An Afternoon to Kill

by Shelley Smith

  ‘I meant to be very grown-up and good and useful to him. I would have done anything to please him, I loved him so. And in fact I did entirely take my cue from him. At that most impressionable age I saw life altogether through his eyes. I wanted to be like him, austere and noble and melancholy; I wished I too had black hair and eyes instead of my long straight dull brown hair and ordinary grey eyes. He possessed my imagination.

  ‘In some mysterious way the house seemed to go to pieces without anything being changed when Mama died. It was always cheerless and cold now. The trees grew too near the house and made it dark. There was an air of crape about the silent unvisited rooms where we children were seldom to be seen (except that as the eldest child at home I took my place at the vast mahogany dinner-table in the sombre green dining-room with its stolid pheasants and fish in their gilt frames, and tried to entertain Papa with the polite trivialities I had heard Mama dispense). It was as though the soul had left the house. I thought that must be the way Papa wanted it. One had always an impression of dust on the furniture, though I suppose it was clean enough really. Yet I understood emotionally that Papa was mourning. I had a queer childish exaggerated idea of love and I was afraid that he wouid not want to live without her. And it may indeed have been only his duty to his children that kept him wearily working. And yet he hardly seemed aware of us. Every morning we came to give him an obedient kiss as he sat at his solitary breakfast with the paper unopened beside him. Lucy fetched his umbreila; I his top-hat; and then, with our noses pressed into green triangles on the window, we watched the carriage clatter away into the grey sea-mist. Then Lucy in her black pinafore scampered up to her governess and I more slowly followed in the weight of my heavy mourning — somehow one could not run in black, one felt too responsible, too grown-up, too consciously sad. And all day long I nervously waited for the evening when, with hair neatly brushed back and fastened with a black ribbon and a locket round my neck, I went down to dinner and tried to engage Papa in conversation. I never succeeded in making him smile, I doubt if he even heard my awkward efforts. It was misery to me. Because I loved him this was the high spot of my day, and I always believed that I failed him. Till I hit on the idea of reading the paper aloud to him as he ate; a solution which absolved us both.

  ‘Every Sunday we took flowers to the churchyard; but Papa never spoke to us about Mama, and I used to pretend that the flowers on the grave had nothing to do with her. I think I must have been very lonely at this time. It was an unnatural life. We visited nobody and no children ever came to play with us. We might have been living a hundred miles from any other habitation instead of a quarter of an hour’s walk from the huddled little village. Yet I had grown to like the life. I wanted Papa to remain for ever with me in this dark unreal world of the past. I wanted to take Mama’s place with Papa.’

  Lancelot Jones sat up more alertly, and behind his glasses he raised his eyebrows.

  ‘That shocks you,’ said the old woman, smiling faintly.

  ‘Oh, not at all,’ Lancelot Jones hastened to assure her. ‘I’m not shocked. We all know about the Oedipus complex now. The only thing about it that is horrifying to our twentieth-century minds is that the Victorians in their innocence found the perverse sexual relationship between parent and child “pretty”, something to be encouraged and fostered. I confess that does make me feel rather ill. It apparently never occurred to them that it was not only dangerous but often disastrous for the child.’

  ‘Not for Miss Mitford, not for Elizabeth Barrett Browning, not — if I dare put myself among such august company — for me,’ said the sturdy old woman equably.

  ‘I don’t think you quite understand,’ said Lancelot Jones kindly.

  ‘But I do,’ she said cheerfully. ‘You think I do not realise that I was in love with my own father; yet that is exactly what I have been at some pains to describe to you, my dear young man, in the simplest language possible, so that you could not fail to understand. It was a tragedy, and from it came tragedy. There is no need to veil one’s meaning behind the timeless antics of Greek mythology.’

  He arched his brows politely.

  ‘Yet you say that it was not disastrous for you.’

  ‘Look at me!’ she said, sitting there with her hands on her knees like a fat brown goddess, placid and ironical. ‘Am I not what they call “an integrated personality”?’

  He gazed at her in silence.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘I do not pretend to be a psychologist,’ he said modestly at last. ‘But, if you will allow me to say so, even I can see signs of a deep-seated neurosis in your retreat from life.’

  ‘You interest me strangely,’ she smiled. ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘Your living here, cut off from the world and your own kind of people.’

  ‘But I have not yet told you why I came here.’

  ‘True, but there is a reason for it, there is a story behind your coming here, a story whose origins lie far back in your life. “It is all such a long time ago,” you said when I asked you. You did not say, “I came because the climate suited me,” or “I had work to do here,” or in fact anything rational that could be explained in a sentence.’

  ‘In a sentence, I came because I wanted to get as far away as possible from England to some corner of the world so remote that my name would be unknown and no one would have heard of me. Does that do?’

  ‘Yet you see you didn’t get away at all. You unconsciously sought out a place that bore for you all the salient characteristics of “home”.’

  ‘Now how do you make that out?’ she said, astonished.

  ‘It’s really rather interesting; the pattern is quite blatant. You come to a country where the thought is predominantly Mahommedan and the women are kept in submission, just as you must have been when you were young in Victorian England; you choose a place where the empty stretch of tawny earth and the enormous arch of unobstructed sky is in some odd way not at all unlike the Essex coast; you create about you the atmosphere of your “dark home” (where the trees grew too near the house with its gloomy Victorian draperies) even here, where the sun is so strong that it has to be filtered through pierced gratings; you have even set yourself a little away from the village so that you can live in studied isolation, “visiting no one, and with no one coming to see you”.’

  The old woman with her strong mannish head and cropped white hair began to laugh, began to shake with silent and prolonged laughter.

  ‘But you are — you really are — extraordinarily clever, my dear young sir — a quite brilliant piece of induction,’ she gasped. ‘I had no idea — very remarkable how it all fits — you have declared me to myself.’ She passed a hand across her mouth as though to wipe away her mirth, and said more seriously: ‘But why is that “disastrous”, if I am happy here, after all?’

  ‘Because — don’t you see? — you can only be happy here, where you can live your fantasy-life undisturbed, where you need never grow up and face life’s realities. You never have escaped from your childhood, you have simply hidden yourself inescapably in the past. Even when you thought you had broken away you came to live in a place that reminded you of the past, you were always in your heart trying to “get back”, you see.’

  ‘My dear, it sounds frantically Barrie-ish,’ old Miss Hine murmured. ‘Blanche Rose is one thing, but the idea of “Mary Rose” is somehow infinitely depressing. That was not what I was trying to convey at all.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ he said with a puzzled air.

  ‘Ah, I fancy that’s a myth you will not have heard of,’ she said demurely. ‘A myth, the meaning of which I suppose you could say was, that it is always too late, really from the moment one is born.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t say that. That is a hopelessly futile and defeatist attitude. One must be practical. One must learn to adjust oneself to an adult conception of life.’

  ‘At my age that would be rather dif
ficult, I suppose,’ old Miss Hine said meekly.

  A servant speaking from the archway made him jump, and spared him the embarrassment of replying, he didn’t want to hurt the old lady’s feelings.

  Alva Hine rose and led the way into a beautiful room with a domed ceiling and blue walls with a design of Arabic script in white lettering running along the top. The windows in here were unlatticed, narrow apertures with a thin column dividing each one into two with a rather pretty and graceful effect. An exquisite carpet hung on one wall, the only ornament. And there was no furniture to fuss the eye as in a European room, except for a table eighteen inches high with a big beaten silver dish on it piled with melons, figs, ruddy peaches, and small black grapes.

  Imitating her example, he folded himself as awkwardly as a camel on to his cushion, while the servant held before him a great platter of meats dyed saffron on a bed of rice garnished with stewed guavas and black olives, from which arose the mingled scents of oil and garlic and spices. Lancelot Jones became suddenly aware that he was exceedingly hungry.

  ‘This is amazingly good,’ he said, the juices running down his chin as he munched.

  ‘Just boiled mutton and rice like we used to have at home when I was a girl,’ she added blandly. ‘I expect that’s why I like it,’ she added, her innocent eye on his.

  He had the grace to smile.

  ‘I see you have a sense of humour.’

  ‘That at least was something I’ve acquired that I hadn’t when I was young. As Cousin Nell used to say to me reprovingly twenty times a day, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you,” and “A merry heart goes all the way”; she was a great one for tags. Not that she was particularly merry herself, poor old soul, but she wasn’t used to children and this seemed to her a happy way of correcting their little faults without nagging. I think we would all rather have been ill-treated even. We despised Cousin Nell. She was a tiresome old bore and we thought her slightly ridiculous, in the intolerant way children have of judging their elders. She was a cousin of Mother’s, and when Mother died she came down from Scotland to look after us all. She cannot have been happy with us, all her efforts were quite unappreciated. And though we were never actively rude or played practical jokes on her, we ignored her, which was worse. I often wonder she stayed so dauntlessly. I suppose it was her sense of duty. She actually cried when she left. But then,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘so did we.

  ‘She was a hopeless spinster of course, and must have been nearly as old as Father — quite fifty, I imagine, yet I fancy she had her dreams, her mad wild hopes and fears, poor sentimental old horse with her ear-rings tinkling like a bridle. She never was silly with Father, she behaved with scrupulous decency always, but if she had not been a little in love with Father herself, would there have been all those jealous scenes between us?

  ‘We disagreed profoundly in our interpretation of Papa’s wishes, and these disagreements always ended in the same way, with me storming from the house in a passion to walk broodingly for hours by the restless sea, or across the fields of harsh grey stubble where the stunted trees seemed to be clinging to the earth by their heels, like gnarled old countrywomen with their skirts blown over their heads by the cutting salt wind.

  ‘Night would fall and owls begin to hoot and I would huddle among the dunes watching the lights go up in the houses in the village, waiting for the sound of Papa’s carriage returning from the station. Then I would gather my heavy skirts with their sodden sand-encrusted hem into my two hands and spring in beside him as he passed. He would look at me, at my wind-tangled hair and white exhausted face, with his solemn black eyes and say nothing. But I would never know what he was thinking, and in a sudden access of guilt would feel wretchedly uncertain of my case, and I would cry out: “Papa, I’ve been wicked!” and follow it immediately with the accusation: “Cousin Nell is a beast! I hate her!” Papa would look at me in pained silence till I began to cry and then he would catch me into his arms and stroke my hair and murmur sadly, “My poor little motherless girl!” Ah, those were really the moments of my life! When I felt close to him and my heart seemed ready to burst with a deliciously painful joy. Once I murmured, “I wish we need never go back,” but Papa’s only thought was to reach the sad comfort of his home, the solace of a fire and a glass of sherry and the evening paper in unbroken peace, after his long day in the City. I would stalk proudly into the house on his arm, looking like a scarecrow no doubt, but feeling like a black-clad Infanta of Spain. I would eye Cousin Nell defiantly where she sat nursing her dignity with her sewing beneath the gaslight that turned her sandy-grey hair to a livid gamboge. But the next day I would be very, very polite and obedient to Cousin Nell, who, as like as not, would merely say, “’Tis never too late to mend,” or “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; I will repay,” delivered with an absent air as though these cryptic laconisms had nothing to do with whatever we were talking about.’

  She took a slice of melon steeped in stem ginger, and added:

  ‘So we dwelt, and continued to dwell, in this curious limbo of the defunct for four years.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  A CARRIAGE IN THE RAIN

  ‘Yes, four years,’ she went on mediatively, wiping her fingers. ‘I was nearly eighteen, when the first, the very first breath of change ruffled the calm of our strange life. I remember it well, that June day. A day of chill ceaseless rain with the sea a pallid dishwater colour beneath the leaden sky. It was too wet to go out, and Edgar cooped up in his nursery all day had been as naughty as an indefatigable four-year-old can be. He threw Lucy’s exercise-books out of the window on to the muddy path beneath and then screamed when Lucy slapped him. He would not play, he would not do his lessons, he would not sit quietly and listen to a story. “He was a bad, disobedient, unruly boy, and Papa would have to be told.” “Damn!” said Edgar with a wicked look in his eye. “Oh, that’s too much, you naughty boy; you shall be sent to bed!” he was told. “Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn!” said Edgar, cheerfully of the opinion that one might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Now Papa would certainly have to be told, and Papa would be very very angry.

  ‘But Papa was late that night; a thing that never happened, he was as punctual as Immanuel Kant. And in such rain too! Could there have been an accident, the carriage overturned, the horse bolted, we were beginning anxiously to wonder, when Papa’s key jingled in the door. He came in whistling faintly through pursed lips and rattling his keys jauntily in his pocket.

  ‘We were surprised — and something more, some uneasiness, or dismay, entered my heart at least. But we all ran to him like well-trained loving hens:

  ‘“Papa!” we cried. “What happened to you? You’re so late!” we cried.

  ‘He looked at his watch solemnly and said he was exactly thirty-eight minutes late, but there was a hint of a smile in his voice.

  ‘“Were my chicks worried about their poor old father? Did they fear they had lost their breadwinner? And may he be allowed to refresh himself somewhat, take off his wet boots, and warm himself by the fire, before he embarks on the narrative of his adventures?”

  ‘We cosseted him and patted him and sat him by the fire with his glass of Madeira, and Lucy knelt at his feet and I leaned against his chair with my arm on his shoulders, and Cousin Nell picked up her sewing again with Harry cross-legged on the mat beside her.

  ‘I can see it as clearly as a picture in the family album; a little tableau of a happy family; and it may be because it was fundamentally the last evening like that, with Papa still in our possession, that the recollection of that moment is still so vivid to me.

  ‘And then father began to tell us his pathetically respectable little adventure, how he descended from the train to find a damsel in distress cowering from the rain in her pretty summer frock, trying to keep her wide-brimmed hat from blowing away with one hand, and her skirts from the puddles with the other. And Father had offered her his carriage to her destination, wh
ich after some little persuasion she had accepted. He had then to wait in the cold draughty station himself for the carriage to return.

  ‘“But why didn’t you go with her, Papa?” Lucy cried.

  ‘“That would not have been proper, my child,” said Papa mildly.

  ‘“Well, I don’t call that much of an adventure!” pouted Lucy. “Do you, Harry?”

  ‘But Papa only smiled and pulled her curls, and said he was too old for proper adventures now. “And what does my big girl say?” he asked, turning to me.

  ‘I took a sip of Madeira from his glass and said: “Who was she, Papa?”

  ‘“I’ve no idea,” said Papa. “I have never seen her before. I should not have forgotten if I had.”

  ‘“Goodness, how mysterious,” I said, “perhaps she had escaped from an asylum, like The Woman in White.”

  ‘“She was in white,” Papa said, “a white frock with black velvet bands on it and a white straw hat with black velvet ribbons.”

  ‘Papa to say this, who never noticed what anyone wore! I felt a strange sensation in my breast and I laughed and said, “She must have looked ridiculous in all that rain!”

  ‘And then we changed the subject and talked of other things till Papa’s dinner was ready.

  ‘The event would have passed from my mind if Papa had not received two days later a letter in a pretty florid hand thanking him for his kindness, and passed it across to me, saying, “My fair unknown!”

  ‘It was signed Sophia Falk with a broad flourish such as a queen might give to her signature. For some reason that signature made me fear the writer’s personality. I could think of nothing to say but, “She’s staying with Mrs Livingstone.” Mrs Livingstone we knew, she was a respectable but indigent gentlewoman who lived in a seedy unattractive house at the wrong end of the High Street, near the gasworks. Mama did not exactly call on her, but I knew she was considered a useful person to help with Bazaars and Flag Days. She was now evidently reduced to taking in “summer visitors” as lodgers were euphemistically called in those days.