‘but not to meet Mr Garbel. And yet: I don’t know. There’s a sort of itch, I confess it, to find out just how deadly dull he is. Like a suicidal tendency.’
‘You must yield to it. Write to him and tell him you’re coming. You might enclose a bus ticket from Putney to the Fulham Road. How do you address him: ‘Dear Cousin –’ but what is his Christian name?’
‘I’ve no idea. He’s just P.E. Garbel. To his intimates, he tells me, he is known as Peg. He adds inevitably, a quip about being square in a round hole.’
‘Roqueville being the hole?’
‘Presumably.’
‘Has he a job, do you think?’
‘For all I know he may be writing a monograph on bicarbonate of soda. If he is he’ll probably ask us to read the manuscript.’
‘At all events we must meet him. Put down that damn’ palette and tell me you’re coming.’
Troy wiped her hands on her smock. ‘We’re coming,’ she said.
II
In his château outside Roqueville Mr Oberon looked across the nighted Mediterranean towards North Africa and then smiled gently upon his assembled guests.
‘How fortunate we are,’ he said. ‘Not a jarring note. All gathered together with one pure object in mind.’ He ran over their names as if they composed a sort of celestial roll-call. ‘Our youngest disciple,’ he said beaming on Ginny Taylor. ‘A wonderful field of experience awaits her. She stands on the threshold of ecstasy. It is not too much to say, of ecstasy. And Robin too.’ Robin Herrington, who had been watching Ginny Taylor, looked up sharply. ‘Ah, youth, youth,’ sighed Mr Oberon ambiguously and turned to the remaining guests, two men and a woman. ‘Do we envy them?’ he asked and answered himself. ‘No! No, for ours is the richer tilth. We are the husbandmen, are we not?’
Dr Baradi lifted his dark, fleshy and intelligent head. He looked at his host. ‘Yes, indeed,’ he said. ‘We are precisely that. And when Annabella arrives – I think you said she was coming?’
‘Dear Annabella!’ Mr Oberon exclaimed. ‘Yes. On Tuesday. Unexpectedly.’
‘Ah!’ said Carbury Glande, looking at his paint-stained finger-nails. ‘On Tuesday. Then she will be rested and ready for our Thursday rites.’
‘Dear Annabella!’ Dr Baradi echoed sumptuously.
The sixth guest turned her ravaged face and short-sighted eyes towards Ginny Taylor.
‘Is this your first visit?’ she asked.
Ginny was looking at Mr Oberon. She wore an expression that was unbecoming to her youth, a look of uncertainty, excitement and perhaps fear.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘My first.’
‘A neophyte,’ Baradi murmured richly.
‘Soon to be so young a priestess,’ Mr Oberon added. ‘It is very touching.’ He smiled at Ginny with parted lips.
A tinkling crash broke across the conversation. Robin Herrington had dropped his glass on the tessellated floor. The remains of his cocktail ran into a little pool near Mr Oberon’s feet.
Mr Oberon cut across his apologies. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It is a happy symbol. Perhaps a promise. Let us call it a libation,’ he said. ‘Shall we dine?’
Alleyn lifted himself on his elbow and turned his watch to the blue light above his pillow. Twenty minutes past five. In another hour they would be in Roqueville.
The abrupt fall of silence when the train stopped must have woken him. He listened intently but, apart from the hiss of escaping steam and the slam of a door in a distant carriage, everything was quiet and still.
He heard the men in the double sleeper next to his own exchange desultory remarks. One of them yawned loudly.
Alleyn thought the station must be Douceville. Sure enough, someone walked past the window and a lonely voice announced to the night: ‘Douce-v-i-ll-e.’
The engine hissed again. The same voice, apparently continuing a broken conversation, called out: ‘Pas ce soir, par exemple!’ Someone else laughed distantly. The voices receded to be followed by the most characteristic of all stationary-train noises, the tap of steel on steel. The taps tinkered away into the distance.
Alleyn manoeuvred himself to the bottom of his bunk, dangled his long legs in space for a moment and then slithered to the floor. The window was not completely shuttered. He peered through the gap and was confronted by the bottom of a poster for Dubonnet and the lower half of a porter carrying a lamp. The lamp swung to and fro, a bell rang and the train clanked discreetly. The lamp and poster were replaced by the lower halves of two discharged passengers, a pile of luggage, a stretch of empty platform and a succession of swiftly moving pools of light. Then there was only the night hurrying past with blurred suggestions of rocks and olive trees.
The train gathered speed and settled down to its perpetual choriambic statement: ‘What a to-do. What a to-do.’
Alleyn cautiously lowered the window-blind. The train was crossing the seaward end of a valley and the moon in its third quarter was riding the westward heavens. Its radiance emphasized the natural pallor of hills and trees and dramatized the shapes of rocks and mountains. With the immediate gesture of a shutter, a high bank obliterated this landscape. The train passed through a village and for two seconds Alleyn looked into a lamplit room where a woman watched a man intent over an early breakfast. What occupation got them up so soon? They were there, sharp in his vision, and were gone.
He turned from the window wondering if Troy, who shared his pleasure in train journeys, was awake in her single berth next door. In twenty minutes he would go and see. In the meantime he hoped that, in the almost complete darkness, he could dress himself without making a disturbance. He began to do so, steadying himself against the lurch and swing of this small, noisy and unstable world.
‘Hallo.’ A treble voice ventured from the blackness of the lower bunk. ‘Are we getting out soon?’
‘Hallo,’ Alleyn rejoined. ‘No, go to sleep.’
‘I couldn’t be wakier. Matter of fac’ I’ve been awake pretty well all night.’
Alleyn groped for his shirt, staggered, barked his shin on the edge of his suitcase and swore under his breath.
‘Because,’ the treble voice continued, ‘if we aren’t getting out why are you dressing yourself?’
‘To be ready for when we are.’
‘I see,’ said the voice. ‘Is Mummy getting ready for getting out too?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s not time.’
‘Is she asleep?’
‘I don’t know, old boy.’
‘Then how do you know she’s not getting ready?’
‘I don’t know, really. I just hope she’s not.’
‘Why?’
‘I want her to rest, and if you say why again I won’t answer.’
‘I see.’ There was a pause. The voice chuckled. ‘Why?’ it asked.
Alleyn had found his shirt. He now discovered that he had put it on inside out. He took it off.
‘If,’ the voice