Read Online A Lovely Day to Die by Celia Fremlin - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Celia Fremlin
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walked the hundred yards or so to Sheila’s along the deserted street. The neat familiar little front gardens were familiar no longer, but seemed twice their daytime size under the grey, primeval light, and suddenly pregnant with dark, mysterious bushes.
And it was only now, listening to the slip-slop of my own footsteps along the silent pavement, that I began actually to think : to ask myself what the hell I thought I was doing? Until now, I’d been in that state of shock that you experience when you are confronted with the fact that something has happened which can’t have happened. Just simply can’t. But it has.
And I don’t mean the flying saucer. Naturally, as a rational man, I dismissed out of hand the possibility that there might actually be a flying saucer in Sheila’s garden. But that only left the mystery even more insoluble—more sinister, even, when youreally came to think about it. What on earth could have got into Sheila that she’d make a crazy call like that? And at this hour of the night, too; and to me of all people? What the hell did she think she was up to? Had she, at long last, actually gone mad?
The thought gave me a nasty little twinge of fear. Goodness knows, Sheila had complained often enough that her husband, Brian, was driving her round the bend; but lots of wives talk like that, as we all know. They seem positively to enjoy their status as most-miserable-wife-in-the-road, weeping on every available shoulder, and sitting at each other’s kitchen tables crying into cups of tea. It can give one quite a jolt to realise, suddenly, that all these tears and dramas may sometimes actually mean something.
By this time, I had reached Sheila’s house, and as I stood at the gate, hesitating, I became aware of something that was really rather strange. How come that all the windows of the house were in darkness? Surely a woman as scared as Sheila had claimed to be would have switched lights on everywhere for reassurance? And why wasn’t she already hurrying out to meet me—or at least calling to me from some upper window? Mad or sane, after that panicky phone call, she must surely have been watching anxiously for my arrival?
Or was the whole thing a trick? A deliberate, carefully thought-out trick for some purpose as yet undivulged? It would be false modesty on my part to pretend that it had not yet crossed my mind that Sheila Curtis might be in love with me. Mine was one of the shoulders she had not infrequently wept on when Brian was up to one or other of his various misdemeanours; and you know what women are. Might she not have cooked up this whole absurd flying saucer story simply and solely to lure me along to her place in the middle of the night, while her errant husband was away? To invite me in, and then, on the pretext of viewing the mysterious object from an upstairs back window, to get me into one of the bedrooms ..?
Okay; so she gets me there. But then what? How does she play the next scene—the scene where she has to explain laughingly—and hoping that I will laugh too—that the whole thing has beena hoax? No wonder she’s getting cold feet about it, and is in no great hurry to come down and face me.
But wait. Perhaps I’ve got it all wrong; perhaps I’m into the wrong scenario altogether. Maybe it’s the well-known game of “Emperor’s New Clothes” we are going to play. Maybe we are going to sidle hand in hand into her commonplace back garden, grey under the dying moon, where she clutches me in simulated terror:
“Look, look!” she is going to whisper hoarsely, pointing at random across the sodden oblong of suburban lawn. “You see?—that huge thing by the hedge—sort of greenish-grey where the moonlight catches it? Gosh, it must be twelve feet across at least, wouldn’t you say? And that great sort of dome on top! Wait a second—your eyes aren’t accustomed to the light yet. It’s the queerest light I’ve ever seen, a sort of unearthly glow! Oh, and look
And it was only now, listening to the slip-slop of my own footsteps along the silent pavement, that I began actually to think : to ask myself what the hell I thought I was doing? Until now, I’d been in that state of shock that you experience when you are confronted with the fact that something has happened which can’t have happened. Just simply can’t. But it has.
And I don’t mean the flying saucer. Naturally, as a rational man, I dismissed out of hand the possibility that there might actually be a flying saucer in Sheila’s garden. But that only left the mystery even more insoluble—more sinister, even, when youreally came to think about it. What on earth could have got into Sheila that she’d make a crazy call like that? And at this hour of the night, too; and to me of all people? What the hell did she think she was up to? Had she, at long last, actually gone mad?
The thought gave me a nasty little twinge of fear. Goodness knows, Sheila had complained often enough that her husband, Brian, was driving her round the bend; but lots of wives talk like that, as we all know. They seem positively to enjoy their status as most-miserable-wife-in-the-road, weeping on every available shoulder, and sitting at each other’s kitchen tables crying into cups of tea. It can give one quite a jolt to realise, suddenly, that all these tears and dramas may sometimes actually mean something.
By this time, I had reached Sheila’s house, and as I stood at the gate, hesitating, I became aware of something that was really rather strange. How come that all the windows of the house were in darkness? Surely a woman as scared as Sheila had claimed to be would have switched lights on everywhere for reassurance? And why wasn’t she already hurrying out to meet me—or at least calling to me from some upper window? Mad or sane, after that panicky phone call, she must surely have been watching anxiously for my arrival?
Or was the whole thing a trick? A deliberate, carefully thought-out trick for some purpose as yet undivulged? It would be false modesty on my part to pretend that it had not yet crossed my mind that Sheila Curtis might be in love with me. Mine was one of the shoulders she had not infrequently wept on when Brian was up to one or other of his various misdemeanours; and you know what women are. Might she not have cooked up this whole absurd flying saucer story simply and solely to lure me along to her place in the middle of the night, while her errant husband was away? To invite me in, and then, on the pretext of viewing the mysterious object from an upstairs back window, to get me into one of the bedrooms ..?
Okay; so she gets me there. But then what? How does she play the next scene—the scene where she has to explain laughingly—and hoping that I will laugh too—that the whole thing has beena hoax? No wonder she’s getting cold feet about it, and is in no great hurry to come down and face me.
But wait. Perhaps I’ve got it all wrong; perhaps I’m into the wrong scenario altogether. Maybe it’s the well-known game of “Emperor’s New Clothes” we are going to play. Maybe we are going to sidle hand in hand into her commonplace back garden, grey under the dying moon, where she clutches me in simulated terror:
“Look, look!” she is going to whisper hoarsely, pointing at random across the sodden oblong of suburban lawn. “You see?—that huge thing by the hedge—sort of greenish-grey where the moonlight catches it? Gosh, it must be twelve feet across at least, wouldn’t you say? And that great sort of dome on top! Wait a second—your eyes aren’t accustomed to the light yet. It’s the queerest light I’ve ever seen, a sort of unearthly glow! Oh, and look
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