EXTRACT FROM THE GUIDE TO COMFORTABLE TAX PUNNING
Sark: Smallest of the Channel Islands, lying between Guernsey and Jersey. Closer geographically to the former, and comprised in the same Bailiwick, but originally colonised (in 1585) by 40 Jerseymen under the patronage of Helier de Carteret, Seigneur of St. Ouen. Area: 1,348 acres. Population: 500. Capital: None to speak of — social and commercial activity centres on the Avenue, an unmade-up road running between the Bel Air tavern and the Post Office and containing several souvenir and jewellery shops. Tractors are the only permitted form of motor transport; bicycles and horse-drawn carriages can be hired. Principal industries: Tourism and financial services. More company directorships per head than anywhere else in the world. Access: Regular boat service from Guernsey; for boat and hydrofoil services to Jersey and St. Malo, enquire locally.
Note 1: Avoid if prone to seasickness.
A slender, fair-haired girl stood hesitating in the doorway of the Corkscrew, as if in surroundings unfamiliar to her, looking from one to another of the groups of lawyers gossiping at candlelit tables. Upon seeing us, she approached our table, and I saw that it was Lilian.
She accepted with some demur the offer of a glass of wine. The purpose of her coming, it seemed, was to deliver to Julia a telex message received a few minutes earlier in 63 New Square. A colleague of Julia’s, knowing something of her ways, had looked for her next door in 62; Lilian, knowing something more, had volunteered to look for her in the Corkscrew.
“It’s extremely kind of you,” said Julia, “to take so much trouble. Does it seem to be urgent?”
“It’s not actually marked ‘Urgent,’ “said Lilian, blushing slightly. “But — I couldn’t help reading the first couple of lines, and I thought you ought to see it right away. Because Mr. Cantrip’s supposed to be in West London County Court tomorrow, and — and Henry’s going to be terribly cross.”
“Oh dear,” said Selena.
TELEX M. CANTRIP TO J, LARWOOD TRANSMITTED SARK 6:15 P.M. MONDAY 30TH APRIL
Yoo-hoo there, Larwood, guess who? Me again, unforeseenly Sark-stuck. Tell Henry hard cheese on West London County Court, they’ll have to make do with Ragwort.
If Henry thinks I did it on purpose, you might point out that Sark isn’t exactly a major centre of exciting and sophisticated entertainment — just a flat-topped lump of rock in the middle of nowhere, with not much to do unless you’ve got a big thing about sea gulls. Gabrielle says it’s like the Garden of Eden, but there wasn’t much to do there either, was there? Except for eating apples.
Anyway, the way I see it, it’s all Darkside’s fault. The plane to Guernsey made him feel sick and the boat to Sark made him feel sicker and the horse and carriage made him feel sickest of the lot. If Henry thinks it can’t take long to get anywhere on an island three miles by one, tell him to try doing it in a horse-drawn carriage sitting next to a chartered accountant who looks like a corpse with liver trouble and groans every time the horse starts to trot a bit.
We had to amble along at about one mph, getting plenty of time to look at the butterflies and wild-flowers and wave graciously at the passing peasantry. Passing, in view of our speed, was something the peasantry did pretty easily, including an old biddy wrapped up in black shawls just like the one in the Grand Hotel the other evening — don’t suppose it was the same one, though.
What with the sun shining and the birds singing and so on, I wouldn’t actually have minded much about going slowly, except I was worried about Gabrielle being on her own somewhere with chaps from the Revenue lurking in the undergrowth.
Philip Alexandre hangs out on the part of the island called Little Sark — almost a separate island, just joined up to the rest by a long thin bit called the Coupee, like a kind of bridge about a hundred yards long, with a three-hundred-foot drop on both sides and railings to stop you falling over. It’s just about wide enough for a carriage, though not with much room to spare, but they’re not allowed to take passengers across it, so we had to get out and walk.
Even that took quite a lot longer than it might have done, because the chap driving the carriage thought this was the right time to fill us in on the local spookery and witchcraft statistics. He’s a boozy-looking character called Albert, who works for Philip Alexandre as a sort of general handyman, and he seems to think he’s got a patriotic duty to tell everyone there are more ghosts and witches per square foot on Little Sark than anywhere else in the Channel Islands, and more at the Hotel Alexandra than at the Sablonnerie down the road.
On Halloween and nights like that, he says, the Devil used to ride across the Coupee in a big black coffin, and the witches used to fly over from Guernsey on their broomsticks and dance on the beach with no clothes on. He’s not sure if they still do it, but he thinks if they don’t, it’s because of television.
Edward Malvoisin and Clemmie started ragging each other about it, with him saying that witches were all rot and her saying they weren’t and her betting him he wouldn’t dare walk across the Coupee at midnight and him betting her he would.
Darkside came back from the dead enough to say we hadn’t come all this way at great trouble and expense, etc., to talk a lot of nonsense about witches. Ardmore said if we could get in touch with the ghost of the settlor and ask it what to do with the trust fund, that would solve all our problems. When Darkside worked out this was a joke he decided to feel sick again and not be well enough to go on for quite a long time.
So that’s how we didn’t get to Philip Alexandre’s place until nearly midday. It’s really just a farmhouse, but he’s added a few extra bathrooms and a cocktail bar and calls it the Hotel Alexandra.
The bar was looking a good bit more stylish than it would normally have done on account of having Gabrielle in it, sitting on a high stool and drinking champagne — it’s funny how seeing Gabrielle in a place makes it feel all sort of Parisian. The chap behind the bar, doing a lot less for the decor, was Philip Alexandre himself — he’s a skinny old chap who looks as if he’d been pickled in walnut juice for about a hundred years, but quite genial when you get to know him. They were chatting away together in that funny kind of Frogspeak people talk here and didn’t seem to have been missing us at all.
Plan A had been to have the board meeting and then a spot of lunch and be driven back in time to catch the 3:30 boat to Guernsey. I thought at first we might still manage it that way, as long as people didn’t talk too much at the board meeting, but that was before they told me that they had to get through 126 other board meetings as well as the Daffodil one.
One two six, just in case you think I’ve mistyped it. That’s because Patrick and Gabrielle have set up Sark resident companies for 126 different clients and they all have to prove that this is where the board of directors take their decisions.
Plan B was skipping lunch, proposed by Darkside and not finding a seconder.
Plan C was to have lunch first, then the board meetings, and then drive back in time for the 5:30 boat to Guernsey. It worked pretty well, up to a point — I mean, it was a jolly good lunch.
They didn’t need me for the first 126 board meetings, so I went and sat in the garden and read a book. There’s a stack of old novels in the dining room by a chap called John Oxenham, and I borrowed one called Perilous Lovers.
It’s all about Sark in the old days, when there wasn’t anyone living here — just the witches flying over from Guernsey for the occasional orgy. The heroine’s called Clare of Belfontaine and she’s married to a frightful rotter who’s madly jealous about her and has her cast away on Sark without any clothes, absolutely not a stitch, but she makes herself a sort of skirt out of bracken. Bet you couldn’t do that.
It’s a pity our book’s not about the old days when people did things like that — it would make it a lot easier to put in exciting bits. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about it, and what I think we need is some sort of extra interest for Carruthers on the romantic side. I mean, it’s all right him fancying Eliane in a way, and marrying her after she turns out to be an heiress, because we want to have a happy ending. But the way I see it is that under all the suavity and daredevil charm, he’s a tremendously sensitive sort of chap who thinks pretty deeply about things, and I don’t see Eliane as the kind of bird who’s going to appreciate that side of him.
So what I thought was that there ought to be some other bird that he’s got a tremendous thing about on a sort of spiritual level, and it can’t ever come to anything because she’s married or something, but deep down she’s the only person who really understands him. She’d be quite a lot older than him, but sort of ageless and a bit mysterious, like the Moaning Lizzie — not miserable, though, a frightfully good sport, and laughing a lot at things.
Where was I? Oh yes, waiting to go on in my big scene as Counsel advising on the Daffodil problem. Which when it came didn’t exactly go like a breeze, because what I told them was that if they couldn’t exercise their discretion the way the settlor wanted them to, and they wouldn’t exercise it any other way, the descendants of the Palgrave chap were going to scoop the jackpot, so they’d better start finding out who they were.
I knew they wouldn’t like it and they didn’t. They were still arguing the toss about it when someone noticed it was quarter to five and time we were on our way back to the harbour. So we looked round for Albert and the carriage and there they weren’t. He’d taken someone to catch the 3:30 boat and not been seen since — it turned out he’d stopped for a swift one at the Bel Air Tavern and forgotten to start again. I suppose we might still have made it to the harbour on time if we’d run all the way, but it wasn’t an idea that anyone seemed keen on.
So here we are for the night, and no way of getting a plane to London before tomorrow evening. Like I said, absolutely not my fault and hard luck on West London County Court.
Looking on the bright side, it means I can go on reading this book about Claire of Belfontaine. I’ve just got to the bit where the chap she really fancies gets cast away on Sark as well. Her husband’s fixed it all on purpose so that they’ll die in a state of sin — people had jolly funny ideas in the old days, didn’t they? — but they’ve decided to scupper him by being all chaste and noble and not getting up to anything. So I don’t really want to leave until I find out what happens.
If I don’t make it back to London by tomorrow night, tell Henry the witches have got me. There’s a cottage here that used to belong to a bird called Rachel Alexandre, who was burned as a witch in 1600 and something — Philip’s frightfully proud of her. It’s got three bedrooms, and of course Gabrielle and Clemmie bagged two of them as soon as they knew we were staying overnight, so I thought I’d better grab the third with a view to keeping an eye on them. No sign of any chaps from the Revenue lurking in the bushes, though.
Over and out — Cantrip
“Poor Mr. Cantrip,” said Lilian, turning her wineglass between anxious fingers. “I hope he’ll be all right.”
“I can see,” said Ragwort, “no reason why he should not be. From the point of view of his own pleasure and convenience, he seems to have arranged things admirably. It is not his plans for tomorrow, for example, which are to be disrupted by an unexpected excursion to West London County Court. Why should he not be all right?”
“I was in Miss Derwent’s office this morning,” said Lilian. “To arrange about collecting my books — you know, the ones my uncle left me that Mr. Cantrip was so kind about. The girls there think there’s something — I don’t know, something unlucky about this case that Mr. Cantrip’s working on. It’s the same one Mr. Grynne was dealing with last year when — when he died. They say it was awfully unexpected.”
“No doubt it was,” said Selena. “One could hardly expect his doctor to have diagnosed a tendency to accidental drowning.”
“Of course,” said Julia absentmindedly, “if it happened to be Halloween, we might have worried about Cantrip being carried off by witches. The more so since he has comprehensively disregarded my advice to avoid girls, women, and crones — these repeated encounters of his with elderly ladies in black shawls would have, at that season, a most sinister aspect. Fortunately, however, it is some months away.”
“But surely,” said Ragwort, with an expression of some surprise, “it is not only at Halloween that the powers of darkness are particularly to be feared? There is at least one other occasion in the year when the witches of Europe climb on their broomsticks and fly across the mountains to gather in their accustomed meeting places. Have you not observed the date and its significance?”
“It’s the thirtieth of April,” said Selena. “Which means that the courts begin sitting again tomorrow.”
“It is indeed the thirtieth of April,” said Ragwort. “Which means that tonight is Walpurgis Night.”
Nurtured as I have been in a sceptical tradition, I am disinclined to believe in witchcraft. No other reason having occurred to me for Cantrip to remain longer in the Channel Islands, I was surprised, on encountering my friends in the coffeehouse on the following morning, to find Julia in possession of yet a further telex from him.
TELEX CANTRIP TO LARWOOD TRANSMITTED SARK 8:00 A.M. TUESDAY 1ST MAY
Phew — if Henry complains about being one suave Chancery junior short of strength, tell him that after last night he’s jolly lucky it’s not permanent.
Look here, Larwood, what I want to know is why birds nowadays aren’t like they used to be in the old days. Yielding is what birds were in the old days, and what I specially like about birds being yielding is that they can’t start being it till they’ve got something to yield to, viz they jolly well wait to be asked.
You remember this book I told you about, the one where this bird and this chap are stuck on Sark with no clothes on being all chaste and noble? Well, there’s a bit where the chap feels tempted by his baser nature, and he goes striding off into the storm until he conquers it, and in some ways you can see it’s pretty sickening for him. On the other hand, when he isn’t being tempted by his baser nature, he doesn’t have to worry about the bird not bothering to conquer hers and dragging him off into the bracken and telling him to get on with it. That’s because it’s all happening in the old days, and you can’t help thinking that in some ways it must have been jolly restful.
The thing that gets me, looking back on last night, is that there was actually a stage when I was quite looking forward to getting a solid eight hours of health-giving zizz. Which just goes to show how right all those chaps are who say what a waste of time it is expecting things to turn out the way you expect them to, because they never do.
We’d all adjourned to the bar for a swift one after dinner, but Gabrielle drank hers quite fast and said she felt like an early night. She’d been a bit edgy all evening, because on the way over from the cottage before dinner she’d thought she’d spotted someone prowling about at the far end of the garden. She wasn’t sure — she’d only seen him for a second or two and it was getting dark — and she pretended it didn’t worry her, but I could see it did.
I wouldn’t have let her walk back on her own, even if there hadn’t been anyone prowling. It’s not far from the farmhouse to the cottage, but it was pretty dark and a bit spooky. The weather had changed while we were having dinner and the moon kept getting covered up with clouds and the wind was making a sort of wailing noise in the telegraph wires.
So I said I’d quite like to turn in early as well, and then Clemmie said she would, too, and we all walked back to the cottage together. We left Patrick Ardmore and Edward Malvoisin drinking whiskey and playing darts, and Darkside drinking barley water and looking disapproving.
Right then — at ten-thirty there I am respectably tucked up in bed, just meaning to read another chapter of this book before I go to sleep, when there’s a knock on the door and Clemmie waltzes in, wearing a pink thing with a lot of frills and saying “Well, how about it?” or words to the like effect.
I know what Ragwort says you ought to do when your instructing solicitor makes a pass at you — adopt an attitude of dignified remonstrance is what he says, viz make a long speech about the traditions of the English Bar and tell her there’s nothing doing. Well, it’s all very well him saying that. If a bird makes a pass at you and you turn it down, either she takes it personally and gets miffed or she doesn’t take it personally and thinks you’re a dead loss, and either way it doesn’t do a lot for the chances of her sending you another brief.
Another thing that cramped my style for remon-stering was that she kept shushing me, because Gabrielle was in the room next door and Clemmie didn’t want her to hear us. It’s jolly difficult to make a speech about the dignity of the English Bar if you’ve got to do it in a whisper.
And then all the lights went out. I suppose we were on course for putting the light out anyway, but it’s one thing putting it out on purpose and knowing you can put it on again and another suddenly finding it’s pitch dark and knowing you can’t.
It looked as if all the lights in the cottage had gone, and I didn’t think it would be much fun for Gabrielle to be all on her own in the dark, worrying about the Revenue chaps prowling round in the garden. So I whispered a few soothing things to Clemmie and pootled out onto the landing in my pyjamas to do the heroic and chivalrous bit, viz call out to Gabrielle to sit tight and not worry while I went and looked for the fuse box.
I don’t actually know why I’m supposed to be any better at finding the fuse box than anyone else, but most birds seem to think nowadays that there are two things chaps are useful for and the other one’s mending the electricity. Which just goes to show that Gabrielle isn’t like most birds nowadays, because she said I mustn’t bother about it and she’d be all right until morning, and I said was she sure and she said absolutely.
So I pootled back, bumping into a lot of furniture that hadn’t been there when the lights were on, and by the time I got to my bed again Clemmie’d sort of settled down in it. After that she wouldn’t let me say anything, not even in a whisper, and I couldn’t remonster any more at all.
I think Clemmie’s one of those birds that get more enthusiastic in bad weather, because the weather outside got worse and worse, with the wind howling round the chimney as if it was trying to get a part in a horror picture, and the worse it got, the more enthusiastic she was.
It was quite lucky really that she wouldn’t let me say anything. She was wearing one of those rather nice kinds of scent that smell like cinnamon toast, and what with that and all the enthusiasm, I started feeling like saying things I’d have felt a frightful ass about afterwards, specially with a sensible sort of bird like Clemmie that I’ve been mates with for years.
When the racket started outside I didn’t really feel much like going to investigate. It’s a bit difficult to explain what kind of racket it was — it was like all the kinds of racket you can think of, all happening at the same time. There was a noise like horses galloping and a noise like roofs falling in and a noise like a lot of people yelling at each other, and the wind decided to put in an extra effort in the special effects department.
The first thing I thought was that the Third World War had broken out and there wasn’t a lot I could do about it. The second thing I thought was that the Alexandra wasn’t a terribly likely place for anyone to start a world war, but it was a jolly likely place for the Revenue to make a raid on — you know, the way they did on those Rossminster chaps a few years ago. I know they’re not supposed to go around making raids on people outside the jurisdiction, but after what Clemmie and Gabrielle had been telling me I didn’t think they’d worry about a little technicality like that.
I still didn’t feel much like getting out of bed, but I couldn’t help feeling that Clemmie and me were going to look pretty silly if we were just lying there being cosy while our clients were being rounded up and interrogated in their nightclothes and having their documents seized. I got this across to her as well as I could in whispers and got up and strode out into the night.
Well, I didn’t stride exactly, because I couldn’t find the bottom bit of my pyjamas and I’d had to wrap myself up in a blanket, and when you’re trying to get down the stairs in the pitch dark with a blanket wrapped round you in a cottage you haven’t been in before you don’t exactly stride, but in the end I made it to the front door.
It wasn’t as dark as it had been indoors — there was a light on in the farmhouse, and the moon came out just as I got outside. I still couldn’t make out what was going on, though — just that there seemed to be a lot of it, with more horsey noises and people shouting at each other in English and local Frogspeak. So I stood on the doorstep and called out, “I say, what’s going on here?” trying to sound sort of dignified and masterful.
Just after that there was the most ghastly scream I’d ever heard, partly a sort of shriek and partly a sort of groan, like someone waking up unexpectedly in a graveyard.
Then something hardish and heavyish went whizzing past my ear and smashed against the wall behind me, and the message seemed to be that someone was trying to kill me.
Well, what they said afterwards was that it was just a misunderstanding and they were frightfully sorry. What I said was that if Albert’s aim had been an inch or two better, they’d have been in a pretty permanent minus-Cantrip situation and sorry would have buttered jolly few parsnips, so the explanation had better be good.
Albert’s story was that he’d stayed a bit longer than he ought to at the Bel Air Tavern. Well, I knew that, because that’s why we missed the 5:30 boat, but he seems to have thought that after that he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb and make an evening of it. So he’d stayed on there until nearly midnight, and by the time he started for home he wasn’t what you’d call sober — more what you’d call sloshed as a newt.
The horse knew the way pretty well, though, and between the two of them they were getting on all right until they got to the Coupee. They’d just started across when Albert got a major attack of the heebie-jeebies — he can’t describe it properly, he says, but he felt a sort of prickling at the back of his neck and remembered about all the ghosts and witches and decided that one way or another this was the place where he most didn’t want to be.
Once you’ve started driving a carriage across the Coupee there’s no way you can turn round, so he thought the best idea was just to get to the other side as fast as possible. He says the horse felt the same way about it. Silly of them really, because in the dark and with a gale-force wind blowing, they’d have done better to take k slow and steady. But they didn’t see it that way at the time, and they hurtled across as if the Devil was after them, which actually Albert seems to have thought he was.
You could say they were lucky in a way. They’d just about made it back to Little Sark when one of the wheels hit a stone and the carriage went over on its side — if it had happened ten yards sooner, they’d have gone over the cliff on one side or the other and that would have been curtains for both of them.
Albert was thrown out into the road, but not badly hurt, and he managed to pick himself up and get the horse free of its harness without too much trouble. Then something made him look round, and he saw the woman in white standing there a few yards away from him.
It seems that women in white are pretty bad news in the Channel Islands. I can’t make out exactly what they’re meant to be, or what they’re meant to do if they catch you, but the general idea is that you don’t want to see them at all, and if you do you get out fast.
So Albert didn’t stop to say “Good evening” or anything, he just scrambled up on the horse and headed full tilt for the Alexandra, not daring to look behind him in case he saw the woman again.
He was too scared to ride all the way round to the stables. He just headed straight for the wall and jumped it, landing on sundry potting sheds and hen coops, etc, — jolly lucky the horse didn’t hurt itself. Philip Alexandre came out and started yelling at him, but he didn’t much mind about that as long as he’d got away from the woman in white.
Then the moon came out and he saw her again, standing there in her white robes in the doorway of the Witch’s Cottage and calling out to him in a hollow voice.
Well, what I said was that even if he didn’t have the sense to tell the difference between a ghost and a Chancery junior wrapped in a blanket, he might at least have had the sense to know that if I was a ghost, chucking bricks at me wouldn’t have done him any good, because they’d just have gone straight through.
Albert said he knew that really, but he’d lived a sinful life and couldn’t remember any prayers, so bricks were the best he could do. He’s not going to be sinful any more, he says — he’s going to give up booze and go to church every Sunday, so that the woman in white won’t come after him again.
Serves him right, because the upshot of all these shenanigans is that the Coupee’s blocked at this end. I went to have a look first thing this morning and there’s no way you can get round the carriage or over it without risking breaking your neck. Philip Alexandre reckons it’ll take a couple of hours to move it, and until then Little Sark’s completely cut off from everywhere else.
Clemmie’d gone back to her room by the time I got to bed again, and I haven’t seen her yet this morning. I haven’t seen any of the rest of the gang either. There’s no way we’re going to get the first boat over to Guernsey, so I suppose they’ve all decided they might as well stay in bed.
We still ought to catch the evening plane all right, but life among the tax planners being what it is, don’t let Henry count any chickens.
Over and out — Cantrip
The news that Cantrip had survived Walpurgis Night, gratifying as it was, caused us no great astonishment: we did not know how grave had been his danger, or that not all his companions had been so fortunate.