Appleby on Ararat by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online

and labouring hard at the role–”
    “What,” she asked dangerously, “is a houri? Something not nice?”
    “Not at all. It’s a black-eyed girl. Born–”
    “My eyes aren’t black. You know they’re not.”
    “Born as you are, and working to perfect the idea, you are yet enormously bored just for lack of a few honest jobs. Hoovering the carpets, perhaps, and tinkering with sherbets in the refrigerator. And the washing on Monday.”
    “I think you have a – a banal mind.”
    “Diana, where do you get these words? And, anyway, it is banal to imagine that I should do in the colonel for a chit like you – entirely pleasing though you are in your way. We have nothing to do on this damned island, and so we turn our minds into cinemas and imagine dramatic absurdities.”
    “Nothing to do? There’s still the exploring.”
    “We’ve been everywhere except over the east range – and that can conceal nothing but a few small coves.”
    “Coves?” said Diana hopefully.
    “Alas, my dear – not that sort of coves. Not men. Small bays.”
    “Small boys?” She had an uncertain ear for strange accents, and looked bewildered.
    “You are unnecessarily and enormously stupid.” He jumped into the sea. “Or rather, you’re not. You put it on – like the coconut oil. Actually you are a woman of astounding character. Our wanderings witnessed it. Come in.”
    They swam to another rock, peering down at the exotic drama clearly visible on the sea floor. “You should have been a pair of ragged claws,” he said as they climbed out.
    “What?”
    “Nothing – only poetry.”
    “It didn’t sound like poetry. Was that Ponto across the lagoon?”
    “I didn’t notice. I’m not all eyes for Unumunu.”
    “You’re horrid. I don’t care a bit for Ponto today.” She stretched herself. “Or rather I do. Listen. If the colonel should die–”
    “He won’t.”
    “If the colonel should die – preferably doing something helpful, like Masterman Ready, so that he would be happy about it – and then if we could get Hoppo up a bit–”
    “Up a bit?”
    “You know – higher again, so that he would believe in a celebrate clergy–”
    “Celibate, Diana.”
    “That’s what I said. Well then, it would be alright – wouldn’t it?”
    “Neither alright nor all right .”
    “John Appleby, if I didn’t think it might just give you pleasure I would bite . And it would be alright. Hoppo could marry Ponto and me, and the Curricle and you – or the other way round – and nobody could say anything.”
    “There’s nobody to say anything in any case, except a dubious entity, of unknown staying-power, called the super-ego.”
    “There!” Diana Kittery stared at him with her lucid and disconcerting intelligence. “I don’t know what you mean. But I think you’re agreeing with me. About the maddened men killing each other.”
    He shook his head, smiling. “Come again in six months, and when we’re having a rainy season. Then, perhaps. At present the super-ego is unchallenged. Not all your genius for flirtation, nor Miss Curricle’s sense of responsibility to the species, nor yet the glamour of that great black piano appassionato–”
    “That what?”
    He sighed. “Just a very allusive way of referring to Unumunu. Such ingenuity shows I’m running to seed. For I’m a policeman, you know. I hunt burglars and murderers.”
    She looked at him round-eyed. “And spies?”
    “And spies. Until I am bundled across the world to help organise a back-of-beyond CID. And now this – shipwreck and the tangles of Neaera’s hair. Don’t you think I would relish the appearance of your absurd maddened men? I’ve known a good homicide give me something to bite on for weeks. Whereas, my dear, you –”
    “I think,” she said, “you must be like so many of the English nowadays – hankering after being the American version of the same thing.”
    He stood up. “You are a demon. I could believe you capable of