Buried for Pleasure (15 page)

‘Then I must wish you the best of luck,' Fen responded with as much heartiness as he could muster.

‘Ah, but it's not all a matter of luck, is it?' By now Boysenberry's unyielding cordiality had grown positively macabre. ‘A lot of good can be done, you know, by a word in the right place.' And with this insinuation the effort of tactfully shooting his bolt became too much for him, and from sheer nervousness his voice rose. to a kind of shout.

‘Oh, I see,' said Fen, at last enlightened. ‘But I scarcely think that
my
recommendation – –'

With a creditable effort Boysenberry regained control of his nerves. ‘You underestimate yourself, Professor Fen,' he said; and when Fen, to whom this accusation was unfamiliar, vaguely demurred: ‘Ah, but indeed you do,' Boysenberry reiterated firmly. ‘You must not, of course, imagine that I'm in any way
canvassing
. Dear me, no. But I thought that if you were to come across any of the members of the selection panel, socially as it were, and if you were just to mention that I was at least – ha! ha! – presentable . . . ' And he left the sentence in mid-air, straightening his pince-nez and smoothing his hair in an attempt to make this suggestion colourable.

As an Open Sesame to the minutiae of Elphinstone's lunacy this could hardly be bettered, and Fen accepted it with a singular lack of scruple. ‘I know all the members of the selection panel intimately,' he said, ‘and they are, on the whole, very suggestible. I think that perhaps I may be able to do something for you. These things are mostly arranged behind the scenes, you know.' And in uttering this intolerable slander, Fen closed one eye in a knowing wink.

Enchanted, Boysenberry winked back. ‘I'm extremely obliged to you,' he said. ‘Extremely obliged. And now – –'

‘And now, Elphinstone.'

‘Yes, yes, of course. Elphinstone.' In his anxiety to be helpful Boysenberry rose agitatedly from his chair and then sat down again. ‘So long as I thought you were a journalist. . . . That is to say in your case . . .' He picked up a sheet of paper and stared at it for a moment uncomprehendingly. ‘Elphinstone, yes. Naturally I shall be most happy to give you any information you require. Most happy . . . And I remember that you have been engaged in a number of cases of a criminal nature. Perhaps, with regard to this dreadful affair last night. . . .'

‘Yes,' said Fen. ‘It's that which interests me. The police, as you probably know, have formed the opinion that it was Elphinstone who committed the murder.'

‘So I understand.' Boysenberry's elation rather abruptly evaporated at the reminder. ‘And no doubt,' he added gloomily, ‘I shall be held responsible, inasmuch as it was from here that he escaped.'

‘If it's any consolation to you,' said Fen, ‘I don't myself believe that he did it. That's why I'm here. And I expect it would help you if it could be proved that he did
not
do it.'

‘It would indeed,' said Boysenberry eagerly. ‘I won't attempt to disguise from you the fact that if Elphinstone
is
proved to have killed this man, the consequences for me will be – ah – somewhat awkward. It will be said by ill-natured persons that I did not keep him under adequate restraint. Do you think, now' – he peered at Fen anxiously – ‘that such a – such a misfortune, let us say – would prejudice my chances of being appointed a Professor at Oxford?'

‘I'm very much afraid that it would.'

‘Oh, dear,' said Boysenberry in blank dismay. ‘Oh, dear. . . . Well, we can only hope that the facts are not as they at present appear.'

‘And it may be feasible to demonstrate that they aren't.' Wearying of these lengthy preliminaries, Fen spoke rather brusquely. ‘From what you know of his condition, would you say that Elphinstone was capable of killing?'

Boysenberry wriggled uncomfortably. ‘The difficulty is,' he said, ‘that from first-hand observation I know very little of him. He had been here not much more than a week when he escaped – and in any case, it was quite a mistake that he was ever sent here at all.'

‘A mistake?'

‘An error of card-indexing, I believe. This Home is not intended for complex cases, such as his, but for the mild and intermittent forms of lunacy, and for patients who are convalescing and well on the way to recovery. By rights Elphinstone should have been sent to Climball or to Ferris Haugh. But someone blundered, as Browning so aptly puts it, and he was delivered here. And I don't know if you've noticed, but the Civil Service is a body whose mistakes are made so thoroughly and definitively, that they can only be rectified by a procedure equally searching and elaborate. . . . The moment Elphinstone and his file arrived I realized, of course, that he had been misdirected. But could I take immediate action to remedy this state of affairs? I could not – unless you are prepared to call the filling-in of forms “action”. And the consequence was that he escaped, since we had not the proper means of restraining him.'

‘Most unfortunate,' Fen agreed. ‘And I can understand, in that case, why you're unable to give an opinion about whether he might turn homicidal or not.'

‘Well, I wouldn't go quite so far as that,' said Boysenberry hastily. ‘If I were pressed for a diagnosis, I should, I think, say that he was
not
homicidal; if I were
pressed
, that is,' he reiterated, thereby nullifying whatever value his pronouncement might have had.

‘Well, you may take it,' said Fen, ‘that I am pressing you.'

‘Yes. . . . On the other hand, it would be fatal to be
too
definite. The public is right in supposing madmen to be logical – and in that sense their actions can to some extent be foreseen. . . . The only trouble is that the results of logic depend on its premises, and since lunatics are capable of changing their premises every two seconds, they can remain logical and yet
still
be totally unpredictable. For example . . .'

But Fen felt no desire for an example. ‘Yes, yes, I see all that,' he interrupted. ‘And it leaves us exactly where we were to start with. Now, may I please hear what you know about Elphinstone's case-history?'

‘Certainly. Certainly you may.' Boysenberry crossed with alacrity to the filing-cabinet and produced from it a pink file, which he laid, open, on the desk in front of him. ‘All the relevant papers are here, I think. . . . Yes. Quite so. . . . Well, in the first place, he's the son of normal middle-class parents; no previous madness in the family, so far as we've been able to discover. And his childhood and adolescence were perfectly normal, except that he developed, at about six years of age, a fixation about gloves.'

‘Ah,' said Fen. Psychologists were unfortunate, he reflected, in that among technical jargons theirs alone had been so completely vulgarized as to have lost all impressiveness. Doctors could still awe their hearers with talk of oedema and ecchymoses, physicists with talk of dielectric constants, isotopes, and photonic mass, chemists with talk of allotropic modification and multiple equivalence; it was only the luckless psychologist who lacked professional runes, for
trauma, complex, fixation
, and the like had long since been deprived by popular usage of all hierophantic mystery. . . . ‘A fixation,' Fen repeated encouragingly.

‘And the significance of it is not, I'm afraid, at all clear,' Boysenberry went on. ‘In the normal way, a glove, being
hollow
, would of course be identified with the
womb
.' He eyed Fen dubiously, as though scarcely expecting him to credit so grotesque an assertion. ‘But even if we make such an identification in this case, we are not,' he admitted with candour, ‘very much helped by it, You must understand that, in spite of having made great strides, our science is still not able to perceive and comprehend
every
quirk of the human mind.'

Fen, who held the reactionary view that this prerogative was unlikely ever to be wrested from the Omnipotence, contrived none the less to look suitably sympathetic. ‘Just so,' he murmured deferentially. ‘However, in Elphinstone's case it's the symptoms I need to know rather than the diagnosis.'

‘Ah.' Boysenberry was perceptibly relieved. ‘To proceed, then . . . The glove-fixation was not accompanied by any other abnormality, and so, not unnaturally, the parents did nothing about it. and all was well until Elphinstone went to the University. There he undertook the study of philosophy, politics, and economics – and our records show,' said Boysenberry ingenuously, ‘that an interest in these subjects often leads on to total madness. . . . However, that's by the way. The first noticeable sign that Elphinstone's mind was actually diseased lay in his growing conviction that President Woodrow Wilson was the most profound political thinker of our own or any age, an opinion which I'm told would be generally regarded as somewhat – ah – eccentric. At all events, his insistence on it resulted in his failing in his final examination. . . . A year passes,' said Boysenberry, relapsing dramatically into the historic present, ‘and when we next see him – the war being over – he is visiting Paris. And during this visit we get, for the first time, evidence that Elphinstone conceives himself to be Wilson, since he is found by an attendant in the Conference Room at Versailles making a long speech about' – here Boysenberry consulted the papers in front of him – ‘about the future of the Ruhr. On the attendant's remonstrating with him he seems to have reverted for a short period to comparative normalcy, but during the voyage back to England complete lunacy at last engulfed him. By some stratagem which remains obscure he assembled several young women on the boat-deck and, after some preliminary remarks on the topic of international justice, ordered them to throw themselves instantly into the sea. They demurred at this – whereupon he seized two of them and threw them into the sea himself. . . . I'm glad to say that the women were picked up not greatly the worse for their experience – but poor Elphinstone has from that time to this been uninterruptedly insane.'

‘Dear me,' said Fen. ‘But wouldn't you say that his behaviour with these women indicated homicidal tendencies?'

‘Well, no, not really. You must understand that he ordered the women to immolate themselves, precisely because they
were
women and not men. A kind of
suttee
was what Elphinstone had in mind; and it was only when the women failed to co-operate that he took direct action. So although in certain circumstances he might just conceivably kill a female, I very much doubt if he would ever kill a man.'

By now, however, Fen felt convinced that Elphinstone was capable of doing absolutely anything, and he was consequently not much impressed by this homiletic; as an argument against Elphinstone's having killed Bussy it was in any case hopelessly ineffectual – as also indeed, was everything else that Boysenberry had told him so far. He cast about in his mind for some new line of approach. ‘The nudity,' he said. ‘What about that?'

‘Normal exhibitionism.'

‘And I gather that that is never simultaneous with the glove-fixation.'

‘No, never. If one interprets the glove-fixation as a womb-fixation, then by rights, of course, the two things
ought
to be simultaneous. But in fact' – and Boysenberry's tone betrayed some resentment at Elphinstone's failure to conform with the more elementary tenets of psychological science – ‘in fact, they are not.'

‘Are there any particular phobias?'

Boysenberry hesitated momentarily, and then said: ‘None – except, that is, things which are associated with his belief that he is Wilson.'

‘Such as?'

‘Well, such as Clemenceau, for instance.'

Clemenceau, Fen thought gloomily: there was not much illumination in that. Moreover, the interview was beginning to pall. If any proof existed that
X
, and not Elphinstone, had killed Bussy, then it was not likely to be found here. ‘I think – –' he began – and was interrupted by a knock on the door. With a hasty word of apology Boysenberry bawled a permission to enter across the acres separating him from it. An attendant came in, accompanying an elderly male patient. They padded over to the desk.

‘Firkin, sir,' said the attendant. ‘You asked to see him before lunch.'

‘Oh, yes, so I did.' Boysenberry was evidently displeased at the interruption; still, it might perhaps provide an opportunity for displaying his grasp of abnormal psychology to Fen. ‘Well,' he said to the lunatic, ‘and how are we this morning?'

‘None the better for seeing you,' the lunatic answered.

Boysenberry assumed an expression of incisive scientific curiosity. ‘Now, why should you say that, I wonder?'

‘I say it because you have such an ugly mug.'

‘Dear me.' Boysenberry laughed uneasily. ‘Well, I've never prided myself on being handsome, exactly, but still, I should hardly – ha! ha! – go so far as that.'

‘I,' said the lunatic, amiably but with emphasis, ‘should go a hell of a sight farther.'

‘Yes, well, Baines, I think you'd better take him away now and give him his meal.' And when attendant and lunatic had peaceably departed: ‘Firkin is recovering fast,' Boysenberry confided to Fen. ‘His is an interesting case, and in some respects similar to Elphinstone's. For instance, Firkin has a phobia about water, just as Elphinstone has a phobia about – –' And here, belatedly realizing what he was saying, Boysenberry checked himself and stared at Fen with dismay.

‘Just,' Fen echoed with deliberation, ‘as Elphinstone has a phobia about
what?
'

‘About Clemenceau,' Boysenberry stammered feebly. ‘About Clemenceau, I was going to say.'