Brother Death

by John Lodwick

  Fiona stood behind it.

  “Why do you stand there?” he said. “There’s no need of knocking for admission . . . Your sister and I have been discussing murders . . . her own and ours. From what I hear, her own was very much more wily. She knocked off her granny, don’t you see . . . you, your child.”

  But Fiona still stood there on the threshold, pale, immobile, and in certain other respects also like a ghost.

  Fifteen

  The wind from Norway blew no longer. For five, for ten, for fifteen thousand feet above the earth the air was almost still. The feeble sun described its daily arc in seven hours, rising like some bloodstained conspirator who loiters in his course from lack of strength, then collapsing in a second bath of gore.

  The cold, throughout the final days of January, was intense, its origin marine and Arctic. Successive ridges of high barometric pressure, situated above the Grampians, drifted slowly southward to the lowlands and disintegration. Snow fell at steady intervals. On hill farms the sheep, their life already made unendurable by the snap and bark of irritable collies, began to starve because they lacked the sense to burrow for the saving grass. Iceland, Orkney, Shetland, Peterhead: all four were one in this great refrigeration, and in Morocco the swallows, warned by some instinct beyond the ken of ornithologists, would now quite certainly postpone the homeward trip until April.

  Inside the house, behind the double windows and the granite slabs, comparative warmth obtained. Peat fires burnt in every bedroom, the glowing maw of Martha’s stove gorged itself on anthracite ovoids and diamond cubes. Alone among the rooms the library was locked: it was no longer possible to heat it satisfactorily.

  Since the midnight conversazione reported in the previous chapter, a change had taken place within the household . . . a change involving the relationship between the man and the two sisters. The servant, the bedridden aunt, the gardener remained in apparent ignorance of this change.

  Fiona now spent, from choice perhaps as well as circumstance, much time alone. Subject by nature to all the ailments which cold weather brings in its train, to frozen toes, to the first jagged premonitions of sciatica, to chilblains, she would sit for half the day before the downstairs fire, her shin-bones red from the reflection of its heat. For books she had her Kierkegaards and with this esoteric Danish dwarf she seemed almost, as it were, in love. Notebooks, copiously filled, littered the floor at her feet, and once, when Rumbold stooped to pick one up, she ordered him almost sharply to leave it be.

  At night, soon after dinner, she would go to bed with three hot water bottles. Rumbold seldom joined her. His honeymoon was in full swing.

  Peggy had grown thin. Her eyes seemed wider, but they were without expression unless it were a gleam of hate. He had observed that gleam for the first time when he had taken her that night. As he had stepped into the lighted bedroom from the dark corridor their eyes had met, clashing in unblinking stare for five seconds, and perhaps more. Then he had thrown aside the sheets, lain down beside her. She had made no gesture of resistance—none at all.

  That night he had returned to his own bedroom, but, on the second, Fiona, believing perhaps that he was still in the sitting-room, had come into her sister’s bedroom without knocking, while the light still burned.

  “Oh,” she had said. “I beg your pardon,” and had retired, had softly closed the door again and gone, even as Rumbold began to lift his head.

  “Speak,” he had said a little later to his partner. “For Christ’s sake say something, can’t you?”

  “What is there to say?” she had replied with truth, for, as he well knew, their struggle was too evenly matched for points to be risked in incautious speech.

  Yet in the daytime, she would follow him about. Polishing his shoes in what had once been the gun-room, he would lift his eyes from the brown and greasy brush to see her standing near him, silent but observant.

  “What is it that you want?” he had said, not once, but many times. Never had she replied, but shortly afterwards muttering of saints with Martha by the sizzling kitchen stove, he would find her there again.

  Did she wish, perhaps, to signify that his triumph was only in the flesh? A log of wood she may once have been, immobile and unresponsive, but he had sawed the log and made it quicken at his slightest touch. For this he claimed no credit. A clumsy husband and a vicious and half-impotent medico could hardly have enlarged her small horizon. No! Deeper, and far deeper, lay the motives for her open-legged silence. Her womb, impenetrable and sterile, pursued other ends than those for which nature had intended it.

  It was not until some days later that they talked. Désœuvré, tired of the house, the frozen garden and Fiona’s constant and neat nips of Haig and Haig (a half bottle was now always by her chairside), Rumbold, with memories of the Polytechnic Art School, had undertaken to decorate the summer-house. A box of auntie’s paints provided his material.

  He wrapped up well: thick under-pants, two jerseys and an overcoat rather spoiled the waist-line which his morning exercises were designed to keep within the middle twenties. The summer-house was bare, except for a few cane chairs, a rejected dartboard and the green drum of an old lawn-mower. This was such a building of Birmingham Japanese design as one sees quite frequently in the gardens of provincial gentry, and it somehow happens—does it not—when one passes, whether it be upon the top deck of a bus, or as a mere trespasser on foot, that the oak trees are always dripping with a recent rain, that their leaves lie sodden and heavy on the paths and that the only sign of life is the spectacle of a startled cat diving for shelter among the rhododendrons.

  The walls of this summer-house had once been distempered white. This white had now peeled and flaked, the sometime victim of rots both damp and dry. Having chipped and rubbed the surface smooth, Rumbold began to paint upon it. He painted a sailor with a French pom-pom cap; a bollard, a length of a steel hawser, and a portion of a harbour, coloured Hessian blue. It was while he was engaged upon the lighthouse in the background of this harbour that Peggy came in and stood, one arm upon her hip and watching. He did not notice her until she spoke.

  “Rather night-club stuff, isn’t it?” she said.

  “No . . . bathing lido,” he replied. “I haven’t any talent, really, but I enjoy it.”

  She sat down in one of the ancient wicker chairs. She had brought an oil stove with her from the house, and now placed it between them.

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “This is where you used to meet the lascivious medico, isn’t it? But surely . . .” and he gazed meaningly at the few poor sticks of furniture.

  “Don’t concern yourself unduly,” she replied. “There was a divan in those days. It’s since been burnt for firewood.”

  He laid down his paints, and stood before her with arms folded and head held slightly forward.

  “There is a story you were going to tell me, isn’t there?”

  “You mean about my grandmother.” She stared at him with what Fiona called her church-mouse face. “I can’t imagine why you want to hear it.”

  He lit a cigarette. “No?” he said. “You mean you really can’t see why? You must be most obtuse then. A true member of the lower middle class, I suffer from ancestor worship at one remove. My own ancestors were mostly plumbers, so naturally I can’t worship them. Therefore I go mainly for the Anglo-Indians and the landed gentry, whose totem symbol, the running fox, has always seemed to me most suitable. Within those perimeters where crumpets are still served at teatime, I make my explorations. In brief, I probe. You will think, perhaps, that I am searching to incriminate you still further or to obtain some piece of knowledge which might serve me well. But that’s not so at all. You poisoned granny; and granny is of great interest to me . . . because she is a kind of symbol which makes me feel much less of a bastard each time that I consult my heart.”

  “So be it,” she replied. �
��You want granny. You shall have her. She’s not a pretty sight. When a baby is very young it soils and wets its nappies, kicks out, cries when contradicted, howls the roof off if left alone. But that baby at least is innocent. You can’t blame it. I only wish that I had had one. Granny was just such a baby once upon a time. I’m no scientist. I know nothing of the genes and hormones you’re always speaking of. I only want to know how it can be that a woman, who must have had some generous impulses at one time, could have turned into the hateful tyrant of her last years.”

  “John Knox,” he said immediately. “Or, if you prefer it . . . Pio Nono. Anyway both eunuchs. When I was aged seven I made my first communion and was positive that there was an angel hovering just above my shoulder. I remember mentioning it to my mother. She made no reply, for, after all, infant saints are not unknown . . . people might even have gone to Guildford instead of Lourdes.

  “But,” and he paused, looking at her, as they say, between the eyes. “If you’ve got to have that nonsense . . . if it’s as essential as oil to motor to keep you going, then I’d rather have my own church than yours. At least, we offer the best insurance policy and don’t bleat Jewish psalms on Sunday nights.”

  “We were talking,” she said slowly, “about my grandmother.”

  “And so?” Silent, he waited for her to continue, but this she did not do at once. He saw that she was staring at a corner, where once, perhaps, the sofa had reposed.

  “Imagine,” she then began, “imagine a childhood absolutely without laughter. At six o’clock, winter, summer, rain or snow—the children must be up. By half past six they must have washed and said their prayers. And for lunch, three days a week . . . tapioca pudding. Once, when I was browsing through the big family dictionary I came upon that pretty word ‘Chatelaine’ . . . a word which I had always loved. But I didn’t love it any more then, for I saw that it described her, with her keys, and lace fichu and uncanny way of creeping up behind me without making any noise.”

  “Oh, come now,” he protested. “She can’t have been a monster all of a single piece. Begin with the extenuating circumstances.”

  “Very well. She was beautiful, by which I mean beautifully proportioned. Besides her everybody seemed clumsy . . . all hands red, all ankles thick. Even when old, she had the face of a girl, quite unlined. And her eyes! Well, none seemed franker or more innocent. They were a rather pretty violet colour.”

  He examined her own hands which, just then, she laid upon the stove in search of warmth. They were large, the fingers stubby.

  “You have heard,” she said, “about her husband, our grandfather. What you have not heard is about her son, my father. He wore his hair in ringlets until he was fourteen, and never played with nasty village boys. I don’t think he ever went to school either . . . or if he did he soon came back again. I believe she had a tutor to teach him his vulgar fractions. The tutor must have taught him one too many, for as soon as father could grow his own moustache he went out and married mother on the sly. That was disappointment number two . . . or number three, really, if you include poor auntie.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I thought that we should come to auntie presently.”

  “Have you ever read,” she said, “about those old sea-fights where one ship aims at the other’s sails and rigging, and the second replies by raking its opponent’s decks . . . then both sheer off, with honour satisfied? That was how it was between mother and granny. They were far too well matched to dream of really mortal combat. Mother had the money: granny the home and what she would sometimes describe as the ‘position’. In the end they made their bargain: Fiona, though temporarily housed here remained mother’s property, while I was transferred to granny, to do with as she pleased.”

  She paused: “To do with as she pleased,” she repeated. “I killed her,” she said, “because she was killing me. I don’t say that I wouldn’t also have killed my mother had I ever had the opportunity. Indeed, I know that I would have.”

  “And Fiona?” he said softly.

  “I’ve no grudge against Fiona, though once . . . Oh God, how I used to envy her. But when I look at her to-day I realise that there’s something to be said for the matriarchal education, after all,” and she smiled at him wanly.

  He rose. “Come inside,” he said. “It’s too cold here.”

  Three days later, on the tenth of February to be exact, Rumbold returned by train from a brief visit to Aberdeen.

  He had the impression that he was being followed.

  In Aberdeen he had obtained without difficulty the signatures of witnesses to Fiona’s false will. Two teashop waitresses had obliged him . . . Irish girls whom he had chosen expressly, though by chance, because he had heard them say that they were returning shortly to their own country.

  After a stomach-curdling luncheon, Rumbold had proceeded to the Central Post Office, from which building he had attempted to telephone the Spanish Embassy in London. In this enterprise he had been unsuccessful. The line, at first apparently engaged, had proved at the second and third attempts to be completely out of order. It had been on leaving the Post Office premises that Rumbold had received the strange impression that he was being followed.

  His first action had been to buy a newspaper. Then, leaving the crowded shopping centre but at the same time walking slowly, he had turned down a deserted side-street which led towards the docks . . . a street of warehouses this, with blind windows, empty hawking carts, and many stationary lorries. Half-way down this street Rumbold had quickened his pace considerably, had almost broken into a run, in fact. Once around the corner, he had stopped, opened his newspaper and pretended to read it, with an air of nonchalance.

  He did not have to wait very long . . . a patter of running feet, a sound of heavy breathing and a man turned the corner, barging into him.

  “Do look where you’re going . . . please,” said Rumbold petulantly. He had managed to administer a smart kick in the scrimmage and now watched gleefully as his antagonist moved off after rubbing his shin . . . moved off down the long, long road towards the gasworks which the man was obliged to follow since he had appeared to be in such a hurry to embark upon it.

  Grinning, Rumbold walked off in the opposite direction, towards the station. He did not know the man.

  Rumbold returned to the house, having travelled on foot from the station, towards five o’clock. The sky was already dark, so that, once inside the drive and beneath the oak trees, he was obliged to use his torch. Something suspect stirring at the frontier of its feeble arc, Rumbold turned the lamp beam on the adjacent shrubberies. He saw the gardener.

  “Mighty cold to be out,” he said somewhat sharply. “Why don’t you go and have your tea, man?”

  “I don’t need muckle tay,” the gardener replied.

  Rumbold continued up the drive, the light from his torch criss-crossing on the broken stones unloaded here twenty years before from the local convict prison. At the front door he was met, in response to repeated knocking, by Martha, with the astonishing information that Auntie was dying. Weeping, the old woman retired towards her kitchen, from which presently came the sound of running taps, the secondary sound of sizzling as water slopped over from a basin to the stove.

  These sounds were, in the circumstances, most sinister, for Martha, upon her own admission, had washed many dead.

  Half expecting to find a family conclave in session presided over by a brace of doctors with clanging stethoscopes, and black attaché bags, Rumbold entered the sitting-room, where Fiona sat alone, playing patience, a glass of whisky by her side.

  “I hear your aunt is in a bad way,” he began.

  “Yes,” replied Fiona. She laid down the fatal nine of spades beside its Queen. “Yes. I’m told that she won’t last the night.”

  She took a sip of whisky; then reaching for the bottle at her feet, poured more into the glass
.

  “And so you’ve been to Aberdeen,” she said and giggled. “Such funny stories they used to tell about Aberdeen, but rather dated nowadays, don’t you agree?” She paused, looking at him almost shyly. “I mean,” she said, “that you don’t have to go to Aberdeen any more to find a miser or a money-grubber.”

  “No,” he replied. “I daresay you don’t.”

  “Do you know,” she said. “When I look at you I am reminded of the verse of Ecclesiastes which goes . . . ‘If two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone?’”

  “I’m glad,” he said drily, “to see that you read your Bible.”

  “Let it pass,” she said, “though I could cite you other texts, among them one or two even nearer to the mark. Did you have a good day in Ab . . . Aberdeen?”

  “Yes, thank you. Very tolerable.”

  “And you were successful in your business?” To this last word she lent strange emphasis.

  “I had no business in particular,” he said. “I was merely sightseeing.”

  “A lot of people seem to be sightseeing just now,” she said. “A little man came to the door this morning and asked for you by name. Perhaps he was sightseeing, too? Perhaps, in Aberdeen, you also saw some sightseers?”

  “Yes,” he replied. “As a matter of fact, I did. I was tailed for quite a time.”

  “Ah, your War Office chums, no doubt. They seem to attach great importance to your future, don’t they? Have they good reason, do you think, or is it just another example of the waste of public money?”

  “The gentleman in question,” said Rumbold, “looked more like a common flatfoot than the exquisite pansies to whom I’m more accustomed.”