by John Bingham
I heard her laugh.
“What are you laughing at?”
“Well, you’re a bit late. They’ve arrived.”
“How long have they been there?”
“They’ve only just arrived.”
“Listen, Kate. This is strictly between you and me. There are one or two odd circumstances in connection with Prosset’s death.”
“Good God! Darling!”
“Look, Katie, don’t read more into it than I’ve said. It will probably all be cleared up soon. Anyway, as far as we are concerned, it is only routine business, see?”
“Yes, I see.”
“There is nothing to be worried about. Understand?”
“Of course not.”
“One other thing. I didn’t tell them I was with Prosset last weekend. I didn’t think it was necessary.”
There was a funny long silence. “Hello,” I said. “Katie? Still there?”
“Yes. But why didn’t you tell them?”
“It would only have led to complications. There was no purpose in doing so. I’ll explain when I see you. I know these police boys.”
“All right, darling.”
“And Katie?”
“Yes.”
“They’ll ask you what you know about John Prosset, what friends or acquaintances he had. You don’t know any that I don’t know, do you? Or do you?”
“No, darling, I don’t.”
“Sure?”
“Absolutely sure.”
I felt relieved. I recoiled from the thought that she might be subjected to a close interrogation, and even more from the idea that she might be called as a witness at the inquest. Some people would not have minded, but Kate was so sensitive and still so shy.
“Kate,” I said suddenly, “do you think it is necessary to tell them you were with Prosset the last evening before he left London?”
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
“It doesn’t seem really necessary to me. It won’t add anything to their information.” I hesitated for a couple of seconds, thinking quickly. “No. Don’t tell them, Kate. They might call you as a witness at the inquest, and it is all quite pointless.”
“Well, I’ll do as you say,” she answered uncertainly. “Supposing they ask me?”
“Why should they ask you? Did anybody see you arrive or leave Prosset’s place?”
She thought for a moment. “I doubt it. We went through the basement door. If they saw me they could hardly have recognized me. It was dark.”
“Good. And one other thing, Kate.”
“What?”
“I don’t see much point in telling them I’ve just telephoned you. Just apologize and say it was some office friend. I’m not really supposed to have mentioned the inquiries to anybody.”
“All right, then. I’ll say that.”
“Bye-bye, sweetheart. And don’t worry.”
“Of course I won’t. There’s nothing to worry about.”
She said goodbye and rang off.
I stood in the telephone booth staring blankly at the official notices on the wall. She was right. There was nothing to worry about. I left the booth and began to walk slowly back along Harrington Gardens.
As I did so, I began to have doubts again. Yet I knew there was nothing seriously wrong. How could there be? I was a perfectly innocent man and could prove it. If the worst came to the worst, I could explain the little subterfuge I had adopted to protect Kate. I might be reprimanded—indeed, I would be—but that was all, and it might not come to that. The odds were against it.
That night, as I lay in bed thinking about the police visit, I heard two cats screaming outside. Beyond keeping me awake a little while, the noise did not worry me, but there had been a time, as a boy, when such sounds would cause me to lie rigid in bed, listening, afraid. It was during the school holidays, and I had learnt for the first time that the dreary house in Earl’s Court was supposed by my Aunt Edith to be haunted by an elderly recluse who had once lived there.
My aunt admitted she had never seen him, but she said she sometimes “felt his presence,” and alleged that on one or two occasions she had heard shuffling footsteps descending the creaking stairs.
There were many cats which frequented my aunt’s colourless garden at night. You could sometimes see them sneaking along the walls in the moonlight, or observe them, crouched down, watching each other with endless patience.
Their calls would wake me up, and the eerie sound would cause me to think of ghosts. I would lie awake, staring into the darkness, listening for the shuffling feet of the old recluse.
Each time the cats screamed and I lay listening, heart beating faster, I thought of what Prosset would have said, and the way he would have looked at me; he would have been genuinely astonished that anybody could be even momentarily frightened by a cat in a garden at night, or that I should listen for the sound of an elderly gentleman’s ghostly steps. I suppose he would have been quite right, too, but Prosset was an exceptional character. He never knew any fear, and I doubt if he knew any in those last moments in the cottage at Ockleton; he would have looked on death with surprise, maybe, but that is about all. I was never in a position to test his nerve in the presence of anything supernatural, but I don’t think it would have failed. He would have reacted as usual, magnificently, chin up, his eyes calculating and cool, facing the direction whence the threat would come.
I wasn’t made like that. I wished I had had a loaded gun by my bed, but my little single-barrel hammer gun was down in Somerset in Aunt Nell’s gunroom. I wished I had had some means of defence; even if it were only a cudgel, and even though I realized you could hardly defend yourself against a spirit with a charge of gunshot or a club.
I remember that those holidays I went off for my week’s stay with my Aunt Nell, as always, in high spirits. Aunt Nell was as different from gentle Aunt Edith as anybody could be.
She was the wife of my father’s uncle, a sort of great-aunt by marriage. She, too, had lost her husband and she lived alone in a large Georgian mansion with about eight hundred acres of farmland and woodland. She was a remarkable old girl, beak-nosed, imperious and short-tempered, and in her youth she had been a great rider to hounds. Now she bred polo ponies, and knew as much about farming as any man in the neighbourhood. She did not make the place show a profit, but she at least made it pay its way. When I stayed with her, I saw comparatively little of her.
I would be out with my gun all day. At mealtimes we sat at opposite ends of a vast mahogany table, waited on by a butler and footman in livery. In the evenings she attended to her correspondence and I read a book. I was not much interested in her, and I had the impression that she was not much interested in me, at any rate while I was very young; and that she had me to stay because I was one of the family, and she thought I ought to be brought up with some vague idea of how the English gentry lived on their estates. But, in view of later events, I think I did her an injustice, and that in her rough way she tried to put some backbone into me.
Apart from being in the country, I enjoyed the luxury of the great house, the choice of food, and having my clothes laid out for me at the beginning of each day by the footman, while I still lay in bed, drowsy and warm. It was so different from the house in Earl’s Court, with its smell of mice, the dank garden, the horrid little leaded windows on the landings, each with a design in red and blue glass.
I have been down there recently. Aunt Nell is long since dead. Death duties made havoc of the property, so that her nephew, who inherited it, was unable to keep it up. It was occupied for a time during the war, but now it is empty. Nobody wants it. It is too big, too isolated. The long drive is covered with weeds, and where the cars used to sweep proudly round with a swish of tyres to deposit their passengers by the great porch there is now a sea of dandelions.
On the south side, velvety lawns and flower beds led down to a big artificial lake, with an island in the middle joined to each bank by two little trellis-work bridges; and in
the mornings, when the dew was still on the grass and a faint mist hung in the air, you could see two or three cock pheasants and half a dozen waterhens on the lawns.
Now you can hardly see that there were ever any lawns or flower beds. Grass grows, knee high in summer, from the house to the water’s edge, and only a stone sundial, and a Grecian statue, rising above the wilderness, show that once it might have been something different. Across the lake, you can still find traces of tall poles and sagging, rusting wire netting, where the young pheasants were reared, and where the keepers hung the vermin which they shot. The head keeper is dead, and I believe the second keeper is living in two rooms in Bristol, earning his livelihood as a none too expert mechanic in a garage. The horse boxes are in ruins, the glasshouses shattered, and the vegetable garden choked with weeds.
But when I went there during those last school holidays, for what was to prove my last visit, though I could not suspect it, the place was still in its heyday. My aunt had inherited the estate from her father, because she was the eldest daughter. She had had a short matrimonial life of about ten years, which had given her the right to call herself Lady Bankhurst. I never knew her husband. He was an impoverished Oxfordshire baronet, a man who was happier in a town than in the country, and who was generally considered by the locals to be a pretty poor fish. Certainly my Aunt Nell dominated him as she dominated everybody else; and when death separated them, possibly with feelings of slight relief on both sides, she took over once again the undivided ordering of the place with her accustomed vigour.
She was on the steps to greet me when I arrived.
“Well, young man, how are you? Got your rugger cap yet?”
“No. I play for the House, though.”
“Not good enough!” she boomed. “Not good enough by a long chalk! What’s the trouble? Afraid to tackle ’em low, or something?”
I saw the chauffeur and butler smiling discreetly.
“No,” I replied lamely, “not really.”
“Going to get into the cricket eleven?”
“Well, no. My eyes are not good enough, really. About the rugger: I’m not heavy enough for the school pack, and not fast enough for a three-quarter.”
“Oh,” she said without much interest, and led the way into the drawing room, followed by two cocker spaniels, a fox terrier and me.
“Well, are you in the Sixth?” she asked, as she sat down at the teatable.
“No,” I said again, blushing crimson. She gave one of her loud, healthy laughs.
“God bless my soul, Michael, what are you good at?”
“Well, nothing really. I mean, I am not particularly good at anything.”
She handed me a dish of scones and began to pour out the tea. She seemed to be trying to think of something upon which to congratulate me. At last she looked up and asked, “Well, are you a prefect?”
I shook my head. She said nothing. She seemed to be bored with the whole conversation, and I don’t blame her.
“Unless you get your colours,” I said after a pause, “you only become a prefect in order of seniority. If I stayed on after the summer term, I would probably be a prefect in the autumn. Lots of chaps leave in the summer.”
But she was trying to make one of the spaniels beg for a bit of scone and made no answer. I felt my toes curling up in my shoes; I felt hot and uncomfortable. I wanted very much to stand well in her eyes, and I never seemed to be able to. I guessed that, with my pale town complexion, short-sighted eyes and inability to ride a horse with much skill, I cut a poor figure in her opinion. The footman came softly into the room and stood by me.
“May I have the keys to your trunk, sir,” he said. I handed them to him, and he went out.
I could imagine the snooty look he would give my ready-made suits, my shirts which Aunt Edith darned and darned again, and my thick woollen socks. He would remember from past experience that he was not going to get much of a tip.
I knew from what Prosset, who often stayed at big houses in Ireland, had said, that it was customary to give the butler a pound, the footman who looked after you ten shillings, and the chauffeur at least five shillings. But of course that was ludicrous in Aunt Edith’s eyes. She provided me with seven-and-sixpence for the butler, five shillings for the footman, and said it was absurd for a boy of my age to have to tip the chauffeur at all.
But in spite of it all I was glad to be there. I spent every moment I could out of doors, killing birds and beasts without the slightest compunction or any feeling other than intense satisfaction when my shots went home. If I wounded one I put it out of its pain as quickly as possible. I did not finish if off with my hands, but fired a further shot.
On Sundays, when shooting was forbidden, I used to accompany my aunt on her rounds when she visited the outlying parts of the estate. It was during these walks that latterly she had endeavoured to strengthen the structure of my character, a character which her natural shrewdness had already divined as unheroic, to say the least, over-sensitive and inclined to envy and spiritual meanness. Prosset would have been her ideal. She was always telling me to stand up for myself.
“If I go and bend down in Trafalgar Square,” she would say, waving her ash stick belligerently, “anybody will kick my bottom for me.”
Once, when I was younger, she said, “Hit a bully in the wind and he’ll double up, and then you can sock him on the chin.”
I once tried this out at my preparatory school, but the bully was only irritated by my first blow, and gave me a good hiding before I could get in a second.
She always talked good straight English, and once almost blasted a waiter out of a hotel lounge when he asked her at teatime whether she would like some gateau. “Gateau!” she roared. “It’s cake, isn’t it? Why call it gateau, man? Gateau, indeed!”
Another time, making a rare appointment to have her hair done, she lost her temper with the store’s telephone operator because he said he would put her through to the “ladies’ salon.”
“Salon?” She stamped her foot. “Salon! I want the hairdresser. He’s a hairdresser, isn’t he? A barber, isn’t he? Salon, indeed!”
Two days before I came back to London, something occurred which although it was only of a trivial nature left a curiously lasting impression on my mind, though I do not see why it should have done.
I had spent the afternoon walking around with my gun on the lookout for vermin. It was the close season for game, and targets were therefore scarce. Apart from an abortive shot at a stoat, I had not had any sport. Before turning back for tea, I decided as a last hope to try a small coppice which stood on a raised piece of ground on an outlying part of the estate. It was round and isolated, mostly composed of conifers, and I knew from experience that such places were seldom inhabited by game or vermin, at any rate on Aunt Nell’s estate; though now and again you might startle a pigeon out of the tree tops, or hear a jay calling in its harsh, rasping tones.
It was a grey day, and a little wind was rising as I walked over and climbed the wooden fence with which the covert was surrounded. It was dark and sombre among the trees, and the pine needles with which the ground was thickly strewn seemed to deaden all noise except the occasional rustle of the wind in the branches. The place was at first sight utterly deserted and seemed to me oppressive and forbidding. I had often passed by on the outside of this little wood, but although I had peered into it, it had never seemed worthwhile to penetrate inside it. It was obviously a hopeless place for game, and I started to walk across it without the slightest hope of seeing anything.
Suddenly, I saw a very large bird with black plumage and black beak sitting on a low branch. It sat perfectly still, about fifteen yards away, apparently listening, its head thrust forward as though about to take flight. I did not know what kind of bird it was, but the thought leaped to my mind that it was a carrion crow. I saw it drop down on to a still lower branch. In a flash my gun was up to my shoulder, and I fired. Yet I recall that before I pressed the trigger I hesitated for a split s
econd, not because I felt unsure of my aim, but because some unformed doubt entered my mind; then I fired. It fell to the ground, but at once began to hop silently away. I fired again and killed it.
Throughout there had been no sound except the crash of the explosions and the echoes of the noise through the dark trees. There had been no sound when it dropped to a lower bough, no fluttering of wings when it fell, no crackling of twigs or leaves as it hopped away.
I did not go and examine the bird, and I had no desire to carry it back to hang in the gamekeepers’ “larder” with the other vermin. I went out of the wood feeling uneasy, though I could not account for the feeling. I had shot hundreds of things as a boy, including large rooks, but I felt that this great black bird, frequenting alone the solitary wood on the hill, had about it something which was malevolent.
I felt I had done something I should not have done. I was sorry I had shot it, and hastened back to the house for tea and human company. Prosset would never have understood this feeling, and neither, of course, would the Chief Detective Inspector who interviewed me about his death.
I shall always remember the last few moments of that stay at Aunt Nell’s place. We stood on the steps as the chauffeur and the footman loaded my trunk on to the back of the car.
The two spaniels were chasing each other about the drive. In the parkland opposite a mare was grazing while her foal followed her, now nuzzling at her side, now gazing with ears erect at the new world around it. Outside the coverts, in the distance, little brown humps which looked like newly turned earth showed where rabbits were eating the fresh spring grass.
My Aunt Nell stood there, dressed in her country tweeds, the sunshine falling on her iron-grey hair and healthy, weather-beaten face. For her, I thought, the years stretched placidly ahead; each day bringing the exhilaration of life on a big estate; each night the peacefulness of deep sleep; the sweet air drifting through the open windows and only the sounds of the country, the startled cry of a waterhen on the lake, or of a cock pheasant in the coverts, to disturb the stillness.
