Balked of an object, my anger vanished in shame. I found myself sitting in the office while the manageress bandaged my wrist and the landlord argued with Frankie Marr as to the respective merits of Guinness and Burgundy — on the house, of course — for the stimulation of the phagocytes and the boy Joe stood by with the avowed intention of driving me back to the house in the Cadillac when my wounds had been dressed. Of that, however, I would have none.
“I walked down and I shall walk back,” I said firmly.
“Go back by the beach,” Frankie suggested. “It’s a bit longer but worth it.”
It certainly would have been worth the extra four furlongs, or so, if I had not been accompanied along the beach by Kinky, the man Myles her husband, and Juliet. I had already begun to find my cousin more than somewhat of a bore. She always seemed to be sorry for herself about something: on the bus she had at first moaned about her poverty then about being car-sick, and this morning she seemed to have some less specific moan about being generally ill-used. At the party she had been merely bitchy but that was easier to take than persistent prickliness; it would scarcely have helped matters to explain to her that people who constantly irritate their fellows bring ill-usage on themselves. It was a pity; the sound and smell of the sea, the heat of the sun and the feel of crisp sand underfoot invigorated the body as they relaxed the mind and should have induced a sunny humour in us all.
“Rich people can get away with murder,” Juliet complained. “If that had been me, I’d have had to pay for breaking the glass and no one would have rushed round getting drinks on the house.”
“They would if you’d let them.”
“Oh, I couldn’t bear to make a fuss over a trifle.”
I pointed out to her that it was she, not I, who had made the fuss in the first place. “If people want to give way to their better instincts, why not encourage them? One keeps one’s serious wounds to oneself. On my first London first night I sat on a broken glass and did myself no good at all, but I couldn’t very well enlist the sympathy of the audience. To-day all my wounds are in front.” I waved my ensanguined sleeve. “I’m not ashamed of them.”
“Oh don’t.” She covered her face with her hands. “I can’t bear the sight of blood.”
We trudged on over the silver sand. My mind regurgitated its worries: I had bought Ivor Brewis’s co-operation but only at the price of a damnably difficult explanation to come and I had probably learnt the hard way what Grace had written to tell me; there remained the little matter of my best friend whom I was committed to cuckolding and of my best friend’s wife for whose embraces I seemed to have lost my enthusiasm. So much for counting one’s blessings. The sun continued to shine regardless.
“We won’t go all the way to the house with you,” Myles told me, somewhat to my relief. “I don’t think Stella likes people dropping in unexpectedly.”
“You mean she doesn’t like us dropping in. Period,” Juliet muttered.
“What a bright little thing you are to-day.” Kinky’s serenity was almost too unruffled; it might well act as an irritant to nerves already on edge. “You really must be hung-over.”
“I’m sorry, Standish. I mustn’t say anything against Stella in your presence. We all know how you dote on her.” Juliet made a ghastly effort to smile. “Let’s talk about something cheerful. Standish darling, is it true that oil has been discovered between here and Rossderg?”
“I don’t know.” The secret, as far as it was one, was not mine; in any case not even Barney really knew. “I’ve heard a rumour — that’s all.”
“Do you mean to say your dear friends the Hazards haven’t told you?”
“We’ve had plenty to talk about since I got here, and there may be nothing to tell. You can’t drill for oil without letting everybody know.”
“Don’t embarrass the man, Julie,” said Myles firmly. “What’s it got to do with us anyway?”
“That,” muttered Juliet in a voice so low that we may not have been meant to hear it, “is just what I’d like to know.”
I wondered what had gone wrong with this golden corner of Ireland. In the old days it had been a haven of peace, now it seemed to have acquired the faculty of setting people at odds with one another. Perhaps the hate, or jealousy, inverted love, or whatever it was that had brought about the killing at the cottage had infected the atmosphere with suspicion. It was to be hoped that when the killer had been caught and carted off to the county town and when police activity would no longer provide us with continual reminders of him things would revert to normal — for those of us who were not involved in tangles of our own making.
“This is as far as we go,” Kinky announced. “I’m going to have a swim.”
They left me; and a jolly good riddance it was.
The beach sloped up to a strip of coarse grass and scrub beyond which was a double bank thickly hedged with fuchsias and marking the boundary of Barney’s property. I found the gap in the hedge, which, as a schoolboy, I had used many times and crossed into a meadow where the winds stood in orderly rows and stubble crunched under my feet; the sound of the tractor came from a few fields away. I could have read Grace’s letter with little danger of interruption but I did not even take it out of my pocket. My agent, I felt, had already told me what was in it. For what conceivable reason would Grace write to me but to let me know that she was going to marry again? Something that had scarcely even been a dream was dead. I headed towards the house. The letter would keep till the night.
I arrived in time to see the police car receding down the avenue. Barney was standing on the steps and gazing after it with a dissatisfied expression; he did not see me till I hailed him.
“Did they find the chap?” I asked.
“They found the fellow they were after. He turned out to be George Wade the landscape painter. Funny, you know. That was the only lead they had. You’d think there’d be something definite by now. Everyone round here knows Scanlon.”
“The husband?”
“Yes. He must have been seen — either coming, or going.”
“It’s early yet. He could have been seen by people who haven’t heard of the murder.”
“I doubt if there’s any man, woman or child who doesn’t know. That sort of news spreads like wildfire.”
Stella put her head out of a window; she had obviously been listening. “Perhaps he’s not here at all,” she suggested. “Perhaps he didn’t do it.”
Barney sighed. “I’d like to think so,” he said. “Scanlon was a magnificent worker — but in this sort of case it’s always the husband. Come on. Let’s do some hay-making.”
Stella did not bother to go round by the door. She came out through the window, displaying the full length of her remarkably attractive legs in the process, and dropped neatly into a bed of begonias without touching one of them. Barney clucked disapprovingly, but whether it was at the leg show or the peril to the begonias was not apparent. Then he caught sight of my blood-stained sleeve.
“My God, Standish. What have you done to yourself?” he demanded.
It was typical of them both, I think, that Barney was the one who made the fuss. He had always made light of his own injuries — laughing off, I remembered, a broken leg as if it were nothing — but over anyone else’s mishaps he became almost irritatingly sympathetic and officious and, of course, curious. I had to explain that I was ringing up about making capital available for investment in the oil project.
“You should have rung from the estate office.”
“I should have but I didn’t think of it in time,” I said untruthfully. “The post office was cluttered up with the local newshounds reporting on the hunt for Scanlon.”
“And Scanlon is probably peacefully at work in a market-garden in Dublin, or wherever he went to from here.” Stella carefully inspected what was to be seen of my wrist and passed the bandage as adequate. “I think there’s more in this murder than meets the eye.”
“How could there be?” Barney showed mo
re testiness than I should have expected. “Who could possibly benefit from a servant-girl’s death? Rural crimes are unsophisticated and ninety-nine times out of a hundred the obvious solution is the right one. You agree with me, Standish?”
“I’d like to. My brain tells me to. But I can’t get over this witchcraft business. It’s a hell of a coincidence.”
“Have you thought what it would mean? Young people, just asses as far as we know, in it together. Remember the time factor. The morons doing the pin-sticking nonsense could hardly have been involved in the actual killing unless the whole thing was carefully planned beforehand. Modern youth may be degenerate but they’re not like that. And I don’t even agree that they are degenerate; the beatnik phase is over.”
“Only because they’ve seen that protest, or anger, from the outside is pointless,” said Stella slowly. “They realise that they’ve got to get in on their own terms before they can shape things their way.”
She surprised me. She was perfectly right, but I had not realised that it was possible from this western fastness in which she had been immured for the best part of three years to observe the general trend.
“What has that got to do with the sordid killing of a servant-girl?” Barney demanded. “That won’t get anybody in — except in prison for life — and that’s a damn’ sight too good for most murderers. If the tendency is to want to get in, youngsters should be better behaved.”
“They are,” I said, “apparently. They don’t parade their weaknesses any more. But individuals still have individual vices. If the idealists want success and money and power in order to be able to protest more effectively against the Vietnam war, or the bomb, or what have you, young people as a whole to-day want success and money and power — on their own terms.”
“So they murder Elly Scanlon,” snapped Barney. “Let’s stop talking nonsense and make hay.”
It did seem like nonsense; in fact in the context it probably was. I left my jacket to have its bloody sleeve sponged by Mrs. Kealey, and we set off for the hay field.
There were things to be carried, of course. We were to have a snack-lunch in the hay, and the tradition of Hazard Point hospitality decreed that the provisions should be as lavish as they would have been had we been lunching miles away on sea, or lough, or in the mountains. With an enormous breakfast still sitting heavy on my bosom I felt little desire to look food in the face till dinner time but no doubt a drink would be welcome before long. We hefted our loads.
The hay was done to a turn, crisped and dried by sun and wind to a perfect pale golden colour; it looked far more inviting than any laxative cereal I have ever got out of a packet and would probably serve Barney’s cattle to the same end. If it had been mine I should have put it straight into the barn without winding it, for fear that the weather might change, but I suppose Barney would say that it had to mature. At any rate it appeared to be a vintage year. The shiny stubble seemed to throw up heat. I was glad that Barney had had the forethought to bring bathing costumes and towels for all of us. The implements of our trade awaited us on the spot.
“I don’t like hay-forks very much since last night,” Stella observed as she picked up hers in rather gingerly fashion.
She was wearing a linen wrap-around skirt with a top that was mainly composed of black net. It seemed to me that I had better not look at her too much while her husband was about; I should be seeing enough of her in time to come, and my enthusiasm for this amorous future had risen so steeply from its morning nadir that I was afraid of giving away my feelings. The letter in my jacket pocket and its writer, wherever she might be, I had thrust firmly from my mind.
We worked fairly steadily for about an hour and a half. Barney, needless to say, did as much as any three normal men, his short legs moving so fast that in the heat they seemed to blur like the spokes of a wheel at speed, his fork pronging vast quantities of hay and packing it firmly and truly for the circular base of the wind. In the circumstances it did not seem to matter that when Stella plunged her fork in a great wodge of hay it came away with only a few stray wisps adhering to the tines, or that my skill had so deteriorated that I packed in loose bundles rather than in layers. We had the recognisable beginnings of a wind standing about four or five feet high by the time that the men in the next field broke off for their midday meal; we could not see them through the luxuriant hedge, but the cessation of the tractor’s chugging let us hear the diminuendo of their voices receding dinnerwards.
“I think we’ve earned a drink,” said Barney.
Hay-making under the hot sun is a sweaty business and therefore a thirsty one. In a Thermos container there was ice to put in our drinks, and the bottles had been nestling in the shade of the hedge; the immediate prospect was as unclouded as the sky. Barney began to pour out Cork gin.
“Oh, hallo, Francis,” Stella called.
Heralded by a faint rattling noise a boy was approaching us on a bicycle. He was a pleasant looking lad with rather spiky hair, a grin from ear to ear and a voluminous blue suit that appeared to be some sort of uniform. Round his middle was a leather belt with a pouch which the boy unbuttoned as he descended from his machine. Both suit and bicycle seemed to have been constructed for someone a couple of sizes larger than their present tenant.
“A telegram for ——” he began.
Barney grabbed it before it was well clear of the pouch and tore open the envelope without even bothering to see to whom it was addressed. With a muttered — “Excuse me, Standish,” he read the message then passed the slip of paper to Stella and delved in his pocket for a coin. “I suppose you’ve missed your dinner by bringing this up, Francis?”
“Yes, sir.” The boy’s grin expanded.
“Go and see Mrs. Kealey. She might be able to do something for you.”
Stella handed the telegraph form to me; the message was from Joyce, whom I remembered to be the tenant of the burnt cottage, saying merely that he was returning by the morning train.
“You’re very welcome to a meal here, Francis,” Stella was saying, “but won’t your mother be keeping dinner hot for you?”
“Rubbish. I never knew a boy of twelve who couldn’t eat two dinners.” Barney handed over a coin. “You run along, Francis, and see Mrs. Kealey.”
“Little mother?” Stella murmured under her breath.
Francis remounted his bicycle and rode unsteadily away over the stubble, his grin extending almost to the back of his neck.
“That boy never delivers anything here except at mealtimes,” Stella asserted argumentatively.
“You taught him to do it — and he’s only a child.” Barney’s mind was obviously on other things. “I wonder why Joyce isn’t driving up?”
“Because he’s left the car with his wife, I suppose. You know she’s not strong.”
“I shall have to meet him at the station. There’s just time.”
“Oh Barney, don’t be an ass.”
“Of course I must. He’d expect it of me. Only decent thing to do.”
I was on the point of asking him if no one in the neighbourhood could do anything without his help when it occurred to me that he might think that I still harboured a grievance about not having been met at the bus on the previous evening. Stella, however, asked the question for me.
“He’d expect it of me,” Barney reiterated. He put down the bottle without having poured out a drink for himself and prepared to depart.
“Couldn’t you send Brown in to Rossderg with a car for him?”
“He could hire a car for himself, if that was all he needed.” The words were thrown over Barney’s shoulder; his short legs were whizzing into action. “What he wants is our moral support.”
Stella gazed after him. “Mother to dozens — and nobody’s pop,” she said.
My mind is not quite clear as to quite what it was that annoyed me: her jibe emphasised the shabbiness of the way in which we proposed to treat a man whom I still looked on as my friend, it was directed at his good qualities and
showed our lack of them, and the time for making it could not have been more ill chosen; on the other hand, my own defensive hackles were raised by the implication that she might be leaving Barney for no other reason than that he had not succeeded in giving her a child and also by the suggestion that she did not want to be left alone with me.
“I don’t think that’s a very nice thing to say,” I observed.
“Why not? It’s true, isn’t it?”
“I think you should be kind to him, now that you’ve made up your mind to leave him — if you’ve made up your mind to leave him.”
“You know damn’ well that I have.”
“I thought you might have changed your mind.”
“Why?”
“You didn’t seem to want him to go.”
“Oh Standish, darling, you are a baby.” Her voice which had been hardening softened again and she laughed as one who understands all and forgives all; I found it uncommonly irritating. “I was only making a gesture, my sweet; I knew what we’d be up to as soon as he was out of the way. We’re not under his roof now.”
“Not literally perhaps.” For some little time I had been holding in my hand a glass half full of gin, neat but for the presence of a few odd bits of hay which had probably come into it by way of my hair; it seemed advisable to knock it back while the balance of power was still on the side of the liquid. It was good stuff but failed to improve my temper. “I should have thought,” I went on, “that we had sufficient control over our emotions to be able to behave decently in any circumstances.”
She gave a little gasp, muttered an extremely rude imprecation, then began to pile hay on top of the half-finished wind as if her life depended on it. Stiffly, and feeling a damnable fool but not knowing quite what to do about it, I joined her in the work with an energy born of anger that matched her own. Slowly, if untidily, the wind rose.
If in the course of the work we had been able to collide, or fall over each other, the nonsense would have ended naturally and at once; the fact that we were each wielding lethal forks, however, constrained us to a care and an absurd politeness that only reinforced the remote dignity in which we had each taken refuge. I suppose it must have been a damned funny sight for the birds, but strictly for them. It might have gone on for hours, with sweat pouring and hay being heaped haphazardly, if I had not spotted a cut glass tumbler amongst the stubble and bent down to pick it up.
Affairs of Death Page 10