Gay Phoenix by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page A

with any certainty how he had come to think up the turn he had so successfully put on in the Adelaide hospital. It must have started up in his mind like a creation, he supposed. But the moment of its inception eluded his recollection. So did much in the stages of its development. But then he had been in a pretty bad way – physically, of course – by the time he brought the Gay Phoenix to port. No doubt he had a little piled it on – his exhaustion and all that. But he had been through experiences – totally unplanned experiences – which hadn’t been funny in the least. So his memory was a trifle shaky as a result.
    ‘Bless me, if it isn’t Master Arthur!’
    These words – which were all too plainly potentially disastrous in themselves – were the more alarming because of something quite unaccountable in the circumstances of their delivery. Arthur Povey, although now, as it were, fairly well established at the wicket, was still subject at least to an intermittent feeling that he must continue very carefully to play himself in. At these times an inconveniently strong sense of nervous strain might result, and to cope with this he had developed what proved to be a tolerably sufficient, and certainly very simple, resource. Just as batsmen at the crease are rather oddly permitted to do, he would declare himself unwell and retire for an interval to the pavilion. In Povey’s case, when he was in England, the pavilion would be some vast and expensive (although gastronom-ically primitive) seaside hotel. England is a free country; you don’t have to carry papers and identify yourself wherever you go; you simply choose any name you fancy, don a pair of large dark glasses, stuff some convenient receptacle with ten-pound notes, and find yourself as free as the wind. The wind, of course, is sometimes displeasingly chilly even in Eastbourne or Torquay. But unless you happen to be experiencing at the time a period of such extreme celebrity or notoriety that the press is after you hotfoot, you are as safe as houses for as long as you please. And the sort of people who frequent such hotels, although necessarily in the enjoyment of a substantial prosperity, were remote in their social contacts from those circles which Arthur as Charles was beginning at other times confidently to frequent.
    So here he was – sitting in sunshine on a broad terrace, with his monstrous hostelry behind him, and nothing except a small table, a balustrade, and the English Channel in front. Yet these shocking words had been more or less breathed in his ear. Bless me, if it isn’t Master Arthur!
    He turned his head, and found himself at gaze with Butter. His memory was at least good enough to recall Butter at once. He did so even although he certainly hadn’t set eyes on the man for a very long time indeed. Butter had been a junior and somewhat anomalous manservant in the ancestral Povey home, hovering between house and garden according to the varying needs of the establishment. It didn’t look as if Butter had much flourished since. Although now so plainly middle-aged, he occupied – Povey saw at a glance – a lowly station in the hierarchy of this hotel. He wasn’t even a fully accredited waiter. He was one of the unassuming characters who go around emptying ashtrays, and whom nobody thinks to tip. This was surprising in itself. Povey had a distinct recollection of Butter as rather an astute and quick-witted young man, who had more than once proved uncommonly useful in getting him out of a scrape. Probably he had taken to drink. Members of the lower classes who were a little too clever for their station but could find no way out of it often sought to resolve their sense of frustration that way.
    The present moment, however, was plainly inappropriate forgeneral reflections of this sort. Here was a crisis – not of a whollyunprecedented kind. Arthur Povey, accustomed to living dangerously, took it in his stride.
    ‘No, no,’ he said, easily and