The Wedding Party (8 page)

‘New boy friend turned up trumps again, I see. More roses, eh? Generous bastard – a whole bleeding dozen again. Have to watch himself or he'll be broke soon.'

‘I have them sent myself,' she said. ‘They're the new Baccarat roses. A special sort. I like them because they last so long.'

All the time, still acting as wine-waiter up at the hotel, Squiff waited for one Saturday after another. He hoped always that she would wear one of the roses in her dress at dinner but she never did. This hope threw him into a tremendous battle to keep himself calm but he could never manage to control the shaking of his hands.

One evening, as the weather turned sharply chilly in late September, Lubbock decided to drink red wine instead of white at dinner.

‘We'll have number 15,' he said ‘the
Nuits St George
' – he pronounced it
Newts Saint George
and in a strange way something inside Stella Howard wept for him – ‘and see it's the right bloody temperature. Nice and warm. I don't want my guts froze out tonight.'

Squiff fetched up two bottles of wine from the cellar,
found a convenient radiator, put the bottles on top and waited for them to warm up.

Ten minutes later Stella Howard was doing her best not to pretend that she knew the wine was cooked. Squiff's hands, as usual, were shaking violently and something about them and about the way she stared up at him as he started to pour a quivering trickle of wine aroused in Lubbock a violent rush of suspicions.

‘Tip some in here!' he ordered. ‘I'll taste it.'

He drank rapidly at the wine and immediately jumped as if scalded.

‘You flaming wet! It's like hot soup! Take the bloody stuff away.'

Squiff stood helpless, without a word, his hands still violently shaking. Stella Howard stared up at him in uneasy pity, without a word either. The clatter of a spoon falling on the bare oak floor at the far end of the dining-room was like a sudden signal to Lubbock, who abruptly turned on her in a lash of rage, for once not loud, but curt and cold.

‘And what are you grinning at? You harboured him in it, didn't you? You knew it was cooked, didn't you?'

‘I am not grinning.'

‘You were grinning like a bloody heifer.'

She at once took the mink wrap from the back of her chair, slipped it over her shoulders and got up.

‘And where d'ye think you're going?' he said.

She merely stared coldly past him, closed the wrap firmly across the front of her dress and started to walk away. She had hardly moved from the table before Lubbock leapt up,
took one long stride towards her and half-pushed, half-knocked her back in the chair.

‘Don't make a damn fool of yourself. Sit down.'

She sat there without attempting to make another move. There were tears in her eyes. The wrap, falling slowly from her bare shoulders, slid to the floor.

For a few miraculous moments Squiff's hands had stopped trembling and he stooped down to pick up the wrap. He had hardly moved before Lubbock said:

‘And what are you dancing about at? She doesn't want any help from you. When she wants any help from you she'll send you a wire.'

Without answering or looking at either Lubbock or the girl Squiff walked away. He had seen the gleam of tears in her eyes and he carried the image away with him. As the evening went on the image grafted itself painfully and permanently on to his own eyes, so that not only was he afflicted with new, greater shakings of his hands but his vision was clouded too.

‘I'll kill him,' he started telling himself. ‘I'll kill him. I'm going to kill him. Somehow.'

All the next week the idea of killing Lubbock chattered through his mind like a tortuous and clumsy tune. It drove him about in a daze. It kept him awake for fearful stretches in the night, his mind cold and haunted and indecisive. In his customary groping and innocent way he tried to fix on some method of killing Lubbock and finally came to a
grotesquely childish conclusion.

‘Got to look like an accident,' he kept telling himself. ‘Got to look like an accident somehow.'

What sort of accident it was going to be he couldn't, for a long time, make up his mind. There was nothing in his nature remotely subtle enough to make any kind of ingenious plan. He merely groped; and in groping got himself into darker confusions where the only things of any abiding clarity were the tears in Stella Howard's eyes, the way her wrap had slid to the floor and the way she had first looked at him. All the time he thought of the great stillness in her eyes.

By the following Saturday night, still without any real idea of what sort of accident it was to be, his nerves were screwed up like wire rope. His hands trembled constantly. His order for roses had gone off as usual and now and then he was able to pacify himself for a moment by dwelling on another secret image: that of Stella Howard unpacking the roses putting them in a vase, gazing at them and perhaps for a few moments wondering who had sent them. He would never be able to know what her feelings about the roses were but it calmed him briefly to think of it.

Then an unexpected thing happened. Just before half-past seven the head waiter came up to him and said:

‘Mr Lubbock's just cancelled his table. Says he won't be in tonight.'

He immediately felt desolate and lonely. The urge to kill Lubbock suddenly receded. The mere fact that he wasn't going to see Stella Howard, even as a figure in a painful scene, put him in a new and different sort of daze. It was
exactly as if they had been married or lovers and she had left him. It was almost as if she, and not Lubbock, had died.

He spent the whole of the following week battered by these opposing ideas: on the one hand of wanting to kill Lubbock and on the other of wanting to see Stella Howard back, as it were, from the dead. The nagging aridity of his thoughts was so great that for the first time in his life he started to take a few drinks. On evenings when the hotel was half-empty he stayed for long periods down in the cellar, staring into the half darkness with a glass in his hands.

Drink didn't help him much; it merely seemed to push the days along a fraction faster towards another Saturday.

And when Saturday came he had another surprise. He was walking through the bar about half past six when he suddenly heard Lubbock's voice, for some reason not so loud as usual, and saw him sitting at the bar. The night was cold and squally and Lubbock's voice sounded curiously brittle, very like an echo of the many pine boughs cracking in the rough wind outside:

‘Ah! it's old Squiff. How's our old Squiff?' Lubbock lugubriously waved a glass of gin about and wagged a heavy cautionary finger. ‘Look a bit pale and drawn, Squiff, old sport. Should take more of this – more of the old oil, eh?'

‘Evening, sir.'

‘More of the old oil, that's what keeps the bloody cold out, eh?'

Squiff didn't want to talk; he started to leave the bar.

‘Here, half a mo, where are you off to? Come 'ere a minute.'

Squiff, wondering over and over again where Stella Howard could be, stood motionless by the door. Behind Lubbock's back the barman was making a prolonged pretence of polishing a bar that was in no need of polishing and Squiff said in a steady voice, his hands surprisingly steady too:

‘I was just off down the cellar, Sir. Thought I might get your usual up. You'll have the red, I suppose?'

‘Not eating tonight, Squiff. No bleeding appetite.'

Squiff, staring straight at Lubbock, felt his whole body tautening up, stiffening with a fresh, sharp hatred of the man.

‘Madam not coming in tonight, sir?'

‘Blast madam. To bloody hell with madam—'

Out of the turbulent stream of alcoholic mutterings – drink seemed to twist the character of Lubbock inside out, suppressing both insolence and the louder of his coarseness, turning him introspective – it gradually grew clear that he and Stella Howard had been quarrelling long and bitterly that afternoon. There wasn't much that was coherent in Lubbock's muttered repetitions until Squiff, in a moment of paralytic astonishment, heard the words, repeated several times:

‘Red roses. The sod sends her red roses, regular as bloody clockwork. Every damn week – there they are, stuck all over the blasted place. Nothing but red roses—'

Squiff's hands started shaking; the sinews jumped as if from acute bursts of electric shock. His tongue recoiled and pressed itself like a short snake against the back of his mouth and he heard Lubbock say:

‘They're all bitches, the whole stinking lot of 'em. You give 'em the bloody world and they take it and then throw it back into your wet physog. Bitches – they stink, the whole lot of 'em – they're only good for one thing—'

Squiff, not waiting to hear any more, turned suddenly, walked out of the bar and then out of the hotel. It was dark early that night and nips of rain were falling in the squalls. Pine boughs were cracking off like so many fireworks. He stood for some moments under the pines, shaking dreadfully, not really consciously thinking, not stopping to ask himself whether in fact Lubbock knew who had sent the flowers or whether it mattered if he did.

There was only one thing in his mind. The shape the accident was to take had suddenly become perfectly clear to him. It was all of miraculous simplicity.

Instinctively he looked round for Lubbock's car and saw it, a big black Mercedes, parked under a big chestnut tree at the upper end of the hotel drive. So early in the evening there were no other cars about and without a second's hesitation he walked over to it, his hands still shaking in that dreadfully helpless fashion, his mind and ears not really conscious, so that he wasn't even aware of the odd chestnut or two that sudden squalls ripped out of the tree and sent bumping down on the asphalt below.

In another minute or two he had found a wheel-brace and a screw-driver in the boot of the car. It was all of a miraculous, grotesque simplicity. Presently he had taken off one of the front wheel hub-covers and was loosening the wheel-nuts with the brace. The concentrated pressure necessary to
turn the nuts had the effect of locking his hands to the brace, so that for some time they actually stopped shaking.

With the loosening of each nut he seemed to see Lubbock, drunk, careering helplesssly down some distant hill in the squally darkness, the front wheel of the Mercedes flying off. The thing was of such fabulous simplicity that no one, he told himself, would ever know. But just to make doubly sure, he thought, he would loosen a second wheel.

He had actually started unscrewing the first nut of the front on-side wheel when a big taxi came up the drive in the rain. In a vague way he was aware of it stopping, of hearing one of its doors slam and of a couple of voices talking. But it didn't occur to him to hide himself. He was thirty or more yards away and most of the sounds were muffled in the squalls.

Presently the taxi turned and drove off, head-lights swinging under the pines. For a few minutes he worked on at the remaining nuts, hands still not shaking, with the vision of Lubbock in a death-spin still vibrantly clear in his mind.

It took him fully another minute to realise that someone was standing by his side, watching him. He slowly looked up. It was Stella Howard standing there; she was wearing a bright yellow mackintosh and a blue scarf on her head.

‘What are you doing to Mr Lubbock's car?'

Her voice was a low whisper but the loudest of shouts couldn't have hit him with greater shock. His hands were suddenly taken by a gigantic spasm of trembling. It was exactly as if another pair of hands, invisible and frenziedly muscular, had violently seized hold of them and given them
a shaking of superhuman power.

He was helpless to stop this shaking and he didn't say a word. For almost another minute she didn't speak either but all the time she was looking at him in that same steadfast way, her eyes full of a miraculous stillness, as when she had first sensed the greatest of his troubles, the fact that he couldn't read or write.

Now for the second time she understood what he was doing. It was all perfectly clear to her and she was very calm.

‘That would be a terrible thing to do.'

Again he didn't say a word and she stood looking down with pity at that dreadful trembling of his hands. She might have been moved to say, in that moment, something about the roses, how she knew who had sent them and why, or to chastise him or in some way threaten him for the thing he was about to do.

But she didn't speak either. Instead she suddenly took hold of his hands and gripped them with her own. She held them like that for fully five minutes, neither she nor Squiff speaking, the squally rain flicking hard at their two silent faces, until the shaking of his hands stopped at last and he was completely quiet again.

Then she said, still very calm: ‘Promise you'll never do anything like that again. There's no way out of a thing like that. It would be an awful thing to have blood on your—'

She broke off. He stood mute in the rain. The slight twist of his head was more like a flicker of terror than any acknowledgement of what she had said and the quick sucking in of his lips, almost child-like, was the only sound he made.

She had nothing else to say to him but suddenly, at the last moment, she bent down, hestitated and then quickly kissed him on the back of both hands. Then she turned sharply and went into the hotel to find Lubbock and in another moment Squiff took the wheel-brace and started winding up the nuts, head tucked down on his chest in the driving rain.

Nowadays he no longer works in hotels. He sells evening newspapers, inland in winter and along the coast in summertime. Sometimes in the invigorating summer air he actually runs along the sea-shore, crying the racing results, the scandals, the catastrophes, the world scares and the latest murders as they happen. And sometimes, prompted by some juicier piece of news, he is actually jocular.

And just occasionally, but only occasionally, his hands start shaking briefly again. But on the whole, especially when he thinks of Stella Howard, he keeps them steady as a rock.