‘Do I?’ said Troy Alleyn, looking startled indeed. ‘Sorry. I was a thousand miles away.’
‘I wish I were. Or no,’ amended Miss Rickerby-Carrick. ‘Wrong again. Correction. I wish I were a thousand miles away from me. From myself. No kidding,’ she added. ‘To try out another colloquialism.’
She wrote again in her book.
Her companion looked attentively at her and might have been said, after her own fashion, also to make notes. She saw a figure, not exactly of fun, but of confusion. There was no co-ordination. The claret-coloured suit, the disheartened jumper, above all the knitted jockey-cap, all looked to have been thrown at their wearer and fortuitously to have stuck. She had a strange trick with her mouth, letting it fly apart over her teeth and turn up at the corners so that she seemed to grin when in fact she did nothing of the sort. The hand that clutched her propelling pencil was arthritic.
Overhead, clouds bowled slowly across a midsummer sky. A light wind fiddled with the river and one or two small boats bumped at their moorings. The pleasure craft Zodiac had not appeared but was due at noon.
‘My name,’ said Miss Rickerby-Carrick, ‘is Rickerby-Carrick. Hazel. “Spinster of this parish”. What’s yours?’
‘Alleyn.’
‘Mrs?’
‘Yes.’ After a moment’s hesitation Troy, since it was obviously expected of her, uncomfortably added her first name. ‘Agatha,’ she mumbled.
‘Agatharallen,’ said Miss Rickerby-Carrick sharply. ‘That’s funny. I thought you must be K. G. Z. Andropulos, Cabin 7.’
‘The cabin was taken by somebody called Andropulos, I believe, but the booking was cancelled at the last moment. This morning, in fact. I happened to be here on – on business and I saw it advertised in the Company’s window, so I took it,’ said Troy, ‘on impulse.’
‘Just like that. Fancy.’ A longish pause followed. ‘So we’re ship-mates? “Water-wanderers?”’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick concluded, quoting the brochure.
‘In the Zodiac? Yes,’ Troy agreed and hoped she sounded friendly enough. Miss Rickerby-Carrick crinkled her eyes and stripped her teeth. ‘Jolly good show,’ she said. She gazed at Troy for some time and then returned to her writing. An affluent-looking car drove half-way down the cobbled passage. Its uniformed driver got out, walked to the quay, looked superciliously at nothing in particular, returned, spoke through the rear window to an indistinguishable occupant and resumed his place at the wheel.
‘When I examine in depth the motives by which I am activated,’ wrote Miss Rickerby-Carrick in her book. ‘I am appalled. For instance. I have a reputation, within my circle (admittedly a limited one) for niceness, for kindness, for charity. I adore my reputation. People come to me in their trouble. They cast themselves upon my bosom and weep. I love it. I’m awfully good at being good. I think to myself that they must all tell each other how good I am. “Hay Rickerby-Carrick,” I know they say, “She’s so good.” And so I am. I am. I put myself out in order to keep up my reputation. I make sacrifices. I am unselfish in buses, upstanding in tubes and I relinquish my places in queues. I visit the aged, I comfort the bereaved and if they don’t like it they can lump it. I am filled with amazement when I think about my niceness. O misery, misery, misery me,’ she wrote with enormous relish.
Two drops fell upon her open notebook. She gave a loud, succulent and complacent sniff.
Troy thought: ‘Will she go on like this for five days? Is she dotty? O God, has she got a cold!’
‘Sorry,’ said Miss Rickerby-Carrick. ‘I’ve god a bid of cold. Dur,’ she added making a catarrhal clicking sound and allowing her mouth to fall slightly open. Troy began to wonder if there was a good train to London before evening.
‘You wonder,’ said Miss Rickerby-Carrick in a thick voice, ‘why I sit on my suitcase and write. I have lately taken to a diary. My self-propelling confessional, I call it.’
‘Do you?’ Troy said helplessly.
Down the cobbled lane walked a pleasant-looking man in an ancient knickerbocker suit of Donegal tweed and a cloth cap. He carried, beside a rucksack, a square box on a shoulder-strap and a canvas-covered object that might, Troy thought, almost be a grossly misshapen tennis racquet. He took off his cap when he saw the ladies and kept it off. He was of a sandy complexion with a not unattractive cast in one of his blue eyes, a freckled countenance and a tentative smile.
‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘We must be fellow-travellers.’
Troy agreed. Miss Rickerby-Carrick, blurred about the eyes and nose, nodded, smiled and sniffed. She was an industrious nodder.
‘No signs of the Zodiac as yet,’ said the newcomer. ‘Dear me,’ he added, ‘that’s a pit-fall of a joke isn’t it? We shall all be making it as punctually as the tides, I daresay.’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick after a moment’s thought, was consumed with laughter. He looked briefly at her and attentively at Troy. ‘My name’s Caley Bard,’ he said.
‘I’m Troy Alleyn and this is Miss Rickerby-Carrick.’
‘You said you were Agatha,’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick pointed out. ‘You said Agatharallen,’ and Troy felt herself blushing.
‘So I am,’ she muttered, ‘the other’s just a sort of a joke – my husband –’ her voice died away. She was now extremely conscious of Mr Bard’s scrutiny and particularly aware of its dwelling speculatively on the veteran paintbox at her feet. All he said, however, was, ‘Dear me,’ in a donnish tone. When she looked her apprehension he tipped her a wink. This was disconcerting.
She was relieved by the arrival on an apocalyptic motorbicycle of a young man and his girl. The noonday sun pricked at their metal studs and turned the surface of their leather suits and calf-high boots into toffee. From under crash helmets, hair, veiled in oil and dust, fell unevenly to their shoulders. Their machine belched past the stationary chauffeur-driven car and came to a halt. They put their booted feet to the ground and lounged, chewing, against their bicycle. ‘There is nothing,’ Troy thought, ‘as insolent as a gum-chewing face,’ and at the same time she itched to make a sharp, black drawing of the riders.
‘Do you suppose –?’ she ventured in a low voice.
‘I hardly think water-wandering would present a very alluring prospect,’ Mr Bard rejoined.
‘In any case, they have no luggage.’
‘They may not need any. They may bed down as they are.’
‘Oh, do you think so? All those steel knobs.’
‘There is that, of course,’ Mr Bard agreed.
The young people lit cigarettes, inhaled deeply, stared at nothing and exhaled vapour. They had not spoken.
Miss Rickerby-Carrick gazed raptly at them and then wrote in her book.
‘– “two of our Young Independents”,’ she noted. ‘Is it to gladiators that one should compare them? Would they like it if one did? Would I be able to get on with them? Would they like me? Would they find me sympatica or is it sympatico? Alas, there I go again. Incorrigible, hopeless old Me!’
She stabbed down an ejaculation mark, clicked off her pencil with an air of quizzical finality, and said to Troy: ‘How did you get here? I came by bus: from good old Brummers.’
‘I drove,’ Mr Bard said. ‘From London and put up at a pub. Got here last night.’
‘I did too,’ said Troy. ‘But I came by train.’
‘There’s a London train that connects this morning,’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick observed. ‘Arrives 11.45.’
‘I know. But I – there was – I had an engagement,’ Troy mumbled.
‘Such