The English Assassin Read online

  They had had to leave Brighton when the malaria got really bad. It had been disappointing, after building everything up there. They had moved further west, to his father’s old place, a large Frank Lloyd Wright style house built on the hill. On one side the house overlooked the village, on the other, the sea. From its windows it was possible to view the valley, with its farm, forest, village and streams, and the little harbour town and the beach. There were very few fishing boats in the harbour, these days. But holidaymakers still came from time to time. It was all very picturesque. “The very best of England,” as Major Nye’s father had often said. But for some reason Major Nye was ill at ease here.

  “I wonder where the doctor could have got to,” said Mrs Nye. “I sent Elizabeth in the Morgan. It was the last of the petrol, too.” Her own complexion was beginning to match her husband’s. Many of the village women were convinced that it would not be long before she ‘followed him’. Once he had gone, she would be glad to follow. She had had quite enough. He, on the other hand, was uneasy about dying in his bed. He had never imagined that he would. It seemed wrong. He felt vaguely ashamed of himself, as if, in an obscure way, he had failed to do his duty. That was why, from time to time, he would try to get up. Then Mrs Nye would have to call her daughter to help put him back in the four-poster.

  A fat, jolly girl bustled into the room. “How’s the patient?” demanded Elizabeth Nye. She had become very attached to her parents just lately. A month ago she had been kicked out of the girls’ school where she had been teaching and it had given her the opportunity to come home and look after them. “Shall I take over now, Mums?”

  Her mother sighed. “What do you think?” she asked her husband. Major Nye nodded. “That would be nice. D’you feel up to reading a bit of the book, Bess?”

  “Happy to oblige. Where is the damned tome?”

  Her mother brought it from the dressing table and handed it to her. It was a large, red book called With the Flag to Pretoria, a contemporary account of the Boer Wars. Elizabeth settled herself in the bedside chair, found her place, cleared her throat, and began to read:

  “Chapter Twenty-Three. The March on Bloemfontein and opening of the railway to the south. With the capture of Cronje in the west, and the relief of Ladysmith in the east, the first stage of Lord Roberts’ campaign may be said to have ended. The powerful reinforcements sent out from home, and the skilful strategy of the commander-in-chief had turned the scale.”

  She read for an hour before she was sure he was asleep. In a way she felt it was a pity to encourage him to sleep when he had so little time left. She wished he was just a bit stronger so that she could take him out for the day in his wheelchair, perhaps to the village, or to the seaside. There was no chance of using her car again. The trip to the doctor’s had used up the last of the fuel. She no longer despised her father and had come to feel very close to him, for his weaknesses were her own in a different guise. Simple-minded loyalty was one of them. And he, too, she had discovered only yesterday, had been crossed in love as a young man.

  As she was putting the book back on the dressing table he opened his eyes, smiling at her. “I wasn’t asleep, you know. I was thinking about the little chap and what’s going to become of him. You’ll make sure he stays at school?”

  “If there’s a school to stay at.” She felt sorry for her cynicism. “Yes, of course.”

  “And Oxford?”

  “Oxford, Yes.”

  “He’s a bright little chap. He was a cheerful lad. I wonder why he’s so melancholy, these days.”

  “A stage,” she said.

  “No. I know it’s the school. But what else could I do, Bess?”

  “He’ll be all right.”

  “But not the Army, eh? It’s up to him to break the chain. Get a good civilian job.”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you get me a glass of water, do you think?”

  Elizabeth poured him some water from the decanter on the bedside table. The room was so unfriendly. She tried to think of ways of making the atmosphere warmer.

  “I heard on the wireless the other day that they can’t find the ravens,” he said.

  “Ravens? Where?”

  “Tower of London. All flown off. When the ravens go the White Tower will fall and when the White Tower falls, my dear, England will fall.”

  “There’ll always be an England,” she said.

  “The chances are good, I admit that. Even Rome lasted in a way, and Greece and Persia before her. Even Egypt, really. But Babylon and Assyria. Well, well… I’m rambling.” He sipped the water. “And America. So short-lived. But very powerful, Bess.”

  “It’s all been fined down, I’ll grant you,” she said. “The barbarians don’t come from outside the walls any more, do they?”

  “We breed our own cancers,” he said. “And never a cure. But perhaps that’s always been the case.” He let her take the glass. “Merry. Hectora. Garvey. Kalu. Grog. Brorai, I think. And Jet.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The names of the ravens.”

  She laughed. “Aha!”

  His voice was tiring. It was little more than a croak as he continued. “I’ve led an ill-disciplined sort of life. No moral fibre. It’s something about the Army. There were thousands of people in my position. Perhaps it was just the standard of living, or something. My old colonel was a drunkard, you know, before he died. And penniless. I used to stand him the odd drink. Decent old boy.” His head trembled and he shut his eyes tight. “All failures. To a man. He—” His pale lips tried to speak but could not. She bent over him.

  “What was that?”

  He whispered, “He committed suicide. Chucked himself out of a bally window at the Army and Navy Club.”

  “Maybe it was for the best.”

  “It’s all gone, Bess.” His face was horribly white, like a skull. His moustache looked incongruous, like a piece of weed which had caught on the skull. “I’m sorry.”

  She said awkwardly: “Nothing to be sorry about, I’d have thought. You’ve done your best for the family. For the country, too, if it comes to that. You’ve put more in than most. You deserve—”

  She knew that the next sound was a death-rattle, but it didn’t last long.

  Her mother came in.

  “He’s dead,” said Elizabeth. “I’ll go into town tomorrow and make the arrangements.”

  Mrs Nye looked down at the corpse as if she couldn’t recognise it.

  “It’s all over,” said Elizabeth. She patted her mother’s shoulder. The action was mechanical and for a moment it seemed to both of them that Elizabeth was actually striking her mother. Elizabeth stopped and went to the window. The lights were off in the village hall. The village was silent.

  Mrs Nye cleared her throat.

  “Well,” she said. “Well.”

  THE SEASIDE

  Next morning, Elizabeth cycled down to the harbour town to make the necessary arrangements. While she waited in the funeral parlour, she thought she saw Catherine Cornelius go past with two other people, a thin man and a fat woman. Elizabeth knew this was less than likely. It was just her mind playing her another morbid trick. Earlier she had had the impression that her father was still alive in the house. She would never see Catherine again. Everything was over now. Her sex-life was over. Having a sex-life involved too much responsibility and now she had her mother and her little brother to think about. She looked through the dark glass of the window at the gleaming sea; she listened to the children playing on the beach. And quite suddenly she felt full of strength; suddenly she was confident that she would have sufficient moral resolve to win through against all the difficulties which faced her. She prayed that the feeling would last.

  * * *

  “Clotted cream and strawberry jam and loverly choccie biscuits,” said Mrs C. “That’s wot I feel like, kids. That bleedin’ hotel thinks we’re bloody budgies, if yer ask me. The size o’ them meals! Fuck that!” She led them towards the beach, much re
lieved by her recent discovery that Colonel Pyat had left his wallet in the car and that the wallet had been stuffed with tenners. There would be no trouble about paying the bill or having a bloody good time while they were down here. They deserved it.

  They stopped at the cafeteria near the beach while Mrs Cornelius had her elevenses. The cafeteria smelled strongly of candyfloss. Frank and Cathy shared a knickerbocker glory, looking rather wanly at the bright, yellow sand.

  “It’s a tidy sort of beach,” said Frank. “Not like Margate, for instance. Very middle class, wouldn’t you say?”

  Catherine felt too warm, even in her light summer frock. She removed her blue cardigan and put it in her gay beach bag. She noticed that both Frank and Mum were sweating too.

  “’Urry up an’ scoff that darn, you two,” said their mother, who had finished three times as much in half the time. “Eat it all up. Don’ wanna waste it. It’s all paid for.”

  They crammed the rest of the tinned strawberries, the chocolate syrup, the nuts and the ice-cream into their mouths and munched while their mother busied herself with her toilet, touching up her carmine lipstick, laying on a little more scarlet rouge, another coating of pink powder, and patting at her perm with a comb. Then she took each of her children by one of its hands and led the way from the cafeteria, down the asphalt slope to the beach.

  “Deckchairs, Frank.” She surveyed the beach, hands on hips, like Rommel planning a campaign. “The sea’s loverly, innit?” Frank went to the neat stack in the little green shelter by the wall of the promenade and got three brand-new candy-striped canvas chairs. “Right,” she said. “This way.” She led them towards a breakwater. Not far from the breakwater were four little children, two boys and two girls, at work on an elaborate sand palace, with turrets and towers and minarets and everything. They were digging a moat round it. Elsewhere, in a rock pool, twin girls, aged about eight, with blonde pageboy haircuts, studied crabs and starfish and seaweed.

  “It’s like the bloody Rainbow Annual,” said Frank with some approval. “Tiger Tim at the Seaside. It’s almost too perfect.” He set up the chairs and got them just so. Then he stripped off his jacket, his shirt, his vest and his flannels to reveal a pair of yellow-and-black silk boxer-style bathing trunks. He stretched his thin body in the chair and drew on a large pair of wraparound mirror sunglasses. But he was still not ready. He got up again and found the Man-tan lotion in his jacket pocket. He began smearing the stuff on his pale, spotted flesh. Meanwhile Mrs C. had applied all her various creams and had lifted her loud print dress to reveal her pink satin Directoire drawers and her huge, white thighs. She sat with her legs spread, as if to catch the sunbeams in her lap. Cathy was reading a copy of The Rescue by Joseph Conrad. “This’ll do,” said Frank, regarding the distant sea. “We can come here next year. Now we’ve discovered it.” Merry laughter rippled from the throats of the children around the sand palace. They were digging a deeper and deeper trench. A few happy seabirds wheeled and screamed. A red-sailed boat drifted by on the horizon. A small black-and-white cat began to walk demurely along the breakwater. Frank picked up a pebble and chucked it at the cat. He missed.

  “Are you going in, love?” said Mrs C. “It must be loverly for swimmin’.”

  Frank shuddered. “I don’t think so. Currents and that. Rip tides. Undertows.”

  “But there’s others bathing over there,” Catherine pointed. “They seem to be okay. There’d be signs if it was dangerous.”

  “Maybe later, then,” said Frank. “I might have a bit of a summer cold.”

  “Oh, all right.”

  Everything was so ideal that Frank almost expected to see a jolly face painted on the golden disc of the sun, or even on the buckets and spades. The sand might have been dyed that bright, clean yellow; the sea might have been stained that bright, clear blue. Well, there was no point in looking a gift-horse in the mouth, was there? He leaned back and began to study the pictures in his bodybuilding magazine.

  “We’ll go ter that pub fer lunch,” said Mrs C. “The on’y complaint I got is there’s no bleedin’ Bingo. That’s a issential part of an ’oliday, I reckon. An’ bumper cars. I like ’em. An’ a bit o’ fish and chips. Yum yum.”

  Cathy suddenly felt funny. “I just had one of those lurches,” she said. “You know. Déjà vu.”

  Frank’s mirror shades regarded her. “Reels within reels,” he said with a thin smile. “Don’t worry, love. It happens to me all the time,” he sniggered.

  “Frank.”

  “Yes, Mum.”

  “Go an’ git us an ice, there’s a love.”

  Frank got up slowly. “I’ll want some cash.”

  She handed him a tenner. “All the jack you need,” she said. “I never bin a rich widder before. Git one fer yourself an’ Caff.”

  But he returned quite quickly, empty-handed. “Sold out,” he said. “They say they weren’t expecting a heatwave. Personally, I don’t find it that hot.”

  “I’m boiling,” said Cathy.

  “Fuck,” said their mother removing the tenner from Frank’s fingers. “I don’t call this much of an ’oliday resort. I mean, they don’t seem ter want ter cater fer visiters. An’ we ’ave got money ter spend. We’re not paupers. I could git through this lot in a day at Brighton.” She put the money back in her large red-and-yellow plastic bag. “I could do wiv a cuppa,” she hinted. “Anyway, I don’t like ’ome-made ice-cream.”

  Frank and Cathy were pretending to be asleep. They lay stretched in their deckchairs, facing out to sea.

  Mrs Cornelius shifted in her chair, wondering whether to get up or not. She looked with some admiration at the huge sandcastle the kids were building. It was going on five feet tall and was elaborately detailed. She could almost have believed it was a real castle if she’d seen it in the distance. And the moat would soon be the size of an army trench. The energy of these kids! Where did they get it all from? They were working like beavers. They were moving about so fast! The sand was fairly flying from the ditch. The castle grew and grew. Turrets and galleries and towers appeared. The children laughed and shouted, carrying their buckets of sand to key points, patting down a tessellation with their little wooden spades. It must be very good sand, thought Mrs C. vaguely. It must be very easy to work with. Now two of the boys were actually burrowing into the castle, hollowing it out. A Union Jack flew proudly from the highest tower. She took a deep breath of ozone. She hadn’t smelled sea like that since she was a kid herself. She reached for the radio in her bag, but changed her mind. It wasn’t too bad, this beach. Her hunger and thirst diminished; she stopped fidgeting. It was peaceful. She closed her eyes, listening to the sound of the surf, the cries of the gulls, the distant chatter of the happy children. Poor old Pyat. She still wondered why he’d married her. He must have been after something. It wasn’t the sex, more’s the pity. She hadn’t done badly out of him. She’d got something out of all her husbands, really. Not to mention the others.

  Frank got up and pulled on his shirt. “Don’t you feel cold, Cath?”

  “What? Sorry. I was miles away.”

  “Aren’t you chilly?”

  “I was thinking it was too warm.”

  “You must be running a temperature.” He sniffed. “Or I am. Maybe we’re sickening for something.”

  She yawned. “It would be a shame to have our holiday cut short. Still, in a way I wouldn’t be sorry. I feel a bit guilty, really. Poor Colonel Pyat.”

  “It was a private issue. Nothing we could do. An accident as far as we were concerned. Unavoidable. I expect he died for a cause or something. Is that a boat on the horizon? A warship?”

  “I’m not sure I believe in accidents, as such.” She looked to where he was pointing. “Could be. Oh, dear, I feel so lazy. And yet, at the same time, I feel I should be doing something. Aah!” She stretched. “Fancy a game of cricket, eh, Frank?”

  He sneered.

  She glanced at the towering sandcastle. The children had found the little ca
t and were pushing it into the hollowed-out main entrance. They didn’t mean any harm and, in fact, the cat seemed to be enjoying himself as much as the children. Soon Cathy saw the amused black-and-white face staring at her from one of the upper windows. She smiled back at it, remembering the pool in the forest. She dug her bare feet into the sand and wiggled her toes.

  A huge, reverberating snort came from the other deckchair. With a great dopey grin on her face, Mrs C. was snoozing. She looked as if she were having a happy dream.

  “Well, she’s all right, anyway,” said Frank. He held his arms round his body, leaning forward in the deckchair and shivering. “I’ll have to split back to the hotel if this goes on. What’s got into those kids?”

  There was a slight note of alarm in the children’s voices. Cathy rose from her chair and walked towards them. “Anything the matter, boys and girls?” But now she could see what was wrong; the roof of the castle had caved in completely. They had got too ambitious and ruined their creation. Also the moat was beginning to fill with foaming water. The tide was coming in.

  “That cat’s in there,” said one of the little girls in panic. She twisted at her hair with her fingers. “The roof’s fallen on him, miss.” The other children were all in tears, shocked by what they had done. It was plain that they thought they had killed the cat. Only one boy was trying to do something about it, digging frantically into the side of the castle with his small wooden spade. Cathy picked up the largest spade she could find and started to dig from the other side, listening for any sounds which the trapped animal might be making. She was afraid it was dead already. “Block that stream,” she said, indicating the channel which fed the moat. “We don’t want to be flooded any sooner than we have to.” She dug and dug, getting her frock all smeared with wet sand, while the other children stood in a silent semicircle watching her. “Come on,” she cried. “Get your spades and help.” Nervously, they came forward. Evidently they would much rather have gone away and forgotten the whole incident. They picked up spades or buckets and began to dig. Sand flew in all directions. Frank came up. He stood there with his hands on his hips, his mirror shades glinting. “What the hell are you doing, Cath?”