by Tony Medawar
The stranger smiled.
‘Not altogether so harmless,’ he said. ‘One might easily take an overdose of that. She probably will one day. They often do, you know.’
‘Think so?’ said Belford. ‘But she’d go to hell for that, you know. Straight to hell. “Where their worm dieth not”.’ He laughed. ‘Worms, eh? That’s a nice thing to think about.’
The stranger leaned towards him. Belford became intensely, seriously aware of his face, with every detail, every line, every tiny pore of the skin marked and individualised, like the pen strokes on a map. It was not a face—it was a continent. It was as wide as Asia, and he was an explorer upon its vast and uninhabited surface. For endless aeons he had been marching along its waste expanse, pitted with holes, ribbed with gullies. He stood at the mouth of a dark cavern, filled with trees, smooth and cylindrical, like hairs. He peered into it, as he had peered since the beginning of time, whose huge heartbeats he heard—tick tock, tick tock—incredible ages apart. Yet all around him the stealthy life of the restaurant went on. The barman was measuring a rainbow cocktail—pink, green, yellow—Belford suddenly realised the intense, the anxious importance of the comparative weight of liquids. Atoms, molecules, heating upward against the furious downward pressure of gravity. If the pink were to overflow into the green, the universe would be flung into chaos. He saw the bleak immensity of space, peopled by whirling planets over innumerable millions of miles, and all dependent upon that pink and green and yellow pinpoint—the ultimate focus of creation. He laughed. It was funny, it was enough to split your sides that he, and he only, should be in possession of that stupendous secret.
‘Two months.’ The stranger’s voice floated over the abyss, clear as water. ‘She will take an overdose before the two months are up. We can ensure that much for you, you know.’
The car sped through street after street, where swarms of men and women swam past like sea-creatures in a tank. At every bump it rose like a ship, riding huge combers. They were moving fast, they were racing at the speed of light. One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. He could watch time spinning backwards, like a cinematograph film reeled out the wrong way. Yet nothing was blurred in their headlong flight. Lamp-post succeeded lamp-post, each one rigid as a soldier on parade, each one with its own mysterious character and importance. His companion was seated beside him, his face averted. He loomed gigantic, his shoulders had the exuberant mass of a sleeping elephant. Belford could hear the billowing outline of his back, like a symphony. It rolled out in striding harmonies. A persistent and birdlike trilling puzzled Belford for a moment, till he traced it to an artificial flower in a silver holder beside him. He felt feverish.
‘It’s rather hot, isn’t it?’ he said.
The stranger put down the window immediately. The air, rushing in, was cool and invigorating, like river water at dawn. Belford was filled with an utter peace and confidence. He had never before seen the beauty of the world so clearly. The smooth leather of the car’s upholstery was a caress to his fingertips. He felt it slowly, luxuriously. It dipped to a hollow, held down by a round button. The exquisite significance of that button penetrated him with an inward ecstasy. He could feel the sense-processes and the thought-processes working swiftly and surely within him. The nerves sent up their urgent message, tingling along his arm. He felt the instant flurry of eager interpretation quickening the cells of his brain, threads of grey matter crossing and inter-crossing. This was what God felt—this endless awareness, stretching to the outer rim of universal consciousness. If a sparrow fell to the ground, he could feel it. He was sensitive to the movements of a microbe or a star. What absurdity to speak of small or great, as though greatness or smallness had any existence! He knew now that what the saints and sages had said was true—but none of them had ever known it as he knew it.
It was funny. It was absurd. Millions of men arguing and disputing—when he could tell them the whole truth of his own, intimate knowledge. But then, everything was funny. Everything had its absurdity, just as it had its beauty and its horror; there were no horrible or beautiful or absurd things; each one was horrible and beautiful and absurd at once, and quite separately. He must tell people about this. The telephone speaking-tube, curled over its iron bracket—it was ridiculous; it was the quintessence of absurdity. Gusts of laughter rolled up and suffocated him as he contemplated that preposterous speaking-tube. He pointed it out to his companion. Its curve as it hung there was a triumph of the incongruous. He shouted and whooped with laughter. One guffaw came breaking over the other like waves on a rocky shore. ‘The laughter of the gods.’ Stray phrases of Greek, forgotten since his school days, came back to him shining, clear-cut and luminous as jewels.
Exhausted with his own exuberance, he lay back in his corner. Every time the wheels turned, the cycle of existence turned through a thousand years. He was God, and he was unutterably lonely. And he was afraid. The stranger had turned and looked at him, and in that look he had seen unspeakable menace. Framed in the dark window of the car he now saw the river. He saw not merely its surface streaked with silver and hung over by brooding trees. He saw beneath the water where the bodies of the dead swam darkly, watched by the flat, round eyes of hungry pike. Small fish, too, devouring one another, struggling for life between the rank stems of the water-weeds, pursuing the dim unlovely things that grew fat upon contamination and sewage. The moon was coming up over a long bank of cloud. The cloud was steeped in silver behind, and he saw through and over it, but on the hither side it was black. Terror held him in chains of iron, so that he could not cry out.
The river had gone, and the moon. The car had stopped. He climbed out of it and stood before a high stone wall, extending right and left for ever. The chauffeur was unlocking the gates. They were enormous. They soared away above his head, so that his neck ached when he tried to see the tops of them. They were green in the headlights. Written across them in bold white letters were the words:
SMITH & SMITH
and underneath, in a smaller script:
REMOVALS
His companion took him by the arm and led him forward. They moved very slowly; each step lasted a week and stretched for a mile. On either side of him, tall poplar trees stood in a whispering avenue. How they talked, leaf chattering to leaf in a continual sibilant chorus! The wind shook them and a leaf fell, slowly, turning and twisting and floating in a dance of inexpressible grace and loveliness. Tears came into his eyes to think that so much wonder could exist. It was heart-rending, and it was beautiful. And all in a moment he was a small boy walking with his nurse along the Cherwell Banks in the grounds of Magdalen College, smelling the sweet, astringent smell of the poplar leaves. The scent rose from the wet earth all about him. His soul ached at it. Then, miles away, glimmering out at the end of the avenue he saw the house of the poplars and knew that he had reached the ultimate significance of all his past and future. Here, since first he stirred in his mother’s womb, the house had stood and waited for him.
He passed over the threshold.
Three men sat about a table. One of them was tall and thin, with sparse red hair and a straggling sandy beard. He sniggered when he spoke.
‘This is Dr Schmidt,’ said Belford’s companion.
‘Delighted,’ said Dr Schmidt. ‘It is very good of my friend Mr Smith to have brought you.’ He sniggered. ‘On my right is Mr Smyth. He spells it with a Y.’
Mr Smyth smiled. He had a narrow, dark face marked with a long white scar as though it had been splashed with acid.
‘It is a pleasure,’ said he, ‘to welcome a new client. Mr Smythe will agree with me, I am sure. He spells his name with a Y and an E.’
The fourth man grunted. He was square and sallow, and his strong hands had short fingers and hairy knuckles.
‘Mr Belford requires a little assistance,’ said Mr Smith. ‘He is troubled with a wife. A wife can be so unnecessary. It is obviously a case for removal.’
‘We undertake removals,’ said Dr S
chmidt.
‘They are a speciality of the house,’ said Mr Smyth.
‘Perfect discretion, and distance no object,’ muttered Mr Smythe.
‘What are the lady’s habits?’ enquired Dr Schmidt. He sniggered again. ‘How often do I not warn people that it is unwise to contract habits, but they do not listen.’
‘The lady’s habits come into your department, I fancy, doctor,’ said Mr Smith.
Belford listened as though from a great distance to the details of his own story. The bottle of tablets was in the hands of Mr Smith. Probably he had kept them ever since Belford had handed them to him that evening, centuries ago, in Rapallo’s. But this was a trifle, after all. His attention wandered to the little tune that was being tapped out by the pattern of the tablecloth. It had a note like a xylophone, very bell-like and delicate, and it rippled out a tinny pastoral melody full of the scent of cowslips and newly-budded hawthorn.
Dr Schmidt was speaking.
‘Ten-grain doses. Fifty tablets and fifty nights. And two months to go. That is easy.’
Mr Smith turned to Belford.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘If your wife were to take a fatal overdose within the next fifty days, would it be worth five hundred pounds to you?’
Extreme clarity of mind came back to Belford in a rush. He spoke precisely, articulating each syllable. It pleased him to feel vowel and consonant marching so orderly from teeth and tongue.
‘It would be exquisitely worth it,’ he said. ‘I stand to receive seventy-five thousand pounds under her will. That would square Ingleborough and put me straight with my debtors. I could easily spare five hundred pounds.’
He made a gesture with his hands. Five hundred pounds in minted gold, running and jingling over the table. Not paper money, but gold. Under his feet he saw deep into the earth, where miners stooped and sweated to drag out the ore for him. Steamers and the noise of the dockyards—leagues of ocean—the work of the world bringing the wealth of the world to his feet. He saw the pictures best without ever losing sight of the quiet room and the four faces clustered beneath that lamplight. Only, on the screen of his imagination, the moving map of the something was mightily unrolled.
‘Very good,’ said Mr Smith. ‘You have your cheque book with you? You will write us a cheque for £500, payable—we will allow a margin—fifty-six days from now. That will bring us to the 17th of December—eight weeks precisely. The removal, you understand, may take place earlier, but in no case later than fifty-six days hence, when the cheque will be presented. That is fair, I think. If, between now and the day of the removal you should change your mind, you have only to leave word for me at Rapallo’s; but when once the removal has occurred it would be unwise to endeavour to stop the cheque. We take our precautions, of course. Have you been abroad lately, by the way?’
‘I was in Germany last May.’
Dr Schmidt sniggered and rose from the table.
‘You need not hesitate to sign,’ went on Mr Smith. ‘It is our pleasure as well as our business to provide these easy little accommodations for our clients. Make it out, please, to Smith & Smith. Thank you—that is admissible. It is remarkable how readily these trifling difficulties can be removed with a stroke of the pen.’
Belford contemplated his signature. The bold outline of the B pleased him, the swaggering lift and drop of the l and f, and the flourish of the final d. Ludicrous, that he should have suffered so long and so acutely, when that powerful pen-shape on a slip of pink paper could set him free.
‘Anything more?’ he asked.
‘Only your name to the Removal Order,’ said Mr Smith.
He sighed again, happily. The paper began ‘Order to Remove’—then came a blank space, with a dotted line at the bottom on which his freshly written name stood out blackly. Mr Smith took the paper from him and filled in at his dictation his wife’s name and address and a date—‘on or before the 17th of December’. The laughter that had seized on him before had him in its grip again. He bellowed, clinging to the table for support.
‘Do you know what time you came home last night, Adrian?’ demanded Mrs Belford, peevishly. Without waiting for a reply she went on, ‘It was a quarter past three in the morning. I will not have these hours kept in my house. There is no godly or respectable occupation that could detain you so long. What can the servants think of you?’
Belford smiled. He knew that it had been past three o’clock when he returned. The white face of the clock on the landing had struck him as exceptionally ludicrous with its hands all askew and its two round winder-holes goggling at him like reproving eyes. Time had stood still for him during the centuries which it had taken him to climb the interminable staircase. He had slept in the House of the Poplars, and dreamed—what dreams! Even now he chuckled over these fantastic dreams.
‘It’s nothing to laugh at,’ said Mrs Belford. ‘I can only imagine that you were—intoxicated. It is most disgusting. Did you even remember to bring home my tablets?’
This staggered Belford. Had he done so? Or had he left them in the hands of the sniggering German doctor? He put his hand to his coat pocket, drew out a small package, wrapped in white paper and sealed at both ends with sealing wax. He stared at it. He so distinctly remembered having unwrapped it in the restaurant.
Mrs Belford twitched it from him.
‘At any rate, I am glad you were not so lost to decency as to leave that behind.’ She broke the seals and extracted the bottle, setting it upright on the bedside table. ‘Fortunately, I still had two or three tablets in the old bottle. Otherwise, I suppose, I might have lain awake in agony all night as far as you were concerned.’
‘Why don’t you get the stuff from Mullings, instead of depending on me?’ enquired Belford, impatiently.
‘I have told you before, I do not care to have my affairs known to the local chemist. Mullings is a perfect centre of gossip. And that is not the point. Is there any reason why you should object to performing a trifling service for your own wife?’
‘None whatever,’ said Belford, cheerfully. He felt curiously well and happy that morning. Whatever it was that he had drunk at Rapallo’s, it certainly left no hangover. The only reminder of his curious mental condition the night before was a tendency to see the funny side of everything. It was with difficulty that he checked a guffaw.
‘I suppose it is useless to ask you where you were or what you were doing?’ pursued Mrs Belford.
‘I met a man and dined with him. We talked business.’ Belford was amused. He looked down at his wife and, with a recurrence of that extraordinary clarity of vision, his eyes seemed to pierce her sallow skin and watch the sluggish and diseased blood as it pumped along the arteries, gathering up God-knew-what poisons by the way.
‘See that it doesn’t occur again,’ said Mrs Belford. ‘If this kind of thing is going to become habitual, I shall be forced to take steps. My dear father, who amassed his little fortune by hard work and sober living, would turn in his grave to think of its passing into the hands of a drunkard and debauchee.’
Belford again controlled his twitching laughter-muscles, and apologised. ‘The happy hypocrite.’ What a good phrase that was, and how well it expressed him. He ran down the stairs on escaping from the sick-room. Indeed, he seemed to float. His feet scarcely touched the treads. He was so buoyant that he could have skimmed right out of the front door on the wings.
His delicious hilarity lasted all day. He astonished his typists and clerks by his pleasant humour. He had only one disagreeable moment, when he took out his private cheque-book to pay a small personal bill. There was a blank counterfoil. He stared at it. Had he really given that cheque for £500 to Smith & Smith? His memory was not at fault; he remembered clearly everything that had happened, up to his falling asleep in the House of the Poplars. He remembered it—but he had not really believed in it. But the cheque was gone. ‘Order to Remove’—‘on or before 17th December’—‘If you should change your mind, leave a message at Rapallo’s’—‘It wou
ld be unwise to change your mind after the Removal has occurred.’ A nauseating feeling of horror rose up from some black deep of his subconsciousness. But it passed, and left him laughing at himself.
Three or four times during the next six weeks he returned to Conduit Street and walked past Rapallo’s. Once he went in and ordered a sandwich and a glass of beer. A different pair of barmen were on duty, and he saw nothing of any Mr Smith. He came out without leaving any message. If he had had any fixed intention of doing so, the ominous sign of ‘Golding & Moss, Financiers’, just visible over the lace curtain, would have deterred him. In any case, it was absurd to suppose that Smith & Smith, or Brown, Jones & Robinson, could possibly influence his wife to take an overdose of medicine. As for the cheque, if he had really drawn it, it could make no difference. Bankruptcy and disgrace are bankruptcy and disgrace; and £500 one way or another was a drop in the bucket.
And, after all, the weeks went by and nothing happened. He began to make necessary arrangements. He drew out what remained of his current account and mentioned to his wife that he had business which called him to Germany. He left on November 20th. He went to the hotel in Berlin where he had stayed before. One must have an address, if one were not to arouse premature suspicion. Later, if nothing happened at the last moment to render it unnecessary, he could disappear quietly.
For he still had dreams. They came to him at night, or walking under the lime trees, past the restaurants where still a few tables stood outside in the crisp autumn air. The leaves being late that year, sometimes a solitary one, blown from the dry twig where it lingered, would flutter with lingering, exquisite grace to his feet, reminding him, so that he seemed to smell the resinous sharp scent of poplars.
He dreamed that one morning they would bring a telegram to his bedside, summoning him home, because his wife had been taken ill suddenly in the night. He would take the steamer. He would drive through the foggy London streets. And when he got to his house, he would find the blinds drawn down.