The Colour of Murder

by Julian Symons

  A week or two after that the doctor found that I had an ear-drum injury which should have been noticed on my original medical examination. He downgraded me to B1, I was made a permanent clerk, and I spent the rest of my time in the Army filling in forms and making up weekly returns. I came out early in 1947. The way I felt about the Army was that I had tried really hard, but it hadn’t done any good. Soon after coming out I took a job in Palings. That was how I met May.

  Chapter Five

  Like most big firms nowadays, Palings have a fine sports ground, with cricket and football teams, six good hard tennis courts and a pavilion where you can get snacks or hot lunches, and play table tennis or cards. I’d given up cricket by this time because you can’t play cricket and tennis, and I was better at tennis. I played football in the winter, and used to spend most weekends down at the ground, which was at Eltham, on the same side of London as Clapham but a kind of cross-country journey. There were dances every other Saturday, and I used to go to them, although I don’t dance much. I don’t flatter myself I’m all that good a dancer, but it seemed to me that others no better than I am were always on the floor. I don’t see anything wrong when I look in the glass, but as I told you I’m not attractive to women.

  It was a surprise to me when one day a girl came up and asked me to dance. She said, “If you’re free would you like to dance this one with me?” So we danced. She wasn’t a bad-looking girl, with a good figure and nice legs, although her nose was too long and her eyes were set rather close together. She told me she worked in the Accounts Department and that her name was May Colter.

  At our second dance – I asked her this time – she said, “I’ve seen you before, I don’t mean at the club. You live in Clapham, don’t you? So do I. Do you think it was awful of me to ask you to dance with me? I’ve never done that before.”

  I said I thought it was very brave.

  “You live in one of those Kincaid Square houses, don’t you?” I told her that we’d moved, and she seemed disconcerted, but not for long. “I’ve known you for years, seen you about,” she said. I asked her where she lived, but she was vague, said with a laugh that it was not nearly so grand as Kincaid Square. I asked her if she played tennis, and she said she loved it. It seemed only natural to be seeing her home, although she wouldn’t let me go all the way, said something about her mother not liking strange young men. When we parted we arranged to meet at the Plough and go down to the ground together on the following day.

  That was how it began. May wasn’t a good tennis player, nowhere near my class, but I got into the habit of partnering her in mixed doubles, and of playing mixed doubles a lot more than I had done. Then we met sometimes at lunchtime and took the same bus home quite often in the evenings. When it was wet we sometimes went to the pictures. Right from the start May wanted me to take her home and introduce her to mother. She didn’t exactly ask me, but she was always saying that she couldn’t wait to see what my home was like, and asking me to describe exactly what things stood where, and so on. I had my doubts about doing it, I’d never invited a girl home before, and I had a feeling mother and May wouldn’t get on, but after a few weeks I gave way. I told mother that I had a girl-friend and I wanted to ask her home.

  So May came in one evening to supper. It didn’t go off very well. Mother and May both seemed to me to behave in such a funny way. Mother was very straight and starchy, as she sometimes is when things go wrong. She’d got out the Doulton dinner service that we didn’t use more than once a year. There were napkins and finger-bowls, which I’d never seen at our table before, and we had four courses, which was something in those days a couple of years after the war, and mother talked an awful lot about the weather.

  As for May, she wore a very frilly white blouse which had no sleeves, so that you couldn’t help seeing she had skinny arms, and she had had her hair done specially.

  She only ate a very little of each dish and she talked about what was on at different West End theatres. Of course mother knew nothing about them, and as far as I knew May had never seen any of the shows herself. I asked her if she’d seen one she was talking about and she said oh yes, and I asked who with. She giggled. “A friend. He mustn’t be jealous, Mrs Wilkins, must he?”

  “I hope he’s no need to be,” my mother said. “Only a foolish woman tries to make a man jealous. I never gave your father cause for jealousy, nor he me, in the twenty-five years we were married.” I couldn’t help thinking of the letters in the office drawer.

  “I think John needs to be made a teeny bit jealous. He might feel too sure of himself otherwise.” May paddled her fingertips in the bowl.

  “What an extraordinary idea.”

  “Honestly it was only a girl I went with, but it was an awfully good show. I did ask John to take me, but he wouldn’t.”

  “John’s a real home boy,” my mother said. “And by the way, I’ve darned another pair of your grey socks, I know you never like wearing them more than two days. He’s so particular,” she said to May. “I really don’t believe anybody but his mother would put up with him.”

  That was the way they went on talking to each other. I was glad when the evening was over and I was seeing May back to Melbourne Avenue, where she had a room. She’d explained to me that her mother and father had both been killed in a railway accident, and since she was seventeen she’d always lived by herself. May didn’t say much about the evening, except when I asked what she thought of my home now she’d seen it. “It’s awfully old-fashioned, isn’t it, all that furniture and everything.

  And that dinner service, some of the pieces were a bit chipped, I couldn’t help noticing.”

  “The dinner service was Royal Doulton. It’s been in our family since grandfather’s time, perhaps earlier.”

  Perhaps I sounded a bit stiff. She said at once, “I know, John, it’s just that I like contemporary things. I expect it was much nicer at Kincaid Square.”

  At the end of Melbourne Avenue, which wasn’t as grand as its name, just about like Baynard Road, I kissed May good night. She would never let me do more than that. “One thing leads to another, and I don’t think people ought to do that kind of thing before they’re married,” she said. Sometimes in the cinema she would dig her nails into my palm, but generally it was just this momentary light pressure on the lips when we parted. I can’t say I ever wanted much more at that time.

  As for mother, she only said, “Arms like matchsticks, that girl’s got. Doesn’t eat proper food, I suppose.” She must have been asking questions, though, because a day or two later she spoke to me casually. “Your friend Miss Colter doesn’t live at home, does she?”

  “No. Her mother and father died years ago.”

  “Her father’s Barney Colter, and he’s very much alive. In fact, he’s only just come out of prison.”

  For a moment I couldn’t think who Barney Colter was. Then I remembered that long ago, at Kincaid Square when I was a child, we’d had a gardener named Barney Colter and he’d been sacked for stealing some money. Since then I vaguely knew that he’d been in and out of prison for street bookmaking and petty theft.

  “It can’t be the same one.”

  My mother nodded. She looked very formidable. “No doubt at all about that. I thought it was odd she should have the same name, and I made some inquiries. The father a thief and the mother a habitual drunkard. Not a nice family, John.”

  Really I agreed with mother, but I felt bound to defend May. “That’s not her fault.”

  “Perhaps not.” My mother gave grudging agreement. “But she should have told you. I must say I consider it deceitful.”

  I didn’t answer, because now I was remembering what must have been May herself, a very small pig-tailed girl who had come sometimes with big Barney Colter, and had played quietly on her own in the garden. Somehow the incident made me feel, for the first time, that I really loved her. It was as though she were a little girl again, somebody who looked up to me and was helpless, in need of protection
. The next time I saw her I told her I knew about her mother and father. She went very red.

  “Why did you say they were dead?”

  “I was so ashamed. I hate them. They’re – oh, you wouldn’t understand – they’re filthy. Disgusting. I never want to see them again.” She burst into tears, I took her into my arms, and for the first time she kissed me of her own accord, a hard passionate kiss. I knew then that I was going to marry her.

  Three months later we were married, very quietly, at a local registry office. I paid for the wedding breakfast afterwards, because May wouldn’t even let her mother and father come to it. I could understand that, I was even rather glad in a kind of way because from what I’d heard May’s parents were quite capable of making an awful scene, but at the same time I felt that she was rather hard about it. A telegram came from them, and Uncle Dan, who was in charge of the proceedings, read it out. The telegram said: Best of luck girlie don’t let him get you down. Dad and Mum. Uncle Dan thought it was a splendid joke and I didn’t mind it, but May was very upset. I think from that time onwards she really hated Uncle Dan.

  Chapter Six

  When I married May I had a kind of idea in my head of what I expected marriage to be like. Not just our marriage, but all marriages. May was up first in the morning and always looked very crisp and neat in little check pinafore frocks, rather schoolgirlish you might say. Breakfast was ready for me, grapefruit, coffee, little squares of toast, marmalade. I went off to the office and came back in the evening to find her cooking something I specially liked.

  “M’m, that smells good,” I said as I came in. “What is it?” But May, who had changed her frock specially for my return, wouldn’t tell me. She bustled about in and out of the kitchen, telling me to put on my slippers and warm my feet in front of the fire. Then after dinner, which would be steak and kidney pie or pork chops with a good suet pudding to follow, she sat by my slippered feet in front of the fire, while I ran my fingers through her hair and told her the events of the day. Sometimes there were difficulties and then she sympathised and told me to throw up the job if I wanted to, sometimes wonderful things happened like my promotion at Palings, and then she shared my pleasure but said it was certainly no more than I deserved. I saw us winning the mixed doubles tournament at the club, being chosen the most attractive young couple on the floor at the big annual dance. I suppose it was all pretty silly. I’ve always been rather a dreamer, and I was only twenty-one when we got married. May was a couple of years older, so my recollection of her as a little girl in pigtails can’t have been quite right. I mean to say, if she was small I must have been smaller, although that’s not the way I remember it.

  We had a week’s honeymoon at Brighton, and it was there I began to find out how different marriage was from the way I’d expected it to be. We had a fine send off, I must say. Most of the people at the wedding breakfast were from the firm, naturally, with a few of mother’s friends as well. I was a clerk in Complaints then, and I was very honoured, and so was May, when Gimball came along. The firm gave us a handsome cheque as a wedding present, and there was a photograph of the wedding breakfast in Palings’ Quarterly, the store magazine.

  It was when we got to the hotel that things began to go wrong, or not wrong exactly but different. I didn’t mind people knowing we were a honeymoon couple, and in fact I told the hotel manager. May was annoyed about that, it seemed she wanted it hidden as though it was something disgraceful. She liked to get up early for breakfast instead of having it in bed, and she wanted to dress in the evening for dinner – not dress really, I mean, but change from what we’d been wearing in the day. It was a small hotel and winter time – we got married early in 1948 – so there weren’t many people staying in the place. I couldn’t see any reason to change our clothes, it seemed awfully silly to me, but May wanted it and that was what we did. At the hotel, too, we started playing bridge for the first time, with an elderly couple. The stakes were only a penny a hundred, but they were both very keen players and so was May. We played several rubbers during that week at times when I was longing, for one reason or another, to go to bed.

  About all that, about going to bed, I found that May was very different from what I’d expected, or I suppose you might say dreamed. She was very shy about letting me see her, which was something that I could understand and respect at first, but then she never changed, or if she did it was to become even more modest. And when we were in bed together she shivered uncontrollably for the first night or two as if she were terrified. Later she lay like a marble block, quite still, and let me make love to her.

  I found out something else too, and this was about myself. I had always been I suppose you might say an innocent young man. I had never thought much about girls, and as I’ve said I had not been successful with them, so that although I knew what to do I was inexperienced. What you have never had you don’t miss, they say. I don’t know about that, but I do know that now I had May I wanted her. What was more, even in that first week I became aware that I wanted her in special ways and wanted her to do certain things, unusual perhaps. At the time I was ashamed of this, and worried about it a lot. Later on I came to read psychologists and the Kinsey Report and realised that the kind of thing I wanted wasn’t so very different from what a good many people want and do. In the few days of our honeymoon I didn’t say anything to her about this. Later on I did speak to her but it was no good, she was disgusted and nothing more.

  May never wanted children, and we made sure that she never had any. She said that we were too poor, but I think she was frightened.

  This is a very delicate subject, but I know you psychiatrist people think it’s important, and perhaps it is. I don’t want to say any more about it. Don’t think I blame May, although I did have that feeling of frustration. Although I said at the beginning that we all have to take responsibility for our actions, at the same time I think we can’t help being the people we are. May and I should never have got married.

  My ideas about home life were changed pretty quickly too. For a couple of months we lived with mother at Baynard Road, which was terrible because mother and May just didn’t get on at all, and then we were lucky enough to get this flat in Windover Close. It was two rooms with a bathroom and kitchenette, all very compact and nice. “A flat can never be a home,” mother said in her decisive way, but I liked the idea of a flat myself. It seemed such a clean, modern way to live, although it was more money than we could afford at that time. I suppose I had really known from the start that May would have to go on working, but still I didn’t like it. Not only that there were no slippers by the fireside (we had all-electric heating) and no steak and kidney pie (May was very economical, good at making scratch meals out of bits of cold meat and some left-over vegetables – at times it seemed we had nothing day after day but bits of stuff left over, and I used to wonder what they could be left over from), but also I feel strongly that the husband should be the breadwinner in a family. At this time May got almost as much money as me.

  What can you say about a marriage? You peel off the years, seven of them there had been, like the skin off an onion, and there’s nothing inside. I got my promotions until I’d become assistant manager of the Complaints Department, May gave up the work at Palings and got a part-time job, we both grew older. We didn’t go down much to Palings’ sports club after the first year of our marriage, when I won the men’s singles. For some reason or other May didn’t like it, she said it was a long way to go and she’d got so bored with the people there, and anyway we saw enough of them in our working hours.

  She joined a local Conservative group and the district Townswomen’s and Housewives’ Association, and made quite a lot of friends there who came in to play bridge. It seemed to me they were much the same sort of people who went down to the club, but May wouldn’t have it. “Why, Moira Tateworthy’s husband is a specialist, a consultant at Barts,” she would say, or “I did like the Batesons, didn’t you? Billy’s got an influential position in a firm
of stockbrokers, you know, he’s almost a partner. I think they’re worth cultivating.” I wanted to join a tennis club nearby, but May wouldn’t have it, said the subscription was too high. So we just went on the way we were, giving and going to little dinner parties or bridge parties or television parties. One of those parties, I remember, was at the home of some people named Lowman, who had a small house in Streatham. Lowman was a bank clerk (“next to the manager,” May called him), a dried-up little man in his forties, and his wife Patricia was a few years younger, lush and overblown.

  We had dinner and then watched the television, and then we had an argument about washing up. “Husbands and wives,” Patricia Lowman said in her rather loud voice, “but not their own wives. Let’s toss up for it.” Her husband muttered something and she said, “Oh, come on, George, be a sport.” So we tossed up and George Lowman and May lost, and went out to wash up. When they were out of the room Patricia Lowman said to me, “They can’t hear a thing, you know, with the tap on out there and the plates clattering.”

  “Can’t they?”

  She looked at me. Her lips were wet. “George is no good to me, you know, no more use than a dry stick. And that wife of yours, she looks a frigid bitch. But not you. I seem to see something burning away below the surface, hidden fires, eh?”

  “No.” My voice was choked, I could hardly speak the word.

  “I say yes. We could make wonderful music together.” She had had a few cocktails that evening, but she was not drunk. She came up to me and pushed her body against mine, pushed her wet mouth against mine. It was revolting. She was a middle-aged woman, nearly forty, and I felt nothing but disgust. I pushed her violently away and she fell back, landing on the sofa. The kitchen door opened and Lowman pushed his head round it.