Malice Aforethought

by Francis Iles

  “Edmund!” said Mrs. Bickleigh loudly and distinctly. “Mr. Torr has nothing to eat. Do please remember to look after your guests.”

  Dr. Bickleigh started, broke off in mid-sentence, and hurried across the room to minister to the Rev. Hessary’s fleshly needs.

  5

  GWYNYFRYD RATTERY did not arrive until the middle of the second set after tea, when Dr. Bickleigh had given up in despair all hope of ever seeing her again. Her excuses were unusual but, to those who knew her father, not unreasonable. Major Rattery invariably insisted on a set of tennis immediately after tea, to keep himself fit. As he refused with equal vehemence to take this exercise anywhere but on his own court and with his own daughter, Gwynyfryd had been unable to leave until she had afforded it to him. That she should not have told her unreasonable parent to whistle for his game if he could not take it at a less selfish time appeared to surprise nobody present except Quarnian.

  Physically, Gwynyfryd Rattery was a fine creature. Twenty-four years old, she was tall and well made, and she played a better game of tennis than any other woman in the neighbourhood—a hard hitter with a graceful style. As for her looks, to those who could appreciate them she was not merely striking, but beautiful; her slightly slanting, green-grey eyes, clouds of hair of the real Titian tint, and the milky skin that often accompanies it, were a real joy to look at. They hinted, too, at a full-blooded zest for life which her tennis seemed to confirm. Her manner was in direct contradiction. She minced; she looked down her pretty, straight nose; she was so excessively lady-like that butter would obviously not melt even in her flaming hair.

  On Dr. Bickleigh Gwynyfryd had always had a disquieting effect. She frightened him, of course; all girls did that, till he knew them thoroughly. But he could not begin to understand her. He longed to approach her, but could not decide on the way. She seemed utterly sexless, but her appearance made it seem unlikely that she really could be so. Yet Dr. Bickleigh knew that she did not attract the average young man of the district. All the other girls, even Quarnian Torr, seemed to be continually marching in a procession of fresh flirtations, but the name of no youth was ever mentioned seriously by the district scandalmongers in connection with Gwynyfryd’s.

  Without quite being able to diagnose the cause of this lack of enterprise on the part of Wyvern’s Cross’s young men beyond the extreme primness of Miss Rattery’s public manner, Dr. Bickleigh was able to feel something about her so a-sexual, so frigidly virginal, so repellent in advance of any tentative overtures, that he had simply not dared to put his luck to the trial with her; for it was just this a-sexuality, this cold, intelligent virginity that froze the hearty marrow of the others, which kept Dr. Bickleigh fluttering helplessly round the lamp of Miss Rattery’s hair. A dozen times in the last three years he had decided that he would never approach her (he was morbidly sensitive to feminine snubs), a dozen times he had decided afresh that he must do something about it—if only once and for all, then once and for all. Meantime he had prepared his path as well as he could by ceaseless attentions when they met in public, a more exquisite deference than he accorded to any other woman, a smile occasionally across a crowded room as if they had some small intimacy in common, a host of other little touches to show Gwynyfryd that he was interested, very respectfully but very intensely, in her good self. And it had seemed to him that during the last month or two Gwynyfryd had responded to this treatment.

  Dr. Bickleigh was quite genuine in his feelings. He did not doubt that he was deeply in love with Gwynyfryd, and that she was the one woman in the world whom he ought to have married. The fact that he had been looking for this one woman so long made his discovery of her all the more poignant; the fact that he had been certain so often before of having found her elsewhere did not affect the matter in the least.

  He had determined at last to stake his luck, for once and for all, this very afternoon.

  His opportunity he had prepared carefully in advance. Under his tuition Gwynyfryd was developing an interest in horticulture. He had arranged to have some hydrangea hortensia cuttings ready for her to take this afternoon. That June is not the best time of year to take hydrangea cuttings he had not mentioned. The cuttings were waiting ready in a tool-shed in the farthest corner of the garden.

  His heart thumped a little as he said, casually enough, after the greetings and explanations were over and before Gwynyfryd had settled herself into a chair: “By the way, I’ve got those cuttings ready for you, Gwynyfryd.”

  “Oo, yerss?” said Gwynyfryd, in her most ladylike tones.

  “You’d better take them now, while you’re free. Would you like to come along and look them over?”

  Not waiting for her answer, he led the way with nervous haste, and escaping his wife’s observation, by the shortest route that would take them out of sight of the tennis-lawn. Gwynyfryd followed him. The kitchen-garden, where was the tool-shed, was on the farther side of the house. Dr. Bickleigh did not pause to let Gwynyfryd come abreast of him till he had reached the shelter of the latter.

  If Gwynyfryd was surprised that the cuttings should be in the tool-shed instead of the greenhouse she did not show it; she walked in without hesitation as her companion opened the door for her. His heart now thumping so violently as to make him almost breathless, Dr. Bickleigh began in stifled tones to point out the merits of hydrangea hortensia. He dwelt on his subject at inordinate length; he repeated himself, stammered, asked foolish, temporising questions; the familiar longing to come to the real point and dread of doing so had him in its grip; he sweated with nervousness.

  It was Gwynyfryd herself who finally gave him his cue. “Is that your heart beating?” she asked incredulously. “Ay can hear it from here.”

  Whether this was innocence or provocation Dr. Bickleigh was in too much confusion to ask himself. He stumbled blindly for the opening. “Well—can you wonder?” he muttered, and tried clumsily to embrace her. In spite of his experience, Dr. Bickleigh had little finesse.

  “Dr. Bickleigh!” exclaimed Gwynyfryd in shocked tones. “What are you doing?” She had small difficulty in extracting herself from the little man’s clasp, but her alarm seemed unabated.

  Dr. Bickleigh followed her as she backed into the farther corner of the tool-shed. He did not know quite what he was saying or doing. “Gwynyfryd—you know I like you frightfully.”

  “Ay don’t.”

  “Well, I do. You must have seen it.”

  “Ay—Ay’ve never thought of you—like that, at all.”

  “I like you better than anyone I’ve ever known.”

  “You say that to every girl.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You do.”

  “I swear I don’t.” A conversation is never so utterly banal as when its participants are at their most tense. “Gwynyfryd!”

  “What?”

  “Just let me—kiss you.”

  “Noo!”

  “Why not?”

  “Ay—don’t want you to.”

  “But why not?”

  “Ay would never come between husband and wife,” said Miss Rattery, clutching at her primness. She was almost in nervous tears.

  “But I like you so dreadfully. Listen, Gwynyfryd: I love you.”

  “You don’t. Ay won’t listen, Dr. Bickleigh.”

  “Oh, don’t call me Dr. Bickleigh. Call me Teddy.”

  “Let me goo, please. You must let me goo.”

  “Well, just let me kiss you first,” repeated Dr. Bickleigh doggedly. Even now he felt his self-respect could be salved if she would do that. He no longer wanted the physical contact, merely the mental satisfaction.

  “Ay will not.”

  “Have you ever been kissed, Gwynyfryd?”

  “You’ve no right to ask me things like that.”

  “I have. I love you.”

  “Ay’m gooing.” Ignominiously she pushed the little man aside by main force and hurried out of the shed, her face crimson.

  “Gwynyfryd! You mustn’t— T
he cuttings . . . Only give things away.”

  She took them without looking at him, and they walked back in silence, both breathing as if they had run a long race. The bitterness of defeat—not even glorious defeat, with a slapped face and unwilling lips masterfully kissed, but defeat ignominious beyond words—oppressed the doctor.

  “Is it quite hopeless, Gwynyfryd?” he ventured once.

  “Ay can’t think how you dared!” she blazed at him.

  By the time they reached the court Miss Rattery had partially recovered her control. Dr. Bickleigh, on the other hand, had come nearer to losing his than ever. A slow anger was burning in him, growing steadily every moment, an all-embracing anger directed as much at himself as at his companion. Gwynyfryd was just a fool. What time and genuine sentiment he had been wasting on her. Come between husband and wife for a kiss, indeed! Good Lord, how he had been taken in. Why, there was more even in Ivy, silly little eternally crying Ivy, than there was in this piece of conceited affectation. And he had thought her sensible, understanding, possessed of brains instead of the usual feminine fluff ! Yes, he was the fool.

  Mrs. Bickleigh had noticed their absence. She knew her husband, and contempt sharpened her voice. “Oh, there you are, Edmund. I’ve been wanting you.”

  “Yes, my dear?” To all appearances Dr. Bickleigh was perfectly normal. The two little spots of red that burned on his cheekbones were too tiny to be noticed.

  “They’re a ball short. Benjie hit one into the gooseberry-bushes again. Please go and find it at once.” She spoke with more than her usual peremptoriness, and her loud, grating voice could not have failed to reach every ear. The men looked most uncomfortable. Each of them had volunteered to look for the ball, and all had been told it was their host’s task, and his only. The same thought was obvious now on all their faces: “I’m hanged if I’d speak to a dog like that.” Dr. Bickleigh felt his wife’s tone and what lay behind it, and he felt his guests’ reactions to it. The two tiny spots of colour on his cheek-bones spread a little.

  And then—Gwynyfryd Rattery laughed.

  It was, had Dr. Bickleigh been able to recognise it, only the meaningless laughter of overwrought nerves. But he did not recognise it. What he heard was the mocking of the whole world, the traditional mocking at the insignificant, henpecked husband. And Gwynyfryd, whose respect he had so particularly wanted, whose understanding he had coveted so hungrily, had ranged herself with the mockers.

  He turned on his heel, his whole face flaming; and every atom of his varied emotions leapt suddenly into overmastering hatred of his wife. “My God,” he muttered to himself, as he strode round the end of the court, his small body taut with anger. “My God, I can’t stand this much longer. I wish she was dead. My God, I wish I could kill her.”

  CHAPTER II

  1

  TO INDICATE Dr. Edmund Bickleigh at the age of thirty-seven it is necessary to lay emphasis first and last upon his size. The smallness of Dr. Bickleigh’s stature was responsible for almost everything that he then was, and had been ever since he first realised that he was not going to grow any more and would have to go through life looking up at nearly all men and quite a number of women. His height was five feet six inches in his boots.

  Physical appearance plays a larger part in the formation of character than is always recognised. Some small bodily defect— an unusually large foot, slightly projecting teeth—is quite enough to turn one who would otherwise have been a perfectly normally balanced person into an awkward hypersensitive, and not on this one point alone. Small men are always either perkily bumptious, which generally means an entire lack of imagination, or else quite unnecessarily humble.

  In these days of glib reference to complexes, repressions, and fixations on every layman’s lips, it is not to be supposed that Dr. Bickleigh did not know what was the matter with him. He could diagnose an inferiority complex, and a pronounced one at that, as well as anyone else. But to diagnose is not to cure. Absurd though he could easily prove it to be, Dr. Bickleigh continued to feel uncouth in the presence of women, insignificant in the presence of men, and an inferior being in every way to each fresh stranger he met. Only when alone could he realise that he was quite as good as anyone else in this world, and possibly a little better.

  His upbringing had contributed to this state of affairs. The son of a chemist in a small way in one of the midland towns, Dr. Bickleigh had begun his career by helping in his father’s shop. Educated at the local grammar school, with a couple of years to follow at one of the very minor universities, he had then been sent by his father (who all his life had been saving every possibly superfluous penny for this purpose) to a Scotch hospital, where expenses are less than at the English ones. There he had qualified—not brilliantly, but quite competently.

  But an L.R.C.P., young Bickleigh was soon to discover, does not necessarily a gentleman make, nor an M.R.C.S. a grandfather. In the atmosphere of the small Devonshire practice which his father bought for him with the last of his savings and a mortgage on the shop as well, and which Dr. Bickleigh had been working up with more than fair success ever since, birth counted for everything and achievement nothing. That he had been able by his own ability to lift himself out of his old plane, and mix on terms of social equality with the kind of people whom he had once served from the other side of the counter, gradually became less and less remarkable; while the fact that he had been born on the wrong side of that counter grew more and more oppressive.

  Surrounded by public-school men, he was not a public-school man himself; rubbing shoulders every day with men who had been up at Oxford or Cambridge, he had been up at neither; meeting on his own level nobody who could not produce at least three generations of gentle ancestors, he could carry his own gentility no further back than his own person; married to someone who by all the canons of his friends, his acquaintances, and even the humblest of his cottage patients, was a Somebody, he was a Nobody. The invariable question about a stranger was, “Who is he?” not, “What has he done?” It was the only criterion.

  A man with the self-confidence born of physical largeness might have resisted this assumption; might have been driven towards a mental arrogance or simply have laughed at it, according to his possession or not of a sense of humour; Dr. Bickleigh inevitably came to accept it. His father, whose vehemence in the opposite direction might have gone some little way to restore the balance, was dead now, and Dr. Bickleigh lived in continual dread that somebody who had known him and his position might appear in Wyvern’s Cross and denounce his son. Even Julia Bickleigh supposed her husband to be at least the son of a doctor, and had never searched a medical directory of ancient date to disclose his perfidy.

  What stature and upbringing had begun, marriage perfected. To be informed—not openly, indeed, but by unmistakable innuendo—day in and day out for ten years, and by someone who regards the fact almost as an axiom of existence, that one is a worm, cannot but make a person, inclined already to attach more weight to the opinions of others than to his own, come in time to believe in the idea as firmly as its expositor.

  Dr. Bickleigh’s reactions to his wormhood were perfectly normal. He accepted it as one accepts a scar on the face. It was a pity, but there it was and it could not be helped. He was not in the least morbid about it. He knew he was popular in the neighbourhood, for instance, worm or no worm, and that pleased him very much; for, like all of us, however superior we may pretend to be about it, he liked to be liked by the people he liked—and he did like most people. He remained more or less what he had always been, a cheerful soul, gregarious, ready to be amused by the simplest means, always willing to do anything for anybody at a moment’s notice. With men he got on quite well; with women (to his own recurrent astonishment) better. Dr. Bickleigh had been getting on well with women for over twenty years now, but he was still as astonished about it as he had been when he found himself permitted to kiss his first girl—a giggling creature who implored him to give over, and showed every sign of wanting anythi
ng in the world rather than to be kissed by him, yet seemed most strangely annoyed when he acceded to her earnest request to be let go, so that he had to begin the whole nerve-racking business all over again.

  To meet him in the ordinary way, then, one would have said that Dr. Bickleigh was as simple, normal a human being as one could find in Devonshire. And so, practically speaking, he was. An inferiority complex, so far from being anything remarkable, is, it would seem, the normal state of affairs; it is its absence which is remarkable, or at any rate the possession of its opposite; for apparently one must have one or the other.

  It was only in his relations with women that the little man’s bias really found any expression.

  Women did not exactly terrify Dr. Bickleigh, but for some reason (traceable, no doubt we should be told, to some incident in infancy) he was far less at his ease with them than with men. He felt more than ordinarily insignificant in their presence. His wife, of course, had a perfect knack, by the mere inflection of a word or lift of an eyebrow, of making him feel quite inexpressibly small; a twist of her lip, and he would know that his evening clothes, so far from improving him, made him look just like a counter-jumper dressed up; a gleam in her eye, and he would realise that his pretensions to gentility were grotesque, that he never had been and never could be anything but an interloper in his own house. But that was a special case. Generally speaking, women were to him, somehow or other by mere virtue of their sex alone, a superior kind of being, simply by being different; for to be different from Dr. Bickleigh was usually, in that particular point, to be superior to him.

  The result was curious. He was compelled to pursue them. Sheer masculinity, of which in spite of everything, he had his share, drove him on. He could tolerate his inferiority where other men were concerned, for, after all, the male criterion is almost always a physical one, and the result is out of one’s own control; but inferiority to women was unbearable. Perhaps he never realised his with full consciousness, but that made little difference: he pursued women unceasingly, doggedly, and resentfully.