Mrs Midnight and Other Stories (28 page)

Someone knocked at my door. I started violently.

I opened the door and on the threshold stood Professor Francine Stalker. She was clothed simply in a long, loose dress of some dark red velvety material and sandals.

‘Hello, Rupert,’ she said, then, as if it was the most natural thing to do in the world, she flicked off the light switch by the door.

‘I don’t want people to see me here,’ she said. The moon flooded my study. I retreated before her as she entered. Francine paused when she had reached the middle of the room, then she removed the comb from her coiffure and, with one expert shake of it she released her black hair which tumbled down to her ankles. It gleamed in the moonlight, a glistening black waterfall, it waved like a fish’s tail in dark waters. With another practised movement she shook off her sandals and unbuttoned her long loose dress, letting it creep down her white nakedness and rustle to the floor. Even in the dim silver light I could see that her nipples were red and engorged like poisoned berries.

I was a slave to the moment. Soon we were in my bedroom and I too was naked but we had not yet so much as touched. Her cold hand touched my chest and pushed me onto the bed.

‘Where is it?’ She whispered.

‘Where is what?’

‘The Mortlake Manuscript, of course! Where is the Manuscript?’

She was bending over me and I could smell a heavy scent of musk on her. No part of us yet touched but I could feel her cold breath on me and as I reached up to stroke her hair, she said again:

‘Where is it, Rupert? Where is it?’

As I felt the last wisp of personal will leave me something happened. The room became full of movement, silent but frantic. Irrational dark shapes chased each other across the pale walls. I saw Francine’s eyes widen, and then a great black shadow like a cloak arched itself over her naked body and enveloped it. For a moment she utterly disappeared, then she was being pulled kicking and struggling through the bedroom door. I got up and tried to follow her, but something black and wet thumped me in the chest. I fell back and hit my head on the bedpost.

When I came to, about an hour later, I suppose, Francine and her clothes were gone. My head ached appallingly and in the middle of my chest was a great black bruise. However I found that when I washed it most of the blackness came off. It must have been soot, or ink.

The following morning I had an unexpected visit from the police. Francine Stalker had laid an accusation of rape against me. I refused the offer of a formal interview with a solicitor present, consenting instead to be questioned where I was. As I answered questions from the two policemen I noticed their slight air of hostility begin to fade. A few days after, I was curtly informed that the charges against me had been dropped. It was only much later that I heard that Professor Stalker had been examined and found to be virgo intacta. The whole business was quite successfully hushed up, as these things can be in the City of Dreaming Spires. Fortunately the Summer Vacation was very nearly upon us.

As soon as term was over I drove to the little house in the Dordogne which I own. A friend was to join me later on, but I had a few days to myself. On my second night there I lit the barbecue under the lime tree as the sun was beginning to set. As soon as the charcoal was hot enough I took out the Mortlake Manuscript which I had brought with me to France and burnt it sheet by sheet on glowing coals.

As I did so I was conscious of shadowy figures gathered in the periphery of my vision, smelling the summer evening air and the sharp, comfortable scent of burning wood and paper. I was not afraid. The shadows were neither hostile, nor friendly; they were merely witnesses. By the time the final sheet had curled, blackened and had been frittered into senseless white flakes on the breeze, the last shadow had gone.

On my return to England I rang up Enoch Stapleton to tell him what I had done. He was quite unperturbed.

‘That is the task you were chosen for,’ he said, rather irritatingly. Nevertheless I remain a sceptic, though not a dogmatic one. That too, I suppose, is the task I have been chosen for.

Professor Stalker is still around. Her hair has been cut and I have seen streaks of grey in it. Some day I will have to tell her that the Manuscript is destroyed. When occasionally our paths cross in Blackwells, or the High, or the Bodleian, I never look away, but she does. Sometimes our eyes meet accidentally and in hers I see a deep and forlorn resentment. The offender never forgives.

VII

The other day I was in Duke Humfrey’s Library in the Bodleian. My book is nearing completion and I had been looking again through the Ashmolean collection of MSS, just in case Aubrey had been wrong and something remained of Tremayne’s
De Rerum Umbris
. It was a vain hope, of course, and I have already had about as much luck as any academic could hope for. I had made up my mind that my research was now at an end. Evening light filtered through the armorial stained glass windows at the end of the long room, painting the polished floorboards with azure, gules and or.

Just as I was about to return the Ashmole manuscripts to the safe keeping of the curator, I noticed that a flimsy scrap of paper had fallen to the floor from my desk. I picked it up. The paper was old, almost certainly seventeenth century, and the handwriting was familiar: Tremayne’s. I knew it from the annotations he had made to the
Narratio Divina de Secreta Secretorum
. On it was written a single stanza. My heart began to beat fast. I had not told it to, but it knew my excitement and was banging the drum in accompaniment. One last glimpse of Elias Tremayne had been granted me. Reverently I touched the words he had written. I suppose it must have been the sweat of excitement in my fingers because a tiny smear of black came away on them. It was almost as if the ancient ink had been wet when I caressed it. Trembling, I read:

Fare well! I have embraced the starrie night.

Dying, I live no more among the dead,

In tombs find no continuing citie here;

No mortall longings hang about my head.

No more! My wingéd soule takes flight

And I ascend from crystall sphere to crystall sphere

Into the Regions of Eternall Light.

THE LOOK

I

Three weeks after I had arrived in Nairobi in January 1976 my father wrote to me. I took it to be a sign that he was reconciled to the fact that his only son had decided to join a theatre company in what he called ‘the back of beyond’. ‘It won’t even advance your
theatrical
career,’ he had told me in England before I went, the emphasis implying that he had still not lost hope that another ‘proper’ career might be pursued. But I was young enough to believe that adventure should take precedence over career considerations; and of course I was right.

In the last paragraph of his letter he wrote: ‘I’ve just discovered that an old friend of mine lives in your present part of the world. His name is Jumbo Daventry—I believe his real Christian name is Hugh but everyone has always called him Jumbo—and he was a P.O.W with me on the Railway in Burma. He was a good man then and a good friend: one of those who behaved well.’ My father almost never talked about his experiences as a prisoner of the Japanese in the war, but one of the few observations he would make on the subject was that: ‘there were those who behaved well, but there were a few who didn’t, and in the circumstances I can’t bring myself to blame them.’

‘I used to see quite a bit of Jumbo just after the war,’ my father went on, ‘but then we lost touch and I gathered he went to Africa to farm. I only recently discovered through another P.O.W. chum that he was in Kenya and got hold of his address. I’ve written to him and told him about you, so don’t be surprised if you are suddenly contacted by a chap called Jumbo. He really is a good man; though I gather he married a rather ghastly woman, as good men have a fatal habit of doing.’

This last remark intrigued me. My father was a solicitor, and his professional deformity was discretion. For him to make such a decisively derogatory statement was a rare occurrence, so I took notice of it and waited for Jumbo to contact me with some apprehension. My father had given me his address, though, and I liked the sound of it. He lived in the Aberdare Mountains north of Nairobi and the name of his house was Cloud’s Hill.

II

The Broughton-Erroll Theatre in Nairobi looked from the front like a run-down old Art Deco cinema which I believe it had once been. Shortly after the War Dick Broughton, a wealthy Kenyan coffee merchant, had bought it for his wife Samantha. Samantha Erroll had been a promising young West-End actress before she married Broughton and was carried off to Kenya. Having the sense to realise that his talented wife would be bored without some sort of artistic stimulus, Broughton set her up as the Queen of Nairobi Theatre, a position in which she continued to reign supreme after his death. She hired actors from England, promising them little money but, by way of compensation, excellent parts in an exotic location.

I knew, even before I went, that the theatre had seen better days. Samantha Broughton, though approaching her sixties, still insisted on playing most of the leading roles and, in addition, directed in a perfunctory but autocratic manner. She liked whenever possible to line her fellow actors across the stage with herself slightly upstage of the rest of us.

The audience consisted mainly of the white community, and the plays were the kind of drawing-room comedies and thrillers that had been the staple diet when Samantha was a rising West-End star. Occasionally she would do a Shakespeare or some other classic for the benefit of the schools, and on those occasions the theatre would be filled with a sea of young black faces, a rustle of excited anticipation. Those were the high points for me.

She had many regulars who would go to all the shows, whatever they were, sometimes two or three times during a run if they took a fancy to the play. One of the most unusual of these regulars was Mrs King.

She generally occupied a small box close to the stage, so that the actors could see her all too clearly. She was in any case distinctive enough in appearance. She was in her sixties and Indian, possibly Eurasian by birth. She had obviously been a beauty and maintained its memory by the wearing of bangles and colourful saris and the lustre of her dark eyes.

She was a friend, some might say a protégée, of Samantha’s and could often be found back stage. Whenever choreography was required in a production she was called in as she had apparently been a noted dancer in her youth, but she was not much help. Her instructions were too oracular and impractical. This mystical cast of mind was reflected in her other backstage activity which was fortune telling.

I gathered that she was not well off because she always charged for her services, or rather asked for a ‘token of appreciation’, and the suggested amount was not modest. Her methods of divination varied: tea leaves, palms and cards were all used, and several of the girls in the company said she was ‘amazingly accurate’. I suspected that this amounted to her telling them that they were fond of travel and felt things more than most people, but I was more of a sceptic in those days than I am now.

Sometimes she would sit with us in the Green Room during the interval, sipping instant coffee and telling us stories about ‘the old days’, the colonial era before Kenyan independence. I gathered that her own social position had been somewhat precarious. While claiming that she had been a ‘good friend’ of this or that notable figure in Kenyan society, she described many of the main social events of the era at second hand, as if she had not actually been present. She implied that this was due to her appearance and ethnicity. Being Asian she belonged to the third and most ambiguous section of the Kenyan nation: neither native, nor European ruling élite. The fact that she had married an English doctor had not qualified her for full white ruler status.

Surprisingly, she did not find her questionable position a source of much distress. Had she been less full of herself she might well have done, but her self-esteem knew no bounds. According to her, most of the male section of the Kenyan élite had been ‘madly in love’ with her, while she was, apparently, equally popular with their womenfolk to whom she acted as confidant. A photograph that she showed us of her as a young woman was enough to demonstrate that the vaunted adulation need not have been entirely a fantasy of hers. She had been strikingly beautiful.

There was an occasion on which I saw the façade of her serene self-satisfaction crack a little. One night in the Green Room one of the actors started to ask her about ‘the Hartland murder’. She seemed disturbed, even offended, by the question, and rapidly changed the subject. She then spilt coffee over her sari and left before the interval was over. When she had gone I asked the actor about the Hartland murder and he expressed surprise that I had not heard of it. Apparently it had been a great
cause célèbre
of the late 1940s among the white élite. He would say no more about it so I left it at that.

After this incident Mrs King did not make an appearance back stage for almost a week during which I had a telephone call. Shortly before the performance one night I was summoned from my dressing room to answer the phone at the stage door. It was an unknown voice, but it was immediately clear who it was.

‘Hello, Jumbo Daventry here. You’re John’s son, aren’t you? Good show! John was one of the best, believe me. True blue all through. Look, my better half Freda and I are coming to the show on the Saturday night. Now, if you have a toothbrush and a few necessaries packed, we’ll whisk you off after the curtain and you can stay through till Monday at Cloud’s Hill. I’ve squared it all with Samantha who’s an old chum. How does that sound?’

I said it sounded splendid. The truth was, I was pining to get out of the heat, the dust and the hooting traffic of Nairobi, but had not yet summoned the courage to find out how to do so. My flat, provided by the management, was Spartan and noisy; what leisure I had to date had been spent learning lines and trying to keep cool.

‘Good egg! Expect to see us after the perf. Over and out!’

On the Saturday evening before the show I was standing in the wings when Samantha came up to me. I was a little surprised because till now she had been rather aloof towards me, as a very junior member of her company. I remember the play was a Somerset Maugham adaptation by Guy Bolton called
Larger than Life
in which she played a star actress and I was cast, rather inappropriately as Sir Charles Temperley, one of her elderly admirers. I remember I had given myself a moustache, greyed my hair at the temples and thought I was looking very distinguished.

‘So you’re off to stay at Cloud’s Hill this weekend, are you, you lucky boy?’

‘I gather you know Jumbo Daventry, Samantha.’

‘Oh, yes. Known him for ages. Everyone loves Jumbo.’

‘And his wife? Freda, isn’t it?’

‘Ah, Freda! To use the phrase beloved of Edwardian dramatists, “she is a woman with a history”.’ With that Samantha turned and swept away from me, as if she had just delivered an exit line from the play.

Mrs King was briefly in the Green Room that night. For the first time she appeared to take an interest in my presence. She fixed her lustrous eyes on me with the look of someone who expects to fascinate. I smiled back.

‘Tell me, young man, what sign were you born under?’

I told her.

‘Ah! I thought so! A dreamer and visionary. Beware, young man. Your ascendant planet is Mercury. Saturn aligns with Mars. You may see more than you would like, and understand more than you expect to. That is often dangerous.’

I hope my response to this nonsense was polite. I believe it was.

After the show Jumbo Daventry came round to collect me from my dressing room. He wore a khaki shirt, a neat pair of khaki shorts with knee length woollen socks and brightly polished brown brogues. I could tell at once why he had been given his nickname. He had the thickest legs I had ever seen on a man: they looked like young pink tree trunks. The rest of him was big too and though middle age was beginning to thicken his waist, he still looked powerful. He had sandy hair, a toothbrush moustache, blunt features and bright blue eyes. I liked him immediately.

‘Jolly good show,’ he said. ‘Thoroughly enjoyed it. I think the wife enjoyed it even more. She loves that sort of witty, sophisticated stuff, you know.’ He winked, then, recognising that her absence from the dressing room required some sort of explanation, he said: ‘Freda’s waiting for us, guarding the old Land Rover. You ready and fit?’

The Land Rover was parked just outside the stage door and we set off as soon as I was in it. I was in the back seat, so my first view of Freda Daventry was of the back of her head and her profile as she turned to address a few words to me.

‘Adored the show,’ she said. ‘An absolute scream. Too killing.’ She talked with a lazy aristocratic drawl that spoke of an earlier age of cocktails and country house weekends. It was a quite different sort of upper class from Jumbo’s clipped, military accents: more privileged, and to me less trustworthy. In the flickering yellow Nairobi streetlights, I could see that her features were thin and fine, her skin pale and wrinkled from long exposure to the sun. It was hard to tell in that light whether her hair was white or a pale platinum blonde.

We said little while Jumbo drove hard along dusty, bumpy roads north from Nairobi into the Aberdares or the White Highlands as they still were sometimes called.

‘Can’t see anything now,’ said Jumbo at one point, ‘but you’ll love the countryside when you see it in the morning. Like Scotland only a damn sight hotter. Eh? Eh?’

He laughed and I laughed with him. I saw Freda’s lips twist into a tight smile. It was obviously a remark she had heard him make many times.

It was a long journey during which I think I must have dozed off several times despite all the jolts. Finally we were coming down a long gravel drive towards a building that looked like a gigantic suburban bungalow built out of yellow stone.

‘Welcome to Cloud’s Hill,’ said Jumbo.

As we came to a halt in front of the house, a Somali servant who had been sitting on the steps of the front porch rose to greet us. Like most of his race, he was a tall, dignified looking man, very smartly turned out with a spotless white tunic and a green fez. I felt decidedly underdressed in his presence. He took my miserable little holdall and carried it in as if it were a precious cargo. I began to wonder desperately if they still dressed for dinner here.

While the Somali stowed my bag, I was shown into a long low sitting room where, from in front of a blazing log fire, two huge tawny Rhodesian Ridgebacks rose lazily to greet their master and mistress. The decor was almost aggressively English and Home Counties: glazed floral chintz on the sofa and armchairs, Persian rugs on polished floorboards, coloured prints of racehorses and hunting scenes on the walls. Apart from a couple of small hunting trophies there was nothing of Africa in the room. Presently, another Somali, attired like the first, brought in a tray of sandwiches and a soda syphon to accompany the whisky, a decanter of which was imprisoned in a Tantalus on the sideboard.

While Freda was making a fuss of the Ridgebacks, Jumbo took a key on a chain out of his shorts to unlock the Tantalus. Meanwhile the first Somali, having rid himself of my bag, entered the sitting room and took his place patiently beside the other servant.