Buffet for Unwelcome Guests

by Christianna Brand

  ‘Of the real shot,’ said Mr. Photoze.

  ‘How do you hide a brown paper bag?—a paper bag that you’ve blown up and burst, to take the sound of a shot. You fill it with too many apples and leave it prominently displayed, with two or three of them apparently rolled out from the tear in the side.’

  ‘So his father did commit the murder,’ said Mr. Photoze. ‘But in fact he didn’t. Because the man he calls his father, was not his father. So we could all look him in the eye and tell him that his father was innocent.’

  ‘These trick-psychs!’ said Inspector Block. ‘Oedipal complexes, delusions, paranoia—looking for a scapegoat for his own guilt feelings towards his dead father, because he had resented him in life, his dominance over himself; been jealous of the father’s possession of the mother—all the rest of it. “A long period of treatment!” Damn nonsense! One evening’s straight-forward discussion—merely convince the boy that his suspicions are unfounded, and that’s all there is to it. From now on, he’ll be as right as rain.’

  The boy was as right as rain. He was bending over the Grand Mysterioso, lying back helpless in the big armchair. ‘If they didn’t do it—then you must have. Of course it wasn’t you that was meant to be killed—I can see that now; it was Tom. Because it was you that killed him—wasn’t it? It has to be. There’s nobody else. You were dependent on him—you hated him for that, to be humiliatingly dependent, like a child; I know about that, I know what that’s like, to be a child and—and hate someone, underneath: and to be helpless. And jealous of him—you were jealous because he was a man and you weren’t one any more; you told us about that just now, you and that woman: you gave away how ashamed you were. I know about that too. I was only a child but my—my father was a man.

  ‘I was angry with my father about that, but you—you were ashamed. And so you killed him; it must have been you, there’s nobody else. Oh, don’t ask me how—you’re the magician, you’re the one that knows the tricks; you said it yourself, things like melting ice and burning-down candles and a lot of others, I expect, that you carefully didn’t mention; but you’d know them all, all right. And there you were with your big cloak, even on such a hot day—all pockets and hiding places…

  ‘And you were on your own—they left you alone when they went down the corridor and hoisted Mr. Photoze up on to the roof and shot the bolt after him; quite a while they must have been there and by the time they came back you were waiting for them, standing in the doorway of the room—standing in the doorway, blocking off their view into that room with your big body and your big cloak. If you could get across the room from the window to the door, then you could do other things—oh, I don’t know how and I don’t care; you’re the magician, you do tricks that nobody ever sees through and this was just another of them. But you did it. If that fool with his bangles and his photos didn’t, well then, there’s no one else.’

  No one else. For a moment there had been no one at all and that had been the worst, that had been the most terrible of all. So this one must not escape. Deep, deep down, perhaps, below conscious calculation, lay the cold knowledge of how tenuous a tether held this last scapegoat safe, the knowledge that this sacrificial goat must be placed beyond power of redemption or he too would be gone. ‘It was you. And for what you did, my father suffered for the rest of his life; it was dreadful, we were so poor, they were always fighting and my father—wasn’t always… Well, sometimes he was unkind, a bloody little bastard he used to call me, and my mother used to cry and cry…’

  He went on and on, face chalk white, scarlet-streaked. But he was all right now, ‘as right as rain’. He had found his scapegoat and now forever made his scapegoat safe; and so might love his mother and be loved by her without feeling guilty that his father was dead and could rival him no more. His father had suffered and died, and it had been—horrible—to go on resenting his memory; but now he had avenged his father and he was free.

  The spittle ran down from his gibbering mouth and fell upon the upturned face of the Grand Mysterioso. But Mysterioso made no move to prevent it. The boy had his hands around his throat and he was dead.

  No More A-Maying…

  THE ROLLING SUMMIT OF the bare Welsh mountain was patched with gorse, standing like sparse tufts of hair on a bald man’s head. ‘Come in by the bushes, Gwennie,’ said Boyo. He had been nerving himself for this for a long time. When they were safe from observation, he blurted it out at last. ‘Gwennie! Show me?’

  ‘Show you what?’ said Gwennie. There’s dense, for a girl of nearly six.

  He went very red, having to say it outright but he summoned up all his temerity. ‘Show me your chest.’

  Gwennie seemed not unduly offended. But…‘How can I show you up by here?’ She peered out from the frail shelter of the prickly patch. ‘Someone might see us.’ And indeed from where they crouched they could see across the valley to her farm, Penbryn. Mam and Da had gone over to Llangwyn for the mart. Ianto would be out in the woods with Llewellyn the Post and Blodwen off somewhere with Nancy James; but their big brother Idris had been left to work in the yard, cleaning out the silo pit, shifting the hay, ready for the new crop. ‘Not up here, Boyo. Come down to the cave.’

  ‘If we go to the cave—will you show me?’

  In the yard outside the hay-barn, her swing hung idle. ‘If I show you, Boyo, will you push me on the swing?’

  ‘Yes, all right,’ said Boyo.

  ‘A hundred times?’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Boyo. But a hundred times!

  They tumbled down the hillside to the trees that edged the little river; crept across the rough path to the green glade that lay at the opening of the cave. It was not a cave, really, but a sort of rock tunnel that opened out again where the low bank dropped, grass over crumbling earth, to the water’s edge. But when, hidden within the cave’s mouth, she had, with much struggling, hauled up her thin cotton dress—nothing! Just a plain old flat chest like his own, two tiny pale pink seed pearls on a flat white front. ‘That’s not a girl’s chest,’ said Boyo, disgusted. ‘You’re not a girl. You’re a boy.’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Gwennie, indignant.

  ‘Oh well! Let’s go in by the river, then,’ suggested Boyo craftily, ‘and make boats out of leaves and launch them down the running water.’ Better than a hundred times pushing her on her old swing. And all for nothing.

  But someone was there already. A girl was lying drinking out of the river as they themselves often stooped to drink, lying with her shoulders hunched and her head right down to the water, one arm still on the bank, lying at an uncomfortable angle, turned at the elbow, palm upward. Huge eyed, they clapped their hands to their mouths and backed silently away. ‘Boyo—it was your Megan!’

  ‘If she’d seen us!’

  ‘If she knew I’d shown you my chest!’

  ‘She wouldn’t tell,’ said Boyo, gaining confidence with distance from danger.

  ‘Well, perhaps not. She’s funny, that old Megan of yours.’

  ‘Lost her ’ealth,’ said Boyo, laconically, in the language of the grown-ups. If you’d lost your health, that was an act of God and no more to be done about it. And Megan had never exactly had her health, not really. Not in her head, anyway. Nevertheless…‘Never tell, Gwennie! Never tell that we went to the cave. If she didn’t think, other people might. If they guessed that you’d shown me your chest!’

  They started back to the farm but for a moment had to shrink back into the bushes hording the path. One of the Hippies came running down into the glade and looked about and called out a name: a funny name, not one that either of them knew—and at last, looking as if he didn’t like doing it, hunched his thin shoulders and went into the cave, still calling. They hared away back to the farm as though devils were after them.

  The Hippies had bought up a derelict small-holding with tumbledown farm cottage of stone held together by crumbling clay, its chimneys nested by jackdaws, its slate roof caving in. They had restored it, painsta
kingly, patiently; cleared and tilled the rough ground, planted a garden there, kept chickens and ducks and a goat and an elderly Jersey cow. Emlyn Lewis had cheated them over the cow; but, fair play, Hippies deserved nothing better—an ignorant, thriftless, carefree lot with their beards and long hair and the girls in long untidy dresses and hair hanging all about their shoulders. And immoral! Walking about pregnant for all to see! The men drove around in a shabby van with goat cheese and ‘natural yoghourt’ and produce from the garden. Who bought enough to make this worth while, remained a mystery. The farmers’ wives simply said roughly, ‘No!’ and turned their stout backs, criss-crossed with the straps of speckled overalls, till, unoffended, the intruders drove away. Summer visitors, perhaps, with their too-bright tents and caravans and lines of washing hung out to dry?—but they were very, very few and far between.

  They were toiling in the garden when Christo came back from the cave. They called him that because he was so beautiful with his long face and scrappy golden beard like the face of the Christ imprinted on the sacred veil. He was married to Primula. They were in fact all married; it seemed rather pointless to resist what, after all, comforted their parents and made life so much simpler, especially when it came to the babies. There were three babies, one to each couple—Christo and Primula, Rohan and Melisande, Abel and Evaine. They all lived well enough on the produce of their land; and Rohan and Melisande sold their pottery to the local shops. They had beautiful names because they had rechristened themselves when they came to settle in Wales. They loved everything around them to be beautiful and if they were sometimes a little intense about it, would also often fall into laughter at their own pomposity. But it was true that their whole intention in forming their tiny community, had been to be beautiful in all ways, all through their lives.

  Christo did not look beautiful now. His white face, whose skin never tanned, was all patched and streaked with pink. He gasped out: ‘It’s Corinna! She’s drowned herself!’ and sat down on the bench outside the cottage door and put his face in his hands and burst into tears.

  ‘Christ!’

  ‘I was late,’ said Christo. ‘She must have thought I wasn’t coming.’

  They stood round him, stricken, the gardening tools still in their hands, stupidly staring—as the foolish wild mountain sheep do, faced, starving, with an artificial feed. ‘Oh, Christo, love!—don’t blame yourself.’

  ‘She wasn’t—accountable,’ said Rohan, comforting.

  The girl was Megan Thomas, daughter of the farmer, who also carried the post; but they called her Corinna, out of Herrick, because she would wander along the hedges picking sprays of the white May blossom, holding it in a sort of ecstasy to her face, feeling the soft brush of the stamens, the caressing roughness of the hidden thorns; snuffing up the strange, musky scent. ‘Corinna’s going a-Maying…’ She was the only one of the farming people who would come near the wicked Hippies. Her Mam told her not to and her Da said he would beat her but she came, nevertheless, and hung about the cottage. Seeing his beautiful face, hearing his name, she had in her hazy, dazy mind come to fancy that here was an incarnation of Iesu Grist, come again; and now, deeply in a trouble she did not fully understand, had turned to him for help—for comfort, for absolution—who could tell? If he would meet her, down in the glade? They would not go into the cave—Christo suffered violently from claustrophobia, could not endure an enclosed space—the very doors of the house were kept open if he were alone in there. But they must go somewhere secret; if her Da knew, he would beat her. And if he knew—if he knew…‘My Da would kill me! My Da would kill me!’

  They had supposed her to be having a baby and advised him that he must at least meet her and try to comfort and advise. If people had faith in one… After all, to love and be kind was the whole foundation of their lives. But now….‘Was she in the river?’

  ‘On the bank. Hanging—hanging over.’ He could not bear to re-live the horror of it, to re-visualise it. He had called to her but she hadn’t been in the glade; had thought he heard a rustling of leaves, seen nothing around him, forced himself to creep through the tunnel to the bank. ‘Her head was in the water, and one arm—one arm was trailing in the water and her hair all like—like seaweed….’

  ‘Did you lift her out?’ said Abel. Abel was the able one, they used to say, laughing; the alert one, the do-er. Christo—well, really, he was like a child in some ways, such a dreamer, so much at the mercy of emotions too delicate for a man. ‘She was dead. I couldn’t bear to—’

  ‘You’re certain she was dead?’

  ‘Oh, yes, yes,’ said Christo. ‘I touched her arm, the other arm. It was—sort of doubled up behind her. It was—cold.’ He shuddered. ‘Her face under the water was all… I couldn’t bear to touch her again, I couldn’t bear the—the oppression of that horrible cave behind me. So I came to tell you.’ But he stumbled to his feet. ‘Just to leave her there!—I shouldn’t just have left her there. I should have lifted her out.’ He looked at them, sick and guilty. ‘I ought to go back.’

  ‘We’ll go,’ said Abel. ‘Rohan and I can go.’

  ‘They’ll say he did it,’ said Melisande, suddenly. ‘They’ll say he made her pregnant and then he killed her. They’ll say it was Christo.’

  They turned upon one another terrified eyes, the whitening of their faces turning the outward tan to an ugly grey. ‘Oh, God, Christo—they’ll say it was you.’

  If Corinna had been ‘simple’, Christo also was simple; though only perhaps in the sense of an absolute simplicity—those who loved him would have said of an absolute goodness. Now, the thought that he might have injured, let alone slaughtered, any creature in the world, turned him almost faint with horror and disbelief. ‘Us so-called Hippies,’ said Rohan. ‘They’d believe anything of us. They knew she hung around Christo. Her parents had warned her not to.’

  Abel said: ‘Rohan—do you think she did kill herself?’

  ‘An accident? Leaning over too far and then—? Oh, my God,’ said Rohan, ‘you don’t mean—?’

  ‘If she was pregnant,’ said Abel, ‘or only if she’d been seduced—because with a girl like that, that’s what it would have been—someone else was involved. She said that if her father knew, he would kill her. But what would he do to that other one?’

  ‘Christo,’ said Primula, imploring, ‘do you think it could have been an accident?’

  He considered it, forcing himself to gather-in his flying wits, to concentrate upon recollection. ‘Leaning over the bank like that—you could get back if you wanted to. You could lift up your head if you wanted to.’

  ‘Could a person just force themselves to keep their head under water and drown, Abel, if by just lifting it up—?’

  ‘No,’ said Abel, sharply resolute.

  ‘Wait!’ said Primmy suddenly. She ran into the house. The movement, the translation into action, relaxed them, they found themselves standing rigidly holding rakes and hoes: threw the tools aside, rested, sitting or half kneeling, still in their ring, gazing into the sick white face with its fringe of ragged gold. ‘Either way, they’ll still think Christo seduced her. Her father—’

  ‘We can deal with fathers,’ said Abel. ‘If it’s murder—that’s the Law.’

  ‘There was someone else involved. They’d be bound to investigate—’

  ‘Where else would they do their investigating?’ said Abel simply. ‘When they’ve got us.’

  Primmy came back. The front of her long cotton dress had dribbles of wetness down it and she held in her hand a sodden paper. She said: ‘She did kill herself.’

  She had printed in straggling capitals, in a rough estimate of Megan’s probable spelling: I am to unhapy. I will droun myself. ‘I’ve made it all wet, as though she dropped it in the water or something; no one could say it was her writing or anyone’s writing. I haven’t said anything about being wicked or pregnant or anything. It needn’t have been that; and we don’t want to put the idea into people’s heads.’

 
‘Primmy—if she was murdered!’

  ‘Anything’s better,’ said Primula, ‘than Christo being put in prison.’

  And the words had been spoken at last: they faced it at last. Christo raised his head. ‘In prison? Dear God, if they put me in prison—!’ A sort of darkness closed in upon him at the bare thought of it. The closeness and the suffocation. ‘I couldn’t. I couldn’t.’

  ‘I’ll take it there,’ said Primmy; and before they could stop her had darted away across the little paved yard and was gone.

  Abel and Rohan started after her but the girls held them back, clinging to their arms. ‘If she’s seen, no one will blame her for anything. Besides she knows the way.’

  ‘Besides,’ said Evaine, ‘she loves him. She wants to be the one to go.’

  It was five o’clock. The sun was high and bright so that the shadows made dark troughs between the tall bean rows and the air was hot with the scents and smells of a farming countryside. Melisande went into the cottage and made a great can of coffee, carrying it out to them carefully on the wooden tray with two rather wobbling stacks of pottery mugs. They crouched on the dry ground about the bench and when the children toddled up to claim love and petting from them, gently sent them back to play. There was perhaps no love to spare from their passionate protection of one who so deeply, deeply needed it.

  On the mountain behind them, two small boys hung about aimlessly, kicking out with stout scuffed shoes at the curled fronds of the bracken. ‘Say we’ve been here the whole time, Llew. If anyone asks you, say we was up here on the mountain. Never went near the woods above Cwm-esgair, never went near the kites….’ A dozen pairs of kites or less, in the British isles, and their nests guarded jealously, with penalties for disturbing, let alone robbing them. But a man in Llangwyn was offering two pounds for an egg. ‘Playing cops and robbers up here on the mountain,’ assented Llewellyn, comfortably. Given a little to the histrionics, Llew; you could always rely on him to embroider things…