Sweetheart, Sweetheart

by Bernard Taylor

  Soon after ten o’clock the three of us walked under the flowered arch towards the car. She­lagh had changed into a long, summery-looking dress of pale lemon, with white lace fringing the sleeves. She looked beautiful.

  “Wait!” she cried as we started to pile into the car. “I must have a bouquet. And you must have boutonnieres.”

  “Buttonholes.” I translated for Jean Timpson who at once said, “I’ll do it,” all shy smiles and eager to be of help, and hurried back into the house for scissors. A few minutes later she came to She­lagh holding out a beautiful bouquet of yellow and white roses. She had brought pins too and handed one to me along with a perfect specimen of a delicate white rose. A second bloom she pinned to the jacket of her suit. “That’s it,” She­lagh said, smiling, looking at us. “Now we can go.” I hesitated for a moment, uneasy about the white roses—symbols of her, who waited, unseen, in the house. Then I mentally shrugged off my misgivings. I wouldn’t let anything get in the way of today’s promise of happiness.

  The ceremony seemed to be over in no time at all and I could understand somehow why couples went for the big church-weddings with all the dressing-up, the service, the ritual, the choir-boys and the confetti; I felt somehow that such a change in one’s life-pattern—from unresponsible singleness to a till-death-us-do-part alliance needed to be marked by some remarkable, dynamic occasion. Did She­lagh feel that too? Did she feel let down at all? She didn’t show it. She looked so happy. And the only shadow that came over her smile was as we were getting into the car again to return to Hillingham. She was looking at her bouquet, and I heard her sigh. “What’s up?” I asked, but even as I spoke I saw the reason. My heart gave a thud and turned over. Dimly, while I gazed at the withered white roses I heard her say: “They’re dead—and in so short a time.”

  The yellow roses, I noted, looked as fresh as ever, though. As did the white roses worn by Jean Timpson and me . . .

  On Gerrard’s Hill I pulled up the car outside the cottage and Jean Timpson and I got out. As I stood there with one hand on the car door a crowd of youths dressed in metal-studded black leather came thundering down the hill on motorbikes. They saw our rose buttonholes and hooted derision at us. I wasn’t bothered by it though. Anything that came from their empty brains couldn’t do anything to pierce the armour of the happiness I was feeling. Their scornful, mindless insults went right over my head. Other things would bother me, but not those drop-outs. Jean Timpson was affected differently though. She stood watching as their emblazoned leather backs roared on down the hill and shook her head in disgust. “Louts,” she muttered. “Not from round here. From London or Reading, I expect. Out on a pleasure-­trip.”

  “Forget them,” I said, “They’re not important.” Shelagh, I saw, had moved across into the driver’s seat. “Are you going somewhere?” I asked her.

  “Down to the village.” She put up a hand as I moved to get in beside her. “No, please. I want to go on my own.”

  And there was nothing I could do about it. I didn’t want to let her out of my sight, but there was nothing I could do. She gunned the motor and took off down the hill while I watched until the car was out of my view . . .

  I needn’t have worried. Fifteen minutes later she was safely back again. She held a package under her arm.

  “What have you got there?” I asked her.

  “A surprise.”

  “For me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Isn’t this wonderful,” she said as she sat at the piano making Beethoven turn in his grave.

  “You mean your playing?”

  “Well, yes, that too—but really I mean being able to make as much noise as you like without anyone being able to hear.”

  “I can hear.”

  She ignored this for a moment, then said patiently: “I mean outsiders.”

  “They’re very lucky,” I agreed.

  She flicked a suspicious glance at me. “I mean it’s not like in some city apartment where you’d have them hammering on the walls yelling at you to be quiet.” To prove her point she struck a succession of heavy chords (which Beethoven had surely never written) and then looked at me askance as I sat wincing in my armchair. “Don’t look like that,” she said, and she played on, my wife the pianist, abandoning Für Elise for a song, adding the words as she read them from the old piece of sheet-music before her:

  Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart,

  Will you love me ever . . . ?

  We had spent a relaxed, happy afternoon. At Shelagh’s insistence I had got out the croquet set and together we had set up the hoops. I couldn’t find the colour-banded finishing-post though, but we made do and hammered into the turf a sharp-pointed dibber from the shed’s array of gardening tools. I tried to get Jean Timpson to come and join us, but shyly—though she was grateful, I could tell—she declined, and left She­lagh and me to fight it out between us. We did so aided by gin-and-tonics (a small one for me; I’d been drinking too much of late) and plenty of curses at the treatment we received at each other’s hands. When at last the game was over—She­lagh won, albeit she bent the rules if not actually broke them—I put the bits and pieces away again and we retired to the house where we sat in the living-room playing records.

  Jean Timpson had surpassed herself preparing our dinner and we ate leisurely, relishing it. Then, coffee served and the washing-up done, Jean whispered to us a happy goodnight and went on her way home.

  Now, while She­lagh sat at the piano the clock struck eleven, making an even greater discord of her song. I yawned. She broke off her playing and singing and turned to me.

  “David, do you really want to sell this place?” It had obviously been on her mind.

  “Well . . .” I floundered. “It’s . . . it’s not for us . . .”

  “Why not?”

  “. . . There are other places. We’ll find somewhere else. Somewhere just as nice.”

  After a moment she murmured sympathetically: “I know why.”

  I looked at her. Did she? How could she know?

  “It’s because of its—associations, isn’t it?” she said. “Colin—and all that horrible business.”

  I felt relief. “Yes . . .” I nodded. “Something like that . . .” I couldn’t tell her the truth. I couldn’t tell her that this beautiful old house harboured a restless, malefic spirit—a spirit from which, even at this moment, I must protect her . . . Although Helen is dead, still she lives on, I would have to say. She wants you gone. She hates you. Yes, I could say all that—and then She­lagh would be certain that I was cracking up.

  “Have you any idea,” I asked her, “how the horse came to bolt like that?”

  She looked suddenly sad at the memory of the dead mare. “I’ve no idea. Something scared her, I guess.” She shook her head. “I don’t know—it’s a mystery to me . . .”

  After a while I said: “I didn’t go to Colin’s­ grave today.”

  “. . . Well, you haven’t had time, have you.” She added softly, “You feel bad about it?”

  “I must go tomorrow. First thing.”

  “Yes . . .” She smiled. “Anyway, cheer up. It’s your wedding-day.”

  I got up and went over to her, knelt by her, my arms around her waist. With her fingers she gently traced the livid scar on my suntanned arm. “Does it hurt now?” “No, no, not at all.” She touched my hair. Dear, dear She­lagh; so much love, so much tenderness.

  “I do understand how you feel, you know,” she murmured. “But it’s over, isn’t it?—with Colin and Helen . . . all that—horror . . .”

  “Over . . . yes,” I said. Over—how I wished it were. It wasn’t over at all. And the horror was greater than She­lagh could ever dream of. At that moment in the thicket, beneath the earth I had hurriedly replaced there lay the remains of a human body. And if Colin’s­ letter was to be believed, I told myself, it was proof that Helen would stop at nothing to get and keep what she wanted . . .

  “I’m tired,” She­lagh said, cutti
ng into my thoughts. “Let’s go to bed.”

  “Are you okay . . . ?”

  She put a hand up to her head. “A bit of a headache, that’s all.”

  “Poor baby.”

  I left her for a moment while I went upstairs. Timpson hadn’t been in touch about the leak in the ceiling so She­lagh and I would use the main bedroom. It was all right. There was no rose there. The pillows lay as smooth and undisturbed as I had left them that morning (after I had found fresh linen and remade the bed). Later, seeing her safely in the bed, with a promise to yell if she needed anything, I left her alone and went back downstairs.

  In the living-room I poured myself a drink, sat sipping it for a while then crept up the stairs again and looked in on She­lagh. In the light from the landing I could see that she was fast asleep. I left the door open and returned to my chair and my scotch, and sat there while all the same old questions re-invaded my mind; I couldn’t do anything to stop them. From the kitchen Girlie came and got up into my lap. Mechanically I stroked her soft fur. I closed my eyes . . .

  I couldn’t have been asleep for more than a few minutes when I came back to consciousness.

  I had been awakened by the sound of She­lagh’s screams as they rang through the house.

  Tearing up the stairs I flung wide the bedroom door. The light by the bed was on and I saw her as she sat pushing herself back into the pillows, clutching the sheets to her, her mouth wide in terror.

  I could see why. One look was enough.

  There on one of the corner-posts at the foot of the bed sat an enormous rat.

  27

  The spider on the stone, as it sits motionless in the crevice of the L makes me think at once of the rat—simply because both creatures are able to generate in so many people—rationally or irrationally—a high degree of fear. So many people feel threatened by various creatures—insects mostly, I suppose: moths, ants, spiders—though a spider, having eight legs, is not, by definition, an insect, I believe. Anyway, whatever—moths, ants, spiders have never bothered me.

  The rat, though, was a different matter.

  I can recall, even now, my feelings of cold horror as I saw it sitting there as if carved from stone, its tiny pinhead eyes staring unblinking into She­lagh’s terrified face.

  For a long moment I too was still as stone, and then, reaching out my trembling hand, I picked up a book and hurled it with all my force.

  I missed. In a clatter of tumbling pages the book hit the carpet. The rat continued to look at me for a second and then, in a smooth flash of sheened brown, leapt down, pattered briefly on the floor and disappeared beneath the bed. Getting down on my hands and knees I peered underneath. There was no sign of it.

  “It’s gone,” I said to She­lagh, holding her shivering body close. “It’s gone . . .”

  Nothing I could say, though, no amount of comforting words could induce her to stay in the room any longer, and in the end I took her downstairs where I made up a bed for her on the living-room sofa. At my insistence she took one of my almost-forgotten sleeping-pills and when she was at last settled I sat on the edge of the makeshift bed looking down at her. The tears of fear and hysteria were gone now from her eyes but even so her hand in mine didn’t relax for a long time. Gradually, at last, her breathing became more even, and she slept.

  In the gentle, dim light I watched over her, sitting in my armchair at her side, unresting, covered with a rug, my feet up on the footstool. I whispered into the greyness:

  “Well, Helen, you didn’t want us to be together, and you got what you wanted.” I paused then added: “But it won’t always be like this.”

  Then, tensed, I waited for some kind of reaction. What?—breathing? laughter? There was nothing. Only the silence.

  Jean Timpson arrived early the next morning and I told her what had happened. She gave me an odd sideways look. Once, she recalled, they had been plagued by mice at the cottage, but rats?—never.

  I sat in the kitchen while she set about preparing my breakfast. She­lagh, in the living-room, was still asleep. “Let her sleep,” I said. “She needs the rest.”

  After I had eaten I went into the garden and cut a large bunch of cornflowers. Before I set off for the cemetery I had a word with Jean Timpson and she gave me her promise to watch over She­lagh, then, feeling much relieved on that score I started off down the hill. I didn’t bother with the car; the walk would do me good. She­lagh would be all right with the older woman, I was certain. I was convinced now of Jean Timpson’s complete honesty and trustworthiness.

  One other thing I was convinced of: that She­lagh and I must leave the cottage today. Last night’s terrifying happening made that clear enough . . .

  As I approached the cemetery I was surprised to see several cars parked alongside the wall; it was an unusual sight; the area generally presented a picture of perfect peace and quiet. There were people milling around the gates. A wedding, I thought, or a funeral . . . But then I realised that it was Sunday. Yet the people there didn’t look as if they were dressed for church; didn’t look as if they were there for a church service. Across the heads of the onlookers I saw, there beyond the wall, a knot of official-looking men, a couple of policemen among them. They were gathered around a small area over to the left of the gates. They were standing at the site of Colin and Helen’s grave.

  I hurried to the gates and pushed my way through the crowd of rubber-necks—only to be stopped on the other side by a young village constable who told me he was sorry, but that I couldn’t go in. “What’s happening?” I asked. I looked again towards the nucleus of men by the graveside and saw Reese standing there. At the same moment he turned, saw me and came over to my side.

  “It’s all right,” he told the constable, and, taking my arm, led me away to another part of the cemetery, far away from the men around the grave. We stopped, facing each other and I could tell at once from his set face that something was wrong—very, very wrong. He looked down at the flowers I held, sighed and said:

  “Go on back home, David.”

  I stared at him. He asked:

  “Did you walk or come by car?”

  “I walked.”

  He nodded. “Come on, I’ll drive you back.”

  “I just got here.”

  He shook his head. “You mustn’t stay—really.”

  “What the hell’s happening?”

  He didn’t answer and I made to step by him, heading for the grave. Through the legs of the grouped men I could see earth piled up. He reached out, grabbed my arm.

  “Don’t go over there.”

  “What’s up? Tell me.”

  Very reluctantly he said, looking steadily into my face:

  “Someone . . . opened their grave last night.”

  My mouth went dry. I just stared. He added then:

  “They—they broke open your brother’s coffin . . .” His voice was shaking.

  “Go on,” I said.

  He put up a gentle hand, to comfort, on my shoulder. I shrugged it off. “Tell me. Don’t just stand there.”

  He shook his head. “Not here . . .” His hand moved again, took my arm, and I let him lead me away, out through the gates, past the gawking, muttering villagers, to where his car stood at the roadside. We got in. I was still clutching the flowers in my sweat-damp hands. He reached forward with the ignition key but stopped, leaving it unturned.

  “The police are pretty sure who did it,” he said. “A crowd of young kids—hooligans—they were in the village last night on their motorbikes. Going from pub to pub, all in their leather gear, and generally creating a nuisance. The police are pretty sure they were responsible. Though why they’d want to do such a thing I can’t imagine. There’s no explaining the way some people get their kicks. Trouble is, nobody knows where they were from. Somewhere in London, it’s thought, going by the accents . . .” He paused. “It makes me sick . . .”

  “Did they—do anything else? Apart from—from ripping open the grave, did they do anyth
ing else . . . ?”

  He sighed, closed his eyes.

  “You might as well tell me,” I said. “I’ve got to know.”

  A fly buzzed through the open window, hit the windscreen, pit, pit, pit, then flew out the way it had come in, leaving us in our own silence again. Reese said:

  “They—whoever . . . they didn’t only open the grave . . . They opened up your brother’s coffin . . . and then they . . .” His voice tailed off. He added, all in a rush:

  “They cut open his body. His chest.”

  His eyes moved from mine, his voice falling to the faintest whisper.

  “And tore out his heart.”

  Inside Reese’s house I drank the brandy he gave me. When I got up to go I found I was still carrying the flowers. I put them on the table. “Please,” I said, “get rid of these for me. I don’t want to take them back to the cottage and then have to explain why.”

  “They’ll know, sooner or later,” he said. “A thing like this won’t be kept quiet for long.”

  I nodded. “Doubtless.”

  Of course I didn’t mention anything when I got back to the cottage. And, with luck, I thought, She­lagh would never hear about it, and if Jean Timpson did—which wasn’t unlikely—I didn’t really believe she’d pass on any such information to She­lagh. The more I could protect She­lagh from the horrors that surrounded us, the less unhappy I would be. So I kept quiet.

  She­lagh was quiet, too. Very subdued. She hadn’t in any way got over the happening of the night before and that, while she still hadn’t fully recovered from her fall, had taken an even greater toll of her vitality.

  “But I’ll be all right,” she told me. “It’s just that it’s not that easy for me to—to shake off just like that.”

  We were sitting in the living-room, drinking coffee. “We could go out somewhere this evening,” I said. “Out for dinner somewhere . . .”

  She nodded. “Good. I’d like that.”

  She had agreed so readily; I knew she no longer felt the same way about the cottage. How could she—after last night?