A Tangled Web

by Nicholas Blake

  Things went a bit better at first over tea. Hugo, appeased by chocolate biscuits, started teasing Gertrude about her male pupils, and she responded more readily than Daisy would have thought possible. The girl relaxed, half her attention occupied with the room where they were sitting. Its walls were colour-washed a thunderous shade of pink, which rendered corpse-like the flesh tones of the nude above the mantelpiece, and clashed stridently with the copper and white stripes of the curtains and chair-covers and a couple of saffron velvet cushions on the sofa. The tea-set was in thick Italian pottery. Magazines littered a low round table, and the wall opposite the window was lined with bookcases of different heights. The window looked out upon a small neglected garden. There was a gramophone, but no television or radio set. The square of shabby carpet left a narrow strip of naked floor-board on one side, where it failed to meet the staining. No ornaments at all, but ash-trays everywhere; yet cigarette-ash lay in patches, like scurf, all over the carpet: Gertrude smoked incessantly, puffing away as if for dear life, and knocking the ash brusquely in the direction of the nearest ashtray.

  There was something nerve-racking, unco-ordinated, schizophrenic almost, about this room, as though a number of total strangers had each, at different times, contributed to it. Neither elegant nor cosy nor agreeably eccentric, it could have been pathetic but for its aggressive disregard of harmony and grace. Its occupants, one might have supposed, either lacked all taste or despised it: an acute observer would have seen that both these predicates were true—indeed, that the latter was, with such people as the Amberleys, a consequence of the former. The room whined a sort of doctrinaire puritanic sermon against the mere enjoyment of life, condemning charm as frivolity: it was a machine, not for living, but for partly living.

  None of these considerations occurred to Daisy. She felt oppressed here, certainly: she thought her hostess’s colour scheme very odd, but assumed it to be artistic in the most up-to-date style. The whole atrocious lack of decorum about this room, the perverse and supercilious flouting of the visual decencies, which even turned the nude into a body one would not be seen dead in a ditch with, passed, like the Amberleys’ talk, over Daisy’s head. She was thinking, this is a home, where two people live together, Hugo’s relations. The unreality of her life with Hugo came over her like a suffocating wave. She wanted to scream out, “It’s all wrong! What are we doing here? Why don’t you ask Hugo where his money comes from—you who ask every other question?” It was like in a dream, standing red-handed beside the corpse, when the tongue cannot utter the confession and the passers-by will not notice the deed.

  Unconsciously Daisy clasped her hands over her breast, and her eyes turned upwards. She was struggling to release herself from the nightmare. Gertrude, like ill-cooked food, had been its accidental cause; but its core was Hugo—the criminal secret which put a barrier between them and the rest of the world, and might even infect their love with its false pretences.

  “She’s just like Lady Hamilton At Prayer. Do look!”

  It was a rasping whisper from Gertrude, which at last penetrated Daisy’s unhappy reverie. She looked about her vaguely, a little wildly, wondering what they were talking about now.

  “What?—I’m sorry.”

  “I was saying you looked just like Lady Hamilton At Prayer. Didn’t she, Mark?”

  “Oh, er, yes. Yes.”

  “I don’t understand,” faltered Daisy, trying to smile.

  “It’s a picture,” Gertrude explained, clicking out the vocables like a string of beads. “By Romney. At Ken Wood.”

  Recollection of a history lesson, years ago, came to Daisy.

  “Is that Nelson’s?—” the girl found herself unable to utter the next word, which was readily supplied, however, by Mark.

  “Nelson’s mistress. That’s right.” He beamed encouragingly at Daisy. “A very beautiful creature she was, too.”

  “I think Romney got her essential floosey-ness quite perfectly, don’t you, Mark. In that painting. It’s genuine criticism.”

  “Unconscious, I take it.”

  “Oh, naturally. One wouldn’t expect critical awareness from a Romney. Dear me, no. No doubt she fooled him to the top of her bent. She was a professional poseuse, after all, the absurd creature. And artists are very naïve. That’s really the whole point. He painted exactly what was there—a glamorous, milkmaid-ish ninny putting on an act of prayer. And because she wasn’t even a very good actress, the floosey emerges from behind the prayerful pose.”

  “But couldn’t she have been praying?” Daisy said on an impulse. “Praying for Nelson? She loved him.”

  “That’s the last thing that would ever occur to Gertrude,” said Hugo.

  “She could have been”—Gertrude ignored him—“but in fact she was putting over her sex-appeal on Mr. Romney, and posterity.”

  Daisy remonstrated, “I don’t see how you can be so sure of that.”

  “I’ve seen the picture. You haven’t, apparently.” Gertrude snapped the words like dry biscuits, and Daisy realised that the woman was suddenly, inexplicably furious; this talk about Lady Hamilton was directed against herself. Though ductile and placid enough in temperament, Daisy could be roused: she was not overawed by Gertrude any longer, now she saw her ill-suppressed venom for what it was.

  “You think I’m a floosey, like this Lady Hamilton?” she said, laughing.

  Mark, without performing the action, gave the impression of one wringing his hands. “Oh, come now, Miss Bland, Gertrude really never suggested—”

  “Why so shocked?” his wife cut in crisply. “You are Hugo’s mistress, presumably? For all I know, you pray for him too—as well as serving him in other capacities.”

  Mark began to flap his hands, looking as if he were about to burst into tears, but Gertrude paid him no heed.

  “I’ve no objection to Hugo’s bringing his mistress to my house—it’s hardly the first time. But I despise this tawdry camouflage of being his fiancée.”

  “I do believe you’re in love with Hugo yourself,” Daisy was startled to hear herself say—and at once bitterly ashamed.

  “No doubt you do. Sex is all that moronic shop-girls ever think about.” Gertrude positively spat the words into Daisy’s face. Hugo leant back, speaking with a measured calmness which frightened Daisy:

  “Gertrude, nature made you a bitch, but you needn’t be a vulgar bitch. You’ve done your best all the afternoon to make Daisy feel ill at ease. I’ll pass that over, because you can’t help waving your intellectual pretensions under people’s noses. But you will apologise for what you’ve just said.”

  “Oh, look now, Hugo. Steady on. That’s damned offensive,” Mark began.

  “Shut up, Mark,” said his wife, beside herself now, and turned upon Hugo. “How dare you talk to me like that! You’re a waster. I know you. A jail-bird. You go round sponging on people—d’you know how much you owe us?—throwing your famous charm about. You make me sick. You’re diseased with vanity. I don’t know what keeps you alive, except basking in the admiration of a string of cretinous creatures like—”

  “Don’t splutter at me, Gertrude. You’re just adding to the list of things you’ve got to apologise for.”

  “Please, Hugo! Let’s go,” said Daisy urgently, pulling at his sleeve.

  “Not till my dear sister-in-law has apologised.”

  “If you think I’m going to apologise to you—”

  “Not to me. To Daisy.”

  Gertrude’s grin was a rictus. “I’m not one of your tarts. You can’t bully me. And if you had any brains in your head, you’d know that.”

  “Aha, my fearless little highbrow critic, don’t you be so sure,” said Hugo; and before Daisy could anticipate his next movement, he had drawn a revolver from his pocket and pointed it at Gertrude. A muddy flush came over her face and went, leaving it dead pale.

  “No, no!” she whimpered, pushing at the air in front of her eyes. It was not the revolver which had done it, so much as Hugo’s expr
ession. Daisy had seen that expression once before: a bleak, cold recklessness: a look of almost ecstatic surrender to the violence within.

  “Please, Gertrude, please apologise,” she cried imploringly. “He means it.”

  Mark had shrunk back against the wall. Daisy feared that, if she herself stirred, it would pull the trigger. The revolver struck forward a foot towards Gertrude, as if of its own volition. She began nodding her head violently, the eyes staring at Hugo, like a woman in a fit. Her teeth chattered, and at last the abject words came out.

  8. “He’d as soon be in Prison”

  One evening, a fortnight later, Daisy set out to visit John Jaques. The fling of high life was over, and Hugo had taken her back to the rooms in Maida Vale. They had seen Jacko several times during that period. Daisy’s first doubts about him were set at rest by these meetings: he was attentive to her, and he jollied Hugo along in an easy, impish way that made her warm to him. He was in any case a more solid figure than the chance acquaintances of bar, night-club and race-meeting—young men who made difficult conversation or facile passes at her, young women whose eyes lingered upon Hugo—a drifting, brittle society with no more relationship than match-sticks swirling together and apart in some back-eddy.

  Jacko represented something more permanent. And it was a measure of Daisy’s need for such stability, now the first flood of passion had subsided a little, that she should seek it in him. Jacko was an abortionist, according to Hugo, and a sort of pilot fish for his own criminal activities, yet Daisy could not feel any moral abhorrence for him. He’s like—like an uncle to us both, she thought as the underground train rattled her towards Kensington High Street. Perhaps I’m just a naturally wicked girl—taking to this sort of thing like a duck to water: I don’t seem to be able to feel shocked any more. She took out her compact. A face pure and dreamy as the dawn gazed at her from its little mirror. So there I am, a burglar’s moll, on my way to visit a doctor who…

  Hugo was out this evening. He would not be back till late, he had said. He said no more than this, but she knew—as she was always to know now—that something was in the wind. He had looked taut this morning, withdrawn from her, as if he must listen attentively to something tuning up within himself. But there was the tacit compact between them that he should not tell her his plans, nor she inquire. A louring, foreboding sensation oppressed her; it was like when the sky came down and sat for days upon the wold above her village in Gloucestershire. Outside the station, some impulse made her ask a policeman the route to Albert Grove, though she did not need his directions: he looked at her steadily, in the policeman’s way, but without suspicion or curiosity. As she walked on, Daisy thought how strange it was that the police should not have troubled them yet: disquieting too, and heightening her sense of isolation, as if They knew all about her but were biding their time, waiting maybe for some sign, some crucial, irretrievable error, before They took action.

  Albert Grove was a crescent-shaped terrace, lined with plane trees, of early-Victorian houses, which one could imagine inhabited by the widows of Deans and Indian Civil Servants, by sere, punctilious bachelors devoted to stamp-collecting or archery, by distant cousins of county families. In the small double drawing-rooms there would be Benares brass, amateur water-colours, a gold-fish bowl, a solitaire board—relics of a civilisation which had never been fighting against time. The brass plate at John Jaques’s door repeated the note of unobtrusive smugness. He came to the door himself, an image of discreet professional respectability, and taking her by the elbow, led her into a parlour on the left of the hall, its window darkened by ferns and muslin curtains.

  For a while, as she sipped the dry sherry he had poured out, they talked on indifferent subjects. Daisy felt both nervous and relaxed. In the dim little room she could only see him as a featureless face surmounted by white hair, outlined against the window. She found herself gradually sinking into this new environment, whose greenish light suggested an aquarium—an impression heightened by Jacko’s slow-motion gestures as he poured out more sherry from a Venetian decanter. His light, throaty voice curled like slow arabesques of smoke in the close air: it was a consoling sound. A phrase swam into Daisy’s head—“bedside manner”—and involuntarily she shivered a little. At once, though how he had noticed it in the gloom she could not imagine, Jacko said with solicitude:

  “Are you cold, my dear? Shall I light the fire?”

  “No, it’s all right,” she replied, in some confusion. “I’m not—it’s very dark, though, isn’t it?”

  “Restful for the eyes. People talk a lot about the effect of noise in our city life; but I believe modern lighting has a more adverse effect on the nervous system—all these high-powered street lights and neons, and hundred-watt bulbs in private houses—it’s against nature.” His voice went soothingly on. Daisy, following her own thoughts, was suddenly arrested by a phrase… “our instincts. We are still creatures of the dark. We ignore the dark element within us at our peril.”

  A not very obscure association made Daisy say, “We had an awful scene at the Amberleys’. Did Hugo tell you?”

  “No. But I’m not surprised. It was Gertrude, I suppose. What happened?”

  As Daisy recounted the lamentable scene, she began to shake uncontrollably. Jacko now came to sit on the arm of her chair, and was stroking the hair over her temple with a rhythmic movement she found quite hypnotic. A car, passing in the street, sounded distant as a memory. The window blurred before Daisy’s eyes: she felt weak, convalescent, comforted.

  “Probably do her good, in the long run,” Jacko was saying. “That sort of woman needs shock treatment. But old Hugo doesn’t normally carry a gun about with him, does he? Was it loaded?”

  “I don’t think so. I really don’t know,” said Daisy, answering both questions. “But I was terrified. Hugo’s face. It scared me dreadfully. I’m afraid what he might do if—”

  “That’s a price you must pay—”

  “I mean, he really might kill someone. He seems to lose all control.”

  “Oh, come now, my dear, I can’t quite believe that. Anyway, it’s what Hugo is like. You’ve got to accept it. You can’t just choose the things you like about a person and say that is the person you love. Though nearly everyone does. You must take him for better and for worse.”

  “Oh, I do, I do! But I wish—”

  “Wish you could change him?”

  “No, understand him. His moods.”

  “Hugo’s not all that difficult to understand, surely. He’s a straightforward manic-depressive type, and—”

  “Oh,” the girl cried, “he’s not—you don’t mean he’s, well, not right in his head?”

  “Of course I don’t. A manic-depressive is simply someone who swings between two extreme states of mind, exhilaration and apathy. Most of us are like that, up to a point. It’s perfectly all right, as long as you don’t swing too far.”

  “I see.” Daisy was partly reassured, and pressed Jacko’s hand in gratitude. He patted her shoulder: and a forgotten memory rose momentarily from the past—of her father, that dour, silent man, comforting her over some childhood misadventure.

  “Nothing gone wrong between you two?” he presently asked: his voice in the gloom sounded strange to her: if it had been anyone but Jacko, whose sympathy she had come to take almost for granted, Daisy might have imagined something in his tone beyond the usual attentive interest—a kind of eagerness.

  “No, nothing at all,” she cried. “But it is difficult. We live such a funny way. The insecurity.”

  Even with Jacko, to say more would be, she felt, a kind of disloyalty to Hugo. However, he took it up briskly.

  “You worry about Hugo’s anti-social tendencies?”

  Dumbly, gazing down at her hands, she nodded.

  “Well, you’ve either got to accept them, or make a break,” Jacko went on. “Unless you plan to reform him.”

  “I just want to do what’s best for him,” she replied, put on the defensive by h
is last words.

  “Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not being censorious, not being nasty. If anyone could reform him, it’s you. But you must understand what you’re up against. Old Hugo hated his father—you know that—when he was a boy. Now that hatred is deeply ingrained in his character. He’s simply transferred it to a wider reference: authority, respectability, society—whatever represents the father-figure he violently reacts against. It’s not his fault. He can’t help being a rebel, an outlaw. Do you see what I mean?”

  “Yes, I think so.” Daisy sighed. “You think I ought to let things go on as they are?”

  “Does it sound very immoral advice to you?” Jacko chuckled in his friendly way.

  “I don’t know,” she replied.

  “Put it this way—do you really want Hugo different, even supposing he could be changed?”

  Daisy bowed her head, feeling suddenly confused and unhappy. They had gone so far in confidence, yet the word “criminal” had not once been used. The vague, sub-aqueous light in this room, Jacko’s fingers gently stroking her upper arm now, seemed to have put a spell around her. It was on an almost desperate impulse to break free of it that she said, “Doesn’t it ever worry you, living the way you do?”

  She was aware at once that Jacko was taken tremendously aback. Glancing up at him, she saw his face overhanging her, like stone, like a gargoyle. His fingers had left her arm.

  “Not in the least,” he said, after a pause. “And what way do I live?” Abruptly rising, he switched on the light, as if to illuminate the early-Victorian respectability of the room.

  “Well, Hugo told me—”