A Lovely Day to Die (4 page)

A real athlete’s body. The light shining in Gerald’s eyes was something Stella had never seen before, not even at the height of their love-making. For a few seconds, she tried to imagine what it would be like to be the mother of that small athlete’s body, to have produced it jointly with Gerald; to have a right, now, to share in
that idiot pride … At the sight of those heavy, self-indulgent features thus irradiated, Stella felt a great darkness coming around her. It came like a black, monstrous wave, engulfing her, leaving her bereft of speech.

“I wouldn’t miss it for a million pounds!” she heard him saying, from somewhere outside the swirling blackness. “To hear his name called—‘Simon Graves’—my own son! And then the clapping … the cheers ..! And him only nine-and-a-half! The others are all over ten, darling,
all
of them! He’s the only nine-year-old who managed to …”

She preferred his lies: preferred them a thousand times. How could she have guessed that the truth, when she finally heard it from those evasive, prevaricating lips, would hurt as much as this?

*

The school gates were propped wide open and welcoming, and through them, in the blazing sunshine, trooped the mothers and the fathers; the sisters and the girl-friends and the aunts. With their white sandals, their bright summer dresses or pale,
freshly-ironed
slacks, women just like Stella, somewhere vaguely in their thirties, were thick upon the ground. Among so many, who was going to give her a second glance? Unless, of course, she gave herself away somehow—walking too fast, maybe, or letting her eyes flit too purposefully this way and that?

The fathers were altogether less numerous than their
womenfolk
, which made Stella’s task that much easier: they stuck out among the bright dresses like the dark stumps of trees. Stella’s eyes darted from one to another of them ceaselessly, for he might be
anywhere
;
and supposing—just
supposing
—he were to catch sight of her before she’d managed to locate
him
!

Not a big risk, really. For she had the advantage that the hunter always has over the prey—she knew what she was looking for, and what she meant to do when she found it; whereas Gerald not only wasn’t on the watch for her—he hadn’t the slightest suspicion that she could possibly be here at all. On top of which she had, after a fashion, disguised herself with a pair of large round sunglasses and a white silk bandanna wound tightly round her black, shining hair.

Across the lawn … up under the avenue of limes the slow procession wound, all chattering, exclaiming, exchanging
greetings;
some were already fanning themselves against the heat. Slowly likewise, but with heart hammering, Stella matched her pace with the rest; and it was not until she had settled herself on the grass at the far end of a long line of deck chairs facing the sports field that she began to breathe more easily. Hemmed-in by all these chairs, she could scarcely be seen from more than a yard or two away, and yet by craning her neck she could get a good view of the crowds still winding up from the school buildings. Here and there a dark head, taller than the rest, would make her catch her breath; but always it was a false alarm.

And now here was the junior P.E. master walking up and down with his loud-hailer, announcing the order of events. Already, the crowd was falling into an expectant silence, the thousand voices dying away in wave after wave, fading away like the twitter of birds at twilight.

And still Gerald hadn’t come.

Had he been lying to her after all? Had his afternoon’s truancy had nothing to do with Simon’s Sports Day, in spite of all those passionate declarations of paternal pride? The swine! The double-crossing, treacherous swine! All that emotion wasted—not to mention having let herself in for a long, hot afternoon of boredom, all for nothing!

I’ll teach you, Gerald Graves! I’ll teach you to lie to me, make a fool of me! Thought you’d get away with it, didn’t you?—
I’ll
show you …

Already, she could feel a line of sweat gathering under the bandanna, along her hair-line. She’d never worn such a thing before, and by God, she thought, I never will again!

“Under sixteen Hurdles …”

“Quarter mile, under fourteen …”

The sheer tedium of it was beginning to make Stella feel quite ill; her back ached, her eyes ached, and her brain felt half-addled with heat and boredom.

Long Jump. High Jump … On and on the thing droned:
whistles blew, shouts exploded into the shimmering air and died away again; the clapping and the cheering rose and fell, and rose again. Cup for this … Prize for that … the sun beat down, the voices swelled and receded … and then, just when Stella was on the verge of sleep, she heard it.

“Simon Graves! Winner of the Under-Eleven two hundred and twenty yards! Simon Graves!”

Stella was sitting bolt upright now, peering past the forest of chairs to get a glimpse of the sports field; but before she had time to locate the dark-haired little boy scuttling proudly towards the side-lines, she became aware of a small commotion going on in front of her and a few yards to the right.

“
Simon!
Our Simon! He’s
done
it, Mummy! Daddy said he would! Oh, Simon … Si-i-imon!”

“Hush, darling, hush Carol, you must sit down …” A plumpish, smiling woman was pulling at the sleeve of a wildly gesticulating little girl of about seven, urging her back into her seat. “Hush, Carol darling, not so loud, Simon’ll be embarrassed. Oh, but won’t Daddy be pleased ..!”

“Daddy will say …” “Daddy will think …” And where the hell
is
Daddy, if one might enquire? “Wouldn’t miss it for a million pounds,” he’d said. Someone, somewhere, with more than a million pounds to spare this bright afternoon?

Peering between the lines of chairs, Stella could see that the exultant mother and little sister were about to receive their hero. Pounding up the bank he came, wiry and brown and all lit-up with triumph, hurling himself upon his mother and sister amid a babel of congratulations from all around.

Past the chairs, past the stirring, smiling people, Stella watched, and kept very still. What
right
had the three of them to such joy, such total, undiluted happiness? Did they not know that the foundations of it were rotten—that their cosy little family life was based on a rotting, disintegrating sub-structure of lies and cheating? “Daddy this …” and “Daddy that …” It made her quite sick to listen to the shrill little voices filled with such baseless adoration.

Quietly, unobtrusively, Stella got to her feet, and worked her
way along between the rows of chairs. She reached the little girl just when mother and brother had turned away for a moment, receiving further congratulations. Quickly, Stella dropped on her knees in front of the child, bringing their faces level.

“Do you know why your Daddy isn’t here?” she said softly. “It’s because he’s spent the afternoon in bed with me!
In
bed.
Do you understand?”

The blank, stupid look on the child’s face maddened her. She leaned closer.

“In
bed!
Having
sex!
”
she hissed. “Sex, sex, sex! Don’t you know what sex is? Don’t they give you Sex Education at the bloody Brownies or somewhere?”

The blank look was still on the child’s face to the end. But Stella had the satisfaction—after she had squeezed back past row after row of chairs and had almost escaped from the enclosure—of hearing Carol, at last, burst into loud sobbing.

*

It was nearly ten’o clock when, at long last, she heard Gerald’s step on the stairs; and even after all these hours, she still could not have said whether she’d been expecting him to come, or to stay away.

He’d be angry, of course. But also, surely relieved? Five years of secrecy was too much; it would be a relief to everyone to have it out in the open.

*

“Don’t you agree, darling, that it was high time we had it out in the open?” she was asking, for the fourth or fifth time, of the silent, slumped figure in the armchair. She’d been trying ever since his arrival to extract some sort of response from him. She’d tried everything—even congratulating him on his son’s success.

“Pity you weren’t there to see it,” she’d been unable to resist adding; but even this had provoked from Gerald nothing more than the bald, factual statement that he
had
seen it, thank you, from the Pavilion, where some of the fathers were helping to organise the boys.

Then more silence. She tried again.

“I’m sorry, Gerald darling, if Carol—if the little girl—was upset. I didn’t mean to upset her, I just thought that the children should know about us. I don’t believe in lies and deceit with children, I think they are entitled to the truth. Oh, darling, please don’t look like that! It’s been a shock, I know, but I’m sure that when you’ve had time to think about it, you’ll see it’s been all for the best. The best for
us,
and for Wendy, too. She can’t have liked all this lying and deception all these years. I’m sure she’d rather know where she stands, and be able to start making sensible plans for the future. I mean, she looks quite a nice sort of person, I don’t think she’ll make any trouble once she understands that we love each other. Oh, darling, what
is
it? Why don’t you
say
something? Look, let’s have a drink and relax, and think what we’re going to do when the unpleasantness is over. This flat is a bit small for the two of us, but assuming that you’ll be getting half the value of your house, then between us we could …”

And now, at last, he
did
make a move. He rose, stiffly, and she thought that he was about to pour each of them a large glass of whisky. Instead, he walked over to the table in the window where Stella’s typewriter stood, open. Laboriously, with one finger, he began to type.

*

Stella left it a minute—two minutes—and then walked over to look.

The long manilla envelope stared up at her from the typewriter-carriage. She watched, stupefied, while he finished the last few letters of the address. Then—“Whatever are you doing, darling?” she asked, with an uneasy little laugh. “Are you writing a letter to
yourself
…?”

And then she saw it, just by his right hand. Her own suicide note of last autumn—“By the time you get this, darling, I shall be dead …”

“The handwriting will be unquestionably yours,” he observed conversationally. “And the address will have been typed on your typewriter. The postmark will also be right, as I shall post it myself, on my way out. It should reach me at breakfast time the day after tomorrow, just in time to show to the police. And now, my dear, just one more little job, and we shall be finished.”

And as he stood up and turned towards her, the light from the lamp fell full on his face, and she saw the look in his eyes.

“No … no ..!” she gasped, took a step backwards, and shrank, whimpering, against the wall.

“I intend it to look like suicide,” he said, as if reassuring her; and as he moved across the carpet towards her, Stella’s last coherent thought was: He will, too! He’ll get away with it, he’ll lie his way out of it, just as he’s always done.

How accomplished a liar he was, she, of course, knew better than anyone, for it was she who had trained him; trained him, like a circus animal, over five long years.

H
E WAS AMAZED
that after more than forty years the smell of the little seaside town should still be exactly as he remembered it. You would have thought, wouldn’t you, that with all the changes of the last half-century—from steam-trains to diesels, from ice-cream parlours to Wimpy bars—not to mention the escalating petrol fumes from ever-multiplying traffic—you would have thought that the long-ago nostalgic smell would have been completely
obliterated.

But no. He’d noticed it the moment they’d stepped outside the station, and had joyously called Maisie’s attention to it.

“
What
smell?” she’d snapped back, tired and irritable after the long train journey; and Malcolm had duly dropped the subject. If she didn’t remember the smell, then she didn’t. He certainly couldn’t describe it to her because it was indescribable. It wasn’t just melting tarmac and hot stone and salty air; it wasn’t even the faint, all-pervading sweetishness distilled from tens of thousands of ice creams licked all summer long. There was something else, something as indefinable, and as exciting, as the smell of a
brand-new
story-book when you are seven years old, breathing in the savour of a binding still stiff with newness, of pages still unopened, and your heart pounding with a sense of the unknown, of glory yet unsampled.

“… and just
look
at the queue for the taxis!” Maisie was complaining, gesturing angrily in the offending direction. “There must be fifty people ahead of us already ..! Come
on,
Malcolm, can’t you hurry up a bit just for once? If only you’d walk a bit faster, we wouldn’t
always
be at the back end of the queue for
everything
!”

Did she have to rub it in so? He hadn’t chosen to have that second heart attack just after Christmas; nor had he chosen that his recovery, this time, should have been so slow, and, to date anyway,
so incomplete. From his earlier heart attack, nearly ten years ago now, he’d seemed to recover in next to no time—back at work in less than six weeks, and within three months redecorating the sitting-room, ceiling and all. But then, as his doctor had pointed out at his last checkup, he’d only been in his sixties then, and how old was he now?—seventy-six?—well, there you are, you see! At seventy-six, the young medico explained cheerfully, scribbling away on his prescription-pad, you can’t really expect …

And so Maisie’s complaints indubitably had a basis in fact, even if they weren’t very kind. His current disability
did
slow him down, to a most inconvenient and often irritating degree. On this occasion, it had caused them—and this no doubt was still rankling in Maisie’s mind—to miss their tea on the train. Malcolm’s sudden attack of breathlessness and pain as they manoeuvred their way along the stifling, jam-packed corridor had brought them to a standstill, and they had had to let half the train push past and ahead of them while he recovered, so that by the time they finally reached the refreshment counter there was nothing left. Not even a dry bread roll or a packet of biscuits.

“You should have gone on ahead, dear,” he’d remonstrated with her gently; but she gave a short, disagreeable laugh:

“Huh! And leave you muddling about by yourself? Getting yourself lost … leaving things on seats? Remember that time in Brussels when all you had to do was get one suitcase and your raincoat from the reception desk to the Departure Lounge …”

He did remember. How could he not, when she was at such pains to remind him of it on every possible occasion? But all the same, it didn’t mean he was getting senile, which was what her endless reiteration of the mishap seemed to imply. Everyone mislays a suitcase
once
in their lives, surely?

Usually, as Maisie well knew, he was most careful about anything like this, checking over every item, making lists … a lifetime of travelling all over the world, on business as well as for holidays, had made him methodical to a fault. Even his packing had been brought to a fine art, with a list pasted inside the lid of his suitcase, together with reminders of the order in which the things
should go in—shoes, shaving tackle and other hard objects at the bottom; then pants, vests, socks, followed by shirts, pullovers, and—yes, he supposed they would swim, the doctor had said it wouldn’t do him any harm, indeed it might easily do some good—this time he’d added swimming trunks and towel. Everything, he knew, was in perfect order: wallet, return tickets and Bankers’ Card in his breast pocket; keys, address-book and spare bifocals in his side-pocket: he’d checked it all over once last night, and then again this morning …

“Where for, sir?” the taxi-driver demanded, reaching off-handedly behind him to open the passenger door; and Malcolm, opening his mouth to reply, found that the name of their hotel had gone completely out of his head. But completely! Only for a second or two, of course … in another moment it would have come to him …

“The Cliff House Hotel,” Maisie filled in, smugly and immediately; and with a tiny, patronising glance in his direction, she took his elbow and with ostentatious and unnecessary solicitude helped him into the car, just as if he was an invalid.

Which he was, damn and blast it!

Damn, damn, damn!

*

The drive through the streets of the little town was not a long one, and Malcolm, staring through the side window, felt his sense of familiarity growing. Forty-five years! It was unbelievable! Those stout, middle-aged matrons, shepherding their charges up from the beach—why, they hadn’t even been born when he passed this way before! And yet they seemed so familiar, so unchanging a part of the scene, he could have sworn it was no more than a few days since, blind with love, he’d blundered through the thick of them, peering wildly past and beyond all those middle-aged bodies, for the one that was young and golden, with shining hair cut in a long bob, and of whom all he knew as yet was that she worked in one of the kiosks on the sea front, and that her name was Maisie.

They were passing through the main street, lined, now, with supermarkets, concrete office blocks and parking-meters … and yet, somehow, it still seemed utterly familiar. Malcolm smiled to
himself, and shook his head in bewilderment. Everything has changed, he thought wonderingly, and yet nothing has! Nothing at all!

It had, though. Within twenty-four hours of their arrival, this had become abundantly, devastatingly clear.

*

It was he who had changed, of course: he and Maisie. Well, naturally they had, he’d expected nothing else. It was while he was convalescing from last winter’s illness, fresh from his brush with Death and consumed with a sense of time running out, that he’d persuaded Maisie to agree to this trip back into the past, to this place where they’d spent what proved to have been the happiest summer of their lives: and naturally, in planning such a holiday he’d borne in mind, and (so he thought) had fully accepted, the fact that they who were once young had become old.

But somehow, when it came to the point, the shock of it was appalling.

It wasn’t just that they’d grown older—this one learns to adapt to because it is part of the pattern of life—it was that the balance of power between them was subtly and completely changed. The eleven years’ difference in their ages, which had once conferred upon him, in the prime of his young manhood, such effortless leadership, such easy, unquestioned dominance in his
relationship
with the shy little salesgirl just out of school—all this had now quietly gone into reverse. It was she, eleven years younger, who was the strong one now, the one with the right to patronise and protect. It was she, now, who helped
him
over the slippery, seaweed-covered rocks; she who waited, resignedly, halfway up gorse-strewn hillsides to allow him to catch up. She it was, now, who carried the heavier cases, who climbed on a chair to fix the wardrobe door, who called out “Are you sure you’re all right?” across the racing surf when they ventured into the sea.

By the end of the first week, it was clear that even worse than these changes, was the sheer boredom. The racking of the brain under a broiling sun to think of something to say to one another
that hadn’t been said before: the scouring of the local amenities for something fresh to do.

What
had
they talked about, all those years ago?

What, when they weren’t making love, had they actually
done
?

It must have been these thoughts, or some very similar, which drove Maisie, after a very few days, to her knitting.

“
Such
a lucky thing I thought of bringing it,” she would say, each time she unrolled it from its plastic bag under the wide summer sky or at the margin of the blue, sparkling sea. “At least I’ll have something to show for it, when we get home.”

In a way, the knitting made things easier for both of them, because from then on Maisie complained hardly at all about the day’s activities. She didn’t mind where they went, what they did, what sort of trips they opted for, so long as, when they reached their destination, there would be somewhere she could sit and get on with her knitting. Among harebells, among poppies, amid the ruins of mediæval abbeys, she would sit hunched contentedly over the monstrously growing garment, her fingers flying. “Did we?” she would say, when Malcolm reminded her of some long ago romantic interlude, or took her on expeditions to the very site of their first picnic, or their last, or whatever it might be. “No, dear, I can’t honestly say I recognise it, not at all. It’s all such a long time ago …”

Was she really so indifferent to the happiness they had once shared? Did it mean nothing to her that they were revisiting, for the first and last time, the haunts of their youth?

And at last, when their holiday was nearly at an end, Malcolm came to a decision. Tomorrow—their last day—he would take Maisie with him to Dead Man’s Rock. Take her, knitting and all—and
make
her remember.

This wasn’t its real name; it was simply what the locals called it. It wasn’t a rock either, not really. It was a narrow headland, an outcrop of granite running about a hundred yards out into the water, and curved at the end, like the beak of a bird of prey. And it was at the very furthermost tip of this curious formation, where it dropped sheer, fifty feet or more, into the green water, that there
stood—had always stood, as far back as living memory could trace—a worn and battered notice-board proclaiming:

The trouble about such notices is, of course, that the sort of people who aren’t frightened of a fifty-foot dive into the heaving sea aren’t usually frightened of Urban District Council notices either; and so it did happen, every so often, that some bold spirit would defy the injunction and go off the perilous tip—sometimes for a dare, but more often for sheer joy in the danger, and in the triumph of achievement. And, as the grim little nickname of the place implied, some of these intrepid souls did indeed come to grief, either from choosing a time when the tide was too low, or from simple ignorance of the techniques for diving from such heights. By striking the water at the wrong angle you can break your back, or knock yourself unconscious; by tilting your head a little too high you can have the water cascading up your nose at forty miles an hour, into your sinus cavities and bursting through your eardrums.

So the young men who ventured upon this feat did have to be careful; and most of them, happily, were so.

It was in the little sandy cove sheltered by this headland and by the cliff behind that Malcolm and Maisie settled themselves on this, the last afternoon of their holiday. It was in this exact same spot, Malcolm remembered, looking out towards the curve of the bay, that they’d settled themselves that other afternoon all those years ago, rejoicing in the solitude and seclusion of the place, and in their cleverness in discovering it.

Then, of course, Maisie hadn’t had her knitting. She had been lying spread out to the sun, wearing only her bathing dress. Even now, Malcolm could recall the slender, golden limbs, the delicate curve of the lashes over the eyes half-closed against the sun as she smiled up at him.

“Do you remember,” he asked abruptly, “the afternoon I dived off Dead Man’s Rock?”

For a moment, it seemed as if she had forgotten even this. Then, with a shrug:

“So you did!” She gave a little laugh. “You were a right show-off in those days, weren’t you!”

A show-off? Is that what he’d been? Well, of course he had. Though an enthusiastic amateur diver within the safety of public swimming-pools, where the top board is rarely much higher than sixteen feet, he’d never in a hundred years have dared to go off such a height as this, if Maisie hadn’t been there watching, open-mouthed and incredulous, breathless with admiration.

It had been a beautiful dive: he had known it, he had felt it, even during the long moments of swooping through the air; and never, as long as he lived, would he forget the moment of surfacing in triumph; of swimming shorewards with long, leisurely strokes through the blue water; of coming striding out of the shallows, the bright drops spilling around him, and stepping ashore, like a god, into the arms of his love …

“It was a silly thing to do, you could have killed yourself,” Maisie was remarking, disapprovingly. “I ought to have stopped you. It was silly.”

But something in her looks belied the prim words. For just one moment, a sort of wonder shone in her plump, middle-aged face, and she raised her eyes from her knitting for a second or two and stared ahead—Not at Malcolm, oh no, but beyond him, at another Malcolm, young, and bronzed and perfect, and long vanished from the earth …

Jealousy of this young, long-ago self, who could even now bring such a look to his wife’s face, burst upon Malcolm like a storm. He felt sick and dizzy with the sheer force of it, and it was a real effort to keep his voice level and ordinary.