Murder at Cobbler's Hulk

It takes about an hour of driving southward out of Dublin to arrive at the small seaside village of Greystones. (For two months in the summer, it calls itself a resort.) Every day, four commuter trains from the city stop here and turn back, as if dismayed by the sight of the desolate beach of shingle that stretches beyond it for 12 unbroken miles. A single line, rarely used, continues the railway beside this beach, so close to the sea that in bad winters the waves pound in across the track, sometimes blocking it for days on end with heaps of gravel, uprooted sleepers, warped rails. When this happens, the repair gangs have a dreary time of it. No shelter from the wind and spray. Nothing to be seen inland but reedy fields, an occasional farmhouse or abandoned manor, a few leafless trees decaying in the arid soil or fallen sideways. And, always, endless fleets of clouds sailing away toward the zinc-blue horizon.

Once there were three more tiny railway stations along these 12 miles of beach, each approached by a long lane leading from the inland carriage road to the sea. The best preserved of what remains of them is called Cobbler's Hulk. From a distance, one might still mistake it for a real station. Close up, one finds only a boarded waiting room whose tin roof lifts and squeaks in the wind, a lofty signal cabin with every window broken and a still loftier telephone pole whose ten crossbars must once have carried at least 20 lines and now bear only one humming wire. There is a rotting, backless bench. You could scythe the grass on the platform. The liveliest thing here is an advertisement on enameled sheet metal, high up on the brick wall of the signal cabin. It shows the single white word Stephen's splashed across a crazy blob of black ink. Look where one will, there is not a farmhouse nor cottage within sight.

It was down here that I first met Mr. Bodkin one Sunday afternoon last July. He was sitting straight up on the bench, bowler-hatted, clad, in spite of the warmth of the day, in a well-brushed blue chesterfield with concealed buttons and a neatly tailored velvet half collar that was the height of fashion in the Twenties. His gray spats were as tight as gloves across his insteps. He was a smallish man. His stiff shirt collar was as high as the Duke of Wellington's, his bow tie was polka-dotted, his white mustaches were brushed up like a Junker's. He could have been 73. His cheeks were as pink as a baby's bottom. His palms lay crossed on the handle of a rolled umbrella, he had a neatly folded newspaper under his arm, his patent-leather shoe tips gleamed like his pincenez. Normally, I would have given him a polite "Good day to you" and passed on, wondering. Coming on him suddenly around the corner of the waiting room, his head lowered toward his left shoulder as if he were listening for an approaching train, I was so taken by surprise that I said, "Are you waiting for a train?"

"Good gracious!" he said, in equal surprise. "A train has not stopped here since the Bronze Age. Didn't you know?"

I gazed at his shining toes, remembering that when I had halted my Morris Minor beside the level-crossing gates at the end of the lane, there had been no other car parked there. Had he walked here? That brambled lane was a mile long. He peeked at the billycan in my hand, guessed that I was proposing to brew myself a cup of tea after my solitary swim, chirruped in imitation of a parrot, "Any water?," rose and, in the comic-basso voice of a weary museum guide, said, "This way, please." I let him lead me along the platform, past the old brass faucet that I had used on my few previous visits to Cobbler's Hulk, toward a black-tarred railway carriage hidden below the marshy side of the track. He pointed the ferrule of his umbrella.

"My chalet," he said smugly. "My wagon-lit."

We descended from the platform by three wooden steps, rounded a microscopic gravel path, and he unlocked the door of his carriage. It was still faintly marked First Class, but it also bore a crusted brass plate whose shining rilievo announced The Villa Rose. He bowed me inward, invited me to take a pew (his word for an upholstered carriage seat), filled my billycan from a white enameled bucket ("Pure spring water!") and, to expedite matters further, insisted on boiling it for me on his Primus stove. As we waited, he sat opposite me. We both looked out the window at the marshes. I heard a Guard's whistle and felt our carriage jolt away to nowhere. We introduced ourselves.

"I trust you find my beach a pleasant spot for a picnic?" he said, as if he owned the entire Irish Sea.

I told him that I had come here about six times over the past 30 years.

"I came here three years ago. When I retired."

I asked about his three winters. His fingers dismissed them. "Our glorious summers amply recompense." At which exact moment I heard sea birds dancing on the roof and Mr. Bodkin became distressed. His summer and his beach were misbehaving. He declared that the shower would soon pass. I must have my cup of afternoon tea with him, right there. "In first-class comfort." I demurred; he insisted. I protested gratefully; he persisted tetchily. I let him have his way, and that was how I formed Mr. Bodkin's acquaintance.

It never became any more. I saw him only once again, for five minutes, six weeks later. But, helped by a hint or two from elsewhere--the man who kept the roadside shop at the end of the lane, a gossipy barmaid in the nearest hamlet--it was enough to let me infer, guess at, induce his life. Its fascination was that he had never had any. By comparison, his beach and its slight sand dunes beside the railway track were crowded with incident, as he presently demonstrated by producing the big album of pressed flowers that he had been collecting over the past three years. His little ear finger stirred them gently on their white pages: milfoil, yarrow, thrift, sea daisies, clover, shepherd's-needle, shepherd's-purse, yellow bedstraw, stone bedstraw, great bed-straw, Our-Lady's-bedstraw, minute sand roses, different types of lousewort. In the pauses between their naming, the leaves were turned as quietly as the wavelets on the beach.

One December day in 1912, when he was 15, Mr. Bodkin told me, he had entered his lifelong profession by becoming the messenger boy in Tyrrell's Travel Agency, located at 15 Grafton Street, Dublin. He went into Dublin every morning on the Howth tram, halting it outside the small pink house called The Villa Rose, where he lived with his mother, his father, his two young sisters and his two aunts. . . .

The Villa Rose! He made a deprecatory gesture--it had been his mother's idea. The plays and novels of Mr. A. E. Mason were popular around 1910. He wrinkled his rosy nose. It was not even what you could call a real house. Just two fishermen's cottages joined front to back, with a dip, or valley, between their adjoining roofs. But what a situation! On fine days, he could see, across the high tide of the bay, gulls blowing about like paper, clouds reflected in the still water, an occasional funnel moving slowly in or out of the city behind the long line of the North Wall; and away beyond it, all the silent drums of the Wicklow Mountains. Except on damp days, of course. The windows of The Villa Rose were always sea-dimmed on damp days. His mother suffered from chronic arthritis. His father's chest was always wheezing. His sisters' noses were always running. His aunts spent half their days in bed.

"I have never in my life had a day's illness! Apart from chilblains. I expect to live to be ninety."

The great thing, it appeared, about Tyrrell's Travel Agency was that you always knew where you were. The Tyrrell system was of the simplest: Everybody was addressed according to his rank. (Mr. Bodkin did not seem to realize that this system was, in his boyhood as in mine, universal in every corner of the British Empire.) Whenever old Mr. Bob wanted him, he shouted "Tommy!" at the top of his voice. After shouting at him like that for about five years, Mr. Bob suddenly put him behind the counter, addressed him politely as "Bodkin" and shouted at him no longer. Five years passed and, again without any preliminaries, Mr. Bob presented him with a desk of his own in a corner of the office and addressed him as "Mr. Bodkin." At which everybody in the place smiled, nodded or winked his congratulations. He had arrived at the top of his genealogical tree. He might fall from it. He would never float beyond it. Very satisfactory. One has to have one's station in life. Yes?

The summer shower stopped, but not Mr. Bodkin. (In the past three years, I wondered if he had had a single visitor to talk to.) There were, I must understand, certain seeming contradictions in the system. An eager ear and a bit of experience soon solved them all. For example, there was the case of old Clancy, the ex-Enniskillener Dragoon, who opened the office in the morning and polished the Egyptian floor tiles. Anybody who wanted him always shouted, "Jimmy!" Clear as daylight. But whenever old Lady Kilfeather came sweeping into the agency from her gray Jaguar, (continued on page 189)Cobbler's Hulk(continued from page 74) ruffling scent, chiffon, feather boas and Protestant tracts, she clancied the whole bang lot of them.

"Morning, Tyrrell! Hello, Bodkin! I hope Murphy has that nice little jaunt to Cannes all sewn up for myself and Kilfeather? Clancy, kindly read this leaflet on Mariolatry and do, for heaven's sake, stop saying 'Mother of God!' every time you see me!"

The aristocratic privilege. The stars to their stations; the planets in their stately cycles about the sun; until the lower orders bitch it all up. Meaning old Mrs. Clancy, swaying into the office like an inebriated camel, to beg a few bob from Clancy for what she genteelly called her shopping. Never once had that woman, as she might reasonably have done, asked for "Jim." Never for "Mr. Clancy." Never even for "my husband." Always for "Clancy." Mr. Bodkin confessed that he sometimes felt so infuriated with her that he would have to slip around the corner to the Three Feathers, to calm his gut with a Guinness and be reassured by the barman's "The usual, Mr. B.?" Not that he had ever been entirely happy about that same B. He always countered it with a stiff, "Thank you, Mr. Buckley."

It was the only pub he ever visited. And never for more than one glass of plain. Occasionally, he used to go to the theater. But only for Shakespeare. Or Gilbert and Sullivan. Only for the classics. Opera? Never! For a time, he had been amused by Shaw. But he soon discarded him as a typical Dublin jackeen mocking his betters. Every Sunday, he went to church to pray for the king. He was 19 when the Rebellion broke out. He refused to believe in it. Or that the dreadful shootings and killings of the subsequent Troubles could possibly produce any change. And did they? Not a damned thing! Oh, some client might give his name in the so-called Irish language. Mr. Bodkin simply wrote down, "Mr. Irish." Queenstown became Cobh. What nonsense! Kingstown became Dun Laoghaire. Pfoo! Pillar boxes were painted green. The police were called Guards. The army's khaki was dyed green. All the whole damned thing boiled down to was that a bit of the House of Commons was moved from London to Dublin.

Until the Second World War broke out. Travel stopped dead. The young fellows in the office joined the army. He remembered how old Mr. Bob--they ran the office between them--kept wondering for weeks how the Serbians would behave this time. And what on earth had happened to those gallant little Montenegrins? When the Germans invaded Russia, Mr. Bob said that the czar would soon put a stop to that nonsense. Mind you, they had to keep on their toes after 1945. He would never forget the first time a client said he wanted to visit Yugoslavia. He took off his glasses, wiped them carefully, and produced a map. And, by heavens, there it was!

There had been other changes. His mother had died when he was 43. His two aunts went when he was in his 50s. To his astonishment, both his sisters married. His father was the last to go, at the age of 81. He went on living, alone, in The Villa Rose, daily mistering thousands of eager travelers around Europe by luxury liners, crowded packet boats, Blue Trains, Orient Expresses, Settlebellos, Rheingolds, alphabetical-mathematical planes. He had cars waiting for some, arranged hotels for others, confided to a chosen few the best places (according to "my old friend Lady Kilfeather") to dine, drink and dance, and he never went anywhere himself.

"You mean you never wanted to travel?"

"At first, yes. When I could not afford it. Later, I was saving up for my retirement. Besides, in my last ten years there, the whole business began to bore me."

He paused, frowned and corrected himself. It had not "begun" to bore. His interest in it had died suddenly. It happened one morning when he was turning back into the office after conducting Lady Kilfeather out to her gray Jaguar. Observing him, young Mr. James had beckoned him into his sanctum.

"A word in your ivory ear, Mr. Bodkin? I notice that you have been bestowing quite an amount of attention on Lady Kilfeather."

"Yes, indeed, Mr. James! And I may say that she has just told me that she is most pleased with us."

"As she might well be! Considering that it takes six letters and eight months to get a penny out of the old bitch. That woman, Mr. Bodkin, is known all over Dublin as a first-class scrounger, time waster and bloodsucker. I would be obliged if you would in future bear in mind three rather harsh facts of life that my aged parent seems never to have explained to you. Time is money. Your time is my money. And no client's money is worth more to me than any other client's money. Take it to heart, Mr. Bodkin. Thank you. That will be all for now."

Mr. Bodkin took it to heart so well that from that morning on, all those eager travelers came to mean no more to him than a trainload of tourists to a railway porter after he has banged the last door and turned away through the steam of the departing engine for a quick smoke before the next bunch arrived.

Still, duty was duty. And he had his plans. He hung on until he was 65 and then he resigned. Mr. James, with, I could imagine, an immense sense of relief, handed him a bonus of £50--a quid for every year of his service, but no pension--shook his hand and told him to go off to Cannes and live there in sin for a week with a cabaret dancer. Mr. Bodkin said that for years he had been dreaming of doing exactly that with Mrs. Clancy, accepted the 50 quid, said a warm goodbye to everybody in the office, sold The Villa Rose and bought the tarred railway carriage at Cobbler's Hulk. He had had his eye on it for the past five years.

The night he arrived at Cobbler's Hulk, it was dry and cold. He was sweating from lugging two suitcases down the dark lane. The rest of his worldly belongings stood waiting for him in a packing case on the grass-grown platform. For an hour, he sat in his carriage by candlelight, in his blue chesterfield, supping blissfully on the wavelets scraping the shingle every 20 seconds and on certain mysterious noises from the wildlife on the marshes. A snipe? A grebe? A masked badger?

He rose at last, made himself another supper of fried salty bacon and two fried eggs, unwrapped his country bread and butter and boiled himself a brew of tea so strong that his spoon could almost have stood up in it. When he had washed his ware and made his bed, he went out onto his platform to find the sky riveted with stars. Far out to sea, the lights of a fishing smack. Beyond them, he thought he detected a faint blink. Not, surely, a lighthouse on the Welsh coast? Then, up the line, he heard the hum of the approaching train. Two such trains, he had foreknown, would roar past Cobbler's Hulk every 24 hours. Its head lamps grew larger and brighter and then, with a roar, its carriage windows went flickering past him. He could see only half a dozen passengers in it. When it died away down the line, he addressed the stars.

" 'O Spirits, merciful and good! I know that our inheritance is held in store for us by Time. I know there is a sea of Time to rise one day, before which all who wrong us or oppress us will be swept away like leaves. I see it, on the flow! I know that we must trust and hope, and neither doubt ourselves nor doubt the good in one another. . . . O Spirits, merciful and good, I am grateful!' "

"That's rather fine. Where did you get that?"

"Dickens. The Chimes. I say that prayer every night after supper and a last stroll up the lane."

"Say it for me again."

As he repeated those splendid radical words, he looked about as wild as a grasshopper. "Thinner than Tithonus before he faded into air."

Had he really felt oppressed? Or wronged? Could it be that, during his three years of solitude, he had been thinking that this world would be a much nicer place if people did not go around shouting at one another or declaring to other people that time is money? Or wondering why Mother should have had to suffer shame and pain for years, while dreadful old women like Kilfeather went on scrounging, wheedling, bloodsucking, eating and drinking their way around this traveled world of which all he had ever seen was that dubious wink across the night sea? He may have meant that in his youth, he had dreamed of marriage. He may have meant nothing at all.

He leaned forward.

"Are you sure you won't have another cup of tea? Now that I can have afternoon tea any day I like, I can make a ridiculous confession to you. For fifty years, I used to see Mr. Bob or Mr. James walk across Grafton Street every day at four-thirty precisely to have afternoon tea in Mitchell's Café. And I cannot tell you how bitterly I used to envy them. Wasn't that silly of me?"

"But, surely, one of the girls on the staff could have brewed you all a cup of tea in the office?"

He stared at me.

"But that's not the same thing as afternoon tea in Mitchell's! White tablecloths? Carpets? Silverware? Waitresses in blue and white?"

We looked at each other silently. I looked at my watch and said that I must get going.

He laughed happily.

"The day I came here, do you know what I did with my watch? I pawned it for the sum of two pounds. I have never retrieved it. And I never will. I live by the sun and the stars."

"You are never lonely?"

"I am used to living alone."

"You sleep well?"

"Like a dog. And dream like one. Mostly of the old Villa Rose. And my poor, dear momma. How could I be lonely? I have my beautiful memories, my happy dreams and my good friends."

"I envy you profoundly," I said.

On which pleasant little coda we parted. But is it possible never to be lonely? Do beautiful memories encourage us to withdraw from the world? Not even youth can live on dreams.

He had, however, one friend.

• • •

One Saturday evening in September, on returning from the wayside shop on the carriage road, he was arrested by a freshly painted sign on a gate about 200 yards from the railway track. It said Fresh Eggs for Sale. He knew that there was not a house nor a human being in sight. Who on earth would want to walk a mile down this tunneled lane to buy eggs? Behind the wooden gate, there was a grassy track, leading, he now presumed, to some distant cottage invisible from the lane. He entered the field and was surprised to see, behind the high hedge, an open shed sheltering a red van bearing, in large white letters:

Flannery's Heavenly Bread.

After a winding quarter of a mile, he came on a small, sunken, freshly white-washed cottage and knocked. The door was opened by a woman of about 35 or 40, midway between plain and good-looking, red-cheeked, buxom, blue-eyed, eagerly welcoming. She spoke with a slight English accent that at once reminded him of his mother's voice. Yes! She had lovely fresh eggs. How many did he want? A dozen? With pleasure! Behind her, a dark, handsome, heavily built man, of about the same age, rose from his chair beside the open turf fire of the kitchen and silently offered him a seat while "Mary" was getting the eggs.

Mr. Bodkin expected to stay three minutes. He stayed an hour. They were the Condors: Mary, her brother Colm--the dark, silent man--and their bedridden mother lying in the room off the kitchen, her door always open, so that she could not only converse through it but hear all the comforting little noises and movements of her familiar kitchen. Their father, a herdsman, had died three months before. Mary had come back from service in London to look after her mother, and poor Colm (her adjective) had come home with her to support them both. He had just got a job as a roundsman for a bakery in Wicklow, driving all day around the countryside in the red van.

Mr. Bodkin felt so much at ease with Mary Condor that he was soon calling on her every evening after supper, to sit by the old woman's bed, to gossip or to read her the day's news from his Irish Times or to give her a quiet game of draughts. That Christmas Day, on Mary's insistence, he joined them for supper. He brought a box of chocolates for Mary and her mother, 100 cigarettes for Colm and a bottle of grocer's sherry for them all. He recited one of his favorite party pieces from Dickens. Colm so far unbent as to tell him about the bitter Christmas he had spent in Italy with the Eighth Army near a place called Castel di Sangro. Mary talked with big eyes of the awful traffic of London. The old woman, made tipsy by the sherry, shouted from her room about the wicked sea crossing her husband had made during "the other war," in December of 1915, with a herd of cattle for the port of Liverpool.

"All traveled people!" Mr. Bodkin laughed, and was delighted when Mary said that, thanks be to God, their traveling days were done.

As he walked away from their farewells, the channel of light from their open door showed that the grass was laced with snow. It clung to the edges of his carriage windows as he lay in bed. It gagged the wavelets. He could imagine it falling and melting into the sea. As he clutched the blue hot-water bottle that Mary had given him for a Christmas present, he realized that she was the only woman friend he had made in his whole life. He felt so choked with gratitude that he fell asleep without thanking his spirits, the merciful and the good, for their latest gift.

What follows is four fifths inference and one fifth imagination: both, as the event showed, essentially true.

• • •

On the Monday of the last week in July, on returning from the roadside shop with a net bag containing The Irish Times, tea, onions and a bar of yellow soap, Mr. Bodkin was startled to see a white Jaguar parked beside the level crossing. It was what they would have called in the travel agency a posh car. It bore three plaques, a GB, a CD and a blue-and-white silver RAC. Great Britain. Corps Diplomatique. Royal Automobile Club. He walked onto his platform to scan the beach for its owner. He found her seated on his bench, in a miniskirt, knees crossed, wearing a loose suede jacket, smoking a cigarette from a long ivory holder, glaring at the gray sea, tiny, blonde (or was she bleached?), exquisitely made up, still handsome. Her tide on the turn. Say, 50? He approached her as guardedly as if she were a rabbit. A woven gold bangle hung heavily from the corrugated white glove on her wrist. Or was it her bare wrist? Say, 55? Her cigarette was scented.

"Fog coming up," he murmured politely when he came abreast of her and gave her his little bobbing bow. "I do hope you are not waiting for a train."

She slowly raised her tinted eyelids.

"I was waiting for you, Mr. Bodkin," she smiled. (One of the sharp ones?)

Her teeth were the tiniest and whitest he had ever seen. She could have worn them around her neck. Last month, he saw a field mouse with teeth as tiny as hers, bared in death.

"Won't you sit down? I know all about you from Molly Condor."

"What a splendid woman she is!" he said and warily sat beside her, placing his net bag on the bench beside her scarlet beach bag. He touched it. "You have been swimming?"

"I swim," she laughed, "like a stone. While I waited for you, I was sun-bathing." She smiled for him. "In the nude."

Hastily, he said, "Your car is corps diplomatique!"

"It is my husband's car. Sir Hilary Dobson. I stole it!" She gurgled what ruder chaps in the agency used to call the Gorgon Gurgle. "You mustn't take me seriously, Mr. Bodkin. I'm Scottish. Hilary says I am fey. He is in the F. O. He's gone off on some hush-hush business to Athens for a fortnight, so I borrowed the Jag. Now, if it had been Turkey! But perhaps you don't like Turkey, either? Or do you? Athens is such a crumby dump, don't you agree?"

"I have never traveled, Lady Dobson."

"But Molly says you once owned a travel agency!"

"She exaggerates my abilities. I was a humble clerk."

"Eoh?" Her tone changed, her voice became brisk. "Look, Bodkin, I wanted to ask you something very important. How well do you know Molly Condor?"

He increased his politeness.

"I have had the great pleasure of knowing Miss Mary Condor since last September."

"I have known her since she was twenty-two. I trained her. She was in my service for twelve years. But I have never looked at Molly as just a lady's maid. Molly is my best friend in the whole world. She is a great loss to me. Of course, as we grow older, the fewer, and the more precious, our friends become."

He considered the name, Molly. He felt it was patronizing. He had never lost a friend--never, before Mary, having had one to lose. He said as much.

"Too bad! Well! I want Molly to come back to us. My nerves have not been the same since she left."

He looked silently out to sea. He was aware that she was slowly turning her head to look at him. Like a field mouse? He felt a creeping sensation of fear. Her nerves seemed all right to him. He watched her eject her cigarette, produce another from a silver case, insert it, light it smartly with a gold lighter and blow out a narrow jet of smoke.

"And then there is her brother. Condor was our chauffeur for five years. It would be simply wonderful if they both came back to us! I know poor old Hilary is as lost without his Condor as I am without my Molly. It would be a great act of kindness if you could say a word in our favor in that quarter. Hilary would appreciate it no end. Oh, I know, of course, about the mother. But that old girl can't need the two of them, can she? Besides, when I saw her this morning, I had the feeling she won't last long. Arthritis? And bronchitis? And this climate? I had an old aunt just like her in Bexhill-on-Sea. One day, she was in splendid health. The next day, her tubes were wheezing like bagpipes. For six months, I watched her, fading like a sunset. In the seventh month. . . ."

As she wheedled on and on, her voice reminded him of a spoon inside a saucepan. He listened to her coldly, with his eyes, rather than his ears, as for so many years he used to listen to old ladies who did not know where exactly they wanted to go nor what they wanted to do, alert only to their shifting lids, their mousy fingers, their bewildered shoulders, their jerking lips. Crepe on her neck. French cigarettes. Sun-bathing nude. Bodkin. Condor. Molly. "Poor old Hilary." What did this old girl really want? Coming all this way for a lady's maid? My foot!

"And, you know. Bodkin, Molly has a great regard for you. She thinks you are the most marvelous thing she ever met. I can see why." She laid her hand on his sleeve. "You have a kind heart. You will help me, if you can, won't you?" She jumped up. "That is all J wanted to say. Now you must show me your wonderful wagon-lit. Molly says it is absolutely fab."

"I shall be delighted, Lady Dobson," he said and, unwillingly, led her to it.

When she saw the brass plate of The Villa Rose, she guffawed and hastened to admire everything else. Her eyes trotted all over his possessions like two hunting mice. She gushed over his "clever little arrangements." She lifted pot-lids, felt the springiness of the bed, penetrated to his water closet, which she flushed, greatly to his annoyance because he never used it except when the marshes were very wet or very cold, and then he had to refill the cistern with a bucket every time he flushed it.

"I find it all most amusing, Bodkin," she assured him as she powdered her face before his shaving mirror. "If you were a young man, it would make a wonderful weekend love nest, wouldn't it? I must fly. It's nearly lunchtime. And you want to make whatever it is you propose to make with your soap, tea and onions. Won't you see me to my car? And do say a word for me to Molly! If you ever want to find me, I'm staying in the little old hotel down the road. For a week." She laughed naughtily. "Laying siege! Do drop in there any afternoon at six o'clock for an aperitif," and she showed half her white thigh as she looped into her car, started the engine, meshed the gears, beamed at him with all her teeth, cried, "A bientôt, Bodkin," and shot recklessly up the lane, defoliating the hedges into a wake of leaves like a speedboat.

Watching her cloud of dust, he remembered something. A chap in the office showing him a postcard of Mona. Lisa. "Ever seen her before? Not half! And never one of them under fifty-five!" Indeed! And indeed! "I am afraid, Lady Dobson, we must make up our minds. A cool fortnight in Brittany? Or five lovely hot days in Monte Carlo? Of course, you might win a pot of money in Monte Carlo. . . ." How greedily their alligator eyelids used to blink at that one! He returned slowly to his wagon-lit, slammed down the windows to let out the smell of her cigarette, washed the dust of yellow powder from his washbasin, refilled his cistern and sat for an hour on the edge of his bed, pondering. By nightfall, he was so bewildered that he had to call on Mary.

She was alone. The old lady was asleep in her room. They sat on either side of the kitchen table, whispering about the hens, the up train that had been three minutes late, the down train last night that was right on the dot, the fog that morning, both of them at their usual friendly ease until he spoke about his visitor. When he finished, she glanced at the open door of the bedroom.

"I must say, she was always very generous to me. Sir Hilary was very kind. He went hard on me to stay. He said, 'You are good for her.' She had her moods and tenses. I felt awfully sorry for him. He spoiled her."

"Well, of course, Mary, those titled people," Mr. Bodkin fished cunningly and was filled with admiration for her when she refused to bite.

All she said was, "Sir Hilary was a real gentleman."

"They are married a long time?"

"Fifteen years. She is his second wife. She nursed his first wife. But I had to come back, Mr. Bodkin!"

"You did quite right. And your brother did the right thing, too. I mean, two women in a remote cottage. Your brother is never lonely?"

She covered her face with her hands and he knew that she was crying into them.

"He is dying of the lonesome."

From the room, the old woman suddenly hammered the floor with her stick.

"Is he back?" she called out fretfully.

Mary went to the bedroom door and leaned against the jamb. It was like listening to a telephone call.

"It's Mr. Bodkin. . . . He went up to the shop for cigarettes.... I suppose he forgot them. . . . About an hour ago. . . . He may be gone for a stroll. It's such a fine night. . . . Och, he must be sick of that old van. . . ." She turned her head. "Was the van in the shed, Mr. Bodkin?" He shook his head. "He took the van. . . . For God's sake, Mother, stop worrying and go to sleep. He maybe took the notion to drive over to Ashford for a drink and a chat. It's dull for him here. . . . I'll give you a game of draughts."

Mr. Bodkin left her.

A nurse? It was dark in the lane, but above the tunnel of the hedges, there was still a flavor of salvaged daylight. He started to walk toward the road, hoping to meet Condor on his way back. The air was heavy with heliotrope and meadowsweet. A rustle in the ditch beside him. Far away, a horse whinnied. He must be turned 40 by now. Behind him, Africa, Italy, London. Before him, nothing but the roads and fields of his boyhood. Every night, that solitary cottage. The swell of the night express made him look back until its last lights had flickered past the end of the lane and its humming died down the line.

But I have lived. An old man, now, twice a child.

By the last of the afterlight above the trees of the carriage road, he saw the red nose of the van protruding from the half-moon entrance to the abandoned manor house. He walked to it, peered into its empty cabin, heard a pigeon throating from a clump of trees behind the chained gates. He walked past it to the shop. It was closed and dark. He guessed at a lighted window at the rear of it, shining out over the stumps of decapitated cabbages. Condor was probably in there, gossiping. He was about to turn back when he saw, about 100 yards farther on, the red taillights of a parked car. Any other night, he might have given it no more than an incurious glance. The darkness, the silence, the turmoil of his thoughts finally drew him warily toward it along the grassy verge. Within 15 yards of it, he recognized the white Jaguar, saw the rear door open, the inner light fall on the two figures clambering out of it. Standing on the road, they embraced in a seething kiss. When he released her, she got into the driver's seat, the two doors banged and everything was silent and dark again. She started her engine, floodlit the road and drove swiftly away around the curve. Crushed back into the hedge, he heard Condor's footsteps approach, pass and recede. In a few moments, the van's door banged tinnily, its head lamps flowered, whirled into the maw of the lane, waddled drunkenly behind the hedges, down toward the sea.

Before he fell asleep that night, Mr. Bodkin heard a thousand wavelets scrape the shingle, as, during his long life, other countless waves had scraped elsewhere unheard--sounds, moments, places, people to whose lives he had never given a thought. The Irish Times rarely recorded such storms of passion and, when it did, they broke and died far away, like the fables that Shakespeare concocted for his entertainment in the theater. But he knew the Condors. This adulterous woman could shatter their lives as surely as he knew, when he opened his eyes to the sea sun shimmering on his ceiling, she had already shattered his.

It was his custom, on such summer mornings, to rise, strip off his pajamas, pull on a bathing slip and walk across the track in his slippers, his towel around his neck, down to the edge of the sea for what he called a dip: which meant that since he, too, swam like a stone, he would advance into the sea up to his knees, sprinkle his shoulders, and then, burring happily at the cold sting of it, race back to the prickly gravel to towel his shivering bones. He did it this morning with the eyes of a saint wakened from dreams of sin.

On Tuesday night, he snooped virtuously up the lane and along the carriage road. The red van was not in its shed. But neither was it on the road. Lascivious imaginings kept him awake for hours. He longed for the thunderbolt of God.

On Wednesday night, it was, at first, the same story; but on arriving back at the foot of the lane, there were the empty van and the empty Jaguar before him, flank to flank at the level crossing. He retired at once to his bench, peering up and down the beach, listening for the sound of their crunching feet, determined to wait for them all night, if necessary. Somewhere, that woman was lying locked in his arms. The bared thigh. The wrinkled arms. The crepey neck.

Daylight had waned around nine o'clock, but it was still bright enough for him to have seen shadows against the glister of the water, if there had been shadows to see. He saw nothing. He heard nothing but the waves. It must have been nearly two hours later when he heard their cars starting. By the time he had flitted down to the end of the platform, her lights were already rolling up the lane and his were turning in through his gateway. Mr. Bodkin was at the gate barely in time to see his outline dark against the bars of the western sky. As he looked at the van, empty in its shed, it occurred to him that this was one way in which he could frighten him--a warning message left on the seat of the van. But it was also a way in which they could communicate with each other. Her message for him. His answer left early in the morning at her hotel.

On Thursday night, the van lay in its shed. But where was Condor? He walked up the grass track to the cottage and laid his ear to the door. He heard Mary's voice, his angry voice, the mother's shouting. He breathed happily and returned to his bed.

On Friday morning, the Jaguar stood outside Mary's wooden gate. Laying siege? That night, the scarlet van again lay idle in its pen. Wearied by so much walking and watching, he fell asleep over his supper. He was awakened around 11 o'clock by the sound of a car. Scrambling to his door, he was in time to see her wheeling lights hit the sky. He went up the lane to the van, looked around, heard nothing, shone his torch into the cabin and saw the blue envelope lying on the seat. He ripped it open and read it by torchlight. "Oh, My Darling, for God's sake, where are you? Last night and tonight, I waited and waited. What has happened? You promised! I have only one more night. You are coming back with me, aren't you? If I do not see you tomorrow night, I will throw myself into the sea. I adore you. Connie." Mr. Bodkin took the letter down to the sea, tore it into tiny pieces and, with his arms wide, scattered them over the receding waves.

That Saturday afternoon, on returning from the shop with his weekend purchases in his net bag, there was the Jaguar beside the level crossing, mud-spattered and dusty, its white flanks scarred by the whipping brambles. Rounding the corner of the waiting room, he saw her on his bench, smoking, glaring at the sparkling sea. She barely lifted her eyes to him. She looked every year of 60. He bowed and sat on the bench. She smelled of whiskey.

"What an exquisite afternoon we are having, Lady Dobson. May I rest my poor bones for a moment? That lane of mine gets longer and longer every day. Has everything been well with you?"

"Quite well, Bodkin, thank you."

"And, if I may ask, I should be interested to know, you have, I trust, made some progress in your quest?"

"I could hardly expect to with that old woman around everybody's neck. I have laid the seeds of the idea. Molly now knows that she will always be welcome in my house."

"Wait and see? My favorite motto. Never say die. Colors nailed to the mast. No surrender. It means, I hope, that you are not going to leave us soon."

"I leave tonight."

"I do hope the hotel has not been uncomfortable."

"It is entirely comfortable. It is full of spinsters. They give me the creeps."

He beamed at the sea and waited.

"Bodkin! There is one person I have not yet seen. For Hilary's sake, I ought to have a word with Condor. Have you seen him around?"

Her voice had begun to crumble. Eyes like grease under hot water. Cigarette trembling.

"Let me think," he pondered. "On Thursday? Yes. And again last night. We both played draughts with his mother. He seemed his usual cheerful self."

She ejected her cigarette and ground it into the dust under her foot.

"Bodkin! Will you, for Christ's sake, tell me what do young people do with their lives in Godforsaken places like this? That lane must be pitch-dark by four o'clock in the winter!"

He looked at his toes, drew his handkerchief from his breast pocket and flicked away their dust.

"I am afraid, Lady Dobson, I no longer meet any young people. And, after all. Condor is not a young man. I suppose you could call him a middle-aged man. Or would you?"

She hooted hoarsely.

"And what does that leave me? An old hag?"

"Or me? As the Good Book says, 'The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off. and we fly away.' "

She spat it at him:

"You make me sick."

From under her blue eyelids, she looked at the clouds crimped along the knife of the horizon. He remembered Mary's twisted face when she said, "He is dying of the lonesome." She turned and faced him. Harp strings under her chin. Hands mottled. The creature was as old as sin.

"Do you happen to know, Bodkin, if Condor has a girl in these parts? It concerns me, of course, only insofar as, if he has, I need not ask him to come back to us. Has he?"

Mr. Bodkin searched the sea as if looking for a small boat in which to escape his conscience.

"I believe he has," he said firmly.

"Believe? Do you know? Or do you not know?"

"I saw them twice in the lane. Kissing. I presume that means that they are in love."

"Thank you, Bodkin," she said brightly. "In that case, Hilary must get another chauffeur and I must get another lady's maid." She jumped up. He rose politely. "I hope you all have a very pleasant winter." She stared at him hatefully. "In love! Have you ever in your life been in love? Do you know what it means to be in love?"

"Life has denied me many things, Lady Dobson."

"Do you have such a thing as a drink in that black coffin of yours?"

"Alas! Only tea. I am a poor man, Lady Dobson. I read in the paper recently that whiskey is now as much as six shillings a glass."

Her closed eyes riveted her to her age like a worn face on an old coin.

"No love. No drink. No friends. No wife. No children. Happy man! Nothing to betray you."

She turned and left him.

• • •

The events of that Saturday night and Sunday morning became public property at the inquest.

Sergeant Delahunty gave formal evidence of the finding of the body on the rocks at Greystones. Guard Sinnott corroborated. Mr. T. J. Bodkin was then called. He stated that he was a retired businessman residing in a chalet beside the disused station of Cobbler's Hulk. He deposed that, as usual, he went to bed on the night in question around ten o'clock and fell asleep. Being subject to arthritis, he slept badly. Around one o'clock, something woke him.

Coroner: What woke you? Did you hear a noise?

Witness: I am often awakened by arthritic pains in my legs.

Coroner: Are you quite sure it was not earlier than one o'clock? The reason I ask is because we know that the deceased's watch stopped at a quarter to 12.

Witness: I looked at my watch. It was five minutes past one.

Continuing his evidence, the witness said that the night being warm and dry. he rose, put on his dressing gown and his slippers and walked up and down on the platform to ease his pains. From where he stood, he observed a white car parked in the lane. He went toward it. He recognized it as the property of Lady Constance Dobson, whom he had met earlier in the week. There was nobody in the car. Asked by a juror if he had seen the car earlier in the night, before he went to bed, the witness said that it was never his practice to emerge from his chalet after his supper. Asked by another juror if he was not surprised to find an empty car there at one o'clock at night, he said he was but thought that it might have run out of petrol and been abandoned by Lady Dobson until the morning. It did not arouse his curiosity. He was not a curious man by nature. The witness deposed that he then returned to his chalet and slept until six o'clock, when he rose, rather earlier than usual, and went for his usual morning swim. On the way to the beach, he again examined the car.

Coroner: It was daylight by then?

Witness: Yes, sir.

Coroner: Did you look inside the car?

Witness: Yes, sir. I discovered that the door was unlocked and I opened it. I saw a lady's handbag on the front seat and a leather suitcase on the rear seat. I saw that the ignition key was in position. I turned it. found the starter and the engine responded at once. At that stage, I became seriously worried.

Coroner: What did you do?

Witness: I went for my swim. It was too early to do anything else.

Mr. Bodkin further stated that he then returned to his chalet, dressed, shaved, prepared his breakfast and ate it. At seven o'clock, he walked to the house of his nearest neighbors, the Condors, and aroused them. Mr. Colm Condor at once accompanied him back to the car. They examined it and, on Mr. Condor's suggestion, they both drove in Mr. Condor's van to report the incident to the Guards at Ashford.

Coroner: We have had the Guards' evidence. And that is all you know-about the matter?

Witness: Yes, sir.

Coroner: You mean, of course, until the body was found fully clothed, on the rocks at Greystones a week later; that is to say, yesterday morning, when, with Sir Hilary Dobson and Miss Mary Condor, you helped identify the remains?

Witness: Yes, sir.

Coroner: Did you have any difficulty in doing so?

Witness: I had some difficulty.

Coroner: But you were satisfied that it was the body of Lady Constance Dobson and no other.

Witness: I was satisfied. I also recognized the woven gold bangle she had worn the day I saw her. The teeth were unmistakable.

Dr. Edward Halpin of the sanatorium at Newcastle having given his opinion that death was caused by asphyxiation through drowning, the jury, in accordance with the medical evidence, returned a verdict of suicide while of unsound mind. The coroner said it was a most distressing case, extended his sympathy to Sir Hilary Dobson and said no blame attached to anybody.

• • •

It was September before I again met Mr. Bodkin. A day of infinite whiteness. The waves falling heavily. Chilly. It would probably be my last swim of the year. Seeing him on his bench--chesterfield, bowler hat, gray spats, rolled umbrella (he would need it from now on), his bulging net bag between his feet, his head bent to one side as if he were listening for a train--I again wondered at a couple of odd things he had said at the inquest; such as his reply to a juror that he never emerged from his railway carriage after supper; his answer to the coroner that he was often wakened at night by his arthritis ("I sleep like a dog," he had told me. "I have never in my life had a day's illness, apart from chilblains."): and he had observed by his watch that it was five past one in the morning ("I live by the sun and the stars"). Also, he had said that from the platform, he had noticed the white car parked at the end of the lane. I had parked my Morris a few moments before at the end of the lane and, as 1 looked back toward it now, it was masked by the signal box.

He did not invite me to sit down and I did not. We spoke of the sunless day. He smiled when I looked at the sky and said, "Your watch is clouded over." I sympathized with him over his recent painful experience.

"Ah, yes!" he agreed. "It was most distressing. Even if she was a foolish poor soul. Flighty, too. Not quite out of the top drawer. That may have had something to do with it. A bit spoiled, I mean. The sort of woman, as my dear mother used to say, who would upset a barracks of soldiers."

"Why on earth do you suppose she did it? But I shouldn't ask; I am sure you want to forget the whole thing."

"It is all over now. The wheel turns. All things return to the sea. She was crossed in love."

I stared at him.

"Some man in London?"

He hesitated, looked at me shiftily, slowly shook his head and turned his eyes along his shoulder toward the fields.

"But nothing was said about this at the inquest! Did other people know about it? Did the Condors know about it?"

His hands moved on his umbrella handle.

"In quiet places like this, they would notice a leaf falling. But where so little happens, every secret becomes a buried treasure that nobody mentions. Even though every daisy on the dunes knows all about it. This very morning, when I called on Mary Condor, a hen passed her door. She said, 'That hen is laying out. Its feet are clean. It has been walking through grass.' They know everything. I sometimes think," he said peevishly, "that they know what I ate for breakfast."

(Was he becoming disillusioned about his quiet beach?)

"How did you know about it? Or are you just guessing?"

He frowned. He shuffled for the second time. His shoulders straightened. He almost preened himself.

"I have my own powers of observation! I can keep my eyes open, too, you know! Sometimes I see things nobody else sees. I can show you something nobody else has ever seen."

Watching me watch him, he slowly drew out his pocketbook and let it fall open on a large visiting card. I stooped forward to read the name, Lady Constance Dobson. His little finger turned it onto its back. There, scrawled apparently in red lipstick, was the word Judas. When I looked at him, he was smiling triumphantly.

"Where on earth did you find it?"

"That morning at six o'clock, it was daylight. I saw it stuck inside the windscreen wipers"--he hesitated for the last time--"of the Jaguar."

My mind became as tumbled as a jigsaw. He was lying. How many other pieces of the jigsaw were missing? Who was it said the last missing bit of every jigsaw is God?

"You did not mention this at the inquest."

"Should I have? The thought occurred to me. I decided that it would be more merciful not to. There were other people to think of. Sir Hilary, for one. And others." He replaced his pocket-book and rose dismissively. "I perceive that you are going for a swim. Be careful. There are currents. The beach shelves rapidly. Three yards out and the gravel slides from under your feet. And nobody to hear you if you shout for help. I had my usual little dip this morning. Such calm. Such utter silence. The water was very cold."

He bobbed and walked away. I walked very slowly down to the edge of the beach. I tested the water with my hand. He was right. I looked around me. I might have been marooned on some Baltic reef hung between an infinity of clouds and a luster of sea gleaming with their iceberg reflections. Not a fishing smack. Not even a cormorant. Not a soul for miles, north and south. Nobody along the railway track. Or was somebody, as he had suggested, always watching?

If he were concealing something, why had he admitted that he had come out from his railway carriage at all? Why did he choose to mention one o'clock in the morning? Did he know that she had died around midnight? Was he afraid that somebody besides himself might have seen her lights turn down the lane? A timid liar, offering a half-truth to conceal the whole truth?

Above the dunes, I could just see the black roof of his railway carriage. I measured the distance from where I stood and let out a loud "Help!" For ten seconds, nothing happened. Then his small, dark figure rose furtively behind the dunes. When he saw me, he disappeared.