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

Stella Howard could be, stood motionless by the door. Behind Lubbock’s back the barman was making a prolonged pretence of polishing a bar that was in no need of polishing and Squiff said in a steady voice, his hands surprisingly steady too:
    â€˜I was just off down the cellar, Sir. Thought I might get your usual up. You’ll have the red, I suppose?’
    â€˜Not eating tonight, Squiff. No bleeding appetite.’
    Squiff, staring straight at Lubbock, felt his whole body tautening up, stiffening with a fresh, sharp hatred of the man.
    â€˜Madam not coming in tonight, sir?’
    â€˜Blast madam. To bloody hell with madam—’
    Out of the turbulent stream of alcoholic mutterings – drink seemed to twist the character of Lubbock inside out, suppressing both insolence and the louder of his coarseness, turning him introspective – it gradually grew clear that he and Stella Howard had been quarrelling long and bitterly that afternoon. There wasn’t much that was coherent in Lubbock’s muttered repetitions until Squiff, in a moment of paralytic astonishment, heard the words, repeated several times:
    â€˜Red roses. The sod sends her red roses, regular as bloody clockwork. Every damn week – there they are, stuck all over the blasted place. Nothing but red roses—’
    Squiff’s hands started shaking; the sinews jumped as if from acute bursts of electric shock. His tongue recoiled and pressed itself like a short snake against the back of his mouth and he heard Lubbock say:
    â€˜They’re all bitches, the whole stinking lot of ’em. You give ’em the bloody world and they take it and then throw it back into your wet physog. Bitches – they stink, the whole lot of ’em – they’re only good for one thing—’
    Squiff, not waiting to hear any more, turned suddenly, walked out of the bar and then out of the hotel. It was dark early that night and nips of rain were falling in the squalls. Pine boughs were cracking off like so many fireworks. He stood for some moments under the pines, shaking dreadfully, not really consciously thinking, not stopping to ask himself whether in fact Lubbock knew who had sent the flowers or whether it mattered if he did.
    There was only one thing in his mind. The shape the accident was to take had suddenly become perfectly clear to him. It was all of miraculous simplicity.
    Instinctively he looked round for Lubbock’s car and saw it, a big black Mercedes, parked under a big chestnut tree at the upper end of the hotel drive. So early in the evening there were no other cars about and without a second’s hesitation he walked over to it, his hands still shaking in that dreadfully helpless fashion, his mind and ears not really conscious, so that he wasn’t even aware of the odd chestnut or two that sudden squalls ripped out of the tree and sent bumping down on the asphalt below.
    In another minute or two he had found a wheel-brace and a screw-driver in the boot of the car. It was all of a miraculous, grotesque simplicity. Presently he had taken off one of the front wheel hub-covers and was loosening the wheel-nuts with the brace. The concentrated pressure necessary toturn the nuts had the effect of locking his hands to the brace, so that for some time they actually stopped shaking.
    With the loosening of each nut he seemed to see Lubbock, drunk, careering helplesssly down some distant hill in the squally darkness, the front wheel of the Mercedes flying off. The thing was of such fabulous simplicity that no one, he told himself, would ever know. But just to make doubly sure, he thought, he would loosen a second wheel.
    He had actually started unscrewing the first nut of the front on-side wheel when a big taxi came up the drive in the rain. In a vague way he was aware of it stopping, of hearing one of its doors slam and of a couple of voices talking. But it didn’t occur to him to hide himself. He was thirty or