Death at the Opera (25 page)

When they had owned the “Swinging Sign” for about twenty months, a son was born to them, and everyone in the village foretold disaster. Their luck had been too good. For one thing, although the village people feared the lonely inn, motorists on the London Road did not. Spratt's bar might often be empty, but his saloon lounge, his bar parlour, his six fine bedrooms and his garage were often filled to capacity with foreigners, Londoners and their cars. He had twice entertained a Gretna couple, and once a man absconding with company funds. All who came were welcome, as long as they were quiet and paid their score. Many people came again and again, for the reckoning was moderate, the food and drink reasonably good, and the beds comfortable. By the time young John was rising twenty, his father was sufficiently rich to be thinking about rebuilding the “Swinging Sign” and laying the ghost.

Upon mentioning this to one of his clients, however, he was persuaded by the young fellow to give up the idea. The ghost was advertised in an important and distinguished Sunday paper as an extra inducement to stay a week-end at the “Swinging Sign” and business became more brisk than ever. Unfortunately, the luck did not last, for, almost coincident with young John's twenty-first anniversary, a new by-pass road was opened which diverted traffic from that part of the London Road which led past the inn, and the “Swinging Sign” was left like an eyot in a looped backwater—not high-and-dry exactly, but subject to the fluctuations of week-end and holiday tides of traffic.

Some motorists preferred the narrow highway to the broad new arterial road, and for these the “Swinging Sign” catered adequately as of old; but the high tide of prosperity had passed, and the villagers revived the old tales of ghosts, ill-luck and sudden death, to the annoyance of young John and the amusement of his father. Neither husband nor son could tell what effect the change in fortune was going to have upon Dora. Slow-moving, gracious, bountiful and aloof as before, she kept the house as she had always kept it, and listened to the troubles of the village as she had always listened to them. She was spacious minded, even when Johntook up with Susie Cozens.

Susie was small and pretty—the antithesis in every way of Dora. She was three years older than John, and had been a shop assistant in London before she came back to keep the village stores with her widowed mother. Even Malachi, who was tolerant of all his fellow-creatures, could not bring himself to contemplate with any degree of enthusiasm the fact that the shallow, cheaply-scented little platinum blonde would be his daughter-in-law. Susie herself looked down on her future relatives. Privately, she would not have been averse to changing her sweetheart had the offer of a better one presented itself.

John was young. That in itself was a disadvantage. She fancied she would have preferred the cave-man type of lover. John, who was big enough, strong enough, taciturn enough, and sufficiently lacking in any sense of humour to fill the role, was inhibited by his upbringing and by the difference in their ages from treating Susie in the rough, contemptuous manner which she fancied she would have enjoyed.

Against the obvious disadvantages of John's youth and courtesy there were, in Susie's opinion, several facts which told fairly heavily in his favour. For one thing, he was, with two exceptions, the only male of her own generation (living in or near the hamlet of Lamkin) who was not a farm labourer. The exceptions were the parson's son, young Eric Greenacre, and the squire's chauffeur, a man of thirty, named Roy.

Roy was his surname. His baptismal name was Ham. He earned thirty-five shillings a week and lived rent free in the room over the squire's garage. He breakfasted free of charge, and paid the cook seven shillings and sixpence a week inclusive for the rest of his food. The squire, a bibliophile and a faddist, had curious economic theories, and tried them on his servants. Thus, if Roy were absent from the servants' breakfast for any reason whatsoever, including illness, a sum of tenpence was added to his weekly wage for every breakfast that he missed. Out of the tenpences he was charged accordingly for the breakfasts taken to his bedside during the period his illness lasted. So when Roy contracted influenza he was in pocket over the breakfasts, for he never had any, and once when he broke his leg he was considerably out of pocket, because he found the enforced inactivity so dull that, as he explained to Susie, he had to eat a lot to keep himself from being bored to death.

It took Susie a considerable time to weigh the two young men in opposite sides of the scale, and to make the nice adjustments which were to aid her in making up her mind between them. It is certain that she could have had her choice, for Roy and John were equally blind, foolish and insensitive where women were concerned, and neither was capable of seeing what a cheap little humbug Susie was. John, getting twenty shillings a week from his father and all found, would one day inherit the “Swinging Sign.” Against this was Roy's extra fifteen shillings, less the seven and sixpence for meals and the fact that presumably he would never be his own master. On the other side, though, thought Susie, it would be possible for her to be married thirty years at least before John inherited anything, and if those thirty years were to be spent with her husband's parents, who obviously disliked and distrusted her, what would be gained?

Roy had no relatives to approve or disapprove of what he did, and he was a good-looking, smart fellow in his trim uniform, whereas John, slouching about the back-yard with a couple of buckets, or serving in the bar with his shirtsleeves rolled up, was not nearly as inspiring a spectacle. Lastly, there was the question of the name. Mrs. John Spratt was not exactly a name to aspire to, but then, was Mrs. Ham Roy much better? Roy was good; but
Ham
! John was permissible; but
Spratt
!

It was a pity, thought Susie, that she couldn't take a fancy to the parson's boy, young Mr. Greenacre. Eric. . . . Mrs. Eric Greenacre . . . even Mrs. Tom Greenacre . . . even Mrs. Eric Roy. Any of them, and she would have made her choice without difficulty. But as edibles, let alone nomenclature, both Ham and Spratt made her feel slightly bilious. It was too bad that a girl should be bothered, thought Susie. Besides, you could not even refer to your husband by his surname of Roy. It was countrified, and therefore common, to speak of your husband except by his given name; so much she had learned in London. And to talk about Ham! . . . really, it gave her the Willies, really it did. Besides, the parents of John Spratt might die. Then there would be the pub and her own motor-car. That would be better than having stolen rides in Roy's employer's automobile. . . .

So, in the end, she plumped for John. Spratt was not such a bad name if one did not visualize it in terms of fish. “And after all,” thought Susie, “people do die. I mean, it's the kind of thing that might happen to anyone. . . .” Fortified by this consideration, she accepted an engagement ring from John, and, suffered by his parents and suffering them in her turn, she used to go to tea and have her weekly bath at the public-house every Sunday, and accompany John to Evensong afterwards. They shared a hymn-book and a prayer-book, held hands during the sermon, walked slowly homewards in the summer gloaming, and for the space of about five months conducted themselves as became two persons who were proposing to spend the rest of their lives in one another's company. John was proud and happy, but Susie was not altogether convinced that she had chosen the right young man.

His parents had nothing to say to John about his choice of a sweetheart. They had learned the futility of attempting to influence his taste. From the age of four onwards, John's likes had been his likes and his dislikes had been his dislikes, and there had been no persuading him into altering his opinion. The father thought that he recognized the mother's characteristic determination coming out in the boy; Dora affected to consider her son's obstinacy a youthful trait which would disappear “as the lad learned sense.”

As though recognizing his right to choose a mate, however, neither Malachi nor Dora, by word or gesture, gave the slightest indication to John that they disapproved of Susie. Susie knew that they did. She, too, did not mention it to John. She knew that if John thought his parents did not like her, he would leave his home and throw away all his prospects. As she was only prepared to marry John for what she could get, his quarrelling with his people would not have suited her at all, so, like the sleek and secretive cat, she made no sign that she observed anything untoward in Dora's manner or in Malachi's silences, and spent a surprising amount of concentrated thought upon the problem of how to make the best of John, Dora, Malachi and the “Swinging Sign.” Meanwhile she herself was earning a little money for the new home in a new, exciting and very simple way. She was blackmailing a murderer.

One Sunday afternoon at the end of the winter, the weather turned damp and foggy. By half-past two, when Susie and her mother had just finished their Sunday dinner, it was dark. Susie would have decided to forgo her customary walk of just over a mile and a half to the inn had she not quarrelled with her mother while they were cooking the dinner.

Mrs. Cozens should have been a warning to John—had he been the kind of person to give heed to a warning—of what to expect of Susie at fifty, for she was whining, spiteful and ill-tempered, a disappointed, nagging woman. She had hoped great things of her husband, but when nothing better than the village stores-cum-post-office turned out to be her portion, and when her child turned out to be a girl instead of the son she had set her heart on, and when her husband became paralysed at the age of thirty, and Susie took herself up to London as soon as she got herself the sack from a most suitable local situation, Mrs. Cozens had grown more and more disagreeable, self-pitying and antagonistic.

She suspected that Susie had only come home to live because she had got herself into some sort of trouble in London. Susie could have confirmed this opinion, had she cared to do so, for she had been taken up for shoplifting in a big London store, and was lucky to have had the case dismissed. Not for one moment had the mother ever believed that her daughter had returned home solely on account of the death of Cozens.

Susie knew her mother well enough to realize that if she stayed at home on this particular Sunday, she would have to prepare herself for a most unpleasant afternoon, so, in spite of the weather, she dressed herself in her best and prepared to set out on her usual Sunday afternoon walk to the “Swinging Sign.” Usually she left the shop at approximately half-past three. By walking briskly she could thus expect to reach the inn round about ten minutes past four. Tea was at five, which gave John roughly thirty minutes, after she had had the promised bath, to sit beside her on the sofa, while Malachi was having his Sunday afternoon sleep and Dora was washing up the dinner-things and changing into her Sunday dress and getting the tea ready in the kitchen.

On this particular Sunday, however, Susie was delayed. She was up in her bedroom putting the finishing touches to her hair, and wondering whether to tell John about Helm and the funny way he had offered her a sea-water bath, when a car drew up. A minute later her mother was calling her downstairs. Roy had come with a message from the squire to request that Mrs. Cozens and Susie would return with Roy to the big house, as the cook had fallen downstairs, and the squire was expecting visitors to dinner.

“You can go, but I shan't,” said Susie decidedly.

As an engaged girl, she felt independent of the squire, whom she disliked. If he had been a little less mean over the question of Roy's wages, she had decided some six days previously, she might not have allowed herself to become engaged to young John Spratt. Privately she considered that her charms were being wasted on John. On the previous Sunday, for instance, he had not even sat beside her on the sofa. He had taken the wireless set to pieces and made her hold small spare parts while he corrected some defect. It had taken him the best part of two hours. She had been intending to tell him about Mr. Helm then but was so bored and angry that she had not done so.

“Might as well be married already,” Susie had thought. She had become sufficiently exasperated to drop a small nut between two gaping boards in the sitting-room floor. John had been annoyed and quite unreasonably profane about it. She was going over to make her peace with him as much as for any other reason. Besides, Helm had frightened her.

“All right. If you don't go, our Sue, I shan't go neither,” said her mother unreasonably.

“I'll go by myself, but I won't go along with you,” said Susie, suddenly changing her mind about the visit to John. “Start her up, Mr. Roy,” she added to the chauffeur.

She was quite ready. She had only to slip into hat and coat. Mrs. Cozens, on the other hand, was still in her kitchen garb. Roy was in a hurry, so, with a half-promise flung over his shoulder to Mrs. Cozens that he would return for her later, he started up the engine, and soon the car was lost to sight in the thick white mist which was already blotting out the daylight.

The car crawled along the old main road through the thick mist, and Susie, seriously alarmed at the prospect of an accident, began to suggest to Roy that he should drop her at the cross roads and make some excuse to the squire. Roy, who knew that if Susie and her mother did not come to the rescue, the servants, equally with the squire, would get no evening meal, invited her to think again, and drove on, carefully but steadily, through the white vapour.

It was very cold. Hedges would loom suddenly out of the mist. Once they were almost ditched. It was uncomfortable and terrifying. At last they reached the big house, managed the turn at the lodge gates, and the journey was over. It was then, according to Susie's wrist-watch, which she had set right that morning by the 10.30 a.m. broadcast signal from Greenwich, just after half-past four. It had taken an hour for the car to do the three and a half miles which lay between Susie's house and the big house. Once they had stopped while Roy gave directions to a man who had lost himself in the midst.