by Dennis Parry
I accepted these conclusions reluctantly. I foresaw their corollary all too clearly. They required that somebody should not only make an objectionable ass of himself, but also run the risk of being pilloried as a corrupter of innocent girls. Drunk and disorderly, said Andrew light-heartedly. But what if the Press got hold of the case? It would be a trivial one but they had a penchant for taking the mike out of college boys. If the authorities at Cambridge learnt that I had been up before the Courts it would do me no good.
Unfortunately, however, I could not pretend that it would be harmful enough to let me cancel the plan with a clear conscience. The damage bulked very small beside an indictment for murder.
My taste for disinterested action was probably rather smaller then than it is now. I suppose I must have been over the borderline of love. But it was not a clear-cut dominant passion and by itself I doubt if it would have swayed me to risk my reputation. More potent than affection for Varvara was an absurd, esoteric sense of loyalty to her dead father. With all his opportunism and amorality Fulk had obviously been a man who would stand by his friends and, if necessary, die with them.
Next day got off to a bad start. Turpin came in at breakfast and announced that there had been yet another call from the police. It was only to say that the inquest had now been definitely fixed for three o’clock on the morrow. For Varvara it was a reminder of her obsession. For me it meant that if I intended to act I must do so immediately.
I cornered her afterwards, when we were alone.
‘I hope you’ve given up the idea of leaving everybody in the lurch.’
‘If I am caught, I shall poison myself before they can torture me. But I shall leave a letter between my breasts swearing by God that you are innocent.’
It was as impossible to ignore her repeated threats as those of a deranged person. Yet Varvara was averagely sane. In her, false premises gave the same effect as advanced paranoia. How I cursed myself for the laziness and complacency which had blinded me until too late to the fact that a few weeks in Britain had hardly touched her ignorance of Western thought and customs. It all seemed ludicrous until one made the imaginative effort of reversing the positions. If I had been dumped unprepared in Doljuk, should I have made an appreciably better estimate of the dangers and impunities?
I took the crucial step.
‘Very well, Varvara. I believe you’re wrong. But I believe even more strongly that it would be a mistake for us two to take different lines. If you go, I go too.’
‘Christ reward you, my dear friend!’ said Varvara, making me feel a monster of duplicity. ‘Let us start quickly. Where shall we go?’
The order of her last two remarks was significant. But her failure to descend to details suited me. It would have been awkward if she had possessed a business-like mind which fixed on the destination as firmly as the resolve to travel.
I had given some consideration to the choice of altars for my self-sacrifice. As Andrew had pointed out, we needed a place from which, when the débâcle was complete, it would be possible to return quickly to London. To this I added the requirement that it should be somewhere where a bit of minor roistering would not be uncommon or exciting enough to induce the local paper to dwell on it. I wanted to get away with a small paragraph at the bottom of a page. This ruled out a number of little towns in Sussex and Hampshire and Surrey. Besides it was essential to the plan that we should be able, if necessary, to point to some reason for being in the locality.
In the upshot I had not been able to think of anywhere more suitable than my old home. Before their death my parents lived at Horrage between Dartford and Gravesend, where my father was a doctor. It was the kind of indeterminate area which we needed. During my childhood it had been a small independent Kentish town. But since then, its two great neighbours had been stretching their tentacles over it and merging it with them in a single urban block. Like most riverside districts it contained a pretty tough element and it had learnt to take the smaller delinquencies in its stride.
‘Where shall we go?’ repeated Varvara with a trace of impatience.
‘What about the Thames Marshes?’ I said, trying to make my tone conjure up an illimitable maze of sedge and water.
‘Is it wild?’ said Varvara.
‘Oh, pretty wild, if that’s what you’re looking for.’
I inwardly excused myself with the plea that there were indeed some stretches of half-flooded meadow and mud-banks just outside the town.
‘Perhaps we shall find a hut to live in,’ said Varvara more happily.
‘Yes. There are quite a lot of huts too. Boarding-huts.’ Seeing a look of disappointment and suspicion growing on her face, I hastily added: ‘You know, in a small country, when you’re running away from the police it’s often better to choose somewhere crowded. Here it’s easier to lose yourself against the people than the scenery.’
Varvara meditated this for some seconds.
‘The English have a nobler character,’ she said at length. ‘In Doljuk when a wrongdoer hid in the bazaar his fellows would wait till he was asleep and then they would stab him and bring out his body for the reward.’
‘What happened if there was no reward?’
‘Then the man went on living,’ said Varvara, surprised by so obvious a question.
Despite Varvara’s impatience, I refused to budge until after lunch, partly because I had no desire to loiter for hours round Horrage until the licensing laws allowed us to set about the task of disgracing ourselves; and partly because the preparations which I thought necessary were not yet complete.
Humanity demanded that some safeguard should be devised for Mrs. Ellison. I had no intention of letting the police know that we had any connection with her. But if she merely discovered that we were both inexplicably absent for the night it would prey on her nerves. Already the delayed action of shock had caught up with her and the doctor was calling twice a day.
I enlisted my old ally, but I dared not tell the truth even to him. Turpin’s face was blank as he listened to my explanation that I was taking Varvara to see some friends outside London in order to distract her mind.
‘There’s something going on in it,’ agreed Turpin, ‘but I wouldn’t have said it was grief for ’er uncle.’
‘That’s as may be. The point is that the trains back from this place are very irregular. If we were to miss our connection we might decide to stay the night. No one is to worry.’
‘Wheels within wheels,’ said Turpin.
‘I wish I could be sure which way most of them are going round.’
I am afraid that, for once, he was slightly shocked by a suspicion that I was using the disorganization of the household to indulge in a frolic with the Bud. But I knew that I could rely on him.
Later I went out to my bank and drew an uncomfortably large sum. I was toying with the idea that if we could pay an immediate fine in cash we might get away under the old guise of John Smith and Jane Brown.
I had never before realized the appalling number of minor snags which crop up along any trail of deception. For instance, I should not need luggage nor would Varvara; but I could not tell that to a girl who believed that she might be away for weeks. Even on the basis of the story which I had told to Turpin, our two small suitcases added an embarrassing hazard to our joint exit. And of course, as we stole downstairs, we walked straight into Nurse Fillis. She gave an audible gasp: then with a convulsive effort she screwed her features into a sad, forgiving smile. It revealed an unexpected degree of charity, but not, I feared, enough to act as a permanent silencer.
We went by taxi to Charing Cross where we found that there was half an hour to wait for the next train. The station bar was still open, so I took Varvara in and we had a couple of drinks. Although I had no intention of enacting my role literally—indeed it would have been fatal to lose control of my wits—I doubted whether I should have the nerve to carry out the programme in cold blood.
Since it was a rather sordid stretch of line, with ro
lling-stock to match, I had taken first-class tickets. Even so an interesting black dust came out of the cushions as we sat down. We shared the carriage with another couple who appeared strangely out of their element: an amiable-looking youngish man who might have been an ex-Guards stockbroker, and a very smartly dressed girl who turned out to be his wife. It was impossible not to learn the relationship between them and a number of additional facts, because they addressed each other with that penetrating clarity which belongs either to the lowest or the highest circles. He was, I gathered, a prospective Parliamentary candidate for one of the riverside constituencies, and he was going down to speak at some function.
The woman began to stare at Varvara with the same frankness which marked her speech. Nevertheless, of their type, neither of them struck me as objectionable people. But I was surprised when they took the opportunity provided by a struggle with a jammed window to get into conversation. Perhaps they thought that nobody would travel on that line unless he had local ties which made him a potential voter.
‘Goodness, how foul!’ said the woman, warding off a large smut. ‘By train, this journey really is the end.’
‘It’s as bad by car,’ said her husband.
‘Oh no, darling. That way you get the sights, but not the dirt.’ She turned to Varvara with a smile. ‘Don’t you agree?’
Varvara looked out of the window at a sordid procession of backyards.
‘It is as poor as a dunghill,’ she said.
The girl blenched slightly, but both of them were more broad-minded or made of sterner stuff than their appearance suggested. The man seemed to think that there might be some political implication in Varvara’s remark and tried to improve the occasion.
‘I don’t say there isn’t a lot round here and elsewhere that needs putting right. But it’s a great mistake to suppose that the Government is doing nothing. They have their eye on the situation.’
Varvara nodded understandingly.
‘No doubt their troops are ready.’
This sabre-slashing approach to economic problems was too much for even the keenest Right Winger.
‘Really, I don’t think there’s any risk of that being necessary.’
His wife, however, either did not believe in criticizing allies for too much zeal or else she realized that they had chosen the wrong subject for a canvass, for she went back to her previous theme about the horrors of rail-travel. ‘I dare say you’re in the same boat as us—car laid up.’
‘Yes,’ said Varvara, ‘one of our cars is smashed at Maidenhead.’
‘Really?’ said the man with a slightly satirical smile. ‘And the other?’
Varvara thought for a moment.
‘We have lent it to a poor trader to carry his merchandise,’ she replied magnificently.
The exchanges continued, but less briskly because they were clogged by mystification. Varvara in her present state was probably more baffling to strangers than when she had first arrived in England. Her choice of words and idioms was still touched with eccentricity: but her former gruff, rather alien accent had been fined down to vanishing-point. This combination, when superimposed on her unexpected outlook, sometimes made people wonder whether they were being guyed.
At Horrage we duly got out and left our bags in the cloakroom. When we had given up our tickets and were walking across the familiar cobbled forecourt of the station, I said:
‘Why the devil did you want to tell them those lies?’
‘It was her feet,’ said Varvara.
‘Her what?’
‘They were so small,’ said Varvara, looking down at her own, which were shapely but bore the same relation to the feet of the girl in the carriage as the fetlock of a Percheron to that of a first-class hunter. ‘Also, she spoke with a very ladylike voice.’
‘One day,’ I said unpleasantly, ‘you’ll know enough not to be jealous of a pseudo-Mayfair whine.’
These asperities were partly calculated in order to take Varvara’s mind off the fact that, so far as the present vista of Horrage extended, we might never have left London. There stretched before us the same sort of dingy street as we had left sleeping in the sunshine behind the main thoroughfares of Paddington and Bayswater. If Varvara jibbed and began to demand forests and deserts it might wreck my plan. It was not easy to find a piece of unoccupied country in that area, nor, having done so, to create an effective disturbance in it. However, I need not have worried, for she accepted her surroundings without demur. The fact was that so many things had recently happened to her within an alien framework that she no longer had any orientations.
We wandered up the main street which had always been a dismal succession of suburban chain stores. I automatically think of it in connection with the sale of innumerable packets of cheap tea. But behind it, on the north side, were two or three older streets running one behind the other in parallel with the Thames. These still retained something of the jaunty, dingy, junk-shop air which Dickens fastened on another and more famous riverside town. You could smell the mud on the flats: its scent, neither seductive nor actively unpleasant, was like that of a trout which has been landed a few hours. The lowest of these roads, the one which actually contained the riparian embankment, was well-known to me: years before it had been one of my favourite walks, partly because it had the reputation of being dangerous to children.
It had a violent camber. On one side some odd little houses were sunk by three or four steps below the level of the roadway. On the other a low wall, broken by little embrasures in which seats were placed, surmounted a bluff or small cliff about twenty feet in height. It is one of the few spots along the flat lower reaches of the Thames where the shore rises at all sharply above the water-level. At some point during the late-Victorian engineering operations which regulated the banks of the Thames a couple of small jetties had been built below the highest point of the bluff. There was a bench immediately overlooking them and giving a further view across the wide dirty expanse of water to some so-called marshes, which were really only a few flooded meadows, bordered with the hulks of derelict barges.
Varvara and I seated ourselves on the bench. It was hot; after the journey and a couple of miles’ walk we were a little tired. I thought again of my duty which now coincided happily with my inclinations. Before I left Aynho Terrace I had asked Turpin to put me up a flask of something drinkable. Now I produced it and unscrewed the stopper. With his usual acute instinct Turpin must have realized that I needed the maximum of stimulant in the minimum of space. For his own taste he dealt in wines; gin he once told me—perhaps quoting his old master, the port-loving professor—was a drink only fit for ostlers. But on this occasion he had stifled his aesthetic sense, and mixed the coarse spirit very cunningly with lemon juice and dashes of Mrs. Ellison’s expensive liqueurs. After a couple of mouthfuls the sunlight began to fall with a softer glow over the great drain and the hoot of a passing tug evoked the image of foreign ports.
‘Have some?’ I said to Varvara.
‘No.’
‘I thought it might be a good idea if we had a few drinks this evening. It would relax us.’
Varvara did not see it: she was both young enough and temperamentally robust enough to prefer staying tense.
After an interval she said in an unexpectedly sentimental tone:
‘This is very sad for you, David.’
‘What is?’
‘That you should be ruined in your life.’
‘How’s that?’ I asked, carelessly allowing my role to slip.
‘Now that you have run away with me there will be a great scandal on account not only of murder but also morals.’ There was a pause whilst I took in the subtle distinction; then she continued: ‘Do not think that I shall be ungrateful.’
‘Oh, no,’ I said reassuringly. ‘I wouldn’t think that.’
Varvara appeared slightly huffed, as if I had taken too much for granted.
‘Tonight,’ she said, ‘I shall grant you my supreme favours.’
> I yelped with involuntary agony.
‘Good God, where do you pick up language like that?’
‘In a book. One that came from my grandmother’s library.’
‘Well, it contains all the essentials of bad taste—archness, genteelism, and imprecision.’
‘Tonight,’ said Varvara, ‘you shall have a cut off the joint.’
‘Now we’ve moved down from My Ladye’s Bower to the palais de danse. May I ask where that bit of your repertoire came from?’
‘A friend of Andrew’s says it.’
‘Suppose we stop talking this nonsense and go for another walk.’
I thought she might start worrying about a room for the night. But she did not seem to care if the joints and favours were granted under the sky. We strolled about half a mile towards the outskirts of the town where my former home was situated. The building looked even less distinguished than in the eye of memory, but the garden had not suffered the customary shrinkage. It was still big and untidy and surrounded by wild shrubberies.
Varvara said: ‘We can hide there from the policemen.’
I sighed. ‘My dear, what on earth is going to happen to you? In the end, I mean?’
Varvara replied: ‘I shall become important.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘In this country,’ said Varvara, ‘I do not know my fanny from my finger-tips—as you are always telling me.’ (I must disclaim the phraseology which presumably came from the same source as her previous remark.) ‘But wherever I am I shall always know better than you how to advance myself in the world.’
I sighed again. It would be a bad day when the granddaughter of Joseph Ellison, the go-getter, finally drove out my Noble Savage.
We wandered back by the way we had come, except that this time our course took us into the topmost of the three small roads which separated the main street from the river. Though it was chiefly residential it had a pleasant humble brown-faced little pub in it. Since it was after half-past five, and Turpin’s cocktail had gone, with all but a memory of its ‘lift’, I turned in and soon we were drinking mugs of Kentish cider. It was last year’s and pretty near the end of the barrel which is said to make it more intoxicating.