We left her in the garden and proceeded down the cliff path to the shingle beneath. I was wearing slacks and a blouse, with the arms of a cardigan looped round my neck in case it turned chilly: the outfit was new, specially bought for the holiday, in shades of tangerine. Strafe never cares how he dresses and of course she doesn’t keep him up to the mark: that morning, as far as I remember, he wore rather shapeless corduroy trousers, the kind men sometimes garden in, and a navy-blue fisherman’s jersey. Dekko as usual was a fashion plate: a pale-green linen suit with pleated jacket pockets, a maroon shirt open at the neck, revealing a medallion on a fine gold chain. We didn’t converse as we crossed the rather difficult shingle, but when we reached the sand Dekko began to talk about some girl or other, someone called Juliet who had apparently proposed marriage to him just before we’d left Surrey. He’d told her, so he said, that he’d think about it while on holiday and he wondered now about dispatching a telegram from Ardbeag saying, Still thinking. Strafe, who has a simple sense of humour, considered this hugely funny and spent most of the walk persuading Dekko that the telegram must certainly be sent, and other telegrams later on, all with the same message. Dekko kept laughing, throwing his head back in a way that always reminds me of an Australian bird I once saw in a nature film on television. I could see this was going to become one of those jokes that would accompany us all through the holiday, a man’s thing really, but of course I didn’t mind. The girl called Juliet was, nearly thirty years younger than Dekko. I supposed she knew what she was doing.
Since the subject of telegrams had come up, Strafe recalled the occasion when Thrive Major had sent one to A.D. Cowley-Stubbs: Darling regret three months gone love Beulah. Carefully timed, it had arrived during one of Cows’ Thursday evening coffee sessions. Beulah was a maid who had been sacked the previous term, and old Cows had something of a reputation as a misogynist. When he read the message he apparently went white and collapsed into an armchair. Warrington P.J. managed to read it too, and after that the fat was in the fire. The consequences went on rather, but I never minded listening when Strafe and Dekko drifted back to their schooldays. I just wish I’d known Strafe then, before either of us had gone and got married.
We had our coffee at Ardbeag, the telegram was sent off, and then Strafe and Dekko wanted to see a man called Henry O’Reilly whom we’d met on previous holidays, who organizes mackerel-fishing trips. I waited on my own, picking out postcards in the village shop that sells almost everything, and then I wandered down towards the shore. I knew that they would be having a drink with the boatman because a year had passed since they’d seen him last. They joined me after about twenty minutes, Dekko apologizing but Strafe not seeming to be aware that I’d had to wait because Strafe is not a man who notices little things. It was almost one o’clock when we reached Glencorn Lodge and were told by Mr Malseed that Cynthia needed looking after.
The hotel, in fact, was in a turmoil. I have never seen anyone as ashen-faced as Mr Malseed; his wife, in a forget-me-not dress, was limp. It wasn’t explained to us immediately what had happened,, because in the middle of telling us that Cynthia needed looking after Mr Malseed was summoned to the telephone. I could see through the half-open door of their little office a glass of whiskey or brandy on the desk and Mrs Malseed’s bangled arm reaching out for it. Not for ages did we realize that it all had to do with the lone man whom we’d speculated about the night before.
‘He just wanted to talk to me,’ Cynthia kept repeating hysterically in the hall. ‘He sat with me by the magnolias.’
I made her lie down. Strafe and I stood on either side of her bed as she lay there with her shoes off, her rather unattractively cut plain pink dress crumpled and actually damp from her tears. I wanted to make her take it off and to slip under the bedclothes in her petticoat but somehow it seemed all wrong, in the circumstances, for Strafe’s wife to do anything so intimate in my presence.
‘I couldn’t stop him,’ Cynthia said, the rims of her eyes crimson by now, her nose beginning to run again. ‘From half past ten till well after twelve. He had to talk to someone, he said.’
I could sense that Strafe was thinking precisely the same as I was: that the red-haired man had insinuated himself into Cynthia’s company by talking about himself and had then put a hand on her knee. Instead of simply standing up and going away Cynthia would have stayed where she was, embarrassed or tongue-tied, at any rate unable to cope. And when the moment came she would have turned hysterical. I could picture her screaming in the garden, running across the lawn to the hotel, and then the pandemonium in the hall. I could sense Strafe picturing that also.
‘My God, it’s terrible,’ Cynthia said.
‘I think she should sleep,’ I said quietly to Strafe. ‘Try to sleep, dear,’ I said to her, but she shook her head, tossing her jumble of hair about on the pillow.
‘Milly’s right,’ Strafe urged. ‘You’ll feel much better after a little rest. We’ll bring you a cup of tea later on.’
‘My God!’ she cried again. ‘My God, how could I sleep?’
I went away to borrow a couple of mild sleeping pills from Dekko, who is never without them, relying on the things too much in my opinion. He was tidying himself in his room, but found the pills immediately. Strangely enough, Dekko’s always sound in a crisis.
I gave them to her with water and she took them without asking what they were. She was in a kind of daze, one moment making a fuss and weeping, the next just peering ahead of her, as if frightened. In a way she was like someone who’d just had a bad nightmare and hadn’t yet completely returned to reality. I remarked as much to Strafe while we made our way down to lunch, and he said he quite agreed.
‘Poor old Cynth!’ Dekko said when we’d all ordered lobster bisque and entrecôte béarnaise. ‘Poor old sausage.’
You could see that the little waitress, a new girl this year, was bubbling over with excitement; but Kitty, serving the other half of the dining-room, was grim, which was most unusual. Everyone was talking in hushed tones and when Dekko said, ‘Poor old Cynth!’ a couple of heads were turned in our direction because he can never keep his voice down. The little vases of roses with which Mrs Malseed must have decorated each table before the fracas had occurred seemed strangely out of place in the atmosphere which had developed.
The waitress had just taken away our soup plates when Mr Malseed hurried into the dining-room and came straight to our table. The lobster bisque surprisingly hadn’t been quite up to scratch, and in passing I couldn’t help wondering if the fuss had caused the kitchen to go to pieces also.
‘I wonder if I might have a word, Major Strafe,’ Mr Malseed said, and Strafe rose at once and accompanied him from the dining-room. A total silence had fallen, everyone in the dining-room pretending to be intent on eating. I had an odd feeling that we had perhaps got it all wrong, that because we’d been out for our walk when it had happened all the other guests knew more of the details than Strafe and Dekko and I did. I began to wonder if poor Cynthia had been raped.
Afterwards Strafe told us what occurred in the Malseeds’ office, how Mrs Malseed had been sitting there, slumped, as he put it, and how two policemen had questioned him. ‘Look, what on earth’s all this about?’ he had demanded rather sharply.
‘It concerns this incident that’s taken place, sir,’ one of the policemen explained in an unhurried voice, ‘On account of your wife –’
‘My wife’s lying down. She must not be questioned or in any way disturbed.’
‘Ach, we’d never do that, sir.’
Strafe does a good Co. Antrim brogue and in relating all this to us he couldn’t resist making full use of it. The two policemen were in uniform and their natural slowness of intellect was rendered more noticeable by the lugubrious air the tragedy had inspired in the hotel. For tragedy was what it was: after talking to Cynthia for nearly two hours the lone man had walked down to the rocks and been drowned.
When Strafe finished speaking I placed my knife and fork t
ogether on my plate, unable to eat another mouthful. The facts appeared to be that the man, having left Cynthia by the magnolias, had clambered down the cliff to a place no one ever went to, on the other side of the hotel from the sands we had walked along to Ardbeag. No one had seen him except Cynthia, who from the cliff-top had apparently witnessed his battering by the treacherous waves. The tide had been coming in, but by the time old Arthur and Mr Malseed reached the rocks it had begun to turn, leaving behind it the fully dressed corpse. Mr Malseed’s impression was that the man had lost his footing on the seaweed and accidentally stumbled into the depths, for the rocks were so slippery it was difficult to carry the corpse more than a matter of yards. But at least it had been placed out of view, while Mr Malseed hurried back to the hotel to telephone for assistance. He told Strafe that Cynthia had been most confused, insisting that the man had walked out among the rocks and then into the sea, knowing what he was doing.
Listening to it all, I no longer felt sorry for Cynthia. It was typical of her that she should so sillily have involved us in all this. Why on earth had she sat in the garden with a man of that kind instead of standing up and making a fuss the moment he’d begun to paw her? If she’d acted intelligently the whole unfortunate episode could clearly have been avoided. Since it hadn’t, there was no point whatsoever in insisting that the man had committed suicide when at that distance no one could possibly be sure.
‘It really does astonish me,’ I said at the lunch table, unable to prevent myself from breaking our unwritten rule. ‘Whatever came over her?’
‘It can’t be good for the hotel,’ Dekko commented, and I as glad to see Strafe giving him a little glance of irritation.
‘It’s hardly the point,’ I said coolly.
‘What I meant was, hotels occasionally hush things like this up.’
‘Well, they haven’t this time.’ It seemed an age since I had waited for them in Ardbeag, since we had been so happily laughing over the effect of Dekko’s telegram. He’d included his address in it so that the girl could send a message back, and as we’d returned to the hotel along the seashore there’d been much speculation between the two men about the form this would take.
‘I suppose what Cynthia’s thinking,’ Strafe said, ‘is that after he’d tried something on with her he became depressed.’
‘Oh, but he could just as easily have lost his footing. He’d have been on edge anyway, worried in case she reported him.’
‘Dreadful kind of death,’ Dekko said. His tone suggested that that was that, that the subject should now be closed, and so it was.
After lunch we went to our rooms, as we always do at Glencorn Lodge, to rest for an hour. I took my slacks and blouse off, hoping that Strafe would knock on my door, but he didn’t and of course that was understandable. Oddly enough I found myself thinking of Dekko, picturing his long form stretched out in the room called Hydrangea, his beaky face in profile on his pillow. The precise nature of Dekko’s relationship with these girls he picks up has always privately intrigued me: was it really possible that somewhere in London there was a girl called Juliet who was prepared to marry him for his not inconsiderable money?
I slept and briefly dreamed. Thrive Major and Warrington P.J. were running the post office in Ardbeag, sending telegrams to everyone they could think of, including Dekko’s friend Juliet. Cynthia had been found dead beside the magnolias and people were waiting for Hercule Poirot to arrive. ‘Promise me you didn’t do it,’ I whispered to Strafe, but when Strafe replied it was to say that Cynthia’s body reminded him of a bag of old chicken bones.
Strafe and Dekko and I met for tea in the tea-lounge. Strafe had looked in to see if Cynthia had woken, but apparently she hadn’t. The police officers had left the hotel, Dekko said, because he’d noticed their car wasn’t parked at the front any more. None of the three of us said, but I think we presumed, that the man’s body had been removed from the rocks during the quietness of the afternoon. From where we sat I caught a glimpse of Mrs Malseed passing quite briskly through the Seeming almost herself again. Certainly our holiday would be affected, but it might not be totally ruined. All that remained to hope for was Cynthia’s recovery, and then everyone could set about forgetting the unpleasantness. The nicest thing would be if a jolly young couple turned up and occupied the man’s room, exorcising the incident, as newcomers would.
The family from France – the two little girls and their parents – were chattering away in the tea-lounge, and an elderly trio who’d arrived that morning were speaking in American accents. The honeymoon couple appeared, looking rather shy, and began to whisper and giggle in a corner. People who occupied the table next to ours in the dining-room, a Wing-Commander Orfell and his wife, from Guildford, nodded and smiled as they passed. Everyone was making an effort, and I knew it would help matters further if Cynthia felt up to a rubber or two before dinner. That life should continue as normally as possible was essential for Glencorn Lodge, the example already set by Mrs Malseed.
Because of our interrupted lunch I felt quite hungry, and the Malseeds pride themselves on their teas. The chef, Mr McBride, whom of course we’ve met, has the lightest touch I know with sponge-cakes and little curranty scones. I was, in fact, buttering a scone when Strafe said:
‘Here she is.’
And there indeed she was. By the look of her she had simply pushed herself off her bed and come straight down. Her pink dress was even more crumpled than it had been. She hadn’t so much as run a comb through her hair, her face was puffy and unpowdered. For a moment I really thought she was walking in her sleep.
Strafe and Dekko stood up. ‘Feeling better, dear?’ Strafe said, but she didn’t answer.
‘Sit down, Cynth,’ Dekko urged, pushing back a chair to make room for her.
‘He told me a story I can never forget. I’ve dreamed about it all over again.’ Cynthia swayed in front of us, not even attempting to sit down. To tell the truth, she sounded inane.
‘Story, dear?’ Strafe inquired, humouring her.
She said it was the story of two children who had apparently ridden bicycles through the streets of Belfast, out into Co. Antrim. The bicycles were dilapidated, she said; she didn’t know if they were stolen or not. She didn’t know about the children’s homes because the man hadn’t spoken of them, but she claimed to know instinctively that they had ridden away from poverty and unhappiness. ‘From the clatter and the quarrelling,’ Cynthia said. ‘Two children who later fell in love.’
‘Horrid old dream,’ Strafe said. ‘Horrid for you, dear.’
She shook her head, and then sat down. I poured another cup of tea. ‘I had the oddest dream myself,’ I said. ‘Thrive Major was running the post office in Ardbeag.’
Strafe smiled and Dekko gave his laugh, but Cynthia didn’t in any way acknowledge what I’d said.
‘A fragile thing the girl was, with depths of mystery in her wide brown eyes. Red-haired of course he was himself, thin as a rake in those days. Glencorn Lodge was derelict then.’
‘You’ve had a bit of a shock, old thing,’ Dekko said.
Strafe agreed, kindly adding, ‘Look, dear, if the chap actually interfered with you –’
‘Why on earth should he do that?’ Her voice was shrill in the tea-lounge, edged with a note of hysteria. I glanced at Strafe, who was frowning into his teacup. Dekko began to say something, but broke off before his meaning emerged. Rather more calmly Cynthia said:
‘It was summer when they came here. Honeysuckle he described. And mother of thyme. He didn’t know the name of either.’
No one attempted any kind of reply, not that it was necessary, for Cynthia just continued.
‘At school there were the facts of geography and arithmetic. And the legends of scholars and of heroes, of Queen Maeve and Finn MacCool. There was the coming of St Patrick to a heathen people. History was full of kings and high-kings, and Silken Thomas and Wolfe Tone, the Flight of the Earls, the Siege of Limerick.’
When Cynthia said
that, it was impossible not to believe that the unfortunate events of the morning had touched her with some kind of madness. It seemed astonishing that she had walked into the tea-lounge without having combed her hair, and that she’d stood there swaying before sitting down, that out of the blue she had started on about two children. None of it made an iota of sense, and surely she could see that the nasty experience she’d suffered should not be dwelt upon? I offered her the plate of scones, hoping that if she began to eat she would stop talking, but she took no notice of my gesture.
‘Look, dear,’ Strafe said, ‘there’s not one of us who knows what you’re talking about.’
‘I’m talking about a children’s story, I’m talking about a girl and a boy who visited this place we visit also. He hadn’t been here for years, but he returned last night, making one final effort to understand. And then he walked out into the sea.’
She had taken a piece of her dress and was agitatedly crumpling it between the finger and thumb of her left hand. It was dreadful really, having her so grubby-looking. For some odd reason I suddenly thought of her cooking, how she wasn’t in the least interested in it or in anything about the house. She certainly hadn’t succeeded in making a home for Strafe.
‘They rode those worn-out bicycles through a hot afternoon. Can you feel all that? A newly surfaced road, the snap of chippings beneath their tyres, the smell of tar? Dust from a passing car, the city they left behind?’
‘Cynthia dear,’ I said, ‘drink your tea, and why not have a scone?’
‘They swam and sunbathed on the beach you walked along today. They went to a spring for water. There were no magnolias then. There was no garden, no neat little cliff paths to the beach. Surely you can see it clearly?’
The Collected Stories Page 103