An Afternoon to Kill

by Shelley Smith

  ‘“Everyone says Oliver is brilliant,” I said hotly.

  ‘“He is twenty-seven. Time he stopped showing promise and produced results.”

  ‘“You don’t like him,” I said with a queer sort of triumph. “You don’t like him!” And indeed the realisation of this filled me with savage delight. I was glad Papa did not want me to marry him, I was glad he did not like Oliver, I was glad to think my marriage would make him unhappy. This was paying skin for skin! It was now in my power, I saw, to hurt my father as much as he had hurt me. If anything could have fixed my obstinate determination to marry Oliver it was my exultant awareness of Papa’s disapprobation.

  ‘“My dear, it is not for me to like or dislike him: I have not got to marry him,” he said patiently. “I have only to see that my daughter does not fall into the hands of the wrong kind of man.”

  ‘“You told me to find myself a husband and now that I have found one you say he is the wrong kind,” I said sulkily.

  ‘“My child, if you really are fond of this man,” he said guilefully, “you will understand that it is not being fair to him to marry him. To have a young family to fend for would be a cruel handicap to him at the beginning of his career. He should marry a girl with a fortune of her own.”

  ‘“Oliver’s not a fortune-hunter!” I said scornfully and triumphantly.

  ‘“Perhaps not,’ said Papa doubtfully. “It is certain that you have no fortune of your own; yet how are you to live if I do not provide for you? Oliver has no money at all.”

  ‘“He must have some!”

  ‘“He has no money at all. Nothing — beyond what he earns. And I have made enquiries. He idles. In the last year, I understand, he has been given opportunities in three sets of Chambers and on each occasion, after a few months, he has fallen away. He makes about enough to pay for his cab fares, I should judge. I wonder if you have any conception, my poor Blanche, of the bills young men of his type run up at their tailors and hatters and wine-merchants? Very well, then, who is to finance all this? Your father, who has three other children still to educate and provide for and a wife to keep? It may even be — though this is not a subject I care to discuss with a young unmarried daughter,” Papa said hurriedly with a look of dark embarrassment, “yet it may even be that God will bless us ... that you will have other brothers and sisters, I mean,” he concluded lamely.

  ‘“It’s not my fault that you married again! Why should my life be made wretched because you and Stepmama ... because you may have other children besides us? We came first.”

  ‘He had been standing with his back to the fire with his coat-tails parted, arguing with me patiently, so maddeningly sure of himself; but these words struck an anger from his heart to equal my own. I quailed. This was my stern Papa of long ago that I feared and revered and loved.

  ‘He said in a quiet terrible voice, “Go to your room, miss! I’ll hear no more of this. And I will tolerate no more of this nonsense about getting married.”

  ‘I went meekly enough, but inwardly the injustice of it brought me out in a rash of rebellion, in which curiously enough, I was encouraged and supported by, of all people, Sophia. It was strange to find my old enemy fighting on my side. But without her I should never have got my way. I believe she wanted me to marry Oliver. Perhaps it was that she wanted to get this great sullen girl out of the house for good and all. (There would still be Lucy to marry off after that, but she was a pretty, docile, amenable child.) Oh, there is no doubt of it, it was Sophia who somehow prevailed on my father to change his mind, by what arts I know not.

  ‘Papa’s idea was a grudging consent stipulating a long, a very long, engagement. I think even Sophia would have been hard put to it to wangle out of that. But Papa had rather suddenly to go abroad and Sophia was to go with him of course. There was some trouble in the tea gardens in Ceylon or Burma, I forget which. In any case, while he was out there he would visit them all. He would be gone several months, perhaps even as long as a year.

  ‘Sophia insisted that I should be married first. (We had returned to Essex directly Papa refused Oliver my hand, so that I should not be encouraged by seeing him. Afterwards, when the engagement was permitted, he did come down sometimes, and Sophia sat in the room with us and helped us make conversation. I cannot remember that he ever kissed me again, except in front of Sophia when he put the ruby on my finger, until after we were married.) I mention this to show you how conventual was the upbringing of delicate maidens in the far off days of my youth.

  ‘Sophia refused to take the responsibility of leaving me in England with no suitable elder person to look after me. The idea of my being alone in a room with my fiancé and no one to chaperon me apparently outraged her sense of decency. It would never do, she assured Papa. What would people say? And girls were so sly, they were simply not to be trusted. And then if anything should occur later to prevent the marriage my good name would be ruined and my chances spoilt for ever.

  ‘Whereas, she pointed out with some cunning, if we were already married we could perfectly well start our housekeeping at The Grange, which would be convenient for us and at the same time I could mind my brothers and sister. Thus saving Papa the trouble of looking for an elderly person as reliable as Cousin Nell, and the expense of keeping her.

  ‘There was some conflict in my mind over that. I did by now desperately want to be married and have done with it. On the other hand, quite an important factor to me in my marriage was the prospect of getting away from The Grange with all its old associations, getting away from Papa, from Sophia, from all that now meant home to me. I candidly hated the idea of beginning my married life in The Grange, it seemed dreadfully inauspicious. Yet what could I say? I must either let Sophia have her way in this or in nothing, and leave my engagement to trail miserably along for years. Of course I backed her up, of course I said I could quite well look after Lucy and Harry and Edgar, of course I said I wanted to get married immediately; and indeed I was thankful for the chance of a small quiet country wedding.

  ‘So Oliver and I were married and went to Venice for our honeymoon. We were to return to The Grange when Papa and Sophia sailed.

  ‘It is a wonder to me how any marriage survives the honeymoon — that season of disillusion and boredom. Perhaps if one is truly in love one can survive the experience of the barbaric cruelty of being, as it were, rejected from society and driven together like unhappy exiles for this period. As though it could ever be a pleasure for two strangers to be forced to live together in the closest intimacy night and day without even the relief of another person’s presence. Oliver and I, at any rate, were complete strangers to each other and knew nothing of what the other liked or disliked. I was wretchedly ill at ease with him. I did not know what husbands and wives were supposed to talk about when they were together. He made very little effort at amusing me, and appeared either languidly indifferent, or lost in sombre thought. He would answer all my questions about the splendours around us most courteously, hut he did not trouble to point them out to me if they escaped my notice.

  ‘I imagined miserably that I had failed him in some way, that he already regretted having married me. I wanted above all things to honour my side of the contract, since he had given me the chance to escape from under Sophia’s hand. It never occurred to me to ask myself whether I loved him; I had been brought up to believe that wives always did love their husbands — automatically, as it were — and husbands their wives; that love was wrought by the miracle of marriage. If I had not been sure of my feelings before marriage I took it for granted that I loved him now.

  ‘How infinitely pathetic young people are,’ sighed the old woman. ‘It is such an old story, always the same, and always new to the one it happens to. That malevolent little piece of paper which the wife finds.’ She lifted her hands a little and let them fall again into her capacious lap. ‘It occurred one evening when I had gone to my room to change for dinner. Oliver had changed first and gone down
stairs again, for I had had a letter to write. His jacket was lying in a heap on the floor, he was hopelessly untidy, and I picked it up and gave it a little shake to straighten it. I did not go over his pockets. I should not have dreamed of such a thing. The paper fluttered out when I shook it. Even then I might not have noticed it if the pretty florid handwriting had not caught my eye. I thought, how funny of Oliver never to mention to me that he had heard! I stooped for it. The words “darling Noll” sprang out at me irresistibly, and I saw the paper shake in my hand. The terror of the words lay in their unfamiliarity; I had never heard her call anyone darling, not even my father; nor had she ever called Oliver “Noll” in my hearing.

  ‘I crossed to the door and turned the key in the lock. Then I deliberately unfolded the letter.

  ‘I had never received a love-letter in my life, so how did I know that this was one? There was not a word of love in it. Except that the run of laconic cynical phrases were broken suddenly by: “Oh, my darling Noll!” like a cry of anguish wrung from the ache of her longing and desperately scrawled across the page. And then she instantly resumed her light manner. She took herself up for that moment of weakness. She refused to rail at Fate over their hard lot, she declared. Fate was nothing but an old curmudgeon invented by cowards to excuse their lack of enterprise. She was not to be scared by bogeys. Had she not been admirably clever so far? she demanded. He must be patient, patient, patient; she knew what she was doing, and were not his interests her own? It was signed satirically, his devoted “Cousin” in inverted commas, no more. But I knew who it was from, of course, it did not need her signature.’

  Lancelot Jones, who liked to be certain of his facts, murmured:

  ‘I suppose it was from Sophia?’

  ‘Have you not been attending?’ said the old lady testily, as if he were a dull or idle schoolboy and she the teacher. ‘Of course it was from Sophia. It is curious to think that if she had not signed herself “Cousin” like that, I might never have known they were not really related.’

  ‘Oh, come!’ he protested. ‘People do, you know, sometimes address one another with extreme formality when they are really intimate. I think it was rather jumping to conclusions to assume that they were not cousins at all. I mean, why should they say they were if they were not?’

  ‘Can’t you imagine?’ said the old lady sardonically. ‘Do you think I was making up a situation out of nothing?’

  ‘I’m bound to say that if you had no other evidence than the letter to go on, I think you were interpreting it rather hysterically.’

  ‘How do you make that out?’ she said surprised.

  ‘I take it you believed your husband and your stepmother were lovers,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, heavens no!’ exclaimed the old woman, throwing up her hands in pious horror. ‘Of course I didn’t. What would a girl of eighteen — in Victorian times — know of such things? It could never have entered my head — I had only been married three weeks, and I still did not know what the seventh Commandment meant. No, all I imagined was that they were in love. And that was quite terrible enough for me, I do assure you.

  ‘I sat, I remember, for a long time staring out of the bedroom window at the darkening canal and the lights pricking out above it one by one and sending long yellow streamers wavering across the dark oily water. At last I folded up the little scrap of paper and tucked it back inside his jacket and hung it away — out of sight but never again out of mind. Then I rang for the valet de chambre and sent him with a message to my husband, that I would not be down to dinner, I had a headache. I wanted time to think, you see. I wanted to get the whole thing clear in my mind. I wanted to decide what had to be done. Oddly enough, it was less of myself than of Papa I was thinking. If I had tears to shed they should be for him; but I had none, I felt as dry-eyed and hard as a stone.

  ‘I had wanted to be revenged on Papa, but I had not meant anything like this, not anything that would break him. I knew, I had seen, with what wretched abandon he had given Sophia his heart. I suppose he never was really sure that she loved him back. How could he be? But to know that she had never loved him and was in love with someone else would be an irrecoverable blow. I realised then that this knowledge must for ever be kept to myself Not only could I not run with it to Papa, but I must shield him from ever learning anything about it.’

  Mr Jones stood up and surreptitiously rubbed his cramped muscles. He moved stiffly across to the window and leaned his elbows in the embrasure. In the courtyard below he could see a servant in a striped vest, with a grimy turban coiled loosely round his head, squatting on his hams before a charcoal brazier and blowing it red.

  Lancelot said abstractedly, ‘You were making a terrific mountain, weren’t you, over surely the merest little scrap-heap of paper?’

  ‘Does it seem so to you?’ she said. ‘There were the carnations, don’t forget.’

  ‘Carnations?’

  ‘That Oliver sent me after his proposal. I hated them because they were Sophia’s favourite flower. They were always in stiff little bouquets all over the house. I disliked them because they reminded me of Sophia herself with their prim starchy petticoats so deceptively at variance with their cloying fragrance. Perhaps she only liked them the best of all flowers because they happened to be the ones Oliver gave her. He always did give them to her, and so I suppose without thinking he ordered them for me too. How true, how cynically true, that there is a language of flowers! Those carnations he sent me declared as plainly as words his passion for Sophia, only I did not understand their message till too late.’

  But the young man was not listening. He was watching in fascinated horror the man in the courtyard dipping his fingers into the pan on the brazier to savour the quality of the contents. Mr Jones hoped devoutly that it was not something that he was going to be expected to eat. The old woman peered over his shoulder, curious to see what held his attention. Unconscious of his observers, the man in the courtyard fished something black about the size of a walnut out of the pan (not without much difficulty and blowings-on of fingers and licking-off of burning sauce) and popped the tit-bit quickly in his mouth. He chewed it blissfully for a moment and then suddenly spat it into his hand, scrutinised it like an augur inspecting the entrails of an eagle, and in a fit of temperament flung it on the ground and stamped on it.

  ‘That’s a good thing!’ said the old woman drily. ‘I’m glad he found that bit himself. I always say, there are more uses than one for a food-taster.’

  ‘Do you mean we are going to eat that?’ said Mr Jones faintly.

  ‘Oh, no. Abdul would never dream of serving up a dish that had anything wrong with it. He is absolutely scrupulous.’

  ‘Scrupulous is scarcely the word I would have chosen,’ murmured Mr Jones in the same dying voice. ‘Do you think he ought to be allowed to lick ... to lick his fingers ... and dip them in the pot like that? Doesn’t it seem to you — forgive me for mentioning it — a little unhygienic? I’m afraid you think me very pernickety.’

  ‘My dear, what is one to do? You see, Abdul learnt cooking from the chefs in the big European hotels. He is an excellent cook, but I’m afraid he did pick up a lot of dirty little habits there. He’s not supposed to do the actual cooking as a rule — that’s how I get round it — he just directs his artless, and therefore cleaner, confrères. But of course temperament, you know; one cannot prevent the poor fellow trying out new dishes from time to time. And naturally he delights to show his skill when we are honoured with a guest,’ she observed with bland irony.

  But Mr Jones fancied his digestion was delicate, his palate unusually sensitive, and he shrank from the ordeal as if it were a form of torture.

  ‘But perhaps the plane will be repaired before then?’ he murmured.

  ‘You would leave without hearing the rest of my tale?’ cried the old woman, piqued.

  ‘Of course not, of course not,’ he said hastily, thinking how obsessed with egotism old peopl
e were.

  ‘It doesn’t interest you,’ she averred, hunching her shoulders like a sulky teddy-bear.

  ‘It does indeed,’ he assured her. ‘I’m afraid I interrupted you, but please do go on.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘We’ll leave it, damn it! Why should you care? I’ll send someone to see how your pilot’s getting on.’ She leaned forward as she passed the opening and gave an order to the servant who stood in the passage beyond the archway.

  ‘I do want to hear, I assure you. It is most interesting.’ He sought words. ‘Really, it’s history — a social history of the period. Most instructive. How you all thought and so on.’

  She gave him a faint mollified smile.

  ‘Very well,’ she agreed at last. ‘And we shall dispose of your portion of Abdul’s dinner if you do not fancy it, and you shall dine ascetically off goat’s milk cheese and fresh figs and watch me wallowing in Abdul’s sinister but delectable offerings.’

  If he felt a moment’s unease at this hint that she had read his thoughts so accurately he quickly decided that it could only have been a random suggestion. He meekly enough resumed his seat and waited for her to resume her tale.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE RETURN

  ‘The thing I could not understand,’ recommenced Miss Hine, ‘was how Sophia could ever have married Papa when it was Oliver she loved. Since he loved her-too, why had she not married Oliver? It seemed so simple and obvious. I used to puzzle over it wearily, poor simpleton that I was. I never imagined that anything so trivial as penury could have kept them apart. But then it was only an abstract word to me, and I had no idea what it meant. Girls hadn’t in those days, if they came from the middle classes. Poverty to me meant taking veal broth into dark noisome cottages with their small leaded windows tightly closed against the dangerous air. Horrible! But nothing to do with US. I did not know about the kind of poverty that means brown paper in the soles of one’s shoes, battling with duns, accepting snubs with a bright smile, and paying for life with coppers. If I had known about it I would have understood that that would have meant defeat to Sophia. To undertake a life of petty pricking poverty demands a kind of courage and a kind of love that Sophia could never have. She had courage all right, but it was a hard, brilliant sort of courage that would dare and dare, and dare yet again, provided she could assault life in the confidence of a brave silk dress from the fortress of her impregnably ladylike demeanour. Sophia was always the lady, however despicably she behaved! She wanted money and she was prepared to pay the price for it. She knew what she was doing. It was, after all, perfectly respectable. I am sure she would not have forfeited her precious respectability for any amount of money. It had to be marriage. When one puts it like that, one sees how exactly Father fitted the bill. She could hardly hope to aspire higher than a wealthy merchant, after all. The chances and opportunity for her to attract the notice of a young man with money were too slender to count. A widower, on the other hand, was by no means impossible. And in a widower no longer young there were positive advantages. Men as a rule died younger than women. And Father was thirty years older than Sophia. So you see it was not by any means an impossible dream that she would one day be a wealthy widow. Perhaps in five years, perhaps ten. Not surely a great deal of one’s life to give to the amassing of a fortune? (It had taken Father considerably longer than that to make it!) And afterwards, the luxury of freedom!