Appleby on Ararat by Michael Innes

advancing all the paraphernalia of the dance, locked in the magic sound-track of a disk. A worn disk, rightly wailing that it wasn’t so young any more, mournfully asserting the thousand miles of its travels, gallantly announcing its intention of hanging its hat on the Bam-bam-bammy shore.
    And I ain’t so young any more…
     
    The music was suddenly vibrant as round the curve of the further reef shot a long white motor-launch. It held a little crowd of people in topees, sun-glasses, skimpy bathers and purposively designed beach suits.
    “The hotel, you know,” said Hailstone. He spoke with what was almost haste. “They are combining your rescue with a little expedition – fishing, and so on. Curious, too, no doubt. Not in very good taste, perhaps; but there you are.”
    The launch turned on the water with a flash of scrubbed paint and burnished brass, turned again as if keeping time to the thrumming tune. At the helm, an indeterminate but commanding figure – Appleby had a glimpse, beggaring description, of flowing skirts and a beard – called an order; the engine faltered and stopped; the bathers and beach suits uncurled, straightened, bent and coiled again as if deliberately adorning the scene with a slow, plastic voluptuousness; at the prow a businesslike sailor appeared with a boat-hook; the music rose and hit the sense with a final blare and cry; in sudden silence the launch and its company glided across the inner lagoon. And in golden letters on the side Appleby could read the words:
    Heaven’s Hermitage Hotel.

 
     
10
    “Is everything,” asked Appleby, “as out of date as their dance tunes?”
    Hailstone shook his head. “The hotel is very insistent that it offers confort moderne . But Mrs Heaven – the woman in the stern there – is something of an artist in her way. She thinks that the establishment should preserve as much of the atmosphere of the later twenties as it can. The thirties give the feeling, I suppose, of being too near the Deluge… George, mind your manners.”
    George was backing slowly up the beach, as if a sea on which there floated Mrs Heaven’s launch was not one in which he would care to wet his paws. Now he paused, a dog learned and aloof, and viewed the scene with austere distaste, like an ancient satirist contemplating the Ship of Fools. From the launch someone was tactlessly whistling the rapid and monotonous whistle with which common dogs are summoned. George turned round and lay down with his behind presented to the offensive scene.
    “Of course,” continued Hailstone, “I must stop and introduce you. Not that I know any of those people very well. I believe they are known as the Younger Crush. Now they’ve got out their little gangway. Yes, the woman in front is Miss Busst, the leader of the Younger Crush.”
    “The fat woman who seems to have rheumatism?” asked Appleby.
    “Yes. And the bald man behind is Mr Rumsby, the most prominent of the Younger Crush men. They are just handing him his stick. His sister, Mrs Sadgrove, is not there. She counts as a Younger Matron, I believe – but now seldom leaves her bed. There is Sir Mervyn Poulish; I am told he was at one time prominent in the City but has been in close retirement for years. Indeed, all these people are seekers of retirement, I suppose. But I do rather wish they hadn’t sought it on my island. It makes the servant problem difficult for one thing. If only the natives were as violent as you appear to believe we might get them to chase Heaven’s whole angelic circle away.” And Hailstone gave something between a chuckle and a sigh.
    “They appear,” said Appleby, watching the party now approaching along the beach, “to be rather old for their roles.”
    “It’s like the people on a cruise – have you noticed?” Hailstone cocked up his blue-spectacled face with sudden scientific incisiveness. “Go for a cruise and you get a glimpse of the western world forty years on. No young people worth speaking