Magnus Merriman (9 page)

‘Would there be any climax or solution?'

‘Yes. After considerable speculation the woman would say: “Now they've changed again. Those are the original six insects.” The man would see that she was right, and I would examine the thought processes by which she knew and he knew that they had changed, and by tracing the involutions and convolutions of their thoughts and cognition-tracks in a reverse direction I would complete the story.'

‘Are the insects of any particular kind? Beetles, for instance?' Magnus asked thoughtfully.

‘No, just insects. I couldn't particularize them without distracting attention from the main theme,' said Skene.

Meiklejohn and McVicar had both joined Skene's audience, and after the recital of his insect story there was a short silence. Skene's manner had passed from ferocity to a very gentle earnestness, and Magnus, though his brain was confused by its pursuit of six isometrical and equivocal beetles, felt warmly attracted to him. Presently McVicar smoked the last cigarette in the room, and Magnus offered to go out and get some more from a near-by automatic machine. He was glad of the opportunity to escape, for the beetles were worrying him, and his attempts to isolate the metamorphosing member of the bewilderingly homogeneous sextet were distracted by the ebb and flow of conversation.

He stood for a moment on the pavement and made a last endeavour to immobilize at least one beetle of the six. But at the very moment when he had successfully visualized the tray and cornered the nearest insect, a motor car swerved across the street and halted abruptly a few yards from him. A door was thrown open and a girl came out. She walked round to the back of the car and proceeded to kick, with great violence and ill-temper, a punctured tyre. She was unusually dressed for that hour and that urban neighbourhood, for she wore Jodhpur trousers, a hunting
coat and a neatly-tied scarf. She was bare-headed, and in the light wind that puffed and played about the street her light-hued, curling hair was dancingly dishevelled. Without hesitation Magnus abandoned his beetle-hunting and asked if he could help in any way.

‘You can tell me a few dirty words to throw at this damned tyre,' she answered, and leaning against the back of the car considered him with a somewhat dazed expression.

She spoke with a drawling American accent, not the hard Northern tone or the strident voice of the Middle-West, but the rich cadence of the South. She had large and beautiful blue eyes, set wide apart and now somewhat obscured by the heaviness of their lids; a short pugnacious nose; a broad, square jaw; and a streak of dirt on one cheek. She was sufficiently tall, conventionally slender, glowing even in the darkness with rose and tawny hues, and her legs were long. And clearly she was not quite sober.

Magnus said: ‘You're tired, aren't you? I have a friend who lives in this house here: come in and rest for a while and have some coffee.'

‘Sure I'll come in,' she answered, ‘but you needn't hope for fun and games when you get me on the sofa. I'm tight all right, but I can look after myself. There was a guy tried to get fresh with me this evening already, and I busted him on the jaw. Look at that!'

She showed him the back of her right hand, and Magnus observed with pleasure that the knuckles were indeed bruised and swollen.

‘It must have been a good punch,' he said. ‘But don't worry; you won't have to use the other hand. I promise that we'll behave with perfect decorum.'

‘Well, I've heard that tale before, but I guess I'll risk it once again for a cup of coffee.'

Meiklejohn's flat was at the top of the house, and, climbing the first long flight of stairs, the girl staggered slightly. She offered no objection when Magnus put his arm round her waist to steady her.

On the top landing Magnus suddenly realized that Skene and McVicar were unlikely to think this girl a welcome addition to the party, and that she might find them no
more congenial to her than she was to them. He paused in some perplexity, and wondered whether Mrs Dolphin had another sitting-room into which he could take her.

‘What's the matter?' asked the girl.

‘I've just remembered that Meiklejohn—the man who lives here—has a couple of guests, and…'

‘Well, if you think I'm not respectable enough for them I'll go: and to hell with you and your friends and your coffee too!'

‘That's a bad guess,' said Magnus. ‘I only meant that you mightn't find them very interesting—they're talking about politics and literature and that sort of thing …'

‘And you think that I'm too dumb to sit-in on a high-brow party? You've got me diagnosed already, have you? Well you're smart.'

Magnus ignored this provocation and continued: ‘I'm going to tell the landlady you're tired, and ask her to bring you some coffee in another room. Now will you wait here for a minute while I go in and speak to her?'

‘Sure I'll wait,' said the girl, and sat down on the top step.

Magnus found Mrs Dolphin in the kitchen.

‘Mrs Dolphin,' he said, ‘there's a girl outside who isn't feeling very well—she's had a drink too much—and I thought you might perhaps make some coffee for her. Can I take her into your other sitting-room?'

‘Indeed you can't,' she answered, ‘for there's two men sleeping there. They came this morning, from Skye, and what they want in Edinburgh God only knows, but young Buchanan came with them and said they were Nationalists, and could I put them up for a night or two. So I said I would give them a shake-down, and there they are, snoring away.'

‘And Skene and McVicar are still in Mr Meiklejohn's room.'

‘What's the young lady like? Is she respectable?'

‘Oh, perfectly,' said Magnus.

‘Well, I'll take your word for it, though I wouldn't take Mr Meiklejohn's where women were concerned. Not when he's had a drink or two, at any rate. He'd kiss a pig when he's drunk.'

‘But how can we get rid of Skene and McVicar?'

Mrs Dolphin answered promptly: ‘Take her into Mr Meiklejohn's room and they'll clear out fast enough. McVicar's frightened to death of women, and when he goes Skene will go with him, for they live near to each other.'

Magnus found the girl still sitting outside, and she followed him into the flat readily enough. In the sitting-room conversation suddenly died when they entered. McVicar stood with a haughty embarrassed look, and Skene's expression lost its animation. But Meiklejohn sprang forward with a cry of delight. Magnus thought he knew the young woman, such was his pleasure at seeing her, but he was in fact merely welcoming her femininity, for he had grown tired of travelling hither and thither on the arid plains of male conversation.

Magnus found the task of introduction easier than he had expected, for while he was tactfully explaining that her car had met with an accident she took charge of the situation and exclaimed: ‘I've had a bum day with the Duke of Buccleugh—anyway, chasing his darned foxhounds—and then a guy took me home with him and gave me all the liquor in the wine-list. So I'm suffering from a touch of the sun. Then I hit the pike for home and got a puncture just round the corner. That's where your friend found me, and he thought it best to bring me in to recuperate. My name's Frieda Forsyth, if you want to know.'

‘Whatever your name is we're charmed to see you,' said Meiklejohn gallantly, and found a cushion for her chair, and asked her what she would drink, and stood before her with an engaging smile to which his drooping eyelid gave a peculiar distinction.

‘Mrs Dolphin's going to bring in some coffee,' said Magnus.

‘I certainly need it,' said Miss Forsyth. ‘I'm sore all over, and my fist aches like hell after socking that guy on the jaw—but I'll tell you that story later—and I'm half-blind through trying to keep the headlights and the road in the same place. I only went in the ditch once, though, and that was when a lump of grit about the size of a roc's egg got in
my eye. I thought I was never going to see blue sky again. But I got it out. I pulled my top eyelid over my bottom, and that did it.'

Magnus laughed loudly and abruptly, and suddenly was silent again.

‘Where's the egg?' demanded Miss Forsyth. Then, with immoderate enjoyment, she also laughed, throwing back her head and opening her mouth so wide that its pink roof was disclosed. She wiped away tears of mirth with the back of her hand, and the grimy mark on her cheek was much enlarged. With her voice still at the mercy of laughter she said: ‘Well, I certainly laid it myself. Pulled my eyelid—say, am I a contortionist or am I not?'

Without shame or embarrassment Magnus and Meiklejohn laughed with her, but Skene showed no amusement, and McVicar was patently ill-at-ease. Before the joke had properly been dismissed the latter stood up and nervously said that he must go. Skene also rose to say good-bye. Miss Forsyth shook hands very cordially, but they showed no great friendliness in reply.

While Meiklejohn was showing them out Mrs Dolphin brought in the coffee. She regarded Miss Forsyth with evident suspicion, and made an excuse of attending to the fire in order to get a full view of her. Then Meiklejohn introduced her and the frown vanished.

‘I wanted to get a good look at you,' she explained, ‘for I've known girls who wore riding-breeches for no more than the show of them. But I see by the marks on yours that you've been on a horse, so stay as long as you like and get a good rest. Mr Merriman and Mr Meiklejohn will look after you.'

‘I've been on a horse all right. There's marks on me as well as on my pants.'

‘Well, we'll not ask you to prove that,' said Mrs Dolphin affably, and bade them good-night.

A new vitality had entered the room with Frieda Forsyth. It would be untrue to say that hitherto the conversation had been dull, for both politics and literature are subjects of perennial interest and superlative importance. But except for a few combative moments the atmosphere had been heavy,
and once or twice, his mind wandering, Magnus had found himself contemplating the phenomenon of speech with a detached and semi-hostile wonder. All over the world, from human lips and teeth and tongue, from palate and throat, words were issuing—and to what purpose? Simply because speech was a human attribute? Had words any more significance than the drumming of snipe, the creaking of a swan's wings, the saltation of March lambs, the thumb-stain on a haddock's side? Once, while he listened to some sentence of inordinate length, he had almost believed that the walls and roof of the room were receding in a gradual seismic yawn. But now the walls came close, eager and friendly, and the air was lively as he and Meiklejohn competed for the attention of their new guest. Now words had a meaning indeed, for they were flies cast on the waters of conversation to attract her smiles, her favour and her interest. And now when Meiklejohn replayed his
Fledermaus
records—because Magnus and Miss Forsyth were finding too much common ground in reminiscences of America—that jocund music had the success it deserved, and their minds reflected its gaiety and warmth.

It appeared that Frieda Forsyth had led an adventurous life. Without boasting of strange experiences, she inferred them by familiar reference to undisciplined modes of existence, and by the rapid scene-shifting in her conversation it was clear that for some time she had enjoyed a nomadic life. She appeared to live with gusto, and she talked with great vitality: that American vitality which, like shot-silk, is interwoven with the colour of wit. But she was Scotch by inheritance, she told them, and now—she said it with a shrug and a grimace—she had come home. She was living with an aunt in Edinburgh. Her father and mother were dead. Her father had been the black sheep of his family, and burdened with that hue had gone in early life to the United States, hoping that there the moral colour-line was not so sharply drawn as in his native land.

‘There's a hell of a lot of dark sheep bred in these respectable Scotch families,' she said. ‘I've heard quite a bit of talk since I've been back living with Aunt Elizabeth, and it seems there's a black lamb in every second family
at least, though the rest are so white and blameless you'd never suspect it. Say, do the men in this town sleep in stiff collars? They look like it.'

‘The trouble is that all the black sheep are sent abroad,' said Magnus. ‘Scotland would be a lot better off if they were kept at home and some of the white ones were deported instead.'

‘Don't get too bitter about respectability,' she said. ‘It's a dull quality, but it's comfortable, and if you'd seen as much of the other side of life as I have you wouldn't be so quick to sneer at it.'

Stung by the suggestion that their lives had been spent in virtuous security, both Magnus and Meiklejohn hotly replied that they also were acquainted with poverty, adventure and turpitude.

Meiklejohn rose from his seat, so great was his agitation, and with indignant gestures said: ‘My dear Miss Forsyth! I admit that anyone so lovely and attractive as you are must have encountered temptations to which we have never been subject, but our lives have not been uneventful. We haven't spent all our days in Edinburgh. I could tell you some astonishing stories about India, and my God! when we were in Russia we took our lives in our hands!'

‘That's a bedtime story,' said Miss Forsyth. She had finished her coffee and was drinking a mild whisky and soda. Suddenly her expression grew sullen and her voice harsh. ‘Ever been a stenographer in New York and held down your job by sleeping with the boss?' she demanded. ‘Ever gone through the Mojave Desert in a 1916 Ford with two cracked cylinders? Ever washed dishes in a company town in North Carolina, or run three blocks from a tubercular Bohunk trying to rape you? Ever pawned your mother's rings to pay for an abortion?'

The ugly violence of these rhetorical questions startled and shocked both Magnus and Meiklejohn. They had not regarded their vision as a tragic figure, for though she had implied her close acquaintance with hardship she had seemed to possess the seagull's aptitude for navigating with unruffled feathers the darkness and unruly depths of tempestuous waters. But now the marks of stormy voyaging
showed clearly on her, and Meiklejohn's volubility was silenced, while to Magnus there came irrelevant thoughts about his native Orkney. Her face was hard, and her eyes cold as a seagull's indeed. He remembered white gulls sailing, cliff-high, on widespread wings and regarding with chill cruelty in their gaze the watcher on the headland. Perhaps the cold brightness of their eyes came from acquaintance with the gulfs of the sea and the ragged edge of a devouring wave. Perhaps that lonely bitterness—he remembered a fulmar sailing three yards from him, insolent and graceful and unwinking eye—perhaps that brumal solitude derived from knowledge of hunger in December and thrashing gales in March. The wren from southward meadowlands had no such black and bitter a gaze. It was an eye familiar with the sea's elements of ruin.