A Short Affair

by Simon Oldfield

  ‘Thomas!’ said our mother. I caught Joyce’s eye, and we both looked away, hiding smiles. At fifteen we were supposed to set an example. Charles held his hands up to quieten us.

  ‘You mean my middle name, don’t you, my dear? It also begins with a C.’ It was Joyce’s turn to start laughing.

  ‘Creepy-Crawly Grubb!’ she exclaimed. The table was in uproar and we abandoned dinner.

  Then, one night when we were least expecting it, our lives changed for ever.

  No one discovered what time Charles went into the stables or why – my mother and he had separate bedrooms and she said she’d taken a sleeping draught and didn’t hear a thing. It was poor Phyllis who discovered him. She told us she’d been worried her pony might catch a chill in the first January snowfall, so before the sun had even risen she went to the stables with a candle and nearly tripped over Charles lying on the brick floor, his pale face haloed by a dark circle of blood. Her scream pierced the sleeping house, so that we were all awake at once, running in every direction in our night clothes and bare feet.

  Finally Joyce put on her shoes and ran to fetch the village doctor who called an ambulance to come and take Charles away. For the whole of that day, with no news from our mother, the five of us huddled around a fire I had lit in the drawing room, eating savoury crackers with apricot jam, going over the events of the previous evening: whose footsteps had crept past Joyce’s door just after midnight, what had Thomas heard our mother say to herself in the pantry, and who had been the last person to see Charles. Phyllis – too big for Joyce’s lap, but perching there like a cuckoo – could only cling to her sister’s neck and sob. Joyce stroked the child’s face until she was able to tell us that although all the horses had been locked in their stalls, when she had held the candle aloft over Charles’s face she had seen the semicircular stamp of a horseshoe on his forehead.

  Charles lay in a coma for fifty-nine days. Our mother visited him every third day – getting a lift to the hospital in the post van. The passenger seat had been removed, so my mother nestled herself down like a giant tweedy hen among the sacks of letters and parcels. By the time she got home she was too tired to give us much news about how our stepfather was progressing.

  On the sixtieth day Charles woke up, although we didn’t learn it from our mother. Joyce had sent me to get gravy browning from the post office where I heard Mrs Mardle talking to a customer. They didn’t see me, crouching behind a tall pile of sandbags, listening.

  ‘The poor man opened his eyes and sat straight up. Pulled out his tubes and whatnot and demanded to go home. Just like that.’

  ‘No,’ said the customer, sucking her teeth.

  ‘Yes, true as I’m standing here. He’s changed, you know.’ Mrs Mardle paused for effect and then continued in a loud whisper. ‘They say you wouldn’t know him. And such a kind man he used to be.’ Coins chinked on the glass counter and there was the click of a purse. ‘He used to come to the shop to buy his cigarettes. Always happy to pass the time of day.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the customer in an encouraging tone. ‘A lovely man.’

  ‘Well, not any longer. He’s been shouting filth at Marjorie Grubb.’

  ‘Marjorie Bird,’ corrected the customer, but Mrs Mardle continued talking.

  ‘Demanding to see the doctors at all hours, ordering the nurses about – he’s got my Nancy running around after him like he’s the only patient on the ward.’

  Forgetting the gravy browning, I hurried out and down the lane to tell the news to Joyce. As I looked over my shoulder I saw Mrs Mardle and the customer craning their necks over the fancy goods in the window, their mouths open like hungry fledglings.

  Two days later we found out for ourselves how Charles had changed when our mother brought him home. As soon as he limped through the front door we crowded around him, talking at once, asking how he was feeling. He ignored us and pushed through to the hall stand where his cane was resting. He grabbed it by the bottom end, swung it, and like a shot-put, the weight of the handle spun him around. The silver head of the cane struck flesh. Clementina, the nearest to him, got the full force of the blow across the back of her thighs.

  ‘Quiet! All of you,’ Charles bellowed. We were so shocked to hear him raise his voice that we were suddenly silent, even Clementina, and in unison took a step backwards. ‘I will not have such behaviour in my house.’ Charles pointed at me. ‘You, boy, help me into the drawing room and you, girl,’ he reached forward and prodded Joyce with the cane, ‘fetch me my slippers.’

  Charles, leaning heavily on my shoulder, limped into the drawing room and indicated that he wished to sit by the fire. As he sagged backwards with a groan, I saw the pink curve of the scar on his forehead and when Joyce came in with his slippers she and I exchanged a look: disbelief and incomprehension.

  From that moment on and for the next eight months, Charles dictated and we obeyed. We were all called ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ as if there were only two children in the house. We hid from him and for the first time kept to our own rooms and didn’t dare leave anything lying around. On rare occasions we were given a glimpse of the old Charles – a quick wink and a smile as if it was all a big joke, but then his face would again turn stony. We whispered in the corners and like ghosts we slunk along the corridors. An apathy came over us and we almost gave up riding altogether – in the mornings we simply turned the horses out into the paddock, where they bunched together, shivering at their sudden change in circumstances.

  Our mother, too, was an altered woman. It seemed everything she said or did was to placate Charles. On Saturday evenings she sent me up to the Lamb and Lion for a pint of stout, a few spoonfuls of which she stirred into his Welsh rabbit. But too often melted cheese and slices of toast would be hurled into the drawing-room fire. Once, as she left the room, I saw her uncurl her fists, revealing red crescents which her fingernails had cut into her palms. But the way Charles broke her was to make her change her name. Marjorie Bird became Marjorie Grubb – dumb, passive and infinitely smaller.

  If Charles saw us creeping about the house, the best we could hope for was that we would be made to scrub at the tide mark around the kitchen walls, or empty the mouse traps in the attic; worse would be a slap on the back of the head for just passing by, or most terrifying of all – a beating with the cane. My siblings and I often met in the furthest stall in the stables and with the comforting smells of hay and warm horses we compared atrocities and punishments, tended wounds and dried each other’s cheeks. One afternoon in early November Clementina ran in crying. She flung herself onto the hay and refused to talk until Thomas, Phyllis and I had gone off for a desultory ride. Eventually, with much cajoling from Joyce, Clem revealed her backside and told all to my twin sister, who later related it to me. Clementina, put in charge of shoe polishing, had forgotten to buff with the soft cloth. She had been summoned by Charles to the drawing room and made to bend over the arm of a wing-backed chair. Clementina, knowing what was coming, shut her eyes, gripped the upholstery and gritted her teeth. Charles pulled down her knickers. Her muscles tensed, waiting for the sting of the cane. It didn’t come. Instead she heard him poke at the fire in the grate. Then he was beside her and once again she readied herself for the beating. His hand stroked one of her exposed cheeks, down one leg and then up her inside thigh.

  ‘This is what little girls get for not cleaning shoes properly,’ said Charles. And he pressed the end of his silver cane, heated by the fire, into the flesh of her bottom. Joyce told me in the stable that afternoon that she had smoothed horse ointment across Clementina’s skin and the clear imprint of the reversed initials, CCG.

  It was Joyce who came up with the plan. Younger than me by ten minutes, but sharper and more practical, she told me about it when we were peeling vegetables in the scullery.

  ‘We have to kill him,’ she said. Just like that, with a potato in one hand and a knife in the other.

  The decision to do it was simple; how was the onerous part. Joyce and I dis
cussed the options endlessly – an air-rifle pellet in his head, pushing him off the church tower, drowning him in the river. Phyllis heard us one night arguing in whispers about whether we could steal the post van, run Charles over and get it back in time for the next day’s delivery. She told Clementina, who in turn blabbed to Thomas, and so when we all met next in the stables Joyce’s idea had become a plan without any of us really discussing it.

  ‘Cut out his heart,’ said Phyllis. ‘It’s the only way.’

  ‘I could strangulate him,’ said Thomas, putting his hands around his own throat and rolling around on the floor making choking noises.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Phyllis, ‘your hands aren’t big enough to kill a grown man.’

  ‘They are too.’ Thomas sat up and held out his hands. They were remarkably large for an 8-year-old’s.

  ‘Suffocation,’ whispered Clementina, who had buried herself up to her neck in hay.

  ‘Hanging’s too good for him,’ I chipped in. It was a phrase I had heard without quite knowing what it meant.

  ‘A sharp blow to the temple might do it,’ said Joyce, leaning over the partition to stroke her horse. ‘Three bones join at the side of your face. It’s a very vulnerable spot.’ I wondered where she got her information from.

  ‘Electrocution!’ shouted Thomas, falling backwards and jerking his body around.

  I laughed, but when Joyce said ‘Thomas!’ she sounded like our mother used to. We all sat quietly for a while thinking, or in my case thinking about what Joyce might be thinking. ‘I know,’ she said finally, ‘we’ll all do all of it, together, all at once. Then they won’t know who killed him and none of us will face the long drop.’

  ‘The long drop?’ I said, my voice wavering.

  ‘Well of course. There are bound to be consequences. This is murder we’re talking about.’

  I can honestly say that up until that point I hadn’t thought of it in terms of ending someone’s life. I had simply seen it as a new beginning. There was silence again whilst we all contemplated our future.

  ‘Children don’t get hanged,’ said Thomas suddenly, ‘they get sent to borstal – the boys anyway. I don’t know what they do with the girls.’ And then with relief at the one sensible thing Thomas had said that week, we were all talking at once. And so in the afternoon the plan was made and we went in to wash our hands for tea.

  Charles liked his household to follow a clear and set routine. We all had our duties; we all knew when breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner were served. And if we weren’t already sitting at the table with our fingernails scrubbed and our hair combed when he limped in, there would be trouble. After dinner Charles retired to the drawing room to read his ironed newspaper. Then at a quarter past ten my mother lent him her shoulder and they walked slowly up the stairs; she helped him change into his pyjamas and made him a cup of cocoa, and we children formed a line to peck his whiskered cheek. Thirteen minutes later my mother went back upstairs to help him use the chamber pot, plump his pillows and turn out the light. By quarter past eleven Charles was snoring. I knew this because for two weeks I had watched it through the crack in his bedroom door. His routine was unfailing.

  We decided to put our plan into action on the night of 22 December. The five of us went to bed as usual, but I lay in my room listening to every sound the old house made. Each creak and rattle was Charles coming to denounce me as a murderer; every gurgle in the pipes was the rumbling stomach of the policeman pressing his ear against my door.

  For hours I lay there, hoping everyone had fallen asleep and wouldn’t wake until morning, but at 2.30 the girls tiptoed into my bedroom, followed by Thomas. Clementina perched on a chair.

  ‘I miss the old Charles,’ she whispered.

  ‘The old Charles is gone,’ said Phyllis coldly.

  ‘Couldn’t we knock this one on the head and bring him back?’

  ‘No,’ said Joyce. ‘This is the only way.’ And I knew then we really were going to do it.

  In single file we crept along the corridor to Charles’s bedroom. Inside it was dark – only a pale moon glowed through the curtains. We tried to be quiet but there were shuffles and bumps as we got into position. Charles didn’t stir.

  ‘One, two, three!’ hissed Joyce. At once a jumble, tumble, flailing of bodies, of bedclothes, arms and legs and pillows leaking feathers fell upon the man on the bed. And we children pressed a last lungful of breath down and out, and large horse-riding hands squeezed like a stopper, and from a fumble of covers a moonlit hammer flashed, and my paltry stab with a penknife jerked and twitched into a dead man.

  It was over much faster than I had anticipated and with much less mess. In no time at all I was back in my own bed, lying in the dark, heart racing. Now, the house’s night noises became even more sinister, and Charles’s ghost creaked the floorboards and billowed the curtains. All night I lay awake and when the sun rose I steeled myself for our mother’s screams. They never came. Instead I heard her voice in Joyce’s room, calm and measured, and then a few moments later, shoes clattering down the stairs, the front door opening and slamming. Fifteen minutes later I joined Phyllis, Thomas and Clementina, as we hung over the landing balustrade watching a deathly pale Joyce take the doctor’s coat and lead him up the stairs into Charles’s room where our mother waited.

  After all those dragging night hours everything happened in a rush. Phyllis shut the front door in the face of a police photographer when she thought he was a reporter from the Oxford Courier. Two sergeants arrived with moustaches and notebooks, our mother fainted and the doctor brought her round with smelling salts, and finally at lunch time, an ambulance came up the drive.

  ‘But he’s dead,’ said Thomas.

  ‘It’s to take his body to the mortuary for a post-mortem,’ said Joyce in a tinny voice.

  ‘So they can look at his insides,’ said Phyllis.

  Clementina, sitting on the bottom step of the staircase, gave a shudder. Joyce pulled her out of the way as two uniformed men struggled down with a covered stretcher. We went into the kitchen to make ham sandwiches.

  We were questioned of course, individually, and with our mother. No one was arrested and no one seemed to know what to do with us – there was some talk of borstal and the girls being boarded-out, but our mother refused to let us go. If we had expected life to return to how it was before Charles was knocked on the head, we were mistaken. We moped around the house and made a half-hearted attempt to celebrate Christmas. Thomas and I went into the woods and spent an afternoon in the rain hacking at a fir tree with a blunt axe. Eventually, knowing we were beaten, we dragged home a fallen branch which we propped up in the hall and decorated with the five white doves which had stood on last year’s Christmas cake. For a week the hall was filled with the woodlice which crawled out from under the branch’s rotten bark. We were in limbo, waiting for the inquest – the final outcome which would seal our fate.

  Then, when the Christmas holiday was over and a date had been set, we were told that, like much of the county, the court had been flooded and the inquest was postponed. Whilst my siblings and I mopped water from the kitchen floor, our mother took to her bed and refused to see anyone but the doctor. He happened to play bridge with the coroner’s cousin and at his intervention the inquest was rearranged to take place in the village hall at the top of our lane.

  Phyllis, in a yellow sou’wester, insisted on riding her pony, with the rest of us trudging behind – our mother leaning tiredly on her dead husband’s cane.

  ‘Who does Phyllis think she is?’ Clementina asked me under our shared umbrella.

  ‘Joan of Arc,’ I said. Over the past month Phyllis’s studies had focused exclusively on martyrs. As we entered the little balcony that had been reserved for us, the crowd below turned en masse and looked up. Mrs Mardle, sitting in the first row, dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief and shook her head. On a podium at the front of the stage, the coroner coughed and the audience turned back to face him and were silent. A t
hin man stepped out from the shadows and started speaking in a monotone:

  ‘An inquest held for our sovereign lady Queen Elizabeth II in the village of Little Wittenham in Wallingford Rural District, United Kingdom of Great Britain, on the tenth day of January in the year 1957 by the grace of God before William Payne, Coroner at Law of our said lady the Queen, for the county of Oxfordshire on view of the death of Charles Carew Grubb . . .’

  ‘Creepy-Crawly Grubb,’ said Clementina under her breath as the man droned on.

  ‘Within the jurisdiction of the said coroner . . .’

  I have to admit my mind wandered and it wasn’t until I heard the shuffling of thirty pairs of wellington boots below that I realised the doctor was about to speak. Yes, he had been called to the house where he found the deceased in bed, yes he had telephoned for the police, yes he had signed the death certificate.

  ‘Get on with it,’ I whispered. The doctor strode off into the wings.

  ‘I have before me,’ the coroner said in a reedy voice, ‘the post-mortem report on Charles Grubb, late of this parish.’ He splayed his hands over a thick sheaf of papers.

  ‘Although the deceased appears to have received several wounds, the report clearly states these were inflicted after death occurred.’ The coroner hacked loudly and wiped his mouth with a grey handkerchief. ‘Charles Grubb died from an overdose of tincture of opium, more commonly known as laudanum, likely to have been administered in the cocoa he drank before he retired to bed.’ A collective gasp came from the people in the hall. Only our mother was silent. At the front Mrs Mardle stood up and turned towards us.

  ‘Marjorie Grubb!’ she exclaimed, pointing her finger at our mother accusingly. Again, all the heads looked around.

  Our mother rose unsteadily. ‘My name is Marjorie Bird,’ she bellowed. And the little balcony and the people of our village trembled as one by one – first me, then Clementina, Phyllis, Thomas and lastly Joyce – stood up beside her and stared back.