Margot Bennett - The Man Who Didn't Fly

“I don’t see that Donegal Poker would ruin his wife,” she now said scornfully. Morgan wasn’t old enough to be treated with the dubious respect she gave her father. He was about forty, too old to count, not old enough to be allowed indulgently to revel in his imaginary illnesses, and he had a twinging smile that scraped uneasy symbols on her mind.

Wade took no part in the discussion. He was lost in a private world of monetary calculations, where the house, miraculously restored, was crammed with guests who paid large sums of money and incurred no overheads. He began to pencil figures on the tablecloth. ‘9 at £10 each.’ Then he thought of Maurice, and looked up smiling.

“How would everyone like a little trip to Madeira this winter?” he asked genially.

Hester smiled at him unhappily, beginning to realise that her father was like a greyhound, doomed for ever to run round a circular track after an electric hare that would never be caught. She stood up, and began to gather the plates.

“The dining-room is so far from the kitchen,” she said. “Couldn’t we move the dishes by bicycle, Prudence?” She wasn’t entirely used to the house. Her father had bought it, an astoundingly bad investment, when he had been forced to sell The Grey House to cover his losses on the fruit farm.

In the kitchen they found Harry with the soup saucepan in front of him. He was eating from it with a spoon.

“There was no sherry in any room at all,” he explained. “So I thought I had better come out here to say goodbye. Who’s lunching here today?”

“Morgan. He pays for his board, so we have to toss him a biscuit now and then,” Hester said coldly.

Harry pushed the saucepan away. “Morgan’s got so much anxiety in his heart he walks with a list to the left side. He has the merit of being very fond of the game of Donegal Poker. I’m still a hungry man, Prudence. You’ll give me a spoonful from that casserole before you take it in?”

“If you help with the washing-up,” Prudence said, scowling.

“We can discuss that later,” Harry said easily. He emptied some of the meat from the casserole on to his soup plate.

“Morgan drinks without getting any pleasure from it,” he said. “He drinks alone in his room.”

“Harry, how do you know?” Hester asked.

“I’ve seen the empty bottles. He hides them in his wardrobe, like Hemingway.”

“But how did you come to look in his wardrobe?” Hester asked, shocked.

“It’s the place to find empty bottles. Why is Morgan hanging around that room your father is painting?”

“Is he?”

“When I couldn’t find any sherry I went up there again. He shot out of the room like a clay pigeon from a trap.”

“We’d better take what’s left of the casserole to the diningroom,” Prudence said bitterly.

“If you don’t want him in that room, getting in the way, I’ll tell him doctors have discovered this new paint is a prime cause of T.B. That will send him off to London for an X-ray,” Harry said.

Prudence hovered in the door with the casserole. “Come on, Hester.”

“How long is it since anyone was in the room – the attic room?” Harry asked.

“Years, I suppose,” Hester said over her shoulder.

She was worried when she went back to the dining-room, and she found it hard not to take too obvious an interest in Morgan’s face. She had never before met a secret drinker, and she looked at him now with a mixture of clinical interest and human sympathy; she saw nothing but a cold, reticent face, with features that suggested strength far more than weakness. She wanted to help him, but she was surprised when she heard herself saying:

“I want to walk to Furlong Hill this afternoon. Would you like to come, Morgan?”

“A walk?” he asked grudgingly. “I don’t know. I’m not sure. Yes, yes, thank you, Hester. In about an hour?”

“Morgan is a bit queer,” Prudence said when the two girls were alone in the kitchen.

“He’s probably going to sit in his wardrobe with the door shut, drinking,” Hester said. “I wonder where Harry is?”

When she went up to the attic she found Harry. He seemed to be tapping the walls.

“What are you doing, Harry?” she asked.

“You saw. I was tapping the walls. Looking for more weak spots.”

Morgan’s uneasy face appeared in the doorway. He stared at the sand and broken plaster on the floor.

“I didn’t know you were going to make so thorough a job of this room,” he said accusingly. “Are you going to have all the walls down?”

“Very likely,” Harry said.

“If I were your father,” Morgan said to Hester, “I should leave this room alone. It’s too big a job for one man.”

“But I’m going to help,” Harry said.

Morgan wavered in the doorway, then left.

“He looks worried,” Hester said.

“He does indeed,” Harry said thoughtfully.

He walked up and down the room, not speaking to her, and she went to the window and looked out again over the trees.

“Do you hear a ticking?” Harry asked from behind her.

She listened. “Only my watch, I think.”

“It’s not that.”

“I don’t hear anything else.” She turned round. “You’re probably listening to your own watch.”

“I haven’t got one. I lent it to a friend. He went to South America. Lie down on the floor and listen.”

“I’ll get paint on my clothes.”

“Lie down and put your ear to this board,” Harry said. His eyes were bright and excited, his normally sad, mocking face was stern. He looked like an anarchist who at last has his hands on a bomb.

Hester lay down obediently. She wasn’t sure. She heard, or thought she heard, something that might have been a ticking.

Her father opened the door and looked at them in consternation.

“Sshh!” Harry said. “We’re listening to a ticking. It comes from under the floorboards.”

“A ticking,” Wade repeated. “You’re mad, Harry.”

“I’m not. The boards are ticking.”

Wade tried to laugh.

“If you think it’s a joke,” Harry said, “lie here and listen.”

Hester stood up. “What do you think it is?” she asked uncertainly.

“Death watch beetle,” Harry said curtly.

“What?” Wade said in a stunned voice. He put out a hand to the wall, to support himself.

“Death watch beetle,” Harry repeated with relish. “They eat their way into the middle of boards and through and through and suddenly the floor collapses, and then the ceiling underneath. They nibble their way round the walls and through the beams on the roof until the whole building shudders and turns to dust – like something found in an Egyptian tomb. Listen!”

Wade dropped on his hands and knees beside Harry and put his ear to the floor. He thought he heard the sound of ticking.

“They make the noise by banging their heads on wood,” Harry explained. “It’s a mating song. When the female death watch beetle hears the male banging its head on wood it gnaws its way through the intervening timbers to reach the male. I suppose they carve themselves out a little cell. It’s like the end of Aida, except they have children.”

“Aida?” Wade asked, looking defenceless and baffled. “What has Italian opera got to do with it?” He was fond of opera, but he hadn’t Harry’s talent for seeing one event in terms of another.

“Oh, Father, don’t look so worried,” Hester said. “There’s bound to be some way of getting rid of death watch beetle.”

“Of course there is,” Harry said briskly. “You send for – I think it’s the County Sanitary Engineer. When he’s confirmed it’s death watch beetle he lists your house as a dangerous structure. You have to pull it down or rebuild.”