Blue Murder (4 page)

“I must say this is the first time I've felt any sympathy for ‘That Man',” remarked Mrs. Hardstaffe, “but if all Jews are like her, I don't wonder he cleared them out of the country, do you?”

“Oh, I shouldn't be too hard on her,” replied Smith. “She'll probably make a good maid in time. They've been through some terrible times, these refugees. I don't doubt that she's seen and heard things that no woman ought to do, and it may have unbalanced her a bit. We've most of us been through it, during the bad blitzes in the towns, and it makes one more sympathetic to those poor creatures who've had to face worse than that. It's bad enough to lose your home and possessions, but it's a great deal worse to have to pack your bag and flee for your life across Europe to a strange country where you don't understand their language or customs. Personally, I don't know how I should stand up to it: it must be much worse for a woman.”

“You put it so well, Mr. Smith,” smiled Mrs. Hardstaffe. “I'm sure I don't know what I should do if I were a healthy young girl in that position. But, of course, I do know what would happen to me as I am. My health would never stand it, and I should simply collapse.”

“Oh, you're both Defeatists,” said Leda. “I don't know what I should do, if it comes to that, but I'm quite sure I should make a better show of it than that wretched girl. What do you say, Daddy?”

“Aren't we going to have any sweet tonight?” growled the schoolmaster, as he tossed the bones off his plate to the dogs which had swarmed into the room with them, and then put his plate down on the floor for them to lick.

They finished the meal without further incident, then Smith rose to open the door for the ladies, while Hardstaffe, who had remained seated, busied himself with the decanter of port which Leda had placed in front of him.

Smith joined him with some reluctance, and the schoolmaster, apparently sensing that he had made a bad impression on the guest, said, in his most ingratiating manner,

“You must forgive me if I'm not at my best to-day. I've been worried lately over a personal matter, and to-day has been particularly upsetting. Things go wrong at school sometimes, and my wife is, of course, always an anxiety to me. I'm afraid I get short-tempered very often nowadays, but you mustn't take any notice of that. Leda would never forgive me if I frightened you away.”

Under the mellifluous influence of his good Cockburn, Hardstaffe grew more jovial, and Smith noticed that his eyes looked more than ever “like fresh-blown thrush eggs on a thread, Faint-blue and loosely floating in his head.”

They exchanged the jokes with which men are accustomed to entertain each other in the absence of their womenfolk, and decided, each for himself, that the other was not such a bad fellow after all.

When they got up to join the ladies, Hardstaffe playfully patted Smith's shoulder.

“I'm glad you've come,” he said. “You'll be company for Leda.”

“But you haven't come here to be company for Leda,” Smith reminded himself, a few weeks later. “You're supposed to be writing a book, blazing a new trail, striking out in a fresh line. You've no excuse: there's no blitz here.”

No, there was no blitz in this peaceful corner of Northshire, although the inhabitants of Nether Naughton took their training as Wardens, Home Guards, A.F.S., and W.V.S. as seriously as if they expected invasion suddenly to be their lot, with squadrons of dive-bombers zooming down with every intention of exterminating the little village which sprawled so untidily over the very least of the Northdown Hills. Here was no ululating siren to disturb his work and shorten his temper; and only once had Smith heard the syncopated throbbing of a plane overhead at night, which, for all he knew, might have been British, though the villagers found it more exciting to believe that it was not.

Every night, he went to bed vowing that tomorrow he would begin to write his new book. Every morning, when he got out of bed to obey the call of a stuttering robin, drew back the patterned curtains, and raised the black linen blind to gaze across the misty-treed garden to the distant mountains and lake, he vowed that to-day he was going to begin it. Yet every day passed with his vow un-fulfilled, chiefly owing to his pursuit of Leda. For when she was so kind and jolly, how could he fail to offer to drive her to the nearest market town to do her shopping, to help her to exercise the dogs, or to give her a game of golf?

He sighed.

If only he could go on writing the kind of book he was accustomed to, it would be no trouble at all, he thought. He could hit off one of those almost without thinking about it. For many years now, he had been writing novels of weak adventure, sugared with ladylike romance, and for many years, they had supplied quite a comfortable income for a bachelor like himself, who had a simple taste for food and drink, and none whatever for women. Now, however, the sales of his books had dropped so low that he had had to consider turning his pen to a more modern style of fiction, for man cannot live by cheap editions alone.

“This is the Age of Youth,” his literary agent had said, “and you must write for the young people of to-day if you want your books to become popular. Now you, Mr. Smith, if you'll forgive my saying so, never did write for young people even when you were young yourself, and when the last old lady who collects your books dies—and she can't be very far off it now—no one will read your books at all, let alone buy them.”

“But what other kind of novel can I attempt?” asked Smith, running troubled fingers through his thinning hair.

The agent regarded him somewhat pityingly.

“Well,” he said slowly, “unless you're related to a Personage, or have done something remarkable, such as travelling to Sardinia on a sardine, the only thing is to turn to murder. In other words, detective fiction.”

“I don't like the idea at all,” frowned Smith. “What about historical romance? I wrote a novel on those lines once. It was about the Queen of Sheba. Do you remember it?”

“Yes,” replied the agent, suppressing a shudder.

In fact, he had never been able to forget it. It had lain in his office for years, until, in response to repeated inquiries from Smith, he had at length returned it with a softened paraphrase of his reader's very outspoken comments.

“That book illustrates what, to me, is the chief weakness of your books, Mr. Smith,” he went on. “You have obviously never met a woman of that type—gold-diggers, I think they call them nowadays—and yet you go and write about one.”

“I daresay you haven't met one, either,” retorted Smith, who still thought it a good book.

“Perhaps not,” replied the agent, with an air which seemed to convey the impression that, if he had done so, he would at least have known how to deal with her. “What I'm trying to say is that you must get into the atmosphere of your books more, if you want to become a successful author. And, mind you,” he added, using in full the charm of manner which had gone far towards making him a successful literary agent, “there's no reason why you shouldn't make a name for yourself. No one can deny your ability to write.”

“But—murder!” exclaimed Smith, now fully placated. “How can I possibly get into the atmosphere of crime? I know nothing about murder. I've never met a murderer.”

“Well, go and meet one,” was the agent's reply, as he rose to his feet and proffered his hand in the most genial manner to put an end to an interview which had already taken up too much of his valuable time. “And if you can't meet one, go and commit a murder yourself, because if you can't strike out in a new line, you might as well go sheep-farming in Australia. Good-bye.”

And, since, at fifty, a man cannot summon up enough enthusiasm to go sheep-farming anywhere, Arnold Smith had decided, with many misgivings, to become a writer of crime stories.

That had been nearly two years ago, and he had spent the time in inventing excuses to account for the undisturbed pile of blank manuscript paper on his desk. At first, it had been the certainty of the blitz; then the uncertainty of it. Finally, his flat which had for so long remained intact, fell to the bomb of a lone raider, and he, who had been one of the faithful, at last turned his back on the dear, scarred face of London.

And now he had no excuse. And still he could not write.

And so it might have continued, had not Leda taken a hand in the matter, as, sooner or later, she took a hand in the affairs of every man, woman, and child in the village.

One evening, as she was on her way home from organising a committee to form a dance in aid of the local Spitfire Fund, she came upon him, glooming along the road.

“What's wrong, Arnold?” she asked, in her most cheerful voice. “Lost a bawbee and found saxpence—or have I got it the wrong way round?”

“Oh, nothing wrong,” he assured her.

“I see. Famous author in the throes, eh?”

He matched his step to hers, and seemed slightly embarrassed by her words.

He rarely mentioned his books to anyone. In his experience, authors hardly ever did, possibly because the fact that they could write down their thoughts more easily than they could speak them, had first made them become authors.

Rather diffidently, he explained his difficulty to Leda.

“I see,” she said, giving serious, and therefore, flattering consideration to his words. “But why don't you set the scene here? New type of book, new surroundings: it's too much of a coincidence to be ignored. Give us a murder in the village! We should all be thrilled to death. I've read somewhere that the plot of a book should grow out of the characters, so what about Mother, to begin with? I've often said she ought to be put into a book, though I daresay you'd have to tone her down a bit, for I'm sure none of your readers would ever believe that anyone so queer could exist in real life. Yes, I do think that if you murdered Mother, it would be a great success!”

At first they laughed, but suddenly Smith exclaimed, “By Jove, yes! I like the idea, Leda. I really think I could work something out on those lines. I should have to look around for a few more characters, you know. And, of course, I shall have to have a love affair.”

“That ought to be easy,” Leda replied archly.

“How long is this evacuee fellow going to stay here, Leda?” her father asked her one morning, as the two of them were taking the dogs for their daily rabbiting expedition across the fields before breakfast.

“Why?” asked Leda.

“Why? Well, for one thing, I consider that in the country's present emergency, every able-bodied man ought to be doing his bit in his own locality. This evacuation is only intended for women and children—his being here is like his taking a woman's place in the life-boat when the ship's sinking. He's not even volunteered for the Home Guard. A bit of a coward, if you ask me, to say nothing of being a bomb-bore. What are a few bombs to any man worth his salt? Now, in the last war...”

“You sound very nautical this morning,” returned Leda. “I seem to remember that you were not in the last war. Correct me if I'm wrong.”

“Don't you take that tone of voice to me!” shouted Hardstaffe, then, taking her arm, he said more softly, “I'm sorry, Leda. I've got a touch of liver this morning. The fact is, the fellow's beginning to get on my nerves. He was two minutes late for breakfast yesterday, and you know how that upsets me. And he was having a bath in the afternoon and I couldn't get into the bathroom to wash. Whoever heard of a healthy man bathing at four o'clock? Besides, he was singing ‘Waltzing with Matilda', or some such nonsense, and you know how I hate people who sing in their bath!”

“Well, he does sing in tune,” was Leda's pointed reply. “I rather like it myself. He's what you'd call ‘a pleasant baritone'. Anyhow, we can't very well turn him out for a reason like that.”

“No. But you could invent a plausible excuse for asking him to cut his visit short. Tell him that you find the catering too difficult. I'm sure he'll believe it, after that skinny bit of meat you provided for dinner last night. And no savoury either.”

“You had cold meat for lunch,” retorted Leda. “You can't expect to have meat twice a day, every day, and we're all sick of rabbit. As for savoury, we can't get enough cheese or Tomatoes, or sardines. You might try to realise that there's a war on.”

“Never mind that. The long and short of it is that I don't like having a stranger in the house, and if you don't tell him to go, I shall.”

“Really!” exclaimed Leda. “The explaining I have to do to you and Mother about wartime conditions would fill a book. The point about Arnold is that he's a decent, presentable sort of man who isn't much trouble in the house, even if he does sing in his bath. Wouldn't you rather have him than two of your evacuee schoolboys from Liverpool?”

“Preposterous! As headmaster...”

“As headmaster you'd certainly have to take the first two of the next batch we're expecting,” interrupted Leda. “The whole village looked down its nose when you didn't set them an example by having two of the first lot, and they'd never let you get away with it again. Then you'd have hobnail boots and swearing and free fights all over the house, and the servants would give notice, and Mother will take to her bed, prostrate with shock. You might as well make up your mind that we shall have to have someone billeted on us. It might even be one of the teachers prying into all our private affairs. And Arnold Smith pays.”

“Of course, if you've made up your mind...” said Hardstaffe, and the subject was dropped.

So it was that this particular morning opened badly for the schoolmaster.

He was a man who expected always to be agreed with, and when anyone got the better of him in argument, as Leda frequently did, he was left with a sense of grievance which sometimes persisted for several days.