Ngaio Marsh - Collected Short Fiction of Ngaio Marsh

“You must have left two fivers on the dressing table,” she accused.

“Yes!” Hersey shouted. “You did, you did! There were two. You put a second one out to get change.”

“Why the hell didn’t you say so!” Harold roared.

“I’d forgotten. You know yourself,” Hersey said with the glint of victory in her eye, “it’s like you always say, darling, I’m such a fool about money.”

On the morning before he died, Caley Bridgeman woke to the smell of canvas and the promise of a warm day. Bell-birds had begun to drop their two dawn notes into the cool air and a native wood pigeon flopped onto the ridgepole of his tent. He got up and went outside. Beech bush, emerging from the night, was threaded with mist. The voices of the nearby creek and the more distant Wainui River, in endless colloquy with stones and boulders, filled the intervals between bird song. Down beyond the river he glimpsed, through shadowy trees, the two Land-Rovers and the other tents: his wife’s; his stepson’s; David Wingfield’s, the taxidermist’s. And Solomon Gosse’s. Gosse, with whom he had fallen out.

If it came to that, he had fallen out, more or less, with all of them, but he attached little importance to the circumstance. His wife he had long ago written off as an unintelligent woman. They had nothing in common. She was not interested in bird song.

“Tint Ding,” chimed the bellbirds.

Tonight, if all went well, they would be joined on tape with the little night owl— Ninox novaeseelandiae , the ruru, the morepork.

He looked across the gully to where, on the lip of a cliff, a black beech rose high against paling stars. His gear was stowed away at its foot, well hidden, ready to be installed, and now, two hours at least before the campers stirred, was the time to do it.

He slipped down between fern, scrub and thorny undergrowth to where he had laid a rough bridge above a very deep and narrow channel. Through this channel flowed a creek which joined the Wainui below the tents. At that point the campers had dammed it up to make a swimming pool. He had not cared to join in their enterprise.

The bridge had little more than a four-foot span. It consisted of two beech logs resting on the verges and overlaid by split branches nailed across them. Twenty feet below, the creek glinted and prattled. The others had jumped the gap and goaded him into doing it himself. If they tried, he thought sourly, to do it with twenty-odd pounds of gear on their backs, they’d sing a different song.

He arrived at the tree. Everything was in order, packed in green waterproof bags and stowed in a hollow under the roots.

When he climbed the tree to place his parabolic microphone, he found bird droppings, fresh from the night visit of the morepork.

He set to work.

At half-past eleven that morning, Bridgeman came down from an exploratory visit to a patch of beech forest at the edge of the Bald Hill. A tui sang the opening phrase of “Home to Our Mountains,” finishing with a consequential splutter and a sound like that made by someone climbing through a wire fence. Close at hand, there was a sudden flutter and a minuscule shriek. Bridgeman moved with the habitual quiet of the bird watcher into a patch of scrub and pulled up short.

He was on the lip of a bank. Below him was the blond poll of David Wingfield.

“What have you done?” Bridgeman said.

The head moved slowly and tilted. They stared at each other. “What have you got in your hands?” Bridgeman said. “Open your hands.”

The taxidermist’s clever hands opened. A feathered morsel lay in his palm. Legs like twigs stuck up their clenched feet. The head dangled. It was a rifleman, tiniest and friendliest of all New Zealand birds.

“Plenty more where this came from,” said David Wingfield. “I wanted it to complete a group. No call to look like that.”

“I’ll report you.”

“Balls.”

“Think so? By God, you’re wrong. I’ll ruin you.”

“Ah, stuff it!” Wingfield got to his feet, a giant of a man.

For a moment it looked as if Bridgeman would leap down on him.

“Cut it out,” Wingfield said. “I could do you with one hand.”

He took a small box from his pocket, put the strangled rifleman in it and closed the lid.

“Gidday,” he said. He picked up his shotgun and walked away—slowly.

At noon the campers had lunch, cooked by Susan Bridgeman over the campfire. They had completed the dam, building it up with enormous turfs backed by boulders. Already the creek overflowed above its juncture with the Wainui. They had built up to the top of the banks on either side, because if snow in the back country should melt or torrential rain come over from the west coast, all the creeks and rivers would become torrents and burst through the foothills. “Isn’t he coming in for tucker?” Clive Grey asked his mother. He never used his stepfather’s name if he could avoid it.

“I imagine not,” she said. “He took enough to last a week.”

“I saw him,” Wingfield offered.

“Where?” Solomon Gosse asked.

“In the bush below the Bald Hill.”

“Good patch for tuis. Was he putting out his honey pots?”

“I didn’t ask,” Wingfield said, and laughed shortly.

Gosse looked curiously at him. “Like that, was it?” he said softly.

“Very like that,” Wingfield agreed, glancing at Susan. “I imagine he won’t be visiting us today,” he said. “Or tonight, of course.”

“Good,” said Bridgeman’s stepson loudly.

“Don’t talk like that, Clive,” said his mother automatically.

“Why not?” he asked, and glowered at her.

Solomon Gosse pulled a deprecating grimace. “This is the hottest day we’ve had,” he said. “Shan’t we be pleased with our pool!”

“I wouldn’t back the weather to last, though,” Wingfield said.

Solomon speared a sausage and quizzed it thoughtfully. “I hope it lasts,” he said.

It lasted for the rest of that day and through the following night up to eleven o’clock, when Susan Bridgeman and her lover left their secret meeting place in the bush and returned to the sleeping camp. Before they parted she said, “He wouldn’t divorce me. Not if we yelled it from the mountaintop, he wouldn’t.”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

The night owl, ruru, called persistently from his station in the tall beech tree. “ More-pork ! More-pork !”

Towards midnight came a soughing rumour through the bush. The campers woke in their sleeping bags and felt cold on their faces. They heard the tap of rain on canvas grow to a downpour. David Wingfield pulled on his gum boots and waterproof. He took a torch and went round the tents, adjusting guy ropes and making sure the drains were clear. He was a conscientious camper. His torchlight bobbed over Susan’s tent and she called out, “Is that you? Is everything O.K.?”

“Good as gold,” he said. “Go to sleep.”

Solomon Gosse stuck his head out from under his tent flap. “What a bloody bore,” he shouted, and drew it in again.

Clive Grey was the last to wake. He had suffered a recurrent nightmare concerning his mother and his stepfather. It had been more explicit than usual. His body leapt, his mouth was dry and he had what he thought of as a “fit of the jimjams.” Half a minute went by to the sound of water —streaming, he thought, out of his dream. Then he recognized it as the voice of the river, swollen so loud that it might be flowing past his tent.

Towards daybreak the rain stopped. Water dripped from the trees, clouds rolled away to the south and the dawn chorus began. Soon after nine there came tentative glimpses of the sun. David Wingfield was first up. He squelched about in gum boots and got a fire going. Soon the incense of wood smoke rose through the trees with the smell of fresh fried bacon.