The rivals of Sherlock Holmes : early detective stories (7 page)

“I can’t help you,” said Munday.

“Now hold on there—”

“I’m not that kind of doctor.”

“I thought there were only one kind,” said the young man, smiling as Munday pulled at the doorhandle.

Munday was nearly out the door; a thought came to him, and he said stiffly to the young man who had started toward the fire and whose back was to him, “No, as a matter of fact, there are as many varieties of doctor as there are varieties of farm laborer—perhaps more. Good night.”

He walked angrily away from The Yew Tree, past the pillar box at the cross roads and the lighted telephone booth. The lights in the pub window illuminated the road, but the road curved off to the right and when Munday turned and lost the lights he stumbled, peering into the darkness for the house lights and trying to stay in the center of the road. The perfect darkness clasped his body and slowed him. What he feared most was meeting someone who would startle him, maybe injure him, by slamming against him in the dark. He felt there was someone walking near him, just in front of him, in the dark, and as always the pinching was in his heart, hurting his blood. A car appeared—the mild glow and engine noise, then the blinding lights and the terrifying rush of wind and metal sweeping past him, forcing him to lean against the bank. The car left him dazed in an even more confusing darkness. He plodded on, taking elderly steps, and then he saw the lighted windows of the house and was guided by them. But he knew he would remember that stretch where the road curved, the lights of The Yew Tree lost at one end, the house lights lost at the other, the elbow in the road, marked by oaks, completely dark. He knew he would always hesitate before walking down it at night, and the experience came to represent so much of his arrival home, the rediscovery of old fears, aimlessness he hadn’t bargained for, and a feeling of age and loss he mocked in a way that seemed to make his mockery an expression of greater fear.

“I hate this place,” he said, stepping into the kitchen. There was no reply. He called, “Emma?”

“In here.” Her voice was weak, but Munday was reassured by it. She was in the living room, stretched out on a chair, her hand over her eyes. She said, “I don’t know what came over me. I had to sit down.” “Have a glass of sherry,” said Munday. He peeled the plastic from the bottle top. “I’m going to have one myself and then ring the vicar about that talk.”

“Didn’t you say Silvano was coming down one weekend from London?”

“Yes,” said Munday. “One weekend.”

“Give your talk then. You could exhibit him—they might never have seen a real African before.”

“I’m not in the mood for that.”

“Bad joke, I suppose,” said Emma. “I’m feeling awful, I must say.”

“But Til show him around, you bet I will. And the first place I take him will be The Yew Tree. I want to see what these local people have to say for themselves when Silvano walks in. You know how very English he is.”

“They’ll laugh at him,” said Emma. “They’ll laugh at you, too. That myth about these African students being frightfully English, with their silly faces and their five-syllable names—as if Englishness were simply a case of smoking a pipe and wearing a suit and subscribing to the New Statesman and saying ‘bloody.’ And taking taxis—they all take taxis. Who pays for it all? English people, of course, to flatter themselves that they’re being imitated. I remember Silvano, with that book he used to carry around the village. How he used to struggle so to pronounce the simple English word ‘situation.* How did he say it? ‘Stoowation,’ something like that.”

“You’re ranting,” said Munday. “You always rant when you’re under the weather.”

“They’ll gape at him,” said Emma. “Not that I blame them, but they’ll make unpleasant remarks.” “You don’t want him to come?”

“I’d like to save him the embarrassment. They’ll be cruel.”

“Let them try,” said Munday. He handed Emma her glass of sherry. “They tried that with me this evening. Bloody cheek.” He told Emma about the driver, repeating the man’s sentence, “We’ll have you and the missus over some time,” and it sounded acutely offensive to him now. Then he told her about the farm boy with the injured arm.

“Oh, dear,” said Emma.

‘Trying to take the piss out of me. They didn’t reckon I’d stand up to them,” said Munday, and coldly he spoke the reply he felt had withered them all. He said, “I don’t give a damn.”

But he was angry, remembering; and the little scene in the pub, like the vicar’s visit, forty minutes in the ten days they had been there, grew out of proportion and would be turned from an incident into an event, something (he knew this as he described it to Emma with exaggerations and additions) they would never stop discussing. And he wondered if what remained of his life would be these few public moments endlessly rehearsed in private.

“You’d better ring the vicar,” said Emma.

“I will when I finish this.” Munday was topping up his sherry.

Emma held her glass to her throat. She sat forward and stared at the fire, and the flames lighted her face, the brightness adding years to her age and giving the long wisps of hair which had fallen loose around her ears and neck an unruly look. Munday was alarmed by the intensity of concentration on her flickering face, the deranged hair, and her unusual jumping shadow on the wall behind her. She stayed like this, studying the fire for several minutes, not drinking from the slender glass, not moving, and it took this long for Munday to realize that it was the fire, flaring and changing so, that changed her expression.

To break the silence he said, “I’d better ring the vicar.”

She said, “Alfred, I—” She was speaking to the fire. “—I’ve had an awful fright.”

“If it’s half as bad as that business in the pub, those impertinent—”

“No,” she said. She held herself motionless and spoke in a deadened voice. Still her shadow leaped. “Don’t say anything now. But when I finish I want you to tell me it’s nothing—my imagination. Please tell me I didn’t see it.”

“Emma, what are you talking about?”

“I’ll tell you, but first I want you to promise me that it’s nothing at all.”

“Good God—”

“Alfred.” Her voice was urgent, and now she turned, putting half her face in shadow; the other half, waxen with terror, still flickered.

“I promise.”

“When you went for the walk I thought I’d better take in the washing while it was still light. You know how windy it is, and the sheets were flapping and making that cracking sound. I had an armful of them and the trees were blowing too. I’ve never heard such noises in England, I never realized—”

“You’ve never lived in the country before.”

“Don’t,” said Emma. “It wasn’t only the wind. I heard someone calling—someone lost. It sounds silly, I know, but I thought it was, well, a woman in a tree. And the sheets were flying up—I couldn’t catch them. I dropped some clothespegs. It seems such a small thing, dropping clothespegs, but it worried me horribly because I could see how frightened I was and the things I was doing. I was hurrying, and I knew why: someone was watching me—that voice. It seemed awfully dark where I was, but everywhere else was light, not daylight, but that sort of silver twilight you get here. I heard the back door slam and I thought, Oh God, I’m locked out. I panicked and started to run across the garden and I suppose I was looking for a window to break. That’s when I saw her.”

“Who, Emma? Where?”

“It was a woman.” Emma’s voice became very small, and without force the whisper seemed to stay in her mouth. “She was standing in our bedroom, at that upper window. In a blue and gray dress, peering out with such a white face. She wasn’t looking at me— she was looking at the wind and the fields, down where you had gone for your walk.”

Munday’s legs went cold and the backs of his arms prickled. He said, “What woman?”

“I can’t go in, I thought. I hadn’t picked up all the washing—half of it was still on the line, behind me, making that flapping, jike sails lifting and filling with wind. I felt she had caught me there in that wind, and I kept thinking, It's her house. I don’t know how long it took because the sheets were all twisted and flying at the window. But when I untwisted them I looked up and she was gone. Now tell me.”

“Did you recognize her?”

“Alfred!” It was a shriek. Munday recrossed his legs. “It was nothing—the sheets reflected on the window, your nerves, suggestions—who can say?”

“You don’t believe that, do you? You think I really saw something.”

“How could you?”

“You’re saying it’s nothing because I told you to.” “No,” said Munday, “that’s not it.”

Emma was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “You’re right. But I wish it had been a ghost.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I do, because if it really was.a ghost then I couldn’t be blamed for seeing it. Now I feel foolish and crazy. It was nothing—it was me. You know that, don’t you?” “Yes,” said Munday. But he was not convinced. He had more questions, but he knew he could not ask them without frightening Emma. And worse, now he could not confide his own fears, those suspicions that had crept upon him in the house and out in the road; those fears that he had hoped to be able to tell her so she could take his hand and smile and hold' his head and say, “It’s nothing.”

It gave him a bad dream, of a tall house on a black landscape where the wind had flattened the meadows and the gates in the hedgerows were broken. He was walking towards the house, slowly in the yielding grass, his feet sinking with each step; and up close he saw it was a stone house, like his own, with a black slate roof, but (and this woke him) it had no doors or windows.

7

It came to him, what she had said on their first day at The Yew Tree; he forgot what preceded it or prompted it, but her words “You know nothing” had swiped at him. And he remembered how he had changed the subject, heading her off with, “What do you mean by saying I’m ridiculous?”

He was not defeated then, he knew how she exaggerated, and he did the same—the precise managing of exaggeration, on which was pinned a timid sincerity, was a convention of their marriage. They didn’t say what they meant, but this manner suggested all that was unsaid. It was an English trait which Africa had intensified almost to the point of parody. They had met by chance, and almost resenting the love they called a deep sympathy so as not to feel foolish, they had married late—Munday was forty, Emma two years older (she had money: it had made her shy, nearly kept her single)—so Africa, which Munday studied and Emma endured, was their honeymoon. Their African isolation had thrown them together, like new cellmates who, once solitaries, learn in a confinement where they are robbed of privacy to protect themselves from greater violation. They had come to each other with a single similarity, a perverse kind of courage each saw in the other but not in himself. That, and an irrational thing—though at the time it seemed like conclusive proof of a common vision—their discovery one evening in idle talk of a fascination they shared for that polished Aztec skull of rock crystal in the Ethnography Section of the British Museum. “There’s only one thing in the world I care about,” Emma had said. Munday had almost scoffed, but when she disclosed it he was won over and from that moment he loved her. They had seen it as schoolchildren and returned to it as adults. It hadn’t been moved; it was still in the center of the aisle, in the high glass case, mounted on blue velvet. It was like an image of their common faith, the carved block of crystal in the dustiest room of the museum, the cold beauty of the blue shafts, sparkling behind the square teeth in the density of that death’s head. Emma said that she had whispered to it—Munday didn’t ask what—and that it was so perfect it made her want to cry. Munday said it was the highest art of an advanced people and he told Emma its cultural origins; but he venerated it no less than she.

Later, married and in Africa, they discovered how opposed they were, but this opposition, their differences with their determined sympathy, gave a soundness to their marriage. Munday had a vulgar streak that Emma’s primness sustained and even encouraged. Munday blustered and was rash; in a professional argument with a younger colleague he would tab his finger intimidatingly at the man and say, “I won’t wear it.” Anyone interested in his work he saw as a poacher. His colleagues said he was impossible and shortly he had no colleagues. He had a reputation for arrogance, and very early in his career he had learned an elderly trick of blustering, pressing his lips together and blowing out his cheeks and prefacing an outrageous remark with something offensive, “Damn it, are you too stupid to see—” Marriage only made his anger blind: he had Emma, and if he went too far he did so because he knew how his wife could draw him back. He might rage, but it was her sensibility that he trusted, not his own. He protested loudly but secretly he believed in her strength, and that belief in her timely sarcasm gave him strength. He relied on her in all ways, to pay for his research when his grant was exhausted, to support his temper and defend his opinions. His science he knew was opinion, full of guesses that made him sound crankish, and she mocked him for it. But just as often- and with more sincerity she reassured him. She allowed him to make all the decisions and complained so haplessly her complaints amounted to very little. But this was insignificant to what bound them, for though in conversation he exaggerated his strength and she her weakness, he knew—and the knowledge gnawed at his confidence—how he leaned on her. So many times in those past days he had tried to reveal his fear to her! Emma, gentle, knew at what moment his pride would allow him to be reassured by hen But they had said nothing and now it was too late. She had seen what he loathed and dreaded, she had named his fear, and in that naming, locating the woman at the window, she had dismissed all her strength. Her picture of the fear was his, she had described his mind. Munday was stripped of his defenses; he was alone; there was no one to turn to.

Without knowing it she had defeated him by confirming his fear, and for the first time she was relying on the strength of his doubt, on his assurance that they were quite safe. Munday had repeated what she asked him to, but he had no answer to console her. He had no answer to console himself. He was staggered by the weight of his own and his wife’s fears. He worried about himself; poor health was his egotism: he saw himself collapsing, falling forward dead in the darkest room of the black house. That star of pain which had twinkled on and off now burned ceaselessly like a hot knuckle of decay in the pulp of his heart. His sleep was a kind of stumbling at night, going down in a restless doze and then scrambling to consciousness. Usually he lay awake, rigid in his bed, listening to the slow clock and the ping of the electric fire, his eyes wide open, wanting to wake his wife and talk to her. He envied her slumbering there, her body purring with snores, but he could not divulge his worry and he knew that to tell her his fears would be to have her awake beside him, fretting through the night.