The Skeleton in the Grass

by Robert Barnard

  When he arrived, driven from Hatherton station by Pinner, she found herself watching Bounce. It was absurd, of course. Bounce stood at the front entrance, barking and wagging his tail nineteen to the dozen. That’s what he did every time a family member arrived home. It told her nothing . . .

  When, in the seventies, Sarah visited the house with her grand-daughter, she said to the woman in the souvenir shop that she’d once lived and worked at Hallam herself.

  Oh, how interesting, the woman said. She wasn’t a local herself, she came over from Banbury every day, but she did know that the last occupant of Hallam was living with his family in one of the farms.

  “Wilton Farm, I think it is. Ever such a nice gentleman, Mr. Oliver, so everyone says.”

  “Yes, Oliver was terribly nice,” the 55-year-old Sarah said.

  “I’m sure he’d love a visit from you,” said the woman. “For old times’ sake.”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t time today,” said Sarah. “We have to rush. Perhaps next time I come . . .”

  But she knew there would not be a next time, and that she would never go and visit Oliver Hallam. And she knew the reason was that she had suspected that generous, selfless man of the murder of Chris Keene.

  When Oliver had greeted everyone and been to have a chat with Mrs. Munday in the kitchen, they got down to a real family council. Chloe insisted on being present, so Sarah was in on all of it, sitting with her in the window-seat, and helping her with her book.

  Dennis told Oliver about Chan’s visit, and his phone call to the Master. He told him about the book on the Emperor of Austria’s peace proposals, and the possibility—“more than a possibility, the Master says—” of a Fellowship.

  “You don’t think I’m running away, old chap?”

  “No, of course not,” said Oliver.

  Dennis explained about the house they would be renting in Oxford, and some of the possibilities if it came to their buying somewhere. He said that Oliver would have a good income from the rents of the farms with tenants, and of course the income from the bits they farmed themselves. With Mrs. Munday and Pinner staying on there would be no problems with running the house. Eventually, if things worked out as they hoped about the Fellowship, it would probably be a good idea to transfer the house to him by deed of gift, or something of the sort.

  “Yes, I see,” said Oliver. “Well, I’ll think it over.”

  Dennis was visibly disconcerted.

  “I say, old chap, have I been jumping the gun? We thought you’d jump at the idea—and you’ll be so much better at running the place than I’ve ever been.”

  “I probably will jump at the idea,” said Oliver. “But it’s all new to me as yet. I’ll need to go away for a bit and think it over.”

  To cover the slight embarrassment, Elizabeth said:

  “Have you seen this picture in the Express of the crowds outside Buckingham Palace? That really does look like Inspector Minchip, helping to control them.”

  They all agreed it did. The crowds had not been large or disorderly, and the King had been at Fort Belvedere anyway, but at least Minchip had been on the fringes of history, as he had hoped.

  “He’ll be happy, anyway,” said Dennis. He turned to Oliver: “Now, you must do exactly as you please, old chap . . .”

  Sarah had been delighted at Oliver’s refusal to have his decisions taken for granted. It was a sign of his growing up, she felt. But she was not surprised, a week later, when Oliver rang and told his parents that he was quite willing to take over at Hallam when he was through with his Finals.

  That made Dennis and Helen happier.

  “Even after all this, I’d have hated to have had to sell the place,” said Dennis.

  That was on December 11th. In the evening the King broadcast—or Prince Edward of Windsor, as the meticulous man at the BBC called him. Chloe was in bed, but the rest of them, with Mrs. Munday and Pinner, sat around the wireless set, and as he talked the women’s eyes brimmed with tears and spilled over.

  “He was so good-looking when he was young,” said Helen when he had finished. “And I do think he meant well.”

  “He’s been brought down by the old men,” said Dennis. He looked around him and laughed at their damp cheeks. “Come on—don’t take it so personally. It’s not any worse because he’s handsome, you know. We’ve got a new start ahead of us too.”

  That was when Helen, turning to Sarah, said:

  “You will be coming with us, won’t you, Sarah?”

  “Actually, I think I may not be,” said Sarah carefully. “I’ve been in touch with people at Kew Gardens, and they have this scheme . . . I think it might be just the thing to suit me.”

  “Sarah! How enterprising of you!”

  “It was Winifred Hallam put me in touch with them. Of course I’ll come to Oxford for a few weeks to tide you over. But there won’t be any problem finding a school for Chloe there, will there?”

  “Oh no, that’s quite true. There are lots of private schools at Oxford, some of them very liberal in their approach.”

  “I imagine the State schools are quite good at Oxford, too,” said Sarah, with malicious intent. People like the Hallams did not send their children to State schools.

  “We must look into them too,” said Helen.

  “So I thought I’d take a quick trip home for Christmas, to see if the arrangements I made are working out. I could come back on Boxing Day. Then I could help with the move to Oxford, see Chloe settled into school—” and see Roland, she said to herself—“and then, with a bit of luck, start at Kew.”

  “We shall be awfully sorry to lose you,” said Helen. “Though in the nature of things Chloe was sure to want to go to school before long. She’s a child who’s made for companionship. And obviously we want what’s best for you, Sarah, dear.”

  So the first weeks of the new reign were to be her last weeks at Hallam. It should have been a time of sadness, but it was not. She sensed new horizons, new relationships ahead of her. And in truth the Hallam that she had come to on that day in July had vanished already. Later, whenever she heard the record of Dylan Thomas reading “Fern Hill,” she always shivered with recognition when he came to the bit about “the farm forever fled from the childless land.” She knew exactly what he meant. The Hallam that she had come to, bathed in sun and nestling in lawns and willows, had already disappeared. It had become a mere thing of bricks and mortar, a superb specimen, as Chan always said, of Tudor domestic architecture. She had lost her adolescent illusions. She had grown up.

  CHAPTER 20

  The heat in the ambulance was intense, for they had been told to come as close as was practicable. Other fires, raging further down the narrow street, added to the heat and seemed likely to prevent their getting out that way. Sarah thought they would have to back into Berkeley Square, and then make their way as best they could through the cratered, lurid streets to Charing Cross Hospital. She sat in the back of the ambulance, hoping they would bring the wounded firemen out soon.

  Normally, like most people involved in the emergency services, she could blot out thought. People in 1941 thought not about the progress of the war, what would happen in victory or defeat, but only about living from day to day: when they would next have food, when they would next have sleep. But in tonight’s terror Sarah kept thinking: if I go my baby dies too. She kept wondering whether Roland had arrived in North Africa, trying to calculate when her letter might reach him. Perhaps in the life he would be leading a first baby would seem an unimportant matter. Sometimes it was even difficult for her, here, to think of the joy of it.

  There seemed to be some movement from the blazing building. It had been the town house of some aristocratic family, converted into offices in the ‘twenties. Spacious, luxurious, heavy. The flames lapped from the windows like the tongues of thirsty dogs. People kept comparing the blitz to pictures by Bosch, but Sarah had never seen any. She could only think of Milton. It was like awaking in Hell.

  Yes, ther
e was movement at what had once been the front door, now a gaping hole. Two stretchermen were manœuvring their way through, with a rough shape on their stretcher, covered with a blanket. Behind them came a fireman, clearly wounded, and walking unsteadily.

  “One of them’s a goner,” the first bearer shouted to the driver. “Or will be before long. I don’t reckon he’ll regain consciousness. The other’ll be OK, but he needs to go to hospital.”

  The driver nodded and started the engine, while Sarah helped to lift the stretcher into the back and slot it into place. This was going to be a long, slow, bumpy ride. As she checked the clasps the other fireman scrambled into the compartment and sank into a seat, and then the doors banged behind them. The stretchermen ran off down the road to one of the other fires, and the ambulance began to back hesitantly into Berkeley Square.

  The fireman on the stretcher was certainly unconscious. As they turned into the square the ambulance was in near-total darkness, only the faintest of orange lights telling Sarah where anything was. They went forward, lurching and hesitant, for a few hundred yards, but then they were stopped by a small fire at ground level. Sarah busied herself with the unconscious man, though experience told her that he was, in the unsentimental phrase of the bearer, a goner. The whole of the bulky body seemed shattered. She busied herself with her kit, but anything she could do was cosmetic. When the ambulance started again she sank back into her seat by his side.

  “It’s Sarah, isn’t it?”

  She jumped and stared through the flickering gloom.

  “The thing about this war is, one meets just everybody,” the voice went on.

  She knew the voice. Oh yes, she knew the voice. And her eyes becoming accustomed a little to the darkness, she recognized with a shock that he had a nasty wound over the left eye. She imagined the red hair, the singed flesh, and the long mobile face of Will Hallam.

  “It’s the left side of the forehead. So appropriate,” said Will.

  “I started when I saw it,” admitted Sarah, in a low voice. “That was my first body. You never quite get over it. Did they tell you about it?”

  Will did not answer immediately, but he asked:

  “How long shall we take, do you think?”

  “I can’t say. You must know what it’s like. This is one of the worst nights yet. Do you need anything?”

  “No, no . . . A bit of dressing and a good night’s sleep . . . They didn’t have to tell me about it. I saw it.”

  “You saw it?”

  “Did you never suspect?”

  In her shock Sarah blurted out something of which she was ashamed.

  “I suspected Oliver. It was Bounce wagging his tail . . .”

  “Poor old Oliver. Not really the temperament. He’s a lieutenant in Signals, did you know? He says he’s the army’s most incompetent recruit but, being Oliver, he’ll make himself useful somehow. The parents were very distressed when he volunteered.”

  “They’re still the same, then?”

  “Oh yes. When I was in prison in Spain they organized an Oxford boycott of Seville oranges.”

  Sarah bent over her patient, who was grunting in pain, then when he was silent she turned back to Will. She could see him now: still slight, but broader of shoulder; more haggard, yet somehow almost cheeky.

  “I once had a vision,” Sarah said. “A sort of nightmare. That your parents were not the kind, generous, high-minded people they appeared to be. That they used people, ignored the ones who were of no use to them . . . It was mean of me. After all they’d done for me.”

  Will smiled with faint traces of his old boyishness into her wan face.

  “You fell in love with us, didn’t you, Sarah? Dennis and Helen did have rather a bad habit of making people love them . . . You fell in love so completely, I suppose you were bound to fall out of love violently . . . I expect the truth is somewhere between the two. They aren’t bad people, or selfish beyond the normal. I suppose the worst thing you could say about them is that they are futile . . . Dad’s finished his book on the Emperor Karl’s peace initiative. This doesn’t seem a good time to find a publisher for it, does it?”

  “I think you’re talking too much,” said Sarah. “That wound could turn out to be nasty.”

  She clasped the hand of the unconscious man on the stretcher as the ambulance lurched forward. She peered out. They were crossing Regent Street into Soho. He was a clever driver, whom the blitz had taught new tricks. He would get them there if anybody could, but by then it would surely be too late for the man on the stretcher. She wished for the hundredth time she was a doctor, not a hastily trained ambulance attendant. But she doubted if even a doctor could do anything in the present case, without an operating theatre.

  They stopped in a seedy little street Sarah didn’t know, behind another ambulance. She was aware that Will had been watching her, and now he started speaking again.

  “Perhaps the worst thing about them, about my parents, is that they paralyse people. You can’t follow that incredible mixture of public-spiritedness and personal warmth. I went to fight in Spain, and I sat on the border, paralysed. I thought I’d kicked over all their training, all their oversimplified precepts, but when it came to the point . . .”

  “But you did fight in Spain?”

  “Oh yes, I fought in Spain,” said Will, his voice tinged with cynicism.

  “We got postcards.”

  “I gave them to friends who were going in. All the early ones.”

  “But—” Sarah wanted to put it obliquely—“how did you come to be at Hallam that night?”

  Will smiled, with a sort of insolent self-deprecation that was to be his trade-mark when he hosted television panel games in the ‘fifties.

  “The answer is so banal that it has to be true. I was coming back to go up to Oxford. I had sat there, on the border, since August. I’d done some work with refugees, but there weren’t many, so early in the war. I kept willing myself to go in, offer myself, take up the fight. And yet all the old Hallam instincts kept me there, immobilized. It was the worst period of my life . . . till then. In the end I could bear it no longer. I was futile, and might as well face up to my own futility. A journalist friend with the Manchester Guardian was motoring home. I came with him, intending to go up to Balliol, if they would still have me.”

  The ambulance jumped forward. Sarah saw bright firelight to her right, and realized they were going up towards Oxford Street to avoid it. They no sooner got there than they were stalled again. There was a faint sigh, but no more, from the man on the stretcher.

  “Poor bastard,” said Will. “His number’s up.”

  When they had been stalled for some time, Will began again.

  “This journalist was driving up to Manchester, but he made a detour and left me in Chowton. I wanted to walk, to get my thoughts together—decide what to say, how to present it. I took the river path, so as not to meet anyone. When I got to the lawns of Hallam, I looked towards the house, and there were no lights. Everyone was out.”

  He swallowed, remembering the time.

  “I stood there by the tree, wondering whether to go and talk to Mrs. Munday. But that wasn’t at all how I’d planned it. Not dramatic enough—you know what sort of a boy I was. I stood there, paralysed again. And then I heard noises from the river path. Someone coming along—quite slowly, clumsily. I couldn’t imagine who it might be. I set down my haversack and waited in the shade of the willow, hardly breathing. He passed the bridge, left the path, and came up on to the lawn. Bounce had begun barking in the house. I’m sure he had sensed me there. Now there was something else too: a hostile presence. He was barking like crazy.”

  The ambulance was still stalled. There was a faint sound from the man on the stretcher, and Sarah took a wet flannel and bathed his face.

  “It all seems so long ago,” Will said wryly, as if to himself. “Another age—when I thought the Falange taking over in Spain was the end of the world.”

  “And your cousin Mostyn th
ought the King going was the end of the world,” said Sarah.

  “Yes . . . Bounce quietened down a bit, and Chris Keene came up near to the tree. Now I could see who it was. He wasn’t willing to go up to the house just yet. The moonlight was quite bright, and I was only feet away. I saw him smile. He put down the rifle, and then he began laying out his other burden. I hadn’t been able to see what it was before, but now I saw it was a skeleton—weird, glowing. I just couldn’t make out what he was doing. Then I realized there was no backbone. It had been painted out. Then, when the skeleton was tidily arranged, he took up the rifle and bent over to put it in place. Suddenly I realized what it was all about. Those rumours about Dad . . . The rifle was to be pointing at his foot. The whole thing seemed like a cruel jeer, not just at him, but at me—a comment on my funking my first test as a man, a sneer at my lack of will, my futility. I felt the blood go to my head . . .”

  “We’re moving,” said Sarah.

  “I had no idea the gun was loaded,” Will said urgently, still in the past. “You’ve got to believe that. How could I have imagined it would be? I threw myself on him, and we grappled, and the next thing I knew it had gone off, and Keene was crumpling to the ground . . .”

  The ambulance was going forward, slowly, carefully, and Sarah realized they were nearing the top of Charing Cross Road.

  “That was the end of my boyhood, when I realized I’d killed him. I didn’t think. I just reacted. I grabbed my haversack from beside the willow, and I ran . . . Odd, isn’t it? If it hadn’t been for my parents and their notions, Chris would never have been killed. If I hadn’t felt this overwhelming, crushing paralysis, I’d never have thrown myself at him. I’d have said: ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ or something like that . . .”