William watched him squint away at the Narbondo picture, and tried to guess his age. It was impossible to say. In a dimly lit room Ashbless could pass for seventy. His wild, voluminous hair, although snow white, gave him a hearty and slightly youthful and fit look. But in the sunlight, when the cracks of his face weren’t obscured by vague and timid illumination, he looked older, peculiarly older. He could have been ninety. A monumental ninety, to be sure. William was reminded of Tennyson, who, supposedly, carried horses around on his back to demonstrate his might. Aware of the stigma of being a poet, perhaps. And that bothered him about Ashbless too. Poets always struck William as being close cousins to actors, strutting about, immersed in themselves, in their own pretensions to seriousness and insight.
There was more to Ashbless than that, but William couldn’t quite pin it down. He decided to bait him, just for sport. “I’ve been reading some of the poetry of your ancestor,” he said, knowing that any hint at the falsity or assumption of Ashbless’ name would mortify the poet.
Ashbless didn’t respond.
“Very good stuff,” William continued, happy with himself. “It’s not at all difficult to see his influence on your own poetry. Clear as a bell, I’d say. You’ve done some elegant things with his themes.”
“I feel a spiritual affinity to him,” Ashbless murmured, pretending to be more concerned with Narbondo’s Gilled Beasts than with discussions of his poetry.
William nodded grandly, as if he understood clearly what Ashbless meant, “like spirit writing?” he asked. “Automatic writing? That sort of thing? No wonder you’ve got such a vivid understanding of the Romantic age.”
“I don’t believe in spirit writing. My knowledge of the Romantic age is a product of unbelievably intense study. Do either of you know how long the Peach family has lived in the manor at Windermere?”
He’s showing off, thought William. “I haven’t a clue.
Didn’t Basil Peach’s father buy it after the war when money went to bits there? Some old family was taxed out of it, I don’t doubt.”
“Actually,” said Ashbless, acting genuinely puzzled, as if he were beginning to grasp the tangled threads of a dark and webby secret, “they’ve been there for ten centuries, maybe longer. And if my memory serves me well, Peach and Narbondo — Ignacio Narbondo, that is — were acquaintances. The doctor had a scientific interest in Peach — you follow my meaning here?”
“Oh quite, quite.” William put down his pipe and stood up. “Your knowledge is astonishingly vast.”
“Not half vast enough,” said Ashbless cryptically, shoving the photo into his coat pocket.
William turned to his brother-in-law who had lost himself in the Sargasso Sea account. “By the way, Edward, speaking of Giles Peach, what news on your conversation with Velma?”
Edward livened up instantly. Ashbless picked up the abandoned volume and thumbed through it. “I spoke to her early this morning,” said Edward. “She was leaving for the bakery just as Russel and I were pulling out for Gaviota. I had a good talk with her. Warned her against Frosticos. It seems that Giles was taken with some sort of fit. Respiratory trouble, from the sound of it. That and dehydration. It was nip and tuck, apparently. Basil used to have the same problem. And get this: Frosticos was his doctor twenty years ago. So Velma called Frosticos. She doesn’t like him a bit, she said, but he came to mind right off. That poor woman has had her share of troubles. There’s no denying that.”
William eyed Ashbless, fairly sure that the poet was only pretending interest in his volume — that he was watching Edward out of the corner of his eye.
Edward continued: “She seemed to think that Frosticos first appeared back in the pre-Arctic days, when Basil and Pinion were thick. So I managed to suggest that Pinion and Frosticos were quite likely fast friends. That set her off. She apparently can’t abide Pinion, who she says had been hounding Giles to help him in some crackpot scheme, to develop the digger, actually. She’s afraid Giles has been influenced. Anyway, she called Frosticos this morning and wrote him off. Told him to send his bill, that Giles had recovered. So that’s that.”
The multiple mentions of Frosticos had a dampening effect on William’s enthusiasm. He thought darkly about the suggested Frosticos-Pinion connection, about the dead Oscar Pall-check, about the mysterious Dr. Narbondo, the grinning Yamoto, the pall of dim and threatening mystery that was settling around all of them. Edward continued to speak, but his words were lost on William, who stared at a dusty, torn, and out-of-date tide chart stuck to the wall with thumb tacks, depicting, below the monthly tide tables, an obese and comic octopus who winked out of the chart from beneath a sort of billed captain’s hat that said “Len’s Baithouse” across it in faintly arabesque letters.
Jim stood up abruptly, tossing The Bride of Fu Manchu onto the coffee table and hurrying out the front door. He couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t thought of it earlier. It might hot tell him a thing. But then again … On the surface of it, Oscar’s death was utter nonsense. But somewhere beneath the surface, in some dark and subterranean cavern, lurked the pale thought that the explanation was clear as crystal — simple, in a hugely strange way.
He strode along down toward Mr. Hasbro’s house, toward the little orange Metropolitan docked at the curbside. No one was about. Jim threw himself down onto the grass and peered under the car, half suspecting some sort of phenomenon, perhaps Hasbro himself, to peer back out at him. There was nothing but an entirely ordinary muffler. The words “Ajax Muffler — Whisper Quiet” were stamped into the steel shell of the thing, which had already begun to discolor from heat. There were no silver wires, no lavender and green lights, nothing at all other-worldly or fantastic about it.
Jim stood up, thinking. Velma Peach’s car was parked in the driveway across the street. He walked toward it, mulling over the idea of confronting Gill about Oscar’s death, of simply insisting that he had certain knowledge of Gill’s complicity, and then watch, like Nayland Smith, the subtle changes of expression on Gill’s face that would give him away — the brief picture that was worth, in the Oriental cliches of Fu Manchu, a thousand words.
Velma Peach dashed out of the house right then and interrupted his musings. She had a worried and wild look about her, and clutched in her hand a scrap of lined notebook paper.
“Have you seen Giles?” she asked Jim frantically.
“Not today. Yesterday morning I did.”
“He was here when I left at eight. I mean since then. Today.”
“Not me,” Jim said. “What’s wrong?”
“Where’s your uncle?” she asked, then hurried away up the street without waiting for an answer.
She rushed into the maze shed waving her shred of paper. Giles had disappeared — was kidnapped possibly. But there was a note in his handwriting. He’d gone away. His mother wasn’t to worry. He had important things to do. Vital things. He was a burden, and he was sorry. It was time for him to act. A new age was upon them. And on it went, rambling for a paragraph about the vague and unlikely grandeur that he’d gone off to seek, possibly to effect.
“He’ll be back,” said Edward.
“Give him till nightfall,” said Ashbless, laughing weakly.
But William noticed that Ashbless looked peculiar, as if something had been revealed, something he was trying desperately to hide but was about to burst with.