Ladies From Hell (7 page)

Most things about life are arbitrary, its ending most of all. It doesn’t come at midnight as a rule, with thunder crashing and ravens perched on chimney tops; it’s much more likely to happen on a still, bright summer afternoon.

Am had challenged me to a game of tennis. She presented herself at the Barn in a ravishing little dress she’d designed; square-necked like a Celtic tunic and with bands of embroidery at neck and hem, chain-link patterns of owls, snails and violets. It had already given me an idea for a picture. I would call it simply, ‘Amaryllis at the Nets’. It would be very detailed and formal and cool, like the cricket series; just Am holding a racquet, and the big green hills all round. The embroidery was going to be hell though.

Everybody was outside, except George. I happened to glance through the office door as I passed, just as he looked up from a sheaf of forms. I waved my racquet at him but he didn’t respond, just favoured us both with a long and thoughtful stare.

Am won the toss and soon had me dashing forward and
back along the service line, short fat hairy legs twinkling. I got tired of it after a time and belted one. She belted it back; I retaliated, and she dropped a return carefully on the top of the net. It hung there apologetically for a moment before falling off my side and dying. Well, two can play the net game. I moved in; something passed my ear making a noise like a partridge, and that was the end of the first set. Halfway through the second there was a hefty rolling bang from somewhere close, followed by a tinkling.

I stopped playing. So did Am. She stood holding the racquet, eyes huge. For a moment she was the spitting image of the Nymph. She said, “What was that?” She must have known anyway, she’s not daft.

I looked round. You can see the Barn from the courts, it isn’t all that far away. One of the panes in the mansard had grown a starshaped hole that certainly hadn’t been there before. “I don’t know, love,” I said. “You stay here, I’ll go and see.”

On the way I broke into a trot; but James was ahead of me. He backed out through the side door as I reached it, shaking his head. He said, “Very nasty, Mr. Blakeney,
very
nasty,” and hurried away.

I went in. The first thing I saw was a pair of feet in stylish brogues sticking out behind the sofa. One of them even had a price tag under the instep, in best Deighton tradition; only would you believe seventy Anglos? I explored further. I’d always wondered where Overseers really kept their brains; you have my word for it, they’re all between the ears. Leastways till they try to ingest a nine mil Parabellum. As things were, some of them had even made it as far as the mansard. The only thing he’d missed was the gold tooth; they certainly keep their sense of values to the last. Something was dripping somewhere with a faint, persistent
plink;
and Coventina hung on her easel, staring at the mess with her great grey eyes.

Things were starting to stir. Am was running across from the courts and I saw Lady A bearing down rapidly from the Big House. I made a chess move that cut them both off. “It’s terrible,” said Her Ladyship. “Quite, quite terrible. I’ve sent for the police.”

That wrapped up the rest of the day of course.
We were questioned, probed, threatened, lie-detected, the lot; but we were all clean. Nobody had been near, and we could prove it. Pete Merriman was the only one who lost his cool. He wanted to holograph the incident, but they wouldn’t let him in.

When the sheeted stretcher was finally carted away nobody wanted to go into the Barn anyway. By that time it was evening. The Pre-Raphs retired to the tent village they’d built, lit their quiet brown lamps across the grass; and the Overseers went up to the House. It was queer to watch them go; in a little phalanx, muttering to each other, looking round them at the darkening sky. As if what had killed him was something they could see.

James came down in the dusk, with a couple of buckets. I think he really enjoys that sort of thing. I was glad I couldn’t see what I was doing too clearly; the mops just got a little darker, that was all. I got the steps and cleaned up there as well. Then we put the lights on. James went round the bits we’d missed, and I got some whisky. He lit a fag and offered one to me. I took it. I said, “All right, ante up.”

He produced a letter from his inside pocket. It was addressed to the Committee for Divisive Activities. “I
did
take the liberty, Mr. Blakeney,” he said. “After all, one can’t be too careful. By the way, the … er … weapon …”

“Still in his hand,” I said. “No dabs on it, except his own.” We’re not all daft, in t’Midlands.

I took the letter. I said, “Fifty?” and he smirked. They wouldn’t have understood it anyway; but like he said, it’s always best to be safe.

After he’d gone I wandered through to the lounge. I was wondering why I wasn’t feeling much remorse. After all, God must love Civil Servants too; He made so many of the sods.

I looked up at the notches round the balloon frames. Just a gross to date, and six of them were mine. Some of the rest had met with pretty suspicious Nasties, but mine had all been classic. The first one hung himself, number two jumped in the brook; the last one, for God’s sake, had used one of those horrid little wavy tourist daggers. You just set up the situation, then suggested the means. It had
taken me a while to get the measure of the Adonis syndrome though. I hadn’t thought it would work at first; but continual dripping, as they say, wears away practically anything. We couldn’t operate on them at all of course without the strain their own System creates; but that’s their lookout, not ours. We didn’t start the war.

I rubbed my face. In the morning I’d carve another notch. In a way it would be for somebody else as well as me.

I got another drink and went back to the Barn. I stood and looked at Coventina. “You can’t get near me,” she was saying. “Here I am, bare as a button and tight as a drum, and you can’t get near …” Neither could I, neither could anybody; but he hadn’t thought of that. Adonis has no
einfühlung
. He has the lot, but still wants more; even the unattainable. He’s a Jealous man; and they don’t call it a Deadly Sin for nothing.

There was a calling outside, low and sweet. I said, “All right, Am. I’m coming.” I knew she’d take my hand, on the way down to the tents. And she’d probably call me Richard.

I turned back at the door. Coventina was smiling. Her expression hadn’t altered of course, it was just in her eyes. She said, “You can finish me now.”

T
HERE WAS A
big streak of lightning, bright as silver. Then the growly thing in the sky came closer very quickly,
and barked once like a dog on the roof of the shack. The Rural heard the scutter of its claws; at this point she woke up.

She had been dreaming; though it is by no means certain that the concept was known to her. She was very afraid. She lay still, eyes tightly closed, feeling the claws prick the air all round about; but the bark did not come again.

She opened her eyes, cautiously. Morning light was seeping through the one window the shack possessed. The light was greenish as yet, and dull. She turned her head, with equal slowness. Through the tilted panes she saw the Convolvulus King watching her, with the first white eyes of summer.

She lay a while longer, but the place remained silent; no creak, no tick of timber, scuff of a footfall. Her notion of silence took no account of the roar from the embankment against which the shack was built. That was a part of her life, and accepted. It had always been there, like the noise of blood in her ears.

She sat up, pulling her legs from the tangle of blankets. It had rained in the night; a puddle had collected, on the stamped earth floor beneath the window. She padded round it, knelt to press her face to the glass. The window itself hung askew; a pane was broken, and the once-white paint was peeling from the frame in thick flakes. It was her pleasure occasionally to pick them away, like little scabs. She ran her fingers along the frame edge, smearing the droplets and spatters, bent to lick. The moisture had an old, white taste. The eyes of the King, she saw, were not yet fully open; they showed like pointed slits, or the glint beneath the lid before the lashes part. The
morning sun would open them, in trumpet glory.

She unfastened the door. The damp had swelled the woodwork, so that it grated and scraped. She tugged till it gave, stepped outside. She knelt a moment by the King’s great bole. Near him she felt safe, though she couldn’t span his body by a quarter. His gnarled arms extended over the shack, protectingly; and his ragged head looked kind. Next to him the Ivy Queen reared her rough brickwork in the brightening mist. One of her eyes was very large, the other small. She watched summer and winter alike; but she was more aloof. The King’s awakening meant that warmth had come again. She looked round for his morning gift; and the thunder-noise was explained, for it lay squarely on the iron roof of the shack. One side of the brown carton was split, showing the bright gleam of cans. She scrambled for it and pulled it down, thrust it and its contents in through the shack door.

Other cans had scattered across the rough slope of the embankment. She climbed for them, clutching them to her chest in twos and threes, sliding back, feeling the harsh grass scrape her under her nightie. The last cans lay high up on the slope; she climbed for them as well, sat gripping them and glaring down. Other shacks sprawled along the embankment foot, leaning each to the next; shacks made of tar paper and asbestos, shacks made of timber balks and canvas, shacks made of packing crates and old tyre stacks. Smoke was rising from one improvised chimney; but there were as yet no other signs of life.

None of the other dwellings was very close to hers; the Convolvulus King kept the rest of the Rurals at bay. She stared down at him, at his wide-stretched arms. Behind him a canal curved off through empty, overgrown meadows. Duckweed coated it, making it a brighter green track through grass; but where it passed beneath the embankment the water showed tarry black.

She climbed farther, hotching herself on the wiry grass, still clutching the last of the tins. Finally she reached the barrier, with its black and yellow tiger-stripes. She clung one-handed to a support, watching the wheels of the Jugs as they roared a few
feet from her head. The high bank shook to their passing; but to her they were objects of indifference, neither friendly nor dangerous. There had perhaps been a time when she had felt otherwise; but she had forgotten.

The metal of the stay was rusty, she could feel the sharp little flakes digging into her palm. Also despite the impotence of the monsters at her back she didn’t feel wholly secure. It wasn’t good to be this high on the bank; it made her feel defenceless, over-exposed. She stayed where she was nonetheless, in hope of further gifts; but for the moment none came.

To her right, built out over the water on a high shelf of concrete, was a deserted Little Chef Grill. She could see its sign, the cheerful white-coated man with his tall white hat, weather-stained now and peeling; and another sign, its front marked with rust, that showed knives and forks and cups on a blue ground. From this height she could see across the littered forecourt; but nothing moved there, and none of the Jugs seemed to stop any more. She stared back down at the canal. Roadway and waterway met like a great cross; the one silent, the other endlessly roaring.

The sun was brightening now, piercing the mist. She slid back the way she had come, closer to the protection of the Convolvulus King. She used the canal, wiping herself with a handful of grass, and finished her morning obeisance; though that too was a conceit she probably didn’t own. She touched the Ivy Queen’s mantle of star-shaped leaves, scurried behind the shack to kneel for a moment by the Place of the Blue Monkey. The Place itself was marked by a pile of water-worn stones, lugged from the canal bank for the purpose. She touched it, as she had touched the King and Queen, bent to sniff the damp scents of earth and moss. A close sound startled her then, a tap; she leaped round glaring and quivering, but once more there was nothing.

She returned to the shack, closing the door and wedging the wooden latch. She took down two tins, one from the new gift, one from her store cupboard, choosing them for the differing
patterns on their labels. She understood the use of tin openers well enough, and her fingers were deft. She scooped up beans and fish, delicately avoiding the jagged metal edges. The fish she ate carefully, splitting each with her nails to extract the limp, parboiled backbone. She wiped her chin with her fingers then her fingers on the hem of the nightie. She lay back on the bed, pulling the blankets loosely across her. It was her custom to sleep through the forenoon, foraging again at midday and once more after dusk.

Constant forays were essential, for the gifts were less frequent now than previously. Whole days passed without the familiar thud and crash of an arriving crate, once an entire week; and the inhabitants of the other shacks, normally never seen, had taken to prowling and eyeing each other suspiciously, their knives at the ready. Though even then they had not troubled her overmuch; the protection of the Convolvulus King was powerful, few stepped willingly into his shadow.

She turned on the bed, snuggling into the sour clothes. Perhaps the good times would come back too now the King was awake again. There had been one good time in particular, seasons ago now; she remembered the rending thunder from the embankment that had heralded it, the terror with which she had seen the Jug veer against the barrier to lean wheels spinning, threatening to topple and crash. The side of the great lorry had split; from it, in bulky showers, flew the tins and preserves, the cling peaches and
ratatouille
, the butter beans and marrowfat peas, the Scottish raspberries and minced stewed steak, the tuna fillets and Canadian salmon, the lychees and selected prawns, the pastes and patés, the cream soups and pilchards and corned beefs and consommés of a lifetime’s dream. Norwegian sild rained in dangerous hail; the jams of Paradise, Tiptrees’ Little Scarlet, Robinsons’ Best Chunky, splashed like magmatic bombs while fumes belched from the wildly-running diesel and a bawling man ran fingerless, trying to stub his hand out on plastic-bright upholstery. The Rurals scuttled, forward and back across the great slope of the bank, groaning and sweating under their loads. By nightfall, when they were driven off with
noise and lights, the Jug was empty; but every shack was full from floor to roof.