Easy Silence

by Angela Huth

  ‘William! We’d better have a long go this afternoon, you said. The Beethoven. The cavatina will calm you down.’

  ‘So I did.’ His heart was battering uncomfortably. However could he put the girl from his long-term plans when she continued to have this effect upon him? ‘See you there.’

  It was Bonnie’s friendliness that was so confusing, made it all so difficult. She didn’t have to ring him, enquire after his well-being. Neither Rufus nor Grant had thought to do so. As a matter of fact, they hadn’t even thanked him for the three bottles of champagne, put on his bill, which William had had to pay yesterday morning–thus adding shock to his hangover. ‘Bloody hell,’ he muttered to himself, very out of sorts. How unappreciative is mankind.

  He braced himself for his late breakfast and Grace’s half-smile, which she employed as her disguise for concern: it never fooled William, but in the game of marriage he had learnt it was easier to appear to accept a spouse’s offering as the truth, rather than provoke complications by asking questions.

  When Grace opened the kitchen window a gust of mild air, out of character with January, came through the window. Intimations of spring, she thought: and the wicked idea came to her that, rather than getting down to painting this morning, she would go and buy pots of hyacinths and narcissi, cheer up the kitchen. Her ankle was better. She would like the walk.

  Grace was not surprised that William had not appeared at his normal time. As far as she could judge, he had a lingering hangover to deal with, though naturally he had made no mention of this–had not even enquired about the whereabouts of the aspirin. Grace had caught him rummaging through unlikely cupboards. She would, of course, go along with his ignoring the whole situation, but in her own subtle way ensure he was in good shape for the next concert. Porridge, she thought. That should help. She would also suggest he open his study window to let in this glorious, downy air. Then a nap before supper, perhaps? As always it was difficult to judge the delicate line between bossiness and kind suggestion. But Grace, who had had a good night’s sleep, felt confident she could work her gentle plan subtly enough not to arouse William’s sensitive defences.

  So busy was she making her calculations that she gave little thought to Lucien. Then, as she ate her own breakfast opposite William’s empty place, he came to mind once more. She looked up at the open window, half expecting to see him: hoping he would come, fearful of the consequences if he did. (William, in his present delicate state, would react in a far from polite way to any visitor this morning.) Grace could not help feeling that Lucien had been here yesterday. There were no signs, no clues: he had not been able to get in, but she had an irrational sense that he had come to find her, and discovering she was away had left–what? angry? disappointed? Guilt struck. Perhaps her flight had been cowardly. She should have been there for him. If he had been in the endearing mood Lobelia had described, it would have been a pleasure. He would have asked to have seen her latest paintings–chided her for not having done more. Encouraged her. They might have made a little expedition together: gone to lunch in the Post House, or taken a bus to Oxford and visited the Ashmolean. Grace would have liked an adventure of that sort: its scale would not have alarmed her, though Lucien’s presence would always cause her unease. But by leaving, full of silly alarm, she had forgone, perhaps, the joy of a whole day with Lucien. Also, had she stayed, she would have remained innocent of the foolish antics of the Elmtree–the evening in Bournemouth she wished in many ways she had never witnessed, despite her curiosity at the time.

  Still, if Lucien had come round yesterday and found the house empty, it was likely he would try again today. She would find out from Lobelia what he had been up to–Lobelia! At the thought of her, Grace’s mind turned to the nurturing of a new friendship–slowly, quietly–visits to each other’s houses, consultations about their gardens and books, then a gradual crescendo into wilder things. Grace envisaged trips to England’s great cathedrals, perhaps, or even a day in Paris (Eurostar there and back) to look at pictures and lunch by the Seine, the kind of thing that William could never be persuaded was a prospect of delight. Grace pictured herself and Lobelia wandering down the Boulevard St Germain arm in arm, on a fine spring day, blue sky. Then William came into the kitchen. It was ten o’clock.

  He took his place at the table, picked up the teapot with a hand that shook very slightly. The considerate silence that had lodged between him and Grace since their return from Bournemouth was broken by a scream–a scream from outside. Then the splattered sound of running footsteps.

  A woman’s cheese–white face appeared at the window. Fright had infected her eyes with an unnatural, myxomatosis bulge. Grace recognised her. She lived a few houses down the road.

  ‘Let me in!’ she shouted. ‘The telephone! There’s no one else in anywhere–there’s been an accident or something–‘

  Grace ran to the back door. William stayed where he was. It seemed to him a shotgun had been aimed at the kitchen table. Grace, in her hurry to rise, had pulled the tablecloth awry. Toast had fallen from the rack. Cups and saucers were askew. The strange woman kept up her damn howling. The possibility of a quiet, restoring breakfast was over. The drama, whatever it was, did not touch him. He sipped his tea.

  But over by the dresser the wild woman, sweat and tears pouring down her cheeks, was screeching into the telephone.

  ‘Number fourteen! Watson, yes. Quickly, please. There’s blood everywhere. I think someone may be dead. Yes, I said fourteen … straight away, please

  She put down the telephone, turned to Grace.

  ‘I couldn’t get an answer from Lobelia’s door–delivering eggs, I always do every Wednesday morning. So I went to knock on the dining–room window, saw all this–’

  Even William noticed a terrible, denser paleness drench her face. She broke into a wailing sob. It bent her double. Grace pushed a chair beneath her. She half collapsed. Her words, in a further attempt to describe the scene, were incomprehensible. William carried on drinking his tea, still detached from the scene a yard from him, still annoyed that the plan for his morning was now upset.

  Grace patted the woman’s shoulder. She knew at once what had happened–Lucien had tried to kill himself, and had succeeded. A sour black nausea rose in her gullet. She felt the discs of her spine loosen, making her useless, floppy, and yet her hands were on the hysterical woman’s shoulders trying to calm. She knew it was her fault: she should have been here when Lucien wanted her, not dashing off in that cowardly way. It was because she had been, insanely, on her way to Bournemouth, where she was not wanted, that Lucien was now either dying or dead.

  ‘I’ll boil the kettle,’ she heard herself saying, ‘get you a cup of tea.’

  ‘They can get in through the back door,’ sobbed the woman, ‘the key’s in the shed. Lobelia always left it there so Lucien didn’t have to take it with him and lose it–’

  ‘William?’ Practicality swung through Grace like a pendulum. Her time to break down would come later. ‘You’d better go round, wait for the ambulance. Give them the key. I’ll come as soon as I can.’ She spoke in the terse snapping tone of one in whom reason surmounts shock.

  ‘Very well.’

  William rose reluctantly: the potential seriousness of the situation he could no longer ignore. He looked mournfully at the untouched toast, and left through the back door, avoiding a further glance at the sobbing woman and Grace’s stricken face. It was so curiously mild, outside, that he abandoned the idea of returning for his scarf.

  William pottered down the road, wondering why he was not gripped by any particular sense of urgency or trepidation. The hysterical bearer of the news had most probably exaggerated, in common with many of her sex, and the drama she described was no more than some minor accident. If by chance Lucien had done himself in–well, not good riddance, exactly, but typical of the self-obsessed, no-good rotter that he was. If that was the case, William hoped Grace would not take it upon herself to feel guilt, blame herself in any way.
There could be no one less to blame.

  Whatever was in store, William enjoyed the exceptional softness of the air, the faint creases of blue teasing their way through the sky. A lilac bush in one of the neighbour’s gardens showed the first swellings of buds. The sight took him to Prague, to Bonnie.

  He turned into the Watsons’ front drive. There were large windows on the left of the front door–similar in all but detail to those at home. The dining room, he supposed. Scene of the … whatever.

  William was puzzled by two reddish marks, like distorted cobwebs, on one of the windows. He hesitated for just a moment. Then he went on, a faint tremor behind his knees. Two feet from the window the marks were clearly distinguishable: the prints of two hands, cast in blood, held up side by side as if in horror. Or perhaps in triumph. From the thumb of each print a single streak of blood had run further down the window and come to rest in a congealing clot, impairing the almost perfect pattern. William swallowed. He moved very slowly over the last foot of tarmac, edging away from the grotesque red hands. Then he stepped into the soft dark earth of the flowerbed. It sank beneath his feet. For a second he had the impression it was lowering him into the ground, giving him reason not to look. But its beneficence only went a few inches. He could not now avoid looking through the window.

  Directly opposite him was a wall-length sideboard of gloomy wood. A long mirror hung above it. Through this he could see a reflection of himself looking through the window at his own reflection, the red hands–alone in space on the invisible glass–just a few inches from his head. There was a breadboard on the top of the sideboard, and half a white loaf. A bottle of sherry, a pepper pot. William let his eyes rest on each object for a long time, dreading moving on to the next for fear of what he should find. He had no wish to look again upon the floating hands so near to his own head.

  The bread knife– where was that? As the question asked itself, William sensed the schoolboy detective within him: the realisation that none of this was quite real, and at any moment there would be a rational explanation.

  His eyes drifted to the white tablecloth, which had been dragged to the far end of the long table and left in a whirlpool of unshining damask, reminding William of the kind of unmade bed that he would find a challenge … The rumpled mess of the cloth, he then saw, was scattered with gashes of scarlet blood. His eyes followed the bloodlines downwards. They led to a dense purple pool on the carpet–dark on dark, the viscous substance only distinct from the fabric in its dull gleam.–And there, too, the bread knife, scarlet blade, bloodied handle. Inches from it … a foot. No: two reddened feet without shoes. Legs to the knee, in pale torn tights, ladders white as tapeworms crawling up through the blood that drenched them. Whoever had been attacked had been pushed under the table. So, thank God, William could see no more of the victim. Drawing his eyes away from the scene–and yet still conscious he must avoid the floating hands–William turned his stupefied gaze towards the right-hand wall of the room. There, a decorous pattern of small framed etchings was stamped like flags in a sunset of blood: a great scarlet fan of the stuff had splattered almost to the ceiling. The stabbing, or slashing, of the body must have been conducted with an almighty force to produce such a high gush of blood. On the glass of the etchings threads of blood still crept down, only stopped by the frames. William’s eyes hovered on down beneath the bloodied wall to a low cupboard. Just one piece of decoration, here: a glass case caging a stuffed owl. This, too, was lashed so thickly with blood that only one dead glass eye and a few deathly breast feathers were visible. The owl appeared to be the second victim in the attack.

  William turned his feet in the earth, stepped shakily back on to the tarmac drive. He had no idea whether he had studied the bloody spectacle for a matter of seconds or for hours. Disinterest, cool, calm, had flown. He shook. The warm air had turned every part of him to ice. He felt very close to vomiting, and swallowed back the sick that rose in his throat. But he was no longer alone. Suddenly a different nightmare confronted him: the flashing of blue lights, wailing sirens, shouting. Several men in green, slashed with livid yellow bands, were running towards him.

  ‘Know how to get in?’ one of them shouted.

  William nodded. That was why Grace had sent him. To let them in. To help. To rescue the owner of the bloody legs. He tried to move, but his feet would not work. The paramedic–the word came to William’s mind like a string of lost beads, an agreeable word–took his arm. Somehow they reached the shed by the back door. The man, the paramedic (how gentle, how comforting was the word) found the key on a nail. He unlocked the back door. Despite his haste to reach the victim, he had thought for William. He was a marvellous man, this paramedic, a credit to his profession. When all this chaos was over William would write to some high-up figure in the NHS … the green arm supported him through the dark hallway, lowered him to sit on a stair.

  ‘You just stay there, mate,’ he said. ‘And don’t look at anything. I’ll be back soon as I can.’

  Two more green-and-yellow men then rushed past William, into the dining room. He heard one of them swear. Then the door was slammed shut. A moment later it opened. William saw another flash of scarlet-and-white tablecloth before he looked away, so dizzy he reached for the support of the banister. He wondered if he could stop himself from spewing out the bile that had risen in his mouth again. The man who had helped William was back in the hallway, speaking on a mobile telephone. He looked up at William.

  ‘Police need to be here pretty quick,’ he said. ‘Whoever did this was out of his bloody mind. Nothing we can do till the police arrive–she’s dead. You look done in, mate. I should stay where you are a bit longer, if I were you.’

  ‘You look pretty shaken yourself,’ said William, quietly. But the man was shouting at the police. He didn’t hear.

  Moments later police tramped in, scarcely glancing at William on the stairs. The dining-room door was opened and quickly shut again. He heard voices on mobile phones. He heard obscene exclamations. One of the paramedics came out with a deadly white face and hurried towards the cloakroom. William put his head in his hands. He wanted to see and hear no more. This was a real murder, he supposed. The very thing he had been playing at, contemplating, made manifest. He crouched over his knees, wizened with self-disgust, horror, fear. Too shaken to stand and leave, he longed only to be with Grace, to hold her hand.

  In her own state of crisis Grace dealt with the traumatised neighbour as quickly as she could. She provided tea and brandy, and suggested she should stay until she felt stronger. Then, asking the woman’s forgiveness, she said she must now go round to the Watsons’ house. However terrible the scene, she wanted to be there.

  ‘Lucien was my friend,’ she said.

  ‘Lucien your friend?’ For a moment incredulity broke through the woman’s sobs. ‘That psychopath?’

  Grace hurried out of the house. How long had William been gone? she wondered. Ten minutes? Two minutes? Time turns such somersaults in a crisis. Silly, irrelevant questions speared her mind. They were cut short by the sight that confronted her as soon as she turned into the road: twenty yards ahead, outside the Watsons’ house, an ambulance and two police cars were parked. Their blue lights turned silently, but sickeningly, throwing ugly streaks of electric colour on to laurel and yew. A crowd had gathered, recognisable neighbours.

  Grace ran. She pushed her way through the spectators. A length of fluorescent tape had been strung across the entrance to the driveway. She tried to duck beneath it, but was stopped by a guardian policeman.

  ‘Sorry, love. No one allowed.’

  ‘But he was my friend.’

  ‘He?–Sorry.’

  Grace stood her ground. She had never felt more determined. Besides, William …

  ‘My husband,’ she said, ‘went ahead to let everyone in, to get the key. He’s in there. I must be with him. Surely … please?’

  The policeman hesitated. He scanned her eyes bleakly, as if studying an out-of-date driving licence. E
vidently he saw something that prompted him to think again.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, lifting the tape, ‘only don’t say I said so.’

  Hurrying round to the back door, Grace did not see the red hands at the dining-room window, or the vile scene inside. She made her way through the kitchen–mud all over the floor, poor Lobelia–to the dark narrow hall, where she collided with another policeman.

  ‘Who are you, may I ask?’

  Grace considered. Who was she in this unreal morning, Lucien in some kind of crisis, police and ambulance men running amok through the quiet grey privacy of Lobelia’s house?

  ‘I’m a neighbour, and William Handle’s wife,’ she said at last, words all bending as if in a breeze.

  ‘Chap on the stairs?’ Grace nodded, though she had no idea what he meant. ‘He’s a bit shocked just at the moment, poor bloke. Soon as we’ve sorted this business someone’ll take care of him.’

  The policeman moved to one side, letting Grace pass in the narrow passage. She looked up to see William, some half-dozen stairs above the ground, sitting with his head hidden in a cradle of unsteady hands.

  Grace moved quickly beside him, leant against him, but did not touch his hands.

  ‘I’m here,’ she whispered. William moved his shoulders.

  ‘Good,’ he said after a while. ‘Christ almighty, my Ace.–What I’ve just seen.’

  Silence.

  ‘Is he … by any chance not dead?’ Grace knew that if she did not ask quickly she would break into tears, and gathering information would be harder.

  ‘Is who not dead?’ Suddenly William raised his head from his hands. Grace was surprised to see that confusion, rather than shock, had gathered in his eyes. It must be the shock, though, that was making him so stupid.

  ‘Lucien, of course.’

  William sighed. He turned to Grace. She could see the movement cost him great effort.

  ‘My dearest Ace, I don’t know what’s going on, but there’s no indication your friend Lucien is dead.’ He watched a smile begin at the edge of her mouth: could read her thinking: Lucien’s alive, the rest is all bearable. She was in for a shock. He took one of her cold hands.