The collected stories (31 page)

'Yep,' said Ira.

'Bangor's a waste from that point of view. Mighty unfriendly -reminds me of the navy, Bangor does. Those crazy Indians come up from Stillwater. Oh, they're a tough bunch when they get a little Orloff's in them. Look at you with them big square faces. I saw a hell of a fight a few nights back.'

'Don't get down Bangor way very often,' said Ira.

'It's a good experience,' said Root, watching the table. 'Like the navy. We'll go down there together next time, what do you say?'

'I'd like that, Chub.'

Root grinned. 'Might even get laid, eh? What would your old woman say to that?'

Ira cleared his throat and looked around. He grasped his pool cue with two hands. One of the high school boys was smiling.

'You mind your own business, sonny,' said Root.

'Sorry, sir,' said the boy.

The next time Root looked over both boys had gone.

'Have another swig, Ira. It won't kill you.'

'Chub, I don't think-'

'Ira.'

T think I'll just have a bottle of tonic,' said Ira.

'Put some of this into it,' said Root. He showed the vodka.

'All right,' said Ira. He smiled while Root splashed some vodka

SINNING WITH ANNIE

into his glass of orangeade. But he did not drink. He set the glass down on the raised bench.

'I can finish this game in three shots,' said Root. He walked around the table, then began knocking the balls into the pockets. The balls dropped in three gulps. Root said, 'How about another? You gave me that one, didn't you?'

'No, no,' said Ira. 'I'd better scoot back to the station.'

'Another game wouldn't hurt.' Root looked at his watch. 'Half-past three,' he said. 'Bet Lavinia's tearing her hair.'

Ira didn't move.

Root giggled. 'She'll bust a gut when I get back, so I'm in no hurry. Women,' he said, facing Ira, 'they're so damn con-trary, ain't they?'

Ira flicked his head up and down. 'Sure are,' he said. He glanced at Wayne, the man behind the soda fountain. At the glance, Wayne picked up a coffee cup and started to wipe it.

'You know what I always say, Ira?' Root held up the vodka bottle, saw there was still an inch left, and took a long pull. 'I always say: You can't live with 'em, and you can't live without 'em. And frankly, Ira, I know what the hell I'm talking about.'

'You do, Chub. A good woman -'

'Ain't no such animal!' said Root. He laughed and drank again. 'Now my name's Warren, as you know, and that's the name I use in Bangor.'

'Warren,' said Ira.

'Know what they call me? Take a guess.'

'Can't guess,' said Ira.

'I'll tell you. It's Don Warren - like Don Juan. Get it?'

'Oh, I see,' said Ira.

Root shook his head and said, 'Jesus.'

'I'd better scoot back to the station,' said Ira.

'You do that.' But as Ira was leaving, Root called, ira, wait!" startling the old man. Root pointed to the glass of orangeade on the bench. 'You forgot your drink, Ira. Set down and finish it. 1

Ira picked up the glass and drank it down with his eyes closed. He left, coughing.

'He's a funny old hayseed,' said Root. 'Ain't that right, Wayne?'

'Yes, sir,' said Wayne, and began to blink and sniff in a rabbity way.

HAYSEED

One of Ira Hubbel's boys was standing near the convertible. 'I washed your car, Mr Root.'

'Much obliged,' said Root. He tried to give the boy a tip. The boy refused it. 'Groceries,' said Root.

At Mason's, the grocery store, Root took a wire carriage and wheeled it around, filling it with cans. Harold Mason was at the cash register. Root said, 'No cartons of Luckies.'

'Aren't there any on the shelf, Mr Root?'

'Not a one.'

'Must be in the stockroom. I'll get you a carton.'

'That's all right. I'll be back later.'

'I won't be a minute,' said Mason, hurrying to the back of the store.

'Didn't mean to cause him any bother,' said Root to a woman holding a child. The woman, gawking by the door, seemed surprised that Root should address her. Root smiled. The woman turned away and left the store.

'Here you are,' said Mason. 'One carton of Luckies.'

'Didn't mean to cause any bother,' said Root.

'No bother at all.'

'What's the bad news?'

'Pardon?' Mason looked shocked.

'The bill. How much do I owe you?'

'You don't have to pay now,' said Mason. 'You must have your hands full.'

Root smiled. 'I don't have an account here, do I?'

'No, you don't. But-'

'So how can I put it on account if I don't have an account? You tell me.' Root looked around for a witness. He saw no one except Mason's wife, watching from the frozen-food section at the rear of the store.

'Suit yourself,' said Mason. He added the column of figures on the paper bag, then rang up the amount on the clanking cash register. 'That will be nine dollars and forty-eight cents.'

Root paid and started to leave.

'Mr Root?'

Root turned.

'I'm very sorry,' said Mason, and he did not take his eyes from Root's.

Root shrugged and went out to his car.

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The Root farm was just outside town, on a slope, at the end of a stony, rain-eroded driveway. Root put the car into second and drove casually, holding a knob attached to the steering wheel, spinning it slightly as the car slid sideways on the gravel and shuddered and jounced to the front of the house. He was out of the car and reaching into the back seat for the bag of groceries; drunk, he spoke his thoughts: 'Hell with it. I bought them, she can lug them in.'

Inside the house he called, 'Lavinia! I'm back!' And again, 'Lavinia!' sharply.

There was no reply and not even much of an echo. The doors were open all the way out to the sunlight on a saw-horse at the back. A plump, reddish chicken bustled mechanically, as if it ran on a spring, and pecked at the floor just inside the kitchen. Root turned and looked back at the car, then at the driveway. At his split-rail fence, which bordered the road, some children stood and were staring up at him. He went to shoo the chicken, but he did not go all the way to the kitchen, for halfway down the hall the sound of his own feet stopped him. He called his wife's name again, now softly, nearly a question; and then he took a sip of air and held it in his mouth.

Later, upstairs, he found the severed length of rope, the note, the overturned stool.

"4

A Deed without a Name

We have known the Crowleys ever since we arrived in Singapore, and to be honest neither Harry nor I found it the least bit strange that they should ring us up in the middle of the night to tell us about that horrid ship disaster in the harbor. It was only later that Harry said he had had a few inklings all along, that it was 'just like the Crowleys,' but that from practically every point of view it was (as he put it) 'very strange indeed,' which I take to mean he agrees with me.

Both Les and Beth - or as I now think of them, Lester and Elizabeth - fancied themselves amateur detectives, better than the fictional ones. At first there was not a bit of this. He puffed his pipe and talked about meerschaum and dottle and Turkish mixtures; and she was frightfully women's pagey, with black stockings and eye make-up and funny beads. He wore a medallion around his neck which embarrassed Harry, though he said he had been wearing it a lot longer than the youngsters these days, and she said the same about her get-up. I shall never know how they got away with it in London just after the war, a trying time for us all; they could have got away with it in Hampstead or Chelsea, I suppose, but certainly not in Sutton where they claimed they had a maisonette. The boring thing about people who dress in this odd way is that they do so to invite comment and challenge approval, like children in company saying to their parents 'I hope you die.' They made Harry's life a misery simply because he always wore a cricketing tie, and Harry worked jolly hard as treasurer of the club. He earned that tie, but I'll never know where they earned the right to dress like an up-dated incubus and succubus, who might be known to their friends as Inky and Sucky. And they always said my frocks were infra.

I was saying about the Crowleys and their detective stories. This subject came up one evening when I told her how thrilled I had been by The Mousetrap and had they seen it? She held a sip of sherry in her mouth and tasted it with a tight little smile. She swallowed; the smile was gone. 'Did you hear that?' she called to

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Lester. 'Yes,' he said, and getting terribly excited he turned to me and said, 'I thought it was such a lot of-'

Do people have to talk that way?

Ellery Queen was going off, they said. And Poirot ('with his mon doos and sacra bloos') was already beyond the pale. 'The only writer worth mentioning is Simenon in the original,' she said, though 'mon doo' I shouldn't think recommended her as much of a French scholar. As I look back on Elizabeth and her nastiness and her French novels I always suspect that her great pleasure must have been in cutting the pages with some ever-so-interesting Oriental dagger. 'And Doyle at his best,' said Lester, 'and B— and Gr—.' (These last two names, which he mumbled, were unfamiliar to me: I am positive that is why he said them.)

'You see, to have a proper murder story there has to be a real sense of sin,' she said.

A sense of sin! Well, that's the Crowleys all over. The Mousetrap, a diverting little gem by the mistress of the genre, didn't have a sense of sin, was that it? I remember the evening Harry and I saw it; I can imagine how it would have been spoiled for us if the Crowleys had been in the next stall and got all shirty about this gripping play not having a sense of sin. And neither will I repeat the uncharitable, not to say the beastly things the Crowleys said about Dame Margaret Rutherford.

I hold no brief for detective stories. Usually I find them very gloomy and always I find them badly written. I suppose Harry and I defended Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle because the Crowleys were being such awful bores. I get no joy from murder, though I admit some do, but in the normal way I would not have lifted a finger to defend a writer of crime fiction, except from an onslaught of prigs. 1 would cheerfully defend anyone in the same way - it is my nature - unless it was another prig. Elizabeth, I hope you and Lester can hear me.

Their infatuation was with murder stories of quite a different stripe. I have already admitted that I did not catch the names of the writers Lester mentioned, but when people say, 'Oh, you know who 1 mean - I'm sure you must have heard of him,' you can be fairly certain they know you haven't any idea who they mean. But 1 can well imagine what sort of stories the Crowleys liked. I had some indication of their tastes when they confessed that they too had thought of being murder-storv writers. This is the chief charac-

A DEED WITHOUT A NAME

teristic of people who read rubbishy books; they take a shameless comfort in the fact that in a pinch they could quite easily duplicate them. Readers of murder stories are the biggest offenders here. I doubt that there is one of them who has not thought of setting pen to paper and dashing off a shilling shocker of his own. These aficionados of gore never actually write their stories, though they insist that with a typewriter and a bank holiday they would 'type it up' (writing, for them, being something like crocheting a doily) and it would be a best seller. Sheer bloody-mindedness prevents them from ever attempting it; they much prefer telling it, with pauses, putting finger to lips and saying um-um, holding a roomful of people captive with boredom. Lester and Elizabeth did this all the time, they were forever going on about their 'own story,' interrupting each other to add bloody minutiae and getting terribly excited about what were (to me, at any rate, and Harry) rather dreary little mysteries with obvious clues, intended only to shock. I have no doubt that there was a sense of sin in theirsl

But their infatuation was with murder stories of quite a different stripe. For Lester and Elizabeth, the crime was everything and solving it did not worry them for a moment; in fact, the crimes they concocted were seldom solved at all. Their theory, I suppose, was that not all crimes are solved - that is, the best ones aren't. Their shockers took ages to tell and always had the servant in a terrible state (Ah Ho doesn't live in this compound and has to be driven home when the guests leave; Harry used to be furious and it always rained). A typical Crowley shocker was about a murder trial in which all the jury, the magistrate, the entire prosecution -everyone in the courtroom except the accused - was guilty of the crime. Of course the poor chap was found guilty and later gassed. (Was it that old gray-haired judge with a nose so big 'it seemed,' Lester put in, 'as if he was perpetually eating a banana' who dreamed up that mess? I forget.) Here the point was that the honest man has no business in society: society is evil and will kill him. For the Crowleys there was no such thing as a good sleuth and no one was innocent except the accused, no one guilty except the law; I think that was how it went, and there was an awful lot of torturing. Positively diabolical.

I do not mean to suggest that the Crowleys were cruel to us or hurt us in any way, or for that matter that they were not, underneath it all, decent people in many ways. Her souffles and his

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imitation of a West Country rustic (I can still hear him saying, 'Ur, it bain't very furr . . .') did more than make up for their rather childish insistence on ticking off the writers of detective stories and their championing of the two I suppose infinitely more tiresome and bloodthirsty writers whose names were lost in the nimbus of Turkish tobacco smoke which hung between Lester's lips and my ear; I mean, B— and Gr—. Perhaps it was the amusing working-class accent which Lester adopted when speaking about very serious subjects. (The middle class often use such devices as a cover for their embarrassment.) And the Crowleys, for all their admitted kinks and quirks, had excellent taste in antiques, little ikons and altars, maps and occult charts which fascinated Harry, who has been looking into old atlases ever since he heard of their annual appreciation of 10 per cent - a good deal sounder than most British investments, which are a scandal. They had cute little black drapes fitted across Lester's 'meditation room' and inside very interesting snapshots of a bald and bug-eyed gentleman Lester said was his father. 'A beastly man, a beastly man,' Lester would say, and this for a reason I cannot guess at sent both Lester and Elizabeth into gales of laughter. They had such things as tiger skins and opium pipes, fascinating Oriental pots, and bric-a-brac imprinted with abracadabra. It was all, Lester said, his father's.