Settling Scores

by Martin Edwards

  “While I was in the middle of saying this the idea hit me, and I got quite a shock when I looked up and saw that Rufus had got it, too.

  “‘How’s Sir Godfrey’s heart these days?’ I said.

  “‘It hasn’t been terrific since he had pneumonia two years ago,’ said Rufus.

  “‘Is there any chance of keeping him out of the court this evening?’ I asked bluntly.

  “‘Have you ever found that he listened to his professional advisers?’ said Rufus.

  “‘Only when it suited him,’ I admitted.

  “We both sat on the sofa and looked at each other like a couple of schoolboys who have gone treasure-hunting and turned up a skeleton.

  “‘Why?’ said Rufus at last.

  “‘Just what you said. He’ll never listen to his professional advisers. I don’t know how many times I’ve told him to make a will. He always promises to do it next time he sees me.’

  “‘Who gets it all if he dies without a will?’

  “‘I don’t suppose he’s even troubled to work it out,’ I said. ‘He hasn’t got any very close relatives. As a matter of fact it goes through his father’s only sister—she died last year—to…’

  “‘I can guess that one,’ said Rufus. ‘To Robert Cavendish.’

  “‘Surely,’ I said. ‘If you told him—’

  “‘I’ve never known Sir Godfrey do anything I’ve told him,’ said Rufus. ‘Besides—this may sound unethical. But supposing we’re right, and supposing it does happen—is it such a bad way to go?’

  “‘He won’t last for ever. Some day soon that heart’s going to catch up with him. It might be running up stairs or it might be just getting up from table. Why not go out in a blaze of glory, playing your favourite game—’

  “‘That’s all very well from his point of view,’ I said. ‘I’m thinking of Cavendish.’

  “I shan’t forget that game as long as I live.

  “It’s the only time I’ve ever seen murder committed, under the blaze of electric lamps in front of a gallery full of spectators who cheered the murderer’s every stroke.

  “Cavendish, you understand, was not only playing the most perfectly judged drops and lobs, but he was playing them so that they were just not quite good enough. He always allowed his opponent a chance of getting to them. Not much chance, but enough to make a sporting old boy like Sir Godfrey go for them.

  “The end came in the fourth game. A drop shot in a million. The old man started to jump. There was a clatter as he dropped his racket, and then he was in a heap on the floor.

  “Rufus Marks was the finest heart man in England, and he was on the job inside five seconds, but he might just as well have been back in his consulting room in London.

  “There wasn’t a thing to be done.”

  I listened in silence. If I hadn’t known Birley so well I should have thought he was making the whole thing up.

  “I never heard that Cavendish came into money,” I said at last. “He must have kept very quiet about it.”

  “Of course he didn’t come into the money,” said Birley. “I told you what the answer to the drop shot was. Anticipation, I persuaded Sir Godfrey to make his will before he went on to the court. Rufus and I witnessed it in the gunroom after tea. He left the bulk of his money to very sound charities—”

  There was a burst of applause from upstairs and a clatter of feet, as the spectators left the gallery.

  The first man down in the bar happened to be someone I knew.

  “How did it go, Duggie?” I asked.

  “Victory for the Air Force,” said Duggie. “By that last game there was really only one man in it. Poor old Cavendish, he literally murdered him.”

  “Not literally, I hope,” said Mr. Birley, mildly.

  ‌Dangerous Sport

  ‌Celia Fremlin

  Celia Margaret Fremlin (1914–2009) made a dazzling start to her career as a crime novelist. The Hours Before Dawn (1958), her first book, won an Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America, and remains a classic of domestic suspense. For more than three decades she continued to produce gripping novels such as Appointment with Yesterday (1972) and The Spider-Orchid (1977). Fremlin’s acute eye for characters must surely have benefited from the time she spent working on the Mass Observation project after leaving Somerville College, Oxford. Her understanding of human behaviour was complemented by a sharp sense of humour, evident in such novels as Possession (1969), while her presentation of quiet, sometimes desperate lives was accompanied by a touch of menace. Her own personal life was blighted by a series of tragic bereavements and she became a vocal advocate of assisted suicide and euthanasia.

  Fremlin was an accomplished writer of short fiction and the virtues of her novels are equally on display in her elegantly crafted tales with a twist. This story first appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in September 1976, and was subsequently collected in A Lovely Day to Die and other stories (1984).

  “Darling, I’d just love to be able to stay. You know I would. I’m just as disappointed as you are. But—”

  But.

  But, but, but. What would it be this time, Stella wondered bitterly. Whatever it was, she’d have heard it before, that was certain. After five years of going around with a married man, a girl knows his repertoire by heart.

  But I have to help Wendy with the weekend shopping. But the man is coming to fix the hot-water boiler. But I have to fetch Carol from the Brownies. But Simon is away from school with a temperature. But I have to meet Aunt Esmé at the airport.

  This last had been the funniest “but” of all; and though in fact it had happened quite near the beginning of her relationship with Gerald, it still made Stella laugh, and grind her teeth, when she thought about it. For it had come so soon after that golden September day when, lying in the long grass by the river outside Marlowe, Gerald had been confiding in her, as married men will, about his loneliness. Even as a child he’d been lonely, he told her.

  “No brothers and sisters. Not even any uncles or aunts,” he’d explained sadly. “I used to long sometimes for one of those big, close, quarrelsome families, all weddings and funerals and eating roast chicken and bread sauce at each other’s tables, and running down each other’s in-laws. I yearned for a group larger than just myself and my two parents—I wanted my own tribe, and that wonderful feeling of belonging. Particularly at Christmas I used to feel…”

  Stella couldn’t remember, at this distance of time, what it was that Gerald used to feel at Christmas—something about tangerines, and somebody else’s grandfather out in the snow sawing apple logs—or something; it was of no importance, and that’s why she’d forgotten it. What was important was the discrepancy she’d instantly spotted between these maudlin reminiscences and the cock-and-bull story about meeting “Aunt Esmé” at the airport.

  She’d given him every chance. Why couldn’t Wendy be the one to meet the woman, she’d asked, watching him intently while she spoke. After all, she was Wendy’s aunt, not his—“Oh, no, darling, no, whatever gave you that idea? She’s my aunt. She was awfully good to me as a kid, and so I feel this is the least I can do. It’s an awful bore, but—you do understand, don’t you, darling?”

  Of course she’d understood. That’s what mistresses are for.

  “Of course, darling!” she’d said, not batting an eyelid; and afterward, how she’d laughed about it—when she’d finished crying!

  She had to be so very careful, that was the thing: call Gerald’s bluff even once, and the whole relationship could have been wrecked forever. He had made it quite, quite clear to her, very early, that suspicion, jealousy, and possessiveness were the prerogatives of the wife, and of the wife alone. It was in the nature of things (Gerald seemed to feel) that Wendy should cross-examine him about his business trips, ring up the office to check that he really was working late, go through his pockets for letters and for incriminating theatre-ticket stubs; for Stella to do these things struck him as an outrage, an insult
to the natural order of things.

  “Look, darling,” he’d said (and the cold savagery of his tone had seemed to Stella quite out of proportion to her very minor misdemeanour—a single tentative little phone call to his secretary asking, just simply asking, what time he was expected back from Wolverhampton), “Look, darling, when a married man starts an affair, it’s because he wants to get away from that sort of thing, not because he wants more of it! He has enough trouble getting a few hours’ freedom as it is, without having his mistress waiting for him like a cat at a mousehole every time he steps outside his front door!”

  A speech both cruel and uncalled-for, and Stella had been dreadfully upset. But being upset never got her anywhere with Gerald, it just made him avoid answering the telephone; and so after a while she’d stopped being upset, and had resolved to watch her step even more carefully in the future. And so that was why, when the Aunt Esmé “bit” cropped up, she’d let it pass without a flicker of protest. Dumber than the dumbest blonde she’d been, as she sleeked back her wings of black burnished hair and listened, her dark eyes wide and trusting, while he floundered deeper and deeper into a labyrinth of lies and evasions from which he would never (unless she, Stella, chose to assist him) be able to extricate himself.

  For the lies hadn’t ended with the meeting of “Aunt Esmé” at the airport; they had gone on for weeks. Because that hypothetical lady’s visit had proved to be a long one, and packed with incident. She had to be taken to the theatre on just the night when Gerald usually went out with Stella; she caught the flu on the exact weekend when Gerald and Stella had planned a trip to the country; and when Stella herself caught the flu, she had to have it alone because it just so happened that Aunt Esmé had to be taken on a visit to an old school friend in Bournemouth at just that time.

  And Stella had taken it all smiling. Smiling, smiling endlessly down the telephone, making understanding noises, and never questioning, never protesting. It had been over a year later (surely a year is long enough, surely no one could accuse her of checking up after a year?) before Stella had ventured, warily, and with lowered eyelashes, to ask after Aunt Esmé. Had they seen her lately, or had a card from her, she’d asked innocently, one late December day when Gerald, preoccupied, filled and brimming over with family life, had driven over hastily with Stella’s present. Jewellery again, and expensive—Gerald was good at that sort of thing.

  Stella thanked him prettily, even warmly; and then, still prettily, she tossed her bombshell into his face. “Have you heard from Aunt Esmé lately?” she asked, and enjoyed, as, she only rarely enjoyed his lovemaking, the look of blank uncomplicated bewilderment that spread over his pink, self-absorbed features. Not even any wariness, so completely had he forgotten the whole thing.

  “Aunt Esmé? Who’s Aunt Esmé?” he asked curiously, quite unsuspicious.

  Stella had intended it to stop there, to brush it off with a light “Oh, well, I must be mixing it up with some other family”; to leave him unscathed, untouched by guilt, and to savour her triumph in secret. But the temptation to go on, to spring the trap, was irresistible.

  “Aunt Esmé, darling! You know—the one you had staying with you for all that time last winter”—and as she spoke Stella watched, with terror and with glee, the dawning of guilt and alarm in his plump lazy features. Fear, calculation, and panic darted like fishes back and forth across his countenance; and then he recovered himself.

  Of course! How stupid! Dear old Esmé, she must mean! Not an aunt at all, but the old family governess from Wendy’s mother’s old home—the children had been taught to call her “aunt” because, you know…

  And of course Stella did know, smiling and lying and letting him off the hook. She, too, had had an “aunt” like that in her childhood. An Aunt Polly (she quickly improvised) who had made gingerbread animals. Smiling, inventing, chattering, breathlessly easing the embarrassment, Stella was nevertheless already making her plans. In a year’s time—or maybe two years—“How’s your mother-in-law’s old governess getting on?” she’d ask, all innocence, watching his face while he blundered into the trap. “Governess? But Wendy’s mother never had—” And while his words stuttered into silence, she would be watching his face, never taking her eyes off it as it disintegrated into terror, bewilderment, and guilt.

  Guilt, that was the important thing. Guilt so richly deserved and so long outstanding, like an unpaid debt. Such a sense of power it gave her to be able to call him to account like this, just now and again—a sense of power which compensated, in some measure, for the awful weakness of her actual position, the terrible uncertainty of her hold on him. To be able to make him squirm like this every so often was a sort of redressing of some desperate balance—a long-merited turning of the tables without which Stella sometimes felt she could not have gone on.

  Oh, but it was fun too! A sort of game of catch-me-if-you-can, a fun game. Not quite as much fun, though, as it used to be, because of late Gerald had been growing more wary, less easily trapped. He was more evasive now, less buoyantly ready to come out with giveaway remarks like “What trip to Manchester, darling?” or “But they’ve never had measles.” Now, before he spoke, you could see him checking through the lies he had told recently, his grey-green eyes remote and sly.

  And as Gerald grew more wary, so did Stella grow more cunning. The questions by which she trapped him were never direct ones now, but infinitely subtle and devious. It was a dangerous sport, and, like all dangerous sports, it demanded skill and judgement, a sure eye and perfect timing. Push Gerald too far, and she would have a terrible, terrifying row on her hands. “Possessive! Demanding!”—and all the other age-old accusations hurtling round her head.

  Push him not far enough, however, and the opposite set of mishaps would be set in motion. He would start thinking he could get away with anything, leaving her for days on end without so much as a phone call, and then turning up all smiles, as if nothing had happened, and expecting her to cook him steak and collect his shoes from the repairers. Taking her for granted, just as if she was a wife—and what sensible woman is going to put up with all the disadvantages of being married as well as all the disadvantages of not being?

  It was a cliff-hanger business, though, getting the push exactly right. Only a few months ago Gerald had actually threatened to leave her if she didn’t stop spying on him—though surely “spying” was an unduly harsh term to apply to Stella’s innocent little show of interest in the details of the business conference he’d pretended to attend the previous weekend?

  “But darling, Lord Berners wasn’t at the dinner!” she’d pointed out, with a placating little laugh, just to save Gerald the trouble of inventing any more humorous quotes from a non-existent speech. “I read in The Times the next morning that”—and at this, quite suddenly, he had gone berserk, and had turned on her like an animal at bay. His rage, his dreadful, unwarranted accusations, were like nothing she had ever heard before, and they threw her into such terror that she scarcely knew what she was doing or saying.

  In the end he had flung himself out of the flat, slamming the door on her tears and screams, and vowing never to set foot in the place again. It had taken an undated suicide note, no less, to bring him back again. It was just about as generous a suicide note as any woman has ever penned to a recalcitrant lover, and Stella still remembered it with a certain measure of satisfaction, despite the misery pertaining to its composition.

  “You mustn’t blame yourself, darling,” she’d written. “It is my decision, and mine alone. If I cannot face life without you, that is my problem, not yours. So don’t, my love, feel that you have to come rushing round when you get this letter. The very last thing I want—or have ever wanted—is to inconvenience you in any way, or make you feel guilty. By the time you get this, darling, I shall be dead…”

  The posts must have been slow that week, because it was nearly three days before she at last heard his feet pounding up the stairs, and had started taking the pills, stuffing them into he
r mouth in handfuls as he burst into the room.

  It had been worth it, though. He’d been sweet to her for days afterward, visiting her often in the hospital; and even after she got home, he’d continued to shower her with presents, calling every day, and displaying in full measure all the remorse, the tenderness, the self-recrimination that such a situation demands of a man.

  Until, of course, he got bored with it. First bored, then resentful, and finally beginning to throw the thing up to her in their arguments. “Blackmail,” he called it now whenever Stella tried to get him to do anything he didn’t want to do; and Stella began to realise, gradually, that she was right back at square one—having to be careful, careful, knowing all the time that the only way she could hold him now was by avoiding quarrels and by being infinitely tolerant and understanding—in short, by letting him get away with every bloody thing.

  And this was why, this summer Saturday afternoon, Stella, her teeth set in a smile, was making herself listen without a murmur to what Gerald was saying. She had known, of course, the kind of thing it would be; married men always have such righteous reasons for letting you down. Sick wives, kids on holiday, family visits—all perfectly uncheckable, and all revealing what a kind, compassionate, virtuous, dutiful creature the lying, treacherous creature really is.

  So what was it this time?

  Simon’s Sports Day. Gerald was potty about that son of his.

  “You do understand, don’t you, darling,” he was pleading; and of course she understood very well, she understood that he preferred the prospect of watching a nine-year-old running across a field in gym shoes to the prospect of spending the whole long afternoon with his mistress, cool and mysterious in her darkened flat, the sunlight flickering across the bed through the slatted blinds.

  “You see, darling, the thing is, he might win! Only nine and he might actually win the under-eleven two hundred and fifty yards! He’s a marvellous little runner, Mr. Foulkes tells me—a real athlete’s body!”