‘I lost … it.’
‘Lost it? Where?’
‘Not like that. I miscarried.’
‘Oh. I see. Yes, yes. I see.’
‘It’s quite common.’
‘I’m so sorry …’
‘I was scared of what you would say. And then when you bought the train set on the boat for … our son I—’
‘Yes that was inexcusably clumsy, I—’
‘No, Jack you must listen. There is more. Please listen. When you talked about … our son I … I …’ Jenny’s voice became constricted to a whisper of unbearable intensity. ‘Oh Jack, I can’t have one. At least, the doctor said it was … very unlikely.’
An unutterable silence followed. Even the distant background din of the Bangkok night subsided. I felt like the man in an electric chair who survives the first lightning bolt that flashed through him and so they press the lever again. Finally I spoke.
‘You … you didn’t tell me.’
‘Jack, how could I have? When could I have? There was never a time when … Do you remember that New Year’s Eve when you proposed? We sat in the train to Bristol … I think we might have been the only ones on the whole train, it certainly felt like it. I didn’t want the train to stop, ever, I just wanted us to travel on and on through that lovely moonlit snow-filled night. And then you asked me to marry you in that terribly silly serious loveable way you have, asked if I would mind terribly if we did it on the footplate of a Great Western engine, and you apologised for the unseemly haste but said we needed to perform the ceremony before midnight, when the Great Western Railway would pass out of existence. And I wanted to tell you, “Oh shut up you daft brush! I will marry you now this very minute if you can find a priest!” But we needed no priest, you had something better in mind. The driver of a train, with a book of common prayer in his pocket, one he had carried all his life in expectation of just such an emergency. I don’t believe there was a happier girl alive that night. How? How could I possibly have told you?’
I stared into her eyes, but said nothing.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘You must think about it. Decide what you think. And if … if you find it changes things, too much … well then it is up to you. But remember whatever it is you think of me,’ her voice rose in pitch, ‘I did nothing worse than your mother.’
She stood up and walked back towards the party. I made no attempt to stop her, but sat on the chair there for a while, my thoughts fizzing like bees in a hive that has been kicked over.
My attention was drawn to a couple of chaps walking across the lobby behaving strangely. It was Roger and Spaulding, visibly inebriated and giggling and shushing each other. Roger was carrying a catapult. They crept towards a small room that served as a library, but was seldom visited. I became aware of a gleam from the gloom within, like a storm lantern at night. I stood up and followed and saw a strange sight. Inside the darkened library there were some candles burning, and Webster, wearing a dog collar and black shirt beneath his jacket, was sitting in a chair, holding aloft a golden cross. Before him, kneeling in supplication with head bowed, was Earwig. It seemed Webster was blessing him, or taking his confession.
Just then an egg smashed into Earwig’s ear, exploding in a slap of yolk on his cheek. Earwig cried out in shock. Roger and Spaulding collapsed with laughter. Webster spun round with a face livid with anger, jumped up and ran to the door. As he reached it, he delved into his jacket and drew out a semi-automatic pistol. Roger and Spaulding had been laughing too much to escape and already it was too late. Webster pushed the pistol into Roger’s face and said, with cold fury in his voice, ‘Get on your knees, you crazy fuck!’ The laughter stopped instantly. And for the first time since arriving here, I saw Roger lose his expression of supercilious detachment and genuine fear filled his eyes.
‘On your knees,’ said the priest again, and Roger obliged, sinking to the ground.
‘Steady on, old man,’ said Spaulding, alarmed. ‘It’s just a bit of harmless fun.’ It was plain that Spaulding had spent his life inflicting cruel jokes on people and then obliging them to regard it as harmless fun or risk being called a bad sport. But tonight he was out of his depth, for once unable to control events.
‘Pray to the Lord,’ said Webster, ignoring Spaulding, ‘pray to be forgiven for your blasphemy or you will be meeting Him face to face with six bullets in your brain. Pray! I said.’
Roger began to mumble the Lord’s Prayer.
‘Lower your eyes,’ said Webster. Roger did so, dropping his gaze to the floor. A second passed. Then Webster raised the pistol and cracked it down hard on Roger’s head. Roger fell forward onto his face and groaned. ‘If you disturb us again,’ said Webster, ‘I’ll shoot you both.’ He returned to the writing room to pick up, it seemed, where he’d left off. Roger began to revive and Spaulding helped him to his feet and they walked off to the main entrance.
I pretended not to have noticed the scene that had just unfolded, even though it was impossible that I could have missed it. In the lobby one of the hotel staff had erected an easel and was pinning to it photographs taken earlier of the party. I asked him if he had seen my wife and he directed me to the lounge. Then I noticed the photographs. One in particular stood out. It showed a guest who had newly arrived, leaning casually on the reception counter, a suitcase at his feet. It was a man with a burned face.
Chapter 18
I heard Jenny’s voice before I entered the room. She was standing before Earwig, with her back to me. He sat in an easy chair, clutching a tumbler of whisky so far from perpendicular it was on the verge of spilling its contents into his lap. He looked confused, with the air of a drunk who can no longer focus his gaze and lacks the energy to care. He did not notice me enter.
‘You gave her the Benzedrine,’ said Jenny. ‘You could have killed her.’ She sounded tired and exasperated, as if trying to explain something that should need no explaining: the obvious cruelty of Earwig’s behaviour.
‘Only Panzer-Schokolade,’ he whined.
‘What difference does it make what you call it?’
‘I don’t see what bloody business it is of yours or that sap of a husband of yours.’
‘Don’t you dare say that about him!’ said Jenny. ‘He’s a good man.’
Earwig gave a sour laugh.
‘He’s worth ten of you.’
‘So what? I’m not worth anything. Besides, if you like him so much you should tell him to mind his step, or he’ll get what for.’
‘Who from? You?’
‘Roger.’
‘He wouldn’t stand a chance! Jack knows how to do Chinese Temple Boxing. They did it at school.’
Earwig’s face creased up in confusion. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘At the orphanage, one of the masters had been a missionary. He knew Chinese Temple Boxing and taught it to the boys.’
He shook his head as if what he had just heard was irrelevant. ‘He wouldn’t last five minutes against Roger.’
‘He’d knock Roger into Kingdom Come.’
For a moment I stood transfixed by the strange conversation. Jenny was clearly exhausted, yet finding the strength to speak of me with fierce pride.
‘I doubt it,’ said Earwig, with barely the energy left to speak. ‘Roger once fought a boy to death at school.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ said Jenny scornfully. ‘Schoolboys don’t fight to the death.’
‘This one did. The other boys wouldn’t let it stop, the fight went on for three hours. Then his heart gave out. It was his first day.’
‘I … I don’t believe you,’ said Jenny in a voice that suggested she did. ‘Boys don’t do that in English schools. They would be arrested.’
‘Who by?’
‘The … the police!’
‘Shows how much you know about English schools,’ he sneered. ‘I daresay they would in the sort of ghastly place you were dragged up in, but in a decent school the police wouldn’t even find out about it.’ Earwig b
ecame animated, as if the memory of this horror from long ago gave him the strength to be bitter. ‘Such things are hushed up of course, or parents would stop sending their little boys and the place would fold.’
‘Someone must have informed the police, it’s … it’s the law,’ Jenny persisted.
‘The boy had a weak heart and simply collapsed on his first day. Why would you call the police?’
In the gloom I sensed rather than saw Jenny stare at Earwig in a sort of bewildered shock, a shock I shared. It was as if we knew the events Earwig described could not possibly have happened, and yet the manner in which he related them left one in no doubt he was telling the truth.
‘Mr Earwig,’ I said, keen to draw Jenny’s attention to my presence. ‘We are very sorry to hear about this.’
She turned and said in a whisper, ‘Jack.’
‘No you are not. How could you be? You couldn’t even begin to imagine.’ He stopped, drained his glass and went to place it on the floor next to his chair. As he reached down it slipped from his grasp, hit the floor and rolled away. ‘Here!’ He reached for his wallet and took out a photo. It was the photo of his nanny in China and two small boys. I remembered the play-acting on the beach when Roger had torn up an imaginary photo in front of Earwig, trying to goad him into violence. ‘That’s him, on the left.’
‘Your … your brother?’ said Jenny.
‘Yes. Roger was the county junior boxing champion. He knocked Ben down two hundred and thirty-four times in a row.’
‘That’s just so horrible,’ cried Jenny. ‘But why?’
‘Ben snitched on Roger’s brother for starting a fire. He liked fire-setting. That’s why be burned the cranes.’
‘Mr Earwig,’ I interrupted, ‘Is Mr Curtis dead?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘Why did you put him in the rattan ball?’
‘To shut him up, the bloody fool. It was just to shut him up. Just horseplay, really.’ That word again made him peer once more at the photo. ‘That’s the thing about photographs, isn’t it? We’re better off without them. They don’t let you forget anything. Whoever invented them should be shot. Here, see? Here’s another one for you, for your scrapbook.’ He slid out another of his nanny, and as he did, a photo lodged behind it slipped out onto the table. It showed a dingy room with a bed and a single ceiling fan. On the bed a naked girl lay draped across a man. The man was me.
There was a moment’s silence. Jenny gasped. I said, in a stricken voice, ‘Jenny!’
Her eyes flashed as if she had just spotted an oncoming car. She flinched, and turned and ran out. I rushed after her. She ran through the main door out into the night. I raced in pursuit but a line of drunken conga dancers came between us and refused to let me pass, insisting instead that I join their childish game. I struggled free of them and bolted into the night.
It was like running into an oven. The night was filled with the din of a thousand noises. Choirs of cicadas fried like bacon, car horns tooted, and music drifted in from all corners. I reached the lane and looked up and down, but the night was a carnival of people urgently going about whatever business it was they had.
They had slipped something in my drink at that nightclub we visited. Why did they do it? Did they fear me looking for Curtis? Feel a need to restrain me? Or was it just the sort of thing they did at a school where boys were boxed to death? Horseplay.
None of that mattered, the only thing that was important was the urgent need to find Jenny and tell her how I had been tricked like that. Surely she could not believe that I … but then what did she know of me? It was only four months ago that we first went to the Lyon’s Corner Shop for a boiled egg, and Jenny, showing off the slang she had learned from the GI, had asked for water by ordering dog soup. I think it was then that I realised that my life had changed utterly in a way that I couldn’t imagine. Jenny was the only girl I had ever known, the only one I ever want to know, the only girl I have ever taken out and bought an egg for.
A lot of chaps, sporty types I suppose, have in the past found this disclosure to be somehow amusing, as if it revealed an inadequacy in my character, but I never greatly minded this. It is the action of a fool to resent what he has become when he had no choice in the matter. During my years as a detective on the railways I have encountered many chaps behaving disagreeably and showing great disrespect for their lady companions. I freely confess it gets my goat, and there have been times when I have deemed it necessary to box a chap’s ears on account of this. Men like Spaulding and Roger and Earwig think being mean and spiteful is a sign of manliness, a form of strength, but I knew that it really shows weakness of character. It is designed to conceal the coward within.
A lot of people supposed that life in an orphanage must be hard and severe, like an institution from Charles Dickens, but this was not true. At the St Christopher’s Railway Servants’ Orphanage there were disagreeable masters and unpleasant incidents, but in the main I would describe the atmosphere we were brought up in as firm but kind. And I know why, too. In contrast to the parents who sent chaps like Spaulding to a school – people who arrived in their Rovers and shook hands with their little boys before abandoning them – in contrast to them, the men and women who paid for the keep of us orphans were poor. Mostly they were the hard-working men of the railway who donated a small fraction of the wage they toiled so hard for, a pittance they could barely afford, to bestow kindness upon children whose parents had worked on the railways and perished.
This kindness, I believed, communicated itself to the school in ways we cannot fathom. It was love, because only a man with love in his heart can so visualise the pain of an orphaned child, one whom he will never meet, and so pare from his meagre wages a few shillings. It was the same love that caused the men in the engineering works to make miniature, fully functioning steam engines and tracks to give to us at Christmas. They did it in their spare time, and if you had asked them why they would have had no answer.
I hailed a tricycle rickshaw. The driver looked about seventy but was probably only half that, his face set in the permanent rictus of a man straining under loads too heavy. He wore a vest that might once have been white, and canvas shorts. I indicated to him that he should cycle round the neighbourhood, as I was looking for my wife. I got in and, without a word, he stood up on the pedals and forced the contraption forward and out into the stream of people in the lane.
He did not ask for any further information but pedalled confidently against the main stream of the throng towards the river. The smell of incense in shadows sweetened the night as we passed the temple where dim figures could be discerned paying obeisance to a glinting shrine. The track became rougher, the suspension squeaked and the driver struggled to make headway. He turned right into a lane and then left and left again. We drifted away from the thoroughfare. There were no lights now, and no people, a road so dark it was a wonder the driver could see to cycle. Maybe he was so familiar with these streets from the daytime, or maybe he had cycled them for so many years that lights were hardly necessary.
It reminded me of driving a train at night. Few passengers had any idea of just how blind the driver and his fireman are at night. We hurtle along at 80 mph, hurled forward with the momentum of a train hauling many tons that would take a mile or so to bring to a halt. There is nothing to be seen ahead, and apart from the occasional cottage light glimmering like the lantern of a traveller lost on the heath, there is nothing to be seen to the left or right. If there is something in our way that should not be there, the only consolation is that we will not see it and, in contrast to the horror that such a sight unleashes during the day, will not have to endure the sickening minutes heavy with the knowledge that we are bound unavoidably for death, nor confront the decision that no man ever wants in his lifetime to face: to jump from the cab or not?
At night we are given a sort of grace, the same grace that a man who dies in his sleep is given. Surely this is the kindest way to die? Without pain in the body or
in the heart. At night, one crashes on in a tiny world of lovely clanging din, and sees no more than does a man in a coal cellar. One doesn’t even see the way the track is heading. At night there is no light at the end of the tunnel.
After ten minutes the driver returned me to the hotel. I realised after I had calmed down that he had not understood a word of my wild instructions. How could he have? I got out and paid him. I knew it was a forlorn task. I wandered out onto the hotel lawn. The proximity to the river gave the air a slightly cooler quality, a gentler one. If this were England, one might expect dew to be forming on the grass, sparkling dimly at one’s feet like beads of glass.
The tranquillity was starkly at odds with the storm in my breast. I could not ever remember a time when my soul had been exposed to such torment as this evening. I suddenly realised a simple truth. The quest for my mother was a fool’s errand. I had never known her, but I did know Jenny. We were both alive and had each other and no one needs more than that. All we had to do was leave this city. But into what danger might she now have accidentally fallen? What if I were now to encounter the man with the burned face? I felt tonight, for the first time, that I could kill him. But I knew that would make the situation more desperate. They would catch me and I would spend years in a prison world where the smell was so strong it could knock a man unconscious.
I could hear the water lapping, and as my steps brought me closer to the water’s edge I discerned the figure of a man sitting in a chair next to the tin of syrup. It was Roger.
He looked irritated, as if he were enjoying the late-night tranquillity and did not want to be disturbed. Or maybe he was just befuddled by drink. ‘What do you want, Wenlock?’ he snapped.
‘I might ask you the same question. What are you doing at this late hour sitting in the garden?’
‘What’s it look like? I’m enjoying the sun.’
‘I’ve always regarded sarcasm as a cheap form of humour.’ My voice was absurdly calm.
The Corpse in the Garden of Perfect Brightness Page 20