Photo-Finish

Alleyn’s arm was across Troy’s shoulders. He pulled her ear. ‘First prize for intrepidity, Mrs A.,’ he said. ‘You’re being splendid.’

‘What did you expect me to do? Howl like a banshee?’

Presently the route flattened out and the driver changed into top gear. They reached the floor of the gorge and drove beside the river, roaring in its courses, so that they could scarcely hear each other speak. It was cold down there.

‘Now you’re in Westland,’ shouted the driver.

Evening was well advanced when, after a two-hour passage through the wet loam-scented forest that New Zealanders call ‘bush’ they came out into more open country and stopped at a tiny railway station called Kai-kai. Here they collected the private mailbag for the Lodge and then drove parallel with the railway for twenty miles, rounded the nose of a hill and there lay a great floor of water: Lake Waihoe.

‘There you are,’ said the driver, ‘That’s the Lake for you. And the Island.’

‘Stay me with flagons!’ said Alleyn and rubbed his head.

The prospect was astonishing. At this hour the Lake was perfectly unruffled and held the blazing image of an outrageous sunset. Fingers of land reached out bearing elegant trees that reversed themselves in the water. Framed by these and far beyond them was the Island and on the Island Mr Reece’s Lodge.

It was a house designed by a celebrated architect in the modern idiom but so ordered that one might have said it grew organically out of its primordial setting. Giants that carried their swathy foliage in clusters stood magnificently about a grassy frontage. There was a jetty in the foreground with a launch alongside. Grossly incongruous against the uproarious sunset, like some intrusive bug, a helicopter hovered. As they looked it disappeared behind the house.

‘I don’t believe in all this,’ said Troy. ‘It’s out of somebody’s dream. It can’t be true.’

‘You reckon?’ asked the driver.

‘I reckon,’ said Troy.

They turned into a lane that ran between tree ferns and underbrush down to the lake edge where there was a garage, a landing stage, a boathouse and a bell in a miniature belfry. They left the car and walked out into evening smells of wet earth, fern and moss and the cold waters of the lake.

The driver rang the bell, sending a single echoing note across the lake. He then remarked that they’d been seen from the Island. Sure enough the launch put out. So still was the evening they could hear the putt-putt of the engine. ‘Sound travels a long way over the water,’ said the driver.

The sunset came to its preposterous climax. Everything that could be seen, near and far, was sharpened and gilded. Their faces reddened. The far-off windows of the Lodge turned to fire. In ten minutes it had all faded and the landscape was cold. Troy and Alleyn walked a little way along the water’s edge and Troy looked at the house and wondered about the people inside it. Would Isabella Sommita feel that it was a proper showplace for her brilliance and what would she look like posing in the ‘commodious studio’ against those high windows, herself flamboyant against another such sunset as the one that had gone by?

Troy said: ‘This really is an adventure.’

Alleyn said: ‘Do you know, in a cockeyed sort of way it reminds me of one of those Victorian romances by George Macdonald where the characters find a looking glass and walk out of this world into another one inhabited by strange beings and unaccountable ongoings.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Troy, ‘the entrance to that great house will turn out to be our own front door and we’ll be back in London.’

They talked about the house and the way in which it rose out of its setting in balanced towers. Presently the launch, leaving an arrowhead of rippled silk in its wake, drew in to the landing stage. It was a large, opulent craft. The helmsman came out of his wheelhouse and threw a mooring rope to the car driver.

‘Meet Les Smith,’ said the driver.

‘Gidday,’ said Les Smith. ‘How’s tricks, then, Bert? Good trip?’

‘No trouble, Les.’

‘Good as gold,’ said the helmsman.

Alleyn helped them stow the luggage. Troy was handed on board and they puttered out on the lake.

The driver went into the wheelhouse with Les Smith. Troy and Alleyn sat in the stern.

‘Here we go,’ he said. ‘Liking it?’

‘It’s a lovely beginning,’ said Troy. ‘It’s so lovely it hurts.’

‘Keep your fingers crossed,’ he said lightly.

II

Perhaps because their day had been so long and had followed so hard on their flight from England, the first night at the Lodge went by rather like a dream for Troy.

They had been met by Mr Reece’s secretary and a dark man dressed like a tarted-up ship’s steward who carried their baggage. They were taken to their room to ‘freshen up’. The secretary, a straw-coloured youngish man with a gushing manner, explained that Mr Reece was on the telephone but would be there to meet them when they came down and that everyone was ‘changing’ but they were not to bother as everybody would ‘quite understand’. Dinner was in a quarter of an hour. There was a drinks tray in the room and he suggested that they should make use of it and said he knew they would be angelic and excuse him as Mr Reece had need of his services. He then, as an apparent afterthought, was lavish in welcome, flashed smiles and withdrew. Troy thought vaguely that he was insufferable.

‘I don’t know about you,’ she said, ‘but I refuse to be quite understood and I’m going to shift my clothes. I require a nice wash and a change. And a drink, by the way.’

She opened her suitcase, scuffled in it and lugged out a jump suit which was luckily made of uncrushable material. She then went into the bathroom which was equipped like a plumber-king’s palace. Alleyn effected a lightning change at which exercise he was a past master and mixed two drinks. They sat side by side on an enormous bed and contemplated their room.

‘It’s all been done by some super American interior decorator, wouldn’t you say?’ said Troy, gulping down her brandy-and-dry.

‘You reckon?’ said Alleyn, imitating the driver.

‘I reckon,’ said Troy. ‘You have to wade through the carpet, don’t you? Not walk on it.’

‘It’s not a carpet: it’s about two hundred sheepskins sewn together. The local touch.’

‘All jolly fine for us to snigger. It’s pretty smashing, really, let’s face it. Not human, though. If only there was something shabby and out of character somewhere.’

‘Us,’ Alleyn said. ‘We’re all of that. Drink up. We’d better not be late.’

On their way downstairs they took in the full effect of the hall with its colossal blazing fireplace, display on the walls of various lethal weapons and hangings woven in the Maori fashion, and a large semi-abstract wood sculpture of a pregnant nude with a complacent smirk. From behind one of the doors there came sounds of conversation. An insistent male voice rose above the rest. There followed a burst of multiple laughter.

‘Good Lord,’ said Alleyn, ‘it’s a house party.’

The dark man who had taken their baggage up was in the hall.

‘In the drawing room, sir,’ he said unnecessarily and opened the door.

About a dozen or so people, predominantly male, were grouped at the far end of a long room. The focal point seemed to be a personage with a grey imperial beard and hair en brosse, wearing a velvet jacket and flowing tie, an eyeglass and a flower in his lapel. His manner was that of a practised raconteur who, after delivering a mot, is careful to preserve an expressionless face. His audience was barely recovered from its fits of merriment. The straw-coloured secretary, indeed, with glass in hand, gently tapped his fingers against his left wrist by way of applause. In doing this he turned, saw the Alleyns and bent over someone in a sofa with its back to the door.

A voice said: ‘Ah yes,’ and Mr Reece rose and came to greet them.

He was shortish and dark and had run a little to what is sometimes called expense-account fat. His eyes were large, and his face closed: a face that it would be easy to forget since it seemed to say nothing.

He shook hands and said how glad he was to receive them: to Troy he added that it was an honour and a privilege to welcome her. There were, perhaps, American overtones in his speech but on the whole his voice, like the rest of him, seemed neutral. He introduced the Alleyns formally to everybody. To the raconteur who was Signor Beppo Lattienzo and who kissed Troy’s hand. To a rotund gentleman who looked like an operatic tenor and turned out to be one: the celebrated Rodolfo Romano. To Mr Ben Ruby who was jocular and said they all knew Troy would do better than that: indicating a vast academic portrait of La Sommita’s gown topped up by her mask. Then came a young man of startling physical beauty who looked apprehensive – Rupert Bartholomew; a pretty girl whose name Troy, easily baffled by mass introductions, didn’t catch, and a largish lady on a sofa who was called Miss Hilda Dancy and had a deep voice, and finally there loomed up a gentleman with an even deeper voice and a jolly brown face who proclaimed himself a New Zealander and was called Mr Eru Johnstone.

Having discharged his introductory duties Mr Reece retained his hold on Alleyn, supervised his drink, led him a little apart and, as Troy could see by the sort of attentive shutter that came over her husband’s face, engaged him in serious conversation.

‘You have had a very long day, Mrs Alleyn,’ said Signor Lattienzo who spoke with a marked Italian accent. ‘Do you feel as if all your time signals had become – ‘ he rotated plump hands rapidly round each other – ‘jumbled together?’

‘Exactly like that,’ said Troy. ‘Jet hangover, I think.’