Give my love to mad Bill, when you’re writing to him. By the way, this admirer of mine, his name is John Wilkins, knows Bill, played in the school cricket team with him. Or so he says. He’s such a romancer I shouldn’t be surprised if he’s made that up too.
And now I must tell you something really exciting. I really have got an admirer. Nobody you know, darling, so it’s no good exercising your wits. Is he serious? Am I serious? I’m really beginning to think I am. But he hasn’t said anything yet and even if he does (said Sheila, anticipating as usual) what am I to do about Dad? His heart is no better, never will be, and I couldn’t possibly leave him, poor dear, he’s got absolutely nobody else. It’s really a terrible problem. But perhaps – I can just see you saying it, Miss Cat – the problem will never arise…
Chapter Eleven
John Wilkins’ Narrative resumed
When I think of the past, the past that is so near yet seems so distant, it is all like a dream. I find it very hard to disentangle what really happened from what I wanted to happen, or hoped might happen, in the weeks before May and I went to Brighton. But I shall tell it as best I can, and I hope that what I am telling will be the truth. It seems to me that I have wanted to tell the truth all my life, yet so often truth has turned to a lie under my hand.
For some days after that terrible evening I didn’t go back to Evesdale. May kept urging me to go there, she simply couldn’t understand anybody not taking full advantage of what she considered the inordinately high subscription, and in the end she badgered me so much that I went again. I didn’t see Sheila and got quite a good game of tennis. Shortly after that I had to go to the library, but I avoided Sheila, actually moved behind one of the rows of bookshelves when I saw her coming. I went to the club again and Sheila was there, but we just nodded to each other, didn’t speak.
Then I began to ask myself what I had done, after all, that was so very wrong. I had told her a bit of a lie about having an invalid sister, certainly. I hadn’t mentioned that I was married. I’d made a fool of myself – no, that was putting it too strongly – I’d behaved impetuously on the tennis court. I granted all that. But what was suddenly obvious to me – I couldn’t think why I hadn’t seen it before – was that all these things had been done for Sheila. She had seen that already, no doubt, and women are always prepared to understand and forgive a lie if it is told for their sake. Yet I couldn’t deny that she had been cold, almost unfriendly, after our game of tennis.
That, I saw now – and if I hadn’t been so dull I should have seen it before – was because of May. Sheila was a simple, honest and innocent young girl. She would never have anything to do with a man who was married. No matter what Sheila’s feelings for me might be, she would never let them show while I was married to May. I saw that my marriage was the most important factor in the situation, and because of it I couldn’t take anything Sheila said at its face value. If I were not married to May, now, everything would be different.
But I was married to May. I thought about our marriage and I had to admit, quite seriously, that it hadn’t been a success. It’s not the kind of thing a man likes to think about his wife, much less to say, but it did seem to me that May was not cut out for marriage. This was something I hadn’t worried about for a long time, but now I began to feel very sharply a yearning for sex relations of the kind that were unattainable with May. I put Sheila in May’s place, quite unconsciously, and the whole thing was different. I couldn’t even imagine anything exciting with May any more, but with Sheila I got to a point where I could imagine nothing else.
All this time, mind you, I knew it was only imagination. For there was May, my wife, and it was absurd to think of any situation in which she wouldn’t be my wife. May had got her teeth into me, into the son of a family that had lived in Kincaid Square, and she would never let go. I don’t mean that there was really anything to living in Kincaid Square, but there was to May. She would never divorce me whatever I did, I knew that.
One morning at breakfast I said, “May, what do you think of divorce?”
She looked up from her cereal. “Is there a case in the paper?”
“No, I was reading somewhere the other day, I can’t remember just where, a man who said when two people didn’t love each other any more they ought to be able to get divorced.”
It was one of the days when May went to the stationer’s shop and she was in a hurry. She spooned the last mouthfuls of cereal into her mouth and frowned. “It sounds a Communistic idea to me.”
“No, it isn’t that at all. The thing is, don’t you agree it would be a good idea? I read somewhere else the other day about a husband and wife who’ve been waiting three years for a Poor Person’s Divorce. In the meantime they’ve both gone off with someone else.”
“I shall be late.” May snapped her handbag decisively. “And you ought to be going too. You don’t want to get into Mr Lacey’s bad books.”
I came back to the subject that evening. “May, you remember we were talking about divorce.”
“No, were we?”
“Yes, I’d been reading something about easier divorce, you know, when people don’t love each other any more.”
“Oh yes, I remember.” May looked at me out of her close-set eyes. “What are you trying to tell me, John?”
“Nothing. I’m not necessarily trying to tell you anything.”
“You’ve been unfaithful to me, is that what you mean?”
“Of course I don’t.” I dare say I said it unconvincingly, although in spirit it was perfectly true.
“It wouldn’t make any difference.” She looked at me, and then round the neat room in which I knew she took such a pride, at the shell-shaped wall brackets and the matching occasional tables, the three-piece suite and the paper frill in front of the fireplace. “I love you,” she said, and I couldn’t be certain whether she was referring to me or to the furnishings.
“And I love you too. I only meant –”
“I should never give you up.” Again it seemed to me that she was not really speaking to me. “No matter what happened, I should never give you up.”
There was no use in going on with the conversation. From that time onwards, though, I found myself increasingly replacing May by Sheila in my mind, thinking what Sheila would be like in the morning at the breakfast table, what Sheila and I would talk about in the evening, the way Sheila would furnish the flat, and so on. And I became very critical of May, and noticed more and more all the things about her that I found irritating. These things aren’t important, except in the way that they show what I felt about May, so I’ll only mention one of them, her way of eating toast and marmalade. There are two ways of eating toast and marmalade. The way I did it was to spread butter over a piece of toast, put marmalade on the butter, and eat. What May did was to put butter and marmalade on her plate, add a little of each to a small piece of toast, eat this piece, and then repeat the process. Silly to be annoyed about such a little thing, wasn’t it, silly even to notice it, but I couldn’t help it, couldn’t even help mentioning it.
“May,” I said one morning, “why do you eat like that?”
She looked at me in astonishment. “Like what?”
“Why don’t you eat your toast in the same way that I do?”
“Do you eat it in a special way? I’d never noticed.”
I felt my voice rising a little, but I kept the tone of it firmly conversational. “It’s just a piece of affectation, that’s all. I suppose you’ve seen somebody at the cinema eating like that or read it in one of those silly little articles on etiquette you’re always studying.”
“I just don’t know what you mean.”
“You know perfectly well what I mean. You did it to irritate me, and you’ve succeeded.” I felt slightly ashamed of myself as I left the flat, and that evening I told May I was sorry. But that didn’t make any difference to my feelings, and it didn’t make any difference to May, who still went on eating her toast and marmalade in the same way.
At about that time, the end of May, the McKenna case was taking up quite a bit of space in the papers, and I found myself becoming very interested in it. You’ll remember that Gregory McKenna was a Jamaican who murdered his English wife when she found out about an affair he was having with a young Jamaican girl. There was no doubt about McKenna’s guilt, but there was quite a lot of sympathy for him. He was a bus conductor who was very well liked by his mates because of his cheerfulness and the way he kept his temper under the most trying circumstances.
His wife, on the other hand, was a slut who spent the housekeeping money on drink and was always telling McKenna he was a dirty nigger who should be thankful he was allowed to live in England. The neighbours heard her, and said his patience with her was something more than human. The Jamaican girl worked at a local café and McKenna met her there when he had to go out one evening to get some food because his wife was drinking. They became friendly, and he took her to one or two dances, without telling her he was married. Mrs McKenna found out about it, went to see the Jamaican girl, called her a whore and made a scene in the café so that the girl lost her job. The girl refused to see McKenna any more. He went home and asked his wife to give him his freedom. She shrieked with laughter and asked what kind of a fool he took her for.
“You’re going to bleedin’ well make money and I’m going to bleedin’ well spend it,” the woman next door heard her say. “And if I hear any more of you going about with that little tart I’ll go to the next place where she gets a job and tell them a few things like I did before.” At that point McKenna hit his wife on the head several times with a rolling-pin, and went on beating her about the face and body after she was dead.
The McKenna case was a good deal in my mind when I went up to the North Clapham Chess Club one evening on Uncle Dan’s invitation. Uncle Dan had been a member of the club for years, and sometimes played on one of the lower boards for the team. He wasn’t all that good a player, but he had a very quick eye for a variation in the opening gambit, and often used to fluster opponents in matches by making his early moves at great speed, banging the clock very emphatically as he did so. Upset by the speed of Uncle Dan’s moves, his clock-banging and his occasional snorts of well-simulated disgust, the opponent frequently made an elementary error which would be pounced on mercilessly. In a friendly game, played without benefit of the time clock and against somebody who knew him, Uncle Dan was less formidable, although he still had to be watched in the early stages.
That night he opened with a variation on the Allgaier gambit, and I almost lost a knight in trying to match his moves for speed. As often happened with Uncle Dan, however, he left himself in a bad position when his original surprise attack had failed. He hadn’t the patience to play a long end game, and after an hour agreed to a draw even though he had an advantage in the pawns.
During the game the McKenna case had been in the back of my mind. Now, as we drank coffee at the table – the club met in a little restaurant – I said, “If you were going to kill somebody, Uncle Dan, how would you do it?”
Uncle Dan put his narrow head on one side and said with his foxy look, “And why should I give you the benefit of my experience?”
“No,” I said. “Be serious.”
“All right. Who do you want to kill?”
“Take the case of this man McKenna. His wife was somebody who, well, you might say she deserved to die. Reading the accounts of it you can see she was a bitch of the first water, no redeeming features about her. If McKenna could have killed her and got away with it I’d have said good luck to him and I expect you would too. As it was, just hitting her on the head with a rolling-pin, he hadn’t a chance. But supposing you were McKenna, how would you have set about it?”
“I’ve been wise enough not to get married.” Uncle Dan picked up the white queen, ran his fingers round her crown. “You’re tired of life with May, is that it?”
“Of course not.” I could feel my face getting hot. “There’s no need to be personal.”
“Isn’t there?” He pushed over the white queen, took her off the board. “Play you a game of fox and hounds. You take the fox.”
You play fox and hounds with four pawns for the hounds, one for the fox. The fox tries to break through the cordon of hounds. If he succeeds he is free. If the hounds pin the fox into a corner he is captured. The game had its usual ending. “You see,” said Uncle Dan.
“What?”
“The fox hasn’t got a chance. Same thing with murder. The police get you every time – if they know it’s murder.” Uncle Dan wagged a long dirty finger at me. “Only one safe way. Don’t let them know. Take an Underground platform in the rush hour. People standing six deep, eight deep, ten deep. Somebody at the front gets pushed over in front of a train. Must have been a sudden attack of vertigo or pushing from the back of the crowd, nobody suspects murder or if they suspect can’t prove it. Somebody nervous about heights falling off a cliff, non-swimmer drowning out of their depth in swimming pool, old lady with arthritis drowning in her bath because the bell won’t work, yachting accident, faulty gas tap, so on and so on. Nobody can prove it’s murder although they may guess. Any help to you?”
“Not very much, no.”
“Didn’t think it would be.” Everything about Uncle Dan was somehow crooked, from his lopsided head and smile to the way he stuck out one foot sideways. “You want a straight answer, ask a straight question.”
“Supposing you were McKenna, what would you have done?”
“Soaked that wife of his in booze until she died of alcoholic poisoning,” Uncle Dan said promptly. His face took on a yearning expression that I knew of old, one that had always seemed to me peculiarly false. “Your mother’s worried about you, Johnny boy.”
I stared down at the chess-board, black squares on white. “There’s no need.”
“She seems to think there is. Some interfering old faggot saw you at the theatre with Sheila Morton, that right? Then you turned up to supper with her cupid’s bow printed on your face–”
“It wasn’t hers.”
Uncle Dan stared. “So much the worse. A real Lothario. Wish I could carve a slice off the same joint. Point is, your mother’s worried about you and May. Not out of any love for May, you know that. But you know how she feels about marriage. Never a cross word in her own marriage, faithful unto death, you know the sort of thing.”
“That’s not true,” I said savagely. I told him about the bundles of letters in the safe at the office.
“The sly old devil,” said Uncle Dan, delighted. “He was a deep one, your father, and no mistake. You’ve never told your mother any of this? Of course not. What a sanctimonious old rogue your dad was, to be sure, when you get right down to it. The way he looked down on the rest of us poor harmless sinners.” He blew his nose loudly on a coloured handkerchief and returned with an effort to the business in hand. “You seem to be following in father’s footsteps, Johnny boy. What are you doing, keeping a harem?”
I began to laugh, not happily. “I wish I were.”
“You come in with lipstick all over your face, whose lipstick was it?”
“I don’t know.” When he stared I repeated, “I don’t know. Those blackouts of mine, I’ve been having them again. The day I came in to supper I’d been drinking in that club you took me to, what’s it called –”
“The Five O’Clock Shadow.” Uncle Dan smirked. “Nice little place. Usually find one or two smart pieces there.”
“One of them must have kissed me. I just can’t remember it, that’s all.”
“Seen a doctor?”
I moved uneasily. “No. I – I just don’t see what they can do for me.”
Head on one side, Uncle Dan stared at me, then swept the chessmen back into their box. “If I were you I’d go and have a talk to one of the old mumbo jumbo men, you know, trick cyclists. Chap I know–” He fumbled in his pockets, looked at various dirty old scraps of paper. “Here we are. Glenister, Doctor Bowen Gleni
ster. Matter of fact, I met him in the Five O’Clock Shadow. Real man of the world. Not exactly Harley Street, I dare say, but none the worse for that probably. Here you are.”
He pushed the piece of paper at me. I put it in my pocket without looking at it.
We got up to go. “Another thing,” Uncle Dan said casually, “I shouldn’t think too much about that Sheila Morton if I were you. From all I hear, she’s been a bit of a sheila in her time. Remember a kid called Bill Lonergan, who was at school with you? She went around with him for quite a while. Then there have been one or two others from what I hear, Charlie Main at the tennis club and Len Pilkington who plays soccer for Dulwich Hamlet. See what I mean?”
“All right.”
He followed me out into the night. “Shouldn’t think too hard about the McKenna case, either, if I were you.”
“All right,” I said. “Thanks for the game. Good night.”
“Love to May.” He began to walk briskly away from me, a tall thin figure leaning into the night wind.
Chapter Twelve
I went to the library again a couple of times and saw Sheila, but didn’t speak to her. Then one day she was at the reception counter when I handed in my book.
She smiled and said, “Hallo.”
“Hallo.” I could feel my heart throbbing hard.
“If you want any Moira Mauleverers there are a couple in.” She smiled again. “Your invalid sister may not have read them.”
“Sorry about that,” I mumbled. “Don’t know what made me–”
She laughed. She was looking beautiful, and terribly happy. “I was annoyed, but do you know a thing about me? I can never be annoyed for long. Shall I show you where the Moira Mauleverers are? They’re with the new returns, not on the shelves.”
“You’re looking very pleased about something.” Was it accident that as she stood beside me her leg moved for a moment against mine? It was removed almost instantly, but had I imagined a faint pressure?
The Colour of Murder Page 6