A Lovely Day to Die (5 page)

“I’m going to try that dive again,” he said; and looked at her.

“Yes, dear,” she answered, winding the wool twice round a needle and pulling it through the loop: and so Malcolm had to say it again, louder.

“I’m going to dive off Dead Man’s Rock again,” he said. “Now. Just you watch …”

She laughed. Well, anyone would. The mere idea of a man of his age, with a bad heart …

“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that dear,” she said, but not unkindly, for the afternoon was a mellow and soothing one. “People will think you’re gaga! Why don’t you have a nice nap before we go home, or look at the paper, or something?”

Even before he reached the base of the cliff, Malcolm’s heart was pounding uncomfortably, and he began to have an uneasy feeling that he would never manage the steep, winding path to the top. Never even reach the headland, let alone dive off the end of it! He sat for a few minutes at the foot of the cliff, getting his breath and trying to clear his thoughts: and presently the pounding of his heart subsided, and he was able to start up the path.

To his surprise, his heart seemed to be taking the climb very well. True, he was giving himself plenty of rests on the way up, but only as a precaution, not once had he been forced into immobility by that awful, griping, clutching sensation behind his ribs. It occurred to him that he must be getting better; the holiday, in spite of everything, must have been doing him good. A few feet short of the top, he gave himself just one more of these precautionary breathers, facing, now, a dazzling panorama of sea and sky. He sat for a while leaning against a sun-warmed boulder, enjoying the feel of the heat on his skin; then, getting to his feet once more, he set off on the last little lap of the climb.

It was only when he reached the cliff top and was setting off, barefoot and stripped to his bathing-trunks, along the tussocky, boulder-strewn headland, that the reality of what he proposed to do hit him with full force: and for a moment he stood stock-still, absolutely horrified.

He would die. There were no two ways about it. He was taking himself to his death. There was no way that this seventy-six-year-old body, weakened by two bad heart attacks, could possibly survive the ordeal that he had planned for it. And it wasn’t just his heart, either; how could these flabby muscles of his possibly fulfil the demands he was going to make on them—the command to make this old, slack body straight and taut as a diver’s
body needs to be as it plummets towards the water, if it is not to strike the surface in a crumpled mess, with the breath battered out of it and bones broken everywhere?

It was hopeless, hopeless. How could he even expect to launch himself on the dive at all, with no spring in his ankles any more, and maybe unable even to raise himself on tiptoe? His
reaction-times,
too, would be all to pieces, four decades too slow. Inevitably, he would bungle the timing of his spring, of his entry into the water—everything.

I must be mad, he thought, mad!—and continued on his way.

Up here, beyond the shelter of the cliff, the wind was icy; it whipped against his spare old body like a knife, almost
overbalancing
him. Down there, in the sunny sheltered cove, you’d never have guessed there was any wind at all. Maisie, at this very moment, could have no idea of it. Soon, he would be in full view, silhouetted against the sky, from where she was sitting.

He shivered, hugged his brown, bony arms across his chest, and thought about giving up. Of turning round and slinking back the way he had come; of putting on his warm clothes again, left in a neat little pile at the top of the cliff path, waiting for him.

“Thought I’d take a little stroll,” he’d say to Maisie, in explanation of his absence, and she would accept it—not
uncomplainingly
, perhaps, but certainly without question. Well, there was nothing
to
question; not for one second had she taken that wild boast of his as anything but an idle joke.

There would be no disgrace in going back. No disgrace, that is, that anyone other than himself, in his own soul, would ever know about.

It had been a crazy idea, right from the start; on top of which, he was getting his death of cold.

Still, having come so far, it would be a pity not to go on to the end, stand on the end of the spit for a moment and look over: no harm in just having a look, and reliving, just once, those moments of terror, of ecstasy, of intensity of living, such as he had never known before or since.

*

It was all exactly the same. The icy wind, the awful distance of the green, crawling water far, far below; the same uncontrollable shrinking of the flesh from even the sight of so sheer a drop … and the same compulsive scanning of the shore, too, to make sure that Maisie was still there …

Yes, there she was, just as he had left her, facing right towards him. Without his glasses, which of course he had left with the pile of clothes, he couldn’t see the expression on her face or even the set of her shoulders—but he knew, well enough, the scorn that both would be expressing. Silly old fool, he
has
gone up there after all! Wallowing in sentiment and nostalgia—I might have guessed it! Living in the past again, dreaming futile, old man’s dreams about the days when he really
could
dive …

I’
ll show
her!
he
thought. It’ll be the last thing I shall ever do, but, my God, I’ll show her!

“Look, Maisie, look!” he yelled into the wind, across the curving sea; and raising himself on his toes—yes, he could still do that much—he sprang.

Strange how the old skills came back, and came back instantly, without fumbling or unsureness. It was as if they had been patiently waiting all these years, deep within his body, poised in readiness through all the long, dull decades for just such a chance as this. Even as his feet left the rocky edge, he could feel every muscle, every nerve, springing into old familiar action, like old war-horses at the sound of a trumpet. They took his body in charge just as they used to do, and straight and taut and perfect he swooped towards the sea. Already, during those two swift seconds of his downward flight, he knew that he was going into a perfect dive. His head tucked well down between his outstretched arms, as the head of a high-diver needs to be, and with his eyes correctly closed, he did not see the green, bulging water rushing up to meet him, and yet the timing of his entry, once again, was flawless. He cut the surface clean as an arrow, and there was scarcely a splash, only a hugely widening circle of ripples, as his body went into the long, graceful parabola that would bring him, after many seconds, safe to the surface a dozen yards away.

*

He could hardly believe that he was still alive! Breathless, yes, as who would not be?—But what a marvellous kind of breathlessness!—how utterly, gloriously different from the sick, dreary kind of breathlessness that had assailed him in the corridor of the train that time! This was the breathlessness of Odysseus when the sea hurled him towards the crags of the Phæacian isle after two days and two nights of swimming; the breathlessness of Hector when the all-day battle rolled towards the walls of Troy …

Once again, with long, slow strokes he swam shoreward in triumph through the blue water; he hadn’t felt so well, so physically perfect, for years. Not for years and years and years. Once again he came striding out of the shallows, the bright drops spilling around him, and once again he stepped ashore like a god—but not, this time, into anyone’s arms. In fact, he had to walk right up the beach, right to where she was sitting.

“You saw that? You saw me? —
Now
what have you to say?” he cried as he drew near; and now, at last, she raised her eyes from her pattern. She’d been decreasing at the neck-edge, a rather tricky operation, as any knitter knows, and one demanding all of one’s concentration.

“Saw what?” she said.

W
HAT WOULD
you
do, friends (and I’m addressing married men everywhere)—what would
you
do if you were roused from the marital bed at two a.m. by a phone call from a blonde and unhappily-married neighbour, telling you that a flying saucer has just landed in her back garden, and she’s frightened?

Well, go on, what
would
you do? Don’t all answer at once; think about it, just like I had to think. And remember that in my case I’d just been wrenched out of my first and deepest sleep—what with the Harpers coming round for Scrabble and staying till all hours, we hadn’t got to bed till after twelve—and so my brain was at its lowest ebb.

To clear it, I shook my head feebly from side to side. I rubbed my eyes. I switched on the bedside light and looked down at my wife Pam, still sleeping peacefully. It takes an earthquake to wake Pam once she is really off, this I know well; but then, of course, an earthquake is one thing, and the husky voice of a blonde and attractive neighbour phoning me in the middle of the night is quite another. Still, asleep she was, no doubt about it at all.

And so the options were all open. I could, if I chose, shake her by the shoulder, pull the covers off her, and bellow into her ear: “Darling, Sheila Curtis has just phoned up to say there’s a flying saucer in her garden. What had I better do?”

Well, how would
your
wife react? I can tell you straight away how Pam would:

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, John!” she’d mumble irritably. “
Do
shut up and go to sleep. I
told
you not to eat all those pickled gherkins last thing at night …” And she’d be dead to the world again before the words were properly out of her mouth.

And so that left the second option.

“I’ll be along right away,” I breathed carefully into the phone.
Then I slipped quietly out of bed, pulled on slacks and sweater over my pyjamas, slid my feet into the comfortable old leather slippers at my bedside, and tiptoed out of the room. Pam’s relaxed and regular breathing followed me across the landing and part-way down the stairs, but after that I lost it. By the time I reached the hall I could hear absolutely nothing. The house, as I gently closed the front door upon it, seemed silent as the grave.

I was to wish, later, that this hackneyed little phrase hadn’t slipped into my mind at that particular moment; but there you are, it did. I’m just telling you.

Outside, the moon was just rising—a half-moon, orangey-coloured, and lying almost on its back in the low, star-studded sky. Have you noticed how the moon, if it is visible at all at these strange hours of the night, always seems to be lying at some strange angle? Once, when I was quite young, I used to understand why this had to be so; and I find it touching, somehow, that it’s all still going on, even though the clear and beautiful explanation of it is gone from my mind for ever.

All this sounds like a digression, doesn’t it, a mere irrelevance; but it isn’t really. The phase of the moon that night, and the hour of its rising, was more important than you might imagine; more important, certainly, than
I
could have imagined as I walked the hundred yards or so to Sheila’s along the deserted street. The neat familiar little front gardens were familiar no longer, but seemed twice their daytime size under the grey, primeval light, and suddenly pregnant with dark, mysterious bushes.

And it was only now, listening to the slip-slop of my own footsteps along the silent pavement, that I began actually to
think
: to ask myself what the hell I thought I was doing? Until now, I’d been in that state of shock that you experience when you are confronted with the fact that something has happened which can’t have happened. Just simply can’t. But it has.

And I don’t mean the flying saucer. Naturally, as a rational man, I dismissed out of hand the possibility that there might
actually
be a flying saucer in Sheila’s garden. But that only left the mystery even more insoluble—more sinister, even, when you
really came to think about it. What on earth could have got into Sheila that she’d make a crazy call like that? And at this hour of the night, too; and to
me
of all people? What the hell did she think she was up to? Had she, at long last,
actually
gone mad?

The thought gave me a nasty little twinge of fear. Goodness knows, Sheila had complained often enough that her husband, Brian, was driving her round the bend; but lots of wives talk like that, as we all know. They seem positively to enjoy their status as most-miserable-wife-in-the-road, weeping on every available shoulder, and sitting at each other’s kitchen tables crying into cups of tea. It can give one quite a jolt to realise, suddenly, that all these tears and dramas may sometimes actually mean something.

By this time, I had reached Sheila’s house, and as I stood at the gate, hesitating, I became aware of something that was really rather strange. How come that all the windows of the house were in darkness? Surely a woman as scared as Sheila had claimed to be would have switched lights on everywhere for reassurance? And why wasn’t she already hurrying out to meet me—or at least calling to me from some upper window? Mad or sane, after that panicky phone call, she must surely have been watching anxiously for my arrival?

Or was the whole thing a trick? A deliberate, carefully thought-out trick for some purpose as yet undivulged? It would be false modesty on my part to pretend that it had not yet crossed my mind that Sheila Curtis might be in love with me. Mine was one of the shoulders she had not infrequently wept on when Brian was up to one or other of his various misdemeanours; and you know what women are. Might she not have cooked up this whole absurd flying saucer story simply and solely to lure me along to her place in the middle of the night, while her errant husband was away? To invite me in, and then, on the pretext of viewing the mysterious object from an upstairs back window, to get me into one of the bedrooms ..?

Okay; so she gets me there. But then what? How does she play the
next
scene—the scene where she has to explain laughingly—and hoping that I will laugh too—that the whole thing has been
a hoax? No wonder she’s getting cold feet about it, and is in no great hurry to come down and face me.

But wait. Perhaps I’ve got it all wrong; perhaps I’m into the wrong scenario altogether. Maybe it’s the well-known game of “Emperor’s New Clothes” we are going to play. Maybe we are going to sidle hand in hand into her commonplace back garden, grey under the dying moon, where she clutches me in simulated terror:

“Look, look!” she is going to whisper hoarsely, pointing at random across the sodden oblong of suburban lawn. “You see?—that huge thing by the hedge—sort of greenish-grey where the moonlight catches it? Gosh, it must be twelve feet across at least, wouldn’t you say? And that great sort of dome on top! Wait a second—your eyes aren’t accustomed to the light yet. It’s the queerest light I’ve ever seen, a sort of unearthly glow! Oh, and look now, John, just look—all those bluey lights flickering from the cabin windows! Those weren’t there before, I’ll swear! Oh, isn’t this exciting! Let’s get a bit closer.”

One step, two steps across the damp grass, and then, “Watch out!” she’ll shriek. “Get back! Get back! The tentacles! Run, John, run! My God, they’re reaching right across the lawn! Get back inside! We must lock all the doors and windows!”

Or something of the kind. I don’t know, actually, if Sheila watches this kind of programme, but they can’t be difficult to make up. And in any case, there’s another way she could play it, an easier way—much, much easier now I come to think of it. Yes, that’s the one she’ll choose:

“John, oh John dear, if
only
you’d arrived just two minutes earlier! It’s gone! It’s just absolutely gone! I saw it with my own eyes, it rose straight off the lawn in a vertical take-off (or wouldn’t Sheila know about vertical take-offs?) and then it suddenly changed direction, almost at a right angle, and whooshed off northwards (or southwards, or whatever) at fantastic speed, and was out of sight in seconds! Look, I’ll show you where the grass is all flattened out, and stones have been knocked from the rockery …”

And there, in the last of the goblin light, we’d lean down, heads together, pretending to examine these nonsensical traces of the thing.

Smiling to myself, curious to guess what innocent irregularities of turf or flowerbed she was going to conjure up as evidence, I slipped round the side of the house, down the narrow cement-paved passageway where the dustbins are kept, and pushed open the gate that led into the back garden.

*

The whole lawn was a huge raw crater of upturned earth and clay, nearly three yards in diameter, the displaced soil heaped up round the rim into a sort of miniature rampart about two feet high. The floor of the thing, as I stood staring incredulously down into it, was shallow, and rough as a ploughed field.

For long seconds I just stood there, rocked by a disbelief so intense that my thought processes were simply at a standstill. Whether such an upheaval could, or could not, have been produced by some extra-terrestrial object was simply beyond my power even to wonder.

But presently, in response to some inbuilt, robot-like impulse of curiosity, I found myself stumbling in a dazed sort of way round and round the rim, back and forth across the moonlit clods, my eyes darting hither and thither, sharp as a hawk’s seeking God-alone-knows-what. Some sort of clue to the mystery, I suppose; but since I had no idea what sort of thing I was looking for, everything—but
everything
—seemed to fill me with dread. A sliver of glass in the moonlight, an odd-shaped stone, the edge of a rusty tin—each and all of these things had the power to set my heart thudding, my brain spinning. At this rate it wouldn’t be long before I began indeed to see the little green men dancing before my weary eyes, hear the tinny little Martian voices in my singing ears …

*

It seemed like hours, though I daresay it was really only a few minutes, before the police came. Within minutes one lot of them had dug up poor Brian’s body from the floor of the crater, while
another lot had me in for questioning. Sheila must have phoned them as soon as she judged, from her vantage point at some darkened upper window, that my footprints must by now be just about everywhere in the wet clay. It must have been quite a laugh for her—me babbling on about a flying saucer, while all she had to do was to deny flatly the whole absurd rigmarole, and repeat her perfectly plausible story about having been roused from sleep by strange noises in the garden.

Clever. But not (I am hoping and trusting) quite clever enough. She had overlooked one thing: that it would have been quite beyond the power of any one man to have dug earthworks on this sort of scale in just the couple of hours that had elapsed between the time the Harpers left our house after playing Scrabble and the time the police found me silhouetted against the moon on top of Brian’s grave.

Of course, I realise that Sheila didn’t know about our Scrabble evening; but this was the sort of thing she should have checked up on, as well as on the time of the moon rising.

Because she, of all people, should have known what a job it was shifting all that clay; known all too well that it would have taken at least two people, working right through the dark from nightfall until the moon rose, to get the job finished; and one of them, at least, would have had to be pretty muscular.

I’ll be interested, when the thing gets into the papers, to learn which of all those shoulders that Sheila wept on turned out to be
that
strong.