The Merciless Ladies

by Winston Graham

  ‘I notice’, I said, ‘that you give this man credit for not doing the job deliberately.’

  ‘Well, obviously this wasn’t a premeditated act or he’d not have taken her to a fashionable restaurant beforehand to advertise himself, would he? Then he’d probably have brought his own weapon; it’s hardly likely he’d know she had one handy.’ Beasley grunted and filled his pipe. ‘Of course, if it was a long-standing liaison and he was tiring of her, that puts another complexion on the matter. But I don’t feel that that was it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Wouldn’t the inquiry agent have seen him before? And wouldn’t the Brade woman have dropped some hint? She’d no reason to love her mistress.’

  We drove for some minutes.

  ‘Anyway’, he said, ‘she didn’t take out the revolver in the first place to protect herself.’

  ‘Why not?’ I said again.

  He looked at me. ‘Well, women don’t discard their underwear to defend their virtue.’

  We came to a stop. ‘This is as far as I go. I suppose’, I said, ‘there’s just a chance they may still find the man had nothing to do with it.’

  Beasley got out of the car. ‘ The evidence was pretty conclusive, wasn’t it? Miss What’s-it heard the shot about midnight, and the inquiry agent saw the man leave at twelve-forty. Do you know what I’d be inclined to do if I were the man?’

  ‘No.’

  He waved his pipe. ‘Come forward and give my version. He might get away with accidental death. After all, there can’t have been witnesses to what happened. She can’t deny what he says. Verdict at a trial might hinge on the strength of his motive, on how much the man stood to gain. It’s a moot point. Don’t you agree?’

  I said: ‘ But men who do that sort of thing don’t usually have the guts to come forward until they’re found by the police.’

  ‘Quite’, he said. ‘So long. And thanks for the lift.

  I watched him lope swiftly away.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I drove to my flat, threw pyjamas and a few accessories into an attaché case and took it out to the car. At a nearby garage I filled up with oil and petrol.

  As I left London a few lights were already winking through the early dusk of the late October afternoon. Rain-clouds blew across the smoky sky. Buses roared and grated down the narrow, busy streets, swinging in and out like galleons on an asphalt sea. Milestones in every suburb, the white granite pillars of ‘The Tailor of Taste’ and the scarlet and gold façade of the sixpenny stores; or the monstrous shape of some local super-cinema thrust itself out, electric lights already glinting a spurious smile of welcome. The pavements were crowded. The world was full of anonymous little egos each jostling with the others, each talkative but secretive, self-assertive but self-afraid, free to go as it wished but a prisoner within its own ivory tower until death brought release, death coming unobtrusively and gently with old age or striking swiftly and unnaturally as it had done with Olive Stafford.

  The afternoon advanced and one town succeeded another, each with the same scene to print on the memory so that there was no memory; lights flickered and multiplied; the few but increasing stretches of unlighted road were a rest to aching eyes. I stopped again for petrol, but not for food, being conscious only of the hunger to get on. I drove clumsily, without consideration for the car.

  Can love turn to hate while the minute-hand of the clock moves an inch on the clock’s face? But love had never entered into it: attraction and aversion had been different sides of the same coin. And all in a way actuated by the feelings I had for the couple I was now going to visit.

  Yet one could not unload the final responsibility on them. Certainly they had provided – their problems had provided – the seed bed from which had sprouted this abnormal, divergent relationship between Olive and me. The crisis of Tuesday night could not be called a catharsis for there had been nothing vicarious about it. But it had been a purging, a resolution, the climax of a conflict that had been deep-rooted in my nature and in Olive’s too.

  It was one of those intense, cloudy, English nights when there is no wind and no light, when there is nothing but an abyss of darkness between the great nebulae of the towns and the small star clusters of each succeeding village. You journey through spaces of night between steep walls of trees, and the approach of another car is like the moon rising below the horizon.

  As hours went by the villages began to wink out and the towns to become less garish. A thin freckle of rain set the screen-wipers to work. The car was running well despite its treatment. I was conscious for the first time of a sense of discomfort which suggested hunger. A snack-bar was still open in a town whose name I never knew and some sandwiches were available. The bright light of the bar was distasteful, as also was the sleepy barman talking and yawning with the solitary customer in the far corner. Keep away from other human beings; keep away while I think what is to happen next.

  Strange that Mr Rosse had ruined everything by putting the idea of the dum casta clause in my head, and then acting on it himself. Yet but for the revolver all would still have worked out. Mr Sparks’s testimony would have confirmed Maud’s. If Maud had refused to tell on her mistress his alone might have sufficed. Olive in any case was likely to have been powerless – as she had seen in a flash. The one in-calculable – the imponderable of this situation – had been her possession of a revolver. Would she have used it on me? I thought so.

  The night turned more chill as I began to thread a way through the Lancashire mill towns. Here again lights winked afresh. Here again big multiple shops and super-cinemas and rows of poor houses, and the occasional clanging tram.

  In Lancaster I stopped to fill up again, and waited long enough to drink three cups of strong black coffee. As I climbed back into the car the first streaks of dawn were splitting the night clouds of the east. Light came slowly, and when I ran over the border into Westmorland there was just sufficient daylight to see the landscape sprinkled with snow. To have gone round and into Crichton Beck by way of the road Holly had once described would have been a sensible precaution; but impatience insisted on the direct route over the Long Neck Pass.

  Past the Langdales the snow showed signs of thickening, but at the beginning of the climb over the shoulder of the mountain it disappeared. The wind had been blowing from the north, and if further snow was to be found it would be on the other face.

  The car was already hot with its long, hard drive. As we climbed the clouds began to clear and a desolate sun stared over the top of the mountains. Boiling, the car reached the top. I stopped and lifted the bonnet; steam simmered from every joint of the cooling system. I walked ahead a few yards, and peered down into a valley of deathly stillness and virgin snow. When the water had stopped boiling I filled the radiator with some scrapings of snow from the ditch and went on. Some guiding providence – whose help I should have appreciated more often during the previous week – avoided a skid, and the valley was reached.

  There had been quietness on my visits before, an all-embracing, all-powerful silence which incidental noise could no more penetrate than a fish breaking the surface can disturb the deeper quietness of a lake. But all previous silences were fussy and commonplace before the supreme quiet of this autumn morning. Even the sputtering of the engine was at once absorbed. A phrase came into my mind and kept recurring: ‘The peace that passeth all understanding.’ Well, you couldn’t get more inapt than that, so far as I was concerned.

  Slipping and sliding, I came to the floor of the valley. Low cloud had drifted across again to obscure the sun. I drew up before the cottage and switched off the engine. Now the true weight of the silence fell on me like darkness on a snuffed candle. There was no movement about the cottage. The gaunt branches of the trees showed black against the snowy hillside. Into numbed ears crept the faint whisper of the stream.

  Climb stiffly out, tired now, and chilled and hungry and afraid. Go to the door and knock. An outrage in breaking this peace.

&
nbsp; The door opened and Holly stood there in a dressing-gown. Her face lit up and she uttered a squeak of pleasure.

  ‘Bill! … I thought you were Mrs Dawson with the milk. Come in, come in. How did you … In that car? Was the snow bad? It’s so unusual so early. Paul’s still asleep. Paul! Paul! Why didn’t you wire us you were coming?’

  She kissed me and I went in and sat back in an easy chair while she bent to set the fire in the grate and chattered.

  ‘Where did you spend last night? Could you drink a cup of tea? I was going to make one. Paul usually comes down, but he was working late, so I’ve stolen a march on him. How long can you stay?’

  I stared at the pleasant room, at the morning light striking a glint from Holly’s hair. She bent prayer-mat fashion before the fire and began to blow through the bars.

  ‘Let me do that’, I said, going down beside her.

  ‘Where did you stop the night?’

  ‘Lancaster.’

  ‘And why so pale and wan, young lover, prithee why so pale? Did they turn you out without breakfast?’

  ‘I was afraid of further snow. I was afraid the pass might be impracticable.’

  ‘You came over Long Neck? You might have been stuck there all day!’ She leaned back on her heels. ‘You look tired.’

  ‘I’ve had a touch of flu, so took a couple of days off. I thought the drive would do me good. How are things with you?’

  She smiled. ‘I never felt better, Bill. Paul is still painting as if he hadn’t a moment to lose, painting as if … What a tragic end for poor Olive … I was sorry.’

  ‘They wired you, then.’

  ‘Yes. I told Paul he ought to go to the funeral. He said he couldn’t.’

  ‘It wouldn’t do any good.’

  Their mixed-up cocker spaniel, Ethelred, came bounding into the room and, finding my face accessible, licked it with enthusiasm.

  ‘It’ll make a big difference to us, but one tries not to look at it that way.’

  ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t look at it that way. There’s no reason not to be thankful.’

  She looked at me. ‘It wasn’t about that that you came? Has the inquest been held?’

  ‘It’ll be just a matter of form … I think I would like a cup of tea, Holly. Can I make it?’

  She scrambled to her feet. ‘ The kettle’s on the oil stove. Let’s go and see if it’s boiling.’

  ‘It’s boiling and I’ve brewed the tea’, said Paul from the door.

  It was interesting to note the way in which he was recalling North-country phrases into his speech.

  II

  That was perhaps the strangest day of my life.

  We were happy together, even high-spirited, while the shadow of little Olive hung over us.

  Or rather it hung over me, not over them. Their concern with her had ended.

  After lunch Paul asked me the same question as Holly had. Both of them in their hearts perhaps had a feeling that my visit to them in this hurried manner was not purely a chance impulse. Mr Rosse’s telegram had stated that Olive had shot herself; but Paul at least was not satisfied with the bare statement; when we were alone he began to question me to find out all I knew. Parrying his questions was a difficult matter, for we understood each other too well.

  At length he seemed satisfied that I was as ignorant as I seemed.

  ‘Well’, he said, ‘I can’t begin to pretend I’m sorry. Why be a hypocrite? It was my fault in the first place for marrying her; but we can’t go on for ever paying for our mistakes. I can’t believe yet that it’s all over. I can’t get away from the feeling that wherever she’s gone she’ll contrive to send me a solicitor’s letter.’

  ‘Are you still talking about that?’ said Holly, coming in. ‘It’s past. Now you’ve only me to maintain. Isn’t that enough to talk about?’

  ‘Indeed, yes.’ He laughed and stretched his legs to the fire. His eyes followed her. ‘ When I can believe it’s true I shall feel like a millionaire. No, that’s wrong. I shall feel like myself, but twice as free.’

  ‘You look like a tramp’, said Holly.

  Paul laughed again. ‘That’s part of the fun.’

  I eyed him, and wondered whether some of his old companions of the successful years would have identified their friend. His cheeks were thin and tanned and sallow; clothes hung loosely on him; his hair needed cutting; his speech was a natural compromise between its too-rough origin and its too-smooth cultivation. His hands were stained with pigment, he looked worn and tired.

  Paul noticed my scrutiny and turned his head and grinned. ‘Don’t quote myself against me.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to.’

  ‘It’s been a devious route, I admit. And not yet ended. But it looks a bit straighter from now on.’

  ‘Not so many of your pictures about.’

  ‘It’s all upstairs.’

  Some of his work, when I saw it, still looked unfinished, tentative. But I was much struck by the colours, which had suddenly released themselves from the occasional muddiness of the past and become altogether brilliant.

  One of the paintings that impressed me that morning was of a spinning wheel and an old cane armchair, done in a farmhouse down the valley. It is now in the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and I have in front of me an early gallery note about it written by Anthony Pride White.

  ‘One has to examine this picture at a distance, for its strength at close quarters is a little overpowering. The cane of the chair looks as if it has supported all humanity, and grown sere and yellow with the passage of so much time and stress. The colour of the shawl hanging over its back makes ordinary crimsons anaemic: there never was such a shawl in Cumberland. The sunlight falling through the window is butter yellow, as if coming from a warmth and radiance unknown to ordinary men.’

  It is of course the function of the critic to express himself in language of this sort, but for once I would not quarrel with the sentiment.

  Of another I saw that day, of two mackerel on a plate, now well known, and now in Cardiff in the National Museum of Wales, A. H. Jennings writes: ‘The blues and greens of this picture are more alive, more radiant than that of almost any painter since Vermeer. His use of white pigment is particularly impressive. Two fish on an old kitchen plate, glinting luminously as if still dripping from the sea. That is all. Yet one imagines that in the dark the painting will be phosphorescent.’

  A third, of which nobody has written, and the one I found most illuminating of a change in development and mood, was a large canvas of Holly standing by the window in his studio wearing a grey woollen frock. She had her back to the painter and the light shone through her hair. Her slim, tall figure was painted in soft, very heavy strokes of grey and green. The figure is too simplified to be a likeness, yet it is unmistakably Holly. Paul has painted the essence of her more than just her physical form. He seems to have seen her with the half-blindness, the half-clairvoyance of a lover and in so doing to have expressed both the individual and the universal.

  I have to write about this painting myself, for it has never been exhibited and is still on the wall of my bedroom.

  We left Paul pottering with some canvases he had primed, deciding whether they were fit for use, and returned to the sitting-room with the welcome warmth of its peat fire. Ethelred lay nose on paws against the fender. Outside the sky had cleared and the sun, less etiolated than at dawn, glistened over the thin white landscape.

  ‘This snow’, she said. ‘We’ve never had it so early.’

  ‘It’ll pass’, I said, ‘like everything else.’

  ‘That’s rather a depressing remark.’

  ‘Think nothing of it.’

  ‘His work’, she said. ‘It’s different, isn’t it? I believe he’s happy for the first time in his life.’

  ‘And you?’

  She stooped to fondle Ethelred’s ear.

  ‘Women are primary producers, aren’t they? Great discovery of mine. Now I’m going to have a baby everything seem
s more complete. Old and puzzling pieces have fitted in. I’ve done the jig-saw.’

  ‘Any plans yet?’

  ‘About? … I think we may go a bit nearer civilization for the Event. Where we haven’t decided. I thought I’d stay with Ma, but Paul thought she wasn’t the type to have the responsibility put on her.’

  ‘Thank God for that’, I said.

  ‘Well, we might have had to. But now – with this happening to Olive …’

  We listened to the wind moving down the valley. She was sitting on the window side of the fire so that her face was in shadow. The light struck the curve of her cheek. Her long fingers clasped and unclasped.

  ‘And you, Bill?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What about you? Are you happy? Or at least content?’

  ‘… I’m always more content for seeing you.’

  ‘Is that an answer? … I see it’s the only answer I shall get.’ She leaned forward and poked the fire. Sparks and a blaze broke reluctantly from the peat. Ethelred cocked a bloodshot eye. ‘Anyway … it’s nice to chatter.’

  ‘Chatter on.’

  The invitation brought silence. I thought of men in London painstakingly reconstructing the events of a crime.

  ‘Tell me, Bill: when I married Paul, did you think the marriage would be a success?’

  ‘If you must know’, I said, ‘no.’

  ‘And have I given you the impression that it is a success now?’

  ‘You have.’ I shifted in my seat. ‘ It wasn’t unnatural to feel at first …’

  ‘Yes, I know. Well, that’s all right. It’s because I’m happy now and begin to see things more straightforwardly, and because of everything, that I’d like to tell you more than you already know. I – hope it won’t spoil anything. I expect I should really keep my mouth shut.’

  She got up and stood by the fire. Under her light and casual manner she was finding it difficult to express something. For a few moments I forgot the patient men.

  ‘I married Paul’, she said, ‘not at the time because I was fearfully in love with him, but because his feeling for me was stronger than anything I could work up in myself either for or against. And he needed me: I knew that, could feel that. All the time he has needed me. It’s funny how things work out, isn’t it? For these three years of our marriage there’s been that in addition to my affection for him to keep me – in contact. It’s kept me content. I’ve been happy in all sorts of things – in his feeling for me, in the knowledge that I was indispensable ro the creation of something greater than either of us. Isn’t that enough for anyone?’