Death of a Huntsman Read online

  It had been rather warm for April that afternoon and with the sun full on the glass of the cab he had been glad to drive in his shirt sleeves. He felt cheerful in the sun; already he was beginning to feel that he could look forward to the warmer, easier nights of summer-time.

  The bell on the front door was one of those old-fashioned iron pulls that connect far back into the house, and he pulled at it several times before he realized that it was no longer working. He tried the front door gently but it was locked and he was thinking of leaving the vacuum flask in the porch when he thought he heard sounds from the back of the house.

  That was how he first discovered how far back the house extended. Bit by bit, bay by bay, its owners had grotesquely enlarged it, trying to cover, and at the same time always increasing, its original hideousness. On one side a tower, a red-brick pepper box with terra-cotta sills and facings, had been built, and above it was a flag-pole. Beyond it was a wing that seemed insecure in its attachment to the rest of the house and that someone had fortified with four stout stone buttresses.

  And then, at the extreme back, behind another shrubbery of lilac and rose and flowering currant, all deep in the witherings of last summer’s grasses, he came upon the conservatory. It was hexagonal in shape and its upper windows were panes of coloured glass, deep blue, green, yellow, bright blood red. And to his astonishment it was full of flowers.

  He did not know much about flowers but as he pushed open the door the scent of them from the steamy interior poured out at him with powerful intoxication. That afternoon the inside temperature of the house must have been a hundred degrees; he could actually see steam rising from rows of pipes under the banks of staged flowers. He did not know the names of a single one of these flowers; he was simply stupefied, for the next few seconds, by the mass of exotic blossom rising from banks of dripping fern.

  That was only the beginning of his astonishment. Some seconds later he was aware of being looked at. What seemed to be a face sprinkled, flower-fashion, with splashes and blobs of blue and crimson and yellow and green, was staring at him from under the rim of a pale straw hat.

  This small figure resolved itself presently into that of a man in a biscuit-coloured alpaca jacket, a narrow starched collar and black pin-stripe trousers. The fact that he wore no neck-tie gave a semi-naked, half-finished appearance to what was otherwise a dapper little body that sat with a kind of doll-like erectness in a wicker chair. The face would have been deep yellow under the sparse white hair if it had not been blobbed with scraps of reflection from the coloured panes in the roof above. It was these blotches of mingled blue and crimson and yellow and green that gave it an unhealthy appearance, the total unreality of a curious, bright disease.

  For some seconds the figure did not move. It seemed torpid in the hot and steamy air. The lids of the eyes were exactly like those of a frog flabbily sunk in stupor.

  Then Williams saw them shoot into squinty wakefulness, and the voice that screeched at him was the voice he had already heard, once before, calling the woman Francie.

  ‘Get out,’ it said.

  ‘O.K,’ Williams said, ‘no harm. I was just looking for Mrs Broderick to give her the tea-flask back.’

  ‘Mrs Broderick is not here. Get out.’

  ‘All right, guvnor, all right.’

  ‘And to bring the what back?’

  ‘The tea-flask. That’s all. It doesn’t matter though. I can leave it here——’

  ‘Where did you get that thing?’

  ‘She lent it me. The other night. I busted a gasket and she give me some tea.’

  ‘Get out!’ he screeched. ‘I don’t like people roaming about here. I don’t like louts in here.’

  ‘Louts?’

  Up to that moment Williams had been patient, unruffled, a little amused. Now he felt the personal affront, the whip of the word louts, go ripping him with anger. The small figure in the chair suddenly looked to him like a dressed-up maggot. It reminded him powerfully of one of those advertisments for pest-killers in which grub and caterpillar sit up on their hind legs with expressions of sinister greed among the flowers they live to destroy. He felt his big arms twitch as he looked at it. He felt that with one single twist of them he could have rubbed it out. There would have been a little mess on the wet, steaming bricks between the stagings of bright flowers and then it would all have been over.

  Then he calmed; his sense of humour came back.

  ‘Look here, grandad, don’t you call me lout. I don’t like it, see? See that, grandad? I don’t like it.’

  In a moment his impression of looking at a dressed-up maggot was gone. His vision cleared. He saw before him once again nothing but the bloodless torpid little figure, pathetic and somehow spurious in the straw hat.

  ‘You want to git out in the fresh air, grandad,’ he said. ‘It ain’t healthy in here. You git hot under the collar——’

  ‘Get out!’ The screech, this time, was several times louder than before. It set the mouth blubbering with a series of foaming convulsions. ‘You cheap lout!—get out of here!’

  A moment later Williams caught himself in the act of throwing the vacuum flask. He actually had it poised above his head. At the word cheap all his rage came rushing back.

  ‘You call me cheap just once more, grandad, and I’ll lay you among the daisies——’

  He did not know quite what he was ready to do at that moment. Once more he could see the maggot in the chair; once more he was aware of the ease with which he could rub it out.

  It was her voice which stopped all this:

  ‘Good afternoon,’ she said. He turned to see her standing behind him, in the blue old-fashioned dress: grey-eyed, pale, calm, almost phlegmatic, her appearance, as he thought, somewhere between a governess and a housekeeper who had come in time to stop a bout of rowdiness between two boys.

  ‘I beg pardon, Mrs Broderick,’ Williams said. ‘I just came to return the tea-flask. Only I don’t think grandad likes me.’ His humour, dry and sprightly, was already back. ‘Don’t like my face or something, do you, grandad?’

  He turned as he said this and he saw that the chair was empty. And all at once he felt himself tricked by an illusion that it had never been occupied. The maggot was a myth; the straw-hat, the torpid-eyed creature sitting among the sweltering forest of fern and flower had never been.

  ‘Where’s grandad?’ He was laughing wryly. ‘Must have slipped down hole or something——’

  ‘I’m sorry he annoyed you.’

  She paused and was looking at him again with grey microscopic curiosity. ‘Don’t let him do it again. Just stop him. Be hard with him. It’s the only way. It’s just his childishness.’

  It had been too dark to notice the colour of her eyes before. Now he saw how brilliant and startling their greyness was. He saw also that his impression of a woman of fifty or so was quite ridiculous. In the bright afternoon light she was clearly not more than forty. And if the thick black hair had drooped less about her face and the blue woollen dress less about the figure he might even have given her, he thought, the benefit of thirty-five.

  ‘I thought you would come last night,’ she said.

  He explained how he had not been able to make it earlier.

  ‘I had the tea made. I waited. I suppose a hundred trucks must have gone by.’

  ‘Well, thank you for the flask,’ he said. ‘I got to push on.’

  ‘Oh! no,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some tea made. Just a cup. And there’s something I want to ask you. Oh! it won’t take a moment—you can spare a moment, can’t you?’

  She smiled; the grey eyes were steeped in a brilliant mist of persuasion, not very obvious or insistent, but so positive that it did not enter his head to do anything else but follow her into the house.

  The tea, as she said, was already made, but this time in a big brown homely sort of pot. ‘I know you like it strong,’ she said. ‘You drivers always do.’ She carved him from a large square block a slice of heavy fruit cake. �
��And you like that too, I know.’

  He did not know quite what to say to this easy and friendly attention and he started talking, as people mostly do, of the weather.

  ‘It’s turned out a nice day,’ he said. ‘Like summer in the cab.’

  ‘Oh! has it?’ she said. ‘I hadn’t noticed. I’m always asleep in the daytime. Or half-asleep. Besides it always rains here, across the hills. This is where the cloud breaks.’

  For the next few minutes, as he drank a second cup of tea and ate a second piece of cake, he kept thinking of the little man in the conservatory. He was puzzled about the torpid grub-like figure crowned by the straw hat. He was mystified by its sudden disappearance out of the forest of flowers. He wanted to ask about it and did not know how to frame his question. Instead he said:

  ‘You were going to ask me something, weren’t you?’

  ‘When you’ve finished your tea,’ she said. ‘Another cup? Another piece of cake?’

  He thanked her and said no, it was really time he got on. The grey eyes were fixed on his forearms, where the light brown hairs were almost sandy against the muscular flesh still white from winter.

  He suddenly felt slightly self-conscious about this gaze and got up. What was it she was going to ask him? he said.

  ‘You won’t think I’m imposing on you, will you?’ she said. Now she too was standing up. She was fairly tall, so that her face was level with his own. ‘You won’t, will you?’ She was smiling; the grey eyes were pleasantly pellucid, mercurial, with soft light. ‘I feel it awful cheek, I know it is—but would you do a little errand in London?’

  ‘Well, sure if I can.’

  ‘It’s just a note about a dress,’ she said.

  She had an envelope in her hands.

  ‘If you would just take this note to this address they will give you the dress and then perhaps you could bring it back next time you come down? Could you?’ She smiled again and gave a relieved sort of sigh. ‘I feel so ashamed about asking you.’

  It crossed his mind that it was odd she could not post her envelope, but she seemed ready for that:

  ‘The last time they sent a dress down the box broke open and there was a fruit stain on it. I could never wear it. I could never get it out.’

  She saw him looking at the address on the envelope and said:

  ‘Oh! yes, it’s off Wigmore Street. It isn’t a stone’s throw from you. I’ve told them who you are in the note and it will be all right. Are you sure you don’t mind?’

  ‘Not a bit.’

  ‘I’m so glad. When will you be back?’

  ‘Day after tomorrow.’

  ‘At night?’

  ‘At night,’ he said. ‘About eleven.’

  She came out with him as far as the truck. The sun was hot on the white chalk road. Sprigs of apple-blossom were breaking on the old scabby trees; the crest of every hedgerow was sprinkled with the bright lace of new leaves.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said. She waited for him to climb up into the cab. ‘It’s most awfully kind of you to do that for me.’

  Something, at the last moment, made him feel that he was entitled to a gesture in return.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘who was grandad? He didn’t seem to like me.’

  Obliquely she looked past him, as if troubled by sun.

  ‘That’s Calvin,’ she said. ‘That’s my husband.’

  The motor was running; he let in the clutch smoothly. She stood in the road, watching him with a face that was negative, with grey eyes that were still so unstirred and so incalculable that they were almost without identity.

  ‘At least what’s left of him,’ she said. ‘But take no notice of that.’

  After that he began to stop at the house every time he went down and every time he came back again. At first she provided the excuses to stop. And they seemed, he thought, like casual excuses. There was a dress to be brought down from London, another to be taken back. She was short of tea once and he bought a small chest for her in Yeovil as he came up from the West. Through the nights when she did not sleep she did a great deal of reading and now and then he would collect a parcel of books for her in London. Once or twice there was change from the money she gave him for these things and each time she said:

  ‘No, you keep that. That’s for you. Buy yourself a drink with that.’

  Then, after a week or two, there was no need for the invention of excuses. It became a simple and congenial habit to stop by the craggy blossoming apple-trees, whose scent he could smell in the warm wet May darkness. It became something to look forward to: tea, a meat sandwich, a hunk of fruit cake, a rest in the dark subdued house, in the mauve light of the spirit flames, perhaps a wash after the oily hot drive down.

  And perhaps because it was now always night when he saw her he did not, for a week or two notice any change in her. But presently the days were almost fully lengthened; the evenings began to be white with midsummer. And on an evening in early June, after a long bright day, the light had still not faded when he parked the truck.

  That evening the front door of the house was open but she was not lying down, as she nearly always was, on the paisley-shawled divan in the big front room. The spirit lamp was not burning. The room was still quite full of light.

  While he waited he walked about the room, looking at many photographs of her that stood on tables and shelves and the big oak mantelpiece. There were perhaps a dozen or fifteen of these pictures of her and he had never really noticed them before.

  He was still looking at them when she came in. She said something about Calvin being naughty, Calvin playing up, and how tiresome it all was. ‘He is getting so that he has a taste for the barbitone,’ she said. ‘Just a craving. Like people do for whisky. He used to sleep well with one or two. Now it’s three or four or five.’

  She had been quick to notice that he had been looking at the photographs and now she said:

  ‘Oh! don’t look at those awful pictures of me. They’re deadly. I ought to hide them up.’

  ‘I thought they were very nice,’ he said.

  ‘Oh! you did? Which one did you like best?’

  More at random than anything he picked on one in which she was wearing a white blouse and rather tight-fitting black skirt; the blouse had a square neck, rather low, across which there was a strip of lace insertion. Her dark hair was piled rather lightly and her figure, under the smooth white blouse, was thrown rather high up, so that she looked full-fleshed and assertive and strikingly young.

  ‘Why that one?’ she said. ‘Why do you like that one?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just do——’

  ‘I’m glad you like that one. Do you know why?’

  He said no, he couldn’t think why.

  ‘Because it’s the last one taken before I was married,’ she said. ‘Ten years ago. Seems like a life-time.’

  The room was still quite light and perhaps he turned instinctively to see if the woman he had known for only four or five weeks could possibly be the same person as the girl in the picture. He was at once arrested by some odd quality of change in her; she seemed to have become, for some reason, uncannily like the younger girl. There was an air of something fresher about her face and his apparent difficulty about accounting for this seemed to amuse her.

  ‘You see something different in me?’ She was smiling, showing her teeth.

  ‘I think there is something different,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you know what it is?’

  No: in his obtuse, clumsy, masculine way he did not know what it was.

  She gave her body a full turn, suddenly, and then said:

  ‘It’s my hair. Didn’t you notice? I’m doing it in the old way.’

  His surprise at his own stupidity at not noticing how her hair was now piled high again, achieving an effect of lightness and freshness in her entire face, must have been responsible for him giving a gasp of pleasure.

  ‘You like it, do you?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’r />
  ‘I hoped you would. I went down today and had it done. You know why today?’

  He had not the slightest idea about that either. The circumstances had the effect, altogether, of bewitching him a little and he could only stare.

  ‘Because it’s my birthday,’ she said. ‘At least it will be at twelve o’clock. Did you bring the dress?’

  ‘Yes, I got it.’

  ‘That’s for my birthday too. I treated myself.’

  The dress was in its box on a chair. She untied the string and parted the tissue wrappings and said, ‘Emerald. Do you think emerald will suit me? You don’t think green is unlucky, do you?’

  She took out the dress and held it in front of her, pinning it to her shoulders with the points of her fingers. The light was fading by that time and the colour of the dress was a sharp strong green.

  ‘Well, say if you like it.’

  Yes, he liked it, he said. He was still feeling the effects of a sense of slight bewitchment and he hardly heard her say:

  ‘Shall I put it on? I was going to put it on for the party anyway.’ He could not conceive what she meant by a party but she went on: ‘A party for me. Tonight—just you and me. That’s if you’ll stay. You don’t mind if I slip it on here, do you? It’s nearly dark now——’

  She began to slip off the dress she was wearing, the old blue woollen dress that he had seen several times before, and then she put the new dress quickly over her head and shoulders. In her haste she forgot to undo the clips at the neck, so that she had to take it off and begin again. Something about this repeated upward stretch of her white arms in the darkening room turned his sense of bewitchment into a final moment of distraction. In another moment he was holding her by the soft upper part of her arms. His blood was beating heavily through him and she was reaching up to him with her mouth.