“Well, it has to be something more than just a silly old glass eye, now doesn’t it? I mean, I’ve never seen you so shaken.” And so she told me.
“It’s just something he said to me,” she explained, “one night when I was late home after the opera. In fact, I believe I’d spent a little time with you that night? Anyway, in that perfectly vulgar way of his, he said: ‘Angela, you must be more discreet. Discretion, my girl! I mean, I know we don’t have it off as often as you’d possibly like—but you can’t accuse me of holding too tight a rein, now can you? I mean—har! har!—I don’t keep too close an eye on you—eh? Eh? Not both of ’em anyway, har! har!’
“So I asked him what on earth he meant? And he answered, ‘Well, those damned boyfriends, my dear! Only right you should have an escort, me being incapacitated and all, but I’ve a position to maintain and scandal’s something I won’t hear of. So you just watch your step!’”
“Is that all?” I said, when it appeared she’d finished. “But I’ve always understood that Jeremy was perfectly reasonable about…well, your affairs in general.” I shrugged. “It strikes me he was simply trying to protect his good name—and yours!”
“Sometimes, Arthur,” she pouted then, “you sound just like him! I’d hate to think you were going to turn out just like him!”
“Not at all!” I answered at once. “Why, I’m not at all like him! I do…everything he didn’t do, don’t I? And I’m, well, entire? I just can’t understand why a fairly civil warning should upset you so—especially now that he’s dead. And I certainly can’t see the connection between that and…and this,” and I kicked the eye back under the bed, for at that moment it had chosen to trundle out again.
“A civil warning?” she looked at me, slowly nodded her agreement. “Well, I suppose it was, really.” But then, with a degree more animation: “But he wasn’t very civil the next time!”
“He caught you out again?”
“No,” she lifted her chin and tossed back her hair, peevishly, I thought, “in fact it was you who caught me out!”
“Me?” I was astonished.
“Yes,” she was pouting again, “because it was that night after the ball, when you drove me home and we stopped off at your place for a drink and…and slept late.”
“Ah!” I said. “I suspected there might be trouble that time. But you never told me!”
“Because I didn’t want to put you off; us being so good together, and you being his closest friend and all. Anyway, when I got in he was waiting up for me, stamping round the place on that pot leg of his, blinking his one good eye furiously at me. I mean he really was raging! ‘Half past three in the morning?’ he snorted. ‘What? What? By God, but if the neighbours saw you coming in, I’ll…I’ll—’”
“Yes,” I prompted her. “‘I’ll—?’”
“And then he threatened me,” she said.
“Angela, darling, I’d already guessed that!” I told her. “But how did he threaten you—and what has it to do with this damned eye?”
“Arthur, you know how I dislike language,” her tone was disapproving. But on the other hand she could see that I was getting a bit ruffled and impatient. “Well, he reminded me how much older he was than I, and how he probably only had a few years left, and that when he was gone everything would be mine. But, he also pointed out how it wouldn’t be very difficult to change his will—which he would if there should be any sort of scandal. Well of course there wasn’t a scandal and he didn’t change his will. He didn’t get the chance, for it was…all so very sudden!” And likewise, she was suddenly sniffling into the hankie she keeps under the pillow. “Poor Jeremy,” she sobbed, “over the cliff like that.” And just as quickly she dried up and put the hankie away again. It helps to have a little cry now and then.
“But there you go!” I said, triumphantly. “You’ve said it yourself: he didn’t change the will! So…not much of a threat in that!”
“But that’s not all,” she said, looking at me straight in the eye now. “I mean, you know how Jeremy had spent all of that time with those awful people up those awful rivers? Well, and he told me he’d learned something of their jojo.”
“Their juju,” I felt obliged to correct her.
“Oh, jojo, juju!” She tossed her hair. “He said that they set spells when they’re about to die, and that if their last wishes aren’t carried out to the letter, then that they send, well, parts of themselves back to punish the ones they held to trust!”
“Parts of them—?” I began to repeat her, then tilted my head on one side and frowned at her very seriously. “Angela, I—”
But off she went, sobbing again, face down in the pillows. And this time doing it properly. Well, obviously the night was ruined. Getting dressed, I told her: “But of course that silly glass eye isn’t one of Jeremy’s parts; it’s artificial, so I’m sure it wouldn’t count—if we believed in such rubbish in the first place. Which we don’t. But I do understand how you must have felt, my darling, when you saw it wobbling about up there on the dresser.”
She looked up and brushed away her tears. “Will I see you tomorrow night?” And she was anxious, poor thing.
“Of course you will,” I told her, “tomorrow and every night! But I’ve a busy day in the morning, and so it’s best if I go home now. As for you: you’re to take a sleeping draft and get a good night’s sleep. And meanwhile—” I got down on my knees and fished about under the bed for the eye, “—did Jeremy have the box that this came in?”
“In that drawer over there,” she pointed. “What on earth do you want with that?”
“I’m simply putting it away,” I told her, “so that it won’t bother us again.” But as I placed the eye in its velvet lined box I glanced at the name of the suppliers—Brackett and Sanders, Jewellers, Brighton—and committed their telephone number to memory…
The next day in the City, I gave Brackett and Sanders a ring and asked a question or two, and finished by saying: “Are you absolutely sure? No mistake? Just the one? I see. Well…thank you very much. And I’m sorry to have troubled you…” But that night I didn’t tell Angela about it. I mean, so what? So he’d used two different jewellers. Well, nothing strange about that; he got about a fair bit in his time, old Jeremy Cleave.
I took her flowers and chocolates, as usual, and she was looking quite her old self again. We dined by candlelight, with a background of soft music and the moon coming up over the garden, and eventually it was time for bed.
Taking the open, somewhat depleted box of chocolates with us, we climbed the stairs and commenced a ritual which was ever fresh and exciting despite its growing familiarity. The romantic preliminaries, sweet prelude to boy and girl togetherness. These were broken only once when she said:
“Arthur, darling, just before I took my draft last night I tried to open the windows a little. It had got very hot and sticky in here. But that one—” and she pointed to one of a pair of large, pivot windows, “—wouldn’t open. It’s jammed or something. Do be a dear and do something with it, will you?”
I tried but couldn’t; the thing was immovable. And fearing that it might very well become hot and sticky again, I then tried the other window which grudgingly pivoted. “We shall have them seen to,” I promised.
Then I went to her where she lay; and in the next moment, as I held her in my arms and bent my head to kiss the very tip of a brown, delicious…
Bump!
It was perfectly audible—a dull thud from within the wardrobe—and both of us had heard it. Angela looked at me, her darling eyes startled, and mine no less; we both jerked bolt upright in the bed. And:
“What…?” she said, her mouth staying open a very little, breathing lightly and quickly.
“A garment, falling from its hanger,” I told her.
“Nevertheless, go and see,” she said, very breathlessly. “I’ll not be at ease if I think there’s something trapped in there.”
Trapped in there? In a wardrobe in her bedroom? What
could possibly be trapped in there? She kept no cats. But I got out of bed and went to see anyway.
The thing fell out into view as soon as I opened the door. Part of a mannequin? A limb from some window-dresser’s storeroom? An anatomical specimen from some poor unfortunate’s murdered, dismembered torso? At first glance it might have been any of these things. And indeed, with the latter in mind, I jumped a foot—before I saw that it was none of those things. By which time Angela was out of bed, into her dressing-gown and haring for the door—which wouldn’t open. For she had seen it, too, and unlike me she’d known exactly what it was.
“His leg!” she cried, battering furiously at the door and fighting with its ornate, gold-plated handle. “His bloody awful leg!”
And of course it was: Jeremy Cleave’s pot left leg, leather straps and hinged kneejoint and all. It had been standing in there on its foot, and a shoe carton had gradually tilted against it, and finally the force of gravity had won. But at such an inopportune moment. “Darling,” I said, turning to her with the thing under my arm, “but it’s only Jeremy’s pot leg!”
“Oh, of course it is!” she sobbed, finally wrenching the door open and rushing out onto the landing. “But what’s it doing there? It should be buried with him in the cemetery in Denholme!” And then she rushed downstairs.
Well, I scratched my head a little, then sat down on the bed with the limb in my hands. I worked its joint to and fro for a while, and peered down into its hollow interior. Pot, of one sort or another, but tough, quite heavy, and utterly inanimate. A bit smelly, though, but not unnaturally. I mean, it probably smelled of Jeremy’s thigh. And there was a smear of mud in the arch of the foot and on the heel, too…
By the time I’d given it a thorough bath in the vanity basin Angela was back, swaying in the doorway, a glass of bubbly in her trembling little hands. And she looked like she’d consumed a fair old bit of the rest of the bottle, too. But at least she’d recovered something of her former control. “His leg,” she said, not entering the room while I dried the thing with a fluffy towel.
“Certainly,” I said, “Jeremy’s spare pot leg.” And seeing her mouth about to form words: “Now don’t say it, Angela. Of course he had a spare, and this is it. I mean, can you imagine if he’d somehow broken one? What then? Do you have spare reading glasses? Do I have spare car keys? Naturally Jeremy had spare…things. It’s just that he was sensitive enough not to let you see them, that’s all.”
“Jeremy, sensitive!” she laughed, albeit hysterically. “But very well—you must be right. And anyway, I’ve never been in that wardrobe in a donkey’s years. Now do put it away—no, not there, but in the cupboard under the stairs—and come to bed and love me.”
And so I did. Champagne has that effect on her.
But afterwards—sitting up in bed in the darkness, while she lay huddled close, asleep, breathing across my chest—I thought about him, the “Old Boy”, Jeremy.
Adventurer, explorer, wanderer in distant lands. That was him. Jeremy Johnson Cleave, who might have been a Sir, a Lord, a Minister, but chose to be himself. Cantankerous old (old-fashioned) bugger! And yet in many ways quite modern, too. Naïve about certain things—the way he’d always trusted me, for instance, to push his chair along the airy heights of the cliff tops when he didn’t much feel like hobbling—but in others shrewd as a fox, and nobody’s fool. Never for very long, anyway.
He’d lost his eye to an N’haqui dart somewhere up the Orinoco or some such, and his leg to a croc in the Amazon. But he’d always made it back home, and healed himself up, and then let his wanderlust take him off again. As for juju: well, a man is liable to see and hear and touch upon some funny things in the far-flung places of the world, and almost certainly he’s like to go a bit native, too…
The next day (today, in fact, or yesterday, since it’s now past midnight) was Friday, and I had business which took me past Denholme. Now don’t ask me why, but I bought a mixed posy from the florist’s in the village and stopped off at the old graveyard, and made my way to Jeremy’s simple grave. Perhaps the flowers were for his memory; there again they could have been an alibi, a reason for my being there. As if I needed one. I mean I had been his friend, after all! Everyone said so. But it’s also a fact that murderers do, occasionally, visit their victims.
The marble headstone gave his name and dates, and a little of the Cleave history, then said:
Distant lands ever called him;
he ever ventured,
and ever returned.
Rest in Peace.
Or pieces? I couldn’t resist a wry chuckle as I placed my flowers on his hollow plot.
But…hollow?
“Subsidence, sir,” said a voice directly behind me as a hand fell on my arm. Lord, how I jumped!
“What?” I turned my head to see a gaunt, ragged man leaning on his shovel: the local gravedigger.
“Subsidence,” he said again, his voice full of dialect and undisguised disgust, gravelly as the path he stood on. “Oh, they likes to blame me for it—saying as ’ow I don’t pack ’em down tight enough, an’ all—but the fact is it’s the subsidence. One in every ’alf-dozen or so sinks a little, just like Old J.J.’s ’ere. This was ’is family seat, y’know: Denholme. Last of the line, ’e were—and a rum un’! But I suppose you knows all that.”
“Er, yes,” I said. “Quite.” And, looking at the concave plot: “Er, a little more soil, d’you think? Before they start blaming it on you again?”
He winked and said, “I’ll see to ’er right this minute, sir, so I will! Good day to you.” And I left him scratching his head and frowning at the grave, and finally trundling his barrow away, doubtless to fetch a little soil.
And all of this was the second thing I wasn‘t going to report to Angela, but as it happens I don’t suppose it would have made much difference anyway…
So tonight at fall of dark I arrived here at their (hers, now) country home. and from the moment I let myself in I knew that things weren’t right. So would anyone have known, the way her shriek came knifing down the stairs:
“Arthur! Arthur!” her voice was piercing, penetrating, very nearly unhinged. “Is that you? Oh, for God’s sake say it’s you!”
“But of course it’s me, darling, who else would it be?” I shouted up to her. “Now what on earth’s the matter?”
“The matter? The matter?” She came flying down the stairs in a towelling robe, rushed straight into my arms. “I’ll tell you what’s the matter…” But out of breath, she couldn’t. Her hair was wet and a mess, and her face wasn’t done yet, and…well, she looked rather floppy all over.
So that after a moment or so, rather brusquely, I said: “So tell me!”
“It’s him!” she gasped then, a shudder in her voice. “Oh, it’s him!” And bursting into tears she collapsed against me, so that I had to drop my chocolates and flowers in order to hold her up.
“Him?” I repeated her, rather stupidly, for by then I believe I’d begun to suspect that it might indeed be ‘him’ after all—or at least something of his doing.
“Him!” she cried aloud, beating on my chest. “Him, you fool—Jeremy!”
Well, ‘let reason prevail’ has always been my family motto, and I think it’s to my merit that I didn’t break down and start gibbering right there and then, along with Angela…Or on the other hand, perhaps I’m simply stupid. Anyway I didn’t, but picked up my flowers and chocolates—yes, and Angela, too—and carried them all upstairs. I put her down on the bed but she jumped up at once, and commenced striding to and fro, to and fro, wringing her hands.
“Now what is it?” I said, determined to be reasonable.
“Not in that tone of voice!” she snarled at me, coming to a halt in front of me with her hands clenched into tight little knots and her face all twisted up. “Not in that ‘oh, Angela’s being a silly again’ voice! I said it’s him, and I mean it’s him!”
But now I was angry, too. “You mean he’s here?” I scowled at her
.
“I mean he’s near, certainly!” she answered, wide-, wild-eyed. “His bloody bits, anyway!” But then, a moment later, she was sobbing again, those deep racking sobs I just can’t put up with; and so once more I carried her to the bed.
“Darling,” I said, “just tell me all about it and I’ll sort it out from there. And that’s a promise.”
“Is it, Arthur? Is it? Oh, I do hope so!”
So I gave her a kiss and tried one last time, urging: “Now come on, do tell me about it.”
“I…I was in the bath,” she started, “making myself nice for you, hoping that for once we could have a lovely quiet evening and night together. So there I am soaping myself down, and all of a sudden I feel that someone is watching me. And he was, he was! Sitting there on the end of the bath! Jeremy!”
“Jeremy,” I said, flatly, concentrating my frown on her. “Jeremy…the man?”
“No, you fool—the bloody eye!” And she ripped the wrapper from the chocolates (her favourite liqueurs, as it happens) and distractedly began stuffing her mouth full of them. Which was when the thought first struck me: maybe she’s cracked up!
But: “Very well,” I said, standing up, striding over to the chest of drawers and yanking open the one with the velvet-lined box, “in that case—”
The box lay there, open and quite empty, gaping at me. And at that very moment there came a well-remembered rolling sound, and I’ll be damned if the hideous thing didn’t come bowling out of the bathroom and onto the pile of the carpet, coming to a halt there with its malefic gaze directed right at me!
And: Bump!—bump! from the wardrobe, and BUMP! again; a final kick so hard that it slammed the door back on its hinges. And there was Jeremy’s pot leg, jerking about on the carpet like a claw freshly wrenched from a live crab! I mean not just lying there but…active! Lashing about on its knee-hinge like a wild thing!
Disbelieving, jaw hanging slack. I backed away from it—backed right into the bed and sat down there, with all the wind flown right out of me. Angela had seen everything and her eyes were threatening to pop out of her head; she dribbled chocolate and juice from one corner of her twitching mouth, but still her hand automatically picked up another liqueur. Except it wasn’t a liqueur.