She said, “You can still find room for a plateful of fresh-baked scones, I reckon.”
“Emphatically.” More of a welcome than last time, I thought. Casually, I asked, “Where’s Bernard this morning?”
“Plowing. He’ll come by presently.”
I tried not to register panic at the prospect. Presently, I remembered, has infinite limits of meaning in the West Country. You learn as much from the speaker’s face as you do from the intonation. I’d never been much good at divining Mrs. Lockwood’s utterances.
So the three of us sat around the old-fashioned wooden table and ate hot scones with strawberry jam and drank tea from the brown pot simmering on the range while I told them what I’d done with my life since 1944. In a few, crisp sentences.
“And what brings you back?” Mrs. Lockwood asked.
“Duke Donovan’s daughter persuaded me to bring her here on Sunday. We met Bernard.”
“I heard.”
“Didn’t have the good fortune to see you, though, so I came back.”
George Lockwood now found his voice and used it ex-pressively, on a rising note of disbelief. “Donovan had a daughter?”
“Bernard told us,” Mrs. Lockwood reminded him quite sharply, adding, with a confidential smile in my direction, “Father’s not so quick on the uptake as he were.”
“Didn’t know he were married,” persisted George.
“George,” said Mrs. Lockwood in a hard-pressed, discouraging voice. Turning to me, she switched to a more generous note. “Theo, my dear, have some more butter on that. ‘Tisn’t the war now, you know.”
I took the butter dish and said, “Duke Donovan’s daughter, Alice, believes her father was innocent.”
“What do she know about it?” said George, not so tardy on the uptake as his wife alleged.
“She’s not the only one,” I said. “Do you remember Harry Ashenfelter, the other GI?”
Behind me, a new voice said, “What about Ashenfelter?” Bernard’s.
I don’t know how he’d managed to enter so quietly or how long he’d been there while his parents talked on, buttering their scones and registering nothing. It shook me, literally. I spilled tea on my trousers. I turned and looked into the twin barrels of the shotgun.
“Sit down, Bernard,” said his mother placidly. “It’s only Theo, come to see us.”
“For no good purpose,” said Bernard, inching the gun towards my eyes. “He’s coming with me.”
Mother and son faced each other across the room, mentally squaring up. Once, I’d have backed Mrs. Lockwood. Her small voice was misleading. She possessed a steely personality with the will to enforce it, as I’d discovered painfully during the war when I learned the secondary purpose of the mangle. In those days she’d been more than a match for Bernard, large as he was. He’d always backed off. Twenty years on, I wasn’t so confident. Bernard’s status had altered. He was the farmer now.
To his credit, George Lockwood sided with his wife and spoke up. “What’s got into ‘ee today?” he demanded of Bernard. “We don’t carry guns in this house.”
Bernard said in a low, level voice that conceded nothing, “If the bastard do what I say, there won’t be no shooting indoors.” He kicked my leg hard. “Get up!”
Mrs. Lockwood scraped back her chair and slapped her gnarled right hand on the table. “Bernard, this is no way to deal with it.”
“Mother,” said Bernard in the same tightly controlled voice, “you’d best not interfere.” This time he jabbed the muzzle of the gun hard against my throat. “Out.”
The neck is a vulnerable area. There isn’t much flesh to absorb such a thrust. The pain was intense, but the effect on my windpipe was worse. I hawked and gulped for breath. It was like drowning, gasping for air that couldn’t reach my lungs. As I rocked forward I felt one of Bernard’s hands across the breadth of my forehead, forcing it back and upward, compelling me to rise. He virtually picked me off the chair one-handedly and stood me up. I was propped against the table facing him, spluttering wretchedly.
From behind me, I heard Mrs. Lockwood repeat, more as a plea than a command, “Bernard, this isn’t the way,” and through my discomfort I concluded that this was the limit of her protest.
I was mistaken. She was out of her chair in the next second and round the table wrestling with him for the gun. He easily could have knocked her down, but he simply gripped the stock with one hand and the twin barrels with the other, and resisted.
They persevered with this unequal struggle for perhaps a quarter of a minute, until she gave up the attempt and settled instead for keeping a token handhold on the gun, shouting bitterly at her husband. “Can’t you do nothing but sit there?”
I suspect that George Lockwood knew his son was physically more than a match for them both. He didn’t stir from his seat at the table.
By now you’re thinking what about Theo Sinclair? What was he doing to support the old lady and help himself? But you’ve got to remember the situation I was in. The shotgun was still a matter of inches from my chest. There wasn’t anything I could usefully do except try to appease Bernard. I found sufficient breath to gasp, “All right, All go. I’m on the way out.”
Bernard commented, “Too bloody true.”
He’d given my words an ugly twist, turning them into a threat that I didn’t seriously believe. I’d never rated him as a likely killer. He was dangerous because the shotgun was a lethal weapon, but I doubted whether he was sufficiently passionate or stupid to kill a man willfully.
So I made an appeal to his better nature. Leaning heavily on my stick, that old friend in adversity, I picked my way pathetically towards the door.
As Bernard moved the gun to keep me covered, his mother tensed again and tried to drag it downwards. There was never a chance that she could deflect the aim long enough for me to escape, but as I shortly discovered, she was more concerned about Bernard than me. She blurted out a frenzied appeal to him. “I won’t let you. My son is not a killer. Thou shalt not kill. Killing is something else, Bernard.”
He said tersely, “You should know, Mother,” and in those four words told me what I’d come to find out.
I didn’t believe it.
Mrs. Lockwood stared at him blankly. She released her grip on the gun and took a step back. She raised one hand to her mouth and pressed it edgewise between her teeth, emitting a long, stifled moan. Then she seemed to shrink into herself, crumpling into a posture of despair.
Bernard had refrained from physical aggression towards her, but his words were relentless. “Blaspheming hypocrite. Quoting the Lord’s Commandments at me when the smell of death is still on you.”
She’d sunk into a chair. She looked up and said, “That isn’t true.”
“Isn’t true?” Bernard challenged her, eyes alight with the force of his recrimination. “Like yesterday?”
Mrs. Lockwood winced, as if he’d struck her. She tried to form a word and couldn’t.
He aped her voice cruelly. “ ‘Bernard, darling, would you drive me into Frome early? I made an appointment with the optician’ Optician be buggered! I watched you go into the off-license and come out of it with two bottles of spirit in the carrier bag. I saw you make off to the railway station and buy a ticket. Your appointment weren’t in Frome at all, and it weren’t with no optician. You took the train to Bath.” He half turned and said, “Father! Have you looked at the paper, seen what happened to Sally Ashenfelter yesterday?”
Old George Lockwood had emerged enough from his passive state to stare in horror at his wife.
Bernard continued inexorably to nail the charge. “Mother were always claiming to be sorry for Sally and her weakness for liquor. Forever meaning to visit her again for old time’s sake. Well, she finally did, with two bottles of vodka and a box of matches.”
Then George spoke up with surprising tenderness. “Molly, what have you done, my love? You promised no more killing. No more blood, you said.”