Michael Innes - Lament for a Maker

Wedderburn interrupted. ‘My dear Mr Appleby, is this really interesting?’

‘Interesting? Well, there’s another point that might interest you more. The distinguished Flinders is not merely a big gun; he’s a prodigy.’

‘A prodigy?’

‘Definitely.’ I pointed to the inscribed fly-leaf. ‘“Born in South Australia February 1893.” If we accept that statement we have to believe that he graduated in medicine at the age of seven.’

Wedderburn exclaimed impatiently. ‘This is nonsense!’

‘On the contrary, it is the first glimpse of the truth. And now we had better aim at the truth all round. Miss Guthrie, I think these developments take you somewhat out of your depth?’

‘Indeed they do.’

‘Then listen. I give you the same promise about Lindsay that Mr Wedderburn gave. We have the truth of his position in the story. He is out of it. So now let me ask you the question Gylby asked. However did you know Guthrie committed suicide?’

‘I didn’t. In fact I saw him sent over the parapet.’

Wedderburn sighed and fell to polishing his glasses. ‘I think,’ I said, ‘we might usefully go up to the gallery.’

3

The faded terrestrial globe stirred, revolved: my finger traced the long route from Australia through Suez to Southampton.

‘It’s in the blood, and by the great God he will…!’

We walked down the gallery, our lanterns and torches playing before us on the long line of dead Guthries. I paused, picked out a sixteenth-century portrait by a Flemish artist, then swung round to a late eighteenth-century laird by Raeburn. It was the same face looked down on us. Softly I said: ‘What for would it not work, man? What for would it not work?’ We stood in silence for a moment. ‘Gylby, can you repeat the end of Dunbar’s poem?’

And Noel Gylby recited:

‘Gud Maister Walter Kennedy

In poynt of dede lyis veraly,

Great reuth it wer that so suld be;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.

‘Sen he has all my brether tane,

He will nocht let me lif alane;

Of force I mon his nyxt prey be;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.

‘Sen for the deth remeid is non,

Best is that we for deth dispone

After our deth that lif may we;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.’

There was another and longer silence. ‘Ranald Guthrie,’ I said at last, ‘has a pretty art in turning medieval piety to irony. Death threatens; best so to arrange for it that one continues to live . That’s his reading of Dunbar. And, somewhere, Ranald is alive now. It was his brother Ian – Richard Flinders the Australian surgeon – who died. Ranald’s story we shall piece together. But the whole story of Ian we shall never know.’

Wedderburn seemed to struggle for words – was forestalled by a startled cry from Sybil Guthrie. There was a scuffle in the darkness; I lowered my lantern and saw that Mrs Hardcastle’s all too potent poison had accounted for yet another rat – a great grey creature that had grotesquely dragged itself to die at our feet. For a moment I thought it was one of Gylby’s learned rats, with its little message attached. Then I saw that it was a rat more learned than that. Clutched in its mouth, as if seized to staunch its final agony, was a small black notebook.

PART FIVE

THE DOCTOR’S TESTAMENT

1

As consciousness came to me I was aware that the landscape was unfamiliar. And this awareness was for a space like Adam’s in the Garden: I recognized novelty without the aid of any of those contrasting memories which would seem essential to the formulation of the idea. More strangely, I was unperplexed by this. I suppose my mind had vigour only for the business of survival.

Before me was a rolling immensity of dark green vegetation, its dull lustre fading into purple distance under a vibrant blue sky. Behind me, I thought, was the roar of breakers, and heat as if the breakers were lava beating up from a subterraneous sea of fire. I struggled round. The sea was an illusion; the reality was a sweeping curtain of veritable flame, a great sickle of flame that reaped the tinder-dry vegetation with a motion perceptible as I watched. For a moment it was a spectacle only; then it realized itself as imminent peril. I got to hands and knees and saw, bounding before the blaze, a scattering of miniature prehistoric creatures – one grotesque form reproduced on every scale from the human to the rodent, like a child’s nest of bricks. Kangaroos and wallabies: with an immense effort my blood-soaked brain gave them their names. And at that much of my local knowledge returned to me; I saw that I was in the path of a bush fire and that I must find a break or be overwhelmed.

I was crouching where I must have fallen, half-way down an out-crop of limestone rock from which a dry gully dropped to lose itself in the scrub. Here and there the scrub gave place to a sparser growth of ti-tree, prickly bushes and salsolae, which in turn exhausted themselves round arid islands of sand. But nowhere was a denuded area large enough to promise security; my only hope was in a single massive ridge of rock that showed not more than two miles away, in startling isolation amid the low and endless undulations of green. It swayed and quivered as I looked – partly from refraction in the heat, partly perhaps to my own impaired sense – and I could be certain neither of its size nor of the practicability of ascent. It rose in sheer lines accentuated by an occasional perpendicular funnel or cleft. Up one of these I might scramble to safety.

I got to my feet and found myself – with a sort of detached surprise – not without considerable physical strength. The fire was partly checked by a veering wind; had it been sweeping directly towards me I should have had no chance at all. As it was, it was a grim race and I wasted no time. But before striking down the gully it occurred to me to discover if I had any possessions. There was evidence of a little encampment: a dead fire, an overturned billy, horse-dung. These meant nothing to me. But I found a haversack which I knew to be mine and took up. I knew too that there ought to be a water-bottle. In a swift and desperate search I failed to find it. T

Then I set out. The scrub was low and, when entered, not actually dense; I got forward without difficulty and with my mark always before me. A mile on I found a water-bottle – mine or another’s – three parts empty. This strange chance gave me a sort of irrational or superstitious confidence without which I should not be alive today.

By the time I reached the foot of the ridge there were already little fires about me. The heat of the conflagration was attracting a light headwind that blew in my face but through this the main blast was carrying forward showers of sparks that in places kindled flaring outposts of fire hundreds of yards ahead. Once I was nearly trapped by a sudden line of flame that leapt to life in a clump of yaccas about me – stunted spearlike growths of which the resinous butts will kindle with the force and rapidity of an explosion.

For agonizing minutes I explored the rock-face in vain for cleft or foothold: it seemed that my back, in a most horrible sense, was to the wall. But presently I found a possible chimney and began to climb. It is interesting that in that crisis I commanded all the lore though nothing of the memories of a mountain youth. And perhaps it was because my memory was like a freshly sponged slate that I can recall now with an almost hallucinatory power every step and strain of that desperate ascent. I emerged at length some nine hundred feet above an inferno of fire, and sufficiently shaken to fear that I might only have attained to a species of monstrously elevated grid-iron where I should perish like a martyr in a mad painter’s dream. I was however perfectly safe.