Affairs of Death

by Nigel Fitzgerald

  A moment later we heard the whine of a self-starter and the crunch of tyres on gravel.

  CHAPTER IV

  Somewhat to my surprise I awoke feeling wonderful on the next morning. I was, I suppose, tired enough and had been sufficiently anaesthetised by alcohol to sleep dreamlessly and the keen Atlantic air had done the rest. All the windows in my room were open to their fullest extent; of these there were four of which one was a big double french window opening on to a balcony. The trouble with these things, balconies, is that they tend to be shared and to lead to a certain amount of not always opportune to-ing and fro-ing. My first visitors of the day were the golden labradors.

  I had begun to sort out in my mind something, though not much, of the happenings of that horrible yesterday, so that I was not altogether unprepared when the excited dogs were followed by Barney, looking revoltingly hearty and carrying a towel; I closed my eyes firmly and simulated sleep. Even at the time I felt that I was denying my friend but I held on to the as yet unclarified thought that, in going for a swim at such an ungodly hour, Barney was doing something unwise and unbecoming in Stella’s husband. What indeed was the hour? I looked at my watch as soon as Barney had gone dejectedly away and found that it was seven-forty, not quite as ungodly as the time at which it was his reported habit to swim but early enough for someone who had spent so much of the night in the midst of horrors — and too early for me. Reflection convinced me that I had been right; I was not going to be a party to Barney’s speeding the break-up of his marriage in such a silly way. Was I, however, going to be a party to it in quite a different way. There, I am afraid, was the rub.

  In the light of an unclouded Connacht morning I could laugh at myself for having taken seriously, even for a moment, the previous evening’s farcical witch game; I could deplore dispassionately and impersonally the tragedy of the girl Elly’s death in the fire — or, to be more accurate, I could dismiss it as a matter not to be mended and on which it was profitless to brood — but I could not forget my friendship for Barney. Still less could I forget that in defiance of that friendship, during Barney’s final absence of the night, I had told Stella that I loved her.

  I had told her the truth, I think, but the truth has many guises and can be variously interpreted according to the desires of the hearer. I had meant her to understand that my love was a self-sacrificing one the knowledge of which might buoy her up in this time of ill-adjustment with her husband. She had taken my meaning more simply: I wanted her, I needed her, and I was prepared to take her away from my friend. Of course, she was perfectly right.

  I had reached no more than this stage in my reflections when Stella pattered in from the balcony and popped into bed beside me.

  “This,” she said, “is like the days when we were happy.”

  The fact was undeniable; but the circumstances had changed if we had not. We were in her husband’s house.

  “Not here,” I said.

  “Don’t you want to?”

  “Of course, I want to.”

  “Yes — I know that you do.” She snuggled in more closely.

  “Not under his roof.”

  “What other roof do you suggest?”

  “Anywhere — any time — but not here and now. I must stop masquerading as the faithful friend before I ——”

  “Before you cuckold him,” she finished for me.

  “Stella my beloved, I want you. I dote on you — but he’s my oldest friend.” I seemed to have been saying that, or something like it, rather too often in the last day or so; only now he appeared to have lost his name and to have become merely a personal pronoun. “I know we’ve got to hurt him, but I don’t want to do it treacherously.”

  “I wonder if it will hurt him, except in his vanity.” Stella had slipped out of her high erotic gear into neutral, as it were, a feat which would have been impossible if love — or whatever it was that we felt for one another — had just come to us as something new. “You must do what you think is right, for your own sake. I don’t even like him any more.”

  “I must go away — that’s the first thing. I must go away to-day.” The thought of my Daimler being repaired in Dublin presented me with a reasonable excuse. I would go to fetch the car and then write to tell him what he had to be told. With Stella wrapped — albeit platonically — round me and her scent in my nostrils I could not regret a decision that had been visited upon us rather than taken. If Paris was worth a mass, Stella was worth a difficult letter. I was only going to take from him something that he no longer possessed. “You shall follow me,” I told her.

  “I shall go with you,” she contradicted.

  “All right, but we must tell him before he finds out for himself. Hop back to your own bed; he’s not going to spend the whole morning swimming.”

  “If that’s the way you want it.” She kissed me so compellingly that my resolution wobbled perilously and then — almost without my realising it, she was gone.

  Naked and lovely, trailing her dressing-gown behind her, she hesitated for a moment in the window, blew me a kiss in promise of joys in store and pattered back along the balcony whence she had come.

  It was only a few minutes later that four very wet and happy labradors came in to tell me what I had missed — or, perhaps, just to sniff around and find out what I had been up to in their absence. I had no wish that their master should find me still in bed, so I made my way to the bathroom to embark officially on the new day.

  Breakfast was a meal. So long had I contented myself with a grapefruit, a piece of toast and a few cups of china tea in the morning that the grilled mackerel, kidneys and bacon, and all the other bits and pieces that were to be found on the sideboard seemed at first sight to represent a monstrous over-estimation of the appetites of two men — Stella, of course, was having breakfast in bed. I had forgotten, however, the sea air and the fact that I had had practically nothing to eat on the previous day; Barney had always been a good trencher-man and the events of the night seemed only to have given an edge to his hunger. After a tentative beginning I matched him mackerel for mackerel and kidney for kidney, though I felt rather as if I were breakfasting with the condemned man and as if I were the executioner. In another way, of course, I too was for the high jump; something in me was about to die, something of my self-esteem at least was doomed.

  There were three papers to read while we ate: that day’s Irish Times and Connacht Tribune and the previous day’s London Times, all specially delivered at enormous expense from the county town to a man who thought the telephone too dear. There was therefore the less reason to talk, for which I was duly thankful, though it crossed my mind to wonder whether Barney’s silence should be regarded as a tribute to our old friendship and understanding or as a sign that he had his own reasons for finding conversation difficult. I am afraid that I took in little of what I read though my intake of food continued unabated. Grace, my ex-wife, used to say that when I was nervous I became a compulsive eater; she, however, was not a person whom I particularly wanted to think about at the moment.

  At last Barney took his nose out of the Tribune and spoke.

  “I had thought we might do a bit of deep sea fishing to-day,” he said. “The weather’s too bright for the trout.”

  I murmured that there was nothing I should have liked better but that I really ought to go and fetch my car.

  “The devil of it is,” he pursued, ignoring my interruption, “that the Joyces not being here, and the cottage that was burnt being my property, and Stella’s suggestion about the identity of the dead girl not having been positively confirmed, I think we ought to stay at home in case the guards need our help.”

  It seemed to me that the guards ought to be able to manage perfectly well on their own, but I did not say so; I contented myself with the assertion that Hazard Point was paradise to me.

  “Besides, the locals might think it a bit unfeeling under the circumstances if we went off fishing,” he continued. “We should at least wait till we know defi
nitely who the unfortunate girl was. I’m damn’ sorry, Standish. I’ve been looking forward to your coming back here for years. I suppose I thought that it would be like the days when we were happy.”

  “Don’t be sorry for me,” I said. Why the hell did he have to echo the very words that Stella had used in bed? “I didn’t come here for the fishing, or to be entertained. I came here to see you — and Stella. Though God knows I’m sorry that things are as they are.”

  “I thought we might do a bit of haymaking, since we can’t go far away. You used to wield quite a dexterous fork, I remember. We’ve only about one field left to wind, and the weather’s perfect for it.”

  “Since the guards won’t want my help, wouldn’t this be a good day for me to go back and fetch my car?” I suggested. I tampered with the truth a little when I added — “They promised to have it ready by this evening.”

  “What do you want to do that for? You can have one of my cars any time you need it.”

  “Just thought I might be in the way while all this fuss is going on.”

  “Nonsense! How could you be in the way? You’re one of the family.”

  “Well, it would be handy to have my own bus for going home, and this seems a suitable time.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Standish, don’t talk about going away just after you’ve got here. My secretary is coming up at the end of the week to bring some papers I’ve got to look through; she’s a damn’ good driver and she’ll be glad to bring your car. Besides, I want you to have a word with Frank Marr before he gets too tied up with his new picture — about a little investment you ought to be interested in.”

  It might have been reasonable for me to point out that I wanted to see my car before paying for the repairs, to make sure that they had been done properly, and I suppose it would have been characteristic to suggest that I had no money to invest, though Barney would scarcely have believed me; in fact I ceased to argue. My guilty conscience made me feel that I had already protested too much. The possibility occurred to me of telephoning from Rossderg to my agent asking him to send me a wire requiring my instant return; the decenter course, however, would probably be to slip away unobtrusively without excuses until I could write in full an explanation of the rather shabby truth. I cannot say that I looked forward with any enthusiasm to composing the letter.

  “Well, that’s settled,” said Barney, shooting up from the table as if he found it impossible to sit still any longer. “Let’s walk over and have a look at the hay.”

  The grey stone of the house glistened in the sun, as did the stream that gave a serpentine curve to the end of the lawn and the flowering shrubs planted thickly along the stream’s banks; half a mile away the placid water of the bay shone more brightly still. Behind us, beyond the gardens and the pastures, a wide semi-circle of woodland covered the lower slopes of the range of hills forming the headland that shared with the house and the village the name of Hazard Point. Perhaps these hills shut off something of reality, as they shut off the harsher winds. It occurred to me that, if this were Eden, my own role in it was somewhat equivocal.

  As Barney had said, most of the hay had been winded. In fact there remained to be done only one complete field and one corner of another — the nearest to the sea — where the makings of one final wind had been collected by some men with a tractor-drawn rake. Barney stopped them from getting to work on it with forks.

  “You can leave that for the amateurs,” he told them, “and get on with the other field. I think one wind will be enough for us.”

  “You’re no amateur anyhow, sir,” one of the men, a big grizzled chap, said with a laugh. “And Mr. Standish was a dab hand when he used to come here as a boy.”

  “I only know what you taught me, Perrot?” I said, his name coming suddenly to me out of a blank mind. “And I’ve had no practice since then. I’m astonished that you remember me.”

  What really astonished me was that he should be still alive and working. He had seemed an old man to me fifteen years ago; now we were both merely adults. We shook hands, of course, and I inquired for his wife and he inquired for mine. I said that Grace was well; I had no reason to believe that she was otherwise. I said no, that I had no children, and he said that they would come, God willing, then — politeness having been satisfied — someone mentioned the fire and the murder.

  “Sure ’twas the husband done it, without doubt,” one of the men asserted.

  Apparently they were taking the identification of the unfortunate girl as definite. Certainly her absence, if it had been established, would seem to provide reasonable — though perhaps not legal — proof.

  “Jealousy is a terrible thing,” said another. “The green-eyed monster.”

  “Terrible entirely,” agreed the youngest. “Specially when there’s good grounds for it.”

  “What business is it of yours whether there was grounds for it?” Perrot demanded angrily. “Speaking ill of the dead. Let you get the tractor into the other field so’s we can get on with our work.”

  “A good man — Perrot,” Barney observed, as we strode back towards the house between neat rows of the little cocks of sun-bleached hay that were soon to be raked together for remaking into the larger winds.

  We found Frankie Marr waiting for us in front of the house; he was sitting on the steps talking to Stella. He wore an air of vague disapproval, which may have been due merely to hang-over — after all, he was not in his first youth — but his clothes were as gay and piratical as ever, though the dark glasses hiding the expression of his eyes, the artificial hand gripping a brief-case, his size, solidness and immobility rather suggested a sophisticated monster made by some up-to-date and more skilful Frankenstein. He greeted us with a wave of his other, his inherited hand.

  “I hope we get this kind of weather when we start shooting,” he said.

  “Good morning, Standish darling.” Stella’s eyes were laughing at me, reminding me that we had not officially met for some eight or nine hours. “I hope you slept well.”

  “Better than I’ve slept for years,” I told her quite truthfully. “And I haven’t eaten such a breakfast for even longer. Yesterday has been wiped from the slate; it’s as if it had never been.”

  I was thinking, of course, merely of my own frustrations of the day before: the mucking-up of the Daimler, the boring bus journey, my annoyance at not being met at Rossderg, the collapse of the bicycle and the revolting party. In any case, my preoccupation with the immediate future had for the moment pushed from my mind a tragedy that did not seem directly to concern me. Barney was quick to recall it.

  “I don’t suppose that wretched girl’s family, wherever they may be, would agree with you,” he said with the machine-gun-like delivery that was habitual to him, “nor the murderer — for that matter — nor the guards.”

  Marr was looking at me speculatively — at least I think that he was looking at me; the dark glasses completely hid his eyes. What I could actually see of his face was as revealing as if it had been carved in stone.

  “That little flossie sonofabitch — or should I say daughter? — who christened a doll with that girl’s name, stuck pins in the doll and then burnt it, is probably doing a bit of hard thinking, too, right now,” he observed.

  Barney stiffened like a fighting terrier. “What the devil are you talking about, Frank?” he demanded.

  “There was a kind of vaudeville witchcraft turn at Myles’s party — just about the same time as the cottage must have caught fire, or been set on fire. I thought you’d know about it.” Marr still seemed to be looking at me and not to be overly enthusiastic about what he saw. “This pansy character was the head witch and insisted on christening the doll Della, or Nelly, or something. Wasn’t the dead girl’s name in that bracket?”

  “Elly,” Stella said.

  “That was probably it then. I wasn’t there.” Marr was staring at me even more pointedly. “My assistant, Joe, told me about it.”

  “He got the name wrong,” I sai
d.

  It was too late to bite my tongue off when I had said it, so I did not try. Stella is not a name that lends itself to cosy diminutives and to me it stood only for this woman that I had loved and would love and thought that I was in love with; had I been told that the doll had been christened Della, or Nelly, I should — even in a concussed condition — have known no fears for Stella’s safety, though I would certainly have appreciated more clearly the coincidence of Elly’s fate. It was a pity, however, that I could not have kept my mouth shut on the subject; now they were all staring at me, and a guilty conscience — whether it be due to misdeeds done or contemplated — reads more into stares than has been put into them by the starers.

  “Why didn’t you tell us about this?” Barney asked — accusingly, I thought.

  “It was a nasty episode, a bit of fun that became unfunny. There was no particular reason to remember it, or to mention it when we’ve had so much to talk about. If I’d realised that the name Elly, or something like it, had been used, the coincidence would have struck me, of course. But I hadn’t, and it didn’t.”

  “You were there,” Marr admitted. “I wasn’t.”

  “What was the name?” Stella asked.

  “I’ve forgotten. Actually I didn’t hear it at the time. Myles told me afterwards. If it had been anything that sounded like Elly, I’d have remembered.”

  “That slob must have had some reason for telling you. It was probably Stella,” she suggested cheerfully. “I’m not very popular with the Myles faction — nor they with me.”

  “Don’t talk rubbish.” Barney seemed to find the situation entirely without humour. “The guards will have to know about this anyhow. First though, we had better get down to business.”

  My house in Chelsea would have fitted into Barney’s study and still have left over enough room to swing a cat in, a cat even of any kind. The room had four big windows and for the rest seemed to be walled with books, as was proper for the place in which Barney’s great-uncle, Sarsfield Hazard, was reputed to have written the picaresque novels which had done so much to foster the legend of romantic Ireland and to keep the home fires burning brightly at Hazard Point. It had been Barney’s father’s sanctum, of course, during my previous visits and therefore was less familiar to me than the rest of the house, so that at first I found myself more interested in the books and the Adam fireplace and the Chippendale furniture than in the business which we had come indoors to discuss.