‘Well, we’re going to end it now.’
‘In the morning. You’re worn-out, exhausted, chilled. Sleep here.’
She looked at him. His face was still blotchy, uneven like a child’s. But how did it compare with Godfrey’s? In those closing seconds before the referee stepped in it had become a mask of blood.
Wilfred said: ‘What is there you see in him?’
‘I’ve told you. He’s a man …’
‘He’s a brute, nothing more. His brutality appeals to your baser instincts.’
‘You dare to talk about baser instincts tonight!’
He sat there in a sort of backwash of passion, half accusative, half in retreat. ‘I need you more than he does, Pearl – even though he is superficially injured. He will have many women. I have only you. If I have done something wrong, unethical … But there has been wrong on both sides. You’re all I have, Pearl. I don’t believe now that without you I can go on living.’
She closed the lid of her case. ‘Why should you?’ she said.
At this direst of all blows, Wilfred put his hands to his face again. ‘Oh, Pearl. Oh, Pearl …’
She went to the cupboard, dragged out her old coat from among all the smart new ones, dropped it on top of the bag. She felt so faint and sick with emotion that it needed all her anger to drive her to leave tonight. She needed to inject herself all the time with memories of the fight, like adrenalin, to keep up the anger.
As she passed him Wilfred grabbed her hand. ‘Pearl don’t leave me. You promised …’
She pulled her hand away. ‘ Promised what?’
He said: ‘I suppose I fell in love with you on that aeroplane. I deluded myself, provided myself with all the other reasons why I should marry you, to avoid admitting that. Only these last two months I’ve come to realize. There wasn’t any other reason for marrying you, there isn’t any other reason why I did what I did tonight. There isn’t any other reason – as I know that you’ve been unfaithful to me – why I ask you now to stay.’
A sort of cramp descended on her. She stood there. ‘I’m sorry.’
He said: ‘In marriage a – a contract was entered into. It is for better or for worse. If I have done you harm tonight, think of the good times we have had, the – the companionship. There has been the better … Don’t deny it. We have much in common – you have a love of the good things in life – good wine, good scent, a cultured way of existing, pretty clothes, intelligent conversation, all the rest. Even if I can’t give you all the love you want, there’s all the rest. Must you throw it all away?’
‘Yes, I must.’
He went on talking, pleading, took her hand again and held it in spite of her efforts to get free. In the end she wrenched her hand away and almost fell with the effort.
‘Don’t you see?’ she cried. ‘Can’t you even begin to see! After tonight …’ She burst into tears.
There was no conversation between them for a time. She was weeping, silently, bitterly, hideously unable to stop. He had his hands before his face, hair falling over his hands, rocking a little on the bed. She tried to gather her last few things, but in a defeated way, as if every movement weighed a ton. At last she was ready and moved to the door. He fell on his knees and took her hand again, talking to her almost incoherently, muttering endearments that had no place in his ordered, careful, legal life before. It was a painful, embarrassing few minutes that always remained as incoherent in Pearl’s memory, the sentences, the postures, clear in meaning but imprecise in detail, as if the embarrassed mind developed astigmatism as a defence. At some stage she found she too was sitting on the bed conceding that she would not leave until the morning.
If she stayed tonight it was certainly no victory for Wilfred but only for a consummate weariness that told her she had no strength left to go through the last processes of departure. The walk downstairs, out into the bitter February night, the walk to the Cadogan Hotel, with the probability that they would be full, then if she were lucky a taxi to some hotel where there was room, signing, the covert stares, the lift to the bedroom, the porter and the tip and the cold cheerless bed.
At some stage Wilfred, half reassured, half forlorn, was pushed out and she was alone in her own room – her own room for one more night.
She was determined to leave early in the morning. After what had happened tonight, and with his knowledge of her unfaithfulness, there just wasn’t a basis for a relationship any more. She could not understand how he supposed there was. Whatever else, her marriage to Wilfred was ended.
Chapter Nine
They took Godfrey to Bethnal Green Hospital and put eight stitches in his cheek and two in his eyebrow, and they set his broken nose. He was dazed for some hours after the fight, and the next morning they took an encephalograph. They also X-rayed his ribs where they were so badly bruised, just to be on the safe side. The doctor said he could go home at the end of the week but would have to come back as an out-patient through the following week.
Godfrey did not make a good patient. His nose was still plugged and his body ached, and he lay simmering, thinking over the defeat, the double-cross, the humiliation, the terrible destruction of the last two rounds, glaring down the long ward, expecting more attention than he got. In the afternoon they let him have a mirror and a safety razor and he glowered at this bruised and bandaged freak and wanted to know what the hell he’d look like when the bandages came off. The doctor said he’d be all right, except that he might need plastic treatment for his nose which had had a nasty fracture, and they hadn’t the facilities for a lengthy treatment here.
Later in the afternoon Pat Prince came to see him, bringing the press cuttings about the fight and a bottle of Pol Roger from Jude Davis. Godfrey hadn’t a wide vocabulary but he used it all in telling Prince what Jude Davis could do with the Pol Roger. Prince snuffled and blinked uneasily.
‘Hey, boy, it isn’t no good getting sore. The fight was made for you. You agreed for it, O.K.? If you didn’t expect to be beat you was a blamed fool. You haven’t got no complaint against Jude.’
‘Got no complaint?’ Godfrey snarled through his bruised mouth. ‘You can tell Jude that the next time he wants to cross somebody it won’t be me.’
‘Get off it, boy, there wasn’t no crossing.’
‘So you say. Well, you can tell Jude I’ve finished with him and his management, see. Tell the filthy little crud that dogs that mess in their own kennels ought to be destroyed. One day – maybe soon – somebody’ll do for him!’
Pat Prince rubbed the scar tissue around his eyes. ‘Look, boy, let me give you a word of advice, see. It won’t be no good taking your beating that way. You were beat in a fair fight, as any bloody fool knowed you’d be, taking on the Jap champion – and if you’re too big-headed to take a beating you’ll be no good in the ring, not to Jude nor me, nor any other manager who’s fool enough to take you on!’
Godfrey tried to sit up, but his nose throbbed. All his head throbbed for a minute, and he could hardly concentrate on what the old pug was saying.
‘When the fight was made,’ Prince said, ‘when it was made I knew you’d be out-matched and I said so to Jude, but he said it was a great chance for you and you’d get more glory going down to Kio than in a dozen ordinary matches he could make for you. And be-God, I believe he’s right if you read these press boys. You ain’t read your press yet. It’s a rave. Go on, read your cuttings!’
Godfrey screwed up his eyes to read his cuttings. They all praised him: from the local papers up to three national dailies that thought fit to mention it. ‘Brave Showing by London Boy.’ ‘Crowd-raising fight in Bethnal Green.’ ‘Jap Champion nearly meets his match.’ While he was reading them he was half listening to what Prince was saying, his still not lucid brain tackling the problem of diplomacy and cunning self-interest, considerations which never came easy to him at the best of times.
‘So when I go back, boy, I’m not going to say not a word to Jude about what you’ve just said to me. I�
��m just going to pretend I haven’t never heard a word of it. See. Because – even if he made a mistake this time – and I’m not saying he did, mind, I’m not saying he did – he’s still your manager and you’d be hard put to find another if you gets on the wrong side of him. And if you stays with him you’re in the money, soon as you mend. Soon as you mend you’re in the big money, boy. That’s where you want to be, isn’t it?’
‘Tell Jude I want to see him,’ said Godfrey. ‘And see him quick. Tell him to bring his ’flu along – and his bed. Maybe he’ll need it.’
‘I’ll tell him you want to see him – won’t say nothing more. If you want him to cut you off where you hang that’s your concern, boy, not any of mine!’
When Prince had gone Godfrey lay back on his pillow and dozed till supper came. He swallowed it with a sore mouth and took his sleeping pill and fell asleep with the problem not resolved. It was against all his temperament to stay with Davis. It was against his temperament even to pretend to stay with him while looking around. His natural instincts were to wait outside his gym until Davis came out alone and there go about disfiguring him for life. (He knew that if he did this, with his record, it would finish his boxing career.) His second alternative was to go to the B.B.B. of C. and lay a formal complaint, hoping Davis would lose his licence. (But where it was simply one man’s suspicion against another’s word, it was an unlikely outcome that he would be believed and a fairly prominent and esteemed manager called a liar. There was no proof, not an atom – only guesswork. Pat Prince had known nothing, he was sure.) If Prince kept his promise and passed on nothing of what had been said, there was the third alternative of meeting guile with guile and deceit with deceit. Next morning when his head was beginning to clear he decided to let the thing run on and see if Davis came.
Davis came, but not until the afternoon. Thursday was visiting day. He came down the long ward, looking thin and dark and distinctive in his own peculiar way. Godfrey had always thought him a natty dresser, in his invariable dark suit and white shirt with its prominent cuffs, and the diamond tie pin and the opal cuff-links. But today, looking at him with different eyes, Godfrey saw an air of shabbiness about the gentility, a shaky seediness in his walk; his eyes were evasive behind their glasses as he said: ‘Well, well, how is it? Not too badly, I hope?’
‘I’ll live to get my own back,’ said Godfrey through his swollen lips.
‘Ah, I doubt if I’ll match you again with Kio, the bastard. I only hope he gets what he deserves in Hamburg.’
‘He fought fair enough,’ said Godfrey. ‘Which is more’n you can say for some filthy Micks.’
Davis bent and opened a bag he was carrying. For the moment he was prepared to misunderstand Godfrey’s replies. ‘Another bottle of champagne. Thought you might like it. Did you know Kio’s fight with Heist has been postponed three weeks?’
‘So what?’
‘It was your doing. You opened up his eyebrow. I wish I’d been well enough to see the fight. All the writers are raving about you.’
‘I was raving about it too,’ said Godfrey.
‘No wonder. No wonder.’ Davis coolly put the champagne on the table, then some dirt in the nail of his index finger attracted his attention and he cleaned it with the nail of his other thumb. ‘Kio and his manager let me down. I was annoyed when I heard, when Pat came over later that night. But Kio I couldn’t talk to. I’ve seen his manager since and we’ve had a row but his manager says it was Kio’s doing, breaking the arrangement. He thought we’d insulted him by not putting him on in a bigger hall, so it was a question of “face”. So all the original plan went overboard and he was out for your blood. If I’d been there on the night I could maybe have intervened. But as it was you had to face it out yourself. And a red hot job you made of it. A red hot job. It’s going to do you a power of good, you can stand on me for that.’
‘It’s done me a flaming lot of good,’ said Godfrey.
‘Reputation wise it has. Reputation wise it’s as good as a gold brick. Now you’re a name. Soon as you get over these bruises we can talk big for your next fight. That’s going to mean a lot to you, Godfrey. You’re a big wheel now. Oh, by the bye, I’ve got the cheque here for the fight. Six hundred less commission.’
‘Thanks for nothing,’ said Godfrey taking the cheque and sneering at it.
Jude Davis leaned on his umbrella and put the handle against his teeth. This was the turning point. He had gone as far as he could to paper over the cracks. Whether Godfrey believed him or not he didn’t much care. What he did care was whether Godfrey appeared to believe him. If he made no effort to do so they couldn’t go on. That would be a pity, because if Godfrey survived this beating, he would now be a valuable property. If Godfrey survived the beating and took it right, everybody would profit.
‘Well, it’s not nothing, Godfrey. You carry it to a bank and see. But I’ve got something more for you here. It’s a hundred pounds in tenners. When you get out of hospital I want you to go away and have a good holiday before we consider your next fight, see. This is a bit of extra to take care of the expense and because I wasn’t there on Tuesday to see it worked to plan. I want you to take this and have a good time. Have a good time on me and come back fighting fit.’
Godfrey hesitated and then put out his hand for the envelope. ‘Thanks.’
Davis did not put the envelope in it.
‘No hard feelings. That’s what we have to be sure of. No hard feelings, see. Manager and fighter can’t ever get on if there’s hard feelings between them.’
There was another pause. Then Godfrey tried to move his lips into a smile. ‘No hard feelings,’ he lied. You bastard, you muck face, you jerk, you punk.
He took the money and put it under his pillow. ‘Thanks Jude,’ he said. ‘I’ll remember this.’
Godfrey’s third guest missed Jude Davis by only ten minutes. She was as much in white as Davis had been in black, and he recognized her tall figure coming down the ward. He swallowed a mouthful of venom and lust as he saw her. She hesitated and licked her lips and smiled, then came on and held out her hand.
‘Godfrey, how are you? I was so sorry. I thought I’d come and see.’
Even her voice had changed since her marriage, he thought. How are you? So sorry. He looked her up and down with bruised bloodshot eyes but did not take her hand.
‘Sorry I can’t touch me forelock. That’s what you expect when you visit the peasants, isn’t it?’ Deliberately he pitched his own voice at its worst.
She sat on the stool beside the bed. Kid shoes and nylon legs and fine wool skirt under the white straight-cut coat. ‘I didn’t come to quarrel – to go on with our quarrel. I came to see how you were.’
‘Well, you can see now, can’t you. Labelled pug at last. I said this’d never happen, didn’t I. Little God with his looks rubbed out. That’s what. Pig-Face wanted it, didn’t he? That’s why Pig-Face fixed my wagon.’
She was startled at this; the things she had intended to say were stopped. She licked her lips again. ‘Wilfred took me to watch the fight, but … I don’t know if you were – I’m only sorry the fight ever happened.’
‘So’ll your fat pig of a husband be when I get around to him. You can tell him that from me.’
She began to say something and then checked herself again.
‘Have some champagne,’ he said sarcastically. ‘It’s just come. Compliments of the management.’
‘Godfrey,’ she said. ‘I was so upset on Tuesday; I don’t know how we got home. I – felt so sick, so sorry. When that Jap – it was horrible. I never want to see another boxing match … Your face will heal, won’t it? You put up a wonderful fight. It must make your reputation.’
He turned over and grunted; his ribs were now at their most painful. ‘I’ll still be able to lay you if that’s what’s fretting you.’
She flushed. ‘Do you hate me all that much?’
He grunted again and sighed. ‘Who knows? Who cares?’
He
was bitter at her for coming and seeing him like this.
It rasped at his vanity, his manhood. And this girl, this girl was married to … ‘What d’you expect? I’m not a mud pie. When somebody treads on my face I tread back.’
Shrinking into herself but still seeking some reassurance, she said: ‘Are you like this with me just because of Wilfred or is there some other reason?’
‘Just because of Wilfred,’ he mimicked. ‘ Isn’t that good enough?’
‘It may be good enough, but I want to know.’
With clumsy fingers he touched his cheek, and the sharp ends of the stitches brushed his hand. ‘Oh, what’s the odds? What does it matter?’
‘It matters to me. I still don’t understand.’
‘How could you?’
‘Well, then d’you want me to go now? To leave you alone?’
‘Please yourself.’
She sat there hesitantly, with the drone of other people’s voices around her.
He said: ‘ Go on. Have some champagne.’
‘Godfrey, are you trying to say Wilfred had some hand in arranging what happened on Tuesday? How could he? You’ve got a manager—’
‘He fixed me up with Davis – remember that? So he—’
‘Because you asked him. Or asked me to ask him—’
‘So he fixed me up with Davis. So he fixed this too.’
She glanced round the big ward, at the old people and the sick people in the beds, at the visitors, some genuinely concerned, others here out of duty, exchanging platitudes, waiting for the time to go.
‘When will you be able to leave hospital?’
‘Next Monday, the body-slicer says.’
‘Where will you go – back to that room in Lavender Hill?’
‘To begin.’
‘If you tell me the time you expect to be home I’ll be there. I’ll try to make it a bit more comfortable for you.’
‘Slum visitor. That’ll be smashing.’
She shrugged helplessly. ‘Do you want me to leave Wilfred?’
Angell, Pearl and Little God Page 36