Margot Bennett - The Man Who Didn't Fly

Hester turned. “Tom, I can think about these things. I won’t talk about them, even to you.”

“You have to talk. You have to talk and talk and get it out of your system. Root it out now or your mind will be smothered with it, like prickly pear. I don’t suppose you know what that is.”

“Of course I do.”

“I thought you didn’t know anything about Australia. We could sit down on that stone and wait for the mist to clear. If it does, we’ll be able to see the valley looking just as wet as the hill.”

Hester looked at the dripping stone, then sat down. He moved away from her, wiping the rain angrily from his face. “Now you listen to me.”

“I thought you wanted me to talk.”

“Later. I don’t want any novelettish misunderstandings. Hester, you know what I’m like. I hated Maurice Reid. I wouldn’t have killed him, but I can’t be sorry he’s dead. That’s the truth about me. You think it’s bad, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said simply.

“I suppose you wouldn’t want to marry me, knowing what I’m like,” he said defiantly.

She shut her eyes, calling up her vision of Harry.

“Harry always said I had to marry someone weak.”

“Harry wasn’t necessarily right. Anyway, I’m weak enough to satisfy most people. I’m weak enough to be afraid of Harry. He had a lot of faults: I know they don’t count now. He was anti-social in quite an innocent way. He could make you laugh; he was in love with you, perhaps he could write poetry. I don’t know. I can compete against someone alive, but not against a man who’s dead. So I’d better clear off.”

Hester stood up. “No, you left out one thing. I wasn’t in love with Harry. I wasn’t. I wanted to change him, that’s all I wanted, just to prove to myself how wonderful I was. He was wrong about me, you know. I couldn’t marry anyone weak.” She kissed him, and there was nothing left of Harry, except a small handful of poems for the anthologies.

BEFORE THE ESTATE AGENT HAD TIME TO SHUT HIS EYES and stick a pin into the waiting list, he found he had let the house to Mrs Brown. She took it, unseen, on a ten years’ lease, and on her way back to the basement room she dropped a pound in a pavement artist’s hat. The pound marked, for her, the end of a year’s exercise in concealing furious despair behind a fagade of untroubled, almost aristocratic, courtesy.

When she unlocked the front door she felt like Robinson Crusoe surveying, for the first time, what was, through no design of his own, to be his kingdom. The grim mosaic of the hall floor would have been naked to the sunshine if it had not been for the porch, a kind of sun baffle-wall in coarsely stained glass. The floor of the porch was also tiled, making it suitable for potted plants.

“A dear little house,” Charles said to her, with just a hint of a question in his voice.

Her mind was wandering on. “If we bought a carpet – second-hand, of course – we could cover those tiles.”

“And how are we to conceal the railway line which passes under the bedroom window?” Charles asked.

She opened a buff-coloured door and peered down the stairs. “Charles,” she said in excitement. “There’s a bath!”

They looked at the bath. “It isn’t very handy,” she admitted.“No,” Charles said. “But I suppose you can dive in from the top step and dry in the hall when you come out.”

Greta ran upstairs. “Look!” she called. “Here’s a room that isn’t really good for anything. Don’t you think we could move the bath up?”

“We’d never get anyone to do it.”

“Nonsense!” she said briskly. “We can do it ourselves. Cut off the water, move the bath, ring the water and the gas company and say our bath’s not connected. Then we’d be priority. We can do it with ropes.”

“I begin to see why this house was to let,” Charles said.

Greta said she’d meant to tell him about that. It belonged, she said, to a man called Smith whose wife had left him for another man, at least that was what the neighbours said, anyway, she’d disappeared, and he was so heartbroken, the neighbours said, that he couldn’t bear to live there any more.

“I’m surprised he ever bore it. Do you think it has a queerish smell?”

“It’s probably only rats,” Greta said, with a flash of her old victory spirit. “Now, I’ll begin to scrub the floors tomorrow. We must buy some distemper for those awful walls. You must get in touch with the storage people and the gas and electricity and water. There’s the food office, and we must find a coal merchant who’ll have us. Do you think we can get that broken window mended? Do try and eat well through the day – there’ll be nothing but bread and marge in the evenings. And buy some rat poison.”

Their lives for the next month might have been planned by some lunatic master mind. One part of the day was spent in making pathetic appeals to gas, electricity, telephone, food, and fuel functionaries; the other in trying to buy things that could not be bought. In the evenings they scrubbed the floors, painted the walls, and ate bread and margarine. All their friends told them how lucky they were, and asked if they had any rooms to spare.

The faintly nauseating smell they had rented with the house did not diminish. Charles said Mrs Smith had run away, not to find romance, but to escape the smell.

Charles found it was impossible to turn on the bath taps without taking off his shoes and standing in the bath. When he had done this he found that the pipes had been disconnected. He agreed that the bath must be moved.

It took them four hours to haul the bath upstairs: some of that time was spent in offering each other conflicting advice at the corners, but there was enough hard work to make Charles feel that his heart was affected. He sat trembling on the edge of the bath, while Greta went to make some tea.

She came upstairs without the tea and stood silent for so long that her husband began to feel nervous.

“I think you should have a look at the bathroom, not this bathroom, the other one,” she said in a thin voice. His smothered thoughts leapt to the surface. It was Mrs Smith.

He went downstairs. When he came back, neither of them spoke for some minutes. They were thinking of estate agents, furniture stores, gas and electricity men, food and fuel offices, carpenters, builders, pots of paint, stacks of bread and margarine. They were thinking of the quiet and orderly lives they had once led, and of how they had never done anyone any harm.

Charles sat stiff and still. He hoped he would never be asked to get up, to speak, to act. Unpleasant as this moment was, he wanted it to last as long as his life and not be succeeded by any kind of future.

“Do you think the shops are shut?” Greta asked.

“We could get some cement from the builder’s,” she said. “Or something airtight. I think jobs like that should be done properly.” She smoothed her hair and hummed a little. “I’ll make some tea while you go for the cement.”

That night, when the rest of the work was over, they moved the bath downstairs again. The neighbours were curious about the noise, but they never learnt what had caused it. This was just as well, for if any rumours had reached the ears of Mr Smith, he would have been most upset.

Mrs Smith was past caring.

MARGOT BENNETT(1912-1980) was a Scottish author and screenwriter who penned a small, though influential, number of crime, thriller, and science fiction novels. After The Man Who Didn’t Fly narrowly missed out on winning the first CWA Gold Dagger Award in 1955, Bennett went on to win with her novel Someone from the Past in 1958.