To Love and Perish. Ernest Dudley
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or twice offered to help him cope with the business side of his practice. He’d been up to the house and seen the shambles of his consulting-room, with its old-fashioned desk littered with unanswered correspondence, uncashed cheques mingled with bills and fisherman’s catalogues, and other miscellaneous odds and ends indicative of Dr. Griffiths’s preoccupation with fishing.
‘Got a spot more work to do,’ he said. ‘I brought some papers back from the office.’
‘You’re not overdoing it, darling?’ she said anxiously. ‘We don’t want you ill.’
‘Of course not, darling,’ he said. ‘I’m enjoying being so busy—’ He broke off and his pale blue eyes fixed themselves on her again. ‘Though come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind a bit of a holiday. I’ve been thinking,’ he went on, and her heart suddenly contracted; he was about to suggest he should go away for a holiday on his own.
‘Yes, darling?’ she said.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said again, ‘a week or two in the South of France wouldn’t do us any harm.’
‘Us?’
‘Why, of course,’ he said, ‘when you’re better. Let’s hop off for a second honeymoon.’
She smiled up at him gratefully.
He bent and kissed her and she exerted all her strength to raise weak, frail arms about his neck. After a few moments he held her as she lay back amongst the pillows, her breathing a little agitated with the exertion, while he stood staring down at her.
She didn’t open her eyes again until she heard him at the door so that his back was towards her, and as he went out of the room Ellen Merrill couldn’t see the expression on her husband’s face.
CHAPTER TWO
1.
The oncoming headlights came up the hill above Castlebay, and as they swung round the corner they held the white Jaguar parked on the side of the road, so that for a moment two faces glimmered white, close together under the drophead. Then the headlights swept over the Jag and tunnelled their way again through the blackness of overhanging trees, up towards Penybryn, where the river twists down towards the estuary.
‘That was Dr. Griffiths’ car,’ Dick Merrill said. He drew his mouth away from hers, his teeth glistening in the Jag’s claustrophobic darkness.
She made no comment. She said she would like a cigarette, and he lit one for her. He lit one for himself, and she let her head fall against his shoulder, while he cupped his hand round her breast.
He heard the rumble of thunder somewhere in the distance, and felt her start as a flicker of lightning sped across the dark sky. He turned and she pressed herself to him, while his other hand moved along her thigh. He caught the mutter of thunder again. This time it sounded nearer, so that he drew his head away to listen to its dying echoes.
‘What’s the matter?’
He told her it sounded like a storm blowing up.
‘I didn’t notice,’ she said, her voice mocking him, and she pulled his face down to hers again.
He was thinking the evening had been oppressive and he had felt a slight headache coming on, the way his head did ache sometimes when there was thunder about; at least it did lately, the past few months. Then he thought he heard the splash of rain on the hood, and she said, her mouth against his, so that he could feel her teeth smooth and the edges sharp: ‘You’re not concentrating.’
‘I think it’s going to rain.’ He didn’t take his mouth away.
She used the four-letter word she often used, and which always shocked him a little, and drew back from him. She gave him the stub of her cigarette which she had been holding and he threw it into the road, and it arched through the darkness and fell on the bank, a few feet above which the woods ran up the hillside.
From the corner of his eye he knew she was watching him as he took a drag from his own cigarette stub. He exhaled slowly so that the smoke clung on the close air about them, then he aimed his stub into the road.
‘What’s wrong?’ he said.
‘You, darling,’ she said, ‘worrying about the rain when you’ve got your hand up my skirt.’
He turned to her quickly, staring into the eyes which blinked up at him; he could feel his heart racing as he watched the soft moistness of her mouth and the planes of her face dusky white in the glimmer from the dashlights.
‘You didn’t hear it that time,’ she said. He looked at her questioningly. ‘The thunder,’ she said.
‘I was thinking of something else.’
She kissed him and clung to him, forcing her body against his. She had on only a thin sweater and tight skirt, which was pushed up to her thighs as she held him, her fingers digging into his back; his sports-jacket was open and her hands reached under it beneath his shoulder blades.
‘Now…now…,’ she was saying; and it was always this way with her, this devouring urgency. He paused for a moment, while she hung on to him and he reached into the car and took the ignition key out of the dash.
She was smiling at him, her eyes brilliant; and he heard the thunder now, and almost immediately afterwards the trees and the road sprang into blue flickering light. ‘You think of everything, don’t you, darling?’ she said.
He saw that her face was a ghastly pallor in the lightning flash, but her eyes were closed against the sudden brilliance. She did not see the expression on his face as he caught what she said. Then his face was in darkness, and he was thrusting the ignition key into his pocket and helping her up the bank, stumbling into the blackness of the trees, until they reached the patch of grass and they knelt down, locked in each other’s arms, and there they lay together.
The rain fell out of a starlit sky on to the two shadows. She smiled up at him deliberately, her face wet.
‘We’ll get soaked, darling,’ he said.
‘Don’t stop…’
2.
Philip Vane and Dr. Griffiths left the Ford by the side of the road; there was no moon but the stars were brilliant, low in the sky. The thunderstorm had been short and sharp and they had sat it out in the car.
Cautiously they got to the side of the pool. Their eyes had grown used to the darkness so that they hardly needed their electric torches to show them the way through the bushes and over the rocks.
‘Some say they can catch fish before a thunderstorm.’ Dr. Griffiths was keeping his voice down. ‘Some say they do best during a storm; some, after a storm.’
He said that anyway the rain would cause the water to become reoxygenated, and the flies to be beaten down on the surface. And, he said that thundery weather does not appear to affect the rise of the fly, as there is often a big rise of fly when thunder is about; the electric discharge apparently eases the pressure which causes the nymphs, waiting to hatch out, to rise to the surface.
The silence in the darkness was broken only by the sound of the running river as they scrambled down through the trees and hedges towards the open pool where the boss-trout lay.
Philip Vane had spent a holiday at Castlebay in 1950. He had been getting over a car smash which had killed the girl who had been with him. He had been in love with the girl. It was Dr. Griffiths who had helped him cope with his insomnia. They had become friendly, and most evenings he had spent with Dr. Griffiths at the river up above the town. Vane had been prevented from going back to Castlebay next year because he had been serving a prison sentence.
Now, it was the beginning of July, 1956, Vane had been out since May and he had come to Castlebay again. Dr. Griffiths had been glad to see him, it was as if nothing had happened in the meantime.
‘Listen,’ Dr. Griffiths was saying, under his breath. Vane heard the soft splash that immediately followed.