“We do this sort of thing much better at the Comédie Française,” Annabella Wells paraphrased, twisting her mouth in self-contempt.
Baradi leaned forward until his nose was placed in surrealistic association with her ear. Beneath the nose his moustache shifted as if it had a life of its own and beneath the moustache his lips pouted and writhed in almost soundless articulation. Annabella Wells’s expression did not change. She nodded slightly. His face hung for a moment above her neck and then he leaned back in his chair.
Above the blacked Mediterranean the sky splintered with forked lightning.
“One. Two. Three. Four,” the hoarse voice counted to an accompaniment of clapping hands. The other guests ejaculated under a canopy of thunder.
“You always have to count,” the voice explained when it could be heard again.
“The thing I really hate,” Ginny Taylor said rapidly, “is not the thunder or lightning but the pauses between bouts. Like this one.”
“Come indoors,” Robin Herrington said. “You don’t have to stay out here.”
“It’s a kind of dare I have with myself.”
“Learning to be brave?” Annabella Wells asked with a curious inflexion in her voice.
“Ginny will have the courage of a lioness,” said Baradi, “and the fire of a phoenix.”
Annabella got up with an abrupt expert movement and walked over to the balustrade. Baradi followed her. Ginny pushed her hair back from her forehead and looked quickly at Robin and away again. He moved nearer to her. She turned away to the far end of the roof-garden. Robin hovered uncertainly. The other four guests had drawn closer together. Carbury Glande half-closed his eyes and peered at the cloud-blocked sky and dismal sea. “Gloriously ominous,” he said, “and quite un-paintable. Which is such a good thing.”
The pause was not really one of silence. It was dramatized by minor noises, themselves uncannily portentous. Mr. Oberon’s canary, for instance, hopped scratchily from cage-floor to perch and back again. A cicada had forgotten to stop chirruping in the motionless cactus slopes that Mr. Oberon called his jardin exotique. Down in the servants’ quarters a woman laughed, and many kilometres away, towards Douceville, a train shrieked effeminately. Still, beside the threat of thunder, these desultory sounds added up to silence.
Glande, with an eye on Ginny, muttered: “I damned well think we need something. After all—” He swallowed. “After everything. It’s nervy work waiting.” His voice shot up into falsetto. “I don’t pretend to be phlegmatic. I’m a bloody artist, I am.”
Baradi said: “Keep your voice down. You certainly have a flair for the appropriate adjective,” and laughed softly.
Glande fingered his lips and stared at Baradi. “How you can!” he whispered.
Annabella, looking out to sea, said: “Keep your hand to the plough, Carbury dear. You’ve put it there. No looking back.”
“I’m on your side,” announced the voice from the balustrade. “Look what I am doing for you all.”
From her remote station Ginny said: “I can’t stand this.”
“Well, don’t,” Robin said quietly. “Old Marie asked me to tell you there’s only one of the big silver goats left. Why not dodge down before the rain and get it? In the passage you won’t see if there’s lightning. Come on.”
Ginny looked at Baradi. He caught her glance and walked across to her. “What is it?” he said.
“I thought I might go to old Marie’s shop,” Ginny said. “It’s away from the storm.”
“Why not?” he said. “What a good idea.”
“I thought I might,” Ginny repeated doubtfully.
For a split second lightning wrote itself across the sky in livid calligraphy. The voice on the balustrade had counted two when the heavens crashed together in a monstrous report. Ginny’s mouth was wide open. She ran into the tower and Robin followed her.
The initial clap was succeeded by a prolonged rattle and an ambiguous omnipotent muttering. Above this rumpus Glande could be heard saying: “What I mean to say: do we know we can trust them? After all, they’re comparative strangers and I must say I don’t like the boy’s manner.”
Baradi, who was watching Annabella Wells, said: “There’s no need to disturb yourself on their account. Robin is much too heavily involved and as for Ginny, can we not leave her safely to Ra? In any case, she knows nothing.”
“The boy does. He might blurt out something to those other two — Troy and her bloody high-hat husband.”
“If Mr. and Mrs. Allen should arrive there need be no meeting.”
“How do you know they don’t suspect something already?”
“I have told you. The girl Teresa reports that having recovered the boy, they have retired to their hotel in high glee.”
“There was a bungle over the kid. There might be another bungle. Suppose Allen hangs about like he did last time asking damn-fool esoteric questions?”
“They were not as silly as you think, my dear Carbury. The man is an intelligent man. He behaved intelligently during the operation. He would make a good anaesthetist.”
“Well — there you are!”
“Please don’t panic. He is both intelligent and inquisitive. That is why we thought it better to remove him, if possible, to St. Céleste, until the Truebody has been disposed of.” Baradi’s teeth gleamed under his moustache.
“I can see no cause for amusement.”
“Can you not? You must cultivate a taste for irony. Annabella,” Baradi continued, looking at her motionless figure against the steel-dark sky, “Annabella tells us that Mr. Allen, as far as she knows, is the person he appears to be: a dilettante with a taste for mysticism, curious literature and big-game hunting. The latter, I may add, in the generally accepted sense of the expression.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Glande cried out. The voice from the balustrade broke into undisciplined laughter. “Shut up!” he shouted. “Shut up, Sati! You of all people to laugh. It’s so damned undignified. Remember who you are!”
“Yes, Grizel dear,” Annabella Wells said, “pray do remember that.”
It had grown so dark that the lightning darted white on their faces. They saw one another momentarily as if by a flash-lamp, each wearing a look of fixity. The thunder-clap followed at once. One might have imagined the heavens had burst outward like a gas-filled cylinder.
Mr. Oberon, wearing his hooded gown, stepped out of the tower door and contemplated his followers.
“Cher maître,” shouted Baradi, waving his hand, “you come most carefully upon your hour. What an entrance! Superb!”
The volley rolled away into silence. Mr. Oberon moved forward and, really as if he had induced it, rain struck down in an abrupt deluge.
“You will get wet, dear Sati,” said Mr. Oberon.
Glande said: “What’s happened?”
They all drew near to Mr. Oberon. The rain made a frightful din, pelting like bullets on water and earth and stone and on the canvas awning above their heads. Landscape and seascape were alive with its noise. The four guests, with the anxious air of people who are hard-of-hearing, inclined their heads towards their host.
“What’s happened?” Glande repeated, but with a subdued and more deferential manner.
“All is well. It is arranged for tomorrow afternoon. An Anglican ceremony,” said Oberon, smiling slightly. “I have spoken to the — should I call him priest? I was obliged to call on him. The telephone is still out of order. He is a dull man but very obliging. A private funeral, of course.”
“But the other business-the permit or whatever it is?”
“I’ve already explained,” Baradi cut in irritably, “that my authority as a medical man is perfectly adequate. The appropriate official will be happy to receive me tomorrow when the necessary formalities will be completed.”