The Singing Sands ag-6 Read online

  He came downstairs again to find the Sabbath atmosphere shattered. The house rocked with war and rebellion. Pat had discovered that someone was going in to Scoone (which in his country eyes was even on a Sunday a metropolis of delectable variety) and he wanted to go too. His mother, on the other hand, was determined that he was going to Sunday school as usual.

  ‘You ought to be very glad of the lift,’ she was saying, ‘instead of grumbling about not wanting to go.’

  Grant thought that ‘grumbling’ was a highly inadequate word to describe the blazing opposition that lighted Pat like a torch. He throbbed with it, like a car at rest with the engine running.

  ‘If we didn’t happen to be going in to Scoone you would have to walk to the church as usual,’ she reminded him.

  ‘Huch, who ever minds walking! We have fine talks when we’re walking, Duggie and me.’ Duggie was the shepherd’s son. ‘It’s wasting time at Sunday school when I might be going to Scoone that’s a fact. It’s not fair.’

  ‘Pat, I will not have you referring to Sunday school as a waste of time.’

  ‘You won’t have me at all if you’re not careful. I’ll die of a decline.’

  ‘Oh. What would bring that on?’

  ‘Lack of fresh air.’

  She began to laugh. ‘Pat, you’re wonderful!’ But it was always the wrong thing to laugh at Pat. He took himself as seriously as an animal does.

  ‘All right, laugh!’ he said bitterly. ‘You’ll be going to church on Sundays to put wreaths on my grave, that’s what you’ll be doing on Sundays, not going into Scoone!’

  ‘I shouldn’t dream of doing anything so extravagant. A few dog-daisies now and then when I’m passing is as much as you’ll get from me. Go and get your scarf; you’ll need it.’

  ‘A gravat! It’s March!’

  ‘It’s also cold. Get your scarf. It will help to keep off that decline.’

  ‘A lot you care about my decline, you and your daisies. A mean family the Grants always were. A poor mean lot. I’m very glad I’m a Rankin, and I’m very glad I don’t have to wear their horrible red tartan.’ Pat’s tattered green kilt was Macintyre, which went better with his red hair than the gay Grant. It had been part of Tommy’s mother’s web, and she, as a good Macintyre, had been glad to see her grandson in what she called a civilised cloth.

  He stumped his way into the back of the car and sat there simmering, the despised ‘gravat’ flung in a limp disavowed heap at the far end of the seat.

  ‘Heathen aren’t supposed to go to church,’ he offered, as they slipped down the sandy road to the gate, the loose stones spurting from under the tyres.

  ‘Who is heathen?’ his mother asked, her mind on the road.

  ‘I am. I’m a Mohammedan.’

  ‘Then you have great need to go to a Christian church and be converted. Open the gate, Pat.’

  ‘I’ve no wish to be converted. I’m fine as I am.’ He held the gate open for them and shut it behind them. ‘I disapprove of the Bible,’ he said, as he got in again.

  ‘Then you can’t be a good Mohammedan.’

  ‘What for no?’

  ‘They have some of the Bible too.’

  ‘I bet they don’t have David!’

  ‘Don’t you approve of David?’ Grant asked.

  ‘A poor soppy thing, dancing and singing like a lassie. There’s not a soul in the Old Testament I’d trust to go to a sheep sale.’

  He sat erect in the middle of the back seat, too alive with rebellion to relax, his bleak eye watching the road ahead in absent-minded fury. And it occurred to Grant that he might equally have slumped in a corner and sulked. He was glad that this cousin of his was a rude and erect flame of resentment and not a small collapsed bundle of self-pity.

  The injured heathen got out at the church, still rude and erect, and walked away without a backward glance, to join the small group of children by the side door.

  ‘Will he behave, now he is there?’ Grant asked as Laura set the car in motion again.

  ‘Oh, yes. He really likes it, you know. And of course Douglas will be there: his Jonathan. A day when he couldn’t spend part of it laying down the law to Duggie would be a day wasted. He didn’t really believe that I would let him come to Scoone instead. It was just a try-on.’

  ‘It was a very effective try-on.’

  ‘Yes. There’s a lot of the actor in Pat.’

  They had gone another two miles before the thought of Pat faded from his mind. And, then, quite suddenly, into the blank that Pat’s departure left, came the realisation that he was in a car. That he was shut into a car. He ceased on the instant to be an adult watching, tolerant and amused, the unreasonable antics of a child, and became a child watching, gibbering and aghast, the hostile advance of giants.

  He let down the window on his side to its fullest extent. ‘Let me know if you feel that too much,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve been too long in London,’ she said.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Only people who live in towns are fresh-air fiends. Country people like a nice fug as a change from unlimited out-of-doors.’

  ‘I’ll put it up, if you like,’ he said, although his mouth was stiff with effort as he said the words.

  ‘No, of course not,’ she said, and began to talk about a car they had ordered.

  So the old battle started. The old arguments, the old tricks, the old cajoling. The pointing out of the open windows, the reminding himself that it was only a car and could be stopped at any moment, the willing himself to consider a subject far removed from the present, the self-persuading that he was lucky to be alive at all. But the tide of his panic rose with a slow abominable menace. A black evil tide, scummy and revolting. Now it was round his chest, pressing and holding, so that he could hardly breathe. Now it was up to his throat, feeling round his windpipe, clutching his neck in a pincer embrace. In a moment it would be over his mouth.

  ‘Lalla, stop!’

  ‘Stop the car?’ she asked, surprised.

  ‘Yes.’

  She brought the car to a standstill, and he got out on trembling legs and hung over the dry-stone dyke sucking in great mouthfuls of the clean air.

  ‘Are you feeling ill, Alan?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘No, I just wanted to get out of the car.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said in a relieved tone. ‘Is that all!’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Yes: claustrophobia. I was afraid you were ill.’

  ‘And you don’t call that being ill?’ he said bitterly.

  ‘Of course not. I nearly died of terror once, when I was taken to see the Cheddar caves. I had never been in a cave before.’ She had switched off the motor and now she sat down on a roadside boulder with her back half-turned to him. ‘Except those rabbit burrows that we called caves in our youth.’ She held up her cigarette case to him. ‘I’d never been really underground before, and I didn’t mind going in the least. I went all eager and delighted, I was a good half-mile from the entrance when it struck me. I sweated with terror. Do you have it often?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know that you’re the only person who still calls me Lalla sometimes? We are getting very old.’

  He looked round and down at her, the strain fading from his expression.

  ‘I didn’t know you had any terrors other than rats.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I have a fine variety. Everyone has, I think. At least everyone who is not just a clod. I keep placid because I lead a placid life and collect adipose tissue. If I overworked the way you do I’d be a raving maniac. I’d probably have claustrophobia and agoraphobia, and make medical history. One would have the enormous consolation of being something in the Lancet, of course.’

  He turned from leaning over the wall and sat down beside her. ‘Look,’ he said, and held out the shaking hand that held his cigarette for her to see.

  ‘Poor Alan.’

  ‘Poor Alan indeed,’ he agreed. ‘That came not from being half a mile underground
in the dark, but from being a passenger in a car with wide-open windows in an open countryside on a fine Sunday in a free country.’

  ‘It didn’t, of course.’

  ‘It didn’t?’

  ‘It came from four years of consistent overwork and an overgrown conscience. You always were a demon where conscience was concerned. Quite tiresome you could be. Would you rather have a spot of claustrophobia or a stroke?’

  ‘A stroke?’

  ‘If you work yourself half to death you have to pay in some manner or other. Would you rather pay in the more usual physical manner with high blood-pressure or a strained heart? It’s better to be scared of being shut into a car than to be pushed about in a bath-chair. At least you have time off from being scared. If you hate the thought of getting back into the car, by the way, I can go on to Scoone with your letter and pick you up on the way back.’

  ‘Oh, no, I’ll go on.’

  ‘I thought it was better not to fight it?’

  ‘Did you scream and yell half a mile underground in the Cheddar Gorge?’

  ‘No. But I wasn’t a pathological specimen suffering from overwork.’

  He smiled suddenly. ‘It’s extraordinary how comforting it is to be called a pathological specimen. Or rather, to be called a pathological specimen in just those tones.’

  ‘Do you remember the day at Varese when it rained and we went to the museum and saw those specimens in bottles?’

  ‘Yes; you were sick on the pavement outside.’

  ‘Well, you were sick when we had sheep’s heart for lunch because you had watched it being stuffed,’ she said instantly.

  ‘Lalla, darling,’ he said, beginning to laugh, ‘you haven’t grown-up at all.’

  ‘Well, it’s nice that you can still laugh, even if it’s only at me,’ she said, caught out in that flash of childhood rivalry. ‘Say when you want to go on.’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘Now? Are you sure?’

  ‘Quite sure. Being called a pathological specimen has wonderfully curative qualities, I find.’

  ‘Well, next time don’t wait until you are on the point of suffocation,’ she said matter-of-factly.

  He did not know which he found more reassuring: her awareness that the thing was a sort of suffocation or her matter-of-fact acceptance of unreason.

  4

  If Grant had imagined that his chief would be gratified either by the possibility of his earlier recovery or by his punctiliousness in the matter of the newspaper, he was wrong. Bryce was still antagonist rather than colleague. And his reply contained a right-and-left that was typically Bryce. Reading it, Grant thought that only Bryce could manage to have his cake and eat it so successfully. In the first paragraph he rebuked Grant for his unprofessional conduct in abstracting any article from the vicinity of sudden and unexplained death. In the second paragraph he was surprised that Grant should have thought of bothering a busy Department with any matter as trivial as that of the purloined paper, but supposed that no doubt his divorce from workaday surroundings had contributed to a lack of judgement and proportion. There was no third paragraph.

  What came off the familiar thin office paper was a strong impression that he had been put, not in his place, but outside. What the letter really said was: ‘I can’t imagine why you, Alan Grant, should be bothering us, either to report on your health or to take an interest in our business. We are not interested in the one and you have no concern with the other.’ He was an outsider. A renegade.

  And it was only now, reading the snubbing letter and having the door banged in his face, that he became aware that beyond his conscientious need to put himself straight with the Department over the purloined paper had been the desire to hang on to B Seven. His letter, as well as an apology, had been a way to information. There was no longer hope of obtaining information from the Press. B Seven was not news. Every day people died in trains. There was nothing to interest the lieges in that. As far as the Press was concerned B Seven was dead twice over, once in fact and once as news. But he had wanted to know more about B Seven, and he had hoped without knowing it that his colleagues might be chatty on the subject.

  He might have known Bryce better, he thought, tearing up the sheet of paper and dropping it into the wastepaper basket. However, there was always Sergeant Williams, thank Heaven; the faithful Williams. Williams would wonder why someone of his rank and experience should be interested in an unknown dead body seen once for a moment or two, but he would probably put it down to boredom. In any case there would be no lack of chat about Williams. So to Williams he wrote. Would Williams find out what the result of the inquest had been on a young man, Charles Martin, who had died on Thursday night a week ago on the night train to the Highlands; and anything else about the young man that might have transpired in the course of the inquiry. And kind regards to Mrs Williams and Angela and Leonard.

  And for two days he settled back in a sort of happy impatience to wait for Williams’s reply. He inspected the unfishable Turlie, pool by pool; he caulked the boat at Lochan Dhu; he walked the hill in the company of Graham the shepherd with Tong and Zang more or less at heel; and he listened to Tommy’s plan for a nine-hole private golf course between the house and the hillside. And on the third day he went homing at post time with an eagerness he had not known since he was nineteen and used to send his poems to magazines.

  Nor was his blank unbelief when there was nothing for him any less poignant than it had been in those callow years.

  He reminded himself that he was being unreasonable. (The unforgivable sin, always, in Grant’s estimation.) The inquest had nothing to do with the Department. He did not even know which Division might have been landed with the job. Williams would have to find out. Williams had work of his own; twenty-four-hours-a-day work. It was unreasonable to expect him to drop everything to satisfy some holiday-making colleague’s frivolous questions.

  For two more days he waited, and then it came.

  Williams hoped that Grant wasn’t hankering after work. He was supposed to be having a rest, and everyone in the Department hoped that he was getting it (not everyone! thought Grant, remembering Bryce) and feeling the better for it. They missed him very badly. As to Charles Martin, there was no mystery about him. Or about his death, if that is what Grant had been thinking. He had hit the back of his head against the edge of the porcelain wash-hand basin, and although able to crawl around for a little on his hands and knees and eventually reach the bed, he had died from internal haemorrhage very shortly after falling over. The fact that he had fallen backwards at all was due to the amount of neat whisky he had consumed. Not enough to make him drunk but quite enough to make him muzzy, and the tilt of the coach as it changed direction had done the rest. There was no mystery either about the man himself. He had had the usual bundle of French identity papers in his possession, and his people were still living at his home address near Marseilles. They had not seen him for some years—he had left home after being in trouble for stabbing his girl in a fit of jealousy—but they had sent money to bury him so that he should not be buried in a pauper’s grave.

  This left Grant with an appetite whetted rather than assuaged.

  He waited until, according to his reckoning, Williams would be happily settled down with his pipe and his paper, while Mrs Williams mended and Angela and Leonard did their homework, and put in a personal call to him. There was always the chance that Williams was out pursuing the ill-doer through the devious ways of his inhabiting, but there was, too, the chance that he was at home.

  He was at home.

  When he had been duly thanked for his letter, Grant said: ‘You said his people sent money to bury him. Didn’t anyone come to identify him?’

  ‘No; they identified a photograph.’

  ‘A live photograph?’

  ‘No, no. A photograph of the body.’

  ‘Didn’t anyone turn up to identify him in London?’

  ‘Not a soul, it seems.’

  ‘That’s odd.’


  ‘Not so odd if he was a wide boy. Wide boys don’t want trouble.’

  ‘Was there any suggestion that he was wide?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘What was his profession?’

  ‘Mechanic.’

  ‘Did he have a passport?’

  ‘No. Just the usual papers. And letters.’

  ‘Oh, he had letters?’

  ‘Yes; the usual odd two or three that people carry. One was from a girl saying she would wait for him. She’s going to wait some time.’

  ‘Were the letters in French?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What money had he?’

  ‘Wait a minute till I find my notes. Um—m—m. Twenty-two, ten, in mixed notes; eighteen and tuppence ha’penny in silver and copper.’

  ‘All English?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Between the lack of passport and the English currency it looks as if he had been in England a good long time. I wonder why no one came to claim him.’

  ‘They may not know yet that he is dead. It didn’t get much publicity.’

  ‘Didn’t he have any address in Britain?’

  ‘He had no address on him. The letters were not in envelopes: just in his wallet. His friends will probably turn up yet.’

  ‘Does anyone know where he was going? Or why?’

  ‘No; seemingly not.’

  ‘What luggage had he?’

  ‘An overnight case. Shirt, socks, pyjamas and bedroom slippers. No laundry marks.’

  ‘What? Why? Were the things new?’