Change Here For Babylon

by Nina Bawden

  She was standing beside me. Her shoulder was very close, but she was not touching me. I could hear her breathing.

  I said: “There’s no hurry, is there?” And I heard her sigh softly. “I shall have to talk to Nora, try and explain to her. Her brother has just died; it would be a cruel moment to walk out without a word. I am responsible for her.”

  The room was silent and washed with yellow light the colour of fog. It was as if the sun never came into it except dimly, through a cloud of smoke.

  Emily stirred beside me gently, like someone waking from sleep. She walked to the bed and picked up her mackintosh. Geoffrey helped her to put it on, guiding her arms as if she were a child. He looked very tall.

  He said: “Have you packed your suitcase, dear? Did you have anything else?”

  She said something, but her voice was so low that I could not hear. She didn’t turn until she was at the door. Then she began to cough again and leant against the lintel until the spasm passed, her face screwed up and scarlet, her shoulders huddled into the raincoat. Then she looked at me across the width of the room.

  She said: “Poor Tom.” Her voice was gentle and empty of complaint.

  They went out together and the door closed behind them.

  Nora smiled at me from the pillows. She looked pale and the skin was puckered round her eyes. There was a dark line on her lips.

  She said: “I’m sorry, Tom. I’ve had a bad head. Worse than I’ve had for a long time. Mother sent for the doctor and he gave me an injection.”

  There was faint pride in her voice. She showed me the light bruise on her arm where she had had the injection and asked me to sit beside her and stroke her head. She closed her eyes while I did so; in spite of the pain she looked ten years younger and unworried as if in her temporary illness she had found a safe retreat. She put up her hand to my face and held it against my cheek. She had tiny hands, so thin that the fragile bones showed through the flesh. She had always been very vain of them, and I could never understand why; I had always thought them ugly and now I found their touch repellent, like the touch of a cold bird.

  I must have made some sort of movement because she opened her eyes and looked at me.

  She pouted like a little girl, and said: “You don’t have to stay with me if you don’t want to. Mother will give you lunch downstairs.”

  I said: “But, Nora, I want to stay with you,” wanting suddenly to make up for everything, most of all for not wanting to be with her, for not wanting to touch her.

  She frowned a little as though she disbelieved me. Then she said: “You aren’t going to leave me, are you, Tom?”

  Her voice was affectedly childish; it was the voice in which she asked for a new dress, a visit to the theatre.

  I said: “No, I’m not going to leave you. Now you must rest and get well.”

  She looked at me with a more adult anxiety and said: “Tom, you do love me, don’t you?”

  I said, drearily conscious that I was committing myself finally to the lie: “Yes, of course I love you.”

  She sighed and closed her eyes again. Her dark lashes were long and curled; they looked moist against her cheek.

  She said sleepily: “You know, if you’d left me, I think I’d have killed myself.”

  She was asleep quite quickly. She always slept heavily and well, although she complained continuously of not doing so. When she was breathing regularly I left the bed and closed the curtains against the pale, mid-morning sun. I went downstairs to have lunch with Mrs. Parry.

  Chapter Twelve

  I said: “Why did you fetch me?”

  For a moment he didn’t answer. His profile, etched in the reflected light from the headlamps, was intent on the road in front of him. In this way, with most of his face lost in shadow, the high narrow bridge of his nose and the receding slope of his forehead stood out more sharply than normally as in a caricature.

  At last he said: “Because if she wants anyone, it will be you.”

  He glanced at me briefly, with sad anger, and turned back to the windscreen and the road.

  I said, because I had to say something, not yet realising the monstrousness of my own part: “Why did she do it?”

  “Have you no idea?” he said, and after that we did not speak. He drove the car at a steady sixty and I huddled coldly in my overcoat, turning up the collar against the wind that whipped through the open window.

  The starlight was pale in the sky and once I looked at my watch. It was five o’clock on an autumn morning and Emily was dying. If she were not already dead.

  Geoffrey had found her about an hour and a half before he had come to fetch me. He had tried to telephone, but my number had given the engaged signal. I discovered, afterwards, that Sandy had been playing with the receiver and had left it off the hook.

  They had gone straight home after leaving me at the hotel. Emily was not well; her temperature was slightly above normal and her cough was troubling her. She had said that it was only a cold and she would not see a doctor. Geoffrey had left to go into the town and when he had come home, in the late afternoon, he had found her listless and exhausted, coughing in a chair by the fire. He had persuaded her to go to bed and she had done so, saying she did not want any dinner. She would take a pill, she said, and try to sleep; her cold would be better in the morning. Geoffrey had insisted that she had some whisky and given her a stiff drink in a tumbler. A little later he had made a warm drink and taken it up to her. She said she was sleepy, the whisky had given her a headache and she did not want to talk. He had left her and gone downstairs to his own cold supper and an article that he particularly wanted to finish.

  It had taken him longer than he had expected; it was for a Sunday newspaper and in an idiom to which he was unused. It was well after midnight when he went upstairs to bed in his dressing-room. He did not want to disturb Emily, and he had not gone into her room. Once in bed, he found it was impossible to sleep. The wind had got up and was rattling the window sashes; after reading for something over an hour, he was still wide awake. He remembered that Emily kept her sleeping pills in the bathroom cupboard and he decided to fetch them. When he reached the bathroom, they were not there.

  He said: “I supposed she’d decided to take one after all—she’d said, when I gave her the whisky, that she wouldn’t. I was a bit worried. You aren’t supposed to take those things when you’ve had alcohol. There have been one or two nasty accidents that way. …”

  I said, foolishly, because it was not important now: “I didn’t know she hadn’t been able to sleep.”

  He said: “Did you really think she would be so unaffected?”

  The door of Emily’s room was ajar and banging in the wind. He was quite sure he had left it closed. When he opened it farther he saw that her bedside lamp was lit, and the wind was blowing through the wide-open windows, billowing the curtains. A couple of small ornaments had been knocked off the dressing-table below the window; one of them was an ash-tray made of heavy Venetian glass that must have made quite a lot of noise when it fell. He was faintly and distantly surprised that Emily had slept through the racket; he closed the sash window with a slam and turned to look at the bed.

  She was still breathing, but so lightly that the bedclothes above her barely moved. There were tiny beads of moisture on her skin and her lips were cyanosed.

  He said: “The bottle was beside her, on the small table. At first I thought it was an accident. The whisky, you see, and then getting drowsy and having the tablets beside her, in the bottle. It is the thing they are always so careful to tell you not to do—the first dose makes you muzzy and you forget that you’ve taken it. But there was no chance that it was bad luck. The bottle was quite empty and this morning it was almost full. I noticed it when I took my shaving things out of the bathroom cupboard. I remembered I was angry because she had put it there and not locked it up in the medicine chest. It seemed the least she could do if she were going off with another man—to leave my house in order.”

>   I wasn’t in the mood for his particular brand of joking.

  I said: “Was she all right when you left her?”

  “Would I know? We were being very polite to each other. I didn’t think she was particularly unhappy.”

  He hesitated, and then he went on as if in justification, to talk of his own complete bewilderment. She had a capacity for enjoying life, he said, even when it dealt harshly with her; she must have suffered beyond bearing to take such a way out of it.

  He had felt her pulse and then he had rung the doctor. He had arrived within ten minutes and brought the district nurse with him. It was already too late to move her to hospital; the loss of time would be more important than the extra care they could give her. He and the nurse had done what they could; in the end he had told Geoffrey there was very little hope. And Geoffrey had come to fetch me. I never really understood why he did that.

  When we reached the house, all the windows except one reflected back the morning redness of the sky. In Emily’s bedroom a light shone out; I saw a shadow move across the closed curtains.

  A frightened maid in a Jaeger dressing-gown opened the front door before Geoffrey had time to find his key.

  She said: “The doctor’s been asking for you, sir,” and scuttled away, the metal curlers bobbing on her neck.

  The sickly, sour smell met us as we went up the stairs; in the room itself it was almost overpowering. There was a rectangular table by the bed, the kidney dishes and rubber tubing half-covered by a white towel. I tried not to look at the table. I didn’t want to know what they had done to her.

  The doctor was sitting on a chair by the bed, writing on his knee. He had come out without his tie and the collarless shirt, buttoned up to his neck, made him look like a labourer. The nurse was holding Emily’s wrist and watching her stopwatch. She was a very young girl, plump, with healthy cheeks. She looked at, us shyly as we came in and laid Emily’s arm back on the bedcover.

  Emily was lying on her back and very still. The honey-coloured hair was soaked with sweat and tangled on the pillow. Her eyes were closed and the mauve flesh beneath them seemed to be without bones. She was as white as the linen on which her head lay.

  The central light in the ceiling was on and its glare was merciless. Under it both Geoffrey and the doctor looked old and tired. I stood between the bed and the door while Geoffrey talked to the doctor. They went over to the window and whispered together. The nurse took a cloth from the table and wiped Emily’s forehead. She did it gently with raw, young hands.

  We were in the study when she died. The nurse came running down the stairs to tell us as if the moment of death were important. Her kind, round face was flushed and upset; she was very near to tears.

  It was about seven o’clock in the morning and outside, in the street, there was the clipping of the milkman’s horse and the rattles of his cart. We switched off the electric light and drew back the dark curtains as if in recognition of the end of a vigil. Geoffrey looked unshaven and dirty, his suit was crumpled as though he had slept in it and his face was deadly tired. He went upstairs with the nurse and then, a little later, I heard him talking to the doctor in the hall.

  When he came back into the study he said: “There was nothing we could have done. There wasn’t, at any point, anything we could have done.”

  He stared at me with his prominent eyes. “The doctor says the police will have to know. He telephoned them as soon as he knew that she was dead.”

  He gave me a cold grin. “Apparently they wait until they’re sure a suicide has been successful before they inform the police.”

  He was very pale and there were deep lines on either side of his thin mouth. He said, in astonishment: “I would never have believed it. She wasn’t that sort of woman.”

  I thought how odd it was that we should speak of her, already, in the past tense.

  I said: “Did you have a row?”

  He looked at me dully. “I suppose so. We both said a lot of things we didn’t mean. Or perhaps we did mean them. I don’t know.”

  I said: “She was afraid of you.”

  “Afraid? Why should she be afraid?”

  “Because she thought you were a murderer.”

  As soon as I had said it, the absurdity became apparent.

  He looked startled, at a loss. Not guilty. I asked him about Martin. Cautiously, because it was already retreating into fantasy.

  He got up and went to the window. The sun streamed in from a high blue sky.

  “I thought it was Parry’s story. Anyway, not hers. Not ultimately.” There was a brittle silence and then he went on, more easily: “After it happened she was in an appalling state. She blamed herself so much for leaving the child—much more than anyone else blamed her. For a little while she was out of her mind. When she was in the nursing home she accused me of murdering the child; she was in a kind of delirium. The doctors said it was the normal transference of a guilt too great for her to bear. They were very embarrassed about it when they told me.

  “Then she was well enough to come out of the nursing home, and I thought it was all over. She never spoke of Martin to me; once or twice I tried to make her, thinking it might do some good. But she always reacted so violently that I gave up doing so. Then the rumours started—I never dreamed that she might have started them.…”

  “What were the rumours?” I said.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing definite. Pretty untraceable—even if they hadn’t been, it was a difficult sort of business to take any action about. The worst and most damaging was a story that the housemaid we had at the time had said she was sure I hadn’t left the study. There was a small pantry on the landing at the top of the first flight of stairs. It was a big house, you see, too big for the domestic staff we could afford, and this place used to be the butler’s pantry where he brewed the coffee after dinner. We kept some china there, and the silver. The girl was polishing silver, she said, throughout the time in question and she would have been bound to see me if I had come out of the study, because the door was immediately opposite the bottom of the stairs and in full view of the pantry. The girl was a thief and an habitual liar—while Emily was in hospital I dismissed her and sent her back to her family in the south. When the rumours started, I tried to trace her, but the family had moved. They were itinerant pedlars—a graceless lot. But there seemed to be no good reason to go to any more trouble. We were leaving the country and not likely to return. If I had thought that Emily believed the stories I would have made more effort. But I trusted her. I thought she had too much sense of loyalty.”

  He sounded injured and surprised. I said: “In the circumstances it would hardly seem to be a matter of loyalty.”

  He said: “But she can’t have believed it. Besides, she had only to ask me.”

  “And you would have convinced her that you were innocent. You always convinced her of everything, didn’t you? Perhaps, for once, she wanted to work it out her own way.”

  His eyes were like stone. He said: “There is no need to be impertinent, Tom.” And I nearly laughed in his face, seeing him for the first and only time in my life as pathetic, standing on his silly dignity, unable to bear censure.

  Then the moment passed and I hated him again, because his pompous, schoolmaster’s reproof had been successful so often before and would be so again.

  I said: “Did David tell you that Emily believed that you had killed your son? If she had believed it, then other people might have believed it too. And David didn’t care about the consequences to himself; he didn’t value his life very highly. It would have needed no more than a hint in a newspaper column to have ruined your career for you.”

  His face was blurred and grey. He made a blind, rough movement towards me and then stopped, his hands held out in front of him because the door bell rang.

  Both of us stood quite still. Then the maid said, from the doorway: “Inspector Walker has come to see you, sir.”

  Walker said: “Did you think her the sort
of woman who might take her own life?”

  His voice was sad and diffident; he looked tired.

  “No,” I told him. “No.”

  He was less composed than I had ever seen him; his narrow hands moved restlessly on his knees. His uneasiness was painful.

  He said jerkily: “I saw Mrs. Hunter yesterday morning. She telephoned and asked if she could come to see me.”

  She had come in a taxi and she swayed a little as she walked into the police station as if she were drunk or ill. She had made up her face heavily and falsely; her hand must have been shaking because the lipstick had slipped over the edges of her mouth and the mascara was thick on her lashes, gumming them together in dark, sticky points. She was wearing the sable coat that Geoffrey had bought her and diamond clusters in her ears. Her hands were heavy with rings. Her voice was high and clear and hard, for she had to hide her fear, and that was a good way to do it; to wear her expensive clothes and to look and sound like a bitch. It had not fooled Walker; he spoke of her with an odd and gentle pity.

  “Poor lady, she wasn’t quite herself. She said that she had come to tell me what happened on the night Mr. Parry died.”

  He had said that David died. Not that he was killed. It was a very distant kind of relief.

  She had gone in order to protect me. It was her last gesture of love; she must have known what it would cost her.

  He said, surprised: “She seemed to have the idea that we suspected you. And, of course, we did, as you must have known. Though not of Mr. Parry’s murder. I may say that what she told me tallied quite remarkably with what we thought must have occurred.”

  He went on, sadly and thoughtfully: “Not all of it, of course, because she tried to do the impossible. She said that she went to see David Parry on his barge because he was threatening to make trouble for her husband, and she thought that she could persuade him to desist. She tried to pretend that she was a very bad kind of woman. I didn’t believe that. She said that you saw her car and followed her there. Then there was a quarrel that was not of your making. Mr. Parry attacked you and knocked you down. She pushed him and he slipped on a bottle and fell. She was very insistent that the fight was not your fault and that you did not touch him, even in self-defence. When it was obvious that he was badly hurt she telephoned her husband and asked him to come to the barge.”