A Lovely Day to Die Read Online Free PDF

Stella quite out of proportion to her very minor misdemeanour: a single tentative little phone call to his secretary asking—just simply asking—what time he was expected back from Wolverhampton)—“Look, darling, when a married man starts an affair, it’s because he wants to get away from this sort of thing, notbecause he wants more of it. He has enough trouble getting a few hours’ freedom as it is, without having his mistress waiting for him like a cat at a mousehole every time he steps outside his front door!”
    A speech both cruel and uncalled-for, and Stella had been dreadfully upset. But being upset never got you anywhere with Gerald, it just made him avoid answering the telephone; and so after a while she’d stopped being upset, and had resolved to watch her step even more carefully in the future. And so this was why, when the Aunt Esmé thing cropped up, she’d let it pass without a flicker of protest. Dumber than the dumbest blonde she’d been, as she sleeked back her wings of black, burnished hair, and listened, her dark eyes wide and trusting, while he floundered deeper and deeper into a labyrinth of lies and evasions from which he would never (unless she, Stella, chose to assist him) be able to extricate himself.
    *
    For the lies hadn’t ended with meeting “Aunt Esmé” at the airport: they had gone on for weeks. Because that hypothetical lady’s visit had proved to be a long one, and packed with incident. She had to be taken to the theatre on just the night when Gerald usually went out with Stella; she caught ’flu on the exact weekend when Gerald and Stella had planned a trip to the country; and when Stella herself caught ’flu, she had to have it alone because it just so happened that Aunt Esmé had to be taken on a visit to an old school-friend in Bournemouth at just that time.
    And Stella had taken it all, smiling. Smiling, smiling endlessly down the telephone, making understanding noises, and never questioning, never protesting. It had been over a year later (surely a year is long enough? Surely no one could accuse you of checking-up after a year? )before Stella had ventured, warily, and with lowered eyelids, to ask after Aunt Esmé. Had they seen her lately, or had a card from her? she’d asked innocently, one late December day when Gerald, preoccupied, brimming-over with family life, had driven over hastily with Stella’s present. Jewellery again, and expensive. Gerald was good at this sort of thing.
    Stella thanked him prettily, even warmly; and then, still prettily, she tossed her bombshell into his face.
    “Have you heard from Aunt Esmé lately?” she asked, and enjoyed, as she only rarely enjoyed his love-making, the look of blank, uncomplicated bewilderment that overspread his pink, self-satisfied features. Not even any wariness, so completely had he forgotten the whole thing.
    “Aunt Esmé? Who’s Aunt Esmé?” he asked curiously, quite unsuspicious.
    Stella had intended it to stop there: to brush it off with a light, “Oh, well, I must be mixing it up with some other family”; to leave him unscathed, untouched by guilt, and to savour her triumph in secret. But the temptation to go on, to spring the trap, was irresistible.
    “Aunt Esmé, darling! You know—the one you had staying with you for all that time last winter …” and as she spoke Stella watched, with terror and with glee, the dawning of guilt and alarm in his bland, contented features. Fear, calculation and panic darted like fishes back and forth across his plump countenance; and then he recovered himself.
    “Of course! How stupid! Dear old Esmé, you must mean! Not an aunt at all, but the old family governess from Wendy’s mother’s old home … the children had been taught to call her ‘aunt’ because, well, because, you know …”
    And of course Stella did know; smiling, and lying, and letting him off the hook. She, too, had had an “aunt” like that in her childhood. An Aunt Polly, she hastily