Death of a Huntsman (8 page)

Nor could anyone possibly hear, in the rising winter wind, in the falling winter darkness, any sound of voices weeping across the hillside in the night-time.

He first met her on an early Spring evening when he was doing the night run from London to the West, a journey that he could do in six and a half hours, if things went well, with a full load on the truck. That night he was about half way, somewhere on the long chalk switch-backs about Salisbury, when he blew a gasket. An almost full moon was shining starkly on the slopes of white hillsides, where leafing bushes of hawthorn looked very much like shadowy herds of cattle crouched and sleeping. It was almost eleven o'clock by that time and he pulled up at the first house he saw.

He was glad to see a light in one window and still more glad to see the twin white cups of a telephone on the side of the house and the wires running across the garden, above a neglected mass of old lilac and apple trees, in the clear moon. At first sight it did not seem to be a very large house; he was deceived by the flat brick front, by what was really a large hooded doorway that through long years had become dwarfed to a mere hole under a drab arch of dusty ivy. It was only later that he discovered that its frontal narrowness concealed a house that seemed to stretch back without ending; as if
successive owners had been shamed by the flat funereal front into adding piece after piece behind, until the final glassy crown had been achieved by putting on a large hexagonal conservatory at the back.

She came to the door with a book in her hand and wearing a dressing gown. At least, that first time, he had the idea that it was a dressing gown. Afterwards he saw her once more in the same garment, in better light, and he realized then that it was a dark blue woollen dress, old-fashioned, waistless, tied about the middle with a cord. She continually played with this cord, making motions of tying and untying it, without achieving any change in it at all.

He apologized and raised his cap to her and asked if he might use the telephone.

‘What is the matter?' she said.

‘My truck,' he said. ‘I blew a gasket. I want to get a garage——'

‘There's no telephone here,' she said.

He said something about the wires going across the garden but she said:

‘I had it cut off. There wasn't much use for it. Nobody called much.' And then: ‘There's a box half a mile down the road.'

He said thank you and how sorry he was for disturbing her at that time of night and asked which way the box was.

‘It's on the corner of the little road. The one on the left you passed a little way back.' Up to that moment she had been framed with an almost faceless obscurity under
the canopy of ivy, against a background of a single electric bulb of meagre wattage that seemed to bathe the hall and staircase behind her in a kind of smoky orange varnish. Now she came out into the moonlight and said:

‘I'll just show you. Where's your truck? Where are you from?'

‘London,' he said and he found she was looking with a sort of microscopic, eager curiosity, almost queerly, up into his face.

‘London,' she said. ‘You drive all that way? This time of night?'

‘Three nights a week,' he said.

‘Where do you sleep?'

‘Sleep before I start,' he said. ‘I get five minutes doss sometimes in the cab——'

He still could not see her face very clearly in the moonlight and now he discovered it was for two reasons. She had a habit of walking with her head down, as if she was fascinated by her hands playing with such restless indetermination with the cord of her dress. Her face too was three parts obscured by a frame of thick black hair. Afterwards he saw her hair in that particular fashion, like the dress, only once more, but that first night it gave him an impression of untidy, uneasy strength, so that he found himself suddenly glad that the telephone box was down the road.

Then she said: ‘Does it mean your truck is stranded? Can't you go any farther? How much farther have you to go?'

‘About a hundred and fifty,' he said.

She seemed to consider this and once again he found her looking at him with microscopic inquisitiveness, from eyes that were simply two dark holes under the drawn-down frame of hair. Then suddenly she said:

‘You can use the telephone if you like. That wasn't true what I said about being cut off. But I didn't know who you were—you've got to be careful, haven't you? But I can see you're all right now—you're a nice fellow. I can see that.'

‘Thanks all the same. I won't bother you. I'll hop down the road.'

‘No, no,' she said. ‘Oh! no. Don't do that. It's a long way. Don't do that. Come in now. You can use the telephone. I've got some tea going. I always have tea going at this time. I drink tea all night.'

He thought for a moment that she was going to pull him by the hand. Her own hand seemed to snatch at the moonlight in a hungry sort of gesture, almost a pounce, not unlike the grab that a child might make, too late, at a butterfly.

‘You could ring up the Acme Service,' she said. ‘They'll come out. They're four miles down the road. Then you can have some tea while you're waiting.'

He thanked her and said all right, he would, and he followed her into the house. The telephone, an old-fashioned fixed wall model, was in the hall, under the single small electric bulb, and while he was telephoning he could smell the fumes of a spirit kettle coming from a room somewhere beyond.

The garage would be an hour, they said; they had only
one night-service breakdown truck and that was out. When he heard this he remembered he still had his supper in a haversack in the cab.

‘Where are you going?' she said.

‘I've got a bit of food in the truck,' he said. ‘I'll just get it——'

‘Oh! No. Don't bother with that. I've got food. If you're hungry I have food.'

So he followed her into the first of what he knew later were many rooms beyond it. It was a large room, furnished in a sort of suburban Jacobean, with a heavy beamed ceiling, encrusted white wallpaper, a big panelled oak fireplace and a bulb-legged dining table in the centre. In one corner was a divan covered by a blue and purple paisley shawl. She sat untidily, almost sloppily, on this divan, in the light of a small brass table-lamp and the mauve flames of the spirit kettle, and told him that that was where she slept.

‘That's when I do sleep,' she said. ‘I don't sleep much. I'm like you—awake most of the night. I have tea and read and then drop off when it's day.'

He saw that the spirit kettle was silver, like the big teapot she presently filled with water. The cups were of thin china, fancily flowered, with high handles.

‘I hear the trucks go by all night,' she said. ‘It's funny—I expect I've heard you go by many a time. What's your name? Mine's Broderick. Mrs Broderick.'

‘Charlie,' he said. ‘Charlie Williams.'

‘Like the prince, eh?' she said.

Now, in the double light of the lamp and the spirit
kettle, he could see her face more clearly. It was a very white face, the kind of face moulded by sleepless nights and airless days into a mask of paste that made it difficult for him to tell how old she was. He noticed she did not smile. Once or twice it occurred to him that she was a woman of fifty or so, and then suddenly her head would turn sideways in the mauve and yellow glow of light. The profile, no longer depressed by the huge black bunch of hair, became delicate, the line of the pale lips unexpectantly much younger.

All this time she was lighting one cigarette after another: lighting it, putting it down, forgetting it, lighting a second from the first and then forgetting again. In this distracted fashion it was some time before she remembered she had promised him some food.

‘I'm sorry. What would you like? Meat or something? Some cheese?'

‘Cheese,' he said, ‘thank you.'

She went away and came back after some moments with the bone of a leg of lamb and a loaf of bread and a big bone-handled carving knife. She held the bone in one hand and sliced off chunks of meat with the other and laid them between pieces of bread.

‘You remind me of somebody,' she said. ‘I've got an idea I've seen you before.'

‘Perhaps going by in the truck,' he said.

‘No,' she said, ‘it couldn't be that.'

She seemed to lapse into a momentary coma of thought, disturbed, stubbing her cigarette absently into a saucer, her head down.

‘Tell me about yourself,' she said. ‘I know you live in London and you come by three nights a week. What else? Where do you live?'

‘Paddington.'

‘Married?'

‘No,' he said. ‘Not me.'

‘Not you?' she said. ‘A young fellow like you?'

‘Pick 'em up and lay 'em down,' he said, ‘that's me for the moment. I don't want to get tied up. Who wants a night driver anyway? They want you home and in bed.'

She laughed for the first time. Her voice had been pitched rather low, much as if she had become fixed in the habit of talking to herself, but the laugh was several notes higher, lifting, rather delicate, a pleasant singing spring of relief.

‘You make me laugh,' she said.

She turned up the flame of the spirit kettle and then poured more water on the tea. She filled his cup and her own again and said:

‘When will you be going back?'

‘Ought to be going back tomorrow,' he said. ‘Depends on the gasket.'

‘It's funny about people,' she said. ‘You coming by here hundreds of times and then you suddenly have trouble and come in and here we are talking.'

It was after midnight when the breakdown truck arrived. As he walked out into the road with the driver he had an impression that she was coming too, but when he turned she had gone from the doorway and back into the house.

It was while he and the driver were still fixing the tow-chain that he heard her coming across the road. She was running with light, almost palpitating steps and she had a vacuum flask and a paper parcel in her hands.

‘I almost thought I wouldn't catch you,' she said. ‘It's just a flask of tea and the lamb-bone. You can have it at the garage while you wait. I saw how you tucked into the lamb——'

‘That's kind of you,' he said.

‘Not a bit. You can bring the flask back when you come by again. I'd be glad of it back.'

She stood in the road, huddled, thoughtful, watching the two of them hitching the tow-chain, for about ten minutes longer. Her face was dead white in the moon. When the chain was fixed and just before he got up into the cab he thanked her again and said good-night. She lifted a thin arm in farewell and at the same moment he heard from the direction of the house a man's voice calling, in a snapped, thin screech, what he afterwards knew was her Christian name:

‘Francie! Francie! For heaven's sake where are you?—Francie!'

And as if it had nothing to do with her or she had not heard it or did not care if she heard it she stood impassively by the trucks and said to him up in the cab:

‘Don't forget the flask, will you? I shall be here.'

Before he could speak the voice screeched for her again but she still stood there, unmoved, in impassive indifference, waiting for the trucks to go. He called down that he would not forget the flask. In that moment he saw
her smile again and that was how he came to see her for the second time.

She must have thought that he was coming back by night. But the garage was small, the size he wanted in gaskets was not in stock, and it was well past breakfast time before he was on the road again. In that way, instead of coming back by night, he was driving through the long switch-backs of low chalk hillsides soon after noon the following day.

Stopping the truck by the house, getting down with the flask in his hand, looking at the ugly deceptive brick front half-lost in its scabby broken apple tree, he did not attach much importance to it all. He had had kindnesses on the road from women before and he had often given kindnesses, in the way truck drivers do, to people in trouble or cars that had broken down, and sometimes women had slipped a note in his hand. There had been a time, once, in Wiltshire, on a late summer evening, when he had helped an old woman get back a charging sow into a sty. The old woman was weeping; she kept saying that her old man would knock her brains out when he came back from the pub and found she had let the pig loose; but he comforted her and she too, like the others, gave him tea. She even promised him a cut of the bacon when the pig was killed and cured, but he had never bothered to go back and claim it. When you travelled about so much, especially at night, you came up against some odd capers.

It had been rather warm for April that afternoon and
with the sun full on the glass of the cab he had been glad to drive in his shirt sleeves. He felt cheerful in the sun; already he was beginning to feel that he could look forward to the warmer, easier nights of summer-time.

The bell on the front door was one of those old-fashioned iron pulls that connect far back into the house, and he pulled at it several times before he realized that it was no longer working. He tried the front door gently but it was locked and he was thinking of leaving the vacuum flask in the porch when he thought he heard sounds from the back of the house.

That was how he first discovered how far back the house extended. Bit by bit, bay by bay, its owners had grotesquely enlarged it, trying to cover, and at the same time always increasing, its original hideousness. On one side a tower, a red-brick pepper box with terra-cotta sills and facings, had been built, and above it was a flag-pole. Beyond it was a wing that seemed insecure in its attachment to the rest of the house and that someone had fortified with four stout stone buttresses.

And then, at the extreme back, behind another shrubbery of lilac and rose and flowering currant, all deep in the witherings of last summer's grasses, he came upon the conservatory. It was hexagonal in shape and its upper windows were panes of coloured glass, deep blue, green, yellow, bright blood red. And to his astonishment it was full of flowers.