Buffet for Unwelcome Guests(84)

What was drowning, after all, but water forced into the lungs? You could drown in three inches in a basin, you could drown in your bedroom at home, just as easily as you could in the sea.

And then if you were found in the sea…!

Force her head into a bowl of water: drown her. Carry her down to the sea and throw her in. (A detail here: could they tell if the water in the lungs was salt water or fresh? Fetch a bucket of sea-water then, and drown her in that. And tip that away somewhere safe, too: no salt-encrusted pipes or wilting garden-flowers to give the game away.)

But what difference between ‘finding’ her dead in the sea, and having in fact drowned her there? They could still say you had pushed her head under the waves and then gone for help. An alibi—that was what one was going to need: an alibi. And his mind had got going again and worked cold and clear. Drown her here, put her body in the boot of the car. Have somebody in the house for an hour at least, while Elsa was supposed to be sporting it down in the bay. Get rid of the alibi, drive down to the cove—‘I began to get anxious when she didn’t return’—dump her in the sea: fish her out again and go for help. Time of death established by the post mortem—a couple of hours earlier: but a couple of hours ago, one would have been sitting chatting, safe at home.

Only—chatting with whom? Who, in all this wasteland of dank woods and distant coast-line and beastly narrow lanes, would come to sit for an hour, chatting with him? And on the very night that the accident was set to occur. Not a soul had ever been to this house during the ten months of their resentful occupancy; every evening he sat, while Elsa went for her swim, and banged at his typewriter, listlessly trying to bash out a short story. (She would not let him write during the day: the hens and the pig and that horrible vegetable garden claimed him then. She said that the stories paid less than would cover the produce from their land; and in fact that was true. But when she was gone, he thought, off in reverie again, he would do not one more hand’s turn on that filthy soil. If he had all day to write, no sneering interruptions from her—then, damn it all, he could really get going, he could really make a big thing of it; he knew.)

An alibi, then; an alibi! Someone who would keep company with him for an evening.

He could go to the pub, of course. What about that? Leave her dead, drive over to Hartling, spend an hour there; drive home, ‘find she wasn’t back’, drive on down to the cove, programme as before. But then, who was to say that he had not done just this?—drowned her before he came to the pub, gone back and pretended to find her. No: somebody must actually see her start off to the cove, alive and well; who would then spend the next hour and a half with him. And he got up to wash out the whisky glass and put it away before she got back; and dropped the glass and, picking it up, pricked his thumb on a splinter: and thought, exultantly: ‘That’s it!’

It made him sick to do it, but when the time was ripe he contrived to get the fingers of his left hand entangled in the cutters of the lawn mower; and, making rather more fuss than was necessary over the mangled mess—but that was in character—said to his wife: ‘What on earth shall I do? I’ve got this commissioned series hardly started and I couldn’t type a word with this.’ The series—six short stories of the war-time R.A.F.—had, needless to say, been commissioned by Mr. Fletcher-Store and by no one else.

‘Oh, well, Gerald, you really are too careless for words,’ said Elsa.

‘I didn’t do it on purpose, my dear, did I?’ he suggested, grinning up his sleeve.

‘Can’t you write it in long-hand, like I do?’

‘I can’t write in long-hand, you know I can’t.’ This was true. Every author has his own taboos and she was writer enough herself to know that unless he saw the words before him in print, no words would come. ‘If I could type,’ she said, ‘I suppose I’d have to do it for you; only I can’t.’ It was typical of her to resent the bare idea of doing for him, what she was not going to have to do anyway.

‘I suppose I shall just have to chuck it in,’ he said.

‘Chuck it in! The first and only chance of actually making a little decent money out of this rubbish of yours.’ She thought it over. ‘I suppose we couldn’t find a typist anywhere, in this God-forsaken hole?’

She had said it. She had actually suggested it herself. He had reconnoitred already in the pub at Hartling; now he went off and returned triumphantly to say that a female called Mrs. Butcher, whose husband worked late shifts or over-time or something, had been a typist before her marriage; and would be very happy to drive over in her Mini-car for an hour or two each evening, and help him out. He would think over the stuff as he dug and delved, said Gerald—for the bad hand was not to stop him from the necessary work with the vegetables and hens—and then she could take it down in shorthand, type it out next day and bring it back. Mrs. Butcher, small, diffident, genteel, began to make her appearance at regular intervals. Elsa continued to go morning and evening for her bathe. Concealed in the tool shed stood a bucket of salt water, ready for The Day.