Last Writes

by Catherine Aird

  At the Hotel Coq d’Or in the Rue Dr Jacques Colliard in Corbeaux she signed the register for Frank and herself and said he would be along in a minute with the rest of the luggage. And, yes, please, she – they – would prefer to have their breakfast in their room every morning. It had been a very long journey. ‘Dinner? No, I mean – merci, madame,’ she said to the patronne, ‘we will be eating out in the town tonight.’

  Actually she didn’t go out at all that evening but instead ate a picnic she had brought with her in her room. A light supper would help her eat two breakfasts the next morning. She spent the next day exploring the little town, having a cup of coffee here and a light lunch there, going into one church here and a lanterne des morts there and the little shops all the time.

  In the late afternoon she came across a group of men playing pétanque in the shade of some lime trees. There was a seat for spectators set alongside the piste and she sat there as long as the play lasted, fascinated first by the glint of the steel balls and the balletic movements of the players, and then quite taken by the intricacies of the game itself.

  The men taking part were not tall, either, but, unlike Frank, didn’t seem to be given to cutting others down to size. It was the game that did that, of course, getting their boule nearer to the jack – le cochonnet, they called it – than anyone else’s being no easy matter.

  For the first week this became the pattern of her days and very agreeable she found it, too. A trip to the street market for fresh fruit, followed by a quiet sit alone by the piste, watching the games, suited her very well.

  She could mull over the past without Frank standing over her, being critical, eternally finding fault. The name Hector would have suited him better than Frank but, oddly enough, she always thought of him as a latter-day Ahasuerus, the king who put his wife, Vashti, away because she would not display herself for the aggrandisement of himself and his court.

  Most people, she thought idly, were all too ready to praise the king’s second queen, Esther, for her good work, but Alice had always admired Vashti, Ahasuerus’s first wife, all the more for refusing to bow to her husband’s will. It was something that she, Alice Osgathorp, had always found difficult.

  Until now, that is. At least Frank had never been able to fault her knowledge of the Old Testament and he hadn’t known anything at all about her careful studies of plant poisons. Or of her purchase in the faraway town of Luston of the largest dog kennel she could find.

  Only once was her reverie at the piste disturbed: this was when she had been joined by another Englishwoman, also on holiday.

  ‘My husband says it’s better than bowls,’ Alice said to her, waving vaguely at the crowd of middle-aged men playing there. ‘He always said he was going to take up bowls when he retired and now he has. French bowls.’ She gave a light laugh. ‘He’s even taken to wearing a beret.’

  ‘You’re lucky,’ said the other woman sourly. ‘I can’t get mine out of the bars, not nohow.’

  ‘I must say my Frank likes his wine, too,’ she said moderately. ‘Especially the local ones – the ones that don’t travel well. He says their Vin de Laboureur here is the best and we never ever see that in England.’

  ‘I’ve always thought that they kept the best wines for themselves,’ sniffed the other woman before taking herself off in search of her bibulous husband.

  Actually Frank, Alice had to concede in his favour, wasn’t a real drinker. Come to that he wasn’t a real anything. Just as some men were just a bag of tools, so he was only a bag of grumbles for whom nothing was right – not ever. Unless, she amended the thought judiciously, he’d thought of it himself first. And then, of course, there was nothing ever wrong with it at all – ever. It was just as well that he’d been self-employed …

  Alice had planned to stay at the Hotel Coq d’Or for at least another week but then luck provided an agreeable touch of verisimilitude. She had located the village cemetery and went there one morning with her camera. There must have been a recent death in Corbeaux because two men were digging a grave there.

  Rightly deciding that any French workmen worthy of their salt would have an extended luncheon at midday, she stayed in the vicinity until they downed tools. Then she went back there with her camera and took some shots of the open grave.

  She had a nasty moment when she got back to the hotel that evening and asked for the key of their bedroom.

  The patronne gave her a keen look as she handed it over. ‘Madame and monsieur are enjoying their vacances, I hope?’ she said.

  ‘Indeed, we are,’ said Alice warmly. She patted her camera. ‘It is so pretty here and I have taken many pictures already and as for my husband …’ She let her voice trail away.

  ‘Yes, madame?’

  She gave a light laugh. ‘He is enjoying playing pétanque and …’ She hesitated and then said delicately, ‘And what comes afterwards. You have so many bars here to choose from that he doesn’t get back to the hotel as early as I would like. I have to stay awake to let him in our room.’

  ‘I understand,’ the woman flashed her teeth, a symphony of gold fillings, and smiled in quick sympathy. ‘In the winter we call it l’après-ski but in the summer it is just the thirst from the heat of the day.’

  ‘I do hope he doesn’t disturb anyone when he gets back late,’ she said.

  ‘Nobody has complained, madame,’ said the patronne, that being her measure of most things.

  ‘That’s a relief.’ Alice looked suitably sorrowful as she added, ‘I’m afraid he’s got quite fond of drinking something here you can’t get so easily in England.’

  The hotel-keeper lifted her head in silent query.

  ‘Pastis,’ said Alice in a lowered voice. ‘Sans eau.’ Édouard Manet’s famous painting Absinthe Drinker was what had come to her mind but she didn’t know if you could buy absinthe now. It had been different in 1858.

  ‘Ah.’ The woman drew in her breath in a sharp hiss. ‘Pastis sans eau.’

  ‘But,’ said Alice bravely, ‘I’m so enjoying exploring your lovely little town on my own.’

  Actually there were one or two more pictures on her agenda still to be taken and she proposed to make her way to the cemetery to do so the very next day. It was strange, she noted subconsciously, how stilted her English became when talking to the French. ‘We shall have many happy mementoes of our visit,’ she added, again patting her camera. ‘Très joli.’

  ‘It is indeed très pittoresque here,’ said the patronne, flashing the improbable teeth again. ‘Corbeaux is a famous old bastide town, you know.’

  Alice returned to the cemetery the next morning and took several general views of the ornate gravestones there. The polished marble should come up very well in the photograph, she decided, before adding a couple of pictures of the views towards the mountains, taking care to include several cypress trees. ‘Sad cypresses,’ she murmured to herself, although she didn’t feel sad. Only surprisingly exhilarated.

  In the afternoon she found the local undertaker’s shop and bought a couple of funeral vases – stout stone things – and an ornate creation of artificial flowers under glass known to the French as éternelles, but no longer permitted in an English graveyard. These she took to the cemetery, added some flowers, and photographed them on the base of a black marble tomb of a couple, long dead, called Henri Georges and Clothilde Marie, taking care, though, not include the headstone in her picture. She spent the rest of the day back at the pétanque piste, debating whether forging someone’s death could be considered pseudocide: or, if not, what then?

  Alice Osgathorp checked out of the hotel four days later. She did it in the middle of the afternoon – that secure hour when the little femme de chambre was taking the place of the patronne while the latter was, as usual, enjoying her postprandial doze.

  ‘Monsieur will be bringing the luggage down soon,’ she lied to the uninterested girl at the desk as she paid the bill for Frank and herself. At least money wasn’t going to be one of her worries in future
. Not only was everything in their joint names, but Frank had never believed in life assurance for the self-employed. She didn’t suppose any government would mind if he didn’t collect his old-age pension. ‘Nothing to beat cash in hand,’ he used to say, salting large notes away in biscuit boxes. ‘The rats can’t get at that and it always buys what you want.’

  Two days after that, back home again, she telephoned the Berebury Pet Cemetery.

  ‘I’ve just lost my dear old dog,’ she quavered, ‘and I would so like to have him buried properly.’

  ‘No problem, madam,’ the owner of Berebury’s Pet Cemetery assured her. ‘Here at what we like to think of the Elysian Fields we do everything properly.’

  ‘The trouble is,’ went on Alice tremulously, ‘he was a very big dog.’

  ‘That’s not a problem,’ said the man, adding rather too quickly, ‘although it might cost a little bit more.’

  ‘Of course, I quite understand that,’ she hastened on, saying anxiously, ‘but there is just one thing …’

  ‘Yes?’ said the cemetery owner. Nothing – but nothing – about the requests made by bereaved pet-owners had the power to surprise him any longer.

  ‘I’d like him to be buried in his own kennel – at least,’ she corrected herself swiftly, ‘in a coffin made from the wood of his kennel. We thought he’d like that.’

  ‘I’m sure he would,’ said the man immediately, only glad she wasn’t asking as some of his customers did for the canine equivalent of pompe funèbre. ‘That’s not a problem either, madam, although if it means a lot more digging that might come out a little more expensive, too.’

  ‘Nothing’s too good for him,’ said Alice brokenly. ‘Besides with a Great Dane you have to get used to everything costing a bit more than you would with a Pekinese.’

  The man, who had known owners almost bankrupt themselves over Pekes, said he quite understood, trying to work out the while how much he could charge for the burial – and then adding a bit. ‘Would next Tuesday afternoon do you?’ he asked. ‘That’ll give us time to dig the gr … get everything ready.’

  ‘Tuesday will be fine,’ said Alice. ‘I’ll arrange the minivan now.’ She cleared her throat. ‘You won’t think me silly if I bring some flowers?’

  ‘You can bring whatever you like, lady,’ he said, mentally adding a little more still to the bill. They liked sentimental owners at the Berebury Pet Cemetery.

  On the Tuesday, Alice wore black with touches of grey. She’d been doing that ever since she got home to lend a touch of mourning to her tale of Frank’s sudden death abroad. The photographic views of the cemetery at Corbeaux had been shared with her friends at work and a generous employer had given her some compassionate leave ‘while she sorted everything out’.

  The minicab driver helped her with the dog kennel, now knocked into coffin-shape. Actually, that had been the most difficult part of the whole business, but eventually she’d found a sympathetic old carpenter in distant Calleford, to whom she had told her tale of losing her dog.

  ‘Dog-lover, myself,’ he’d said. ‘How big was this old chap that’s got to go in here?’

  ‘Big. Eight stone and a bit. That was before he was ill, of course,’ said Alice. This last at least was true even if – so to speak – the dog it was that didn’t die. ‘About, say, hundred and ten pounds, that is.’ Kilograms were beyond her.

  The cemetery owner received the coffin with practised compassion.

  ‘And what about a stone?’ Alice asked the man at the cemetery after the interment was complete. ‘I should like him to have a stone.’

  ‘No problem,’ the man, pocketing her cheque. ‘Just let me know what you want putting on it.’

  ‘His name,’ she sniffed.

  ‘Which was?’ He was a man inured to tears. Somewhere in his office, he’d even got a box of tissues.

  ‘Hamlet, of course,’ she said, sounding pained. ‘I told you he was a Great Dane, remember.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He tried to make amends. ‘And the inscription? A lot of people put “Thy servant, a dog”. From Kipling, I think someone said it was. It’s very popular.’

  ‘I would like something from Shakespeare’s Hamlet,’ she said austerely.

  ‘Fine.’ In his time he’d had to put amateur verse on stones. ‘We charge by the number of letters.’

  ‘It’s the words at the end of the play …’

  ‘Which are?’ He’d never liked doing English at school.

  ‘“The rest is silence”.’

  She thought it would be, too.

  QUICK ON THE DRAW

  Jane steered their little car carefully into the car park of the Berebury Flying Club and switched off the engine.

  Peter made no move to get out of the passenger seat. ‘There’s no hurry,’ he said, leaning back. ‘We’re early anyway.’

  ‘Better than being late,’ said Jane briskly.

  ‘I think we’re actually the first here,’ said Peter, looking round the empty car park and then over at the planes standing silent on the tarmac.

  ‘All the more time to check your kit before you jump,’ said Jane, turning her head to look at him.

  He was still sitting in the passenger seat, his head sunk now between his hands. ‘I can’t go through with it, Jane,’ he said and groaned. ‘I just can’t.’

  ‘I don’t see how you can very well change your mind,’ she said. ‘Not now.’ She sighed and added, ‘Not without causing a lot of trouble all round.’

  ‘It’s never too late to change your mind,’ he came back quickly.

  Too quickly.

  ‘And if you do?’ she said not unreasonably. ‘What then? Had you thought about what would happen next? It won’t be any better tomorrow.’ She turned her head as another car drove into the airport car park and came to a stop a little way away. ‘Look, here comes the first arrival.’

  A young man got out of the other car and gave them a casual wave as he walked off towards the Flying Club’s hut. Peter gave the other driver a wan smile as he returned the wave. ‘That’s our pilot.’

  ‘He’s not very old, is he?’ said Jane anxiously.

  ‘Parachuting’s a young man’s sport,’ said Peter.

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said doubtfully.

  He gave her a little smile. ‘And pilots are usually on the young side. Those that go in for sport, anyway.’ He stopped speaking suddenly, a spasm crossing his face. His whole bearing changed and he sank his head back between his hands. ‘Oh, God, Jane, I really don’t think I can go through with it after all.’

  ‘Yes, you can,’ she said quietly. ‘You must, in fact, or you’ll always regret it.’

  ‘There’s no must about it …’

  ‘There is,’ she countered. ‘Once you’ve said you will. Besides …’

  ‘There’s our instructor arriving.’ He lifted his head briefly and pointed out a tousle-haired fellow, already kitted out in his flying suit, walking across the car park from a lively looking four-by-four. ‘Hell of a nice fellow.’

  ‘So’s Mr Murgatroyd,’ she remarked.

  ‘I know, I know. Wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ he said with more than a touch of sarcasm. ‘They always say that.’

  ‘No need to be like that,’ she said lightly, touching his shoulder as she spoke.

  ‘Well, you know how I feel about him, don’t you?’

  She sighed. ‘I do, but I’m sure there’s no need. You’ve just got to be brave and screw yourself up to it.’

  ‘It’s all very well for you to sit there and say that,’ he began heatedly, subsiding again suddenly, sinking his head back between his hands. ‘Oh, God, I do feel awful.’

  ‘It won’t take a minute,’ she said.

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with it,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, it has,’ she came back at him. ‘At least they don’t say that to you when you’re having a baby.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he apologised. ‘I’m being a bit of a baby myself, aren’t I?’

  �
�A lot of people do find it frightening,’ she said. ‘I know that. Especially the first time.’

  ‘That does make it worse,’ he agreed.

  He waved at another arrival – a girl who was clambering at out of a snazzy red sports car. ‘There’s Shirley turning up as usual. She’s the club’s star performer.’

  Jane gave the young woman a considering look. ‘Got the figure for it, hasn’t she?’

  He smiled for the first time. ‘They don’t like you to be too heavy when you jump.’

  ‘I can understand that.’

  ‘She’s done it dozens of times, of course.’

  ‘Practice makes perfect,’ said Jane. ‘Come to think about it, Peter, Mr Murgatroyd must have done it hundreds of times.’

  ‘Don’t,’ he groaned. ‘I don’t even like to think about it. Especially now.’

  ‘Think how much better you’ll feel when it’s all over.’

  ‘People always say that when it’s not them who’ve got something nasty ahead of them.’

  ‘That’s true,’ she admitted candidly, ‘but then so is what they say about feeling better afterwards. It’s true, too.’

  ‘That doesn’t help much though, does it, when you’ve still got to go through with it yourself,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose not,’ she said, leaning over and nestling her head near his. ‘My poor love, I hate to see you like this, I really do, but you’ve got to face up to it, you know. You can’t go on like this.’

  ‘It’s not so bad some of the time,’ he insisted.

  ‘Darling, don’t start that again. We’ve been over all that before.’ She glanced across the airfield. ‘Why don’t you just go into the clubhouse and talk to somebody.’

  ‘No one’s all that chatty before a jump.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘Besides, you have to concentrate on checking your kit.’

  ‘I should hope so, too,’ she said sternly. ‘Mistakes aren’t going to get you anywhere at twenty thousand feet.’