The Beast Must Die (12 page)

Felix, indeed, was so absorbed in the controlling of this unruly boat that he scarcely gave George a thought. He was vaguely aware of the delicious power
he
exercised over this cheap, complacent bully; he was enjoying the man’s ill-concealed fear, but only at present as a minor, accidental part of the familiar struggle against wind and wave. Another part of his mind was recording the black and white inn standing back on the far bank; the derelict, broken-backed barge that lay in front of it beside the slipway; the fishermen contemplating their floats in a mystic trance unbroken by the twistings and turnings of the dinghy that wove its criss-cross way from bank to bank. I could drown George now, if I wanted to, he thought, and I don’t believe one of these fishermen would notice.

At that moment a blare of sound reached them; looking back, Felix saw nosing round the corner two motor barges, running abreast, each towing a couple of lighters behind it. He measured the distance carefully with his eye. They were a couple of hundred yards behind him, and would catch him up on his third tack from now. As they passed, he could do short tacks between the bank and the nearer string of barges, but there was a danger of being temporarily blanketed by their hulls and thus laid at the mercy of the next gust, the danger of their wash throwing him off his course, the danger of the rigid hawser that stretched between them. The alternative was to turn and run past them before the wind, and bring her round again after they had passed. His calculations were interrupted by George, who cleared his throat and said:

‘What do we do now? They’re getting pretty close, aren’t they?’

‘Oh, there’ll be plenty of room.’ Felix added mischievously, ‘Power vessels have to give way to sailing vessels, you know.’

‘Give way? Huh! Can’t see them giving way. Damn it, though, do they think they own the blasted river – coming along two abreast? It’s a scandal. I’ll take their numbers and make a complaint to the owners.’

George was obviously working up for an attack of nerves which he would soon be quite unable to repress. And indeed the great motor barges bearing down on them, moustaches of foam waving up on either side of their bows, were formidable enough. But Felix calmly put about on another tack, and began crossing the river a bare seventy yards ahead of them. George was now mopping his face, shifting furtively nearer to Felix, glaring at him with the whites of his eyes showing larger. Suddenly he burst out shouting.

‘What are you going to do? Look out, I tell you! You can’t –’ but whatever he was going to say was snapped short and drowned by a great bellow from the siren of one of the barges, which seemed to echo the rising hysteria in George’s own voice. Seeing George’s ludicrously working face, it occurred to Felix in a sudden flash that now would be the perfect opportunity for staging an impromptu accident. George’s panic, even as he despised it, was also goading him towards this. But he repelled the temptation to alter his original plan; that plan, he knew, was the best
– to
make assurance doubly sure. Let him stick to the set piece, and venture on no improvisations. But there would be no harm in giving George another fright.

The barges were now twenty yards away, hemming the dinghy into the bank. Felix had little room to manoeuvre in. He put about, and the course of the dinghy began to converge with that of the nearer barge. He was dimly aware of George gripping his leg and shouting in his ear, ‘If you run us into that barge, you bloody fool, I’ll bloody well hang on to you.’ Felix put his helm up and paid out the main-sheet, so that she spun about, her boom flying out to port, the great minotaur-browed stem of the barge sweeping past with ten feet to spare. As they were carried downwind past her side, George in an uncontrollable fury, staggered to his feet, and waved his fists and shouted imprecations at the impassive man in the deck-house. A youth sitting further aft stared at his gesticulations indifferently. Then the barge’s wash caught the dinghy, and George lost his balance, collapsing on to the floorboards.

‘I shouldn’t stand up again,’ said Felix Lane mildly. ‘Next time you mightn’t fall into the boat.’

‘Damn this—! Damn their eyes! I’ll—’

‘Oh, take a grip on yourself. We were never in the least danger.’ Felix went on conversationally. ‘The same thing happened the other day when I was out with Phil.
He
didn’t lose his nerve.’

The following barge swept past, a long, low, iron craft with
INFLAMMABLE
written along its deck cover.
It
certainly looked as if Felix was out to inflame his companion. As he hauled the dinghy round into the wind again on the port tack, and bounced across the swelling wake of the barges, he remarked coldly and distinctly, ‘I’ve never seen a grown-up person make such an exhibition of himself.’

It must have been a long time since anyone had addressed George like that. He stiffened, stared incredulously at Felix as though wondering if he could believe his own ears; then glowered at him dangerously. But after a few moments some new thought struck him, for he turned away, shrugging his shoulders and smiled a secret, sly smile to himself. Of the two, it was now Felix Lane who seemed to be growing more and more nervous, fiddling unnecessarily with the gear and casting uncertain glances towards his companion; while George, shifting his great bulk from side to side of the boat as she went about on new tacks, began to whistle and make occasional facetious remarks to Felix.

‘I’m beginning quite to enjoy myself,’ he said.

‘Good. Care to take a turn with the tiller now?’ Felix’s voice was dry, tense, almost a gasp. So much hung on the answer to that question. But George did not seem to notice anything amiss.

‘When you like,’ he replied carelessly.

A shadow, an expression that might have been translated as ambiguity or consternation or dark irony, came and went on Felix’s face. When he spoke,
his
voice was little more than a whisper, yet there was a challenging note in it which could not be concealed.

‘Right you are. We’ll just go up a little bit farther, and then we’ll turn round and you can steer.’

Putting off, he thought to himself; infirm of purpose, putting off the crisis, your last chance, it must be, if it were done when ’t were done then ’t were well it were done quickly, but that was different, a very different kettle of fish, that fisherman there I wonder what he uses for bait, my rod is baited too, a rod in pickle for George Rattery.

The positions were now reversed. Felix was in a state of pitiable nerves, fidgeting no longer, but his whole body rigid with misery; George had regained his jocular tongue, his self-confident, supercilious, brutal attitude; or so it would have seemed to one of those ubiquitous, omniscient observers of Thomas Hardy, if such a one had been a third party in this bizarre voyage. Felix noted that the place he had marked out for action – a clump of elms away on the right bank – was now astern. Setting his teeth, still unconsciously watching for the approach of gusts on the port bow, he brought the dinghy round in a broad sweep. The swirled water chuckled at him sardonically. He could not meet George’s eyes as he said, in an abrupt, breathless voice:

‘Here you are. Take the tiller. Keep the main-sheet right out, like it is now. I’ll just go forward and raise the centre-board – she runs better like that, less resistance to the water.’

Even as he spoke, he received a queer impression that the wind had dropped, that everything had hushed into silence, the better to hear his crucial words and await their outcome. Nature seemed to be holding its breath, and in the hush his own voice sounded like a loud challenge cried from the top of a watchtower in a desert. Then he began to perceive that this shocking silence was not of wind and water, but emanated like a chill mist from George himself. The centre-board, he thought, I said I was going forward to raise the centre-board. But still he remained sitting in the stern-sheets, as though nailed there by George’s eyes, which he could feel boring into him. He forced himself to look up and meet them. George’s whole body seemed to have swollen and horribly advanced, like a creature of nightmare. It was just that George had quietly moved aft and was sitting close to him, of course. In George’s eyes there was an expression of crafty, naked triumph. George licked his gross lips, and said sweetly, ‘Very well, little man. Budge up and I’ll take the tiller.’ His voice dropped to an edged whisper. ‘But I shouldn’t try any of those funny tricks you’ve been planning.’

‘Tricks?’ said Felix dully. ‘What do you mean?’

George’s voice rose in a shattering gust of rage. ‘You know damn’ well what I mean, you filthy murderous little tick!’ he roared. The, quietly again, he said, ‘I posted your precious diary to my solicitors today – that’s the little job I had to do after lunch when I sent you off to get the boat ready. They’ve got instructions to open it in the event of my death and
take
the necessary action. So it’ll really turn out more unfortunate for you if you let me drown this trip, won’t it? Won’t it?’

Felix Lane kept his face averted. He swallowed hard and tried to speak, but no words would come out. The knuckles of his hand were dead white on the tiller.

‘Lost your lying little tongue, have you?’ George went on. ‘And your claws, too. Yes, I think we’ve drawn Pussy’s claws for him all right. Thought you were so damned superior, didn’t you? So much cleverer than all the rest of us. Well, you’ve been just a bit too clever.’

‘Do you have to be so melodramatic about it?’ Felix muttered.

‘If you start being rude, little man, I’ll break your jaw for you. In fact, I’ve a good mind to break it anyway,’ said George dangerously.

‘And sail the boat home yourself?’

George stared truculently at him. Then he grinned. ‘Yes, that’s quite an idea. I think I will sail the boat home myself. I can always break your jaw when we get back to terra firma, what?’

He pushed Felix aside, and took the tiller. The boat surged and swooped downwind, the banks fled past. Felix, still holding the main-sheet and automatically watching the leech of the sail for the dangerous lifting that would mean the beginning of a gybe, seemed sunk in apathy.

‘Well, hadn’t you better start something soon? We’re halfway to the lock already. Or have you decided not to
drown
me after all?’ Felix lifted one shoulder in a little gesture of resignation, of defeat. George sneered, ‘No? I thought so. Lost your nerve, eh? Want to save your rotten little neck. I thought you wouldn’t have the guts to go through with it now and take the consequences. I banked on that. Quite the psychologist, aren’t I? … Well, if you won’t talk, I will.’

And he proceeded to explain, amongst other things, how Felix’s remarks one day at lunch had made him curious about this ‘detective novel’ he was writing, so he had gone up to his guest’s room one afternoon when he was out, and found where it was hidden, and read it. He had felt vague suspicions about Felix before that, he said, and the diary proved them well founded.

‘So now,’ he concluded, ‘we’ve got you in a cleft stick. From now on, you’ll have to behave, Pussy; you’ll have to watch your step very, very carefully.’

‘You can’t do anything,’ said Felix sullenly.

‘Oh, can’t I just? I don’t know exactly about the legal position, but that diary of yours would land you precious near a charge of attempted murder.’

Whenever George mentioned the word ‘diary’, he checked, then spat it out fiercely, as though the thing had stuck in his throat. He had evidently not appreciated the analysis of his character which it contained. Felix’s dull silence seemed to infuriate him: he began cursing his companion again, not full-bloodedly as before, but in querulous, shocked, incredulous terms, almost as
though
he was complaining about a neighbour’s radio which kept him awake at night.

As George whipped himself up into another frenzy of righteous indignation, Felix cut across it with, ‘Well, what do you propose to do about it?’

‘I’ve a darned good mind to hand over your diary to the police. That’s what I
ought
to do. But of course it would be very upsetting for Lena and – er – everybody. It’s just possible that I might decide to sell the diary back to you. You’re quite well off, aren’t you? Care to make an offer for it? – a generous offer, it’ll have to be.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ remarked Felix unexpectedly. George’s head jerked. He stared at the little man unbelievingly.

‘Wha – what’s that? What the devil d’you mean by—?’

‘I said don’t be silly. You know perfectly well that you won’t hand over my diary to the police—’

George gave him a wary, calculating look. Slumped in the stern, his arm rigid on the thwart, Felix was gazing up at the mainsail intently. George followed the direction of his gaze, persuaded for a moment that some surprise was going to be sprung at him out of the curved and bellying sail.

Felix went on, ‘– for the very good reason that you don’t want the police to haul you in on a charge of manslaughter.’

George blinked his eyes. His heavy face became suffused with blood. Incredibly, in the heat of his
triumph
over this dangerous little adversary, in the tumult of relief he had been feeling now that physical danger was past, in the gloating expectation of all he could do with the purchase money of the diary, he had been quite overlooking its contents – the perilous knowledge which Felix possessed. His fingers twitched; they ached to be at his companion’s neck, delving into his eyes, gouging and breaking this rotten little twister who seemed to have extricated himself from an impossible position, who had beaten him to the punch.

‘You can’t prove anything about that,’ he said truculently.

Felix’s voice was indifferent. ‘You killed Martie, you killed my son. I’ve no intention of buying the diary back from you. I don’t think blackmailers ought to be encouraged. Hand it over to the police, if you like. They give quite long sentences for manslaughter, you know. You can’t bluff it out. And even if
you
could, Lena would soon crack up. No, it’s a stalemate, my friend.’