“Or in private,” says Albert.
She turns and smiles. “You’re right, my love. Never a cross word in forty-seven years.”
“Forty-eight.”
Rose frowns. “No dear, forty-seven. This is 1995. We were married in 1948. The difference is forty-seven.”
“Yes, but we met in 1947.”
“I wasn’t counting that,” Rose says.
“It’s another year.”
“Of course, looked at like that . . .”
“No arguments when we were courting. Lovers’ tiffs, they would have been.”
“But there weren’t any. Ah, well.” She puts her mug on the bedside table and switches out the light on her side. “It’s far too late for mental arithmetic. Time to get my beauty sleep. Nighty-night, darling.” She turns for the goodnight kiss. They’ve never gone to sleep without the goodnight kiss, in forty-seven years, or is it forty-eight?
Their lips meet briefly.
“Sweet dreams.”
Albert gets rid of his mug and reaches for the light switch. He yawns, wriggles down and turns away from her, wondering what time the library opens.
* * *
He’s in an aircraft about to take off for Australia. Off for a long holiday, time to adjust, to get over the grief, he has been telling everyone. The engines of the Jumbo are roaring, louder by the second, building to the immense power needed for take-off.
A voice says, “Have I disturbed you, dear?”
“What?”
“It’s only me filling my hottie.”
He emerges from the dream and looks at the clock. Five past two.
“I couldn’t survive without my hottie,” Rose says. “I don’t know how you manage, really I don’t.”
“Marvellous circulation,” Albert says silently, moving his lips unseen.
Rose says, “It must be your marvellous circulation. Well, there it is: a nice hot bottle for my poor cold feet. Now I’ll be off to sleep again in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”
Forty minutes later, Albert is still awake, thinking about ways of faking a suicide.
* * *
He is up as usual on the dot of six, groping for his slippers. He feels as if he could sleep three more hours, given the opportunity, but the habit of rising at six is too deeply rooted ever to change. He knows he’ll feel better after the first cup of tea. He edges around the bed to her side and unplugs the electric kettle.
Picking it up, he shuffles towards the bathroom.
Down in the kitchen, he cleans the saucepan and the spoon from the night before and wipes the surface clean. The kettle boils. The tea is a life-saver.
* * *
In the library, while Rose is looking at the Romance section, Albert covertly inspects a volume entitled Essentials of Forensic Medicine.
The chapter on Suffocation and Asphyxia runs to several pages. The list of post-mortem appearances, external and internal, is so daunting that he abandons the whole idea. But another chapter, Electrocution, catches his eye and captures his imagination.
“Do you want to borrow it?”
He snaps the book shut and looks to his right. Rose is at his side. He pushes it back into the first space he can see and says, “No, I was just browsing really.”
“This is the medical section, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I was only whiling away the time, checking up on my rheumatism. Have you picked yours, my love?”
“I’m going to borrow three, just in case I find I’ve read one of them before.”
“Good thinking.”
* * *
That afternoon, when Rose is deep in her romantic novel, Albert tries to slip away unnoticed to the bedroom.
“Where are you off to, honeybunch?”
“I think some air must have got into one of the radiators. I’d like to check.”
Rose says admiringly, “My handyman.”
“I shouldn’t be more than twenty minutes.”
“I think I may have read this. I’m not sure.”
“If you have, you could always try one of the others.”
He goes upstairs, straight to the bed and lifts up the undersheet on Rose’s side. The electric blanket lies there, the single size, only on her side—because his marvellous circulation keeps him warm without artificial help. This blanket been doing its job for at least ten years and has lost most of its original colour. The fabric at the edges is getting frayed, and where her feet go, it has worn thin. He stares at it thoughtfully. He looks at the flex leading to the twin point where it is kept plugged in.
“Will it take long, dear?” Rose calls up. She must be standing at the foot of the stairs.
Hastily, Albert tugs the undersheet over the electric blanket again. “Not long, my dear,” he answers, adding in a whisper, “It should be very quick.”
“Shall I put the kettle on? I wouldn’t mind a cup.”
“Good idea.”
A few precious minutes. He folds the sheet back again, takes a penknife from his pocket, opens it, and begins scraping at the thin covering where her feet go. Cutting would be too obvious. It must look as if it has worn away naturally. He scrapes at several places and finally the threads begin to part and the copper element beneath is laid bare. He continues to work, exposing more of it, until he gets the call that the tea is ready downstairs. He scoops the loose threads into his hand, pockets the penknife and straightens the undersheet and tucks it in.
“Is that job done, my love?” Rose calls up.
“I hope so, my dear,” answers Albert, planning the next part of the operation. It can wait until the evening.
“Have some tea, then. You deserve it.”
* * *
About nine-thirty, after watching the news on television, he gets up as usual to take the kettle upstairs and switch on the electric blanket. Rose remains in her chair, knitting. Albert has done this so many times that he doesn’t even have to tell her where he is going.
He collects the kettle, fills it with water in the kitchen, and carries it upstairs, placing it on Rose’s bedside table. He switches on the electric blanket.
The hot water bottle is in the bathroom as usual, and has to be emptied. He unscrews it and stands it upside down in the wash basin to drain. Then he gets to work on the stopper. He pulls the rubber washer away from the base. This should ensure that the bottle leaks.
To be quite certain, he makes a test, half-filling it, screwing in the stopper and holding it upside down. Sure enough, it drips steadily. The preparations completed, he goes downstairs and joins Rose for the last hour before retiring.
* * *
When the milk is simmering in the saucepan, Rose asks, “Did you remember to switch on the blanket, Albert darling?”
“An hour ago, my love.”
“So thoughtful.”
“I think the milk—”
“Quick! The mugs.”
Rose lifts the saucepan from the hob. Albert places the mugs beside the cocoa tin and Rose does the rest.
Everything is in place, as the politicians like to say. There is little else for Albert to do. At two in the morning, he will be wakened as usual while Rose fills the hot water bottle. She will push it down by her cold feet. In two shakes of a lamb’s tail, as she will tell him, she will be asleep. For the next hour it will seep, seep over the undersheet, slowly saturating the electric blanket. While it remains warm, she won’t notice. And when he judges the moment right, Albert will get out of bed, move around in the dark and switch on the blanket.
An unfortunate accident, they will decide at the inquest. Faulty equipment.
“Is it up the stairs to Bedfordshire?” says Rose.
“I think it is, dear.”
“Will you lock the doors and turn out the lights?”
“Depend upon it,” says Albert.
In bed, they drink their last cup of cocoa together, sitting up.
“People are so stupid,” says Rose.
“What do you mean, dear?” says Albert.
“True,” says Albert.
You bloody old hypocrite, thinks Rose. Driving me to the brink of insanity with your sanctimonious smile and your “Yes, my darling,” while you pursue your own selfish ways, waking me every blasted morning at six. Heaving yourself up with a groan and a yawn, to put on your slippers, regardless that it all causes a minor earthquake in the bed. Groping around the edge of the mattress to collect the damned kettle. Switching on the bathroom light. Flushing the toilet. Clumping downstairs and turning on the radio. Forty- seven years of it, I’ve endured. His farting, his fishing and his football on television.
And never a cross word between us. I wouldn’t give you that satisfaction. I’ve held out all this time.
“Oh, dear.”
“What’s the matter, love?” says Albert.
“I’ve forgotten to go to the bathroom—and just when I was getting nice and cosy.” She sighs. “I suppose I shall have to get out.”
“That’s one thing I can’t do for you,” says Albert. “Snuggle down, dear. I shan’t be long.”
From the bathroom Rose collects a chair and takes it to the landing, stands on it and removes the bulb from the landing light. She returns the chair to the bathroom and collects the length of Albert’s fishing twine she has earlier concealed under the mat. She takes it to the top of the stairs and attaches it firmly to a nail in the skirting board.
Then she ties the other end to one of the banisters to form a tripwire over the top stair. In the dark at six in the morning he will never see it.
Rose returns to bed and gets in.
“Nighty-night, my darling.”
“Sleep well, sweetpea.”
They exchange the goodnight kiss and turn out their lights.
THE ODSTOCK CURSE
“Finally, ladies and gentlemen, finally I want to come close to home, to your home, that is to say, to Odstock and the bizarre events that happened in your village almost two hundred years ago, events that I venture to suggest still have the capacity to chill your spines.”
Dr Tom Staniforth peered over half-glasses at his awestruck audience. Truth to tell, he felt uneasy himself, not at his spine- chilling material so much as the fact that he had consented to give this talk to an open meeting in a village hall on—of all evenings— October 31st.
The timing had not been his suggestion and neither had the title, Horrors for Halloween. He dreaded the possibility that some university colleague had seen the posters or otherwise got wind that a senior member of the Social Anthropology Department was sensation-mongering in the wilds of Wiltshire. He had come simply because Mother had insisted upon it. Pearl Staniforth had arranged the whole thing as a personal tribute to a former colleague of her late husband. And now, wearing one of her appalling red velvet hats,
Mother was seated beside this old gentleman in the second row giving a sub-commentary and beaming maternally at regular intervals.
He was almost through, thank God.
“Forgive me if what I have to say about the Odstock curse is familiar to most of you, but I suggest it can still bear telling. I thought it would be instructive in the first place to relate the legend and afterwards to pick out the truth as far as one can verify it from reliable sources—by which I mean parish records, legal documents and, perhaps less reliable, the memoir of a contemporary witness, the village blacksmith. In the anthropological scale of things, it is all very recent.”
He paused, widening his eyes. Having abandoned his academic scruples, he might as well milk the subject for melodrama. Spacing his words, he went on, “In the churchyard is an old gravestone partially covered by a briar rose. The stone has an intriguing inscription: “ ‘In memory of Joshua Scamp who died April 1st, 1801. May his brave deed be remembered here and hereafter.’ ”
With strange timing came a distant rumble of thunder that cued an uneasy murmur in the audience. The storm had been threatening for hours.
“Thank you, Josh, we heard the commercial,” Tom Staniforth adroitly remarked, giving the opportunity for everyone to laugh aloud and ease the tension. “The brave deed is a matter of record. The unfortunate Mr Scamp allowed himself to be hanged for a crime he did not commit. He was a gypsy accused of stealing a horse, which was a capital offence in those Draconian times. The real thief and villain of the piece was his feckless son-in-law, Noah Lee, who not only stole the horse but planted a coat belonging to Joshua at the scene of the crime. Joshua was arrested. He refused to plead and maintained a stoic silence throughout his interrogation and trial. He went to the gallows—a public execution in Salisbury—without naming the true culprit. You see, his daughter Mary was expecting a child and he could not bear to see her bereft of a husband, facing a life of misery and destitution.
“Joshua’s heroic act might have gone unremarked were it not for the gypsy community, who protested his innocence. They recovered the corpse of the hanged man from the prison authorities, brought him home to Odstock and gave him a Christian burial. Hundreds attended. And later the same year the real horse-thief, Noah Lee, was arrested at Winchester for stealing a hunter. He was duly hanged, which you may think made a mockery of Scamp’s noble sacrifice. But the truth emerged because Joshua’s daughter Mary no longer felt constrained to remain silent. Great sympathy was extended to her and she was well cared for. And Joshua Scamp became a gypsy martyr. The briar rose was planted at the head of his grave and a yew sapling at the foot. Each year on the anniversary of his execution they would make a pilgrimage here, large numbers from all the surrounding counties.
“Now it seems that after some years the annual visit of the gypsies became a nuisance.” Another clap of thunder tested Staniforth’s powers of improvisation.
“Have it your way, Josh,” he quipped, and earned more laughter, “but there must have been some justification for the rector of Odstock to have sworn in twenty-five special constables to keep the peace. Well, the blacksmith’s memoir claims that the yew tree by the grave had become unsightly and the rector insisted that it was pulled up by the roots—a job that the sexton duly carried out. Unfortunately this measure deeply upset the gypsies and a mob of them descended on the church. There were scuffles as attempts were made to keep them off the sacred ground. The crowning insult was when Mother Lee, the Gypsy Queen, was evicted from the church, where she had come to pray, and the door locked behind her. The lady in question was venerated by the gypsies. She was the elderly mother of Noah Lee, the horse-thief, and she had earned enormous respect for disowning her son and praising the bravery of Joshua Scamp.
“Whatever the rights and wrongs of it—and I imagine there was cause for grievance on both sides—the gypsies were deeply angered. They took their revenge by breaking into the church and attacking everything inside. The pews, the windows, the communion plate, the vestments, the bell-ropes: nothing was spared. The constables were vastly outnumbered and powerless to prevent the desecration. This is all on record.
“Late in the evening, Mother Lee, having allegedly spent some hours in the Yew Tree Inn, returned to the churchyard where her people were still at work uprooting trees. Perched on the church gate, she called them to order and addressed a crowd that included most of the villagers as well as her own flock. Gypsies, as you know, have always claimed powers of divination. Speaking in a voice of doom Mother Lee pointed to the rector and told him that he would not be preaching in Odstock at that time next year. She told the church-warden who had engaged the special constables, a farmer by the name of Hodding, ‘For two years bad luck shall tread upon thy heels. No son of thine shall ever farm thy land.’ The sexton was informed that by next April he would be in his own grave. Two half-gypsy brothers unwise enough to have been employed as special constables were told, ‘Bob and Jack Bachelor, you will die together, sudden and quick.’ And finally she dealt with the door that had been slammed in her face: ‘I put a
curse on this church door. From this time whoever shall lock ’un shall die within a year.’ And legend has it that all the curses came true.”
Tom Staniforth let the drama of the story hold sway for a moment. He looked out at his audience and made brief eye contact with several. How gullible people are, he thought. They patently believe this codswallop.
“However, I promised to deal in facts, not legend,” he resumed in a businesslike tone. “Let us see what survives of the Odstock curse when we test it against reliable sources. The parish records are helpful. They tell us that the rector retired within a year, so that part is true, though we have no contemporaneous evidence for the throat cancer which was said to have robbed him of his power of speech. Nothing is known of bad luck afflicting Farmer Hodding except that his wife had a series of stillborn infants, which was not unusual in those days. I was unable to verify the story that his crops failed and his herd had to be slaughtered after contracting anthrax. The sexton, it is true, appears in the records of burials a few months after he was cursed. As for the Bachelor brothers, they are not mentioned in the register again, but superstition has it that a pair of skeletons found in 1929 in a shallow grave on Odstock Down belonged to them.” Staniforth raised his hands to the audience. “So what? Even if they were the brothers, a supernatural explanation is unlikely. The possibility is high that the gypsies took revenge and disposed of the bodies. The so-called power of the gypsy’s curse is undermined if they had to resort to murder to make it come true. To sum up, ladies and gentlemen, I have to say that I find the Odstock curse a beguiling story that, sadly for believers in the occult, falls well within the bounds of coincidence and manipulation.”
He stepped from behind the table. “That concludes my talk. I hope you are reassured and will sleep peacefully tonight. I certainly intend to, and I have spent more time on these legends than most.”
The reception he was given was gratifying. Pearl Staniforth, smiling this way and that as she clapped, prolonged it by at least ten seconds.
And there was a curious effect when the clapping died, because the storm outside had just broken over Odstock and the beating of rain on the roof appeared to sustain the applause. While the downpour continued no one was eager to leave, so the speaker invited questions. A man at the back of the hall got up. He was one of the committee; earlier he had taken the money at the door. “What a wonderful talk, sir—a fitting subject for the occasion, and so eloquently delivered. I can’t remember applause like that. Just one question, sir. I don’t know if it was deliberate, only when you were discussing the evidence for the curse, you omitted to mention the gypsy’s warning about the church door. What are your views on that?”
Do Not Exceed the Stated Dose Page 10