Читать книгу Untimely Death - Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark - Страница 4

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Mrs. Gorman was right. It was a lovely day, and on such a day a picnic lunch was clearly indicated. When Eleanor went into the kitchen to suggest it to Mrs. Gorman she found that Doreen, the twelve year old, was already preparing the basket.

“The meet’s at Satcherley Way, so you’ll want to leave by half-past ten,” she explained.

“The meet?” said Eleanor, puzzled.

“The meet,” Doreen repeated, her large eyes round with surprise at such stupidity. “The meet of the stag-hounds. Didn’t you see the card in the hall?”

“But what makes you think we want to go to the meet, Doreen?”

“Visitors always do.”

“Well this one doesn’t. I don’t like hunting, and neither does Mr. Pettigrew.”

“Cor!” said Doreen, in a tone of incredulity.

So that there should be no doubt about the matter, Eleanor took the precaution of finding Satcherley Way on the map before they set out, and the picnic took place at a spot which seemed reasonably remote from the contaminated area. So far as her husband was concerned, it was an immense success. The food was good, the weather was warm, the heather on which they reclined was deliciously soft and yielding. Decidedly the holiday had been an excellent idea of Eleanor’s. If only he had been able to sleep better the night before....

“Wake up, Frank,” said Eleanor a little later.

“My dear, I am wide awake. I have never been anything else.”

“Then you should not have been snoring. What was that noise I heard just now?”

“Obviously, I should have thought, my snoring. Or do you mean something else?”

“I do mean something else. Listen!”

Pettigrew was well awake by now, and straining his ears. In a moment he heard the sound, distant but clear and quite unmistakable.

“That was the horn,” he said.

“A horn, did you say?”

“Yes.” Actually, Pettigrew realized, he had said, not “a horn”, but “the horn”. It came to him with a little hock of recollection that there was a world of difference between the two. “A hunting horn. Perhaps they’re running this way.”

“I hope not,” said Eleanor chillingly. “It must be a disgusting sight. But they may not be chasing a stag at all. The man was probably only blowing to call the dogs together.”

“No.” Pettigrew was quite decided on the point. “Hounds are running all right. He was doubling his horn.” (The phrase slipped easily off his tongue—fantastically easy for one who had not used it for fifty years.)

“Frank!”

“Yes, my love?” Pettigrew turned from looking at the distant ridge of moorland to see his wife’s brilliant blue eyes fixed on him accusingly.

“You seem to know a lot about this stag-hunting business. Have you been deceiving me all this time?”

“God forbid!”

“Have you ever been a huntsman?”

“Heavens, no! A huntsman is a highly skilled professional. I’ve only had one profession all my life. You know that.”

“Don’t quibble, Frank. You know what I mean. Have you ever been a hunter?”

“No, of course not! A hunter is—— All right, I won’t quibble. I do know what you mean. I will be honest. I have hunted. And with these hounds, too. But it was a long time ago.”

“How long?”

“Longer than I care to think. When that I was a little tiny boy. My father used to bring us down here for the holidays.”

“And you hunted,” said Eleanor reproachfully.

“If you can call it hunting. I was put on a pony and bumped about the moor after the hounds. One hadn’t much choice in the matter. Everybody did it.”

“I see.” Eleanor sounded mollified by his explanation. “You don’t sound as if you enjoyed it very much.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Pettigrew slowly....

How fantastic to suppose that he had forgotten all about it! With the scent of the heather in his nostrils, the sound of the horn fresh in his ears, gazing across the valley at two distant hummocks which suddenly revealed themselves as the very oldest of old acquaintances, Pettigrew found his memory opening up like some monstrous flower, fold within fold. He saw himself, a small boy, jogging uncomfortably to the meet along a road innocent of motor traffic but thick with dust on a hard-mouthed, self-willed pony that could not accommodate its pace to that of the big hunter alongside. It was a pony given to habits so unpleasing and undignified that even in retrospect he averted his mind from them; but once away, it would gallop for ever. The boy was wearing what struck him now as fantastically uncomfortable clothes—a hard hat that seared his forehead, breeches that pinched his flesh below the knees, gaiters that never quite spanned the gap between the breeches and the heavy black boots. In his leather gloves he clutched a thonged hunting crop that was at once his greatest pride and an appalling encumbrance. One pocket was weighed down with a vast pocket knife equipped among other things with a hook designed to take stones out of horses’ hooves; another bulged tightly over the packet of sandwiches, which, when eaten later in the day, would prove, whatever their composition, to taste of leather gloves and smell of sweating pony. His secret hope was that someone would give him for his birthday a man’s-size sandwich box in a leather container which could be strapped to the saddle. The ultimate glory of a hunting flask might be attained next season, perhaps.

Pettigrew could see the boy in his mind’s eye with remarkable clarity, except for one particular—his face. But if the features altogether escaped him, he could be sure of the expression, which he knew to be one of intense solemnity, the expression of the participant in a sacred rite. Had he enjoyed it? That was the very question they used to ask him at the end of the day, he remembered. He had always said “Yes”, as a matter of course, before stripping off those agonizing breeches and plunging into a hot mustard bath. It was the answer they expected. But even then he had known how hopelessly inadequate the word “enjoy” was. One “enjoyed” so many things—parties, theatres, the common pleasures of life. Hunting was a thing apart—a compound of excitement and terror, discomfort and ecstasy, boredom and bliss....

“Well?” said Eleanor.

By now the picture of the small boy was becoming overlaid in Pettigrew’s mind with a host of other images—his father’s old-fashioned, full-skirted hunting coat, the Henry Aiken prints in the Sallowcombe dining-room, the echo of the peculiar wail of the Vicar’s voice at Mattins. With an effort he came back to the present and looked for inspiration across the valley towards Tucker’s Barrows. (How could he have forgotten that household name for an instant? he asked himself.) But the view gave him no help in self-expression. Rather flatly he said at last:

“Actually, it was rather fun.”

“Fun!”

There was something in his wife’s voice that made Pettigrew add hastily, “Fun for a boy of that age, of course, I mean.”

“But even at that age, Frank, did you not realize the pointlessness, the wanton cruelty of the whole thing?”

“No, I certainly didn’t. Boys don’t, you know, unless there is someone about to point it out to them.”

“I suppose not. Girls are different, of course.”

Pettigrew, remembering certain female cousins among whom he had been brought up, opened his mouth to speak and then thought better of it.

In the silence that fell between them he became aware of a variety of small sounds—the buzzing of an intrusive fly, the plash of water from the stream in the combe below, and finally the sound for which, without realizing it, he had been straining his ears for minutes past—the faint whimper of hounds. It came for a moment only and was not repeated. Pettigrew was not surprised. Wherever they were running, he reflected, it was an even chance that it was uphill and through long heather or bracken. They would have little breath to spare to give tongue on a warm afternoon like this. It was, of course, a matter of complete indifference to him whether they were running, or in what direction; but he found himself none the less concentrating his attention upon a particular part of the skyline where the ground dipped to form a saddle between the Barrows and another, less prominent eminence. The latter point he recognized at once, in his mood of reawakened sensitivity to the past. It was called Bolter’s Tussock; and astonishingly enough, the absurd name evoked a thoroughly disagreeable sensation in his mind. Alone in that wide prospect of familiar, friendly scenes the place stood for something vaguely but unquestionably sinister. Something had occurred there so unpleasant that he had long since buried the recollection of it deep in his subconscious mind. Painfully and perversely he struggled to disinter it. He was almost on the point of success when the present intruded upon the past, and temporarily blotted it out. An object appeared momentarily on the skyline at the very point that he had selected for attention, and began to move at a steep angle down the slope opposite to where they sat. Pettigrew leapt to his feet, startling Eleanor, who had begun to assemble the contents of the picnic basket.

“There he goes!” he exclaimed.

Eleanor looked up, and after some little difficulty Pettigrew succeeded in pointing out the deer to her just before it disappeared in the wood of stunted oaks that clothed the lower slopes of the valley.

“Oh, the poor thing!” she said softly.

Pettigrew said nothing. Already the leading hounds were racing down the slope from the brow of the hill, not half a minute behind their quarry. Barring a miracle, the stag was doomed, though there might yet be an hour’s tow-row down the water before he was booked. It was no use being sentimental about it. But telling himself so did not prevent him feeling sentimental, all the same. It was all of fifty years since he had last seen a hunted deer and now the sight of it had in some way dispelled the enchantment of reminiscence in which he had been living up to that moment. Willy-nilly, he found himself looking at the hapless beast through the eyes of the elderly, urban humanitarian who had somehow evolved from that small boy. He had forgotten that a stag looked so defenceless, lumbering along with its curious stiff-legged canter in front of the pitiless pack. A shrill squeal from below announced that someone had viewed the deer on his way down the valley, and he felt a sudden stab of pity for the victim.

This is quite illogical, he told himself. I shouldn’t feel a bit like this for a hare, and if it was a fox I should have probably screamed my head off by now. Why the distinction? He pondered the problem gravely, while the field streamed across the slope opposite and clattered down the track that led through the wood. On serious reflection, he came to the conclusion that it was a question of size. A deer was altogether too big to hunt with a clear conscience. In sport one should always kill something a good deal smaller than oneself, something that succumbed easily, quickly, anonymously. A stag was too large to be anything but an individual, his death too difficult to be other than a prolonged personal affair.

“Honestly now, Frank,” said Eleanor, “what do you think of it?”

“I think,” said her husband deliberately, “that it would be much worse if they were elephants.”

It was quite impossible to tell from Eleanor’s expression what, if anything, she made of this remark. By way of reply, she picked up the rug on which they had been sitting, shook it free of crumbs and returned it to the car.

“The last of the hunters has gone,” she said. “I think we’ve seen all that there is to see. Shall we be getting back?”

“By all means.”

“You’re sure you want to? You don’t want to—to walk it off before you come home?”

“Walk it off? What do you mean?”

“Come, Frank, you know perfectly well.”

Pettigrew looked at his wife in silence for a moment. Then he acknowledged defeat with a shrug of his shoulders.

“To be honest, I do,” he said. “What beats me is how you know.”

“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? You’re suffering from a bad attack of—I suppose the psychologists have invented a technical term for it, but I should call it nostalgia. You’ve been living in a dream world of your own ever since we arrived at Sallowcombe. Was that where you used to stay when you were small, by the way?”

“You know perfectly well that it was,” said Pettigrew, a shade bitterly. “I thought that I was being decently reticent about it, and all the time it appears that I’ve been making life quite intolerable for you by my sentimentalizing. I apologize.”

“Don’t be absurd, Frank, there is nothing to apologize for. Only it struck me, especially since this stag-hunting business began, that perhaps there was a ghost that wanted laying and you might be happier if you went ghost-hunting by yourself.”

Francis Pettigrew was staring across the valley again in the direction from which the stag had appeared.

“A ghost!” he reflected. “Do you know, Eleanor, you are a great deal nearer the truth than even you have any business to be. There is a ghost, and I’ve only just remembered what it is.”

He picked up the picnic basket and, walking over to the car, got into the passenger seat. Eleanor took her place at the wheel.

“So you’ve decided not to walk?” she said.

“I intend to walk,” he replied, “but not from here. We’ll drive round the head of the combe, and you can put me down near Bolter’s Tussock.”

“But that’s taking you away from Sallowcombe.”

“Not as much as you’d think. There’s quite a good cross-country track past Tucker’s Barrows that cuts off a mile of road. I shall manage it very well.”

Eleanor started the car and they set off. Presently she asked: “Is there any particular virtue in Bolter’s Tussock that makes you want to start your walk there?”

“I don’t know that you’d call it a virtue, exactly, but it has one excellent qualification for ghost-laying.”

“What is that?”

“Obviously, that it should be haunted.”

They drove some distance in silence before Pettigrew spoke again.

“As you have not asked what I mean, I assume that you intend to rely on your usual uncanny methods to find out. I propose in this case to thwart you by the simple expedient of telling you outright. The plain fact is that I was more horribly frightened at Bolter’s Tussock than I have ever been in my life.”

“What by? Did your pony run away with you?”

“Actually, the pony did bolt—and anyone who thinks that isn’t a frightening experience has no imagination. But that was afterwards. The real horror came first.”

“Don’t tell me about it if you’d rather not.”

“Good Lord, I’ve no objection to talking about it now! The interesting thing is that this is literally the first time I have ever mentioned it to anybody. I was much too scared at the time to say anything, and after that I must have bottled it up inside me so successfully that I ended by forgetting it altogether—until about ten minutes ago. Memory’s a funny thing, isn’t it? Perhaps that suppressed memory was at the back of the hideous nightmares that used to plague me at school.”

“Perhaps,” said Eleanor a trifle acidly. “But I shouldn’t like to give an opinion till you’d told me what ‘it’ was.”

“‘It’ was simply a dead man.”

“On Bolter’s Tussock?”

“Yes.”

“What was it doing there?”

“I have no idea—I never found out.”

“And you—you just left it there?”

“I left very quickly, when the pony bolted.”

“But somebody else must have found it, even if you said nothing. Didn’t you read about it in the papers or hear people talking about it?”

“One doesn’t read the papers much at that age, except the cricket scores, and I didn’t listen to what my elders said about things like that.”

“You seem to have been remarkably incurious.”

“Incurious! Good God, woman, can’t you understand? I was terrified. I didn’t want to know any more about it. I was convinced that if anything came out, I should be made in some way responsible. For days afterwards I couldn’t see a policeman without being certain that he was going to ask me about the body on Bolter’s Tussock. Every time my father opened a newspaper I was sure he would read out an account of it, and turn on me with some deadly question which would end in my being hauled off to prison. And then time went by—it can’t have been more than a week or so, really, but it seemed longer—and the holidays were over, and I was safe back at prep school and nothing had happened.”

He stopped abruptly and looked out of the window.

“All right, you can put me down here,” he said.

He got out of the car. In the bright autumn sun, Bolter’s Tussock, above and to the left of where he stood, looked as innocent and peaceful as any strip of moorland could well do. From far down the valley a distant cry of hounds told him that the hunt was still afoot.

“Have a good walk,” said Eleanor. “And don’t be too disappointed if——”

“If what?”

“If there’s nothing there after all.”