Death of a Huntsman (2 page)

It might also have seemed, from the snap in her voice, that she was not very tolerant of forgetfulness. But fortunately neither surprise nor forgetfulness were habits of his. He was never surprised and he never forgot the gin.

‘On the hall table, Katey,' he would tell her. ‘Any message from Lewis? I'm just hopping across the yard.'

His enquiry about Lewis, his groom, was never answered, except by another cough, and this never surprised him either. His only real thought was for his horses. In summer he had only to whistle and they came to him from across the meadows. In winter he walked quietly across the courtyard to the stables, let himself in, touched for a moment the warm flanks of the two animals, said good-night to them exactly as if they were children and then, almost on tip-toe, let himself out again. Outside, if there were stars, he generally stopped to look up at them, breathing over again the good country air. Then he stiffened, braced his short pulpy body and went back into the house again.

‘Where the hell did you say the gin was? Every bloody evening you slink off like a badger and I'm left wondering where you dump the stuff.'

‘I told you where it was, Katey.' From the hall table he would quietly pick up the gin-bottle and take it to the kitchen. ‘Here. Here it is.'

‘Then why the hell couldn't you say so?'

‘I did say so.'

‘You talk like a squeak-mouse all the time. How do you expect me to hear if you talk like a damn squeak-mouse?'

His wife was tallish, fair and very blowsy. She looked, he always thought, remarkably like some caged and battered lioness. Her hair, which she wore down on her shoulders, had passed through several stages of blondeness. Sometimes it was almost white, bleached to
lifelessness; sometimes it was the yellow of a ferret and he would not have been surprised, then, to see that her eyes were pink; sometimes it was like coarse rope, with a cord of darker hair twisting through the centre. But the most common effect was that of the lioness, restless, caged and needing a comb.

‘Any news, Katey?' he would say. ‘Anything been happening?'

‘Where, what and to whom?' she would ask him. ‘To bloody whom? Tell me.' The fingers of both hands were stained yellow with much smoking. Her lips were rather thick. She had also mastered the art of getting a cigarette to stick to the lower, thicker one without letting it fall into whatever she was cooking. She was very fond of cooking. The air, every evening, was full of odours of herbs, garlic, wine vinegars and frying onions. The smell of frying onions invariably made him ravenously hungry but it was always nine o'clock, sometimes ten, occasionally still later, before she would yell across the hall to where he sat sipping sherry in the drawing room:

‘Come and get it if you want it. And if you don't want it——' the rest of the sentence asphyxiated in coughing.

Sometimes, so late at night, he did not want it. Excellent though the food often was, he found himself not hungry any more. He sat inelastically at table, ate with his fork and sipped a glass of claret, perhaps two. She, on the other hand, more than ever like the lioness, ravenous far beyond feeding time, ate eyelessly, no
longer seeing the food, the table or himself through mists of gin.

‘Forgot to tell you—Lewis saw that kid riding through the place again today. Rode clean through the courtyard, by the cucumber house and out the other side.'

‘Good Heavens, didn't Lewis choke her off?'

‘Gave her hell he says.'

‘And what happened? What did she say?'

‘Said she'd been told it was perfectly all right. You'd never mind.'

‘But good grief,' he said, ‘we can't have that. We can't have strangers riding through the place as if it's their own. That won't do. That simply won't do——'

‘All right,' she said. ‘All right. You tell her. I've told her. Lewis has told her. Now you tell her. It's your turn.'

She lit a cigarette, pushed more food into her mouth and began laughing. A little stream of bright crimson tomato sauce ran down her chin. A shred or two of tobacco clung to her front teeth and there was actually a touch of pink, the first bloodshot vein or two, in the whites of her eyes.

‘But who
is
she?'

‘Search me.
You
find out. It's
your
turn——'

Open-mouthed, she laughed again across the table, the cigarette dangling this time from the lower lip as she mockingly pointed her glass at his face.

He knew that this gesture of fresh derision meant that she no longer saw him very well. Already the eyes had begun their swimming unfocused dilations.

‘All right,' he said. ‘I'll speak to her.'

‘Good,' she said. ‘That's the brave Harry. Brave old Harry.'

As she threw back her head, laughing openly now, letting the cigarette fall into her plate of half-eaten food, revealing relics of her last mouthful smeared across her lips and her tongue, he did not ask himself why he had ever married her. It was too late for asking that kind of question.

‘When does she appear?' he said.

‘Oh! off and on. Any time. On and off——'

‘I'll try to catch her on Saturday,' he said. ‘Or Sunday.'

Derisively and deliberately she raised her hand, not laughing now, in a sort of mock benediction.

‘Now don't be rash, Harry dear. Brave old Harry,' she said. ‘Don't be rash. She might catch you.'

On the following Sunday morning, as he walked up past the cucumber house to where a path led through two wicket gates to the meadows beyond, a light breeze was coming off the little river, bringing with it the scent of a few late swathes of hay. The glass of the cucumber house, with its dark green under-tracery of leaves, flashed white in the sun. The summer had been more stormy than fine, with weeks of August rain, and now, in mid-September, the fields were flush with grasses.

He stopped to look inside the cucumber house. Under
the glass the temperature had already risen to ninety-five. Thick green vines dripped with steamy moisture. Columns of cucumbers, dark and straight, hung down from dense masses of leaves that shut out the strong morning sun.

The cucumbers were his wife's idea. She was very imaginative, he had to admit, about cucumbers. Whereas the average person merely sliced up cucumbers, made them into sandwiches or simply ate them with fresh salmon for lunch in summer, his wife was acquainted with numerous recipes in which cucumbers were cooked, stuffed like aubergines or served with piquant sauces or high flavours such as Provençale. Harry Barnfield did not care much for cucumbers. More often than not, cooked or uncooked, they gave him wind, heart-burn or chronic indigestion. But over the years of his married life he had learned to eat them because he was too good-natured to deny his wife the chance of surprising guests with dishes they had never heard of before. He well understood her cucumbers and her little gastronomic triumphs with them.

That Sunday morning, as he stood under the steaming shadowy vines, he thought he saw, suddenly, a bright yellow break of sunlight travel the entire length of the glasshouse outside. The leaves of the cucumbers were so thick that it was some moments before he grasped that this was, in fact, a person riding past him on a horse.

Even then, as he discovered when he rushed out of the cucumber house, he was partly mistaken. The horse was
merely a pony, blackish brown in colour, with a loose black tail.

With impatience he started to shout after it: ‘Hi! you there! Where do you think you're going? Don't you know—?' and then stopped, seeing in fact that its rider was nothing more than a young girl in a yellow sweater, jodhpurs, black velvet cap and pig-tails. The pig-tails too were black and they hung long and straight down the yellow shoulders, tied at the ends not with ribbon but with short lengths of crimson cord.

The girl did not stop. He started to shout again and then, quite without thinking, began to run after her.

‘Young lady!' he called. ‘Young lady!—one moment, young lady, one moment please——'

It was thirty or forty yards farther on before he caught up with her. By that time she had stopped, bent down and was already lifting the catch of the first of the wicket gates with the handle of her riding-crop.

‘Just a moment, young lady, just one moment——'

As he stopped he found himself short of breath and panting slightly. She turned very slightly in the saddle to look at him. Her eyes were brown, motionless and unusually round and large. They seemed, like his own, rather too big for her face.

‘Aren't you aware,' he said, ‘that this private property?—this path? It's private property!'

She did not move. She looked, he thought, fifteen, perhaps sixteen, not more than that, though rather well developed for her age. The sleeves of the yellow jumper were half-rolled up, showing firm brown
forearms that glistened with downy golden hairs. Her face was the same golden brown colour, the lips without make-up, so that they too had a touch of brown.

‘You really can't ride through here like this,' he said. ‘You've been told before. You really can't, you know.'

Again she did not move. He did not know if the large motionless eyes were utterly insolent or merely transfixed in frightened innocence and he was still trying to make up his mind about it when he noticed how straight but relaxed she sat on the pony. He had to admit, even in vexation, that she sat very well; very well indeed, he thought.

‘It's very tiresome,' he said, ‘all this. You simply can't ride rough-shod over other people's property like this.'

‘Rough-shod?'

Her voice surprised him very much by its deepness. It almost seemed, he thought, like the voice of a woman twice her age.

‘Do you really think,' she said, ‘I'm riding rough-shod?'

The eyes, still holding him in enormous circles of inquiring innocence, disarmed him with sheer brightness.

‘That's neither here nor there,' he said. ‘The simple fact is that you cannot ride when and how you please over other people's property.'

‘I was told I could.'

‘Told? By whom?'

‘My mother.'

At this moment his spectacles began to mist over. For the next second or two she seemed to melt away and become lost to him.

Uneasily he thought to himself that he ought to take his spectacles off, polish them and put them back again. He began to feel inexplicably nervous about this and his hands groped about his face. Then when he realized that if he took off his spectacles he would, with his weak, short-sighted eyes, be able to see her even less well he made the unfortunate compromise of trying to look over the top of them.

She smiled.

‘Your mother?' he said. ‘What has your mother to do with it? Do you mean I know your mother?'

‘You
knew
her.'

‘Oh! and when pray would that be?'

He hadn't the slightest idea why he should ask that question and in fact she ignored it completely.

‘My name is Valerie Whittington'.

‘Oh! yes. I see. Oh! yes,' he said slowly. ‘Oh! yes.' He was so intensely surprised that, without thinking, he at once took off his spectacles and rubbed the lenses on his coat sleeve.

‘Is the colonel——?'

‘He died last year.'

Again he polished the lenses of the spectacles quickly on the coat sleeve.

‘We've taken the gamekeeper's cottage at Fir Top. I don't suppose you know it,' she said.

‘Oh! yes.'

Something made him keep the spectacles in his hand a little longer.

‘I can ride down through the park and along by the
river and then back through the woods across the hill,' the girl said. ‘It's a complete circle if I take the path through here. If not I have to go back the same way again and you know how it is. It's never so nice going back the same way.'

He murmured something about no, it was never so nice and then put on his spectacles. Clear, fresh and with that remarkable blend of insolence and innocent charm, she stared down at him, making him feel a baffled, fumbling idiot.

‘So it was your mother told you about the path?'

‘She just said she was sure you wouldn't mind.'

Why, he wondered, did she say that?

‘She said you were the sort of man who never did mind.'

Again he felt baffled and stupid.

Then, for the first time, the pony moved. Up to that moment she had kept remarkably still and it was in fact so quiet, standing erect in the hot September sun, that he had been almost unaware that it was there until now, suddenly, it reared its head and shuddered.

Instinctively he put one hand on its flank to calm it down. It quietened almost immediately and she said:

‘I'm afraid he's really not big enough for me. But he's the best we can afford for the time.'

She ran her hand down the pony's neck, leaning forward as she did so. He saw the muscles of the neck light up like watered silk. At the same time he saw the flanks of the girl tauten, smooth out and then relax again.

‘Does your mother ride now?' he said.

‘No,' she said. ‘Not now.'

‘She used to ride very well.'

‘Yes. She said you'd remember.'

Again he felt baffled; again he groped towards his spectacles.

‘Well,' she said. ‘I suppose I must go back.'

She started to turn the pony round. He found all his many uncertainties stiffen into astonishment.

‘I thought you wanted to go on?' he said— ‘over the hill?'

‘You said you didn't want me to.'

‘Oh! yes I know, but that was—I admit—Oh! no—well I mean——' He found himself incapable of forming a coherent sentence. ‘By all means—it was simply that I didn't want—well, you know, strangers——'

‘I ought to have come and asked you,' she said. ‘I know now. But you were never at home.'