A Lovely Day to Die by Celia Fremlin Read Free Book Online

of person, I don’t think she’ll make any trouble once she understands that we love each other. Oh, darling, what is it? Why don’t you say something? Look, let’s have a drink and relax, and think what we’re going to do when the unpleasantness is over. This flat is a bit small for the two of us, but assuming that you’ll be getting half the value of your house, then between us we could …”
    And now, at last, he did make a move. He rose, stiffly, and she thought that he was about to pour each of them a large glass of whisky. Instead, he walked over to the table in the window where Stella’s typewriter stood, open. Laboriously, with one finger, he began to type.
    *
    Stella left it a minute—two minutes—and then walked over to look.
    Gerald B. Graves        
        27 Firfield Gardens,      
            Sydenham Way.        
    The long manilla envelope stared up at her from the typewriter-carriage. She watched, stupefied, while he finished the last few letters of the address. Then—“Whatever are you doing, darling?” she asked, with an uneasy little laugh. “Are you writing a letter to yourself …?”
    And then she saw it, just by his right hand. Her own suicide note of last autumn—“By the time you get this, darling, I shall be dead …”
    “The handwriting will be unquestionably yours,” he observed conversationally. “And the address will have been typed on your typewriter. The postmark will also be right, as I shall post it myself, on my way out. It should reach me at breakfast time the day after tomorrow, just in time to show to the police. And now, my dear, just one more little job, and we shall be finished.”
    And as he stood up and turned towards her, the light from the lamp fell full on his face, and she saw the look in his eyes.
    “No … no ..!” she gasped, took a step backwards, and shrank, whimpering, against the wall.
    “I intend it to look like suicide,” he said, as if reassuring her; and as he moved across the carpet towards her, Stella’s last coherent thought was: He will, too! He’ll get away with it, he’ll lie his way out of it, just as he’s always done.
    How accomplished a liar he was, she, of course, knew better than anyone, for it was she who had trained him; trained him, like a circus animal, over five long years.

HIGH DIVE
    H E WAS AMAZED that after more than forty years the smell of the little seaside town should still be exactly as he remembered it. You would have thought, wouldn’t you, that with all the changes of the last half-century—from steam-trains to diesels, from ice-cream parlours to Wimpy bars—not to mention the escalating petrol fumes from ever-multiplying traffic—you would have thought that the long-ago nostalgic smell would have been completely obliterated.
    But no. He’d noticed it the moment they’d stepped outside the station, and had joyously called Maisie’s attention to it.
    “ What smell?” she’d snapped back, tired and irritable after the long train journey; and Malcolm had duly dropped the subject. If she didn’t remember the smell, then she didn’t. He certainly couldn’t describe it to her because it was indescribable. It wasn’t just melting tarmac and hot stone and salty air; it wasn’t even the faint, all-pervading sweetishness distilled from tens of thousands of ice creams licked all summer long. There was something else, something as indefinable, and as exciting, as the smell of a brand-new story-book when you are seven years old, breathing in the savour of a binding still stiff with newness, of pages still unopened, and your heart pounding with a sense of the unknown, of glory yet unsampled.
    “… and just look at the queue for the taxis!” Maisie was complaining, gesturing angrily in the offending direction. “There must be fifty people ahead of us already ..! Come on, Malcolm, can’t you hurry up a bit just for once? If only you’d walk a bit faster, we wouldn’t always be at