does it matter what I say?’

He took their luncheon basket out of the boat and returned to her.

‘Sorry about all that,’ he said. ‘Shall we bathe before the tide changes and then eat? Come on.’

She followed him down to the sea and lost her sensation of inadequacy as she battled against the incoming tide. They swam, together and apart, until they were tired and then returned to the beach and had their luncheon. Patrick was well-mannered and attentive and asked her a great many questions about New Zealand and the job she hoped to get, teaching English in Paris. It was not until they had decided to row back to their own side of the Island and he had shipped his oars, that he returned to the subject that waited, Jenny felt sure, at the back of both their minds.

‘There’s the brow of the hill,’ he said. ‘Just above our beach. And below it on the far side, is the spring. Did you notice that Miss Cost, in her interview, talked about the Pixie Falls?’

‘I did. With nausea.’

He rowed round the point into Fisherman’s Bay.

‘Sentiment and expediency,’ he said, ‘are uneasy bedfellows. But, of course, it doesn’t arise. It’s quite safe to strike an attitude and say you’d rather sell plastic combs than see the prostitution of the place you love. There won’t be any upsurge of an affluent society on Portcarrow Island. It will stay like this – as we both admire it, Jenny. Only we shan’t be here to see. Two years from now and everybody will have forgotten about Wally Trehern’s warts.’

He could scarcely have been more at fault. Before two years had passed everybody in Great Britain who could read a newspaper knew all about Wally Trehern’s warts and because of them the Island had been transformed.

CHAPTER 2

Miss Emily

‘The trouble with my family,’ said Miss Emily Pride, speaking in exquisite French and transferring her gaze from Alleyn to some distant object, ‘is that they go too far.’

Her voice was pitched on the high didactic note she liked to employ for sustained narrative. The sound of it carried Alleyn back through time on a wave of nostalgia. Here he had sat, in this very room that was so much less changed than he or Miss Emily. Here, a candidate for the Diplomatic Service, he had pounded away at French irregular verbs and listened to entrancing scandals of the days when Miss Emily’s papa had been chaplain at our embassy in Paris. How old could she be now? Eighty? He pulled himself together and gave her his full attention.

‘My sister, Fanny Winterbottom,’ Miss Emily announced, ‘was not free from this fault. I recall an informal entertainment at our embassy in which she was invited to take part. It was a burlesque. Fanny was grotesquely attired and carried a vegetable bouquet. She was not without talent of a farouche sort and made something of a hit. Verb. sap.: as you shall hear. Inflamed by success she improvised a short equivocal speech at the end of which she flung her bouquet at H.E. It struck him in the diaphragm and might well have led to an incident.’

Miss Emily recalled her distant gaze and focused it upon Alleyn. ‘We are none of us free from this wild strain,’ she said, ‘but in my sister Fanny its manifestations were extreme. I cannot help but think there is a connection.’

‘Miss Emily, I don’t quite see what you mean.’

‘Then you are duller than your early promise led me to expect. Let me elaborate.’ This had always been an ominous threat with Miss Emily. She resumed her narrative style.

‘My sister Fanny,’ she said, ‘married. A Mr George Winterbottom who was profitably engaged in Trade. So much for him. He died, leaving her a childless widow with a more than respectable fortune. Included in her inheritance was the soi-disant island which I mentioned in my letter.’

‘Portcarrow?’

‘Precisely. You cannot be unaware of recent events on this otherwise characterless promontory.’

‘No, indeed.’

‘In that case I shall not elaborate. Suffice it to remind you that within the last two years there has arisen, fructified and flourished, a cult of which I entirely disapprove and which is the cause of my present concern and of my calling upon your advice.’

She paused. ‘Anything I can do, of course –’ Alleyn said.

‘Thank you. Your accent has deteriorated. To continue. Fanny, intemperate as ever, encouraged her tenants in their wart-claims. She visited the Island, interviewed the child in question, and, having at the time an infected outbreak on her thumb, plunged it in the spring whose extreme coldness possibly caused it to burst. It was no doubt ripe to do so but Fanny darted about talking of miracles. There were other cases of an equally hysterical character. The thing had caught on and my sister exploited it. The inn was enlarged, the spring was enclosed, advertisements appeared in the papers. A shop was erected on the Island. The residents, I understand, are making money hand-over-fist.’

‘I should imagine so.’

‘Very well. My sister Fanny (at the age of 87), has died. I have inherited her estates. I need hardly tell you that I refuse to countenance this unseemly charade, still less to profit by it.’

‘You propose to sell the place?’

‘Certainly not. Do,’ said Miss Emily sharply, ‘pull yourself together, Roderique. This is not what I expect of you.’

‘I beg your pardon, Miss Emily.’

She waved her hand. ‘To sell would be to profit by its spurious fame and allow this nonsense full play. No, I intend to restore the Island to its former state. I have instructed my solicitors to acquaint the persons concerned.’

‘I see,’ said Alleyn. He got up and stood looking down at his old tutoress. How completely Miss Emily had taken on the character of a certain type of elderly Frenchwoman. Her black clothes seemed to disclaim, clear-sightedly, all pretence to allure. Her complexion was grey: her jewellery of jet and gold. She wore a general air of disassociated fustiness. Her composure was absolute. The setting was perfectly consonant with the person: pieces of buhl; formal, upholstered, and therefore dingy, chairs; yellowing photographs, among which his own young, thin face stared back at him, and an unalterable arrangement of dyed pampas plumes in an elaborate vase. For Miss Emily, her room was absolutely comme-il-faut. Yes, after all, she must be –

‘At the age of eighty-three,’ she said, with uncanny prescience, ‘I am not to be moved. If that is in your mind, Roderique.’

‘I’m much too frightened of you, Miss Emily, to attempt any such task.’

‘Ah, no!’ she said in English. ‘Don’t say that! I hope not.’

He kissed her dry little hand as she had taught him to do. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘tell me more about it. What is your plan?’

Miss Emily reverted to the French language. ‘In effect, as I have told you, to restore the status quo. Ultimately I shall remove the enclosure, shut the shop and issue a general announcement disclaiming and exposing the entire affair.’

Alleyn said: ‘I’ve never been able to make up my mind about these matters. The cure of warts by apparently irrational means is too well-established to be questioned. And even when you admit the vast number of failures, there is a pretty substantial case to be made out for certain types of faith-healing. Or so I understand. I can’t help wondering why you are so very fierce about it all, Miss Emily. If you are repelled by the inevitable vulgarities, of course –’

‘As, of course, I am. Still more, by the exploitation of the spring as a business concern. But most of all by personal experience of a case that failed: a very dear friend who suffered from a malignancy and who was absolutely – but I assure you, absolutely – persuaded it would be cured by such means. The utter cruelty of her disillusionment, her incredulity, her agonized disappointment and her death: these made a bitter impression upon me. I would sooner die myself,’ Miss Emily said with the utmost vigour, ‘than profit in the smallest degree from such another tragedy.’

There was a brief silence. ‘Yes,’ Alleyn said. ‘That does, indeed, explain your attitude.’

‘But not my reason for soliciting your help. I must tell you that I have written to Major Barrimore who is the incumbent of the inn, and informed him of my decision. I have announced my intention of visiting the Island to see that this decision is carried out. And, since she will no doubt wish to provide for herself, I have also written to the proprietress of the shop, a Miss Elspeth Cost. I have given her three months’ notice, unless she chooses to maintain the place as a normal establishment and refrain from exploiting the spring or mounting a preposterous anniversary festival which, I am informed, she has put in hand and which has been widely advertised in the Press.’

‘Major Barrimore and Miss Cost must have been startled by your letters.’

‘So much so, perhaps, that they have lost the power of communication. I wrote a week ago. There has been no formal acknowledgment.’

She said this with such a meaning air that he felt he was expected to take it up. ‘Has there been an informal one? ‘he ventured.

‘Judge for yourself,’ said Miss Emily, crisply.

She went to her desk, and returned with several sheets of paper which she handed to him.

Alleyn glanced at the first, paused, and then laid them all in a row on an occasional table. There were five. ‘Hell!’ he thought, ‘this means a go with Miss Emily.’ They were in the familiar form of newsprint pasted on ruled paper which had been wrenched from an exercise book. The first presented an account of several cures effected by the springs and was headed with unintentional ambiguity, ‘Pixie Falls Again.’ It was, he recognized, from the London Sun. Underneath the cutting was an irregularly assembled sentence of separated words, all in newsprint.

‘Do not Attempt THREAT to close you are WARNED.’ The second read, simply: ‘DANGER keep OUT,’ the third, ‘Desecration will be prevented all costs,’ the fourth: ‘Residents are prepared interference will prove FATAL,’ and the last, in one strip, ‘DEATH OF ELDERLY WOMAN’ with a piecemeal addendum ‘this could be you.’

‘Well,’ Alleyn said, ‘that’s a pretty collection, I must say. When did they come?’

‘One by one, over the last five days. The first must have been posted immediately after the arrival of my letter.’

‘Have you kept the envelopes?’

‘Yes. The postmark is Portcarrow.’

‘May I see them?’

She produced them: five cheap envelopes. The address had been built up from newsprint.

‘Will you let me keep these? And the letters?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Any idea who sent them?’ he asked.

‘None.’

‘Who has your address?’

‘The landlord. Major Barrimore.’

‘It’s an easy one to assemble from any paper. Thirty-seven Forecast Street. Wait a moment though. This one wasn’t built up piece-meal. It’s all in one. I don’t recognize the type.’

‘Possibly a local paper. At the time of my inheritance.’

‘Yes. Almost certainly.’

He asked her for a larger envelope and put the collection into it.

‘When do you plan to go to Portcarrow?’

‘On Monday,’ said Miss Emily composedly. ‘Without fail.’

Alleyn thought for a moment and then sat down and took her hand in his. ‘Now, my dear Miss Emily,’ he said. ‘Please do listen to what I’m going to say – in English, if you don’t mind.’

‘Naturally, I shall listen carefully since I have invited your professional opinion. As to speaking in English – very well, if you prefer it. Enfin, en ce moment, on ne donne pas une leçon de français.’

‘No. One gives, if you’ll forgive me, a lesson in sensible behaviour. Now, I don’t suggest for a minute that these messages mean, literally, what they seem to threaten. Possibly they are simply intended to put you off and if they fail to do that, you may hear no more about it. On the other hand they do suggest that you have an enemy at Portcarrow. If you go there you will invite unpleasant reactions.’

‘I am perfectly well aware of that. Obviously. And,’ said Miss Emily on a rising note, ‘if this person imagines that I am to be frightened off –’

‘Now, wait a bit. There’s no real need for you to go, is there? The whole thing can be done, and done efficiently, by your solicitors. It would be a – a dignified and reasonable way of settling.’

‘Until I have seen for myself what goes on in the Island I cannot give explicit instructions.’

‘But you can. You can get a report.’

‘That,’ said Miss Emily, ‘would not be satisfactory.’

He could have shaken her.

‘Have you,’ he asked, ‘shown these things to your solicitors.’

‘I have not.’

‘I’m sure they would give you the same advice.’

‘I should not take it.’

‘Suppose this person means to do exactly what the messages threaten? Offer violence? It might well be, you know.’

‘That is precisely why I have sought your advice. I am aware that I should take steps to protect myself. What are they? I am not,’ Miss Emily said, ‘proficient in the use of small-arms and I understand that, in any case, one requires a permit. No doubt in your position, you could obtain one and might possibly be so very kind as to give me a little instruction.’

‘I shall not fiddle a small-arms permit for you and nor shall I teach you to be quick on the draw. The suggestion is ridiculous.’

‘There are, perhaps, other precautions,’ she conceded, ‘such as walking down the centre of the road, remaining indoors after dark and making no assignations at unfrequented rendezvous.’

Alleyn contemplated his old instructress. Was there or was there not a remote twinkle in that dead-pan eye?

‘I think,’ he said, ‘you are making a nonsense of me.’

‘Who’s being ridiculous now?’ asked Miss Emily tartly.

He stood up. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘As a police officer it’s my duty to tell you that I think it extremely unwise for you to go to Portcarrow. As a grateful, elderly, ex-pupil, I assure you that I shall be extremely fussed about you if you’re obstinate enough to persist in your plan. Dear Miss Emily,’ said Alleyn, with a change of tone, ‘do, for the love of Mike, pipe down and stay where you are.’

‘You would have been successful,’ she said, ‘if you had continued in the Corps Diplomatique. I have never comprehended why you elected to change.’

‘Obviously, I’ve had no success in this instance.’

‘No. I shall go. But I am infinitely obliged to you, Roderique.’

‘I suppose this must be put down to the wild strain in your blood.’

‘Possibly.’ Indicating that the audience was concluded, she rose and reverted to French. ‘You will give my fondest salutations to your wife and son?’

‘Thank you. Troy sent all sorts of messages to you.’

‘You appear to be a little fatigued. When is your vacation?’

‘When I can snatch it. I hope, quite soon,’ Alleyn said and was at once alarmed by a look of low cunning in Miss Emily. ‘Please don’t go,’ he begged her.

She placed her hand in the correct position to be kissed. ‘Au revoir,’ she said, ‘et mille remerciements.’

‘Mes hommages, madame,’ said Alleyn crossly. With the profoundest misgivings he took his leave of Miss Emily.

II

It was nine o’clock in the evening when the London train reached Dunlowman where one changed for the Portcarrow bus. On alighting, Jenny was confronted by several posters depicting a fanciful Green Lady across whose image was superimposed a large notice advertising ‘The Festival of the Spring.’ She had not recovered from this shock when she received a second one in the person of Patrick Ferrier. There he was, looking much the same after nearly two years, edging his way through the crowd, quite a largish one, that moved towards the barrier. ‘Jenny!’ he called. ‘Hi! I’ve come to meet you.’

‘But it’s miles and miles!’ Jenny cried, delighted to see him.

‘A bagatelle. Hold on. Here I come.’

He reached her and seized her suitcases. ‘This is fun,’ he said. ‘I’m so glad.’

Outside the station a number of people had collected under a sign that read ‘Portcarrow Bus.’ Jenny watched them as she waited for Patrick to fetch his car. They looked, she thought, a singularly mixed bunch and yet there was something about them – what was it? – that gave them an exclusive air, as if they belonged to some rather outlandish sect. The bus drew up and as these people began to climb in, she saw that among them there was a girl wearing a steel brace on her leg. Further along the queue a man with an emaciated face and terrible eyes quietly waited his turn. There was a plain, heavy youth with a bandaged ear and a woman who laughed repeatedly, it seemed without cause, and drew no response from her companion, an older woman, who kept her hand under the other’s forearm and looked ahead. They filed into the bus and although there were no other outward signs of the element that united them, Jenny knew what it was.

Patrick drove up in a two-seater. He put her luggage into a boot that was about a quarter of the size of the bonnet and in a moment they had shot away down the street.

‘This is very handsome of you, Patrick,’ Jenny said. ‘And what a car!’

‘Isn’t she pleasant?’

‘New, I imagine.’

‘Yes. To celebrate. I’m eating my dinners, after all, Jenny. Do you remember?’

‘Of course. I do congratulate you.’

‘You may not be so polite when you see how it’s been achieved, however. Your wildest fantasies could scarcely match the present reality of the Island.’

‘I did see the English papers in Paris and your letters were fairly explicit.’

‘Nevertheless you’re in for a shock, I promise you.’

‘I expect I can take it.’

‘Actually, I rather wondered if we ought to ask you.’

‘It was sweet of your mama and I’m delighted to come. Patrick, it’s wonderful to be back in England. When I saw the Battersea power-station, I cried. For sheer pleasure.’

‘You’ll probably roar like a bull when you see Portcarrow and not for pleasure, either. You haven’t lost your susceptibility for places, I see. By the way,’ Patrick said after a pause, ‘you’ve arrived for a crisis.’

‘What sort of crisis?’

‘In the person of an old, old angry lady called Miss Emily Pride, who has inherited the Island from her sister (Winterbottom, deceased). She shares your views about exploiting the spring. You ought to get on like houses on fire.’

‘What’s she going to do?’

‘Shut up shop unless the combined efforts of interested parties can steer her off. Everybody’s in a frightful taking-on about it. She arrives on Monday, breathing restoration and fury.’

‘Like a wicked fairy godmother?’

‘Very like. Probably flourishing a black umbrella and emitting sparks. She’s flying into a pretty solid wall of opposition. Of course,’ Patrick said abruptly, ‘the whole thing has been fantastic. For some reason the initial story caught on. It was the silly season and the papers, as you may remember, played it up. Wally’s warts became big news. That led to the first lot of casual visitors. Mrs Winterbottom’s men of business began to make interested noises and the gold-rush, to coin a phrase, set in. Since then it’s never looked back.’

They had passed through the suburbs of Dunlowman and were driving along a road that ran out towards the coast.

‘It was nice getting your occasional letters,’ Patrick said, presently. ‘Operative word “occasional”.’

‘And yours.’

‘I’m glad you haven’t succumbed to the urge for black satin and menacing jewellery that seems to overtake so many girls who get jobs in France. But there’s a change, all the same.’

‘You’re not going to suggest I’ve got a phoney foreign accent?’

‘No, indeed. You’ve got no accent at all.’

‘And that, no doubt, makes the change. I expect having to speak French has cured it.’

‘You must converse with Miss Pride. She is, or was, before she succeeded to the Winterbottom riches, a terrifically high-powered coach for chaps entering the Foreign Service. She’s got a network of little spokes all round her mouth from making those exacting noises that are required by the language.’

‘You’ve seen her, then?’

‘Once. She visited with her sister about a year ago and left in a rage.’

‘I suppose,’ Jenny said after a pause, ‘this is really very serious, this crisis?’

‘It’s hell,’ he rejoined with surprising violence.

Jenny asked about Wally Trehern and was told that he had become a menace. ‘He doesn’t know where he is but he knows he’s the star-turn,’ Patrick said. ‘People make little pilgrimages to the cottage which has been tarted up in a sort of Peggotty-style Kitsch. Seaweed round the door almost, and a boat in a bottle. Mrs Trehern keeps herself to herself and the gin bottle but Trehern is a new man. He exudes a kind of honest-tar sanctity and sells Wally to the pilgrims.’

‘You appal me.’

‘I thought you’d better know the worst. What’s more, there’s an Anniversary Festival next Saturday, organized by Miss Cost. A choral procession to the Spring and Wally, dressed up like a wee fisher lad, reciting doggerel if he can remember it, poor little devil.’

‘Don’t!’ Jenny exclaimed. ‘Not true!’

‘True, I’m afraid.’

‘But Patrick – about the cures? The people that come? What happens?’

Patrick waited for a moment. He then said in a voice that held no overtones of irony: ‘I suppose, you know, it’s what always happens in these cases. Failure after failure until one thinks the whole thing is an infamous racket and is bitterly ashamed of having any part of it. And then, for no apparent reason, one, perhaps two, perhaps a few more, people do exactly what the others have done but go away without their warts or their migraine or their asthma or their chronic diarrhoea. Their gratitude and sheer exuberance! You can’t think what it’s like, Jenny. So then, of course, one diddles oneself – or is it diddling? – into imagining these cases wipe out all the others and all the ballyhoo, and my fees and this car, and Miss Cost’s Giffte Shoppe. She really has called it that, you know. She sold her former establishment and set up another on the Island. She sells tiny plastic models of the Green Lady and pamphlets she’s written herself, as well as handwoven jerkins and other novelties that I haven’t the face to enumerate. Are you sorry you came?’

‘I don’t think so. And your mother? What does she think?’

‘Who knows?’ Patrick said, simply. ‘She has a gift for detachment, my mama.’

‘And Dr Maine?’

‘Why he?’ Patrick said sharply, and then: ‘Sorry: Why not? Bob Maine’s nursing home is now quite large and invariably full.’

Feeling she had blundered, Jenny said: ‘And the Rector? How on earth has he reacted?’

‘With doctrinal léger de main. No official recognition on the one hand. Proper acknowledgments in the right quarter on the other. Jolly sensible of him, in my view.’

Presently they swept up the downs that lie behind the coastline, turned into a steep lane and were, suddenly, on the cliffs above Portcarrow.

The first thing that Jenny noticed was a red neon sign, glaring up through the dusk: ‘Boy-and-Lobster.’ The tide was almost full and the sign was shiftingly reflected in dark water. Next, she saw that a string of coloured lights connected the Island with the village and that the village itself must now extend along the foreshore for some distance. Lamps and windows, following the convolutions of bay and headland, suggested a necklace that had been carelessly thrown down on some night-blue material. She supposed that in a way the effect must be called pretty. There was a number of cars parked along the cliffs with people making love in them or merely staring out to sea. A large, prefabricated, multiple garage had been built at the roadside. There was also a café.

‘There you have it,’ Patrick said. ‘We may as well take the plunge.’

They did so literally, down a precipitous and narrow descent. That at least had not changed and nor at first sight had the village itself. There was the old post-office-shop and, farther along, the Portcarrow Arms with a new coat of paint. ‘This is now referred to as the Old Part,’ said Patrick. ‘Elsewhere there’s a rash of boarding establishments and a multiple store. Trehern, by the way is Ye Ancient Ferryman. I’ll put you down with your suitcase at the jetty, dig him out of the pub and park the car. OK?’

There was nobody about down by the jetty. The high tide slapped quietly against wet pylons and whispered and dragged along the foreshore. The dank smell of it was pleasant and familiar. Jenny looked across the narrow gap to the Island. There was a lamp now, at the landing and a group of men stood by it. Their voices sounded clear and tranquil. She saw that the coloured lights were strung on metal poles mounted in concrete, round whose bases sea-water eddied and slopped, only just covering the causeway.

Patrick returned and with him Trehern who was effusive in salutations and wore a peaked cap with ‘Boy-and-Lobster’ on it.

‘There’s a motor launch,’ Patrick said, pointing to it. ‘For the peak hours. But we’ll row over, shall we?’ He led the way down the jetty to where a smart dinghy was tied up. She was called, inevitably, The Pixie.

‘There were lots of people in the bus,’ said Jenny.

‘I expect so,’ he rejoined, helping her into the dinghy. ‘For the Festival, you know.’

‘Ar, the por souls!’ Trehern ejaculated. ‘May the Heavenly Powers bring them release from their afflictions.’

‘Cast off,’ said Patrick.

The gurgle of water and rhythmic clunk of oars in their rowlocks carried Jenny back to the days when she and Patrick used to visit their little bay.

‘It’s a warm, still night, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘Isn’t it?’ Patrick agreed. He was beside her in the stern. He slipped his arm round her. ‘Do you know,’ he said in her ear, ‘it’s extraordinarily pleasant to see you again.’

Jenny could smell the Harris tweed of his coat. She glanced at him. He was staring straight ahead. It was very dark but she fancied he was smiling.

She felt that she must ask Trehern about Wally and did so.

‘He be pretty clever, Miss, thank you. You’ll see a powerful change in our little lad, no doubt, him having been the innocent means of joy and thanksgiving to them as seeked for it.’

Jenny could find nothing better to say than: ‘Yes, indeed.’

‘Not that he be puffed-up by his exclusive state, however,’ Trehern added. ‘Meek as a mouse but all-glorious within. That’s our Wally.’

Patrick gave Jenny a violent squeeze.

They pulled into the jetty and went ashore. Trehern begged Jenny to visit her late pupil at the cottage and wished them an unctuous good night.

Jenny looked about her. Within the sphere of light cast by the wharf lamp, appeared a shop-window which had been injected into an existing cottage front. It was crowded with small indistinguishable objects. ‘Yes,’ Patrick said. ‘That’s Miss Cost. Don’t dwell on it.’

It was not until they had climbed the steps, which had been widened and re-graded and came face-to-face with The Boy-and-Lobster that the full extent of the alterations could be seen. The old pub had been smartened but not altered. At either end of it, however, there now projected large two-storied wings which completely dwarfed the original structure. There was a new and important entrance and a ‘lounge’ into which undrawn curtains admitted a view of quite an assemblage of guests, some reading, others playing cards or writing letters. In the background was a ping-pong table and beyond that, a bar.

Patrick said, ‘There you have it.’

They were about to turn away when someone came out of the main entrance and moved uncertainly towards them. He was dressed in a sort of Victorian smock over long trousers and there was a jellybag cap on his head. He had grown much taller. Jenny didn’t recognize him at first but as he shambled into a patch of light she saw his face.

‘Costume,’ Patrick said, ‘by Maison Cost.’

‘Wally!’ she cried. ‘It’s Wally.’

He gave her a sly look and knuckled his forehead. ‘’Evening, ’evening,’ he said. His voice was still unbroken. He held out his hands. ‘I’m Wally,’ he said. ‘Look. All gone.’

‘Wally, do you remember me? Miss Williams? Do you?’

His mouth widened in a grin. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Your teacher.’

‘One lady gave me five bob, she done. One lady done.’

‘You mustn’t ask for tips,’ Patrick said.

Wally laughed. ‘I never,’ he said and looked at Jenny. ‘You come and see me. At Wally’s place.’

‘Are you at school, still?’

‘At school. I’m in the fustivell.’ He showed her his hands again, gave one of his old squawks and suddenly ran off.

‘Never mind,’ Patrick said. ‘Come along. Never mind, Jenny.’

He took her in by the old door, now marked Private, and here everything was familiar. ‘The visitors don’t use this,’ he said. ‘There’s an office and reception desk in the new building. You’re en famille, Jenny. We’ve put you in my room. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘But what about you?’

‘I’m all right. There’s an emergency bolt-hole.’

‘Jenny!’ said Mrs Barrimore, coming into the little hall. ‘How lovely!’

She was much more smartly dressed than she used to be and looked, Jenny thought, very beautiful. They kissed warmly. ‘I’m so glad,’ Mrs Barrimore said. ‘I’m so very glad.’

Her hand trembled on Jenny’s arm and, inexplicably, there was a blur of tears in her eyes. Jenny was astounded.

‘Patrick will show you where you are and there’s supper in the old dining-room. I – I’m busy at the moment. There’s a sort of meeting. Patrick will explain,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I hope I shan’t be long. You can’t think how pleased we are, can she, Patrick?’

‘She hasn’t an inkling,’ he said. ‘I forgot about the emergency meeting, Jenny. It’s to discuss strategy and Miss Pride. How’s it going, Mama?’

‘I don’t know. Not very well. I don’t know.’

She hesitated, winding her fingers together in the old way. Patrick gave her a kiss. ‘Don’t give it a thought,’ he said. ‘What is it they say in Jenny’s antipodes? “She’ll be right”? She’ll be right, Mama, never you fear.’

But when his mother had left them, Jenny thought for a moment he looked very troubled.

III

In the old bar-parlour Major Barrimore with Miss Pride’s letter in his hand and his double-Scotch on the chimneypiece, stood on the hearthrug and surveyed his meeting. It consisted of the Rector, Dr Maine, Miss Cost and Mr Ives Nankivell, who was the newly-created Mayor of Portcarrow, and also its leading butcher. He was an undersized man with a look of perpetual astonishment.

‘No,’ Major Barrimore was saying, ‘apart from yourselves I haven’t told anyone. Fewer people know about it, the better. Hope you all agree.’

‘From the tone of her letter,’ Dr Maine said, ‘the whole village’ll know by this time next week.’

‘Wicked!’ Miss Cost cried out in a trembling voice, ‘that’s what she must be. A wicked woman. Or mad,’ she added, as an afterthought. ‘Both, I expect.’

The men received this uneasily.

‘How, may I inquire, Major, did you frame your reply?’ the Mayor asked.

‘Took a few days to decide,’ said Major Barrimore, ‘and sent a wire. “Accommodation reserved will be glad to discuss matter outlined in your letter”.’

‘Very proper.’

‘Thing is, as I said when I told you about it: we ought to arrive at some sort of agreement among ourselves. She gives your names, as the people she wants to see. Well, we’ve all had a week to think it over. What’s our line going to be? Better be consistent, hadn’t we?’

‘But can we be consistent?’ the Rector asked. ‘I think you all know my views. I’ve never attempted to disguise them. In the pulpit or anywhere else.’

‘But you don’t,’ said Miss Cost, who alone had heard the Rector from the pulpit, ‘you don’t deny the truth of the cures, now do you?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I thank God for them but I deplore the – excessive publicity.’

‘Naow, naow, naow,’ said the Mayor excitedly. ‘Didn’t we ought to take a wider view? Didn’t we ought to think of the community as a whole? In my opinion, sir, the remarkable properties of our Spring has brought nothing but good to Portcarrow: nothing but good. And didn’t the public at large ought to be made aware of the benefits we offer? I say it did and it ought which is what it has and should continue to be.’

‘Jolly good, Mr Mayor,’ said Barrimore. ‘Hear, hear!’

‘Hear!’ said Miss Cost.

‘Would she sell?’ Dr Maine asked suddenly.

‘I don’t think she would, Bob.’

‘Ah well, naow,’ said the Mayor, ‘Naow! Suppose – and mind, gentlemen, I speak unofficially. Private – But, suppose she would. There might be a possibility that the borough itself would be interested. As a spec –’ He caught himself up and looked sideways at the Rector. ‘As a civic duty. Or maybe a select group of right-minded residents –’

Dr Maine said dryly: ‘They’d find themselves competing in pretty hot company, I fancy. If the Island came on the open market.’

‘Which it won’t,’ said Major Barrimore. ‘If I’m any judge. She’s hell-bent on wrecking the whole show.’

Mr Nankivell allowed himself a speculative grin. ‘Happen she don’t know the value, however,’ he insinuated.

‘Perhaps she’s concerned with other values,’ the Rector murmured.

At this point Mrs Barrimore returned.

‘Don’t move,’ she said and sat down in a chair near the door. ‘I don’t know if I’m still –?’

Mr Nankivell embarked on a gallantry but Barrimore cut across it. ‘You’d better listen, Margaret,’ he said, with a restless glance at his wife. ‘After all, she may talk to you.’

‘Surely, surely!’ the Mayor exclaimed. ‘The ladies understand each other in a fashion that’s above the heads of us mere chaps, be’ant it, Miss Cost?’

Miss Cost said: ‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ and looked very fixedly at Mrs Barrimore.

‘We don’t seem to be getting anywhere,’ Dr Maine observed.

The Mayor cleared his throat. ‘This be’ant what you’d call a formal committee,’ he began, ‘but if it was and if I was in occupation of the chair, I’d move we took the temper of the meeting.’

‘Very good,’ Barrimore said. ‘Excellent suggestion. I propose His Worship be elected chairman. Those in favour?’ The others muttered a disjointed assent and the Mayor expanded. He suggested that what they really had to discover was how each of them proposed to respond to Miss Pride’s onslaught. He invited them to speak in turn, beginning with the Rector who repeated that they all knew his views and that he would abide by them.

‘Does that mean,’ Major Barrimore demanded, ‘that if she says she’s going to issue a public repudiation of the Spring, remove the enclosure and stop the festival, you’d come down on her side?’

‘I shouldn’t try to dissuade her.’

The Mayor made an explosive ejaculation and turned on him: ‘If you’ll pardon my frankness, Mr Carstairs,’ he began, ‘I’d be obliged if you’d tell the company what you reckon would have happened to your Church Restoration Fund if Portcarrow hadn’t benefited by the Spring to the extent it has done. Where’d you’ve got the money to repair your tower? You wouldn’t have got it, no, nor anything like it.’

Mr Carstairs’s normally sallow face reddened painfully. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t suppose we should.’

‘Hah!’ said Miss Cost, ‘there you are!’

‘I’m a Methodist myself,’ said the Mayor in triumph.

‘Quite so,’ Mr Carstairs agreed.

‘Put it this way. Will you egg the woman on, sir, in her foolish notions. Will you do that?’

‘No. It’s a matter for her own conscience.’

The Mayor, Major Barrimore and Miss Cost all began to expostulate. Dr Maine said with repressed impatience: ‘I really don’t think there’s any future in pressing the point.’

‘Nor do I,’ said Mrs Barrimore unexpectedly.

Miss Cost, acidly smiling, looked from her to Dr Maine and then, fixedly, at Major Barrimore.

‘Very good, Doctor,’ Mr Nankivell said. ‘What about yourself, then?’

Dr Maine stared distastefully at his own hands and said: ‘Paradoxically, I find myself in some sort of agreement with the Rector. I, too, haven’t disguised my views. I have an open mind about these cases. I have neither encouraged nor discouraged my patients to make use of the Spring. When there has been apparent benefit I have said nothing to undermine anyone’s faith in its permanency. I am neutral.’

‘And from that impregnable position,’ Major Barrimore observed, ‘you’ve added a dozen rooms to your bloody nursing home. Beg pardon, Rector.’

‘Keith!’

Major Barrimore turned on his wife. ‘Well, Margaret?’ he demanded. ‘What’s your objection?’

Miss Cost gave a shrill laugh.

Before Mrs Barrimore could answer, Dr Maine said very coolly, ‘You’re perfectly right. I have benefited like all the rest of you. But as far as my practice is concerned, I believe Miss Pride’s activities will make very little difference, in the long run. Either to it or to the popular appeal of the Spring. Sick people who are predisposed to the idea, will still think they know better. Or hope they know better,’ he added. ‘Which is, I suppose, much the same thing.’

‘That’s all damn’ fine but it won’t be the same thing to the community at large,’ Barrimore angrily pointed out. ‘Tom, Dick and Harry and their friends and relations, swarming all over the place. The Island, a tripper’s shambles, and the Press making a laughing-stock of the whole affair.’ He emptied his glass.

‘And the Festival!’ Miss Cost wailed. ‘The Festival! All our devotion! The response! The disappointment. The humiliation!’ She waved her hands. A thought struck her. ‘And Wally! He has actually memorized! After weeks of patient endeavour, he has memorized his little verses. Only this afternoon. One trivial slip. The choir is utterly committed.’

‘I’ll be bound!’ said Mr Nankivell heartily. ‘A credit to all concerned and a great source of gratification to the borough if looked at in the proper spirit. We’m all waiting on the doctor, however,’ he added. ‘Now, Doctor, what is it to be? What’ll you say to the lady?’

‘Exactly what I said two minutes ago to you,’ Dr Maine snapped. ‘I’ll give my opinion if she wants it. I don’t mind pointing out to her that the thing will probably go on after a fashion, whatever she does.’

‘I suppose that’s something,’ said the Mayor gloomily. ‘Though not much, with an elderly female so deadly set on destruction.’

‘I,’ Miss Cost intervened hotly, ‘shall not mince my words. I shall tell her – No,’ she amended with control. ‘I shall plead with her. I shall appeal to the nobler side. Let us hope that there is one. Let us hope so.’

‘I second that from the chair,’ said Mr Nankivell. ‘Though with reservations prejudicial to an optimistic view. Major?’

‘What’ll I do? I’ll try and reason with her. Give her a straight picture of the incontrovertible cures. If the man of science,’ Major Barrimore said with a furious look at Dr Maine, ‘would come off his high horse and back me up, I might get her to listen. As it is –’ he passed his palm over his hair and gave a half-smile, ‘I’ll do what I can with the lady. I want another drink. Anyone join me?’

The Mayor and, after a little persuasion, Miss Cost, joined him. He made towards the old private bar. As he opened the door, he admitted sounds of voices and of people crossing the flagstones to the main entrance.

Patrick looked in. ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ he said to his mother. ‘The bus load’s arrived.’

She got up quickly. ‘I must go,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

His step-father said: ‘Damn! All right.’ And to the others. ‘I won’t be long. Pat, look after the drinks, here, will you? Two double Scotches and a glass of the sweet port.’

He went out followed by his wife and Patrick and could be heard welcoming his guests. ‘Good evening! Good evening to you! Now, come along in. You must all be exhausted. Awfully glad to see you –’

His voice faded.

There was a brief silence.

‘Yes,’ said the Mayor. ‘Yes. Be-the-way, we didn’t get round to axing the lady’s view, did we? Mrs Barrimore?’

For some reason they all looked extremely uncomfortable.

Miss Cost gave a shrill laugh.

IV

‘“;– and I’d take it as a personal favour”,’ Alleyn dictated, ‘“if you could spare a man to keep an eye on the Island when Miss Pride arrives there. Very likely nothing will come of these communications but, as we all know, they can lead to trouble. I ought to warn you that Miss Pride, though eighty-three, is in vigorous possession of all her faculties and if she drops to it that you’ve got her under observation, she may cut up rough. No doubt, like all the rest of us, you’re under-staffed and won’t thank me for putting you to this trouble. If your chap does notice anything out of the way, I would be very glad to hear of it. Unless a job blows up to stop me, I’m grabbing an overdue week’s leave from tomorrow and will be at the above address.

‘“Again – sorry to be a nuisance,

Yours sincerely,”

‘All right. Got the name? Superintendent A. F. Coombe, Divisional HQ, wherever it is – at Portcarrow itself, I fancy. Get it off straight away, will you?’

When the letter had gone he looked at his watch. Five minutes past midnight. His desk was cleared and his files closed. The calendar showed Monday. He flipped it over. ‘I should have written before,’ he thought. ‘My letter will arrive with Miss Emily.’ He was ready to leave, but, for some reason, dawdled there, too tired, suddenly, to make a move. After a vague moment or two he lit his pipe, looked round his room and walked down the long corridor and the stairs, wishing the PC on duty at the doors good night.

It was his only superstition. ‘By the pricking of my thumbs.’

As he drove away down the Embankment he thought: ‘Damned if I don’t ring that Super up in the morning: be damned if I don’t.’

CHAPTER 3

Threats

Miss Emily arrived at noon on Monday. She had stayed overnight in Dorset and was as fresh as paint. It was agreeable to be able to command a chauffeur-driven car and the man was not unintelligent.

When they drew up at Portcarrow jetty she gave him a well-considered tip, asked his name and told him she would desire, particularly, that he should be deputed for the return journey.

She then alighted, observed by a small gang of wharf loiterers.

A personable young man came forward to meet her.

‘Miss Pride? I’m Patrick Ferrier. I hope you had a good journey.’

Miss Emily was well-disposed towards the young and, she had good reason to believe, a competent judge of them. She inspected Patrick and received him with composure. He introduced a tall, glowing girl who came forward, rather shyly, to shake hands. Miss Emily had less experience of girls but she liked the look of this one and was gracious.

‘The causeway is negotiable,’ Patrick said, ‘but we thought you’d prefer the launch.’

‘It is immaterial,’ she rejoined. ‘The launch, let it be.’

Patrick and the chauffeur handed her down the steps. Trehern stowed away her luggage and was profuse in cap-touching. They shoved-off from the jetty, still watched by idlers among whom, conspicuous in his uniform, was a police sergeant. ‘’Morning, Pender!’ Patrick called cheerfully as he caught sight of him.

In a motor launch, the trip across was ludicrously brief but even so Miss Emily, bolt upright in the stern, made it portentous. The sun shone and against it she displayed her open umbrella as if it were a piece of ceremonial plumage. Her black kid gloves gripped the handle centrally and her handbag, enormous and vice-like in its security, was placed between her feet. She looked, Patrick afterwards suggested, like some Burmese female deity. ‘We should have arranged to have had her carried, shoulder-high, over the causeway,’ he said.

Major Barrimore, with a porter in attendance, awaited her on the jetty. He resembled, Jenny thought, an illustration from an Edwardian sporting journal. ‘Well-tubbed’ was the expression. His rather prominent eyes were a little bloodshot. He had to sustain the difficult interval that spanned approach and arrival and decide when to begin smiling and making appropriate gestures. Miss Emily gave him no help. Jenny and Patrick observed him with misgivings. ‘Good morning!’ he shouted, gaily bowing, as they drew alongside. Miss Emily slightly raised and lowered her umbrella.

‘That’s right, Trehern. Easy does it. Careful, man,’ Major Barrimore chattered. ‘Heave me that line. Splendid!’ He dropped the loop over a bollard and hovered, anxiously solicitous, with extended arm. ‘Welcome! Welcome!’ he cried.

‘Good morning, Major Barrimore,’ Miss Emily said. ‘Thank you. I can manage perfectly.’ Disregarding Trehern’s outstretched hand, she looked fixedly at him. ‘Are you the father?’ she asked.

Trehern removed his cap and grinned with all his might. ‘That I be, ma-am,’ he said. ‘If you be thinking of our Wally, ma-am, that I be, and mortal proud to own up to him.’

‘I shall see you, if you please,’ said Miss Emily, ‘later.’ For a second or two everyone was motionless.

She shook hands with her host.

‘This is nice,’ he assured her. ‘And what a day we’ve produced for you! Now, about these steps of ours. Bit stiff, I’m afraid. May I –?’

‘No, thank you. I shall be sustained in my ascent,’ said Miss Emily, fixing Miss Cost’s shop and then the hotel façade in her gaze, ‘by the prospect.’

She led the way up the steps.

‘’Jove!’ the Major exclaimed when they arrived at the top. ‘You’re too good for me, Miss Pride. Wonderful going! Wonderful!’

She looked briefly at him. ‘My habits,’ she said, ‘are abstemious. A little wine or cognac only. I have never been a smoker.’

‘Jolly good! Jolly good!’ he applauded. Jenny began to feel acutely sorry for him.

Margaret Barrimore waited in the main entrance. She greeted Miss Emily with no marked increase in her usual diffidence. ‘I hope you had a pleasant journey,’ she said. ‘Would you like to have luncheon upstairs? There’s a small sitting-room we’ve kept for you. Otherwise, the dining-room is here.’ Miss Emily settled for the dining-room but wished to see her apartment first. Mrs Barrimore took her up. Her husband, Patrick and Jenny stood in the hall below and had nothing to say to each other. The Major, out of forgetfulness, it seemed, was still madly beaming. He caught his step-son’s eye, uttered an expletive and without further comment, made for the bar.

Miss Emily, when she had lunched, took her customary siesta. She removed her dress and shoes, loosened her stays, put on a grey cotton peignoir and lay on the bed. There were several illustrated brochures to hand and she examined them. One contained a rather elaborate account of the original cure. It displayed a fanciful drawing of the Green Lady, photographs of the Spring, of Wally Trehern and a number of people passing through a sort of turnpike. A second gave a long list of subsequent healings with names and personal tributes. Miss Emily counted them up. Nine warts, five asthmas (including Miss Cost), three arthritics, two migraines and two chronic diarrhoeas (anonymous). ‘And many many more who have experienced relief and improvement,’ the brochure added. A folder advertised the coming Festival and, inset, Elspeth Cost’s Giffte Shoppe. There was also a whimsical map of the Island with boats, fish, nets and pixies and, of course, a Green Lady.

Miss Emily studied the map and noted that it showed a direct route from The Boy-and-Lobster to the Spring.

A more business-like leaflet caught her attention.

THE TIDES AT PORTCARROW

The tides running between the village and the island show considerable variation in clock times. Roughly speaking, the water reaches its peak level twice in 24 hours and its lowest level at times which are about midway between those of high water. High and dead water times may vary from day to day with a lag of about 1-1 3/4 hours in 24 hours. Thus if high water falls at noon on Sunday it may occur somewhere between 1 and 2.45 p.m. on Monday afternoon. About a fortnight may elapse before the cycle is completed and high water again falls between noon and 1.45 on Sunday.

Visitors will usually find the causeway is negotiable for 2 hours before and after low water. The hotel launch and dinghies are always available and all the jetties reach into deep water at low tide.

Expected times for high tide and dead water will be posted up daily at the Reception Desk in the main entrance.

Miss Emily studied this information for some minutes. She then consulted the whimsical map.

At five o’clock she caused tea to be brought to her. Half an hour later, she dressed and descended, umbrella in hand, to the vestibule.

The hall-porter was on duty. When he saw Miss Emily he pressed a bell-push on his desk and rose with a serviceable smirk. ‘Can I help you, madam?’ he asked.

‘In so far as I require admission to the enclosure, I believe you may. I understand that entry is effected by means of some plaque or token,’ said Miss Emily.

He opened a drawer and extracted a metal disc. ‘I shall require,’ she said, ‘seven,’ and laid two half-crowns and a florin on the desk. The hall-porter completed the number.

‘No, no, no!’ Major Barrimore expostulated, bouncing out from the interior. ‘We can’t allow this. Nonsense!’ He waved the hall-porter away. ‘See that a dozen of these things are sent up to Miss Pride’s suite,’ he said and bent gallantly over his guest. ‘I’m so sorry! Ridiculous!’

‘You are very good,’ she rejoined, ‘but I prefer to pay.’ She opened her reticule, swept the discs into it and shut it with a formidable snap. ‘Thank you,’ she said dismissing the hall-porter. She prepared to leave.

‘I don’t approve,’ Major Barrimore began, ‘I – really, it’s very naughty of you. Now, may I – as it’s your first visit since – may I just show you the easiest way?’

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