The Colour of Murder

by Julian Symons

  Because, you see, while I had been talking to Gimball I had remembered those letters being on my desk, I remembered thinking that I must answer them. Why hadn’t I done so? When I reached that question my mind became blank and at last, some time in the afternoon, I gave up trying to answer it and began to think again about the girl in the library.

  Chapter Three

  May didn’t much like going round to mother’s place every Wednesday, she only did it because I insisted, and she often complained. There were several reasons for this, as far as I could make out. One was that we had a flat in Windover Close, a newish block overlooking the south side of Clapham Common, while mother lived in a small house in Baynard Road, one of the small roads between the Common and Wandsworth Road.

  There was nothing wrong with this house, you understand, but when father died, that was when I was in the Army, mother hadn’t much money. We moved out of the big house in Kincaid Square and she bought this one in Baynard Road. There was nothing wrong with the house as I’ve said, it was like all the others in Baynard Road to be sure, but it was respectable. I’d been living there myself when I first met May. I had a kind of affection for the place, even liked the little squeaking iron gate and the dust patch at the back that you couldn’t call a garden.

  May hated it. She’d been brought up herself in Nelson Terrace, which was much worse than Baynard Road, on the wrong side of Wandsworth Road, really in Battersea, not Clapham. Her own mother and father – well, May never wanted to be reminded about them or about that kind of life. I think Baynard Road did remind her. She was a great one for having nice young couples in to play bridge and drink coffee and eat little sandwiches cut into shapes of hearts, clubs, spades and diamonds and watch TV. She was always on at me to ask Gimball and his wife to dinner, and used to say I had no idea of improving my social position. It was funny she should be like that when she wanted to forget all about her own social background, but that’s the way it was. And then she didn’t like mother, and hated Uncle Dan, who lived in Baynard Road too, and – but I’d better get back to that evening, which was like all the other evenings and yet a little different.

  The pattern of the evenings never changed much. We would have dinner, a good solid dinner of the kind I liked, the kind that May never cooked for me. Then there’d be a bit of talk, and we’d settle down to play cards, sevens or Newmarket or solo whist. May really only liked playing bridge, she said the games we played round at mother’s were slow and old-fashioned.

  That evening there was steak and kidney pie, plenty of kidney inside and a nice brown crust on top. When I passed up my plate for more, mother said, “I knew you’d be asking for a second helping. I don’t forget my boy’s favourites.”

  “You shouldn’t have any more, John,” May said. “It’s gluttony, really. It’s not good for you.”

  “Not good for him.” Mother held up her hands in astonishment. “Steak and kidney pie never hurt anybody.”

  “It’s delicious pie.” May snapped off the word pie as though she were biting it. “But too much isn’t good for John. He’s getting fat.”

  It was a fact that I’d put on a bit of weight in the last few months. Doubtfully I said, “I don’t know, perhaps May’s right.”

  By now two great tablespoonfuls of pie were on my plate. “Can’t take it back now,” mother said. “It won’t hurt him for once. After all, he doesn’t get it very often.” She didn’t mean any harm but I could see from May’s face that it was the wrong thing to say.

  “Eat it up, boy. Be all the same in a hundred years,” boomed Uncle Dan. He was my mother’s brother, a big man with a fine shock of grey hair, who had done all sorts of things in his time – trading in a Chinese junk up the Yangtse, acting as agent for several British firms in the Far East, and finally running an insurance book in south-west London. He had given this up a few months back and now lived with my mother as a kind of lodger or paying guest.

  After the pie came treacle pudding. Uncle Dan ate heartily, and so did I. May hardly touched her piece. Afterwards we had the usual argument about helping with the washing up, and as usual mother finally agreed to let us wipe the plates. May never let guests help with the washing up at home. When it was done she said she was too tired to play cards. Mother had just got down the pack from its place on the mantelpiece. Now she paused.

  “Too tired to play cards,” Uncle Dan said incredulously. “Why, girl, I’ve sat up all night playing solo, drinking whisky, felt fresh as a daisy at the end of it. Nothing like a game of cards to take you out of yourself when you’re feeling down.”

  “I’m not feeling down,” May said. “Just too tired to play cards.”

  “Tell you what, we’ll have a change.” Uncle Dan took the cards and gave them what he called his cardsharp’s shuffle. “We’ll have a real little flutter tonight, a game of pontoon.”

  “Pontoon would be a nice change.” That was my mother.

  “Need to get the rules straight first. My experience is every school has its own different way of playing. Split on aces only, is that agreeable to all? Pay double for pontoons, treble for five-card tricks, maximum stake threepence, banker can double if he wants. A real gamble, eh?”

  “I don’t want to play cards,” May said in a high voice.

  “Have a little flutter and see if you can be the first lady to break the bank at Monte Carlo,” said Uncle Dan. “Wonder if I’ve got enough money for this gambling school now, where are my coppers?”

  Mother said in the very quiet voice she uses when she feels hurt, “May said she didn’t want to play cards, Dan.”

  Uncle Dan looked quickly at my mother and at May, then he put the cards away again in their case. We spent the rest of the evening talking about the weather and the neighbours and whether it was better to own your house or rent it. Mother kissed my cheek with an extra pressure when she said good night. Uncle Dan asked why I didn’t join the tennis club this year. I said I would think about it. I had been a pretty good player, but I’d given it up when I got married because May didn’t like the game.

  Walking back home over the Common, May and I didn’t talk to each other. When we’d got into the flat, though, she said, “That’s over for another week, thank goodness.”

  “You upset mother.”

  “She knows I don’t like to play cards. Why does she produce them every time we go over as if she were giving us a treat?”

  “You play bridge.”

  “That’s a real card game.”

  “Just once a week doesn’t hurt, surely.”

  May was off on a new tack. “Don’t think I didn’t notice what your mother said about the steak and kidney pie. Won’t hurt him for once, doesn’t get it very often, I know just what she means. And that awful vulgar old man with his bad jokes. It’s not just once a week, it’s been once a week for years.”

  “What’s the matter with Uncle Dan? I must say I’m surprised to hear you talking about vulgarity. I don’t think it comes very well from you.”

  She turned to me. Her face was flushed, but her long nose was quite white. “That’s a mean thing to say. Just because my father was a workman –”

  “A street bookie,” I said. “When he wasn’t drunk or in prison.”

  She sat down in a chair and began to cry. Phrases came through the tears about having made a good home for me, my family always having been against her, I was ashamed of her, and so on.

  “Stop it,” I said, and then I shouted, “Stop it. It’s all nonsense.”

  “Your mother hates me. I took away the baby boy she used to make steak and kidney puddings for.”

  I hit May then. It was the first time I’d ever hit her. I struck her with the palm of my hand across the cheek, not very hard but enough to make a mark. She put her hand to her cheek, stopped crying, and looked surprised.

  Immediately I’d done that I was terribly sorry and ashamed. I had never struck a woman before, and I had been brought up to believe that nobody who is decent does that kind of thi
ng. I can remember that once, when we lived in the Kincaid Square house, before father died and we moved to Baynard Road, I looked out of the window one night and saw a man hitting a woman in the square. I was perhaps eight years old at the time, and the noise outside must have wakened me from sleep. The linoleum was cold under my feet as I went to the window, pulled aside the curtain and looked out.

  A man was shouting at a woman, then they were locked together and he had pushed her over to the pavement. Another man came up and they began shouting and then hitting at each other. The woman got to her knees and was pushed over again. It all seemed to me a joke, grown-up people playing the same kind of games that we played at school. Rain was falling, the pavements gleamed in the lamplight, and I can remember that what impressed me most vividly was that grown-ups apparently did not mind getting their clothes dirty. My excitement and interest must have made me move about, for my mother came in and exclaimed with dismay as she saw me standing by the window. She bundled me back to bed, and would not answer my questions except to say that the people outside were behaving in a beastly way, that they were drunk, and that drink was a terrible thing. I remember wondering why when children did that kind of thing it should be called play, and when grown people did it they were behaving like beasts. I did not forget the scene when I grew older, but of course I understood it and came to think of it with horror, as some adults think of films that frightened them long ago. Now I had behaved like that man in the square and I was ashamed. I hadn’t even the excuse of drink. I wondered what my mother would have said.

  I went down on my knees to May and asked her to forgive me, told her I had had a difficult day at the office, she shouldn’t have spoken as she had of my mother, but I was wrong, too, much more wrong. I had my arms round her legs and when she suddenly stood up I nearly fell over. She said she was going to bed. She went to the bathroom while I undressed and put on my dressing-gown. Then I went to the bathroom, washed, and brushed my teeth. I took a long time about this because I knew that May did not like me to see her undressing. When I got back to the bedroom the light was out. I got into bed and put my hand on her side, but she pushed it away.

  I lay on my back and began to think about the girl in the library. I used to be a good runner, good at most games as a matter of fact, although I gave them up when I got married because May wasn’t interested. Now I was running in the half mile, which was always my best distance, and she was in the crowd, I saw her before the race and her eyes widened in surprise. “I didn’t know you were a runner,” she said. “You looked so much like a student, a real literary man, the other day in the library. Are you going to win?” I smiled and answered confidently, “You’ll see.” When I made my spurt as I came into the straight, legs pounding away like pistons, gathering speed in a way which took me yards beyond the pacemaker and allowed me safely to look over my shoulder before I breasted the tape, I saw her looking at me with lips parted, white teeth showing. And when I went up to receive my prize she was there on the platform. She gave me the little silver cup and then said, “There’s another prize, too, you know.” She put her arms round me and kissed me full on the lips…

  Chapter Four

  How did I come to marry May? It’s very hard for me to think back, and understand the state of mind in which I got married. My father died early in 1945, he was killed by one of the V2’s as he was going out to lunch one day. He was fifty years old. I was just old enough to be in the Army, doing my preliminary training, and I came home for the funeral. Mother was very brave, I remember, but she broke down at the graveside.

  I had a week’s compassionate leave to clear up father’s affairs, and I soon found out that there weren’t many affairs to clear up. In my grandfather’s time Wilkins Engineering Distributors had been a flourishing little firm. Grandfather had bought the house in Kincaid Square, which was one of the best parts of Clapham, and had brought father up into the business. Father had never really liked engineering or even been interested in it, but he had done what grandfather told him. He was the only son, and when grandfather died he got the business and the house in Kincaid Square. There were two daughters as well, Ellen and Gertrude, who got a thousand pounds each. Both of them were married. Ellen to a dentist in Manchester and Gertrude to a farmer up in Scotland. We had always stayed on good terms with Ellen, and mother and she wrote to each other quite often, but my father had had a great row with Gertrude at the time of grandfather’s death, and they hadn’t seen each other for years. The Kincaid Square house was much too big for us, as I was an only child, but father would never consider letting any of it, any more than he would consider having a partner in the business. It was a family business, he said, and it was going to stay that way. He wanted me to apply for exemption from military service so that I could stay and help him, but I wouldn’t do that. It was one of the things, and there were a good many of them, about which we didn’t see eye to eye.

  Somehow I never seemed really to get to know father. He was a quiet, lonely man, and looking back now I think he always had it in mind that, without meaning to do so, I took mother away from him. He thought that she spoiled me and so he was determined that he wouldn’t spoil me too. I don’t mean that he was unkind, but he always kept his distance from me and never showed much interest in what I did. I was very good at running as I’ve told you, got in the first team at Cording Grammar School for football and cricket, and later on when they started a tennis team I was captain of tennis, but it never seemed to mean anything to father. He never meant much to me either, or that’s the way I felt about him at the time. It is only since his death that I’ve come to realise how much he must have disliked most of the things he did and the life he led. Mother once told me that what father really wanted was to go on the stage, and he was very disappointed when grandfather wouldn’t permit it.

  As I’ve said, I went through father’s affairs, with a lawyer to help and advise me. The position was that Wilkins Engineering Distributors was practically finished. Father had neglected it for years. The firm existed simply on little dribs and drabs of orders from people who’d dealt with it in grandfather’s time and had gone on doing so out of habit. No new business came in because father never looked for any, and he lost a certain amount of old business each year because of slackness in filling orders. I had known something of this, because I worked at the office for a few months before going into the Army, but I was too young then to understand that behind father’s grave attentive manner and his courteous way of speaking to clients on the telephone was simply laziness. For the past five years, we discovered, father had been drawing on his capital. There was nothing for it but to close down the firm, and sell the house in Kincaid Square. When that had been done and the house in Baynard Road bought, mother had just enough to live on, especially with the help of Uncle Dan.

  I made another discovery at the office, one which shocked me a great deal. In the safe, to which in his lifetime only my father had had a key, were three bundles of letters. They were from a woman called Mrs Meadows, a widow, and they showed conclusively that she had been, and in fact was up to the time of his death, his mistress. I couldn’t imagine such a thing, a man like my father having a mistress, a man who always seemed to me the image of respectability. It was a betrayal of my mother, that was the way I felt about it. He had always come home at nights as far as I could remember, so he must have gone to see Mrs Meadows in the afternoons. That was another reason, no doubt, for the decline of the business.

  I burned the letters from Mrs Meadows, and never mentioned them to my mother. I have wondered sometimes recently if mother knew about them all the time, or if Mrs Meadows wrote to her after father’s death. I don’t suppose I shall ever know now.

  All this happened while I was in the Army. I was very keen to get in, volunteered when I was still under age, but I was disappointed with Army life. Most of the men were so cynical, they seemed to regard the war and everything about it as a racket. They called me a bullshitter because I tried to be sm
art and because I once asked the drill corporal for an extra hour’s instruction. I didn’t take much notice of them, but what did upset me was that I didn’t seem to get on too well with the instructors either. I tried really hard and I was as good as most of them and a lot better than many, but even after I’d passed out as a driver-mechanic in the RAC I wasn’t quite satisfied. I won’t say I felt there was a conspiracy against me, but people who hadn’t got a quarter of my intelligence and enthusiasm got one stripe and even two stripes up while I remained a trooper.

  One of the sergeants said to me, “You know, Wilkins, you try too hard.” I said to him that I couldn’t see there was such a thing as trying too hard. I simply wanted to be a good soldier. At that he just laughed and didn’t say any more.

  After I’d been in about three months I was ragged one night. There was a big tough fellow named Gibson who bunked next to me in the barrack room. He used to go out and drink a lot, and after he’d had a few drinks he was very quarrelsome. This night he came back to camp just before lights out and said to me, “Who’s the biggest crawler in the squad? You are, Wilkins.” I took no notice of him, and he came over and grinned at me. “Say it, Wilkins. Say ‘I’m the biggest crawler in the squad.’ Tell the truth for once in your life.” I still said nothing, but when Gibson came up and put his hand on my shoulder I punched him on the jaw.

  You might think that the other men would respect somebody who was prepared to stand up for himself, but what happened was that a whole pack of them, Gibson’s friends, set on to me. I fought, but I was no match for the lot of them. I won’t say what they did, it was humiliating more than painful, but it made me sick of the Army. It seemed you couldn’t be a good soldier when you tried, the others wouldn’t let you.

  A couple of days afterwards I had the first of my blackouts. I got a pass out, went into town on my own and drank some beer, and didn’t get back to camp until three o’clock in the morning. I got seven days CB for that.