“In that case,” Alleyn said, “I can at least touch wood.”
She gave him a quick grateful look and said, “What is all this about Mr. Garbel?”
“I saw the A.C. this morning. He was particularly nice, which generally means he’s got you pricked down for a particularly nasty job. On the face of it this one doesn’t sound so bad. It seems M.I.5. and the Sûreté are having a bit of a party with the Narcotics Bureau, and our people want somebody with fairly fluent French to go over for talks and a bit of field-work. As it is M.I.5. we’d better observe the usual rule of airy tact on your part and phony inscrutability on mine. But it turns out that the field-work lies, to coin a coy phrase, not a hundred miles from Roqueville.”
“Never!” Troy ejaculated. “In the Garbel country?”
“Precisely. Now it occurs to me that what with war, Ricky and the atrocious nature of my job, we’ve never had a holiday abroad together. Nanny is due for a fortnight at Reading. Why shouldn’t you and Ricky come with me to Roqueville and call on Mr.Garbel?”
Troy looked delighted, but she said: “You can’t go round doing top-secret jobs for M.I.5. trailing your wife and child. It would look so amateurish. Besides, we agreed never to mix business with pleasure, Rory.”
“In this case the more amateurish I look, the better. And I should only be based in Roqueville. The job lies outside it, so we wouldn’t really be mixing business with pleasure.”
He looked at her for a moment. “Do come,” he said, “you know you’re dying to meet Mr. Garbel.”
Troy scraped her palette. “I’m dying to come,” she amended, “but not to meet Mr. Garbel. And yet: I don’t know. There’s a sort of itch, I confess it, to find out just how deadly dull he is. Like a suicidal tendency.”
“You must yield to it. Write to him and tell him you’re coming. You might enclose a bus ticket from Putney to the Fulham Road. How do you address him: ‘Dear Cousin—’ But what is his Christian name?”
“I’ve no idea. He’s just P. E. Garbel. To his intimates, he tells me, he is known as Peg. He adds, inevitably, a quip about being square in a round hole.”
“Roqueville being the hole?”
“Presumably.”
“Has he a job, do you think?”
“For all I know he may be writing a monograph on bicarbonate-of-soda. If he is he’ll probably ask us to read the manuscript.”
“At all events we must meet him. Put down that damn palette and tell me you’re coming.”
Troy wiped her hands on her smock. “We’re coming,” she said.
ii
In his château outside Roqueville, Mr. Oberon looked across the nighted Mediterranean towards North Africa and then smiled gently upon his assembled guests.
“How fortunate we are,” he said. “Not a jarring note. All gathered together with one pure object in mind.” He ran over their names as if they composed a sort of celestial roll-call. “Our youngest disciple,” he said, beaming on Ginny Taylor. “A wonderful field of experience awaits her. She stands on the threshold of ecstasy. It is not too much to say, of ecstasy. And Robin too.” Robin Herrington, who had been watching Ginny Taylor, looked up sharply. “Ah, youth, youth,” sighed Mr. Oberon, ambiguously, and turned to the remaining guests, two men and a woman. “Do we envy them?” he asked, and answered himself. “No! No, for ours is the richer tilth. We are the husbandmen, are we not?”
Dr. Baradi lifted his dark, fleshy and intelligent head. He looked at his host. “Yes, indeed,” he said. “We are precisely that. And when Annabella arrives — I think you said she was coming?”
“Dear Annabella!” Mr. Oberon exclaimed. “Yes. On Tuesday. Unexpectedly.”
“Ah!” said Carbury Glande, looking at his paint-stained fingernails. “On Tuesday. Then she will be rested and ready for our Thursday rites.”
“Dear Annabella!” Dr. Baradi echoed sumptuously.
The sixth guest turned her ravaged face and short-sighted eyes towards Ginny Taylor.
“Is this your first visit?” she asked.
Ginny was looking at Mr. Oberon. She wore an expression that was unbecoming to her youth, a look of uncertainty, excitement and perhaps fear.
“Yes,” she said. “My first.”
“A neophyte,” Baradi murmured richly.
“Soon to be so young a priestess,” Mr. Oberon added. “It is very touching.” He smiled at Ginny with parted lips.
A tinkling crash broke across the conversation. Robin
Herrington had dropped his glass on the tessellated floor. The remains of his cocktail ran into a little pool near Mr. Oberon’s feet.
Mr. Oberon cut across his apologies. “No, no,” he said. “It is a happy symbol. Perhaps a promise. Let us call it a libation,” he said. “Shall we dine?”
Chapter I
Journey to the South
i
Alleyn lifted himself on his elbow and turned his watch to the blue light above his pillow. Twenty minutes past five. In another hour they would be in Roqueville.
The abrupt fall of silence when the train stopped must have woken him. He listened intently but, apart from the hiss of escaping steam and the slam of a door in a distant carriage, everything was quiet and still.
He heard the men in the double sleeper next to his own exchange desultory remarks. One of them yawned loudly.
Alleyn thought the station must be Douceville. Sure enough, someone walked past the window and a lonely voice announced to the night: “Douce-v-i-ll-e.”
The engine hissed again. The same voice, apparently continuing a broken conversation, called out: “Pas ce soir, par exemple!” Someone else laughed distantly. The voices receded to be followed by the most characteristic of all stationary train noises, the tap of steel on steel. The taps tinkered away into the distance.
Alleyn manoeuvred to the bottom of his bunk, dangled his long legs in space for a moment, and then slithered to the floor. The window was not completely shuttered. He peered through the gap and was confronted by the bottom of a poster for Dubonnet and the lower half of a porter carrying a lamp. The lamp swung to and fro, a bell rang, and the train clanked discreetly. The lamp and poster were replaced by the lower halves of two discharged passengers, a pile of luggage, a stretch of empty platform, and a succession of swiftly moving pools of light. Then there was only the night hurrying past with blurred suggestions of rocks and olive trees.
The train gathered speed and settled down to its perpetual choriambic statement: “What a to-do. What a to-do.”
Alleyn cautiously lowered the window-blind. The train was crossing the seaward end of a valley and the moon in its third quarter was riding the western heavens. Its radiance emphasized the natural pallor of hills and trees and dramatized the shapes of rocks and mountains. With the immediate gesture of a shutter, a high bank obliterated this landscape. The train passed through a village and for two seconds Alleyn looked into a lamplit room where a woman watched a man intent over an early breakfast. What occupation got them up so soon? They were there, sharp in his vision, and were gone.
He turned from the window wondering if Troy, who shared his pleasure in train journeys, was awake in her single berth next door. In twenty minutes he would go and see. In the meantime he hoped that, in the almost complete darkness, he could dress himself without making a disturbance. He began to do so, steadying himself against the lurch and swing of this small, noisy and unstable world.