The Complete Short Stories (57 page)

This was five years ago,
in the last year of my life. Kathleen and I had become very close friends. We
met several times each week, and after our Saturday morning excursions in the
Portobello Road very often I would accompany Kathleen to her aunt’s house in
Kent for a long weekend.

One day in the June of
that year I met Kathleen specially for lunch because she had phoned me to say
she had news.

‘Guess who came into the
shop this afternoon,’ she said.

‘Who?’

‘George.’

We had half imagined
George was dead. We had received no letters in the past ten years. Early in the
war we had heard rumours of his keeping a nightclub in Durban, but nothing
after that. We could have made inquiries if we had felt moved to do so.

At one time, when we
discussed him, Kathleen had said,

‘I ought to get in touch
with poor George. But then I think he would write back. He would demand a
regular correspondence again.’

‘We four must stick
together,’ I mimicked.

‘I can visualize his
reproachful limpid orbs,’ Kathleen said.

Skinny said, ‘He’s
probably gone native. With his coffee concubine and a dozen mahogany kids.’

‘Perhaps he’s dead,’
Kathleen said.

I did not speak of
George’s marriage, nor of any of his confidences in the hotel at Bulawayo. As
the years passed we ceased to mention him except in passing, as someone more or
less dead so far as we were concerned.

Kathleen was excited
about George’s turning up. She had forgotten her impatience with him in former
days; she said,

‘It was so wonderful to
see old George. He seems to need a friend, feels neglected, out of touch with
things.’

‘He needs mothering, I
suppose.’

Kathleen didn’t notice
the malice. She declared, ‘That’s exactly the case with George. It always has
been, I can see it now.’

She seemed ready to come
to any rapid new and happy conclusion about George. In the course of the
afternoon he had told her of his wartime night club in Durban, his
game-shooting expeditions since. It was clear he had not mentioned Matilda. He
had put on weight, Kathleen told me, but he could carry it.

I was curious to see
this version of George, but I was leaving for Scotland next day and did not see
him till September of that year, just before my death.

While I was in Scotland I gathered from
Kathleen’s letters that she was seeing George very frequently, finding
enjoyable company in him, looking after him. ‘You’ll be surprised to see how he
has developed.’ Apparently he would hang round Kathleen in her shop most days, ‘it
makes him feel useful’ as she maternally expressed it. He had an old relative
in Kent whom he visited at weekends; this old lady lived a few miles from
Kathleen’s aunt, which made it easy for them to travel down together on
Saturdays, and go for long country walks.

‘You’ll see such a
difference in George,’ Kathleen said on my return to London in September. I was
to meet him that night, a Saturday. Kathleen’s aunt was abroad, the maid on
holiday, and I was to keep Kathleen company in the empty house.

George had left London
for Kent a few days earlier. ‘He’s actually helping with the harvest down
there!’ Kathleen told me lovingly.

Kathleen and I planned
to travel down together, but on that Saturday she was unexpectedly delayed in
London on some business. It was arranged that I should go ahead of her in the
early afternoon to see to the provisions for our party; Kathleen had invited
George to dinner at her aunt’s house that night.

‘I should be with you by
seven,’ she said. ‘Sure you won’t mind the empty house? I hate arriving at
empty houses, myself.’

I said no, I liked an
empty house.

So I did, when I got
there. I had never found the house more likeable. A large Georgian vicarage in
about eight acres, most of the rooms shut and sheeted, there being only one
servant. I discovered that I wouldn’t need to go shopping, Kathleen’s aunt had
left many and delicate supplies with notes attached to them: ‘Eat this up
please do, see also fridge’ and ‘A treat for three hungry people, see also 2 bttles
beaune for yr party on back kn table’. It was like a treasure hunt as I
followed clue after clue through the cool silent domestic quarters. A house in
which there are no people — but with all the signs of tenancy — can be a most
tranquil good place. People take up space in a house out of proportion to their
size. On my previous visits I had seen the rooms overflowing, as it seemed,
with Kathleen, her aunt, and the little fat maidservant; they were always on
the move. As I wandered through that part of the house which was in use,
opening windows to let in the pale yellow air of September, I was not conscious
that I, Needle, was raking up any space at all, I might have been a ghost.

The only thing to be
fetched was the milk. I waited till after four when the milking should be done,
then set off for the farm which lay across two fields at the back of the
orchard. There, when the byre-man was handing me the bottle, I saw George.

‘Halo, George,’ I said.

‘Needle! What are you
doing here?’ he said.

‘Fetching milk,’ I said.

‘So am I. Well, it’s
good to see you, I must say.

As we paid the
farm-hand, George said, ‘I’ll walk back with you part of the way. But I mustn’t
stop, my old cousin’s without any milk for her tea. How’s Kathleen?’

‘She was kept in London.
She’s coming on later, about seven, she expects.’

We had reached the end
of the first field. George’s way led to the left and on to the main road.

‘We’ll see you tonight,
then?’ I said.

‘Yes, and talk about old
times.’

‘Grand,’ I said.

But George got over the
stile with me.

‘Look here,’ he said. ‘I’d
like to talk to you, Needle.’

‘We’ll talk tonight,
George. Better not keep your cousin waiting for the milk.’ I found myself speaking
to him almost as if he were a child.

‘No, I want to talk to
you alone. This is a good opportunity.’ We began to cross the second field. I
had been hoping to have the house to myself for a couple more hours and I was
rather petulant.

‘See,’ he said suddenly,
‘that haystack.’

‘Yes,’ I said absently.

‘Let’s sit there and
talk. I’d like to see you up on a haystack again. I still keep that photo.
Remember that time when —’

‘I found the needle,’ I
said very quickly, to get it over.

But I was glad to rest.
The stack had been broken up, but we managed to find a nest in it. I buried my
bottle of milk in the hay for coolness. George placed his carefully at the foot
of the stack.

‘My old cousin is
terribly vague, poor soul. A bit hazy in her head. She hasn’t the least sense
of time. If I tell her I’ve only been gone ten minutes she’ll believe it.’

I giggled, and looked at
him. His face had grown much larger, his lips full, wide, and with a ripe
colour that is strange in a man. His brown eyes were abounding as before with
some inarticulate plea.

‘So you’re going to
marry Skinny after all these years?’

‘I really don’t know,
George.

‘You played him up
properly.’

‘It isn’t for you to
judge. I have my own reasons for what I do.’

‘Don’t get sharp,’ he
said, ‘I was only funning.’ To prove it, he lifted a tuft of hay and brushed my
face with it.

‘D’you know,’ he said
next, ‘I didn’t think you and Skinny treated me very decently in Rhodesia.’

‘Well, we were busy,
George. And we were younger then, we had a lot to do and see. After all, we
could see you any other time, George.’

‘A touch of selfishness,’
he said.

‘I’ll have to be getting
along, George.’ I made to get down from the stack.

He pulled me back. ‘Wait,
I’ve got something to tell you.’

‘OK, George, tell me.’

‘First promise not to
tell Kathleen. She wants it kept a secret so that she can tell you herself.’

‘All right. Promise.’

‘I’m going to marry
Kathleen.’

‘But you’re already
married.’

Sometimes I heard news
of Matilda from the one Rhodesian family with whom I still kept up. They
referred to her as ‘George’s Dark Lady’ and of course they did not know he was
married to her. She had apparently made a good thing out of George, they said,
for she minced around all tarted up, never did a stroke of work and was always
unsettling the respectable coloured girls in their neighbourhood. According to
accounts, she was a living example of the folly of behaving as George did.

‘I married Matilda in
the Congo,’ George was saying.

‘It would still be
bigamy,’ I said.

He was furious when I used
that word bigamy. He lifted a handful of hay as if he would throw it in my
face, but controlling himself meanwhile he fanned it at me playfully.

‘I’m not sure that the
Congo marriage was valid,’ he continued. ‘Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, it
isn’t.’

‘You can’t do a thing
like that,’ I said.

‘I need Kathleen. She’s
been decent to me. I think we were always meant for each other, me and
Kathleen.’

‘I’ll have to be going,’
I said.

But he put his knee over
my ankles, so that I couldn’t move. I sat still and gazed into space.

He tickled my face with
a wisp of hay.

‘Smile up, Needle,’ he
said; ‘let’s talk like old times.’

‘Well?’

‘No one knows about my
marriage to Matilda except you and me.

‘And Matilda,’ I said.

‘She’ll hold her tongue
so long as she gets her payments. My uncle left an annuity for the purpose, his
lawyers see to it.’

‘Let me go, George.’

‘You promised to keep it
a secret,’ he said, ‘you promised.’

‘Yes, I promised.’

‘And now that you’re
going to marry Skinny, we’ll be properly coupled off as we should have been
years ago. We should have been — but youth! — our youth got in the way, didn’t
it?’

‘Life got in the way,’ I
said.

‘But everything’s going
to be all right now. You’ll keep my secret, won’t you? You promised.’ He had
released my feet. I edged a little farther from him.

I said, ‘If Kathleen
intends to marry you, I shall tell her that you’re already married.’

‘You wouldn’t do a dirty
trick like that, Needle? You’re going to be happy with Skinny, you wouldn’t
stand in the way of my —’

‘I must, Kathleen’s my
best friend,’ I said swiftly.

He looked as if he would
murder me and he did. He stuffed hay into my mouth until it could hold no more,
kneeling on my body to keep it still, holding both my wrists tight in his huge
left hand. I saw the red full lines of his mouth and the white slit of his
teeth last thing on earth. Not another soul passed by as he pressed my body
into the stack, as he made a deep nest for me, rearing up the hay to make a
groove the length of my corpse, and finally pulling the warm dry stuff in a
mound over this concealment, so natural-looking in a broken haystack. Then
George climbed down, took up his bottle of milk and went his way. I suppose
that was why he looked so unwell when I stood, nearly five years later, by the
barrow in the Portobello Road and said in easy tones, ‘Halo, George!’

The Haystack Murder was one of the
notorious crimes of that year. My friends said, ‘A girl who had everything to
live for.’

After a search that
lasted twenty hours, when my body was found, the evening papers said, ‘“Needle”
is found: in haystack!’

Kathleen, speaking from
that Catholic point of view which takes some getting used to, said, ‘She was at
Confession only the day before she died — wasn’t she lucky?’

The poor byre-hand who
sold us the milk was grilled for hour after hour by the local police, and later
by Scotland Yard. So was George. He admitted walking as far as the haystack
with me, but he denied lingering there.

‘You hadn’t seen your
friend for ten years?’ the Inspector asked him.

‘That’s right,’ said
George.

‘And you didn’t stop to
have a chat?’

‘No. We’d arranged to
meet later at dinner. My cousin was waiting for the milk, I couldn’t stop.’

The old soul, his
cousin, swore that he hadn’t been gone more than ten minutes in all, and she
believed it to the day of her death a few months later. There was the
microscopic evidence of hay on George’s jacket, of course, but the same
evidence was on every man’s jacket in the district that fine harvest year.
Unfortunately, the byre-man’s hands were even brawnier and mightier than George’s.
The marks on my wrists had been done by such hands, so the laboratory charts
indicated when my post-mortem was all completed. But the wrist-marks weren’t
enough to pin down the crime to either man. If I hadn’t been wearing my
long-sleeved cardigan, it was said, the bruises might have matched up properly
with someone’s fingers.

Kathleen, to prove that
George had absolutely no motive, told the police that she was engaged to him.
George thought this a little foolish. They checked up on his life in Africa,
right back to his living with Matilda. But the marriage didn’t come out — who
would think of looking up registers in the Congo? Not that this would have
proved any motive for murder. All the same, George was relieved when the
inquiries were over without the marriage to Matilda being disclosed. He was
able to have his nervous breakdown at the same time as Kathleen had hers, and
they recovered together and got married, long after the police had shifted
their inquiries to an Air Force camp five miles from Kathleen’s aunt’s home.
Only a lot of excitement and drinks came of those investigations. The Haystack
Murder was one of the unsolved crimes that year.

Shortly afterwards the
byre-hand emigrated to Canada to start afresh, with the help of Skinny who felt
sorry for him.