The Japanese Girl & Other Stories

  ‘He did what?’

  ‘Well, apparently he did quite a lot. It was even more of a ruin when he bought it. You were saying to me yesterday that somebody’d spent money on it before us …’

  ‘Yes, I know … It’s certainly been patched up.’

  ‘Apparently Boduel came down here and bought this house mainly to please his wife – and then about eighteen months after they got settled in she left him. She just took a suitcase and some personal jewellery with her. Aukett says the village were pretty sure she’d run away with another man – a poet who’d been living round here – but Boduel wouldn’t give anything away. He took it very hard and put it out that she was expected back at any time. But she never came, and after a bit he began to speculate on the Stock Exchange and lost his money. So one night he tried to hang himself. He tried to hang himself in our bedroom, Aukett says.’

  ‘A bit of local colour. These old chaps are great on the personal touch.’

  ‘Anyway, he was cut down in time, but afterwards he was examined by doctors and certified insane. After he was taken away the Tredinnicks got the place for a song; but they were all great drinkers and let the house go completely to pot.’

  That ended the conversation, and we began to look through a tractor catalogue. But when we went up to bed that night she said:

  ‘I wonder which beam he used.’

  Philippa isn’t in the least a neurotic girl, and the Boduel story dropped between us like a stone and left no apparent trace. Anyway there was too much to do. When you take over a place that’s been neglected, the pressure builds up to do everything at once. The land had to take precedence because while you can board up a window or knock in a few extra slates at any time, nature’s like a damned obstinate old man who won’t be hurried. If you miss one season you’ve got to wait twelve months until the chance comes round again. I sighed for thirty men and three bulldozers.

  So we were too busy to think about anything else. All the same I’m glad she was away in December when the rest happened.

  Aukett and Bray and the woman who did for us lived in the hamlet of Pencarrion at the foot of the hill, so while Philippa was visiting her mother I slept in the house alone, and rather liked it. I always like being in a house alone. I think one somehow gets to know it better, and I wasn’t troubled by a fear of meeting ten generations of dead Pencarrions on the stairs, or even waking one morning and hearing the creak of a rope.

  But I did wake and hear something one morning nevertheless.

  It was the fifth night I’d been alone, and for the two previous days a gale had been striding across the land, birch-brooming the hills and the valleys with angry rain. For two days chimneys had boomed, windows had rattled, everything that could bang had banged, everything that could leak had leaked, cobbles oozed liquid mud, mats wriggled like snakes, and there had been no peace in the world.

  Usually I wake about six-thirty, and when I woke this morning I knew we had been left behind at last by the storm. It was very quiet, a quiet such as one only gets in the country, and in the winter when the birds are still. Although the room was dark, you could see the pale oblongs of the windows with their pear-shaped architraves. If allowed, Pencarrion was very free from creaks and other noises. The early Tudors knew how to build.

  And, just as I was thinking that, I heard a very distinct creak in one corner of the room. It was in the alcove beyond the windows and therefore in the greatest darkness. In this alcove was an easy chair and a table with some books.

  The creaking stopped, but I lay there listening for some time, not quite so sure of myself as usual. It’s surprising how quickly confidence ebbs away when the untoward seems about to happen.

  Well, dawn was breaking and the light began to grow. It was infinitely silent. My breathing grew longer again. There would be a lot of work to do today, making up two days of lost time. Philippa was returning tomorrow and would be bringing …

  Just for final reassurance I pulled the bedclothes quietly down so that I could stare into the corner. It was still shadowy there, but now something was coming into view.

  The first thing I was certain of was a hand with a gold signet ring. Then the light seemed to catch on a shoe. Farther back and higher up you could just see a faint oval blur.

  When I had swallowed back about a pound of gut, I sat up in bed with a jerk.

  Chapter 10

  ‘Who’s there?’

  No reply. In the distance now a faint wind moved like an echo of yesterday.

  ‘Who’s there? What the hell d’you mean coming into my room?’

  A man’s voice said: ‘ I might ask you the same question.’

  In spite of what my eyes could see, the fact that somebody actually answered shocked me still further.

  I was sitting stark upright in bed now. I couldn’t move any farther. My muscles were in a sort of cramp.

  ‘But then,’ the voice said, ‘ I suppose you’re the present owner.’

  It was going to be a bright morning, and light was coming quickly. The man sat with his legs crossed. In his right hand he was holding something below the level of the table.

  ‘What d’you want?’ I croaked, and stopped. My throat was constricted as if someone were holding it.

  He said: ‘As a matter of fact I’d forgotten all about anyone else being here. But we won’t dispute the ownership. My name’s Frank Boduel. Does that mean anything to you? Ah, I see it does.’

  He was about fifty-five, bald, with intent watchful eyes, and a few days unshaven. His clothes were curiously old-fashioned without conforming to a period. His loose tie was not unlike a stock. His buckle shoes were either a hundred years old or in the height of fashion.

  He said: ‘I bought this house once but never really had a chance of enjoying it. Last night when – when I was able to free myself I came back. Can you blame me?’

  The shock wave was at last receding and leaving the hard pebbles of anger behind. I made a move to get out of bed, and for the first time he stirred. He lifted his right hand. In it was a butcher’s knife.

  ‘Since I’ve been certified insane by all sorts of doctors I must claim the advantages of the complaint. Lie down.’

  I lay down. I needed the rest. It wasn’t a nice position. No one would be coming to the house yet.

  He said: ‘You seem to have made a thorough mess of the garden. What did you do with the ash tree?’

  After he had repeated the question, I realized he required an answer. ‘I cut it down.’

  ‘I planted that. Good God, you vandals from up country don’t realize how hard it is to grow trees in this country with the winds that blow. And that depressed-looking little hedge. Whatever is it?’

  ‘Which hedge?’

  ‘The one by the gate.’

  ‘Pittasporum.’

  He grunted. ‘ You’ll not rear it. All this salt in the air.’

  There was silence.

  ‘I won’t try to persuade you I’m not insane,’ he said, and gave a brief dry laugh. ‘The word means nothing anyway. One is persecuted for taking an unpopular view, that’s all. So were the saints.’

  I said: ‘ Why were you persecuted?’ If he would go on talking long enough Aukett would come.

  ‘Ah, you must know all the ordinary details. I’m sure I’m still talked of in the district.’

  ‘I’ve been here only a few months. I don’t go to the village.’

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Yes. But my wife’s away.’

  He smiled slightly and put down the knife. ‘Are you sure she’ll return?’

  I tried to think of a way of continuing. ‘Yours did not?’

  ‘Ah, so I see you have heard.’

  ‘The barest details.’

  He was looking up at the beams of the ceiling with an intent stare.

  ‘It’s an intensely unpleasant death, being strangled by a rope,’ he said. ‘I suffered it and then they brought me round. It wasn’t fair. She was the last of the Pencarrions. I su
ppose you know that. She persuaded me to buy this place. It had been out of her family for a century and she wanted it back. Sometimes I have thought she wanted the house more than she wanted me. When we got here she tried hard to persuade me to change my name to Pencarrion. I wouldn’t … She was a beautiful woman. Dark hair, milk skin, features like a doe. I was fascinated by her. The last of the Pencarrions! My father was a postman.’

  I dragged up the eiderdown and pulled it round my shoulders. He watched my movements carefully.

  ‘But I wouldn’t change my name. What utter damned nonsense all this pride of name is, this glorifying of ancestry! The Fitz-something-this and the De-something-that go back only as far as the name of the humblest labourer. We come out of the stewpot together, and when we’re done we go back in. Annabel wouldn’t see that. She took pride in the most ridiculous things. Shade of her ancestors! They’d been a lawless lot; but by the time it came to my wife the Pencarrion blood was running thin.’

  Boduel got up restlessly with the knife in his hand and walked to the window. ‘You’ve been pruning the apple trees, I see.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I could never get the things to fruit. Good blossom, and then the wind would come.’ He felt the edge of the knife with his thumb. ‘Are you quite alone here?’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘What happened where?’

  ‘Between you and your wife.’

  ‘Oh … We quarrelled from the start. She’d a sort of weak stubbornness, a thin pale obstinacy more durable than any anger. I’m not a vicious man. I’m not a brutal man. I was an ordinary human being asking for human companionship and affection. But the only interest she showed in anything or anyone was an intellectual one. No; a sham intellectual one, for intellect isn’t separate from life, is it? She’d a mind with blinkers on, fastidious, selective, afraid of the mud.’ He went slowly back and sat down again. ‘Of course perhaps I wasn’t entirely without blame. Have you ever heard of the Gorsedd?’

  ‘How did you get in?’ I asked. ‘All the doors were locked, weren’t they?’

  He considered me. ‘The Gorsedd is a Cornish thing in which they elect Bards and parade about in white robes like Druids. Utter damned nonsense. I’m as Cornish as can be, but this dressing up, this trying to revive something that never was, it makes me sick! Annabel got involved in it. Last descendant of one of the oldest families. It suited her perfectly – all the make-believe. She lived on make-believe. And after a while she took up with a Cornish poet called Trelowarren. He wrote poetry in the Cornish language! Can you match that! As if there aren’t enough languages in the world without trying to revive one that never was any good anyhow and never had any literature of its own. Could anything be more futile? I used to laugh at her, deride her. I used to say, could anything be more futile, Annabel. She didn’t like that at all!’

  It was almost full light now. His clothes were in a bad way and there was thick mud on his shoes. He looked as if he had been out in yesterday’s gale.

  ‘D’you get on with your wife?’ he demanded suddenly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No doubt you make allowances sometimes. I tried hard to. I tried to believe we could go on as we were. I knew other men envied me. But it wasn’t any good. In the end things went too far. This poet, this Trelowarren fellow, left the district. He made his living out of insurance or something, and his firm sent him to South Africa. Of course they’d been very friendly for some months before he left. By chance I found one of his letters. It was full of sympathy for her, with ridiculous quotations from his own poems, a sort of metaphysical love-making; and pressing her to leave me and join him. Then I intercepted one of her letters to him and found it a distortion of my every act, representing herself as martyred purity, talking about the sacredness of Celtic culture … and – promising, making a pledge to leave me and join him as soon as it could be conveniently arranged, while I was away. Have I struck you as mentally deranged up to now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No indeed. But maybe this shows that I am after all – because I didn’t let her go.’

  ‘You – didn’t let her go?’

  ‘No, I didn’t let her go. Instead I stormed up to our bedroom – this bedroom – with her letter in my hand – and there she was standing in front of the mirror in her white Gorsedd robes admiring herself! Over there it was. The long mirror was against that wall. I – I waved the letter at her and told her what I thought of her, and for once she lost her temper too and called me all the names her high mind could remember. She said she supposed I was used to opening letters since my father was a postman and no doubt had done it before me. It went on and on and on, and a great bitterness welled up in me. I took her by the neck and shook her. It was not unpleasant. I often think that damned Gorsedd robe was partly to blame.’

  Boduel paused and sighed through his large yellow teeth.

  ‘Are you cold?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said carefully.

  ‘I was cold,’ he said, ‘when I’d done it. Just for a little while I was cold. D’you remember that Browning poem of the man who strangles his mistress and then sits all night holding her head against his? What utter damned nonsense. You can’t love a corpse. You can’t even hate it. There’s only one thing you want to do and that’s get rid of it. It was midnight when I’d finished and the servants slept out. You know the old tin mine in the orchard?’

  ‘Yes.’ My mind was racing ahead of his story.

  ‘It goes down thirteen hundred feet and links with all the disused workings in the vicinity. It’s been flooded for sixty years. I carried her downstairs and through the orchard dressed just as she was in her Druid’s gown. There was no moon. Many times I’ve dropped things down that shaft. And some of them have made more noise than she did. Then I went back to the house, packed her suitcase and threw it after her. That was a gesture that pleased me somehow. Then I came back and unlocked the front door and went to bed.’

  Boduel got up restlessly again. ‘ I don’t like your furniture,’ he said. ‘ I had some Sheraton antiques in here; and a four-poster bed with a figured canopy. God, that dressing-table!’

  ‘We did our best,’ I said humbly, ‘with what we could afford.’

  ‘I suppose things are different these days. But tell me, is every murderer a madman? If not, why am I? The thing worked well enough. She had stolen out in the night – and I was broken-hearted. I told people she was away for a holiday, but I let the vicar know in confidence that she had left me for Trelowarren, and that way it got about. The whole thing was quite clever, I thought, because even if anyone had suspected the truth there could have been no proof of it. To do that they would have had to spend £200,000 draining the mines. Even with the present price of tin you can’t afford to lay that much out.’

  He went across to the window, and peered out again. The light glinted on knife edge, signet ring, tie-pin, bald head. Then he went to the door and opened it an inch and listened. A man’s voice could be heard downstairs.

  ‘That’s only one of my farm hands,’ I said nervously. ‘He’ll do you no harm.’

  He smiled sadly. ‘I came back to see what it was like. Living in that other place I used to wish myself back here. I used to dream about it. But there’s no real life for me here. Things have moved on. They always do. I’m a stranger now, an intruder. Besides … they’d look for me here in the end.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘In a way I suppose she’s won, the bitch. So it would be appropriate if I joined her. I’ve always wondered what it must feel like to go straight down an air adit.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool!’

  ‘These rugs,’ he said. ‘They’re terrible. You should go to Wherry’s of Plymouth. They import direct. Mention my name, if you like.’ He stood half in the door brooding. ‘But they’ll have forgotten. Everything is forgotten in a few years. That’s why I’d like you to remember me and what I’ve told you. Nobody else knows the truth. I did w
ant someone to know.’

  He was gone.

  In the December daylight I found myself staring at my own cold face in the glass. It was drawn and older than I remembered it last night. Then the front door slammed. I dug my feet into slippers, snatched a coat from the wardrobe, ran downstairs and out. Round the corner Aukett was standing gaping.

  ‘That man, sur, he’s just been in your ’ous. He looked like –’

  ‘Stop him!’ I shouted.

  I ran through the walled garden with the remnants of ungathered prunings cracking under my feet. I could hear the tramp of Aukett close behind. At the broken gate I stopped. Boduel was already on the wall beside the mine, his stocky figure like a pin-man against the bright morning sky. Beside him was the ruined finger of the mine chimney.

  I shouted to him and ran on, but he jumped down the other side. I got to the wall and pulled myself over. He was already on the rim of the low wall round the air shaft. I shouted again.

  He saw me and lifted an ironical hand in which the butcher’s knife still gleamed. Then as I started forward again he jumped.

  From where I was I couldn’t hear much, but as I reached the wall the echoes of his fall were still coming up the shaft.

  They recovered his body. A difficult, job, but fortunately it was lodged about three hundred feet down on some timbers across the farther drop. The woman’s body wasn’t found.

  I wired Philippa to stay away until the inquest was over. It was an unpleasant business altogether.

  Thinking it over in the weeks that followed I wondered, as he clearly wondered, with what degree of greater ingenuity a supposedly sane man could have acted, always supposing the sane man had wished to dispose of his wife. The course he had followed – once embarked on – had the merit of simplicity, spontaneity and tidiness. The stumbling-block in so many crimes is, of course, just that disposal of the body. Get rid of it and even the utmost suspicions and the cleverest detectives are likely to stumble and fail.