He had no answer to this, so after a slight pause, she added: “Well? Do you?”
“No,” he said, frostily, “I’m afraid I don’t! Your age is on your insurance card no doubt, but I don’t remember looking at it.”
At the mention of the insurance card she laughed outright and he decided that he did not like the key of her laughter. It was hollow, almost harsh, and he began to feel more nervous than ever.
Even yet, however, he did not feel personally involved. Away at the back of his mind he began to form the opinion that she was in some kind of trouble, and was anxious to discuss it with him, but was finding the subject very difficult to broach.
He decided to make a start. “What’s the matter, Miss Redvers? Are you unhappy about something? Can I help? I would, of course, surely you know that?”
The effect of his question was startling. She jumped up and crossed to the window, moving very swiftly. He caught the gleam of tears in her eyes. It embarrassed him to think that her sister, Peggy might return at any moment, and find them alone together and her in tears, but it seemed callous to ignore her distress altogether.
“Well, Kay,” he said, kindly, “you can confide in me if you like, I’m a good deal older than you and I might.…”
Suddenly she whipped round on him and he was horrified to see that her face was now twisted with misery. She no longer looked the least bit attractive and her pursy little mouth was screwed into a tight, red knot.
“What is it, Kay?”
“It’s you!” she snapped, “it’s your continual harping on age! You talk as if there was thirty years between us! You don’t know how old I am but I know how old you are! I’ve always known, you’re fifty-seven next March and that makes you just nineteen when I was born! Well, I suppose you could have been my father, but it wouldn’t be very likely, would it?”
He sat quite still, his hands grasping his knees, his mouth slightly open. ‘Good Gracious! he thought, now I am in a fix! It’s me that she’s after! Me!’
He was the more surprised because he had never thought of himself as even eligible. Eunice was dead, of course, but that only made him technically available to someone like Miss Redvers, for he had never once contemplated remarriage, not to her, or to anyone else!
Even in the pain and bewilderment of the moment it crossed his mind that this was a strange attitude on his part, that a second marriage should have occupied his thoughts at least occasionally, but the truth was it had not, and he supposed that she could hardly be blamed for imagining that it must have done.
He thought back, quickly but systematically, over his relationship with this girl in all the years that had led up to this extraordinary situation. Had he ever, by word, deed or glance, encouraged her to think one day he might marry her? He had been kind and considerate, he hoped, ever since she had been sent into him as a copy-typist, long before the war, but beyond that he could recall paying her no special attentions, certainly not to the degree of encouraging her to believe that he would ever propose marriage to her!
Reassured on this point his bewilderment suddenly gave way to indignation.
“I say, look here, K…Miss Redvers,” he spluttered, “just what’s in your mind? Just what are you trying to imply?”
She began to weep in earnest then, the tears streaming down her plump cheeks and her shoulders quivering with an emotion that she made no attempt to restrain, while he, on his part, began to panic, thinking of her parents just across the passage, and of her sister, Peggy, whose key might grate in the lock at any moment.
He jumped up and took her by the hand, leading her over to the arm-chair beside the fire.
“Now…now take a hold of yourself, Miss Redvers…please…I beg of you…you’ve really no right to…to carry on like this…it makes me feel dreadful! Here, use this!” and he whipped his handkerchief from his breast pocket and pushed it into her hands, afterwards retreating to the far side of the fireplace.
To his immense relief she made the effort, dabbing her eyes and indulging in a series of prolonged gulps.
“There now,” he encouraged, “there’s no need to get hysterical, is there? If you…you want to say anything, then perhaps you’d better say it, before your sister comes back.”
“She…won’t come in here when she comes back,” said Kay, “they’ve all gone out of their way to leave us alone!”
He glanced about him like a trapped animal, too frightened to feel anger at the perfidy of womankind. He realised now that he must get out of the house somehow, and with dignity, but at the moment he could think of no way of achieving this, for his legal mind was still obsessed with the frightful possibilities of doing the wrong thing in the wrong way.
He sat quite still and fought for calmness; presently he was able to address her in a fairly reasoned tone.
“Do you mean to say that…that your inviting me here was part of a…a plan, Miss Redvers?”
Her tears ceased to flow and now it was she who looked frightened.
“Oh, no…! Not like that, Mr. Godbeer! Really it wasn’t, it’s all much more complicated! You see, it all goes back to before…well, before you lost your wife!”
“Indeed,” said Harold, with an edge to his voice that made her heart leap. “And just how, may I ask? Just how, and why?”
“I’m afraid I…I’ve always given them the wrong impression,” said Miss Redvers, so wretchedly that he at once began to feel renewed compassion for her. “I…well, I suppose I pretended you…you liked me when I first became your secretary and then, when your wife was killed, I suppose they got the impression that we might.…”
His eyes began to glitter again as her voice tailed away. “Well?”
“Oh, Mr. Godbeer, you must think I’m a terrible person but it didn’t seem bad at the time, really it didn’t! It seemed a kind of…well, a kind of game I was playing with them, with myself even!”
She had not expressed herself very clearly but because he was a gentle, sensitive person, her rambling explanation was almost adequate. The anger and indignation went out of him and he felt only pity, mingled with embarrassment. Beyond these feelings, hidden shamefully away at the bottom of his large heart, was something else, a tiny spark of pride that refused to be extinguished by the douches of guilt he applied to it. After all, she was only thirty-seven, and earlier in the evening, when she had swept into the room in that pretty yellow dress and high-heeled shoes, she had looked quite desirable, the kind of woman indeed that men a good deal younger and more flighty than he would have liked to have kissed. Yet, for all that and for years on end if she was to be believed, she had had eyes only for him, a fifty-six-year-old managing clerk, earning eight-pounds-ten a week, less National Insurance! It was incredible but, no matter how one looked at it, it was also very flattering!
He switched his mind back to her and wished that he could think of some way to help her over the next few days. He could imagine what those days would mean for her, with the family waiting, hopefully, at first, then with deepening disappointment, for the announcement that she was to marry Mr. Godbeer at last. She could never return to the office after this, of course, it would be too embarrassing for both of them, and the memory of this evening would cloud their minds all the time he was dictating and whenever their heads came together over a lease, or a brief. This, he told himself, was a great pity, for she was very good at her work and he would miss her; nevertheless she would have to go and he felt sure that she herself would be the first to admit as much.
“I’m sorry if you’ve been hurt, Kay,” he said at length and for the first time his use of her Christian name came naturally to him. “Is there anything at all I can do? Anything that might…er…smooth things over, I mean? I’ve always thought of you as a nice girl and I always will, so don’t let that part of it worry you. It’s just that.…”
She handed him his handkerchief and made a brave attempt to smile.
“You don’t have to make excuses, Mr. Godbeer,” she said quietly. “I’
m the one who has to do that.”
She got up and switched on the radio. There was a click and a faint hum. “We’ve missed the New Year, I’m afraid, but you’ve still time for your ’bus, if you hurry.”
She went out and returned with his hat, coat and umbrella.
“Won’t you walk to the stop with me?”
“No, not if you don’t mind,” she said, “I must look like hell.”
“Will you…would you like to take a few days off and then ring me at the office?”
She reflected. “Yes, I’ll do that if I may, I’ll go off on a bit of a holiday and ring you on Monday.”
She held out her hand and he squeezed it. “I can only say that I…I’m as sorry as it’s possible to be.”
“Don’t mope about it, Kay…but you didn’t let me finish what I was going to say.”
“I said you didn’t have to say anything, Mr. Godbeer!”
“But I’d like to because it…well because it may help to explain things. I was very much in love with my wife, and I suppose I still am, and always will be! People like me never do get married again, not after a certain age anyway, but you…well, it’s ridiculous to think that thirty-seven is old and you’ve got to stop thinking it is, really you have! That’s all I wanted to say. Good night, Kay.”
“Good night, Mr. Godbeer.”
She opened the front door and he went out. The rain had stopped and the pavements gleamed in the swift glow of the hall light and then went black again as she shut the door. He stood blinking for a moment, trying to accustom his eyes to the darkness. Then, feeling for his pocket torch and switching it on he made his way carefully along to the ’bus stop.
The air was not cold but fresh and sweet after so many hours in an overheated room. He felt glad to be in the open again and glad that this astonishing incident was now behind him. There would be loose ends, of course, but they could be tied now that she had come to her senses, poor girl.
He looked anxiously down the road and was relieved to see the masked headlights of the ’bus approaching.
“I’d better tell someone,” he said to himself, “I’d better confide in someone, just to be on the safe side, and that someone will have to be old Jim. Thank God, there’s Jim! Thank God, we’re such good friends!”
New Year celebrations inside the county gaol, where Archie Carver was serving his sentence, were limited to a film show and an extra half-hour’s free association on Old Year’s Night.
The film was a Laurel and Hardy, and Archie enjoyed it much more than he had imagined he would, for he had never liked this comedy team in the days when he could visit any cinema that he cared to visit.
That was one of the remarkable things about losing one’s freedom and living a strictly regimented life, where every moment of one’s time was accounted for in advance, and one knew, with certainty, that the unexpected could not happen. Under these conditions one’s sense of values changed, changed so much, and so quickly, that one’s entire outlook became warped. Trivialities developed into enormously important issues and what had once been an important issue became less than a triviality, and was brought to mind only after concentrated effort.
Income-tax, for instance.
There had been a time, not so long ago if one reckoned by the calendar, when income-tax was a very important matter indeed, often occupying a man’s thoughts from morning to night. In here, however, nobody gave a damn about income-tax, no one so much as mentioned it. The possession of a cigarette stub was far more important than all the money in the coffers of the Inland Revenue.
Women, too!
Women had always engaged Archie’s attention if but lightly, for no woman had ever dominated it, or claimed any of the time that he devoted to business matters. Yet in here his mind was obsessed with women, and with one woman particularly, so that he found himself remembering the smallest particular of his association with Elaine Fraser and the capaciousness of his memory regarding her astonished him.
He could recall, for example, exactly how she had stood when she was regarding herself in the mirror before getting into bed with him. Without him knowing it his mind must have formed a minutely accurate picture of her pose, with both hands resting lightly on the glass-topped dressing-table, her body and one foot thrust forward, inclining one buttock towards him in what now seemed a provocative posture.
He remembered her clear, white skin, and the spread of her thick curls on the pillow! He remembered her frank, laughing sensuality, and the sense of repose that she brought to him after a day spent wrestling with travellers, coupons, and stock returns.
He yearned for her as he had never yearned for any human being; beside her the contents of all the tills in London seemed less than a heap of packing-case shavings.
He always began to think of Elaine and to examine his memories of her the moment they had dispersed to their cells and the clanging of steel doors had receded along the gallery.
This was usually his time for a systematic probe into the facts and coincidences that had cost him his freedom. The nightly marshalling of this chain of events had helped him over those first, hideous weeks, until he landed the soft job in the store, and had something else to occupy his mind.
He would ask himself just where he began to go wrong and would fix the starting-point at the purchase of those two crates of spirits from the egregious Mr. Swift. From here he would slowly trace his run of bad luck to his row with the accountant, his settlement with the Inland Revenue, his failure to change the lock on the store-room in the yard, his mad rush into the West to recover his reserve capital, up to the very moment of the impact with the cyclists on the main road.
After that he found it difficult to remember the order of events and his memories of the inquest and trial were confused. He knew that at sometime between these events they had given him a wire or a letter, informing him that Tony had been killed in action in North Africa, and that it had seemed to him at the time that the people who brought him this news were sadists who enjoyed pounding and pummelling a prostrate man.
The news of Tony, however, and the abrupt change in his life that immediately followed it, had done a good deal to help him, for it had lifted the burden of guilt from his shoulders and enabled him to wipe away the memory of death that had burdened his conscience.
Archie was coarse-grained, greedy and almost completely selfish, but he was not inhuman and the knowledge that he had snuffed out somebody’s life had troubled him for many weeks.
As the year wore on, however and he slipped into the routine of prison life, it began to trouble him much less, for it seemed to him that Tony’s death, and the time he was spending in this half-world, more than atoned for the girl’s death. As the weeks passed this idea strengthened in his mind and he began to regain his self-confidence.
His strongest characteristics had always been self-reliance and the habit of thinking along constructive lines, and these came to his rescue during the long hours that he remained shut away from distractions. In the long silences that followed lock-up he was able to go back over his life phase by phase, and re-examine all his decisions, not only those decisions regarding the management of his businesses, but those affecting his relationships with all kinds of people. He learned a great deal from these inquests and one of the first things he learned was the value of privacy, the kind of privacy that only a sentence of imprisonment can provide.
This was an aspect of prison life that surprised him. He remembered, years ago, hearing someone express satisfaction at the news of a notoriously work-shy man being sent to prison. “That’ll teach him to work.” the person exclaimed, and for some reason Archie had never forgotten the remark.
He now had an opportunity of testing the statement and found that it was wholly false. Nobody, he soon decided, had ever learned how to work in a prison, for a prison was surely the laziest place in the world, and its routine the most leisurely ever contrived by human beings.
Inside a prison only the privileged would work a no
rmal span of hours. The others filled in their time as best they could and the constant struggle to find tasks that would occupy mind and hand was, to Archie at any rate, the most punishing feature of his sentence. He had been lucky, inasmuch as the prison staff soon came to recognise his organising ability, and made him a storekeeper, where his detailed knowledge of everyday commodities proved invaluable and he was able to set about reorganising the antiquated issue and withdrawal system of stores. This not only helped him to occupy his mind but it also recommended him to the elderly officer in charge of the department. Soon he was recognised as a model prisoner, bent on giving no trouble and gaining the maximum remission of sentence.
It was after supper, when he was back in his cell, that he had to make a conscious effort to think constructively and to discipline his thoughts to follow a set pattern. He had never been in the habit of spending much time in bed and was therefore seldom able to get to sleep until after midnight. This left him four hours in which to meditate and it was at this time, when he had temporarily exhausted all other sources, that his thoughts began to centre on Elaine.
On the final night of the old year he found it impossible to think of anyone else, for he remembered that they had spent Old Year’s Night together two years before, and had seen 1941 launched at a dance, organised by a Polish relief organisation, at Lewisham.
It had been, he recalled, an entirely satisfactory evening. They had danced until midnight and then driven off in his car to Shirley Hills, parking on a high, windy ridge, where they could look down on blacked-out London, silent under a brilliant moon and a sitting target for the Luftwaffe.
There had been plenty of night flares and distant explosions, an occasional flicker of tracer and here and there, a small fire, but it had all seemed to have little to do with them, for they had had plenty to drink and were in high spirits.
They had watched the show for a while and then climbed into the back of the car and made love. Elaine, he remembered, had been particularly demanding that night and he had put this down to the excitement of the raid and the amount of gin and Pym’s Number One she had consumed at the dance. Afterwards, as was their custom, they talked, quietly and amiably and he had sensed very strongly the kinship that made her company so rewarding. She had said to him on that occasion:
The Avenue Goes to War Page 44