Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

The only thing to be fetched was the milk. I waited till after four when the milking should be done, then set off for the farm which lay across two fields at the back of the orchard. There, when the byre-man was handing me the bottle, I saw George.

‘Halo, George,’ I said.

‘Needle! What are you doing here?’ he said.

‘Fetching milk,’ I said.

‘So am I. Well, it’s good to see you, I must say.

As we paid the farm-hand, George said, ‘I’ll walk back with you part of the way. But I mustn’t stop, my old cousin’s without any milk for her tea. How’s Kathleen?’

‘She was kept in London. She’s coming on later, about seven, she expects.’

We had reached the end of the first field. George’s way led to the left and on to the main road.

‘We’ll see you tonight, then?’ I said.

‘Yes, and talk about old times.’

‘Grand,’ I said.

But George got over the stile with me.

‘Look here,’ he said. ‘I’d like to talk to you, Needle.’

‘We’ll talk tonight, George. Better not keep your cousin waiting for the milk.’ I found myself speaking to him almost as if he were a child.

‘No, I want to talk to you alone. This is a good opportunity.’ We began to cross the second field. I had been hoping to have the house to myself for a couple more hours and I was rather petulant.

‘See,’ he said suddenly, ‘that haystack.’

‘Yes,’ I said absently.

‘Let’s sit there and talk. I’d like to see you up on a haystack again. I still keep that photo. Remember that time when —’

‘I found the needle,’ I said very quickly, to get it over.

But I was glad to rest. The stack had been broken up, but we managed to find a nest in it. I buried my bottle of milk in the hay for coolness. George placed his carefully at the foot of the stack.

‘My old cousin is terribly vague, poor soul. A bit hazy in her head. She hasn’t the least sense of time. If I tell her I’ve only been gone ten minutes she’ll believe it.’

I giggled, and looked at him. His face had grown much larger, his lips full, wide, and with a ripe colour that is strange in a man. His brown eyes were abounding as before with some inarticulate plea.

‘So you’re going to marry Skinny after all these years?’

‘I really don’t know, George.

‘You played him up properly.’

‘It isn’t for you to judge. I have my own reasons for what I do.’

‘Don’t get sharp,’ he said, ‘I was only funning.’ To prove it, he lifted a tuft of hay and brushed my face with it.

‘D’you know,’ he said next, ‘I didn’t think you and Skinny treated me very decently in Rhodesia.’

‘Well, we were busy, George. And we were younger then, we had a lot to do and see. After all, we could see you any other time, George.’

‘A touch of selfishness,’ he said.

‘I’ll have to be getting along, George.’ I made to get down from the stack.

He pulled me back. ‘Wait, I’ve got something to tell you.’

‘OK, George, tell me.’

‘First promise not to tell Kathleen. She wants it kept a secret so that she can tell you herself.’

‘All right. Promise.’

‘I’m going to marry Kathleen.’

‘But you’re already married.’

Sometimes I heard news of Matilda from the one Rhodesian family with whom I still kept up. They referred to her as ‘George’s Dark Lady’ and of course they did not know he was married to her. She had apparently made a good thing out of George, they said, for she minced around all tarted up, never did a stroke of work and was always unsettling the respectable coloured girls in their neighbourhood. According to accounts, she was a living example of the folly of behaving as George did.

‘I married Matilda in the Congo,’ George was saying.

‘It would still be bigamy,’ I said.

He was furious when I used that word bigamy. He lifted a handful of hay as if he would throw it in my face, but controlling himself meanwhile he fanned it at me playfully.

‘I’m not sure that the Congo marriage was valid,’ he continued. ‘Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, it isn’t.’

‘You can’t do a thing like that,’ I said.

‘I need Kathleen. She’s been decent to me. I think we were always meant for each other, me and Kathleen.’

‘I’ll have to be going,’ I said.

But he put his knee over my ankles, so that I couldn’t move. I sat still and gazed into space.

He tickled my face with a wisp of hay.

‘Smile up, Needle,’ he said; ‘let’s talk like old times.’

‘Well?’

‘No one knows about my marriage to Matilda except you and me.

‘And Matilda,’ I said.

‘She’ll hold her tongue so long as she gets her payments. My uncle left an annuity for the purpose, his lawyers see to it.’

‘Let me go, George.’

‘You promised to keep it a secret,’ he said, ‘you promised.’

‘Yes, I promised.’

‘And now that you’re going to marry Skinny, we’ll be properly coupled off as we should have been years ago. We should have been — but youth! — our youth got in the way, didn’t it?’

‘Life got in the way,’ I said.

‘But everything’s going to be all right now. You’ll keep my secret, won’t you? You promised.’ He had released my feet. I edged a little farther from him.

I said, ‘If Kathleen intends to marry you, I shall tell her that you’re already married.’

‘You wouldn’t do a dirty trick like that, Needle? You’re going to be happy with Skinny, you wouldn’t stand in the way of my —’

‘I must, Kathleen’s my best friend,’ I said swiftly.

He looked as if he would murder me and he did. He stuffed hay into my mouth until it could hold no more, kneeling on my body to keep it still, holding both my wrists tight in his huge left hand. I saw the red full lines of his mouth and the white slit of his teeth last thing on earth. Not another soul passed by as he pressed my body into the stack, as he made a deep nest for me, rearing up the hay to make a groove the length of my corpse, and finally pulling the warm dry stuff in a mound over this concealment, so natural-looking in a broken haystack. Then George climbed down, took up his bottle of milk and went his way. I suppose that was why he looked so unwell when I stood, nearly five years later, by the barrow in the Portobello Road and said in easy tones, ‘Halo, George!’

The Haystack Murder was one of the notorious crimes of that year. My friends said, ‘A girl who had everything to live for.’

After a search that lasted twenty hours, when my body was found, the evening papers said, ‘“Needle” is found: in haystack!’

Kathleen, speaking from that Catholic point of view which takes some getting used to, said, ‘She was at Confession only the day before she died — wasn’t she lucky?’

The poor byre-hand who sold us the milk was grilled for hour after hour by the local police, and later by Scotland Yard. So was George. He admitted walking as far as the haystack with me, but he denied lingering there.

‘You hadn’t seen your friend for ten years?’ the Inspector asked him.

‘That’s right,’ said George.

‘And you didn’t stop to have a chat?’

‘No. We’d arranged to meet later at dinner. My cousin was waiting for the milk, I couldn’t stop.’

The old soul, his cousin, swore that he hadn’t been gone more than ten minutes in all, and she believed it to the day of her death a few months later. There was the microscopic evidence of hay on George’s jacket, of course, but the same evidence was on every man’s jacket in the district that fine harvest year. Unfortunately, the byre-man’s hands were even brawnier and mightier than George’s. The marks on my wrists had been done by such hands, so the laboratory charts indicated when my post-mortem was all completed. But the wrist-marks weren’t enough to pin down the crime to either man. If I hadn’t been wearing my long-sleeved cardigan, it was said, the bruises might have matched up properly with someone’s fingers.