“What’s this?” said Dr Dilke.
He picked up a scrap of paper that showed vivid on the dusty floor and handed it to me. It was a prescription. He took out his note-book and showed me the page where this fitted in.
“This page I tore out last night when I wrote that prescription in this room. The bed was just there, and there was the table on which were the papers and the glass of milk.”
“But you couldn’t have been here last night,” I protested feebly, “the locked doors – the whole thing! . . .”
Dr Dilke said nothing. After a while neither did I. “Let’s get out of the place,” I said. Then another thought struck me. “What is your prescription?” I asked.
He said: “A very uncommon kind of prescription, a very desperate sort of prescription, one that I’ve never written before, nor I hope shall again – an antidote for severe arsenical poisoning.”
“I leave you,” smiled Cuming, “to your various attitudes of incredulity or explanation.”
Christmas Honeymoon
Howard Spring
Location: Falmouth, Cornwall.
Time: Christmas Eve, 1938.
Eyewitness Description: “The remarkable thing about what happened to me and Ruth was simply that Nothing happened. If you have never come up against Nothing you have no idea how it can scare you out of your wits . . .”
Author: Howard Spring (1889–1965) was born in Cardiff, the son of a poor jobbing gardener, and had to leave school at the age of 12 when his father died. He alleviated his tough life as an office boy in the Cardiff docks by taking Evening Classes at the local university and achieved his dream of becoming a newspaper reporter. After learning his trade on several provincial newspapers, Spring landed a job on the London Evening Standard where his descriptive prose and astute literary reviews lead to him achieving an international success with one of his first novels My Son, My Son, which was filmed in 1940. That same year he wrote Fame is the Spur, about a labour leader’s rise to power, that established his reputation. During the years of the Second World War, he continued to demonstrate his understanding of contemporary human character in books such as Hard Facts (1944) and Dunkerley’s (1946). He and his wife settled in Falmouth where he produced three volumes of fascinating autobiography, half a dozen more novels and several short stories: a number of which evoked the supernatural in a completely new way. “Christmas Honeymoon”, which appeared in the 24 December 1940 issue of the Standard, is arguably the best of these and also believed to be based on personal experience.
We were married on 22 December, because we had met on the 21st. It was as sudden as that. I had come down from Manchester to London. Londoners like you to say that you come up to London; but we Manchester people don’t give a hoot what Londoners like. We know that we, and the likes of us, lay the eggs, and the Londoners merely scramble them. That gives us a sense of superiority.
Perhaps I have this sense unduly. Certainly I should never have imagined that I would marry a London girl. As a bachelor, I had survived thirty Manchester summers, and it seemed unlikely to me that, if I couldn’t find a girl to suit me in the north, I should find one in London.
I am an architect, and that doesn’t make me love London any the more. Every time I come down to the place I find it has eaten another chunk of its own beauty, so as to make more room for the fascias of multiple shops.
All this is just to show you that I didn’t come to London looking for a bride; and if I had been looking for a bride, the last place I would have investigated would be a cocktail party. But it was at a cocktail party in the Magnifico that I met Ruth Hutten.
I had never been to a cocktail party in my life before. We don’t go in much for that sort of thing in Manchester: scooping a lot of people together and getting rid of the whole bang shoot in one do. It seems to us ungracious. We like to have a few friends in, and give them a cut off the joint and something decent to drink, and talk in a civilised fashion while we’re at it. That’s what we understand by hospitality. But these cocktail parties are just a frantic St Vitus gesture by people who don’t want to be bothered.
I shouldn’t have been at this party at all if it hadn’t been for Claud Tunstall. It was about half-past six when I turned from the lunatic illumination of Piccadilly Circus, which is my idea of how hell is lit up, and started to walk down the Haymarket. I was wondering in an absent-minded sort of way how long the old red pillars of the Haymarket Theatre would be allowed to stand before some bright lad thought what fun it would be to tear them down, when Claud turned round from reading one of the yellow playbills, and there we were, grinning and shaking hands.
Claud had something to grin about, because the author’s name on the play-bill was his. It was his first play, and it looked as though it wouldn’t matter to Claud, so far as money went, if it were his last. The thing had been running for over a year; companies were touring it in the provinces and Colonies; and it was due to open in New York in the coming year. No wonder Claud was grinning; but I think a spot of the grin was really meant for me. He was the same old Claud who had attended the Manchester Grammar School with me and shared my knowledge of its smell of new exercise books and old suet pudding.
Claud was on his way to this party at the Magnifico, and he said I must come with him. That’s how these things are: there’s no sense in them; but there would have been no sense either in trying to withstand Claud Tunstall’s blue eyes and fair tumbling hair and general look of a sky over a cornfield.
That’s going some, for me, and perhaps the figure is a bit mixed, but I’m not one for figures at any time. Anyway, it explains why, five minutes later, I was gritting my teeth in the presence of great boobies looking like outsizes in 18th-century footmen, yelling names and looking down their noses.
We stood at the door of a room, and I was aware of the gold blurs of chandeliers, and a few dozen apparent football scrums, and a hot blast of talk coming out and smacking our faces, so I deduced this was the party all right. One of the boobies yelled: “Mr Claud Tunstall and Mr Edward Oldham,” and from what happened it might just as well have been “The Archangel Gabriel and one Worm”. Because, the moment we were over the threshold, all the scrums loosened up and girls descended on Claud like a cloud of bright, skitering, squawking parrakeets, flashing their red nails at him, unveiling their pearly portals in wide grins, and bearing him off towards a bar where a chap in white was working overtime among all the sweet accessories of Sin. I never saw him again.
Well, as I say, I might have been a worm, no use at all to parrakeets, but that lets in the sparrows. I was just turning slowly on my own axis, so to speak, in the space that was miraculously cleared round me, when I saw a girl looking at me with an appreciative gleam in her brown eye. She was the brownest girl I ever saw – eyes, skin, and hair – homely as a sparrow, and just as alert.
As our eyes met, there came fluting out of one of the scrums a high-pitched female voice: “No, Basil, I’m teetotal, but I can go quite a long way on pahshun fruit.”
The pronunciation of that pahshun was indescribable; it seemed the bogus essence of the whole damn silly occasion; and the brown girl and I, looking into one another’s eyes, twinkled, savouring together the supreme idiocy. Instinctively we moved towards one another, the twinkle widening to a smile, and I found myself getting dangerously full of similes again, for when she smiled the teeth in her brown face were like the milky kernel of a brown nut.