Sleep and His Brother Page 7

  And he was strangely frightened now, in a sane and waking fashion. He was going to be sucked in, to become an exhibit, a phenomenon, a thing. Men (oh, distinguished and clever men) would come to inspect him, not because he was Jimmy Pibble, minor expert in beer and murder and the treatment of ailing lawns, but because he had this irrelevant knack, this kink. As though he were to open his eyes one morning and find a circle of serious medicos bending over him to inspect the odd growth that his forehead had sprouted in the night. He’d have opened three eyes. No question of “Bad luck, Jimmy!” No “How do you feel, old man?” Only “Please close the two lower organs, Mr. Pibble. Now you observe, gentlemen …”

  Bip . . . and then no more. Dr. Silver had reached the switchboard.

  Pibble pushed on along the narrow windings, drenched each time he had to ease a laurel branch aside to let him through. A stream rattled sideways out of green gloom and under a stone bridge, very artificial-rural. It must be fed by a real spring, but felt as though there were an electric pump at the lower end, ceaselessly recirculating the same water. Along this path, once, chaperoned damsels had glided beside potential husbands, the bends and the screening evergreens would let them out of sight for one protestation, one blush, and then propriety again. Now it would be a pig of a place to search for a child who had simply crawled off the path under the black branches. The path looped back at last to a clearing round the building he’d seen from the entrance, and by the time he reached it he hadn’t seen another footprint: Marilyn must have done just that.

  Mr. Costain was in the clearing, hunched over a large, old-fashioned camera. Pibble coughed, and Mr. Costain flashed him a look which said, “I’m within my rights.” The shutter clicked, and the photographer skipped to a new position and hunched again.

  “I’m sorry,” said Pibble, “but have you seen a sleeping child? Or one just wandering about?”

  Mr. Costain took another picture.

  “We’re only just in time,” he said.

  “It looks in very good condition.”

  “Great bricklaying,” said Mr. Costain. “Truly great.”

  A wincing and tentative patch of sunlight shone through the elm boughs. At once Mr. Costain darted in like a dragonfly, poised his lens about two feet from the brick, flashed a light meter, fiddled with the shutter, poised again, and clicked. Pibble remembered the glowing gold close-up of a pillar at Sunium with which Mary liked to start her living room odysseys.

  “I suppose it’s a good deal older than the house,” he said.

  “No no no no,” fluted Mr. Costain. “Your eighteenth- century landowner might amuse himself by putting a Neo-Gothic fal-lal in his grounds, but he had the sense to live Palladian. Old Peter Sospice turned the idea inside out, though the house isn’t exactly Gothic—in fact it isn’t exactly anything, which gives it its weird charm, don’t you agree? But he insisted on very rigid classical for his garden ornaments. This started as an exact model of the Colosseum at a scale of one in ten, but it gave his wife nightmares about tiny gladiators coming to get her”—Mr. Costain gave a freakish giggle—“so he pulled it down and stuck this up instead. I should think it’s one of the ten ugliest old buildings in South London, wouldn’t you? Of course they didn’t have the resources for uglification that modern architects command. On the other hand, it’s great bricklaying—I assure you of that. They must have had men over from Battersea to do it.”

  Pibble looked at the squat curve of blank brick and the flabby dome. Between the two a line of letters ran. RS MORTIS MORTEM MORTI NISI MORTE DEDI was all he could read.

  “It’s a mausoleum, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Yes. I take it you’re some kind of lawyer.”

  “No. Why?”

  “I saw you outside that harridan’s office, didn’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “I imagined they’d started hiring professional help to fight us off.”

  “If they have, I’m not it. I came about a personal matter, but I had some time to spare so I said I’d look for this missing child. There’s a theory she might be sleeping in the wood, and I found a footprint back there.”

  “She’s round the other side,” said Mr. Costain, jerking his head toward the west of the mausoleum.

  “Thanks,” said Pibble, starting off.

  “Come back a moment.”

  “They say she’ll catch pneumonia.”

  “I wrapped her up in my cloak. She’ll do for another five minutes. Just tell me, if you know, what’s going on down there. Why are they all so rabid?”

  “Rabid?”

  Pibble was unable to conceal his surprise that Mr. Costain should apply the adjective to anyone else.

  “The woman is psychotic—I think that’s the jargon. That Arab I talked to this morning seemed a reasonable type, but he took up a very extreme position—quite unnecessarily so. Our local preservation group are sensible and businesslike—much more so than most. But from the very beginning all the officials at the McNair fought like maniacs against any suggestions at all. The Ministry was unusually generous about the repair grant, largely thanks to my efforts—it’s not at all the type of place that everybody hankers to see preserved, don’t you agree? But that seemed to make them more furious still.”

  “When did these negotiations start?’

  “Almost a year ago.”

  “I don’t know much about it, but I think there are two things. The obvious one is that until four months ago the Foundation was desperately poor, and hated the idea of spending anything except on the children. Then, Dr. Silver told you, they had a windfall in the shape of a very rich man who became interested in cathypnics. The other thing is vaguer, but you must have come across set-ups where worthy people have been struggling along against difficulties for so long that they’ve become used to their own discomforts and react fiercely against having them changed. And you’ve got to remember that the children really do have a strong emotional appeal which doesn’t wear off. To outsiders the staff ‘s attitude to them might look, well, rabidly overprotective.”

  “But why here?” exclaimed Mr. Costain, pointing westward between the tree trunks. “D’you realise that there isn’t a decent open space within two miles in any direction. I sometimes imagine a hand coming out of the clouds holding a vast aerosol and simply spraying on these grisly hutches and garish, soulless high streets. This could be a centre, a smaller version of Kenwood, a public park and garden with a gallery of Victoriana in it. It’s badly needed. And surely the children would be much better off out in a clean little modern prison somewhere in the country. I cannot see how the welfare of forty or fifty morons can outweigh the needs of tens of thousands of normal citizens.”

  Pibble felt it was not an equation he’d care to cancel out.

  “Who does the place actually belong to?” he said.

  “Trustees. They seem to be local bigwigs and lawyers from London.”

  “Are they rabid, too?”

  “They were hell at first. The harridan had them completely under her thumb. And then, just before it all built up to a really big row, they suddenly caved in.”

  “They hate the idea of publicity,” said Pibble. “For the children’s sake, that is. And I think they’re right about it—I mean it may be overprotective but I don’t think it’s irrational.”

  Mr. Costain concertinaed the lens of his camera back into the body and shut the lid with a snap.

  “I’ll go and do the grotto while this light lasts,” he said. “I’ll come back for my cloak if you like. I couldn’t wake her, so you may need a stretcher party.”

  He sounded suddenly very gruff and abrupt, as though his care for the child might be construed as the irrational over-protectiveness that the staff were guilty of. Pibble decided he was simply shy—shy of the danger of being caught in a direct emotional appeal, unmitigated by aesthetic theory or the scholarship of London
bricklaying.

  “I’ll see if I can wake her,” said Pibble.

  On the westward side of the mausoleum a monstrous porch sprouted; its luxuriant stonework, of a blotchy yellowish hue, made it look like a heavy fungus growing from the curve of a rotten tree trunk. Slumped in its shelter, wrapped in mottled tweed, a girl slept. She looked no different from any of the others.

  When Pibble knelt on the flagstones and blew softly in her ear she stirred and mumbled; he blew harder and she opened her eyes, irises a pale cloudy green with the cathypnic ring very marked, the colour of laurel leaves.

  “’Tain’t fair,” she said in the usual slow whine.

  “The man lent you his coat,” said Pibble. “Now he wants it back.”

  “Ta,” said Marilyn.

  Pibble eased the cloak off her and handed it to Mr. Costain,who said, “Thanks. You’ll cope now?” and darted off.

  “We must go back to the house, Marilyn,” said Pibble.

  “Stay here.”

  “But you’ll get cold.”

  “Cold ’ands, warm ’eart.”

  Yes, she was very different from the others. She said it without smiling. Pibble, awkward and stiff with her as he was with normal children, hesitated.

  “All right,” he said. “We’ll stay here for a little, then go down.”

  “Lovely,” she breathed, and her eyelids began to droop. Pibble seized her by the wrists like a lover.

  “Hey!” he said. “You mustn’t go to sleep. That’s not fair.” He dragged her into a sitting position and let her flop against the porch wall. She seemed unsurprised.

  “Game,” she said.

  What game does one play with a nine-year-old child with the intelligence of a three-year-old? Pibble groped in his pocket, found sixpence, put his hands behind him, then held them forward with the coin tight in the left fist.

  “Which hand?” he said.

  A slow finger came up and touched chill against the back of his left hand.

  “Pennies,” she said.

  Pibble blinked and showed her that she was right, but she didn’t smile. She could have seen what he’d brought out of his pocket—he wasn’t sure. The movement had been too trivial to remember. This time he did the same trick with his penknife, taking care to hide it all the way.

  “Sharp,” she said as she touched the hand that held it. A loose button he’d been carrying around.

  “Button.”

  The nut from the lawn mower which he was trying to match every time he passed an ironmonger.

  “Hole in it.”

  Nothing, then—but think, Pibble, think of the burnished horse chestnut in your right palm, fresh-fallen, cold and shiny to the touch, mottled with dark ripples, white pith still filming the pale patch at the bottom where it grew from its cushioning husk.

  “Conker.”

  He relaxed the effort of imagination.

  “Not there.”

  He opened both hands, empty, to show her she was right and smiled at her. She was terrified.

  The facial movements of cathypnics are very slight and inevitably difficult to interpret through the mask of fat, but he had been staring, thoughtlessly astounded, at the stodgy and unresponsive features and so actually perceived the change. Now he could see the whole round of her irises, so wide had she opened the drowsy lids, and that clue made him see how the curve of her cheeks had hardened and how her lips had become yet paler.

  “I won’t hurt you,” he said gently. “It’s only a game.”

  “Good day,” she whispered.

  “Yes, but it’s not very warm. Let’s go down to the house now. The exercise will do you good.”

  “Good day for Posey.”

  “Oh.”

  “Poor Posey.”

  “She’ll be glad to see you. She doesn’t know where you are. She asked me to look for you.”

  “Goin’ upstairs.”

  Bip. Bip. Bip.

  “They’re calling me, Marilyn. We must go now. I’ll help you up.”

  She looked slowly at his outstretched hand and rolled herself away, onto all fours, then used a barley-sugar-shaped pillar to haul herself upright. There she looked at him again, still so tense with terror that he stepped away from her, out of the porch into the pithless sun. After all, it would be no trouble to hurry down to the house and tell Mrs. Dixon-Jones where he’d left her—one responsibility less, in fact. But the girl maundered out after him. She wasn’t frightened of him, he guessed—simply floating on a tide of fright which the guessing game had released. Why? Had Sam … ?

  Into his mind slid a picture, a dismal interior scene, a basement, stuffy but cold and smelling of damp dirt; a pregnant blonde held a pasty babe to her breast; on the worn mock-parquet linoleum knelt a boy who piled three cotton spools into a tower, knocked them across the floor with a wooden spoon, fetched them, piled the tower again … and on the bed sat a dark, sly, handsome man holding out his two fists to a small girl, and her fat hand came slowly up to touch the back of one of his, and her lips moved. Sam would have found out her gift. There are few games you can play with a child like that, few objects to play with in a room like that. He was superstitious—hadn’t he invented his own elaborate diabolism on a basis of pulp astrology? But what was frightening? Had he punished her when she was wrong, as she’d been wrong over the conker? Or … If the brat could tell him what was in his fist, she could tell him how his luck would go with the latest prim matron who’d caught his fancy, tell him when to start the hunt, which was a good day …

  Bip. Bip. Bip.

  Today was a good day for Posey. She was “going upstairs.”

  Something with the chill of autumn touched his hand. “Come on,” drawled Marilyn.

  Still she did not smile, and neither did he. He took her offered fist and they walked in silence down the mossy path toward the house, confident in the communion of terror.

  The Rolls was long enough to hold a coffin, but it had been painted peacock blue. Tinted windows hid its innards, secretive against the flaunting coachwork, an effect like sunglasses on a teen-age idol. A chauffeur in peacock blue livery marched up the slope and saluted.

  “Mr. Pibble.”

  “That’s me.”

  He was blond, and had the look of a killer, but he turned deferentially, led the way back to the car, and opened a door into a vision of lush living.

  “I must find someone to take charge of Marilyn,” said Pibble.

  “Please hurry, sir.” It was an order.

  “Three minutes.”

  Pibble dragged Marilyn to the door. He had to open it for himself this time, and inside he found the two doorkeepers sitting back to back on the floor, like bookends waiting for a library; they turned their heads away as he pulled Marilyn in. Hustling her across the hall and along the corridor was like driving a car with the brakes on, and after all he found Mrs. Dixon-Jones snapping too vigorously into a telephone to be interrupted. She managed a moment, while the fellow at the far end was making some unappeasing excuse for his inadequacies, to put her hand over the mouthpiece and say, “Go to the nursery, darling. Find Ivan.” But before Marilyn had drifted, without any farewell, from the door she was snapping at her enemy again. Pibble decided he could keep the peacock storm trooper waiting one more minute, but to save time he took the electric gadget, still hipping, out of his pocket and put it on the mantelpiece. Mrs. Dixon-Jones had modulated into a coda of chill disgust, so he picked up a tear bottle and compared it mentally with Mary’s. It looked several degrees more plausible. What he was going to say seemed more absurd with every wasted second. Mrs. Dixon-Jones said, “See that it doesn’t happen again,” and put the receiver down. He turned with the tear bottle still in his hand.

  “They’re all fake,” she said. “But don’t tell Ram—he found them for me.”

  Perhaps it was the
exhilaration of browbeating an enemy that now made her sound relaxed and pleased.

  “There’s Doctor Silver’s bipper,” said Pibble.

  “Thank you. And thank you for finding Marilyn. Where was she?”

  “Sleeping by the mausoleum. The next bit sounds like complete nonsense, and I haven’t time to explain it, but she seems to think, as far as I can make out, that you are in some sort of personal danger.”

  “Me! Oh, that’s stupid. The only person in any danger round here is that little rat Costain. You can never be sure you really understand what they’re saying.”

  “I know. I’m not sure. I’ll tell you this afternoon. Mr. Costain found her, incidentally, and wrapped her up in his cape.”

  “It isn’t fair!” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones.

  “See you later,” said Pibble.

  “Sorry,” he said ten seconds later as he scrambled through the flunky-held door of the car; it contained chairs, not bench seats, and by the time Pibble had settled into the cradling black leather and discovered that the chair swiveled on its central column, the car was moving. His last glimpse of the sane world—already suffering the alienation effect of the sepia-colored glass—was of Mr. Costain standing open-mouthed among the rhododendrons.

  “May I suggest you fasten your seat belt, sir?” said a voice from the ceiling. It was another order, so Pibble fiddled with silk straps; the buckle was platinum, decorated with a Greek theta in sapphires. Secure, he began to gaze in wonder at the minuscule luxury of the interior: white carpet, black leather, silver fittings, all costly but severe and at the same time slightly kinky. He spun his chair round, for the fun of it, and ended facing a rear corner where hung the selfsame snow scene by Sisley that he had given Mary the Christmas before last, though naturally Mr. Thanatos could afford a more expensive reproduction. No, he could afford the real thing. Crippen, that would make a hole in his no-claim bonus if it were nicked!