The Case of the Gilded Fly (17 page)

Nigel, now that he had arrived in the open air, felt disinclined for sleep, and he walked down past Christ Church to the tow-path by the canal, and stood gazing down into the water, in which patches of luminous white and jet-black performed silent, bewildering manoeuvres. The gas-works, the factory chimneys and the railway siding – from which the distant clatter of shunting goods trains could be heard from time to time – stood silhouetted against the moon like a Muirhead Bone etching. Somewhere far away an air-raid siren began its dismal portamento progression of minor thirds.

Little by little the events of the evening seeped back, rearranged themselves in fantastic patterns, clamoured for explanation, for scrutiny, even for dismissal. The figures of the participants inconsequently mingled in strange relationships. Broken phrases returned, and became perverted to extraordinary senses. The rational element, sated and wearied, stood back to regard with impotent disapproval this grotesque panorama. Was there, for a moment, a fleeting glimpse of the true pattern? Nigel never knew. Hunching his shoulders, despite the warmth of the evening, he returned to the hotel.

That night he dreamed he was again naked on the lawn of St Christopher's. Only it seemed somehow different, and the college receded to an infinite distance even as he looked at it. He was vaguely aware that Helen was clinging to the lower boughs
of a tree and shouting something at him. It was only after a time that he realized she had taken refuge. Looking about him, he saw something on hands and knees crawling towards him through the bushes. The features, which were terribly distorted, were those of someone he knew, but when he woke up, and, shaking himself irritably free of the nightmare, lit a cigarette, he could not remember whose they had been.

How! A woman ask questions out of bed?

Otway

The next day the weather broke. Early in the morning, before the first rays of light had touched the towers and pinnacles of the city, the rain began to fall from a leaden sky. When Nigel woke from a disturbed sleep the streets were already soaking, the elaborate and inefficient drainage systems of Gothic, Mock-Gothic, Palladian and Venetian architecture were already emitting accumulated jets of water on unwary passers-by: From Carfax the gutters streamed down the gentle slope of the High, past the ‘Mitre', past Great St Mary's, past the Queen's, and so down to where the tower of Magdalen stood in solitary austerity above the traffic which ran towards Headington or Iffley or Cowley. Outside St John's, the trees began to creak and whisper, and the drops rattled with dull monotony from their branches, while a few solitary beams of pale sunlight rested on an architrave of the Taylorian, glanced off southwards down the Cornmarket, and were rapidly engulfed somewhere in the precincts of Brasenose. The cinereous sky echoed the grey of innumerable walls; water ran in streams down the ivy which more or less shields Keble from offensive comment; paused and momentarily glistened on the wrought-iron gates of Trinity; gathered in innumerable runnels and rivulets among the cobbles which surround the Radcliffe Camera, standing like a mustard-pot among various other cruets. The eloquent décor of Oxford is bright sunlight or moonlight; rain makes of it a prison city, profoundly depressing.

Tomorrow would be the first day of full term. Those undergraduates who had not already arrived moved towards the city. In the hubbub of greater England their thin, purposeful, converging trickles were still discernible. In the Clarendon Building, two new proctors contemplated resignedly a list of pubs to
be visited that evening, while junior members of the University
in statu pupillari
calculated the chances of their remaining decently over their port until a late hour. Notices concerning club activities, many offensively designed, began to appear in college lodges; taxis appeared, piled high with luggage; a week or so later more luggage would arrive, under the system ironically described by the railway companies as luggage in advance; collection papers were set and distributed; tutors heaved regretful sighs, freshmen arrived in a state of crescent bewilderment and anguished self-consciousness, and college cooks meditated enormities.

It was a gloomy day; but Nigel, as he peered out of the window of his Baptistery, felt more than usually cheerful. This is the stage, he told himself, at which the stark, terrible realization of the thing envelops you with a sudden rush; fortunately it is doing nothing of the sort; on the contrary, its supreme unimportance is most impressive and is resulting in a perceptible lightening of spirit. He watched attentively a small rivulet of water as it dropped with gathering momentum from level to level down the front of the building and observed it precipitate itself on to the umbrella of the Regius Professor of Mathematics, who happened to be passing below. Then, fortified in spirit by this heartening sight, he withdrew his head, washed, shaved, dressed, and went down to breakfast.

‘Murder,' said Nicholas Barclay didactically to Sheila McGaw, with whom he was having breakfast. ‘Effective, no doubt – immediately effective – but basically unsatisfactory.' He made an expressive gesture, thereby projecting a globule of marmalade into the salt. ‘Now, consider how incomparably better whipping and dragging at the cart-tail would have been. Murder is so
abrupt
– that it leaves nothing to be enjoyed afterwards; like drinking good wine at a gulp instead of lingering over it. Then again, think of the question of appropriateness. How admirable the Middle Ages were in that respect! – scold's girdles, ducking-stools, drunkards' cloaks, chastity-belts, stocks; all designed in the most rough-and-ready standards of retribution for particular failings of human nature. I tremble with joy, as Ruysbroek said, when I think for how many of those Yseut must have qualified. Murder is so abstract and impartial,'
he complained, ‘it lacks utterly the poetic element of
choice
, in fact I'm not sure that it isn't at any time in dismally bad taste.' He bit off a piece of toast, and regarded the remainder ruminatively before replacing it on his plate.

‘May I ask,' said Sheila, ‘whether you've contrived this argument in order to convince the police that you didn't kill the girl? If so, I'm afraid it's doomed to failure.'

‘My dear Sheila: I had no possible
motive
for killing Yseut. It's true I lied to the police last night about whether Donald or I left the room, and equally true that I think Fen noticed it – damn him. But even if that should come out I can't see what I have to fear. Now you –'

Sheila looked up quickly. ‘What motive have I?'

‘Vengeance, my dear,' Said Nicholas histrionically. ‘I told them about your little fracas. You don't mind, I hope?'

To his disappointment she accepted this revelation without resentment. ‘No,' she said slowly after a pause, ‘I don't mind. They would have found out soon enough anyway. Are they going to question me?'

‘No doubt. But it's an innocuous process; they haven't the slightest idea what they're about.' There was another pause. ‘I think,' added Nicholas meditatively, ‘I shall come to rehearsal this morning: it will be interesting to see how people react.'

In the small, unsolidly modern bed-sitting-room which she inhabited in her college, Jean Whitelegge awoke, opening one eye cautiously to admit the impressions of a new day; gazed at the mantelpiece opposite, with its little china dogs and wooden animals of all kinds; at the window with the rain streaming down it, the tree-tops and the red brick wall beyond blurred to fantastic images; at the wardrobe which held her small collection of garments; at the portable gramophone with the albums of Beethoven Quartets strewn round it; at the shallow, messy Gauguin reproductions on the walls; at the bookcase with its tall, thin-spined volumes of modern verse, its books on ballet and the theatre, its plays by Strindberg, Auden, Eliot, Bridie, Cocteau, and, in a place of honour on the top shelf, a uniform edition, well-thumbed and bound in austere uncompromising black, of the works of Robert Warner. Her eye
rested long on this, reflectively, doubtfully, phrases from his plays leaped into her mind, characters reasserted themselves unbidden, a multitude of subtle, surprising, apparently inconsequent curtain-lines came to memory. She sat up in bed, deliberately readjusted a shoulder-strap which had fallen over her arm, looked at her watch and discovered that it was long since too late for breakfast, threw her shapely legs out of bed, stood up, and regarded herself contemplatively in the full-length mirror set in the door of the wardrobe: plain, she thought, but undeniably well-made; a good deal more attractive in that way than Yseut … Her thoughts were suddenly checked, and she made an attempt to summon up dim and inaccurate recollections of criminal law.

There was a tap on the door; that it was a purely conventional signal of approach was proved by the rapidity with which its author followed it into the room. Estelle Bryant was one of the richer women undergraduates, painted and scented by Chanel, silk-stockinged and exquisitely tailored, as opposed to the brogues and indeterminate tweeds and blouses affected by the majority of her tribe. She flung herself down on the end of the bed in a state of high excitement.

‘Darling!' she said. ‘Have you heard about Yseut?'

Jean looked at her in silence for a moment. Then she said: ‘Yseut? Well?'

‘Murdered, my child: shuffled off unhousel'd, disappointed, unanneal'd, with a bullet-hole in the middle of her forehead. Your gang at the theatre will have to find a new juvenile lead. If it weren't for the allurements of Middle English I think I should apply for the job myself.' Lying on one elbow, she succeeded with difficulty in lighting a cigarette.

Jean said: ‘Where, Estelle? And when?' Her voice sounded oddly incurious.

‘In Kit's, of all places, in your precious Donald's bedroom. Oh Lord, I shouldn't have said that, should I? Sounds bad.'

Jean smiled faintly. ‘Don't mind me. I happen to know Donald wasn't there at the time, anyway. Who do they think did it?'

‘Can't imagine what you see in that youth, darling,' said Estelle inconsequently. She made a manifest effort to recall the
question. ‘Oh, as to who did it. I imagine they don't know; or if they do they're keeping it to themselves. Anyway, they haven't arrested anyone yet.'

‘Thank God for that.'

‘Yes, I see what you mean, child. A nasty piece of work, if all I hear is true. But I shouldn't like to be the murderer now Fen's on the job; even the way he tears my essays to pieces is bloodcurdling enough.' She became momentarily wistful. ‘God, how clever that man is! I mobilize all the resources of Hartnell for tutorials, but it's no good; he flirts violently, but quite insincerely. Ah me!' She sighed.

‘They don't think it's Donald, do they?' asked Jean.

‘My love, I am not privy to their secrets. Lord Almighty, child, what heavenly undies! Where from?'

From the discussion of underclothes they passed by a natural transition to the sempiternal feminine discussion of sex.

Donald Fellowes opened his eyes to the spectacle of an untidy heap of clothes piled on a chair by his bed. In the unfamiliar surroundings of the guest-room, it took him some moments to realize where he was, and why. A Breughel, of Flemish oafs all compact, stared at him from over the fireplace; a very bad Haden etching was suspended beyond it; otherwise, the room was characterless. He had a splitting headache and a bad mouth. He sat up and put his head in his hands, muttering ‘God! Oh, God!' A scout poked his head in at the door and reminded him that breakfast was in five minutes. Pulling himself reluctantly out of bed, he thought, distantly and indifferently, of Yseut – and of something else. ‘Lord, oh Lord!' he said to himself. ‘Who in God's name would have thought … Women are inexplicable.' He ruminated this unoriginal conclusion at length as he put on his slippers and dressing-gown, and marched out to the baths under the protection of an umbrella.

Rachel West pulled back the corner of the negligée which had slipped away from her thigh and poured out another cup of tea. Robert, watching her from a chair opposite, reflected that she had lost none of her beauty in the years he had known her.
What was she now? Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? Yet her figure was still firm, delicately-moulded, slightly boyish, and she had never allowed her long familiarity with him to make her neglect her appearance in the early mornings, the time when wives, official and unofficial, invariably look their worst; an unspoken convention and routine had in fact grown up to prevent this. He had been relating to her the events of the night before. There was a pause when he had finished. Rachel spoke at last.

‘I feel I'm somehow to blame,' she said, ‘for making such a damned fool of myself over you and the girl. It was a sort of madness.'

‘I did nothing to ease the situation, I fear. And apparently the business of her coming to my room did look bad; even the police wanted to insist that I'd been sleeping with her.'

‘If I'd been in my senses –'

‘Oh, be damned to it now, darling. It's over.'

Rachel was grave. ‘Over – yes. Have they any idea who did it?'

‘As far as I could gather, very little. Fen may have an idea; but he does a lot of play-acting and it's difficult to tell. Anyway, for heaven's sake let's forget about it. I fear the police will visit you today.'

‘Is there – anything – ?'

‘Good Lord, no, I've got nothing to conceal. Tell them the truth.'

‘The truth as far as I'm concerned is – well, darling, the fact is I didn't go to North Oxford last night; that was a blind. After we quarrelled, I – I – well, I just couldn't bear it, that's all. I had to go away somewhere by myself.'

‘Tactless devil that I am.'

‘No, darling, of course it wasn't your fault. But that made no difference to the way I felt. I – I went to the cinema and saw an awful film.'