The Colour of Murder

by Julian Symons

  “I thought I heard something. Did you fall over, my dear?”

  Patricia Lowman was sprawled on the sofa, and she was laughing. Behind Lowman I saw May’s head. She looked from one to the other of us, frowning.

  “Did you hurt yourself, dear?” Lowman asked.

  “Only my feelings,” said Patricia Lowman. “Do you know, Mrs Wilkins, you’ve got a wonderful husband. I just assaulted his virtue and he repulsed me. Now I’m going to bed. Good night all.”

  Lowman laughed uncertainly as she went out of the room. “Patricia will have her joke. I expect you’ve got a headache, isn’t that it, Patricia?”

  “I expect so.” Her voice came down the stairs.

  “The television, you know, that screen does flicker – under the circumstances don’t bother about the washing up –”

  We said our goodbyes. We never saw the Lowmans again. That night I had a blackout. We reached home at half past ten and I told May I should go for a short walk before coming to bed. I returned, so she told me, just after two o’clock. I had no idea where I had been.

  This story about Mrs Lowman may sound as if I considered myself a sort of Don Juan. That isn’t the case at all, it was the only time such a thing happened to me, but I must say that although it was a small incident it was something I never forgot. For some time afterwards I used to lie awake at night wondering what would have happened if I hadn’t said no to her. How would she have arranged meetings? She could have telephoned me at the office to say that Lowman was going out for the evening, and then I could have made some excuse to May. Or the other way round – I would have let her know that May was out at a meeting and she would have come to Windover Close, quickly, furtively, for an hour. I could see it all, the careful watch to make sure that no one knew it was our flat she was coming to, the door gently opened and closed, our embrace inside the hall, so furious that we could hardly wait to get into the bedroom. Slowly the real Mrs Lowman, the wet-mouthed, sagging-bodied woman who had pressed herself against me, disappeared from my mind and was replaced by somebody much younger and more attractive, one of half a dozen cinema stars.

  I said not long ago that May and I shouldn’t have got married. That’s what I think now, but I don’t want to make it seem that I was really unhappy. If anyone had asked me I would have said that ours was a pretty average marriage, and as far as I know May felt the same. That was the way things were when I met Sheila.

  Chapter Seven

  After that first meeting I used to go to the library fairly often. If May remarked it she didn’t say anything. I went to get books out for myself, which I hadn’t done for a long time, and I usually found the chance to say a few words to Sheila. She always smiled at me, but then she smiled at most people, I noticed, she was a friendly kind of girl. One day I got quite annoyed because she kept talking to somebody else while I was waiting to speak to her, to ask whether A E W Mason’s Four Feathers was in, and at last another attendant came up to me and asked if she could help me.

  A few days later Mr Gimball gave me two complimentary tickets for a West End theatre. A cousin of his worked in the box office, and often gave him tickets. He couldn’t go this time, because his wife wasn’t well, and he wondered if I could use the tickets. I thanked him and said I could. The next night I went to the library and asked Sheila (I had found out that her name was Sheila Morton) what she usually did in the evenings.

  “In the evenings.” She smiled. “It all depends. Sometimes I stay indoors, and sometimes I go out. If anyone asks me.”

  “I wondered if you were doing anything particular next Tuesday.” I spoke very casually.

  “Tuesday. I rather think I am going out on Tuesday. Yes, I’m sure I am. What a pity.”

  “Isn’t it?” I tried to stay casual, although I felt desperate. I found myself saying, “I’ve got complimentary tickets for the show at the Princess, and it’s supposed to be rather good. A relative of mine’s a theatrical manager, and I often get tickets. Perhaps another time.”

  “That would be lovely. It’s sweet of you to ask me, and I’d really love to come another time.”

  Why did I tell that lie? I think it must have been because I knew that in the future there would be nothing to stop me buying two tickets and saying they were complimentary. After all, Sheila wouldn’t need to look at the tickets. So I went with May to the show at the Princess and the next time I saw Sheila asked her again. That was no good, but the third time I asked her she said she would love to come. I’d been able to find out what it was she particularly wanted to see, and it turned out to be a detective play at the Aldwych, so I bought two tickets in the dress circle.

  It should have been one of May’s nights at the Housewives’ Association, but the meeting for that night had been cancelled. I had to think of a story to tell her, and it had to be a good story too because obviously we wouldn’t be back till late. I said I had been asked to stay late by Mr Lacey. He was one of Palings’ directors, and in fact I had only spoken to him once or twice.

  I aimed high to impress May, but I hadn’t quite realised the effect of mentioning Mr Lacey’s name. She became very excited.

  “But, John, that’s wonderful. It must be something very important.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Probably he just wants to talk about office work.”

  “It must be much more than that. You say he told you it would take the whole evening.”

  “Yes, well, that’s what he said.”

  “That means he must be taking you out to dinner. Do you think you ought to dress?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Now I come to think of it, he said we would be going to his club.”

  “You don’t seem very excited. Didn’t he say anything at all about why he wants to see you? He must have dropped some sort of hint, he can’t just have said he’d like you to come out to dinner, just like that.”

  “It was like that – more or less, anyway. He’s quite informal, you know, Mr Lacey, always has been. I am excited about it, but I don’t want to build up any hopes. It may be to do with my idea for reorganisation.” Two years earlier I had put forward a scheme for the reorganisation of the Complaints Department so that it should be merged with the Service Department, but nothing had ever happened about it.

  “I thought you said Gimball simply sat on that.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said, exasperated. “But for goodness’ sake I don’t know, do I? Perhaps he suddenly changed his mind and passed it on to Lacey. We’ll have to wait and see.”

  “Don’t have too much to drink, you know drink brings on those fits of yours.” May annoyed me by calling my blackouts fits. “And don’t tell your mother about it when we go over there on Wednesday. You tell her everything.”

  I got very much worked up, looking forward to my meeting with Sheila, but it wasn’t really an exciting evening. We met at six o’clock and had supper before the theatre, in a little restaurant. My idea had been that we should have one or two drinks beforehand and then have supper after the theatre, but Sheila said that she had to get home early because her father was more or less an invalid. The service was slow and we had to hurry a bit, but it was wonderful to see her sitting opposite me, wearing a blue silky kind of dress that showed off her wavy dark hair and was the colour of her blue eyes. I told her that her eyes were a deep deep blue, blue as the sea, and she laughed.

  During dinner she told me about herself and her family. Her mother was dead and her father had been a timber merchant, but a few years ago he had retired after suffering a heart attack. Sheila was an only child. “As a matter of fact I haven’t got many relatives at all. Mary, that’s my second cousin up in Manchester, she’s married to a doctor named Dansett, she’s my best girl-friend, I suppose. And my cousin Bill, that’s Bill Lonergan, he’s doing some kind of engineering job in Birmingham.”

  “Bill Lonergan,” I said. “I used to know a Bill Lonergan at school.”

  “That would be the one. He lived in Clapham till a couple of years
ago. He’s a mad boy, but sweet too. He was kind of an elder brother to me when I was a kid.”

  “I remember Bill Lonergan.” For the rest of dinner we talked about him. I did remember him very well, a tough chubby boy a couple of years younger than I was, a good cricketer who opened the first eleven batting. I didn’t remember anything particularly sweet about him but he was mad all right, had a terrible temper at times. I told Sheila about the time when I bowled Bill Lonergan for a duck and then said something or other which annoyed him, so that he suddenly picked up a chunk of iron railing that was lying around, and threw it at me. I can remember it whistling past my head now.

  Sheila laughed, which wasn’t exactly the reaction I had expected. “Yes, Bill used to be mad all right, I remember when he drove off in somebody’s car just for a dare, they’d left the ignition key in, you know. Drove it around for an hour, then returned it, no damage done. And he hadn’t even got a licence. But he’s settled down a lot in the last few months. I say, were you in the cricket team then, Mr Wilkins?”

  “Call me John. Yes, cricket and football too.”

  “Funny, I used to watch most of the matches, but I don’t remember you.”

  “I was a pretty useful bat and first change bowler, one year I took most wickets and another I headed the bowling averages. But I expect you were thinking about Bill Lonergan.” I was beginning to feel a little jealous of Bill Lonergan and the way Sheila must have been watching him at the matches, although I knew that was silly.

  So that was the way we passed the time, getting along pretty well, calling each other John and Sheila, and then we went to this detective play. After we sat down there was a bit of trouble because somebody thought we were in the wrong seats. To prove that it was all right I got out our counterfoils, and it turned out that the other people were in the wrong row.

  “Extraordinary to me how people can make mistakes like that,” I said.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Those aren’t complimentary tickets.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Complimentary tickets always have the word stamped on.”

  She certainly had sharp eyes. I swallowed. “The tickets had it on, these are just the counterfoils.”

  “The counterfoils have it on too. You shouldn’t have done it.” She put her hand on mine for a moment. “But it was sweet of you.”

  Somehow that pat on the hand and being told I was sweet didn’t please me very much. I found it hard to give much attention to the play, which was one of these things about how a man plans a perfect murder and then it all goes wrong. I was too conscious of Sheila sitting next to me, her bare arm touching mine occasionally in the darkness. I kept thinking of that, and wondering what she really felt about the theatre tickets.

  In the second interval she wanted to smoke a cigarette, and we stood out in the corridor. Somebody tapped me on the shoulder. A woman’s voice said, “Hallo, John, fancy seeing you here.”

  I turned round with a sick feeling. There stood an enormous shark-like woman, with a lopsided grin on her face, and her tiny pilot fish husband in tow. It was Mrs Piddock, an old acquaintance of mother’s. Her husband owned a chemist’s shop and was a harmless little man, but Mrs Piddock was one of the biggest gossips in Clapham. She used to go to mother’s tea parties.

  Mother had a liking for gossip which I could never understand. I always thought of her as a severe and reserved woman, devoted to her family, first her husband and then me. That was true enough, but there was this other side to her nature as well. I suppose most people who have lived for a long time in one place get absorbed in what happens there, and mother certainly kept tabs on everything that happened in her part of Clapham. Almost every week she gave or went to a couple of tea parties where she chattered away with half a dozen women like Mrs Piddock. These tea parties constituted a kind of unofficial detective agency about affairs in the neighbourhood, and it was through a tea party that mother had learned about May’s family. Then once a week what you might call a digest of this news was sent to Mrs Vincent, who was the widow of a friend who had lived in Clapham. Nora Vincent now only came up to Clapham from her home in Wiltshire two or three times a year, but mother never failed to send her weekly budget of local news, and I suppose Nora Vincent read it as eagerly as mother wrote. I shall never understand women.

  I said hallo and tried to get away, but it is not so easy to get away from Mrs Piddock. She asked what we thought of the play and then if I’d seen mother lately, she kept the conversation going with very little help from me and none at all from Sheila, while I waited for the bell to call us back to our seats as a groggy boxer waits for the gong. Before it came, though, Mrs Piddock gave up subtlety and came in with a direct frontal attack.

  She said to Sheila, “We don’t know each other, do we, my dear, and yet I’m sure I’ve seen you before.” The shark jaws opened, revealing her very white false teeth.

  “Perhaps you have. I work in Clapham Library.”

  “Oh, I’m not a reader.” She gave a great guffaw and her husband, the little chemist, smiled in timid sympathy. “Not in the library. You’re a local girl, I suppose.”

  “I live in Clapham, if that’s what you mean.”

  Mrs Piddock gave her lopsided grin, and was obviously about to move in for the kill when the bell rang. I quickly took Sheila’s arm and steered her away, muttering goodbye. When we were back in our seats again I said how sorry I was. “That woman, her name’s Mrs Piddock and she’s nothing but a menace, one of these women who has nothing better to do than tear other people’s reputations to bits. I don’t know why mother even speaks to her. You were wonderful, really you were.”

  “It’s nothing. She’s just a busybody.”

  “You must have felt you were being pestered and it’s all my fault. I do apologise.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, but I thought she spoke rather coolly.

  After that, somehow the whole evening seemed to go wrong. The third act of the play was a flop, so that I was fidgeting in my seat by the end, and after it we just went back to Clapham on the Underground. I don’t know exactly how I’d thought that the evening would end, really I hadn’t thought about it, I suppose, but it was certainly not with the two of us sitting side by side in a rackety tube train, staring at our reflections opposite and reading the advertisements above them. When I’d been thinking about the end of the evening I’d sort of pictured myself with a car, and we’d driven out in it to one of those roadhouses on the Great West Road, danced and had something to eat there, and got back in the small hours of the morning. But I hadn’t got a car, and when I suggested getting a taxi back to Clapham Sheila said no very firmly. It would be a job to get a taxi out to the suburbs at this time of night, she said, and it would cost the earth, she just wouldn’t think of it. So we took the tube and walked back from the Plough to the house she and her father lived in, on the North Side.

  When we were walking down Long Road I drew her into the shadows and tried, rather clumsily, to kiss her. My lips only touched her cheek. I tried again, but her head was turned away. She said in a low voice, “I’d like you to take me home.”

  After that we didn’t speak until we reached her home, which faced the Common, a little slit of a house among the red brick Edwardian villas. There was a light showing, and she said her father would be sitting up.

  “I promised him I wouldn’t be late. He’s really not at all well.” She took my hand. “Thank you for a lovely evening. I did enjoy the play. I hope it wasn’t – wasn’t too much of a disappointment for you.”

  “Of course not.” My voice had a strangled sound.

  “I think really I shouldn’t have come. But I did want to see it.” Then she was gone, the iron gate opened and shut, her feet tapped up the narrow road, the front door closed decisively. I walked back across the Common to Windover Close, my mind blank yet (I can’t put it any clearer than this) with thoughts whirling among the blankness. If I had been a little more forceful, if we had had more to
drink at dinner, if we had not met Mrs Piddock – and then I went on to think how things might have been if she had returned my kiss and we had actually gone on to the Common. Somehow it wouldn’t focus, none of it would focus in my mind, I couldn’t get my thoughts into any kind of shape.

  When I went in May looked up from the mending in her lap. “You’re late enough. It’s a quarter past eleven.”

  “Is it?” I looked at my watch. Since I had planned to come back at two or three o’clock in the morning, it seemed to me positively early.

  “He must have had a lot of interesting things to say to keep you this long.”

  “Who?”

  “Really, John.” The tip of May’s nose began to quiver, a sure sign that she is annoyed. “Mr Lacey.”

  “Oh, Lacey.” Before I went out I had had a story all ready to tell her, but now I simply could not remember it.

  “I hope you’ve not had too much to drink. You know you can’t take it.”

  “Certainly not. A little wine at dinner, that’s all.”

  “What was it, then? Just tell me what he wanted to see you about, if that’s not too much to ask. After all, I am your wife.”

  I had to sit down and tell her something, I knew that. So I told her in detail about how Lacey had wanted to talk to me about the reorganisation idea, he was much impressed with it and wanted to congratulate me on it, we had had drinks and then dinner at his club, and talked about all kinds of things, Gimball’s impending retirement (which had been impending for years), the possibility of streamlining the Complaints Department, using fewer staff after the merger, and so on. There was not a word of truth in any of it, and I think I did a good job of fabrication.

  When I had finished May was quite excited. “It’s wonderful. I don’t know how you can take it so calmly.”

  “Nothing’s happened yet, it’s only words.”

  “I suppose it would mean quite a lot more money.”