Untimely Death

by Cyril Hare

  “Actually, it was rather fun.”

  “Fun!”

  There was something in his wife’s voice that made Pettigrew add hastily, “Fun for a boy of that age, of course, I mean.”

  “But even at that age, Frank, did you not realize the pointlessness, the wanton cruelty of the whole thing?”

  “No, I certainly didn’t. Boys don’t, you know, unless there is someone about to point it out to them.”

  “I suppose not. Girls are different, of course.”

  Pettigrew, remembering certain female cousins among whom he had been brought up, opened his mouth to speak and then thought better of it.

  In the silence that fell between them he became aware of a variety of small sounds—the buzzing of an intrusive fly, the plash of water from the stream in the combe below, and finally the sound for which, without realizing it, he had been straining his ears for minutes past—the faint whimper of hounds. It came for a moment only and was not repeated. Pettigrew was not surprised. Wherever they were running, he reflected, it was an even chance that it was uphill and through long heather or bracken. They would have little breath to spare to give tongue on a warm afternoon like this. It was, of course, a matter of complete indifference to him whether they were running, or in what direction; but he found himself none the less concentrating his attention upon a particular part of the skyline where the ground dipped to form a saddle between the Barrows and another, less prominent eminence. The latter point he recognized at once, in his mood of reawakened sensitivity to the past. It was called Bolter’s Tussock; and astonishingly enough, the absurd name evoked a thoroughly disagreeable sensation in his mind. Alone in that wide prospect of familiar, friendly scenes the place stood for something vaguely but unquestionably sinister. Something had occurred there so unpleasant that he had long since buried the recollection of it deep in his subconscious mind. Painfully and perversely he struggled to disinter it. He was almost on the point of success when the present intruded upon the past, and temporarily blotted it out. An object appeared momentarily on the skyline at the very point that he had selected for attention, and began to move at a steep angle down the slope opposite to where they sat. Pettigrew leapt to his feet, startling Eleanor, who had begun to assemble the contents of the picnic basket.

  “There he goes!” he exclaimed.

  Eleanor looked up, and after some little difficulty Pettigrew succeeded in pointing out the deer to her just before it disappeared in the wood of stunted oaks that clothed the lower slopes of the valley.

  “Oh, the poor thing!” she said softly.

  Pettigrew said nothing. Already the leading hounds were racing down the slope from the brow of the hill, not half a minute behind their quarry. Barring a miracle, the stag was doomed, though there might yet be an hour’s tow-row down the water before he was booked. It was no use being sentimental about it. But telling himself so did not prevent him feeling sentimental, all the same. It was all of fifty years since he had last seen a hunted deer and now the sight of it had in some way dispelled the enchantment of reminiscence in which he had been living up to that moment. Willy-nilly, he found himself looking at the hapless beast through the eyes of the elderly, urban humanitarian who had somehow evolved from that small boy. He had forgotten that a stag looked so defenceless, lumbering along with its curious stiff-legged canter in front of the pitiless pack. A shrill squeal from below announced that someone had viewed the deer on his way down the valley, and he felt a sudden stab of pity for the victim.

  This is quite illogical, he told himself. I shouldn’t feel a bit like this for a hare, and if it was a fox I should have probably screamed my head off by now. Why the distinction? He pondered the problem gravely, while the field streamed across the slope opposite and clattered down the track that led through the wood. On serious reflection, he came to the conclusion that it was a question of size. A deer was altogether too big to hunt with a clear conscience. In sport one should always kill something a good deal smaller than oneself, something that succumbed easily, quickly, anonymously. A stag was too large to be anything but an individual, his death too difficult to be other than a prolonged personal affair.

  “Honestly now, Frank,” said Eleanor, “what do you think of it?”

  “I think,” said her husband deliberately, “that it would be much worse if they were elephants.”

  It was quite impossible to tell from Eleanor’s expression what, if anything, she made of this remark. By way of reply, she picked up the rug on which they had been sitting, shook it free of crumbs and returned it to the car.

  “The last of the hunters has gone,” she said. “I think we’ve seen all that there is to see. Shall we be getting back?”

  “By all means.”

  “You’re sure you want to? You don’t want to—to walk it off before you come home?”

  “Walk it off? What do you mean?”

  “Come, Frank, you know perfectly well.”

  Pettigrew looked at his wife in silence for a moment. Then he acknowledged defeat with a shrug of his shoulders.

  “To be honest, I do,” he said. “What beats me is how you know.”

  “It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? You’re suffering from a bad attack of—I suppose the psychologists have invented a technical term for it, but I should call it nostalgia. You’ve been living in a dream world of your own ever since we arrived at Sallowcombe. Was that where you used to stay when you were small, by the way?”

  “You know perfectly well that it was,” said Pettigrew, a shade bitterly. “I thought that I was being decently reticent about it, and all the time it appears that I’ve been making life quite intolerable for you by my sentimentalizing. I apologize.”

  “Don’t be absurd, Frank, there is nothing to apologize for. Only it struck me, especially since this stag-hunting business began, that perhaps there was a ghost that wanted laying and you might be happier if you went ghost-hunting by yourself.”

  Francis Pettigrew was staring across the valley again in the direction from which the stag had appeared.

  “A ghost!” he reflected. “Do you know, Eleanor, you are a great deal nearer the truth than even you have any business to be. There is a ghost, and I’ve only just remembered what it is.”

  He picked up the picnic basket and, walking over to the car, got into the passenger seat. Eleanor took her place at the wheel.

  “So you’ve decided not to walk?” she said.

  “I intend to walk,” he replied, “but not from here. We’ll drive round the head of the combe, and you can put me down near Bolter’s Tussock.”

  “But that’s taking you away from Sallowcombe.”

  “Not as much as you’d think. There’s quite a good cross-country track past Tucker’s Barrows that cuts off a mile of road. I shall manage it very well.”

  Eleanor started the car and they set off. Presently she asked: “Is there any particular virtue in Bolter’s Tussock that makes you want to start your walk there?”

  “I don’t know that you’d call it a virtue, exactly, but it has one excellent qualification for ghost-laying.”

  “What is that?”

  “Obviously, that it should be haunted.”

  They drove some distance in silence before Pettigrew spoke again.

  “As you have not asked what I mean, I assume that you intend to rely on your usual uncanny methods to find out. I propose in this case to thwart you by the simple expedient of telling you outright. The plain fact is that I was more horribly frightened at Bolter’s Tussock than I have ever been in my life.”

  “What by? Did your pony run away with you?”

  “Actually, the pony did bolt—and anyone who thinks that isn’t a frightening experience has no imagination. But that was afterwards. The real horror came first.”

  “Don’t tell me about it if you’d rather not.”

  “Good Lord, I’ve no objection to talking about it now! The interesting thing is that this is literally the first time I have ever mentioned it t
o anybody. I was much too scared at the time to say anything, and after that I must have bottled it up inside me so successfully that I ended by forgetting it altogether—until about ten minutes ago. Memory’s a funny thing, isn’t it? Perhaps that suppressed memory was at the back of the hideous nightmares that used to plague me at school.”

  “Perhaps,” said Eleanor a trifle acidly. “But I shouldn’t like to give an opinion till you’d told me what ‘it’ was.”

  “‘It’ was simply a dead man.”

  “On Bolter’s Tussock?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was it doing there?”

  “I have no idea—I never found out.”

  “And you—you just left it there?”

  “I left very quickly, when the pony bolted.”

  “But somebody else must have found it, even if you said nothing. Didn’t you read about it in the papers or hear people talking about it?”

  “One doesn’t read the papers much at that age, except the cricket scores, and I didn’t listen to what my elders said about things like that.”

  “You seem to have been remarkably incurious.’

  “Incurious! Good God, woman, can’t you understand? I was terrified. I didn’t want to know any more about it. I was convinced that if anything came out, I should be made in some way responsible. For days afterwards I couldn’t see a policeman without being certain that he was going to ask me about the body on Bolter’s Tussock. Every time my father opened a newspaper I was sure he would read out an account of it, and turn on me with some deadly question which would end in my being hauled off to prison. And then time went by—it can’t have been more than a week or so, really, but it seemed longer—and the holidays were over, and I was safe back at prep school and nothing had happened.”

  He stopped abruptly and looked out of the window.

  “All right, you can put me down here,” he said.

  He got out of the car. In the bright autumn sun, Bolter’s Tussock, above and to the left of where he stood, looked as innocent and peaceful as any strip of moorland could well do. From far down the valley a distant cry of hounds told him that the hunt was still afoot.

  “Have a good walk,” said Eleanor. “And don’t be too disappointed if——”

  “If what?”

  “If there’s nothing there after all.”

  CHAPTER III

  Minster Tracy

  Having left her husband to walk home, Eleanor took the opportunity to carry out a plan which had long been in her mind. She would call on Hester Greenway.

  Hester Greenway had been Eleanor’s best friend at school. She had not seen her for a long time, but they had kept in touch over the years. They remembered each other’s birthdays, and every Christmas brought from Hester not only a small hand-made gift in impeccable taste but a long, chatty letter. Frank had never met her, and it is regrettably to be recorded that he had taken a strong dislike to her, solely on the strength of her taste in Christmas presents and her epistolary style. For this reason, Eleanor had seen fit to say nothing to him of the arrangement by which she was now driving, not back to Sallowcombe, but to Minster Tracy.

  Following the directions she had been given, Eleanor turned off the main road down a lane that led her into a deep valley. As she rounded a bend, she saw below her Tracy Church, embowered in trees, the inevitable stream purling past its west door. Hester’s father had been vicar of the parish, which after his death had been amalgamated with another, because its small and dwindling population could not support an incumbent of its own. Eleanor knew all this, and that Minster Tracy was reputed to be the second smallest church in England; but she had not expected anything quite so tiny or so lonely. The minute church was surrounded by a well-filled churchyard, but she could see no living habitation. Only when she had almost reached it did she notice a pair of stone pillars marking the entrance to a drive that led to a house of some substance set well back from the road. A little further on, the furious barking of a Sealyham terrier announced her arrival at Hester’s little house.

  Eleanor had not been prepared for the Sealyham. Hester had not betrayed any interest in dogs during their schooldays, or in that never-to-be-forgotten fortnight in Florence which had been the highlight of their friendship. Herself not a dog-lover, she was perhaps unreasonably surprised to find that Hester had become one. She found that it was not the only respect in which her friend had changed. It was natural enough that she should have become countrified, and in the process have somewhat aged, but need her form be quite so tweedy, her face so weatherbeaten?

  Oddly enough, Miss Greenway, though hospitable enough in her welcome, seemed to find cause for comment in the changes which the years had wrought in Eleanor.

  “Good old Ellie!” she cried as she came to the door. “My word, but anyone can see with half an eye that you’re married! Let’s see, how long is it now? Ten years? Twelve? Who would have thought it? Down, Jeannie, down!” she went on to the Sealyham. “Go to your basket! Isn’t she a ripping little bitch? Three litters I’ve had from her, and do the pups sell! You’ve never embarked on a family, have you, Ellie? I dare say you’re right, but it seems rather a shame to have got the matronly figure with nothing to shew for it.”

  Eleanor, who had not been called Ellie since she was in Upper Fifth, said in non-committal tones that she was very well and that Hester also looked well.

  “I’m blooming, thanks. So I should be with all the fresh air and exercise I get. You’d be all the better for it, Ellie, and thinner, I shouldn’t wonder. Where’s your husband? Out with the hounds, I suppose?”

  “No, Frank doesn’t hunt.”

  “Doesn’t he? Why not?”

  Eleanor drew breath to explain her views on hunting, but Hester gave her no opportunity to express them.

  “I suppose he’s like me and can’t afford to,” she said. “I get the loan of a pony at the fag-end of the season sometimes, and what’s the good of that?”

  Eleanor gave it up. Her old friend was hopelessly coarsened and depraved. She began to wish that she had not come. And then, quite unexpectedly, things took a turn for the better. Hester began to talk about the past, and soon convinced her that she had not lost all regard for the finer things of life. She remembered Florence with enthusiasm and accuracy, had been buying some quite expensive reproductions of Renaissance masters, and shamed Eleanor altogether by proving that she had kept up the study of Italian which she, Eleanor, had long neglected. And her interest in the fine arts was not confined to Italy.

  “Come and have a look at the church,” she commanded. “There’s a very decent thirteenth-century font, and what I say is a leper’s squint, though the experts won’t admit it.”

  Miss Greenway proved an excellent guide to the church, though Eleanor could well have dispensed with the anecdote about a vixen in the pulpit which she insisted on telling. But the second smallest church in England does not take very long to explore, and they were soon out in the sun again. As they walked through the churchyard Eleanor’s eye was caught by an imposingly ugly polished granite tombstone. It bore the name of Ephraim Gorman. Just beyond it, and scarcely less expensive, was the memorial stone of Samuel Gorman. A broken marble pillar, evidently of slightly earlier date, proved to mark the grave of Job Gorman and his wife Sarah.

  “They all seem to be Gormans here,” she remarked. “They must be a very large family.”

  “Very large and very quarrelsome,” Hester replied. “They intermarry all over the place, and go to law with one another at the drop of a hat. They all come back here to be buried, though. My father always used to say that a Gorman funeral was the most typical family gathering. The only completely comfortable member of the party was the deceased, because like all the others he wasn’t on speaking terms with anybody else, but he didn’t have to pretend that he was. Which reminds me, there’ll be another Gorman funeral here before long.”

  “Has one of them died?”

  “Not yet, so far as I know, but he can’t h
old out much longer. Gilbert, my landlord, is about on his last legs, the doctor tells me. He lives at the Manor, the house you saw as you came down the hill. No children, so goodness knows who gets the place when he goes—I shouldn’t wonder if it meant another lawsuit.”

  “Then the Mrs. Gorman at Sallowcombe, Mr. Joliffe’s daughter, married into this family? I suppose her husband is buried somewhere here?”

  “What, Jack Gorman? Good Lord, no! He’s very much alive and kicking—too much so for some people’s tastes. He got a girl into trouble down at Brockenford only the other day. Oh, he’s quite a lad, is Jack.”

  Hester’s attitude of approval towards the backslidings of a husband and father shocked Eleanor profoundly. They were unworthy of her old school friend, altogether unsuitable for a parson’s daughter. As they strolled back again to Hester’s cottage, she shut her ears to yet another regrettably earthy anecdote and came to a firm conclusion. She would not stay to tea.

  Hester took the decision with calm. Possibly she was as disappointed in Eleanor as Eleanor with her, but for different reasons. She bade her goodbye affectionately, expressed the hope that they would meet again soon and added some directions for an interesting variant on the route back to Sallowcombe.

  There followed an anticlimax. The car refused to start.

  “What a bore!” Hester observed, after watching Eleanor’s struggles in silence for some time. “It looks as if you’ll have to stay to tea after all, Ellie. No good asking me to help. I don’t know the first thing about cars.”

  “Where’s the nearest garage?” asked Eleanor.