Ten and a Quarter New Tales of Read online

  ‘My God,’ said Gordon. ‘My God, it’s Lawrence’s cat. It must have got in through the window.’

  He bent down and picked up the cat, a soft, stout, marmalade-coloured creature. I felt sick at the anticlimax. The time was exactly nine o’clock. With the cat draped over his arm, Gordon went back into the morning room and I followed him. We didn’t sit down. We stood waiting for the wheels and the closing of the doors.

  Nothing happened.

  I have no business to keep you in suspense any longer for the fact is that after the business with the cat nothing happened at all. At nine-fifteen we sat down in our deckchairs. The cat lay on the floor beside the oil stove and went to sleep. Twice we heard a car pass along Shawley Lane, a remotely distant sound, but we heard nothing else.

  ‘Feel like a spot of brandy?’ said Gordon.

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  So we each had a nip of brandy and at ten we had another look in the drawing room. By then we were both feeling bored and quite sure that since nothing had happened at nine nothing would happen at ten-thirty either. Of course we stayed till ten-thirty and for half an hour after that, and then we decamped. We put the cat over the wall into Lawrence’s grounds and went back to Gordon’s house, where Patsy awaited us, smiling cynically.

  I had had quite enough of the Rectory but that wasn’t true of Gordon. He said it was well known that the phenomena didn’t take place every night; we had simply struck an off-night and he was going back on his own. He did too, half a dozen times between then and the 30th, even going so far as to have (rather unethically) a key cut from the one Curlew had lent him. Patsy would never go with him, though he tried hard to persuade her.

  But in all those visits he never saw or heard anything. And the effect on him was to make him as great a sceptic as Patsy.

  ‘I’ve a good mind to make an offer for the Rectory myself,’ he said. ‘It’s a fine house and I’ve got quite attached to it.’

  ‘You’re not serious,’ I said.

  ‘I’m perfectly serious. I’ll go to the auction with a view for buying it if I can get Patsy to agree.’

  But Patsy preferred her own house and, very reluctantly, Gordon had to give up the idea. The Rectory was sold for £62,000 to an American woman, a friend of Judy Lawrence. About a month after the sale the builders moved in. Eleanor used to get progress reports from Patsy, how they had rewired and treated the whole place for woodworm and painted and relaid floors. The central-heating engineers came too, much to Patsy’s satisfaction.

  We met Carol Marcus, the Rectory’s new owner, when we were asked round to the Hall for drinks one Sunday morning. She was staying there with the Lawrences until such time as the improvements and decorations to the Rectory were complete. We were introduced by Judy to a very pretty, well-dressed woman in young middle age. I asked her when she expected to move in. April, she hoped, as soon as the builders had finished the two extra bathrooms. She had heard rumours that the Rectory was supposed to be haunted and these had amused her very much. A haunted house in the English countryside! It was too good to be true.

  ‘It’s all nonsense, you know,’ said Gordon, who had joined us. ‘It’s all purely imaginary.’ And he went on to tell her of his own experiences in the house during October – or his non-experiences, I should say.

  ‘Well, for goodness’ sake, I didn’t believe it!’ she said, and she laughed and went on to say how much she loved the house and wanted to make it a real home for her children to come to. She had three, she said, all in their teens, two boys away at school and a girl a bit older.

  That was the only time I ever talked to her and I remember thinking she would be a welcome addition to the neighbourhood. A nice woman. Serene is the word that best described her. There was a man friend of hers there too. I didn’t catch his surname but she called him Guy. He was staying at one of the locals, to be near her presumably.

  ‘I should think those two would get married, wouldn’t you?’ said Eleanor on the way home. ‘Judy told me she’s waiting to get her divorce.’

  Later that day I took Liam for a walk along Shawley Lane and when I came to the Rectory I found the gate open. So I walked up the gravel drive and looked through the drawing-room window at the new woodblock floor and ivory-painted walls and radiators. The place was swiftly being transformed. It was no longer sinister or grim. I walked round the back and peered in at the splendidly fitted kitchens, one a laundry now, and wondered what on earth had made sensible women like Mrs Buckland and Kate spread such vulgar tales, and the Galtons panic. What had come over them? I could only imagine that they felt a need to direct attention to themselves which they perhaps could do in no other way.

  I whistled for Liam and strolled down to the gate and looked back at the Rectory. It stared back at me. Is it hindsight that makes me say this or did I really feel it then? I think I did feel it, that the house stared at me with a kind of steady insolence.

  Carol Marcus moved in three weeks ago, on a sunny day in the middle of April. Two nights later, just before eleven, there came a sustained ringing at Gordon’s door as if someone were leaning on the bell. Gordon went to the door. Carol Marcus stood outside, absolutely calm but deathly white.

  She said to him, ‘May I use your phone, please? Mine isn’t in yet and I have to call the police. I just shot my daughter.’

  She took a step forward and crumpled in a heap on the threshold.

  Gordon picked her up and carried her into the house and Patsy gave her brandy, and then he went across the road to the Rectory. There were lights on all over the house; the front door was open and light was streaming out on to the drive and the little Citroën Diane that was parked there.

  He walked into the house. The drawing-room door was open and he walked in there and saw a young girl lying on the carpet between the windows. She was dead. There was blood from a bullet wound on the front of the dress, and on a low round table lay the small automatic that Carol Marcus had used.

  In the meantime Patsy had been the unwilling listener to a confession. Carol Marcus told her that the girl, who was nineteen, had unexpectedly driven down from London, arriving at the Rectory at nine o’clock. She had had a drink and something to eat and then she had something to tell her mother, that was why she had come down. While in London she was seeing a lot of the man called Guy and now they found that they were in love with each other. She knew it would hurt her mother, but she wanted to tell her at once, she wanted to be honest about it.

  Carol Marcus told Patsy she felt nothing, no shock, no hatred or resentment, no jealousy. It was as if she were impelled by some external force to do what she did – take the gun she always kept with her from a drawer in the writing desk and kill her daughter.

  At this point Gordon came back and they phoned the police. Within a quarter of an hour the police were at the house. They arrested Carol Marcus and took her away and now she is on remand, awaiting trial on a charge of murder.

  So what is the explanation of all this? Or does there, in fact, have to be an explanation? Eleanor and I were so shocked by what had happened, and awed too, that for a while we were somehow wary of talking about it even to each other. Then Eleanor said, ‘It’s as if all this time the coming event cast its shadow before it.’

  I nodded, yet it didn’t seem quite that to me. It was more that the Rectory was waiting for the right people to come along, the people who would fit its still un-played scenario, the woman of forty, the daughter of nineteen, the lover. And only to those who approximated these characters could it show shadows and whispers of the drama; the closer the approximation, the clearer the sounds and signs.

  The Loys were old and childless, so they saw nothing. Nor did Gordon and I – we were of the wrong sex. But the Bucklands, who had a daughter, heard and felt things, and so did Kate, though she was too old for the tragic leading role and her adolescent girl too young for victim. The Galtons had been nearly right – had Mrs Grainger once hoped the young rector would marry her before he showed his
preference for her daughter? – but the women had been a few years too senior for the parts. Even so, they had come closer to participation than those before them.

  All this is very fanciful and I haven’t mentioned a word of it to Gordon and Patsy. They wouldn’t listen if I did. They persist in seeing the events of three weeks ago as no more than a sordid murder, a crime of jealousy committed by someone whose mind was disturbed.

  But I haven’t been able to keep from asking myself what would have happened if Gordon had bought the Rectory when he talked of doing so. Patsy will be forty this year. I don’t think I’ve mentioned that she has a daughter by her first marriage who is away at the university and going on nineteen now, a girl that they say is extravagantly fond of Gordon.

  He is talking once more of buying, since Carol Marcus, whatever may become of her, will hardly keep the place now. The play is played out, but need that mean there will never be a repeat performance …?

  A Drop Too Much

  You won’t believe this, but last Monday I tried to kill my wife. Yes, my wife, Hedda. And what a loss that would have been to English letters! Am I sure I want to tell you about it? Well, you’re not likely to tell her, are you? You don’t know her. Besides, she wouldn’t believe you. She thinks I’m the self-appointed president of her fan club.

  The fact is, I’m heartily glad the attempt failed. I don’t think I’ve got the stamina to stand up to a murder enquiry. I’d get flurried and confess the whole thing. (Yes, thanks, I will have a drink. My back’s killing me – I think I’ve slipped a disc.)

  Hedda and I have been married for fifteen years, and I can’t complain she hasn’t kept me in the lap of luxury. Of course, I’ve paid my own price for that. To a sensitive man like myself, it is a little humiliating to be known as Hedda Hardy’s husband. And I don’t really care for her books. It’s one thing for a man to write stuff about soldiers of fortune and revolutions in South American republics and jet-set baccarat games and seductions on millionaires’ yachts, but you expect something a little more – well, delicate and sensitive from a woman. Awareness, you know, the psychological approach. I’ve often thought of what Jane Austen said about the way she wrote, on a little piece of ivory six inches wide. With Hedda it’s more a matter of bashing away at a bloody great rock face with a chisel.

  Still, she’s made a fortune out of it. And I will say for her, she’s generous. Not a settlement or a trust fund though, more’s the pity. And the property’s all in her name. There’s our place in Kensington – Hedda bought that just before house prices went sky-high – and the cottage in Minorca, and now we’ve got this farmhouse in Sussex. You didn’t know about that? Well, that’s crucial to the whole thing. That’s where I made my abortive murder attempt.

  Hedda decided to buy it about six months ago. Funnily enough, it was the same week she took Lindsay on as her secretary. Of course she’s had secretaries before, must have had half a dozen, and they’ve all worshipped the ground she trod on. To put it fancifully, they helped fill my cup of humiliation. (And while on the subject of cups, old man, you may re-fill my glass. Thank you.)

  I’ll tell you what I mean. They were all bitten by the bug of this Women’s Lib rubbish, so you can imagine they were falling about with glee to find a couple like us. And though I manage to be rather vague about my financial position with most of our friends, you can’t keep things like that dark from the girl who types the letters to your accountant, can you? The fact is, Hedda’s annual income tax amounts to – let me see – yes, almost six times my annual income.

  They were mistresses of the snide comment. What did you say? All right, I don’t mind admitting it, a couple of them were my mistresses too. I had to prove myself a man in some respects, didn’t I? But Lindsay … Lindsay’s different. For one thing, she’d actually heard of me.

  When Hedda introduced us, Lindsay didn’t come out with that It-must-be-wonderful-to-be-married-to-such-a-famous-writer bit. She said, ‘You write that super column for Lady of Leisure, don’t you? I always read it. I’m crazy about gardening.’

  My heart warmed to her at once, old man. And when Hedda’d finished making the poor sweet type about twenty replies to her awful fan letters, we went out into the garden together. She’s really very knowledgeable. Imagine, she was living with her parents in some ghastly suburban hole and doing their whole garden single-handed. Mind you, though, it’s living in the suburbs that’s kept her so sweet and unspoiled.

  Not that it was just that – I mean the gardening bit – that started our rapport. Lindsay is just about the most beautiful girl I ever saw. I adore those tall delicate blondes that look as if a puff of wind would blow them away. Hedda, of course, is handsome after a fashion. I daresay anyone would get a battered look churning out stuff about rapes and massacres year after year between breakfast and lunch.

  The long and the short of it is that by the end of a week I was head over heels in love with Lindsay. And she feels the same about me. A virgin too, old man. What did you say? You should be so lucky? I reckon I deserved every bit of luck I could get in those utterly bloody weeks while Hedda was buying the farmhouse.

  Honestly, Hedda treats me the way some men treat their wives. Pours out all her troubles, and if I don’t grovel at her feet telling her how wonderful she is she says I don’t know what it is to have responsibilities and that, anyway, I can’t be expected to understand business. And all this because the house agent didn’t phone her at the precise time he’d promised and the vendor got a bit bolshie about the price. I don’t blame him, the way Hedda drives a bargain.

  (Another Scotch? Oh, well, if you twist my arm.) Hedda got possession of the place in March and she had an army of decorators in and this firm to do the carpets and that one to do the furnishings. Needless to say, I wasn’t consulted except about the furniture for what she calls my ‘den’. Really, she ought to remember it isn’t lap dogs who live in dens.

  It’s an extraordinary thing how mean rich people can be. And quixotic. Thousands she spent on that wallpaper and Wilton, but when it came to the garden she decided I could see to all that on my own, if you please. Hedda really has no idea. Just because I happen to know the difference between a calceolaria and a cotoneaster and am able (expertly, if I may for once blow my own trumpet) to instruct stockbrokers’ wives in rose-pruning, she thinks I enjoy nothing better than digging up half an acre of more or less solid chalk. However, when I said I’d need to hire a cultivator and get God knows how much top soil and turves, she was quite amenable for her and said she’d pay.

  ‘I don’t suppose it’ll come to more than a hundred or so, will it?’ she said. ‘With the Stock Market the way it is, I don’t want to sell any more shares.’ Just as if she was some poor little housewife having to draw it out of the Post Office. And I knew for a fact – Lindsay had told me – she was getting fifty thousand for her latest film rights.

  She’d had the old stables at the end of the garden converted into a double garage. You can’t park on the road itself, there’s too much through-traffic, but there’s a drive that leads down to the garage between the garden and a field. Not another house for miles, by the way. But the garden was a bloody wilderness and at that time you had to plough through brambles and really noxious-looking giant weeds to get from the garage to the house. Taking care, I may add, not to fall down the well on the way. Oh, yes, there’s a well. Or there was.

  ‘I suppose that’ll have to be filled in?’ I said. ‘Naturally,’ said Hedda. ‘Or are you under the impression I’m the sort of lady who’d want to drop a coin down it and make a wish?’

  I was going to retort that she’d never dropped a coin in her life without knowing she’d get a damn sight more than a wish for it, but she’d just bought me a new car so I held my tongue.

  I decided the best thing would be to fill the well up with hardcore, concrete the top and make a gravel path over it from the garage entrance to the back kitchen door. It wasn’t going to be a complicated job – just arduous – as th
e brick surround of the well lay about two inches below the level of the rest of the garden. The well itself was very deep, about forty feet, as I know from measuring with a plumb line.

  However, I postponed work on the well for the time being. Hedda had gone off to the States on a lecture tour, leaving mountains of work for poor little Lindsay, a typescript to prepare about a million words long and God knows how many dreary letters to write to publishers and agents and all those people for whom the world is expected to stop when Hedda Hardy is out of the country.

  Still, since Hedda had now established her base in Sussex and had all her paraphernalia there, Lindsay was down there too and we had quite a little honeymoon. I can’t begin to tell you what a marvel that girl is. What a wife she’ll make! – for some other lucky guy. I can only say that my wish is her command. And I don’t even have to express my wish. A hint or a glance even is enough, and there’s the drink I’ve just been beginning to get wistful about, or a lovely hot bath running or a delicious snack on a tray placed right there on my lap. It makes a change for me, old man, the society of a really womanly old-fashioned woman. D’you know, one afternoon while I happened to be taking a little nap, she went all the way into Kingsmarkham – that’s our neighbouring burg – to collect my car from being serviced. I didn’t have to ask, just said something about being a bit weary. And when I woke up, there was my vehicle tucked away in the garage, and Lindsay in a ravishing new dress tiptoeing about getting our tea so as not to disturb me …

  But I mustn’t get sidetracked like this. Inevitably, we began to talk of the future. Women, I’ve noticed, always do. A man is content to take the goods the gods provide and hope the consequences won’t be too bloody. It’s really quite off-putting the way women, when one has been to bed with them once or twice, always say:

  ‘What are we going to do about it?’

  Mind you, in Lindsay’s case I felt differently. There’s no doubt, marriage or not, she’s the girl for me. I’m not used to a sweet naivety in the female sex – I thought it had died with the suffrage – and to hear the assumptions Lindsay made about my rights and my earning power et cetera really did something for my ego. To hear her talk – until I put her right – you’d have thought I was the breadwinner and Hedda the minion. Well, you know what I mean. Unfortunate way of putting it.