Ngaio Marsh - Death At The Bar

“Yes.”

“Are you going to marry him, after all?”

“I don’t know. He’s ridiculously class-conscious about sex. He’s completely uneducated in some ways but — I don’t know. If he knew about last year he’d take it very badly and I can’t marry him without telling him.”

“Well,” said Watchman suddenly, “don’t expect me to be chivalrous and decent. I imagine chivalry and decency don’t go with sex-education and freedom, anyway. Don’t be a fool, Decima. You know you think it would be rather fun.”

He pulled her towards him. Decima muttered, “No, you don’t,” and suddenly they were struggling fiercely. Watchman thrust her back till her shoulders were against the bank. As he stooped his head to kiss her, she wrenched one hand free and she struck him, clumsily but with violence, across the mouth.

“You—” said Watchman.

She scrambled to her feet and stood looking down at him.

“I wish to God,” she said savagely, “that you’d never come back.”

There was a moment’s silence.

Watchman, too, had got to his feet. They looked into each other’s eyes; and then, with a gesture that, for all its violence and swiftness, suggested the movement of an automaton, he took her by the shoulders and kissed her. When he had released her they moved apart stiffly, with no eloquence in either of their faces or figures.

Decima said: “You’d better get out of there. If you stay here it’ll be the worse for you. I could kill you. Get out.”

They heard the thud of footsteps on turf and Cubitt and Sebastian Parish came over the brow of the hillock.

i

Watchman, Cubitt and Parish lunched together in the taproom. Miss Darragh did not appear. Cubitt and Parish had last seen her sucking her brush and gazing with complacency at an abominable sketch. She was still at work when they came up with Watchman and Decima. At lunch, Watchman was at some pains to tell the others how he and Decima Moore met by accident, and how they had fallen to quarrelling about the Coombe Left Movement.

They accepted his recital with, on Parish’s part, rather too eager alacrity. Lunch, on the whole, was an uncomfortable affair. Something had gone wrong with the relationship of the three men. Norman Cubitt, who was acutely perceptive in such matters, felt that the party had divided into two, with Parish and himself on one side of an intangible barrier, and Watchman on the other. Cubitt had no wish to side, however vaguely, with Parish against Watchman. He began to make overtures, but they sounded unlikely and only served to emphasize his own discomfort. Watchman answered with the courtesy of an acquaintance. By the time they had reached the cheese, complete silence had overcome them.

They did not linger for their usual postprandial smoke. Cubitt said he wanted to get down to the jetty for his afternoon sketch, Parish said he was going to sleep. Watchman, murmuring something about writing a letter, disappeared upstairs.

They did not see each other again until the evening when they met in the private tap-room for their usual cocktail. The fishing boats had come in, and at first the bar was fairly full. The three friends joined in local conversation and were not thrown upon their own resources until the evening meal which they took together in the inglenook. The last drinker went out saying that there was a storm hanging about, and that the air was unnaturally heavy. On his departure complete silence fell upon the three men. Parish made one or two half-hearted attempts to break it but it was no good, they had nothing to say to each other. They finished their meal and Watchman began to fill his pipe.

“What’s that?” said Parish suddenly. “Listen!”

“High tide,” said Watchman, “it’s the surf breaking on Coombe Rock.”

“No, it’s not. Listen.”

And into the silence came a vague gigantic rumour.

“Isn’t it thunder?” asked Parish.

The others listened for a moment but made no answer.

“What a climate!” added Parish.

The village outside the inn seemed very quiet. The evening air was sultry. No breath of wind stirred the curtains at the open windows. When, in a minute or two, somebody walked round the building, the footsteps sounded unnaturally loud. Another and more imperative muttering broke the quiet.

Cubitt said nervously: “It’s as if a giant, miles away on Dartmoor, was shaking an iron tray.”

“That’s exactly how they work thunder in the business,” volunteered Parish.

“ The business ,” Watchman said with violent irritation. “What business? Is there only one business?”

“What the hell’s gone wrong with you?” asked Parish.

“Nothing. The atmosphere,” said Watchman.

“I hate thunder-storms,” said Cubitt quickly. “They make me feel as if all my nerves were on the surface. A loathsome feeling.”

“I rather like them,” said Watchman.

“And that’s the end of that conversation,” said Parish with a glance at Cubitt.

Watchman got up and moved into the window. Mrs. Ives came in with a tray.

“Storm coming up?” Parish suggested.

“ ’Ess, sir. Very black outside,” said Mrs. Ives.

The next roll of thunder lasted twice as long as the others and ended in a violent tympanic rattle. Mrs. Ives cleared the table and went away. Cubitt moved into the inglenook and leant his elbows on the mantelpiece. The room had grown darker. A flight of gulls, making for the sea, passed clamorously over the village. Watchman pulled back the curtains and leant over the window-sill. Heavy drops of rain had begun to fall. They hit the cobblestones of the inn yard with loud slaps.

“Here comes the rain,” said Parish unnecessarily.

Old Abel Pomeroy came into the Public from the far door. He began to shut the windows and called through into the Private:

“We’m in for a black storm, souls.”

A glint of lightning flickered in the yard outside. Parish stood up, scraping his chair-legs on the floor.

“They say,” said Parish, “that if you count the seconds between the flash and the thunder it gives you the distance—”

A peal of thunder rolled up a steep crescendo.

“—the distance away in fifths of a mile,” ended Parish.

“Do shut up, Seb,” implored Watchman, not too unkindly.

“Damn it all,” said Parish, “I don’t know what the hell’s the matter with you. Do you, Norman?”

Abel Pomeroy came through the bar into the tap-room.

“Be colder soon I reckon,” he said. “If you’d like a fire, gentlemen—”

“We’ll light it, Abel, if we want it,” said Cubitt.

“Good enough, sir.” Abel looked from Cubitt and Parish to Watchman who still leant over the window-sill.

“She’ll come bouncing and teeming through that window, Mr. Watchman, once she do break out. Proper deluge she’ll be.”

“All right, Abel. I’ll look after the window.”

A livid whiteness flickered outside. Cubitt and Parish had a momentary picture of Watchman in silhouette against a background of inn yard and houses. A second later the thunder broke in two outrageous claps. Then, in a mounting roar, the rain came down.

“Yurr she comes,” said Abel.

He switched on the light and crossed to the door into the passage.

“Reckon Mr. Legge’ll bide to-night, after all,” said Abel.

Watchman spun round.

“Is Mr. Legge going away?” he asked.

“He’m called away on business, sir, to Illington. But that lil’ car of his leaks like a lobster-pot. Reckon the man’d better wait till to-morrow. I must look to the gutters or us’ll have the rain coming in through upstairs ceilings.”