by Nina Bawden
He was wearing a Harris tweed sports coat patched with leather at the elbows, a canary-yellow pullover, breeches and boots. It was hot in the workshop and there was a smell of leather and oil. He had a pair of twelve-bore double-barrelled guns on the table one still in its mahogany box and the other in his hands. He was rubbing down the barrel and the silver chasing on the butt was clear and polished. Outside the autumn sun was bright; it fell through the narrow, cobwebbed window and glinted on the eddying dust and on the shining guns and on Geoffrey’s flaxen head.
He looked up as I came in and his smile was cautious. The colour deepened under the thin, fair skin.
He said: “Hallo, old chap. You’re early this morning.”
The shaft was blunt. I told him that I had been talking to Emily. I told him that I knew he had seen the police.
He broke the gun and peered intently down the barrel. His mouth was wry.
“Annoyed with me?” he said.
The back of his head was thin and pointed; his neck, where the fair hair grew clipped and low almost to the collar of his jacket, was bent and vulnerable. I felt my hands stiffen and clench, and thrust them deep into my trouser pockets.
My mouth was dry. I said: “What do you expect me to do? Congratulate you?”
His eyes were the washed-out blue of a spring sky. There were thin threads of scarlet in the corners. He looked anxious.
He said uneasily: “Don’t lose your temper, Tom. It was the only thing to do. I wasn’t deliberately involving you. We’re all in this together.”
“Some of us appear to be more deeply in than others,” I said.
He gave me a startled look and stood up. He took the other gun out of the mahogany box and handed it to me.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
I felt clumsy with the gun; it was a long time since I had been shooting and I had almost forgotten how to carry it. We walked out of the workshop into the garden and through the small gate at the end that led to the fields behind the house. We climbed, on the sloping turf, to the patch of woodland on the top of the low hill; there were mare’s tails in the sky and a wet, gentle wind blowing. In the neighbouring fields, hens scratched among the corn stubble and the air was filled with the broken hum of tractors. We stopped at the stile at the entrance to the wood and Geoffrey leaned on one knee crinkled his eyes across the valley, and said, to the manner born.
“Jenkins has got a decent herd of Red Polls there.”
He looked and sounded like a gentleman farmer; it was not a pose and was as genuine as Geoffrey the politician, Geoffrey the scholar. I was wearing a dark suit, a white shirt and black shoes, and felt as out of place as an insurance clerk.
Then Geoffrey explained about Walker. The confidence had returned to his voice and he no longer looked anxious. I felt as if somehow I had lost the initiative without realising that I had ever had it.
Walker had been waiting for him at the house; he was sitting in the study with a cup of coffee balanced awkwardly on his knee. He had been polite but dogged and his interest had become clear. He had already inquired about Geoffrey’s car; he had learned from the garage that it was being resprayed and that it had been badly scratched. He had appeared to accept Geoffrey’s assurance that the spraying was merely routine, but he had come back to it again and again with courteous tenacity. In the end he had mentioned my accident with the bicycle.
Geoffrey said: “After that I had to tell him. I did my best to sound pretty casual. I said that my wife had had the car out the night before, that I hadn’t noticed any scratches on the wing, but that I wasn’t in the habit of looking for them. I let him drag the rest of the story out of me—it seemed to be the most convincing way to handle it as I hadn’t told the truth in the beginning. In the end I told him that she’d said she’d gone to meet you, but hadn’t mentioned anything about an accident. I gave him to understand that I was pretty fussy about the Bentley and that Emily would have preferred, whatever the circumstances, not to tell me she had damaged it. Naturally, I explained that neither of you would have been particularly anxious to tell the police what had happened. It wouldn’t have seemed necessary and nobody likes to wash their dirty linen in front of strangers—not even the police. I said that I had myself hoped to be able to respect my wife’s confidence or I would have been more honest with him in the beginning. He quite understood and he said he hoped it wouldn’t have to go any further. …”
It struck me, then, that he wasn’t in the least concerned with the moral implications; that to him, keeping out of trouble in a murder case was no more important than a customs evasion.
I said: “You made a nice smoke screen for yourself, didn’t you?”
His laughter was simple and unaffected. He slapped his breeches with his free hand and his eyes were amused and kindly.
“Don’t be an idiot, Tom,” he said. “No harm’s done. The man has no real reason to be suspicious of any of us—he was only being officious. He’s probably due for promotion or something. Now he knows that we were all hiding something that it was, in fact, quite reasonable to hide, it’s not likely that he’ll risk making a fool of himself by looking any farther.”
“All right,” I said. “And so you’ve thrown him off the scent. What am I supposed to do about it?”
The laughter died on his thin mouth and he looked suitably grave.
“Go along and see him,” he said. “Tell him you’ve thought it over and decided to tell the truth. The police aren’t, after all, guardians of public morals. There’s no need for you to be embarrassed.”
I said: “It was muddy down the lane. Won’t there have been tracks? And if there were tracks they would have found the marks of two cars, not one.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s a risk,” he said. “But not, I think, a serious one. If they have any suspicions about Parry’s death it’s probably to our advantage if they think another car went down the lane that night. Honestly, Tom, I don’t think you should worry any more.”
His face was clear and untroubled in the sun. He vaulted the stile and grinned at me.
“You mustn’t confuse your own feelings of guilt and responsibility with fear of the police,” he said.
After that, we were silent for a while. We got a brace of partridge, about half a dozen wood pigeon and a couple of rabbits. I was ridiculously pleased to find I was a better shot than I had expected to be, and that Geoffrey was surprisingly bad. Both the partridges were mine and most of the pigeon.
In the end we came to a clearing in the centre of the wood and the edge of a Roman camp. There had been a digging there some years before; now the grass had grown smooth over it and it looked like a natural hollow. In the grassy bottom some boys had made a hideout and abandoned it. There were the charred remains of a fire and a few, rusty saucepans.
The wind had changed and it was gusty and suddenly cold although the sun was bright.
Geoffrey said: “I’ve got some coffee. Let’s get down there, out of the cold.”
He looked frozen. His face was pinched and mauve round the lips and his skin was pimpled with cold. I started down the slope. It was comparatively steep and once out of the wind the chill went from the air, and the sun was warm on the back of my neck.
Then I saw Geoffrey’s shadow. It was thrown long by the sun and stretched in front of me. His gun was raised at his shoulder and pointed at my back.
I felt a sick lurch of fear and then, curiously, calmness. I remembered his story about the railway worker and his wife’s lover. I thought how easily explained a shooting accident would be. I felt a kind of wonder that he should think me worth killing and knew that I had always believed he considered me of very little importance. I think that, in the midst of fear, I was almost proud.
Of course I turned round. And Geoffrey was standing where I had left him at the top of the bluff, his gun loose at his side, looking at the sky. I wheeled round to face down the slope again and saw his tall figure with the menacing, pointed gun, and r
emembered that the sun plays odd tricks with shadows.
I think I laughed out loud. I know that suddenly Geoffrey was looking at me curiously, as if there were something about me that surprised him, before he started down the slope towards me.
We sat side by side, our backs against the curving side of the hollow, and drank the hot, sweet coffee, taking turns with the Thermos cup.
He said: “You know, Tom, I think I managed to talk Nora out of divorcing you.”
I wondered whether I was expected to thank him.
“I think it was pretty unlikely, anyway,” I said.
He looked at me sideways. “Do you? I’m glad of that.” Then he grinned at me as if I were one of the boys. “I think, between you and me, that she was almost enjoying herself and her feeling of being the wronged little wife.”
I said: “It’s a comparatively strong position, haven’t you found it so?”
His face became solemn and his voice, avuncular.
He said: “We should respect her feelings, I think. It is too easy to be frivolous about this sort of thing. And rather regrettable. It is obvious that she loves you, Tom. You didn’t expect her not to be hurt and angry, did you? It is natural for her to feel deeply insulted, but I should think that if you played your cards carefully you should be able to get her back. After all, you have been married for eight years. It’s not a thing to be lightly discarded.”
I said: “Thanks for the advice.” I got up and took my gun and climbed up out of the hollow. I walked through the wood, kicking at the carpet of leaves, until I came to the far side of the wood. The sky was clouding over and the sun had gone from, my side of the valley, but over on the far hill it lit a field of late, uncut corn, rippling it with waves of gold and darker gold until, it had the colour and texture of a Chinese carpet.
I fired a dozen cartridges at a young, sapling birch at the end of the field and the delicate trunk shivered with each shot. Then I walked back through the wood to the Roman working.
Geoffrey was sitting where I had left him, his head tilted back against the turf. The gun lay on the ground at his side and his hands were loose on his knees. He was fast asleep.
I went quietly down, suddenly quite aware of what I was going to do. It had all been made so simple for me. I could be expected to be unhandy with a gun. I had no reason to kill Geoffrey, or no reason that would mean very much to a policeman or in a court of law. There are always shooting accidents. There would be people who would think that Geoffrey had brought it on himself by putting a gun in the hands of someone so unused to handling it.
I went up to him. His head had fallen a little on one side and the tendons of his neck were standing out like wires beneath the flesh. His mouth was slightly open and his breath whistled as though his position were uncomfortable. His hair had been blown untidy by the wind and stood up at the back in absurd, spiky tufts like a schoolboy’s. His hands were blue-veined and looked cold; otherwise, he was sleeping very neatly, with his knees drawn up towards his chest and his hands resting lightly on them. In sleep his face looked tired and scholarly.
I thought: I will have to shoot him from a distance because it will look less suspicious. I wonder how far away it will have to be if it is going to look like an accident. I will have to kill him at the first shot, otherwise he will wake.
For a moment, the terror of missing him and having him wake and see me standing there, went through me and made me sick. Then I walked away from him, walking carefully backwards and on my toes, although the grass was soft and soundless, and he was sleeping very deeply.
I thought that if I stood on the edge of the working and shot him from there, I could say that I had aimed at a rabbit on the far side of the hollow and caught my foot in a hole and stumbled. There were plenty of rabbits; the clearing was full of warrens and grey pellet droppings.
Then I realised that it would be better to shoot him somewhere among the trees, in the thickest part of the wood, where I could say I hadn’t seen him. I wondered if there would be much blood on the green cropped grass, and if it would be safe to carry him home and say he had died elsewhere.
He stirred in his sleep and stretched out one of his legs slowly, as if it were cramped. His hand fell limply away from its support and lay open on the ground.
I don’t know at what point I knew it was useless. I tried to tell myself afterwards that it was his helplessness, his look of ordinary humanity that stopped me. But it wasn’t true. It was my own weakness and my own bungling and failure.
When I knew I couldn’t do it, I began to run away from the camp. I ran fast, stumbling among the blackberry bushes that grew thick and tangled and low. At last my foot caught in a briar and I fell, cracking my chin on the butt of the gun. I lay among the bushes, my scratched hands covering my face and the warm blood running into my mouth and cried and cried like an adolescent until I was tired and soggy and weak. And then I got up and wiped my mouth and my hands, and went back to fetch Geoffrey.
Chapter Ten
The pain started in the bus on the way to the police station. I had been aware of it for some time but only as a vague and irritating discomfort, a solid lump of pain that seemed to be located behind my diaphragm. My mouth tasted foul; I lit a cigarette and the smoke was harsh and sour against my tongue. I shifted my position on the seat and huddled forward, wrapping my arms round my body. The woman beside me looked at me curiously and edged a little away.
The bus stopped and I got up cautiously; the pain was no worse when I stood upright. By the time I had got off the bus and was walking along the pavement, I had discovered that I was able to live with it. It had become an accepted part of me; I discovered that if I held my stomach muscles in a certain way it was more bearable.
When I got to the police station they said I would have to wait; Inspector Walker was busy. I sat on a wooden seat in a long, bare corridor, wondering how soon I would be able to get to a doctor. The physical discomfort had momentarily removed my apprehension so that when I was shown into Walker’s room I was not at all dismayed and only anxious to get the whole thing over as quickly as possible.
Walker was alone, small and shabby behind a bland and polished desk. The room was obsessionally neat, there was no clutter, no untidy files. On the leather surface of the desk a pair of Georgian inkwells, proudly polished, flanked a silver pen tray, and all the time I was talking Walker played with a penknife with a beautifully-carved handle. He ran his slender fingers up and down the blunt blade; when I stumbled finally into silence he laid the knife neatly in the exact centre of the blotter in front of him and looked, not at me but at the painted wall behind my shoulder.
I was suddenly afraid. The story had sounded lame and foolish and because it was not entirely true I felt its falseness must be immediately clear and apparent to the silent little man behind the desk.
In the end, he looked at me and smiled. It was a glowing smile, curiously sweet, although his eyes looked tired and sore at the edges as though he had been rubbing them.
He said: “I’m glad you came, Mr. Harrington.”
The flatness of his midland voice was somehow incongruous beside the civilised beauty of his possessions. It was an uncultured voice, the voice of a man who made no attempt to conceal his origins.
He picked up the paper-knife again and fiddled with it nervously as if the interview were not to his liking. The smile had left, his face and without it he looked dry and middle-aged and weary.
He said: “It had worried us, you know. Your accident with the bicycle, I mean. You’d had a nasty knock—you might have been killed. Frankly, I didn’t understand why you were so little concerned with finding the car that had knocked you down. It wasn’t natural now, was it? After all, the owner of the car would have had to pay for the repairs to your bicycle. Of course we had nothing to go on—it was only by chance that we found out about Mr. Hunter’s Bentley and that Mrs. Hunter had been driving it. The mechanic at the garage told us that the left wing had been badly scratched. Then of
course things began to fall into place.…”
I wondered why he was being so open with me and what chance had taken him to the garage. It sounded a far-fetched piece of luck and he didn’t look clever or particularly percipient, just ordinary, conscientious and rather dull. There was no surprise in his voice or condemnation; he sounded like a man who had lived for so long with falsehood and petty wickedness that he no longer found it unexpected.
He said: “I suppose you have already seen Mr. Hunter?”
He gave me a quick, apologetic look as though he knew that I had half-hoped that my story would appear to be spontaneous.
I said: “Yes, I saw him this morning. He told me that he had seen you.”
He nodded and said gravely: “You know, it would have been so much simpler to tell the truth in the beginning. We are not moral judges or tale-bearers, Mr. Harrington, only the imperfect instruments of law.”
I noticed with a certain malicious pleasure that even Walker was not above borrowing a phrase from Geoffrey.
I said humbly, accepting the reproof: “I know. I’m very sorry.”
He dug at the white blotter with the tip of his paper-knife and said, casually, as if the answer did not greatly matter: “Had you arranged previously with Mrs. Hunter what you were both going to say to us?”
I remembered Geoffrey’s line of open candour and the success he appeared to have with it.
I said: “Yes, I’m afraid we had.”
As soon as I had spoken I saw the depth of the pit I had dug for myself. The room was still, quite silent except for the small muffled noises that crept in through the closed, uncurtained window. A car changed gear in the road outside, a baby wailed, and somewhere in the distance a dog was barking with a high-pitched, querulous insistence as if it had been chained up all day.
The pain behind my ribs was an inflated balloon of agony and I felt damply cold.
Walker’s voice came from a great distance. He said: “Mr. Harrington, are you all right?”
I said: “Yes, I think so.” The pain eased a little and my vision cleared. There was concern on his face and he had risen from his chair.