The Man Who Was Left Behind Read online

  “Oh, hello, Sir,” he said. “What’s happened to you?”

  “Broke my nose. What’s happened to you?”

  “It’s Linda. She’s in a coma or something, but they won’t call a doctor. I don’t understand it.”

  The man who looked like a manager came and took me by the elbow and pulled me back. Another man, in a business suit and carrying a doctor’s bag, took Butterworth in tow and steered him over to the car. He didn’t look back. They got in to the back seat with a policeman, and the two other policemen got into the front and closed the doors. Suddenly Butterworth leaned over and started to rap on the window. He was looking at me.

  “Just a minute,” I told the man holding my arm.

  The doctor rolled down his window and Butterworth leaned over him.

  “Mr. Coleman,” he said, “she can’t get an annulment, can she?”

  “Annulment? Did she say that?”

  “Not after you get married, can you? It wouldn’t be fair.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “That’s what I told her,” he said. “They don’t do it any more nowadays.”

  “It’ll be okay,” I told him, and waved. The car started up. As soon as they began to move, he lost interest in the window and looked straight ahead.

  “Monsieur is staying at the hotel?” the manager-figure asked me.

  “Yes. A lovely hotel.”

  He inclined his head very slightly in what might have been a bow.

  “My name’s Coleman,” I said.

  He told me his, which began with Pappa-something. Then he said, “Ah yes, the nose. Last night.”

  “Yes,” I said. “The night staff were very helpful.”

  We started to walk away from the doors and towards the main hotel entrance.

  “You are a friend of Mr. Butterworth?”

  “Not exactly. My wife and I met them last night at a nightclub and we walked back to the hotel together.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “While we were walking, he talked to me. He said he needed some advice.”

  “Yes.”

  “About his marriage.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “I tried to talk to him like a friend. Or as a father would talk to his son. He seemed rather young for his age.”

  “Yes.”

  “I think you’d better tell me about it. Has he killed her?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  I thought he would leave it at that, but as it turned out, he decided to tell me about it, starting from the point when the maid had run to the floor waiter.

  When I got to my room I found my wife sitting on the edge of my bed.

  “I got your stamps.”

  “Oh, thank you. I forgot.” She handed me the postcards. I sat down next to her on the bed and stuck stamps on all of them.

  “One thing about a broken nose, you can’t taste the glue,” I said. “Does it really matter if I add something?”

  “No, go ahead.”

  I took out my pen, and on the one to Ginny I put a plus sign after the signature and wrote, “Love from Daddy.” On Bobby’s it was “Love from Dad.” He had taken to calling me Dad two years before, because it sounded more grown-up, I suppose. I put the pen back in my pocket and felt lousy. Then I turned the postcards over and looked at the pictures.

  “We haven’t even been here yet.”

  “I thought they’d like it anyway.”

  “I like it, too. We should go there. Maybe we could go later this afternoon.”

  “Would you feel up to it?”

  “I think so. I’m going to take another pill. Is the door closed on the other side?”

  “Yes.”

  I went into the bathroom and took two of the pills. Then I unstrapped the sunglasses and went back into the room.

  “Did you find out what all those policemen were for?”

  “Some Englishman couldn’t find his passport and thought the maid had stolen it. One of those types that wouldn’t take the manager’s word for it.”

  “Oh. What an anti-climax. I was sure with so many of them it must be a jewel thief at least. Or maybe a bomb.”

  “They wouldn’t notice a bomb with all the doors slamming around here.”

  I took off my jacket and shoes.

  “Well, I’ll go read my book,” she said, and stood up.

  “Stay here and read it. Maybe you could read it out loud to me. My eyes aren’t good for much.”

  “All right.”

  I lay down on the bed.

  “I can use that chair,” she said.

  “If I move over a little, you can sit on the bed. Unless your back is going to get tired.”

  “Oh. All right.”

  She sat on the bed near my knees.

  “What’s happened so far?”

  She explained the plot. A body had been found in the library and everyone in the house had a good motive and lots of opportunity. Things were just coming to the point where she was sure there was going to be a second murder. It had said on the blurb that there were two.

  “All right?”

  “Bring on the corpses,” I said, and shut my eyes.

  She began to read. The second body was found, shot this time instead of stabbed, and all the members of the houseparty were having a sticky time getting through breakfast without hysterics.

  I began to feel happy listening to her voice. And I thought about poor Butterworth who would never be lying in bed listening to his wife reading a book to him. It was just like being home again, with everything all right. I started to cry.

  If it always hurt so much, no one would ever cry. The salt in my eyes, the nose broken up and held together with splints and bandages. With every breath the pain knocked me over. I turned my head away, but couldn’t help making a noise.

  “What is it?” she said. “Oh, Don. I’ll call the doctor.”

  My nose was broken, my head was breaking up, my life was all broken up. And I couldn’t even cry.

  “Oh hell,” I sobbed. “Oh hell. Oh God damn it to hell!” I grabbed her hand and made whooping noises, trying to stop.

  Finally I got it under control and lay back.

  “Does it hurt real bad?” she said, in the accent she hadn’t used or heard for fourteen years.

  “It’s all right now, I think. I just started to think how nice it was to hear you reading to me. Can’t even cry in this damned thing.”

  She rubbed her free hand over my hair.

  “Do you want me to go on?”

  “Let’s rest here for a while.” I pulled her forward carefully and she put the book down on the floor and took off her shoes and let me settle her on the bed. We were lying the way we lay after love.

  “Tell me something,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Anything. A story, anything, anything that comes to mind.”

  “I can’t think of anything.”

  “All right. I’ll tell you.”

  I told her about going down to the lobby and meeting the night staff, and tried to make it sound funnier than it had been. When I got to where I claimed to have fought in a war against the Chinese, she started to laugh. Her hair was by my mouth and I missed not being able to smell it. I told her about the doctor and his goatee and the letter he had given me, which had been so interesting to see being written, and about getting dizzy from looking at the palm trees as I came up the stairs.

  “Now you. Tell me.”

  “I just can’t think of anything.”

  “Tell me about what you did this morning while I was dead to the world.”

  “I went down to the changing-room and got into my bathing suit. And I sat on the beach. There were only one or two other people there and one or two boys from the hotel raking the pebbles. I tried to read, and I got more and more sort of nervous. That huge, empty beach full of pebbles. So then I got up, and changed back into my clothes and went and bought postcards. And that was all.”

  She started to cry. I smooth
ed down her hair with my hand and held her with the other hand around her waist.

  Butterworth had held on to his wife, too, but too tightly. And he had also managed to make love to her; whether before or after her death was something I didn’t want to know, though no doubt the hotel manager had known.

  She stopped crying, and sighed. I smoothed her hair back and put my arm around her shoulder. Butterworth had held his wife by the neck and held her too tightly, for too long. But I held my wife close and carefully, by the waist and shoulders, and shut my eyes. And then the doctor’s pills began to work, and I floated and I floated, and I slept.

  About the Author

  Rachel Ingalls grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has had various jobs, from theatre dresser and librarian to publisher’s reader. She is a confirmed radio and film addict and has lived in London since 1965. She is the author of several novels and collections of short stories.

  Copyright

  This collection first published in 1974

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  All rights reserved

  Collection © Rachel Ingalls, 1974

  The Man Who Was Left Behind © Rachel Ingalls, 1970

  The right of Rachel Ingalls to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–29979–9