Change Here For Babylon

by Nina Bawden

  He looked at me. “Is that how it happened?” he said.

  I could have denied it; she was dead and she had been ill when she made her statement. But my life was no longer worth defending; I stood helplessly in its ruin and told the truth.

  I said: “Yes. Of course we tried to hush it up. I don’t know what happened afterwards when I left the barge.”

  He looked at his hands. “She said that Mr. Parry died then, before she joined you in the car. That she asked her husband to say nothing to you.” His eyes were bright and moist. “I think she wanted to protect him also, perhaps she loved him too. If it had been possible she would have taken the entire guilt on her own shoulders. This is the part of her story that we cannot believe—it is against the medical evidence. It is unlikely that death could have come so quickly.”

  He rose abruptly from his chair and stood in the centre of the room, staring in to space.

  He said, with sudden and quite unexpected violence: “She was crucified between you.”

  The words dropped like stones into the room. He looked, as soon as they were spoken, angry and abashed as if he had been tricked into a display of emotion.

  “Mr. Harrington,” he said, “what happened yesterday—between the three of you?”

  He seemed not in the least like a policeman. I told him that Emily and I had gone away together the night before, and that we had intended it to be a final departure. I told him what had happened in the early morning and how Geoffrey had come to the hotel and taken Emily away with him.

  He sat down slowly, crushed and shabby in the big leather chair. The clipped Midland voice was harsh.

  He said: “So she went home with her husband, not because she chose to, but because you found that you could not leave your wife?”

  I think that he had meant it to sound like an accusation, as if I had betrayed a trust.

  “Yes,” I said. “I suppose so.”

  Curiously, I wanted to explain, to vindicate myself in the eyes of this common little man, but I knew that he would know any defence to be as shoddy as paper.

  “Do you think,” he said, “that this final rejection by you—because it was final, wasn’t it?—might have forced her into suicide?”

  I told him that I didn’t know, and I knew that this was true. I had no idea what it might have meant to Emily; at the end I had thought of myself and not of her.

  He said: “She had sunk everything in you. All her life she had been sure of nothing. With you and in you she had found herself and a kind of peace. Without you there was emptiness. She had only despair.”

  His cheeks were darkly flushed as if he were ashamed of the things he was saying. I did not think to wonder at the springs of percipience and imagination she must have touched in this dry man; I only thought that it was as if we were talking about someone I had never known.

  Then he smiled, suddenly and sweetly, and said: “I’m sorry, Mr. Harrington. This is a kind of torture for you. But I have a reason.”

  I said slowly: “If you are trying to make me say that I thought she was the sort of person who could kill herself, I can only say, even now, that I would never have believed it. I know that I was wrong, but even knowing that she did it in the end, doesn’t make it believable for me.”

  He said: “I thought you would say that. Indeed, I hoped you would. You see, I agree with you.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  I handed in my resignation three days later. There seemed to be nothing else to do. We sold the house in Sanctuary Road to a neighbour whose son was getting married in a hurry. I found a job in one of those small, free-education schools that exist for the spoiled children of the fashionable intelligentsia. They had wanted an assistant master for some time and were glad to get anyone. The pay was bad but a cottage went with the appointment, and the countryside around the school was high, purple moorland, the winds blowing, sharp and bitter, inland from the grey North Sea. It would be a change from the lush green of the river valley and the sluggish air.

  I remember very little about the whole of that time except that the days were crowded and yet seemed to be barren. The nights were long and dark and empty; I slept rarely and then only from exhaustion, waking with a furred tongue and a throbbing head. The pain in my stomach seldom left me; for most of the time it was there, a constant reminder of my body’s weakness until I became used to living with it and it no longer worried me. The days passed and brought no solution, only acceptance of despair.

  A few, blurred pictures of Nora remain with me. In the days after Emily’s death she tried to enfold me with love, believing, or wanting to believe, that I had returned to her because I loved her. When I rebuffed her with unintentional silence or merely by forgetting that she was there, she withdrew into her own world and, I think because she thought I wanted it, tried not to bother me. When I went to bed she lay, unmoving and still, beside me. So still that she must often, have been, awake and feigning sleep. The house was cleaner than it had ever been. It smelt of furniture wax and antiseptic; the fire was always welcomingly bright in the polished grate. One day she took down all the curtains and washed them; I found her, in the late evening, ironing them in the kitchen. She looked flushed and tired, but she made no complaint and only smiled at me in the determinedly bright, apprehensive way that had become a habit with her as though I were a tyrant of whom she was afraid. When I was in the house she came and went on silent feet like a timid ghost so that her unnatural quietness, her attempts to deflect attention from herself, became an additional burden of condemnation. Mrs. Parry went to live with her sister because there would be no room for her in the cottage. I think she was glad to go; even she had grown taut and strained and uneasily silent as though the situation had defeated her funds of private malice and she could not have dealt with it in any other way.

  Only Sandy was unaffected; he sang and swooped and shouted round the house and in the tangled garden, riding his new bicycle along the shabby pavement so that when he was there life assumed a sort of temporary reality and purpose. He loved the new cottage, the low, smoke-blackened ceilings and the bare wooden stairs that were enclosed in a cupboard at one end of the stone-flagged kitchen. There was a big uncleared garden and he and I spent the end of the autumn days cutting down the crowded trees and overgrown bushes, and making bonfires that were his abiding joy. He fed the broken branches into the crackling smoke with a tense and private pleasure, absorbed in the moment in a way that brought a temporary heart’s ease, watching the small, shut face and the sudden child’s smile as the branch he had carried to the fire flared into sparks that hissed on the damp wood. We planted bulbs for the spring in the cleared ground and scythed the grass that had grown long, like hay.

  There were old apple trees growing in the wide ditch that marked the garden’s boundary. Most of the fruit was finished and fallen, but there was one tree left with late hard clusters still clinging to the branches. The apples were small and sour and not fit to eat, but Sandy gathered them like a squirrel and stacked them in the garden shed. He plagued Nora until she bottled some of them to please him, but the rest rotted into a brown, sweet-smelling mess on the concrete floor of the shed. I meant to bury them in case his feelings should be hurt, seeing them lying there and wasted, but when I forgot about doing so and he found them later, spoiled and rotten, he said they were a lot of nasty rubbish and kicked them with his boot, forgetting his careful gathering and the days of eager work.

  I bought him a mongrel puppy, a wild, squirming black creature, half Labrador. It was a little over six months old and we walked him for miles across the moors when school was over, training him to carry sticks and bring them back to us when we had thrown them. He was an engaging dog with a lolling, wet tongue and clumsy paws; at night he slept on Sandy’s bed, whimpering in his sleep.

  Sandy grew brown and well in the bright, cold air. His legs became sturdy and covered in pale, silky down. There were moments when, watching him run before me and seeing his laughing face as he turned to
cry out some new discovery, I thought that some kind of permanent healing was taking place within me. But when he was in bed and sleeping, and the wind sang down the chimney I knew it was an illusion.

  For the weeks after we had first come to the cottage, Nora had not sat with me in the evenings. I did not know whether it was from embarrassment or genuine preoccupation, but I was glad of the respite from the sense of guilt that her presence brought me. She made curtains for the cottage, using her sewing machine on the kitchen table because it was more convenient there and the light was better. When she was not sewing she seemed to find endless small jobs with which she did not want my help, and I sat by the fire in the sitting-room and tried to read, hearing her movements about the house and longing for her to go to bed. We lived together like a pair of strangers with a barrier of silence between us.

  In the end, the silence became brittle. She began to join me in the evenings, bringing her sewing and her magazines to the chair on the other side of the hearth. Her movements were gentle and timorously shy; when she spoke it was haltingly, as though she were afraid of offending me. It became impossible to keep up even a semblance of reading; whenever I looked up, she was there, her head bent over her work apparently absorbed in it, but I could feel the tenseness of her body like an electric current in the room.

  One day I went into the nearest town to order paper and books for the school. When I came home she had cooked a special supper and bought a bottle of wine. She had laid the table with a lace cloth and candles and we had a chicken. She was wearing a red silk dress that we had bought together two years before, and she had curled her hair and made up thickly so that she looked five years older than her age. She was brassily bright; it was an uneasy moment for a celebration.

  When we had finished eating I wanted to wash up, but she said brightly that this was a party and we would leave the dishes until the morning. So I sat stiffly and alone by the fire in the sitting-room, waiting for her to bring in the coffee.

  When she came, she carried the tray with care. With the coffee was a half-bottle of brandy and the balloon glasses that belonged to a set we had been given as a wedding present.

  She put the tray on a low table and held the bottle out to me.

  “Look, Tom,” she said. “We’ve been gloomy long enough.”

  I tried not to disappoint her with pretended pleasure, smiling at her until my mouth felt fixed and hard. She turned out the centre light and switched on the soft reading-lamp, settling herself at my feet with her silk skirts swirled about her. The heat of cooking had made her make-up run a little so that her skin looked drawn and unnaturally lined. She toasted me with her brandy, raising her glass and smiling at me with sudden, artificial coyness so that I knew, immediately, the purpose of the party.

  At first I wanted to laugh. Loud, hysterical, idiot laughter. And then I wanted to run away, out of the room, before we could humiliate each other further. But it was impossible. I stayed, with Nora sitting at my feet, and we played out the farce to its inevitable end.

  She drank her brandy quickly and then another as if she wanted to give herself courage. Her brightness grated like a nail on a blackboard. She gave me a brave, jangling smile.

  She said: “Tom, it’s so lovely to be alone here, with you. I am so grateful.”

  It sounded wooden and long-rehearsed. I knew how much effort it had cost her.

  I said: “I hope you will be able to be happier.”

  She twisted round and fondled my knee. “I am sure we could both be happier,” she said. “Tom, I love you so much. Can’t you love me a little?”

  I said: “Silly one, of course I love you.”

  She stared at me. The brightness had gone and her eyes shone with despair. She got up from the floor and flung her arms around me, pressing her body against mine. She was trembling. I kissed her and released her gently; she stood up in front of me, her hands flung out like a suppliant.

  She said: “I’m not ugly, am I? Or wicked? Couldn’t you be happy with me?”

  Terror rose up and engulfed me. I felt for the words to stop her, to stop her degrading herself in front of me. Oh, God, I prayed, let her stop before it is too late, before she learns to hate herself for ever.

  She pressed her small hands to her breasts, smoothing the silk over their childish roundness. Her eyes were wild and hopeless and her mouth trembled.

  She said: “You used to love me. You don’t have to love me now if you can’t love me. But I’m a woman, aren’t I? Not the one you want, I know, but I’m here and I love you. Won’t I do? Do you find it so terrible to touch me?”

  I put my hands over my ears, trying to shut out the sound of her high cracked voice and her desperate unhappiness. I think that I said I was sorry, over and over again because there was nothing else that I could say, nothing else that I could do for her.

  At last she ran from the room and the door of the cupboard stairs slammed behind her. I heard the creak of the springs in the room above as she flung herself on the bed. I stayed by the fire until the red cinders fell on to the hearth beneath, knowing that she would never forgive me or herself for this, knowing the agony of shame that would be with her always and that the responsibility was mine and mine alone. At some point I might have done something, averted tragedy. Now there were no more chances; the pattern was rigid in its mould.

  After a while, I went into the kitchen and washed the dishes. I threw the empty wine bottle into the dustbin and put the brandy bottle at the back of a cupboard. At least she would not be faced in the morning with immediate reminders of her disaster. It was all I could do for her.

  The next two days were a nightmare. She would not look at me or talk to me, and when, she did there was something in her face that was much like hatred. Even Sandy seemed to sense the tension in the house; he came home late from school and went out again immediately after tea, going to bed when he was told silently and without fuss, so that the cottage seemed quiet and cold and empty.

  On the morning of the third day, life intruded. The paragraph in the northern edition of the London paper was small and on an inner page. Geoffrey Hunter was to be tried in two weeks’time for the murder of his wife. He had been arrested, six weeks after her death, about a fortnight after I had left the town.

  I suppose that I should have expected it. In the months before we left there had been sufficient indication of the way things were going. But at the time I had been aware only that she was dead; nothing else had mattered or had had any reality. I had known that the inquest had been adjourned at the request of the police, and I imagine that at some level or other I had known it to be significant. I was too obsessed with the fact of her death to be much concerned about the manner of her dying; even if I had thought then, as I did not, that Geoffrey had killed her it would not have seemed to be of very great importance.

  Walker had been to see me twice before I left. Looking back now, on those interviews, I realised that I should have known the way the wind was blowing. He had asked me about Geoffrey during one of our conversations and whether he had been jealous of me, and bitter against Emily. I had said that I thought not; that if he had felt anything it would have been insulted pride of possession. Walker had smiled then and said that it was not always the obvious emotions that were the dangerous ones.

  We had not, on the whole, talked much about Geoffrey. Mostly he had wanted to know about Emily, seeming to be obsessed with her so that I had grown tired of his dry, gentle voice asking questions that it was a torment to answer. I had gone on repeating that I would never have thought her capable of suicide, feeling that it must be for him, as it was for me, a constant wonder that anyone so unlikely could have taken her own life, not realising then that he was using it as evidence to build up a case in his own mind for murder. Even if I had known, I am not sure that I would have answered very differently.

  But remembering came later. At the time there was only shock like the shock of cold lake water on a blazing day. At first there was relief becau
se if Geoffrey had killed her, then I had not; if he had murdered her, then I was not as guilty of her death as I had believed myself to be.

  The second reaction was one of simple disbelief. Geoffrey could not be, and was not, a murderer. I reminded myself that I had believed him guilty of David’s death and that Emily had been sure he had allowed his only son to die; I tried to persuade myself that this was something different. That even if he had been, in a way, responsible for David’s death and for his son’s, that it was not the same thing. In Martin’s case he had not taken any deliberate action; in David’s, he was merely hastening a process because it suited him to do so. But he could not have killed Emily, not Emily.

  Then I knew that my reasoning was false and the inability to believe was in my own mind. That when I had believed him to be a murderer; it had been in the irresponsible realms of speculation only. That I would never, as Geoffrey knew, have gone to the police even though my suspicion, had been ten times as well founded because that would have meant translating fiction into reality.

  But now that had been done by other hands than mine. Geoffrey had been arrested and the entire, be-wigged and solemn panoply of the law set in motion against him. He was still innocent because he had not yet been proved guilty, but his innocence was difficult to credit because he was awaiting trial.

  In the morning I had a letter from Geoffrey’s solicitors, saying that they wanted to see me in case they should want to call me as a witness for the defence.

  I went to see Geoffrey in the prison. His solicitor told me that he had asked to see me and that he had already made arrangements for the visit. There was no decent way of refusing and I was, I think, too bewildered to do so. The solicitor was a small man with an open, ruddy face and an air of being a farmer. He wore country clothes and his office was tidy and uncluttered in a way I had not expected. He asked me questions about Emily, the same questions that Walker had asked, and seemed to be disappointed by the answers. He hinted, when he had finished, that it was unlikely that I should be wanted at the trial. Then he asked an office boy to call a taxi to take me to the prison; he smiled and said that it would be put down to expenses.