Daphne du Maurier - Not After Midnight & Other Stories

'The Commander is waiting for you, miss. He wants to show you the grave. We've just uncovered it.'

Oh God, what grave, for whom? She felt the colour drain from her face. Michael was not smiling. He jerked his head towards a clearing just ahead. Then she saw the others. There were two other men besides Nick. They were stripped to the waist, bending over something in the ground. She felt her legs weaken under her, and her heart began thumping in her breast.

'Miss Blair is here, sir,' said Michael.

Nick turned and straightened. He was dressed like the others, in singlet and jeans. He did not carry a spade, but had a small axe in his hand.

'So,' he said, 'the moment has arrived. Come over here and kneel down.'

He placed his hand on her shoulder, and drew her towards the crater that opened wide before her. She could not speak. She could only see the brown earth piled on either side of the crater, the tumbled leaves, the branches tossed aside. Instinctively, as she knelt, she buried her face in her hands.

'What are you doing?' He sounded surprised. 'You can't see with your eyes covered. This is a great occasion, you know. You're probably the first Englishwoman to be present at the uncovering of a megalithic tomb in Ireland. Court cairns, we call them. The boys and I have been working on this one for weeks.'

The next thing she knew was that she was sitting humped against a tree with her head between her legs. The world stopped spinning, gradually became clear. She was sweating all over.

'I think I'm going to be sick,' she said.

'Go ahead,' he replied. 'Don't mind me.'

She opened her eyes. The men had all disappeared and Nick was crouching beside her.

'That's what comes of only having coffee for breakfast,' he told her. 'Quite fatal starting the day on an empty stomach.'

He rose to his feet and wandered back to the crater.

'I've tremendous hopes of this find. It's in a better state of preservation than many others I've seen. We only stumbled upon it by chance a few weeks ago. We've uncovered the forecourt and part of what I think is a gallery for the burial place itself. It's not been disturbed since about 1,500 years B.C. Can't have the outside world getting wind of it, or we shall have all the archaeological chaps over here wanting to take photographs, and that would put the fat in the fire all right. Feeling better?'

'I don't know,' she said weakly. 'I think so.'

'Come and have a look, then.'

She dragged herself to the crater and peered into the depths. A lot of stones, a sort of rounded arch affair, a kind of wall. Impossible to show enthusiasm, her misunderstanding and fear had been too great.

'Very interesting,' she said, and then to her shame, far worse than being sick, she burst into tears. He stared at her, momentarily nonplussed, then taking her by the hand began walking briskly through the wood without speaking, whistling between his teeth, until within a few minutes the trees had cleared and they were standing by the side of the lake.

'Ballyfane is over to the west. You can't see it from here. The lake broadens to the north on this side, and winds in and out against the mainland like a patchwork quilt. In winter the duck fly in and settle amongst the reeds. I never shoot them, though. In summer I come and swim here before breakfast.'

Shelagh had recovered. He had given her time to pull herself together, which was all that mattered, and she was grateful to him.

'I'm sorry,' she said, 'but frankly, when I saw Michael with the spade and he said something about a grave, I thought my last moment had come.'

He stared at her, astonished. Then he smiled. 'You're not so hard-bitten as you like to pretend. That swagger of yours is all bluff.'

'Partly,' she admitted, 'but it's a new situation to me, being dumped on an island with a recluse. I see now why I was hijacked. You don't want anyone leaking about your megalithic find to the press. O.K., I won't. That's a promise.'

He did not answer immediately. He stood there, stroking his chin.

'I–I'm,' he said after a moment. 'Well, that's very sporting of you. Now, I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll go back to the house, get Bob to make up a packed lunch, and I'll take you for a tour of the lake. And I promise not to push you overboard.'

He's only mad, she thought, nor-nor-west. He's sane in every respect save for the photograph. But for that… but for the photograph she would come clean at once and tell him the truth about herself, about her reason for coming to Ballyfane. Not yet, though.

Nothing could be more different, Shelagh decided several hours later, than the Nick described by her father, with a chip on the shoulder, a grudge against the world, soured by disappointment, than this man who put himself out to entertain her, to see that she enjoyed every moment of the hours spent in his company. The twin-engined launch, with a small cabin for'ard-not the little chug-chug craft in which Michael had brought her to the island the day before-glided smoothly across the lake, dodging in and out amongst the tongues of land, while he pointed out to her, from the helmsman's seat, the various points of interest on the mainland. The distant hills to the west, a ruined castle, the tower of an ancient abbey. Never once did he allude to the reason for her visit, nor press her for information about her own life. They ate hard-boiled eggs and cold chicken seated side by side in the small cabin, and she kept thinking how her father would have loved it, how this would have been just his way of spending a day had he lived to take that holiday. She could picture him and Nick together, chaffing, slanging away at each other, showing off, in a curious sort of way, because she was there. Not her mother, though. She would have wrecked the whole thing.

'You know,' she said in a burst of confidence, the effect of a tot of whisky before the Guinness, 'the Commander Barry I imagined wasn't a scrap like you.'

'What did you imagine?' he asked.

'Well, because of your being this recluse they told me about, I pictured someone living in a castle filled with old retainers and baying wolf-hounds. Rather a buffer. Either grim and very rude, shouting at the retainers, or terribly hearty, playing practical jokes.'

He smiled. 'I can be very rude when I choose, and I often shout at Bob. As to practical jokes… I've played them in my time. Still do. Have another Guinness?' She shook her head and leant back against the bulkhead. 'The trouble was,' he said, 'the sort of jokes I played were mostly to amuse myself. They've gone out of fashion, anyway. I don't suppose you, for instance, ever put white mice in your editor's desk?'

For editor's desk substitute star's dressing-room, she thought.

'Not white mice,' she replied, 'but I once put a stink-bomb under my boss's bed. He hopped out of it pretty quick, I don't mind telling you.'

Manchester it was, and Bruce never forgave her, either. What he thought was boiling up to be a discreet affair between them vanished in smoke.

'That's what I meant,' he said. 'The best of jokes are only fun for oneself. A bit of a gamble, though, to pick on your boss.'

'Self-protection,' she told him 'I was bored at the thought of getting into bed with him.'

He started to laugh, then checked himself. 'Forgive me, I'm being hearty. Do you have a lot of trouble with your editors?'

She pretended to reflect. 'It all depends. They can be rather demanding. And if you're ambitious, which I am, it earns you promotion. The whole thing's a chore, though. I'm not really permissive.'

'Meaning what?'

'Well, I don't strip down at the flick of a hat. It has to be someone I like. Am I shocking you?'

'Not in the least. A buffer like myself likes to know how the young live.'

She reached for a cigarette. This time he lighted it for her.