The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest Page 14

  Pibble refused to think about it. “You mentioned Christianity,” he said. “I gather that Aaron was a very ardent Christian. Why would he want to take the tribe back to New Guinea?”

  “Because he had heard the drumming, I think. He may have felt that Christianity had failed to flourish here as it did in the valley, and that we must therefore go back and start again where the Reverend Mackenzie stopped, and make a Christian tribe growing on its own roots in its own soil. He may have felt, as I should if I did not have Eve and my work, that nothing that happened here was real, that most of us would die and the rest would be assimilated, and the tribe would be lost like beer spilled on gravel, and with the tribe the Reverend Mackenzie’s work would be lost, and then all would be as if the Reverend Mackenzie himself had never come and lived among us and changed our lives. We are an anthropological mutation, Superintendent. The Reverend Mackenzie was a cosmic ray which strikes by chance upon the genetic apparatus of some plant—perhaps a small, dull yellow flower which hitherto has flowered only with a single row of petals—and makes it flower double. Then came the frost, and Eve transplanted us to this greenhouse, where we pine. So Aaron wanted to move us back into our own soil, now that the frosts are gone. Possibly his motives were something like that. You distrust analogies?”

  “Usually.”

  “I, too. But the Reverend Mackenzie was a phenomenon of that order. Look.”

  Paul leaned sideways and took a fat folder of papers from a bottom drawer. They were artist’s studies, the top ones mostly of cats. Below the felines came the people: a brilliant but affectionate caricature of Billy Youbegood; several Kus, done in techniques ranging from many-lined scratchings to five strokes of a brush; lots of studies of Eve; one drawing of a bearded man in a floppy hat.

  “I used a photograph, of course,” said Paul.

  Pibble was disappointed. Thin face, eyes rather close, high cheekbones, the body-jointing oddly ungainly—you could read anything into the picture, anything you already believed to be there. He stared at the sketchy lines suggesting a crumpled tropical jacket and willed some clue to emerge, some certainty, either the dynamic saint witnessed by Paul and Caine or the selfish don he had sensed lurking between the lines of Eve’s absurd fragments of biography. He found nothing, and handed the sheet back to Paul.

  “A hypnotist, you think?” he said. “That might account for the way you all speak English. Hypnosis would help, wouldn’t it?”

  “It did,” said Paul. “But we all lapsed badly as soon as the Reverend Mackenzie died. I think we would have forgotten the language entirely, or reverted to some form of pidgin English, but for Aaron. He was a very dedicated man and drove us back into the grammar of righteousness. Nothing that the Reverend Mackenzie had achieved must be lost, he felt.”

  “But he seems to have gone through remarkable contortions to keep the vision alive,” said Pibble. “Like St. Paul, I suppose. Will you tell Dr. Ku that I was looking for her? It isn’t urgent. This thing will take a day or two yet.”

  Paul grunted—a deep, wild noise like a lion’s hiccup—and started to lay a flat wash of green across his “O,” stopping with a gymnast’s precision at the exact edges. Pibble watched, half bemused, half simply idling, happy to watch anything provided that it was in no way related to Aaron’s murder. He was suddenly sure that the whole business was going to end in misery. The knowledge shook him into leaving.

  As he went down the dusky stairway, he realized what was wrong with his case: he didn’t want to catch anybody if it wasn’t going to be Caine, and he didn’t believe it was—though Robin seemed to think so. Always a bit deficient in the hunting instinct—more of a herbivore than a carnivore, as detectives go—this time he simply didn’t care whether anyone was arrested or not. Interesting setup, of course; curious people. That was part of the trouble; it was only a sort of scholarly inquisitiveness that kept him asking questions and nosing about; the purpose behind the questions seemed increasingly irrelevant, the murder hunt a distraction from the real thing. Dammit, he was much more interested in the prospect of watching the drumming ritual than he was in questioning the old men.

  That being so, he decided, who would he like to talk to next? Somebody normal, for God’s sake, who’d give him tea and not badger his sensibilities with prehistoric woes. Mrs. Caine seemed the only candidate.

  Outside the westering sun was off the street, and the shadows of the crenelations above him marched evenly across the surface of the opposite façade, repeating the pattern of solid stone above them like a visual echo in an early Dali. He was just starting down the steps toward Cora Lynn when he realized that it would be kinder and more convincing if he rang Mrs. Pibble up now. The unvandalized booth was empty this time.

  “Hello, darling. Sorry to disturb you. Look, I’m afraid I’m going to be late home tonight, if you can stand it … No, nothing like that … I’m sorry; can’t you put it in the fridge? … I’ll tell you when I see you; it’s a very odd business, and if I keep going I might … Yes, of course … I’m sorry … Is there anything you want me to do? … I’ll write to her tomorrow … No, it’s very interesting, but not the sort of thing that makes the newspapers. Except the West Kensington Gazette, I suppose … Ah well, life’s like that. How’re things with you? … O.K., I’ll tick him off at the weekend … How can I? There isn’t going to be a moment when we’re both about before then … I’m sorry … About eleven, I should think. Don’t keep your light on … Bye, then. I love you … Bye.”

  Minute by minute they live, and every minute a brick which they carefully fit together into a wailing wall.

  The door of the basement flat was open. Mrs. Caine sat at the kitchen table, her spectacles clinging absurdly to the tip of her inadequate nose as she stitched at a pair of crimson pajamas. There was something clumsy about the way she was doing it. Ah, yes, the plaster on her thumb made it difficult for her to hold the needle. She looked up with the same sharp, suspicious twist of the head she’d used that morning, then smiled and put her work down.

  “Good afternoon, Superintendent. Did Bob find you? He hasn’t come back.”

  “Yes, he did. I expect you’re too young to know the tradition that a policeman visiting a kitchen expects a cup of tea.”

  “A cup of tea from the cook and a kiss from the housemaid. We have no cook or housemaid, I’m afraid, but I’ll put a kettle on for you. Are you sure you don’t want whisky?”

  “Tea’s what I want, if it’s not a nuisance.”

  “Course not. Bob drinks quarts of the stuff. I’ll have some Nescafé. Sit in the armchair and I shan’t fall over you.”

  Small chance of that, thought Pibble, watching her do her cooking trick; she hardly moved a step to get kettle and milk onto the gas, then mugs, spoons, tea, Nescafé, milk, sugar, teapot, and biscuits onto the table. Accustomed to Mrs. Pibble’s flurried dashes to unrelated cupboards, he found the process fascinating. Often she did not have to look before reaching the right container off a shelf.

  “Do you run your whole life like that?” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “A place for everything and everything in its place, and all in easy reach.”

  “Oh, does it look like that?”

  She laughed—a curious noise, more like the preening coo of a pigeon on a June morning than anything else, made with her small mouth opened to an “O” and the tips of her tiny teeth just showing and looking as sharp as a puppy’s.

  “I was just talking,” said Pibble.

  “Honestly,” she said, “I’m not one of those people who think about themselves very much. I don’t mean I’m not selfish, but if I want something I want it and don’t wonder why. Sometimes I read an article somewhere about psychology—one of the TV critics in the Sundays goes on and on about it—and I don’t say, like my pa does, what a load of drivel. I just think, Goodness, all that’s going on inside me without me having the slighte
st idea. Like digestion, sort of, and I don’t think about my kidneys very much, either. I suppose the answer to your question is yes, in a sort of way. I don’t like to find things sensibly arranged, but I like to leave them like that. Give me a good old-fashioned attic, where people have been putting things for twenty years to get them out of the way, old wickerwork cots and dressing-up clothes and iron bedsteads and horrible green glass vases and trunks full of albums and diaries and other trunks full of tropical uniforms and marble washstands and picture frames and nursery fireguards and broken deck chairs and wooden-shafted golf clubs, and so on, and I’ll be happy for a week. I like a jungle to tidy, but once it’s tidy I like to move on. I suppose that’s why I picked Bob. He’ll never be in the same place I put him down; he’s even more of a mover-on than I am. Foundations of a stable marriage, believe it or not. How many spoons shall I put in?”

  “A couple would be fine.”

  Again the cooing laugh. “Bob likes six,” she said. “How are you getting on next door?”

  “Difficult to say,” said Pibble. “Thanks, that’s super. It’s a jungle all right, but I don’t much feel like tidying it; I’d much rather just watch it. Do you know Robin at all?”

  The effect was like hail at a garden fête, prattle and parasols one moment and a scurry for shelter the next. Mrs. Caine’s small features, animated so far like those of a little girl in her granny’s feather hat, became pinched and suspicious.

  “You know Bob’s his father?” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” said Pibble. “I didn’t mean anything policelike by bringing him up. It was just an example of the fascination of the jungle. Here’s this schoolboy who’s managed to set himself up as a sort of spiritual adviser to a group of great-uncles because his mother’s brother had been the village priest before they were converted to Christianity. One moment he’s eagerly showing me round the roof, and the next he’s threatening me with complete withdrawal of assistance by himself and his flock.”

  “How could they help?”

  “Oh, by telling me things. The old men treat it as a sort of game and bet with each other about how much I’ll find out. Robin, at least the priest Robin, takes it more seriously. He says he could name the murderer, if he chose.”

  “Could he?”

  “I think so. I don’t think he could actually prove it yet, but I think he and his old men know enough between them to make a reasonable case, once you’d added on all the police nonsense about fingerprints and such.”

  “And without his help you haven’t a clue?”

  “I’ve got lots of clues, but none of them adds up to anything. I need the sort of push that will make me pick up the ones which matter. You know, like a good photograph of an apparently boring building, which tells you what the architect thought he was up to. If you look at it from here, in this kind of light … Robin could very well give me that sort of angle on the whole business. Eve ought to be able to, but she’s so determined not to prejudice me in any direction that she only adds to the confusion.”

  “Wouldn’t one of the old men do as well?”

  “Unlikely. I’m going to talk to them all, one at a time, after tea, and I bet you when I’m finished I’ll be no further on than I am now. They don’t take it seriously, and I never have the slightest idea if they’re telling the truth.”

  “When d’you think Robin will come up with the goods?”

  “Your slang is curiously out of date for one so young. I bet your father reads Wodehouse aloud.”

  “Bang on, Hawkshaw. He does all the different voices, too, quite beautifully. You should hear him as Gussie Fink-Nottle giving away the prizes. It drives poor Bob round the bend; he can’t stand it; he always slopes off to the pub at reading time. Will Robin blow the gaff soon?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe tonight. He’s a bit preoccupied with his drumming this evening; then he usually goes out on the roof to cool off.”

  “Drumming?”

  “Part of his job as priest. They do it in Haiti—for Voodoo purposes, I’ve read—and this seems to be the same sort of thing. All the men think it’s very important. I’m going to listen to it this evening, with luck.”

  “What does Eve think about it?”

  “She seemed very shocked when I told her, and Paul says she’s upset, though she’s got a right to be that anyway.”

  “Didn’t she know about it before? She must have heard it.”

  “You know what these houses are like. Billy Youbegood, on your top floor, says he first heard it when he was out on the roof looking for lead to nick, and now he can tell if it’s going on by the vibration, but I don’t think Eve knew about it. She’s two floors down, and the women spend most evenings watching the telly. As an anthropologist, she ought to be all agog about it, but I think she’d like to stop it; only she can’t do anything until they’ve chosen a new chief—that’s to say she thinks she can’t, though I’d have thought she had the whip hand if it came to an argument.”

  “Bob always says she’s utterly helpless without a man around.”

  And that was true. He’d used almost those words. Pibble, so expansive a moment ago, shrank into himself like a disturbed anemone, one of those blobs of unresponsive jelly which disappointed children poke at in rock pools. The sensation was so sudden and so fierce that he was sure a physical spasm must have rippled across his features, plain for Mrs. Caine to see if she hadn’t been at the stove refilling his teapot.

  “Doesn’t Paul count as a man?” he said.

  “I don’t know. Bob hates Paul; isn’t it funny? He hates him worse than Aaron, and he always used to say Aaron was a thief. He’s got a bee in his bonnet about them both.”

  “What did Aaron steal?”

  “A … Oh, I don’t really think he stole anything. He was such an honorable old boy. But Bob lost a lucky mascot which he’d had all through the war, and he convinced himself that Aaron took it.”

  “And what about Paul?”

  “I’m not at all sure about that, either, but Bob’s always had a roving eye, you know, and there they were alone in the jungle, two white people among a lot of savages, and in a film they’d have finished up falling into each other’s arms; only in real life Eve preferred Paul. Lucky for me, but bad luck on Bob. She’s rather special, don’t you think? And she still will be when I’m a fat old crone. Is that you, darling?”

  Pibble heard a cough and a shuffling in the hall, rather stagy, a noise made by someone who meant to be heard. Eve put her head around the door.

  “May I come in, Susan?” she said. “I think the Superintendent wants to talk to me.”

  “Super,” said Mrs. Caine. “You’re just the excuse I need to make the Superintendent a fresh pot of tea. Do you ever get on Christian-name terms with people before you arrest them, Superintendent?”

  “Not yet,” said Pibble. (And not this time, please God.) “I’m sorry to bother you, Dr. Ku, but there are two things I really need your help on. The first one hasn’t got anything to do with the murder directly, but I’ve landed myself in a spot over Robin. I ought to tell the N.S.P.C.C. people what’s been going on, but he’s rather cornered me into not doing so. Still, I must do something or I shan’t sleep easy, but I don’t know what. Have you got any ideas?”

  Eve sighed and settled into one of her ballet poses on the tall kitchen stool.

  “I have been brooding on that also,” she said. “Do you know if the men forced him into being priest?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Pibble. “If anything, he maneuvered them into having him, but mostly it was something that suited them all.”

  Eve sighed again. “That makes the moral issue no clearer,” she said. “Left to myself, I think I would do nothing; any action must cause a greater upheaval, a worse derangement of the pattern. But I see you must do something. You had best tell Rebecca what has been happening, and leave her to act.
I think she will do whatever it is that turns out to be for the best, and she’s the only person Robin will take interference from. The priest is very much set apart from the rest of the tribe, but as he cannot marry he tends to develop a forceful relationship with his mother; many of his powers are felt to stem through her. I don’t know how much Robin knows …”

  “He got most of it out of a book you wrote,” said Pibble.

  “Ah, yes, I see—my doctorate thesis. I did lend him that. What pits one digs for one’s own feet. When I wrote it, I thought how pleasant to think that it was all now history, dead and buried. How could I have foreseen this loathsome ghost walking? How could I?”

  “Here’s your tea, Eve,” said Mrs. Caine. “You mustn’t think that she’s specially favored, Superintendent, having a cup when you’ve only got a mug, but she doesn’t have milk or sugar, so I keep our only cup for her, and even that doesn’t have a saucer.”

  “What is it?” said Pibble, glad of a little chitchat to give Eve a chance to recover from her agonies. The cup was the thinnest imaginable china with a green and violet parrot on it. “Meissen? It’s very pretty.”

  “Not bad, Hawkshaw. Nymphenburg, actually. I got it in the Portobello.”

  “If Robin’s read my book with care,” said Eve, “he will be very impressed by his mother’s wishes. I don’t know how much he actually believes, and how much is just make-believe, but theoretically Rebecca could withhold a lot of his powers from him. They are transmitted through her, you see; the hereditary ones, that is. I wonder how they managed the earliest steps of initiation. I can’t ask myself, but if he tells you I should be most interested to know.”