Shakespeare's Sword

by Alan Judd

  After more heaving his head thumped onto the wet stone. I remember thinking that that would have done for him if nothing else had. I pulled the rest of the rug out and closed the tailgate. Next thing was to drag him as near as I could get to the far end. That was hard, too. Everything was hard now. I could feel my corduroys wet against the backs of my legs and the flap of my jacket slapping against my back. Twice I nearly lost my footing before concluding I couldn’t get to the end without serious danger of going in with him. He would have to go over the nearer edge, but even dragging him there was risky. It was too dark to see much of him apart from his bulky shape and large pale face. I knelt beside him and began trying to roll him. That too was hard work. I got his head and shoulders near the edge, then went to the other end and grabbed a foot to lever one leg over the other. His leg was heavy and while I was pulling it over his shoe came off in my hands and went into the sea. I rested for half a minute, still kneeling, my elbows on his hip. Then I pushed again, and again. Slowly at first, then with unstoppable momentum, the sodden bulk slid off the edge into the surly water below, leaving me kneeling as in prayer. The wind and waves were such that I heard only a muted splash.

  I suppose we should really have taken the rug and string a mile or so along the coast to dump them but I was wet and exhausted and my hands weak with cold. I threw them both in on the other side of the groyne.

  When I was back in the car she said, ‘Well done, darling. I wish I could hold you on the way home but you’re soaking. Where’s the rug?’

  I told her.

  ‘It would have been better to separate them. We don’t want it associated with the body.’

  ‘They’ll drift apart, surely. And the sea should take care of any blood or DNA. And there was nothing on it to say where it came from.’

  ‘It was his father’s, of course. Probably Persian but very worn and not a very nice one. I’ve been longing to replace it, as I said. Nice to think I can now.’ As we neared Winchelsea the rain lessened and she said, ‘Better not drop me near the house. Fewer sounds of movement the better. I’ll just have to chance getting wet.’

  ‘What will you . . . we . . .?’

  She smiled. ‘Don’t worry, darling, everything’s under control. You drive straight home and go to bed. Make sure you get the car valeted tomorrow and I’ll make sure everything’s tidied up in the house. First thing in the morning I’ll call the police. I’ll say I got up to go to the loo and saw his bed was empty and found the front door unlocked. Then I’ll go and ask friends and neighbours, then later in the day I’ll ring you as a friend and ask you to come over and help with the search. What we’ll do next depends on when the body is found. If it’s found.’

  ‘But what about the—?’

  ‘About the sword? Oh, that’s already safe enough, don’t worry. No one will find it and your replacement is in its place. No one will know the difference. So clever of you to think of that.’

  I had stopped the car by then. She leaned across and again brushed my lips with hers. ‘Be patient, darling, we’ll soon be together properly.’

  Chapter Eight

  It all worked as she intended. The police search the next day, including dozens of volunteers, featured on local radio and television. There was an interview with a restrained and dignified Charlotte, who managed to convey deep emotional currents while staying calm on the surface and thanking all involved for their help. It was a finely wrought performance; I was proud of her.

  The Military Canal, a defence structure dating from the Napoleonic Wars, runs along the foot of Winchelsea and is an obvious hazard for anyone out of his mind enough to wander into it. Police divers came and dragged it while volunteers walked the beach between Rye and Pett Level. A dead dog was found. A helicopter buzzed around and a lifeboat cruised up and down offshore until the wind got up again and the seething grey sea became querulous, at which point everyone gave up and went home. It was an impressive effort, all told.

  I tried to imagine Gerald’s body, a soggy mass tossed about in those waves, sinking a bit here, rising there. It would not incarnadine those multitudinous seas, as Shakespeare had it, but would be consumed utterly unless washed up somewhere. Presumably it would cease floating once all the air was out of it, the head and limbs would come apart and sea creatures would lunch on it. I tried too to feel something for the man the flesh had embodied. Not a bad man, surely. Never happy in himself, perhaps, not only unfulfilled but lacking any potential for fulfilment, with no gift for making others happy and little awareness of or sympathy for those around him. But not actively bad and his asking me to take Charlotte to concerts and talks suggested he must have sensed her longing for something other than the joy of living with him in his father’s house. Unless she had put him up to it. But certainly not a bad man as men go, not cruel or brutal or dishonest, just not noticeably good, either. Something of a lost soul, as lost in life as his disintegrating remains were now in death.

  I couldn’t feel much for him because the decomposing mess wasn’t him and whatever had been him was no more. He had been losing it, anyway, whatever was him. Being dead would be all right, I thought, just like before you were born.

  Yet a better man than me, I now think.

  Charlotte rang me late that afternoon, pretending to tell me for the first time what had happened. I acted my part, shocked and concerned, again admiring her act. ‘It would be so nice if you could come over and help. Most of the searchers have gone now but I’d like to walk the ditches down by the station. We rarely went that way but Gerald and I had walked down there once or twice and it’s possible he might have remembered.’ I presumed she thought that phone calls might somehow be recoverable but she was also, I now realise, setting the tone for our subsequent life together.

  Winchelsea Halt is on the single-track railway line traversing the valley between Hastings and Rye, near Dumb Woman’s Lane. The River Tillingham runs through fields intersected by dykes and ditches which flood in winter and in which the frail or suicidal might plausibly drown. When I picked her up at the house she was already in Wellington boots, Barbour jacket and matching hat, with two of Gerald’s walking sticks. ‘I thought it would be sensible to involve you early on, in my hour of need,’ she whispered. ‘Makes it more natural that we get together later. I’ve told people you’re coming to help and that we’ll concentrate on the inland bits since everyone else has been searching coastwards. I’ve got a stick for you, look.’

  We parked near the halt and enjoyed a wet ramble, probing ditches and pools with our sticks. We talked again about the long-threatened, ever-delayed bypass, agreeing that it would be criminal to ruin that valley, and about the disfiguring new windmills cluttered over towards Dungeness. ‘One of the policemen who came to the house,’ she said, ‘turned out to be an authority on Romney Marsh churches. We must visit them all sometime. They were absolutely charming, the police. So helpful and considerate.’

  Gerald’s remains were found three days later, when the weather had calmed. The body was spotted by a bird-watcher at the foot of Fairlight Cliffs, ‘incomplete’ according to the police and in a state that made identification possible but not easy. Charlotte was not asked to identify it. ‘No face, apparently,’ she whispered, making it sound like a private scandal. ‘I just had to confirm that part of his tweed jacket was his and they do the rest scientifically. It had been bashed about on the rocks, they said, which makes them think that’s where he went in because the tide drift is normally easterly and he wouldn’t have got there if he’d gone in where they found him last time. Which was near where we put him, of course. I had to bite my tongue to stop myself correcting them.’ She tinkled again. ‘I suppose the storm must have taken him out to sea and then brought him in again in a different place. No one mentioned the rug.’

  There was a postmortem followed later by an inquest which concluded death through natural causes. The postmortem showed that he was dead when he entered the water and that he had suffered a heart attack. The various
contusions and lacerations were likely to have been caused by frequent violent contact with the rocky foreshore. The coroner extended his sympathy to Mrs Coombs.

  Are we very bad people, Charlotte and I? Or are we merely ordinary people who have done a bad thing, which I imagine is what many bad people are? And does it matter? Yes and no. We end where nothing matters, but until we get there I suppose you would say that it does.

  Thus it is that you find me here today, comfortably ensconced in a fine house in Winchelsea awaiting our friends the Marsh farmers, who are coming to dinner along with the Witneys, the retired judge and his wife, and my own special friend, Eileen, the GP. They were all so fond of Gerald. Charlotte thought it a nice idea that, two years to the day after the dinner she and Gerald gave – the last they were to do together, sadly – we should have the same company, in commemoration. Only this time Charlotte has help in the kitchen in the form of Stephanie, who lives with Millie now in our attached cottage and spends her time happily doing housework apart from the afternoons she spends with me in the shop, polishing. But she looks more to Charlotte now than to me. I feel I have lost my sister.

  Charlotte and I married a year ago, also to the day. When I protested that it was less than a year since Gerald’s death, quoting funeral baked meats, she said it was important not to leave these things too long. After all, we were neither of us getting any younger. We now live pretty much the life she lived with Gerald, except that I’m in the shop most days and she is free to potter about as she chooses. She likes that but she doesn’t only potter. It has amused her – though she claims she does it to help me – to become an authority on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century swords. She is an astute buyer at auctions and I now sell them in the shop. The sword, meanwhile, the sword that brought us together, I have not seen since I put it down to help move the body.

  ‘Better you don’t know where it is, darling,’ she said, ‘in case one day you inadvertently give it away. Don’t you think?’

  She did not need to mention that it still has Gerald’s blood on one end and my DNA and fingerprints on the other. Nor that Stuart’s sword, now serving as the most expensive poker ever, is evidence of premeditation. Should I ever think of leaving her or crossing her, the authorities would no doubt believe whatever account she chose to give. After all, she is known for her devotion to Gerald. Hence our dinner party tonight.

  Why me? Why did she choose me? Not, it turns out, from desire or passion. We have not shared a bed since a few nights after Gerald’s disposal when she led me to hers, permitted rather than participated in the usual thing, and afterwards said, ‘There, d’you feel better now?’

  Perhaps it’s control, control and security, also the satisfaction of having a more or less presentable man around as a stage-prop, one without – as yet – Gerald’s obvious disadvantages. And she knows how to keep me guessing. One evening, when I was poking the fire with Stuart’s sword, she looked up from her newspaper and said, ‘By the way, the other sword – you know the one? – did I ever tell you that it was apparently sent off once, years ago before I knew Gerald, to be examined to see if it could be Shakespeare’s? Teddington or somewhere. It came back with a note saying it was a German sword made later in the seventeenth century. Too late for Shakespeare, apparently. They could tell by the steel.’ She tinkled. ‘I think Gerald intended to mention it to you, as you’d shown such interest, but you know how confused he was before he died. I sometimes wonder if one of the swords we buy will turn out to be Shakespeare’s.’

  Is that true? There’s no way of knowing.

  Our registry office wedding was quiet, with just Eileen and the Witneys as witnesses. ‘I thought you’d like someone to tease,’ Charlotte had said. ‘So long as you don’t make it too obvious.’ In fact, I like Eileen more now. Making such an effort with her so that I could relish disliking her has had the perversely opposite effect. She makes a change from Charlotte.

  Stephanie was bridesmaid, to her huge delight. She so adores Charlotte. Afterwards we lunched in a good – expensive, anyway – local fish restaurant and after that the judge was ill, which failed to sadden me. Later that afternoon as I walked Eileen to her car, she said, ‘It’s so nice to see Charlotte so happy again. She’s had such bad luck, first with Paul and then Gerald.’

  ‘Paul?’

  ‘Her first husband. She’s told you, surely?’

  I pretended to have forgotten the name.

  ‘He died suddenly too. Mind you, he wasn’t right for her. Any more than Gerald, really. Third time lucky, I’m sure.’

  I mentioned this to Charlotte that evening, as it were in passing, pretending that she had told me herself ages ago and that I’d just forgotten Paul’s name. ‘Eileen was quite concerned about you. She thinks you’ve had such bad luck, with Paul and then Gerald.’

  I could see her struggling with the implication that she might have told me about Paul but forgotten. She couldn’t afford to query it because she couldn’t be sure what she’d said. ‘Yes, poor Paul. So sad.’

  ‘Poor you, too. How did it happen, exactly? I can’t remember.’

  ‘He fell out of a train at night. One of those old slam-door ones, with doors you open yourself, remember? Just outside Runcorn, where we lived then.’

  ‘How did it happen? Drink? Suicide?’

  ‘Neither of those. Definitely not drink and no indication of suicide, no notes or history of attempts or anything like that. All a terrible mystery. No witnesses, either. He was alone in the carriage. I’d gone to the loo.’

  ‘Perhaps he was pushed.’

  ‘He may have thought we’d reached the station. He could be a bit absent-minded. After that I moved down here and met Gerald.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am very grateful to Dr Tobias Capwell, FSA, curator of Arms and Armour at the Wallace Collection, for his help and advice on swords. Any inaccuracies or inadequacies are, of course, my doing.

  Alan Judd is a novelist and biographer who has previously served in the army and at the Foreign Office. Chosen as one of the original twenty Best Young British Novelists, he subsequently won the Royal Society of Literature’s Winifred Holtby Award, the Heinemann Award and the Guardian Fiction Award; he was also shortlisted for the Westminster Prize. Two of his novels, Breed of Heroes and Legacy, were filmed for the BBC and a third, The Kaiser’s Last Kiss, has been filmed as The Exception, starring Christopher Plummer and Lily James. Alan Judd has reviewed widely, was a comment writer for the Daily Telegraph and writes the motoring column for The Oldie.

  Also by Alan Judd

  Fiction

  A Breed of Heroes

  Short of Glory

  The Noonday Devil

  Tango

  The Devil’s Own Work

  Legacy

  The Kaiser’s Last Kiss

  Dancing with Eva

  Uncommon Enemy

  Inside Enemy

  Slipstream

  Deep Blue

  Non-Fiction

  Ford Madox Ford (biography)

  The Quest for C: Mansfield Cumming and the Founding of the Secret Service (biography)

  First World War Poets (with David Crane)

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2018

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © 2018 Alan Judd

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  eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-6714-0

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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