Bernard was on the point of voicing his sincere doubt of this proposition when Shorty came in, as was customary, with coffee and biscuits – cheaper and nastier, if fresher, biscuits than the ones offered Dr Mainwaring. When he had served the other two, Shorty sat down and served himself. After more than three years, Marigold still found this unsettling. It was as if one of those foreign waiters at the Café Royal should have pulled up a chair next to her and started on the grouse and burgundy. But she was not to be unsettled for long: after a sip of coffee, Shorty excused himself and hurried from the room.
‘Right,’ he said, once more emerging from the outside lavatory – ‘cement, here I come.’
Up in Bernard’s half of the bedroom, a spot he visited not once a year, he looked to see if there had been any changes or additions. No: water-carafe and tumbler, clean silver ashtray on small wine-table by bedside, silver pen-and-ink set on chest of drawers, and that was the lot. He, Bernard, had thrown everything away; Shorty himself had never kept anything.
The green leather case came to hand readily enough and the two bottles were there, each of them surrounded with a label worn and faded into illegibility. As if in response, his guts, seldom altogether silent, intensified their stirrings. The effect was of an acoustic recording of a thunderstorm played on an acoustic gramophone.
‘You look out, you lot,’ he said: ‘heap big chief him coming to put paid to palaver.’ He picked up the glass and poured into it a little of the contents of one of the bottles: a transparent fluid. In Shorty’s world, transparent fluids were called white, notably white (as opposed to yellow) gin, white (as opposed to caramel-coloured) whisky. He was not very sober, and he had forgotten Bernard’s caution about the clear liquid. So he poured again, making up a dose of about two tablespoonfuls, and drank it down.
‘Ugh,’ he said. ‘Well, we all know it won’t do you any good if it’s not bloody horrible. That’s life. By the great bull of Bashan, that is life for you. I reckon God was pissed when he made the world and he’s had a screaming hangover ever since. Wow.’
Bernard too had left the sitting-room and was now in the coal-house looking through the detached drawer in which Shorty kept a stock of largely corroded tools. He searched through them with mounting fervour until he found an implement of the type he needed. Time was not on his side; he wanted very much to act now, but knew he must wait until the afternoon, when the other two would have retired.
On her way upstairs to wash her hands before luncheon, Marigold noticed Mr Pastry’s tennis-ball lying in shadow on the second tread from the top. She left it where it was, saying to herself idly that it would do one or the other of those two no harm to tread on it and take a bit of a toss.
They ate a cold meal in the kitchen, George a portion of the same in his bedroom. Bernard returned to the sitting-room and chain-smoked until all was quiet, really impatient, the vestiges of his imagination caught by the task-force, behind-the-lines aspect of what he was about to do. Finally he crept into the garden, trampled some flower-beds and pulled up a number of plants – this to lend colour to the vandalism theory he would later advance. When he came out of the coal-house carrying the ladder, he did not hear a fairly loud groan and a spluttering sound from near by. The daylight had just begun to fade. Bernard, wincing with pain and effort, propped the ladder against the far side of the house and laboriously mounted it. At the top, he reached up and cut the telephone wire with the pair of pliers he had found, laughed with great abandonment, lost his balance and fell.
He had broken something, something large. There was also a lot of what must be blood. Crying out with pain now, he crawled a little way, just far enough to be out of sight of anyone approaching the front door of the cottage, and found he could crawl no further.
A little later, Marigold went upstairs to the lavatory. This time, in the thicker shadows, she did not notice the tennis-ball, and did not remember having done so before when she began her descent. Her foot came down squarely on it and both her legs seemed snatched into the air. She went full tilt, not stopping until her forehead came into contact with the heavy brass rim of the log-basket in the hall.
George was asleep, heavily because he had been awake, as usual, since about six o’clock that morning, but the sound from downstairs reached him. He pulled himself upright and shouted at the top of his voice for several minutes; there was no response. With great exertion, he worked his way out of bed and on to the floor. Then nothing happened for a time.
When he recovered consciousness, he was stretched on the landing in almost complete darkness with Mr Pastry at his side. He tried to shout again, but could not, tried to move, but could not. All he could do was turn his eyes this way and that. He felt no fear: whether or nor the other three returned soon from wherever they had gone, Adela was bound to arrive eventually in her car. Yes, her car, with its wheels, tyres, axles, windows, gear-lever, dashboard … So he still had that.
Adela drove along the side of the house, her headlights just missing Bernard’s corpse by the wall. As she approached the back door, she heard a strange noise a few feet away, hesitated, found the door of the lavatory unbolted and was aware of a smell that was worse than strange. She groped for the light-switch. Shorty had fallen off the w.c. seat and was lying in a considerable pool of brownish water with long streaks of dark blood in it. Adela walked a few unsteady paces, felt her way into the kitchen, then the hall, turned on the light there and saw Marigold.
‘Oh, my dearest, whatever have you done to yourself?’ she said in a thicker voice than usual. She was aware of something like a huge weight against her chest, and then of nothing at all.
Forty
Nobody except the postman, who noticed nothing out of the ordinary, came to Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage for several days, because nobody else had reason to: no milkman arrived to find bottles not taken in, no shopkeeper missed Adela’s custom, and Keith, having conscientiously tried to telephone his wife’s grandmother with news of his success and failed to get through, had assumed that Adela had once more neglected to pay the bill and been cut off. So he wrote a letter instead.
At the end of those days, a large red car bearing the name of a hire firm came laboriously up the drive. It stopped at the front door and its hooter sounded for a minute or so. Then a man in his thirties, wearing a suit of some shiny material rarely seen thereabouts, opened the driver’s door.
‘I’ll take a look around in back,’ he said in a North American accent.
‘Okay, Stanley,’ said his companion, a woman of about his age. ‘But hurry it up, will you? I’m not exactly cooking to death.’
The man nodded and walked slowly along to the angle of the house. Here he saw a ladder leaning against the wall, a metal tool near its foot and a fallen telephone wire. Frowning, he moved to his right and walked on more slowly still; then his eye fell on what might have been a heap of sacking three-quarters covered with windblown leaves, except that it had a trousered human leg and a shoed foot sticking out of it. The new arrival drew in his breath, stooped quickly and brushed away the leaves until he had uncovered a face. Because it was a face he knew only from photographs and the dimmest of infantile memory, he did not at once recognize it.
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