The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

by The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories (retail) (epub)

  She tapped ash from her cigarette.

  ‘Did you ever see his scrapbooks?’

  ‘His what?’

  ‘They’re in the library down at Tetbury. All bound in blue morocco. Gilt-tooled. His initials. Dates. All his press cuttings. Right back to the legal days. Times law reports, things like that. Tiniest things. Even little local rag clippings about opening bazaars and whatnot.’

  ‘Is that so unusual?’

  ‘It just seems more typical of an actor. Or some writers are like that. A kind of obsessive need to know… that they’ve been known?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘It’s a kind of terror, really. That they’ve failed, they haven’t registered. Except that writers and actors are in far less predictable professions. They can have a sort of eternal optimism about themselves. Most of them. The next book will be fabulous. The next part will be a rave.’ She looked up at him, both persuading and estimating. ‘And on the other hand they live in cynical open worlds. Bitchy ones. Where no one really believes anyone else’s reputation – especially if they’re successful. Which is all rather healthy, in a way. But he isn’t like that. Tories take success so seriously. They define it so exactly. So there’s no escape. It has to be position. Status. Title. Money. And the outlets at the top are so restricted. You have to be prime minister. Or a great lawyer. A multi-millionaire. It’s that or failure.’ She said, ‘Think of Evelyn Waugh. A terrible Tory snob. But also very shrewd, very funny. If you can imagine someone like that, a lot more imagination than anyone ever gave him credit for, but completely without all the safety valves Waugh had. No brilliant books, no Catholicism, no wit. No drinking, no impossible behaviour in private.’

  ‘Which makes him like thousands of others?’

  ‘But we have a fact about him. He did something thousands of others don’t. So it must have hurt a lot more. Feeling failed and trapped. And forced – because everything was so standard, so conforming in his world – to pretend he was happy as he was. No creative powers. Peter’s told me. He wasn’t even very good in court, as a barrister. Just specialized legal knowledge.’ She said, ‘And then his cultural tastes. He told me once he was very fond of historical biography. Lives of great men. And the theatre, he was genuinely quite keen on that. I know all this, because there was so little else we could talk about. And he adored Winston Churchill. The biggest old ham of them all.’

  A memory jogged the sergeant’s distracted mind: Miss Parsons, how Fielding had ‘nearly’ voted Labour in 1945. But that might fit.

  He said, ‘Go on.’

  ‘He feels more and more like this minor character in a bad book. Even his own son despises him. So he’s a zombie, just a high-class cog in a phony machine. From being very privileged and very successful, he feels himself very absurd and very failed.’ Now she was tracing invisible patterns on the top of the table with a fingertip: a square, a circle with a dot in it. The sergeant wondered if she was wearing anything at all beneath the dress. He saw her sitting astride his knees, her arms enlacing his neck, tormenting him; and brutality. You fall in love by suddenly knowing what past love hadn’t. ‘Then one day he sees what might stop both the rot and the pain. What will get him immortality of a kind.’

  ‘Walking out.’

  ‘The one thing people never forget is the unsolved. Nothing lasts like a mystery.’ She raised the pattern-making finger. ‘On condition that it stays that way. If he’s traced, found, then it all crumbles again. He’s back in a story, being written. A nervous breakdown. A nutcase. Whatever.’

  Now something had shifted, little bits of past evidence began to coagulate, and listening to her became the same as being with her. The background clatter, the other voices, the clinging heat, all that started to recede. Just one thing nagged, but he let it ride.

  ‘So it has to be for good?’

  She smiled at him. ‘God’s trick.’

  ‘Come again.’

  ‘Theologians talk about the Deus absconditus – the God who went missing? Without explaining why. That’s why we’ve never forgotten him.’

  He thought of Miss Parsons again. ‘You mean he killed himself?’

  ‘I bet you every penny I possess.’

  He looked down from her eyes.

  ‘This writer of yours – has he come up with a scenario for that?’

  ‘That’s just a detail. I’m trying to sell you the motive.’

  He was silent a moment, then sought her eyes. ‘Unfortunately it’s the details I have to worry about.’

  His own eyes were drily held. ‘Then your turn. Your department.’

  ‘We have thought about it. Throwing himself off a night-ferry across the Channel. But we checked. The boats were crowded, a lot of people on deck. The odds are dead against.’

  ‘You mustn’t underrate him. He’d have known that was too risky.’

  ‘No private boats missing. We checked that as well.’

  She gave him a glance under her eyebrows; a touch of conspiracy, a little bathing in collusion; then looked demurely down.

  ‘I could tell you a suitable piece of water. And very private.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the woods behind Tetbury Hall. They call it the lake. It’s just a big pond. But they say it’s very deep.’

  ‘How does he get there without being seen?’

  ‘He knows the country round Tetbury very well. He owns a lot of it. Hunting. Once he’s within walking distance from London, he’s safe.’

  ‘And that part of it?’

  ‘Some kind of disguise? He couldn’t have hired a car. Or risked the train. By bus?’

  ‘Hell of a lot of changing.’

  ‘He wasn’t in a hurry. He wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere near home before nightfall. Some stop several miles away? Then cross-country? He liked walking.’

  ‘He still has to sink himself. Drowned bodies need a lot of weight to stay down.’

  ‘Something inflatable? An air mattress? Car-tyre? Then deflate it when he’s floated far enough out?’

  ‘You’re beginning to give me nightmares.’

  She smiled and leant back and folded her hands in her lap; then she grinned up and threw it all away.

  ‘I also fancy myself as an Agatha Christie.’

  He watched her; and she looked down, mock-penitent.

  ‘How serious are you being about all this?’

  ‘I thought about it a lot in Paris. Mainly because of the British Museum thing. I couldn’t work out why he’d have wanted to see me. I mean if he didn’t, it was a kind of risk. He might have bumped into me. And you can’t walk into the reading-room just like that. You have to show a pass. I don’t know if that was checked.’

  ‘Every attendant there.’

  ‘So what I think now is that it was some kind of message. He never meant to see me, but for some reason he wanted me to know that I was involved in his decision. Perhaps because of Peter. Something for some reason he felt I stood for.’

  ‘A way out he couldn’t take?’

  ‘Perhaps. It’s not that I’m someone special. In the ordinary world. I was probably just very rare in his. I think it was simply a way of saying that he’d have liked to talk to me. Enter my world. But couldn’t.’

  ‘And why Tetbury Hall?’

  ‘It does fit. In an Agatha Christie sort of way. The one place no one would think of looking. And its neatness. He was very tidy, he hated mess. On his own land, no trespassing involved. Just a variation on blowing your brains out in the gun-room, really.’

  He looked her in the eyes. ‘One thing bothers me. Those two hours after work of yours that day.’

  ‘I was only joking.’

  ‘But you weren’t at home. Mrs Fielding tried to telephone you then.’

  She smiled.

  ‘Now it’s my turn to ask how serious you’re being.’

  ‘Just tying ends up.’

  ‘And if I don’t answer?’

  ‘I don’t think that writer of yours would allow
that.’

  ‘Oh but he would. That’s his whole point. Nice people have instincts as well as duties.’

  It was bantering, yet he knew he was being put to the test; that this was precisely what was to be learnt. And in some strange way the case had died during that last half-hour; it was not so much that he accepted her theory, but that like everyone else, though for a different reason, he now saw it didn’t really matter. The act was done; taking it to bits discovering how it had been done in detail, was not the point. The point was a living face with brown eyes, half challenging and half teasing; not committing a crime against that. He thought of a ploy, some line about this necessitating further questioning; and rejected it. In the end, he smiled and looked down.

  She said gently, ‘I must go now. Unless you’re going to arrest me for second sight.’

  They came to the pavement outside the house in Willow Road, and stood facing each other.

  ‘Well.’

  ‘Thank you for the cup of tea.’

  He glanced at the ground, reluctantly official.

  ‘You have my number. If anything else…’

  ‘Apart from bird-brained fantasy.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. It was fun.’

  There was a little silence.

  ‘You should have worn a uniform. Then I’d have remembered who you were.’

  He hesitated, then held out his hand. ‘Take care. And I’ll buy that novel when it comes out.’

  She took his hand briefly, then folded her arms.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The one you were talking about.’

  ‘There’s another. A murder story.’ She looked past his shoulder down the street. ‘Just the germ of an idea. When I can find someone to help me over the technical details.’

  ‘Like police procedure?’

  ‘Things like that. Police psychology, really.’

  ‘That shouldn’t be too difficult.’

  ‘You think someone… ?’

  ‘I know someone.’

  She cocked her left sandal a little forward; contemplated it against the pavement, her arms still folded.

  ‘I don’t suppose he could manage tomorrow evening?’

  ‘How do you like to eat?’

  ‘Actually I rather enjoy cooking myself.’ She looked up. ‘When I’m not at work.’

  ‘Dry white? About eight?’

  She nodded and bit her lips, with a touch of wryness, perhaps a tinge of doubt.

  ‘All this telepathy.’

  ‘I wanted to. But…’

  ‘Noted. And approved.’

  She held his eyes a moment more, then raised her hand and turned towards the front door; the dark hair, the slim walk, the white dress. At the door, after feeling in her purse and putting the key in the lock, she turned a moment and again raised her hand briefly. Then she disappeared inside.

  The sergeant made, the next morning, an informal and unsuccessful application to have the pond at Tetbury Hall dragged. He then tried, with equal unsuccess, to have himself taken off the case, indeed to have it tacitly closed. His highly circumstantial new theory as to what might have happened received no credence. He was told to go away and get on with the job of digging up some hard evidence instead of wasting his time on half-baked psychology; and heavily reminded that it was just possible the House of Commons might want to hear why one of their number was still untraced when they returned to Westminster. Though the sergeant did not then know it, historical relief lay close at hand – the London letter-bomb epidemic of later that August was to succeed where his own request for new work had failed.

  However, he was not, by the time that first tomorrow had closed, the meal been eaten, the Sauvignon drunk, the kissing come, the barefooted cook finally and gently persuaded to stand and be deprived of a different but equally pleasing long dress (and proven, as suspected, quite defenceless underneath, though hardly an innocent victim in what followed), inclined to blame John Marcus Fielding for anything at all.

  The tender pragmatisms of flesh have poetries no enigma, human or divine, can diminish or demean – indeed, it can only cause them, and then walk out.

  * * *

  J. G. BALLARD

  * * *

  MEMORIES OF THE SPACE AGE

  I

  All day this strange pilot had flown his antique aeroplane over the abandoned space centre, a frantic machine lost in the silence of Florida. The flapping engine of the old Curtiss biplane woke Dr Mallory soon after dawn, as he lay asleep beside his exhausted wife on the fifth floor of the empty hotel in Titusville. Dreams of the space age had filled the night, memories of white runways as calm as glaciers, now broken by this eccentric aircraft veering around like the fragment of a disturbed mind.

  From his balcony Mallory watched the ancient biplane circle the rusty gantries of Cape Kennedy. The sunlight flared against the pilot’s helmet, illuminating the cat’s cradle of silver wires that pinioned the open fuselage between the wings, a puzzle from which the pilot was trying to escape by a series of loops and rolls. Ignoring him, the plane flew back and forth above the forest canopy, its engine calling across the immense deserted decks, as if this ghost of the pioneer days of aviation could summon the sleeping titans of the Apollo programme from their graves beneath the cracked concrete.

  Giving up for the moment, the Curtiss turned from the gantries and set course inland for Titusville. As it clattered over the hotel Mallory recognized the familiar hard stare behind the pilot’s goggles. Each morning the same pilot appeared, flying a succession of antique craft-relics, Mallory assumed, from some forgotten museum at a private airfield nearby. There were a Spad and a Sopwith Camel, a replica of the Wright Flyer, and a Fokker triplane that had buzzed the NASA causeway the previous day, driving inland thousands of frantic gulls and swallows, denying them any share of the sky.

  Standing naked on the balcony, Mallory let the amber air warm his skin. He counted the ribs below his shoulder blades, aware that for the first time he could feel his kidneys. Despite the hours spent foraging each day, and the canned food looted from the abandoned supermarkets, it was difficult to keep up his body weight. In the two months since they set out from Vancouver on the slow, nervous drive back to Florida, he and Anne had each lost more than thirty pounds, as if their bodies were carrying out a reinventory of themselves for the coming world without time. But the bones endured. His skeleton seemed to grow stronger and heavier, preparing itself for the unnourished sleep of the grave.

  Already sweating in the humid air, Mallory returned to the bedroom. Anne had woken, but lay motionless in the centre of the bed, strands of blond hair caught like a child’s in her mouth. With its fixed and empty expression, her face resembled a clock that had just stopped. Mallory sat down and placed his hands on her diaphragm, gently respiring her. Every morning he feared that time would run out for Anne while she slept, leaving her for ever in the middle of a nightmare.

  She stared at Mallory, as if surprised to wake in this shabby resort hotel with a man she had possibly known for years but for some reason failed to recognize.

  ‘Hinton?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Mallory steered the hair from her mouth. ‘Do I look like him now?’

  ‘God, I’m going blind.’ Anne wiped her nose on the pillow. She raised her wrists, and stared at the two watches that formed a pair of time-cuffs. The stores in Florida were filled with clocks and watches that had been left behind in case they might be contaminated, and each day Anne selected a new set of timepieces. She touched Mallory reassuringly. ‘All men look the same, Edward. That’s streetwalker’s wisdom for you. But I meant the plane.’

  ‘I’m not sure. It wasn’t a spotter aircraft. Clearly the police don’t bother to come to Cape Kennedy any more.’

  ‘I don’t blame them. It’s an evil place. Edward, we ought to leave, let’s get out this morning.’

  Mallory held her shoulders, trying to calm this frayed but still handsome woman. He needed her to look her best for Hinton. ‘Anne, w
e’ve only been here a week – let’s give it a little more time.’

  ‘Time? Edward…’ She took Mallory’s hands in a sudden show of affection. ‘Dear, that’s one thing we’ve run out of. I’m getting those headaches again, just like the ones I had fifteen years ago. It’s uncanny, I can feel the same nerves…’

  ‘I’ll give you something, you can sleep this afternoon.’

  ‘No… They’re a warning. I want to feel every twinge.’ She pressed the wrist-watches to her temples, as if trying to tune her brain to their signal. ‘We were mad to come here, and even more mad to stay for a second longer than we need.’

  ‘I know. It’s a long shot but worth a try. I’ve learned one thing in all these years – if there’s a way out, we’ll find it at Cape Kennedy.’

  ‘We won’t! Everything’s poisoned here. We should go to Australia, like all the other NASA people.’ Anne rooted in her handbag on the floor, heaving aside an illustrated encyclopaedia of birds she had found in a Titusville bookstore. ‘I looked it up – western Australia is as far from Florida as you can go. It’s almost the exact antipodes. Edward, my sister lives in Perth. I knew there was a reason why she invited us there.’

  Mallory stared at the distant gantries of Cape Kennedy. It was difficult to believe that he had once worked there. ‘I don’t think even Perth, Australia, is far enough. We need to set out into space again…’

  Anne shuddered. ‘Edward, don’t say that – a crime was committed here, everyone knows that’s how it all began.’ As they listened to the distant drone of the aircraft she gazed at her broad hips and soft thighs. Equal to the challenge, her chin lifted. ‘Noisy, isn’t it? Do you think Hinton is here? He may not remember me.’

  ‘He’ll remember you. You were the only one who liked him.’