And she advanced: screaming out suddenly, sharp and shrill, flying down the steep slope of the bank above and across the sands towards him: running, screeching—‘You brute, you filthy, cheating, lying beast, pretending you were working late; when all this time…!’ And she was upon him: and as beneath the violence of her assault he stumbled and half fell, spilling the body to the sands, plunged into his breast the kitchen knife she held in her hand.
And lay there for a moment, spread-eagled across him, tumbled over upon him by the violence of the knife thrust; and raised herself and looked down: and screamed out: ‘Fred? Oh, my God, it isn’t Fred! Oh, God, what have I done?’ And beat at the blood-drenched breast and cried: ‘But you told me it was Fred. You said he was there with her every night, making love to her you said; you said you knew. A big man, you said, dark and handsome—well, isn’t that Fred, what other man is there round here that looks like that?—only Fred.’ And as the red life-blood ebbed away, sinking into the white fleece, oozing out through the gashed tan leather above his heart, she sobbed: ‘And this is Fred’s jacket. The minute I saw it, I knew it, this—this horrible jacket of Fred’s…’
As Mrs. Fletcher-Store had long ago said, Mr. Fletcher-Store should have been more careful what he bought off strangers in pubs. And meanwhile…
Meanwhile: hic jacet. Here he lies.
The Merry-Go-Round
LINDA HARTLEY WAS SKIPPING with the Bindell twins, singing, to the well-known old tune, a verse of their own improvisation: a game at which Joy and Roy were, through long practice, past-masters.
‘One, two, three and four,’ chirped Joy,
‘Father locks the office door.
Five, six, seven, eight—
He pretends he’s working late.’
She tripped over the rope and Roy leapt in.
‘Nine, ten, eleven, twelve—
He’s not working by himself!’
They all three stopped skipping and burst into giggles. Joy took the rope and skipped by herself, changing the theme.
‘Pig, dog, cat and cow
Mother knows and what a row!
Horse, goat, rat and boar—
I was listening at the door.’
Linda was not so accomplished as the twins at it but she took the rope and had a go herself.
‘Sun, moon, day and night
My parents also had a fight….’
But she gave up and resorted to prose. ‘My mother said my father had got to make your father make your mother get me into Hallfield.’ Hallfield was the posh girls’ school of Linda’s aspirations: Joy was going there in the summer term. Mrs. Bindell was on the Board of Governors and, since she disapproved of Linda and looked down upon her mother, only too likely to oppose her election.
‘Stove, grate, fire and hob,’ sang Linda, skipping again. ‘Your mother is an awful snob.’
‘Awful,’ agreed the twins, not singing. It must be ghastly for poor Linda, her father having married beneath him.
That Harold Hartley had married beneath him was acknowledged by one and all, not excluding Mrs. Hartley and himself. That he had had much the best of the bargain, occurred to none of them. Not that he was unkind to Louisa—not particularly; but he had always been a difficult, disagreeable man and of late had grown quite impossibly irritable—so ill-tempered and nervous and—suspicious; neurotic, Louisa supposed would be the word for it—he had even dug out an old war-time, smuggled-home revolver and kept it loaded in a drawer beside his bed. A nasty, black, ugly thing, she wouldn’t so much as touch it herself, but it seemed to give him confidence. She sometimes wondered whether he wasn’t the victim of some kind of mild blackmail—there was some oddly secretive visiting, now and then. Well, if that were so, she could only pray that it might continue—there seemed enough money to spare, and anything was worth paying that might prevent any smear of scandal from interrupting the triumphant progress through life of her darling Linda.
Linda was their ‘only’: a horrid child, really, but to the loving and simple heart of her mother, the very pink of perfection both in brains and in beauty. For Linda alone did she resent the social rebuffs of snobby little Sanstone—led by Mrs. Bindell, the solicitor’s wife. Why Mrs. Bindell should be so positively inimical towards her, she never could quite understand; that she resented the bosom-friendship of the twins with Linda was evident. To effect a separation, Louisa strongly suspected, she would certainly oppose Linda’s entry to the new school. However, Harold must cope with that; Harold saw a good deal of Mr. Bindell over these property deals of his, and he would fix it…