Death of a Huntsman (10 page)

‘I think there is something different,' he said.

‘Don't you know what it is?'

No: in his obtuse, clumsy, masculine way he did not know what it was.

She gave her body a full turn, suddenly, and then said:

‘It's my hair. Didn't you notice? I'm doing it in the old way.'

His surprise at his own stupidity at not noticing how her hair was now piled high again, achieving an effect of lightness and freshness in her entire face, must have been responsible for him giving a gasp of pleasure.

‘You like it, do you?' she said.

‘Yes.'

‘I hoped you would. I went down today and had it done. You know why today?'

He had not the slightest idea about that either. The circumstances had the effect, altogether, of bewitching him a little and he could only stare.

‘Because it's my birthday,' she said. ‘At least it will be at twelve o'clock. Did you bring the dress?'

‘Yes, I got it.'

‘That's for my birthday too. I treated myself.'

The dress was in its box on a chair. She untied the string and parted the tissue wrappings and said, ‘Emerald. Do you think emerald will suit me? You don't think green is unlucky, do you?'

She took out the dress and held it in front of her, pinning it to her shoulders with the points of her fingers. The light was fading by that time and the colour of the dress was a sharp strong green.

‘Well, say if you like it.'

Yes, he liked it, he said. He was still feeling the effects of a sense of slight bewitchment and he hardly heard her say:

‘Shall I put it on? I was going to put it on for the party anyway.' He could not conceive what she meant by a party but she went on: ‘A party for me. Tonight—just you and me. That's if you'll stay. You don't mind if I slip it on here, do you? It's nearly dark now——'

She began to slip off the dress she was wearing, the old blue woollen dress that he had seen several times before, and then she put the new dress quickly over her head and shoulders. In her haste she forgot to undo the
clips at the neck, so that she had to take it off and begin again. Something about this repeated upward stretch of her white arms in the darkening room turned his sense of bewitchment into a final moment of distraction. In another moment he was holding her by the soft upper part of her arms. His blood was beating heavily through him and she was reaching up to him with her mouth.

She found it hungrily; and then, when he had kissed her for that first time, she had only one thing to say.

‘I began to think,' she said, ‘that you'd never notice me.'

He had not intended to go as far as that; he had never had any thought that it would be more than a casual episode. The situation took him by surprise. It was another pick 'em up and lay 'em down affair and he could not resist its distraction.

But that night, after what she called her party, he was not so much aware of the pleasant nature of her body as the insistence of her voice, suddenly freed, emotionally charged, talking on into the morning, disjointedly, telling him about herself, about Calvin, her marriage and how she had come there and what a dreary bore it was.

The party had consisted of a bottle of gin, a pile of thick ham sandwiches which she had tried in vain, in a bungling way, to make elegant by removing the crusts, and a large white sugary cake, her birthday cake, made by herself and inscribed with her own best wishes:

‘Lisa: A Happy Birthday.'

He was puzzled by this inscription.

‘I thought your name was Francie,' he said.

‘So it is,' she said. ‘But Lisa—that's my pet name. It's a name somebody used to call me.'

‘Old flame?'

‘In a way,' she said, ‘yes. We went to a play together once and there was a girl in it named Lisa. You know how people are. Perhaps he saw something in her that was like me.'

Anyway, she said, she didn't want to talk about that. Her hands groped for him in the half-darkness. Where was he? she said. He seemed so far away. Then her mouth found his face again and she said:

‘That's better than any talking, isn't it? Don't you like that better?'

Then, some time later, he was saying:

‘That fellow. The one you went to the play with. Was he the one you thought I was like?'

‘Partly,' she said. ‘But you're bigger. You're a bigger man altogether——'

‘What made you marry this one?' he said.

‘Calvin?' Her voice, he remembered long afterwards, was surprisingly casual. It seemed, he thought, almost offhand. ‘Oh! the usual—sort of rebound.'

‘From the other one?'

‘He was killed,' she said. Emotionlessly she spoke of the war, a raid somewhere, a bomb that with impersonal lack of drama had wiped a man out. ‘He went into a cinema somewhere and never came out again. There was nothing left. We were going to be married. I was going to have someone all to myself, and then——'

She laughed with a sort of dry stutter, almost a cough.

‘And now here I am. Stuck,' she said. ‘At first I came as housekeeper. Then he wanted to marry me.' Her voice was flat. ‘Like that it was cheaper. He didn't have to pay me.'

He said it occurred to him, not for the first time, that a simple solution would be to pack her bags and walk out.

Again she gave the short laugh that was between a cough and a stutter.

‘Walk out? On about four hundred thousand?'

Before he had time to do anything about expressing his astonishment she asked him if he had ever heard of the Fresco Patent Clip Spring? She hadn't more than a vague idea what it was herself. It had something to do with time-fuses, she thought.

‘I think it's fuses,' she said. ‘Something to do with the way a bomb goes off or a gun fires. I've never even seen one. But Calvin invented it. He draws a royalty on it until the end of time.'

Thoughtfully he considered his picture of the little figure in the straw hat, the torpid angry maggot among the flowers.

‘It wouldn't be bad, would it, four hundred thousand?' she said.

Her way of saying this too was casual. He could not even determine whether she was really addressing him or not. They were lying together on the shawl-covered divan. He could feel her body pressing against him in the darkness, and himself the central core of a quietness that was as unreal as her voice going on to frame her thoughts:

‘What would you do with that much money if you
had it? With even half of it? You know what I'd do? What I'm going to do? I'll have a house on an island somewhere where the sea's warm, where I can swim all day and lie in the sun. How's that, do you think? After years in a dump like this.'

‘How do you know you'll get this money?'

‘I've seen the will,' she said. ‘I know. It's in my favour. There isn't anyone else except me. And besides, he's fond of me. He likes me.'

Walk out, his mind began saying, walk out. Before it's too late. Before you're in any deeper. Don't be a fool. And all the time he knew that he was a fool to be lying there with her, a woman of that particular sort of temperament, with a husband somewhere upstairs, and he turned involuntarily at the sound of a bough scratching the wall of the house outside.

‘Lie still,' she said. ‘There's nothing to be worried about.'

Worried? he thought. Why should he be worried by the wizened maggoty little figure of grandad? Worried by grandad? That made him laugh.

‘What are you laughing at?' she said.

Something made him say: ‘Me on an island. I was thinking of that. Nothing to do but lie in the sun all day. Swim and lie in the sun. What a caper.'

He laughed again, amused by the sheer fantasy of it.

‘What's funny about it?' she said.

‘I'm a night driver. I drive a two-ton truck.'

‘You're twenty five,' she said. ‘Is that what you want to do all your life? Drive a truck? Slog up and down here?'

Was it what he wanted? No, he supposed it wasn't. He hadn't thought about it. He must always have supposed it was what he wanted. He'd got used to it. It wasn't bad.

Before he could speak she stirred in the darkness. She raised herself on one elbow and leaned over him, brushing her mouth against his face with a surprising, delicate tenderness and the curve of her body against his own.

‘It's nearly daylight,' she said. ‘You must love me and leave me. You're hours behind.'

‘I'll make it up.'

He lay still on the divan, resting the back of his head on his hands.

‘Don't you want to go?' she said. ‘Do you like it with me? Do I make it so nice for you?'

‘I wouldn't call it bad.'

She laughed quietly, kissing him again.

‘I wish I was coming with you. A free day and a long ride—just you and me in the truck. That would be nice wouldn't it? But perhaps some day I will ride with you—what do you think? When I get out of this?'

‘But not in a truck.'

‘No, not in a truck,' she said.

When she came out to see him drive away she had her birthday cake wrapped up for him in a box.

‘It seems funny, doesn't it?' she said. ‘Having to make your own birthday cake and put your name on it and give it to yourself? If it hadn't been for you I wouldn't have known I had a birthday.'

For the first time she seemed to speak with bitterness;
she seemed to gasp in suppression of a sob. He felt all at once affectionately sorry for her. He thought how touching and nice she looked standing there, in the growing daylight, below his driving-cab, in the new emerald dress.

‘That's how I live,' she said. ‘I might as well be a widow on a shoe-string.'

In a sudden effort to cheer her up he winked.

‘See you tomorrow, Lisa.'

The grey eyes seemed to draw slightly together as they smiled, like two bright steel points closing together to hold him there.

‘I love you for saying that,' she said.

It was three weeks later when he drove up, late one night, in a raging thunderstorm. The August air was heavy with the stifling vapour of nearly a day of hot and steaming rain. In the big numerous flashes of lightning he could see whole fields of wheat and barley lying flattened as white straw mats under a dripping sky. And as the weight of his truck hit the floods of water the road in front of him kept exploding in white water spouts, like the echoes of thunder.

He had never been so glad of the thought of her as he was that night. His clothes were drenched with sweat and most of the time his thought was of a dry room, tea, something to eat, a chance to lie down in quietness with her, out of the harsh dazzle of his headlights on the streaming windscreen in the humid darkness and rain.

But the moment he saw her he knew that there was no
chance of quietness. Instead of the usual lamp by the divan, together with the blue flame of the spirit kettle, he saw that the big heavy Jacobean chandelier was full on. She was walking up and down underneath it, smoking a cigarette, pulling hard at it in agitation. On the table was a full ash-tray of cigarette stubs. The front of her dress was dusty with ash and for the first time since he had seen her, on the night he had blown the gasket, he thought she looked untidy and old and tired.

She was so agitated that she made no attempt to kiss him. In fact in a queer way he had an idea that she resented his presence there.

‘I didn't think you'd turn up in this,' she said.

He said something about having to try to make it whatever the weather was, but he had an impression that she neither heard nor cared what he said. Some of the time he had been thinking of her idea of an island in sunshine. ‘Somewhere out of this blasted rain. Out of this God-forsaken climate,' he had been thinking. ‘Anything to get out of this.'

And now, almost as if she knew he had been thinking exactly that, she said:

‘I think Calvin is on his way out. I think he might even be dead. I daren't go up to him.'

He said ‘God,' very quietly, under his breath. Through his mind went a reminder, jolting, preposterous, a little sickening, of the four hundred thousand she had spoken about and he said unsteadily:

‘What makes you think that? What's the matter with him?'

‘It's the dud heart,' she said. ‘And the thundery weather. He can't get his breath in this weather.'

‘I better push on,' he said.

‘No, don't go,' she said. ‘We've got to find out if he's all right before you go.'

We? he thought and a first sensation of wild uneasiness shot through him like a palpitation.

‘He always has a glass of whisky about nine and then two or three tablets. That puts him off generally,' she said.

‘Has he had them yet?'

‘Not yet,' she said. ‘I went up at six and he was lying there like a stone. I haven't been up since. I daren't go up. He was lying there like a stone.'

‘Must have been asleep.'

‘It didn't look like sleep. It looked queer. Different from sleep,' she said.

He did not know quite how he walked up the wide carpetless oak stairs. His shoes were so noisy that he felt a horrible and compelling notion that he ought to take them off in deference to the possible dead lying there somewhere in the rooms above him. At the last moment she had reminded him to take the whisky bottle and a glass, but he had even forgotten to ask her which room, and then suddenly she called up to him from below:

‘You'll see it. The room at the end of the corridor. There's a light. There's always a light there.'

He felt he ceased, in that moment, to be himself. It was exactly as if he had taken his shoes off and was walking under the compulsion of a series of muffled reflexes. And before he really knew it he was in the bedroom.

It was a big bedroom and in the centre of it, not pushed back against the wall, was a cheap brass bed. The floor was covered with linoleum and a single night-light in a saucer was burning on a table beside the bed. On the west wall of the room a high sash window had been left open and rain was pouring in on the linoleum, which shone like grey wet skin in the flashes of lightning.