Death of a Huntsman Read online

  ‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘where Valerie had——’

  A moment later, before he could complete the sentence or she could answer it, he felt himself pressed to the thin sheer front of her body and borne away.

  Chapter 9

  It might have been half an hour, perhaps only twenty minutes, when he turned in the middle of the second of his dances with Edna Whittington and became the victim of exactly the same kind of momentary illusion that he had suffered one brilliant Sunday morning in the cucumber house.

  For a second or two, out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a strange but remotely recognizable fragment of yellow light cross a far corner of the room and disappear behind a triangular tier of pink chrysanthemums.

  He was suddenly stunned to realize that this was Valerie Whittington, wearing a remarkably long pale yellow dress and long black gloves that showed her pale bare upper arms and her completely naked back and shoulders. He was so numbed by this appearance that only one thought raced through his head, in reality the rapid recollection of something she had said by the lake on the previous afternoon:

  ‘Nobody knows about it. It’s the colour of—No, I won’t tell you. You’ll see it tomorrow and then you can tell me if it reminds you of anything.’

  Instantly he recalled the quinces and how the lamp of summer had gone out.

  Somehow he got through the rest of the dance without betraying that he was in a turmoil of fright and indecision. He had broken out already into a cold and sickening sweat but as the dance ended he had presence of mind enough to mop his forehead with his handkerchief and say:

  ‘It’s awfully hot in here, Edna. My glasses are getting misty. Do you mind if I go and clean them? And wouldn’t you like a drink? Can I bring you something—gin and something?—would you?—by all means, yes——’

  He escaped, spent five minutes in an empty back corridor breathing on his spectacles, polishing them and then in sheer fright breathing on them again. After that he worked his way to the corner of the bar and restored himself with a whisky, saying desperately at the last moment:

  ‘No, a large one, large one please.’

  Then he took the drink back into the corridor. He had hardly leaned against the wall and had actually not lifted the glass to his lips when he looked up and saw Valerie Whittington suddenly appear at the far end of the corridor as if she had in some miraculous way come up through a trap door.

  She started to walk towards him. She walked quite slowly, upright, shoulders square and splendid, the motion of her legs just breaking the front of the dress with ripples. And across the vision of her walking slowly down towards him he caught for the flash of a second the former vision of her in the gabardine mackintosh, schoolgirlish, tense and obliterated, the pig-tails tucked into the collar at the back.

  A moment later she was saying:

  ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking did I have it on under the mackintosh, aren’t you?’

  ‘Partly that——’

  ‘I hadn’t,’ she said. ‘It was easy. I got the shop to send it here. I’d hardly a thing on under the mackintosh.’

  She started to smile. Her lips were made-up, a pale red, and she had managed once again to pile her hair into a mass of curls. She did not speak again for a moment or two. She continued to smile at him with the large circular brown eyes that so often seemed to embrace him with tenderness and then at last she said:

  ‘Does it remind you of anything?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  To his surprise the two words seemed to move her very deeply and he saw that there were sudden tears in her eyes.

  ‘You’re the bestest good one in the world,’ she said and she pressed her face against his own.

  He too found himself very moved by that. He wished he had nothing to do but take her by one of the long black gloves and into the dark spaces of parkland outside the house, but he remembered Edna Whittington.

  Some of his anxiety about this must have crossed his face because almost immediately she said:

  ‘I’ll tell you something else you’re thinking too, shall I?’

  Harry Barnfield, only too well aware of what he was thinking, could not answer.

  ‘You’re thinking you’ve got to dance with me.’

  ‘Well——’

  He inclined his head a fraction down and away from her. When he looked up at her again he was struck by a wonderful air of composure about her face, the wide bare shoulders and especially the hands, black in their gloves, clasped lightly before the waist-line of the yellow dress. She could not have looked more composed if she had been wearing the dress for the fiftieth instead of the first time but he knew, somehow, in spite of it all, that she was frightened.

  ‘It’s got to be done,’ she said, ‘and I can’t do it without you.’

  He tried not to look into her eyes. They were no longer wet with even the suspicion of tears. They gazed back at him, instead, with an almost luminous composure and now, at last, she stretched out her hands.

  ‘Come along,’ she said. ‘Take me.’

  If there had been no other person on the dance floor as he led her on to it some moments later he could hardly have felt more pained and conspicuous. It was like dancing in some sort of competition, naked, in the middle of an empty field, before a thousand spectators.

  The amazing thing was that whenever he looked at the face of the girl it was still alight with that astonishing luminous composure.

  ‘Look at me,’ she said once. ‘Keep looking at me.’

  Whether she was thinking of her mother, as he was the whole time, he did not know. He could not see Edna Whittington. But as he danced he became more and more obsessed with the haunting impression that she was watching him from somewhere, evilly and microscopically, waiting for the dance to end.

  When it did end he turned helplessly on the floor, arms still outstretched, very much like a child learning to walk and suddenly deprived of a pair of helping hands. The girl, composed as ever, started to move away, the skin of her back shining golden in the light of the chandeliers. The dress itself looked, as she had meant it to do, more than ever the colour of quinces and he saw on her bare arms a bloom of soft down like that on the skin of the fruit.

  Then as she turned, smiled at him with an amazing triumphant serenity, holding out her arm for him to take, he saw Edna Whittington.

  She was standing not far from the tier of pink chrysanthemums. She did not look, now, like a piece of silver cardboard. She looked exactly like the perfectly straight double-edged blade of a dagger rammed point downwards into the floor: arms perfectly crossed, feet close together, thin body perfectly motionless under the tight silver dress, small microscopic eyes staring straight forward out of a carved white face, fixed on himself and the girl as they crossed the dance floor.

  Suddenly he was no longer uneasy, self-conscious or even disturbed. He began to feel strangely confident, almost antagonistic. And in this sudden change of mood he felt himself guide the arm of the girl, changing her course across the dance floor, steering her straight to Edna Whittington.

  Suddenly the band started playing again. The girl gave a quick little cry of delight, turned to him and put her hands on his shoulders. A moment later they were dancing.

  Then, for what was to be the last time, she spoke of her mother.

  ‘Is she looking?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me how she looks,’ she said. ‘You know I dance with my eyes closed.’

  ‘There’s no need to think of her.’

  Whether it was because of this simple remark of his he never knew, but suddenly she rested her face against his and spoke to him in a whisper.

  ‘You don’t know how happy I am,’ she said. ‘Oh! don’t wake me, will you? Please don’t wake me.’

  She spoke once more as they danced and it was also in a whisper.

  ‘If I told you I loved you here in the middle of this dance floor would you think it ridiculous?’ />
  ‘That’s the last thing I would ever think.’

  ‘I love you,’ she said.

  At the end of the dance a frigid, pale, supernaturally polite Edna Whittington, holding a glittering yellow cigarette holder in full stretched magenta fingers, met them as they came from the floor. Rigidly and antagonistically he held himself ready to do some sort of brave and impossible battle with her and was surprised to hear her say:

  ‘You did book our table for supper, didn’t you, Henry?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You should have told me where it was,’ she said. ‘Then I could have sat down.’

  Throughout the rest of the evening, until one o’clock, this was as sharp as the tone of her reproach and resentment ever grew. She regarded himself, the girl, the dancing, and even the dress, with the same unmitigated calm. When he danced with her, as he did several times, she talked with a kind of repressed propriety, saying such things as:

  ‘It’s a most pleasant evening, Henry. And not noisy. Not a brawl. Not half as crowded as I thought it would be.’

  ‘The Hunt’s going through a difficult patch,’ he said. ‘Rather going down, I’m afraid. There isn’t the interest. There aren’t the chaps.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot of people, even so.’

  The more polite and calm she grew the more unreal, he thought, the night became. Alternately he danced with herself and the girl. Friendly and bantering from across the floor came exchanges of manly pleasantry with friends like Punch Warburton, Freddie Jekyll and George Reed Thompson, the city gentlemen, from odd acquaintances like Dr Frobisher, Justice Smythe and Colonel Charnly-Rose: stalwart chaps, the solid backbone of the Hunt.

  Away somewhere in the distance lay the even greater unreality of Katey: Katey drowned throughout the years of his marriage in mists of gin, Katey the tawdry lioness, Katey with her garlic-raw, smoke-stained fingers, calling him a squeak-mouse.

  He felt himself left, over and over again, with the one reality of his life that had ever meant anything. All the rest had shrivelled behind him like black burnt paper. Nothing made any sense in any sort of way any more, except the voice of the girl imploring him with the tenderest, most luminous happiness:

  ‘Oh! Don’t wake me, will you? Please don’t wake me.’

  It would be the best possible thing now, he thought, to get it over quickly: to go straight to Katey, in the morning, and tell her what had happened and how, because of it, he could not go on with the old, damnable dreary business any longer.

  He had arrived at this, the simplest of decisions, by midnight, when Edna Whittington, the girl and himself sat down to supper. To his relief and surprise it was a remarkably pleasant supper. He poured champagne and the girl, unreproached, was allowed to drink it. He fetched, with his own hands, as she and her mother expressed their fancy, plates of cold chicken or salmon, frozen strawberries and ice-cream, mousse and mayonnaise.

  ‘Did I see someone with pineapple gateau, Henry?’ Edna Whittington said and he went dutifully to search for it, pursued by a voice of unbelievably husky-sweet encouragement: ‘And be a lamb and find cream, Henry, if you can. Dancing makes me hungry.’

  In the next hour the wine, the food and the utter absence of malignity in all that Edna Whittington said or did had lured him into a state where he was no longer apprehensive or uncertain or even ready to go into brave and antagonistic battle against her.

  In consequence he was as unprepared as a rabbit sitting before a stoat when, at one o’clock, Edna Whittington looked at her watch, then at the girl, then at himself and said:

  ‘Child, it’s time for you to go home. Henry, are you ready to take her?’

  Chapter 10

  The girl did not move. He felt the ease of the evening shatter with an ugly crack. His nerves upheld his skin with minute pin-pricks of actual pain.

  ‘I said it was time to go home, child. Get your things. Put your coat on. Mr Barnfield will take you.’

  The girl still did not move or speak. Looking at her, he was reminded of the first morning he had ever met her. The innocent insolence had come back to her face again and he understood it now.

  ‘Valerie.’

  Edna Whittington waited. He lifted his glass, drank some champagne and waited too. The girl still did not move. She sat with black gloves composed and crossed on the table in front of her. Her eyes, not so wide and circular as they often were, looked half down at her hands, half at the dance floor. Just above the cut of the yellow dress her breasts started to rise and fall rather quickly but otherwise she did not stir.

  ‘I am not in the habit of telling you twice,’ Edna Whittington said. The voice was icy. ‘Get your things at once and go home.’

  The band had begun playing. He clenched the stem of his glass, then relaxed his fingers and looked straight at the ice-grey microscopic eyes of Edna Whittington.

  ‘She’s not going home,’ he said.

  ‘Will you please mind you own business?’

  He found himself drawing on remarkable reserves of calm, backed by the echo of a voice which kept saying ‘I feel in a wonderful way that we’ve been growing up together.’

  ‘Child!——’

  ‘I have told you, Edna, that she is not going home.’

  ‘Will you kindly mind your own business!’

  He lifted his face, pushed his glass aside and looked straight into the eyes of the girl.

  ‘Shall we dance?’ he said.

  She hesitated for a fraction of a second. He thought he saw at the same time an indecipherable shadow run across her face, as if she were actually in a turmoil of indecision. And for a moment he was in horror that she would fail, break down and go home.

  Instead she smiled and got up. As the skirt of the yellow dress moved into full view from below the table he remembered the shining lamp of the solitary remaining quince burning in the blue November glassiness above the lake on cooling crystal afternoons, the last phial of the summer’s honey, and he knew that now, at last, there was no need to doubt her.

  A moment later they were dancing. They danced perhaps twice round the room before she even looked or spoke to him. Then slowly she lifted her face, staring at him as if she could not see him distinctly.

  ‘You’re the bestest good one,’ she said. ‘The most bestest good one in the world.’

  And as she spoke he found, suddenly, that he could not bear to look at her. Her huge brown eyes were drowned in tears of happiness.

  Chapter 11

  It was nearly three o’clock when Edna Whittington said to him in a husky discordant voice that betrayed, at last, the first snap of anger:

  ‘If you feel you’ve enjoyed yourself enough I should like to go home.’

  ‘I’m ready whenever you are,’ he said. ‘Shall I take you alone or shall we all go together?’

  She paused before answering; and he thought for a moment that she was going to laugh, as she sometimes did, distastefully. Instead she picked the minutest shred of tobacco from her mouth, looked at it and then flicked it away.

  ‘We’ll go together,’ she said. ‘I want to talk to you.’

  ‘As far as I’m concerned there’s nothing to talk about.’

  ‘She’s my daughter,’ she said, ‘and I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Very well, Edna,’ he said. ‘Talk to me.’

  ‘I’ll talk to you,’ she said, ‘at home.’

  They drove home in frosty darkness, under a starry sky from which the moon had gone down. The girl sat in the back of the car, as before, and no one spoke a word.

  When he pulled up before the cottage no one, for nearly half a minute, moved either.

  ‘Will you come in?’ Edna Whittington said at last.

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘Then I’ll talk to you here.’ She turned to the girl.

  ‘Go inside, Valerie. Here’s the key.’

  The girl did not move or answer. Harry Barnfield turned, saw her sitting there motionless, mackintoshless, cool in the yel
low dress, and said:

  ‘Better go.’ He took the key of the cottage from Edna Whittington and handed it to the girl. ‘I think it’s better.’

  ‘I’m going,’ she said very quietly. ‘Good-night. See you tomorrow.’

  Then, and he could only guess what it cost her to do it, the girl leaned over, turned his head with her hand and kissed him on the lips, saying:

  ‘Thank you for everything. Good-night.’

  Before he could move to open the door for her she was out of the car, running. He heard the key scrape in the lock of the cottage door. Then the door opened and shut and he was alone, in silence, with Edna Whittington.

  He said at once: ‘I don’t know what you have to say, Edna, but it’s very late and I’d like to get home.’

  ‘How long has this been going on?’ she said.

  ‘About twenty years.’

  ‘If you’re going to be flippant I shall probably lose my temper and——’

  ‘I’m not going into explanations,’ he said, ‘if that’s what you want, and the sooner you get it into your head the better.’

  She gave the distasteful beginning of a laugh.

  ‘All right. I’ll just ask you one question. If that isn’t too much?’

  ‘Ask.’

  ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me you love this child?’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘Setting aside the word infatuation,’ she said, ‘do you suppose she loves you?’

  ‘I do, and she does,’ he said.

  This time she did laugh. It was husky, unpleasant and briefly sinister.

  ‘I honestly think you’re serious about this.’

  ‘I’m not only serious,’ he said. ‘It’s my whole life. And hers.’

  She started to light a cigarette. He disliked very much the idea of smoking in cars and he was annoyed as he saw the thin masked face, so drawn that it was almost skeletonized, in the light of the match and then in the burning glow of the cigarette held between the drooping magenta lips.

  ‘You know, Henry,’ she said, She blew smoke with what appeared to be unconstricted ease. ‘Somebody will have to be told.’