by John Lodwick
“Yes,” she said. “I can see that. I can almost see it happening.”
“Who’s sorry now?” he said. “Don’t forget your brave words in the train.”
She stared at him again, the tragic eyes peeping between the white snowdrifts of her cheeks. “I’m not sorry,” she said. “It is you who are sorry. You are not the man I should have asked to do it.”
“Let’s drive on,” he said. “I just can’t wait to meet your family.” But she laid her hand upon his own. A moonstone ring she wore, and the heavy setting lay flat against his knuckles. “Do you know what day it is?” she said.
“I’m not much good at dates.”
“Three weeks ago we met. It was a Saturday. I can see you sitting there at your table when the dancer fell.” She paused, glanced at him sideways, then spoke almost in a whisper. “A woman cannot live alone.”
“No, indeed.” He laughed, but she, ignoring the coarse sound, continued. “You have something against me besides the affair at Kingsbridge, haven’t you . . . something physical?” And, half jesting, because she feared to know the truth, she asked him if it was not the smallness of her bosom which repelled him?
“Oh, as to that,” he laughed again. “One is nearer to the heart when the chest is flat. No, it is not your breasts, nor your legs, which are shapely, nor halitosis or any other disease of the advertising columns, nor even your age, for you are certainly one of those women who reach their best in the third decade of life. It is none of these things but something much more complicated.”
“All I want is affection,” she said. “You must admit that my demands are humble.”
“Precisely . . . humility is the key word. All your life you have been bitchy. Now you feel the need to make amends. The recent murder . . . notice that I call it murder and by no other name . . . was to be your swan song in the world of wickedness. And with good reason, too, for now that the obstacle to your happiness has been abolished you can wait for the first twinges of rheumatism without a qualm. The winter in Scotland, the summer at Cannes or in the Antilles! A lovely prospect, isn’t it? Three thousand a year and your baggage always labelled, ready for embarkation towards some new and as yet unvisited Cythera. But of course, there’s one small snag. Life, as you know well, is not quite so simple as the travel brochures pretend. Life is real, and very, very earnest. And so one needs an anchor, something rather solid, which one carries about from port to port and lets slip in the estuary mud. I’m to be that anchor, aren’t I? . . . the object of faint amusement in Casinos and of cupped hands behind which old women whisper: ‘He’s so kind . . . what a lucky girl she is to have him’.”
“Not kind now,” she said, “but cruel and shameful.”
“Shameful perhaps, for like the policeman’s, the gigolo’s life is not a happy one. Though please don’t mistake my meaning. I know that your intentions are entirely honourable. Corner-boys won’t do now, will they, nor glamorous fishermen nor even artists on the staff of Vogue? You want a husband . . . a husband.” He slapped his knee from merriment and stared out at the silent pine-trees.
She was crying now. The tears fell softly. She made no effort to staunch their lukewarm trickle. “How could you,” she said, “how could you speak to me like that?”
“Why, easily, but let’s go back a little, shall we? Let’s take a look at you in the Escapada, in Madrid. The idea comes suddenly, prompted by champagne and the exchange of autobiographical data. It could be done, you think . . . two birds and the single stone retained for further use. What better than a man bound to you by the remembrance of a deed too dark for publication in a drawing-room? On such a soil love may grow, if not, perhaps, esteem.”
“Yes,” she said simply. “I had hoped it might, but although mine the Scottish upbringing it is you the Puritan . . . a dreadful, twisted Puritan who hates me because I made him hate himself.”
“Ah,” he said. “Ah, so you can hit back, can you? There is still some malice in the floods of sweetness and light,” and seizing her arm, he pinched and twisted it.
“Now you are behaving like a barbarian,” she said, freeing herself with difficulty.
“A barbarian? But naturally. What else can you expect? Wasn’t it for my vices that you chose me? Panthers won’t pull a milk-cart, you must understand. When they’ve caught one, hunters watch their step.”
The tears had ceased now. “I don’t think that’s a very apt analogy,” she said. “If you were the strong character you claim to be, you wouldn’t make this fuss. I love you. You find that incomprehensible but all the same it is a fact. I love you for your weaknesses, not for your strength. I think that we are more alike than you imagine . . . certainly more alike than I shall ever get you to admit. What we have done . . .” She paused, seeing his hand raised, ready to interrupt. “All right, what you have done was perhaps not very pretty, but why dwell on it, why torture yourself unnecessarily? Believe me, I know the itch that’s in you because I once possessed it in a high degree myself. Bang . . . crash . . . no sooner do you have the edifice of happiness than you set about destroying it.”
She paused again and turned to him appealingly. From a corner of one eyelash the blue tinge of her mascara ran. “Don’t you think,” he said, “don’t you think we have exchanged enough aphorisms for one morning? There is a more current one which goes: ‘Don’t bite the hand which feeds you,’ and that, in the last resort is what you really mean.”
“Listen,” she said. “I’m indulgent . . . too indulgent even, but I can’t let you have it every way. If the whole thing has been so repulsive to you, why did you come up here when it was over?”
“To collect,” he said and, because that was his game, his line of strategy, he bent down and kissed her. The bucket seat slipped backwards on its rails.
“I want you so much,” she whispered. “I need you. Don’t be cruel to me any more.”
Annually, tourists emplane for the sands of Egypt and marvel at the symmetry of pyramids erected by a hundred thousand slaves, but weight is only relative and the sands of Egypt flat. The Lairds of Dear Old Scotland, kilted, caber-tossing against a background of heather-covered hills, have, as their draughty, massive homes reveal, more exigence than any Pharaoh.
Slab upon granite slab, the house revealed itself as the car descended the winding road into the dip. The effect—and she stopped to let him look at it—was undeniably impressive. A mausoleum, but one of great solidity . . . rather in the style, with its gables and polyangular, jutting windows, of those illustrations on brick sets which children find beside their beds at Christmas-time.
“It was built,” she said, “in 1862. That was before the Prince Consort’s death, if you remember . . . long before John Brown. Balmoral, though not far away, was not yet a rival to Nice in the smart world. My grandfather took a chance.”
“But why Peterhead?” he said. “Why not Dundee, or St. Andrews or the railway junctions with the unpronounceable names—Leuchars and Cupar?”
“Dundee was too vulgar for Victorians,” she replied. “Sacking cloth, you know. St. Andrews was too genteel, and then, of course, there was no golf course then.”
A high wall surrounded the property, for the Scots keep even the bitterns and the wild-cats out. Behind the wall a kitchen garden full of rotting brussels-sprouts and, spaced between these sprouts, fir trees with that curvature of the spine and umber-coloured foliage which are the consequence of unequal battle against a single and prevailing wind . . . the wind from Norway.
“Eh bien, je t’en félicite,” he said.
“Don’t speak too soon,” said she. “Behind the house it’s comparatively sunny. In a good year the figs ripen. Even in a bad one they have peaches.”
Four acres: certainly not more. An estate agent’s pebble-toss from the North-South road, the same estate agent’s stone-throw from the town. Gas-light of varying pre
ssure and window corners letting in a constant stream of air.
The gate was open. They drove in past a lodge.
“And who lives there?” he said.
“Oh, just a kind of ghillie,” said she. “The tenancy stays in the family. We don’t bother them overmuch. He works for Ferguson up the hill. During the war he shot pellets at Commandos on the Mountain Warfare course. Now he reaps the benefit . . . every rabbit is his own because he saved the deer.”
A gravel drive, a circular flower bed without benefit of blossoms, a face peering rapidly from an upstairs window; then as rapidly withdrawn.
“This is the moment,” said Fiona. “Brace up. Prepare your little speech.”
For the speech there was, however, no need, because the front door opened at once, silhouetting a young woman with thick legs.
“Peggy, this is Eric,” said Fiona, disembarking with rucked skirt.
“How do you do?” said Rumbold, and he bowed slightly from the waist. His manners, when he thought the occasion warranted their display, were always very Olde-Worlde.
“How do you do?” said Peggy; then relinquishing his hand shouted in a loud voice for “Martha”.
“It’s no use,” said Fiona. “She’s out of harm’s way by now. She saw us from the window.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Peggy. “About your bag, I mean.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Rumbold and, seizing it, ran lightly up the steps to show that he was both athletic and good-natured. But alas! the hall was dark, so that even if it had been his intention he could have gone no further.
A stuffed mallard in a case stared down at him unwinking. The bird, for the death of which, a century earlier, some ancestor had no doubt been responsible, must have seen the come and go of many.
As Rumbold’s eyes became accustomed to the light, half a cargo of Masefield’s Dirty British Coaster introduced itself: ancient opalescent vases, amphoræ from Cyprus, beaten brass trays from Benares. To the right of the mallard, who, although secure within his airtight case, seemed to resent their presence, a pair of antlers hung.
“Won’t you come upstairs?” sister Peggy said.
They followed . . . pad-pad; cut-price carpets everywhere, for, as Rumbold recollected, Grandpapa had been a Consul in the Middle East. Twenty yards of Turkey, then a touch of Kurdistan, then a tapis from the Azerbaijan. Finally, the banisters, thicker than a flagpole and very much more knobbly.
“Fiona sleeps in the nursery,” said Peggy, mounting. “I had a second bed put in this morning. I take it that you don’t occupy separate rooms?”
“No,” said Rumbold, somewhat disconcerted by this direct attack and by the hostility which it implied.
“There are sweet peas on the wall-paper,” put in Fiona. “Unfortunately, they’re peeling. Also little rhymes . . . Jack and Jill, you know, with a pikky of the bucket and the hill. But the bucket’s peeling, too,” she added.
The landing . . . several doors, before one of which they halted. “Well,” said Peggy awkwardly, “I daresay you’d like a wash.”
“Oh, yes, I would indeed,” said Rumbold promptly. But since she seemed to linger, uncertain when or how to go, he added, “We’ll be downstairs in a moment,” and watched her trail away.
“And the water?” he said, when the door was closed. “Where is it?”
Fiona peeled off laddered stockings, revealed a cut of whitewash thigh. “You’re in Scotland now,” she said. “Not Barcelona. Walk down the passage to the bathroom. Light the geyser, but hold yourself well back . . . it’s just a little temperamental.” She unfolded nylons from a drawer. “And what do you think of sister Anne?” she said, not looking at him.
“Do you know, I don’t know what to say. I scarcely saw her.”
“Yes, that’s her line: the three-quarter profile. I’m not speaking nastily, you know. She’s shy. You must remember that, at thirty, she’s been twice to London and perhaps ten times to Edinburgh.”
“What a formidable chin she has,” he said. “I noticed that at least,” and off he went to the bathroom to wash his hands in rusty water and to speculate, like Hans Castorp, concerning the difference between children from the same sire and dam.
When he returned Fiona was lying on the bed, pads of wet cotton-wool above her eyelids. “Do you mind?” she said. “I’ve such a headache. I’d rather not come down till lunch-time. . . .”
“All right,” he said, for the prospect of exploring the house alone was not unpleasant to him.
Fiona removed a plummet of wet wool and squinted. “Take my advice and try the library,” she said. “First on the left at the bottom of the stairs. The rest I leave to your fieldcraft and sense of danger. Sister Peggy’s probably in the kitchen, stirring soup.”
“Just one thing,” he said, “before I go. When do you expect your solicitors to tell you that the boy is dead?”
“Oh, not for weeks yet. There are so many six and eight pences to be plucked from an untimely death. The news will be shuttle-cockled between London and Australia. The letter with black margins may not reach me until March. I suppose you did kill him,” she said suddenly, sitting up.
“Look and see,” said Rumbold. From his wallet he removed and laid upon the counterpane a cutting from the Western Morning News.
“‘Schoolboy’s Tragic Fall,’” he said. “I had hoped it might be that. The report is very circumstantial, for, of course, such accidents happen every day.”
Along the landing, down the stairs on tip-toe he went, every muscle tensed; but in the hall there was no sound other than the tick of the grandfather clock, though among the lower regions pots were being scraped.
Rumbold entered the library. This was a large room, measuring some forty feet by twenty even with the omission of several alcoves from the count. In the centre and no doubt the place of honour, a billiard table stood; besheeted now in white, the chink of its snooker balls a distant memory. At the far end, a fireplace with an open hearth of stone; this same fireplace laden with bellows, tongs, griddle-irons and other curved and twisted iron horrors. Above, upon the mantelpiece, the family picture gallery, just a little dusty . . . Fiona, jeune fille, very serious with her Russian cheek-bones and wide eyes . . . Sister Peggy, improbable in Girl Guide garb, clutching a lanyard and a whistle . . . then others, quite easily identifiable . . . Mama, terrifically Edwardian, with breasts like broken pears enclosed in court dress, and a young man with the Black Watch headgear and short-clipped moustache; quite obviously the daddy who had died on barbed wire in First Arras.
But for the remainder, who were not displayed so prominently, Rumbold was obliged to employ rather his sense of period than such slender knowledge of the family tree as he possessed. This old Tartuffe, with mutton-chops and Gladstone collar, enclosed within an oval of daguerreotype tint . . . ah, the famous Consul, naturally, and the lady with the fringe and acid smile next door, his wife; who had died (if Fiona was to be believed) in Davos.
These photographs of the second rank were all in some degree sub-actionable but none more so than the two old ladies who, hands upon their laps and fingers intertwined, stared upon the world above single lines of pearls from the boom days of 1928. The granny and the auntie! Rumbold was not conscious of having said these words, but when he turned, hearing a step behind him, Peggy proceeded with his thought.
“Yes,” she said, “that’s them. Granny’s dead, but auntie’s still alive, though bedridden. We do what we can for her. She sleeps upstairs in the blue-room next to yours.”
“Why do you submit to ‘Peggy’?” he said. “I can’t bear these diminutives. Isn’t Margaret good enough?”
“One has these things from birth,” she said. “There’s no way out. At school, there was a girl called Hortense. Are you really married to Fiona?” she added.
“Yes,” he sai
d, surprised at her audacity, then countered quickly. “And your husband in Ceylon . . . have you your marriage lines?”
“Fiona has all the luck,” she said, ignoring this. “She always had it. She was mother’s favourite.”
“And so you hate her?”
“No, certainly not,” she said. “How could I hate my sister?”
Rumbold did not reply, but instead moved over towards the bookcases.
The Children’s Encyclopædia, the Illustrated London News, calfbound; Punch, also calf bound (circa 1890), the complete Charlotte M. Yonge in red leather, the lives of Sir Redvers Buller and of Mrs. Beeton, whose own major work lay no doubt in the kitchen; the collected sermons of Dean Farrar, with those of Laurence Sterne in uneasy proximity; the daring modernity of Compton Mackenzie and Michael Arlen, and nudging their last volumes, Shakespeare and Shelley, from whose summits Rumbold blew the dust.
There was one French book, and it was, of course, Tartarin of Tarascon.
“Any further evidence of culture?” said Rumbold. “Mind you, I’m dead against it personally but one likes to know.”
Peggy said nothing, but his eyes, following her, picked out the evidence she indicated.
“Ah, Virginia Woolf . . . now that shows genuine courage: and the sunflowers of Van Gogh upon the wall.” Well! Well! He stared at them. “But why does no one ever buy the chair?” he said.
“I have it in my room.”
“Then persevere. In twenty years you’ll buy your first print of Matisse.”
She asked him if he would like some coffee. He said “No, no coffee thanks” and, wandering about the room, was presently attracted by a cupboard containing many little ivory elephants, snuff boxes, spoons and several rows of spindled wine glasses.