The Man from the Sea by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page B

away. It’s got enormous grounds.”
    “Of course Blair is wealthy as well as scientifically distinguished.” The man from the sea had turned on his note of irony. “I remember how your friend’s diamonds proclaimed the fact at that reception.”
    “Did you say the Royal Society?” Cranston scarcely knew why he asked the question. But even as he uttered it he acknowledged that it was significant – that his mind by means of it was taking a dive at some submerged memory.
    The man from the sea made no answer – perhaps because he had almost stumbled at a turn of the path. When he recovered himself it was to speak in a tone of impatience. “Aren’t we nearly there?”
    Cranston in his turn was silent. The garden was warm and scented and very still. The breeze from the sea had either dropped or was here deflected by the sweep of the cliff. The scents were the unique mingling he had known from childhood in such rare northern gardens as this: lavender and roses and sweet briar and night-scented stock shot with the sharpness of the sea and the tang of the surrounding pine and heather. It was a heady mixture. Eden, it queerly occurred to him, had been eminently aromatic – and but for that Eve might never have eaten her apple there. His own apple – Cranston caught himself up. With an appropriateness that was sufficiently broad, the familiar summerhouse had loomed up before him. “We’re there,” he said briefly. “I don’t know about risking a light. We’ll see when we get in.”
    They mounted the little flight of steps and passed across the broad verandah. The summerhouse was an elaborate and expensive affair, commodious but without appropriateness to its situation. There was a large dark central room that might have been intended as a refuge from tropical heat, and from the shadowy corners of which it was possible to picture the emergence of exotic persons in the tradition of Conrad or Somerset Maugham. And there was such a presence now – a vaguely defined form in white, that stirred and rose as they entered, and then stood still.
    Cranston was startled. “Caryl! You’ve waited? We’ve been–”
    The figure in white took a single step forward, and spoke very quietly. “I’m not Caryl. I’m Sally.”

 
     
4
    “Mother sprained an ankle coming up the path. She could hardly get as far as the house.” Sally Dalrymple continued to speak from the darkness. Her voice was slightly tremulous and slightly hurried, as if she were determined not to be interrupted before she had declared herself. “So she tumbled me out of bed. She’d had one of her bouts of sleeplessness, she said, and had gone to walk on the beach. And she’d run into you, Dick, with a friend in some sort of fix. It wasn’t very clear – but I was to bring these clothes. Is that right?”
    There was a silence – a silence that Cranston knew it was his business to break. But his mouth had gone dry, and he felt as he had sometimes felt when half awakening from a ghastly dream. In the dream he had done he hardly remembered what. But it could never be undone. Never . And its aftermath was dread and dereliction and dismay.
    “The clothes are right, at least.” It was the man from the sea who spoke – striking in with the hateful urbanity he could command. “From my point of view, they are the important thing. I have to be dressed in them.”
    “Then I hope they fit.” Sally’s voice was cold, and Cranston knew that she had instantly disliked the stranger. She distrusted him – and for the same reason that Cranston himself had felt a sudden distrust earlier. He was the wrong age to be in a fix with innocence, with any attractiveness as of mere escapade or extravagance. She had been trying to accept the situation as her incredible mother had launched it at her – and that meant a Dick Cranston involved in some hazardous silliness with a contemporary. Poaching, perhaps – or swimming out to Inchfail to play some prank on old Shamus in