Death on the Air (17 page)

Susan Bridgeman said, ‘I would rather it wasn't played.'

‘But why?'

‘It – it would be – painful. He always announced his recordings. He gave the date and place and the scientific name. He did that before he set the thing up. To hear his voice – I – I couldn't bear it.'

‘You needn't listen,' said her son brutally.

Solomon Gosse said, ‘If Susan feels like that about it, I don't think we should play it.'

Wingfield said, ‘But I don't see—' and stopped short. ‘All right, then,' he said. ‘You needn't listen, Sue. You can go along to your tent, can't you?' And to Curtis-Vane: ‘I'll get the recorder.'

McHaffey said, ‘Point of order, Mr Chairman. The equipment should be handled by a neutral agent.'

‘Oh, for God's sake!' Wingfield exclaimed.

‘I reckon he's right, though,' said Bob Johnson.

Curtis-Vane asked Susan Bridgeman, very formally, if she would prefer to leave them,

‘No. I don't know. If you must do it—' she said, and made no move,

‘I don't think we've any right to play it if you don't want us to,' Solomon said.

‘That,' said McHaffey pleasurably, ‘is a legal point. I should have to—'

‘Mr McHaffey,' said Curtis-Vane, ‘there's nothing “legal” about these proceedings. They are completely informal. If Mrs Bridgeman does not wish us to play the record, we shall, of course, not play it.'

‘Excuse me, Mr Chairman,' said McHaffey, in high dudgeon. ‘That is your ruling. We shall draw our own conclusions. Personally, I consider Mrs Bridgeman's attitude surprising. However—'

‘Oh!' she burst out. ‘Play it, play it, play it. Who cares! I don't. Play it.'

So Bob Johnson fetched the tape recorder. He put it on the table. ‘It may have got damaged in the storm,' he said. ‘But it looks OK. He'd rigged a bit of a waterproof shelter over it. Anyone familiar with the type?'

Dr Mark said, ‘It's a superb model. With that parabolic mike, it'd pick up a whisper at ten yards. More than I could ever afford, but I think I understand it.'

‘Over to you, then, Doc.'

It was remarkable how the tension following Susan Bridgeman's behaviour was relaxed by the male homage paid to a complicated mechanism. Even Clive, in his private fury, whatever it was, watched the opening up of the recorder. Wingfield leaned over the table to get a better view. Only Solomon remembered the woman and went to sit beside her. She paid no attention.

‘The tape's run out,' said Dr Mark. ‘That looks promising. One moment; I'll rewind it.'

There broke out the manic gibber of a reversed tape played at speed. This was followed by intervals punctuated with sharp dots of sound and another outburst of gibberish.

‘Now,' said Dr Mark.

And Caley Bridgeman's voice, loud and pedantic, filled the tent.

‘
Ninox novaeseelandiae
. Ruru. Commonly known as Morepork. Tenth January, 1977. Ten-twelve
P.M.
Beech bush. Parson's Nose Range. Southern Alps. Regarded by the Maori people as a harbinger of death.'

A pause. The tape slipped quietly from one spool to the other.

‘
More-pork!
'

Startling and clear as if the owl called from the ridgepole, the second note a minor step up from the first. Then a distant answer. The call and answer were repeated at irregular intervals and then ceased. The listeners waited for perhaps half a minute and then stirred.

‘Very successful,' said Dr Mark. ‘Lovely sound.'

‘
But are you sure? Darling, you swear you're sure?'

It was Susan Bridgeman. They turned, startled, to look at her. She had got to her feet. Her teeth were closed over the knuckles of her right hand. ‘No!' she whispered. ‘No,
no
.'

Solomon Gosse lunged across the table, but the tape was out of his reach and his own voice mocked him.

‘
Of course I'm sure, my darling. It's foolproof. He'll go down with the b-b-b-bridge
.'

Moonshine
was first published in the Christchurch evening newspaper
The Sun
, and was re-published in an anthology entitled
Yours and Mine: Stories by Young New Zealanders
in 1936. It is one of Ngaio Marsh's earliest published stories.

J
aney sat up in her stretcher-bed on the verandah and sniffed at the bloom in the cabbage-tree. It was exactly opposite her head, and looked pale in the early moonlight. Its smell was mixed with the smell of red roses and soft night-scented flowers that bloomed on the other side of the lawn. Janey had thought the evening was absolutely still, but there must have been the tiniest of all breezes somewhere abroad, because the cabbage-tree leaves were lisping together very slightly.

This was the one night in all the year when Janey went to bed willingly. Dangling limply from the wall was her skinny stocking, and she put out her hand and touched it to give herself that heavenly feeling inside. Then she rummaged under her pillow and fished out a stumpy notebook and a short piece of pencil, very much chewed at one end. She had taken a great resolution. She would write in this notebook the sort of things she was ashamed to put in schoolroom compositions, and then she would hide it away in a cigar-box until next Christmas Eve. A whole year away! Perhaps she would forget, or feel superior about her book in a year's time. Gerald, who was nine and went to boarding-school, was superior about many things that they had both admired last Christmas Eve. Janey became conscious of an uneasy sensation somewhere in the back of her mind that spoilt the warm evening and intruded on the specialness of the occasion. For a little while she wondered why she felt horrid and uncomfortable. Then she remembered. Gerald was superior about Father Christmas, and had said so in a few well-chosen words. The conversation had taken place on the day that he came home from school.

‘What are you going to ask Father Christmas for, Gerald?' ‘I'm not going to ask Father Christmas for anything.'

‘Why?'

‘Because there isn't any Father Christmas.'

And then, at her look of flabbergasted dismay, he had said, ‘Never mind, J. I was a rotter to tell you. I'm going to hang up my pillowcase any old way.' Gerald considered his stocking inadequate, as he hoped for a cricket bat. Janey could see the pillowcase gleaming whitely at the other end of the verandah, and could hear Gerald's faraway murmur of breathing. How warm and still it was! Down on the flat bigger boys than Gerald were beginning to let off crackers and rockets. She was frightfully happy and excited, and yet somewhere about her heart was that little lump of melancholy that in itself Was not altogether unpleasant. When she sat up she could just see the lights down in town. In all those houses all over Christchurch children were hanging up their stockings and trying to go to sleep soon, because of Father Christmas. Just like herself and Gerald.

(Only Gerald didn't believe.)

And beyond the lights, very dim and blue, Janey could see the mountains, where Father Christmas was at this moment, possibly, harnessing up his reindeer under the winking stars.

(But just supposing Gerald was right…)

She licked the point of her pencil and contemplated the open page, manoeuvring it so that it caught the light from the drawing room window. In its left-hand corner it recommended whisky in very small letters, but otherwise was entrancingly smooth and blank. Janey began:

‘I am writing in this book because I think it will be nice to reed about what I thort when I was little when I am a bigger girl.'

Vaguely dissatisfied with this sentence, she paused. And then, stealing across the gully, came the sound of music. Somewhere…somewhere a long way away they were singing a Christmas carol:

‘
The first Noel the angels did say

Was to certain poor shepherds infields as they lay
…'

Inside the drawing room her father crackled his newspaper and her mother murmured something.

‘
No-el, No-el No-el, No-o-el,

Born is the Ki-ing of Is-rae-el
.'

Janey could no longer endure unexpressed such a flood of emotion as this music conjured up. She called quietly, ‘Mummy!' her voice dropping small and still on the warm air. Her father's voice came through the open window.

‘Aren't you asleep yet?'

‘What's the matter, Janey?' said her mother.

‘Can you hear singing?'

‘We can hear a hideous row somewhere,' grumbled her father.

Her mother said:

‘It's the waits singing on Dyer's Pass Road. Do go to sleep, darling. Father Christmas can't come till you do.' Janey was going to ask her mother there and then about Gerald's statement of disbelief, but something stopped her. Her mother wouldn't talk about things that didn't exist. Janey wrote down:

‘There's a lovly crismassy feeling in the air and I want to be an awfully good girl to my mum. I can't write properly the way I feel.'

‘Mummy,' she called out, ‘please may I ask one question?'

‘Well, only one.'

‘What was that bit on the Christmas cards we sent to England?'

‘Peace on earth: good will towards men.'

Janey considered. ‘Is that what Father Christmas says?' she enquired.

‘If you don't go to sleep there won't be any Father Christmas,' said her father.

‘It's what God says,' said her mother.

Janey reflected that God was another of the persons of
whom there was much talk and no tangible evidence. God and the fairies and Father Christmas. She wrote on a new page:

‘Pease on earth good will toards men,' and with a last feel of the limp white stocking, snuggled back into bed.

Janey was awake. She lay quite still, without thinking of anything except that she had suddenly waked out of a very deep sleep. The drawing room lamp was out. It must be very late. Then she became aware of somebody moving about on the verandah, and heard a surreptitious rustling of paper that made her heart start thud-thudding loudly underneath the blankets. The rustling and crackling went on and Janey lifted her head and saw a big black cape, hooded and clumsy, moving about by Gerald's bed. So it was true! True that he came in the middle of the night lovingly, once a year, on Christmas Eve. True that he carried a sack on his shoulder…yes, surely that was it with the moonlight shining on its delicious bumpy surface. Gerald's pillowcase was bumpy, too, now, and sagged heavily from its nail on the wall. She could see the cricket bat quite distinctly; it was sticking up in the moonlight. There was moonlight everywhere. It flooded the verandah, turning it into a fairy place. The cabbage-tree seemed to be growing by her bedside, so heavily did it scent the night.

And now a great shadow slid across the silvery floor, and Janey's little being was surging with an ecstasy so poignant that it was almost impossible to lie still with closed eyes. She peered under her quivering lashes and saw the stocking a little way off, and a big hand plunging down with a swishing nubbly parcel. A familiar smell, not of flowers now, but of something homey, hung in the warm air.

The stocking was almost full. In a moment he would go. Of all the children – hundreds and thousands of them all over the world – not one had ever said ‘Thank you' for the presents or given him a hug. Should she, too, lie there without stirring, or should she…her heart started off again louder than ever.
Should she let him steal away thinking perhaps that she, like Gerald, did not believe in him?

The hand stretched out across the bed, and a grotesquely bulging stocking was hitched on to the nail. He gave a short sigh and turned away. Janey's voice was all ready, and the words were on the tip of her tongue, and still she had not let them go. Would she ever let them go? Now his foot was on the step. In another second it would be too late.

‘Father Christmas! I'm awake!' How small her voice was, after all. There was a long pause before a sort of gruff whisper answered:

‘Time for little girls to be asleep.'

‘I couldn't go to sleep, Father Christmas.'

‘Well, child?'

‘I'm awfully glad…' She was going to say, ‘I'm awfully glad you're real,' but divining that his feelings might be hurt if he knew she had doubted him, she substituted delicately: ‘I'm awfully glad you've come.'

He seemed extraordinarily shy, and began to mutter that he must be off. ‘There's a greedy little boy in Dunedin…If I don't hurry I won't get done before dawn…' He had actually got down the steps when she found herself flying across the moonshiny floor and grasping at his robe. He tried too late to escape her, and it fell to the floor and became the schoolroom tablecloth.

‘Oh, Janey…Janey, I'm sorry.'

The little figure in its straight white nighty stood dreadfully still, gazing at him. There was a long pause.

‘Gerald was right,' whispered Janey. ‘It's only pretend.' And Gerald, as though aware of this conclusive vindication of his superiority, stirred slightly and muttered something in his sleep. Janey's mouth quivered, but she added firmly: ‘There isn't any Father Christmas.'

‘There's only your old fool of a daddy.' They gazed at each other helplessly.

‘Why did you and mummy say there was, then?' asked Janey tragically.

‘Oh, Lord, Janey,' groaned her father, ‘I suppose it's because we're fond of pretend games ourselves.' He looked at her doubtfully, and seeing that she was giving him desperate attention, he added: ‘It's our stunt, you see. It's the grownups' great chance for playing pretend and it only comes once a year.'

‘Do they all do it?'

‘Most of us are groping round in tablecloths and bed-socks this very minute.'

‘It's the only pretend you've got left…sort of,' said Janey gently.

‘It's gone west now, like the rest of 'em. I won't be able to play again.'

‘I'm awfully sorry,' whispered Janey. ‘It's 'cause I touched you. It broke the spell. It often does in fairy tales.'

‘Why did you do it, Jane?' asked her father mournfully. A great wave of self-pity, and love, and passionate yearning engulfed her, and she flung herself savagely into her father's arms.

‘I wanted to hug you,' said Janey, and sobbed as though her heart would break…

The last firework down on the flat had cracked and gone out when Janey's father laid her softly back in bed. She was not quite asleep and when he muttered, ‘Good night, old girl,' and kissed her, she answered, with drowsy determination:

‘Good night…Father Christmas.'

And her lax little hand happening to touch her stocking, she thought, ‘That's the orange he always puts in the toe.'