by Rennie Airth
A hundred and twenty pounds the pair of them. He could buy a wireless set for £120. For a lot less, as a matter of fact, but the balance could go towards a motor-car.
Harold Biggs sat like a statue, his pen poised above the paper, while the thought of larceny slithered into his mind like an adder and lay there, quietly coiled.
He glanced at the figure in the chair. The old woman seemed to be dozing.
He got up quietly and went out of the room and into the kitchen. His heart was leaping in his chest. He needed time to think. He drew a glass of water from the sink tap and stood at the window staring out. Scattered raindrops fell through sunshine. Blue skies showed on the heels of the clouds, which were moving eastwards. He wouldn’t get wet after all.
Dry-lipped he told himself he was entitled to claim payment, to be compensated for his trouble. But it wasn’t that. He knew. It was the excitement he felt racing through his veins. The realization that he might be about to do something he had never dreamed of doing. Had never dared to dream of doing. It was like stepping into a new skin. A new person.
He went back to the front room. Mrs. Troy hadn’t stirred. Her chin lay on her breast. Her eyes were shut.
Biggs held his breath. The cat watched from her lap as he crossed the room silently to the cabinet.
Could he do it? Yes? No?
He opened the glass doors and took out the tankards, one in each hand, hefting them, testing their weight. His eyes, behind his glasses, began to water.
“Mr. Biggs? Are you there?”
Harold froze. His back was to her.
Are you there?
He turned his head slowly—and then relaxed with a slow expulsion of breath. Her face was pointing towards the door. She couldn’t see across the room. He had banked all on that.
“Mr. Biggs . . . ?”
Taking care not to make any sound, he replaced the mugs in the cabinet and shut the glass doors. Black spots danced before his eyes.
“Here I am, Mrs. Troy.” He crossed the room unhurriedly to the desk. “I’ll just finish this letter now.”
Kindly remove all your belongings and leave the door unlocked . . .
Biggs’s pen squeaked faintly on the paper.
I shall return next Saturday, a week from today, to ensure that the shed has been vacated as Mrs. Troy requests.
Yours faithfully,
Harold Biggs
(Solicitor’s Clerk)
“I’ve been thinking this over, Mrs. Troy.” He spoke to her from the desk as he addressed an envelope in clear capitals: MR. GRAIL, BY HAND. “A letter’s not enough, I feel. I ought to handle this in person. I’ll be coming back next Saturday to make sure this fellow has got the message. Don’t worry, I’ll have him out of here, bag and baggage, I promise you.”
Because he didn’t want to take the tankards now. Not today. He had thought it all out in the kitchen. First, Grail had to be sent packing. Then, anything found missing from the cottage could be laid at his door. He’d be the obvious culprit, a man with a grievance. It was an added bonus, as far as Harold was concerned, that he did not need to trouble his conscience, either. Even if the police got around to questioning Grail they would find no evidence of the theft, no stolen goods, and the matter would be dropped.
Always supposing it came to that. Always supposing Winifred Troy even noticed the mugs had gone missing.
He sealed the envelope, got up and went over to where she was sitting.
“Do you understand, Mrs. Troy?” He sat down beside her again. “This letter’s his notice to quit. I’ll be back in a week to make sure he’s gone. You don’t have to deal with him. If he makes any objection refer him to us, to the firm. Tell him we’re handling the matter.”
He didn’t like it when she turned her face to him. An exchange of glances was part of any conversation. You looked into the other person’s eyes and tried to judge their reactions. Mrs. Troy’s clouded gaze gave no hint of her feelings. Then he felt her fingers close on his.
“Thank you, Mr. Biggs.” It was no more than a murmur. “I’m sorry to have put you to all this trouble.”
Too late, he thought angrily, pulling his hand from hers. He didn’t want to think about her, or her life. Or how little of it was left.
“I’ll be going now,” he said, getting up. “I’ll see you a week from today.”
He went out of the room without waiting for her response and left the house by the kitchen door, crossing the lawn and pausing at the shed to slip the letter under the door. The puddles in the dirt track outside the wicket gate reflected the washed blue sky.
He stopped for a moment to savour the extraordinary events of the past half-hour. He had walked across the room to the cabinet in her presence and taken out the tankards! He had done what he meant to do. Assert himself! He only wished he could bring it to Mr. Wolverton’s attention. Somehow ram it down his throat!
As it was, he couldn’t even tell Jimmy Pullman what he’d done, or what he planned to do. It would have to remain his secret.
Always in the past he had lacked courage, he thought, needing an explanation for the mediocrity of his life. But he felt if he could do this one thing—return next week and take the tankards—the whole of his future might change. In spite of everything he had a deep-rooted belief in his own good fortune.
“You’re a lucky devil.”
Harold grinned at the remembered words. They had been spoken to him by a woman he had picked up one evening in the high street in Folkestone. It was in the second year of the war. He’d forgotten her name now.
They had walked arm in arm from the upper town to one of the pubs in the harbour, down the same winding road that, day by day, echoed to the marching feet of thousands of men on their way to the moored Channel steamers, and to France. (Harold heard them still in his dreams, those marching feet.) She told him her fiancé had been killed at Loos and he had wondered whether this bright-eyed girl with the brassy manner might not feel contempt for a man who, with the help of weak eyesight and a cough he had learned to exaggerate, had worked himself a soft posting in the quartermaster’s stores at Shorncliffe Camp. She soon put him right.
“I’ll take a live man over a dead hero any day,” she declared, and proved it to him a few hours later, up against the wall in a dark alleyway behind the pub.
“You’re a lucky devil.”
He never saw her again, but her words stayed with him. As the war continued, and the casualty lists lengthened, and weak eyes and doubtful lungs were no longer enough to keep a man out of the trenches, Harold had waited for the day when his name would be added to the columns marching down daily to the waters edge. It never arrived. He had remained at his post in the quartermaster’s stores. And with the passing of time he came to see that what the girl had told him was true, though in a way she could not have imagined. He was specially blessed. Anointed. One of those, who, by fate or accident, was destined to escape the slaughter.
He still had the shiny new shilling he had been given when he enlisted and he had drilled a hole in it and threaded it on to his key ring. Even now, in moments of doubt or indecision, he would find himself slipping his hand into his pocket and running his thumb over the milled edge.
5
Amos Pike slipped into the kitchen and deposited the parcel of food he had brought in the pantry. He waited, expecting to hear the old woman’s voice from the front room asking who was there. When she didn’t speak he went through and found her sitting in her usual place by the window. In the fading light of early evening she seemed unusually pale and shrunken and he looked at her with cold-eyed concern.
“I brought you some things,” he said, in his dead voice.
“Thank you, Mr. Grail.”
She sounded breathless, uneasy.
“I got some fish, like you asked.” He studied her face, observing the faint tremor that tugged at the corners of her mouth.
“Thank you,” she whispered again.
Pike’s brow creased. He seldom con
versed with anyone, but his instincts, like an animal’s, were strongly developed.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
She shook her head at once. “No, nothing. Thank you for bringing the food.” She kept repeating herself.
He knew she found his presence unsettling, but now there was something else in her manner: a kind of tension, which she was trying to hide. He moved a little closer. He wanted to get to the bottom of this. Distrust and suspicion were the dominant strains of his character, together with his need, and it was this last—the constant thrust of his longing—which caused him to turn away suddenly and leave her sitting where she was.
He would find out later what had upset her.
A last-minute change in Mrs. Aylward’s itinerary had meant a delay of several hours in his departure for Rudd’s Cross. Normally he accepted these occasional disruptions in his plans without emotion. He could afford to take the long view.
But this afternoon for the first time he had felt impatience. The everyday world with its routine of chores and duties was becoming a burden to him. Though he wasn’t aware of it, the frail moorings that bound him to common reality were starting to fray.
Twilight was falling when he opened the shed door, and he failed to see the letter lying on the floor at his feet. When he lit the paraffin lamp a minute later he had already stripped the dust cloth off his motorcycle and thrown it aside. It fell on the floor, covering the white envelope.
He reached the forest before midnight and slept, wrapped in his groundsheet, beside his motorcycle until dawn. At first light he was on the move, hoisting his heavily laden bag on to his shoulder and striding, silent and ghostlike, through the thick ground mist that swirled about the tree trunks.
He found the dugout as he had left it, apart from a layer of mud that had accumulated at the bottom with the recent rains. He used his entrenching tool to scrape it out, stamping the remaining wet soil into a hard surface, and then went in search of one of the many stands of saplings with which the forest was seeded, returning an hour later with two armfuls of poles, which he trimmed and laid side by side on the packed mud floor, damp-proofing the pit.
At noon he broke off to open a tin of bully beef. All morning he had kept his mind fixed on the minutiae of the jobs he was engaged in: on the branch he was trimming to size, on the neatness of the levelled floor. But he had been conscious all the time of the forces gathering within him: a tidal bore of emotion that throbbed at his nerve ends, making his skin prickle and burn as though lava flowed in his veins.
The sensation was thrilling. But it also made him uneasy. Self-control was the anchor of his life. It had steadied him through years of near unbearable anguish and aching need, and the fear of losing it now was enough to calm him and keep his mind fixed on the tasks ahead.
When he had finished eating he left the area again, this time heading for a nearby pond, and returned with a sheaf of willow branches. Earlier he had nailed together a rough frame from the remaining saplings and now he began to plait the willow into a lattice to be fixed to the frame. It was painstaking work, and twice he had to return to the water-side for more willow laths, but by five o’clock he had constructed a roof for the dugout and laid it in place.
Collecting his bag and tools he retired into the refuge he had built. Now that his preparations were complete he was able to relax, lighting a cigarette and brewing a mess tin of tea on the Primus stove he had brought on his last visit. While it was still light he went through the contents of his bag, picking out those items he meant to leave behind. The stove he wrapped in oilcloth and stowed in a corner with the tinned supplies, following the pattern he had established, preparing himself for several visits and a long period of anticipation.
But even as he did these things he felt a seed of doubt. He wasn’t sure he could wait. His experience at Highfield had been unique, a period when time had seemed suspended, a moment of sweet indecision prolonged to the point where he had temporarily lost the power to act. In retrospect he seemed to have sat for countless evenings in the woods above the village while the excitement mounted in him bit by bit like the slow accretion of coral.
He felt different now. The pressure inside his chest was like a clenched fist. His desire was growing by the day.
The last thing he did before leaving the dugout was to cut fresh brush, which he used to camouflage the site, threading the branches into the surrounding undergrowth, creating the illusion of a dense thicket. Having made a final inspection of the area to satisfy himself that all was as it should be, he returned to where he had left the motorcycle, taking his bag with him.
Before wedging it into place in the sidecar he unbuckled the straps and took out a piece of meat wrapped in striped butcher’s paper, which he slipped into the pocket of his leather jacket, wrinkling his nose at the gamy smell. He had bought it the day before and it was starting to go off.
The doors to the drawing-room stood open and the curtains on the windows had been pulled back so that light from inside poured out on to the grass. Two maids were busy with trays, moving back and forth between the house and the table under the trellised vine. Beyond the stretch of lawn illuminated by the lights the garden lay in silvered shadow under the bright moonlight.
Pike sat with his binoculars nailed to his eyes.
He had been watching for more than two hours, propped against the trunk of the beech tree, motionless in a well of darkness untouched by the moon’s rays.
The adult members of the family were eating dinner. There were three of them, but two he barely noticed. His attention was fixed on the fair-haired woman facing him, whose bare arms and shoulders glowed like ivory in the flickering candlelight.
Some kind of celebration was in progress. All three were in evening dress. Champagne had been poured at the start of the meal and glasses raised to the older of the two women. Even from a distance Pike could see the wine froth and sparkle.
He had done this at Highfield. He had sat in the shadows and watched. But try as he might now he couldn’t recapture the feeling he had had then: the sense of a pleasure postponed, but within his grasp. A fruit he could pluck whenever he chose.
The beast stirring within him now cared nothing for patience and detachment. Its demands were insistent. He shifted, easing the pressure in his groin.
He turned his attention away from the table to the edge of the lawn, where the yew alley began, and then traced the course of the path that ran the length of the garden to the croquet lawn. Three-quarters of the way along the yew alley a subsidiary path branched out and led to the gate in the messed wall. Pike’s eye came to rest there.
But not for long. Slowly, with all the deliberation he could muster, he made the return journey with his glasses, following the pathway back to the yew alley and then up to the lawn and the house.
He pictured it all in his mind’s eye.
The charge, with the rifle and bayonet thrusting ahead!
The glass doors shattering!
He heard the screams. He’d heard them before. They only increased his excitement.
Heart pumping in his chest, he brought the binoculars back to bear on the distant figure of the woman. His mouth turned dry at the sight of her bare arms. The thought of her body beneath his brought a low growl from his throat.
“Call me Sadie . . . I want you to call me Sadie.”
He whispered the words.
At Melling Lodge he had been unable to contain himself. His climax had come too soon, soiling his trousers, while he struggled with the woman on the bed, the shame and the blood and the pleasure all mixed together.
Recalling those moments now, he made a silent vow.
This time it would be different. This time he would call on his iron control.
But the last two hours had shown him he couldn’t wait. His need demanded urgent satisfaction. Even tonight would not have been too soon.
He put down his glasses and lit a cigarette, deliberately allowing his body to cool.
The following weekend Mrs. Aylward would take the train to London on Saturday morning. He had already been informed of her plans. She would go from there to visit friends in Gloucestershire, returning only the following Tuesday. He would have the whole weekend free, and Monday, too, if he chose.
Pike drew deeply on his cigarette. In a moment his mind was made up.
He had one more thing to do.
Extinguishing his cigarette, he rose and started down the hill, slipping between the trees, catlike in the sureness of his footing, a shadow among the shadows. At the bottom he left the treeline and joined the path that led through the water-meadow, walking silently between the ponds where the moon hung motionless on the dark surface of the water.
When he reached the garden gate he stopped and went down on his haunches. He could hear their voices. The silvery notes of a woman’s laugh came to him on the still night air. He thought of her white throat.
He began to whistle. Softly, almost inaudibly at first. Then a little louder. He went on that way, the grating tuneless air growing in volume all the time.
He was rewarded after a minute by the sound of a yelp coming from the direction of the lawn. Then almost at once he heard another noise in which whining, panting and scurrying movement were all mingled, and the dog burst into view on the pathway ahead of him, skidding around the corner from the yew alley, heavy ears flapping.
Growling a challenge, it ran towards the figure crouched behind the barred gate.
It was after midnight when he returned to Rudd’s Cross, switching off the stuttering engine of his motor-cycle when he was still some distance from the cottage. It had given trouble on the ride back, the carburettor needed cleaning. He pushed the machine for the last hundred yards along the puddle-strewn dirt track up to the shed.
Once inside, he wasted no time, not bothering to light the paraffin lamp, locating the dust cloth by feel in the pitch darkness and flinging it over the motor-cycle. He was anxious to get home as soon as possible. A long drive lay ahead of him the following day—Mrs. Aylward had a client in Lewes.
