Josephine Tey - The Singing Sands

‘But he wrote those line about Paradise,’ a voice in him said.

‘He didn’t,’ he said to the voice. ‘There’s not the slightest evidence that he did any such thing.’

‘There’s his face. No ordinary face. It was the face that you first succumbed to. Long before you began to think of his Paradise at all.’

‘I have not succumbed,’ he said. ‘In my job you take an automatic interest in people.’

‘Yes? You mean, if the occupant of that whisky-sodden compartment had been a fat commercial traveller with a moustache like a badly kept hedge and a face like a boiled pudding, you would still have been interested?’

‘I might.’

‘You lying dishonest bastard. You were B Seven’s champion the minute you saw his face and noticed the way that Yughourt was mauling him about. You snatched him from Yughourt’s grip and straightened his jacket like a mother pulling a shawl over her baby.’

‘Shut up.’

‘You wanted to know about him not because you thought there was anything odd about his death but because, quite simply, you wanted to know about him. He was young and dead, and he had been reckless and alive. You wanted to know what he had been like when he was reckless and alive.’

‘All right, I wanted to know. I also want to know who is going to ride the Lincolnshire favourite, and what my shares are quoted at in today’s market, and what June Kaye’s next picture is going to be; but I’m not losing any sleep about any of them.’

‘No; and you don’t see June Kaye’s face between you and the water, either.’

‘I have no intention of seeing anyone’s face between me and the river. Nothing is going to come between me and the river. I came here to fish and nothing is going to muck up that for me.’

‘B Seven came North to do something too. I wonder what it was?’

‘How should I know?’

‘It couldn’t be fishing, anyhow.’

‘Why couldn’t it?’

‘No one who was going five or six hundred miles to fish would be without tackle of some kind. If he was as keen as that he would at least have his own pet lures with him, even if he was going to be lent a rod.’

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps his Paradise was Tir nan Og. You know: the Gaelic one. That would fit.’

‘How would it fit?’

‘Tir nan Og is supposed to be away out to the west, beyond the outermost islands. The Land of the Young. The land of eternal youth, that’s the Gaelic Paradise. And what “guards the way” to it? Islands with singing sands, it seems. Islands with stones that stand up like men walking.’

‘And beasts that talk? Do you find them too in the Outer Isles?’

‘You do.’

‘You do? What are they?’

‘Seals.’

‘Oh, go away and leave me alone. I’m busy. I’m fishing.’

‘You may be fishing, but you’re not catching a damned thing. Your Jock Scott might as well be stuck in your hat. Now you listen to me.’

‘I will not listen to you. All right , there are singing sands in the Islands! All right , there are walking stones! All right , there are gabby seals! It has nothing to do with me. And I don’t suppose it had anything to do with B Seven.’

‘No? What was he going North for?’

‘To bury a relation, to sleep with a woman, to climb a rock! How should I know? And why should I care?’

‘He was going to stay at a Caledonian Hotel somewhere.’

‘He was not.’

‘How do you know where he was going to stay?’

‘I don’t. Nobody does.’

‘Why should one of them be all facetious about “robbing the Caley” if he was going to stay at a Waverley?’

‘If he was going to Cladda—and I’ll bet there’s no inn on Cladda called anything as reeking of the mainland as the Caledonian—if he was going to Cladda he would have gone via Glasgow and Oban.’

‘Not necessarily. It’s just as short and just as comfortable via Scoone. He probably loathed Glasgow. A lot of people do. Why not ring up the Caledonian in Scoone when you go back to the house tonight and find out if a Charles Martin was expected there?’

‘I shall do no such thing.’

‘If you slap the water like that you’ll frighten every fish in the river.’

He went back to the house at supper time in a very bad mood. He had caught nothing and had lost his peace.

And in the somnolent hush that filled the sitting-room when work was over for the day and the children in bed, he caught his eye wandering from his book to the telephone at the other end of the room. It stood on Tommy’s desk, provocative in its suggestion of latent power, in the infinite promise of its silent presence. He had only to lift that receiver and he could speak to a man on the Pacific coast of America, he could speak to a man in the wastes of the Atlantic Ocean, he could speak to a man two miles above the earth.

He could speak to a man in the Caledonian Hotel in Scoone.

He resisted this thought, with growing annoyance, for an hour. Then Laura went to get bed-time drinks, and Tommy went to let the dogs out, and Grant reached the telephone in a dive that was nearer a rugby tackle than any civilised method of crossing a room.

He had lifted the receiver before he realised that he did not know the number. He put the receiver back in its cradle and felt that he had been saved. He turned to go back to his book but picked up the telephone book instead. He would have no peace until he had talked to the Caledonian in Scoone; it was cheap enough to have peace at the cost of being a little silly.

‘Scoone 1460….Caledonian Hotel? Can you tell me: did a Mr Charles Martin book accommodation with you any time in the last fortnight?…Yes, thank you, I’ll wait….No? No one of that name…Oh…Thank you very much. So sorry to have bothered you.’

And that was that, he thought, slamming the receiver down. That, as far as he was concerned, was definitely the end of B Seven.

He drank his nice soothing bed-time drink, and went to bed, and lay wide awake staring at the ceiling. He put the light out, and resorted to his own cure for insomnia: pretending to himself that he had to stay awake. He had evolved this long ago from the simple premise that human nature wants to do the thing it is forbidden to do. And so far it had never failed him. He had only to begin pretending that he was not allowed to go to sleep for his eyelids to droop. The pretence eliminated in one move the greatest barrier to sleep: the fear that one is not going to; and so left the beach clear for the invading tide.

Tonight his eyelids dropped as usual, but a jingle ran round and round in his head like a rat in a cage:

The beasts that talk,

The streams that stand,

The stones that walk,

The singing sand…

What were the streams that stand? Was there something in the Islands that corresponded to that?

Not frozen streams. There was little snow or frost in the Islands. Then, what? Streams that ran into the sand and stood still? No. Fanciful. Streams that stand. Streams that stand?

Perhaps a librarian might know. There must be a goodish Public Library in Scoone.

‘I thought you weren’t interested any more?’ said the voice.

‘You go to hell.’

A mechanic, he was. What did that mean? Mechanicien. It involved an endless range of possibilities.

Whatever he did, he was successful enough to be able to travel First Class on a British railway. Which in these days made one practically a millionaire. And he had spent all that money on what, to judge by his overnight case, was a flying visit.

A girl, perhaps? The girl who had promised to wait?

But she had been French.

A woman? No Englishman would go five hundred miles for a woman, but a Frenchman might. Especially a Frenchman who had knifed his girl for letting her glance stray.