Affairs of Death Read online




  Affairs of Death

  Nigel Fitzgerald

  © Nigel Fitzgerald 1967 *

  *Indicates the year of first publication.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  About the Author

  CHAPTER I

  There had been a faint pink haze over the sea as we angled into our allotted runway; now the bus that was to take me to the other side of Ireland shone back at the sun from polished surfaces of rose and cream, more inviting and more seasonable than the sombre green that I remembered and that I had expected. I wondered whether the country was making me extravagant promises, or blushing at what it had already done to me. My stay, no more than three hours old, had begun badly. I peered into the comparative gloom of what, I suppose might be called the bus station’s concourse.

  “Are there shops and things in there?” I asked the conductor.

  “Every manner of shop will be there, sir, some day. There’s even a class of a theatre you can go to this minute, if you wait till eight o’clock to-night.” Deliberately he stowed away in their roof-top compartment my air-travel bag and the heavy leather suitcase that had unbalanced me so much on the walk from the city terminal, so much indeed that I had almost weakened enough to take a taxi. “All depends on what you want.”

  What did I want? With what can one best while away the tedium of an unlooked-for seven hour bus journey? A book, perhaps. A road-map, certainly; it is something to be able to plot one’s route ahead, even if one cannot alter half a mile or cut short a single yard of it. Sandwiches? A bottle? No. Mercifully Irish country buses tend to make pubs their stopping places and, in the wayside towns at any rate, to adapt the length of the halt to the reasonable requirements of passengers. I left a cap, a pipe and a copy of the Irish Times to assert squatter’s rights on my chosen seat and went to look at whatever might chance to catch my eye.

  The first agreeable thing that I noticed was a blonde — of course. She had soft, white-gold hair, the sort of skin that soap-ads enthuse about and a trimly clad figure that left nothing to be desired — or everything, according to the point of view of the observer. Time was when I would have hastened to make a pass at her; nowadays, however, I seldom get involved in that particular field of activity with malice aforethought. It is nonetheless possible that I may have studied her a little more closely than was strictly necessary; at any rate she looked up at me and smiled.

  “Standish! What are you doing at a place like this?” she inquired. “Not that it isn’t nice to see you.”

  I hastened to remove from my expression any latent lechery. “A moron backed his truck into my car just after she’d been landed. I’m afoot for a week,” I explained. “If I had known you were going to be here, of course, I should have come anyhow.” It would have been a help to have known who she was, even to have had some clue; at least she seemed too young to be a spectre from my past.

  “I don’t believe you even know who I am,” she said.

  “Actors never remember people’s names. That’s why they call everybody darling.”

  She made a face at me. “Oh, don’t you go all theatrical. It doesn’t suit you. And I think you might remember your first cousins from Cork. I’m Juliet, the one who has to work.”

  Of course she was; at any rate there was enough similarity in face and voice and colouring for me to accept the fact, once it had been brought to my notice, though it was hard to believe that no more than three or four years could have transformed a flat-chested child with an inordinate length of leg into a poised young woman with just the right amount of everything. If she took after her mother, however, she would probably disapprove of me on general principles; she would certainly object to my grinning at strange young women in the bus station and therefore must not be allowed to think that I make a practice of it.

  “You have the family face at its best. I knew it at once, though I couldn’t pin a name to you,” I said. “Teenagers improve more quickly than a man of thirty-five disintegrates, if that’s possible.”

  “Don’t call me a teenager; it’s a dirty word. Anyhow I shall be twenty in a year or so, long before you’re thirty-five, so there’s no need to be so pompous about it. And if you want me to tell you that you haven’t begun to disintegrate, you haven’t, as you very well know, not even by putting on a bit of weight. Ma says you’ll never get fat because it’s not in your nature to be really self-indulgent — just lazy.”

  It seemed rather as if Juliet took after her mother in her opinions as well as in the frankness of their expression; however she looked nicer.

  “How is Aunt Emily?” I asked.

  “Oh, Ma’s all right, thanks — a bit narked with me at the moment about going to Rossderg, she ——”

  “You are going to Rossderg?”

  “Yes.”

  “From here, to-day? By the twelve-fifteen bus?”

  “That’s the one. You don’t mean to tell me ——?”

  “I was just getting round to tell you.”

  “All the way to Rossderg?”

  “All the seven hours of it.”

  “Isn’t that lovely,” she said.

  I was not at all sure that I agreed with her. Frankness is all very well in its place but its place is not in the mouths of pert girl cousins whom one is prevented by consanguinity from treating as they deserve. I felt, too, that frankness for even a fraction of a seven hour journey would provoke me to a rudeness which would in due course be reported to Aunt Emily and widely commented upon — though I cannot think why that prospect should worry me. On the whole it seemed best that, if I could not decently avoid sitting beside the child, I should take refuge in slumber.

  “Have you booked a seat on the bus?” I asked her.

  “Oh, it won’t be crowded,” she said airily. “Normal people who haven’t got cars go by train.”

  “All the same we had better see to it.”

  It was as I had expected; one of the few vacant seats, of which none was a window-seat, was beside mine. It seemed only decent that I should offer her the inside place, the one with a view, mine, my claim that I had so carefully staked out with a cap, stick and Irish Times; it was inevitable that she should take it as a matter of course. I left her in possession and went to get something for her to read.

  I got back just in time for the off. Juliet gave me a brief smile and returned her attention to what was to be seen from the window as we poured ourselves into the stream of traffic flowing round the back of the Customs House, under the railway arches and on to the quays. The tide was at the full and Liffey looking her best in spite of the first irruption of skyscrapers along her banks; the water was still bright and the trees green, and even from where I sat old bookshops could be glimpsed and preposterously painted pubs and the spires of the great cathedrals. We rolled out past the Four Courts, the Park Gates and Island Bridge and were on the road to the west. Nearly two hundred not particularly distinctive miles lay between us and Rossderg. With the thought a sudden suspicion dawned.

  “Are you going to stay with the Hazards?” I asked Juliet.

  “What did you say?” She appeared no longer to be with it; in fact she had gone rather pale and seemed preoccupied. “Staying with who?”

  “The Hazards — at Hazard Point.”

  “Good heavens, no. I’m going to work — sort of. A holiday job. I’m studying design.”

  “In Rossderg?” It didn’t seem possible.

  “No. Not in Rossd
erg.” She sighed — or was it a yawn? Since the start of the journey her resemblance to her mother enjoying a headache had become more pronounced. “I’m going to spend the summer working on costumes and masks and things for an autumn pageant. The artist who’s got the job owns a cottage in Rossderg. His wife’s a friend of mine — Kinky Myles; she’s putting me up.”

  “I see.” I had never heard of any Myleses, certainly not of Kinky, though the name conjured up visions of black leather, thigh-length boots and whips; there seemed to be no point, however, in mentioning the fact. “I don’t know what Stella Hazard’s plans are, so I shall have to wait till I see her before trying to organise anything. There probably won’t be any need, though, she’s a great one for parties; Rossderg is such a small place, anyhow, that she’s bound to know your friends.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it.” Juliet was apparently concentrating on the view from the window — and not thinking much of it, to judge by her expression. “Bernard Hazard married an actress, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Stella Lorn. Wasn’t that her name?”

  I grunted affirmatively. I had already guessed what was coming.

  “I saw her in a picture with you when I was at school. She was fabulously lovely, really gorgeous looking, then.” She spoke as if the intervening age, two or three years at the most I should think, could not but have dealt hardly with Stella. I was so amused that I failed to notice Juliet turning to look at me till she had fixed me with an eye that was unpleasantly like her mother’s. “She was a girl-friend of yours, wasn’t she? I don’t mean just in the picture.”

  Sometimes I wonder what they would have to talk about down in Cork if it were not for me. “Stella is certainly a friend of mine,” I said — rather more pompously than I intended. “She is also a girl, or was, I suppose, by your standards — she must be nearly thirty now. In that sense she’s my girl-friend. I might point out that Barney is also my friend and has been for years; he just doesn’t happen to be a girl.”

  “I’m sorry, Standish. I didn’t really mean ——”

  “If you’re referring to rumours about my marriage,” I pursued, almost in spite of myself. “I can assure you that my wife and I needed no third party to come between us; our own personalities were quite sufficient for that — so you need have no fear that I am heading for Rossderg with adulterous intentions.” Already I had protested too much but I seemed unable to stop; old irritations and the aura of disapproval in which I always seemed to move when I came back to Ireland were proving too much for me. “It was through me that Barney and Stella met. I was his best man — and I’m not utterly without a sense of decency, whatever people may think.”

  “I’m sorry, Standish. I never meant to suggest ——” Juliet broke off, as if uncertain how to finish the sentence; she looked tired and strained and rather hopelessly young, like the plain school-girl that I remembered. “I don’t know what I said, but I didn’t mean to.”

  I told her not to give it a thought, that I was a quarrelsome type and that it was I who should apologise. The scenery would not really get interesting until we had crossed the Shannon, I further pronounced. Would she like to read? I had got Vogue and Harpers in the hope that they might pass the time for her.

  “Both of them?” She looked at me, I thought, with more surprise than gratitude. “But they’re fabulously expensive. That’s much too kind. I never dreamt you’d do anything like that.”

  “I find that in a bus it’s easier on the eye to look at pictures than to read.”

  Juliet gave a wan smile. “I always get sick on buses,” she said. “I can hold out for about twenty minutes, perhaps; after that I just have to shut my eyes and wallow in misery till it’s over. Sorry.”

  I felt immediate sympathy, for I, too, have been known to feel a bit queasy when being driven fast along a winding road by someone other than myself; the sympathy was counterbalanced, however, by the thought that I should have to watch out for fear that she might get sick over me. There was also the matter of a wasted Vogue and Harpers; they are of little interest to a man who has not currently got a woman to dress. On the whole I wished my cousin Juliet elsewhere.

  “Then it seems damn’ silly to travel by bus,” I observed.

  “It happens to be nine and fourpence cheaper than the third-class train fare.” She had closed her eyes and began to wallow; her voice seemed to have struggled up from immense depths. “Of course that wouldn’t mean anything to someone rolling in money like you.”

  I probably snorted. This was a fiction that I resented more than most. How could anyone be rich nowadays, with taxes as they are?

  “It’s precisely because of that nine and fourpence that I am travelling by bus,” I told her. It was true, though not, perhaps, the whole truth; one sees more of the countryside from a bus than from a train. “I’ve had just as much experience of stretching pennies as anyone.”

  “Well, bully for you,” she said. She had sunk more deeply inside her collar and seemed to be talking in her sleep. “So when the Rolls is out of action you have to go by bus.”

  “I have not got a Rolls.”

  “Well, the Jaguar then.”

  “Nor that, either. Jaguars have become far too much of a status symbol; one sees some fearful fellas driving them.”

  She grunted, rather as if she felt the onset of nausea, before suggesting — “Then, I suppose you’ve just replaced the old Daimler with a new one.”

  I had, as it happened. It saves money in the end to have a really efficient car, and so I told her. “But I’m damned if I’m going to throw pounds away on taxis and first-class railway fares just because an accident sets me afoot for a few days. If some other actors of my acquaintance had been prepared to put up with a little discomfort occasionally they’d have kept out of the bankruptcy court. I have no intention of following them there.”

  “That’s what Ma meant when she said you’d never get fat.” It seemed to require an effort to drag her voice up from the depths, an effort that would have been better left unmade. “She says you’re too mean.”

  That put an end to conversation between us for some miles. What a ghastly creature the child had grown into — she certainly looked ghastly anyhow, so much so indeed that I tactically disposed some sheets of newspaper for fear that she might inadvertently vent her spleen upon me more literally. That sort of thing is quite unnecessary nowadays and I have very little sympathy with it; Aunt Emily would never stir from home without being provided with remedies for sea-sickness, or air-sickness, or what have you, so why the graceless old cow should allow her youngest child to travel in misery and to spread misery round her is more than I could imagine. Inert and semi-conscious, the wretched girl was occupying my window-seat and preventing me from getting a decent look at a countryside that I had not seen for years; I could not even settle down to read because of her occasional groans of anguish. There was, too, a matter of six shillings for unappreciated magazines that deeply rankled. It was at this point that the conductor came round for the fares.

  “Two to Rossderg,” I said in a low voice that I hoped would not wake the sleeper. I intended to show the silly little bitch who was mean.

  It was a comfortable bus, the kind that for some reason is referred to as a coach. The high-backed seats provided a head-rest but had the disadvantage of hiding not merely the road ahead but also most of one’s fellow-passengers. My view was constricted to what could be seen across Juliet; woods, which gave place to a canal that followed the road for some miles and afforded a glimpse here and there of a converted and brightly-painted barge, to be succeeded in turn by the hedges of Westmeath’s rich but unspectacular pastureland. Across the aisle on my right the only two of our travelling companions whom I could see were rather less than interesting, middle-aged farmers, I judged, conversing desultorily and inaudibly on the price of crops or herds or the inadequacies of government. From somewhere behind us, however, I could hear cheerful voices, Irish and American mixed, whic
h suggested a family reunion in the old country; the sound did something to detract from the funereal quiet of our journey. More to the point was that we kept up a high speed, for the road was wide, its surface good; furthermore we were fully laden and were able to sweep magnificently by the little groups of would-be travellers that waved indignantly at us in wayside villages. It gave me an evil sense of satisfaction that increased till we had rolled to a halt in Mullingar.

  “Ten minutes,” said the conductor, meaning fifteen.

  I looked at Juliet. The tip of her nose was a sort of pinkish mauve, while the rest of her face was colourless and the life had gone out of her hair; her eyes were shut.

  “Have you passed away?” I inquired.

  “This bloody bus is swaying like hell,” she observed thickly.

  “Then you had better get out of it before it actually starts to move. I’m not going to put up with you like this all the way to Rossderg. I’m going to fill you full of pills or brandy. The choice is yours.”

  She opted for pills, dispensed by a deaf chemist who seemed to think at first that she was suffering from morning sickness but in the end produced an American remedy that cost the earth but proved itself to be efficient — if Juliet’s symptoms had not been entirely psychosomatic. At any rate the child bucked up as soon as she had taken the stuff — before it could possibly have had any physical effect — and came with me to the Greville Arms where I knocked back a stiff brandy to restore my own somewhat frayed nerves. Juliet had the grace to apologise for her former rudeness.

  “You’re Ma’s favourite nephew, you know,” she explained. “That’s why she talks about you so much. She thinks you’re wasting your talents on the stage, so she’s got to justify herself by finding you disimproved each time she sees you — to prove that the life you lead is ruining you.”

  “So it is,” I conceded, “mentally, morally, physically and financially. I’m too old to change now, though.”

  She made a face at me. “Both feet in the grave. It used to be rather the same with me — the same as with Ma, I mean. I had a childish passion for you that I felt sure you’d have returned if it hadn’t been for Stella Lorn. I didn’t think it mattered that you had a wife — because you’re an actor — but Stella Lorn mattered. I’d have bashed her beautiful face in with pleasure and a hockey stick, if I’d had the chance. How I hated that woman! When you came to see us and didn’t notice me I always thought that you were thinking of her.”