Death of a Huntsman (22 page)

It was not only because the door was open a little but because the voices had begun slightly to raise their pitch that I heard them more clearly as I came to the foot of the stairs.

‘It's merely a point of honour with me, that's all,' I heard him say.

‘You mean you won't accept it?' It was Miss Carfax speaking and her voice was sharp and thin. ‘Is that it?'

‘My dear——'

‘Or is it just that you won't accept it from me? Perhaps that's it?'

‘Not at all,' he said. ‘It's simply that I never mount——'

‘You do know what it is, I suppose, don't you?' she said. Her voice was growing tauter. ‘You've hardly even looked at it.'

‘Of course I know what it is,' he said. ‘It's a Queen of Spain Fritillary.'

‘Is it rare? I heard you say once——'

‘It's rare in this country,' he said, ‘but not in France. I had scores of specimens in France but when the war came I left them there.'

‘I heard you say once you hadn't got one,' she said. ‘I remembered the name so well. I thought the name was so beautiful. Now it seems you had hundreds. Well, scores——'

‘But not British,' he said. ‘A British specimen——'

‘This is British!' she said. ‘That is the whole point of it! I understand that!' Her voice was rising towards breaking pitch, thin with anger. ‘I took great care about that—that was why I bought it for you. Don't you understand? It was just a little present I thought I should like to bring back for you——'

At that moment she opened the door. I heard him begin to say, ‘Look, my dear. I appreciate all that. That I appreciate——' when she turned and saw me standing in the hall-way outside.

For a moment or two she couldn't speak. Her mouth opened itself and stuck there in a stiff long-toothed gap, painfully ludicrous and paralysed.

Behind her Frederick Fielding-Brown appeared and began to say, ‘Miss Burnett got caught in the rain—and then got no further. She suddenly turned and a sort of hysterical hiss into his face. It was the sore sound that cats make when they spit at each other then she shouted:

‘I wonder if you're quite so particular about accepting what she has to give you? Do you make that a point of honour, I wonder?'

The front door slammed. It was all so innocent on my part, my being there in the dressing gown, that I wanted to howl with laughter. How absolutely and madly idiotic the old could make themselves look, I thought, and then I saw that Frederick Fielding-Brown, still clutching the handle of the drawing room door, was white and shaking.

‘Come and sit down,' he said. ‘That has upset me.'

His voice was quite sepulchral. ‘She came just as tea arrived. Now we must ring for more toast. Would you ring?' he asked me. ‘My hands are shaking. The toast is cold.'

It was nearly a week later when my mother, after supper, sat reading the local evening paper. My sister and Ewart Mackeson had at last found themselves a suitable house in which to live. It was nicely gabled, with much ivy growing on the walls, an important-looking coach-house with a weathercock, an acre or two of rabbit shooting, a tradesman's entrance and a tennis-court. My sister was quite crazy about the tennis-court and the prospect of giving garden parties there and every evening now she and Ewart Mackeson would be over at the house, measuring it for carpets and curtains.

‘Wasn't that house called
Orleans
?' my mother said. ‘The one we went to see?'

‘Yes,' I said.

‘An awful thing has happened,' she said, ‘if that's the
same house. Was that gentleman's name Carfax? Didn't he live there with his sister?'

‘No,' I said. ‘His name was Fielding-Brown.'

‘That's right. Then it is the same,' she said. ‘It's here. Listen. It says that a Miss Gertrude Carfax was found dead by the river there last Sunday and that her body was first discovered by her friend and neighbour from
Orleans
, the residence next door.'

Before I could say anything my mother began to read the coroner's report. ‘Cyanide,' she said. ‘How dreadful. What a dreadful thing. How awful. With cyanide.'

I stayed in my room for several days after that, in what my mother said was one of my old, inexplicable, maddening fits of sulking.

‘If you are going to start that again,' she said, ‘I warn you that I won't put up with it. You will go and stay with your aunt at Southsea for a week or two. You can get some sea-air inside you and plenty of exercise and see what that will do. Once and for all I will not have that sulking.'

One of the parts of the world that has not changed much in over thirty years is that wide stretch of river in the valley of the Ouse. Like much else, of course, it has changed a little. The house called
Orleans
, for example, has a different name. Whoever owns it calls it
The Prospect
now. They have also pollarded the limes, cut away the old mullein wilderness at the back and laid steep well-mown lawns that run right down to the huge balsam poplars by the riverside.

But on the whole it has not changed much. And in
summer, now that I am almost as old as Miss Carfax, which of course is not really old as we think of age today, I like to go and look at it. I like to stand on the high road above the valley and stare down at the water-lilies that are so much like white ducks, the crowds of little blue and amber butterflies that tremble about the grass-seed and the lovers who lie kissing in the meadows, not caring if they are seen, on Sunday afternoons.

And as I do so I remember, always, the Queen of Spain Fritillary.

Almost the first time I ever went to London to stay, as a young man of twenty, my father said, ‘Now don't go and waste a lot of money on an hotel. Go and see Alfred Mastin. He's sure to be able to fit you up.'

Alfred Mastin had been a tobacconist in our town for ten years, and then he had moved to London. He kept a little shop off the Gray's Inn road.

So in the evening I went along there.

It turned out to be just an ordinary little tobacconist's shop, not big enough for a tired man to stretch his arms in, and the Mastin's were just ordinary quite people.

They lived in a room over the shop and they asked me to stay to supper. After supper we talked about home and my father.

It was very homely and then gradually I got round to what my father had said: how perhaps the Mastin's could put me up for the night.

No sooner had I said it than I saw a change come over the Mastins' faces and I realised that what I had said was embarrassing.

I realised that they ate, lived, and slept in that one room and that they had no other. ‘But it's all right,' Alfred Mastin said. ‘We can fit you up.'

‘No,' I said, ‘Don't bother.'

‘No bother at all. I've got a room just round the corner. Just started to rent it. I'm going to use it as a store room. There's a camp bed in it and a wash-basin. You'll be all right there.'

I tried to protest that it wouldn't matter, but it was no use. Alfred Mastin insisted. So we sat there talking for another hour and then he took me to find the room.

It was December, and outside it was very dark and it felt like rain.

The room, instead of being just round the corner, was two or three streets away.

‘This is it,' Alfred Mastin said, and when I looked up I saw a tall, bleak, disheartening building rising up from a dark cage of area railings.

And then we got to the room. It was on the second floor.

As Alfred Mastin opened the door I suddenly had the awful impression of being sandwiched in by two vast layers of oppressive silence and that there was no escape. Silence was going to imprison me, keep me imprisoned for the whole night.

It was going to sleep with me. It was even, I felt for a moment, going to do something to me.

Then Alfred Mastin put his hand inside the room and groped for the light switch.

It clicked, but there was no light.

‘They can't have connected up yet,' he said. ‘You'd better keep the torch for the night.'

I didn't say anything. He shone the torch over the room and I saw the camp bed, the wash-basin.

Then he pulled the covers of the bed back and put in the hot-water bottle which Mrs. Mastin had made him bring, and which he had carried under his coat.

As he did so I felt my mind reach out and grasp the thought of the hot water bottle and hang on to it. It became instantly something firm and comforting.

Then Alfred Mastin gave me the torch. That, too, was comforting. I had light and warmth.

Two minutes later I heard Alfred Mastin's footsteps going away downstairs. I heard the front door shut. And then the silence came back.

It became something tangible and positive in the room with me. I could feel it pressing on my hands and face. I got undressed immediately and lay down and put my feet on the hot-water bottle.

The warmth comforted me, but the silence came and stood over me. It was still standing over me when I went to sleep.

But when I woke up, suddenly some time later, something had broken it. It was something tapping. It was beating regularly and softly on the window above my head. I sat up in bed and listened. The force of the silence was emphasized by the tapping as the force of a piece of writing is emphasized by dots and commas.

I sat in suspense. It was as though the silence were speaking.

Then suddenly I was no longer scared. It was all right. I knew what was happening. It was raining. The rain was dripping off a leaky gutter outside the window. There is always a logical explanation for everything, I thought, and gradually the sound itself sent me to sleep again.

But the tapping had frightened me and later I woke up again. It was because of an awful dream I dreamed that huge rats were running up and down the stairs outside and they were barking just like dogs.

I sat up in a cold sweat. In the split second between dreaming and knowing I was dreaming I felt in great danger and great terror.

Knowing I was awake, I reached out for the silence. It wasn't there. It had been broken again, not by barking rats, but by somebody shouting—somebody in the house.

It was a man's voice, the voice of a man in hysteria. It sounded as if he were screaming orders at someone. I lay listening to it in suspense and fear.

Then I got up and put on my slippers and overcoat and went to the door and opened it. The voice came from downstairs.

I walked slowly downstairs without quite knowing what I was doing.

The voice came from a room on the ground floor, and I began to realise that it was really the voice of someone in pain.

I must have stood outside the door for three or four minutes before doing anything. Then I knocked.

The shouting stopped at once. The door was flung open and a man got hold of me and dragged me into the room. ‘For heaven's sake don't stand there like that. You want to get your head blown off?'

I was just scared and dumb.

‘Sit down,' he said. ‘And keep your head down.'

I sat down and looked at him. He was a little partly bald-headed Cockney, and even I could have taken him on with one hand.

He was wearing an old khaki overcoat and he had an old service revolver in one hand. He pointed the revolver straight at me and looked at me with odd, childish, far away eyes.

‘You stop there and keep your head down until I give the orders,' he said. ‘See?'

‘Yes.'

‘Yes, Sir!' he ordered.

‘Yes, Sir!' I said.

We sat there in silence. But now there was a difference in the silence.

It was a silence that had nothing to do with me. It belonged to the little Cockney with the gun in his hand. He controlled it and governed it; with one movement of his finger he could have smashed it.

But it controlled and governed him too. It was the thing which had driven him crazy. And it wasn't a silence so much as an absence of sound. It was the silence of battle-fields in which the guns have stopped.

How long we sat there I don't know. He kept looking at an imaginary watch on his wrist. I think we waited for less than five minutes, and during that time I think the thought of killing me was something which was a common place in his mind.

I think if I had broken the silence by fear or stupidity or even words he would have turned the gun on me. Perhaps not.

Suddenly he got very tense. He pressed his lips together and looked at the watch on his wrist. He stood slowly up.

He moved his hand toward me and I stood up. We waited. Then he lifted the hand holding the revolver and he looked at the watch on his wrist and we waited again, another ten seconds. Then he gave the signal with his right hand.

As he went over, staring intensely into space, I turned and pulled open the door and rushed up the dark stairs. I don't think he noticed it. He only knew that he was going into an attack.

I heard him smashing against the furniture and then he must have fallen down. In the darkness I fell down myself.

I lay listening for about half a minute, but nothing happened. From down below there was nothing but dead silence; the silence after advance, the silence once again imprisoning the little Cockney with the gun in his hand.

As I came downstairs early next morning the silence was still there. The door of the little Cockney's room was shut and I could hear nothing.

I came downstairs quickly and opened the door and slid out into the empty street with the awful feeling of escaping from something just behind me.

But now when I look back and recall how I sat with the little Cockney and waited for zero hour and how he might have blown my head off because of a movement or a word, I see it differently.

It was a tight corner, but I do not see it like that. I see that there are things worse than sitting in a strange room with a war-crazy man with a gun in his hand.

And it seems to me that one of these things is to be what the little Cockney was and had been for years and perhaps still is—a victim of silence.