Free The Wedding Party by H. E. Bates Page A

her eyes and he carried the image away with him. As the evening went on the image grafted itself painfully and permanently on to his own eyes, so that not only was he afflicted with new, greater shakings of his hands but his vision was clouded too.
    â€˜I’ll kill him,’ he started telling himself. ‘I’ll kill him. I’m going to kill him. Somehow.’
    All the next week the idea of killing Lubbock chattered through his mind like a tortuous and clumsy tune. It drove him about in a daze. It kept him awake for fearful stretches in the night, his mind cold and haunted and indecisive. In his customary groping and innocent way he tried to fix on some method of killing Lubbock and finally came to agrotesquely childish conclusion.
    â€˜Got to look like an accident,’ he kept telling himself. ‘Got to look like an accident somehow.’
    What sort of accident it was going to be he couldn’t, for a long time, make up his mind. There was nothing in his nature remotely subtle enough to make any kind of ingenious plan. He merely groped; and in groping got himself into darker confusions where the only things of any abiding clarity were the tears in Stella Howard’s eyes, the way her wrap had slid to the floor and the way she had first looked at him. All the time he thought of the great stillness in her eyes.
    By the following Saturday night, still without any real idea of what sort of accident it was to be, his nerves were screwed up like wire rope. His hands trembled constantly. His order for roses had gone off as usual and now and then he was able to pacify himself for a moment by dwelling on another secret image: that of Stella Howard unpacking the roses putting them in a vase, gazing at them and perhaps for a few moments wondering who had sent them. He would never be able to know what her feelings about the roses were but it calmed him briefly to think of it.
    Then an unexpected thing happened. Just before half-past seven the head waiter came up to him and said:
    â€˜Mr Lubbock’s just cancelled his table. Says he won’t be in tonight.’
    He immediately felt desolate and lonely. The urge to kill Lubbock suddenly receded. The mere fact that he wasn’t going to see Stella Howard, even as a figure in a painful scene, put him in a new and different sort of daze. It wasexactly as if they had been married or lovers and she had left him. It was almost as if she, and not Lubbock, had died.
    He spent the whole of the following week battered by these opposing ideas: on the one hand of wanting to kill Lubbock and on the other of wanting to see Stella Howard back, as it were, from the dead. The nagging aridity of his thoughts was so great that for the first time in his life he started to take a few drinks. On evenings when the hotel was half-empty he stayed for long periods down in the cellar, staring into the half darkness with a glass in his hands.
    Drink didn’t help him much; it merely seemed to push the days along a fraction faster towards another Saturday.
    And when Saturday came he had another surprise. He was walking through the bar about half past six when he suddenly heard Lubbock’s voice, for some reason not so loud as usual, and saw him sitting at the bar. The night was cold and squally and Lubbock’s voice sounded curiously brittle, very like an echo of the many pine boughs cracking in the rough wind outside:
    â€˜Ah! it’s old Squiff. How’s our old Squiff?’ Lubbock lugubriously waved a glass of gin about and wagged a heavy cautionary finger. ‘Look a bit pale and drawn, Squiff, old sport. Should take more of this – more of the old oil, eh?’
    â€˜Evening, sir.’
    â€˜More of the old oil, that’s what keeps the bloody cold out, eh?’
    Squiff didn’t want to talk; he started to leave the bar.
    â€˜Here, half a mo, where are you off to? Come ’ere a minute.’
    Squiff, wondering over and over again where