A Lovely Day to Die (7 page)

And so on and so forth. Now, I may not be married myself, but all the same I am not a complete ignoramus. I can tell when a man is speaking the truth right from his heart, and I know for certain that Hugo that night, in those last minutes before his death (as it turned out) was so speaking.

*

Well, the police came, and went, and I told my story. They never knew about Lucy’s absence from her bed, nor about Hugo’s
phone-call, and they never will. As I said at the beginning, friendship comes high on my list of priorities. They kept on for weeks, though, looking for the blonde typist who was presumed to have wielded the heavy bronze ornament that was the instrument of his death. The theory was that there’d been a lovers’ quarrel about Hugo suddenly returning to the marital bed (which was, of course, where he was found), and the young woman had gone berserk with jealousy and rage. As I say, they looked for her, but they never found her.

Well, I ask you! A blonde typist! I could see, now, why it was that Lucy wouldn’t demean herself by knowing the girl’s address, off the Fulham Road or elsewhere.

*

It faded out of the news fairly soon, of course; just one more unsolved murder in the huge, teeming city; and the next I heard of Lucy, some weeks later, was that she was honeymooning in the Bahamas with a bronzed playboy a few years younger than herself, and very nearly as rich. He could hardly have been
quite
as rich, because Hugo had been a very wealthy man, and had left the whole of his estate to his “beloved wife”.

*

The Luck of the Devil? Sometimes, I find myself wondering about all those other strokes of luck over the years. Certainly, the Devil comes into it somewhere.

T
HE BEGINNING WAS
exactly like the beginning of a story in a woman’s magazine; so much so, that I actually
felt
tall, dark and handsome, I really did. Well, who wouldn’t, in the situation I found myself in that afternoon?

Let me quickly give you the synopsis, and you’ll see what I mean. Eligible young Honours Graduate (that’s me), all set to rent picturesque country cottage for the summer, finds himself forestalled by beautiful blonde complete with order-to-view from the local Estate Agent. The two meet (surprise! surprise!) under the honeysuckle entwining the trellissed porch; and at first (as is virtually obligatory in this sort of story) she is a bit sharp with him, not to say uppitty. But after a few minutes …

*

By now, I am sure, you are feeling that you could go on with the story yourself, blindfold, right through to the happy ending and the wedding-bells. But it so happens, dear reader, that you are wrong. For though, as I say, the whole thing started like a magazine story, the ending was quite, quite different: it was an ending which no woman’s magazine anywhere—none that I know of, anyway — would countenance for one moment.

Readers don’t want horrors, we are told; particularly horrific endings. They want to be assured that everything in the garden is lovely, that all clouds have silver linings, all that sort of thing. And why not, indeed? There is nothing unrealistic about it, lots of things
do
turn out all right in real life, plenty of people
are
quite happy: this, in fact, is something I have to keep reminding myself of when the horror of it all becomes more than I can bear. There
are
such things as happy endings, I keep telling myself; it didn’t
have
to end the way it did …

I must apologise. I suppose it is because I am a writer that I am
thinking of the thing in these terms—a would-be writer, perhaps I should say, one of those legions of young men who come down from University each year with a good degree in English and a burning ambition not—but absolutely
not
—to teach. And since teaching is the one and only career for which a degree in English is the slightest use, I did what many another foolish—and moderately fortunate—fellow has done before me: I drew out my modest savings—a nest-egg left by my fond grandparents—and resolved to give myself a year—just one year—to become a Writer. As is well-known, Writers (the ones with a capital W, that is) need to Get Away From It All; and so this was how it came about that, at the age of twenty-two, on a hot June afternoon, under the honeysuckle of Green End Cottage, I met my destiny.

And everything in the garden
was
lovely. The nasturtiums were out, and the tiger-lilies, and the stocks, all in a sweet-smelling, tangled profusion, growing like weeds, as they do in these
old-fashioned
cottage gardens. And the girl under the honeysuckle was like a flower herself, so straight and slim, her red-gold hair aflame in the midsummer sun. Only her expression was less than flower-like; that, and the arrogant, possessive way she swung the heavy iron door-key from the middle finger of her right hand.

“
I
was here first!” she addressed me belligerently—though in fact I had made no attempt, as yet, to question her prior rights; questioning the rights of beautiful girls is not something that I’ve ever gone in for much—“
I
was at the Estate Agent’s before nine this morning …
I
spoke to Miss Fry herself …”

I, I, I. Here was a girl who was going to get her own way. A girl with whom it would be pointless to argue.

But since when has anyone—particularly anyone with a
University
education—refrained from argument simply because he knows it to be pointless?

“
I
spoke to Miss Fry, too,” I lied glibly (actually Miss Fry was as yet only a name to me, from the Estate Agent’s lists); and I added, for good measure, “She told me I was just the sort of tenant she—”

“No!” The girl was outraged, tossing her blazing head like a flame-thrower: “That’s what she said to
me
!
She said
I
was just the sort of tenant she—”

“She didn’t!”

“She did!”

The playground idiocy of the dialogue struck us both
simultaneously;
together we burst out laughing; and within minutes we were inside the cottage, exploring.

*

I don’t know what Theresa (for this I learned was the girl’s name) was thinking as she looked around; but for myself, I could see at once that this was the ideal setting for an aspiring writer. You know: the nitty-gritty, and all that, starting with a stone-flagged kitchen where nothing worked except, intermittently, and with terrible gurglings, a single cold-water tap. On the other side of the passageway was what I suppose you would call a “parlour”—a cavern of green darkness from vegetation overgrowing the
cobwebby
window and blotting out the midsummer sun.
Upstairs
—up, that is, a narrow flight of creaking wooden steps—there was a long, low attic bedroom, with one tiny grimy window and a sloping ceiling. For anyone planning to starve in a garret, this was
the
garret par excellence: only ten minutes away from the village pub, and everything inches thick in dust—no one had done any cleaning here in years, and so why should
I
be expected to start?

All this was wasted on a woman: a woman’s first instinct would be to get at the place with a bucket and broom.

I began trying to explain this to Theresa; but when I saw that all too familiar Women’s Lib look coming over her face, I hastily changed my tactics. There were other forms of dissuasion.

“You do know, don’t you,” I said (and I’ll swear that at that moment I honestly had no idea that I was telling anything more than a light-hearted lie) “You do know, don’t you, that this place is supposed to be haunted?”

Looking back, I can’t think what reaction I expected to evoke by this bit of invention. I can hardly have expected a girl like Theresa to go all pale and trembly at the idea, and to say that in that case
nothing would induce her to rent the cottage, I could have it all for my own; but all the same I was a bit deflated when she merely laughed.

“Well, of course I know!” she retorted. “That’s why I’m so anxious to live in it for a bit. I’m doing a thesis, you see, on Rural Superstitions, and so …”

And so the afternoon shadows were reaching far across the tangled, overgrown garden, and the scent of the flowers was almost gone, by the time she’d finished telling me about her thesis, and her Sociology degree, and about her boy-friend who might, or who on the other hand might not, be coming to join her in the cottage, sooner, or maybe later.

And after that it was my turn. I told her about my ambitions, and about the awfulness of having an English degree and already being twenty-two: but when it came to the question of how I could afford to get away from it all like this, I found I just couldn’t bring myself to tell her about my grandfather’s legacy. Well, you know how my generation feels about inherited wealth; I was just too ashamed. And so I told her instead (improvising on the spur of the moment, as one has to on these occasions) that I had already written one novel, and that my publishers were so confident that it was going to be a best-seller that they’d given me this huge advance …

Well, of course, if I’d understood Theresa then as I came to understand her later, I would never have dreamed of telling her this pack of lies; but at the time she was simply an attractive stranger whom I was setting out to impress. I had no idea, then, that our relationship was going to develop as it did—nor, indeed, that we were ever going to see each other again after that one afternoon.

But you know how it is: one thing leads to another, and by the end of that long midsummer day, I had not only totally relinquished my own (admittedly tenuous) claim to the cottage, but had offered to help her move in; which, two days later, she did.

By this time, I couldn’t see a reason in the world why I shouldn’t move in with her, cobwebby attic bedroom and all. But what about the boy-friend, Colin, she said? and, Well what about him? I replied. I mean, he wasn’t here, was he? And who’d helped her move in,
anyway, him or me? You don’t have to be nasty about him, she’d retorted, he’s probably coming down this very weekend … on the Friday evening very likely, or possibly not till Saturday …

And so, in the end, rather than waste in argument the sunshine and the scent of the cow-parsley, and the way it felt to be walking hand-in-hand with her through the long summer grass—rather than put all these present delights at risk, I shrugged, and agreed to keep my room at the pub for the time being. I promised, too, to keep away from the cottage over the weekend. She insisted on this.

It was a set-back, but I wasn’t unduly bothered. There was, after all, something rather special about falling in love slowly like this. We’d got the whole summer ahead of us, and with this Colin character only around for odd weekends, Time was clearly on my side.

Or so I thought …

*

And that, I suppose, was the end, really, of the woman’s magazine part of the story, though I did not realise it at the time. On the contrary, when I arrived at the cottage on Monday morning and learned that Colin hadn’t turned up after all, I was jubilant. I remember standing there under the honeysuckle, breathing in the news of Theresa’s disappointment as if it was yet another of the sweet scents of summer, mingling with the scent of the stocks and of the Sweet Williams. I felt, in that moment, as if the whole golden summer was on my side, leaning up against me like a great, warm, purring cat, edging me towards some new and incomparable happiness.

Perhaps even then, even in that very moment of joy and triumph, I should have realised that something was amiss. I can only say that I didn’t. I simply felt an immense and uncomplicated delight that my rival seemed to have been so easily and painlessly eliminated, and it never even occurred to me to ask Theresa what had gone wrong. Still less did it occur to me to condole with her on her disappointment, or to wonder why, in that first second when she opened the door to me, something had flashed into her eyes that looked for a moment like fear …

Anyway, it was all over in a moment; and there was no doubt at all that, once she had taken in who it was, she was pleased to see me. Smiling, she took my hand and led me into the cool sunless kitchen at the back of the cottage, and began talking, almost at once, about her thesis. It was going well, she said, filling the old iron kettle and preparing to make coffee; she felt that she was really getting somewhere … and since this was precisely where my own writing currently wasn’t getting, I had to suppress a sharp and painful stab of envy.

But suppress it I did. For one thing, I still didn’t want Theresa to know that I was something less than the established and successful writer I’d pretended to be; and for another, I wanted to keep her talking, in that husky, eager voice, and to watch her as she moved about the kitchen, her bright hair now red, now gold among the changing shadows.

Right from the start, the subject of Theresa’s thesis had struck me as slightly bizarre—though not outstandingly so, I suppose, sociology being the sort of subject it is; and certainly, the earnestness with which she applied herself to it, and to the collecting of the necessary data, seemed to me to be touching rather than macabre. Her work—if such it may be called—seemed to consist mainly of wandering around the village in the pleasant June weather asking old gaffers what they’d heard from their grandfathers about the “haunted” cottage; getting the vicar to show her some bones, or something, out of the crypt; and then writing it all up in her round, rather childish handwriting and filing it under headings like “Bones, Hallowed and Unhallowed”—“Vampires, Miscellaneous”—and so forth.

To me, during the long summer days, it all seemed perfectly harmless, and rather sweet. All these legends she was managing to unearth about the cottage—bricked-up brides, gibbering
skeletons,
all that sort of thing—roused in me nothing more than a sort of awed wonderment that she should actually be getting
paid
for
it. I even began to wonder whether I shouldn’t have gone in for
post-graduate
work myself ..?

But I must be fair. It wasn’t
all
headless monks and unhallowed
corpses mooching around the centuries like bored teenagers on a Sunday afternoon; here and there a dollop of real, actual history would raise its uneasy head.

“In the reign of Henry IV,” I remember her reading out excitedly one golden noontime, with the bees buzzing in and out among the marigolds and the lupins, “In the reign of Henry IV, it was decreed that the juries, after they had been sworn, should not see nor take cognizance of any other evidence than that which had already been laid before the open court …”

What with the bees, and the sunshine, and the music of her eager, slightly breathless voice only inches from my ear, it is not to be wondered at that I was not applying any very deep critical attention to the vagaries of fourteenth-century judicial practice; but to the story to which all this proved to be a preamble, I did listen. It concerned an unhappy damsel whose lover was on trial for a murder he hadn’t committed—
couldn’t
have committed, for he had been in her arms throughout the fateful night—so that now it was she, and she alone of all the world, who had in her possession the evidence which would have saved him. Torn
between
the maidenly modesty appropriate to those times, and fear for her lover’s life, she dillied and dallied despairingly, wrestling with her mediæval conscience, praying to her
mediæval
God, and all the time hoping against hope that the poor fellow might somehow get let off without her intervention. Only when it came to the very last day before the verdict was to be given did she summon up the courage to reveal her shameful secret.

But by this time it was too late. The jury, to their despair and fury (for the accused man was a merry fellow, and well-liked in the village) were not permitted to “take cognizance” of this belated though conclusive bit of evidence, and were compelled, knowing that he was innocent, to declare the young man guilty.