Sting of Death

by Shelley Smith

  “Who else could ride it?” Trevor asked.

  “Do you think Auntie Tory might have ridden it down there and then tumbled into the bushes? I should like to have seen that! She makes everyone cry. Even Werner didn’t get on with her very well, though he understood her, he said. He said – ” she groped back for the exact words and she uttered them with meticulous precision – “her asperity was the old maiden’s release from thwarted sexuality. He spoke very good English.”

  “You liked him.”

  “Oh, very much. He was awfully kind to me always. He said what I needed was a father-substitute, and then he used to laugh and say, what he needed was a child-substitute, and so we had better comfort each other. I did love him,” she sighed; “more than Daddy, I sometimes think, because he always spoke seriously to me just as if I was a real person. You would think I was fated, wouldn’t you, when everyone I love dies?”

  “Unhappily, there are very many of us today who have, lost all those we love. But you are still young enough to find other people to love – even though you don’t expect it – just as you found Werner Hauser,” Trevor said mildly.

  She said with a curious nonchalance:

  “Oh, I’m reconciled to losing Werner because he wanted to go. He wasn’t happy, you know. He couldn’t have been, could he? He said I was the only one he could talk to, the only one who understood...”

  “Mrs. Hauser didn’t?”

  “Oh, he did love her, because she is so beautiful, you know. But she didn’t understand. She could only live in the beautiful past, he said; she felt that he had failed her because they had been forced to leave their own land and live in poverty like nobodies among strangers. All his adoration was not enough, he said; he no longer satisfied her. It used to make me cry to hear him.”

  “Poor child,” said Trevor gently, “it wasn’t fair, was it? Taking advantage of you emotionally.”

  She did not quite understand what his words meant, but the unexpected tone of sympathy brought the ready tears welling up. Her greenish eyes, enlarged and stiff-lashed with tears, gave her a queer kind of dignity that held a promise of future beauty.

  She burst out suddenly: “Auntie Linda gave me the bicycle, and Daddy was killed in London in an ordinary air raid like anybody else. He wasn’t even a soldier... I do tell lies. Werner says – said, I mean – that it’s a hunger for approval and it’s quite natural in the circumstances; having to build my own background now, I invent what doesn’t exist. But all this that I’ve been telling you isn’t lies, it’s the truth. I just wanted you to know.”

  “It was nice of you to tell me. I hope that means we’re going to be friends.” Poor moppet, he thought, is this fair? And sighed. After a decent pause, Trevor briskly changed the subject by asking her to tell him what it was she had hinted the other day that she knew about her Aunt Linda to her detriment. Priscilla looked embarrassed.

  “I don’t know how to say it,” she said, sniffing and blowing her nose. “It was wrong of me ever to have mentioned it. Uncle Edmund would say it was disloyal; I see that now. But I didn’t know who else to go to, as darling Werner was already dead, and really and truly I couldn’t have shown it to Uncle Edmund, even if he had been here. It would have hurt him so much.” She kept her gaze fixed on her fingers she was carefully plaiting.

  Trevor said: “What would?”

  “Why, the letter of course. I thought and thought. I didn’t like to ask Grandpa’s advice. And I wouldn’t have shown it to Aunt Tory for the world. I didn’t know what I ought to do with it. And so in the end I asked Ilse. Was it wrong?”

  “How can I tell? I don’t know what was in the letter. What was it about?”

  “I don’t know,” she said hastily. “I didn’t read it. Only the beginning. Then I saw it was private, so I didn’t read any more. I just folded it up and put it in my pocket.”

  “Why not simply have left it where it was, if you didn’t know to whom it belonged?”

  “Don’t you see,” she said impatiently, “it wasn’t the sort of letter to be left lying about. And of course I knew who it belonged to, isn’t that just what I’m saying? It belonged to Aunt Linda. At least, it was meant for her. But Ivor had written it, so perhaps it really belonged to him. Only I couldn’t possibly have given it back to him; I just couldn’t you know. And I couldn’t give it to Aunt Linda, either. Don’t you understand, she would have been so ashamed! It’s horrible to find a grown-up doing something they shouldn’t, it makes you feel prickly all over.”

  “And what did Mrs. Hauser say?”

  “She said she’d take care of it; it would be safe in her hands, she said, and I wasn’t to bother my head any more about it. ‘Forget it,’ she said, ‘forget it, my child.’ So I tried not to think any more about it; and anyway, there really wasn’t anything else I could do,” she concluded primly.

  “If I understand you right, you think that Ivor Campion and your Aunt Linda were lovers. Is that it?”

  She pinkened.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Any other evidence, beside the letter, of which you only saw the beginning?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said warily.

  “Dear me, how am I to put it? You understand what it is, to be lovers? Do you understand?”

  “Of course I do,” she said indignantly with a furious toss of her head that sent her blonde hair flying...flying to conceal her flushed cheek. “Besides, Ivor is Uncle’s best friend, and that’s why he’s here. And it always is the best friend, isn’t it, who betrays the husband’s trust?”

  “In books, you mean?”

  “Aren’t books true?” she said innocently.

  “Oh, Priscilla, Priscilla! What a dangerous girl you are!” sighed Trevor.

  *

  “Hullo, sir, what have you there?” said Sergeant Drake when Trevor strolled into the station that evening.

  “This,” he said, holding the prize up but away from Drake’s grasp, “this is the object for which some person or persons unknown were searching in Mrs. Campion’s room. Interesting, eh? It was found in the false bottom of the rosewood box.”

  “But we looked there, sir, didn’t we, and there was only a lot of rubbishy recipes and receipts and such.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply that I had found it in the rosewood box, my dear fellow. It was Mrs. Hauser who won the lucky dip.”

  “What is it?”

  “Letters. She had them in her sponge-bag, of course.”

  “Hers, are they then?”

  “Oh, no, Drake, no. Quite the contrary, as Mrs. Potter would say. They were addressed to the late-lamented by Ivor Campion apparently. I cannot but think that Mrs. Hauser must have rather a nasty nature. Vicious, would you say? Or simply, an eye to the main chance?”

  “How did she know they were in the rosewood box?”

  “Is that what they call womanly intuition, Drake? Or perhaps it was simply trial and error. I knew she’d been at it of course, because of the bronze hairpin. Remember? She’d bent it to pick the lock of the false drawer. Too clever for her own good, that madam.”

  “Rum idea, though, to write letters when you’ve living in the same house,” Drake mused.

  Trevor, turning over the envelopes, said: “He wasn’t at Hawkswood all the time. Look, here’s one from S.W. 1, here’s another from Surrey, two more from London. The ones written in the house have only got her name typewritten on the front. Reasonably cautious, you see. He would write, my unromantic Drake, because he found it difficult to be alone with her, with few opportunities to say all the things he wanted to get said – which, after all, are only the things all lovers say. Or were they? ... We shall see!”

  He pulled out a stiff white sheet inscribed with a vigorous black lettering. Hardly the precise exquisite hand he had imagined to be Ivor’s, and he turned to the end to see the signature – merely a devil-may-careish “I.”

  Two A.M. (he read):

&nb
sp; Insomnia is my pleasure now as well as my torment, for all these empty hours can be filled with you. Only, if I slept I might dream of you, and my dreams might be more satisfying than the reality. It isn’t that I want to touch you, Linda, my beautiful Linda. If you came to me now, at this hour of the night, I would only adore… Ah, but I tremble at the thought! You’ve no idea how I feel about you, my lovely girl; you’re all that I never believed in…

  “And so on and so on,” groaned Trevor, with paragraphs arresting his eye...

  …I would cheerfully forfeit my right hand (as well as my right foot!) to make you happy, but all the same, and without any thought of self, I say, FORGET HIM! FORGET HIM! Believe me, darling, he’s not worth one of your tears…

  …Why do you avoid my eyes so persistently? How have I offended you? You are angry with me. Is it because I kissed you in the garden? But, my dear, it was simply out of gratitude to you for all your sympathy and goodness. How could you think otherwise? Don’t you know how deeply I respect you? Believe me, you are not by any means in the same category as the girls I kiss. You are Edmund’s wife. I know that, with my reputation, that hardly seems adequate to protect your honour; but strangely enough that has all changed. My feeling for you is one of sincerest friendship, truest devotion, and a very humble hope that you will represent to me the pure love of the sister I should have had…

  “It’s easy enough to date them, isn’t it, even though he hasn’t. This is obviously one of the first, or the first. Sweet-spoken young blackguard, ain’t he?” said Trevor with relish. He turned the pile over. “Here’s one!”

  You are cross with me; I can see it in your averted cheek, and your little roughened fingers tapping on the arm of your chair. And I don’t care! It made me want to laugh. Oh, Linda, you little fool, you little darling fool! You are jealous! All because I flirted with Ilse. Do you really think I care tuppence for, or even like, that tarty little Austrian egotist? Don’t you know by now that the image which gives me no peace at night or day is of a thin girl with long black hair...?

  “It’s as good as a diary, isn’t it? Tells you everything you want to know.”

  “Of course, if the husband knew...” Drake said tentatively.

  “Oh, quite! He’s the obvious person, isn’t he? So everyone is at pains to point out to me. It’s quite a commonplace nowadays for men to come out of the Services, find their wives have been or are being unfaithful, and kill them.”

  Drake drew a pencil line down the centre of the page.

  “And he’ll say a red mist seemed to float in front of him and he didn’t know what he was doing, and when he saw what he’d done he was frightened, or he lost his memory and he’s been wandering about the countryside... This country is getting just like France to my mind, sir; no morals; and all this crime passionnel stuff.”

  Looking at his sergeant, Trevor thought, the English character never changes; but he did not knock him. He said: “It’s habit. People get in the habit of killing during a war, and afterwards, the customary inhibitions no longer act with the same force and certainty. All the same, it won’t go down very well with a jury if he tries the ‘red mist’ plea. We know she was killed about half-past three or four and she certainly wasn’t dropped over the stairs until after five. Not much ‘red mist’ there, eh?”

  “I rather think you’ve got something there, sir, if you don’t mind my saying so. It does look bad, doesn’t it?”

  Trevor laughed.

  “Always bearing in mind, my good Drake that this is all supposition only… Nevertheless,” he added a moment later, “he does not make it look very well for himself, staying away like this.”

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 4

  He was a man of about thirty-six years, with a tough, sturdy frame, muscular and lean; there was nothing rangy about his limbs; they were close-knit and disciplined in their movements, so that even without his uniform you might guess him to be a soldier. His face was square, frowning and pugnacious as a schoolboy’s; his hair was watered down to the colour of old wood but the freckles on his skin and the light hazel brown of his deep-set eyes betrayed its natural reddish tinge. His expression was wooden, unvarying, even now when he was alone, though certain lights could lend his stubborn, shut-in face a look of weary melancholy, could make him look unexpectedly, touchingly frail in his ill-fitting khaki, as small boys at their prep schools look unnervingly fragile. It was as deceptive an appearance in the one case as the other; he was inexorably tough...even now, staring about him at the desolation, like the desolation in his heart.

  It was for him exactly like a nightmare, walking up the long drive home. It was the more curious, because the return to Hawkswood had been a recurring nightmare of Edmund’s wherever he had been during the last four years, in prison camp, in the jungle of Central Borneo, even in the Technicolor brilliance of the States; only in these dreams Hawkswood was always just the same as when he left it and the nightmare part of it was in the awakening.

  The recollection of those dreams tinged the present scene with their unreality, as though this too were just one more jest of the mind. The rank, filled ditches by the wayside, the overgrown hedges too thin at the base, the wilderness of grass where used to undulate fine-mown turf, the drive shaggy with weeds, indicated years of neglect. The elegant Palladian face of the building itself looked hopelessly dilapidated and uncared for; creeper obscuring two of the upper rooms gave it a rakish cast, a drunken raffish look that was faintly obscene.

  He walked on, slowly, round the side of the house…

  A little girl with a towel about her shoulders was running excitedly round and round a small boy crouched over something on the grass. Beyond, he saw two short stout legs and an all-enveloping towel, and Linda. Linda, sitting on her heels with her back turned toward him. Linda, in the same blue cotton frock she was wearing the last time he saw her, four years ago, on his embarkation leave. Linda, the one unchanged creature in a changed world. Her black hair hung untidily about her shoulders in a weary shoulder-length bob, like a schoolgirl’s. She was crooning to the little boy (it must be Charles under that towel, the one he had never seen, who had been born while he was abroad after that last embarkation leave); she crooned to him, as she rubbed his hair dry, in a pretty off-the-key voice that grated on the ear the way ultra-sweetness sets the teeth on edge.

  The little running girl was the first to notice the intruder. She stood very still a moment, surveying him, and then said in an inquisitive cajoling voice:

  “Hallo?”

  “Hallo!” said Edmund.

  At the sound of his voice the girl in the blue frock swiftly turned and stared at him with something like dismay in her face.

  He said: “Hallo, Linda!”

  She went white. Then scarlet.

  She said incredulously: “Edmund!”

  Then she flung herself against him, thin body and coltish limbs as light as a bird in his arms, black hair flying. Linda, her voice muffled against his collar, said: “I wasn’t expecting you so soon, Eddie. You ought to have let me know. Nothing’s ready, and I did so want to have everything looking extra-specially nice for you. I meant to get my hair done, and I wanted to dress up, and do my nails and all that... I can’t help crying, to think you’ve come home at last and will never go away again!” she snuffled.

  “What a charming way to put it! I’d forgotten your famous tact, dear!”

  She began to laugh, and blew her nose. She said, rather shakily, to the children: “Do you know who this is?”

  “Yes. It’s our father. Hallo,” said Jane with an impudent face. Jane hesitated and then turned upside down defiantly and stood on her hands. “Look at me,” she piped shrilly. “Look at me!”

  “I can do that,” said Oliver quickly, and running forward a few steps he pressed the top of his head on the grass, flung up his legs half-heartedly, and fell over on his side.

  “Very good, darling,” said Linda.

  “But it
wasn’t,” Edmund objected.

  Linda said hastily at his ear: “I know. But Jane is better than he is at everything physical and she’s a year younger; it’s so bad for his morale. I like to encourage him a little.”

  Edmund said firmly, crushing down an all-too-familiar feeling of irritation: “It can’t be very good for his morale to tell him he has done a thing well when he hasn’t done it at all. It only makes a fool of him if he believes it. But as he looks quite an intelligent little boy I don’t suppose he does believe it. In that case, he knows you’ve lied to him. That’s not good for his morale either.”

  “You’re quite right,” she said, with all her old devastating facility for evading an issue. “But let’s not bother about them now; I want to have you to myself for just a minute. I want to have a good look at your ugly old face, because I can’t believe it’s really you at last. I want to see if you’ve changed. I want you to tell me if you’re glad to be home. Do you know you haven’t kissed me yet?” She held up her face, innocently.

  “I know,” he said, and bent his head; for it was easier to touch her unfamiliar mouth with his lips than to answer her terrible questions or look into her eyes.

  Her thin shoulders felt brittle under his hands, and he dropped them to his sides with an odd feeling of guilt.

  “Oughtn’t I to meet my youngest son?” he suggested.

  Charles, addressing his invisible audience with Churchillian rhetoric, ignored Linda’s coaxing: “This is Daddy, darling.”

  “My Daddy’s coming to-mollow!” He waved them away like tiresome wasps. “My Daddy’s coming to-mollow!” he repeated, trundling away like a stout old Georgian gentleman.

  They laughed a little, insincerely, as though they were playing a scene in a film.

  “I’m not surprised really,” he said, with his eyes on the ground. “I don’t feel like a father to them myself. They’re just little strange children that don’t seem any part of me. Where’s Lionel? I can remember him, at any rate; though of course he won’t remember me either.”