Death of a Huntsman (7 page)

He felt himself left, over and over again, with the one reality of his life that had ever meant anything. All the rest had shrivelled behind him like black burnt paper. Nothing made any sense in any sort of way any more, except the voice of the girl imploring him with the tenderest, most luminous happiness:

‘Oh! Don't wake me, will you? Please don't wake me.'

It would be the best possible thing now, he thought, to get it over quickly: to go straight to Katey, in the morning, and tell her what had happened and how, because of it, he could not go on with the old, damnable dreary business any longer.

He had arrived at this, the simplest of decisions, by midnight, when Edna Whittington, the girl and himself sat down to supper. To his relief and surprise it was a remarkably pleasant supper. He poured champagne and the girl, unreproached, was allowed to drink it. He fetched, with his own hands, as she and her mother expressed their fancy, plates of cold chicken or salmon, frozen strawberries and ice-cream,
mousse
and mayonnaise.

‘Did I see someone with pineapple gateau, Henry?' Edna Whittington said and he went dutifully to search for it, pursued by a voice of unbelievably husky-sweet encouragement: ‘And be a lamb and find cream, Henry, if you can. Dancing makes me hungry.'

In the next hour the wine, the food and the utter absence of malignity in all that Edna Whittington said or did had lured him into a state where he was no longer apprehensive or uncertain or even ready to go into brave and antagonistic battle against her.

In consequence he was as unprepared as a rabbit sitting before a stoat when, at one o'clock, Edna Whittington looked at her watch, then at the girl, then at himself and said:

‘Child, it's time for you to go home. Henry, are you ready to take her?'

The girl did not move. He felt the ease of the evening shatter with an ugly crack. His nerves upheld his skin with minute pin-pricks of actual pain.

‘I said it was time to go home, child. Get your things. Put your coat on. Mr Barnfield will take you.'

The girl still did not move or speak. Looking at her, he was reminded of the first morning he had ever met her. The innocent insolence had come back to her face again and he understood it now.

‘Valerie.'

Edna Whittington waited. He lifted his glass, drank some champagne and waited too. The girl still did not move. She sat with black gloves composed and crossed on the table in front of her. Her eyes, not so wide and circular as they often were, looked half down at her hands, half at the dance floor. Just above the cut of the
yellow dress her breasts started to rise and fall rather quickly but otherwise she did not stir.

‘I am not in the habit of telling you twice,' Edna Whittington said. The voice was icy. ‘Get your things at once and go home.'

The band had begun playing. He clenched the stem of his glass, then relaxed his fingers and looked straight at the ice-grey microscopic eyes of Edna Whittington.

‘She's not going home,' he said.

‘Will you please mind you own business?'

He found himself drawing on remarkable reserves of calm, backed by the echo of a voice which kept saying ‘I feel in a wonderful way that we've been growing up together.'

‘Child!——'

‘I have told you, Edna, that she is not going home.'

‘Will you kindly mind your own business!'

He lifted his face, pushed his glass aside and looked straight into the eyes of the girl.

‘Shall we dance?' he said.

She hesitated for a fraction of a second. He thought he saw at the same time an indecipherable shadow run across her face, as if she were actually in a turmoil of indecision. And for a moment he was in horror that she would fail, break down and go home.

Instead she smiled and got up. As the skirt of the yellow dress moved into full view from below the table he remembered the shining lamp of the solitary remaining quince burning in the blue November glassiness above the lake on cooling crystal afternoons, the last phial of the
summer's honey, and he knew that now, at last, there was no need to doubt her.

A moment later they were dancing. They danced perhaps twice round the room before she even looked or spoke to him. Then slowly she lifted her face, staring at him as if she could not see him distinctly.

‘You're the bestest good one,' she said. ‘The most bestest good one in the world.'

And as she spoke he found, suddenly, that he could not bear to look at her. Her huge brown eyes were drowned in tears of happiness.

It was nearly three o'clock when Edna Whittington said to him in a husky discordant voice that betrayed, at last, the first snap of anger:

‘If you feel you've enjoyed yourself enough I should like to go home.'

‘I'm ready whenever you are,' he said. ‘Shall I take you alone or shall we all go together?'

She paused before answering; and he thought for a moment that she was going to laugh, as she sometimes did, distastefully. Instead she picked the minutest shred of tobacco from her mouth, looked at it and then flicked it away.

‘We'll go together,' she said. ‘I want to talk to you.'

‘As far as I'm concerned there's nothing to talk about.'

‘She's my daughter,' she said, ‘and I want to talk to you.'

‘Very well, Edna,' he said. ‘Talk to me.'

‘I'll talk to you,' she said, ‘at home.'

They drove home in frosty darkness, under a starry sky from which the moon had gone down. The girl sat in the back of the car, as before, and no one spoke a word.

When he pulled up before the cottage no one, for nearly half a minute, moved either.

‘Will you come in?' Edna Whittington said at last.

‘No thank you.'

‘Then I'll talk to you here.' She turned to the girl.

‘Go inside, Valerie. Here's the key.'

The girl did not move or answer. Harry Barnfield turned, saw her sitting there motionless, mackintoshless, cool in the yellow dress, and said:

‘Better go.' He took the key of the cottage from Edna Whittington and handed it to the girl. ‘I think it's better.'

‘I'm going,' she said very quietly. ‘Good-night. See you tomorrow.'

Then, and he could only guess what it cost her to do it, the girl leaned over, turned his head with her hand and kissed him on the lips, saying:

‘Thank you for everything. Good-night.'

Before he could move to open the door for her she was out of the car, running. He heard the key scrape in the lock of the cottage door. Then the door opened and shut and he was alone, in silence, with Edna Whittington.

He said at once: ‘I don't know what you have to say, Edna, but it's very late and I'd like to get home.'

‘How long has this been going on?' she said.

‘About twenty years.'

‘If you're going to be flippant I shall probably lose my temper and——'

‘I'm not going into explanations,' he said, ‘if that's what you want, and the sooner you get it into your head the better.'

She gave the distasteful beginning of a laugh.

‘All right. I'll just ask you one question. If that isn't too much?'

‘Ask.'

‘I suppose you're going to tell me you love this child?'

‘Very much.'

‘Setting aside the word infatuation,' she said, ‘do you suppose she loves you?'

‘I do, and she does,' he said.

This time she did laugh. It was husky, unpleasant and briefly sinister.

‘I honestly think you're serious about this.'

‘I'm not only serious,' he said. ‘It's my whole life. And hers.'

She started to light a cigarette. He disliked very much the idea of smoking in cars and he was annoyed as he saw the thin masked face, so drawn that it was almost skeletonized, in the light of the match and then in the burning glow of the cigarette held between the drooping magenta lips.

‘You know, Henry,' she said, She blew smoke with
what appeared to be unconstricted ease. ‘Somebody will have to be told.'

He instantly thought of Katey: Katey the shabby lioness, passing through her blonde phases, her gin-mists; Katey yelling at him, calling him a squeak-mouse; messy, lost, groping, scrofulous Katey.

‘Oh! Katey will be told,' he said. ‘I'll tell Katey. Tomorrow.'

Edna Whittington blew smoke in a thin excruciated line.

‘I wasn't thinking of Katey.'

He couldn't think who else could possibly be told and for a moment he didn't care.

‘I daresay my friends have put two and two together,' he said, ‘if that's what you mean.'

‘I wasn't thinking of your friends.'

‘Who then?'

She drew smoke and released it. The smoke had a strange repugnant scent about it. He saw her eyes narrowed in the narrow face, the mouth drawn down, almost cadaverous, and he grasped that this was a smile.

‘Valerie,' she said. ‘Valerie will have to be told.'

‘Told?' he said. The car was half full of smoke, tainted with the scent of it. He felt his annoyance with her rising to temper. ‘Told what, for God's sake?'

‘About us,' she said. ‘You and me.'

‘Us? And what about us?'

He suddenly felt uneasy and on edge, nerves probing, the smoke sickening him.

‘I think she has to be told,' she said, ‘that you and I
were lovers. Of course it was some time ago. But wouldn't you think that that was only fair?'

He could not speak. He simply made one of his habitual groping gestures with his hands, up towards his face, as if his spectacles had suddenly become completely opaque with the white sickening smoke of her cigarette and he could not see.

‘Not once,' she said, ‘but many times. Oh! yes, I think she has to be told. I think so.'

She did not know quite what happened after that. He seemed suddenly to lose control of himself and started yelling. She had never known a Harry Barnfield who could yell, show anger, make foul noises or use violence and now he struck her in the face. The blow partially blinded her, knocking the cigarette from her lips, and in the confusion she heard him yelling blackly as he turned the key of the car.

When she recovered herself the car was travelling down the road, very fast. As it turned under dark trees by a bend, she realized that the headlights were not on. He was bent forward over the wheel, glaring wildly through the thickish spectacles into a half darkness from which trees rushed up like gaunt shadows.

‘I'll kill you, I'll kill you,' he kept saying. ‘I'll kill you first.'

She started screaming. Out of the darkness sprang a remembered figure of a Harry Barnfield in a white straw hat, white flannel trousers and a college blazer, a rather soft Harry Barnfield, simple, easy-going, good-time-loving, defenceless and laughing; one of the vacuous
poor fish of her youth, in the days when she had kept a tabulation of conquests in a little book, heading it
In Memoriam: to those who fell
, her prettiness enamelled and calculated and as smart as the strip-poker or the midnight swimming parties she went to, with other, even younger lovers, at long week ends.

Almost the last thing she remembered was struggling with the door of the car. When at first she could not open it she struck out at Harry Barnfield with her hands. At the second blow she hit him full in the spectacles. She heard them crunch as they broke against the bone of his forehead and then the car door was opening, swinging wide, and she was out of it, half-jumping, half-falling on to the soft frosted grass of the verge.

The car, driven by a blinded Harry Barnfield, swerved on wildly down the hill. She was conscious enough to hear a double scream of brakes as it skimmed the bends and then the crash of glass as it struck, far down, a final telegraph pole.

On the afternoon of Harry Barnfield's funeral the wind rose greyly, mild in sudden rainless squalls, across a landscape bare of leaves. The heads of many of the mourners were very bald and as they followed the coffin, in a long slow line, they gave the appearance of so many shaven monks solemnly crossing the churchyard.

At the house, afterwards, there were tea and coffee, with whisky and gin for those who preferred something
stronger. The Hunt was well represented. The city gentlemen, J. B. (Punch) Warburton, Freddie Jekyll and George Reed Thompson, were there. The Sheriff of the County was represented. The Masters of several other Hunts, two from a neighbouring county, together with three local magistrates and two doctors from the local hospital were there. Colonel and Mrs Charnly-Rose, Justice Smythe and his two daughters, both excellent horsewomen, and several clergymen, farmers, horse-dealers and corn-merchants were there. It was impossible to say how many people, from all sections of society, from villagers to men of title, had come to pay tribute to Harry Barnfield, who as everyone knew was a good huntsman, a good sport, a great horse-lover and a man in whom there was no harm at all.

In addition to the tea, coffee, whisky and gin there were also cucumber sandwiches and many people said how excellent they were. Several people, as they ate them, walked out of the crowded house into the garden, for a breath of fresh air. Others strolled as far as the edges of the meadows, where Harry Barnfield's horses were grazing and his run of brushwood jumps stood dark and deserted beneath a squally sky.

As they walked they wondered, as people do at funerals, about the future: what would happen, who would get what and above all what Katey would do. Across the fields and the hillside the wind blew into separated threads the wintry blades of grass, over the parched fox-like ruffles of dead bracken and, rising, rattled the grey bones of leafless boughs. ‘We'll miss him on the
five o'clock,' the city gentlemen said and confessed that they had no idea what would happen, who would get what or above all what Katey would do.