What Dread Hand? (22 page)

The small birds were grateful for her presence, poor little things: the sparrow, the robin, the tiny Jenny Wren and of course the sly jackdaw with his monastic grey cowl… And seeing them all feeding there as the bitter weather went on, the buzzards swooped down also, to see what might be going. And then one day—one day, royalty itself: the kite.

Who said the wild creatures couldn’t be taught by man? The buzzards, consistently driven off by flapping arms and screeching voice, soon enough learned to come no more. The kite, on the other hand, enticed with lumps of meat from the deep-freeze, as soon knew he was welcome. At first she must go far afield to tempt him down, slipping and stumbling over the frozen paths, over the fields when the paths became indistinguishable from the rest of the land—to place the offerings only as near as his wary aloofness would admit. But soon, because her legs were growing weak under the unaccustomed exercise, she must place them closer; and still he came, and still he came nearer, starved into daring, until one day he took meat from the wooden table set up just outside her door, where in summer time she would sit and take her own meals—took meat from the very table where Miss Bellingham herself would eat. From within her small, deep-set cottage window, she watched him and could have cried for joy. She had taken the King’s Bounty: now she would earn it and place him for ever in her debt.

In these days she could send no postcards: the postwoman came no more, crawling like a bug in her little green van, up the twisty lane; but she started a diary in an old exercise book: ‘Today, Feb. 6th., kite approached within two yards of house. Quite true that rim of eye is pronounced yellow. Eye very bright and proud.’

The days passed, the snow fell no longer but still lay deep, wind-swept into drifts along the lane, levelling the fields into flat white sheets, damming up, icing-over, the sluggish stream. No thaw came. The resources of the deep-freeze began to get low. Miss Bellingham cut down the kite’s ration and her own. He came now regularly to the table: had seen her watching from the window and after the first shock and swift, evading flight, took no more heed of her. But more and more it was becoming an effort for her to get out to the table; the snow, iced over into a
piste
by the back and forth passing of her feet on her errands of mercy, had grown skiddy and treacherous. Once or twice she slipped and fell and the effort of raising herself again to her feet, made her heart thump and her mind grow grey and blurred. One day, standing at the table with the meat in her hand, she felt suddenly strangely ill and was obliged to sit down abruptly in the old wooden arm-chair and let the world swim round her in a sudden swirling of darkness and light. And her hand dropped the meat without volition on her part and somehow—somehow it came to her that time had passed without her knowing anything of it. The kite was wheeling above her head; he had not been there when she first began to feel ill. ‘I have had a little faint,’ she said to herself. But she knew it was more than that.

The kite hardly waited for her slow, stumbling return to the cottage before he swooped down upon the meat. ‘Kite came within five feet,’ she wrote in the diary. ‘True that bill is strongly hooked.’ Next day she waited, very, very quiet, only half way to the door—and again down he came; and that afternoon she stayed nearer the table still: and still he came. It was very cold waiting there, but worth it—worth it! One day, she thought, if the cold lasts long enough, if I am patient enough, he will take it from my hand.

She ate very little now. The other birds had finished up her store of frozen fruit and vegetables and nowadays sought elsewhere—or sought no more, poor little things, clamped frozen to frozen twigs. And the bread was all gone and even such meat as she allowed herself, she begrudged for the kite’s sake. And there came another little fainting spell and this time a numbness of her left arm and leg; and Miss Bellingham recognised in a mind growing increasingly woolly and vague, that she could not go on for very long more. And if she were to die—who then was going to feed the kite? She feared that she would have the strength for very few more journeys out to the table. Fortunately, she had, while she still could, removed what was left of the meat from the depths of the refrigerator: the weather was sufficiently cold to keep it wholesome and the kite could not have eaten it solid frozen. She looked at it despairingly: so little left that she must somehow eke it out day by day: if she were to place it all out on the table in one last great effort, would he not take it all at once and then have none left for the rest of the time until the thaw came? Might not—worse and worse—the buzzards return and seeing the meat there, unguarded, swoop down and help themselves? And… ‘I would have liked before I die,’ she confided to the diary, painfully scrawling with her stub of pencil, ‘to have had him take meat from my hand, just once.’

And that day—that very day—so he did. Limping and struggling, dragging herself by slow, painful inches, she had got out to the table and there collapsed again into the chair and for a long time lay sprawled there, the meat still held in her out-stretched hand. So long, indeed, that the kite grew weary of circling unobserved about the old, grey tumbled head and came down closer—closer—closer: and, since the enemy made no move, swooped at last and with a wild snatch tore the food from her lax fingers and with two great thrashing flaps of dappled wings, soared up again into the whiteness of the sky. The violence of his up-winging awakened and startled her. She felt very ill and the halting journey back to the house took longer than ever. But that night she scrawled triumphantly in the book: ‘Not true that kite will not feed from human hand.’

Next day she retained her consciousness but lay as she had before, across the table; only this time she watched him. The cold was bitter but, wrapped in her old winter coat, she seemed strangely, hardly to suffer from it, sitting there hour after hour, waiting for his coming, the meat held out temptingly; waiting, when the meat was gone, to gather strength to make the slow, creeping journey indoors again. By night she did not undress, just lay down by the warm oil radiator and there slept her oddly untroubled sleep, building up courage again for the next day’s effort. But again that evening she was able to record faithfully in the diary: ‘Kite alighted on the table, took food from hand, ate it close by. Beak very fierce and strong. True that crown of head is almost white.’

But still the freeze held; and now there was meat for only one more day.

She sat for a long time that morning, huddled against the warm radiator—thinking. No more food for the kite; and if the cold lasted much longer—already it must be unprecedented for this time of year—what would become of him: what would become of him, her love, her lord, her king of the air? No man in all her life had claimed an ascendancy over the heart of Miss Bellingham: mind and body she had remained all too free of the dominance of the male over feminine frailty; in her youth much longed for, in age deeply regretted—the sweet, the easeful submission to a strength superior to her own. Now into her blurred mind, shot through with fantasies of that long-ago, starved youth, had come a hazy recognition that here at last he was: the over-lord, to be submitted to, sacrificed to, body and soul…

Body and soul.

Her soul in a very short while would be with God; but was it not woman’s duty—should it not be her delight—to give up her body to the dominant male?

‘Alive I have served him,’ she wrote, the letters straggling crazily across the page of her diary, ‘why shouldn’t I, dead, serve him still? In life I have suffered in serving him. I shan’t suffer when I am dead.’

And she struggled out of the old coat and, thinly clad carrying only the diary and stub of pencil, with the small remains of the meat, for the last time she made the painful journey, crawling now on hands and knees, out to the table; and hoisted herself up somehow and once again, exhausted by the effort, fell back unconscious in the wooden arm-chair. And this time when she awoke to sensibility, sensibility was indeed almost all that remained to her. In the right hand a little strength, in the leg also, perhaps; but not enough any longer to move the dead weight of the left. Willing or not—now there was no more possibility of changing her mind. The die was cast: at this sacrificial altar the victim had tethered itself without hope of escape. Painfully she wrote: ‘Do not be distressed. It is what I have chosen to do.’

The whirr of his wings was like thunder as he swooped, the beat of them fanned the grey hair back from the balding crown. Proud as a king, an emperor, proud as a god—scornful of danger now, he strutted with a click of curved talons, the bleached silver of the birchwood boards. Fierce was the yellow-rimmed brilliance of his pale eye, sizing her up. When he had gone she feebly added her note in the diary: ‘He is only waiting till…’ The writing tailed off.

And she wrote once more: how much later, how many hours or even days later, who could tell? They found the words, almost indecipherable, straggling across the blotted and bloodstained page, off on to the boards of the table itself. ‘Not true…’

Not true that the bird of prey waits to feed until the victim is dead.

‘G
OOD HEAVENS,’ SAID MRS.
Fletcher-Store, ‘what a revolting jacket! Where on earth did you get it?’

‘I bought it off a man in the pub,’ said Mr. Fletcher-Store.

‘A man—what man?’

‘
I
don’t know—just a man.’

‘You really should be more careful what you buy off strangers in pubs,’ said Mrs. Fletcher-Store. ‘It’s awful. Looks like a dead sheep, turned inside out.’

‘Good lord!—just what he said
his
wife said.’ He looked down at the jacket doubtfully, flattening his chin against his chest. It was a brightish tan, true, but heavily fleece-lined and he’d fancied it had a—well—a bit of a Raffish look… And, lost in reverie, he saw himself, flailing his arms to shrug on the jacket as he ran across the tarmac to his waiting kite. ‘I thought it looked rather good,’ he said.

‘You thought it looked like the jolly old R.A.F.,’ said Mrs. Fletcher-Store, pronouncing it ‘raff’. ‘Wizard prang, old boy, and a couple of crates in the drink in my time, what, what: and if you don’t believe me—as well you may not!—a handle-bar moustache to prove it.’ She looked at her husband with something very much like loathing. ‘How I’ve lived all these years with such a miserable phoney…’

‘I
was
in the Raff,’ protested Mr. Fletcher-Store.

‘For six months. On the ground. And never saw a kite fly, except on Hampstead Heath. The ugly truth is, Gerald,’ she said viciously, ‘that you’re a phoney, a rotten, bombasting phoney, trying to cover up from all the world, yourself included and especially, that you’re nothing but a dud and a failure—never did a decent job in your life, never kept a woman in your life—except me, because I’m sorry for you; never even made a friend, except a few miserable pick-ups in pubs, bought with drinks you couldn’t afford. And now selling you jackets you can’t afford either…’

‘All right, all right,’ said Fletcher-Store. ‘I know.’

‘You
know? You don’t know and you don’t want to know.’

‘I don’t suppose any man wants to know that sort of thing about himself. Especially if it’s true,’ he said. ‘And I don’t think it really does any good, quite so constantly reminding him of it.’

‘Then don’t go off spending money at that rotten little pub in Hartling and buying a lot of rubbishy tripe we can’t afford. You seem to forget that what money comes into this house is made by me. You with your shoddy little half-baked short stories—’

‘All right, all right,’ he said again. ‘Skip it. I’ve got the message. No more purchases in pubs.’ And he added, half to himself but loud enough for her to hear it, for it always galled her that in fact he was the better educated of the two:
‘Hic jacet.’…

‘Hick jacket?’ she said. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I was making a pun, dear,’ he said sweetly. ‘In Latin. It means you’ve slain me in the battle of the jacket.
Hic jacet
—here lies…’

But she got the last word as usual, after all. ‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘you were always good at that.’ He heard her footsteps pounding up the stairs, moving about the bedroom as she changed for her evening swim. After a little while the front door banged.

He waited five minutes to be sure she wouldn’t come back for anything, and then went out to the tool-shed where he kept hidden his bottle of whisky: she hardly ever let him go to the pub, so this was next best. Just the right tot, or one’s brain got fuddled and he had some hard thinking to do—filled up with a good deal of water to make it last longer. He carried it back to the sitting-room, pulled up a chair to the moonlit window, and sat down to go on thinking out his plan to murder her.

On the whole, Gerald had decided, the odds were in his favour. For a start there need be no hurry: the sooner the better, certainly, but there might yet come to be almost a pleasure in listening to increasingly frequent tirades, when each word added fuel to a funeral pyre already crackling. And then there could be no obvious motive. No ‘other woman’—one reason for coming to this ghastly hole had been, according to Elsa, to get away from the other-woman menace; and certainly here, candidates were nil. And no money interest: they could just about eke out on her scribblings and his own: living cheap on the fruit and vegetables and eggs he was supposed to provide by his work on the small-holding. (Small-holding! A vile old pig and a lot of scrawny hens, and all that manuring and digging—he, who in his day…) And he fell into a reverie again of those old wild, wonderful times of the ditched crates and the pranged kites and the boon companions boasting together over the exploits of others—never of one’s own, by George!—over the tankards in the jolly old hostelries… And after all, given the chance, might not he too have been of that splendid company? A man was not born to failure: surely it must be fair to say that it was bad luck that had made him one?

Well, in the matter of Elsa’s murder, he would not fail.