A Double Coffin

‘Oh, this fine fellow won’t be stopped. He’s a real beauty. You were right to get him, Stella.’

Augustus and Martin seemed acquainted, which Coffin found mildly irritating. ‘You know the dog?’

‘Oh yes, isn’t he nice? He’s from the Deddington kennels … they have a lot of the old Alderbourne breed in them which makes them special. I knew it was the right place to go to.’

‘I’ve always had mongrels before,’ said Coffin, thinking of his last dog and the dog of his troubled boyhood, who had appeared out of a bomb shelter, the only survivor. Coffin had always felt that he and that first dog had a lot in common. But then he had felt the same about the second, only a mongrel, a rangy beast and a good fighter.

‘Oh, they’re the best of all,’ said Martin, ‘if you can get a good one, but if not you can’t go wrong with a peke.’

‘And so you told Stella?’

‘Yes, she took my advice.’ Martin bent down to pat the dog. ‘Come on, Gus, off we go.’

They bounded down the stairs, sure-footed this time.

‘So he chose the dog for you,’ said Coffin, coming back into the room and throwing himself on the sofa. ‘Let’s get out the champagne.’

‘Oh, come on.’ A flutter of red silk settled beside him. ‘Don’t be childish, besides, he’s your dog, I bought him for you. He’s Augustus, his mother was called Empress and his father was Pompey, Policeman of Rome.’ And she laughed.

Coffin laughed in spite of himself. ‘You are making that up.’

‘You can look at his pedigree.’

He stood up. ‘I don’t believe a word of it, but I will get the drinks out. And do you want champagne?’

‘No, of course not, he’s far too young to give good champagne to, let him have gin and like it. Or a nice sweet white wine, much more his style.’

‘I’d be surprised,’ said Coffin, as he moved away. ‘He has obviously got good taste.’

He got the reward for his good humour because Stella came up to him and kissed his cheek. ‘That is a lovely compliment, thank you.’

‘He’s back, there’s the bell.’

Dog, Martin and Coffin, with a tray of drinks, came back into the living room together. By this time, Stella was standing by the window staring down across the road to the old churchyard. Last year it had been turned into a small park, and all the dead, long dead they were by then, were disinterred and buried in one big grave in the new cemetery in East Hythe Road, where one great stone was their memorial. The old headstones were placed like a stone fringe in the former churchyard. The years had worn away most of the inscriptions but some could still be read: she remembered a Duckett, several Cruins, and many Earders, all of which names the district still knew. Families seemed to stay in Spinnergate over the generations.

Surely, she asked herself, when the churchyard was turned into a park, and graves were dug up, they would have found a body if one had been buried there?

As Coffin came up to her, offering her a glass of wine, she looked towards where Martin was playing with the dog, and murmured: ‘But wouldn’t a body have been found last year when the graves were dug up?’

‘I have been wondering about that myself,’ he said quietly. ‘None was found as far as I know, and I think I would know, but as I remember only the central area of the churchyard was excavated, and a wild area with shrubs and grass around left.’

He moved away to give Martin his drink. Martin stood up and smiled. ‘Thanks, I feel better already. I felt suicidal before I came … this is my big chance’ – he looked at Stella – ‘and I don’t want to fluff it …’ He walked over to her, drink in hand, and followed by Augustus. ‘I really have a problem with Shakespeare … I know you are not supposed to say so, but the verse is so difficult … it’s dialogue, right? I want it to sound like dialogue and not verse.’

‘Well, Olivier managed it,’ observed Stella, ‘and Gielgud managed to combine both.’

Martin groaned. ‘Have a heart, please. I am not in their class. Not yet.’

‘What’s the part that worries you?’ asked Coffin, trying to take his own mind off a dead woman who might not be there.

‘Malvolio, a tricky part at the best and I have to get it across to an audience of schoolchildren.’

Stella explained: It’s an examination text this year – we always try to do a performance of the play if we can. We get a grant from the Schools Theatre Society on condition we do it. Short run and full houses … the kids are conscripted.’ She turned to Martin. ‘Best part in the play, and you know it.’

‘And the most difficult … I’ve always fancied Sir Toby Belch.’

‘You will have to wait a decade or two to do that.’

‘Or Maria … good part, that.’

‘Don’t go bisexual on me.’

Coffin watched them gloomily: they were flirting, it was only a theatrical flirtation, which did not usually mean much, but he found it hard to handle. And you never knew where it could go: to bed quite often, and then best friends for ever, only they might never meet again – that was the theatre world.

I’m afraid, he said to himself, that’s it. I am afraid. I fenced myself in, I built a wall and felt safe inside it. Stella broke down that wall. I can’t risk anything with Stella and nature has not made me a trusting customer.

Nature and his profession. There he was again, thinking about Dick Lavender and his astonishing story. He wondered if he could get away with doing nothing, and telling the old man that there had been nothing to find.

But bodies and bones have a way of outing themselves when least you want them to.

He raised his eyes to Martin, who was saying that in many ways Shakespeare’s tragedies were easier to act than his comedies. ‘We laugh at different things now compared with Tudor England, but we cry at the same. I could manage tragedy.’

No doubt, thought Coffin. Perhaps we all can.

‘Depends on the part,’ said Stella, always willing to enter into a good theatrical discussion. ‘I defy anyone to call Hamlet easy, or Lear.’

‘They support you,’ said Martin with animation, ‘Iago must be a wonderful part to play.’

‘We don’t do Othello much for the school and college audiences,’ said Stella drily.

Augustus sidled up to Stella, opening his mouth and looking at her intently. He gave a little bark.

‘He wants a drink.’ Martin reached out a hand to pat the white head.

‘He’s not having gin or wine.’

The loose sleeve of Martin’s jacket had fallen back; Coffin saw a line of just-healed scratches on his arm. Three ragged, not parallel but haphazard, lines. Gouged out. They didn’t look like loving but overpassionate scratches, more as if delivered with a sharp instrument. Say a knife. To his experienced eye they looked both deep and sore. Fairly new, also.

‘I’ll get a bowl of water,’ Coffin said. A self-mutilator? Or how much did the lad see of his sister of the knife?

The conversation was going on when he got back. Stella was showing Martin a book of her press cuttings; she was unusual among actresses since she kept bad notices as well as good ones. ‘Look at that one’ – she pointed – ‘the stoat … never got a good notice out of that man, I always got the parts his girlfriend wanted. Even when he decided that he wanted a boyfriend and not a girlfriend, he didn’t change to me … Now this one, bit sharp, but not bad. I was a bit facile in those days.’ She frowned. ‘I think I have got over that, life knocks it out of you in the long run.’

Martin picked out a review. ‘You know, I couldn’t do that … keep the bad notices. I’d have to tear them up, pretend they hadn’t happened.’

‘It’s one way,’ said Stella, closing the book.

‘That’s what makes Jaimie so mad with us … my girlfriend,’ he explained. ‘She says I bottle things up. So I do, I suppose.’ He sighed and suddenly looked very young.

‘Jaimie is not usually a girl’s name, is it?’