Death of a Huntsman (11 page)

‘Mr Broderick,' he said quietly, ‘Mr Broderick.'

There was to be one more occasion after that when he was to stand there before the little bloodless figure and say the same words and wait with breathless, still more terribly anxious tension for an answer. This first time there was no answer. All his own breathing seemed to have stopped by that time and all he could hear in return for his third mention of Broderick's name was the stiff croak of a throat slowly gasping, like the dry gyrations of some old unoiled machine, for breath.

Then he saw Broderick sitting up, dummy-wise, hands stiff and outstretched, in the bed. He did not know whether it was pure relief or vexation or fright about something that made him stride across the room and shut the window. The edges of its frame were so wet that his hands slipped as he grasped it and it came down with a crack on the flooded sill. Rain was still coming down heavily but the storm was veering away now and the flashes of lightning were simply like far-off stabbing light-echoes on the hills.

‘Mrs Broderick sent me up to shut the window,' he said.

That seemed as good an excuse as any, he thought, to offer to the figure that had not moved an inch in the
bed since he had opened the door. Now he went a few paces nearer the bed and said:

‘All right, grandad? Why don't you go to sleep now?'

He rubbed the sweaty palms of his hands down the sides of his trouser-legs and began to feel better as he saw, in the glow of the night-light, the little eyes responding with dumb delicacy to his stare.

‘You remember me, don't you, grandad?' Again there was no answer. ‘Why don't you be a good boy, grandad, and have your whisky and drop off for a while?'

He was quite near the bed now. The sound of Broderick gasping for breath reminded him of the croak of the sheep he sometimes heard when he stopped his truck in some remote still place in the dead of night-time.

And suddenly, inexplicably, again perhaps out of pure relief, he felt sorry for him. There was something appalling and touching about the little erect dummy sitting there in half-darkness, in mute paralysis, in the sound of thunder and driving rain, like a child frightened by a storm.

Something made him put out his hands and touch the hands that lay outstretched on the bed. The contact of their scabby frigid flesh was something he never forgot. He felt he was touching death in living flesh and only once again, afterwards, was he so repulsed and so frightened.

‘Come on, grandad,' he said. He took the unresisting, terribly light shell of bone and skin in his hands and tried to make it, very gently, to lie back on the pillow.

‘Where is Francie?' it said.

‘She's tired. She's having a lay-down. She's tired out worrying about you.'

‘She's a good girl, Francie,' he said. ‘It's not much fun for her here.'

That too, Williams found, was surprisingly touching. He had always suspected something in the nature of a feud between them: one of those dreary drawn-out feuds that each side knows only death can extirpate. Now his surprise was all the greater, not only because there was affection there, on the part of the old man at any rate, but because Broderick suddenly said:

‘You're a truck-driver, aren't you? She told me how kind you'd been to her.'

‘Ah! that's all right,' he said. ‘Like to help people if I can.'

‘Do you? She's been very kind to me. Very kind. For a long time. She deserves a little herself.'

‘What about having your tablets now, grandad, and dropping off for a bit?'

‘I can't sleep with this weather,' Broderick said. ‘I can't get my breath.'

‘You have your tablets and a drop of whisky and you'll sleep like a cat,' he said.

‘Whisky?'

‘Whisky—yes. I brought it up,' Williams said. ‘It's over on the chest of drawers here.'

‘Who said I could have whisky? I'm not supposed to have whisky. For several years I've not had whisky. I used to be very fond of it——'

‘Ah! come on, you can have whisky. You know you can have whisky. Mrs Broderick says you can.'

‘I used to have it—a year or two back, but——'

‘You have a tot, grandad,' he said. ‘It'll do you good.'

He poured a fair measure of whisky into a glass and one of his clearest images of Broderick that night was of the little quivering figure sitting up in bed with a strange grin on its face in the glow of the night-light. It was the sunny, bright-eyed grin of a boy who had been bribed by sweetness or promises to lie down and be good and go to sleep at last. With loud relish the old dry mouth sucked and lapped at the whisky as Williams said:

‘How many tablets?'

‘I've been taking three or four.'

‘All right. Say four.'

Just before they said good-night Williams picked up the whisky bottle and said, ‘All right now, grandad? Think you can get off now?' and he saw the old eyes, already woken from their torpor by the excitement of liquor, regarding him and the bottle with keen, bright greed.

‘Now, grandad, don't tell me you want a refill already. You on the waggon all this time too.'

‘Just a thimble-full.'

As Williams filled up the glass the hands quivered with a start of greedy joy.

‘What about you?' Broderick said. ‘A drop for you?'

He said something about it being late and there not being another glass, but Broderick pointed to the bottle. There was actually the crease of a smile on his face as he
did so. Williams picked up the bottle and took a deep steady gulp of whisky and Broderick said:

‘At one time the doctors used to say it would kill me. Why don't you sit down a minute with me?'

‘Better not, grandad. Got to push on.'

‘Where are you going? You're the night driver, aren't you? She told me about you.'

‘Other side of Exeter. Get there by breakfast time.'

‘I see. It's very nice of you to stop with me. How do you find the whisky? I prefer it neat, don't you?'

All this was said slowly, with croaking difficulty, between crackling gasps for breath. In spite of it all the crease of a smile actually re-appeared once or twice again. Finally he made another gesture or two towards the whisky bottle and one more towards his glass.

‘No more, grandad. Got to drive, y'know. You'll get me for the high jump, smelling like a four-ale bar.'

‘Well: all right. But you'll come in again, won't you?'

‘Some time. Don't have much time, most nights.'

‘Please come in,' Broderick said, and the crease of a smile, yellowish, more than ever like the crinkle in the neck of a pale maggot slowly turning its head, came back again. ‘I like to talk to you. Don't get much chance of talking.'

As he went out of the room with its dim night-light embalming and enshrining Broderick with its upward glow Williams felt the absence of death so keenly that he could do nothing but joke about it as a man jokes about an escape from it.

‘Perky as a chicken,' he said. Downstairs, in the hall, she was waiting for him exactly as he had left her, almost as if she might have been listening all that time. ‘Probably live to be a hundred.'

‘Don't talk like that,' she said. Her face was an extraordinary sight in the poorish light of the one electric light bulb shining through its stained glass bowl above her. It seemed twisted with tension. The muscles of the neck and cheeks were sucked in, darkly, making her fiercely alert and cadaverous. ‘You mustn't talk like that. If you'd seen him this afternoon——'

And then suddenly:

‘What about the whisky? Did you give him his whisky?'

‘Whisky?' Williams laughed softly. ‘You should have seen us. Totting it out. The two of us. Having a good old buddies' party.'

‘I can't understand why you joke about it,' she said.

And long afterwards, when it was all over, that was one of the things he could not understand himself. Only the blindest kind of a fool could have joked about it. But that night, in his relief that he had not had to deal with death, he was glad of it as something of a distraction to seize on. It was not really that he was joking about it; perhaps the whisky had pepped him up a bit, he thought. He was just relieved that death had not complicated things. He did not want to be mixed up with death. If there was anything he loathed and hated it was dying and the dead. He had once seen the body of a man on the roadside, just out of London, lying on the grass, after a smash, the face
covered with a sheet of newspaper, and the sight of it leered backwards and forwards across his mind, grotesque and haunting, for nights and days.

‘You'd better go now,' she said.

When he took hold of her shoulders to say good-night he found that she was shivering. The tendons of her neck were drawn and cold. If it had not been for the intense pressure of light burning in the eyes it might have been, in fact, that she was the person who had died.

‘Here, come on. Come on,' he said. ‘You got to pull yourself together. You got to snap out of this.'

Her heard her teeth crack against themselves, like a key snapping in a lock.

‘I don't want to be alone here when it happens,' she said. ‘That's all. I can't bear to be alone here with that.'

‘Don't get jittery,' he said. ‘I'll be back tomorrow.'

‘All right,' she said. She seemed to make a great effort to calm herself. She drew in a deep rasping breath. ‘You'll know by the blinds if anything has happened.'

He supposed he must have called again five or six times, for perhaps ten days or so, perhaps two weeks, before two things occurred. Like so many other things that had happened, both were casual. Each time he repeated the habit of going upstairs and saying good-night to Broderick—‘coming to tuck you up, grandad, and give you your night-cap'—seeing that the old crinkled neck swallowed its tablets, talking a little, sharing a glass of whisky with him, and it was after about the fourth or fifth of these visits that she said:

‘You know, he's quite taken to you. He likes you. He told me so today. He quite looks forward to your coming.'

And then, as if in an afterthought, more casually still:

‘He told me something else about you.'

‘Bad, I'll bet.'

‘No. He's probably going to alter his will and leave you a little money, that's all.'

‘Stone the crows,' he said.

‘There,' she said, ‘wouldn't that be nice?'

‘Well, knock me down.'

‘Now you'll be able to have your own island, won't you?'

‘Now why would he want to do that?' Williams said. ‘I'm nobody. He hardly knows me.'

‘He says you help him to go on living,' she said. ‘You give him confidence, he says.' She smiled. ‘Of course I may have helped a bit. Just a bit—for you.'

Later, on the divan, before he left, she again drew out of the half-darkness, for only the second time for several weeks, the old, insidious dream of the island: the sun, the sea, the leisure, the way they could live together. ‘Like this,' she said. ‘All the time. No more of this awful country. Where you can't get warm. Where it's always raining. And these awful winters.'

‘That's me,' he said. ‘I can go for plenty of that.'

‘Perhaps it won't be long now.'

‘Oh! I can wait—I can wait till Doomsday for stuff like that.'

‘And how long do you think I've been waiting?' She
was almost yelling at him now, in a curious forced undertone, hoarse in the darkness with anger and frustration. ‘I've been waiting ten years and it seems like ten thousand—how would you like to wait like that? No fun, no bed, no nothing. When I married him they said he wouldn't live a year—not six months. A cardiac complaint like that, they said—it can't live. One bit of over-exertion and he'll drop down and it's all over.'

Her voice was rasping now with a tearless, suppressed rage. ‘But you see it's never the sick that die, is it? It's the healthy that drop down dead. The sick just go dragging on for ever.'

For a moment it seemed that she was going to break into uncontrolled weeping. He heard her mouth sucking air in an enormous sob. Then it stopped suddenly and she said:

‘I'm sorry. I didn't mean to get worked up like that. I don't know what I'd have done without you.'

He did not know quite what to say. He was distracted, not for the first time, by the emotional change of her voice. It almost mesmerized him and then she said:

‘It was bad enough when there wasn't you. But now it's awful. I can't wait like that any more—I can't wait much longer.'

Before he went that night he thought he heard Broderick calling from his bedroom. ‘Yes, perhaps it's him,' she said. ‘He's been terribly restless. Would you go up? You could give him another tablet or two if he's still awake. And just a sip to calm him down.'

* * *

Two days later it happened that a mate of his, a day-driver named Davies, broke his wrist at the depot when a starting handle kicked. He had been going to drive a load of plaster-board to Bristol. And that was how Williams found himself driving out of London at eight o'clock in the morning instead of eight o'clock at night, in misty September rain that sprayed back on his windscreen in a greasy film that never wiped away.

Twenty miles out he decided to stop and wash his windscreen and have a plate of eggs and bacon and some tea at a shack where he sometimes breakfasted coming back to London from the West. While the eggs were cooking the woman who kept the shack lent him the morning paper and he sat for some moments with elbows on the counter, reading it, casually wondering whether he should do a horse named Snow Flurry at 40-1 at Hurst Park that afternoon or be sensible and have something each way on the favourite at Worcester, Lorelei.

Then while he was still reading the woman leaned over from behind the tea-urn and said: