Alleyn said, “I should be delighted,” and introductions were made. Mr. Merryman looked sharply at him over the tops of his spectacles and said, “How do you do, sir.” He added astonishingly, “I perceived that you were effecting an escape from what was no doubt an excruciating situation.”
“I?” Alleyn said. “I don’t quite—”
“The sight,” Mr. Merryman continued in none too quiet a voice, “of yonder popinjay ruffling his dubious plumage at the bar is singularly distasteful to me and no doubt intolerable to you.”
“Oh, come, now!” Father Jourdain protested.
Alleyn said, “He’s not as bad as that, is he?”
“You know who he is, of course.”
“Yes, indeed.”
“Yes, yes,” said Father Jourdain. “We know. Ssh!”
“Have you witnessed his weekly exhibitions of indecent exposure on the television?”
“I’m not much of a viewer,” Alleyn said.
“Ah! You show your good judgment. As an underpaid pedagogue it has been my hideous lot to sit on Tuesday evenings among upper-middle-class adolescents of low intelligence, ‘looking in’ (loathsome phrase) at this man’s antics. Let me tell you what he does, sir. He advertises women’s bathing clothes and to this end he incites — arrogant presumption — he incites members of the public to bring their troubles to him! And the fools do! Conceive!” Mr. Merryman invited. “Picture to yourself! A dupe is discovered, his back (or much more often hers) to the camera. Out of focus, unrecognizable, therefore. Facing this person and us, remorselessly illuminated, enthroned and elevated in blasphemous (you will appreciate that in clerical company I use the adjective advisedly) in blasphemous supremacy is or was the countenance you see before you, but garnished with a hirsute growth which lent it a wholly spurious distinction.”
Alleyn glanced with amusement at Mr. Merryman and thought what bad luck it was for him that he was unable to give visual expression to his spleen. For all the world he looked like an indignant baby.
“If you will believe me,” he continued angrily whispering, “a frightful process known as ‘talking it over’ now intervenes. The subject discloses to That Person, and to however many thousands of listening observers there may be, some intimate predicament of her (it is, I repeat, usually a woman) private life. He then propounds a solution, is thanked, applauded, preens himself, and is presented with a fresh sacrifice. Now! What do you think of that!” whispered Mr. Merryman.
“I think it all sounds very embarrassing,” Alleyn said.
Father Jourdain made a comically despairing face at him. “Let’s talk about something else,” he suggested. “You were saying, Mr. Merryman, that the psychopathic murderer—”
“You heard of course,” Mr. Merryman remorselessly interjected, “what an exhibition he made of himself at a later assignment. ‘Lady Agatha’s umbilicus globular,’ ” he quoted, and broke into à shrill laugh.
“You know,” Father Jourdain remarked, “I’m on holiday and honestly don’t want to start throwing my priestly weight about.” Before Mr. Merryman could reply he raised his voice a little and added, “To go back, as somebody, was it Humpty Dumpty? said, to the last conversation but one, I’m immensely interested in what you were saying about criminals of the Heath type. What was the book you recommended? By an American psychiatrist, I think you said.”
Mr. Merryman muttered huffily, “I don’t recollect.”
Alleyn asked, “Not, by any chance, The Show of Violence, by Frederic Wertham?”
Father Jourdain turned to him with unconcealed relief. “Ah!” he said. “You’re an addict, too, and a learned one, evidently.”
“Not I. The merest amateur. Why, by the way, is everybody so fascinated by crimes of violence?” He looked at Father Jourdain. “What do you think, sir?”
Father Jourdain hesitated and Mr. Merryman cut in.
“I am persuaded,” he said, “that people read about murder as an alternative to committing it.”
“A safety valve?” Alleyn suggested.
“A conversion. The so-called antisocial urge is fed into a socially acceptable channel; we thus commit our crimes of violence at a safe remove. We are all,” Mr. Merryman said tranquilly folding his hands over his stomach, “savages at heart.” He seemed to have recovered his good humour.
“Do you agree?” Alleyn asked Father Jourdain.
“I fancy,” he rejoined, “that Mr. Merryman is talking about something I call original sin. If he is, I do of course agree.”
An accidental silence had fallen on the little assembly. Into this silence with raised voice, as a stone into a pool, Alleyn dropped his next remark.
“Take, for instance, this strangler — the man who ‘says it with’—what are they? Roses? What, do you suppose, is behind all that?”
The silence continued for perhaps five seconds.
Miss Abbott said, “Not roses. Hyacinths. Flowers of several kinds.”
She had lifted her gaze from her book and fixed it on Mrs. Dillington-Blick. “Hot-house flowers,” she said. “It being winter. The first time it was snowdrops, I believe.”
“And the second,” Mr. Merryman said, “hyacinths.”
Aubyn Dale cleared his throat.
“Ah, yes!” Alleyn said. “I remember now. Hyacinths.”
“Isn’t it awful?” Mrs. Cuddly gloated.
“Shocking,” Mr. Cuddy agreed. “Hyacinths! Fancy!”
Mr. McAngus said gently, “Poor things.”
Mr. Merryman with the falsely innocent air of a child that knows it’s being naughty asked loudly, “Hasn’t there been something on television about these flowers? Something rather ludicrous? Of what can I be thinking?”
Everybody avoided looking at Aubyn Dale, but not even Father Jourdain found anything to say.
It was at this juncture that Dennis staggered into the room with a vast basket of flowers which he set down on the central table.
“Hyacinths!” Mrs. Cuddy shrilly pointed out. “What a coincidence!”
It was one of those naïve arrangements which can give nothing but pleasure to the person who receives them unless, of course, that person is allergic to scented flowers. The hyacinths were rooted and blooming in a mossy bed. They trembled slightly with the motion of the ship, shook out their incongruous fragrance and filled the smoking-room with reminiscences of the more expensive kinds of shops, restaurants, and women.
Dennis fell back a pace to admire them.
“Thank you, Dennis,” Mrs. Dillington-Blick said.
“It’s a pleasure, Mrs. Dillington-Blick,” he rejoined. “Aren’t they gorgeous?”
He retired behind the bar. The passengers stared at the growing flowers and the flowers, quivering, laid upon them a further burden of sweetness.
Mrs. Dillington-Blick explained hurriedly, “There isn’t room for all one’s flowers in one’s cabin. I thought we’d enjoy them together.”
Alleyn said, “But what a charming gesture.” And was barely supported by a dilatory murmur.
Brigid agreed quickly, “Isn’t it? Thank you so much, they’re quite lovely.”
Tim Makepiece murmured, “What nice manners you’ve got, Grandmama.”
“I do hope,” Mrs. Dillington-Blick said, “that nobody finds the scent too much. Me, I simply wallow in it.”