A Lovely Day to Die by Celia Fremlin Page A

heavy bronze ornament that was the instrument of his death. The theory was that there’d been a lovers’ quarrel about Hugo suddenly returning to the marital bed (which was, of course, where he was found), and the young woman had gone berserk with jealousy and rage. As I say, they looked for her, but they never found her.
    Well, I ask you! A blonde typist! I could see, now, why it was that Lucy wouldn’t demean herself by knowing the girl’s address, off the Fulham Road or elsewhere.
    *
    It faded out of the news fairly soon, of course; just one more unsolved murder in the huge, teeming city; and the next I heard of Lucy, some weeks later, was that she was honeymooning in the Bahamas with a bronzed playboy a few years younger than herself, and very nearly as rich. He could hardly have been quite as rich, because Hugo had been a very wealthy man, and had left the whole of his estate to his “beloved wife”.
    *
    The Luck of the Devil? Sometimes, I find myself wondering about all those other strokes of luck over the years. Certainly, the Devil comes into it somewhere.

THE POST-GRADUATE THESIS
    T HE BEGINNING WAS exactly like the beginning of a story in a woman’s magazine; so much so, that I actually felt tall, dark and handsome, I really did. Well, who wouldn’t, in the situation I found myself in that afternoon?
    Let me quickly give you the synopsis, and you’ll see what I mean. Eligible young Honours Graduate (that’s me), all set to rent picturesque country cottage for the summer, finds himself forestalled by beautiful blonde complete with order-to-view from the local Estate Agent. The two meet (surprise! surprise!) under the honeysuckle entwining the trellissed porch; and at first (as is virtually obligatory in this sort of story) she is a bit sharp with him, not to say uppitty. But after a few minutes …
    *
    By now, I am sure, you are feeling that you could go on with the story yourself, blindfold, right through to the happy ending and the wedding-bells. But it so happens, dear reader, that you are wrong. For though, as I say, the whole thing started like a magazine story, the ending was quite, quite different: it was an ending which no woman’s magazine anywhere—none that I know of, anyway — would countenance for one moment.
    Readers don’t want horrors, we are told; particularly horrific endings. They want to be assured that everything in the garden is lovely, that all clouds have silver linings, all that sort of thing. And why not, indeed? There is nothing unrealistic about it, lots of things do turn out all right in real life, plenty of people are quite happy: this, in fact, is something I have to keep reminding myself of when the horror of it all becomes more than I can bear. There are such things as happy endings, I keep telling myself; it didn’t have to end the way it did …
    I must apologise. I suppose it is because I am a writer that I amthinking of the thing in these terms—a would-be writer, perhaps I should say, one of those legions of young men who come down from University each year with a good degree in English and a burning ambition not—but absolutely not —to teach. And since teaching is the one and only career for which a degree in English is the slightest use, I did what many another foolish—and moderately fortunate—fellow has done before me: I drew out my modest savings—a nest-egg left by my fond grandparents—and resolved to give myself a year—just one year—to become a Writer. As is well-known, Writers (the ones with a capital W, that is) need to Get Away From It All; and so this was how it came about that, at the age of twenty-two, on a hot June afternoon, under the honeysuckle of Green End Cottage, I met my destiny.
    And everything in the garden was lovely. The nasturtiums were out, and the tiger-lilies, and the stocks, all in a sweet-smelling, tangled profusion, growing like weeds, as they do in these old-fashioned cottage gardens. And the girl under the honeysuckle