It was then that I pin-pointed the thing that was making me shake — laughter, not giddiness at all. The artificial hand had helped me to identify the big man. I felt wonderful and I knew that my wit sparkled; another gem came to my mind but I was laughing too much to give it expression. Perhaps fortunately, it now escapes my recollection.
“Guess he’s concussed,” said the other voice, the one that did not belong to the big man. “The guy can’t be as nutty as this all the time or he wouldn’t be let out alone.”
“Maybe he is concussed. I didn’t recognise you at first.” My prop was addressing the latter part of his remarks to me. “I think it would be fair to say, Mr. Standish Wyse, that just now you’re not projecting your popular image in pictures, the unemotional Englishman.”
“Irishman,” I corrected. Even this seemed to me to be funny; I laughed some more.
“You’ll pardon me but the image is English. I see your pictures — you only act in them.”
“Pardon me, too; but you’re an American — you wouldn’t know.” I tried to stand without his support but thought better of it. “Even if you are a bloody good director, Mr. Franklyn Marr.”
“Francis my name is. Your brain can’t be too much damaged if you recognise me. Yeah. I’m Irish as well as American. The first producer to give me a job only knew me as Frank and misspelt my name, and it’s stayed that way. I was christened Francis Xavier Maher. Is there anything more Irish than that?”
“Patrick Murphy,” I said and crowed with laughter.
“Here — we’d better be getting you some place where you can lie down.” He began to steer me towards his car, as if I were unable to get there under my own steam. “Open the door, Joe. This,” he added somewhat unnecessarily, “is Joe.”
I looked for the first time at Marr’s companion, a cherubic young man with a great deal of black hair, enormous brown eyes and a round rosy face — a busy tongue, too; it was borne in upon me that he had been talking incessantly from the time that I had first heard his voice. He seemed unperturbed at having been largely ignored. “Hi, Joe,” I said.
He broke off the thread of whatever it was that he had been saying in order to reply — “Hi, Standish” — which proved that he could listen while he talked — and helped Marr to propel me into an enormous Cadillac convertible. The cushions of the back seat came up to meet me in a surprising way, and Marr disposed himself at my side.
“Joe was born in Ireland and lived all his life here till he came over to the States a few months ago to be my assistant,” the big man observed. “Now he’s as American as Brooklyn — more so, perhaps.”
Joe took no offence. “I’ve got ambitions, I guess.”
“My ambition,” I told them, “is to play the villain in a classic Western.”
“Sure. Sure it is,” Marr agreed soothingly. “Now where do you want us to take you.”
“Somewhere that we can get a drink,” I suggested.
For some reason Marr did not think much of the idea; he seemed to have it firmly fixed in his head that I had got concussion and must be kept quiet. His advice was that I should go straight back to my hotel, or wherever I was staying, and get my feet up for a couple of hours.
“I’m staying with the Hazards,” I said. “About twelve miles farther on.”
“Oh! Stella. I should have guessed.” There was a note of disapproval in the big man’s voice that accorded better with his Francis Xavier beginnings than with his Franklyn present. “It was probably a subconscious association of ideas that made me recognise you so quickly; I just didn’t carry it far enough. I was thinking about Stella just before we — er — met.”
“Oh, you were, were you.” It seemed to be a good time to say — “Barney’s one of my oldest friends. Summer after summer he asks me to stay with them, though this is the first time that I’ve been able to make it.”
“I see.” He did not sound entirely convinced of the blamelessness of my visit. “They’ll probably be at the party, I guess. Was that where you were headed?”
“Party?”
“Artist feller called Myles. He’s been doing some work on my new picture.”
“Wife called Kinky?”
“That’s the one.”
“I was asked to that party. Lead me to it. The Hazards can pick up the pieces.”
“So long as you put your feet up and keep off alcohol for the present — it can be dangerous with concussion, you know.”
The alcohol twaddle I could not take seriously; for the rest it seemed to me that the guise of a road-casualty was as dramatic as any in which I could re-enter the lives of Stella and Barney. I laughed heartily and said that it was all okay by me.
“What about your iron horse?” Joe wanted to know.
“To hell with the bloody thing,” I said.
Joe was a skilful driver, one had to say that for him. He sent the Cadillac rolling at incredible speeds along twisting lanes that were scarcely wider than its wheelbase with the touch of a master. Normally I dislike being driven, but on this occasion I found it merely amusing. Marr had retreated into his thoughts. Again I was conscious only of his size; he was like a chunk of granite, but a chunk that was in the habit of making very interesting pictures. At the moment I was fed up with both the theatre and the goggle-box: drawing-room comedy, kitchen-sink drama and dust-bin social commentary with all the dreary combinations had got in my hair. Perhaps the winds of the great open spaces could blow them out again, as this meeting with Marr had reminded me, though there are probably better ways of commending oneself to a man who has directed some of the best Westerns ever made than by falling off a bicycle. Be that as it might, however, the exuberance of my spirits was beginning to seem a bit excessive, even to me.
“This is it, the Myles residence,” called Joe, stopping somewhat too abruptly beside a duck pond that flanked a row of three white-washed cottages. “Pardon me if I jump in the swimming pool.”
“You do that, Joe,” said Marr. He bestirred himself to alight.
There were half a dozen or so other cars pulled in off the narrow road in the general vicinity of the door. I say the door because, as I subsequently discovered the cottages had been knocked into one to provide a sufficiently commodious but rather tatty dwelling full of the lumber of the studio and the workshop and resembling nothing so much as a theatrical prop-room. For the moment all that I noticed was our hostess, Kinky Myles whom I had met at the Rossderg bus terminus, coming out glass in hand to meet us; she had changed into a saffron hued sort of tunic affair under which she wore what I presumed to be tights, since no top was visible through the slits at the side of the tunic, and looked both extremely odd and aggressively sexy. She enfolded as much as she could reach of Marr in a welcoming embrace.
“Frankie, how sweet of you to come,” she said.
“I said I’d come — didn’t I?”
“If other men always did what they promised — and as often — the world would be a better place.”
Marr ignored this pleasantry and waved his artificial hand to indicate me. “We brought a casualty along, Standish Wyse. Have you a sofa or something he could use? He bumped his head.”
Immediately I was enveloped in sympathy which by this time I was beginning to accept as my due, though it all still struck me as being very funny. The man Myles, Kinky’s husband, a pipe-sucking character with straight hair that receded in front and hung dankly to his collar at the back, appeared with two or three of his guests and Juliet, whereupon I was made welcome and taken in convoy to a tiny room which smelt of size and was cluttered with an assortment of the impedimenta of the theatrical artist’s work, stowed no doubt where it would be least likely to get in the way of the party. Here I was invited to recline on the bed and my head was examined for abrasions, in vain. This seemed to occasion some disappointment.
“Not a mark,” said Juliet, “except something green in his hair. That accounts for the smell of cow. But there isn’t even a scratch.”
“There
could be internal bleeding though,” Myles objected. “That’s why Frankie says it might be dangerous to let him take alcohol just now. Would you try a drop of fruit juice, old man? Or, perhaps, plain iced water would be better for you?”
I disliked being addressed as old man, but I took an even poorer view of this obsession about alcohol; the fellow was, however, my host and probably meant well. To please him I accepted a glass of water, though not without hope that the ban on the hard stuff might afterwards be relaxed. Juliet shepherded the mere spectators out of the room on the pretext that I needed quiet, and Myles settled down beside me to do his hospitable duty.
The windows looked towards the west and the last of the blood-orange glow of sunset leered in at us, leaving the greater part of the room in shadow; since there are few sights less inspiring, however, than theatrical properties disarranged and out of context, I decided that in being unable to examine whatever was stacked along the walls I was not missing much. In other respects it was obvious that I was missing something, for from a little distance the inviting sounds of a party in progress became increasingly audible; glasses clinked and sporadic laughter rang, laughter which still had a tinny timbre but with the third or fourth drink would no doubt acquire a deep genuineness. I inhaled the size-scented air and sighed.
“If you could go to sleep, ’twould be the best thing for you,” Myles suggested. He was probably already finding his role of gaoler irksome. “It’s a long old journey down in the bus.”
“Juliet seems to have recovered from it all right.”
“Wasn’t it funny, now, you should both be coming down at the same time? I mean — you going to stay with Stella — and Julie ——” He returned his pipe suddenly to his mouth and chortled for a little round the stem in a rather forced way. “I mean — it’s a funny coincidence, like.”
“Remarkably.” Actually the humour of the situation eluded me. If my car had not been run into in Dublin, I should not have had to endure the bus journey, and, if I had not travelled by bus, I would not have hired a disjointed bicycle and have had occasion to stand on my head in a ditch; it was just being borne in upon me, too, that it did not seem so necessary for me when in a horizontal position to laugh all the time. “Barney Hazard is one of my oldest friends,” I said — not for the first time that day.
“Isn’t that great.” He sounded quite enthusiastic about it.
I turned another sigh into a smothered yawn. “Don’t let me keep you from your guests,” I said. “I shall be quite happy here — I might even go to sleep.”
It was all that he had been waiting for apparently; he went. I had every intention of following him in the fullness of time, and to judge by the sounds of merriment, it would not be long before the time, and everyone else, would be sufficiently full for my reappearance to be greeted with tolerance and, perhaps, with the stiff drink which was what I really needed to make me my own man again. It was at about this point in my reflections that I seem to have fallen asleep.
It was only a matter of minutes at the most, but when I separated from the images and the words whirling in my mind an actual conversation it seemed to have been in progress for some little time outside my window. I suppose my waking dream had adapted itself to fit the sounds — but not their meaning; awake or asleep I had not been eavesdropping till the word Hazard struck my ear, and it was the deep dislike in the voice rather than the name itself that made me listen. “You don’t suppose the Hazards ever meant to come here,” a man said with heavy emphasis on the “here.” A woman’s voice answered but more softly, so that I could not hear what she said, then the man spoke again in what used to be called a pregnant tone. “My dear, the trouble with Barney Hazard is that he gets up at half past six every morning to go for a swim before breakfast.” After that the speakers must have moved away, for the voices faded.
Why the hell shouldn’t Barney go for a swim before breakfast, I wondered. What the hell business was it anyhow of some unidentifiable busybody? It was most unlikely that I should be able to recognise the voices — given the opportunity; I had not been fully awake, nor yet so nearly asleep, I thought, as merely to have dreamed the words. I was still undecided on the point when the door opened a foot or so and a head was thrust into the room; Juliet’s head it seemed to be. We peered at each other through the deepening shadows.
“Are you awake?” she inquired.
“Unless I’m greatly deceived. What have you brought me — grapes?”
“Some quite drinkable sort of orange stuff — it’s iced.” She came completely into the room and shut the door by leaning against it; at the same time she used her elbow to switch on the light. Her hands were occupied, each with a brimming glass.
“That looks more like a good strong whisky to me,” I said.
“This one is.” She put both glasses down on the bedside table and perched herself beside me. “It’s for Mr. Marr. He asked me to get it for him and then wandered off somewhere.”
“It shouldn’t be hard to find someone of his size.”
She stared into my eyes. “How are you feeling, Standish? Really?”
“Fine — just fine.”
“I wish I could think so. I feel responsible for you. Shouldn’t I let your wife know that you’re ill?”
“That would give her a good laugh.”
“Supposing you died — I don’t even know her address.”
“I’m not at all sure that I do. Grace has ceased to be my wife, actually — as you very well know.”
“Not in the eyes of the Church, Standish.”
“In the eyes of the law, and in her own. You’re my next-of-kin now.”
“Am I?” She seemed quite pleased.
“You or your mother. So in the event of my departure from this life you need inform no one but her — and, of course, the undertaker. My agent can read of it in The Times and shed a brief tear into his breakfast coffee. Oh, and it might be a nice thought to go and sing — ‘Mr. Standish regrets he’s unable to stay to-day,’ to Stella.”
“Stella.” Juliet’s face lost its beatific expression. “Thinking of Stella at a time like this.”
“Stella, let me tell you, is one of my oldest friends.”
“I thought that was Barney.”
“They both are. In any case I have no intention of bloody well dying as of now. Thank you very much.”
“Oh, I’m not so very worried about that — I mean I hadn’t really seriously considered it. If you stay quiet, you should be safe enough. But delayed concussion can have an odd effect on the brain.” She began, absent-mindedly as it were, to straighten my tie; probably some such attention was needed, but one does not have to be a psychologist to know that this is just the sort of damn’ silly thing a woman does when she is about to lob a loaded question at you — the idea being to keep you from looking into her eyes. “Just how far would you go to help your old friends?”
“What on earth d’you mean?” She was looking down at my tie, so all that I could see of her eyes were long dark lashes; I wondered if they were real.
“They say that you were asked here now for a reason.”
“What reason?”
“In the hope that you’ll take Stella away with you.”
“What?” I sat up so violently that I almost knocked Juliet from her perch on the edge of the bed. She could not avoid looking at me.
“They say he wants to get rid of her,” she said.
“They! Who the hell are they?”
“Oh — just people. No one you know.”
“Perhaps it’s just as well that I don’t. Myles doesn’t look the sort of fellow who’d keep a horsewhip in the house. What a foul-minded lot they must be around here. This country is certainly changing for the worse.” I swung my legs off the bed, once more almost unseating Juliet. “I’m going to get out of this bloody place if I have to walk.”
She started in again to fuss over me then, just as if it were not her fault that further quiescence of body or mind had become impo
ssible. Like her mother, she had an instinct for being irritating, and I suspected that — also like her mother — she usually had some Macchiavellian reason for giving rein to that instinct. She had, however, another inherited quality: she was practical. What was the point of making a scene, she wanted to know?
“I shall make no scene — just walk out of here without being noticed.”
“Westwards, I suppose, till your hat floats. Even if you could, there’d be all the more talk when they found you were gone. People who haven’t heard any gossip would start inventing it. They’d probably think you’ve gone bats and organise search-parties to find you. If you have any sense, you’ll stay where you are till I’ve organised a lift for you. I’m sure Mr. Marr will be glad to help — and anyhow it’s high time that I took him his drink.”
Without waiting for a reply she picked up the glass and went out, as if I had no option but to do what she said. I remembered feeling sorry for the girl when she had been so sick on the bus; now I recalled the memory with pleasure.
It was the only thing I had to be pleased about, now that my anticipation of seeing Barney and Stella had been poisoned. I did not, of course, set any store by the obscene gossip that had been repeated to me, but it was bound to lurk in the back of my mind — as a bad smell does in the nose — and make me doubtful even of my own intentions. Automatically I reached out for the glass that Juliet had left for me and took a good swig of what was in it before I realised that the stuff was supposed to be orangeade; it was not, in fact, orangeade at all but a good four fingers of very palatable whisky.
My first reaction was of surprised delight, not just at having got a decent drink but at the thought that the wretched girl in spite of all her cock-sureness had made a mistake, though at the time I would not have put it past her to have left the whisky on purpose in the hope that I should kill myself by getting plastered on top of delayed concussion; she might have taken that next-of-kin business rather too seriously. I must really make a new will sometime soon, I decided. For the moment, the drink tasted good and life might yet prove liveable. I straightened my tie somewhat more effectively than Juliet had done, unscrambled my hair and wandered out to join the party.
Affairs of Death Page 3