She Died a Lady (3 page)

‘No, no, no! I never said that. Barry’s not going back to America. On the contrary, he’s come down to visit us again. Arrived last night.’

This, I think, was where I became most conscious of the conviction that we were heading for disaster.

‘Here’s what I wondered,’ pursued Alec, with a meagre attempt at heartiness in his voice. ‘What about coming out to the house to-night for some cards. Like the old days. Eh?’

‘With the greatest of pleasure. But –’

‘I’d thought of inviting Molly Grange,’ said Alec. ‘You know: the solicitor’s little girl. Young Barry seems rather keen on her, and I’ve had her out there for him several times.’ Alec smiled a rumpled smile; he was really anxious to please. ‘I had even thought of inviting Paul Ferrars, that artist chap at Ridd Farm, and a guest he’s got, and perhaps Agnes Doyle. Then we could have two tables.’

‘Whatever you say.’

‘But Molly, it seems, isn’t coming home from Barnstaple this week-end. And, anyway, Rita thinks it would be more cosy and intimate if we just had the four of us. This is the maid’s night off, and a bigger crowd is awkward.’

‘Of course.’

Alec looked out to sea, a wrinkle between his eyebrows. His determination to please, his evident concentration on it despite other matters that racked his mind, was dogged and somewhat pathetic.

‘We ought to entertain more, you know. Yes. We really ought to entertain more. Have young people about us. I realize it’s dull for Rita. And she says it’s bad for me. Thinks I’m getting morbid.’

‘You are. And, frankly, if you don’t stop this drinking –’

‘My dear fellow!’ breathed Alec, in a tone of hollow and injured astonishment. ‘Are you trying to tell me I’m drunk?’

No. Not now. But you polish off a pint of whisky every night before you go to bed, and if you don’t stop it –’

Once more Alec looked out to sea. Folding his hands, he smoothed the baggy skin across the backs of them. He kept clearing his throat. But his tone changed: he sounded less hazy and muddled.

‘It hasn’t been easy, you know,’ he said. ‘It hasn’t been easy.’

‘What hasn’t been easy?’

‘Things,’ answered Alec. He struggled with himself. ‘Financial things. Among others. I had a lot of French securities. Never mind. We can’t put the clock back to …’ Here Alec sat up, galvanized. ‘I almost forgot. Watch: I’ve left my watch back home. Do you happen to know what time it is?’

‘It can’t be much past twelve.’

‘Twelve! Good lord, I’ve got to get back! The news, you know. One o’clock news. Mustn’t miss the news.’

His anxiety was so infectious that my own fingers shook when I took my watch out of my pocket.

‘But, man, it’s only five minutes past noon! You’ve got all the time in the world!’

Alec shook his head.

‘Mustn’t risk missing the news,’ he insisted. ‘I’ve got my car, of course. Left it down the road a way when I came for a stroll. But I have to walk at a snail’s pace to get to the car. Stiff joints. Look here, you won’t forget about tonight?’ Getting up from the bench, he wrung my hand and looked at me earnestly out of the once-sharp grey eyes. ‘I’m not very entertaining company, I’m afraid. But I’ll try. Maybe we’ll do some puzzles. Both Rita and Barry are fond of puzzles. Tonight. Eight o’clock. Don’t forget.’

I tried to hold him back.

‘Just a minute! Does Rita know about this financial trouble of yours?’

‘No, no, no!’ Alec was shocked. ‘I wouldn’t worry a woman about a thing like that. You mustn’t mention it to her. I haven’t told anybody but you. In fact, Dr Croxley, you’re just about the only friend I’ve got.’

And he stumped away.

I walked back to the village, feeling a little heavier weight of trouble on my shoulders. I wished the rain would fall and get it over with. The sky was lead-coloured; the water dark blue; the headlands, at bare patches in their green, like the colours of a child’s modelling-clay run together.

In the High Street I noticed Molly Grange. Alec had said she wouldn’t be coming back from Barnstaple that weekend – Molly owns and manages a typewriting bureau there – but presumably Rita had been mistaken. Molly smiled at me over her shoulder as she turned in at her father’s gate.

It wasn’t a pleasant day. Tom dashed in for a very late tea just after six. He was doing a post-mortem for the police at Lynton on a somewhat messy suicide; he gave me all the details as he wolfed down bread and butter and jam, and hardly heard what I had to tell him. It had gone eight o’clock, and the sky was darkening, when I drove out the four miles to ‘Mon Repos’.

It would not be black-out time until past nine o’clock. Yet no lights showed in the house. That in itself inspired a feeling of disquiet.

‘Mon Repos’ had originally been a handsome bungalow, large and low-built, with a slanting tiled roof and leaded-paned windows against mellow red brick. Most trees won’t thrive in sea air, and the grass of the lawn was sparse. But a tall yew hedge screened it from the road. There were two sanded drives, one to the front door and one to the garage at the left. Beside the garage was a tennis court. A creeper-hung summer-house stood on the lawn at the right.

Now, however, the whole place had gone faintly to seed. Nothing very noticeable, nothing greatly to remark. The hedge was just beginning to need trimming. Somebody had left bright-coloured beach-chairs out in the rain. One of the shutters had a loose hinge, which the handyman – if there was a handyman – had not bothered to repair. It was present less in tangible details than in an atmosphere of subtle decay.

You became conscious of the place’s isolation, of its Godforsaken loneliness after dark. Anything could happen here; and who the wiser?

The light had grown so bad that I was compelled to switch on my head-lamps when I drove in. The tyres of the car crunched on sand. Nothing else stirred. Hardly a breeze from the sea ruffled that muggy heat. Behind the bungalow, beyond a long stretch of damp reddish soil, you could dimly make out the line of the cliffs which fell seventy feet to rocks and water below.

The light of the head-lamps, hooded, ran ahead dimly to the open doors of the garage. It was a double garage, with Rita’s Jaguar inside. As I slowed down, a figure appeared round the side of the house and wandered towards me.

‘Is that you, Doctor?’ Alec called.

‘Yes. I’d better run the car into the garage, in case it rains. Be with you in half a tick.’

But Alec didn’t wait. He blundered over into the glow of the head-lamps, and I had to stop altogether. Putting his hand on the door of the car, he peered up and down the drive.

‘Look here,’ he said. ‘Who cut the telephone-wires?’

T
HE
engine of the car had stalled, and I started it again. Alec was not even angry: he sounded merely puzzled and troubled. Though you could smell whisky about him, he was quite sober.

‘Cut the telephone-wires?’

‘It was that damned Johnson, I expect,’ Alec declared without rancour. ‘The gardener, you know. He wasn’t doing his work. Or at least Rita says he wasn’t. So I had to sack him. Or at least Rita sacked him. I hate trouble with people.’

‘But …’

‘He did it to spite me. He
knows
I always ring up Anderson at the
Gazette
office every evening to see if they’ve got any news that isn’t released to the BBC. The phone wouldn’t work. Then, when I lifted it higher, the wires came loose from the little box. They’d been cut and stuck back in again.’

For a second, there, I thought Alec was going to cry.

‘It was a low trick, a damned unsportsmanlike trick,’ he added ‘Why won’t people let you alone?’

‘Where are Rita and Mr Sullivan?’

Alec blinked.

‘Come to think of it, I don’t know. They must be somewhere about.’ He craned his neck round. ‘They’re not in the house. At least, I don’t think they are.’

‘Hadn’t I better go and round them up, if we’re going to play cards?’

‘Yes. Do that. I’ll go and get us something to drink. But we won’t play cards just yet, if you don’t mind. There’s a very fine radio programme going on at eight-thirty.’

‘What is it?’

‘I’m not sure.
Romeo and Juliet
, I think. Rita particularly wants to hear it. Excuse me.’

He moved across the sparse-grown lawn in the twilight, and stumbled over something. As though instantly conscious that I might think he wasn’t sober, he glanced round, tried to look dignified, and sauntered on.

I ran the car into the garage. A nerve was switching in the calf of my leg when I got out. It was not that I was so anxious to find Rita and young Sullivan: I wanted a chance to think.

First I walked round to the back of the house. The breeze was colder here, smoothing down coarse grass on the edge of the cliff; the stretch of damp red soil was deserted. Hardly seeing anything, deaf and blind with preoccupation about those cut telephone-wires, I circled the bungalow and passed the summer-house.

They must have heard me. From inside the summer-house there was a stifled, startled exclamation. I glanced round – the light was just good enough to see inside – and then I walked on very quickly.

Rita Wainright was half sitting, half lying across a mat on the grubby wooden floor of the summer-house. Her head had been bent back, and her arms were round Sullivan’s shoulders just before he sprang away. Both faces turned towards me. The open mouths, the peculiar guilty shine of the eyes, the frightened spasmodic reaction of heightened senses: I saw these things only in a flash, a sliding past the eye, before I hurried on.

But I saw them.

Perhaps you think that an old duffer like myself shouldn’t have been embarrassed. But I was, badly. Probably more so than those two. It wasn’t the actual fact: which was, after all, only a good-looking woman being kissed. It was the rawness, the grimy floor of the summer-house, the sense of forces now released and beyond control.

Look out: danger
, something kept saying.
Look out: danger. Look out: danger
…

Behind me a husky voice called: ‘Dr Luke!’

If Rita hadn’t called out, I shouldn’t have stopped. I was pretending not to have seen them. They should have played up to this, but their consciences wouldn’t let them.

I turned round. My head felt light and my voice was thick, partly from shock and partly from wrath. It wasn’t as bad as Rita’s voice or Sullivan’s, but it was noticeable.

‘Hullo, there!’ I found myself saying, in such a tone of hypocritical surprise that I could have kicked myself. ‘Is there somebody inside?’

Rita stepped out. Her dusky skin now had a colour, especially under the eyes, which showed the rate at which her heart must have been beating. She drew her breath with difficulty. Her light tweed suit and white blouse were rumpled; she brushed surreptitiously at the skirt. Behind her in the doorway lurked Sullivan, clearing his throat.

‘We – we were in the summer-house,’ cried Rita.

‘We were talking,’ said her companion.

‘We intended to come in straightaway.’

‘But we got to talking. You know how it is.’

Barry Sullivan coughed abruptly as his voice grew husky. I had not remembered him as looking quite as callow or young. He was a handsome fellow beyond any doubt, straightforward of eye if somewhat weak of jaw. But all the confident self-assurance of a year ago had gone: unless I much misread the signs, he was as badly gone on Rita as she was gone on him, and ready for anything.

A breeze stirred in the vines of the summer-house. The emotional temperature between those two was so strong that it surrounded them like a fog; they could not get rid of it. A drop of rain fell, and then another.

‘I’m – I’m not sure if you’ve met Barry?’ Rita went on, in a voice as though she were calling on tiptoe over a fence. ‘I think you were there when we first met, though? Dr Luke Croxley.’

‘How do you do, sir?’ muttered Sullivan, and shuffled his feet.

‘I remember Mr Sullivan very well, I believe’ – it was impossible to keep acid out of this – ‘I believe he’s one of our most promising West End actors?’

Sullivan’s handsome forehead wrinkled.

‘
Me
?’ he exclaimed, and tapped himself on the chest.

‘You are, too!’ cried Rita. ‘Or you will be!’

The boy looked even more uncomfortable. ‘I don’t want to sail under any false colours, sir,’ he said.

‘I’m sure you don’t, Mr Sullivan. I’m sure you don’t.’

‘He means …’ cried Rita.

‘He means what, my dear?’

‘Look. I’ve never played in the West End,’ said Sullivan. ‘Just a couple of provincial engagements, and not very good ones at that. For the past two years I’ve been selling automobiles for Lowther & Son.’ His dark eyes, with the hollows drawn slantwise under them, moved to Rita. ‘I’m not
worthy
…’

‘You are too,’ said Rita. ‘Don’t say things like that!

They were in such a state of mind that they might have poured out the whole story (or so I thought then), if Barry Sullivan had not suddenly noticed it was beginning to rain. He looked up at the sky. He looked at his immaculate sports coat and grey flannels, with the silk scarf knotted and thrust into the neck of the shirt. All his confused frustration rushed out in some form of activity.

‘I’ve got to get those beach-chairs in,’ he shouted. ‘They’ve been rained on before. Excuse me.’

‘Darling, you’ll get
wet
!’ cried Rita, with such passionate naïveté that it would have been funny if matters had not reached a point where something had to happen, one way or the other.

I walked with Rita to the front door of the bungalow. She pressed her hands together and twisted the fingers. Also, she had been drinking: you realized that when you got close to her.

‘I can’t stand this,’ she said flatly. ‘I’d rather be dead.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense!’

‘Are you so sure it’s nonsense, Dr Luke? I don’t think you are.’

‘Never mind that, my dear. Just tell me: what games have you been up to?’

‘So you did see us back there in the summer-house. I thought you did. Well,
I
don’t care.’

‘I wasn’t talking about the summer-house. I want to know who cut the telephone-wires.’