Gently Continental (2 page)

Make-believe? But no! Something indeed has happened, something in terms of experience, or reality, shouldering mental worlds aside: something shocking, as people call it, when their system of concepts is paralysed, when, against their will, their consciousness is modified, and their identity suddenly at question. Something shocking – but what, and to whom? Somebody thinks of the American. Yes, the American. He didn't come in. He certainly went out, but didn't come in. Could it, was it . . . did he go swimming? Obviously the fishermen had found him. And that innocent sea by that innocent beach had a treacherous current on the ebb, had drowned strong swimmers, was the subject of a stricture by the local coroner. But wasn't it an unusual time to go swimming, especially after a Breskeian dinner – to which, as those who sat nearest to him recall, the American did a noisy justice? He would need to be mad to go swimming after that: even though American, he'd need to be mad; and however, he'd taken no towel or costume, simply set off as for a stroll. And yes: he did the same every evening. Now people remember his evening stroll. After dinner, after his whiskies, in the cool of the twilight, he went strolling. Perhaps to meet somebody? A woman? But he was never gone for long. And other guests have met him out there, on the beach, the cliffs, always alone. In fact, the American is mostly alone, it is one of his un-American traits. A lonely American, with no conversation. A mystery man. Why is he here?

And while they talk, a low chatter, Frieda is sitting at the desk, huddled, her broad chin on her hands, her grey eyes staring empty: Frieda, Miss Breske, who locked the doors against the American, who despised the American, she sits there, thinking. So like her mother, so unlike her. In features like, unlike in character. No tears from Miss Breske, no hysteria, no volubility, no tags of German left over from her Vienna childhood; a drab, sad girl, a business girl, a thinker. Now she picks up the phone. Who is she ringing – the police? Very composedly she speaks into it, answers questions, gives information. Yes, Miss Breske runs that hotel, notwithstanding her mother's fine cooking, her mother's Viennese fancy: she is the salt in the dish. She lays the phone down, rises. The guests on the landing fall silent. She looks up at them – quite expressionless – and several make a motion of drawing back. Are they suddenly feeling ashamed, like a group of gapers at an accident? Standing solitary in the hall Miss Breske looks so pale, so forlorn.

The bell rings again! Miss Breske hurries to the door. One of the guests, who has a sea-facing room, slips into it to stare from his window. Quick, quick! Others join him. Down there, look, covered with sacks, lying on a stretcher of a boat's floor-boards, dead for a ducat, dead he must be. Dead, dead, dead, dead. And covered with sacks on a boat's floor-boards. Drowned dead, found dead, but dead all ways. Now they carry him round the back and there's a rush to fresh windows. In there, in there, Miss Breske is saying, pointing to the timber, thatch-roofed summerhouse. She has a key, she always has keys, she opens the door, stands aside. They carry him in. The dead American. Into the summerhouse. Under his sacks. Do this, do that, her lips are saying, put him on the bench, oh, and cover him up. And this they have done, the fishermen, the waiters, because they bring out the floor-boards but not the sacks; and Miss Breske locks up, like a careful housekeeper, locks up the lonely American, dead. What happens now, says the big fisherman. Nothing, she says, I've informed the police. Just give me your names. They give her their names. They pick up the floor-boards, go humping away. And Miss Breske, and key, and the two waiters, come back from the summerhouse and into the hall. Yet – surely! – there's more to it, this dying, this tragedy? More than four old sacks and boards freckled with dried fish scales? More awe, more sentiment, more sacredness, more . . . make-believe? Or do all Americans, and perhaps other men, go dying like this?

Perhaps, even dying is a label given to an attitude.

B
UT OF COURSE
there is more to it, the death of the Hotel Continental's American, if not at a universal, then certainly at a particular, level. Though at first he lies more quiet than ever beneath his sacks in the summerhouse, attracting no notice, as he silently cools, except that of an early-flying bluebottle. But the living have formulas for the dead, however, wherever, the dying is done, and the appropriate formula, selected tentatively, is already in motion for the American: he waits, but does not wait long, under his second-hand hessian. First, from the village, comes Police Constable Stody, who in fact is a brother of the big fisherman, also a big man, a compassionate man, one who is troubled by duties of this kind; he has a few words, official and unofficial, with Mrs and Miss Breske, then reluctantly takes the key and goes to his statutory appointment with the deceased. He is brief. He removes the sacks, gazes unwillingly at what is beneath them. He notices the American's head is twisted to the left, that the skull is gory and undoubtedly fractured. Runnels of blood have dried on the face, which has the mouth open, as though screaming, while the eyeballs, though caked with sand and mere carrion, express horror. Stody closes his eyes a moment, then he bends over the American. The American had been wearing a pea-green silk shirt, green hopsack trousers, a cream tussore jacket. Stody empties the pockets of trousers and jackets. They do not contain anything remarkable. He looks at the passport, which tells him the deceased was Wilbur O'Brien Clooney, of East 115A Street, New York. Stody looks for letters. There are no letters. Other than the passport, there are no documents. The passport tells him Clooney is single, is a dealer in real estate, is fifty-one. Well, his Embassy will sort that out, whether he has a next-of-kin, a mother, brother, sister Clooney who, for some reason, writes him no letters. None of Stody's business, thank Heaven. Stody has finished in the summerhouse. He recovers the body, packs the belongings in a grip, gets to hell out of there, may he never see that body again. He goes up to Clooney's room, Number 7, along with Frieda Breske, who brings the key. Number 7 is a small single at the end of the landing. In the chest, a lot of shirts, string underwear, brilliant ties. In the wardrobe, one suit and a collection of pants and jackets. Shoes, he'd a taste for English brogues, but liked them pointed and particoloured. Two suitcases with Pan-American stickers. A Mickey Spillane. That was the lot. Did he never have any mail? No letters came for Mr Clooney. Did he talk about himself, his family? Frieda Breske shakes her head. Did he deposit anything in the safe. Frieda thinks, says no.

An odd fellow, this American! What sort of picture can Stody be forming? Probably a confused, quite uncritical picture, because, after all, there's no accounting for Americans. Didn't they take these long vacations, spending months at a time in Europe – in England, even, let alone Europe – and so perhaps here, in the Hotel Continental? An American businessman having a break, getting away from it all, letting his mail, if any, pile up elsewhere until he was good and ready to deal with it. Yes, that would be Stody's picture of the lonely American, if Stody felt a need (as perhaps yet he did not) to form a picture at all. Clooney's merely being American would blunt Stody's normal speculation. Also, occupying the foreground in his mind, was the pity he felt for the poor devil. Keep his room locked, he says, we'll fetch the stuff away later. How about – , Miss Breske says. We'll fetch him after the doctor's seen him, Stody says. And taking his grip, and thinking no evil, but still sick inside, Stody climbs into his '59 Morris Minor and drives away to his brother's house.

Fred Stody, Brother Fred, changed now out of his thigh-boots, shakes his head with Brother Jim and gives him his theory of the tragedy. It was this pill-box, he says, that's what busted his skull in, the one that toppled off the cliff. We found him lying nearly touching it. You mean he fell off the cliff on it, Stody says, and Brother Fred says, Blast, what else? Brother Fred is drinking tea laced with whisky, a cup of which he offers Stody. Anywhere else, Brother Fred says, well, he might have broke his neck. But those cliffs aren't high nor yet steep, and there's only sand at the foot of them. Blast, I once took a tumble down there, and never let on to Ma about it – I was a bit stiff for a day or two – you remember, Jim? I never broke nothing. Brother Fred sucks down some tea. It was just his bloody bad luck, he says. Anywhere else and he'd have walked away, but he had to hit that bugger head-on. Ah, you can see the spot, says Balls, skinny Sid Balls, Brother Fred's mate, blood shot out there a-rummun, like you'd hulled down a ripe tomato. Yes, that's a fact, Brother Fred says, that's a bloody fact, Jim, that is. I suppose you didn't see anything, Stody says, not at the time, when you were out there? Brother Fred scorns this suggestion, for weren't they fishing half a mile out? And between the moons, what's more, with a bit of shore-mist coming up later, laying and hauling their long, circling net from the rolling boat with its one hurricane lamp. Oh, they could see the shape of the cliffs (like the shape of their own faces they knew them, so that just by glancing at the shore, as they frequently did, they could fix their position with marvellous accuracy), and they could see the lights of the town, farther along, even the garlanded ribbons of the ‘illuminations', and, before the last one went out, some while before midnight, the lights of the Hotel Continental. But see something happening on the cliffs? Brother Jim knew better than that. Nor they didn't hear a cry? Stody persists. No, nor they wouldn't and couldn't have heard a cry. Not though that mouth, death-arrested in the act, had split in twain to give the utterance passage. The linear sea, rolling in to the shore, would have captured that cry in its corrugations, may have echoed it down to surprised mermaids, but not to the fishermen lugging their nets. No, Brother Jim, it's no use pressing them, they have no titbits for the coroner, they cannot illumine that dark moment when the lonely American cried, Truth. So drink Mrs Brother Fred's tea with its shot of Highland Cream.

But the ranged cliffs themselves, may they not bear witness? Those soft-lined, honey-coloured cliffs, seventy or eighty feet at their highest? Descending, scramblably, with little pockets of wiry grass and ling, at no precipitous angle, to the fawn sand of the beach? To them, still before breakfast, go the two brothers and Sid Balls, bumping and swerving along a stony track in the shiny black 1000. The track, much used by Brother Fred, winds over the hump of a hill, gives a fine view of the heathy cliff-tops, then settles again towards the beach. Stody parks just short of the beach, just short of Brother Fred's boat. They climb out. There you are then, says Brother Fred, the showman. He points up the beach. A few yards from the cliff-base is lying a grotesque concrete iceberg, three parts submerged in soft sand, one part: digging at the sky. The concrete is crumbling but defiant, unlike the resigned rock of the cliffs, and from its defiance, resembling hooked fingers, stretch bent rods of rusted steel. I heard it come down, says Brother Fred, blast, I thought it was a bomb. That gale we had two years ago. I was down here seeing to the old girl. And they stand by the car for a moment contemplating this Ozymandian symbol, the pill-box which had stood on the cliff's brow, which now was buried in the lone, level sands. And that's where we saw him, Brother Fred says, when we were unloading the nets. ‘Is that a bloke up there?' Sid says, and I saw him between the cliff and the pill-box. Ah, Sid Balls says, I knew he was a dead 'un, the funny way he was lying. You could see straight away, Brother Fred says, he'd come down the cliff. From the way he laid. He leads on, still the showman, along a line which previous feet have trampled, up to the pill-box, Ozymandian symbol, the precise and reverberating spot. See here, and see here. Stody, poker-faced, sees. The bloody blot with its shooting radii, as yet not quite dried. The bloody sand, kneaded, trampled. The marks where the floor-boards had lain. He sees, stares vulnerably, makes a motion with his hand. Fetch some water, he says, wash that lot off, help me kick some sand over this mess. So they fetch sea-water in a dipper and scrub and scrub the spot clean, the damned spot, they have it clean, and the bloody sand is dispersed. All under a morning sun which has some spite in it already. Now we'll look up on the cliff, Stody says, and this time Stody leads the way. They climb, perspiring lightly, up a zig-zag path, to the heathery furzy fragrant tops. Here the linnet sings, the goldfinch, flies the red-winged Cinnabar moth, lurks, to be seen suddenly after much not-seeing, and always inaccessible, the bottle-tit's nest. But these are things of no witness. They are not in Stody's eye. He looks abroad and sees – yes! directly – a green straw hat with a broad brim. The American's hat, almost certainly, for the colour is a match with his shirt: and it lies, as though carelessly thrown there, in a furze bush, fifty yards from the cliff edge. They hasten to it. Stody picks it up. It is cold with the dew just going off it. A flamboyant, flaring Italian straw, made limp by exposure. An Italian straw hat. So they look at it, and Brother Fred says, Blast, but what's it doing over here? – and they look from the hat across to the cliff-edge, and from the cliff edge back to the hat. Do you reckon something frightened him? Sid Balls says, with the sudden urgency of a shallow mind. What could've frightened him? Brother Fred says, don't talk daft, Sid, there's nothing up here. But he looks around, all the same, and so do Stody and Sid Balls. A bull? A ghost? Old Shuck the phantom – hound of staring eyes, who pads the coast roads? Did one or another of them startle the American, send him leaping, screaming over the cliff? I reckon, Brother Fred says, reaching for firmer ground, I reckon he got himself lost up here. There wasn't any moon, don't you forget it. You can easy get lost amongst these old furze bushes. But he'd know where the cliff was, Sid Balls says, he'd hear the sea if he couldn't see it. If you get panicked enough, Brother Fred says, you'll just dash around, sea or no sea. But somehow even this doesn't seem to explain the matter, though it was worth hearing how it sounded, worth putting it up in defence of reason before succumbing to the mystery of the American's hat. What do you reckon? Brother Fred asks Stody. Stody only shakes his head. He doesn't know, admits he doesn't know, supposes that now, nobody ever will. The American, that achingly unknown quantity, unanswerable for any of his peculiarities, leaves his hat some distance from the cliff-edge, here endeth a fact, place a period. I wonder if – Stody says. He moves across to the cliff-edge. There indeed, directly below him, lies the amorphous nugget of steel and concrete. He didn't just slip, says Brother Fred, coming up, if he'd just slipped he'd have missed it. He walked off, or ran off, or jumped off, but anyway he didn't just slip. They pause to consider this proposition of a walking, running or jumping American. Sid Balls says, Perhaps he thought he could fly, but Brother Fred squashes him as usual. And so, another fact, another mystery – the American didn't slip, apparent and contained in the simple geometry of cliff, beach and concrete. He removed his hat, took a running jump: no other construction is available. With the dark, dark night pressing around him he performed this inexplicable act. He must have done it on purpose, Sid Balls says, and this once Brother Fred forbears to squash him. How is it possible to resist this simple, immaculate, solution? Answering, in Stody's case, every question raised by this lonely and untypical man, offering a consummate picture of him, according to information received? Ah, that's it, Brother Fred says, either that or he was balmy. It stands to reason, Sid Balls says, swelling with vanity at his own acuteness. But if it was dark – Stody says, and they watch him, catching at his words. If it was dark, he was going to say, how had the American judged his fall so well? He doesn't say it, looks instead for any marks at the cliff-edge, but the ground hard, sour and ling-covered, is proof against chance impressions. He has been, has seen – as much as a constable needs to see on these occasions. Enough for a coroner to moralize over, devise a verdict upon, sign, dismiss. Right, Stody says, meaning right by the rules, the customs, the formula, and with the Italian straw hat in his hand he draws off to his Morris 1000.