Dead Water

‘You appear to be a little fatigued. When is your vacation?’

‘When I can snatch it. I hope, quite soon,’ Alleyn said and was at once alarmed by a look of low cunning in Miss Emily. ‘Please don’t go,’ he begged her.

She placed her hand in the correct position to be kissed. ‘Au revoir,’ she said, ‘et mille remerciements.’

‘Mes hommages, madame,’ said Alleyn crossly. With the profoundest misgivings he took his leave of Miss Emily.

II

It was nine o’clock in the evening when the London train reached Dunlowman where one changed for the Portcarrow bus. On alighting, Jenny was confronted by several posters depicting a fanciful Green Lady across whose image was superimposed a large notice advertising ‘The Festival of the Spring.’ She had not recovered from this shock when she received a second one in the person of Patrick Ferrier. There he was, looking much the same after nearly two years, edging his way through the crowd, quite a largish one, that moved towards the barrier. ‘Jenny!’ he called. ‘Hi! I’ve come to meet you.’

‘But it’s miles and miles!’ Jenny cried, delighted to see him.

‘A bagatelle. Hold on. Here I come.’

He reached her and seized her suitcases. ‘This is fun,’ he said. ‘I’m so glad.’

Outside the station a number of people had collected under a sign that read ‘Portcarrow Bus.’ Jenny watched them as she waited for Patrick to fetch his car. They looked, she thought, a singularly mixed bunch and yet there was something about them – what was it? – that gave them an exclusive air, as if they belonged to some rather outlandish sect. The bus drew up and as these people began to climb in, she saw that among them there was a girl wearing a steel brace on her leg. Further along the queue a man with an emaciated face and terrible eyes quietly waited his turn. There was a plain, heavy youth with a bandaged ear and a woman who laughed repeatedly, it seemed without cause, and drew no response from her companion, an older woman, who kept her hand under the other’s forearm and looked ahead. They filed into the bus and although there were no other outward signs of the element that united them, Jenny knew what it was.

Patrick drove up in a two-seater. He put her luggage into a boot that was about a quarter of the size of the bonnet and in a moment they had shot away down the street.

‘This is very handsome of you, Patrick,’ Jenny said. ‘And what a car!’

‘Isn’t she pleasant?’

‘New, I imagine.’

‘Yes. To celebrate. I’m eating my dinners, after all, Jenny. Do you remember?’

‘Of course. I do congratulate you.’

‘You may not be so polite when you see how it’s been achieved, however. Your wildest fantasies could scarcely match the present reality of the Island.’

‘I did see the English papers in Paris and your letters were fairly explicit.’

‘Nevertheless you’re in for a shock, I promise you.’

‘I expect I can take it.’

‘Actually, I rather wondered if we ought to ask you.’

‘It was sweet of your mama and I’m delighted to come. Patrick, it’s wonderful to be back in England. When I saw the Battersea power-station, I cried. For sheer pleasure.’

‘You’ll probably roar like a bull when you see Portcarrow and not for pleasure, either. You haven’t lost your susceptibility for places, I see. By the way,’ Patrick said after a pause, ‘you’ve arrived for a crisis.’

‘What sort of crisis?’

‘In the person of an old, old angry lady called Miss Emily Pride, who has inherited the Island from her sister (Winterbottom, deceased). She shares your views about exploiting the spring. You ought to get on like houses on fire.’

‘What’s she going to do?’

‘Shut up shop unless the combined efforts of interested parties can steer her off. Everybody’s in a frightful taking-on about it. She arrives on Monday, breathing restoration and fury.’

‘Like a wicked fairy godmother?’

‘Very like. Probably flourishing a black umbrella and emitting sparks. She’s flying into a pretty solid wall of opposition. Of course,’ Patrick said abruptly, ‘the whole thing has been fantastic. For some reason the initial story caught on. It was the silly season and the papers, as you may remember, played it up. Wally’s warts became big news. That led to the first lot of casual visitors. Mrs Winterbottom’s men of business began to make interested noises and the gold-rush, to coin a phrase, set in. Since then it’s never looked back.’

They had passed through the suburbs of Dunlowman and were driving along a road that ran out towards the coast.

‘It was nice getting your occasional letters,’ Patrick said, presently. ‘Operative word “occasional”.’

‘And yours.’

‘I’m glad you haven’t succumbed to the urge for black satin and menacing jewellery that seems to overtake so many girls who get jobs in France. But there’s a change, all the same.’

‘You’re not going to suggest I’ve got a phoney foreign accent?’

‘No, indeed. You’ve got no accent at all.’

‘And that, no doubt, makes the change. I expect having to speak French has cured it.’

‘You must converse with Miss Pride. She is, or was, before she succeeded to the Winterbottom riches, a terrifically high-powered coach for chaps entering the Foreign Service. She’s got a network of little spokes all round her mouth from making those exacting noises that are required by the language.’

‘You’ve seen her, then?’

‘Once. She visited with her sister about a year ago and left in a rage.’

‘I suppose,’ Jenny said after a pause, ‘this is really very serious, this crisis?’

‘It’s hell,’ he rejoined with surprising violence.

Jenny asked about Wally Trehern and was told that he had become a menace. ‘He doesn’t know where he is but he knows he’s the star-turn,’ Patrick said. ‘People make little pilgrimages to the cottage which has been tarted up in a sort of Peggotty-style Kitsch. Seaweed round the door almost, and a boat in a bottle. Mrs Trehern keeps herself to herself and the gin bottle but Trehern is a new man. He exudes a kind of honest-tar sanctity and sells Wally to the pilgrims.’

‘You appal me.’

‘I thought you’d better know the worst. What’s more, there’s an Anniversary Festival next Saturday, organized by Miss Cost. A choral procession to the Spring and Wally, dressed up like a wee fisher lad, reciting doggerel if he can remember it, poor little devil.’

‘Don’t!’ Jenny exclaimed. ‘Not true!’

‘True, I’m afraid.’

‘But Patrick – about the cures? The people that come? What happens?’

Patrick waited for a moment. He then said in a voice that held no overtones of irony: ‘I suppose, you know, it’s what always happens in these cases. Failure after failure until one thinks the whole thing is an infamous racket and is bitterly ashamed of having any part of it. And then, for no apparent reason, one, perhaps two, perhaps a few more, people do exactly what the others have done but go away without their warts or their migraine or their asthma or their chronic diarrhoea. Their gratitude and sheer exuberance! You can’t think what it’s like, Jenny. So then, of course, one diddles oneself – or is it diddling? – into imagining these cases wipe out all the others and all the ballyhoo, and my fees and this car, and Miss Cost’s Giffte Shoppe. She really has called it that, you know. She sold her former establishment and set up another on the Island. She sells tiny plastic models of the Green Lady and pamphlets she’s written herself, as well as handwoven jerkins and other novelties that I haven’t the face to enumerate. Are you sorry you came?’

‘I don’t think so. And your mother? What does she think?’

‘Who knows?’ Patrick said, simply. ‘She has a gift for detachment, my mama.’