A Lovely Day to Die (8 page)

They never forgave her. The night after he was hanged, they came in a body to the cottage, all twelve of them, seeking
vengeance;
but lo and behold, the girl had vanished, never to be seen again.

And very sensible of her too, you may say—the first sensible thing she’d done throughout the whole sorry business—but of course that wasn’t how they saw it in the fourteenth century. Having searched the cottage and the surrounding fields and woods all that night and for many days after, they finally settled, in the absence of her physical body, for a ceremonial cursing—priest, candles, the whole bit—with solemn prayers for her soul, that it should never find rest.

Which it didn’t, of course (well, it wouldn’t have been much use to Theresa’s thesis if it had, would it?)—and neither did the souls of those twelve jurors, whose rage, frustration and sense of justice outraged went with them to their graves … so that sometimes, on that stretch of lonely lane that winds from the churchyard to the cottage, you may still see the shadowy outlines of cloaked men in the moonlight … hear the tramp, tramp of long-dead feet—the feet of men still reaching out for vengeance from a distance of nearly six hundred years.

Theresa, of course, was thrilled by this dismal little tale, and anxious to get it down as quickly as possible, while the details were still fresh in her mind. In the end she dictated it to me—she said she could think better that way—and we filed it, I remember, under “Apparitions, Multiple”; and then we went down to supper.

I was used to it by now, of course, but at the beginning I’d been amazed at the nonchalance with which Theresa could thus thrust her day’s gruesome findings into their appropriate files and then, apparently, think no more about them. Didn’t she ever feel frightened, I used to ask her, all alone in the creaking, ancient cottage after I’d left her and gone back to my lodgings?

She seemed quite surprised at such a notion.

“But I’m
studying
the subject, don’t you see?” she would explain, “You can’t be frightened of something you’re
studying.
You can’t really feel anything much about it at all.”

And remembering my own experiences of getting up Hamlet, say, or Macbeth, for some imminent exam, I did know exactly what she meant. I suppose this is one of the occupational hazards of the academic life, this draining-away of emotion in the interests
of exact knowledge; but it has its advantages as well as its disadvantages. It certainly had for us: it meant that Theresa wasn’t frightened, I wasn’t worried about her, and in this
peaceful
ambience our relationship seemed to be blossoming smoothly, easily, and without trauma or anxiety.

*

And so, when a week or so later Miss Fry, the owner of Green End Cottage, marched up to me one morning in the village street and accused me of deliberately terrorising her new tenant with stories of the cottage being haunted, I was completely thrown.

By now, I knew Miss Fry quite well by sight, though this was the first time we had actually engaged in conversation. She was not a lady who looked easy to converse with—sixty if she was a day, and very tough, pounding around the neighbourhood on a bicycle, her thick muscular legs taking the hills at a speed which put my own effete and pleasure-loving generation to shame.

So when she skidded to a stop and strode across the street towards me, all tweeds and weather-beaten indignation, I could find at first absolutely nothing to say. The accusation was so wild, you see, and so absurdly wide of the mark, that I simply could not orientate myself. It was
I
who had been putting all this superstitious nonsense into Theresa’s head?—
I
who had been filling her imagination with gruesome fancies, so that she was scared to death every time she spent a night alone in the cottage? The sheer, idiotic injustice of the charges took my breath away.

“But it’s
she
who …” I began angrily—and then stopped. For Theresa had, right at the beginning, extracted from me a
promise
that I would tell no one—absolutely no one—about the subject of her thesis. You see, she’d explained, she was employing the “Depth Interview” technique, which meant that she had to get her victims into conversation, and get them to answer her questions, without their realising what she was up to; and
naturally,
if it once got around the village that she was interviewing them for her thesis and writing-up everything they said about
the “haunted” cottage, then their reactions to her questions would no longer be “spontaneous and unbiased”.

Her phrase, not mine. For it seemed to me (though of course I didn’t tell her so) that their reactions were probably pretty suspect anyway. Not that I’d ever seen her in action: the hours she spent on “field-work” (as she called this business of chatting-up startled yokels leaning over gates) seemed always to be just exactly those same hours that
I
spent brooding over my typewriter in my room above the saloon-bar, and so I can’t speak with authority, I can only guess. But my guess was that the yokels, having recovered from their first stupefaction, would have fixed their rustic gaze on that smashing head of hair and on those wide, green-flecked eyes, and would have proceeded to do whatever it seemed necessary to do to keep the goods around. Yokels aren’t stupid—that I
have
learned—and as soon as they discovered that what kept her chatting them up was a bit of well-chosen grue about Green End Cottage, why, then, a bit of grue they’d give her, tailored to the occasion. They wouldn’t be short of plots; after all, they all watched television, and their knowledge of Village Superstitions probably matched hers easily, werewolf for werewolf.

But I am digressing. The validity or otherwise of Theresa’s research methods was irrelevant to my immediate predicament. The point is that I had promised—no matter how light-heartedly—that I would keep the subject of her thesis secret; and so now, confronted by Miss Fry and her outrageous accusations, I was left with no way of defending myself. To have pointed out to Miss Fry that if Theresa
was
scared (and I happened to know she wasn’t) then she must be scaring herself, with her own research project—this would have been a breach of trust of which I’m not capable: not when the trusting is done by a beautiful girl, anyway.

So, “Er …” I said; and, “Um … well … you …” I must have sounded guilty as hell. Miss Fry simply overrode my feeble protestations, and in a loud, overbearing voice, which carried from one end of the village street to the other, she got on with the case against me. How dared I use my talent for fiction (yes, it had got around that I had come here to write)—how dared I use this
talent for the perverted purpose of terrifying a suggestible young girl? (Theresa suggestible—I should be so lucky!) and trying to frighten her into giving up her tenancy of the cottage! Only a couple of mornings ago, before Miss Fry was even out of bed, it seemed that the poor girl had come knocking on her door in a state of near-hysteria, babbling of disembodied voices, of skeleton knuckles rapping on the window, of phantom footsteps and demonic howlings round and about the cottage …

And so on and so on. I knew it was all lies, because I’d seen Theresa both yesterday and the day before, and hadn’t heard a word about any of it.
Why
Miss Fry should go to the trouble of concocting this ludicrous rigmarole I couldn’t imagine; maybe old maids of sixty were like that? The one thing that
did
get me on the raw, though, was the implication that
I
—a serious and up-and-coming novelist in the Social Realism tradition—could
possibly,
in any circumstances whatever, have employed my “Talent for fiction” on such a load of out-dated Gothick balderdash! I was outraged, I felt professionally insulted, and I turned on Miss Fry in a sort of impotent fury—impotent because I couldn’t say any of the things I really wanted to without breaking my promise to Theresa.

Still, I did my best. I didn’t exactly call her a meddling old fool—something in those snapping, Colonel’s daughter eyes precluded such language—but I think the idea must have got across; because when she mounted her bicycle again she was actually trembling with rage.

“You’ll be sorry for this!” was her parting shot, as her
well-brogued
foot drove against the pedal. “You’ll be sorry! As the dear Vicar was telling me only last week …”

I wish now that I’d listened more carefully to what the dear Vicar
had
been telling her. But how was I to know, then, that it would be worth hearing? I had met the Rev. Pinkerton only once since taking up my residence here, and I had formed the opinion—a snap judgment, I have to admit—that he was crackers. Either that, or that he was a very, very holy man indeed.

It was on that first Monday morning that our encounter had taken place. I was on my way up the lane that led to Green End Cottage, full of dark thoughts about the week-end boyfriend (I didn’t know then, of course, that he hadn’t turned up after all), when I heard footsteps round the bend ahead of me; quick, loud footsteps, almost running; and a moment later, down the lane towards me, black as a crow in his clerical garb, the Reverend Pinkerton came striding. He was muttering as he came, and as he drew near I heard the words:

“Evil! … Before my very eyes … the embodiment of Evil …”

I thought at first that he was addressing me, personally; and I was just trying to think of the right reply—I mean, “And good morning to you, too, Sir,” didn’t seem to strike quite the right note—when I realised he wasn’t speaking to me at all—hadn’t, indeed, actually seen me, for all that his pale, wild eyes seemed to be staring right into mine. He was in some sort of trance, or state of prayer, or something, I decided; and when he strode on past me without a backward look, I breathed a sigh of relief. The last thing I wanted was a lecture on the Nature of Evil on this, my beautiful morning.

And so, naturally, I’d written him off, poor old chap—well, not
so
old really—around fifty, I’d guess—but you know what I mean. And equally naturally, when Miss Fry invoked his name to clinch her crazy argument, I’m afraid I could only laugh. I wish now that I hadn’t—as I say, I wish that I’d actually listened to those parting shots of hers: but how could I have guessed—how could I possibly, at that time, have conceived—that above the Rev. Pinkerton’s grim clerical collar and beneath his sparse greying hair, dwelt the only brain which already knew the secret which would have saved me? I didn’t even know there
was
any secret; there had been nothing to Miss Fry’s melodramatic maunderings to make it cross my mind, even for a moment, that there might
actually
be something mysterious about Green End Cottage; that those ancient walls really
might
be harbouring forces of evil; that in that cottage where Theresa spent her days and her solitary nights there might be danger—real, deadly danger—lurking.

And so, as I say, I laughed. After all these humiliating and unfounded accusations, to which I was debarred from replying, it was good at the end to have the last laugh. I laughed as Miss Fry angrily hoisted her great tweed-clad bottom into the saddle; and I was laughing still as I watched her pedalling umbrageously down the street, her front wheel wobbling with temper, as I’m sure it couldn’t have done for decades.

*

Theresa thought it was all very funny. And I suppose it was, really. Certainly, I tried to make it sound so, because I didn’t want Theresa to imagine that I had for one moment taken Miss Fry’s far-fetched allegations seriously—particularly the bit about Theresa having knocked on Miss Fry’s door in such an
uncharacteristic
state of nervous alarm. Reassuringly, this was the bit that made her laugh most of all—though not until she had ascertained, with a couple of sharp questions, that I had at no point given away to Miss Fry the subject of her thesis. Reassured as to this, she relaxed, and I’ll never forget the fun we had that afternoon, lying in the long grass behind the cottage, my arm thrown lightly across her lissom body (the nearest to love-making that she would so far allow, on account of Colin, the Vanishing Wonder), and talking about Miss Fry.

Not a very romantic topic, you may object? Ah, dear reader, you don’t understand! When you are young, and carefree, and in love, there is something infinitely satisfying in the contemplation of all the people who are none of these things. People like Miss Fry, old and ugly and alone—and all through her own fault, because she had never had the courage to grasp at happiness when it was offered … had never lain in the long June grass with a man’s arms around her … never heard his whispered words of love …

I don’t know why we were so sure that she hadn’t. We’d “typed” her I suppose (in the jargon of Theresa’s colleagues): the stereotype of the village old maid was just what we needed on that golden afternoon, to enhance by contrast our own sense of triumphant and eternal youth. The mere contemplation of Miss Fry’s primness and old-maidishness made us feel deliciously and
quite effortlessly abandoned, though in fact we were both limp with the heat.

“The poor old thing’s half-crazed with jealousy, you see,” Theresa explained, in her psychological-insight voice, playing smugly with the lobe of my ear as she spoke, to show how different she was from Miss Fry. “You see, having heard that I was a Ph.D. student, she must at once have pictured the sort of frumpish, lumpish creature that students were in
her
young days. But now that she’s actually
seen
me, and … well … noticed that I’ve found myself a rather nice young man who … What? … Oh, but yes, sweetie, you
are
nice, of course you are, I never said … No, look, darling, stop it. Remember we agreed …”

“We”
was an overstatement, but I let it pass. As I say, it was
very
hot, and it was nice to hear Theresa’s earnest, husky voice going on and on so close to my ear.

“You see,” she was explaining, “she’s got you cast as the villain. A real, old-fashioned villain, like the ones in the novelettes of her youth. She thinks you’re plotting a fate worse than death for me …”