by Nina Bawden
I tried not to hurry down to the river. I felt that somehow it was important not to hurry, to remember that I knew nothing, that I was just a passer by who had been told that there was some excitement on the tow path and that the police were there. It wasn’t until afterwards that I realised it would have been more sensible not to have gone at all.
When I came to the end of the lane and the width of grey water, the knot of men round the barge had their backs to me. They stood motionless, looking for a long moment like a still from a film. There were perhaps half a dozen people there, men from the council estate, the policeman and the doctor crouching on his haunches by the gangplank of David’s barge.
As I came up to them the men moved aside and I could feel their eyes in the back of my neck and their eager, whispering voices.
David was lying face down, his feet on the boards and his head in the mud at the river’s edge. The checked woollen shirt was tawdry bright against the dirty colour of the bank and he had lost one of his plimsolls so that his white, bare foot looked ludicrous and pathetic. One arm was crumpled beneath him; he looked curiously small and somehow empty. I would have known he was dead without the paraphernalia of the police and the gawping crowd.
The things I had meant to say died in my throat. The policeman looked at me inquiringly. I think I said: “He is my brother-in-law.”
The policeman said: “I see, sir. I’m sorry. There’s been an accident.”
He was a big man with curly hair and a shocked, young face. His eyes widened. “Are you Mr. Harrington?” he said. “Mrs. Foster, up at the cottage, told us to get in touch with you. She said you were married to Mr. Parry’s sister. Is that right?”
He sounded baffled, a little out of his depth.
I said: “Yes. I seem to have saved you some trouble. As a matter of fact, I came to collect my bicycle. I had a smash last night and left it in the lane. I saw Mrs. Foster and she said there had been an accident by the river.”
As soon as I had said it I wondered whether I had explained my presence too eagerly, whether it might not have been better to have said nothing. I remember that I was not at all afraid and that the scene was almost painfully clear and sharply definite so that a long time afterwards I could call it up at will and see the barge and David’s dead body and the men standing round it.
The policeman said: “Did Mrs. Foster tell you that it was Mr. Parry who was dead?”
I said: “No, she didn’t tell me.” I hoped that I sounded like an innocent man.
The doctor got up from his knees. He was elderly, with a narrow, tired face. He said: “He’s been dead some time. Can’t say anything definite now.”
He brushed the mud from his raincoat with nervous fingers. His clothes were fussily neat; he examined his spotted shoes with distaste.
I said: “How did he die?” And he looked at me with weary, distant eyes.
“Really, it’s difficult to tell,” he said. “You can’t give a snap decision in this sort of thing. We shall have to wait for the p.m. before we know the exact cause of death.” He sounded a little peevish as if he wasn’t used to people who lacked the good manners to die in their beds. He picked up his bag from the bank. “He might have drowned. On the other hand, there’s a lesion at the base of the skull. Might be a fracture there. Might be a chronic alcoholic for all I know.”
I said: “He wasn’t a drunk.” And he shrugged his shoulders.
“I wasn’t attacking his moral character,” he said. “Only answering your question.”
It was like scratching a sore spot. I had to go on. I said: “Could a crack on the skull have killed him? I mean, if there is a fracture there?”
He examined me coldly. “It might have done. But damage to the skull is often no indication of the extent of the damage to the brain. Severe brain injuries may exist without any fracture of the bone.”
I was in no mood for a medical lecture. I said: “I’m sorry to make a fuss, but the man happens to be a relation of mine.”
He looked a little shamefaced. “I quite understand” he said.
Then he took the policeman aside and they stood apart from the group of watchers and talked together. At last the doctor nodded, smiled frostily and went off along the tow path, stepping carefully to the side of the puddles. The policeman came back to me.
He said: “I’m sorry, sir. This must be a shock for you. Finding your brother-in-law like this, I mean. When did you last see him, sir?”
I lied then, more from instinct than from any consciously formulated fear.
I said: “I saw him yesterday. At lunch time. In the Woolpack.”
He nodded slowly and scratched his head. “Well, I needn’t keep you,” he said. He didn’t seem very sure what to do next. I had the impression that he would be more at home dealing with a traffic offence.
I said: “What could have happened to him?”
He said helplessly: “I don’t know, sir. They’re usually suicides—in the river. But he doesn’t look like a suicide.”
After that we hung about silently for a while. There was no point in my staying, but it was difficult to leave. The river was moving gently and the water lapped round David’s head with a damp, sucking sound, stirring the wet, dark hair. I wondered how long they would leave him lying there. It seemed somehow blasphemous that he should not be covered with a blanket in the final indignity of death.
I think the sergeant must have felt something of the same emotion; his silence was embarrassed and he moved uneasily from one foot to the other, staring unhappily at the sky.
In the end I said: “I think I’ll go along now.” It sounded forced and out of place, but there seemed to be nothing else to say.
He looked startled, as if he had forgotten I was there.
He said: “What? Oh, yes, sir. Can I have your address? In case we need to get in touch with you.”
He wrote it down in his notebook and thanked me solemnly. I took one last, self-conscious look at what remained of David and walked away. As I turned into the lane a police car swept by me followed by a closed van and the calmness deserted me. I stood still for a moment engulfed in wet, shivering fear and then I forced myself to walk up the lane to where I had left my bicycle. I tried to tell myself that it was important that I should act normally, that I had lied and that I had to stick to the lie. That whatever had happened to David I was morally innocent, that I had not hit him, that I had only acted in self-defence. It didn’t help; by the time I had reached my bicycle and began to push it home, I had begun to feel that the net was closing round me.
I stopped at a telephone box on the main road and sent a telegram to Nora. I remember that I was distantly amused at my conventional phrasing. I only said that there had been a serious accident and that David was badly hurt.
There was a long stretch of dreary main road back to the town. I had gone about half a mile when the police car stopped in front of me and the sergeant got out. He was alone in the car except for the driver and he looked very young and anxious.
He said: “Beg your pardon, sir, but you said you had an accident last night.”
He looked at my bicycle with a professional air. “That bike’s had quite a bashing,” he said appreciatively. “How did it happen?”
I said carefully: “I rode into a car.” I explained where it had happened and what I had been doing there. He listened politely and said:
“What time would that have been?” I told him and he said: “You know, you should have reported it.”
I tried to make a joke of it. “It didn’t seem worth it. After all, I wasn’t killed.”
He was unamused. He said reproachfully: “Didn’t you take the number of the car? Can you remember what it looked like?”
I said: “It was very dark and raining. It was difficult to see. I think it was a big car. It might have been a van. Anyway, it was as much my fault as the driver’s.”
He nodded slowly. “Well, being as you weren’t hurt, I suppose it’s all right. Only this s
ort of thing really ought to be reported.” He seemed happier now than he had been by the river, as if he was on his own ground.
He said: “Well, I’m sorry you’ve been troubled, sir.”
We smiled at each other and he got back into the car and drove off. I watched him go with a feeling of sweating relief, wondering how soon it would strike him that there were no houses between the council estate and the river, and no habitation that could be reached from that part of the tow path except David’s barge. I felt the bicycle was somehow incriminating; I stopped at the nearest shop and left it there, the mechanic shaking his head over the buckled frame saying that it would take at least a week to repair, that it was an out-of-date model so that spare parts were difficult and that it would never be the same again.
I rang the college and told the porter that I would not be in; I gave the impression, I think, that I was unwell although there was no reason why I should not have told the approximate truth. Perhaps, having already lied, it seemed safer to continue to do so.
I caught a slow, jolting bus out to the village. The main street was calm and bright although there was a frosty look to the sun and the conductress said she didn’t think that the fine weather was going to last.
I saw Emily before she saw me. She was coming out of the house with a shopping basket on her arm; she hesitated on the pavement, crinkling her eyes at the sky. I liked to watch her when she did not know I was there; there was a kind of excited pleasure in knowing how she looked when she was alone. For a moment I was happy in looking at her and knowing that I loved her; then she turned and saw me and the happiness was gone. Now that we were aware of each other, loving her was no longer a simple and uncomplicated joy. I knew suddenly that I didn’t want to have to tell her about David because I loved her and didn’t want to frighten her. And this, in a way, meant that I wished I were not with her or that I didn’t love her.
She smiled and I said quickly before there would be too much happiness to destroy:
“David’s dead.”
She looked at me without understanding. Then the lines of her face stiffened, and she said: “Dead? Tom, how do you know?”
I said: “I saw him. There’s no mistake. He’s dead.”
Then, because she continued to stand so still and people passing were beginning to look at us curiously: “For God’s sake let’s get off the street.”
She jerked into movement and began to fumble for the latch key in her handbag. She had some difficulty with the lock as if her fingers were shaking. Finally, she opened it and we went inside.
In the morning-room she turned and faced me with incredulous eyes. She said, her words breathless and unfinished: “How did you find him? Have you told anyone? What did you do?”
I said gently: “There wasn’t anything to do. The police were with his body when I went down to the river.”
She said, bewildered: “But how did they find him? How did they know he was dead? And why the police?”
I said: “He wasn’t in the barge. He was outside, lying on the gangplank. A child found him there.”
Her mouth went suddenly shapeless, like an old woman’s mouth. She said stupidly: “But I don’t understand. How did he die?”
I said: “I don’t know. His face was in the water. It looked as if he cracked his skull when he fell last night.”
She sat down on the arm of a chair in a boneless way as if her legs would not support her.
“But why should he be there—outside the cabin? Could he have walked there, and fallen?”
I said: “I suppose so. I don’t know. There was a doctor there. He said they would find out at the post-mortem how he died.”
There was no beauty in her face any more and she might have been any age from thirty to sixty.
She said: “Tom, did we kill him? Oh, my darling.”
It was something I had tried not to think about. Now, in the face of her obvious terror, I was not as afraid as I had expected to be.
I said: “I don’t know.” I fumbled for words of comfort. “Dearest—whatever happened—it was an accident. If he was all right when Geoffrey left him, what else could we have done? If he got sick or dizzy afterwards, when he was alone, and went outside—then we are only distantly to blame.”
I didn’t believe it and from the way she looked at me she didn’t believe it either. For a long, frightening moment we looked at each other almost with enmity and then she got up and came across the room, into my arms. It seemed then that I felt a complete and passionate longing that I had never felt before.
When she drew away and looked at me, her eyes were soft and not frightened any more. Then she said: “Tom, we shall have to tell Geoffrey.”
I was grateful for that “we.” I said: “It would come better from you. Is he here?”
She said: “In the study, I think. Shall I go and fetch him?”
As soon as she had gone, I felt empty and deprived. I walked about the room, straining to hear Emily’s returning footsteps, half-hoping that she would not be able to find Geoffrey and that we could be alone together a little longer. I wondered what Geoffrey would say when she told him and whether he would take control of this situation too.
When they came he looked calm, but his eyes were tired and oddly withdrawn.
He said: “Emily’s told me. What did you say to the police?”
It was abrupt, even for him. He took out his pipe and began to fill it, spilling loose tobacco out of his pouch on to the floor with an unusual, nervous clumsiness.
I said: “I didn’t tell them I had been to the barge last night.”
He said: “Thank God for that, anyway.” He went to the drink cupboard in the corner of the room and poured out three glasses of Scotch.
I said: “It’s nice to be able to afford to drink yourself out of a gloom.”
He grinned a little sourly. “You don’t have to join me,” he said.
We emptied our glasses in silence and then Geoffrey filled them up again. The whisky tasted sour and I felt that I could drink a bottle without it having any noticeable effect.
Geoffrey said: “I suppose he got out of his bunk and collapsed outside. Didn’t the police have any idea what might have happened?”
I said: “No. If the doctor knew, or guessed, he wasn’t saying.
He was standing very hard on his professional dignity. Was David really all right when you left?”
A little tic had started at the corner of his left eye. He said: “How should I know? He seemed to be well enough. A bit dazed, perhaps, but quite rational. I wanted to fetch a doctor but he insisted that he didn’t want to see one. It struck me that he was pretty ashamed of the whole business and only anxious that it should be forgotten as quickly as possible.”
Emily sounded puzzled. “But Tom said that he had hurt his head badly.” She looked beautiful again and moderately composed.
Geoffrey looked at her. “Head injuries are tricky things. I remember we had a fellow at school who was knocked on the head by a cricket ball. He acted a bit silly for a moment or two and then he went on playing as if nothing had happened. He collapsed and died the next morning during prayers.”
I wondered why he was being so affable.
Emily said: “But if it was the bang on the head that killed him, what would happen if the police found out we’d been there?”
Geoffrey leaned back in his chair and examined the whisky in the bottom of his glass. He spoke slowly, in a deliberately judicial voice.
“I would say that it puts Tom in a tight corner. It wouldn’t be murder, of course, because from what you’ve told me it was Parry who started the ball rolling, but I suppose they could get him on a charge of manslaughter.”
I knew, then, why he was being so friendly and social. He was enjoying himself. He smiled at me from his unassailable position; the look in his eyes was faintly malicious.
Emily did not move. Her voice was light and strained. “But he fell,” she said. “He slipped on the bottle. Tom didn’t h
it him. Not once. And if he had done, it would have been in self-defence.”
Geoffrey stared beyond me, at the wall. “I don’t know that it would make all that much difference, dear. Tom would still be held responsible. Oh—I expect he’d get off pretty lightly, but he’s already queered his pitch a bit by lying to the policeman. Not that I blame him for that—I’d have done the same thing myself, in similar circumstances. Why put your head in a noose if you don’t have to?”
My mouth was dry. “A remarkably unpleasant image, isn’t it?”
He smiled. “Sorry, old chap. Clumsy of me.” His eyes were wide and blue and shining with surprised amusement.
I said: “Do you propose to tell the police what happened last night? Because if you do I should like to get my story in first.”
Emily was on her feet. She was very white. She said: “Of course he isn’t going to tell the police. He wouldn’t dare. And if what he says is true, then it was me who killed him and not you. I pushed him and he fell.”
This sort of stupidity could go on for ever. I said: “David slipped. It was an accident. But he was fighting me, not you. If anyone is to blame, then I am.”
Geoffrey tapped out his pipe in the ash-tray. He got up from his chair and stood in front of the fire looking tall and handsome and very much in command. He cleared his throat.
“Look here,” he said. “There’s no point at all in working out who is to blame. There is no reason why the police should ever know that either of you were there. I don’t pretend to know what the legal consequences would be if they found out; that is a risk we must be prepared to take. I think that we should all be concerned to see that they do not find out.”
He looked at his shining shoes and then at the ceiling. He might have been on a platform, making a public speech.
“I know that I must sound as if I am evading my duty as a citizen, but this is an exceptional situation. I think, that as long as our consciences are tolerably clear, it would be reasonable to say nothing.”