Killer Dolphin

ONE Mr. Conducis

“Dolphin?” the clerk repeated. “Dolphin. Well, yerse. We hold the keys. Were you wanting to view?”

“If I might, I was,” Peregrine Jay mumbled, wondering why such conversations should always be conducted in the past tense. “I mean,” he added boldly, “I did and I still do. I want to view, if you please.”

The clerk made a little face that might have been a sneer or an occupational tic. He glanced at Peregrine, who supposed his appearance was not glossy enough to make him a likely prospect.

“It is for sale, I believe?” Peregrine said.

“Oh, it’s for sale, all right,” the clerk agreed contemptuously. He re-examined some document that he had on his desk.

“May I view?”

“Now?”

“If it’s possible.”

“Well — I don’t know, reely, if we’ve anybody free at the moment,” said the clerk and frowned at the rain streaming dirtily down the windows of his office.

Peregrine said, “Look. The Dolphin is an old theatre. I am a man of the theatre. Here is my card. If you care to telephone my agents or the management of my current production at The Unicorn they will tell you that I am honest, sober and industrious, a bloody good director and playwright and possessed of whatever further attributes may move you to lend me the keys of The Dolphin for an hour. I would like to view it.”

The clerk’s face became inscrutable. “Oh, quite,” he muttered and edged Peregrine’s card across his desk, looking sideways at it as if it might scuttle. He retired within himself and seemed to arrive at a guarded conclusion.

“Yerse. Well, O.K., Mr.— er. It’s not usually done but we try to oblige.” He turned to a dirty-white board where keys hung like black tufts on a piece of disreputable ermine.

“Dolphin,” said the clerk. “Aeo, yerse. Here we are.” He unhooked a bunch of keys and pushed them across the desk. “You may find them a bit hard to turn,” he said. “We don’t keep on oiling the locks. There aren’t all that many inquiries.” He made what seemed to be a kind of a joke. “It’s quite a time since the blitz,” he said.

“Quarter of a century,” said Peregrine, taking the keys.

“That’s right. What a spectacle! I was a kid. Know your way I suppose, Mr.—er—Jay?”

“Thank you, yes.”

“Thank you, sir,” said the clerk, suddenly plumping for deference, but establishing at the same time his utter disbelief in Peregrine as a client. “Terrible weather. You will return the keys?”

“Indubitably,” said Peregrine, aping, he knew not why, Mr. Robertson Hare.

He got as far as the door when the clerk said: “Oh, by-the-way, Mr.—er—Jay. You will watch how you go. Underfoot. On stage particularly. There was considerable damage.”

“Thank you. I’ll be careful.”

“The hole was covered over but that was some time ago. Like a well,” the clerk added, worrying his first finger. “Something of the sort. Just watch it.”

“I will.”

“I—er—I don’t answer for what you’ll find,” the clerk said. “Tramps get in, you know. They will do it. One died a year or so back.”

“Oh.”

“Not that it’s likely to happen twice.”

“I hope not.”

“Well, we couldn’t help it,” the clerk said crossly. “I don’t know how they effect an entrance, reely. Broken window or something. You can’t be expected to attend to everything.”

“No,” Peregrine agreed and let himself out.

Rain drove up Wharfingers Lane in a slanting wall. It shot off the pavement, pattering against doors and windows, and hit Peregrine’s umbrella so hard that he thought it would split. He lowered it in front of him and below its scalloped and bearded margin saw, as if at rise of curtain in a cinema, the Thames, rain-pocked and choppy on its ebb-tide.

There were not a great many people about. Vans passed him grinding uphill in low gear. The buildings were ambiguous: warehouses? wharfingers offices? Further down he saw the blue lamp of a River Police Station. He passed a doorway with a neat legend: Port of London Authority and another with old-fashioned lettering: Camperdown and Carboys Rivercraft company. Demurrage. Wharfage. Inquiries.

The lane turned sharply to the left, it now ran parallel with the river. He lifted his umbrella. Up it went, like a curtain, on The Dolphin. At that moment, abruptly, there was no more rain.

There was even sunshine. It washed thinly across the stagehouse of The Dolphin and picked it out for Peregrine’s avid attention. There it stood: high, square and unbecoming, the object of his greed and deep desire. Intervening buildings hid the rest of the theatre except for the wrought-iron ornament at the top of a tower. He hurried on until, on his left, he came to a pub called The Wharfinger’s Friend and then the bombsite and then, fully displayed, the wounded Dolphin itself.

On a fine day, Peregrine thought, a hundred years ago, watermen and bargees, ship’s chandlers, business gents, deepwater sailors from foreign parts and riverside riff-raff looked up and saw The Dolphin. They saw its flag snapping and admired its caryatids touched up on the ringlets and nipples with tasteful gilt. Mr. Adolphus Ruby, your very own Mr. Ruby, stood here in Wharfingers Lane with his thumbs in his armholes, his cigar at one angle and his hat at the other and feasted his pop eyes on his very own palace of refined and original entertainment “Oh, oh!” thought Peregrine. “And here I stand but not, alas, in Mr. Ruby’s lacquered highlows. And the caryatids have the emptiest look in their blank eyes for me.”

They were still there, though, two on each side of the portico. They finished at their waists, petering out with grimy discretion in pastrycook’s scrolls. They supported with their sooty heads and arms a lovely wrought-iron balcony and although there were occasional gaps in their plaster foliations they were still in pretty good trim. Peregrine’s envious thoughts restored, too, the elegant sign supported above the portico by two prancing cetaceous mammals, and regilded its lettering: the dolphin theatre.

For a minute or two he looked at it from the far side of the lane. The sun shone brightly now. River, shipping and wet roofs reflected it and the cobblestones in front of the theatre began to send up a thin vapour. A sweep of seagulls broke into atmospheric background noises and a barge honked.

Peregrine crossed the wet little street and entered the portico.

It was stuck over with old bills including the agents’ notice which had evidently been there for a very long time and was torn and discoloured. “This Valuable Commercial Site,” it said.

“In that case,” Peregrine wondered, “why hasn’t it been sold? Why has no forward-looking commercial enterprise snapped up the Valuable Site and sent The Dolphin Theatre crashing about its own ears?”

There were other moribund bills. “Sensational!” one of them proclaimed but the remainder was gone and it was anybody’s guess what sensation it had once recommended. “Go home——” was chalked across one of the doors but somebody had rubbed out the rest of the legend and substituted graffiti of a more or less predictable kind. It was all very dismal.

But as Peregrine approached the doors he found, on the frontage itself, high up and well protected, the tatter of a playbill. It was the kind of thing that patrons of the Players Theatre cherish and Kensington art shops turn into lampshades.

The rest was gone.

When, Peregrine speculated, could this overwhelming solicitation have moved Mr. Ruby? In the eighties? He knew that Mr. Ruby had lived to within ten years of the turn of the century and in his heyday had bought, altered, restored and embellished The Dolphin, adding his plaster and jute caryatids, his swags, his supporting marine mammals and cornucopia, his touches of gilt and lollypink to the older and more modest elegance of wrought iron and unmolested surfaces. When did he make all these changes? Did he, upon his decline, sell The Dolphin and, if so, to whom? It was reputed to have been in use at the outbreak of the Second World War as a rag-dealer’s storehouse.

Who was the ground landlord now?

He confronted the main entrance and its great mortice lock for which he had no trouble in selecting the appropriate key. It was big enough to have hung at the girdle of one of Mr. Ruby’s very own stage-gaolers. The key went home and engaged but refused to turn. Why had Peregrine not asked the clerk to lend him an oil-can?

He struggled for some time and a voice at his back said, “Got it all on yer own, mate, aincher?”

Peregrine turned to discover a man wearing a peaked cap like a waterman’s and a shiny blue suit. He was a middle-aged man with a high colour, blue eyes and a look of cheeky equability.

“You want a touch of the old free-in-one,” he said. He had a gritty hoarseness in his voice. Peregrine gaped at him. “Oil, mate. Loobrication,” the man explained.

“Oh. Yes, indeed, I know I do.”

“What’s the story, anyway? Casing the joint?”

“I want to look at it,” Peregrine grunted. “Oh, damn, I’d better try the stage-door.”

“Let’s take a butcher’s.”

Peregrine stood back and the man stooped. He tried the key, delicately at first and then with force. “Not a hope,” he wheezed. “ ’Alf a mo’.”

He walked away, crossed the street and disappeared between two low buildings and down a narrow passageway that seemed to lead to the river.

“Damnation!” Peregrine thought. “He’s taken the key!”

Two gigantic lorries with canvas-covered loads roared down Wharfingers Lane and past the theatre. The great locked doors shook and rattled and a flake of plaster fell on Peregrine’s hand. “It’s dying slowly,” he thought in a panic. “The Dolphin is being shaken to death.”

When the second lorry had gone by, there was the man again with a tin and a feather in one hand and the key in the other. He re-crossed the street and came through the portico.

“I’m very much obliged to you,” Peregrine said.

“No trouble, yer Royal ’Ighness,” said the man. He oiled the lock and after a little manipulation turned the key. “Kiss yer ’and,” he said. Then he pulled back the knob. The tongue inside the lock shifted with a loud clunk. He pushed the door and it moved a little. “Sweet as a nut,” said the man, and stepped away. “Well, dooty calls as the bloke said on ’is way to the gallers.”

“Wait a bit—” Peregrine said, “you must have a drink on me. Here.” He pushed three half-crowns into the man’s hand.

“Never say no to that one, Mister. Fanks. Jolly good luck.”

Peregrine longed to open the door but thought the man, who was evidently a curious fellow, might attach himself. He wanted to be alone in The Dolphin.

“Your job’s somewhere round about here?” he asked.

“Dahn Carboy Stairs. Phipps Bros. Drugs and that. Jobbins is the name. Caretaker. Uster be a lighterman but it done no good to me chubes. Well, so long, sir. Hope you give yerself a treat among them spooks. Best of British luck.”

“Goodbye, and thank you.”

The door opened with a protracted groan and Peregrine entered The Dolphin.

The windows were unshuttered and though masked by dirt let enough light into the foyer for him to see it quite distinctly. It was surprisingly big. Two flights of stairs with the prettiest wrought-iron balustrades curved up into darkness. At the back and deep in shadow, passages led off on either side giving entrance no doubt to boxes and orchestral stalls. The Pit entrance must be from somewhere outside.

On Peregrine’s right stood a very rococo box-office introduced, he felt sure, by Mr. Ruby. A brace of consequential plaster putti hovered upside down with fat-faced insouciance above the grill and must have looked in their prime as if they.were counting the door sales. A fibre-plaster bust of Shakespeare on a tortuous pedestal lurked in the shadows. The filthy walls were elegantly panelled and he thought must have originally been painted pink and gilded.

There was nothing between Peregrine and the topmost ceiling. The circle landing, again with a wrought-iron balustrade, reached less than halfway across the well. He stared up into darkness and fancied he could distinguish a chandelier. The stench was frightful: rats, rot, general dirt and, he thought, an unspeakable aftermath of the hobos that the clerk had talked about But how lovely it must have been in its early Victorian elegance and even with Mr. Ruby’s preposterous additions. And how surprisingly undamaged it seemed to be.

He turned to the righthand flight of stairs and found two notices: dress circle and to the paris bar. The signwriter had added pointing hands with frills round their wrists. Upstairs first, or into the stalls? Up.

He passed by grimed and flaking panels, noticing the graceful airiness of plaster ornament that separated them. He trailed a finger on the iron balustrade but withdrew it quickly at the thick touch of occulted dust Here was the circle foyer. The double flight of stairs actually came out on either side of a balcony landing that projected beyond the main landing and formed the roof of a portico over the lower foyer. Flights of three shallow steps led up from three sides of this “half-landing” to the top level. The entire structure was supported by very elegant iron pillars.

It was much darker up there and he could only just make out the Paris Bar. The shelves were visible but the counter had gone. A nice piece of mahogany it may have been—something to sell or steal. Carpet lay underfoot in moth-eaten tatters and the remains of curtains hung before the windows. These must be unbroken because the sound of the world outside was so very faint Boarded up, perhaps. It was extraordinary how quiet it was, how stale, how stifling, how dead.

“Not a mouse stirring,” he thought and at that moment heard a rapid patter. Something scuttled across his foot. Peregrine was astonished to find himself jolted by a violent shudder. He stamped with both feet and was at once half-stifled by the frightful cloud of dust he raised.

He walked towards the Paris Bar.

A man with a shaded face moved toward him.

“Euh!” Peregrine said in his throat. He stopped and so did the man. He could not have told how many heart thuds passed before he saw it was himself.

The bar was backed by a sheet of looking-glass.

Peregrine had recently given up smoking. If he had now had access to a cigarette he would have devoured it. Instead, he whistled, and the sound in that muffled place was so lacking in resonance, so dull, that he fell silent and crossed the foyer to the nearest door into the auditorium. There were two, one on each side of the sunken half-landing. He passed into the circle.

The first impression was dramatic. He had forgotten about the bomb damage. A long shaft of sunlight from a gap in the roof of the stage-house took him by surprise. It produced the effect of a wartime blitz drawing in charcoal and, like a spotlight, found its mark on the empty stage. There, in a pool of mild sunlight, stood a broken chair still waiting, Peregrine thought, for one of Mr. Ruby’s very own actors. Behind the chair lay a black patch that looked as if a paint pot had been upset on the stage. It took Peregrine a moment or two to realize that this must be the hole the clerk had talked about. It was difficult to see it distinctly through the shaft of light.

Against this one note of brilliance the rest of the house looked black. It was in the classic horseshoe form and must have seated, Peregrine thought, about five hundred. He saw that the chairs had little iron trimmings above their plushy backs and that there were four boxes. A loop of fringe dangled from the top of the proscenium and this was all that could be seen of the curtain.

Peregrine moved round the circle and entered the O.P. box, which stank. He backed out of it, opened a door in the circle wall and found an iron stair leading to the stage.

He climbed down. Even these iron steps were muffled with dust and they gave out a half-choked clang as if he were soft-pedaling them.

Now he was onstage, as a man of the theatre should be, and at once he felt much easier—exhilarated even, as if some kind of authority had passed to him by right of entry. He peered through the shaft of sunshine which he saw was dense with motes that floated, danced and veered in response to his own movement. He walked into it, stood by the broken chair and faced the auditorium. Quite dazzled and bemused by the strange tricks of light, he saw the front of the house as something insubstantial and could easily people it with Mr. Ruby’s patrons. Beavers, bonnets, ulsters, shawls. A flutter of programmes. Rows of pale discs that were faces. “Oh, wonderful!” Peregrine thought, and in order to embrace it all, took a pace backward.

To fall without warning, even by the height of a single step, is disturbing. To fall, as he did, now, by his height and the length of his arms into cold, stinking water is monstrous, nightmarish, like a small death. For a moment he only knew that he had been physically insulted. He stared into the shaft of light with its madly jerking molecules, felt wood slip under his gloved fingers and tightened his grip. At the same time he was disgustingly invaded, saturated up to the collarbone in icy stagnant water. He hung at arm’s length.

“Oh God!” Peregrine thought. “Why aren’t I a bloody Bond? Why can’t I make my bloody arms hitch me up? Oh God, don’t let me drown in this unspeakable muck. Oh God, let me keep my head.”

Well, of course, he thought, his hands and arms didn’t have to support his entire weight. Eleven stone. He was buoyed up by whatever he had fallen into. What? A dressing-room turned into a well for surface water? Better not speculate. Better explore. He moved his legs and dreadful ambiguous waves lapped up to his chin. He could find nothing firm with his feet. He thought: “How long can I hang on like this?” And a line of words floated in: “How long will a man lie i’ the earth ere he rot?”

What should he do? Perhaps a frog-like upward thing? Try it and at least gain a better finger hold? He tried it: he kicked at the water, pulled and clawed at the stage. For a moment he thought he had gained, but his palms slid back, scraping on the edge and sucking back his soaked gloves. He was again suspended. The clerk? If he could hang on, would the clerk send someone to find out why he hadn’t returned the keys? When? When? Why in God’s name had he shaken off the man with the oil can from Phipps Bros.? Jobbins. Suppose he were to yell? Was there indeed a broken window where tramps crept in? He took a deep breath and, being thus inflated, rose a little in the water. He yelled.

“Hullo! Hullo! Jobbins!”

His voice was silly and uncannily stifled. Deflated, he sank to his former disgusting level.

He had disturbed more than water when he tried his leap. An anonymous soft object bobbed against his chin. The stench was outrageous. I can’t, he thought, I can’t stay like this. Already his fingers had grown cold and his arms were racked. Presently—soon—he would no longer feel the edge, he would only feel pain and his fingers would slip away. And what then? Float on his back in this unspeakable water and gradually freeze? He concentrated on his hands, tipping his head back to look up the length of his stretched arms at them. The details of his predicament now declared themselves: the pull on his pectoral muscles, on his biceps and forearms, and the terrible strain on his gloved fingers. The creeping obscenity of the water! He hung on for some incalculable age and realized that he was coming to a crisis when his body would no longer be controllable. Something must be done. Now. Another attempt? If there were anything solid to push against Suppose, after all, his feet were only a few inches from the bottom? But what bottom? The floor of a dressing-room? An understage passage? A boxed-in trap? He stretched his feet and touched nothing. The water rose to his mouth. He flexed his legs, kicked, hauled on the edge and bobbed upwards. The auditorium appeared. If he could get his elbows on the edge. No.

But at the moment when the confusion of circle and stalls shot up before his eyes, he had heard a sound that he recognized, a protracted groan, and at the penultimate second, he had seen—what? a splinter of light? And heard? Somebody cough.

“Hi!” Peregrine shouted. “Here! Quick! Help!”

He sank and hung again by his fingers. But someone was coming through the house. Muffled steps on the rags of carpet

“Here! Come here, will you? Onstage.”

The steps halted.

“Look here! I say! Look, for God’s sake come up. I've fallen through the stage. I’ll drown. Why don’t you answer, whoever you are?”

The footsteps started again. A door opened nearby. Pass-door in the Prompt-side box, he thought. Steps up. Now: crossing the stage. Now.

“Who are you?” Peregrine said. “Look out. Look out for the hole. Look out for my hands. I’ve got gloves on. Don’t tread on my hands. Help me out of this. But look out. And say something.”

He flung his head back and stared into the shaft of light. Hands covered his hands and then closed about his wrists. At the same time heavy shoulders and a head wearing a hat came as a black silhouette between him and the light. He stared into a face he could not distinguish.

“It doesn’t need much,” he chattered, “if you could just give me a heave I can do it.”

The head was withdrawn. The hands changed their grip. At last the man spoke.

“Very well,” said a voice. “Now.”

He gave his last frog leap, was heaved up, was sprawled across the edge and had crawled back on the stage to the feet of the man. He saw beautiful shoes, sharp trouser ends and the edge of a fine overcoat. He was shivering from head to foot.

“Thank you,” he said. “I couldn’t be more grateful. My God, how I stink.”

He got to his feet.

The man was, he thought, about sixty years old. Peregrine could see his face now. It was extremely pale. He wore a bowler hat and was impeccably dressed.

“You are Mr. Peregrine Jay, I think,” said the man. His voice was toneless, educated and negative.

“Yes—I—I?”

“The people at the estate agents told me. You should have a bath and change. My car is outside.”

“I can’t get into anyone’s car in this state. I’m very sorry, sir,” Peregrine said. His teeth were going like castanets. “You’re awfully kind but—”

“Wait a moment. Or no. Come to the front of the theatre.”

In answer to a gesture, Peregrine walked through the pass-door down into the house and was followed. Stagnant water poured off him. It ran out of his gloved finger-tips and squelched and spurted in his shoes. He went through a box and along a passage and came into the foyer. “Please stay here. I shall only be a moment,” said his rescuer.

He went into the portico, leaving the door open. Out in Wharfingers Lane Peregrine saw a Daimler with a chauffeur. He began to jump and thrash his arms. Water splashed out of him and clouds of dust settled upon his drenched clothes. The man returned with the chauffeur, who carried a fur rug and a heavy mackintosh.

“I suggest you strip and put this on and wrap the rug round you,” the man said. He stretched out his arms as if he were actually thinking of laying hands on Peregrine. He seemed to be suspended between attraction and repulsion. He looked, it struck Peregrine, as if he were making some kind of appeal. “Let me—” he said.

“But, sir, you can’t. I’m disgusting.”

“Please.”

“No, no—really.”

The man walked away. His hands were clasped behind him. Peregrine saw, with a kind of fuddled astonishment, that they were trembling. “My God!” Peregrine thought. “This is a morning and a half. I’d better get out of this one pretty smartly but how the hell—”

“Let me give you a hand, sir,” said the chauffeur to Peregrine. “You’re that cold, aren’t you?”

“I can manage. If only I could wash.”

“Never mind, sir. That’s the idea. Leave them there, sir. I’ll attend to them. Better keep your shoes on, hadn’t you? The coat’ll be a bit of help and the rug’s warm. Ready sir?”

“If I could just have a taxi, I wouldn’t be such an infernal nuisance.”

His rescuer turned and looked, not fully at him but at his shoulder. “I beg you to come,” he said.

Greatly worried by the extravagance of the phrase Peregrine said no more.

The chauffeur went ahead quickly and opened the doors of the car. Peregrine saw that newspaper had been spread over the floor and back seat.

“Please go,” his rescuer said, “I’ll follow.”

Peregrine shambled across the portico and jumped in at the back. The lining of the mackintosh stuck to his body. He hitched the rug around him and tried to clench his chattering jaw.

A boy’s voice in the street called, “Hey, look! Look at that bloke.” The caretaker from Phipps Bros, had appeared at the top of his alley and stared into the car. One or two people stopped and pointed Peregrine out to each other.

As his master crossed the portico the chauffeur locked the theatre doors. Holding Peregrine’s unspeakable clothes at arm’s length he put them in the boot of the car and got into the driver’s seat. In another moment they were moving up Wharfingers Lane.

His rescuer did not turn his head or speak. Peregrine waited for a moment or two and then, controlling his voice with some success, said, “I’m giving you far too much trouble.”

“No.”

“If—if you would be so very kind as to drop me at The Unicorn Theatre I think I could—”

Still without turning his head the man said with extreme formality, “I really do beg that you will allow me to—” he stopped for an unaccountably long time and then said loudly “—to rescue you. I mean to take you to my house and set you right. I shall be most upset otherwise. Dreadfully upset.”

Now he turned and Peregrine had never seen an odder look in anyone’s face. It was an expression almost, he thought, of despair.

“I am responsible,” said his extraordinary host. “Unless you allow me to make amends I shall—I shall feel—very guilty.”

“Responsible? But—”

“It will not take very long, I hope. Drury Place.”

“Oh Lord!” Peregrine thought. “What poshery.” He wondered, suddenly, if perhaps the all too obvious explanation was the wrong one and if his rescuer was a slightly demented gentleman and the chauffeur his keeper.

“I really don’t see, sir—” he began, but an inaudible conversation was taking place in the front seat.

“Certainly, sir,” said the chauffeur and drew up outside the estate agents. He pulled the keys out of his pocket as he entered. In a moment or two the clerk’s face appeared looking anxiously and crossly over the painted lower pane of his window. He disappeared and in a moment came running out and round to the passenger’s side.

“Well, sir,” he obsequiously gabbled, “I'm sure I’m very sorry this has occurred. Very regrettable, I’m sure. But as I was saying to your driver, sir, I did warn the viewer.” He had not yet looked at Peregrine but he did so now, resentfully. “I warned you,” he said.

“Yes, yes,” Peregrine said. “You did.”

“Yes, well, thank you. But I’m sure—”

“That will do. There has been gross negligence. Good morning.” The voice was so changed, so brutally icy that Peregrine stared and the clerk drew back as if he’d been stung. They moved off.

The car’s heating system built up. By the time they had crossed the river Peregrine was a little less cold and beginning to feel drowsy. His host offered no further remarks. Once when Peregrine happened to look at the rear-vision glass on the passenger’s side he found he was being observed, apparently with extreme distaste. Or no. Almost with fear. He looked away quickly but out of the tail of his eye saw a gloved hand change the angle of the glass.

“Oh, well,” he thought bemusedly, “I’m bigger and. younger than he is. I suppose I can look after myself, but how tricky it all is. Take away a man’s clothes, after all, and you make a monkey of him. What sort of public image will I present, fleeing down Park Lane in a gent’s mac and a fur rug, both the property of my pursuer?”

They were in Park Lane now and soon turned off into a side street and thence into the cul-de-sac called Drury Place. The car pulled up. The chauffeur got out and rang the bell of No. 7. As he returned to the car, the house door was opened by a manservant.

Peregrine’s host said in a comparatively cheerful voice, “Not far to go. Up the steps and straight in.”

The chauffeur opened the door. “Now, sir,” he said, “shan’t be long, shall we?”

There really was nothing else for it. Three impeccable men, an errand boy and a tightly encased lady carrying a little dog walked down the footpath. Peregrine got out and instead of bolting into the house made an entrance of it. He ascended the steps with deliberation, leaving a trail of filthy footprints behind him and dragging his fur rug like a ceremonial train. The manservant stood aside.

“Thank you,” Peregrine said grandly. “I have fallen, as you see, into dirty water.”

“Quite so, sir.”

“Up to my neck.”

“Very unfortunate, sir.”

“For all concerned,” said Peregrine.

His host had arrived.

“First of all, of course, a bath,” he was saying, “and something to defeat that shivering. Mawson?”

“Certainly, sir.”

“And then come and see me.”

“Very good, sir.”

The man went upstairs. Peregrine’s host was now behaving in so normal a manner that he began to wonder if he himself had perhaps been bemused by his hideous experience. There was some talk of the efficacy of Epsom Salts in a hot bath and of coffee laced with rum. Peregrine listened in a trance.

“Do forgive me for bossing you about like this. You must be feeling ghastly and really, I do blame myself.”

“But why?”

“Yes, Mawson?”

“If the gentleman will walk up, sir.”

“Quite so. Quite so. Good.”

Peregrine walked up and was shown into a steaming and aromatic bathroom.

“I thought pine, sir, would be appropriate,” said Mawson. “I hope the temperature is as you like it. May I suggest a long, hot soak, sir?”

“You may indeed,” said Peregrine warmly.

“Perhaps I may take your rug and coat. And shoes,” said Mawson with an involuntary change of voice. “You will find a bath wrap on the rail and a hot rum and lemon within easy reach. If you would be good enough to ring, sir, when you are ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“To dress, sir.”

It seemed a waste of time to say, “In what?” so Peregrine merely said “Thank you” and Mawson said “Thank you” and withdrew.

It was rapture beyond compare in the bath. Essence of pine. A lovely long-handled brush. Pine-smelling soap. And the hot rum and lemon. He left off shivering, soaped himself all over, including his head, scrubbed himself scarlet, submerged completely, rose, drank and tried to take a responsible view of the situation. In this he failed. Too much had occurred. He realized after a time that he was becoming lightheaded and without at all fancying the idea took a hard-hitting cold shower. This restored him. Rough-dried and wrapped in a towelling bathrobe he rang the bell. He felt wonderful.

Mawson came and Peregrine said he would like to telephone for some clothes, though when he thought about it he didn’t quite know where he would ring. Jeremy Jones with whom he shared a flat would certainly be out and it wasn’t the morning for their charlady. The Unicorn Theatre? Somebody would be there, of course, but who?

Mawson showed him to a bedroom where there was a telephone.

There were also clothes laid out on the bed. “I think they are approximately your size, sir. It is hoped that you will have no objection to making use of them in the meantime,” said Mawson.

“Yes, but look here—”

“It will be much appreciated if you make use of them. Will there be anything else, sir?”

“I—honestly—I—”

“Mr. Conducis sends his compliments, sir, and hopes you will join him in the library.”

Peregrine’s jaw dropped.

“Thank you, sir,” said Mawson neatly and withdrew.

Conducis? Conducis! It was as if Mawson had said “Mr. Onassis.” Could this possibly be Mr. Vassily Conducis? The more Peregrine thought about it the more he decided that it could. But what in the wide world would Mr. Vassily Conducis be up to in a derelict theatre on the South Bank at half past ten in the morning when he ought to have been abominably lolling on his yacht in the Aegean? And what was he, Peregrine, up to in Mr. Conducis’s house which (it now dawned upon him) was on a scale of insolently quiet grandeur such as he had never expected to encounter outside the sort of book which, in any case, he never read.

Peregrine looked round the room and felt he ought to curl his lip at it. After all he did read his New Statesman. He then looked at the clothes on the bed and found them to be on an equal footing with what, being a man of the theatre, he thought of as the decor. Absently, he picked up a gayish tie that was laid out beside a heavy silk shirt. “Charvet,” said the label. Where had he read of Charvet?

“I don’t want any part of this,” he thought. He sat on the bed and dialed several numbers without success. The Theatre didn’t answer. He put on the clothes and saw that though they were conservative in style he looked startlingly presentable in them. Even the shoes fitted.

He rehearsed a short speech and went downstairs, where he found Mawson waiting for him.

He said, “Did you say—Mr. Conducis?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Vassily Conducis. Will you step this way, sir?”

Mr. Conducis stood in front of his library fire and Peregrine wondered how on earth he had failed to recognize a face that had been so widely publicized with, it was reported, such determined opposition from its owner. Mr. Conducis had an olive, indeed a swarthy, complexion and unexpectedly pale eyes. These were merely facial adjuncts and might, Peregrine afterwards thought, have been mass produced for all the speculation they inspired. The mouth, however, was disturbing, being, or so Peregrine thought, both ruthless and vulnerable. The chin was heavy. Mr. Conducis had curly black hair going predictably gray at the temples. He looked, by and large, enormously expensive.

“Come in,” he said. “Yes. Come in.” His voice was a light tenor. Was there a faintly foreign inflection? A slight lisp, perhaps.

As Peregrine approached, Mr. Conducis looked fixedly at his guest’s hands.

“You are well?” he asked. “Recovered?”

“Yes, indeed. I can’t thank you enough, sir. As for—well, as for lending me these things—I really do feel—!”

“Do they fit?”

“Yes. Very well.”

“That is all that is necessary.”

“Except that after all they are yours,” Peregrine said and tried a light laugh in order not to sound pompous.

“I have told you. I am responsible. You might—” Mr. Conducis’s voice faded but his lips soundlessly completed the sentence “—have been drowned.”

“But honestly, sir!” Peregrine launched himself on his little speech. “You’ve saved my life, you know. I would have just hung on by my fingers until they gave out and then—and then—well, finally and disgustingly drowned as you say.”

Almost soundlessly Mr. Conducis said, “I should have blamed myself.”

“But why on earth! For a hole in The Dolphin stage?”

“It is my property.”

“Oh!” Peregrine ejaculated before he could stop himself. “How splendid!”

“Why do you say that?”

“I mean: how splendid to own it. It’s such an adorable little playhouse.”

Mr. Conducis looked at him without expression. “Indeed?” he said. “Splendid? Adorable? You make a study of theatres, perhaps?”

“Not really. I mean I’m not an expert. Good Lord, no! But I earn my living in theatres and I am enormously attracted by old ones.”

“Yes. Will you join me in a drink?” Mr. Conducis said in his wooden manner. “I am sure you will.” He moved to a tray on a sidetable.

“Your man has already given me a very strong and wonderfully restoring hot rum and lemon.”

“I am sure that you will have another. The ingredients are here.”

“A very small one, please,” Peregrine said. There was a singing sensation in his veins and a slight thrumming in his ears but he still felt wonderful. Mr. Conducis busied himself at the tray. He returned with a reeking tumbler for Peregrine and something that he had poured out of a jug for himself. Could it be barley water?

“Shall we sit down,” he suggested. When they had done so he gave Peregrine a hurried, blank glance and said, “You wonder why I was at the theatre perhaps. There is some question of demolishing it and building on the site. An idea that I have been turning over for some time. I wanted to refresh my memory. The agents told my man you were there.” He put two fingers in a waistcoat pocket and Peregrine saw his own card had been withdrawn. It looked incredibly grubby.

“You—you’re going to pull it down?” he said and heard a horribly false jauntiness in his own unsteady voice. He took a pull at his rum. It was extremely strong.

“You dislike the proposal,” Mr. Conducis observed, making it a statement rather than a question. “Have you any reason other than a general interest in such buildings?”

If Peregrine had been absolutely sober and dressed in his own clothes it is probable that he would have mumbled something ineffectual and somehow or another made an exit from Mr. Conducis’s house and from all further congress with its owner. He was a little removed, however, from his surroundings and the garments in which he found himself.

He began to talk excitedly. He talked about The Dolphin and about how it must have looked after Mr. Adolphus Ruby had gloriously tarted it up. He described how, before he fell into the well, he had imagined the house: clean, sparkling with lights from chandeliers, full, warm, buzzing and expectant. He said that it was the last of its kind and so well designed with such a surprisingly large stage that it would be very possible to mount big productions there.

He forgot about Mr. Conducis and also about not drinking any more rum. He talked widely and distractedly.

“Think what a thing it would be,” Peregrine cried, “to do a season of Shakespeare’s comedies! Imagine Love's Labour’s there. Perhaps one could have a barge—yes. The Grey Dolphin—and people could take water to go to the play. When the play was about to begin he would run up a flag with a terribly intelligent dolphin on it. And we’d do them quickly and lightly and with elegance and—oh!” cried Peregrine, “and with that little catch in the breath that never, never comes in the same way with any other playwright.”

He was now walking about Mr. Conducis’s library. He saw, without seeing, the tooled spines of collected editions and a picture that he would remember afterwards with astonishment He waved his arms. He shouted.

“There never was such a plan,” shouted Peregrine. “Never in all London since Burbage moved the first theatre from Shoreditch to Southwark.” He found himself near his drink and tossed it off. “And not too fancy,” he said, “mind you. Not twee. God, no! Not a pastiche either. Just a good theatre doing the job it was meant to do. And doing the stuff that doesn’t belong to any bloody Method or Movement or Trend or Period or what-have-you. Mind that.”

“You refer to Shakespeare again?” said Mr. Conducis’s voice. “If I follow you.”

“Of course I do!” Peregrine suddenly became fully aware of Mr. Conducis. “Oh dear!” he said.

“Is something the matter?”

“I’m afraid I’m a bit tight, sir. Not really tight but a bit uninhibited. I’m awfully sorry. I think perhaps I’d better take myself off and I’ll return all these things you’ve so kindly lent me. I’ll return them as soon as possible, of course. So, if you’ll forgive me—”

“What do you do in the theatre?”

“I direct plays and I’ve written two.”

“I know nothing of the theatre,” Mr. Conducis said heavily. “You are reasonably successful?”

“Well, sir, yes. I think so. It’s a jungle of course. I’m not at all affluent but I make out. I’ve had as much work as I could cope with over the last three months and I think my mana’s going up. I hope so. Goodbye, sir.”

He held out his hand. Mr. Conducis, with an expression that really might have been described as one of horror, backed away from it.

“Before you go,” he said, “I have something that may be of interest to you. You can spare a moment?”

“Of course.”

“It is in this room,” Mr. Conducis muttered and went to a bureau that must, Peregrine thought, be of fabulous distinction. He followed his host and watched him pull out a silky, exquisitely inlaid drawer.

“How lovely that is,” he said.

“Lovely?” Mr. Conducis echoed as he had echoed before. “You mean the bureau? Yes. It was found for me. I understand nothing of such matters. That is not what I wished to show you. Will you look at this? Shall we move to a table?”

He had taken from the drawer a very small wooden Victorian hand-desk, extremely shabby, much stained, and Peregrine thought, of no particular distinction. A child’s possession perhaps. He laid it on a table under a window and motioned to a chair beside it. Peregrine now felt as if he was playing a part in somebody else’s dream. “But I’m all right,” he thought “I’m not really drunk. I’m in that pitiable but enviable condition when all things seem to work together for good.”

He sat before the table and Mr. Conducis, standing well away from him, opened the little desk, pressed inside with his white, flat thumb and revealed a false bottom. It was a commonplace device and Peregrine wondered if he was meant to exclaim at it. He saw that in the exposed cavity there was a packet no bigger than a half-herring and much the same shape. It was wrapped in discoloured yellow-brown silk and tied with a morsel of tarnished ribbon. Mr. Conducis had a paper knife in his hand. “Everything he possesses,” Peregrine thought, “is on museum-piece level. It’s stifling.” His host used the paper knife as a sort of server, lifting the little silk packet out on its blade and, as it were, helping Peregrine to it like a waiter.

It slid from the blade and with it, falling to one side, a discoloured card upon which it had lain. Peregrine, whose vision had turned swimmy, saw that this card was a menu and bore a date some six years past. The heading, the steam yacht kalliope. gala dinner, floated tipsily into view with a flamboyant and illegible signature that was sprawled across it above a dozen others when a short white hand swiftly covered and then removed the card.

“That is nothing,” Mr. Conducis said. “It is of no consequence.” He went to the fire. A bluish flame sprang up and turned red. Mr. Conducis returned.

“It is the packet that may be of interest. Will you open it?” he said.

Peregrine pulled gingerly at the ribbon ends and turned back the silk wrapping.

He had exposed a glove.

A child’s glove. Stained as if by water, it was the colour of old parchment and finely wrinkled like an old, old face. It had been elegantly embroidered, with tiny roses in gold and scarlet. A gold tassel, now blackened and partly unravelled, was attached to the tapered gauntlet. It was the most heartrending object Peregrine had ever seen.

Underneath it lay two pieces of folded paper, very much discoloured.

“Will you read the papers?” Mr. Conducis invited. He had returned to the fireplace.

Peregrine felt an extraordinary delicacy in touching the glove. “Cheveril,” he thought. “It’s a cheveril glove. Has it gone brittle with age?” No. To his fingertip it was flaccid: uncannily so, as if it had only just died. He slipped the papers out from beneath it. They had split along the folds and were foxed and faded. He opened the larger with great care and it lay broken before him. He pulled himself together and managed to read it.

The accompanying note was no more than a slip of paper. The writing on it was much faded and so extraordinarily crabbed and tortuous that he thought at first it must be hieroglyphic and that he therefore would never make it out. Then it seemed to him that there was something almost familiar about it. And then, gradually, words began to emerge. Everything was quiet. He heard the fire settle. Someone crossed the room above the library. He heard his own heart thud.

He read.

Peregrine sat in a kind of trance and looked at the little glove and the documents. Mr. Conducis had left the paper knife on the table. Peregrine slid the ivory tip into the gauntlet and very slowly lifted and turned it. There was the mark, in the same crabbed hand: HS.

“But where—” Peregrine heard his own voice saying, “where did it come from? Whose is it?”

“It is mine,” Mr. Conducis said and his voice seemed to come from a great distance. “Naturally.”

“But — where did you find it?”

A long silence.

“At sea.”

“At sea?”

“During a voyage six years ago. I bought it.”

Peregrine looked at his host. How pale Mr,. Conducis was and how odd was his manner!

He said: “The box — it is some kind of portable writing-desk — was a family possession. The former owner did not discover the false bottom until—” He stopped.

“Until—?” Peregrine said.

“Until shortly before he died.”

Peregrine said, “Has it been shown to an authority?”

“No. I should, no doubt, get an opinion from some museum or perhaps from Sotheby’s.”

His manner was so completely negative, so toneless that Peregrine wondered if by any extraordinary chance he did not understand the full implication. He was wondering how, without offense, he could find out, when Mr. Conducis continued.

“I have not looked it all up but I understand the age of the boy at the time of his death is consistent with the evidence and that the grandfather was in fact a glover.”

“Yes.”

“And the initials inside the gauntlet do in fact correspond with the child’s initials.”

“Yes. Hamnet Shakespeare.”

“Quite so,” said Mr. Conducis.