by Nina Bawden
At the prison, they showed me into a bare, long room with a table down the centre that was topped by a barrier of wire mesh like the counters in General Post Offices. There was a high barred window at one end of the room and there were chairs on either side of the table. The room was very clean and smelt of antiseptic, like a hospital.
Geoffrey looked as he had always done; except for the fact that his suit was not as well pressed as usual he might have been dressed for the day in London. Only in his face was there any perceptible change; he was more lined than I remembered him, and there was a dark shadowed hollow below the cheekbone that had not been there before. His hair was fair and shining, and looked cropped and naked round the ears as if they had cut it in prison.
He grinned at me. He said: “Tom, I’m sorry to have dragged you into this silly muddle.”
At first I thought it was an act, the conventional behaviour expected of a gentleman, but as we went on talking I knew that he believed it. It was a silly muddle, no more, no less. And his confinement and his trial only the disagreeable preliminaries to his release. I do not remember how I felt; perhaps astonishment and anger. I know that sympathy and anxiety were removed and replaced with dislike.
He told me that they had arrested him when he came home from a party.
“An official party,” he said. “I couldn’t have avoided it. And when I came back, there was the Inspector waiting for me with a policeman. An unpleasant ending to a not-altogether unpleasant evening. He’s a stupid little fellow, that policeman. I told you he was on the look out for promotion.”
I said: “But why? What reason have they got?”
He shrugged his shoulders and his eyes smiled at me. “That on the evening of whatever the date was I did feloniously procure and administer to my wife a noxious substance with malice aforethought. Or some such jargon, Tom.”
I said: “But she killed herself. You told me so.”
“I made her some chocolate,” he said. “They found some of the barbiturate in the sediment at the bottom of the cup. The capsules the stuff was in were quite pleasant to take—a sort of jelly coating that slips smoothly down the throat. I imagine they argue that she wouldn’t have bothered to mix them up with the chocolate; they would have been just as easy and pleasant to take as they were. I am not altogether up in the case for the prosecution, but we had a row, before she went to bed, and I suppose that the maid was there, and heard us.”
I said: “But there has to be a motive.”
He looked at me steadily and I saw, with surprise, that there was a white line round the coloured part of his eyes. I had seen it in ill and very old people; I think it is called the senile arc. I knew, because I had read it somewhere, that it could be found in people of thirty and over; somehow it was unexpected to find it in Geoffrey as if one had not thought to find in him any sign of decay.
He said: “She loved you, Tom. She loved you so much that she left me to go away with you. She only came back to me because she had nowhere else to go, and because you did not want her. It might be a reason for suicide, Tom, but it might be a reason for murder. No one likes to be cuckolded or betrayed in any other way. At some point or other the civilisation cracks.”
He was smiling, a sure and confident smile. “I don’t believe they have a very convincing case, Tom. You and I know, more than anyone else, how much she loved you and how much she lost when you sent her back to me. She was a very simple creature; she believed in the judgment of the heart. She had never been unfaithful to me before, you know. There had been other men but it had all been innocent. It was emotional release she was looking for, not sexual fulfilment. She was not a particularly passionate woman, you know.”
I said, with a dry throat: “What about David Parry?”
“Parry? No, I don’t think so. Oh, I know that you thought she had been his mistress and maybe she didn’t bother to contradict you. You were very jealous, Tom. You wouldn’t have believed in her innocence. Only I did that. And so I was the only one who knew what it meant to her when you went back to your wife.”
His eyes were moist. “I would not have killed her, Tom. She was my wife and my responsibility.”
He looked haggard in the pale light that came through the barred, unclean window. I tried to remember that he was a hard man and that hard men were almost always sentimental. It was the opposite side of the same coin.
There was a small silence while he looked at the window and I stared at his profile, wondering why I had found it worth while to hate him. And wondering why he had wanted to see me.
Then we talked for a little about the trial. He had, he said, an excellent counsel. He did not seem to be concerned about the final outcome; his main theme was his own complete astonishment that they had arrested him. I do not think that at any point he felt any doubt or dread. Something had gone wrong because of a stupidity; it would, in time, be righted and those who had caused him trouble would be made to suffer for it.
Before I went, he said: “Did she never give you any idea that she might do this? Did she say nothing?”
I shook my head.
His eyes narrowed suddenly so that they looked very pale and shining.
“She did not even write to you? I should have thought that, at the end, she would have written to you.”
I said: “No,” and he sighed. Not as if it were the one hope he had clung to, but rather as if it were tiresome of me to have no corroboration of the fact that she had taken her own life. It was impossible to feel any particular pity for him because even here, in prison, it seemed that he had everything on his side.
It obviously seemed to him a ludicrous farce that he should be deprived of his freedom, even though it was only a matter of time before it was restored to him.
We were not allowed to shake hands. When the time was up the policeman told us so and another policeman came through a door on the opposite side of the room to me and led Geoffrey away.
When I felt the prison I left ill and sick. The pain had come back behind my ribs with more force than usual. I went to an A.B. C, and bought myself a cup of white coffee. There was skin like glue on the top of the liquid and I burned my lip. I felt only half-alive as if I were moving through cotton-wool.
Chapter Fourteen
The doctor said: “When do you get the pain? After you have eaten, or before?”
His face and Nora’s floated above me, looking like the balloons at children’s parties with grinning, spherical features painted on their emptiness. The pain was almost unbearable and, in a way, welcome.
He said in a jolly, fatherly way: “Well, we won’t need to send you to the butcher’s this time. A few days of rest, care with the diet …”
They went out together and I heard their voices through the closed door.
“It’s often anxiety as much as anything else, Mrs. Harrington. It’s frequently a cause and often a hindrance to recovery. Has he had any particular worries lately?”
Her voice faded down the wooden stairs with the clatter of her heels.
“Oh, no, Doctor. He’s not been particularly worried. But he’s always been highly strung and a new job, you know, is always a worry.”
I thought: So she can’t tell the truth, not even to a man who is always hearing secrets. Respectability was too necessary, the desire to hide corruption with a sepulchre.
I lay there, between white sheets, looking out at the high, moorland sky through the window and the white scudding clouds. I told myself: Nothing is over, presently I shall get better and life will begin again. Nothing is ever irrevocable; there is always hope. The door opened slowly, and I thought it was Emily coming in. The moment expanded into hours; she was a long time coming through the door, but soon she would be with me, in the room, and I would see her.
Nora came in with the tray and I was angry because she wasn’t Emily. For a moment I wanted to ask her where Emily was, and then I remembered that she was dead and I had been wrong about there being hope.
Nora had brought
me a glass of milk.
“You must drink it now, while it’s warm. I’ll make you some more in two hours’time. You have to have it all through the night. I think it would be best to get a Thermos and then you can set the alarm clock so that you wake up.”
She plumped up the pillows behind me and made up the fire in the poky, old-fashioned grate. She was very brisk about it and talked all the time in a loud cheerful voice.
“Will it be all right if I take Sandy to see Joan Mansfield this afternoon? I won’t be long—I may not even stay to tea. I rang her this morning and promised to take her some of my bottled cherries. She’s such a nice woman and it would be nice for Sandy to play with her little boy. He’s got lots of lovely toys—she has her own money, you know.”
I said: “She certainly doesn’t get it from her husband. I shouldn’t think he makes much out of the school.”
I was sorry for Mansfield. He had the shy, apologetic look of the convinced failure and he was terrified of his nagging, clever wife.
She sniffed. “I shouldn’t think he’d make money anywhere,” she said. “Joan’s too good for him. Did you know she was at Girton? I’m so glad we’ve met her. It’s lovely having someone about who talks your own language.”
I wondered if her enthusiasm would survive the first snub. I had seen her like this before, looking for friendship with the over-anxiousness of the lonely, trying to win people with pathetic presents. I wondered whether Joan Mansfield would make her a target for her contemptuous wit and hated her in prospect.
I said: “Go along to your tea. But I’ll be glad if you don’t stay.” Trying to soften the blow of an unwelcoming reception.
She said: “Perhaps I won’t stay, then. I’ll take the cherries and come straight home. Would you like to read?”
“No. I’m too tired, I think.”
She looked at me with concern. “Are you sure you don’t mind being alone, even for a little while? Will you try and sleep? The doctor said you ought to sleep.”
“I’ll try,” I said. I felt, suddenly, unwilling to let her go; her presence shut out the emptiness and the futility. But we had nothing to talk about; there was no reason to ask her to stay.
I said: “Enjoy yourself. The walk will do you good.”
When she came back, I knew that she had not been asked to tea. She said she had been worried about my being alone so long, but her mouth was dragged down at the corners and her voice was nervously light.
When she had put Sandy to bed, she came to sit with me, eating her supper by the bed. I saw, for the first time, that there was grey in her hair and new lines round her mouth. I thought: This is what I have done to her. And this is only the outward sign, the decay that shows.
In a little while she looked at me shyly and said: “Darling, why don’t you talk to me about it?”
“Talk to you about what?” I tried to smile at her.
She floundered. “You’re terribly unhappy, aren’t you? If only you’d let me help you. I want to, so much. After all, I love you.”
I said: “Can you love me? I shouldn’t, if I were you. I’m not much good to anyone.”
She leaned towards me, her face flushed and earnest.
“Darling, you mustn’t talk like that. Please don’t talk like that. It doesn’t do any good. Perhaps I used the wrong word, maybe love has too many interpretations. But we’re adults, not children. We’re fond of each other. We can make life easier for each other. Will you let me try?”
I wondered what magazine she got it from. And then, I thought: Perhaps love isn’t the wrong word. Perhaps this is love, this thing you feel for the people whose trust you betray, this desire to protect what you have already destroyed.
I said: “I don’t deserve it,” feeling the weak tears in my eyes.
Her face was lit with missionary zeal. She said: “You are fond of me, aren’t you, Tom?”
“Of course I’m fond of you.” I thought drearily: There is no end to this, I am committed now. Seeing in front of me the treacherous bog of easy, sentimental affection, the conventional covering of lives without grace or joy.
She kissed me on the forehead and then on the mouth. It seemed like the confirmation of a lie.
I found the letter four days later. I was downstairs, in the sitting-room. I was not supposed to work, but there were letters that had to be answered and bills to pay. The desk was a small bureau with a sliding compartment in the flat part of it which we used very little because when you were sitting at the desk you had to clear the papers away before you could get at it. Inevitably, it hid a collection of rubbish that we never had time to tidy up and throw away. This afternoon, I opened it before I started to write, looking for the last receipt for the rates on the house in Sanctuary Road. I had promised, when we left, to send it to the present owners and I had forgotten to do so. They had written to remind me about it.
Nora was in the room and when I found Emily’s letter she was standing beside me. It was lying there unopened among the letters and the receipts and the bills. For a moment I felt, absurdly, pure delight. I took it with the eager hands of a miser. And then, with the stiff envelope in my hands, I began to be afraid.
Nora gave a deep indrawn sigh. I looked at her and her face was scarlet.
She said, gabbling: “It came after she died. You weren’t there, I knew it came from the village by the postmark. I thought, now it was all over, we could be happy again. It was like a hand from the grave.”
I said, wondering: “Why didn’t you destroy it, then?”
She began to cry as a kind of safety measure, fumbling in her pocket for a handkerchief.
“I meant to. I know it was wrong, but I meant to put it in the fire. Then we would have been finished with her. I had it in my hand and you came into the room when I wasn’t expecting you. I was standing by the desk—I’d been looking for something when the postman came, and I went back to the desk to close it after I’d picked up the letter. So when you came in, it was the easiest thing to do—to drop the letter in and shut the desk. For a little while I was going to take the letter out and burn it, but there was always someone in the room. And then we moved and I forgot about it.”
I said, and it felt as though my tongue were weighted with lead: “Don’t worry. I expect I would have felt the same way.”
Her face glowed as though I had done her an unexpected kindness. She said: “You’re not angry?”
I shook my head, wary of trying to comfort her further, knowing that the only way we could live together was to keep the barrier between us and not break through it with fumbling occasional affection.
She hesitated. Her eyes slid away from my face and fixed on my chest. She said, with appalling, sad humility: “You’ll want to read it, won’t you?”
And she went out of the room and closed the door softly behind her.
The room tilted sideways and I put my head between my knees. My knuckles grazed against the side of the bureau; I forced myself to sit upright and open the letter.
It was short. It was written in the violet ink she habitually used, on very stiff paper with deckled edges. It made her seem very young, somehow, as if she were a girl in the sixth form writing her first love letter.
MY DEAREST TOM,
This is the last letter I shall write to you and it is to say that
I have never loved anyone in my whole life as I do you. I am
only sorry that it has to end like this. My poor, poor darling.
It will be a terrible time for you, but now you must only think
of the future and of Sandy and try not to be afraid any more.
Try to forgive me, because I love you and love doesn’t come
to an end even if people do. There is so much that I would
like to say and I don’t know how to because just now words
seem so inadequate, and I was never very clever with them.
God bless you and watch over you, my love.
EMILY
The room was co
ld. I was alone in an unsafe place. She loved me. She loved me more than anything else, more than I knew and more than I deserved. She was sorry for me. And I had failed her.
There was a time after that when nothing seemed real except my own, terrible responsibility. I remember that after everyone was in bed and the house was dark, I got up and tried to pray. I knelt by the bed like a child gabbling his good night prayer. Desire struggled in my body, too formless to express. It was only just beyond my reach like a familiar word that is temporarily forgotten, but that you are sure the next moment must reveal. I repeated a prayer that I had learned at school, trying to instil into the formal, empty words a meaning that they must once have held for others if not for me. And then the monstrous hypocrisy struck me like a blow. How could I ask for comfort when I had betrayed her? The transient need was almost gone and I saw myself with contempt; a tired man searching for the remembered comfort of a father image.
I turned on the light by the bed and read the letter again. She had said: “It will be a terrible time.” Not, “it is.” She had said good-bye. Geoffrey had known she would write to me at the end. I had not thought her capable of suicide and I had been wrong. She had believed, with the simplicity of a child, in her love for me; there had been no alternative.
Then I remembered that Geoffrey was on trial for her murder and a little time after that I saw the postmark. The letter had been posted the day after she was dead.
The light grew gradually brighter at the end of a dark tunnel. When she wrote the letter she had been making a gesture, a gesture she wasn’t sure she intended to carry out. She wrote the letter and left it, perhaps on her dressing-table. Geoffrey had seen it, either before he killed her, or afterwards. He had posted the letter to me, perhaps not thinking about the postmark, perhaps believing it would be indecipherable. At first I wondered why he had bothered to post it and why he had not given it to the police. Then I knew that it was as Emily had said; he always over-reached himself. He was so sure that her death would look like suicide that he could afford to risk my not producing the letter. And it would look more plausible if she had posted the letter to me before she killed herself; it was unlikely that she would leave a farewell letter to her lover where her husband would find it after she was dead.