The Assize of the Dying Read online

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘It has a curious effect on me. It makes me clairvoyant. I ask myself, since when did my wife develop a taste for garnets and such small fry? Or is this, perhaps, a survival from the days when even garnets were not to be despised? There was a time, of course, when there were no diamonds to be had.’ His voice was quite flat and low, and it was with astonishment that she saw the large, pale hand shaking as it held the ring.

  ‘How like you,’ she said agreeably, ‘to remind me in every crisis, however small, of your beastly money. It’s true I enjoy it. It’s also true I could live without it. I know more than one way of enjoying life.’

  ‘So I observed,’ said Gerard, ‘just now when you took his hand beneath the tea-table. Beware of mirrors, Estelle!’

  She had never seen him so still, or so precariously under control. Who would have thought there was any passion to be found in the inert mass? She let fall the thin nylon wrap from her shoulders and stretched up her arms, spreading out the skirt of the red-gold dress above her head. It was the exact colour of her hair, and had a comparable glitter about it.

  ‘He gave you this ring,’ said Gerard. It was not a question, and she made no answer. ‘When?’

  ‘Long before I ever knew you,’ she said calmly, emerging radiant and indifferent from the golden tissue. ‘And I hadn’t set eyes on him since until the evening we met them in the theatre. What I did and didn’t do before I met you can hardly affect you, can it?’

  ‘I am not concerned with what you did before we met. I’ve never asked you any questions about what may have happened before. But I am concerned with what you do now. If the ring belongs to the past, why have you resurrected it now?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I? It belongs to me, if I choose to wear it what is there to stop me?’

  ‘For seven years you’ve never given it a thought, or I should have seen it before. Now suddenly you put it on, and spread out your hand before his eyes, for him to see that his gift still means something to you. And was that to be all, Estelle?’

  ‘I never knew you had so much imagination,’ she said, sitting down before the dressing-table within reach of his hand if he had chosen to touch her. ‘A ring is something to be worn when one fancies it. So is a dress.’

  ‘And a lover? And a husband? When one fancies them?’

  ‘Since I married you,’ she said, with a sudden fiery glare upward into his heavy face, ‘I’ve been faithful to you.’ And as soon as she had uttered the words she saw how astonishing they were, and cast about within herself almost disbelievingly for a reason. ‘What more do you want?’

  ‘Nothing more. Just as long as I have that. But be careful, Estelle, how you break bargains with me, even unspoken ones.’

  It was not fear she felt, but this was a Gerard so strange to her that she did experience a chill of caution. She turned to face him, staring indignantly into his eyes, and her own were wide and clear.

  ‘What do you think I’ve been doing? You’ve been within sight of me all day long – what have I done to make you so damned suspicious?’

  ‘Do you really want me to tell you? You meet this man again after all these years, you – yes, now I think back to that evening, I see that you forced this invitation out of his wife. You fish out his ring from some corner where it’s lain forgotten, and stick it on your finger, and insinuate your hand into his. And you ask me what reason I have to be suspicious! Well, fortunately for him – and for you, too! – he’s out of your reach. He’s in love with his wife! – that’s something you wouldn’t understand. Do you think she doesn’t know what you’re about? Do, you think she wasn’t sitting there, last night, enjoying the spectacle of you breaking your head against a rock?’

  Estelle’s hands clenched into fists in the coils of her shining hair, and the crystal comb snapped in two, and fell silently on to Helen’s guest-room carpet. ‘Damn you!’ she said, in a muted scream of fury. ‘Damn you, shut up!’

  She loathed herself for it the next moment. How could she have been such a fool as to let him prise that betraying reaction out of her? She began to hate him then; the only amazing thing was that until that moment he had seemed far too dull to be worth hating.

  He laughed, and it was a chilly and chilling sound. ‘All the same, you should be glad of failure, my dear Estelle – let me advise you seriously, beware of success! It wouldn’t be at all healthy – for you or for him!’

  The door closed quietly upon his departure. Estelle sat staring into the mirror until he had vanished from its silver frame, and only the gracious room and her own beauty were left confronting her. And in a moment or two she had regained her shaken equilibrium, and the confidence he had so nearly drained out of her rose like a triumphant tide. She knew her Philip, all her adroitness in manipulating him was coming back to her. She knew herself and her capabilities. As for her husband’s last threat, it was the kind of utterance that could have come only from a man who felt himself to be impotent; she dismissed it with a contemptuous smile, and began to make up her face.

  Philip closed the door of his study and stretched out a hand towards the light-switch, and another hand came out of the deep dusk in the corner of the room and took him by the wrist, arresting the movement. He stiffened for an instant only, and then quite softly and delightedly he began to laugh. And he did not switch on the light.

  ‘My dear Estelle! My dear girl! How like you! May I put on the desk-light, at least? It would be nice to see you – that was always a pleasure, and believe me, it still is. The curtains are already drawn, I see – that was thoughtful of you.’

  ‘I am thoughtful – had you forgotten? How lucky that you’re not one of those authors who lock the doors of their work-rooms.’ She herself reached out and switched on the reading-light on the desk; the confined shadows it cast did not reach the curtains at the window.

  ‘And how is your headache now? Better, I trust?’ His voice, even in mockery, was perforce an intimate whisper. In the hall below the others were talking steadily, the murmur of their conversation came up as though from a great distance.

  ‘So much better that I shall be able to come down and enjoy Helen’s recital, in half an hour or so – if Helen’s husband sees fit to complete the cure!’ She drew near to him very softly, her eyes shining with laughter. He made no move to meet her or to retreat from her, but stood quite still as she slid her hands upward to his shoulders, and her warmth and her faint, sweet scent touched him together. ‘How long have we? How long ought it to take you to find one of your own novels on your own shelves?’

  ‘How did you know Mary wouldn’t simply come in here and fetch it herself, and bring it straight to you?’

  ‘Mary touch anything in your holy of holies? Never! No, I knew she’d have to send you up to get it yourself. Are you angry?’ A question no one ever asks in that particular tone without first knowing the answer.

  ‘Oh, my sweet, crazy, darling girl, angry? I can’t thank you enough! Here was I thinking old age already had me by the tail, and all the bloom was off me for good, and you blaze into the house like a comet and get me feeling young again! It’s a compliment I won’t forget to you.’

  Her hands stole round his neck, and drew him against her breast; and in a moment she felt his arms go gently round her. ‘Philip! You must have seen, you must have known, how I still feel about you. We made the worst mistake of our lives when we separated. I’ve been miserable ever since, and you – you can’t go on for the rest of your life living on milk and water! That’s no diet for you!’

  He was quivering gently in her embrace, and at first she thought that it was with passion, but when he spoke there was no mistaking the deep tremors of laughter, a teasing, affectionate laughter that made her heart sink.

  ‘I think maybe a milk diet’s all I can digest these days, Estelle, my love. And as for you, there’s many a woman would be glad to be miserable with you, if it would give her your blooming looks. I like to think of you lying awake all night regrett
ing the old days, but it doesn’t come easy. It’s no use, my dear, it’s too late to reform me – I’m a married man clean through to the heart, and all the devilry’s gone out of me. What use would I be to you, and me fifteen years on a lowering diet?’

  ‘Philip the married man!’ she whispered, with her lips against his cheek and her fingers in his hair. ‘I can’t believe you’ve really changed so much. How could you be satisfied with this? Have you been happy? Can you truthfully tell me you’ve been happy?’

  ‘I’ve had what I wanted most in the world – if that’s the same thing.’

  ‘It isn’t! Addicts want drugs more than anything in the world, but they die of them in the end. I could make you come alive again.’

  ‘You could make stones get up and walk,’ he said, smiling. ‘But I’m not a stone, I’m a poor, helpless married man who’s lost his taste for adventures, and is past praying for.’

  Caressing him with hands, and arms, and lips, in a frenzy of disbelief, she whispered in a trembling voice: ‘I love you, Philip, I love you—’

  ‘And I love you, devilment and all, but I doubt if we mean the same thing. I’m not what I was, and you’re to the last letter what you’ve always been, and there’s no going back. And what’s more, you don’t really want it any more than I do. And now go on back to the headache you left in your room, because I’m going down to hand over your book to Mary, and in five minutes she’ll be up to bring it in to you.’ He enveloped her suddenly in a hearty hug and, taking her by the chin, kissed her emphatically, without reluctance, even with unmistakable enjoyment, but with the large, unembarrassed calm of a man quite at peace with his present and his past. It was the quality of that calm that turned her blood to gall within her, and the kiss to acid on her mouth. She was so stunned that when he released her and turned cheerfully away she let him get to the door before she could find strength to move. Then she sprang silently after him, and wrenched him round by the shoulder to face her again.

  ‘Philip, is that all you have to say to me? Do you know what you’re doing?’

  He frowned, touching a finger warningly to her lips. ‘Keep your voice down! And wait until I’ve gone halfway down the stairs before you slip back to your room – even when the landing light’s off they can see this door vaguely from below. Of course I know what I’m doing! I’m going down to give Mary the novel you felt you’d like to read – and you’d better be there to receive it when she brings it up to you. And then I’m going to make reasonably civilised conversation with your husband until it’s time to turn on the TV for my wife’s recital – which is what I’m really waiting for.’ He touched Estelle’s pale and rigid cheek with a sympathetic finger. The soft thread of a voice said wryly: ‘Oh, my dear, we’re not children any more. We grew up an uncomfortably long time ago. And in an uncomfortably short time now we’re going to grow old. I’m not forgetting anything, believe me, or regretting anything, either. But I’m not such a fool as to think I can live my green days all over again.’

  The spot where his touch had rested burned her. She put up a cold hand to rub the mark away. ‘And I mean nothing to you!’

  ‘You mean very much, high spirits, fun, fine memories, beauty, kindness.’

  ‘But not love! She means that to you!’

  ‘Since you understand only one thing by that word – yes, Helen means that to me.’

  He smiled at her, and he was gone. She stood where he had left her, cold now to the heart with humiliation and rage. She thought that if she could have killed him at that moment she would have done it, and felt healed and vindicated in the act.

  ‘Helen Greville ends this Good Friday recital with two arias by Bach. First, she sings “Komm, süsser Tod” – “Come, sweet death”—’

  Unbelievably fair and delicate, Helen stood in her austere white dress in the semi-circle of strings, and sang. Her pure minor talent was ideally suited to the television screen; she came fresh to the medium, and had not yet acquired the technique of restlessness; she simply stood and sang, her hands lightly clasped under her breast. And the cameras were subdued by her stillness and the solemnity of the occasion to a quite unusual repose, moving with subtlety and tenderness over her beauty. For in song she kept her beauty unimpaired. She sang smiling, and when she was deeply moved, as now, the smile had a kind of anguish in it.

  ‘Come, sweet death, come, desired rest—’ sang Helen, clearly and solemnly against the organ’s deep, sombre tone.

  In the darkened room, which only she illuminated, Philip sat with his chin on his hand, his eyes fixed upon the miniature Helen in the screen. Not two yards away from him, rigid in her chair, and as intent upon his profile as he upon his wife’s radiant whiteness, Estelle sat burning in her own rage and grief, and somewhere in the darkness beyond her Gerard watched her as narrowly. He had not believed for a moment in her headache; she never had headaches. And yet she was certainly ill, her sick pallor proclaimed it; she was ill with a disease rest and aspirins and a darkened room wouldn’t cure.

  ‘And finally, from Cantata Number one hundred and fifty-nine. “Es ist vollbracht” – “It is finished—”’

  The oboe obbligato, inexpressibly sad and pure and final, played round Helen’s stillness like an air from heaven, sourceless and miraculous. Her clear voice lifted quietly after it, uttering the last ecstasy of achievement and despair. ‘Es ist vollbracht, es ist vollbracht—’ soaring first to resolution and triumph, sinking afterwards to the composure of death, and absolution from all further effort and all further hope or pain. She looked out from the screen suddenly in close-up, full-face, her singing, smiling mouth convulsed with grief, and tears swimming in her eyes. She looked into her husband’s rapt and quiet face until the aria ended, and it was as though they were alone together, somewhere far from the world. And then the announcer was closing the programme with suitable reverence, and the shock of change made them all start and shiver as the preliminary shot for the news appeared in the screen.

  Philip jumped out of his chair with a movement of violent suddenness, and switched off. There was an instant of complete darkness in the room. Somewhere close to the french window, which stood open upon the sleeping garden, a voice repeated softly: ‘The end is come – the pain is over—’

  Bill, startled, reached up and fumbled for the light-switch, and in the abrupt blaze Rachel stood wide-eyed in the frame of the window, staring at him wildly for an instant, as people do after darkness, and having about her, as suddenly appearing out of air, something at once dazzling and sinister, an over-significance, a symbolic virtue. Her lips were still curved upon the free translation of the wonderful and terrible words of the Bach aria, words which belonged to the last ebb of the hope of man, before anyone dreamed of resurrection. The moment of the victory of evil, to all appearances permanent, final, beyond appeal. Bill saw all this in Rachel’s brooding face, and it was terrifying; and it had always been there for the imaginative to see for themselves, yet until now he had never seen it. It made light, and movement, and gaiety, and good faith, suddenly a thousand times more wonderful, to have experienced that moment and survived it to remember Easter Day, which was as surely coming.

  ‘Did I startle you?’ said Rachel, moving forward into the light. ‘I’m sorry! I came in almost at the beginning, but I didn’t care to disturb you all. I knew Mr Greville wouldn’t mind if I walked in.’

  Philip said: ‘Of course not!’ but he said it like a sleepwalker, his eyes still turned inward upon the remembered vision of his wife. ‘I’m glad you looked in.’

  ‘I mustn’t stay. I just wanted to hear and see Helen.’

  ‘And she was magnificent!’ said Gerard, stirring heavily in his chair, and watching every tremor of his wife’s haggard face.

  ‘Oh, Helen’s an artist, all right,’ said Rachel simply. From her there could scarcely be higher praise, and she said it with conviction.

  Mary offered drinks, and they sat for an uneasy while making desultory conversation round their host, wh
o sat silent and absent from them still, and presently rose with a murmured apology, and said good night. They watched him climb the stairs and vanish into his study, closing the door behind him with a finality no one was likely to challenge. With Helen’s going the evening had ended. Unless, perhaps, for Bill at least, there had been one last significant moment, Rachel’s entry in the dazzling darkness and light of revelation; and even that had all been part of Helen’s spell. Nor could anything of importance happen now until Helen’s return; they might as well go to bed, they were only sitting in an uncomfortable vacuum between a day which had already ended, and one which could not yet begin.

  They all felt it. Rachel stayed only long enough to take the edge of abruptness from her coming and going, and then said good night. It was dark outside; Bill supposed, rather grudgingly, that he ought to walk home with her to the rectory, and made the offer with only a lukewarm grace, but she accepted it at once. Mary rolled up her knitting and went to make Philip’s coffee, and was presently seen mounting the stairs with the little black ceramic tray, and laying it on the table outside his door. She hesitated, wondering if she ought not to come down and pick up the hospitable duties Philip had kicked out of his way with so little ceremony, keeping his guests company until they chose to go to bed; but Gerard looked up from the hall and met her eyes with a masterful stare, and said with emphasis: ‘Good night, Miss Greville!’ And after all, Bill would be back from the rectory soon, she thought, not displeased with this dismissal. They might like to sit talking for some time yet.

  ‘Good night! Good night, Mrs Renaud, I do hope you’ll have a good sleep, and feel better in the morning.’

  ‘Thank you!’ said Estelle mechanically. ‘I’m sure I shall. Good night!’

  Mary’s steps receded along the long corridor. They were alone in the hall. On the landing the door of Philip’s room remained closed, and from behind it they caught now, in the stillness, faint strains of music, a clear, high voice from an infinite distance.