I didn’t see anything of them for the first year of so. Merridew is a civil engineer, you know, and he took his wife away after the honeymoon to Liverpool, where he was doing something in connection with the harbour. It must have been a big change for her from the wilds of Norfolk. I was in Birmingham, with my nose kept pretty close to the grindstone, so we only exchanged occasional letters. His were what I can only call deliriously happy, especially at first. Later on, he seemed a little worried about his wife’s health. She was restless; town life didn’t suit her; he’d be glad when he could finish up his Liverpool job and get her away into the country. There wasn’t any doubt about their happiness, you understand – she’d got him body and soul as they say, and as far as I could make out it was mutual. I want to make that perfectly clear.
Well, to cut a long story short, Merridew wrote to me at the beginning of last month and said he was just off to a new job – a waterworks extension scheme down in Somerset; and he asked if I could possibly cut loose and join them there for a few weeks. He wanted to have a yarn, with me, and Felice was longing to make my acquaintance. They had got rooms at the village inn. It was rather a remote spot, but there was fishing and scenery and so forth, and I should be able to keep Felice company while he was working up at the dam. I was about fed up with Birmingham, what with the heat and one thing and another, and it looked pretty good to me, and I was due for a holiday anyhow, so I fixed up to go. I had a bit of business to do in Town, which I calculated would take me about a week, so I said I’d go down to Little Hexham on June 20th.
As it happened, my business in London finished itself off unexpectedly soon, and on the sixteenth I found myself absolutely free and stuck in an hotel with road-drills working just under the windows and a tar-spraying machine to make things livelier. You remember what a hot month it was – flaming June and no mistake about it. I didn’t see any point in waiting, so I sent off a wire to Merridew, packed my bag and took the train for Somerset the same evening. I couldn’t get a compartment to myself, but I found a first-class smoker with only three seats occupied, and stowed myself thankfully into the fourth corner. There was a military-looking old boy, an elderly female with a lot of bags and baskets, and a girl. I thought I should have a nice, peaceful journey.
So I should have, if it hadn’t been for the unfortunate way I’m built. It was quite all right at first – as a matter of fact, I think I was half asleep, and I only woke up properly at seven o’clock, when the waiter came to say that dinner was on. The other people weren’t taking it, and when I came back from the restaurant car I found that the old boy had gone, and there were only the two women left. I settled down in my corner again, and gradually, as we went along, I found a horrible feeling creeping over me that there was a cat in the compartment somewhere. I’m one of those wretched people who can’t stand cats. I don’t mean just that I prefer dogs – I mean that the presence of a cat in the same room with me makes me feel like nothing on earth. I can’t describe it, but I believe quite a lot of people are affected that way. Something to do with electricity, or so they tell me. I’ve read that very often the dislike is mutual, but it isn’t so with me. The brutes seem to find me abominably fascinating – make a bee-line for my legs every time. It’s a funny sort of complaint, and it doesn’t make me at all popular with dear old ladies.
Anyway, I began to feel more and more awful and I realised that the old girl at the other end of the seat must have a cat in one of her innumerable baskets. I thought of asking her to put it out in the corridor, or calling the guard and having it removed, but I knew how silly it would sound and made up my mind to try and stick it. I couldn’t say the animal was misbehaving itself or anything, and she looked a pleasant old lady; it wasn’t her fault that I was a freak. I tried to distract my mind by looking at the girl.
She was worth looking at, too – very slim, and dark with one of those dead-white skins that make you think of magnolia blossom. She had the most astonishing eyes, too – I’ve never seen eyes quite like them; a very pale brown, almost amber, set wide apart and a little slanting, and they seemed to have a kind of luminosity of their own, if you get what I mean. I don’t know if this sounds – I don’t want you to think I was bowled over, or anything. As a matter of fact she held no sort of attraction for me, though I could imagine a different type of man going potty about her. She was just unusual, that was all. But however much I tried to think of other things I couldn’t get rid of the uncomfortable feeling, and eventually I gave it up and went out into the corridor. I just mention this because it will help you to understand the rest of the story. If you can only realise how perfectly awful I feel when there’s a cat about – even when it’s shut up in a basket – you’ll understand better how I came to buy the revolver.
Well, we got to Hexham Junction, which was the nearest station to Little Hexham, and there was old Merridew waiting on the platform. The girl was getting out too – but not the old lady with the cat, thank goodness – and I was just handing her traps out after her when he came galloping up and hailed us.
‘Hullo!’ he said, ‘why that’s splendid! Have you introduced yourselves?’ So I tumbled to it then that the girl was Mrs Merridew, who’d been up to Town on a shopping expedition, and I explained to her about my change of plans and she said how jolly it was that I could come – the usual things. I noticed what an attractive low voice she had and how graceful her movements were, and I understood – though, mind you, I didn’t share – Merridew’s infatuation.
We got into his car – Mrs Merridew sat in the back and I got up beside Merridew, and was very glad to feel the air and to get rid of the oppressive electric feeling I’d had in the train. He told me the place suited them wonderfully, and had given Felice an absolutely new lease of life, so to speak. He said he was very fit, too, but I thought myself that he looked rather fagged and nervy.
You’d have liked that inn, Harringay. The real, old-fashioned stuff, as quaint as you make ’em, and everything’s genuine – none of your Tottenham Court Road antiques. We’d all had our grub, and Mrs Merridew said she was tired; so she went up to bed early and Merridew and I had a drink and went for a stroll round the village. It’s a tiny hamlet quite at the other end of nowhere; lights out at ten, little thatched houses with pinched-up attic windows like furry ears – the place purred in its sleep. Merridew’s working gang didn’t sleep there of course – they’d run up huts for them at the dams, a mile beyond the village.
The landlord was just locking up the bar when we came in – a block of a man with an absolutely expressionless face. His wife was a thin, sandy-haired woman who looked as though she was too down-trodden to open her mouth. But I found out afterwards that was a mistake, for one evening when he’d taken one or two over the eight and showed signs of wanting to make a night of it, his wife sent him off upstairs with a gesture and a look that took the heart out of him. That first night she was sitting in the porch, and hardly glanced at us as we passed her. I always thought her an uncomfortable kind of woman, but she certainly kept her house most exquisitely neat and clean.
They’d given me a noble bedroom, close under the eaves with a long, low casement window overlooking the garden. The sheets smelt of lavender, and I was between them and asleep almost before you could count ten. I was tired, you see. But later in the night I woke up. I was too hot, so took off some of the blankets and then strolled across to the window to get a breath of air. The garden was bathed in moonshine and on the lawn I could see something twisting and turning oddly. I stared a bit before I made it out to be two cats. They didn’t worry me at that distance, and I watched them for a bit before I turned in again. They were rolling over one another and jumping away again and chasing their own shadows on the grass, intent on their own mysterious business – taking themselves seriously, the way cats always do. It looked like a kind of ritual dance. Then something seemed to startle them, and they scampered away.
I went back to bed, but I couldn’t get to sleep again. My nerves seemed to be all on edge. I lay watching the window and listening to a kind of soft rustling noise that seemed to be going on in the big wisteria that ran along my side of the house. And then something landed with a soft thud on the sill – a great Cyprian cat.
What did you say? Well, one of those striped grey and black cats. Tabby, that’s right. In my part of the country they call them Cyprus cats, or Cyprian cats. I’d never seen such a monster. It stood with its head cocked sideways, staring into the room and rubbing its ears very softly against the upright bar of the casement.
Of course, I couldn’t do with that. I shooed the brute away, and it made off without a sound. Heat or no heat, I shut and fastened the window. Far out in the shrubbery, I thought I heard a faint miauling; then silence. After that, I went straight off to sleep again and lay like a log until the girl came in to call me.
The next day, Merridew ran us up in his car to see the place where they were making the dam, and that was the first time I realised that Felice’s nerviness had not been altogether cured. He showed us where they had diverted part of the river into a swift little stream that was to be used for working the dynamo of an electrical plant. There were a couple of planks laid across the stream, and he wanted to take us over to show us the engine. It wasn’t extraordinarily wide or dangerous, but Mrs Merridew peremptorily refused to cross it, and got quite hysterical when he tried to insist. Eventually he and I went over and inspected the machinery by ourselves. When we got back she had recovered her temper and apologised for being so silly. Merridew abased himself, of course, and I began to feel a little
de trop
. She told me afterwards that she had once fallen into a river as a child, and been nearly drowned, and it had left her with a what d’ye call it – a complex about running water. And but for this one trifling episode, I never heard a single sharp word pass between them all the time I was there; nor, for a whole week, did I notice anything else to suggest a flaw in Mrs Merridew’s radiant health. Indeed, as the days wore on to midsummer and the heat grew more intense, her whole body seemed to glow with vitality. It was as though she was lit up from within.
Merridew was out all day and working very hard. I thought he was overdoing it and asked him if he was sleeping badly. He told me that, on the contrary, he fell asleep every night the moment his head touched the pillow, and – what was most unusual with him – had no dreams of any kind. I myself felt well enough, but the hot weather made me languid and disinclined for exertion. Mrs Merridew took me out for long drives in the car. I would sit for hours, lulled into a half-slumber by the rush of warm air and the purring of the engine, and gazing at my driver, upright at the wheel, her eyes fixed unwaveringly upon the spinning road. We explored the whole of the country to the south and east of Little Hexham, and once or twice went as far north as Bath. Once I suggested that we should turn eastward over the bridge and run down into what looked like rather beautiful wooded country, but Mrs Merridew didn’t care for the idea; she said it was a bad road and that the scenery on that side was disappointing.
Altogether, I spent a pleasant week at Little Hexham, and if it had not been for the cats I should have been perfectly comfortable. Every night the garden seemed to be haunted by them – the Cyprian cat that I had seen the first night of my stay, and a little ginger one and a horrible stinking black Tom were especially tiresome, and one night there was a terrified white kitten that mewed for an hour on end under my window. I flung boots and books at my visitors till I was heartily weary, but they seemed determined to make the inn garden their rendezvous. The nuisance grew worse from night to night; on one occasion I counted fifteen of them, sitting on their hinder-ends in a circle, while the Cyprian cat danced her shadow-dance among them, working in and out like a weaver’s shuttle. I had to keep my window shut, for the Cyprian cat evidently made a habit of climbing up by the wisteria. The door, too; for once when I had gone down to fetch something from the sitting-room, I found her on my bed, kneading the coverlet with her paws – pr’rp, pr’rp, pr’rp – with her eyes closed in a sensuous ecstasy. I beat her off, and she spat at me as she fled into the dark passage.
I asked the landlady about her, but she replied rather curtly that they kept no cat at the inn, and it is true that I never saw any of the beasts in the daytime; but one evening about dusk I caught the landlord in one of the outhouses. He had the ginger cat on his shoulder, and was feeding her with something that looked like strips of liver. I remonstrated with him for encouraging the cats about the place and asked whether I could have a different room, explaining that the nightly caterwauling disturbed me. He half opened his slits of eyes and murmured that he would ask his wife about it; but nothing was done, and in fact I believe there was no other bedroom in the house.
And all this time the weather got hotter and heavier, working up for thunder, with the sky like brass and the earth like iron, and the air quivering over it so that it hurt your eyes to look at it.
All right, Harringay – I am trying to keep to the point. And I’m not concealing anything from you. I say that my relations with Mrs Merridew were perfectly ordinary. Of course, I saw a good deal of her, because as I explained Merridew was out all day. We went up to the dam with him in the morning and brought the car back, and naturally we had to amuse one another as best we could till the evening. She seemed quite pleased to be in my company, and I couldn’t dislike her. I can’t tell you what we talked about – nothing in particular. She was not a talkative woman. She would sit or lie for hours in the sunshine, hardly speaking – only stretching out her body to the light and heat. Sometimes she would spend a whole afternoon playing with a twig or a pebble, while I sat by and smoked. Restful! No. No – I shouldn’t call her a restful personality, exactly. Not to me, at any rate. In the evening she would liven up and talk a little more, but she generally went up to bed early, and left Merridew and me to yarn together in the garden.