AN AFTERNOON TO KILL
SHELLEY SMITH
© Shelley Smith 1953
Shelley Smith has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1953 by Wm. Collins Ltd.
This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.
For Liz
With Affection
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
THE HOUSE IN THE DESERT
It was the hour before high noon when the old-fashioned aeroplane that was taking the English tutor from England to the remote little Indian state came out of the vast empty sky and quavered down upon the sun-bleached silent land. The pilot clambered down and slowly walked round the machine; but as soon as the Englishman called out to know what was wrong he changed the expression of anxiety on his brown face to a grin of cheerful confidence.
‘Is all right. I fix,’ he said, with an airy wave of the hand, as if he knew what was wrong.
The Englishman climbed down to join him.
‘What’s the damage?’ he said again.
‘Bust the under carriage on these damn stones you see,’ the pilot said, kicking it. ‘Not too bad. Might be worse. And a little engine trouble. Is nothing. I soon fix.’
‘Where are we?’
The pilot would like to have known this too; for he had no idea how far off-course he was. He also did not know what was wrong with the machine, or how long it would take him to mend it. He was badly frightened under his nervous veneer of competence. If something went wrong and the Englishman — well, if the Englishman never arrived, then he, Ras Ali, would be finished, ruined, disgraced (it had not yet occurred to him that if the Englishman did not arrive presumably neither would he); he saw his thin dark little wife and the children with their poor little hands raised tremblingly for mercy, and he wanted to weep. The baked yellowish earth patched with brown grass and stunted thorn bushes (a landscape like the end of the world) began to shimmer in his tear-filled eyes.
‘We are in the desert,’ he said. But then this tiresome Englishman with his passion for facts demanded to know which desert.
‘Perhaps the Iranian Plateau.’
‘What do you mean, “perhaps the Iranian Plateau”? Don’t you know where we are?’
‘Well, it is the Iranian Plateau,’ said Ras Ali, convinced by his own words.
The Englishman frowned.
‘We shouldn’t be anywhere near Iran, surely?’
‘Oh, another route,’ said the little man, again with an airy gesture of the hand. ‘Just as good. Quicker. Better,’ he improvised.
The Englishman was just about to explode into rage at this stupid lie when he thought it would be seemlier to appear cool and amused by the situation. At Oxford one was expected to remain the cool spectator in all circumstances. In all circumstances. And Mr Jones was profoundly serious about this philosophically detached attitude to life. (Mr Jones was twenty-four.) So he smiled down at the absurd little man and said:
‘It’s damned hot out here, I think I’ll get back into the plane while you get on with the job. I’m afraid I’m no use with machinery at all.’
But the plane was unbearably hot and stuffy inside, the sun’s rays seemed all to converge on this metal box, charging it with heat. And Mr Jones very soon stumbled out gasping like a landed flounder. He thought to seat himself in the shade of the machine. But the sun was already too high. The narrow black places were intolerable.
He shielded his glasses and peered short-sightedly at the bare horizon quivering in the heat surrounding them. Through the distorting glare of heat there did seem to be something. A mark like a pearly blemish where the japanned sky met the earth. He called Ras Ali. It was a building, the pilot declared after an instant’s scrutiny. And from a building help might be forthcoming, he realised jubilantly, and at once offered to go and see. But Mr Jones firmly nipped that suggestion; the pilot should stay with his plane and get on with the job of mending it. If there was any form of help coming from this building Mr Jones would send it.
‘You will not leave me alone in this desert all night!’ cried the pilot.
‘All nightl How long is it going to take you to do this job?’ said Mr Jones in equal dismay.
‘Two days, three days, I cannot tell, I do not know,’ wept the little man.
‘Nonsense,’ said Mr Jones languidly, savouring his own aplomb. ‘It can’t possibly be anything serious. Dirty plugs, I expect. We’ve got to get going, you know, we can’t be stranded out here.’
‘No, sir. Jolly well right you are. I fix it at once, right away, this afternoon. I will be ten minutes,’ he promised, recalling the notices he had seen pinned to obscure English shops: ‘Back in ten minutes.’
But Mr Jones was taking no chances. Besides, even standing in this fierce heat made him feel dizzy. ‘It must be finished this afternoon,’ he said, tucking a handkerchief under his topee to protect the back of his neck, and then he walked away towards what he sincerely hoped was not a mirage. He dwindled from the pilot’s sight ...
He approached a high wall with dark windows cut in it here and there like dominoes. He walked round two sides of the wall before he found the way in; a small gate black as iron. He rang and turned, waiting, to see in the distance the piled white boxes of a village and the beautiful liquid mirror of a lake or reservoir. When he returned impatiently to the gate he wondered how long those eyes had been watching him through the grille.
It couldn’t have been harder to get inside if it had been a harem, and not for want of comprehension, for the doorkeeper spoke an adequate sort of basic English.
‘Take me to your master,’ demanded Jones impatiently, tired of this oriental beating about the bush.
The cross-eyed doorkeeper looked at his left ear and the ghost standing at his right-hand side at the same instant, and said with all the decision of an English butler:
‘She not possible see anyone.’
Mr Jones thought, ‘I shall expire if I don’t get out of this heat,’ and desperation spurred his addled wits into commonsense. He brought out a handful of money. The bolts slid cautiously back.
The courtyard was like Paradise. There was shade and scent, and that sound as refreshing as a breeze, the lucid tinkle of water. A jasmine cast a filigree of shade on one side to the edge of an inner colonnade. A china rose offered its hundred blossoms to the sun. But Mr Jones was not permitted to linger within the discreet gaze of those latticed windows. He was urged towards an inner apartment, large and dim with a bizarred design of sunlight on the floor. He looked about him, blinking, dazzled by the sudden duskiness. He presumed the servant had scuffed off to fetch someone; but whom? ‘She not possible see anyone,’ he remembered, and imagined a wealthy Moslem widow in ‘purdah’. On the mother-of-pearl table beneath the pierced lattice a cricket chirped perpetually in its little paper cage. The sound was insistent, hypnotic, and he stared at the little creature absorbedly.
He was quite ridiculously startled when a voice suddenly bade him, ‘Good afternoon!’ He swung round in quite a tiz. He thought at first it was a man standing in the archway. Then he saw it was an old woman, a sturdy wide-hipped old woman like a
peasant, with her white hair cropped as short as a man’s. She came forward.
‘I’m sorry I startled you,’ she said in a deep pleasant voice.
‘You’re English!’ he exclaimed, for some reason astonished beyond words at finding an English woman in this oriental citadel.
‘And so are you, and I could not resist hearing the tones of an English voice again after all these years.’
‘It’s extraordinary,’ he murmured.
‘You are easily astonished,’ she said with a faint smile. ‘I shall introduce myself. I am Alva Hine.’ She saw the name meant nothing to him.
‘My name is Lancelot Jones,’ he said, ‘and I’m supposed to be flying out to Bandrapore, as tutor to Mahmoud Kahn’s son. But we were forced to come down here with engine trouble, and I’ve left the pilot to tinker up the machine while I came out to see if there was any help to be got. I don’t know anything about machinery myself, but it strikes me that the pilot is a complete fool, and I believe he’s just been flying blind,’ he said, at last acknowledging to himself his ludicrous plight.
The old woman said:
‘Then you didn’t come to see me?’
‘Dear me,’ said Lancelot Jones, who had vaguely supposed her position in this household equivalent to what his own was to be in Bandrapore. ‘Actually, no.’ He looked attentively now at that square majestic head which bore in its features the nobility of some ancient granite sculpture. ‘I suppose then you are She?’ he tentatively suggested.
‘She?’
He explained the ‘She not possible see anyone’.
‘Oh! Like Ayesha,’ she chuckled.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Ayesha,’ she repeated, ‘the wonderful white goddess. Rider Haggard. Don’t you remember?’
‘A book?’ he hazarded.
‘I have put the fear of God into them of course. I had to. They know I never see anyone.’
‘You’ve been out here a long time.’
‘Many years,’ she said, ‘many years. But you, I am sure, are not anxious to stay as long as that. They will be expecting you in Bandrapore. How long were you thinking of staying here? There is nothing in the vicinity to attract a stranger, I’m afraid, and I fear you’ll find my poor hospitality very primitive,’ she announced with placid cruelty.
‘Dear lady, I hope I shall not have to stay at all,’ he said hastily. ‘If you could shelter me for just a few hours, I think the pilot will have put it in order.’
‘I shall send my chauffeur to help him, he is quite clever with engines, I find.’ She clapped her hands and gave an order to a servant. ‘Now tell me all about yourself, Mr Jones?’ she commanded as imperiously as a child awaiting a fairy story.
But either there was nothing to tell, or he did not know how to tell it. He told her he was twenty-four ... His father ... His mother ... Oxford ... Alva Hine patted away a little yawn. This was not worth while disturbing herself for, she thought, studying the serious young man with his long thin legs poking up in front of him. If she was disappointed it did not show in her serene face.
A servant brought in little glasses of sweet mint tea.
‘Tell me about London,’ she said. ‘What goes on there, and who are the novelists you admire to-day?’ she said, searching for a suitable subject of conversation for this dull young man.
‘I never read novels.’
‘My dear young man!’ she expostulated with some irritation. ‘Why not, may I ask?’
‘You may indeed. They don’t interest me.’
‘But why not?’ she insisted.
‘Frankly, I can’t see the point,’ he shrugged. ‘Even if I had the time to waste (which I haven’t) I don’t believe I should ever come to reading novels. I really cannot fathom why anyone ever does.’
‘Or write them, I suppose.’
‘No, I can’t say that. There are such an immense number of curious ways of earning a living, that I suppose writing fiction is no odder than any other. But why anyone should bother to read it is another matter. A pernicious infection of the mind.’
‘You think so?’
‘At any time. But at this period of history when one really does feel that one cannot be too serious in one’s approach to the problems of this age, why fritter one’s valuable energies away on such senseless frivolity which weakens the moral fibre — so my tutor always said — and dulls the intellect,’ said Lancelot Jones in wise lecture-room tones, approving the sonorous periods.
The old woman smiled at the ridiculous young prig.
‘You have nothing to learn,’ she said.
‘No, but you do see what I mean?’
‘Ah, I see; but I like to wander through these childhood groves of fantasy you so disapprove of. It seems to me that I am looking at my own heart in a mirror, and seeing there things I never knew I knew.’
‘What sort of things?’ he said like a chess-player.
‘Secrets about the nature of humanity.’
‘Then why not study psychology, my dear madam, which would unfold to you the meaning of these secrets you find so esoteric?’ He made a very slight gesture with one tense hand, which betrayed his excitement.
‘Have you ever considered,’ she said slowly and now quite seriously too, ‘that there are truths that are not strictly communicable in words, or are conveyed somehow beyond the total effect of the book? Like the ungraspable truths of lyric poetry. But I suppose that poetry, too, is beneath your consideration.’
‘I want facts, not poetry,’ he cried. ‘Poetry was good enough for me when I was jogged up and down on my mother’s knee before I could speak. Poetry is for the infancy of the world, or the slack irresponsible dreamer, or the dictator who uses words to hypnotise people. Down with poetry, I say; it has been a curse to mankind!’
‘“Milton, thou should’st be living at this hour!”’ she remarked. ‘I can see that if I am to be allowed to retain my own feeble convictions of what constitutes noble pleasure — let us call it “the right to the pursuit of happiness” — we must find some other subject for discussion. You shall choose this time, it is your turn.’
He hesitated.
‘May it be personal? May I ask why you live in this strange solitary place?’
She was silent, thinking. Her round brown hands lay quietly in her lap.
‘I will tell you,’ she said at the end of her deliberations. ‘It is all so long ago now it cannot matter. I should like to tell it to someone, and it will help to kill the hours of waiting for you, perhaps. I shall try not to bore you,’ she added considerately.
CHAPTER ONE
THE HOUSE BY THE SEA
The old woman began dreamily:
‘It is like pulling back veil after veil from the past to find the beginning of the story that ended with my coming here. And now that I examine it, I can think of no other place to begin than the beginning — when we were all children and lived in a massive pink and yellow crenellated Victorian house with a clock-tower. It stood out hideously in that bleak Essex landscape; but its shrubberies and all those deadly dark evergreens made it a romantic place for children to play and hide and dream in, swaying high up in the shadowy branches of a cedar. And the rambling echoey house too was just what children like. I suppose that was why Father bought it. It was so suitable for a large and growing family. And there was a railway in the village not far away to take Father to Town. Father was a tea merchant. Once a year we children were taken on a pilgrimage to the warehouses in Stepney and the business in the City, queer-smelling dusty old places with flights of stairs that made my young legs ache.
‘It must have been quite a prosperous business, since it supported our large family in comfort, though we lived plainly and sensibly with our nurses and governesses, very much in awe of our parents, at least of Papa. He was a tall man with a stern pale face and dark eyes. His whiskers and eyebrows were handsomely black in my recollection of
him, although his hair was already crowded with silver. I thought he was God,’ the old woman said with a simple smile.
‘I loved Mama. That was different, But Papa I adored. I think the boys were frightened of him. His displeasure could be terrible. I wasn’t afraid of him. I only wanted to be his favourite, and when poor little Ursula died I became the eldest girl — “Papa’s pet”. There were — let me see — eight of us in all, counting the ones who didn’t live to grow up. There was Percival, who was nine years older than me, and Ursula who died when she was thirteen, and Mary who died as a baby, and Robert, and then me, Blanche Rose — Oh,’ she said, catching the young man’s surprised look, ‘Alva Hine is only the name I am known by now, it’s not my real name. Blanche Rose was my parents’ cruel choice for a girl who turned out to be about as unlike a white rose as a girl can. Poor lanky, graceless, shy Blanche Rose! And after her came Harry, as handsome and cheerful as Blanche was plain and awkward. And then Lucy, a pretty little fair child like Mama.
‘It must have been a bitter blow for Papa when Percival elected to go into the Indian Army instead of the business. The eldest boy and all that, you know. And then Robert was a disappointment too. He did something disgraceful and ran away, and we children were never allowed to utter his name again. But I was still a child at that time, and I did not understand or care. My elder brothers were so far above me that I hardly missed them anyway. My own life was absorbedly busy then. Until I was fourteen I imagined that life was meant to be enjoyed.
‘But when I was fourteen Mama died. They can never have meant to have another child after Lucy, and when Edgar was born it killed her. Not at once. For some weeks she seemed uncertain whether she wanted to live or die, and I remember how impressed and terrified I was by the sense of illness in the house, the hush, the solemn crackling nurse, and the breath-catching odour of disinfectants, and Mama looking horribly small and yellow suddenly in the big white bed. And then one day, I don’t know why, I suddenly realised that she was going to die, that death was inescapable. I couldn’t bear to see her after that. But when she lay dying with all her children around her and Papa kneeling at her side with his face in his hands (Weeping? Or praying?), she took my cold hand weakly in her burning one and whispered, “Look after Papa, my little girl.” And I promised with all the passion of my young heart.
An Afternoon to Kill Page 1
