The Riddle of the River (26 page)

‘Mr Archer,’ I said suddenly, ‘I know you’re very interested in machines. I wanted to ask you – do you have the telephone at home?’

‘No, I haven’t had one installed,’ he said, surprised at my odd question. ‘The Darwins have, though; they were one of the very first families in Cambridge to get it. Number 10, I believe they are, and they highly recommend it.’

‘Do they? And what do
you
think?’ I improvised quickly. ‘I wanted to ask your advice, because my parents were wondering if it would be a useful thing to have, and not too difficult or peculiar to use.’

‘Well,’ he replied, ‘it certainly isn’t difficult. And it’s absolutely fascinating, technologically speaking. But as to usefulness, it has its disadvantages, I find. As far as calling the tradespeople is concerned, they come to the house for their orders and deliveries, and for anything particular, I have servants who can just as well go and call upon them. And for any private communication, I prefer the post. There’s no privacy over the telephone, you know. The girl at the Exchange hears everything, to say nothing of other families, if you have a party line. It doesn’t tempt me.’

‘I wonder what it is really like to live with the thing,’ I said. ‘It is strange to think that a girl one doesn’t even know can listen to everything one is saying. Do you mean that a telephone call can never be secret in any way?’

‘Not even the fact that you made one,’ he answered, with a smile that struck me as smug.

The flame of hope that had suddenly awoken in me died down. Not only was every telephone in Cambridge apparently registered by number, so that it would be impossible to hide the fact of owning one, but the girl at the Exchange would know about and quite possibly remember precisely any call that had been made. One could not be sure that she would remember, of course, but the risk was far too great for him to have even considered using such a method.

Then
what?
What had he done?

‘Let’s do like Munroe,’ said Mr Archer, becoming impatient with my thoughtful silence and pulling me by the arm. ‘We’ll
take a turn and see what’s happening in the streets.’

It was after a long time of strolling about the streets and lanes, punctuated by a pleasant cup of tea, that we began to notice that a large portion of the crowd that had previously been at the water’s edge was now headed inland, seemingly all in the same direction. A little automatically, we took to following them.

The moving stream thickened as we advanced, and there was a sense of expectation. The few people we crossed who were coming the other way were in animated conversation.

‘It’s some kind of hoax,’ said a man who passed us, speaking loudly, ‘to keep people from becoming bored with the whole race because they can’t see it.’

‘I wonder what’s happening?’ I said. ‘Shall we follow all these people and find out what the hoax might be?’

Mr Archer merely smiled enigmatically.

After just a few moments, we discovered the place where the stream of people had converged into an excited, milling pool. They all stood in front of a long, low, cream-coloured building, elegantly built in the style of a Palladian villa, its two Ionic porticoes linked by a colonnade, which ran down a great length of the street. People were pressing and crowding under the porticoes, in front of the enormous windows giving out on them. The words

were emblazoned over the main entrance, which was further decorated with a triangular flag, red with a white cross in the centre of which was a crown.

Starting on the fringe, we worked our way forwards as people looked and departed, until we finally reached the window which was the main feature of attraction. As it came into my field of vision, I saw a young man adding, from the inside, a piece of paper to a long column of papers already gummed to the pane. The top paper read

Underneath was a list of handwritten messages describing the progress of the yachts in the race. Mr Archer began to read them eagerly.

stated the first one. All were brief, technically worded descriptions of the movements of the various boats.

‘And it’s nearly one o’clock now,’ said Mr Archer, taking out his watch and glancing at it. ‘They’ll be more than an hour finishing the loop and starting the second round. Let’s go get something to eat, shall we? We’re to meet the others at a very nice little place – you’ll like it.’

‘I should love to,’ I said. ‘But do tell me how the Yacht Club can know all this, when nobody can see anything?’

‘They’ve got a boat out there watching,’ he said shortly.

‘But…’ I stopped, staring at him, my heart pumping suddenly. ‘But…but how can the boat out there tell the people here what is going on?’

He hesitated, but before he could say anything, a lady standing near me, wearing a very large hat decorated with ostrich feathers, intervened excitedly. ‘Don’t you know?’ she
asked. ‘Why, this is the work of the Italian boy genius Marconi. Don’t say you haven’t heard about his astounding discovery? It’s been in all the papers!’

I felt Mr Archer pulling on my arm, and a tiny alarm seemed to go off inside me. I wanted to know about Marconi – the name, already, reminded me of something – and I felt that Mr Archer did not want me to know. I resisted his pressure, and opened my mouth to put some questions to my informative neighbour, but I was forestalled by a gentleman standing close by.

‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘It’s all nothing but a great trick to keep us busy till the boats come in! Messages transmitted from the water twenty miles away! What will they expect us to believe next?’

‘I read that they are transmitted by waves travelling through the ether,’ cried the lady.

I felt a great shock of disappointment. The ether – why, Arthur had told me that modern physicists no longer believed that it even existed! This was no better than Sir Oliver. I shrugged gloomily, and followed Mr Archer.

‘Then it really is some great hoax?’ I said to him as we emerged into the street, in which the mist was lifting slowly, allowing glimmers of pale sunshine to seep through.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said brusquely. ‘We’ll see what is going on later on. It’s sure to be better by two or three. The Queen’s Cup will not be over until after four o’clock, so we’ll have plenty of time to go back down to the waterfront to watch the end. Do you like oysters?’

I admitted to a fondness for oysters, and allowed myself to be taken to a open-air restaurant looking directly out over the water. Mr Munroe and his lady friend were standing in front
of it already, waiting for us. We were seated together at a table for four, and oysters duly arrived, followed by cod, Atlantic salmon and halibut. Mr Archer ordered conger eel.

‘We’ve been on a ramble,’ said Mr Munroe. ‘Can’t see a thing. Dead boring.’

I wanted to ask him if he had seen the messages at the Yacht Club, but I felt that the subject annoyed Mr Archer, perhaps because of the foolishness or pretence surrounding an activity to which he clearly attributed the highest importance. However, I soon became aware that two gentlemen at the table next to ours were discussing nothing other than that precise topic. Showing nothing, keeping up a light flow of conversation, I lent an ear to their words over the clink and scrape of glasses and forks.

‘The Flying Huntress is a good little tug,’ remarked the elder of the two, who was elegantly dressed in summer flannels and wore a close-cut beard. ‘Marconi did well to choose her. He’s a good sailor; he and his assistant will be able to follow the manoeuvres as accurately as it’s possible to think of doing.’

‘Yes, we’re in luck,’ replied the other. ‘Marconi knows as much about yachting as any good amateur; he and his assistant can handle the sailing, the messages and the transmission all by themselves.’

‘And know what to write,’ said the first. ‘Not that he couldn’t have taken an expert on board if he’d needed to. But he’s a loner, that fellow. Have you ever met him?’

‘No, have you?’

‘Once, at Cowes. The fellow’s a regular yachting maniac. He’ll change the future of yacht races with this system of his. It was a splendid idea of the paper’s, hiring him to report on
the race. And they’ve got even more than they bargained for. They couldn’t possibly have guessed how foggy it would be.’

‘They say it’s all for the best,’ said the bearded gentleman. `His system works better in fog and stormy weather, so I’ve heard. Something to do with conductivity. I wonder what’s happening now? Just look at the time – they’ll be well into the Sovereign’s, and the Queen’s will be starting the second round. Let’s go and get some news.’

They paid, rose and left, leaving me filled with an odd confusion, increased by the impossibility of thinking clearly and calmly while sitting at a white-clothed table, covered with dishes containing the bony remains of aquatic creatures, together with a man who might or might not be the father of a murderer, a lady who had very clearly applied rouge to her cheeks and redness to her lips, and her swain who clapped his hand too familiarly upon her arm and drank at least four glasses of wine during the meal. The gentlemen at the neighbouring table took the messages
seriously
– and they continually mentioned
Marconi
. And the name appeared familiar to me. But where had I seen or heard it before?

A creamy syllabub concluded the meal. Mr Archer summoned the waiter with a lordly gesture and paid the bill, while I tried to pretend that this was perfectly normal and not a shameful and inadmissible proceeding which I would never dare to admit to any human soul. I felt more uncomfortable than I ever had, for money spent in one’s favour creates a debt towards the spender which is more dreadfully difficult to erase or forget than that created by words, smiles or even (Heaven forbid!) kisses. It was a relief when we arose and made our way back to the dock, but a disappointment to find that although the fog had turned to no more than a light mist
inland, the worst of it appeared to have drifted out to sea, so that the horizon was still as invisible as before.

‘What shall we do?’ complained Mr Munroe, ‘We’re not going to stay here, are we? Why, we might as well be lying in bed!’

‘Let’s go back to the Yacht Club and look at the messages,’ I suggested quickly. ‘If you want to know how the race is going, you can find it out from there.’

He did not know about them. ‘What are you talking about?’ he asked me, surprised.

‘They have information on the course of the race, that they are putting up on the front window for all to see,’ I said. ‘We were there just before lunch.’

‘What is this cock-and-bull story?’ asked Mr Munroe, turning towards Mr Archer.

‘I don’t know the details,’ he replied. ‘She’s correct that there are messages proclaiming the progress of the race, though I don’t know how accurate they can be.’

‘Well, let’s go and see!’ exclaimed Mr Munroe. ‘It’s almost three o’clock; the race is practically over anyway.’ He turned on his heel, and off we went, the four of us, back in the direction of the Yacht Club.

The list of messages on the door had become considerably longer, and another list had been started next to it, this one giving the progress of the Sovereign’s Cup race, which had started some two hours later than the Queen’s.

‘What do you make of all this?’ exclaimed Mr Munroe, with real amazement, when we had worked our way to the window and read over everything from the beginning.

I was beginning to answer him by some reference to the scientific impossibility of such a thing, but he had quite other ideas in his mind. Turning towards Mr Archer and gesticulating with annoyance, he cried,

‘Why, it says here that Bona’s ahead by seven minutes or more! I was certain Astrild couldn’t fail this year – she’s been so completely overhauled I thought she was primed to win!’

‘Astrild looks to be last,’ laughed Mr Archer. ‘Better luck next time, old fellow.’

The young employee of the Yacht Club, wearing his smart cap and buttons, appeared behind the window holding a rather large sheet and placed it carefully below the preceding one.