Change Here For Babylon

by Nina Bawden

  “What excellently reliable people they are,” he said. “I take it that we are not to be arrested?”

  Emily said: “They wanted to know about Martin. You didn’t tell me you had been to see them, Geoffrey.”

  He smiled at her. “My dear, I didn’t want to worry you. That business always upsets you. I couldn’t have told you I was going to the police without telling you that Parry was threatening more than a scandal about you and Tom. And I had no wish to cause you pain.”

  He sounded genuine enough and yet there was something a little out of key. His smile was kind and yet she shrank away from him almost imperceptibly and her face was frozen. I wondered whether to remind him that he had sent Emily to the barge to see Parry, something that assorted badly with his pretended concern for her, but I wasn’t sure that she had told me the truth about it.

  He said: “It was just a threat. I don’t really think that he would have dared to do anything—or, if he had, that it would have done me any harm. I was thinking more of the distress it would cause Emily. It would have been unpleasant for her if it had been dragged into the light after all these years.” He looked at me gravely. “She has always blamed herself so much. Now you know about it, I hope that you won’t blame her too.”

  At first I didn’t think he was serious, but that it was a bad sort of joke. And then I saw that he was looking at me without any hint of laughter.

  I said: “It would be absurd to think her responsible in any way.”

  I thought he looked a shade disappointed. As if in pleading for my understanding on Emily’s behalf he had hoped himself to gain in stature, prove himself to be a good fellow, a decent chap.

  Emily said: “Oh, God.” She was staring at Geoffrey with complete helplessness and despair. She scrambled to her feet and went to the door. She turned, one hand on the door jamb, and said: “Thank you for coming home with me, Tom.”

  When she had gone, Geoffrey grinned at me wryly. “I must apologise,” he said. “It was an awful business for both of us, but probably much worse for Emily. She has never quite forgiven herself—she has a very tender conscience.” He grinned again. “At least, I always thought she had.”

  I let that one go. I said: “Why didn’t you have another child? Wouldn’t that have helped her?”

  He regarded the tips of his long-fingered hands. “I think, that at one point, she was anxious to have a child,” he said. “But it seemed to me to be a bad idea. After all, we had hardly shown ourselves to be very responsible parents, do you think?“

  I felt the skin tighten round my forehead. I said: “Did you say that to Emily?” I wanted to call him a sanctimonious prig, but it was almost impossible to call Geoffrey names.

  He smiled in sheer good humour and the smile lit up his face. “Hardly in so many words. It would have been bitterly unkind. I’m not quite the monster you would like to think me.”

  I muttered some sort of an apology and said that I must go.

  Instantly he was on his feet, the good host, and asking me for my glass.

  “It’s a cold night,” he said. “You’ll have one for the road?”

  He filled my glass and gave me a cigarette. There was something singularly ludicrous in his sudden care for my comfort. He settled himself back in his chair like a man preparing for a long evening, his legs stretched out to the fire and his flaxen head against a cushion. He looked handsome and scholarly; his manner was that of a university don with a private income.

  Eventually he said: “You know, Tom, in another class of society I should probably have knocked your teeth in by now.”

  His laugh was unforced and merry, and I felt my skin prickle. I said: “I’m not sure that it wouldn’t have been a healthier reaction.”

  “Come, come, my dear fellow,” he said. “Have my gentlemanly inhibitions offended you as much as that?” He looked reflectively at his glass. “There was a murder in the town last week,” he said. “A woman had been carrying on with the lodger—who was a railway man on night work—and the husband came home unexpectedly in the middle of the day and found them in bed together. He split the man’s head open with a hatchet. Admirably healthy, perhaps, but wasteful.… Would you have preferred me to behave like that? I hardly think the poor woman, who is now left without either her husband or her lover, would agree with you.”

  I said: “That’s an unfair argument.” He paid no attention to me, but went on developing his theme with a certain amount of gusto.

  “It’s one way out,” he said. “Murder. Or, in this case, they may commute it to manslaughter as the provocation was so extreme. They lived in one of those back-to-back houses by the gasworks; the sort of house that has a kitchen and a front parlour downstairs, two bedrooms upstairs and no bath. You manage as best you can in the kitchen sink. The husband had known about his wife and the lodger for some time. He was asked why he hadn’t done anything about it—got rid of the lodger, for instance—and he said he hadn’t been able to afford it. He’d been keeping a widowed mother in Bath. So they were all three shut up together, unable to get away from each other either economically or physically, mewed up in this nasty little box of a house. The woman shared her husband’s bed at night and the lodger’s in the daytime. The man said the housework had suffered as a result. It seemed to annoy him out of all proportion that his tea wasn’t always ready when he came off work at night. One interesting thing—he said also that he couldn’t have left his wife because it wouldn’t have been right for her to be left alone in the house with a man she wasn’t married to. He was apparently quite serious about it. Now you and I, Tom”—he smiled expansively—“aren’t concerned about our respectability, we don’t have to live together. And we can talk about it, work it out of our systems, in a way that poor devil sitting in prison presumably couldn’t do. So the thing doesn’t build itself up into violence … it wouldn’t give either of us any relief. It would just leave a nasty taste in the mouth.”

  I was surprised to find he had so much imagination.

  I said: “Is this some sort of apologia? Or a thesis to prove that crimes of passion don’t happen in the middle class?”

  He wasn’t smiling now. “Neither,” he said. “Perhaps an apology for myself. At bottom, however educated or civilised we may be, don’t we all have an uneasy feeling that it would be more proper to react to this sort of nonsense like a caveman with his club? I imagine, anyway, that it is how you feel. You are more straightforward than I am, Tom. I don’t feel like that at all. I liked you before this happened and I like you still. Can you understand that?”

  I wondered if he meant it. He stroked the fair hair back from his forehead with a weary gesture and looked at me in a puzzled way as if there really were something that he didn’t properly understand and would like to have explained to him. He seemed more vulnerable than I had ever seen him, and I wasn’t angry any longer, only sorry.

  I said: “I’m not sure that I do understand. And does it do any good to talk? It gets us no nearer a solution.”

  He sounded worried. “Doesn’t it? I’m not sure that I agree with you. I should have thought that it helped to clarify, to put things into perspective.”

  He smiled, this time almost anxiously, and I was suddenly aware that he was trying to be friendly with me. I felt instantly and unreasonably wary.

  He went on: “After all, Tom, our interests are the same in this. You know Emily well, though perhaps not as well as I know her. She’s a nice, sweet, good-hearted creature, but completely at the mercy of her own emotions. If we’re not sensible, you and I, she’ll get us both into the kind of mess that would suit neither of us.”

  I said: “What do you expect me to do?” Waiting for the sharpness of the steel beneath the velvet.

  It was there all right. “Stop seeing her,” he said. “At least for a while. Don’t come to the house. Don’t talk to her on the telephone. She’ll get over it—and though I don’t expect you to believe me now, so will you. These things don’t last, although they may s
eem important at the time. And we both have so much to lose.”

  He was pompous and unbearably smug. He looked so safe and so confident, sitting at ease in his well-upholstered chair, wearing an excellently-cut suit and hand-made shoes.

  I said: “What else did you tell the police? When you went to see them about David?”

  He scratched his head and looked rueful like a small boy caught out in a lie which he confidently expects the grownups to find funny.

  He said: “You’re clever, Tom, aren’t you?”

  I said sharply: “Gutter-brightness. I’ve had to be or I would have ended up as an errand boy.”

  He knocked out his pipe on the sole of his shoe and filled it slowly. When it was alight he looked at me steadily and said: “I told them that David was threatening me on two counts. Because of the circumstances of my son’s death and because of Emily’s behaviour with you. I fancy that the second thing was the most important and the one he could have done most damage with. And easier to hint at in a gossip column without running the risk of libel.”

  “I see.” I could feel the jumping muscle in my cheek and the room seemed suddenly very small and hot. “So their visit to me this afternoon may not have been entirely because David was my brother-in-law? Because I might reasonably be expected to have had a fight with him and knocked him down?”

  He said solemnly: “I’m afraid that may be true, Tom. Believe me, I’m sorry. But you must remember that I had no idea, when I went to the police, what was going to happen later in the day.”

  “This hurts you more than it hurts me,” I said, and got up from my chair. He was with me before I reached the door, his face anxious and contrite.

  “I would far rather not have had to tell them about you and Emily,” he said.

  I think, at that moment, he honestly believed he was speaking the truth. Perhaps he, even believed it to be true that he liked me and bore me no ill-will. I wondered how he managed to deceive himself so completely; it was a nice talent and must have made his life a more comfortable one than most.

  I caught that last bus back to the town, got off at the terminus and walked the last, cold mile. The sky was wintry and high and flecked with October stars.

  The house was dark; I stumbled over Sandy’s satchel in the hall and cracked my head on the banister rail.

  A camp-bed had been set up for me in the sitting-room; my pyjamas and dressing-gown were laid on a chair beside it. I felt faintly embarrassed and wondered whether Nora had locked the bedroom door.

  It was an old camp-bed and rocky. There weren’t enough blankets and my feet were cold. After a long while I went to sleep.

  I woke up suddenly; the light was on and Nora was kneeling beside me. She was huddled in an old coat and the tears were pouring down her face. She wasn’t touching me, but I had the impression that she had been trying to wake me.

  I said: “What on earth are you doing here? Go back to bed. You’ll make yourself ill.”

  She was shuddering and shaking, her face was swollen and her hair was tangled and looked dull. I sat up with an effort and put my arm round her.

  She wriggled away half-heartedly, making her point as it were, but remaining within the circle of my arm.

  She said: “Don’t. You don’t want to touch me, do you? I must look awful. I couldn’t sleep, I was waiting for you to come in. Tom, I’m so miserable.”

  I rocked her in my arms, feeling the intolerable burden of my responsibility.

  In the end, she said: “Tom, come upstairs to bed. It’s terribly cold down here.”

  Chapter Eight

  The inspector arrived just after I had finished the last of my morning tutorials. Since the moment of waking I had spent the hours in chilling expectation of disaster, so that when he finally appeared, ordinary and tired and badly dressed, fear took on a human shape and was no longer nameless.

  His name was Walker. He stood in the high old room, as ill-at-ease as any penniless undergraduate in his first term, regarding the lines of books with an air of cautious reverence.

  He said: “Nice place you have here, Mr. Harrington.”

  He had not brought the sergeant with him; he sat, shabby and alone, in the chair where my pupils normally sat, and as uneasily upright. His small feet were planted neatly together on the carpet before him, and the outline of his bony knees was visible beneath the thin tweed of his trousers. I felt confidence flow back into me; I was on my home ground now, and I had been prepared for him.

  He said: “Mr. Harrington, I believe you had a quarrel with your brother-in-law? About someone you were friendly with?”

  I said: “Hardly a quarrel. He told me that he knew. But you have already been told about it, haven’t you?”

  “It has been brought to our notice. You were concerned, I imagine, that your wife should remain unaware of this—friendship?”

  His delicacy was absurd. He seemed, himself, to be nervously aware of its absurdity. He looked at me in a manner that was unhappy and shy.

  I said: “When I met him in the Woolpack, he told me that he knew about my affaire with Mrs. Hunter. He said that he had no intention of telling my wife and apart from trying to borrow five pounds from me on the strength of it, nothing more was said. There was certainly no quarrel.”

  “I see.” He gave a small sigh of relief as though he felt that the awkwardly disagreeable preliminaries were over. “I understand, however, that he informed Mr. Hunter of the situation between you and his wife? That must have been unpleasant for you.”

  “I knew nothing of it until last night,” I said.

  He went on: “Mr. Parry had been a friend of Mrs. Hunter’s. Had he told you that? It must have made difficulties between you.”

  I said flatly: “We did not quarrel. My brother-in-law was a malicious man. He liked to make trouble; I knew that and so I wouldn’t allow myself to get angry. We weren’t good friends, but we weren’t enemies either.”

  He nodded and looked out of the window at the grey quadrangle and the moving sky. I wondered how old he was. His skin was dry and flaky and wrinkled round the eyes from smiling; ten years ago he had probably looked as he did now and it was improbable that the next ten years would see much change in him. He was that kind of man.

  He said abstractedly, as if it were not of any great importance: “You are quite sure that you did not see Mr. Parry, on his barge, last night?”

  He turned his gaze from the window and towards me and his eyes were suddenly bright and lively with interest.

  He was gently apologetic. “You must understand that this is not official. Only sometimes people withhold things mistakenly. It isn’t only the guilty who lie; even the innocent are often afraid that their actions may be misinterpreted. The police are not as stupid as they are occasionally thought to be.”

  He no longer looked insignificant. He was sharp and alert, and smiling a little. I met his brown eyes and hoped I looked sure of myself.

  My mouth seemed to move in a stiff and jerky fashion.

  I said: “I have not lied to the police, now or at any other time.”

  It seemed that I was being given endless chances of redemption; I saw myself throwing them away with terrifying inevitability.

  He looked immediately saddened, and I felt guilty in the way that a child feels when he has been expected to own up by his schoolmaster and failed to do so. His silence was somehow a reproach.

  I went on: “Did you think I had lied?”

  He looked shocked as if I had said something improper.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “It wasn’t an accusation, you know.” And then, with the air of a man leaving a painful subject: “We had the report of the post-mortem, this morning.”

  I wondered whether it was in keeping with innocence to ask the obvious question; he seemed to expect me to do so.

  “What was the result?” I said.

  He opened his hands and held them palm upwards in a quietly despairing gesture.

  “Indefinite, sir,” he said. “
Not that there is ever anything very clear cut in these cases, but we had hoped for something a little more helpful. Your brother-in-law died from a cranial injury, Mr. Harrington. There was a fracture of the skull and extensive damage to the brain. There had been a haemorrhage of the middle meningeal artery.”

  His voice was careful, as if he were speaking some unfamiliar tongue.

  I had no idea what he meant. I said slowly: “How do you think it happened?” I moved my body in the chair and felt my clothes damp with sweat and clinging to me.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “How can we tell? He wasn’t drunk, and it was a violent fall for a man who had done no more than stumble. I am told, that with this kind of injury, a man falling will concuss himself. Then, if it is serious, the concussion will pass into symptoms of compressison of the brain. The surgeon tells me that it is possible that there would be what he called a ‘lucid interval’ between the concussion and the final coma.”

  I hoped I didn’t sound too eager. “Then if he fell inside the barge, he might have gone outside to get help? And then collapsed again?”

  I tried not to think of David opening the cabin door on to the wind and the night, and the beating rain. I wondered if he had called for help before he fell on to the slippery boards of the gangplank and died there.

  He was looking at his hands. “It might have happened like that,” he said. “They can’t tell.” He went on almost lightly, as if death were not a very important matter. “The river finished him, of course. There was water in the lungs. But we would like to know more about the original injury.”

  I said: “It must be unsatisfactory for you.”

  His eyes were tired and shrewd. “Very,” he said. “These things so often are. Especially as in this case I am told it is rather unlikely that he would have had a lucid interval. I don’t pretend to understand the mechanics of it, but it is something to the effect that the meningeal artery connects directly with the brain which means that the damage is more immediate and serious. Oh—no one will say anything definite. There’s nothing as cagey as a pathologist.”