Death of a Huntsman (12 page)

‘There's a thing there that give me a turn when I got down this morning. Here, where is it, I was reading it when you come in. I'll see I never take another, if I lay awake a week. You see that?' she said. She turned the pages over for him. ‘My blessed fingers are all thumbs this morning. There—there it is.'

Dully, not fully grasping it for a moment, he found himself reading the piece the woman had found for him. It was the account of the inquest on an actress who had
died. Her death, the coroner said, was the third of its kind in a month: an alarming situation that should serve as a warning to people who took sleeping tablets and a night-cap of neat brandy or whisky on top. It could not be stated too strongly that the combination of these things was likely to be fatal.

‘I done it,' the woman said. ‘Two or three times last winter. And once last week. Two tablets and a tot of Johnny Walker. And neat at that. I hadn't slept right for a week. I felt I'd got to have something——'

The smell of eggs and bacon was suddenly an insufferable sickness, searing in his throat. A few moments later he was walking out of the shack, slopping through big black puddles of rain that lay all across the cinder surface of the pull-in.

For some time he did not know whether it was raining or not. It was perhaps ten or fifteen miles farther on that the clap-clack of windscreen-wipers on dry glass really woke him. His hands were smeary with sweat and there was a dry acid crust on the walls of his throat. Most of the time he was not really seeing the road before him, drying in the September sun, but only the recurrent, entangled, haunting picture of the big ugly house that no one had ever seemed to stop building. It was a picture with something evil and luminous about it. He saw it in the purplish glow of the spirit kettle, then in the feeble aura of the night-light and the broad stabbing flashes of lightning on the night he had first gone up to Broderick. He tried to remember how many times he had been up to that room and how many tablets and
glasses he could have given Broderick and above all he kept thinking what a fool he had been ever to go there and stay there and listen to her.

The sun was hot in a clear noon sky by the time he came to within sight of the house. He decided to park the truck half a mile away, on the top of a hill, and walk the rest of the way to the back of the place. The air was humid and thick after rain and when he got out of his cab he felt his knees buckle and sag underneath him with a complete absence of feeling that was more sickening than sudden pain.

He walked through a field at the back of the house and came into the garden through a fence that had fallen down under the weight of blackberry and bindweed. Instinctively he looked at the windows, but the blinds were not down. Up to that time he did not know quite what he was looking for. He was aware simply of groping in a scared cold way through sensations of nausea, through horror at being caught in a trap, through revulsion at the dead.

Then he remembered the conservatory. He remembered that that was where Broderick sat during most of the afternoon. He had heard her speak of a gardener named Smithson who came in for two hours in the morning to work among the flowers and then left at noon.

He did not know how long he stood in front of the conservatory door in exactly the way he had stood in the bedroom, in the storm, calling Broderick's name.

‘Mr Broderick,' he said, ‘Mr Broderick.'

The little figure in the straw hat was sitting among the
flowers. It seemed to be transfixed in the same torpid coma as when Williams had first seen it there. The skin of the face was blotched, as it had been then, with blobs of coloured light streaming down, diffused, from the roof above, giving it the appearance of a marbled, artificial flower.

For a moment he could not make up his mind whether in fact he was not, after all, looking at the dead. All his sickness and revulsion came rushing back. Then he turned the handle of the door and through the steamy unreal heat of the conservatory he saw Broderick stir, raising his eyes from their torpor.

‘Williams,' Broderick said, ‘what are you doing here?'

Under the torrid glass, brilliant in the September afternoon sun, the bloodless face was actually bathed in sweat.

‘Are you all right, Mr Broderick?' Williams said. ‘I dropped in to see how you were.'

‘Perfectly all right.' The face tottered in the overheated air like a petal about to fall. ‘This isn't your time, is it?'

‘Got a change of job,' Williams said. ‘I'm on day-shift now. Are you sure you're all right, Mr Broderick? Don't you want some air in here?'

‘Perfectly all right,' Broderick said. ‘Thanks to you.' Incredulously Williams listened. In stupefaction he heard Broderick mumble on: ‘The whisky seems to have given me a new lease of life. Done me a power of good. Gives just enough stimulus to the heart without affecting it.'

In the stifling heat, among the scent of flowers, Williams
felt his own sweat prickling harshly through every pore.

‘I got to go now, Mr Broderick,' he said. ‘Got to push on. Got to get down as far as Bristol before tea-time.'

‘Haven't you seen Mrs Broderick?'

‘No.'

‘Don't you want to see her? I fancy she's asleep in the house somewhere.'

‘Not today,' Williams said. ‘I got to push on today.'

By that time he was standing by the door of the conservatory, holding it open, ready to go. Behind him the free cool air was blowing in.

‘Shall I give her a message?' Broderick said. ‘Is there some message I can give?'

Message? For some moments he stood thinking that there was no message. He had nothing to say that made sense about an island, the sea, the sun or about Mrs Broderick, who could not sleep at night-time.

Then he decided, after all, that there was a message.

‘Tell Mrs Broderick,' he said, ‘that I shan't be coming this way again.' He was outside now; he was breathing at last the cool, sweet, free air. ‘Tell her that from now on I'll be working in the day time.'

Manson lifted one corner of the green gauze window blind of the shipping office and watched, for an indifferent moment or two, the swift cortège of a late funeral racing up the hill. It flashed along the water-front like a train of cellulose beetles, black and glittering, each of the thirty cars a reflection of the glare of sun on sea. He wondered, as the cars leapt away up the avenue of jade and carmine villas, eye-less in the bright evening under closed white shades, why funerals in Salandar were always such races, unpompous and frenzied, as if they were really chasing the dead. He wondered too why he never saw them coming back again. They dashed in black undignified weeping haste to somewhere along the sea-coast, where blue and yellow fishing boats beat with high moon-like prows under rocks ashen with burnt sea-weed, and then vanished for ever.

He let the blind fall into place again, leaning spare brown elbows on the mahogany lid of his desk. He was thinking that that evening a ship would be in. It could not matter which ship—he was pretty sure it was the
Alacantara
—since nobody in their senses ever came to Salandar in the summer. There would in any case be no English passengers
and he would meet it out of pure routine. After that he would go home to his small hotel and eat flabby oil-soaked
esparda
that had as much taste in it as a bath sponge and drink export beer and read the English papers of a week last Wednesday. In the street outside men would sit on dark door-steps and spit golden melon seeds into gutters, coughing with tubercular mournfulness. The flash of an open air cinema down the street would drench the plum-black air above the surrounding courtyards with continuous gentle fountains of light, above little explosions of applause and laughter. In one of the old houses behind the hotel a woman would lull her baby to sleep with a prolonged soft song that was probably as old as the moon-curve of the fishing boats that lined the shore. Under the infinite stars the red beacons on the radio masts would flame like big impossible planets above the mass of the fortress that obscured, with its vast and receding walls, nearly half the sky. And that would be his evening: a lonely and not surprising conclusion to a tiring day when nothing had happened, simply because nothing ever happened in summer in Salandar.

From across the quayside, out on the landing pier, he suddenly heard the sound of more voices than he thought was customary. He got up and parted the slats of the window shade. The pier was massed with emigrants, emigrant baggage, emigrant noises, the messy struggle of emigrant farewells. He remembered then that the
Alacantara
was not coming in. It was the
Santa Maria
, coming from precisely the opposite way.

That sort of trick of memory always overtook him at the height of summer, two months after the tourist season had died. It was the delayed shock of seasonal weariness. He was as unprepared for it as he was unprepared for the sight of the
Santa Maria
herself, a ship of pale green hulls with funnels of darker green, suddenly coming round the westerly red-black cliffs of the bay. It made him less annoyed to think that he had to meet her. He did not like to hurry. There was no need to hurry. There was nothing to hurry for. He was not going anywhere. He was not meeting anyone. The point of his meeting a ship on which he had no passenger was purely one of duty. Like most of the rest of his life on Salandar it was a bore.

Was there a passenger? With the precision of habit he turned up a black ledger of passengers names that gave him nothing in answer. It was nice to be assured, anyway, that he was not mistaken.

A moment later he called to the only clerk to tell the porter that he wanted the launch in five minutes. His voice was dry from the summer catarrh that came from living low down, at sea-level, in the rainless months, in the sandy dust of the port. He cleared his throat several times as he went out into the street and the sun struck him below the eyebrows with pain. On the corner of the pavement he stood and closed his eyes briefly before he crossed to the water-front and as he opened them again the last black beetle of the funeral cortège flashed past him, expensively glittering, lurching dangerously, chasing the dead: a car filled with weeping men.

On the ship the air seemed absorbent. It sucked up the life of the fanless purser's cabin on the middle deck.

‘She got on at Lisbon, Mr Manson,' the purser said. ‘She said she cabled you from there.'

A small quantity of pearl-grey luggage, splashed with varnished scarlet labels, among them the letter V, stood by the purser's door. Staring down at it, Manson tried to remember back through a long drowsy day to some point where a cable might have blown in, rushed past him and, like the cortège of racing mourners, have disappeared. He could not recall any cable and the purser said:

‘I had better take her luggage up. I promised to look after her.' He began to pick up suitcases, tucking the smallest under his arms. ‘She seems to like being looked after. Perhaps you will bring the last one, Mr Manson?—thank you.'

No one else had come aboard except a harbour policeman in flabby grey ducks, so thin that he seemed impossibly weighed down by black bayonet and revolver, and a customs officer in crumpled washed-out sienna gabardine. These two stood sweating at the head of the companion-way, the policeman with thumbs in his drooping belt. There was not even the usual collection of hotel porters' caps on the ship simply because every hotel was closed.

‘Where is she staying?' Manson called. ‘There isn't a single hotel open.'

‘I told her that. She said she did not mind. I told her you would see all about it.'

‘She's nothing to do with me.'

‘She's English. I told her you would do it——'

‘Do what? I'm not a sight-seeing guide for anybody who comes and dumps themselves down here in the middle of summer.'

He felt his hands grow sweaty on the high-polished fabric of the suitcase handle. He knew, he thought, all that English women could be. Ill-clad in worsted, horribly surpliced in porridge-coloured shantung, they arrived sometimes as if expecting the island to yield the horse-drawn charm of 1890, where everything could be had or done by the clapping of hands.

‘Anyway I had no warning,' he said. ‘What warning had I?'

He thought he saw the customs officer grin at this, and it annoyed him further.

‘She said she cabled you herself, Mr Manson,' the purser said.

‘I've seen no sign of a cable,' he said. ‘And anyway cable or no cable——'

‘It was awfully good of you to meet me,' a voice said.

When he turned, abruptly, at the same time as the sweat-bright faces of the policeman, the customs officer and the purser, he saw her standing behind him: a tall black-haired girl, with an amazing combination of large pure blue eyes and black lashes, her hair striped across the front with a leonine streak of tawny blonde.

He found himself at once resenting and resisting this paler streak of hair.

‘It was really very good of you,' she said. ‘My name is Vane.'

He checked an impulse to say ‘Spelt in which way?' and she held out a hand covered with a long cream glove. This glove, reaching to her elbow, matched a sleeveless dress of light cool linen.

‘I know you think I've come at the wrong time of year,' she said.

‘Not at all.'

‘No?' she said. ‘I thought I heard you say so.'

He was so irritated that he was not really conscious of helping her down the gangway. He felt instead that the gangway had begun to float on air. It was nothing but a shaky ladder of cotton-reels swaying above the calm sea. It seemed almost perpendicular, pitching him forward as he went down first and waited to help her into the launch below.

The red triangular pennant of the company drooped above the burnished deck house and she said, staring beyond it: