The Benefits of Death Read online

  He turned the handle of the coffee-grinder a few times before he said: “Would you let me resolve the difficulty?”

  “No, I wouldn’t, and you damn’ well know it. I’m willing and eager to commit adultery, but I’m not going to be paid for it.”

  “Pam, I didn’t…”

  “I know, you lovable old fool. You don’t mean it like that and I’m all sorts of a swine for suggesting you did. Shall I let you into a secret? Sometimes, I get a lot of fun out of teasing you. You can be so very solemn, just like you were before I met you — and to save you telling me I couldn’t know, other people told me. You realise, don’t you, that when I was informed I’d meet a fellow author at the cocktail party it nearly put me right off it? ‘A nice man, but just a little serious.’ And when I was introduced to you, you said: ‘How d’you do?’ Exactly as if you’d feel hopelessly compromised by anything more. My first impulse was to empty a jug of water over you.”

  “Shall I tell you what the first thing I wanted to do was?”

  “I’ve no desire to be reminded of the disgusting way you leered at me.”

  “Then I wasn’t quite that pedantic?”

  “You leered at me in a pedantic way. Get on with the coffee, Charles.”

  Later, they left the house and drove to Rye. Rye, with its pebbled streets that came from a different age, held a special significance for them. Their first meeting after the cocktail party had been there: a meeting she had tried to avoid even when she wanted it to take place. He might have been pedantic in some ways, but there had occurred between them that strange flash of spirit which accurately foretold the future. And although she continued to fight against their friendship for some time, because after the death of her husband she had sworn never again to become so deeply attached to any person that she could be mentally injured by that person, she had lost.

  After dinner, they drove down to the sea, beyond Camber. They sat in the car and enjoyed the esoteric pleasure of seemingly being the only persons in the world.

  On their return to her house he brought the car to a halt immediately outside the front gate. “O.K.?” he asked.

  “Charles, must we…” She stopped, then opened the door. “All right.”

  He watched her climb out of the car and slam the door shut and he knew exactly what she had been about to say. But he could not leave the car all night in the front of the house in case it was recognised.

  He drove on and turned right at the first cross-roads, then right again. This brought him to a track in the woods which eventually came to a natural clearing. He parked the car, locked the doors, and left.

  He flashed the torch ahead of him and carefully stepped over the fallen elm. After four minutes, he came out at the back of the oast-house. She was in the sitting-room, drinking whisky, and it was immediately obvious that the storm warnings were flying. He was not surprised. They had been in sight for some time. He sighed.

  “The drinks are over there,” she said. She pointed at three bottles which were balanced on top of a pile of four thick books that were, in turn, on the window-sill. He poured himself out a stiff gin and vermouth and wished to God life didn’t have to be so complicated. “Cheers.”

  She gave no answer, but finished her drink and handed him the glass for a refill.

  He offered her a cigarette and when he flicked open his lighter, she suddenly said in a tight voice: “What are we going to do?”

  He drank. “Do?” he queried. He knew his delaying tactics were completely futile, yet he still tried to delay.

  “I can’t go on like this.” With a nervous gesture, she smoothed down the front of her frock into which she had changed before they went out.

  He sat down on the gaudy pouf that her husband had brought back from Port Said. Strangely, he often thought of her husband as if he had been an old friend. “It’s difficult…”

  “Don’t give me all the old stories, Charles. I know only too well that all the money’s in a trust fund and that because your father had a ridiculous phobia about divorce you stand to lose everything if you’re divorced. But so what?”

  He lit his own cigarette. Did one really dismiss a quarter of a million pounds so casually?

  She drank quickly. “Suppose she finds out about us and divorces you? Between us, we make enough to live on. It won’t be the kind of luxury you’re used to, but is that so very important?”

  “I don’t make a living, Pam, you know that. Six hundred a year, all told.”

  “And d’you know why it’s so little? It’s because you’re isolated from the world, insulated by a fortune. You could write if you really had to. You could write damn’ good books, much better than I could ever dream about, but because you’re removed from life the stuff you turn out is dead. Didn’t Mills say he reckoned you could easily become a first-class writer?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “If you were shot of all the trust money, you’d have to improve.”

  “And just suppose I didn’t? What if you and Mills are wrong and that whatever I did I continued to limp along on six hundred? Then what?”

  “Why suppose the worst? In any case, in a reasonable year I knock back fifteen hundred. Doesn’t that make you want to stir yourself? I don’t write because there’s something inside me that’s clamouring to come out: I write solely because when Bernard died my total assets were seven hundred and fifty quid. The stuff I churn out is muck, but I get paid for it because I know what kind of muck people like to read. For God’s sake, Charles, don’t go wasting yourself. Climb out of your ivory tower and dip your feet in the dung of the world so that you can experience its stink.”

  He finished his drink and then gave himself another. How did you explain the dread that accompanied money, the dread of losing its security? She was asking him to blindfold himself and jump into a pit full of serpents. If his writing wasn’t any good at the moment, who could say what it might, or might not, become?

  “What are you thinking?” she demanded. Her expression was hard and she looked her thirty-three years.

  He returned to the pouf and sat down. “We agreed at the beginning…”

  “We’ve been having a hole in the wall affair for just over two years,” she said furiously. “For two years you’ve come and slept with me if and when that bloody bitch lets you off the string. Maybe you don’t mind continuing that way, but I do. I want to have a family. Or hasn’t that word ever occurred to you? Maybe you think of me as your cut-price prostitute?”

  “Don’t talk like that. I love you, more than anything.”

  “Not more than the money.”

  “It isn’t that simple.”

  “You won’t let it be. Study things in their true light and they all become rather sordid, don’t they?”

  “There’s nothing sordid about us.”

  She finished her drink. “Give me another.”

  He hesitated.

  “Are you worried about my getting too tight to perform?” she demanded.

  He refilled her glass.

  “You’ve got to make your mind up, Charles.”

  He handed her the glass and then stood by the side of her chair and rested his hand on her shoulder. “I know it’s difficult for you, but…”

  “Just forget the buts and start deciding. I need and want you desperately and there’s nothing on God’s earth I desire more than to have you with me all the time — but that doesn’t mean I’m willing to put up with things as they are.”

  He withdrew his hand and went back to the pouf. Illogically, he was angry because she had spoken as she had. She had known the exact position from the beginning of their affair. He had kept nothing back, hidden nothing.

  “You understand, don’t you?” she said. “We’re not going on like this. I just can’t stand you leaving the car in the woods because you daren’t put it in front of the house. I love you so very, very much,” she said quietly.

  Quite suddenly, the years began to leave her and she looked young and fresh. Her cu
rved mouth seemed about to smile and her slightly turned-up nose derisively challenged the world.

  *

  He left her house at six and returned through the woods to his car. He felt, for the first time, as if he were engaged on something nasty and that made him furious. He and Evadne were poles apart so where was the wrong in enjoying the love of Pamela? There was no question of religious scruples because he did not even confess to the comforting religious beliefs of the average conforming Englishman, and he admitted only logic. But even logic seemed to have deserted him.

  He reached the main road along which he continued until just before Kingsnorth. Then he entered the country lanes with their timeless turnings that he liked so much — although many of these lanes were ruined by a rash of bungalows and houses that disfigured the land as if it were suffering from an outbreak of acne. It was said that, because no one really cared, soon the whole of Kent would be little better than a dormitory town with the air black from the belching funnels of industry: when that happened, he would move and try to find somewhere where man did not strangle his environment.

  He reached his house and drove into the garage. The dogs yowled a welcome and he distinguished the extra frenzy of Stymphalian. She was always completely outraged that he should so betray the deep friendship between them as to leave her in the kennels.

  He let Stymie out of her pen and the other dogs watched in impotent fury. He stared at them with distaste and remembered the writer who had classified a Cuenca as the illegitimate offspring of a mange-ridden Griffon and a fractured Pekinese.

  He went into the house and, inevitably, was struck by the clinical neatness everywhere and the contrast so formed with the place he had just left. The one was a home, the other wasn’t. He went up to the bedroom and, after pulling back the cover, he sat on it to crumple the bedclothes. The first time he had told Pamela about his attempts to persuade Mrs. Andrews he had spent the night as he should have done, Pam had laughed. She would not laugh now.

  He wondered what in the hell he was to do? Was it so wrong not to want to view life outside the cover of the trust fund? What man, after enjoying an income that was close to ten thousand a year, would willingly take up life at six hundred? Pam believed that life without the umbrella would sharpen his writing and turn it into something good. But was she right? What if she were wrong and at the same time she found it less easy to sell her own work? Their combined income could dwindle until it was on the point of vanishing.

  He fondled Stymie’s ears. If he refused to break with the money, he would lose Pamela. But he daren’t lose her. Equally, he daren’t lose the money.

  He suddenly thought of Evadne and in his imagination she had a jeering smile on her face.

  The specialist had said that she could live for years if she took care of herself. Why, he thought bitterly?

  Chapter IV

  Leithan walked across the field to the concrete yard and the milking parlour beyond. The herd of Jerseys was a hobby of his, as was the whole farm, but both showed a profit. That was because he was deeply interested in them and because Ted Deakin was a born cowman who was careless about the hours he worked.

  Deakin was swilling down the floor of the milking parlour. He saw Leithan and nodded his head quickly and then carried on with the job. He turned off the hose and used a squeegee to push the last of the water down the drain. His right arm had been badly injured in the war and three operations had left it an inch shorter than his other arm, but the physical handicap never seemed to hinder him.

  He leaned on the end of the handle. “Milk’s holding well, considering, and they’re fair tearing into the silage. Sent off eighteen gallon more this week than last.”

  “How’s Judy?”

  “Bagging up nicely and if it ain’t a heifer what’s due, I’ll keep pigs.”

  Leithan smiled. “Why?”

  “She’s heavy in the middle. Heavy in the back and it’s a bull.”

  “Maybe! I was talking to an expert the other day about breeding and he said A.I. was giving better fertility results every time.”

  “Aye. There’s some twist the facts round to suit ’emselves.”

  And that, thought Leithan, was that. Deakin considered A. I. was death to a good herd — indeed, almost the product of the devil — and insisted on keeping two bulls. Nothing would ever make him change his mind. “Is there anything you want in Ashford? I’m just on my way.”

  “The missus was talking about how she might be goin’ in.”

  “I’ll call in and see if she’d like a lift.”

  Deakin nodded his head. Then he said casually: “Alf’s down in the ten-acre field putting up that new fence.”

  Leithan waited for a torrent of criticism.

  “Not a bad worker, even if ’e looks at the watch a trifle close at times.”

  Leithan was surprised — and grateful. Deakin was the most intolerant of men when it came to his assistants. The previous one had lasted only three weeks before he fled Deakin’s caustic tongue. “By the way, are you O.K. for cake?”

  “The millers left a ton yesterday — said as the order was overlooked, or something. I told ’em straight, overlook anything more and we was off. They ain’t the only millers.”

  “I’ll call into the cottage to see if Mrs. Deakin wants a lift.”

  Leithan went up the cinder path to the semi-detached cottages. As he came abreast of the right-hand one, he saw Sarah Pochard in the kitchen. She was making a cup of tea and when she looked out and saw him, a defiant expression crossed her face. She was not going to be with them very long, he thought.

  Mrs. Deakin, an angular woman who ruled her household in a very old-fashioned way so that her two children still paid open respect towards their parents, accepted the lift into Ashford with alacrity.

  Leithan walked to the garage and then drove back to Deakin’s cottage in the Rapier. On arrival in Ashford, he dropped Mrs. Deakin outside the Odeon, after which he continued on to Parade Street where he was surprised to find he could park within sight of Enty’s offices.

  The girl at the reception desk on the ground floor smiled and said she was certain Mr. Enty would have time to see him and would he mind waiting just for a few moments? He went into the waiting-room and half-heartedly looked through one or two of the ancient copies of Punch. Finally, he sat down and studied the estate agent’s advertisement of a forthcoming farm sale which was pasted up on the far wall.

  Phillimore Enty was his half cousin. Their common ancestor was a grandfather whose escapades with a chorus girl had been responsible for the terms of the trust fund Leithan’s father had drawn up. Leithan was never quite certain how this fact affected Enty and himself in terms of friendship. The difficulty of evaluating the answer was to try to decide how friendly they would have been had they not been related, and that was like telling a visitor he should have seen the roses the week before.

  The receptionist came and said that Mr. Enty was free. Leithan went up the winding staircase to the first landing and then along to the far room. Enty was waiting in the doorway. “Hallo, Charles, how’s the world treating you?” His voice was loud, almost booming.

  “Not too badly.”

  “Come in and give me all the latest. How’s Evadne? Or more important, I suppose, how is that herd of smelly dogs? Did you see the Schipperke on the telly the other evening? It tried to bite Dangerfield’s finger and that, I thought, was bloody funny.” Enty went round his desk and sat down in the swivel chair. He offered cigarettes. As always, he was dressed in a country check that was a trifle too flamboyant for the air of sober respectability most country solicitors deemed so essential.

  They spoke for a few moments about family matters, then Leithan said: “I want a word about the trust.”

  Enty sprawled back in his chair. “Nothing wrong, I trust? Excuse me, quite unintentional, I assure you.”

  Leithan stared at the pile of law books on the far end of the desk. “I want to break it, Phil.”

  Enty bl
ew out two smoke rings that chased each other across the room. “Yes?”

  “I must break it.”

  “That’s something of a tall order, Charles, as well you ought to know. Your father put the pistol to the heads of his solicitors and he saw to it that they gave him just what he wanted. The thing’s tied up tighter than a banker’s heart.”

  “It can’t be impossible. The law’s always got a dozen different faces.”

  Enty tipped back his chair until he could rest his knees on the edge of the desk. “You remember you asked me about this a couple of years back and I had a close look into it? We even got counsel’s opinion because you were so insistent.”

  “I know all that.”

  “Counsel said that even if the trust was an odd one, under the existing law there’d be no hope of breaking it. In fact, some of the more stuffy judges would positively exalt it as promoting the sanctity of marriage. The divorce courts of this country do two things superlatively well — they breed perjury and sanctimoniousness.”

  Leithan became impatient with the other’s apparent flippancy. “I haven’t said anything about breaking up my marriage.”

  “No.” Enty’s voice became deliberately neutral, as if he suddenly realised that this was a professional and not a friendly visit. “I’m afraid, Charles, that when our mutual grandfather left your grandmother and went off with mine, he was unknowingly tying a very tight knot about you. In some ways, your father was rather too much of a moralist.”

  “That came from remembering how much my grandmother suffered.”

  “In order to avoid a family row in our generation, I won’t argue on that one!” Enty’s attitude always half suggested that he, also, would have gone off with the chorus girl. “The harsh fact is, Charles, that your father not only disliked our side of the family sufficiently much always to refer to us as bastards — I usually carry my birth certificate around for proof to the contrary — he was also determined that you should never have the chance to frolic off with a chorus girl. Consequently, the money remains in trust for you and Evadne until the death of either of you when the capital goes to the survivor and his or her children. In the event of a divorce, the money vests absolutely in the innocent party.”