Ngaio Marsh - Dead Water

“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 suzeraine, “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 under way in the Sun on the subject of faith healing and unexplained cures.

By Friday, there were inquiries from a regular television programme. The school holidays had started by then, and Jenny Williams had come to the end of her job at Portcarrow.

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!”

“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 two 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 — oh, 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.”

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

“Teeny. Now 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 stepfather was axed out of the army.”

“If 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, bellyaching 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 —”

“ ‘Redheaded 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. Oh, 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 Gifte 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 stepfather 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.”