‘When I did see the possibility, I realized it meant a lot of ground-work that I couldn’t cover on my own, so I had to call in the professionals. They were pretty good, I thought, and they certainly removed any doubt about the line being the right one, but what they could tell me ended on board a ship bound for Canada. So then I had to call in some inquiry agents over there. It’s a large country. A lot of people go to it. There was a great deal of routine searching to do, and I began to get discouraged, but then they got a lead, and in another week they came across with the information that she was a secretary working in a lawyer’s office in Ottawa.
‘Then I put it to E.P.I. that I’d be more valuable after a bit of unpaid recuperative leave –’
‘Just a minute,’ put in the doctor. ‘If you’d asked me I could have told you there are no Harshoms in Canada. I happen to know that because –’
‘Oh, I’d given up expecting that. Her name wasn’t Harshom – it was Gale,’ Colin interrupted, with the air of one explaining.
‘Indeed. And I suppose it wasn’t Ottilie, either?’ Dr Harshom said heavily.
‘No. It was Belinda,’ Colin told him.
The doctor blinked slightly, opened his mouth, and then thought better of it. Colin went on:
‘So then I flew over, to make sure. It was the most agonizing journey I’ve ever made. But it was all right. Just one distant sight of her was enough. I couldn’t have mistaken her for Ottilie, but she was so very, very nearly Ottilie that I would have known her among ten thousand. Perhaps if her hair and her dress had been –’ He paused speculatively, unaware of the expression on the doctor’s face. ‘Anyway,’ he went on. ‘I knew. And it was damned difficult to stop myself rushing up to her there and then, but I did just have enough sense to hold back.
‘Then it was a matter of managing an introduction. After that it was as if there were – well, an inevitability, a sort of predestination about it.’
Curiosity impelled the doctor to say:
‘Comprehensible, but sketchy. What, for instance, about her husband?’
‘Husband?’ Colin looked momentarily startled.
‘Well, you did say her name was Gale,’ the doctor pointed out.
‘So it was, Miss Belinda Gale – I thought I said that. She was engaged once, but she didn’t marry. I tell you there was a kind of – well, fate, in the Greek sense, about it.’
‘But if –’ Dr Harshom began, and then checked himself again. He endeavoured, too, to suppress any sign of scepticism.
‘But it would have been just the same if she had had a husband,’ Colin asserted, with ruthless conviction. ‘He’d have been the wrong man.’
The doctor offered no comment, and he went on:
‘There were no complications, or involvements – well, nothing serious. She was living in a flat with her mother, and getting quite a good salary. Her mother looked after the place, and had a widow’s pension – her husband was in the R.C.A.F.; shot down over Berlin – so between them they managed to be reasonably comfortable.
‘Well, you can imagine how it was. Considered as a phenomenon I wasn’t any too welcome to her mother, but she’s a fair-minded woman, and we found that, as persons, we liked one another quite well. So that part of it, too, went off more easily than it might have done.’
He paused there. Dr Harshom put in:
‘I’m glad to hear it, of course. But I must confess I don’t quite see what it has to do with your not bringing your wife along with you.’
Colin frowned.
‘Well, I thought – I mean she thought – well, I haven’t quite got to the point yet. It’s rather delicate.’
‘Take your time. After all, I’ve retired,’ said the doctor, amiably.
Colin hesitated.
‘All right. I think it’ll be fairer to Mrs Gale if I tell it the way it fell out.
‘You see, I didn’t intend to say anything about what’s at the back of all this – about Ottilie, I mean, and why I came to be over in Ottawa – not until later, anyway. You were the only one I had told, and it seemed better that way … I didn’t want them wondering if I was a bit off my rocker, naturally. But I went and slipped up.
‘It was on the day before our wedding. Belinda was out getting some last-minute things, and I was at the flat doing my best to be reassuring to my future mother-in-law. As nearly as I can recall it, what I said was:
‘ “My job with E.P.I. is quite a good one, and the prospects are good, but they do have a Canadian end, too, and I dare say that if Ottilie finds she really doesn’t like living in England –”
‘And then I stopped because Mrs Gale had suddenly sat upright with a jerk, and was staring at me open-mouthed. Then in a shaky sort of voice she asked:
‘ “What did you say?”
‘I’d noticed the slip myself, just too late to catch it. So I corrected: “I was just saying that if Belinda finds she doesn’t like –”
‘She cut in on that.
‘ “You didn’t say Belinda. You said Ottilie.”
‘ “Er – perhaps I did,” I admitted, “but, as I say, if she doesn’t –”
‘ “Why?” she demanded. “Why did you call her Ottilie?”
‘She was intense about that. There was no way out of it.
‘ “It’s, well, it’s the way I think of her,” I said.
‘ “But why? Why should you think of Belinda as Ottilie?” she insisted.
‘I looked at her more carefully. She had gone quite pale, and the hand that was visible was trembling. She was afraid, as well as distressed. I was sorry about that, and I gave up bluffing.
‘ “I didn’t mean this to happen,” I told her.
‘She looked at me steadily, a little calmer.
‘ “But now it has, you must tell me. What do you know about us?” she asked.
‘ “Simply that if things had been – different she wouldn’t be Belinda Gale. She would be Ottilie Harshom,” I told her.
‘She kept on watching my face, long and steadily, her own face still pale.
‘ “I don’t understand,” she said, more than half to herself. “You couldn’t know. Harshom – yes, you might have found that out somehow, or guessed it – or did she tell you?” I shook my head. “Never mind, you could find out,” she went on. “But Ottilie … You couldn’t know that – just that one name out of all the thousands of names in the world … Nobody knew that – nobody but me …” She shook her head.
‘ “I didn’t even tell Reggie … When he asked me if we could call her Belinda, I said yes; he’d been so very good to me … He had no idea that I had meant to call her Ottilie – nobody had. I’ve never told anyone, before or since … So how can you know?”
‘I took her hand between mine, and pressed it, trying to comfort her and calm her.
‘ “There’s nothing to be alarmed about,” I told her. “It was a – a dream, a kind of vision – I just knew …”
‘She shook her head. After a minute she said quietly:
‘ “Nobody knew but me … It was in the summer, in 1927. We were on the river, in a punt, pulled under a willow. A white launch swished by us, we watched it go, and saw the name on its stern. Malcolm said” ’ – if Colin noticed Dr Harshom’s sudden start, his only acknowledgement of it was a repetition of the last two words – ‘ “Malcolm said: ‘Ottilie – pretty name, isn’t it? It’s in our family. My father had a sister Ottilie who died when she was a little girl. If ever I have a daughter I’d like to call her Ottilie.’ ” ’
Colin Trafford broke off, and regarded the doctor for a moment. Then he went on:
‘After that she said nothing for a long time, until she added:
‘ “He never knew, you know. Poor Malcolm, he was killed before even I knew she was coming … I did so want to call her Ottilie for him … He’d have liked that … I wish I had …” And then she began quietly crying …’
Dr Harshom had one elbow on his desk, one hand over his eyes. He did not move for some little tim
e. At last he pulled out a handkerchief, and blew his nose decisively.
‘I did hear there was a girl,’ he said. ‘I even made inquiries, but they told me she had married soon afterwards. I thought she – But why didn’t she come to me? I would have looked after her.’
‘She couldn’t know that. She was fond of Reggie Gale. He was in love with her, and willing to give the baby his name,’ Colin said.
After a glance towards the desk, he got up and walked over to the window. He stood there for several minutes with his back to the room until he heard a movement behind him. Dr Harshom had got up and was crossing to the cupboard.
‘I could do with a drink,’ he said. ‘The toast will be the restoration of order, and the rout of the random element.’
‘I’ll support that,’ Colin told him, ‘but I’d like to couple it with the confirmation of your contention, Doctor – after all, you are right at last, you know; Ottilie Harshom does not exist – not any more. – And then, I think, it will be high time you were introduced to your granddaughter, Mrs Colin Trafford.’
A Long Spoon
‘I say,’ Stephen announced, with an air of satisfaction, ‘do you know that if I lace up the tape this way round I can hear myself talking backwards!’
Dilys laid down her book, and regarded her husband. Before him, on the table, stood the tape-recorder, an amplifier, and small sundries. A wandering network of leads connected them to one another, to the mains, to a big loudspeaker in the corner, and to the pair of phones on his head. Lengths and snippets of tape littered half the floor.
‘Another triumph of science,’ she said, coolly. ‘As I understood it, you were just going to do a bit of editing so that we could send a record of the party to Myra. I’m quite sure she’d prefer it the right way round.’
‘Yes, but this idea just came to me –’
‘And what a mess! It looks as if we’d been giving someone a ticker-tape reception. What is it all?’
Stephen glanced down at the strips and coils of tape.
‘Oh, those are just the parts where everybody was talking at once, and bits of that very unfunny story Charles would keep trying to tell everyone – and a few indiscretions, and so on.’
Dilys eyed the litter, as she stood up.
‘It must have been a much more indiscreet party than it seemed at the time,’ she said. ‘Well, you clear it up while I go and put on the kettle.’
‘But you must hear this,’ he protested.
She paused at the door.
‘Give me,’ she suggested, ‘give me one good reason – just one – why I ought to hear you talk backwards …’ And she departed.
Left alone, Stephen made no attempt to gather the debris; instead, he pressed the playback key and listened with interest to the curious gabbeldigook that was his backwards voice. Then he stopped the machine, took off the headphones, and switched over to the loudspeaker. He was interested to find that though the voice still had a European quality it seemed to rattle through its incomprehensible sounds at great speed. Experimentally, he halved the speed, and turned up the volume. The voice, now an octave lower, drawled out deep, ponderous, impossible-sounding syllables in a very impressive way indeed. He nodded to himself and leant his head back, listening to it rolling sonorously around the room.
Suddenly there was a rushing sound, not unlike a reduced facsimile of a locomotive blowing off steam, also a gust of warm air reminiscent of a stokehole …
It took Stephen by surprise so that he jumped, and almost overturned his chair. Recovering, he reached forward, hastily pressing keys and turning knobs. The voice from the loudspeaker cut off abruptly. He peered anxiously into the items of his apparatus, looking for sparks, or smoke. There was neither, but it was while he was in the act of sighing his relief over this that he became, in some way, aware that he was no longer alone in the room. He jerked his head round. His jaw dropped fully an inch, and he sat staring at the figure standing some four feet to his rear right.
The man stood perfectly straight, with his arms pressed closely to his sides. He was tall, quite six feet, and made to look taller still by his hat – a narrow-brimmed, entirely cylindrical object of quite remarkable height. For the rest, he wore a high starched collar with spread points, a grey silk cravat, a long, dark frock-coat with silk facings, and lavender-grey trousers, with the points of black, shiny boots jutting out beneath them. Stephen had to tilt back his head to get a foreshortened view of the face. It was good-looking, bronzed, as if by Mediterranean sun. The eyes were large and dark. A luxuriant moustache swept out to join with well-tended whiskers at the points of the jaw. The chin, and lower parts of the cheeks were closely shaved. The features themselves stirred vague memories of Assyrian sculptures.
Even in the first astonished moment it was borne in upon Stephen that, inappropriate as the ensemble might be to the circumstances, there could be no doubt of its quality, nor, in the proper time and place, of its elegance. He continued to stare.
The man’s mouth moved.
‘I have come,’ he announced, with a pontifical air.
‘Er – yes,’ said Stephen. ‘I – er – I see that, but, well, I don’t quite …’
‘You called upon me. I have come,’ the man repeated, with an air of explaining everything.
Stephen added a frown to his bewilderment.
‘But I didn’t say a thing,’ he protested. ‘I was just sitting here, and –’
‘There is no need for alarm. I am sure you will not regret it,’ said the man.
‘I am not alarmed. I’m baffled,’ said Stephen. ‘I don’t see –’
The pontifical quality was reduced by a touch of impatience as the man inquired:
‘Did you not construct the Iron Pentacle?’ – Without moving his arms, he contracted three fingers of his right hand so that the lavender-gloved forefinger remained pointing downwards. ‘Did you not also utter the Word of Power?’ he added.
Stephen looked where the finger pointed. He perceived that some of the discarded scraps of tape did make a crude geometrical figure on the floor, just permissibly, perhaps, a kind of pentacle form. But iron pentacle, the man had said … Oh, the iron-oxide coating, of course … H’m, pretty near the border of permissibility, too, one would think …
‘Word of Power,’ though … Well, it was conceivable that a voice talking backwards might stumble upon a Word of practically anything …
‘It rather looks,’ he said, ‘as if there had been a slight mistake – a coincidence …’
‘A strange coincidence,’ remarked the man, sceptically.
‘But isn’t that really the thing about coincidences? That they are, I mean,’ Stephen pointed out.
‘I have never heard of it happening before – never,’ said the man. ‘Whenever I, or any of my friends, have been summoned in this way, it has been to do business: and business has invariably been done.’
‘Business …?’ Stephen inquired.
‘Business,’ the man repeated. ‘You have certain needs we can supply. You have a certain object we should like to add to our collection. All that is necessary is that we could come to terms. Then you sign the pact, with your blood, of course, and there it is.’
It was the word ‘pact’ that touched the spot. Stephen recalled the slight smell of hot clinkers that had pervaded the room.
‘Ah, I begin to see,’ he said. ‘This is a visitation – a raising. You mean that you are Old –’
The man cut in, with a quick frown:
‘My name is Batruel. I am one of the fully accredited representatives of my Master; his plenipotentiary, holding his authority to arrange pacts. Now, if you would be so good as to release me from this pentacle which I find an extremely tight fit, we could discuss the terms of the pact much more comfortably.’
Stephen regarded the man for some moments, and then shook his head.
‘Ha-ha!’ he said. ‘Ha-ha! Ha-ha!’
The man’s eyes widened. He looked huffed.
‘I beg
your pardon!’
‘Look,’ Stephen said. ‘I apologize for the accident that brought you here. But let us have it clearly understood that you have come to the wrong place to do any business – the wrong place entirely.’
Batruel studied him thoughtfully. He lifted his head, and his nostrils twitched slightly.
‘Very curious,’ he remarked. ‘I detect no odour of sanctity.’
‘Oh, it isn’t that,’ Stephen assured him. ‘It simply is that quite a number of your deals have been pretty well documented by now – and one of the really consistent things about them is that the party of the second part has never failed to regret the deal, in due course.’
‘Oh, come! Think what I can offer you –’
Stephen cut him short by shaking his head again.
‘Save yourself the trouble,’ he advised. ‘I have to deal with up-to-date high-pressure salesmen every day.’
Batruel regarded him with a saddened eye.
‘I am more used to dealing with the high-pressure customer,’ he admitted. ‘Well, if you are quite sure that there has been no more than a genuine mistake, I suppose there is nothing to be done but for me to go back and explain. This has not, to my knowledge, ever happened before – though, of course, by the laws of chance it had to happen some time. Just my bad luck. Very well, then. Good-bye – oh, dear, what have I said? – I mean vale, my friend. I am ready!’
His stance was already rigid; now, as he closed his eyes, his face became wooden, too.
Nothing happened.
Batruel’s jaw relaxed.
‘Well, say it!’ he exclaimed, testily.
‘Say what?’ Stephen inquired.
‘The other Word of Power, of course. The Dismissal.’
‘But I don’t know it. I don’t know anything about Words of Power,’ Stephen protested.
Batruel’s brows came lower, and approached one another.
‘Are you telling me you cannot send me back?’ he inquired.
‘If it needs a Word of Power I certainly can’t,’ Stephen told him.