He'd Rather Be Dead

by George Bellairs

  Boumphrey cast a pathetic look at Littlejohn, who, in turn, wondered what would have become of Fenwick and Boumphrey if it had come off. Probably both would have been happy by this.

  “There’s not much more to tell. Instead of getting married, I set about making a career. I went and saw Ware, disclosed that I knew about his purple past and, whilst assuring him I wouldn’t say a word to discredit him, promised to try and trace his son if I could. Meanwhile, unknown to him, I’d kept a kindly eye on Alan for his mother’s sake. I never told him why … never even made a friend of him. Just kept an eye on him. I got him out of the Cherry mess because of his mother … or rather her memory. He packed up and went to Westcombe. I knew why. Ware got me the job at Battleford and then this one here. I met Fenwick, who recognised me, but we didn’t have much to do with one another. This job was too much for me. I wasn’t the class for Chief Constable. The town was corrupt, thanks mainly to Ware. It was as good as my job was worth to meddle … Then, Ware was murdered. You know the rest. I did my best to shield Alan. But I’d called you in, you see, and do what I might, you were too good for me. I’m beat. Better report it and I’ll face the music.”

  Littlejohn removed his pipe. Then, he slowly rose to his feet, crossed to Boumphrey and offered him his hand.

  “I believe you, Boumphrey,” he said. The Chief Constable gratefully took the Inspector’s hand in both his own, wrung it and then sobbed harshly.

  Littlejohn felt like fleeing, for the situation was intensely painful.

  “You’ll have to resign, you know, Boumphrey. But it’s better that way than getting the sack after an enquiry. Fenwick’s diary is bound to contain references to you. I can’t suppress that, even if I omit mention of our differences in my report. I’ll put as strong a case as I can for leniency in the right quarters, but you understand, I can’t withhold evidence, can I?”

  “No, Littlejohn. I’ll resign. There are plenty of jobs I can do these days and, if I’m given a chance, by God, I’ll make good.”

  The embarrassing interview thus ended and shortly afterwards, Boumphrey left Westcombe. A retired army man became Chief Constable and Hazard, who was persuaded from leaving for Manchester, took on the job of Superintendent of Police. ‘The incorruptible’ soon cleaned-up the local corruption.

  The following recently appeared in the daily press:

  The George Medal was recently awarded posthumously to Stephen Boumphrey, Air Raid Officer of an East Coast town, for conspicuous gallantry during an air-raid. He was responsible for rescuing fourteen people entombed in a bombed building. Tunnelling to their aid, he cheered and comforted them until they could be released. He was crushed by a fall of masonry just as he had freed the last victim.

  Boumphrey, who until recently was Chief Constable of Westcombe, asked to be released for service in a bombed area, where he felt he could be of more use. Before his death in hospital, he was informed that he had been recommended for decoration and asked that any token of such honour might be handed to the police at Follington as a memorial of happy days spent in the force there.

  Thus Stephen Boumphrey atoned in full measure, pressed down, and overflowing.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN - THINGS PAST—I

  (A journal, found by Littlejohn, interleaved in Chateaubriand’s “Mémoires d’ Outre-Tombe.”)

  WHENEVER I read such exquisite works as the one in whose pages I am concealing this manuscript, I always feel moved to write about myself and my sufferings.

  I might, given the right time, publisher and press, produce a masterpiece, a best-seller, for I have the material of which such things are made stored in my memory. Probably the goddess of luck, who has always turned her back on me, would play me a dirty trick again!

  Inspired by the great works of others, I would often rush hot-foot to my desk to write, my brain teeming with unborn thoughts and a great eagerness to translate them into the written word. But when I took up pen and paper, I found myself struggling for that facile, flowing expression, which is a joy to the reader and the consummation of the artist’s work. I was like a dumb man whose tongue cannot shape the treasures of his glittering brain into forms which will delight all who hear, or a woman whom the pains of false labour continually torture, yet from whom the ecstasies of creation are for ever withheld.

  Time and again, I have begun and time and again lain down my pen in utter despair after feverishly covering half-a-dozen pages with matter which, when I have read it afterwards, has filled me with disgust. As though a gramophone record of the most exquisite singer rendering the loveliest of songs were played by a rusty needle on the titubating turntable of a machine whose speeds were constantly changing.

  Could I only have broken down the barrier between thought and its expression, that mental lock-gate which dammed up the waters of my mind, and let flow forth the surging flood of my heart, I would have known the happy joys of relief. But no device would bring this about. Stimulants, tonics, drugs, were of no avail. Fasting was equally ineffective in tapping the hidden springs, as were the bottles of whisky I emptied or the cocaine I sniffed in my desperation.

  Now—irony of ironies—when my time is short and justice knocks at the door, my brain seethes with inspiration, the once dried-up wells are bubbling to overflowing, and my hands can hardly move fast enough over the keys to anchor my thoughts on paper before they are gone, like migrant birds which die in foreign lands.

  Nay, I do not need to think in words. An automatic liaison has been established between my unconscious and the tips of the fingers which manipulate my typewriter. My body, like that of a medium, translates thoughts from an unseen world of the spirit, into ordered letters of the alphabet without any conscious sorting into speech.

  I could go on like this for ever, but Nemesis, in the form of one Littlejohn, is almost on the doorstep. Yet another of the ghastly jokes of fate!

  Autobiography suits me. If truth were told, it suits everyone. We can never know anybody but ourselves and that but dimly, like a dark room with dirty windows viewed from without. In the case of the second or third person, the glass of the windows is opaque. We cannot even guess what goes on behind it, but discern only the vagueness of shadows moving to and fro inside. We cannot know whether the words of our dearest friend contain truth or falsehood. Even the kisses of the beloved in the orgasm of passion may be to her those of another, held in the heart, whilst the poor dupe in her arms merely provides the stimulus of the flesh and the stage-setting of the event.

  Well do I know that distant look, that almost forcible ejection from paradise which brings one back to the dull reality of the world, to the realisation that some other, some unattainable holds the stage in the soul of the loved one and that one’s self is the mere lifeless puppet capering forlornly outside, receiving nothing!

  But I digress. My own tragic life began before I was born. Foolish thought, you will say. But do not most parents of a firstborn, even before he has taken the shape of man and is yet a mere amoeba, a dog, an ape in the slowly unfolding course of evolution, begin to prepare the silver spoon for his arriving, to plan the road which they dream he will take and which fate so often diverts into the wilderness? And is he not, at least, granted the full span of the dreamless, effortless rest in the heart of his mother’s body until the allotted time for his awakening and birth into the world?

  Such things were not for me. I was conceived in dark corners, fashioned in agony and bewilderment, and finally rejected in torment. For I am an illegitimate child, born after seven months with a physical endowment which was for years the despair of all who knew me and the one who loved me, and with a wounded spirit which has been my private hell since first I knew the truth.

  I am choosing my words like one who has a whole lifetime in which to select and ponder! At any time now there will be a ring on the door-bell which will sound my knell. Then I shall fling away in disgust the life which was forced on me. This is no time for washing for the fine gold of my thoughts and expressions. I was born in D
impsay, Norfolk, early this century, two months before my time. Not considering that my mother had enough trouble, the fates gave her another in advance of schedule!

  I can still remember my mother as though she were alive today and in the next room, waiting for me to finish my work and to make my malted-milk before I retire. Her name was Mary Fenwick. I thought her a widow and it was not until after her death that I found she had never married at all and that I bore her maiden name, or rather, the name she had assumed. That was a blow from which I never recovered. Not that I blamed my dear mother. She was the saint to whom I owe all that is best in me … But more of that tale later.

  Physical weakness may naturally be expected in one cast into the world with two months of preparations not completed. I gather that I was a puny, howling baby, half-dead more than a dozen times, yet clinging to life as though it were something worth keeping. Would that they had left me to perish, or, in a fit of rage, smothered my pulings until there wasn’t breath in me any longer. I was seven when I was fit to go to school, by which time, thanks to my mother’s efforts, I could read, write and figure better than most at my age. I never took to games, I disliked my schoolmates as much as they disliked me. They used to call “Pansy” after me and “Mother’s darling,” but I grew accustomed to it. At any rate, I could beat them in class and kept away from them outside. Once they caught me alone and knocked me about until I was sick. After that, I was sent to the High School where it was every bit as bad. But why go on …

  By this time, we were living in Follington, Essex, where my mother took me as a baby.

  I could not have hoped for anything but the life of a member of the unskilled working-class, for my mother was compelled to keep the pair of us by toiling every hour of the waking day and night. She could, with justification, have turned me out to earn my living as soon as the law would allow me to leave school. When not ‘obliging’ the so-called better-class ladies of the town by assisting them to keep their hands out of slop-buckets and away from scrubbing-brushes, she took in laundry and sewing at home.

  At night, she made our clothes and those of quite a number of the women of the church we attended.

  Sustained by a scholarship, I managed to finish my education at the local High School. I was not in those days greatly concerned in how the family budget was balanced. Like a fledgling in the nest, I opened my mouth widely and plaintively and swallowed all, regardless of how it arrived.

  One day, I suffered the first of a series of emotional shocks which since then have occurred like volcanic eruptions in my life, with periods of apparent quiescence between each.

  We were granted an indefinite holiday through an out-break of scarlet fever in the school and, going home at an unusual hour in the middle of the morning, I passed a large house, the steps of which I was horrified to see my mother cleaning with a bucket of dirty water and a scrubbing brush.

  I cannot analyse the sensations of shame and degradation which flowed over me in hot waves as I first perceived her. Thank God, I did not feel ashamed of her. Rather did I wish the cause of it all would materialise in order that I might assail it with my fists and boots.

  She was kneeling on the bottom step, like a suppliant grovelling for life or food before some arrogant Ruler or Dives who stonily averted his face. When, in later years, I stood before the picture of Monmouth crawling, pleading for his life before James II, the memory of that moment returned, filling my eyes with the bitter tears of hopeless despair. For my mother was then long dead and there was nothing to be done about it.

  I remember standing speechless beside her, knowing not what to say or do, but aware that I loved her past telling, until she turned her head and saw me. Her hair had fallen over her face, beads of sweat stood on her brow and upper lip, and a long scar of soot stretched like a brand from her mouth to her cheek-bone. She turned pale at my thus discovering her, and anxiously enquired what I did there at that unaccustomed time. With one hand she pushed the bucket and its fetid contents from her, as though attempting to conceal it from me, and with the other brushed away the fallen wisps of hair.

  I can still see her hands, the skin of the fingers in folds through long immersion in water, the looseness of her knuckles and finger joints lined with grime. I would have kissed them had I had the grace to do so. As it was, I ran home and threw myself on the bed in a turmoil of despair. I had witnessed sacrilege like the violation of a holy place, the trampling underfoot of sacred relics, the feeding of the Host to swine.

  Thenceforth, I realised that during my absence, my mother led a hidden life of humiliating and menial toil for my sake, yet hastening to meet me, clean, sweet and cheerful when I returned at night. This was the beginning of my constant enquiry into the past which she had hitherto kept concealed from me. I asked about my father. Who and what was he? What had he looked like? Why had we no pictures of him? When did he die, and how? My mother was a religious woman and such an inquisition must have sorely tried her, for lying was abhorrent to her. She must have been an astute diplomat, for there comes back to me no recollection of any unsatisfactory answer, no memory of any reply which was of a nature only to stimulate further questions. She died with her secret undisclosed.

  Meanwhile, nothing destroyed our happy train of domestic associations. As I grew older and the sap of life rose within me, I felt that indefinable unrest, that sad seeking for the unattainable which in youth is torture, but, recollected in later years, one of its dearest memories, but I singled out no other woman for its object. I was not to be found at night parading the High Street, philandering up and down the ‘Cakewalk,’ as it was called locally, casting longing eyes, making swaggering gestures or uttering those sibilant whistles, shouts or spurious, almost hysterical laughs which constituted the mating-calls of the young males of Follington and, I suppose, everywhere else. In Westcombe, of course, the overtures of such rough wooing are not essential, for under the influence of sea air and the sense of abandon known as “the holiday feeling,” the preliminaries are flung to the winds and the partners in the game hurl themselves upon each other almost at sight.

  Too late I realised that my mother had denied herself the bare essentials of life for my sake. Like the legendary pelican, she had fed her offspring on her own blood. I do not recollect her ever taking a holiday away from Follington. Sometimes, in summer, we would ramble out to the salt marshes to the east of the town and there, among the things of nature and under summer skies draped with vast white clouds of ever-changing shapes and speeds, the burden of years would seem to fall from her and she would become young again. She even sang now and then the old songs and hymns she was fond of.

  Last week, more than twenty years later, hearing Gaukroger and his Beach Mission bleating one of those hymns, I was so overcome that I sat behind one of the sham rocks which Gideon Ware made of cheap cement for the greater glory and decoration of Westcombe, and wept in a spasm of overwhelming grief. After which, returning to my surgery to keep an appointment, I so mishandled a triple extraction, that the patient rose from the chair in pain and struck me in the face with his fist in uncontrolled rage before he left the house, spitting blood and pieces of jawbone.

  The discovery of my mother’s secret activities wrought a revolution in my life and outlook. I was fourteen at the time and had but vaguely thought of a career. Engine-driver, controlling a great locomotive; cinema manager in evening dress at the door of his picture palace every night; parson holding huge audiences spellbound like my mother’s hero, Charles Haddon Spurgeon; these all had their day and passed by. The one which remained longest in my heart was the doctor. I once saw a local practitioner thrust his way through a huge, milling throng round a street accident and with deft skill, render help and healing before the awestruck crowd. I decided that was the job for me. I confided this ambition to my mother, who smiled and sighed. I might as well have wished for the moon.

  As it was, she consulted Mr. Hardcastle. He was a deacon of our church. A huge, black-bearded man who ran a denta
l practice in Follington. I think he would have married my mother had he been able, for he admired her greatly and always treated her with the greatest tenderness, which filled me with the jealous pangs of one who sniffs out a supplanter. But his wife was still alive and hopelessly insane in a mental home.

  Hardcastle was an unqualified practitioner. That is, if you regard experience as no qualification and intricate book-learning as the Open Sesame to success and recognition. He could not call himself a dental-surgeon and the orthodox described him as a false-teeth maker. The blue lamp over his door had DENTIST strung round its circumference like strangely-shaped continents splashed on a planet. He earned a respectable living by extracting poor folk’s teeth at sixpence a time; cocaine or gas, a shilling extra and guaranteed painless. He had spent some years in America and served as mechanic to some good and up-to-date dentists. He made excellent dentures, which never betrayed themselves or their wearers, and executed fillings better than any man I ever met. To this giant I became apprenticed at the age of fifteen, for whatever decency was in me, revolted against my being longer dependent on my mother’s humiliation.

  “That’s a sensible boy. There’s a son worthy of his mother,” boomed Mr. Hardcastle in that voice which was almost as effective as his laughing-gas in paralysing his patients. He had proved the financial impossibility of my ever acquiring a medical education and he had offered me a job as his errand, page and bell-boy. I had agreed. “I’ll teach you all I know. But you’ll have to be patient, young man. You’ll have to be patient.”

  When I was eighteen and making teeth as skilfully as my master, my mother died. My conversion from a liability to an asset in her finances had eased her burdens considerably, but the past had gnawn too viciously in her vitals and she began to fail in health. When nothing short of an operation would save her, she went valiantly to the Infirmary, keeping the severity of her condition from me, promising to be back speedily. They brought her back, dead. I remember calling with the undertaker to claim the body from the keeper of the Infirmary mortuary, who spat a stream of tobacco juice on the courtyard, handed me my mother’s spectacles and the hymn-book she had taken with her to cheer her in convalescence, and said, “It’s in there; ready for you.” I was the man who had called for the “returned empties.” In vain did my companion try to excuse the formality of the proceedings which had dulled the sensibilities of the tobacco-chewer. I made the precincts ring with my laughter and was hustled-off the premises like a child who has suddenly revealed his whooping-cough in a crowded gathering.