“Killed him!” breathed Patsy. She had gone quite pale—she held her chubby little hand to her heart.
“It created a tremendous sensation at the time,” said Purbeck solemnly. “Oh, immense! The papers were full of it. But it had been—well, a pretty messy and obvious affair, and Valerie—well, I told you, darling—or rather, you told me. Valerie—died . . .”
Patsy was silent, breathing deeply.
“Oh Lord,” she said at last. “Oh Lord! She was—ugh!”
She looked across to the table on the other side of the room. The old man had finished his meal and was preparing to go. The empty tea-cup from the vacant place hung quite still at the end of the lamp chain. Patsy shuddered.
“Oh Lord!” she said again. “And all these years he’s come in here and ordered tea for two! . . . Oh Lord! Poor old man—and she had been living with Richardson . . . all the time. And then she was ha—— oh Lord!”
She stared, horrified, at the dangling cup.
Purbeck, with a slow smile, leaned very close to her across the table.
“Darling Patsy,” he said, in a very low voice, “before I eat you there’s just one extra little thing I’ve got to tell you. It’s about the Maestro—before he retired. He was, as you said, a Civil Servant—he was the most curious and terrifying of all Civil Servants. He was—well, you know, darling—someone has got to do it. Has it ever struck you, that? Someone’s got to do it, darling.”
“What?” she asked dazedly.
He looked at her for a long time with his intangible smile.
“He was the Public Hangman, darling,” he said at last.
There was one long terrible scream, and then Patsy began to have hysterics. Purbeck leaned back in his chair again.
“Yes . . .” he said slowly. “It all depends. It all depends on what you mean by romance . . .”
Clair de Lune
A GHOST STORY
“You must come,” said Christine. “You simply must, my dear. It’s the most wonderful place. You meet such interesting people . . .”
There was a copy of the New Statesman and Nation under her arm. I loved Christine. She was almost too typical—if you encountered Christine in a book or a play you would say she was overdrawn. She was large and very pale. She dressed outrageously. She had a high-pitched humourless voice. If you sat on top of a bus with Christine, people looked round the moment she began to talk: if you went to a cinema with her (she would only go to French or Russian films—or perhaps to a Disney festival in a News Theatre), she would whisper penetratingly about “trends” till people went “ssh” on all sides. Christine was “in on” things. When I first knew her it was education. Then she had religion for a time (but she called it “scientific humanism,” or something). Then there was town-planning—“reconstruction.” It was all—she said—part of a “widening horizon.” It was “awareness.”
I loved Christine; and felt, in a queer helpless way, sorry for her. I believe that at the root of her there was a quiet, kind, ordinary human being. She had had one big love affair—beautifully worked out—with a married man. His wife was away—abroad for a time. Christine and this man sat for two months or so discussing the situation from all angles. In the end, when, in the light of scientific humanism, they had decided that an affair would be justified, they went to bed together. When the wife came back they would explain: they were intelligent people: Christine would give up the man, whose first duties, of course, lay with his wife and children. It would be a tableau beautifully illustrative of the virtues of enlightenment.
The wife came back. The great confessional took place. Christine sat forward in her chair, her brows drawn together. The man stood before the fireplace (I think it was at Letchworth he lived), and explained lengthily. The wife poured tea and listened. When it was all over she said:
“I see, George. Two lumps of sugar, isn’t it, Christine? . . .”
A week later she—the wife—went off with another man, who apparently had been in the offing for a long time. The husband lived with Christine for a month, then he had another explanation tableau (not at Letchworth this time, for he could hardly live there with Christine, could he?—enlightenment notwithstanding). It was Christine’s turn to say: “I see, George.”
“Somehow it didn’t work,” she said to me long afterwards. “We weren’t in tune. But I admired George’s integrity so much—he was so straightforward and honest about it all . . .”
And I looked at her big sad white face and pondered deeply. Either she had great courage or else she was just plain stupid.
But this story isn’t really about Christine. She only started it all when she said, in that high plangent voice:
“Do come, my dear. You’ll meet such interesting people . . .”
“Christine, darling,” I said, “—do you see that roadman sweeping up dung over there? He is an interesting person. He has two legs, he has two arms, he has a heart and a pair of lungs. He has a wonderful arterial system and an epiglottis. He is a fascinatingly interesting person.”
“Don’t be stupid, Harry,” said Christine. “You know what I mean. There’s a woman down at Crudleigh who once met George Moore.”
“Do you mean that she hasn’t an epiglottis, Christine?” I asked mildly.
She looked at me, her brows pulled together. Tony came in at that moment and gave her a great hearty slap on the behind.
“Hullo, Chris,” he cried. “How’s the horizon, eh?—still widening?”
She blinked and looked sad. I felt sorry for her again and cursed myself for a sentimentalist. I always do curse myself for a sentimentalist and a fool. If I hadn’t been so sentimental the whole strange business of the Crudleigh ghost might never have happened. At least—However . . .
Crudleigh was a long low house with a thatched roof. It was very old. At one time it had been a whole row of cottages. Downstairs there were several long narrow rooms—a music room, a writing room, a discussion room. They were furnished with hand-made plain oak tables and stools, rough Indian mats, and yards of coloured hessian.
Upstairs were many little bedrooms. Bare wooden floors, more mats, divan beds with hand-printed fabric coverings, rough baked pots and vases in the windows for flowers, a few tasteful books, more hessian, and some small selected pictures—wood-cuts mainly, or prints from lino-blocks.
In the grounds were many outbuildings. Far-off, buried among the outbushes of Crudleigh Combe, was a small solarium where you could sunbathe in the nude. Nearer at hand, across the croquet lawn, was a shed with some potters’ wheels in it. A small brick building in the back yard housed a hand-loom. A hut at the foot of the salad garden contained a little turning lathe and an old-style hand printing press.
It was pouring with rain when Christine and I arrived. We walked through the woods, she with her big swinging stride that threw her flared skirt out in great ugly sweeps, I scuttling a little behind, dodging the drips from the trees. Except for the swishing of the rain through the leaves, everything was quiet and somehow mournful. Now and again I would stumble against a big yellow fungus and it would go rolling in pieces among the undergrowth.
Just before we reached the house we heard quick footsteps behind us, and as they got nearer there came the sound of hasty breathing. I looked round. A young man was running towards us along the path. He was dressed in a singlet and running shorts which clung to him closely, sopping wet, showing his gaunt ribby figure. His earnest face looked like a horse’s.
We stepped aside and he swung past us, with a grunt of recognition for Christine.
“That’s Hector Lowe,” she whispered to me. “He must do his five miles a day—always, wet or fine.”
I said: “Oh—what an interesting person,” and we walked on.
We eventually entered the long low lounge. An immense log fire smoked dismally at one end of it, and round it, in a semicircle, sat a little group of people. One of them, a tall willowy woman with black tousled hair, advanced to meet us. She was dressed in a
little Chinese jacket with a long clinging skirt, and her hands and ears were laden with jewellery.
“Christine, darling,” she murmured, in a husky, mournful voice. “How enchanting of you to come. And this is your friend?”
Christine introduced us. The woman was the famous Tess Beauchamp, who owned and ran Crudleigh. She showed me to the others—I say “showed” deliberately, for her whole attitude seemed to imply that I was something dreary, brought in almost by accident, that had to be put up with. The people round the fire looked up desultorily. They were a strange-looking bunch: an old man with a patriarchal beard, dressed in a green velvet jacket (a Mr. Belarius), a young man named Dobson, who absently fingered a lute, two women, both gaunt-looking and with drooping, heavily-mascara’d eyes, and a young angular girl who wore a turban of green silk and was engaged in cutting the leaves of an exotic-looking book with a carved pearwood paper-knife.
“Now do sit down, you two,” finished the Beauchamp. “Mrs. Fletcher is just telling us about the first time she met George Moore.”
We sat down—Christine on a hessian-covered pouf, I on a hard, perfectly flat wooden stool that gave me hell after the first ten minutes.
Mrs. Fletcher—one of the mascara-eyed women—talked on and on and on about George Moore. It seemed that she had been his sole confidante—their conversations must have been interminable. Dobson, as a constant background, fingered his lute. The young man with the horse face—Hector Lowe, the runner—came in, having presumably completed his five miles, and then we all drank weak China tea from handleless home-baked cups.
Christine sat on her immense behind, her skirt flaring out all round her, her brows drawn intensely together. I suffered a damnable torture from my hardwood stool and wished myself a thousand miles away.
We had been sitting like that round the bleak fire for perhaps half-an-hour. Outside it was already growing dark. The rain had stopped and a light damp breeze was in the air, slowly dispersing the grey, low-lying storm-clouds. A big cypress just outside the window opposite me swished gloomily against the wall, as if engaged in a slow rhythmic dance. Mrs. Fletcher’s carefully modulated voice went on and on, with occasional husky interjections from Tess. And I felt, creeping over me as I sat there, an unaccountable sense of sadness. I felt isolated and forlorn among those strange folk in that old bare house. I began to wish I had never acceded to Christine’s request to meet the “interesting people”—I was annoyed with myself for having been so weak—and for having been sentimental enough to feel sorry for Christine. She was all right, I reflected, as I watched her drinking in everything that Mrs. Fletcher had to say. She would go on—there would always be something for her to do: there would always be literary and debating societies who would welcome her as a member—perhaps she would write a book one day, for one of the Left Wing Clubs. And the others too—the interesting people; old Mr. Belarius, half-asleep, fingering his white beard: Tess Beauchamp, chin on hand, so that her rings were shown off to their best advantage (vast heavy rings they were—Celtic jewels in silver mountings): young Dobson, his lute set aside for the moment, his head turned so that we could see his profile (he tried to look, I am certain, like the misty photographs of Rupert Brooke that frontispiece the Collected Poems): the girl with the turban—she was Dobson’s sister, I discovered later, and her name was Sylvia—all tight and bleakly virginal, clasping her knees in her hands and staring into the smoky, sizzling fire . . . They were all all right—there was no need to worry about any of them: they had some sort of plan of campaign—they knew what they were doing. Either all this was a phase they were passing through, in which case it did not matter, or it was something they had arrived at, in which case it did not matter either. But still, as I surveyed them, I felt the unaccountable mournful sadness—the same sadness I had felt in the damp woods as Christine and I made our way to Crudleigh: the same sadness of old things, and decay, and quiet forlorn places.
Thinking of the woods I turned for a moment to look at Hector Lowe, the runner. He was the strangest of all the Crudleighites. He sat bolt upright in his chair, munching slowly at a raw carrot. His long horse face was puffy and drawn-looking—it seemed to me, at a venture, that his five miles had exhausted him. As I looked, he solemnly crossed one stringy leg over the other and struck his knee sharply with the edge of his hand. He did this several times, testing his reflexes: and apparently the result was not quite what he had hoped for, for he sighed and shook his head, then brought out a little book and wrote something in it. I smiled, and was on the point of looking from him back to Christine, when something else attracted my attention. Faintly, ineffably faintly, and thin and tenuous against the low monotonous voice of Mrs. Fletcher, I had heard a chord of music.
I looked at Dobson, thinking that perhaps he had picked up his lute again. But no: he still sat balancing his profile—and the lute lay on the floor where he had placed it, in the little dark corner beside the fireplace. I thought I must have been mistaken in thinking I had heard the music; but even while I looked at the instrument, with the pale lifeless firelight reflecting from its polished belly, again there came the ghostly chord—a melancholy interval, exactly in tune with the unaccountable sadness I was feeling. And just for a moment I had the impression—an astonishing, fleeting impression—that lingering over the lute strings in that dark corner were two white emaciated hands.
I looked more closely and they had gone. I stared at the circle of listeners again, but they were all intent on Mrs. Fletcher’s recital. I blinked my eyes—they had been playing tricks on me in the bad light, I decided. Yet just for a moment, unmistakably, the hands had been real—small, pale, infinitely delicate: and sad—as sad as the chord they had plucked.
I shivered. I had a sudden uneasy sense that all was not well—there was something just under the surface in that strange house. Somewhere, lingering in the background, were other things—there was at least one other guest at Tess Beauchamp’s party.
I stirred, found my voice, and suddenly threw a banal remark into Mrs. Fletcher’s monologue. The guests all looked at me disdainfully—Christine blushed as if she were ashamed.
We went through to the dining room and had something to eat—not before time, as far as I was concerned. We sat at a long refectory table, on forms, and ate first some soup in wooden bowls—a thin, saltless vegetable brew—then had salad and brown bread with peanut butter, and finished with some dried fruits—dates, figs, and brown and withered dehydrated bananas. I still felt hungry at the end of the meal, and took an opportunity, when all the guests had their attention fixed on something Tess was saying, to slip two hunks of bread into my pocket—it would always be something to gnaw in my bedroom later on.
After the meal we trooped into the music room, and old Mr. Belarius sat down at a harpsichord there and played—quite pleasantly, I thought. Then Sylvia Dobson took up a recorder and, accompanied by her brother on the lute, blew her way tensely through an arrangement of the Purcell Golden Sonata. Half-way through I managed to signal to Christine to come outside with me.
We walked slowly about on the damp croquet lawn in the dusk, with the sweet sound of the recorder coming through the windows to us. I had a mallet in my hand, and now and again shot a ball absently towards a hoop.
“Tell me, Christine,” I said, “what is the history of Crudleigh?”
“It used to be a row of cottages,” she said. “They were built round about 1820—it was some sort of housing experiment, I think—a group of London ladies financed it—blue-stockings. Then round about the middle of the century a set of artists took them over and started a colony—the Crudleigh Water Colour Group—they had the same sort of ideas as the Pre-Raphaelites a little later on. Then in 1880 the cottages were reconstructed into one long house and some friends of William Morris’s took it over. Tess bought it about three years ago, after it had been lying derelict for a time, and started running it as a guest house.”
“For interesting people,” I gibed. “No, what I meant,
Christine, was—has anyone died here? Committed suicide, or been murdered—you know the sort of thing.”
She looked at me strangely.
“Good heavens, Harry—what on earth put ideas like that in your head? Of course not—at least, I’ve never heard of any such thing.”
I started on another tack. I sent a ball scooting through a hoop, then straightened myself, swinging the mallet.
“Tell me, Christine,” I said, “why does Tess use wooden dishes? And why does she serve the food in them without salt?—that dreary vegetable soup, for instance?”
“Really, Harry! You know perfectly well that wooden dishes are a hundred times healthier than any other sort—besides, Tess makes them herself on the turning lathe—it’s one of her crafts. And as for salt—if you took any interest in dietetics you’d know that mineral salt is bad for you: all the latest books say so. If you cook vegetables properly you don’t need it—and it’s far better for you without.”
She went into a long statistical report about the latest situation in dietetics. I listened as patiently as I could. When she had finished she said:
“Anyway, Harry, why did you ask? It’s not the sort of thing I should have thought you would have been interested in.”
I remained swinging the mallet a long time. Then I said:
“Christine—in very old books—not the sort of books I suspect you’ve ever read—there are such things as witchcraft recipes and so on. One of them tells you to use wooden dishes and to cook without salt—that is, if you suspect that there are evil spirits in your house.”
She stared at me, her brows drawn together.
The Other Passenger Page 5