Death of a Huntsman (6 page)

‘Do you know what I used to say when I was a child and wanted to describe something that was very, very good?'

‘No.'

‘I used to call it the bestest good one.' She laughed with large shining eyes and drank half the sherry in a gulp. ‘Here's to our evening. May it be the bestest good one in the world.'

All this time she kept the blue gabardine school mackintosh closely buttoned at the neck. He would not have been surprised to see that her stockings were black, though in fact they were flesh-coloured, and once he found himself looking down at her black flat-heeled shoes.

‘Oh! that reminds me,' she said. ‘Would you hide these in the car for me? They're my dancing shoes.'

He took the brown paper parcel she gave him and went out to the car and put the parcel on the back seat. The night was starry and crisp, with a half moon in the west.

Immediately, as he got back to the house, he heard the husky voice of Edna Whittington asking where he was.

In the sitting room she greeted him with outstretched thin bare arms, fingers crooked.

‘Henry. I thought you were leaving us, trotting out there in the cold. I thought my little girl wasn't looking after you.'

She was wearing a skin-tight dress that looked, he
thought, as if it were made of silver mail. It made her look more than ever like a sere cardboard leaf left over from a wedding cake. Her long finger nails and her lips were a sharp magenta and the skin of her chest and face was powdered to a rosy-violet shade.

‘No Katey?'

Her voice was full of petulant mock regret.

He apologized and said that Katey was, on the whole, not a great one for dancing.

‘Poor Katey. Well, anyway, all the more luck for me.'

In the intervals of talking and, he thought, smiling too much, she poured herself a glass of sherry and then filled up his own. All this time the girl stood apart, schoolgirlish, meek, hands in pockets of her mackintosh, not speaking.

‘Henry,' Edna Whittington said, ‘It's terribly sweet of you to take us to this thing and it's mean of me to ask another favour. But would you?'

‘Of course.'

‘What time does this affair break up?'

‘Oh! hard to say,' he said. ‘Three or four. I've known it to be five.'

‘Shambles?'

‘Quite often,' he said. ‘Well, it's the Hunt Ball and you know how people are.'

‘I know how people are and that's why I wanted to ask you. Would you,' she said, ‘be an absolute lamb and bring Valerie back by one o'clock? I've promised her she can come on that one condition.'

‘If you think——'

‘I do think and you're an absolute lamb. She doesn't mind being alone in the house and then you can come back for me and we'll stay on to the end.'

The girl did not speak or move. Her large brown eyes were simply fixed straight ahead of her, as if she actually hadn't heard.

Ten minutes later the three of them drove off, Edna Whittington sitting beside him at the wheel, wearing only a white long silk shawl as a wrap, the girl at the back, motionless and obliterated in the darkness, without a word.

‘Oh! look! they've floodlit the mansion! The whole place looks like a wedding cake!'

As he turned the car into tall high park gates Edna Whittington's voice ripped at the night air with a husky tear. At the end of a long avenue of bare regiments of chestnut a great house seemed to stare with a single candescent eye, pure white, across black spaces of winter parkland. And as the car drew nearer he thought that it looked, as she said, like a wedding cake, just as she herself, thin, shining and silver, looked more than ever like a leaf of it that had been long since torn away.

Less than ten minutes later he was inside the long central hall of the mansion, bright with chandeliers and crowded already with dancers, many of them his acquaintances of the hunting field, some his friends the city gentlemen, hearing Edna Whittington say with a smile of her bony once pretty magenta mouth:

‘It's over twenty years since I danced with you, Henry, and I can't wait to have a quick one. What are they playing? What are you looking at?'

‘I was wondering,' he said, ‘where Valerie had——'

A moment later, before he could complete the sentence or she could answer it, he felt himself pressed to the thin sheer front of her body and borne away.

It might have been half an hour, perhaps only twenty minutes, when he turned in the middle of the second of his dances with Edna Whittington and became the victim of exactly the same kind of momentary illusion that he had suffered one brilliant Sunday morning in the cucumber house.

For a second or two, out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a strange but remotely recognizable fragment of yellow light cross a far corner of the room and disappear behind a triangular tier of pink chrysanthemums.

He was suddenly stunned to realize that this was Valerie Whittington, wearing a remarkably long pale yellow dress and long black gloves that showed her pale bare upper arms and her completely naked back and shoulders. He was so numbed by this appearance that only one thought raced through his head, in reality the rapid recollection of something she had said by the lake on the previous afternoon:

‘Nobody knows about it. It's the colour of—No, I
won't tell you. You'll see it tomorrow and then you can tell me if it reminds you of anything.'

Instantly he recalled the quinces and how the lamp of summer had gone out.

Somehow he got through the rest of the dance without betraying that he was in a turmoil of fright and indecision. He had broken out already into a cold and sickening sweat but as the dance ended he had presence of mind enough to mop his forehead with his handkerchief and say:

‘It's awfully hot in here, Edna. My glasses are getting misty. Do you mind if I go and clean them? And wouldn't you like a drink? Can I bring you something—gin and something?—would you?—by all means, yes——'

He escaped, spent five minutes in an empty back corridor breathing on his spectacles, polishing them and then in sheer fright breathing on them again. After that he worked his way to the corner of the bar and restored himself with a whisky, saying desperately at the last moment:

‘No, a large one, large one please.'

Then he took the drink back into the corridor. He had hardly leaned against the wall and had actually not lifted the glass to his lips when he looked up and saw Valerie Whittington suddenly appear at the far end of the corridor as if she had in some miraculous way come up through a trap door.

She started to walk towards him. She walked quite slowly, upright, shoulders square and splendid, the motion of her legs just breaking the front of the dress
with ripples. And across the vision of her walking slowly down towards him he caught for the flash of a second the former vision of her in the gabardine mackintosh, schoolgirlish, tense and obliterated, the pig-tails tucked into the collar at the back.

A moment later she was saying:

‘I know what you're thinking. You're thinking did I have it on under the mackintosh, aren't you?'

‘Partly that——'

‘I hadn't,' she said. ‘It was easy. I got the shop to send it here. I'd hardly a thing on under the mackintosh.'

She started to smile. Her lips were made-up, a pale red, and she had managed once again to pile her hair into a mass of curls. She did not speak again for a moment or two. She continued to smile at him with the large circular brown eyes that so often seemed to embrace him with tenderness and then at last she said:

‘Does it remind you of anything?'

‘Of course,' he said.

To his surprise the two words seemed to move her very deeply and he saw that there were sudden tears in her eyes.

‘You're the bestest good one in the world,' she said and she pressed her face against his own.

He too found himself very moved by that. He wished he had nothing to do but take her by one of the long black gloves and into the dark spaces of parkland outside the house, but he remembered Edna Whittington.

Some of his anxiety about this must have crossed his face because almost immediately she said:

‘I'll tell you something else you're thinking too, shall I?'

Harry Barnfield, only too well aware of what he was thinking, could not answer.

‘You're thinking you've got to dance with me.'

‘Well——'

He inclined his head a fraction down and away from her. When he looked up at her again he was struck by a wonderful air of composure about her face, the wide bare shoulders and especially the hands, black in their gloves, clasped lightly before the waist-line of the yellow dress. She could not have looked more composed if she had been wearing the dress for the fiftieth instead of the first time but he knew, somehow, in spite of it all, that she was frightened.

‘It's got to be done,' she said, ‘and I can't do it without you.'

He tried not to look into her eyes. They were no longer wet with even the suspicion of tears. They gazed back at him, instead, with an almost luminous composure and now, at last, she stretched out her hands.

‘Come along,' she said. ‘Take me.'

If there had been no other person on the dance floor as he led her on to it some moments later he could hardly have felt more pained and conspicuous. It was like dancing in some sort of competition, naked, in the middle of an empty field, before a thousand spectators.

The amazing thing was that whenever he looked at the face of the girl it was still alight with that astonishing luminous composure.

‘Look at me,' she said once. ‘Keep looking at me.'

Whether she was thinking of her mother, as he was the whole time, he did not know. He could not see Edna Whittington. But as he danced he became more and more obsessed with the haunting impression that she was watching him from somewhere, evilly and microscopically, waiting for the dance to end.

When it did end he turned helplessly on the floor, arms still outstretched, very much like a child learning to walk and suddenly deprived of a pair of helping hands. The girl, composed as ever, started to move away, the skin of her back shining golden in the light of the chandeliers. The dress itself looked, as she had meant it to do, more than ever the colour of quinces and he saw on her bare arms a bloom of soft down like that on the skin of the fruit.

Then as she turned, smiled at him with an amazing triumphant serenity, holding out her arm for him to take, he saw Edna Whittington.

She was standing not far from the tier of pink chrysanthemums. She did not look, now, like a piece of silver cardboard. She looked exactly like the perfectly straight double-edged blade of a dagger rammed point downwards into the floor: arms perfectly crossed, feet close together, thin body perfectly motionless under the tight silver dress, small microscopic eyes staring straight forward out of a carved white face, fixed on himself and the girl as they crossed the dance floor.

Suddenly he was no longer uneasy, self-conscious or even disturbed. He began to feel strangely confident,
almost antagonistic. And in this sudden change of mood he felt himself guide the arm of the girl, changing her course across the dance floor, steering her straight to Edna Whittington.

Suddenly the band started playing again. The girl gave a quick little cry of delight, turned to him and put her hands on his shoulders. A moment later they were dancing.

Then, for what was to be the last time, she spoke of her mother.

‘Is she looking?'

‘Yes.'

‘Tell me how she looks,' she said. ‘You know I dance with my eyes closed.'

‘There's no need to think of her.'

Whether it was because of this simple remark of his he never knew, but suddenly she rested her face against his and spoke to him in a whisper.

‘You don't know how happy I am,' she said. ‘Oh! don't wake me, will you? Please don't wake me.'

She spoke once more as they danced and it was also in a whisper.

‘If I told you I loved you here in the middle of this dance floor would you think it ridiculous?'

‘That's the last thing I would ever think.'

‘I love you,' she said.

At the end of the dance a frigid, pale, supernaturally polite Edna Whittington, holding a glittering yellow cigarette holder in full stretched magenta fingers, met them as they came from the floor. Rigidly and antagonistically
he held himself ready to do some sort of brave and impossible battle with her and was surprised to hear her say:

‘You did book our table for supper, didn't you, Henry?'

‘Of course.'

‘You should have told me where it was,' she said. ‘Then I could have sat down.'

Throughout the rest of the evening, until one o'clock, this was as sharp as the tone of her reproach and resentment ever grew. She regarded himself, the girl, the dancing, and even the dress, with the same unmitigated calm. When he danced with her, as he did several times, she talked with a kind of repressed propriety, saying such things as:

‘It's a most pleasant evening, Henry. And not noisy. Not a brawl. Not half as crowded as I thought it would be.'

‘The Hunt's going through a difficult patch,' he said. ‘Rather going down, I'm afraid. There isn't the interest. There aren't the chaps.'

‘You seem to know a lot of people, even so.'

The more polite and calm she grew the more unreal, he thought, the night became. Alternately he danced with herself and the girl. Friendly and bantering from across the floor came exchanges of manly pleasantry with friends like Punch Warburton, Freddie Jekyll and George Reed Thompson, the city gentlemen, from odd acquaintances like Dr Frobisher, Justice Smythe and Colonel Charnly-Rose: stalwart chaps, the solid backbone of the Hunt.

Away somewhere in the distance lay the even greater unreality of Katey: Katey drowned throughout the years of his marriage in mists of gin, Katey the tawdry lioness, Katey with her garlic-raw, smoke-stained fingers, calling him a squeak-mouse.