Authors: Sinister Weddings
“Come here, come here, you beauty.” Then he opened the cage door and letting the bird settle on his finger carefully withdrew it. The bird sidled rapidly up his arm and on to his shoulder. Simon pursed his moist lips, his eyes beaming. “Pretty boy, pretty boy,” he cooed. The miniature voice, like a ghostly distorted echo, came back, “Pretty boy, pretty boy!”
The telephone was out of reach now. Antonia could hear the faint crackle of voices in the receiver. She could have burst into tears of angry frustration. There, three yards away, was a clue to the mystery and she couldn’t seize it.
Simon oblivious to her despair, was smiling with pleasure. He took the bird on his finger and holding its tiny beak to his mouth made rapturous kissing sounds. Then he said, “Say lucky girl! Lucky girl!” He looked sideways at Antonia. She had a queer feeling that he was meaning her. But surely he must mean Iris. “Lucky girl!” he insisted.
“Simon!” cried Iris in a high taut voice behind them. “Simon don’t be so asinine about those damned birds.”
A look of hurt surprise came over Simon’s face.
“Honey! Honey, you’re not jealous?”
“Jealous! Good God!” Iris turned on her heel and flounced towards the kitchen. Antonia caught no more than a glimpse of her tense white face.
“Has something upset you?” Simon called. “Who was ringing?”
“Oh, just a man. Just one of those stupid builders. He’s being difficult about materials.” She went on out of sight.
“Simon,” said Antonia urgently, “I recognised that voice. It was the man who rang me in Auckland.”
“What, that mysterious fellow?” Simon’s mouth fell open. “But it couldn’t have been. That was one of the builders. Iris just said.” He paused to think. He looked puzzled and uneasy. Then he said definitely, “Their voices must have been alike. You could easily mistake a voice over the telephone. He didn’t—actually mention Aunt Laura, did he?” he added uneasily.
“No.”
Simon’s face cleared.
“Then of course, you’re imagining it. You’ve got the jitters. Iris has, too. But Iris has more excuse than you have.”
“Why?”
Simon looked at her coyly.
“Doesn’t a girl get a bit jittery before her wedding?”
But not Iris, Antonia thought silently. Iris was too sophisticated to let the mere fact of acquiring a husband disturb her poise.
T
HERE WAS A STEEP
path from the Hilltop down the cliff’s edge. It was a path Gussie took when he went fishing, scampering over the dried grass on his bare feet, giving no heed to the steep dangerous drop over the cliff’s edge to the jagged rocks beneath. If one went too near the edge the dried earth could so easily crumble. Antonia took that path the next morning, and two hours later climbed up it, swinging her wet swimming suit and looking hot and sunburnt.
Iris was upstairs trying to rest before lunch, Simon said as she went in. He didn’t think she was able to rest very much because he could hear her walking about her room.
“I’m glad you’ll be here to feed the birds,” he said. “Iris said Bella could manage, but I couldn’t trust her like I could you. I’ve shown you where the seed is and you won’t forget to change their water, will you? And talk to Johnnie. He likes it. He gets lonely without a little attention.”
“I’ll remember them,” said Antonia. She was impatient to go upstairs and find out why Iris couldn’t rest. But would Iris tell her if she asked? She would say, as she had said to Simon, that she was suffering from nerves and not from some peculiar private fear which was associated with the telephone call she had yesterday.
She went to her room to change, and then there came Iris’s voice from outside saying:
“Antonia, what extraordinary things you do! Bringing in this horrid wet seaweed.”
Antonia went to the door and stared in amazement at the brown dripping seaweed lying on the floor.
“But how did it get there?” she exclaimed. “I didn’t bring it.”
Iris stooped and picked it up gingerly.
“Darling, you must have. Who else would? But you might have left it outside.”
“I didn’t!” Antonia insisted. “What would I bring it
for?”
“I haven’t the faintest notion. But there it is, isn’t it? And no one else has been to the beach this morning. Not even Gussie.”
Iris had on a faded cotton housecoat tied round her thin waist with a cord. She had a cigarette between her lips. Her eyes narrowed against the smoke. She looked nervy, as if an argument would snap the last threads of her patience.
“Take it downstairs, will you,” she said, handing the slimy unpleasant stuff to Antonia.
Antonia was suddenly angry.
“You must think I’m an imbecile,” she exclaimed. “Walking in my sleep, bringing home this nasty messy stuff for a joke!”
Iris frowned wearily.
“Honestly, darling, I don’t know what to think. Let’s not worry about it now. Just get rid of that stuff. I’ve got a splitting head and how I’m going to look like anything but a rag this afternoon I don’t know.” She patted Antonia’s arm. “These things aren’t important. I mean, they’re just silly, aren’t they. But I think you ought to see a doctor. We’ll fix it when Simon and I get back after the week-end.”
“And what do you think I’m suffering from?” Antonia asked. She wanted to retain her anger, because that way she didn’t feel this queer fear, this sense of danger closing round her. If she stayed angry the whole thing was just ridiculous.
“There’s something called limited amnesia,” Iris said. “I’d insist on your going to an hotel while we’re away, but Simon says there are his birds. And after all you don’t do anything dangerous, do you?” She pressed her hand to her forehead. She had a look of extraordinary tension as if she could well be the person suffering from amnesia.
“Darling, when you take that stuff outside would you bring me up a brandy and water. Mostly brandy.” She smiled forlornly. “I didn’t know I’d be a jittery bride. Isn’t it silly!”
Antonia had a feeling that the stranger with the thick slow voice might come into the church during the marriage ceremony. She kept looking towards the open door and not paying a lot of attention to the minister’s murmured words, or to Iris’s thin pointed face with its glitter of excitement and tension, or to Simon’s large figure, oddly untidy even in his new dark suit. Simon repeated the marriage vows after the minister in an almost absent voice. Simon’s mind would be dwelling more on the Song of Solomon—
sweet is thy voice and fair is thy face.
He would be waiting to spend his passion on the unloosed splendour of Iris’s hair.
No one else came into the church. There was just herself and Dougal Conroy and Dougal’s mother, a large woman with a plain face and bright observant humorous eyes.
Henrietta Conroy, Antonia thought, wouldn’t miss much. Did she have the feeling that this marriage was completely unreal?
After the ceremony the five of them went back to the Conroys’ house for tea served by a plump heavy-handed maid who was inclined to giggle at any remark at all, and later still Simon and Iris went away in the car hired by Simon for the week-end. Their last remarks to Antonia came back on the rising wind, Iris’s “Lock your door at nights, darling, in case you
should
sleep-walk,” and Simon’s, “Don’t forget to change the birds’ water each day.”
Henrietta Conroy, with her rich warm voice and her constant chatter about everything in the world, had provided the only gaiety there had been at that odd little ceremony. Now, as Iris and Simon left, she turned to Antonia.
“Do you sleep-walk, dear? How interesting.”
“I don’t,” Antonia denied, raising her voice to reach Henrietta’s hearing. “At least, I’m sure I don’t.”
Henrietta looked at her curiously.
“Then why does Iris say you do?”
“Oh—things have happened.”
“Things! But you must tell me. Mustn’t she, Dougal?”
Dougal frowned.
“Don’t take any notice of my mother, Antonia. She’s just inquisitive.”
“And why shouldn’t I be?” Henrietta retorted. “It isn’t a crime. Tell me,
who
sleeps in the empty wing? I understood it wasn’t being used at all.”
“Why do you ask that?” Antonia enquired sharply.
“Well, someone keeps awfully late hours. I see a light burning at three o’clock in the morning.”
“Then there
is
one,” Antonia said triumphantly. “That was one thing Iris said I must have imagined. But do you know the room’s absolutely empty. Absolutely. Dust everywhere.”
“How very odd! Isn’t it, Dougal?”
“There’s probably an explanation, mother.”
“Of course there is. There’s an explanation to everything. But it’s such fun finding it. Dougal says I have a distorted imagination, Antonia. Do you think your cousin is hiding someone up there?”
“But the room’s empty,” Antonia repeated. “I saw it. Except for that grey hair I picked up, of course.”
“A grey hair!” Henrietta pounced on the information eagerly. “I knew it! Your Aunt Laura has been murdered for her money.”
“Mother!” Dougal remonstrated. “Don’t be absurd. Laura Mildmay died in Auckland on the first of last month.”
Henrietta sagged disappointedly.
“Then it’s someone else.”
“No one at all has been murdered. Don’t talk such nonsense. The grey hair will belong to a cleaning woman. It could have been there for months.”
Henrietta looked sadly at Antonia.
“My son has no imagination. He makes life so ordinary. It’s that woman he’s got at the office. That Miss Fox.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Dougal asked mildly.
“She’s too efficient. You’ve said so yourself. Life can be ruined by efficiency. Can’t it, Ethel?”
The stout maid who had come in to gather up the dishes gave a deep-throated giggle. She didn’t speak. To Antonia she gave the impression of never speaking. She thought of Dougal surrounded by the efficient Miss Fox, the giggling Ethel and his mother with her mind full of fantastic weavings. No wonder he was so reserved and practical. If odd things happened to him he just wouldn’t believe them. He would let people tell him he had been suffering from limited amnesia. Or would he? He might be very much more stubborn than that. She was aware of a great curiosity to find out what he was really like. Her eyes suddenly began to twinkle with mischief. She wouldn’t let him drive her home but would suggest walking up the hill in the growing darkness. And she would make him kiss her. Just for fun.
Antonia Webb, you’re being a little miss! she told herself. Perhaps she was. But the mischievous desire to feel Dougal Conroy’s lips against hers persisted.
The wind bent the tamarisk tree at the gate and sent its lonely rustling up and down the hillside. The sky was champagne coloured, the hills were drawing shadows like blankets over their bony ridges. Down in Sumner the white houses perched in tiers on the steep sheltered cliffs, the gay pink and yellow portulacca and geraniums ran riot in the gardens. The sea drifted in and out over the sand in gentle wavelets, reserving its wildness for the dark rocks on the other side of the hill. No sound of the melancholy whistling buoy came down into this sheltered valley.
Henrietta called goodnight to them from the open doorway.
“You should stay here,” she called. “If anything frightens you be sure to ring up and Dougal will come and get you.”
Dougal, rather stiffy, put his arm through hers. She drew closer to him companionably. As they climbed the wind grew colder and stronger. The thorny bleak manuka bushes crouched like giant spiders against the hillside.
“Are you going to be nervous up there?” Dougal asked politely. “Don’t let my mother’s nonsense worry you.”
What about her own ‘nonsense’ Antonia wondered. She had talked as much as Henrietta had.
“No, I don’t think so,” she answered quite honestly. After all, nothing had happened. It had all been sound, the voice on the telephone, the voice crying in the night, the window rattling, the snap of the light going off. It was a subtle assault on her ears, but nothing had actually happened. The evidence of one’s ears was neither tangible nor visible.
“It might have been wise for you to stay in an hotel,” Dougal said. He added, “Or with us.” Antonia had the impression that he would prefer her in an hotel. She shook her head.
“Bella and Gussie are there. And Simon wants me to look after his birds. No, I’ll be perfectly all right. After all, I know that room is empty.”
“Of course it is,” Dougal said. His voice was a little puzzled. “It’s odd, though. There was a light, you know. I saw it myself. But there must be a simple explanation for it.”
“Then why doesn’t someone make it?”
She contemplated telling him about Iris’s curious telephone call yesterday, then decided against it. She didn’t want to be scoffed at again for making a mountain out of a molehill. This, she divined, was something she was going to have to work out alone. Besides, she didn’t want to talk about it now. They were a man and a woman walking home alone and she had this odd inquisitive desire to rouse him to a little warmth. In the past her chief trouble had been to moderate the warmth of male approaches. Dougal Conroy intrigued her by his aloofness. But it was probably defensive. Poor boy, he was smothered by women.
“Never mind about all those things now,” she said lightly. “If it’s a nice day will you come swimming with me tomorrow?”
She felt him stiffen slightly.
“Tomorrow? Well—”
“Ah, come now, don’t say you can’t,” Antonia exclaimed. She was still being mischievous, but she found the thought of lazing on the sand with this fair-headed reserved young man pleasant. She was a little lonely after all.
“I usually go fishing at week-ends,” he said. “With a friend. Up country. We get salmon in one of the rivers.”
Antonia could see him then, in waders and a sports jacket, his fair hair blown by the mountain winds, his eyes blue and keen. She felt lonelier.
“You don’t like women, do you?”
She felt him give an impatient movement.
“You have no reason to say that.”
“Haven’t I? Perhaps I should define it and say you don’t like the sort of women who come bouncing all the way from England to grab a legacy.” She stopped being facetious. She couldn’t think why she was behaving so stupidly, and added, “It wasn’t the money that brought me. It was what I felt Aunt Laura had really left me—her love for travel and adventure. I felt I was letting her down if I didn’t accept the challenge.”