Death of a Huntsman Read online

  He stopped to look inside the cucumber house. Under the glass the temperature had already risen to ninety-five. Thick green vines dripped with steamy moisture. Columns of cucumbers, dark and straight, hung down from dense masses of leaves that shut out the strong morning sun.

  The cucumbers were his wife’s idea. She was very imaginative, he had to admit, about cucumbers. Whereas the average person merely sliced up cucumbers, made them into sandwiches or simply ate them with fresh salmon for lunch in summer, his wife was acquainted with numerous recipes in which cucumbers were cooked, stuffed like aubergines or served with piquant sauces or high flavours such as Provençale. Harry Barnfield did not care much for cucumbers. More often than not, cooked or uncooked, they gave him wind, heart-burn or chronic indigestion. But over the years of his married life he had learned to eat them because he was too good-natured to deny his wife the chance of surprising guests with dishes they had never heard of before. He well understood her cucumbers and her little gastronomic triumphs with them.

  That Sunday morning, as he stood under the steaming shadowy vines, he thought he saw, suddenly, a bright yellow break of sunlight travel the entire length of the glasshouse outside. The leaves of the cucumbers were so thick that it was some moments before he grasped that this was, in fact, a person riding past him on a horse.

  Even then, as he discovered when he rushed out of the cucumber house, he was partly mistaken. The horse was merely a pony, blackish brown in colour, with a loose black tail.

  With impatience he started to shout after it: ‘Hi! you there! Where do you think you’re going? Don’t you know—?’ and then stopped, seeing in fact that its rider was nothing more than a young girl in a yellow sweater, jodhpurs, black velvet cap and pig-tails. The pig-tails too were black and they hung long and straight down the yellow shoulders, tied at the ends not with ribbon but with short lengths of crimson cord.

  The girl did not stop. He started to shout again and then, quite without thinking, began to run after her.

  ‘Young lady!’ he called. ‘Young lady!—one moment, young lady, one moment please——’

  It was thirty or forty yards farther on before he caught up with her. By that time she had stopped, bent down and was already lifting the catch of the first of the wicket gates with the handle of her riding-crop.

  ‘Just a moment, young lady, just one moment——’

  As he stopped he found himself short of breath and panting slightly. She turned very slightly in the saddle to look at him. Her eyes were brown, motionless and unusually round and large. They seemed, like his own, rather too big for her face.

  ‘Aren’t you aware,’ he said, ‘that this private property?—this path? It’s private property!’

  She did not move. She looked, he thought, fifteen, perhaps sixteen, not more than that, though rather well developed for her age. The sleeves of the yellow jumper were half-rolled up, showing firm brown forearms that glistened with downy golden hairs. Her face was the same golden brown colour, the lips without make-up, so that they too had a touch of brown.

  ‘You really can’t ride through here like this,’ he said. ‘You’ve been told before. You really can’t, you know.’

  Again she did not move. He did not know if the large motionless eyes were utterly insolent or merely transfixed in frightened innocence and he was still trying to make up his mind about it when he noticed how straight but relaxed she sat on the pony. He had to admit, even in vexation, that she sat very well; very well indeed, he thought.

  ‘It’s very tiresome,’ he said, ‘all this. You simply can’t ride rough-shod over other people’s property like this.’

  ‘Rough-shod?’

  Her voice surprised him very much by its deepness. It almost seemed, he thought, like the voice of a woman twice her age.

  ‘Do you really think,’ she said, ‘I’m riding rough-shod?’

  The eyes, still holding him in enormous circles of inquiring innocence, disarmed him with sheer brightness.

  ‘That’s neither here nor there,’ he said. ‘The simple fact is that you cannot ride when and how you please over other people’s property.’

  ‘I was told I could.’

  ‘Told? By whom?’

  ‘My mother.’

  At this moment his spectacles began to mist over. For the next second or two she seemed to melt away and become lost to him.

  Uneasily he thought to himself that he ought to take his spectacles off, polish them and put them back again. He began to feel inexplicably nervous about this and his hands groped about his face. Then when he realized that if he took off his spectacles he would, with his weak, short-sighted eyes, be able to see her even less well he made the unfortunate compromise of trying to look over the top of them.

  She smiled.

  ‘Your mother?’ he said. ‘What has your mother to do with it? Do you mean I know your mother?’

  ‘You knew her.’

  ‘Oh! and when pray would that be?’

  He hadn’t the slightest idea why he should ask that question and in fact she ignored it completely.

  ‘My name is Valerie Whittington’.

  ‘Oh! yes. I see. Oh! yes,’ he said slowly. ‘Oh! yes.’ He was so intensely surprised that, without thinking, he at once took off his spectacles and rubbed the lenses on his coat sleeve.

  ‘Is the colonel——?’

  ‘He died last year.’

  Again he polished the lenses of the spectacles quickly on the coat sleeve.

  ‘We’ve taken the gamekeeper’s cottage at Fir Top. I don’t suppose you know it,’ she said.

  ‘Oh! yes.’

  Something made him keep the spectacles in his hand a little longer.

  ‘I can ride down through the park and along by the river and then back through the woods across the hill,’ the girl said. ‘It’s a complete circle if I take the path through here. If not I have to go back the same way again and you know how it is. It’s never so nice going back the same way.’

  He murmured something about no, it was never so nice and then put on his spectacles. Clear, fresh and with that remarkable blend of insolence and innocent charm, she stared down at him, making him feel a baffled, fumbling idiot.

  ‘So it was your mother told you about the path?’

  ‘She just said she was sure you wouldn’t mind.’

  Why, he wondered, did she say that?

  ‘She said you were the sort of man who never did mind.’

  Again he felt baffled and stupid.

  Then, for the first time, the pony moved. Up to that moment she had kept remarkably still and it was in fact so quiet, standing erect in the hot September sun, that he had been almost unaware that it was there until now, suddenly, it reared its head and shuddered.

  Instinctively he put one hand on its flank to calm it down. It quietened almost immediately and she said:

  ‘I’m afraid he’s really not big enough for me. But he’s the best we can afford for the time.’

  She ran her hand down the pony’s neck, leaning forward as she did so. He saw the muscles of the neck light up like watered silk. At the same time he saw the flanks of the girl tauten, smooth out and then relax again.

  ‘Does your mother ride now?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not now.’

  ‘She used to ride very well.’

  ‘Yes. She said you’d remember.’

  Again he felt baffled; again he groped towards his spectacles.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I suppose I must go back.’

  She started to turn the pony round. He found all his many uncertainties stiffen into astonishment.

  ‘I thought you wanted to go on?’ he said— ‘over the hill?’

  ‘You said you didn’t want me to.’

  ‘Oh! yes I know, but that was—I admit—Oh! no—well I mean——’ He found himself incapable of forming a coherent sentence. ‘By all means—it was simply that I didn’t want—well, you know, strangers——’

  ‘I ough
t to have come and asked you,’ she said. ‘I know now. But you were never at home.’

  ‘Oh! no, no, no,’ he said. ‘Oh! no.’

  The pony was still facing the cucumber house, uneasy now. Sunlight was catching the angle of the roof panes, flashing white glare into the animal’s eyes in spite of the blinkers, and Harry Barnfield put his hand on its nose, steadying it down.

  ‘I’ll be putting up jumps next week,’ he said. ‘In the meadows there.’ The touch of the animal brought back a little, but only a little, of his assurance. ‘You could—well, I mean if you cared—you could use them. I’m never here weekdays.’

  She smiled as if to begin to thank him but a flash of light from the cucumber house once again caught the pony’s eye, making it rear.

  ‘You’d better turn him round,’ he said, ‘and take him along. It’s the sun on the cucumber house.’

  ‘I will,’ she said.

  He moved forward to unlatch the gate for her. The pony also moved forward. A new wave of uncertainty ran through Harry Barnfield and he said:

  ‘Remember me to your mother, will you? If she would care—Oh! I don’t suppose she would like a cucumber? We have masses. We have too many cucumbers by far.’

  ‘We neither of us care for them,’ she said, ‘but I’ll tell her all the same.’

  She rode through the gate. He shut the gate after her, leaned on it and watched her ride, at a walk, up the path. After forty or fifty yards the path began to go uphill to where, against the skyline, clumps of pine grew from browning bracken hillocks before the true woods began. The morning was so clear that he could see on the tips of these pines the stiff fresh crusts of the light olive summer cones. He could see also the brown arms of the girl below the rolled sleeves of the yellow sweater, the flecks of white on the short legs of the pony and the knots of red on the pig-tails.

  He was suddenly aware that there was something disturbing about her without being able to say what it was. In that insolent innocent way of hers she rode very well, he thought, but the pony was quite ridiculous. Her body and the pony simply did not fit each other, any more than her body and her voice seemed part of the same person.

  ‘Edna should get her a horse,’ he said aloud and then, with sweat breaking out again from under his misty spectacles, began to walk back to the cucumber house.

  There he was overcome by embarrassment at remembering how he had been stupid enough to offer the girl a cucumber; and in remembering it forgot completely that he had called her mother by name.

  Chapter 4

  Soon after that he began to come home on late September evenings to a recurrence of mild gin-dry quips from Katey. He did not really mind being quipped; the city gentlemen made him used to that sort of thing.

  ‘Your girl-friend was jumping again today. Here most of the morning and back again before I’d swallowed lunch. Stayed till five. I’d have offered her a bed but I wasn’t tight enough.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t call her my girl-friend.’

  ‘Best I can think of, Harry. You put her up to this game.’

  Presently she began to use his jumps not only on week-days but on Saturdays and Sundays too. Sometimes he would wake as early as eight o’clock, look out across the meadows and see the yellow sweater dipping between the barriers of brushwood.

  He saw it also as it faded in the twilights. And always he was baffled by the ridiculous nature of the pony, the pig-tails and the long impossibly dangling legs of the girl as she rode.

  ‘Your girl-friend certainly works at it. Lewis tells me she was here at six the other morning. He was mad. The animal kicked up his mushrooms.’

  ‘I do wish you wouldn’t call her my girl-friend. She’s fifteen. Sixteen if she’s that.’

  ‘From the day they’re born,’ Katey said, ‘they’re women. Never mind their age.’

  At first he found it an embarrassment, slight but uneasy, to join her at the jumps. He supposed it arose from the fact that in his inelastic way he often fell off the horse. That did not matter very much when he jumped alone but it was awkward, even painful, when people were watching.

  In this way he began to ride more cautiously, more dumpily, more stiffly than before. For two week-ends he did not jump at all. At the third he heard a clatter of pony hooves on the stable yard, looked up to see her long legs astride the pony and heard her deep voice say:

  ‘I thought you must be ill, Mr Barnfield, because you weren’t jumping. Mother sent me to inquire.’

  Her voice, deeper than ever, he thought, startled and disturbed him; and he fumbled for words.

  ‘Oh! no, oh! no. Perfectly all right, thank you. Oh! no. It’s just that the countryside has been looking so lovely that I’ve been giving the jumps a miss and riding up on the hill instead. In fact I’m just going up there now.’

  ‘Do you mind if I ride that way with you?’ she said.

  Some minutes later they were riding together up the hillside, under clumps of pines, along paths by which huge bracken fronds were already tipped with fox-brown. Late blackberries shone pulpy and dark with bloom in the morning sunlight and where the bracken cleared there ran rose-bright stains of heather, with snow-tufts of cotton-grass in seed.

  ‘You can smell that wonderful, wonderful scent of pines,’ she said.

  He lifted his face instinctively to breathe the scent of pines and instead was distracted, for it might have been the fiftieth time, by her incongruous legs scratching the lowest tips of bracken fronds as she rode.

  ‘My wife and I were having a slight argument as to how old you were,’ he said. ‘Of course it’s rude to guess a lady’s age but——’

  ‘Oh! I’m ancient,’ she said. ‘Positively and absolutely ancient.’

  He started to smile.

  ‘And how old,’ she said, ‘did you say?’

  ‘Oh! fifteen,’ he said at once, not really thinking at all. ‘Perhaps I’ll give you sixteen.’

  ‘Give me sixteen,’ she said. ‘And then seventeen. And then eighteen. And then if you like——’

  She stopped. Looking up from the pony she turned on him the enormous circular eyes that appeared so often to be full of naïve insolence and then waited for him, as it were, to recover his breath.

  ‘And then nineteen. And then if you like, next month, you can come to my twentieth birthday.’

  He was too staggered to bring to this situation anything but absolute silence as they rode to the hill-top.

  ‘I think you’re surprised,’ she said.

  ‘Oh! no. Oh! no,’ he said. ‘Well, yes and no, in a way——’

  ‘Don’t you think I look twenty?’

  ‘Well, it’s not always absolutely easy——’

  ‘How do you demonstrate age?’ she said and he rode to the crest of the hill-top without an answer, his head sweating under his close tweed cap, his spectacles misting and turning to a premature fog-bound landscape the entire valley of morning brilliance below.

  He was temporarily saved from making a complete and disastrous fool of himself by hearing the pony breathing hard, in partial distress.

  ‘I think you should give him a blow,’ he said. ‘It’s a pretty long drag up here.’

  She thought so too and they both began dismounting. Then, as she swung to the ground, he had a second surprise.

  This, he suddenly realized, was the first time he had actually seen her when not on the pony. Standing there, at his own level, she seemed to enlarge and straighten up. He was aware of a pair of splendid yellow shoulders. Riding had made her straight in the back, throwing her breasts well forward, keeping her head erect and high. She was also, he now discovered with fresh uneasiness, slightly taller than he was.

  He turned away to tie his horse to a pine. When he had finished he looked round to see her walking, with surprisingly delicate strides for so tall a girl, towards the ridge of the hillside.

  Finally she stopped, turned and waved to him. For a single moment he thought she had in her hand a flower of some kind and it loo
ked, he thought, like a scarlet poppy. Then he saw that it was one of the cords she had snatched from her pig-tails.

  ‘Come over and look at the view,’ she called.

  By the time he joined her she was sitting down in a patch of bracken. He sat down too: looking, not at the view below him, the map of copse and pasture and hedgerow flecked already with the occasional pure bright chrome of elm and hornbeam, the dense oaks and grass still green as summer, but at the sight of the girl now unplaiting and combing out the mass of bright brown hair into a single tail.

  ‘You look surprised,’ she said, ‘but then I notice you always do.’

  She started to let her hair fall loosely over her shoulders, until it half-enclosed her face. Then she put her hand in the pocket of her jodhpurs and pulled out a powder compact, a lipstick and lastly a small oval mirror with a blue enamel back.

  ‘Do you mind holding that?’ she said.

  He held the mirror in front of her face. Once or twice she stretched forward, touching his hand and moved the mirror to one side or the other.

  In silence, for perhaps the next five minutes or so, he watched her make-up her face. He saw the lips, freed of their dull brownness, thicken, becoming very full, almost over-full, in redness. He saw her smooth with the powder-pad the skin of her face, giving it a tone of milky brown.

  Finally she threw back her hair from her shoulders and he had time to notice that the enlargement of the lips, so bright now and almost pouting, had the effect of bringing into proportion the large brown eyes.

  ‘How do I look?’ she said.

  His immediate impression was that the make-up, the loosened hair and the fuller, brighter lips had softened her completely. It was very like the effect on parched grass of warm and heavy rain.

  At the same time he could not help feeling desperately, awkwardly and embarrassingly sorry for her.

  ‘Now do I look twenty?’ she said.

  It was on the tip of his tongue to say ‘More—older’ and afterwards he knew that it would have pleased her very much if he had, but he said instead:

  ‘What made you do that just now?—just here?’

  ‘Oh! God!’ she said and the sepulchral wretched cry of her deep voice shocked him so much that his mouth fell open, ‘I’m so miserable—Oh! God! I can’t tell you how miserable I am.’