He came out on the drive and turned towards the house. No sign of Slater yet. Alma couldn’t still be on the phone, she would have to be back at the car by now, something else must have claimed Slater’s attention. As he approached the terrace he heard opera issuing at full blast from an upper floor, the great aria from the last act of Tosca, E lucevan le stelle. The volume was enormous. Of course – he ought to have thought of it: Sylvia hadn’t been in the marquee at all, she had shut herself away here with music, on this day of Erika’s triumph. Booze too, probably. Hearing knocks she would simply have turned the music up. Or she might have passed out …

  Crossing the terrace he stopped for a moment to look back. The marquee was closed. Hogan was twenty yards or so into his leisurely return journey. No one seemed to have noticed anything.

  There was no sound of activity inside the house. He experienced some wavering of purpose. Entering would make him definitely an intruder, a trespasser. Need he do anything? In ninety seconds or so from now all the Fictioneers would be on the escape route.

  Peering uncertainly into the interior he noticed with vague surprise that a small circular table had been overturned in the middle of the room. Flowers and pieces of the vase that had contained them lay scattered round it. There was something else too, lying alone on the carpet. He moved a little nearer to the french windows. It was a knife with the hilt on one side like a bayonet. The short, broad blade was not gleaming, as when he had seen it last, but dulled by some stain.

  His new position allowed a better view into the room. On the floor, some way beyond the overturned table, he made out a pair of legs in fawn suiting sticking out from behind an armchair. They ended in blue socks and upturned shoes of the moccasin type set at a relaxed angle.

  Still conscious of not much more than surprise he entered and went along the side of the room until he could see past the chair. Slater was lying on his back, eyes closed, face set in an expression of stern repose. His jacket lay open and the upper part of his shirt front was covered with a red that made the carnation in this buttonhole look pale. He had brought Lord Macaulay’s clock down in his fall and fragments of china lay around him. In the warm, still air of the room there was a clinging, fetid odour, one Benson immediately knew – from sense, from memory, from a sudden conviction of necessity. Thompson had made it over the water. The signals had got crossed again. He had come creeping down the drive to ask for his bit of capital, found no one, entered. Surprised among objects of plunder, he had gone back to the Wadis. In Slater’s grip, in that crazed struggle to get the knife home, he had shed his smell about. It must have happened now, the scent was fresh, perhaps half a minute before. While I was coming up to the terrace. There had been no crash, no sound of struggle – the loud yearning of the music had muffled it. He could hear the aria continuing as he stood there. O dolci baci, languide carezze. No more than thirty seconds ago. He must be still about. Crawling somewhere, looking for a safe trench, at the last gasp himself or he would never have left his cherished knife behind.

  The recentness of it, the sense of Thompson’s proximity, gave Benson his first real stab of fear. These two looters had killed each other. He must get away, there would be people here soon. He took a last look at the dead face. This blood-dabbled bulk among its litter, what price the knighthood now, where was the caviar, where the champagne? With a shock of fear and surprise he saw Slater’s eyes open, saw him look up fixedly at the rococo extravagance of his ceiling as if pondering a reply to these questions. Then an arm came up with an inch of immaculate shirt cuff showing. Slater pawed the air for some moments, then grasped strongly at the arm of the chair. Slowly he began to hoist himself into a sitting position, making slight motions of the head. In seconds he would be on his feet, he would turn his terrible, his inextinguishable gaze about the room.

  It was this, not fear of detection but the horror of meeting Slater’s eyes, witnessing his resurrection, that brought the panic rising to Benson’s throat. He went shuffling back the way he had come, the trouser bottoms again impeding him. As he crossed to the steps he was momentarily struck by the vastness of the sky. He saw smoke, dark curls and plumes of it, drifting up from the foot of the marquee, hazing as it rose, shot through with sunlight, slowly in the windless air enveloping the whole structure. There were no sounds of shouts – they were drowned by the great sobs of lost love still coming from Cavaradossi upstairs; but he thought he heard the staccato crackling of the fireworks. People were running from the summerhouse and from the refreshment tent towards the smouldering marquee. He saw figures, small in the distance, come squirming and crawling from under the canvas, like creatures expelled by fumigation.

  In his haste to get down the steps and away he was tripped by his trouser-bottoms and almost fell headlong. He had to stop and roll them up again. He went through the trees at a stumbling run. The car was waiting on the road, engine running, Alma at the wheel, Hogan already ensconced in the back. As they gathered speed Benson let out a single sobbing breath of exhaustion, distress, relief.

  Alma was smiling. “What held you up?” she said.

  Available in Norton Paperback Fiction

  Aharon Appelfeld

  Katerina

  Rick Bass

  The Watch

  Simone de Beauvoir

  The Mandarins

  She Came to Stay

  Wendy Brenner

  Large Animals in Everyday Life

  Anthony Burgess

  A Clockwork Orange

  The Wanting Seed

  Stephen Dobyns

  The Wrestler’s Cruel Study

  Leslie Epstein

  King of the Jews

  Mary Flanagan

  The Blue Woman

  Montserrat Fontes

  First Confession

  Dreams of the Centaur

  Paula Fox

  Desperate Characters

  Jonathan Franzen

  Strong Motion

  Carol De Chellis Hill

  Eleven Million Mile High Dancer

  Henry James’ Midnight Song

  Let’s Fall in Love

  Janette Turner Hospital

  Dislocations

  Oyster

  Siri Hustvedt

  The Blindfold

  Starling Lawrence

  Legacies

  Bernard MacLaverty

  Cal

  Grace Notes Lamb

  Walking the Dog

  Alyce Miller

  The Nature of Longing

  Bradford Morrow

  The Almanac Branch

  John Nichols

  A Ghost in the Music

  The Sterile Cuckoo

  The Wizard of Loneliness

  Craig Nova

  The Universal Donor

  Jean Rhys

  Good Morning, Midnight

  Wide Sargasso Sea

  Agnes Rossi

  The Quick

  Joanna Scott

  Arrogance

  Josef Skvorecky

  Dvorak in Love

  Rebecca Stowe

  The Shadow of Desire

  Kathleen Tyau

  A Little Too Much Is Enough

  Barry Unsworth

  After Hannibal

  The Hide

  Mooncranker’s Gift

  Morality Play

  Pascali’s Island

  The Rage of the Vulture

  Sacred Hunger

  Sugar and Rum

  Rafi Zabor

  The Bear Comes Home

  BY BARRY UNSWORTH

  The Partnership

  The Greeks Have a Word for It

  The Hide

  Mooncranker’s Gift

  The Big Day

  Pascali’s Island

  The Rage of the Vulture

  Stone Virgin

  Sugar and Rum

  Sacred Hunger

  Morality Play

  After Hannibal

  Copyright © 1988 by Barry Unsworth

  First published as a Norton paperback 1999

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  ISBN: 978-0-393-31890-6

  ISBN: 978-0-393-35720-2 (ebk.)

  W.W.Norton & Company, Inc.

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  www.wwnorton.com

  W.W.Norton & Company Ltd.

  10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU

 

 

  Barry Unsworth, Sugar and Rum

 

 

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