Affairs of Death

by Nigel Fitzgerald

  “What are you doing?” Stella demanded.

  “Rescuing a glass that someone might have walked on.” I held it up for inspection. “It’s quite a good one.”

  In the moment of silence that followed, broken only by the sound of our breathing, we looked at each other for the first time since we had encased ourselves in aloofness; we were both visibly sweaty and gave the impression that we had worked our way backwards through a thick hedge. Perhaps it was a novel sight for each of us; at any rate it was only when we heard a car, presumably Barney’s, round the house and go speeding down the avenue towards the road that we once again avoided each other’s eyes. I turned to the picnic basket to dispose of the glass.

  I was putting the wretched thing away, bending down over the basket with as much dignity as possible, when I felt my bottom pricked not ungently but in two places simultaneously; I lost my balance, grabbed at the basket-lid — which not unnaturally closed — and for the second time that day heard the crunch of broken glass. Stella was standing over me, wearing a grin of devilish glee and holding her hay-fork like a bayonet. When she saw me looking at her she dropped the fork and, laughing like a drain, turned to run.

  Without taking the time to get up I launched myself after her and just managed to get a grip on the end of her flying wrap-around skirt; it came off in my hand and in its descent tripped her up, so that for a moment we were both laughing absurdly and rolling in the stubble a few feet apart. Before I could grab her again she climbed on to our untidy wind, sank into the loose hay on the top and disappeared from sight. Instinctively I leapt after her.

  The rest of the world seemed very far away.

  CHAPTER VI

  It is not given to everyone to take part literally in what is known as a tumble in the hay; certainly this was my first experience of it and the odds on its being my last are pretty steep. I could not help thinking of Macbeth. He had no spur to prick the sides of his intent — a somewhat different intent admittedly — but we had spurs and to spare, not only such goads as we had ourselves brought to the occasion but a myriad needles of hay which were not particular where they pricked. Nevertheless time passed swiftly in the peace and the heat and the silence. It seemed that only a moment had gone by when the sound of the restarting tractor told us that the men were again at work in the adjoining field; they were not so very near, three or four hundred yards away, perhaps, at the other end of the field, but they reminded us of the realities surrounding our private world. The interlude was at an end.

  “I’m going for a swim,” I said. “Coming?”

  “I’ll stay here and sunbathe and think of you and all the hundreds, the thousands of times we’re going to do this again.”

  “If I don’t stop thinking about you, I’ll stay here too and we’ll be taken in flagrante.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You would afterwards.” I readied myself to meet the public gaze and slid down from the hay.

  The beach was so nearly deserted that I must have had a quarter of a mile of it to myself. I chose a spot where one side of a low rampart of rock provided deep water almost at once; it was not the place where Barney swam but that was on the other side of the headland in the open sea and all that I wanted to do was to laze in the water. I had had enough activity for one day. There seemed to be little need for bathing-trunks; I could see anyone who approached along the beach and, if any couples were lurking in the undergrowth, they were no doubt sufficiently occupied, so I entered the sea à la “September Morn” and swam slowly out for about fifty yards.

  There was a shock of coldness to begin with — the heat of the day was enough to ensure that — then came the soothing realisation that the water was actually tepid in this shallow little bay; I rolled and wallowed like a hippopotamus and enjoyed myself enormously. It was only when I saw two unmistakable members of the Civic Guard strolling slowly towards me along the beach that I decided it was time to get out; the guards would probably not be offended by the sight of a naked bather in such a lonely place but I preferred not to put the matter to the test. They were, I supposed, out looking for Scanlon, though there was nothing of the shotguns-and-bloodhounds manner in their approach; indeed, had they not been in uniform, one would have taken them to be merely enjoying an afternoon constitutional by the sea. Whatever their intentions, however, mine was to get dressed.

  Somewhat furtively, using the rampart of rock as a screen for my nakedness, I made my way from the water to the belt of scrub and shrubs beyond the beach and so to the privacy of the special clump of fuchsias where I had left my things. I had stooped down to pick up my towel before I realised that it was not there. I looked again; I searched carefully then desperately but with no better result. There was no towel. There were no clothes. There was nothing but the thick ring of fuchsias, some tufts of coarse grass and a jumble of footprints in the sand.

  With the thought that water would to some extent regularise my condition I bolted back to the sea and submerged myself to the neck in its tepid depths. The two guards continued their approach with the unhurried inevitability of fate.

  “Ahoy!” I called to them when they came abreast of my rock.

  One of them nodded; the other gave me something between a salute and a wave. “La breagh,” he observed.

  “Buaideas le Dia,” added the other piously.

  I understood what they said but it would have been quite beyond me to explain my predicament in Irish. Perhaps they knew no other language, I thought in a moment of panic. They were continuing their stroll as if my intention in calling to them had been merely social. This time I shouted.

  “I’ve been robbed.”

  They came back and gave ear. I told them what had happened. I even emerged from the water to demonstrate the truth. They were big, burly men with weathered complexions and would have been alike as two peas only that one was red of hair and the other dark. They listened and inspected me with faces of official blankness.

  “You’ve got a fine day for it anyway.” The dark one showed a slight crack in his impassivity. He spoke English all right.

  The red-head was also bilingual but his mind was more specifically on his work. “This’ll be the fugitive’s doing,” he suggested, “if it isn’t a class of a practical joke.”

  The idea of a joke had not occurred to me but it seemed likely enough; my shoes were probably worth pinching — in fact they were a damn’ good pair — but only the scruffiest of tramps would stoop to crime for the sake of my threadbare jeans or sweaty shirt and socks and they could be of little use to Scanlon. I told them that I could not think of anyone in particular who might have taken the things out of a perverted sense of fun. I did not mention Stella; she would have been the most likely bet but, if she had done it, she would have been cackling at me from the bushes when I discovered my loss.

  “Did you have any valuables in the pockets?”

  I knew another moment of panic when I remembered Grace’s letter, but of course that was in my jacket pocket with my wallet and keys and things, and my jacket had been left to be sponged; I had been a bloody fool not to have removed the letter but I suppose Mrs. Kealey’s custody was preferable to that of an unknown thief — at least I would probably get to read the letter in the end.

  “Nothing but a handkerchief and a little loose change,” I said. My watch is waterproof and was on my wrist.

  “Let you wait there now for a bit while we make a search round,” the red-haired guard advised. “If ’twas a joke, your things won’t be far off.”

  “Jump up and down on the beach and you won’t catch cold,” suggested his companion solemnly.

  I was not in the least danger of catching cold — unless I had to wait for the cover of darkness to return to the house; the rock was too hot to sit on, and I had already noticed that the sand was uncomfortably hot underfoot. I returned to the water and brooded.

  Now that I had not got and could not get Grace’s letter I wanted passionately to read it. How could I have been
such an ass as to leave it for more than four hours unread? Until I knew what was in it I could take no pleasure in the recollection of my recent encounter with Stella and could look forward with nothing but unease to my future life with her. What we were doing to Barney I had come to accept as inevitable but my failure to read Grace’s letter seemed to me an infidelity, and at the moment there was not a single damned thing that I could do about it. So preoccupied was I with my thoughts that I did not notice that the guards had returned till one of them spoke.

  “We’ve managed to borrow a garment that will get you back to the house,” announced the dark man, holding it up for me to see, “from a lady.”

  It was one of those voluminous hooded things made of baby-blue towelling, part tent, part dressing-gown, under which women sometimes contrive to undress on crowded beaches. I viewed it without enthusiasm as I waded ashore.

  “Very kind of you,” I said, “and the lady.”

  Of course it did not fit; that was only to be expected. The width of my shoulders raised the solitary fastening to chest-level below which the garment flared out like a cavalry cloak.

  “Put the hood up, sir, and you’ll be bat-man to the life,” observed the garment’s provider. Poker-faced he waited while I gathered the flying tails and wrapped them round me to preserve the decencies before adding — “If we meet any young ones on the way, they’ll ask for your autograph and then you’ll be in a fix.”

  The way back towards the house was painful in the extreme. Stubble is not easy on bare feet and the uncut strips by the hedges were not entirely free from thorns. The guards were sympathetic, quick with the solace of cigarettes, and anxious to help. The dark one, having had his little joke, wanted to run on ahead and bring me back shoes and trousers, but I would not let him; if they had to accompany me — and this they seemed bent on doing, presumably to confirm my story of being a guest at Hazard Point — I intended to keep them well away from Stella’s hay-wind where she was probably still sun-bathing and still naked. I had no wish that they should add two and two together and arrive at the correct answer, so I chose our route ostensibly to save my feet but in reality to save something else — face perhaps, all our faces.

  Once we had passed well clear of Stella’s wind, however, and had come abreast of the tractor and its accompanying gang of workmen, I was able to compromise. I sat down under the hedge that still separated us from the hay-makers and suggested that the guards should call over Perrot, the head-man, to assist us. This satisfied all parties: Perrot was able to identify me before rushing off to fetch me some clothes of my own. It was out of sheer good will that the two guards sat with me till his return. He was away for less than ten minutes, but rather to my surprise he brought Barney back with him.

  “Standish! What’s all this?” Barney still gave an impression of rapid movement even after he had come to a halt beside us. He greeted the guards monosyllabically by name without taking his attention from me. “What happened to you?”

  “I went for a swim. My clothes were stolen.”

  “Where was Stella?”

  “She didn’t want to swim.”

  “A mercy she didn’t. It’s obviously Scanlon who has got your things. Wants to change his appearance.”

  I did not argue the point. I was climbing gratefully into a pair of grey flannel trousers, and whoever had my jeans was welcome to them; I only hoped that they were full of red ants. Barney seemed to notice my baby-blue beach-robe only as I took it off; he shied away from it.

  “Where did you get that thing?”

  I handed it back to the dark-haired guard. “It’s his,” I said. “Thanks very much for the loan.” It was only as he took it with a straight face but a twinkling eye that I noticed the name Myles on a laundry-tag affixed to the garment.

  Barney continued to eye the thing as if it conveyed some message to him. “I left Mr. Joyce with the sergeant,” he told the guards. “There’s been no news of Scanlon apparently. This theft of clothes may be a lead — must be, surely; the wretched man’s own things are probably blood-stained. In any case I think ——”

  What Barney thought was probably of little consequence and will certainly never now be known, for his remarks were cut short by an exclamation from Perrot which drew our attention to a scene of feverish activity on the other side of the hedge. Two of the hay-makers were running in the general direction of the beach, another sat impatiently at the wheel of the tractor while the fourth man unhitched from it the hay-rake; they all seemed to be shouting. Before we had taken in the cause of the excitement the freed tractor set off at what looked to me to be a dangerous speed towards the house and the man who had freed it turned to follow his running fellows. It was his final shouted word to us that made the situation clear.

  “Fire!”

  A ribbon of smoke, almost invisible in the sun’s glare, was ascending from somewhere near the uncompleted wind on which Barney and Stella and I had been working earlier in the day, the wind where I had left Stella contented and sun-drugged and disposed to sleep. I thrust my feet into my shoes without bothering to fasten them and joined a general rush towards the smoke.

  The hay-makers had the start of us but the hedge between them and the fire was so thick as to be impenetrable — its thickness indeed had been the main security against surprise when Stella and I had been making love on top of the wind — consequently hay-makers, guards and Barney arrived at the scene of the fire at more or less the same time; the completion of my struggle into my clothes kept me some fifty yards behind them. This accounts for the fact that I was able to assess the horror of what they saw before I saw it for myself. For an instant it seemed as if they had looked on Medusa and had been turned to stone.

  The wind was on fire. A chimney-shaped segment had been burned out of the side of the wind that faced us and was still smouldering while, at the very moment that we came in sight of it, the loose hay on the top burst freely into flame. The fire must have started at the foot of the wind and worked its way slowly upwards through the tightly packed hay of Barney’s foundation till it came to its own among the loose stuff that Stella and I had thrown so carelessly on the top. Stella was still there — on the ground. She lay among singed stubble at the point from which the fire had spread, her head pillowed on embers of which her vanished hair must have provided a part. She was dead — so much was obvious — but, leaving that and what the first flickers of flame had done to her aside, she was not quite as I had left her. She had put on a bathing-dress of the bikini kind, the gap between the upper and lower parts of which was neatly bisected by the business end of a hay-fork; the fork’s handle made an angle of forty-five degrees with her outstretched legs.

  There was a faint smell of roasting meat.

  The happenings of the next hour or so are blurred in my mind, though individual pictures of particular significance, or of none at all, stand out with an unpleasant clarity. There was little that we could do but try to stop the fire from spreading till the man who had driven away the tractor brought it back towing the garden water cart with its hose, and there was little that we had the will to do save cover up the once lovely thing that had been Stella whom I thought I loved. The one thing above all others that we did not want to do was to talk, and I think that was true of all of us. If the two guards were making observations and drawing conclusions, they kept them to themselves.

  Odd as it may seem, however, the aspect of the affair which the presence of the guards should have brought to my mind did not at once occur to me. Stella was dead in much the same inconsequential way as the girl in the cottage had died and, if Scanlon had killed her, Scanlon was only a name, as earthquake and flood are names and all those other impersonal things that bring tragedy alike to the guilty and the innocent and that are known in the insurance world as acts of God. It was not till the investigation was well under way that it dawned on me that the agony was to be prolonged by searches and inquisitions and all the other methods by which we sublimate our desire to cry over spil
t milk. I knew that these things must follow, of course, but knowledge and realisation do not necessarily go hand in hand. For the time I thought not just that nothing worse could happen but that nothing more could happen; this was the end.

  It was the end indeed for Barney and for me. If he did not love Stella, he had loved her once, and I had thought that I loved her; had I never known Grace, I should have been sure of it. Perhaps it is because of the genuineness of my feelings both of loss and of guilt that forgetfulness now mercifully veils from me the picture of Barney’s behaviour and mine after we had taken in the horror of her death. I only know that when it was over, when the fire was out and the body covered with the same blue beach-wrap that I had used to hide my nakedness, I was utterly exhausted in body and spirit.

  Some pictures remain in my mind, however: of Barney when he had overcome the initial shock directing operations with calm efficiency while tears trickled down his expressionless face; of the two guards taking care to disturb as little as possible the position of the body and taking almost equal pains to avoid offence to the living, and of the hay-makers when there was no more to do gathering together in a silent head-hanging group. After a little there was only one guard, the other having disappeared after a whispered conference between the two of them. It was while this conference was going on that I saw Barney pick something up from under the scorched stubble, something that looked to me like a magnifying glass; he glanced round rather furtively, I thought, saw himself to be apparently unobserved, then wrapped the thing in a handkerchief that must have been damp from mopping sweat from his brow and slipped it into his pocket. I was half turned away and saw what he did only out of the corner of my eye, nevertheless of all the impressions of that afternoon this is the one that recurs most insistently to my mind, though it was not till long afterwards that I looked for any significance in his concealment of his find. As far as I was then concerned, the past was dead with Stella and the future was of no consequence.