The Smell of Evil

by Birkin, Charles

  Milo held Penny tightly to him. There were smudged bluish shadows under the little boy’s eyes. He stared up at the ceiling, his ears straining to catch any sound that might come from the landing . . . or from the drawing-room. He would leave the bedside light on until he felt sleepy.

  It was still burning, wan and almost killed by the daylight, when Mrs. Jackson arrived to begin her work.

  “IS THERE ANYBODY THERE?”

  “Is there anybody there?”

  Millie Ackland knew that she was all alone in the cottage. It had been stupid of her to call out, but she could not help feeling nervous. She had pretended to Ida that she had not minded her going off to London for two nights. She had told her that she did not mind in the very least, and that of course she would be all right, perfectly all right she had repeated with emphasis. What could possibly happen to her? She appreciated her solicitude, but honestly there was no need for it.

  She had said what Ida had wished her to say, and had felt a little heroic. It was unfortunate that Ida was ignorant of the extent of her heroism. No doubt she had reassured herself about Millie’s safety with the fact that their neighbors, the Kearnons, lived only a few yards away, to the left of the blue gate at the bottom of the path. Blue had been Ida’s choice—everyone else had their gates painted green or white, so why should they not show some originality? Then there was Monica Findhorn, whose house was on the other side, and who could actually look into their garden from her bathroom window. There was no reason for apprehension, how could there be? Ida must go off to her cousin and enjoy herself as she had arranged, and there was no more to be said.

  Millie Ackland and Ida Rankin had shared Rosemary Cottage for the past two years, and they had done a great deal to improve it, more, in fact, than they had been able to afford. They had installed a bathroom and an up-to-date kitchen and had built on a lean-to glasshouse on the south side, and they had hermasealed the warped windows, which nobody could deny had been essential for health as well as for comfort, and which could not be regarded as having been an extravagance.

  Millie had known Ida since they had been at Hatchdean together more than fifty years ago. It sounded so antediluvian when she said it aloud, which she did sometimes, to hear the gratifying astonishment that was her listeners’ reaction. “Ida and I,” she would boast, “have known one another for more than half a century, since we first met in the Lower Fourth at Hatchdean in nineteen hundred and six!” And it was true. They had always “kept up”, and when the time had come for their respective retirements from the scholastic careers which each had chosen what could have been more natural than for them to decide to enjoy the closing years of their lives in one another’s company. “Ida may have her shortcomings,” Millie often said with a twinkle, “but then so have I, and we have no unpleasant shocks in store for one another as sometimes happens to newlyweds!” She meant nothing peculiar by this announcement.

  Ida had been headmistress at Moatlands, an expensive and rather snobbish school which had grown even more militantly exclusive after the arrival there of several of the European princesses. Millie herself had never been officially a headmistress, but on occasion had acted as such at Charleville House when there had been illness among the staff. Charleville House had been intended originally for the daughters of the clergy and professional classes and Millie considered it to be, both in education and in games, far in advance of Moatlands. She did not of course say this to dear Ida. The majority of the Charleville girls had had to work in later life and had been trained to become useful, self reliant and cultured citizens.

  Rosemary Cottage had, to begin with, been a laborer’s dwelling with, in house agents’ parlance, “two up and two down”. That was before they had added the improvements. The “down” which had been the former kitchen, was now the dining-room, and the new kitchen, with a communicating hatch, had been built on at the back underneath the bathroom. It was all most convenient.

  They had bought the cottage for fifteen hundred pounds which, in view of its deplorable condition and lack of amenities, they had considered to be daylight robbery, but they had been assured that it had in point of fact been a bargain. Millie gravely doubted if her father, the Reverend Maurice Ackland, had he been alive, would have regarded it as such, but then values had changed and everything had become so terribly dear.

  Monica Findhorn had had the nerve to tell them that they had managed to get it so “cheaply” owing to its “reputation”. Ida had looked at her with quizzically raised eyebrows waiting for her to explain herself, and when she had failed to do so she had said humorously: “Are you implying, dear Miss Findhorn, that our sweet cottage used to be the local house of ill fame?”

  Miss Findhorn had smiled and shaken her head, sharing in the joke. “No, Miss Rankin, I am not! It is supposed to be haunted. A young ploughman is said to have murdered his wife soon after the end of the first war. It was before my day. There was a lot of speculation, and although some people declared that he was innocent and that it was a case of cherchez la femme he was executed for the crime, and is said to be “earthbound”! Since then Rosemary Cottage has changed hands no less than three times. You know how superstitious villagers can be about such matters, especially in East Anglia.” She had busied herself with the teapot. “For you ladies,” she went on playfully, “the idiotic tale has proved most beneficial for, as you know, the price of property around here has risen scandalously! He worked for the Fillingham family,” she finished inconsequently.

  “I am not likely to lose any sleep over your revelations,” Ida had said. “There is not a house in the country that has not been the scene of a death, and the older the building the more of them it must have witnessed.”

  “But not deaths by violence,” Millie had put in. “When did it happen, Miss Findhorn?”

  “In twenty-one . . . twenty-two? I’m afraid I can’t tell you the precise date. But it was on Midsummer Eve. And please will you call me Monica, both of you. I hope that we may be good friends as well as near neighbors.”

  Ida had laughed about it on their way home. “We are apparently indebted to Piers Plowman for getting us a real bargain!” she had said. “It’s an ill wind . . . not that it was not bad luck on the wretched victim.” She had no patience with the psychic world. She had once misguidedly attended a séance and it had been perfectly obvious to her that the medium, a woman, had been an outrageous fraud. Tommy-rot!

  She was not certain that Millie altogether shared her views, for, although the dear thing had known better than to express openly any such beliefs, she had been known to drop hints. Ida suspected that Millie thought herself receptive to vibrations from the Other World and that she was rather proud of it, as it made her feel superior, like claims of being “old souls” always heartened reincarnationists and made them quite insufferable. Millie naturally refrained from parading her fanciful theories for she knew that if she did so they would inevitably receive short shrift.

  Millicent Ackland had, with difficulty, kept her accomplishment to herself. She was devoted to Ida and would do nothing which might annoy or vex her, or which could endanger the harmony of their lives together, and it was for this reason that she had resolved to hold her tongue.

  She had begun to hear things the very evening after they had been to tea with Monica Findhorn. Perhaps, she thought, it had been Miss Findhorn’s disclosures that had opened the door of her awareness, had tuned her in to the right wavelength. She would have known in any case that the house was haunted, but the knowledge might not have come to her so soon.

  At first she had caught only a few disjointed and whispered words, and weeks and sometimes months had gone by before she had heard more; but with the passing of time the voices had grown gradually more distinct and had come to her with more regularity, and recently she had begun to think that if she were to turn her head quickly enough she would be able to catch sight of the speakers.
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  She tried to do so now. “Is there anybody there?” she called. She knew that with the supernatural one must never show fear.

  There were four of them; she had discovered that very early on. A man, two women and a child. When they spoke to one another Millie was usually alone in a room, but of late they had started to do so even when Ida had been seated opposite to her, reading or knitting or engaged in solving a crossword puzzle, but invariably Ida had appeared sublimely unconscious of anything untoward and Millie had hesitated to alarm her or to draw down upon herself the pungent dryness of her tolerant rebuke.

  Beyond Miss Findhorn’s somewhat vague statement that a murder had taken place in their cottage Millie had had no very clear picture of the personalities concerned, but by now the characters were familiar to her to the extent that she was sometimes tempted to take part in the dialogue.

  There was Adam Loft, the dominant figure who, from what she had heard and subsequently observed, had been a handsome, conceited and hard-drinking man with a controlled but bullying nature. There was his wife, Nancy, a young woman of dull mind who subconsciously rejoiced in being downtrodden, and who gave every evidence of being a mental and physical slattern. Then there was their child, Lucy, a tiresome little girl who was alternately spoiled and punished by her father and nagged at by her mother.

  Millie found Judith Cromer the most interesting. She was having an affair with Adam. She lived in the village, was unmarried, and was obviously terrified that her family would discover the liaison in which she was engaged. She was quite intelligent, but her judgement had been clouded by her overwhelming sexual desire. She had been trying to persuade Adam to emigrate with her to Australia. Millie knew that he had no intention of doing so, and she knew also that he was a man of considerable obstinacy. All that he wanted to do was to continue his cohabitation with Judith in his own house and on his own terms, and to prevent his wife and Judith’s parents from finding out about their relationship.

  Millie acknowledged that, in spite of herself, despite her natural alarm, she was growing more and more interested and involved in the lives of these people, just as some viewers are inextricably netted by the enthralling dramas of television serials. She knew that she should switch off, but was incapable of closing her mind. She had been jockeyed into being an unwilling eavesdropper and it had not been of her own choosing, and she began to fear that she might easily find herself slipping into the role of voyeur of scenes and also of actions that were for the eyes of the participants alone.

  She remembered the first snatch of talk which she had overheard. There had been the slam of a door and the man had said to his wife: “I don’t know what you do with yourself all day, Nance, honest I don’t. Lucy looks like a gypsy, and the house is no better than a slum. There’s not even a hot meal on the table, and nought in the oven, I’ll bet. Search me why I married you. Must have been off my rocker.” He had spoken with unconcealed bitterness.

  And Nancy had answered him: “I’m out of sorts, Adam. Really I am. It’s the headache. Somehow it don’t seem to lift, no matter what. Lucy’s been that trying, you’ve no idea. If it’s not one thing it’s another. I’ll be glad when she gets off to school.” She had paused and there had been the sound of sniffing. “And I’ll be gladder still when she’s old enough to go into service, ’tho that won’t be for a long while yet, not for another nine years. I try to do my best, Lord knows.”

  There had been a silence, then the man had said roughly: “Just look at you! Like something the cat brought in. You might be fifty, not thirty. You can’t be bothered with cooking or cleaning, and you’re always tired out.”

  The voices had grown indistinct, and Ida had come in and stripped off her gardening gloves and had said: “We must order some more coal so as to be ready for the winter. Do remind me, Millie. Oh, and Miss Findhorn—Monica, I should say—telephoned while you were at the chemist’s this morning. I forgot to tell you. She wondered if we would take charge of the tombola at the church fête in July. I told her that we would be delighted to do so. Did I do right, Millie?” She had smiled kindly, aware that her friend enjoyed the companionship of such social activities.

  Adam Loft’s voice had been very different when he had been talking to Judith Cromer. It was slower and softer and took on a caressing and deeper slur. Not that he was in the habit of speaking a great deal when they were together. It seemed to Millie that it was the girl who did most of the talking. On each occasion when Judith called there were just the two of them. Nancy and Lucy were always out.

  After they had made love, and Millie was perfectly aware that this was the sole object of Judith’s visits, the girl would keep on pestering Adam about his leaving Nancy and going away with her to start a new life. “Nobody would know us,” she used to say, “if we went overseas, we could make a fresh start. Nancy’s no good to you, Adam, and you know it. She’ll only drag you down to her own level. You don’t love her, and she loves nobody but herself. She’s not got it in her. She’ll ruin you, mark my words. Don’t I mean anything to you, darling? We could be someone if we went to Canada or Australia. Achieve something. There’re wonderful openings in the Colonies for people like us. I had a letter from John only yesterday. He and Doris are doing ever so well in Vancouver.”

  Adam had avoided replying directly to these urgings. Instead there had been sounds of kissing and half-hearted protests and the creaking of leather which, Millie thought, must have come from the old hide sofa which she and Ida had found abandoned in an outhouse, and which, the cost of repair having proved exorbitant, they had subsequently sold at an auction on the Green for ten shillings.

  And so the story had unfolded. There were no twists, no unexpected developments. Adam’s affair with Judith gathered momentum; his irritation with, and dislike of, his wife increased, as did the mounting tediousness of his child’s behavior, which maddened him and frayed his nerves. Then, a few days before Ida’s proposed visit to London, Judith had come to Adam and told him that she was pregnant. Millie had not heard this scene before. She did not think that the girl was unduly distressed by this occurrence, no doubt largely because the circumstance might enable her to force Adam’s hand, and rather to her surprise the young man, after a brief outburst of impatient disgruntlement, had taken the news quite well and had made no effort to dispute her claim of his paternity.

  The events which she overheard were not, to Millie’s annoyance, always in continuity. She was anxious to know the outcome, but, on the next occasion when she was able to tune in, it was to a conversation that she had already listened to several times and thus she knew exactly what would happen. Adam had come in from work and had sat down to unbuckle his leggings, which he would throw over to Nancy to clean and polish for him while he went out to wash at the pump. Her protest at his request would be followed by the thud of his heavy boots as they too were tossed in her direction, and then would come her whining voice: “It seems so silly and such a waste of time. They’ll only get muddy again in the morning, and I’ve been on the go all day. Hardly been off my feet since you left the house.”

  “So you want me to go down to the village all mucky, is that it?”

  “I don’t want you to go down to the village at all, Adam, and well you know it. Wasting your money in the Pelican with that Bill Haskins and all the rest, and then stumbling back home with a skinful and a face as black as thunder, so that I’m afraid to open my mouth.”

  “Well, I earn the bloody money, don’t I?”

  “I’m not denying that it’s your money, and I do wish you wouldn’t swear in front of Lucy. It’s how you spend your wages that riles me. Lucy’s not had a new frock this year, and come to that nor more have I, not for a twelve-month. After all, we are your wife and child . . . your own flesh and blood.”

  “Why can’t I have a new dress?” It was the little girl. “Why must you drink so much beer, Daddy?”

  �
��For Christ’s sake, shut up, can’t you?”

  It was by now the second week of June, and it had been during March that Millie had just seen the hazy outlines of the speakers, outlines which had grown increasingly detailed until she had been able to discern their features.

  Adam Loft was about thirty, clean-shaven and broad-shouldered, dark and sullenly handsome, with the strength of one of the shire horses with which he worked. Nancy had once been pretty, but discontent and fatigue had left their mark, sapping away the good looks which she had formerly possessed. Her reddish hair was streaked with gray and hung in wisps which she was forever pushing away from her forehead with the back of her hand. Lucy was a miniature replica of her mother at the same age.

  Judith Cromer could not have been more than eighteen or nineteen. Millie had imagined from her voice that she would have been older, a bold and probably buxom hussy, but she was nothing of the sort. On the contrary, she was tall and slim with beautiful hands and feet, and had an exotic charm which was almost oriental and which was unexpected to come across in the wind-swept plains of the Norfolk countryside.

  The next happening of which Millie had not been previously aware had taken place after tea on the day following the one on which she had learned of Judith’s pregnancy. She had no means of knowing if it had occurred before or after that event.

  Adam had been shrugging on his jacket preparatory to departing for the Pelican, when Nancy had said: “Lucy, run along, dear. I want to have a word with your father alone.”