She was a little anaemic; it was not serious. I went into a patter; she had had colds. She said without hesitation, quite simply, that she was pregnant.
“Yes.” I was giving her a general examination; she had undressed unselfconsciously and was lying on the couch. “I see as much. Well, that is all the more important, to get you in good shape, hm? I would have suggested a good holiday in the sun, but soon you won’t be wishing to wear a bathing dress. Never mind. We’ll give you some artificial sunlight.” For I intended to give her some harmless ultra-violets, and slip in a much shorter wave, in which I am proficient; a type of deep X-ray that I know would ‘do the trick’ as it is revoltingly called.
I cannot explain either my tension or her abrupt encouragement of my vicious instinct. She has a splendid body, unusually finely formed for a girl of that age. Bella’s body, and Bella’s internal noises, I noticed while listening to her. But I had myself under control – I am a doctor, after all. My voice was calm as always, my eyes masked from her candid blue look.
Had she some suspicion of the relationship between myself and her mother? Bella had perhaps been a scrap indiscreet in getting her to come and see me. Had she wished to get me in some way in her power? Had she some youthfully cynical contempt for men in general, acquired from her recent experiences? I have no idea. I cannot tell. Break your head on it, if you will.
For she deliberately encouraged me, and I lost my head.
I can only relate that for a month she came for treatment. She seemed indifferent to me. And I was possessed by passion for that girl. I raged in her. I made a beast of myself the way one does sometimes in a very expensive restaurant. And I loved her. In a way I have loved no one.
A month. Then she simply stopped coming. Bella came one day after, and told me that Suzanne had had a harmless, painless miscarriage. She was much relieved. She kept saying so. She said that Carl knew nothing, that the family doctor knew nothing, that she had fixed everything, and that she was eternally grateful. To show how grateful she was she pelted into the back room and took her clothes off in a great hurry. I am fond of Bella. I tried to oblige her out of politeness.
I suppose you have understood. I found out quite by accident that Suzanne was acquainted with Casimir. I saw her once, after she left me, go towards his door. I imagined that Casimir, idiot that I was, for what ground could I conceivably have, was the ‘unpleasant, undesirable person’ of Bella’s fears. That Casimir, and no other, was the putative father of the child that I was busy getting rid of. The child I would have so greatly desired, and so greatly desired from that young girl of sixteen…
Once more, irony has overtaken me. For when, the last time, I asked Bella to come and see me, in order to satisfy myself that no effort had been made at blackmailing her, I asked, in a casual turn of phrase, whether she had seen anything of Suzanne’s past snare.
“Oh that, no, no, thank heaven,” she said quite airily. “A young man called Simons whom I’ve never even seen, but from all I’ve ever heard I felt quite sure was objectionable. Suzanne’s quite got over that, at least.”
Suzanne? I have never seen Suzanne since. I think she regarded me as a catharsis for the whole episode. Looking back now, I feel sure that she knew all along that I was employing means to abort her. And, even, that her mother had sent her to me for that express purpose. I would not be in the least surprised, now, to learn that the very thought of me made her sick.
I think, Inspector, that this episode comes under the heading of criminal conversation. Don’t you? I am not proud of it.
And poor old Casimir. I should have told him simply to go to hell. With his tape recorder and his cheap binoculars and his eavesdropping. And every word he uttered giving him away for the mangy old dog he had become. Nobody would have listened to him for a second. I had not the slightest need to stamp on him in that frenzied way. Obliterating a poor harmless old bugger whose simple pleasure was gazing at the windows opposite, where typists changing their frocks after work can sometimes be espied in their underclothes. He was not as much of a criminal as I was.
A thought has just struck me. I think, now, that Casimir hated me, and for the identical reason that I hated him. I think that in his espials he had seen Suzanne leave my house. Knowing what he already did I think he jumped to the conclusion that I had seduced her. I think that he may have loved her, in much the same ridiculous, absurd way that I did – and do – myself.
In killing Casimir, did I kill myself?
Thirteen
I am sitting up in the top-floor flat, quite alone, in Casimir’s studio. It looks almost as if the summer had died suddenly, violently, for it is cold, and rain is beating fiercely on the windows. I understand that the little gas fire would not have heated the studio enough in winter. It makes, too, a tiresome hissing sound, and I have preferred to light Casimir’s oilstove. I have had to shut the windows, and the paraffin makes the room stuffy and smelly. I am changing: a month ago it would have been impossible for my fastidious nose to remain five minutes in a room with the thing. Now I am almost enjoying it. I have always had a sensitive nose, even as a child…
Now I had resolved to have none of that. I had determined to avoid this imagined psychoanalytic claptrap whereby scarring episodes of childhood and youth are presented with a flourish in novels. With the author, the fool, clapping himself upon the back in self-congratulation and saying ‘How clever I am’ as he presents some worthless fiction as a justification for the unreality, the pretentiousness, the imbecilities which the worthless poltroon knows, uneasily, have filled his print-wasting pages.
There is truth in it though, alas. There are episodes in one’s childhood that one always remembers. And they can be so trivial. Why should one remember them, if it were not that one knows they left a permanent mark? Ach, knows; what does one ever really know? Still, I am as detached as any man. And since I said in my last instalment that there were things I now wished to show you, to allow you to draw your own conclusions – I do not pretend or wish to ‘explain’ anything at all – so be it, then.
I doubt, in fact, whether anyone can really pinpoint with accuracy the hours or days that later gave direction to his character. I fancy though that anybody with training can give some indications. Take this rain, now. It is a summer’s day, although the fine weather has been broken off like a branch struck by the summer lightning. Heavy rain is falling out of an overcast sky, with a fairly strong westerly wind and a temperature around fourteen degrees. The day before just such a one – there may have been sun then or there may have been cloud; I do not recall – I went to school, aged seven, in the neat, tree-lined, clean streets of the provincial town of my childhood. Recall that there were no buses then with automatic doors but primitive-looking trains with open platforms. It was our pride, as children, to finish the ride on the bottom step and hop off thirty or forty metres before the train ground to a stop. The bigger children gauged with absolute precision the speed at which they could jump as against the chance of being taken by the ear in the grimy fingers of an elderly conductor and pinned until the train stopped altogether – a disgrace this, though it could happen to anybody. Rather like the paratrooper colonel Langlais, who broke an ankle in the first jump over Dien Bien Phu! Indeed the bigger children had to us, the seven-year-olds, all the glamour of paratroopers. I had never dared jump, myself, and had perforce cravenly to wait with a group of other timid tinies, till the old tram had lurched to its standstill. One morning – this morning – I jumped, and at a speed that only lordly eleven-year-olds could attempt. I was determined, you see, to ‘get my wings’.
I had, however, never grasped the trick of the three or four rapid pattering steps in the wake of the momentum. I leapt out at right angles, stumbled erratically, gyratically, through bewildering space, tripped over the gutter, and tumbled on the pavement, my head coming hard against a tin litter-box, and fortunately not the ornate cast-iron lamp-post to which it was wedded. Several sympathetic middle-aged women picked me up, a
nd brought me into the nearest shop, where a kindly butcher deposited me on a slab and poured cold water on me. I came to and was violently sick.
“Oh, the poor lamb,” said all the women, a thing they would never have said to the other lamb, hanging above me on a hook.
“He’ll be all right,” said the butcher soothingly. “Where d’you live, sonny?”
I suppose I told. The butcher, possessor of a Citroën delivery van (yes, it was a Citroën, I recall it perfectly) deposited me on some cleanish sacks smelling only slightly of blood, so that it may have been the smell of sacking that promptly made me sick again, and brought me home, where my dear mother flapped about rather. The butcher calmed her down, doubtless, and she recalled that she had recently followed a grandiose First-Aid-To-The-Wounded Course. (Evening classes were organised in the singularly gloomy urine-scented building of the lyceum, even more petrifying after twilight, but adults, I had remarked, were indifferent to such things.) She diagnosed concussion, quite sensibly, wound me in wet compresses, gave internal treatment of linden-tea-and-Aspro, and put me into bed.
Our house at the time was a large pompous villa – I was ten or so before we got ‘poor’. It had turrets and gables, stood in a quiet heavy street where all the shopping was brought by errand-boys, and had a garden with evergreen oaks and a copper beech. It was called, of course, ‘The Beeches’. Firmly in the plural, according to the current snobbery that a suburban villa was a townsman’s country mansion. (The house next door was called ‘Normandie’ and on the other side ‘Montreux’ – and both had tennis-courts.) I had, being the youngest, the only son, and a great treasure, a room of my own; the ‘tower’, which had two lancet windows and an octagonal shape.
Next day – the day it rained - I was kept in bed. I had a very slight headache and was otherwise in rude health. After my dear mother had fussed about with bread-and-milk and tip-toed out, I sat up. I wolfed the two dry rusks that had been left me, abolished the beastly cold compresses, and reached for a book. I spent there, with the rain hammering upon the tiles and windows of the turret – my crow’s nest – the happiest day of my life. Quite alone, in a warm ecstatic nest, thinking occasionally, between more highly coloured fantasies, of all the other little boys, suffering in their inky smelly classroom with the opaque globular lampshades that spread an acrid stink of heated dust. I hated and dreaded school.
I was a fidgety child, frail and timid. I was quick at reading and spelling, and had always the ‘recitation’ and the verses by heart while the class was still struggling with the first line and a half up-to-the-semicolon. But figures were a nightmare to me. To this day I am flummoxed by nine sevens and seven eights. The decimal point was to me a maniac dot, invented by scholarly sadists. It flitted about among the rows of noughts, utterly uncomprehended, and poisoned my life. The classical ‘passage from one ten to another’ pushed me with contempt and derision to the bottom of the school, and I suffered. What would have been my lot had I had to wrestle like an English child with pounds, shillings and pence?
Every day we had a ‘maxim’. This was a pious thought written first thing every morning by the master, in superb flowing longhand at the very top of the blackboard, and it stayed there till the following morning, when it was erased with hieratic gestures by a long hairy hand projecting from a grimy flannel cuff and the shiny sleeve of a soutane, holding a thing like a clothes-brush, but that had a sort of pad instead of bristles. I can still see it, sewn in a blue-and-white swiss roll of some woolly dishcloth material.
When we did our homework we had to write at the top of the page, very neatly, name and christian name, date, the Jesuit motto A.M.D.G., and this ‘maxim’ which we were trained to copy into our rough-books the moment it appeared. I fought, even then, an instinctive war against all maxims, and did this with the greatest distaste. My writing was uncontrolled and sprawling, and I always lost marks for imperfect transcription of those ornate flourishes signalling a capital letter’s dreaded approach.
Horror – one winter evening I found that I had forgotten the maxim, and without it my homework would receive an inexorable zero. It was that kind of educational system: work counted for nothing if the seven-year-old were not thoroughly impregnated with some literary nun’s corrections of Bernadette Soubirous’ solid good sense.
My mother was adamant. Back I had to go, under wet dripping ghastly trees, through the black echoing ‘playground’ past reeking dark sheds (lavatories, in the dark the gas chambers of Auschwitz) into a building that was still open, because at the other end the big boys were still getting instruction hammered into their dirty ears. I crept into an empty classroom, lit by an economical fifteen-watt bulb in the passage, and found that maxim, smug and imbecile on its blackboard, and ran like a fury home, in hysterical tears long before I reached ‘The Beeches’.
Next morning I got a zero after all. I had looked in Class Two.
Fourteen
It must have been a year later, and in Class Two, that I was so terrified at not knowing my tables that one day I never went to school at all. I left the house, naturally, at the given time, my satchel on my back. But I spent the whole day lying concealed in the belt of rhododendrons by the front gate, trembling as the baker’s boy banged along the path whistling, a foot from my head, but unsuspected and undiscovered, the whole blessed day. I was immensely proud of this achievement, and my confidence lent me a fluent mendacity when I said at school I had had to go to the dentist. I repeated the trick twice, that year. I did not suffer from those hours lying in damp leafmould. Indeed no prison would appear to me brutal, no guard severe, even now.
From the age of seven, children who misbehaved were not punished with a tweak to the ear or even a back-hander in class, but were sent formally with a chit to the Prefect of Discipline, an aged tyrant who walked endlessly around the playground with his breviary. In the top class of the preparatory department, aged eleven and bold with beginnings of muscle and pubic hair, we maintained that inside the pages of the breviary he really had cowboy stories, folded small.
When a child reached this chalky old gentleman with one of the chits (there was no means of evasion, since after execution a second chit was given, to be handed to the master originator of the court-martial) he would slip the cowboy stories into a side pocket of the soutane, read the chit severely, and motion the criminal towards his office, a bleak little room embellished with an extraordinary ornate rolltop desk. This walking to the office was the worst part of the punishment. For children as for adults the leisureliness of justice carries the real sting.
Out of a back pocket, for those soutanes were ingeniously designed for the carriage of concealed weapons (and in the sleeves were stuffed large dirty clerical handkerchiefs) he then produced a Jesuit invention, most painstakingly manufactured and well finished, officially called a ferula. It was a shiny thing of black stitched leather, something like the sole of a narrow shoe in shape, rather elegant, flexible and springy as a Negro athlete. One then held out one’s hand for Twice Two or Twice Four, according to the gravity of the offence. Some recommended holding the hand limp and hollow, others keeping stiff and brave; the methods were equally painful. Maximum in theory was Twice Nine, but there were dread tales of even dreader beatings. I was beaten frequently, being dreamy, inattentive, fidgety, often disrespectful, and occasionally really wicked, as witness the time when I discovered that by swallowing quantities of air I could presently send the whole class into hysterics by loud emissions of wind. I got Twice Six for Disrespect, Creating Disturbance, Obscenity, and the grave crime known I believe to the army as Dumb Insolence. I was also beaten frequently for lying.
We measure time in decades: one is infant till ten, child till twenty, youth till thirty. After that one is just man for thirty years, until one’s sixtieth birthday and, I suspect, the beginnings of wisdom and decrepitude hand in hand. At ten years old I got from my father my first fountain pen, rather superior, black with a rolled-gold clip. Rolled gold sounds good but means, I be
lieve, some cheap plating process. To a child, it is very fine.
I had surmounted the initial stage of a Jesuit school - Preparatory, Elements, and Figures. I was in Rudiments, and before me lay Grammar, and the superior school, the names of whose classes I have forgotten, save two which were beautiful: Poetry, and
Philosophy. In Grammar I met the one sympathetic action I was to encounter from the teaching staff throughout my whole school days, indeed the one action approaching intelligence.
I had the highest marks in the class, consistently, save for one boy, a Jewish boy called Gold. I have no idea why he was sent to a Catholic school, though he had bright blond hair and a muscular Aryan exterior that would have pleased Heinrich Himmler. Certainly he made no effort to deny or conceal his Jewishness. He was good at gymnastics, for which I envied him bitterly; to me gymnastics – those dread bars, those ropes, those harsh coconut mats, that smell of feet and carbolic – were hell. I could box, though, much to my surprise, and Gold and I – the children called him Fish, of course – fought furiously. Once he knocked half my left ear loose, and I still feel the tiny welt. He was, you will understand, my friend.
His parents were rich, and he turned up one day with a French dictionary, so new, shiny and delectable that I was eaten up by the desire for it. I stole it, thinking that its newness made it untraceable. Alas the master, investigating, found Gold’s name, written after the fashion of children very small, in pencil, at the extreme inside bottom corner of the back cover. I will always remember that master. He said nothing in public at all. He made me go quietly to Fish, admit my theft, and give back the dictionary. And he gave me another, as new, as shiny, he had himself gone out to buy in the midday break.
Criminal Conversation Page 15