Malice in Wonderland Read online

  The general impression derived from this brochure was that, if you could not enjoy yourself at Wonderland, you were past praying for. And Wonderland was evidently determined to make you enjoy yourself there, even if you had to perish from a surfeit of recreation in the process. As the bus drew to a standstill outside the main building, several men and women approached it, smiling hospitably but purposefully. The men wore green sweaters with a white letter W upon them, and white flannel trousers ; the women, green jerseys and short white skirts. In a moment each of the new batch of visitors had a numbered green disc pinned on him, and they were led off in groups to the chalets where they would be sleeping.

  The Thistlethwaite family were evidently going to be near neighbours of Paul. As he trailed along behind them, he heard Sally say to her mother, in a voice—for her—strangely subdued.

  “Did you see Rip Van Winkle up there?”

  “Rip Van——? No, dear.”

  “In that copse, beside the road, just before the bus turned into the grounds. He shook his fist at me. Darling, he really did look rather awful. Just his head was showing, above a bush. He had a long grey beard. I thought it was part of the bush at first.”

  “What you need is a nice, hot drink, my love. Why, you’re trembling. You haven’t caught a chill, have you?”

  “But, Mummy, I saw him. He seemed to be looking straight into my eyes as we passed by. And he shook his fist at me.”

  “We must tell your father about it,” said Mrs. Thistlethwaite. “He’ll see that it doesn’t happen again. It was just a tramp, I expect.”

  Paul Perry, who was looking with interest at the row of chalets, green-painted and pleasantly set amidst groups of trees, only gave half an ear to this conversation. He was to be reminded of it, however, before long, and in a disagreeable manner.

  For the present, he was occupied by the sensation, part bewilderment, part timidity, which comes over any but the stoutest spirit when he is about to enter a community of unknown people, himself unknown to them. It was like the first day at a public school, thought Paul. This impression was heightened by the athletic attire of the professional hosts and hostesses, and the groups of young people who were strolling about everywhere, laughing among themselves, so plainly knowing the ropes—five hundred of them the place could accommodate, for Wonderland was the biggest, brightest, most ambitious of all the holiday camps that had sprung up over England during the last year or two.

  Paul closed the door of his chalet, and unpacked with the forlorn gloom of a new boy on the first day of term arranging his few possessions in his locker. The luxuriant Sleepeesi mattress wooing the tired reveller into the arms of Morpheus, the water (H. and C.), the electric light, hanging wardrobe and 100% damp-proof walls—all extolled in the Wonderland Ltd. brochure—failed to drive away Paul’s blues. Luxury, indeed, though he approved of it on principle provided it was put within the reach of the masses, had a certain disquieting effect upon him. He was not for nothing the son of an Evangelical minister, brought up in a harsh, poverty-stricken north-country town.

  “Mr. Perry? Good. Settling in all right?”

  The young man who had knocked at the chalet door was tall broad, and tanned a gorgeous mahogany, like an advertisement out of Esquire.

  “I’m the games organiser,” he added. “Name of Wise. My step-brother’s the resident manager.”

  “Edward Wise? The rugger blue?”

  “Yes. I used to play a bit,” said the gorgeous young man, with what seemed to Paul the most offensive false modesty.

  “You were up at Cambridge just before me, then. And your brother’s the manager? All one big, happy family here.”

  “We aim to give you a home from home, set in sylvan surroundings beside the sparkling waves. See our brochure.”

  “You’ve certainly got a nice little place here.”

  “Not too dusty. Well, I suppose you’ll be clocking in at the Reception. Eight pip-emma. Hallo,” said Mr. Wise, noticing Paul’s note-books which were piled on the chest of drawers. “You an author? I say, not so bad. Never met a live author before. Down here for local colour?”

  “Something of the sort,” replied Paul mendaciously. He was not unmoved by the evident respect which had come into the athlete’s voice. His pleasure was short-lived. Edward Wise, who had moved to the door, exclaimed:

  “Hallo, hallo, hallo! If it isn’t our Sal! Back amongst the hectic pleasure-seekers again, Sally?”

  “How are you, Teddy?”

  “Full of oats, midear, full of oats. I say, you’re in distinguished company. Celebrated author in our midst. Name of Perry. You’ll have to watch your step, midear.”

  “Perry?” Paul could hear her saying. “But that’s the man we travelled down on the train with. He said he was a scientist.”

  “Ah. Pulling your leg. Mystery man.”

  “Well, I don’t know. He’s a high-brow, anyway——”

  “Moderate the voice, Sally. The gentleman’s just down this street.”

  “I say, Teddy, talking of mystery men, have you seen an old guy with a beard a mile long in the wood up there?”

  “Beard? Oh, that must be old Ishmael. Sort of hermit idea. Quite harmless, but he doesn’t like us very much. Wasn’t in residence last time you came, I believe. He——”

  Paul could not follow the rest of this interesting conversation, for the two moved away out of earshot. The girl had quite a pleasing voice, he reflected: deep, liquid, faintly countrified in accent. Pity she had nothing in her head. Edward Wise he dismissed as the normal, hearty type: common as blackberries at Cambridge: potentially, no doubt, the Enemy—but with a little diplomacy you could get them eating out of your hand. He wondered what Wise did in the winter months when the camp was closed, and jotted down a memo. in the note-book marked Q (for Queries).

  Presently, taking off his tie and turning his shirt-collar down over his coat (“protective colouring” was the way he put it to himself), Paul wandered out to take the air before dinner. A huge figure, resplendent in white drill suit, Panama hat, and what appeared to be an M.C.C. tie, bore down upon him.

  “Salubrious air, sir,” boomed Mr. Thistlethwaite. “Putting colour in those cheeks already. May we have the honour of including you at our table, sir? Very congenial company you will find it, I venture to say. Interesting material, too, for a gentleman of the pen. Ah, yes,” he continued, silencing Paul’s protest with a roguish finger. “My daughter told me. Have no fear, sir. Like myself, you prefer to be incognito. Very natural. Very proper. A chiel amang us taking notes.”

  Paul had no very keen desire for Mr. Thistlethwaite as a permanent mess-mate during his stay at Wonderland: but the prospect of sitting down to table with a number of total strangers, though professionally suitable enough, intimidated him more than he would have cared to say. Paul Perry was still pretty new to his job. So he accepted Mr. Thistlethwaite’s offer, and together they strolled towards the great white building from which the sound of a deep gong reverberated.

  “‘The clamorous harbinger of victuals,’” quoted Mr. Thistlethwaite. “You will find the table modest, sir, but not unpalatable. They keep a very tolerable cellar. I fancy we might broach a bottle to launch our—ah—pleasure cruise.…”

  “I can’t think how they do it on £3 10s. a week,” Paul was saying twenty minutes later to his left-hand neighbour, a small, tubby, beaming man with gold-rimmed pince-nez. They had eaten through two excellent courses, and there was still Crême brulé, cheese and coffee to come.

  “Wonderful, isn’t it?” replied the small man. “Organisation, of course. Mind you, they put on specially good grub for the Saturday dinner, because newcomers generally turn up to-day. But £3 10s. inclusive of everything—all the fun of the fair, as you might say—that’s good going.” He blinked rapidly several times, then murmured to Paul out of the corner of his mouth, with an absurd air of self-importance, “Shouldn’t be surprised if they aren’t losing money over it. I’m told they’re out to knock out
Beale Bay—that’s the holiday camp farther down the coast. Competition’s pretty fierce, you can bet. If we saw the balance sheet, we’d find the Wonderland people had cut profits down to the bone, anyway.”

  “Well, that’s their look-out, isn’t it? Lowers the cost of luxury for us poor holiday-makers, so we won’t complain.”

  “What? Yes, oh yes, I see what you mean,” said the small man. He had an anxious way of listening to you, Paul noticed—head slightly on one side, eyes peering up through the pince-nez—as though what you said might contain some clue that would turn out a matter of life and death for him.

  “Mind you,” he went on, lowering his voice again, “the cheap tariff here—well, it means that you get rather a mixed crowd. At Bognor, now——”

  “Sir,” interrupted Mr. Thistlethwaite, who had overheard this sentiment, “do you suggest that the amenities of civilisation should not be open to all alike, from the highest in the land to the humblest?”

  “Oh, indeed no, I certainly didn’t. I——”

  “You will concur with me, as a” —here Mr. Thistlethwaite winked ponderously at Paul—“as a scientist, Mr. Perry, that science should benefit all equally.”

  “It would be nice if it did.”

  “Quite so. Your sentiments, Mr. Morley, were illiberal, to say the least.”

  “Now, Daddy, you mustn’t bully Albert,” said Sally. “Albert, my pet, don’t listen to him. He’s just practising speeches for when he’s a town councillor.”

  Albert Morley gave Sally a look of almost dog-like gratitude. She smiled back at him kindly. She had dark eyebrows and eyelashes, Paul noticed for the first time: they gave a certain vivacity, he admitted, to a blonde type which would otherwise be quite conventional and insipid. Catching his glance, she said to him coolly:

  “As a scientist, Mr. Perry, you must think us a very low-brow, dull lot here. Funny place for you to come for a holiday.”

  “A scientist is always on the look-out for specimens,” Paul replied, giving back her haughty gaze with interest. If she was determined to make unprovoked war on him, war she should have.

  “The back-chat king,” said Sally, turning her shoulder upon him.

  Paul looked round the tables at what Mr. Morley had called “a mixed crowd.” Young people, for the most part. From the £150 to the £300 income groups, he imagined: that could be verified later by taking a cross-section. Quite a number of older men and women, though: brought their children, no doubt: the children had a special supper at 6. Many of the girls wore evening frocks, in readiness for the dancing. Flannel suits predominated among the males: the faces, like the suits, were spruce, showy, cut to a pattern. There was no doubt that the visitors were enjoying themselves: far more animation than you would get at a seaside boarding-house, thought Paul, remembering with a shudder those boyhood holidays in grim pensions at Scarborough or Skegness.

  Two sides of this restaurant were occupied by glass windows almost from floor to ceiling: the other walls looked like unstained oak, but were probably faked pitch-pine. The chairs were imitation Spanish style, quite well padded. Flowers and electric-light standards decorated the tables, which seated anything from two to a dozen people. Some of the visitors, Paul noticed, seemed a little subdued by the unusual luxury of their surroundings: these, no doubt, were new arrivals who had never been to such a camp before. On the whole, though, it was evident that they took to what Mr. Thistlethwaite called “the amenities of civilisation” like ducks to water. He wanted to ask someone whether this short, annual brush with “the amenities” dissatisfied people with the drabness of their own homes; but he feared lest the question might bring down on his head some crushing, Johnsonian rebuke from Mr. Thistlethwaite who, under the influence of good wine and the holiday spirit, was growing more democratic every minute.

  Yes, the Wonderland Thistlethwaite was noticeably different from the fellow-traveller of a few hours ago, just as that fellow-traveller no doubt differed markedly from the tailor of Oxford. Environment conditions personality, said Paul Perry to himself: like many of his age, he had a weakness for generalisations with a scientific smack about them.

  After dinner was over, Mr. Thistlethwaite suggested that they should take the air on “the Captain’s bridge” until it was time to enter the concert hall for the Reception ceremony. Albert Morley trotted upstairs in their wake. It was he who pointed out to Paul the sights that could be seen from the balcony, which indeed commanded a superb prospect of the sea and of the coast to east and west. With a proprietary, but faintly anxious pride, as of a father introducing his children to a rich, capricious relative, Mr. Morley called Paul’s attention to the sunset, a passing freighter, an old smugglers’ cove, the section of cliff that concealed the naval port of Applestock—their nearest town.

  “I wanted to join the navy myself, when I was a nipper: but my eyesight——” said Mr. Morley, peering up into Paul’s face. “I remember my dad taking me on a steamer down the Thames. It was the August Bank Holiday of 1913—or was it 1912?—I can’t remember now. We passed the warehouses, down Limehouse way, and he told me—my dad was in the coastal trade, you see—that in the old days you could smell the spices in the warehouses right across the river. From the East, they brought them. I fancied to myself I could smell them even then. Of course, I’d wanted to be a sailor long before that, but it brought it home, somehow. I went into a shipping office. It was the next best thing, if you take my meaning.”

  Mr. Morley broke off, blushing a little. Oh, hell, thought Paul. Am I going to have this little bore attached to me for the duration? He was embarrassed by this disclosure of Albert Morley’s fantasy-life, and ashamed of his embarrassment.

  “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to a section of the balcony that was shut off from the rest by a glass partition.

  “That’s Captain Wise’s private end of the bridge. Captain Mortimer Wise. He’s the resident manager. You’ll be seeing him shortly in the concert hall, when he receives the guests. A very pleasant-spoken gentleman. Wonderful organiser.”

  The resident manager. I could get a good deal of the information I want from him, thought Paul: if he’s not too busy. Should I take him into my confidence at the start? Better wait and see what he’s like.

  “Time to be going below,” said Mr. Thistlethwaite, who had been standing a little apart from them on the bridge, breathing stertorously, and waving his arms in strange gestures like a lunatic signaller. “The ozone here, sir, is incomparable,” he explained. “‘Mens sana in corpore sano,’ as the Latin poet has it.”

  The concert hall was already, almost full. Although this was ostensibly a reception for the new-comers, everyone was going—as Edward Wise had phrased it—to clock in. The Wonderlanders were evidently a gregarious lot. This pleased Paul, who on principle approved of mass movements, and could quote chapter and verse from certain modern authors to condemn the detached, the solitary, the bird-watcher, the secret vice of romantic isolation.

  “Holds five hundred, this hall does,” whispered Albert Morley with timid pride. “You wait till the fun starts. That young Mr. Wise—he’s a card.”

  Paul began to feel a trifle apprehensive. Wait till the fun starts. It sounded ominously like the initiation ceremony of a savage tribe. Not that one didn’t approve of Malinowski, and all that.

  The green-and-white-clad officials of the camp now filed on to the platform amid applause, and took their seats on a crescent of chairs. The staff at prize-giving, talking among themselves, elaborately unconscious of those in the body of the hall. Now it’s the cue for the headmaster to appear. Louder applause. Captain Wise, carrying a sheaf of papers, came to the front of the platform. Considerably older than his step-brother. Smaller. The same square shape of head. The professional look, worried but infinitely capable, of the organiser. No nonsense about him.

  “I won’t keep you long,” he said. “We welcome you to Wonderland. We hope you’ll all have a good time. My assistants and I are here to make sure that you
have it. You’ll find a time-table of the week’s activities on the notice board in the entrance hall. I’m sure you’ll all find something to your taste there. But don’t think you’ve got to go in for any of these competitions and things if you don’t want to. We have no compulsory games at Wonderland.” (Mild applause: the public school reference is slightly above their heads, thought Paul.)

  “We try to have a minimum of rules. We rely on your cooperation, and you’ve never let us down. The chief of them is, no noise in the camp after 1 a.m. The ladies need their beauty sleep.” (Laughter and protests.) “And, of course, no rowdiness. Our expert gang of chuckers-out——” (Captain Wise indicated the row of officials behind him: cheers and laughter: he’s a good psychologist, thought Paul—knows how to jolly them along, without being false-hearty.) “If you’ve any complaints, great or small, any suggestions for improving the place, bring ’em to me or one of the staff. We’re always on tap. And don’t forget to book early for next year’s visit: we’ve had to turn away over two hundred applications this summer. Well, I’ll hand you over now to the tender mercies of the games organiser. Teddy, step forward. Cheerio, everybody.”

  Edward Wise took the floor. There was a perceptible stir among the female section of the audience.

  “Hi-ya, boys and girls,” he cried.

  “Hi-ya, Teddy,” the cry went back.

  “Before we have a spot of community singing, let’s loosen up on the old war-cry. Won-der-land, hi-yi-yi. Gently at first. Gently does it. Let her go.”