Affairs of Death

by Nigel Fitzgerald

  Marr did not sigh. His face was set like granite and he gripped his glass so tightly that I thought he would break it. We sat in silence.

  “I had a black filly one time,” said Barney after a little, “the loveliest creature you ever clapped an eye on. She won her first two-year-old race by five lengths, and even at that she was being held in. O’Brien said she might win the Oaks for me the next year, if nothing went wrong. When she was being led back to her box a drunken fool waved his hat under her nose and she tried to jump the rails. She broke a fetlock, smashed it into fragments. We had to shoot her. I sat with her head on my knees and I cried.” He took a gulp of brandy for fear that he might again burst into tears. “I cried like a baby.”

  Marr came back from his spiritual journey in time to hear the end of the story; he listened and seemed a little surprised.

  “You’re looking peaked,” said Barney, examining each of us in turn through narrowed eyes. “You’re both looking peaked. Remember it all happened a long time ago. There’s no need to cry now.” He peered at me again more closely. “I know what it is. You’re hungry. You haven’t eaten anything all day, and neither have I. Neither has Frank, for all I know. I’m a shocking host. You’re hungry. Frank’s hungry. I’m hungry. We must eat.” He shot over to press a bell by the chimneypiece and back so quickly that I felt it was only his speed that kept him upright. “But first we must drink.” He waved the bottle over our glasses. “Drink up there and make room. You’re shaming me. Drink up and get an appetite.”

  I had quite early in the evening got the message that it was Frankie Marr’s kindly intention to make Barney drink himself under the table; now Barney had taken the initiative and seemed bent on reducing us all to forgetfulness. For myself I had no objection — if it could be done; but there was the rub. I did not believe that all the brandy that ever came out of France could have eased my mind that night, any more than the perfumes of Arabia could have done a similar sort of job for Lady Macbeth’s little hand; anyhow, assuming that the intentions of all of us really were kindly, there was no harm in trying. I knocked off my drink and held the glass out for more.

  Marr followed suit. “Twist,” he said.

  Barney accomplished the refilling in a rather slapdash way but without spilling a drop; as if he were about to propose a toast, he held up his drink for a moment then gulped half of it without speaking. Marr, too, raised his glass with some solemnity.

  “Respite,” he murmured, “Respite.”

  “And nepenthe,” I completed the quotation for him in a whisper.

  “Ballox!” said Barney clearly and threw back the rest of his drink. He went to the door and flung it open “Where the hell is everybody?” he demanded of the empty hall.

  “It’s late,” I said. “Everyone’s in bed.”

  “Fiddlesticks!” He came back for bottle and glass and began to pour with somewhat diminished accuracy. “Am I in bed? Are you? Is Frank? As long as I can remember, ever since I was a little tiny boy too small to look over the top of the table and see what my father was drinking, if I had guests, Mrs. Kealey always stayed up to see if anything was wanted.”

  I could not help observing — “She wouldn’t have had to stay up so late when you were a little tiny boy.”

  “I had only to ring the bell and there was Mrs. Kealey. You must remember that, Standish — not Brown — not Williams, but Mrs. Kealey. She wouldn’t desert me in my adversity.” He took a deep breath and roared like a lion. “Mrs. Kealey — where the hell are you?”

  It took some time for the echoes of that stentorian yell to sort themselves out and give the house back to silence, but eventually silence came and out of it after a little the padding of carpet-slippered feet. Mrs. Kealey materialised in the doorway.

  “What is it, Master Bernard?” She cannot have called him that, I imagine, for many a year. “Is it nice to screech out like that in a house of the dead? Ah, Master Bernard.” She put out a hand as if to take away the brandy bottle but thought better of it. “Isn’t it time for bed for all?”

  “Mr. Standish wants something to eat,” said Barney rather sheepishly.

  “And what’s to stop him from having it? Or any of you? When you wouldn’t eat your dinner I left cold meat and salad in the dining-room. And I made up the blue room for Mr. Marr.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Kealey. I should have known.”

  “Sure how could you think? God help you.” She searched in the bosom of her apron and produced a letter; for a moment I thought that it was mine, but this one was in a sealed envelope. “I was tidying up the poor mistress’s things and I found this.”

  Barney stared at it, then he stared at her. “Thank you, Mrs. Kealey,” he said.

  She sighed as deeply as any of us had sighed during the evening, went out and shut the door behind her. Barney peered again at the envelope in a puzzled fashion, brought it under a light and turned it the other way up. “It’s addressed to me,” he said.

  “Perhaps we’d better go,” Marr suggested.

  “No. No, don’t leave me. I don’t want to be alone.” Barney topped up our glasses — this time with almost unnatural steadiness and accuracy — then took his over to his desk where he opened the letter and focused the reading-lamp on its contents. His lips moved as with difficulty he spelt out the words under his breath.

  Marr sipped his drink and gazed into space. I could almost see the wheels turning as he searched for something to say to me. “This guy that the guards are holding down at the station-house,” he began.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a surprising development.”

  “It seems to rule out your maniac theory.”

  “You mean that no one would want to suppress evidence against a maniac?”

  “Doesn’t seem likely.” What Barney was reading interested me more than what Marr was saying; if Stella had been imprudent enough to write a farewell letter too soon, it could only make things more unpleasant for all of us now, particularly for Barney — and I can only hope that it was with his feelings that I was mainly concerned. “Only a woman can love a madman enough to protect him whatever he does.”

  “And the guards are holding a man. Anyway, the kind of madman we postulated has a short way with his women friends.”

  “With women. Scanlon can scarcely have been a friend of Stella’s.”

  “Scarcely.” Marr shot me a glance under his heavy brows. “He hasn’t even been seen here for months, I understand.”

  Barney had taken from a drawer a magnifying-glass — from the corner of my eye I could see that it was sufficiently shiny and unscathed for there to be no question of its having survived a fire — with its aid and by dint of closing one eye he seemed to make better headway at deciphering the letter.

  “I wish I’d known,” he muttered to himself. “By God, I wish I’d known.”

  Marr and I nattered on for a little without saying anything memorable. It seemed to me that what Barney wished that he had known could only have been our plan to cuckold him and that he might well guess — if not now, later when his brain had cleared — how far we had gone in its consummation, even though our tumble in the hay had been unplanned. I wondered whether he would throw me out of the house forthwith or be agonisingly noble and forgiving, or permit me to stay on sufferance because the guards wanted me on the spot; certainly it would seem more than odd if I were to move to the Hazard Arms at this hour of the night. There was nothing much that I could do, anyhow, except wait for his reaction. It was not long in coming.

  “Can anyone explain to me why my wife has to write me a letter to tell me something that she could have told me herself any day for the last month?” he inquired. “And I wish to God she had.” He sighed and folded the sheet of writing-paper with care and put it in his wallet. “Never mind. Let’s have a drink.”

  It seemed to me that for Barney another drink would be supererogatory; he was already cross-eyed, and the care that he now took in speech and movement was only a symptom of it.
Nothing, however, seemed to have the slightest effect on Frankie Marr, and I seemed to be temporarily immune; I had already swallowed the contents of my glass in relief. I held it out to be refilled.

  We drank with maudlin solemnity to Stella’s memory, killing the bottle in the process, and we did not protest when Barney went back to his cupboard for a third; after all, the object of the exercise was temporary oblivion — for him. Marr and I were, ourselves, like brandy bottles, unaffected by the contents. It was before we had started on the third post-letter-round that Barney put his hand on my shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, Standish,” he said almost tearfully. “I should have taken better care of her.”

  Then he threw back his drink and went out like a light.

  The road to bed was long and arduous. When we got Barney’s arms round our shoulders his legs did not reach the floor and, swinging this way and that, managed to get entangled with ours; when we supported him at a lower level the same legs became boneless tentacles and wrapped themselves round every obstacle and round us. Worse, however, was to come. Upstairs he had a brief return to consciousness; the power of speech was restored and his limbs behaved once more as if they were his own. We came near to dropping him at the suddenness of the ghastly noise that burst upon us before we realised that he was singing — a Jacobite song.

  The good old lord fell in that fight,

  For every drop he she-hed tha-hat night

  A Saxon cav-alier shall bite

  The dust beneath Lord Clare’s dragoons.

  That was bad enough; the “vive ala” part was awful. His voice seemed to redouble in volume and to have lost any claim to tunefulness that it had ever possessed. It was not altogether surprising that in one of Barney’s pauses for breath we heard the pound of constabulary feet on the stairs. Obviously no one had bothered to lock the hall door. We made a swaying turn to face the new-comers. Barney assayed a precipitous descent from a high note.

  “What the hell goes on here?” he demanded. “Ah, Fox — and you, Lee. You’re just in time. I was trying to get my friends to bed. They’re a little under the weather.”

  “Holy mackerel! I thought someone was being killed. We heard shouts for help.”

  “And I certainly do need help with these two — they’re bigger than I am. But what about a little song before we part? You’ve got a good voice, Lee. I know you have. Heard you in a concert once.”

  The dark guard who had come to my aid in my nakedness gave a rather forced sneeze and said — “Nothing I’d like better, sir, but I’m tormented with hay-fever this minute.” He sneezed again more realistically. “And isn’t it time for bed?”

  “I suppose it is,” Barney admitted regretfully. “Can’t read my watch. Something’s happened to the figures. Well, I can leave you gentlemen to look after each other, I imagine. Good night.”

  We were directly opposite Barney’s bedroom door; it was open. He shot suddenly away from us and into the room, took a running jump feet-first on to the bed, from which — with a sort of trampoline effect — he was bounced onwards to collapse with a loud thud on the floor.

  When we reached him he was already asleep and snoring.

  Guard Lee observed that it was the — “Best thing that could have happened to the poor devil. God be good to him.”

  Contrary to my expectations I, too, slept that night, though not at once. As soon as I lay down my heart, of whose activities I had not hitherto been conscious, began to thump at a frightening rate. I had no sooner grown accustomed to this phenomenon that the ceiling began to heave and convolute before my astonished gaze; it did no good to shut my eyes, for then the bed took its turn at the dance and leapt and twisted like a gone cat. Yet in the end I slept — but only to dream. There indeed was the rub.

  I dreamt of the last night that I had slept with Grace. It was a dream that like my recollections of that night ranged from the zenith of bliss to the nadir of nightmare. We had, on that night, not seen each other for months — our divorce hearing was coming up in a matter of days — and it was by the most unlikely of accidents that we met in the train on a wet Sunday in Crewe. We were both returning to London from different points of departure, and she took the seat beside me while I was hidden behind The Observer. We talked; we left the train at the next stop in order to be able to talk more freely. We walked in the rain and to get out of it went to the pictures where we held hands; after that we had a few drinks and dinner together and spent the night in a hotel room of faded Victorian grandeur and before a smoky fire made love with a joy and abandon all the greater for our long abstinence. That night the divorce action came within an inch of being called off, but that final inch was too much for us; our pride would yield so far and no further, so she left me in the morning, she left in tears that neither of us would wipe away because of our pride. If we had children, perhaps we should never have parted but, because of the selfishness that went hand in hand with our pride, we had decided that we did not want children — so that night in a nameless Victorian hotel became the finale of our married life.

  In my dream we met, we went to the same room and made love before the same smoky fire, and when it was over I stabbed her again and again only to find that each time I stabbed her I jabbed a point into my own heart; before the end we exchanged looks of longing and with our last breath swore that we loved each other. Perhaps, indeed, we did — but it did not seem to do us much good. Of Stella I was not reminded at all in my dream.

  I was awakened revoltingly early by the dogs and by Barney, who pattered in from the balcony carrying a towel.

  “How about a swim?” he said.

  I had neither the heart, nor the strength, to say no.

  We plunged from the headland rocks into the open sea, or it might be more true to say that I stood on the brink and toppled in to swim in a circle of a few yards before clambering with difficulty up the rusty iron ladder that had been placed in position by the order of Barney’s grandfather. Previous to my hitting the water a private haze had shut me off from the world without my realising it; thereafter I was conscious of the haze, that was the only difference. Barney, too, seemed to be enveloped in a hazy cocoon of his own, but far be it from me to say that in the case of either of us this was matter for surprise.

  We breakfasted for the most part in silence though, strangely enough, not without appetite and we stared unseeingly at the morning papers; I even turned automatically to the sporting section without noticing the account of Stella’s murder headlined on the front page. Hers was not like the killing of a servant-girl to be tucked away among items of minor interest; she was the wife of one of the country’s most prominent men, had been a good actress and what is referred to as a film star, and her death following on Elly Scanlon’s seemed to suggest a series of sex and witchcraft murders; no wonder it got the treatment. Of these unpleasant side-products of the crime, however, I had no thought as I champed my way through several fillets of sole — for some reason bacon and eggs had temporarily lost their appeal. I was thinking, while my jaws worked, that feelings of loss and of remorse and of hangover are practically indistinguishable when a frightened-looking maid announced that a Superintendent Duffy had called to see the master of the house.

  “Show him into my study,” said Barney. “I’ll be with him in a minute.” He finished his coffee and lighted a cigarette. “He’ll probably want to have a word with you afterwards, Standish?”

  “Very likely. My mind is a blank.”

  “I wish mine were,” said Barney. He strode from the room followed by the still subdued dogs.

  Waiting to be interviewed by the police in a murder case is not a pastime that I would recommend to my friends; a thousand viva voce examinations would be preferable to it. It amounts in fact to queuing up to make a confession the end of which is not to be absolution, and one thinks in advance of all the slab-faced cops of fiction whose object is not so much to learn the truth as to pin something on someone and to make it stick; one wonders, if this is the wa
y things are in fiction, can fact be far behind. I thanked heaven for the crossword puzzle by somebody called Crossaire in the Irish Times; I couldn’t do it, but it gave me an interesting object on which to fix my mind. It was, of course, when I was on the way complete with puzzle to the loo that I was told that the superintendent would like a word with me.

  “Tell him,” I said, “that I’ll be with him in five minutes.”

  I might just as well have gone at once.

  I do not quite know what it was that I expected to find waiting for me in the study but, whatever it was, Supt. Duffy was not it. I saw him as quite a nice looking fair-haired fellow, tallish and perhaps some ten years older than I am. I liked his greenish-grey tweeds, neither old nor new, and I positively coveted his shoes; one cannot get leather like that in London nowadays — at least I cannot. I had expected him to be wearing uniform and a scowl; he greeted me with a smile, a smile that wiped away his one resemblance to an ordinary policeman, an impassivity that amounted to a complete lack of expression. I was to see more of that dead-pan look of his later.

  “The last time I saw you, Mr. Wyse,” he said, “you were playing Vershinin in The Three Sisters. Odd, isn’t it, that the Celts can play the Russians better than any other race except the Russians.”

  “If you mean that for me, most people take me to be the typical Englishman. Everyone in the theatre does.”

  “No Irishman would. But you don’t have to be Irish to play Chekov; Ion Swinley was a wonderful Vershinin — and he was only half Welsh.”

  “Oh!” This man was a continuing surprise. “Swinley and Stanislavsky were the great Vershinins — I’m told. I’m not old enough to have seen either of them, I’m afraid.”

  “Being young has its compensations.” Duffy grinned again then his face retreated behind a professional mask. “We may as well sit at the desk; the light’s better. To begin with. I owe you an apology. I’ve read a letter of yours — though I didn’t know it was yours at the time.”

  “A letter?” For some reason it did not occur to me that he meant the letter.