They spent a few days at Brighton, then moved on to Southbourne. It was Daisy’s idea to go there: she had a vivid memory of a picture postcard which her aunt had sent her from Southbourne many years ago. It was now the first week of October, and they found lodgings without any difficulty. Making amends for that dismal summer, the sun shone day-long, day after day. In a trance of quiet happiness, Daisy sat with Hugo on the esplanade, looking out over the great half-moon of the bay, the golden sands, the long pier pointing towards the horizon. She imagined her child playing amongst those children on the shore one day: they would come here again, they would come every year when Hugo got his annual holidays. The Town Hall clock calmly chimed their hours away: a freshness of autumn and the sea mingled with the smell of asphalt drawn out by the sun’s heat. It was all such worlds away from the greasy squalor of those London back-streets, Daisy felt she had slid from one dream into another.
Some evenings they would stroll along to the harbour, whose narrow waterway ran deep into the town under two bridges, then broadened to a lagoon. Rusting hulks reclined groggily on the mud: there were yachts and paddle-steamers laid up for the winter, and on the lagoon itself a sprinkling of small boats rode at their moorings. The little streets leading from the harbour offered a number of snug small pubs, patronised by longshoremen, the crews of rescue tugs, liberty men from the naval harbour which lay on the far side of the headland, sailors off the Channel steamers.
“It’s romantic,” sighed Daisy, leaning on Hugo’s arm as they watched the lights of the night steamer recede towards the harbour mouth. “I’d like Thomas to be a sailor.”
“Suppose it’s a she?” Hugo teased her. “I don’t fancy having a stewardess in the family.”
“Well, she could be an air hostess. Flying all over the world. Must be a wonderful job.”
“Why not marry her to a millionaire? Then she could have her own aeroplane.”
“Silly! If she could marry a man just like you—that’s all I’d ask.”
They turned into one of the little pubs near the quayside, and Hugo ordered Hollands for them both. The bar was divided up into snugs by high-backed settles, as in an old-fashioned restaurant. Woodwork and brass shone like a naval pinnace’s. The bar was already fairly crowded, but most of the company were regulars, playing dominoes, talking quietly and intermittently, so that Daisy was able to hear a conversation taking place behind the settle where she and Hugo had established themselves.
“… Don’t give me Princess. You want to know what I think? I’ll tell you then. She’s a spy.”
“If she’s a spy, you’re Marilyn Monroe.”
“What she come to roost for in a dead-alive hole like Southbourne then? If she’s a bona-fide resident, why does she hang about the pubs this end of town?”
“All right, you tell us.”
“I’m telling you. Because it’s handy to the naval harbour see, and the Navy lads talk when they’re in these pubs. She come from Roumania, didn’t she, and Roumania’s Red, isn’t it? Trouble with you, matey, you couldn’t recognise a hammer and sickle if little old Malenkov walked in and stuck it under your nose.”
“Wait a minute. Look. Spies don’t make themselves conspicuous. They don’t want anyone to notice them. Now the Princess—well, I ask you! Those hats she wears, and talking in broken English, and—”
“Double bluff. Where does she get her money from, then? You answer me that. You know what the rent of those houses in Queen’s Parade is? Well I do. Here’s a woman who’s supposed to have escaped just in time from the revolution over there—a refugee—the Commies take over her family estates. Why isn’t she broke, like any other D.P.?”
“I can answer that one.” It was a third voice, mellow with liquor and authoritative. “She got out with the family jewels. Worth a king’s ransom. The Popescus were one of the wealthiest—”
“You seen these jewels?” broke in the first speaker sceptically.
“No, but my niece Alice did. She was working for the Princess. The old girl took a fancy to Alice, and showed them her one day. That was some years ago, mind you. She must have popped a few of ’em by now. But she told Alice they’d last her out her time all right.”
Daisy stole a glance at Hugo. He was sitting quite still, gazing into his glass of Hollands. She put out a hand, in what might have been a restraining gesture; and when Hugo felt it on his wrist, he started.
“Want to go, love?” he said.
The girl shook her head. Hugo gazed at her more attentively. Then he whispered:
“Don’t you worry. That’s all over and done with now….”
The next evening, Daisy was not feeling so well. She decided to go to bed early, and Hugo went out for a drink alone. He returned, an hour or so later, in high excitement. At the bar of the Queen’s Hotel, he told her, he had met an old acquaintance, a trainer, who had a horse running in the local races tomorrow—an outsider which simply could not lose: it was a red-hot tip.
“And, do you know, love, it’s called Autumn Daisy! If ever there was a sign from heaven! Shall we have a real splash on it?”
“Oh, darling, you know we haven’t much money.”
“But the odds, my pet. Twenty to one. Think of it. Come on, say yes.”
She could never refuse him when he was in this boyish, extravagant mood, for it filled her with his own recklessness. She was a little dashed, the following morning, to find that he did not intend to take her, but was quickly comforted when he said:
“No, love. You get a rough crowd at these local meetings. Too much bumping and boring—might be bad for young Thomas.”
She sat out on the sea-front all that afternoon, making clothes for the baby, sunning herself, and basking in the thought of Hugo enjoying himself: it was good for him to get away from her now and then.
So, when Hugo got back to their lodgings that evening, the sight of his face, tight and haunted, was all the more of a shock.
“What’s the matter, love?”
“The bloody brute fell down on me,” he flung out. “Beaten by a head. I could kill myself.”
“Never mind, precious, it’s only a horse.”
“A horse? A God-blasted, spavined cripple. It had the race in the bag, and then—”
“How much did you put on it?”
Hugo’s expression changed, from black rage to a kind of childish mutinous guilt. Looking away from her, he sullenly muttered:
“Fifty quid.”
“But where did you get fifty—?”
“You agreed we should have a real splash, put our shirt on it.”
“Oh, Hugo! You didn’t take the money I was keeping for the baby?”
“Yes I did take the money we were keeping for the baby!” he exclaimed furiously. “Where the hell else would I get fifty pounds?”
It was her heartbroken tones, Daisy knew, which had stung him into this cruel violence. What Jacko had said once—“you must accept him for better and for worse”—came into her mind, and she made a superhuman effort to conceal the grief, resentment, dismay which she felt.
“Never mind, darling. We’ll manage,” she said at last.
“I am to be forgiven?”
Daisy fought down her temper, which had risen at the sneer behind these words. She spoke quietly:
“There’s nothing to forgive, my sweetheart. It was your money.”
At once, with an impetuous movement, he was beside her.
“Oh, Daisy, Daisy, I’m sorry, I am sorry! I’m utterly worthless. I even have to steal from my own wife and child.”
Her heart lifted, hearing him call her “wife,” and she began to soothe him. She hated his self-pitying mood, anyway—hated, or feared, anything he did to humiliate himself. But he went on brokenly:
“I did it for young Thomas, for you both. It would have given him a proper start in life. And it was a certainty—an absolute certainty. It’d have won us £1000, given me time to look around for a decent job. You could have had a nurse for the baby. And
now I go and muck everything up!”
“Darling, please don’t. We can—”
“I’ll make it up to you, I swear I will. I’ll get that money back somehow.”
“Yes, love, of course you will. It’ll be all right, I promise you.”
The next morning Hugo went out early. When he returned, he told her he had found cheaper lodgings nearby. He was determined that she should not miss the last few days of her holiday. As Hugo paid the landlady, Daisy heard him say they had been called back to London suddenly. “Well, I couldn’t very well tell her we were moving to other lodgings in Southbourne, could I? She’d have been dreadfully offended,” Hugo explained when Daisy commented on this later. The new lodgings were five minutes’ walk away. When they arrived, Hugo registered them as Mr. and Mrs. Bland: he had often used Daisy’s maiden name like this, and she thought no more about it.
The scene of the previous night had taxed the girl more severely than she realised, so she was quite amenable to Hugo’s suggestion that she should lie down and rest after lunch. He himself went out, not returning till the late afternoon. They had high tea together. Then Hugo asked her, if she felt better, to come out for a blow with him. He changed into his dark green tweed suit, put on a cap she had bought him in Brighton, and tucking a brown-paper parcel under his arm, led Daisy out of the house. He was very gentle with her, but subdued and withdrawn—which Daisy put down to the shame he felt at having lost them the £50. But she herself was still too numbed by that bitter blow to react with her usual sensitivity.
They sat down in a shelter on the esplanade. Hugo clung to her side, yet his mind did not seem with her. Presently, as if by a hard physical effort, he detached his arm from hers.
“Wait for me here,” he said abruptly. “I shan’t be very long.”
He flipped his hand at her, unsmiling, and walked away into the dark, walking with that limber, self-contained gait which always made him look alone, even in a crowd. “Come back, Hugo!” To Daisy it sounded like a scream, but she had only whispered the words, and he did not even glance back.
The girl was used to these comings and goings of Hugo’s, sudden and unexplained; but this evening it felt different. Her eye lit upon the brown-paper parcel. Had Hugo left it behind by mistake? She would have run after him with it, but he was already out of sight and she did not know where he had gone. The Town Hall clock chimed a quarter—7.15. Daisy opened the parcel. It contained a length of rope, about twenty feet, with a hook at one end. She gazed at it in a stupor. Her first thought—she almost smiled at the absurdity of it—was that Hugo had gone off to hang himself and forgotten to take the rope. But it could be used for burglary too. Her mind filled with vague misgivings. Carefully she did up the parcel again, then pushed it behind her as if to conceal from herself the riddle it contained.
The incoming tide crept up, a splash of sea upon the pebbled beach below, then the hoarse, bronchial, rattling sound, as of wounded lungs gasping hard for air, when a wave drew back, dragging at the stones. From time to time, strollers went past; but Daisy, wrapped up in her own foreboding, did not notice them. A fantastic notion had begun to pluck at her mind—that Hugo had gone for ever, deserted her, and left her the rope to hang herself with. She thought she must be going mad. Getting up, she moved to the edge of the esplanade and gripped the iron railing. She was still standing there, peering seawards, when, half an hour after he had left her, Hugo returned.
Daisy flung herself upon his breast, sobbing, “I thought you were never coming.” He comforted her, but in an absent-minded way so unlike himself, so mechanical, that she drew back and looked full into his face, and saw a fixed wild glare she had never seen there before.
“What’s the matter, love? What is it?”
“Nothing. Come on, let’s go back.”
“All right. Oh, what about that parcel? You left it behind.”
“You may as well throw it away now.”
She flung it down on to the beach below the esplanade, and took his arm. It was like walking with an automaton.
“Where’s your cap, darling?” she asked. “Have you lost it?”
“It blew off,” he answered, still in that dead voice. Petrified by this stranger who had returned to her Daisy said nothing more, though she was hurt that he expressed no sorrow at losing a present she had given him.
When they got back to their lodgings, Hugo sat for a short while, still as a stone image except for his fingers ceaselessly tapping on the table. Then he jumped up again, saying he must go for a walk, and was out of the door before Daisy could stop him. Calling to him to wait for her, she put on a coat and ran downstairs after him. Daisy had known these moods of his before, which froze him into glum silence and made him at the same time edgy and restless: she knew from experience there was no talking him out of them. One had to distract him, as one would distract a child from a fit of grief by showing it some new object. She suggested now that they should go to a cinema, and listlessly he agreed.
The next morning, when the landlady brought in their breakfast, she was breathless with excitement.
“Terrible doings last night! It’s all over Southbourne. A murder. A police Inspector was shot. Burglar trying to get into a house on Queen’s Parade. Such a respectable district. But you’re not safe anywhere nowadays, I always say. Poor man had a wife and kiddies, too.”
Part Two
11. The Morning After
Hugo and Daisy sat up in bed, reading the local paper which the landlady had laid on their breakfast tray. The Southbourne Echo, like many of the older residents of the town it served, seemed a relic of more spacious days. Its lay-out was old-fashioned, its style formal: if any newspaper could have succeeded in making the events of the previous night sound unsensational, it was the Southbourne Echo.
Police Inspector Herbert Stone, of Southbourne, well known to visitors in the town for many years as the Parade Inspector, was shot last night by an unknown man who is believed to be a burglar. He died within a few minutes. The murderer made his escape, and up to a late hour the Police search for him had been unsuccessful. The fatality occurred outside the residence of Princess Popescu, in Queen’s Parade, which leads from the sea-front, east of the Queen’s Hotel, to the main shopping centre. Little is definitely known as to the circumstances leading up to the crime, but it is established that about 7.25 a man was seen on the top of a porch, above the front door of the house.
On receiving a telephone call from Princess Popescu’s companion, Mrs. Felstead, Inspector Stone proceeded to Queen’s Parade. Entering the front garden, the Inspector was shot and severely wounded. He went out into the road, and was then shot again. One bullet entered his chest, causing a fatal wound, and the other struck him in one of the legs. Several persons heard the report of the shots, and an alarm was at once raised. Subsequently a man was seen running down the road towards the sea-front, and a cloth cap was found in the garden of an adjacent house.
Princess Popescu, who is a well-known local figure and related to the former royal family of Roumania, told our reporter that the unknown assailant had not succeeded in breaking into her house: but there is little doubt that his intention was to commit a burglary.
A keen bowls player, Inspector Stone, who joined the Wessex Constabulary 24 years ago, was transferred to the Southbourne Police in 1940. He was a popular figure in Southbourne, and leaves a widow and three children.
“Well, that’s torn it,” said Hugo. “We’ll have to get out of here double-quick.”
Daisy sat rigid, her tea growing cold. She felt she could not breathe, so terrible was the oppression weighing upon her. There were so many questions she wanted, and feared, to ask: any of them would sound like an accusation. Why did you leave me last night? Where did you go? What was that rope for? How did you lose your cap? Why were you so strange when you came back? The questions tapped and tapped in her head, like hammers. She felt, even above her anxiety and bewilderment, an immense pitying love for Hugo, a passionate desire to help h
im. But there was no way to help him: except by silence, by holding back those questions which were all accusations.
He had got out of bed and was opening the Gladstone-bag he always kept padlocked. With affrighted eyes she stared as he took out a revolver and began to clean it.
“Hurry up and get dressed, love,” he said, not even looking up at her. Automatically she started to obey, then sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, crying.
“What is it, pet? Look, your tea is getting cold. Be a good girl and drink it.”
“That gun!” she sobbed. “I can’t bear it!”
“We’ve got to get rid of it. They’ll be combing this town, and any chap with a police record they find—he’s had it. I know them. How much money have you left?”
Daisy groped blindly in her bag. There were two £1 notes and a little silver.
He said, “We’ll need more than that. My brother’ll have to fork out. We’ll put through a trunk call on the way to the beach, and then bury this little old gun.” As he spoke, Hugo wrapped the revolver in a handkerchief he had been rubbing it with, and stowed it in his trouser-pocket. “Better get on to Jacko, too, while we’re about it. He’ll have to look after you for a bit, till this kerfuffle dies down.”
“No, Hugo, please! I don’t want to leave you!” the girl cried.
“It’s only for a little, my pet. There may be some unpleasantness, and I’m not having you involved. I’ve got to be pretty mobile, and I’ve got to disappear till they’ve found the chap who did this: which means being alone.”
Hugo spoke briskly, kindly, if in a preoccupied voice, as though the need for action had dispelled the nightmare stagnation of his mood last night. But his business-like tone had only thickened the nightmare for Daisy. It gave her the feeling of being enclosed in a small box, blinded, suffocated, with no possible way out, shut off from Hugo and all hope.
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