Buried for Pleasure

He studied her covertly as she sat down at the table. Though she had neither Diana’s fresh, open-air charm nor Myra’s vivacity nor his blonde visitant’s filmic radiance, she was none the less pretty in a shy, quiet fashion; and her features showed what seemed to be a mingling of two distinct strains. The nose, for instance, was markedly patrician, while by contrast the large mouth hinted at vulgarity; the set of the eyebrows was arrogant, but the eyes were timid; and it occurred to Fen, in a burst of rather dreary fancifulness which only the unnaturally early hour can excuse, that if a king were to marry a courtesan, a daughter very much like this might be born to them.

It seemed to him, too, that the girl was nervous, rather as if she were about to face some new and testing experience of which the issue was uncertain. And her clothes confirmed this notion. They were good and tasteful, but something in the way she wore them suggested that they were her cared-for best, that she could not always afford to dress thus, that she was wearing them now – yes, that was it – in the hope of making a good impression.

On whom? Fen wondered. A potential employer, perhaps. Her being here to be interviewed for a coveted job would explain her nervousness plausibly enough…

Or, after all, would it? Somehow he sensed that the testing was to be at once more urgent and more intimate than that.

They talked a little, on conventional topics. Fen asked her if she had heard about the lunatic, and on discovering that she had not, explained the situation to her. However, her responses, though polite and intelligent enough, showed that she was too preoccupied to be very much interested in the subject.

He noted that she watched him steadily whenever he spoke, as if trying to assess his character from his expression. And in the fashion of her own speech there was further matter for surmise, since she pronounced her words in a slightly foreign fashion, which he found himself unable to identify. She was not – to judge from that – German or Italian or French or Dutch or Spanish; nor was there any immingled trace of dialect which might account for the oddity of the effect. Analysed, it came to this, that while her vowel sounds were pure and accurate, there was a very slight tendency to blur and confuse the individual constituents of each group of consonants – labials, gutturals, sibilants. Thus, ‘p’ was not entirely distinct from ‘b’, nor ‘s’ from ‘z’.

Fen discovered that he was incapable of explaining this, and the effect was to make him slightly peevish.

He finished his coffee and looked at his watch. Half past eight. In three hours he had an appointment with his election agent, but until then he was free to do what he pleased. And since the tumult of renovation made ‘The Fish Inn’ uninhabitable for long at a time, he decided to go out into the sunshine to inspect his constituency at first hand. He therefore took his leave of the girl, suspecting – though without rancour – that she was not sorry to be rid of him.

Outside the door he encountered Myra, and asked for news of the lunatic.

‘Well, they haven’t caught him, my dear,’ she said, ‘though the asylum people have been traipsing about the neighbourhood all night.’

‘It actually was a lunatic, then?’

‘Oh, yes. I didn’t think it was at first. Mrs Hennessy’s just the sort of daft old woman to have – what d’you call them? – sexual delusions about naked men jumping out at her in the dark.’

‘But I saw him, too,’ Fen pointed out.

Myra’s expression suggested that only politeness had prevented her from attributing sexual delusions to Fen also.

‘Anyway, he’s real enough,’ she said, ‘and they’ve put out he’s harmless, though, of course, they couldn’t very well say he was homicidal for fear of creating a panic. And what I say about lunatics is this: they wouldn’t be lunatics if you knew what they were going to be up to next.’

With this sombre prognosis she left Fen, informing him parenthetically that the bar would be open at eleven.

He was about to go out when his attention was caught by the inn register, which lay on a table almost at his elbow. Opening it, he found that the girl with whom he had breakfasted was named Jane Persimmons, that she was British, and that she lived at an address in Nottingham. And it struck him that here also he might get enlightenment about the man he had glimpsed the previous evening and whose appearance had seemed vaguely familiar.

He turned back the page and read with some interest the entry immediately preceding his own. It ran:

Major Rawdon Crawley, British, 201 Curzon Street, London.

‘Good God,’ Fen murmured to himself. ‘Either he just doesn’t care, or else he imagines that no one in this district has ever read Thackeray… Well, well, it’s none of my business, I suppose.’

He noted that the soi-disant Crawley had arrived two days previously, closed the book, and went out into the inn-yard.

There was no cloud in the sky, but a brief shower during the night had mitigated the dust accumulated during weeks of drought, and painted grass, leaves, and hedges, a fresher and more lively green. The non-doing pig was noisily eating potatoes. Fen crossed the yard and came out into the main street of the village.

Before setting out for the district he had studied Ordnance Survey maps, and so he was able to orientate himself fairly easily. The district is an agglomeration of Sanfords, presided over by Sanford Hall, which stands isolated on one of the few eminences which that very level country can claim. Rich pasture extends uninterruptedly almost as far as the Marlock Hills, though here and there you may see little rashes of barley, to which the soil is unsuited, but which protesting farmers have been obliged to put in by ill-informed fiats from the Ministry of Agriculture. The River Spoor, here only twenty miles from its source, meanders amiably between willows and alders, its waters reputedly inimical to fish. It is fed by a small, erratic tributary, very liable to drought, which runs down from a lake in the grounds of Sanford Hall.

Sanford Morvel is the chief town. It has no function except as a market for neighbouring farmers, and this parasitic existence gives it a blustering, unconfident air. Four miles to the south-east of it is Sanford Condover, less a defined community than a fortuitous collection of small farms loosely plastered together by some cottages, a Baptist chapel, and an unsightly pub. Six miles to the south of that is Sanford Angelorum.

A small branch line of the Great Western Railway proceeds reluctantly as far as Sanford Morvel, and an even smaller branch line proceeds even more reluctantly from Sanford Morvel to within two miles of Sanford Angelorum (taking in an almost totally disused halt at Sanford Condover on the way), where it suddenly peters out, the Company, with the optimism engendered by nineteenth-century industrial progress, having built the line thus far on the assumption that the then Lord Sanford would allow them to continue right up to the village. This supposition, however, proved to be mistaken, since the then Lord Sanford was a disciple of William Morris and nourished a fanatical hatred of railways. The station at which Fen had arrived consequently stands, futile and alone, at a place from which no human dwelling is even visible, and though amended laws would now permit the railway to carry out its original project, it has long since lost interest in the matter.

In the normal way Fen would have made Sanford Morvel his headquarters, since it is admittedly the central point of the constituency. But he had entered the political arena cavalierly and late, to find the housing shortage in Sanford Morvel so acute that neither a committee room nor a bedroom could be found for him. He had therefore been obliged to choose between Sanford Angelorum and a slum-like place, twelve miles to the north of Sanford Morvel, named Peek. Peek, an affair of mean, grey, semi-detached houses, sprang up in the eighteen-fifties as a result of the discovery of a seam of inferior coal. It declined, some twenty years later, as a result of the working out of that seam, which to the irritation of those who had financed it proved to be minute. The mining community, for which Peek had been built, departed; the more thriftless elements of the district took over and Peek, its raison d’être gone, decayed with startling rapidity.

Of all this Fen had deviously apprised himself. Peek, for his purposes, was clearly impossible. And, surveying Sanford Angelorum in the clear summer light, he was glad he had elected to stay in that charming, unpretentious village.

He admired it as he walked along the main street in the direction opposite to that of the railway station. Like most such places, it was assembled, he saw, round the church, a medium good example of the decorated style, whose ornamental conceits, being carved in red sandstone, were a good deal blurred by weathering. The Rectory, built large for an age more opulent and more philoprogenitive than this, adjoined it. There were one or two shops; there was a green with a war memorial; there was a row of delightful eighteenth-century cottages; there was, obstinately Victorian, ‘The Fish Inn’.

Outside the gate of one of the cottages Fen saw Diana talking earnestly to a young man in shabby tweeds. She waved to him, but her conversation seemed engrossing, and he did not venture to interrupt it.

Before long he reached the edge of the village and came to a spot which he suspected might be the scene of Mrs Hennessy’s encounter on the previous evening. Resisting the temptation to root about for traces of the lunatic, he passed on, and soon arrived at a miniature cross-roads, with a sign-post which added to its total illegibility the even graver defect of pointing in no particular direction.

After some hesitation he entered the lane on the left.

It was the height of summer. The hips of the dog-rose were ripe in the hedges. Barley was being cut, flecked with the scarlet of poppies. Copper butterflies roamed fragile as thistledown through the hot air. Spiders’ webs draped the twigs and leaves. In the distance a heat haze was forming, but a line of white smoke enabled you to follow the progress of a distant train.

Fen began to walk more briskly. The country, a place with which he was not normally infatuated, seemed particularly winning today…

But he had not gone a hundred yards before a startling spectacle halted him in his tracks.

Chapter Four (#ue8bc9131-63ab-5413-9328-0a1aae04bdcc)

He had come to a five-barred gate giving access to a large, irregularly-shaped field. Its hedges were mainly of thorn. It had a dank-looking pond – much diminished now by the lack of rain – in the middle of it. And at the pond’s margin a duck, its snow-white plumage somewhat marred by the green slime which clung to its underside, was hobbling slowly about.

But it was not these things that had caught Fen’s attention. It was a man who was entering the field through a gap on the far side.

He was short, stout, harassed-looking, middle-aged. He wore gloves, a reefer jacket inside out, and pale purple trousers tucked into large black gumboots. And he was moving in a crouched, furtive manner, like one who tries to evade pursuit.

On reaching the edge of the pond, however, he straightened up and glanced quickly about him; then produced from the pocket of his coat a large, antique service revolver which seemed to be attached by a length of string to his braces. This he levelled at a wizened sapling which was growing by the hedge.

‘Bang,’ he said. ‘Bang, bang, bang.’

Now a look of satisfaction appeared on his face, and, turning, he suddenly hurled the revolver, still attached to its string, into the centre of the pond. After a moment’s pause he hauled it out again, like a fish on the end of a line, removed the string both from it and from his braces, wrapped this string in a piece of newspaper, crammed it into his pocket and, leaving the revolver where it lay, hurried across to the sapling, where with much difficulty he shouldered an imaginary burden and tottered with it in Fen’s direction. The duck, which had ambled into his path, gave him one look and then fled away before him, quacking angrily, like a leaf driven by an autumn gale.

It was clear that the man had not yet become aware of Fen’s presence. He staggered almost as far as the gate, lowered his invisible load to the ground with a sigh of relief, pulled off his coat, removed the paper-wrapped length of string from its pocket, turned the coat delicately right side out, and with much groaning and effort began putting it on to whatever it was he imagined was lying at his feet.

He was thus engaged when, becoming abruptly conscious that he was not alone, he looked up and caught Fen’s fascinated eye.

He stood upright, slowly, and expelled his breath in a long gasp of dismay.

‘A – aaaaaah,’ he said.

They gazed rigidly at one another for a moment longer. Then the man, recovering the power of articulate speech, remarked: ‘I’m not mad.’

This discouraging social gambit touched Fen. He said kindly: ‘Of course you’re not mad.’

The man became frantic. ‘I’m really not mad, I mean,’ he said.

‘I quite believe you,’ said Fen. ‘You needn’t imagine I’m just trying to humour you.’

‘You see,’ the man nervously explained, ‘there’s a lunatic at large, and I was afraid that you, being a stranger, might assume—’