Death of a Huntsman (4 page)

He started to feel uneasy again at that remark and said something about he would do his best and did it include his wife, the invitation?

‘Nothing was said about Mrs Barnfield.'

A few minutes later, at the crest of the hill, he was holding her foot in the stirrup while she mounted the pony. There was really no need for that piece of help of his, since she could almost have mounted the animal directly from the ground, but she seemed touched by it and turned and gave him, without a word, a short thankful smile.

This touched him too more than words could possibly have done and he mounted his horse in silence. After that they rode, also in silence, for two hundred yards along the hill-top to where the path forked and she said:

‘This is my way back. Thank you for everything. Don't forget Tuesday. I'll get it in the neck if you do.'

This again was beyond him and he said simply, raising his cap:

‘I'll do what I can. Goodbye.'

Then, turning to ride away, she gave him an odd miserable little smile and once again he found himself appalled by the ridiculous sight of her sitting on the pony. Somehow the picture was not only fatuous. It struck him as being infinitely lonely too.

‘And no more crying now,' he said. ‘No more of that.'

She turned, rested one hand on the rump of the pony and stared, not at him but completely and far past him, with empty eyes.

‘If you listen carefully,' she said, ‘you'll probably hear me howling across the hill in the night-time.'

It was past half past seven and already dark, the following Tuesday evening, when he drove up to the old keeper's cottage on the opposite side of the hill. There were lights in the narrow mullioned windows of the little house but, much to his surprise, no other cars.

Edna Whittington herself came to the door to answer his ring, holding in her left hand a half-empty glass and a cigarette in a bright yellow amber holder.

‘Sweet of you, Henry. Absolutely and typically sweet.'

As she leaned forward so that he could kiss her first on one cheek and then the other he caught an overpowering fragrance, sickly in the night air. He did not fail to notice too how she called him Henry.

‘But come in, Henry, come in, come in, you sweet man. Let's look at you.'

He went in and, inside, discovered that the house was empty.

‘I'm sorry I'm so late,' he said.

With magenta-nailed fingers she took his black homburg hat and umbrella and laid them on a window sill. ‘The train lost time.' He looked round the room to make perfectly sure, for a second time, about its emptiness. ‘Has everybody gone?'

‘Everybody gone?'

‘I thought it was a party.'

‘Party?' she said. ‘Whoever said it was a party?'

‘Valerie.'

‘Oh! my little girl,' she said. ‘That little girl of mine. My silly little girl.'

He started to say that he thought the girl had been pretty emphatic about the party but Edna Whittington laughed, cutting him short, and said:

‘She never gets it right, Henry. Never gets anything right, the silly child, just never gets it right.'

‘Isn't she here either?'

‘Out to a little birthday party,' she said. ‘Just a teeny-weeny affair.'

She poured him a glass of sherry. Her voice was husky. It was nearly twenty-five years since he had seen her before and he remembered, in time, that the voice had always been husky.

‘Well, cheers, Henry,' she said. ‘Resounding numbers of cheers. Lots of luck.'

She raised her glass, looking at him with chilled, squinting, remarkably white-blue eyes. Her hair was
bluish too and there were shadows of blue, almost violet, in the powder on her face. Her chest, flattish, was steely and bare, except for a double row of pearls, to the beginnings of the creased pouches of her breasts, and her face had a strange bony prettiness except in the mouth, which twisted upward at one side.

‘Come and sit here on the sofa and tell me all about yourself. Tell me about life. Here, dear man—not there. Just the old Henry—afraid something will bite you.'

He did not think, he said, as he sat beside her on the settee, that he had anything very much of himself to tell; or of life for that matter.

‘Well, I have,' she said. ‘Here we've been in the neighbourhood six months and not a bleat from you.'

‘I honestly didn't know you were here.'

‘Then you honestly should have done. It was in all the papers. I mean about the colonel. Didn't you read about that?'

He had to confess, with growing wretchedness, that he hadn't even read in the papers about the colonel, who had dropped down of thrombosis a year before. Nevertheless he was, he said, very sorry. It was a sad thing, that.

‘He'd got awfully fat,' she said. ‘And of course marrying late and so on. He was a man of forty-five before Valerie was born.'

He knew that it was not only the colonel but she too who had married very late. He sat thinking of this, sipping his sherry, watching a meagre fire of birch logs smouldering in the round black grate, and she said:

‘Yes, I call it pretty stodgy, Henry. Two miles away and not a single lamb's peep out of you. The trouble is you live in a stew-pot.'

‘Now here, I say——'

‘Well, don't you? Up to town with
The Times
in the morning. Down from town with
The Standard
in the evening. If that isn't stew-potism tell me what is. Doesn't anything else go on in these parts?'

‘Oh! blow it,' he said, ‘It isn't bad as that.'

‘Isn't it?' she said. ‘I think it's absolutely fungoid.'

He suddenly felt very slightly incensed at this and went on to explain, as calmly as he could, how you sometimes held parties, had people to dinner, went in spring to the point-to-points and, damn it, in winter, hunted quite a lot. He didn't think you could call that stew-potism, could you?

‘There's the hunt-ball in a month's time too,' he reminded her finally. ‘You can chalk that up for a whale of a time.'

‘I would,' she said, ‘if anybody had invited me.'

Before he realized what he was saying, he said:

‘I'll invite you. Both of you. Delighted.'

‘Oh! the child could never come.'

‘No?'

He could not think why on earth the girl could never come.

‘She's a mere infant, Henry. Hardly out of the shell. She never does these things. Besides, I'd never let her.'

‘Why?'

‘Oh! Henry, she isn't fledged. She's only half-grown.
She isn't fit for that sort of thing. You know what these hunt affairs are too. Wolf-packs. Those gangs are not hunts for nothing.'

In his direct, harmless, simple way, the way in which, as everybody always said, there was never any malice, he said:

‘But you'd come, wouldn't you?'

‘Like a lamplighter, Henry. Absolutely adore to.'

He began to murmur something in polite satisfaction about this when she added:

‘That's if Katey wouldn't explode.'

‘I don't think Katey would mind.'

That, he always thought, was one nice thing about Katey. She was a good sport, Katey: never jealous in that way.

‘And how,' she said, ‘is Katey?'

He shrugged his shoulders: as if there were nothing of very great moment to tell of Katey.

‘Tell me about her, Henry,' she said. ‘You can tell me.'

There was nothing, he thought, that he possibly wanted to tell.

‘I'm sorry,' she said, ‘have I boobed? I simply thought—well, people talk and you know how it is. Somehow I got the impresh—well, you know the impresh one gets—that you and Katey weren't pulling all that steamingly well in harness.'

He was roused by the increasing absurdity of her language. She was like a piece of ice-cake that one finds in a silvered box, in a forgotten drawer, among silver leaves, thirty years after the voices at the wedding have
faded away. The brittle archaisms of the language were like the hard tarnished silver balls left on the cake. They had seemed so magnificently bright in his youth but now—Good God, had he and Edna and the rest of them really talked like that? If it hadn't been for that absurd, husky clipping voice of hers he would never have believed they had.

As if her thoughts were running in the same direction she said:

‘We had some great times, Henry. You and I and Vicky Burton and Freddie Anstruther and Peggy Forbes and Carol Chalmers and Floaty Dean—he was a bright moonbeam, Floaty—do you ever hear anything of any of the crowd?'

‘I'm afraid I've lost touch with all of them.'

‘Well, not all, Henry. Don't say that. You haven't lost touch with me.'

Here, as so often in the conversation, she smiled, played with the pearls above the thin steely bosom or extended, to its full length, the arm holding the dying cigarette in its yellow holder.

‘Do you remember a day on the river at Pangbourne?'

He pretended not to remember it while, in reality, remembering it very well. That day she had worn her pale yellow hair in a bob and a hat like a round pink saucepan. Her white dress had been short and waistless, revealing round and pretty knees below the skirt.

There was no doubt in his mind that she too had been very pretty and she said:

‘But you remember coming home, through the woods?
You wanted to go with Carol but I wanted you to come with me. All the rhododendrons were out, big white and pale pink ones so that you could see them in the dark, and I made an honest man of you.'

She laughed distastefully.

‘You
surely
don't forget, Henry, do you?' she said. ‘After all, it was the first time with you and me, even if it wasn't the last, and you know how——'

‘Look, Edna, we were all a bit crazy at that time and I don't think we have to drag it all——'

He was relieved to hear the sound of car-brakes in the road outside. Then he heard a car door slam and the sound of feet running up the path outside.

A moment later Valerie Whittington came in. She was wearing a blue gabardine school mackintosh and a plain grey felt hat and white ankle socks above her plain flat shoes. The mackintosh was too long for her by several inches and when she started to take it off he saw that underneath it she was wearing a plain dark blue dress that was full and bushy in the skirt. It too was too long for her.

‘Well, there you are at last, child. Say good-evening to Mr Barnfield before you go up. I know you know him because he was kind enough to let you use the path.'

‘Good-evening, Mr Barnfield.'

He said good-evening too and knew, as he did so, that she had the greatest difficulty in looking at him. He tried in vain to catch the big, brown, too-circular eyes.

‘Well, up you go now, child. It's late. It's past your time. Say good-night to Mr Barnfield.'

‘Good-night, Mr Barnfield.'

He nodded. He thought she made a sort of timid, half-urgent effort to protest but she turned away too quickly, leaving him unsure. The last visible sign of what she might be thinking was a shudder of her lower lip, hard and quite convulsive, just before she turned, opened the door and went out without a word.

‘I must go too,' he said.

‘Oh! not yet, Henry. Have another sherry——'

‘No, no,' he said. ‘Really, no, no. Katey will have dinner——'

‘Give her a ping on the blower and say you'll be another half hour. We've hardly exchanged the sliver of a word——'

‘No, honestly, Edna,' he said. ‘Honestly I must go.'

She came with him, at last, to the door. In the light from the door she stood for a moment gauntly, thinly framed, a piece of silver cardboard, and he thought again of the wedding cake. Then she half closed the door behind her. The October air was mild and windless but as she stretched out long fleshless arms to say goodbye he said hastily:

‘Don't come out. Don't get cold. I'm perfectly capable——'

‘Good-night, Henry,' she said. ‘Sweet of you to come. And that's a date, then, isn't it?—the ball?'

‘That's if you'd care——'

‘Oh! Henry.' She laughed huskily. ‘Care?'

She offered her face to be kissed. He made as if to inflict on it, somewhere between cheek and ear, a swift
dab of farewell. The next moment he felt her thin fingers grasp him about the elbows. Then they moved up to his shoulders and suddenly she was offering her mouth instead.

‘You can do better than that, Henry, can't you?' she said. She laughed with what he supposed she thought was tenderness. Her voice crackled on its rising note with a brittle snap. ‘I know you can. From what I remember of the rhododendrons. And not only the rhododendrons.'

‘Look, Edna, I've already told you. That's all over long since,' he said, and escaped, leaving her mouth in air.

He was surprised, the following Sunday morning, to see no sign of the yellow sweater among the brushwood jumps in the meadows.

‘Your girl-friend has passed you up,' Katey said. ‘She hasn't been near all week, so Lewis says.'

After breakfast he rode out to the meadow and jumped for half an hour in cool exhilarating air, across grass still white-wet from frost. In the hedgerows leaves of maple and hornbeam were growing every day more and more like clear light candle-flame and up on the hill the beeches were burning deeper and deeper, fox-fiery beyond the pines, against ice-blue autumn sky.

The hill was irresistible and finally he rode up, slowly, in bright sunshine, about eleven o'clock, through acres of dying bracken and birches that were shedding, in pure
silence, after the night frost, the gentlest yellow fall of leaves.

One or two people were walking on the crest of the hill but no one except himself was riding and he was half in mind to turn the horse, ride down the opposite hillside as far as
The Black Boy
and treat himself to a whisky there at twelve o'clock, when he suddenly saw walking across the bracken a tall figure in a black skirt and a puce-pink blouse.