Margot Bennett - The Man Who Didn't Fly

“I’ll stay at The Running Fox,” Marryatt said, looking at Hester, who was absorbed in some private calculation, and scarcely seemed to hear him.

“Then goodbye for the present. If you happen to see Jackie, don’t forget we’d like to get in touch with him.”

They went, and a few minutes later Prudence had the great pleasure of showing Marryatt out.

FOR the first part of the night Hester allowed herself to think of Harry, to recreate his face and remember the few words of love he had spoken, to dream of the plans she had made to save him and believe again in his genius. She struggled with unreality, desperately injecting life into it, and won a guilty victory. She offered herself to his memory, and fell asleep believing she would dream of him.

She woke early in the morning with a shock of unhappiness and terror, convinced that she had heard an anguished voice calling to her. Desperate fancies and premonitions bred in her mind like bacteria in an open wound: she lay in agony, trying somehow to find the strength to control her own thoughts. She saw Harry’s face again, and angrily pushed the picture away. He had gone, he had left her; to try to live with his memory was like nurturing corruption and decay.

She forced herself to rise and dress, to think of her father and her sister, and of the fact that they needed her. She thought bitterly that she no longer needed them. The last few days had forced her into an existence that was quite apart from theirs; she had her private life, her secret thoughts; she couldn’t relapse into being a member of her father’s house. She would live alone for ever.

She went downstairs and found Prudence in the kitchen.

“Hello,” Prudence said. “I thought if I peeled the potatoes now you wouldn’t mind if I went swimming.”

“Swimming!” Hester repeated. “Oh, I’m very glad that you are able to enjoy yourself again. You’re not worried about what people will think?”

“Don’t say people when you mean you,” Prudence advised. She threw the potatoes into the sink, viciously, as though she wanted to knock the bottom out of it. “We can’t let this go on for ever, that’s what I think. Why shouldn’t we just behave? Let’s get some pleasure before the summer’s over. If Father didn’t stop that cheque I’ll probably have to go and be a kitchen girl among the cockroaches in some ramshackle hotel where people murder each other in the third floor back.”

“He sent a wire last night. He won’t know till this evening or tomorrow if the cheque has been paid in already. It’s more than likely that it has – in that letter Maurice gave Uncle Joe to post. Now, Prudence, could we stop talking, just stop talking for the rest of the day? Go swimming. Do what you want. But whatever you do don’t go on talking for ever and ever and ever like this making me think of everything all over again.”

Prudence looked at her angrily, then, in compunction, looked away again. “Don’t worry too much, Hester,” she said awkwardly. “I’ll take the tea up to Father. You wouldn’t like to come swimming?”

Hester shook her head. She sat, drinking hot tea, considering with dull surprise the death of her emotions. She had no more capacity to feel. She didn’t know how life was to be faced. She put down the tea and went to the sink and washed her face in cold water, thinking sadly there was no way of washing out her mind and making it clean and clear again. The police, she thought, could come and go for ever, asking questions, producing results, assaulting her with each question, destroying her spirit with every answer, taking a technical interest in the nature of the wounds they inflicted: she had no refuge from them, although she had committed no crime.

She went out of the house and into the garden, hurrying past the bed where the roses grew. It was less than a week since Harry had cut the rosebuds for her, one for every year of her life. She went into the woods and slowly towards the chapel. She sat down on one of the ruined walls, remembering the hour she had spent there with Harry, probing the wound, trying to make it hurt again.

When she heard a step she looked up, half-afraid that Harry had come back.

It was Marryatt.

“Hello,” he said. “I’ve been looking for this place. And I wanted to talk to you again.”

She nodded mutely. She didn’t want to talk. She had no energy to tell him to go away.

He sat down in the corner where the two broken walls met, lit a cigarette, and smoked it in silence. She looked at him once or twice, impatiently.

“You wanted to say something?” she asked.

“No, not now.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Just accustoming you to my presence…”

“Then I’ll go.”

“No, please. We needn’t talk. I won’t worry you at all.”

She sat down again. She was too tired to force herself to any kind of action. She drifted slowly into a waking dream of the past. Marryatt was part of it. His presence in the corner was neither remembered nor forgotten, until he stirred and she looked round to see an increased intensity on his face. He was staring across into the far corner of the chapel, and she looked too, and saw the blue paper carton lying there.

“So this is where Harry ate his lunch,” she said. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

“Not if he liked this place,” Marryatt said, still looking intently at the blue paper. “Did he?”

“Oh, he might have liked it,” she said angrily.

“And Morgan liked it too? This is where your sister saw Harry and Morgan quarrel, isn’t it?”

“Questions again,” she said wearily.

He walked over to the blue paper, looked down at it, bent, and touched it. He pulled one corner of it gently, but it was imprisoned between two stones.

He stood up again, looking dubiously at Hester, not certain how much she should be asked to hear.

She walked across to him.

“So someone’s raised the stone,” she said. “Don’t look like that. You needn’t look like that. It doesn’t mean anything. If you think it does, lift the stone yourself. Go on. Lift it. I’ve more right than you to see.”

“We’ll go back to your house,” he said quickly. “You’ll come with me, won’t you?”

She let him take her by the arm. She didn’t listen to anything he said, as they walked back through the woods, but when they reached the house she shook free from him.

“There’s the telephone,” she said bitterly. She began to walk upstairs, but on the landing she stopped and listened long enough to hear what he had to say to the police. Then she went in her bedroom and locked the door.

When the police came and raised the stone and descended into the six-foot deep vault, they found all that was left of Harry. He had been shot in the chest, and one hand still lay protectively over the wound.

At first they thought there was nothing in the vault but Harry and the decaying wooden coffins. When they raised him they found a few scattered flower petals; colourless, shrivelled nearly to the heart, but still with a vestige of the soft bloom of the living rose.

They searched the vault, but nowhere in the disturbed dust was any proof that the Sackford diamonds had ever lain there.

INSPECTOR LEWIS, confronted with murder instead of an irritating problem about missing persons, looked like a marble statue of himself. If he had any feeling of indulgence or sympathy for interfering civilians, he calcified it instantly. He had made it known he wanted to see Hester, and he waited for Hester to be produced.

“I’m sorry,” Marryatt said. “You can’t see her. She’s not feeling like that.”