A Penknife in My Heart Page 5

  “Not unless you’ve switched on your lights, Ned.”

  “I still think it’s an unnecessary risk.”

  Stuart frowned; then a mischievous look came on his face. “My God! Why not pinch the old man’s car for the job!”

  Herbert Beverley, he explained, was so mean that he would not build a garage onto his old-fashioned house, but kept his car in a cul-de-sac fifty yards away. He described the car, gave Ned its registration number, and said he would send him a key that would open it and work the ignition. Ned should leave his own car somewhere near by, and take Beverley’s: if by ill luck the latter happened to be in dock that night, he would have to use his own after all.

  “But couldn’t you ring me up on the day if—”

  “No,” said Stuart. “Not on your life. The whole business depends on there having been no communication between you and me which could be traced later. The car key will come to you by post.”

  “But, dammit, we’ve got to have some means of communication in case it’s necessary to postpone things. Your uncle might get flu. Helena might take it into her head to stay away from home for a night—though she very seldom does.”

  “All right. But I’m not having any letters or telephone calls, unless we have to alter our plans at the very last moment. Let’s see now. Agony column of The Times’d be best. A code. You’ve the brain. You can spend tomorrow thinking one up.”

  “Actually I invented a code once, for a short story that never got written. Based on the Test averages. For instance, ‘The evenings are drawing in,’ inserted on the morning of the day, would mean, “All clear, go ahead.’ If something goes wrong, we’d put ‘The evenings are drawing out’ in the Agony column.”

  “Fine. But where do the Test averages come in?”

  “Like this. Take the final order of the batting averages. We make a list of possible messages we might have to send each other, and number them. They’re keyed to the order of the England batsmen, using the first three letters of their surnames. ‘Com’ for Compton, ‘Gra’ for Graveney, and so on. May comes top in the averages: so, if you saw in the Agony column, ‘The evenings are drawing out. May,’ you’d look up message number one on our list and act on it.”

  “I’m with you. We’ll work out the messages tomorrow.” Stuart Hammer gave Ned the frank, jovial look which had taken in everyone but his uncle and one or two women, and said, “One thing more, old man. The question of a guarantee.”

  “Guarantee?”

  “Yes. I’m taking first knock. I’ve got to be sure you’ll go in when it’s your turn.”

  “You don’t trust me?” Ned was quite genuinely wounded.

  “I wouldn’t trust anyone but S. Hammer. Not that far, old son. I was giving the matter some thought while I was at the stove. An I.O.U.? Well, frankly, I doubt if you’d have enough money to interest me, even if Helena left you her all. So I ask myself, what’s Ned standing to make out of our little transaction? Answer: his Laura. If he doesn’t play his part, he must lose the main object of the combined operations.”

  “I don’t—”

  “What I have in mind,” said Stuart, in the friendliest possible way, “just to cover myself, is that you should write a letter to your Laura—the sort of letter that’d insure she’d never wish to see you again. See what I mean? An absolutely foul missive—let yourself rip on it. You give me this letter, together with envelope addressed to her, all in your own fair hand. If you don’t keep your side of the bargain I post it to her. If you do, I burn it. Neatish work, what?”

  Ned was frowning. “How do I know you will burn it?” he said slowly.

  “You don’t,” Stuart cheerfully replied. “You’ll have to trust me. Well, I mean, the letter’d be useless to me once the job was done, wouldn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes.” Ned’s tone reflected a reluctance he could not account for.

  Misunderstanding his hesitation, Stuart said, “It must be a decisive letter. And remember, you wouldn’t be able to explain it to Laura afterward—not without telling her that you’d been accessory to the murder of your wife.”

  The appalling thing, Ned discovered when he sat down to write the letter next morning, was how easily it came to him. He was flooded with bitter resentment, previously suppressed, that Laura should be reluctant to continue as his mistress, and with suspicion rising from his knowledge of her many other affairs. He found himself even blaming her in his mind for having driven him to the desperate expedient of planning Helena’s death. Everything had become so unreal for him, cut off from his past and from the outside world within the gently rocking hull of the sloop, that it seemed as if some compulsive hand were shaping the words he wrote.

  Showing the letter to Stuart proved much more difficult than writing it. Ned did it with great reluctance, and with a curious embarrassment.

  “Yes, this is fine as far as it goes,” said Stuart crisply. “But you’ve forgotten that, if and when Laura received it, your wife would be dead. You must make some reference to Helena.” His eye lit up. “I’ve got it! Put in a bit at the end saying that, since her death, you’ve come to realize that you loved Helena better than anyone else. That’ll clinch it, coming on top of your other unkind remarks.”

  Ned rewrote the letter. He was then required to make a second copy, “just in case the first should get lost in the post or intercepted or anything,” as Stuart Hammer meaningly put it. The rest of the day the two men spent working out their code of messages and going over their plans again and again, looking for weak spots. That evening, with Ned still immured in the cabin, Avocet, under her auxiliary, left the creek which Ned had never seen and set course for Yarwich.

  Some five hours later, Stuart was rowing him ashore. They had hardly spoken during the voyage.

  “Well,” said Stuart, “our troubles will soon be over. It’s all in the bag, eh?”

  Ned came out of his daze. “Look here, you’ll—I don’t want her to suffer—you’d do it quickly?”

  Stuart Hammer’s lip curled a little, invisible in the darkness. “Don’t you worry, old son. She won’t know what’s happening to her.”

  4 The Snared Falcons

  The Stowes were to have a small cocktail party this evening; and Helena was as usual in a tiz. She had not got round yet to reading Josephine Weare’s new novel; Colonel Gracely only drank whisky, and half a bottle might not be enough; Ned had forgotten to bring the olives from London last night; was Lady Avening on speaking terms with Brian Holmes and his mother?

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Helena, don’t fuss so! What does it matter?” Ned exclaimed. “Nobody expects us to entertain like millionaires.”

  “You’ll tell me next I’m trying to keep up with the Joneses. Go on, say it.” Helena’s cool voice was already turning into the resentful whine he dreaded.

  “I never suggested that. I’m only saying we can’t afford—”

  “You can afford to go off on holidays, and—and start taking The Times. I don’t know what induces you to read the boring rag.”

  “And anyway, it’s your money.” And here we are, back in the bloody old groove again, thought Ned.

  For over a week, since his return from his “Norfolk holiday,” he had been trying to detach himself from Helena—to feel her as a dead woman, and accustom his palate to the exotic flavor of the idea. His half-conscious need to do so had one paradoxical effect: he found himself constantly hanging round her, unwilling to let her out of his sight. And this, misinterpreted by her, had led to one of her rare fits of amorousness. Ned remembered it now, with equal disgust and self-disgust. “Her whom abundance melts” is Laura, and “her whom want betrays” is Helena, he said to himself viciously. His mind, whirling in a vicious circle, became a stationary blur like an airplane propeller revved up. Two days more in which to make his decision. He could still send The Times an insertion for the Personal column—“The evenings are drawing out”—still send it tomorrow and stop Stuart Hammer. Save Helena, and ruin his own life. For a week, he re
alized, he had been waiting for something to happen which would force him to make this decision, for his will seemed paralyzed.

  It had been like this on a previous occasion when he and Laura decided to part. They had kept away from each other for a fortnight—a period of extreme anguish for Ned—and then, their resolution failing, come together again. Their reunion had been rapturous. But, when the intoxication of it wore off, Ned felt more powerless than ever to free himself from the vicious circle in which his life ran. Even now, it was incredible to him that he should let Stuart Hammer’s plan take its course. Examining himself, he realized that he was only waiting for a letter from Laura to tell him that she would, after all, continue their relationship on the old terms.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” asked Helena.

  “Sorry. I didn’t know I—Like what?”

  “You’ve been very queer since you came back from Norfolk.”

  “Have I? How?”

  “Dreamy. Distrait. You look at me as if I was a sum that wouldn’t come out.”

  He dreaded the intuition her oversensitivity gave her—the neurotic woman’s flair for putting her finger on a man’s weakest spots.

  “Well, you must do your own sums, Ned,” she went on, when he made no reply. She sighed. “Not that you’ll ever add me up right. Or perhaps you think you know the answer. Well, at least you do seem to take some interest in me these days.”

  “I think you’re a vulgar fraction posing as a compound one.” He tried to say it lightly, but failed to conceal the impatience in his voice.

  Helena flushed, giving her ugly shrug, and started spreading pâté on some cheese biscuits. She did it clumsily, smearing her fingers, breaking a biscuit. This clumsiness of hers, which he had found so moving when first they were in love, aroused nothing but irritation now: it was no longer even pathetic—an appeal to his tenderness. It exasperated him endlessly that so delicately formed a creature could be so maladroit, and such a slut. He looked round the room: crumbs on the floor, flowers stuffed into vases and withering, a heap of unmended socks on Helena’s work table, letters—no doubt unanswered—spilling over her desk. What on earth did she do with her time? There was a thick layer of dust on the grand piano, he knew; but this he dared not even glance at, for fear of provoking an outburst of self-pity. Instead, he let his eyes rest on Helena. Thinning flaxen hair in an untidy coil on top of her head—a small head, with features delicate in profile but made lifeless by her shut-in expression; blue eyes, a little protuberant, anxious looking; slender limbs, which should have been graceful but were made angular and awkward by the unquiet spirit within.

  She was a beauty once, he thought: and even now a stranger might call her attractive.

  “Oh, Ned, do stop mooning around. I hate being stared at. Why don’t you go and work on your play or something?”

  “I’m thinking about it—rather a difficult scene.”

  This was a lie, of course. Living with a woman like Helena, he thought, you became infected with her self-deception: first you tempered the truth to her raw sensibility, then you were driven to dishonesty in self-defense.

  “Have you written about that I.T.A. job yet?”

  “Not yet,” he replied.

  “Why are you always putting things off?” she exclaimed with a stagy sigh.

  Ned went cold and his face started to twitch. “Putting things off”—their conversation was always turning up these crude ironies just now. Or had Helena somehow sensed what was in his mind? The decision he must make within the next twenty-four hours? Glancing covertly at his wife, he surprised a curious expression on her face—a sly, complacent look which mystified and disturbed him. The fantastic notion crossed his mind that she did know all about it: Stuart Hammer had written and told her: Stuart was really a friend of hers, and it had been a put-up job between them so as to get Ned completely in Helena’s power. That would account for Helena’s not having catechized him about his Norfolk holiday—normally she’d have been on at him for hours.

  Ned’s brain was whirling again. With a strong effort, he slowed it down. If I live with Helena much longer, I shall become as paranoiac as she is—always suspecting plots and injuries.

  “I’d better go and cut some flowers,” he said.

  “You needn’t bother, dear. Brian Holmes left a marvelous bunch of roses at the back door this morning.”

  “Oh, did he? You’ve made a conquest.”

  “That’s an awfully vulgar thing to say.” Helena’s voice stabbed like an icicle. He deliberately ignored the provocation, knowing from long experience how she hated having her provocations ignored.

  “Well then, I’ll empty these vases. The flowers are dead and the water stinks,” he said. As he was carrying them out of the room, his wife remarked, with the petulant whine returning to her voice:

  “Why are you so disagreeable about Brian?”

  “Am I? He’s a bit wet. Otherwise I’ve nothing against him.”

  “He does at least do a job and make a success of it.”

  “Unlike your ineffectual husband?” Ned spoke tonelessly, with a weary indifference which stung Helena worse than any violent answer.

  “Ineffectual?” she said, then boiled over suddenly like a saucepan of milk. “Impotent is a better word. Impotent and futile! You—”

  Ned left the room and shut the door on her wild ranting, lest he should be drawn into it. Misery closed down on him. He threw away the dead flowers, emptied the vases, refilled them and arranged the roses. He heard Helena banging about upstairs; making the beds—at 3 P.M.: the daily woman did not come at weekends. He wandered about downstairs, touching the furniture, the curtains, the ornaments. This was the house they had come to a few years ago, intending a fresh start; country air, the garden, fields stretching away to the wooded hills, new interests. And big, empty, farmhouse rooms for the children. But there had been no children. Better be unborn, than have a woman like Helena for a mother. Yet it might have been her salvation—who knows …?

  An hour later he walked down to the post office to see if any letters had come in for him by the afternoon post. There was one from Laura—the first he had received since she left him in Norfolk. To open the flimsy envelope cost him an almost superhuman effort of will, so much did he dread to know what it contained. It was a loving, despairing letter, but it removed his last hope of compromise. Laura made it quite clear that she would not resume their old relationship: he must choose between her and Helena: it was the only way out of a situation that otherwise would grow more and more intolerable. She loved him with all her heart, but about this her mind was made up.

  “Your wife is looking very well,” remarked Lady Avening, with the air of one who had conferred upon Mrs. Stowe this desirable condition.

  “I’m glad you think so,” answered Ned.

  Lady Avening nodded to her husband, and her voice went into a boom like a radio suddenly turned up. “I was saying, Bob, that Mrs. Stowe looks remarkably well.”

  “Quite,” said Sir Robert, with the start of a guilty thing surprised. “Ah—quite. The air in this part of the world is exceptionally good. I’m sure you will find it so, Mrs. Stowe.”

  “Really, Bob! The Stowes have been here for years, as you well know.”

  “To be sure. Precisely. Old neighbors. My memory’s not what—”

  “My husband,” Lady Avening broke in, “lives very much in the clouds.”

  “Like a test pilot,” murmured little Josephine Weare, her enormous blue eyes fastened on Lady Avening with an entranced expression. The latter brushed it aside.

  “He lives for his collection of coins. I always say it is so nice for a man to have a hobby.” She inclined her head toward Mrs. Holmes. “Your son’s garden, for instance. A splendid, healthy, outdoor occupation.”

  “But not exactly a hobby,” said Mrs. Holmes dryly. “We’re in market gardening for a living, you know.”

  “Came across an extraordinary orchid once in the Himalayas. Extraordina
ry,” remarked Colonel Gracely. “Whopping great blue thing. Devours hummingbirds, or so the natives believe. Doesn’t bear transplantation, though.”

  “Which is lucky for our local hummingbirds,” said Josephine Weare.

  “Eh? Oh, yes.” The colonel peered myopically into the novelist’s face. “Damned enormous blue things, Miss Weare. Like your eyes.”

  Josephine giggled enchantingly and the colonel beamed at her, his ascetic countenance suddenly boyish.

  “You didn’t actually feed hummingbirds to this orchid of yours?” she pursued.

  “Well, no. I was on my way to visit a lama. Hadn’t much time for botanical investigation. I was doing some research into Tibetan dialects.”

  “I’m sure Colonel Gracely would not lend himself to any such barbarity,” Lady Avening pronounced. “Which reminds me, Mrs. Stowe. I’m getting up an entertainment in Marksfield, for the R.S.P.C.A. funds. I want you to help us.”

  “Of course I will.”

  “I thought a few pieces on the piano would be nice.”

  Oh God, that’s torn it, thought Ned. Helena’s fists were clenched; her cool voice became a hurried gabble.

  “Oh, no, I couldn’t do that, I’m sorry, I’ll sell tickets, address envelopes, anything you like, but not—”

  “My wife never plays in public now,” Ned put in. He was trying to protect Helena, but she shot a bitterly resentful glance at him. Lady Avening said:

  “You shouldn’t let her bury her talent in a napkin. I am a busy woman, but I have always kept up my water colors. I—”

  “Music isn’t a hobby for Mrs. Stowe, like—like fretwork.” Brian Holmes’s immature face was flushed, and his lanky frame twisted in the chair. “She’s an a-a-artist, a f-first-rate c-concert pianist. You can’t expect—”

  “I am well aware that Marksfield is not the Albert Hall. But I’m sure, in a good cause, Mrs. Stowe would not feel it beneath her to—”

  “That’s not what I meant.” Brian Holmes writhed, fingering his straggly beard. “It’s a question of artistic integrity.”