Retirement had loomed large for Spencer Harrison during the last twelve months, and considerably more so for his wife, Eunice. Inevitably, it was now here, and to celebrate, Spencer had put two bottles of champagne on ice. He and Eunice lay on garden chairs in the hot sunshine, waiting to drink them. The salmon mayonnaise and the raspberries and cream to follow stood ready in the fridge.
‘I think,’ Spencer said, ‘I can run the track fairly easily round that maple.’
Eunice wasn’t listening. She lay back in the garden chair, hoping they could get this business over quickly so that she could go back to her summer pruning. Leaning over, she tugged at a daisy between the paving. The state of her hands was deplorable, but she didn’t care for wearing gloves. She enjoyed the cool, green feeling of tiny plants and the sensuousness of sweet, crumbling earth between her fingers. She was large and placid, with a fair, bland face and a patient, plodding walk.
The garden had daunted other buyers, twenty years ago. Disproportionately large in relation to the size of the house, and encompassing to one side a steep and desolate jungle, bramble and weed-infested, where once stone had been gouged from the hillside, it had, however, rejoiced Eunice’s heart with its challenges and possibilities. Spencer had bought the house for Eunice even before his first wife—Eunice’s best friend, as it happened—had astonished him and left him, without so much as a word or a note, but at least sparing him the inconvenience and expense of the divorce he would never have got around to asking for.
Behind the house now stretched smooth lawns and herbaceous borders, while to the side the old quarry cascaded with rock plants in season, intersected by winding paths. High up, a small ornamental bridge crossed a narrow crevasse down which a bright, natural stream tumbled from above, providing moisture for the heathers, rhododendrons and azaleas which bordered it. All the work had been done by Eunice. She was a strong woman and lifted large rockery stones or wheeled heavy barrowloads of timber for constructing the bridge more easily—or at any rate more willingly—than Spencer would have done. He did not share her obsession.
The garden was indeed beautiful, but above all it was quiet, blessedly quiet. Apart from the gentle splash of the stream, the sounds were all of bees buzzing, leaves falling, birdsong in the springtime and the wind in the trees. Not a clock within earshot.
If Eunice’s passion was gardening, Spencer’s was clocks. Twenty-three at the last count, disposed in various parts of the house: the grandfather—which she must remember to call the longcase clock—in the hall, the Viennese wall-clock half-way up the stairs, the French carriage clock whose moods varied with the temperature, the sheep’s-head country clock whose wooden works were riddled with worm, the skeleton clock in the dining-room, the hideous black marble and ormolu mantelpiece set. Spencer was incapable of doing things by halves.
The clocks were the only things ever seriously to disturb Eunice’s placidity. The relentless chimes and strikes counting and measuring out the quarter-hours of her life drove her mad, while their constant ticking was like the Chinese water torture to her. Throughout the day, throughout the night, they ticked and chimed and struck, the silvery tones of the walnut bracket clock vying with the loud bong of the kitchen wall-clock and the double strike and the slow, measured thunk of the grandfather—the longcase—not to mention the Westminster chimes on the landing and the Whittington ones in the study.
It was no use stopping them while Spencer was out at work, because starting them again put the chimes and strikes out of kilter. Spencer’s rage when this happened made even the noise of the clocks seem easy to bear He had been a British Army sergeant once, and still wore a stiff moustache and a bristly haircut. He was compact and muscular. His temper was nasty when roused.
The years with Spencer had, after all, been no big deal, and Eunice sometimes wondered if the clocks were a punishment for the wrong done to his first wife. But at least now she was spared the worst atrocity of the lot: a wooden wall-clock decorated with garish Highland scenes and ‘A Souvenir from o’er the Border’ painted around the face, with the long and repetitious tune of ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’ marking the quarters. Several years ago they’d been burgled and it had been lost, along with some ugly Victorian silver that had belonged to Spencer’s mother. The police, thank God, had found neither clock nor silver.
Spencer lifted the first bottle of champagne from the bucket, uncorked it faultlessly and poured it so they might toast his future retirement. He could have stayed on until he was sixty-five, but he’d elected to go at sixty. ‘Well, you please yourself,’ Eunice had said, ‘but you, retiring at sixty? You’re a young man yet!’
He wasn’t going to disagree with that, but she hadn’t fooled him. She didn’t want him under her feet all day, keeping her from her confounded garden. Their garden, upon which his own eye had now lit.
He wasn’t going to be idle, he told her. He had plans for his retirement. Weekly trips to the library. Auctions where he might find the odd clock bargain. Visits to stately homes. Railway museums. He didn’t mention the holidays abroad, he knew she’d never be persuaded to leave her garden.
He was full of the little economies they might make, too, and began to list them as the wine loosened his tongue—Eunice could dispense with the services of Mrs Cathcart, who presently came twice a week, because he wasn’t a man who was afraid of turning his hand to a bit of help with the housework. And he would make their own wine, he added, gazing reflectively into his Sainsbury’s champagne-type bubbles. Of course, they’d get rid of Eunice’s car—not that they’d get anything for it, B-reg and all that, but they’d save on the tax and insurance.
Eunice, who’d heard all this before and had succeeded in coming to terms with what was going to happen by so far ignoring it, sipped her wine. She was totally unprepared when Spencer dropped his bombshell. ‘I think,’ he remarked, evidently continuing something he’d begun earlier, ‘the track can run along there’—pointing to her herbaceous border—‘and come along to the tunnel which I’ll make here.’
‘There’ appeared to go smack through the middle of the magnificent clump of lilium regale that had taken years to establish. ‘Here’ was just where the small rockery was, a little beyond the flagged path outside the French windows. Looking at it, Eunice’s heart, not normally a volatile organ, jumped about like a wild thing inside her ribcage. She felt sick. The moment she’d dreaded for years was here.
‘Track?’ she echoed faintly. ‘What track?’
‘My steam railway track. I knew you weren’t listening.’ He repeated what he’d said before and outlined its proposed route through the peonies, skirting the Japanese maple, with a little station, maybe, at that point, there . . . where this year Nevada excelled herself in a huge arched spread of white fragrance. ‘I’ve always wanted a steam railway, ever since I was a lad.’
Eunice’s horrified mind took in the enormity of what he was saying, and what she was going to have to do. She looked around at her beautiful garden. ‘You have? I never knew.’
‘Oh, yes, dear, I’ve been planning it for years,’ he said.
* * *
The next morning, Eunice went into town to do some shopping. Before she went, she announced that if the track was to go through the rockery by the French window the stones and some of the plants would need to be moved, and she’d do it on Tuesday.
‘Isn’t it a bad time of year for moving plants?’
‘I’ll settle them in plenty of peat—they won’t realize they’ve been moved. There’s a nice shady place for them on the other side of the bridge.’
Spencer was very busy while she was out. Afterwards, he cleaned up the tools and put them all back in place so that she wouldn’t notice they’d been used.
It was raining the next day, but that didn’t prevent Eunice starting on the job. He watched her from the kitchen window, monolithic in a shapeless old waterproof garment and gumboots, patiently trudging up the steep, narrow path of the quarry with her first barrowload of stones.
He knew how she hated his precious clocks, though she’d long ago given up saying so. After that burglary, in fact. She’d been very shifty about it and he’d suspected for years why the police had never been able to trace any of those stolen goods—the Scottish clock and the silver, taken while he was away on a business trip. It had been fairly obvious, knowing Eunice as he did, that to get rid of them she’d bury them somewhere in the garden, but where, in a garden this size? He’d known that one day, if he waited, she’d give herself away and he’d find out what she’d done with them.
She’d gone white when he’d mentioned tunnelling under that rockery.
There was the second bottle of champagne left from Sunday, nearly full. Eunice had suddenly seemed to lose her taste for it after his announcement about the rockery. He’d corked it up again with one of those gizmos that was supposed to keep it drinkable, and put it back in the fridge. It shouldn’t be too bad.
He took it out and poured a glass, holding it in readiness as Eunice came to the bridge with the heavy barrow. She paused and lowered it, and he began to sweat. She wasn’t going to cross after all. But, after a moment, she lifted the barrow again and moved. When she reached the middle, the planks he’d loosened yesterday gave with the heavy weight and he watched his wife, jerked forward and off balance as the barrow tipped, tumble down the steep crevasse of the stream, with the barrowload of stones on top of her. He smiled and lifted his glass. Now he could go out and finish the job she’d started. No chance of salvaging anything much of his clock by this time, but at least he’d have proof of her perfidy, and justification for what he’d done. He tipped the glass and drained the champagne.
The clocks all over the house began to chime eleven o’clock as Spencer Harrison died from the Paraquat put into the champagne bottle by his wife. Outside, under the aubrietia and alyssum and miniature junipers by the French windows, the first Mrs Harrison, put there by Eunice before she constructed her rockery twenty years ago, slept on undisturbed.