The Mudflats Of The Dead
Gladys Mitchell
Bradley 56
To Gwen Robyns
with love and admiration
‘And to be read herself she need not fear;
Each test and every light her Muse will bear,
Though Epictetus with his lamp were there.’
John Dryden
PART ONE
Colin Palgrave
CHAPTER 1
THE COAST ROAD
‘The irresponsive silence of the land,
The irresponsive sounding of the sea.’
Christina Georgina Rossetti
Palgrave was in search of inspiration; that is how he put it to himself, although not to those of his circle who had asked him how he intended to spend his holidays. What he meant was that he needed a plot for his second novel. He had been overjoyed when his first book had been accepted, the more so when he signed a contract which called for another two novels. The signing, however, was six months old and, strive as he might, not a single idea which could form the basis of a second novel had come into his head.
‘And if not a second, how on earth can I manage a third?’ he had asked himself miserably on the eve of the school’s seven-week summer vacation, as he stared at the rows of empty desks in a form-room he had grown to hate. He had been reminded of himself at the age of nine, seated in a similar room, but in a pupil’s desk, not at the teacher’s table. The end of term examinations had been over, sports day had come and gone, the little boys were restless and fidgety, the form-master was bored and had run out of subjects for the weekly essay. Falling back on a well-tried but never very successful formula, he had told his class to choose their own subjects for composition. Having stifled the groans and the reproachful cries of ‘Oh, sir! which this shifting of his responsibilities had evoked, Palgrave’s form-master had spent the next twenty minutes on the boys’ reports and in trying to find alternatives to Works well on the whole or Could do better or the even less helpful, from the child’s or the parents’ point of view, Finds this subject difficult. Failing in this object, he had laid the blotter over the reports and resorted to his usual practice of strolling up and down between the rows of desks to see how his embryo and mostly unwilling authors were getting on.
When he had reached Palgrave’s desk he had found an unhappy small boy staring at an almost blank page. Palgrave had written the date in a fair, round hand and had added: My Own Choice of Subject. Otherwise the page was empty.
‘Well, Colin, old lad,’ the master had said, ‘what is your own choice of subject?’
‘Please, sir, I can’t think of one.’
Here he was again, once more in the same boat.
That time, however, rescue had been at hand.
‘What about Myself on Sports Day?’
‘Please, sir, I wasn’t there. It was my father’s holiday and I was taking my fortnight.’
‘And had the good sense to miss the maths paper, I remember. Well, imagine you were there. You can do that, can’t you? Pretend you won the four hundred metres.’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’
‘All part of the service, so get a move on. The lesson’s half over.’
But now there was no kindly assistance forthcoming and Palgrave’s dilemma had reached the stage of giving him sleepless nights and a daily sensation of near panic.
‘I can’t have dried up already!’ he told himself despairingly. ‘If I have, bang goes my dream of giving up this miserable job and becoming a professional writer.’
He jettisoned his gloomy thoughts after giving a last glance of loathing at the ink-stained empty desks, smiled at the cleaner as she came in with her tea-leaves, broom and pail, and went whistling down the stone stairs to the masters’ lobby. Cheerful masculine voices were exchanging jests and holiday farewells and from the adjoining lobby came the inexorable clacking of female voices from the distaff portion of the staff.
Palgrave took his mackintosh from its peg, responded to one or two friendly quips and then went into the staffroom to collect his briefcase and a couple of books he did not want the cleaners to handle, and found the room in the occupation of his particular buddy, a young man named Winblow, who was clearing out a locker. He desisted when Palgrave came in.
‘Oh, hullo, Colin,’ he said. ‘Thought you’d gone. You’re off on the sacred quest tomorrow, then, are you?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Meet me at the Dog and Duck at six and I’ll buy you a drink and wish you luck.
Meet me at gloaming at the Dog and Duck,
And in their witches’ brew I’ll wish you luck!
How’s that for a rhyming couplet?’
‘Lousy. All right, I’ll meet you when I’ve done my packing. Thank God for the invention of the internal combustion engine! One doesn’t any longer need to travel light.’
‘No. Even room for a dead body in a four-seater’s boot. Why don’t you write a thriller if you’re stuck for a plot?’
‘Because a thriller has to have a plot. That’s the one thing it can’t do without. See you at seven, not six. I’ll have all my gear marshalled by then, I trust. Six is too early to get all my packing done.’
‘Don’t forget the kitchen sink!’
Winblow was in his confidence, but in reply to other staffroom enquiries about his holiday plans, Palgrave had said that he was going to take his car and tour the roads, stopping for the night at any place which pleased him and staying longer if the neighbourhood was especially attractive. What he did not say (but it was his real objective) was that he wanted to find a setting which would suggest a theme for his second book.
He had thought of Cornwall and Wales, but it seemed to him that what he required was a part of the country which he did not know at all, so that he came to it with a fresh mind and no preconceived ideas. He thought, too, that it ought to be lonely, desolate and mysterious, although he wondered whether there could be such a locality on an overpopulated island.
However, by the beginning of his second week he began to think that he was on the track of what he wanted. His progress had been leisurely and he had been held up in Colchester for a couple of days while the car was in dry dock for repairs to a faulty clutch. In any case, he had decided that up to about a hundred and twenty miles a day, following by-roads and avoiding the motorways, would take him as far as he wanted to go in the four weeks he had allowed himself for research, and on the Monday of the second of these weeks he was on a coast road which left a large and a smaller town behind and ran almost due west, linking a number of small villages whose names he knew only from the motoring atlas which he kept in the car.
Again according to the map, they were seaside villages, but once he had left the cliffs behind him, the road was often two miles or more from the sea. The high cliffs had been formed of sand and gravel, deposits of the Ice Age, a series of moraines brought by the action of glaciers, but, after the first few miles, these cliffs had given place to huge banks of pebbles as the sea had receded from the land and left its own desposits behind. Between these pebble-ridges and the sand-dunes blown together by the bitter winter winds were the vast sea-marshes which accounted for the coast road having been made so far inland.