by Alec Waugh
“You didn’t notice that he’d not returned?”
“I was very tired. I can’t remember. I may have said to myself * He’s rather late.’ I wanted to get into bed, to get to sleep as soon as possible.”
“And the next thing that: you remember is being woken up in the morning by your maid?”
“Yes.”
“And when your maid woke you, you were, so you have told us, too sleepy at first to be alarmed. Tell me what you did.”
“I went out on to the verandah to see if the car was there.”
“Why shouldn’t it have been?”
“I thought Gerald might have got up early and driven it away.”
“Did he often do that?”
“No. But that seemed that morning the likeliest explanation of his absence.”
“I see. And looking across from the verandah you saw that the garage door was shut? What did you think then?”
“That the car must be in the garage still. I didn’t see any reason why Gerald should not have driven the car out of the garage, then got out of the car to shut the garage door.”
“Naturally. No, of course not. So that when you saw the door was shut, you assumed that your husband had not driven the car away?”
“I couldn’t be sure. The wind might have blown the door to after him.”
“So you thought you’d go across to the garage and make quite sure.”
“Yes.”
“You had a key?”
“Both Gerald and I had keys.”
“And no one else?”
“No.”
“You went straight across to the garage. Did you notice this smell that your gardener mentions?”
She shook her head.
“I haven’t a very keen sense of smell. Besides, I hurried over. I was beginning to feel anxious.”
“And it was alone that you went over to the garage?”
“Yes.”
“You opened the garage door, and then …?”
He paused, interrogatively.
She shrugged.
“I can’t remember. I was choked, stifled. I can’t say what it was like. I’ve never known anything in the least bit like it. I don’t know how long it took me to recover, before the air was clear, and even when it was clear, I’d breathed in so much. I didn’t know where I was. I just knew something terrible had happened. I may have shouted. I don’t know what I did. I felt as though I were fighting my way into that garage. I was half blinded. I couldn’t find the switch. It was very dark. Then when I saw Gerald …”
She paused. The coroner waited for her to recover. Once again a moment had come that under ordinary conditions he would have seen as an opportunity to aggrandise his personality. Once again he resisted the temptation. It was in a very gentle voice that he addressed her.
“Please, please, Mrs. Montague. I don’t want to harrow you. There are only a very few questions that I must ask. Had you any doubt when you saw your husband that he was dead? “
“No, none at all.”
“What did you do next?”
“I went back into the house. I told the cook to ring up the doctor.”
“Not the police?”
“No, the doctor.”
“Had you any explanation in your own mind as to how this tragedy happened?”
“Not then. I was too dazed. I just knew a tragedy had happened.”
“But later, when you were thinking it over? Did you find any explanation for yourself?”
She shrugged.
“I’ve relived that last night so often; I’ve blamed myself so much. There’s only one explanation that I can see: that after I left him, before he had time to switch off the engine, he had one of his coughing fits; that he fell asleep when he recovered; that a gust of wind blew the door to, while the engine was still running.”
“These choking fits were of frequent occurrence, weren’t they?”
“My husband had them every night, in one form or another. That’s why I’ve blamed myself. I should never have left him there. I should have waited for him, to make sure that he was all right.”
“Ah, no.”
Pontifically, he shook his head.
“You must not think that. On no account must you let yourself think that. No wife could have shown more care, more unselfishness, more devotion. It was not for that reason that I put that question. I want the jury to be quite satisfied that there can be no other explanation than the one you’ve given. Your husband had no worry of any kind?”
“None that I know of.”
“He was not in any financial trouble?”
“On the contrary, he was very hopeful that the building of this hotel, would make El Santo popular with tourists. He kept saying that in a few years’ time we should all be very rich.”
“He was, wasn’t he, a happy man?”
“He had his depressed moments.”
“My dear lady, but who hasn’t? It is one of a wife’s privileges that in her presence a husband can relax, can reveal his anxieties and doubts. To the world at large your husband was a symbol of optimism. I should have said, wouldn’t you, that he was one of those men to whom the mere fact of being alive was an adventure?”
“I think he was.”
“I’m sure he was. I have never met anyone with such a zest for living, who would be more anxious to hold on to life. Thank you very much, Mrs. Montague. That is all. I’m sorry, I must repeat, to have had to inflict this ordeal on you. And once again in the name of the court, I extend to you my sincerest sympathy.”
As she sat down, her solicitor leant across and patted her on the knee.
“Very good, admirable. You couldn’t have been better. You are brave, very brave.”
She closed her eyes. This isn’t happening, she thought, this isn’t real. It’s a play, a film, a novel. The setting out of the evidence, with everything straightforward and above board, but the reader’s on his guard, knowing that somewhere in that evidence the clue’s concealed, that on page 257 he’ll be cursing at his own stupidity, turning back to that third chapter; saying, “Why, of course. Plain as a pike-staff. Why on earth didn’t I see it then. Yes, that was how it was.
And here was Lucille the cook giving her evidence.
‘ Yes, sah,” she was saying. “Der Ah was in de kitchen, thinking about whether to scramble dose eggs or trydem, when in comes Mistress Mary. No, sah, not at all excited Just quiet. Very white. ‘ Will you please telephone Doctor Brown,” she says. ‘ The master’s in the garage, Ah’m afraid he’s dead.’ Yes, sah, just like that. No, sah, no hysterics. Man, you could have knocked me down. Said it just like that. Then walked over to the verandah. Sat down there, just as though nothing at all had happened. Ah certainly wouldn’t have believed it.”
“Yes, yes, we understand.”
Lucille would have been prepared to run into a long digression, but the coroner cut her short.
There was a scowl on her dark face as she stepped reluctantly from the witness-box. She was a comic, right enough, in the way that only a West Indian can be. And there was a comic, wasn’t there, in every detective novel, to remove the tension. Lucille fitted into the picture right enough.
And here was the doctor giving evidence, the dear old family doctor, tall and stooping, with pince-nez and a kindly voice, the kind of doctor anyone could fool: who would sign any birth certificate. What was it he was saying now : finding a long Latin explanation for the fact that a man in an air-tight garage had been suffocated by the fumes of an exhaust. Yes, it was just like a novel.
“Please describe exactly how you found him,” the coroner was saying.
It was the question that she had expected to have had put to her, the question that she had dreaded, the answer to which she had phrased and memorised: that to her grateful surprise had not been put to her.
“He was in the corner by the seat, away from the wheel, his head against the door.”
“A natural position?”
“Perfectly.”
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“The position of a man who had fallen asleep and been suffocated in his sleep?”
“Exactly.”
“You have been Mr. Montague’s doctor for many years?”
“Since he was a schoolboy. My father brought him into the world.”
“You were thoroughly familiar with these choking fits?”
“Thoroughly.”
“Will you describe one to the court?”
The explanation was involved and technical. It would, under ordinary circumstances, have given Camberley an opportunity to display his cleverness. He did not take it. He had another role to play. He listened carefully.
“Yes, I see,” he said. “These violent fits would leave him limp, worn out, in a kind of coma. Would it be easy for him to fall asleep the moment a fit subsided?”
“It’s what would happen nine times out of ten.”
“Would these fits come on him suddenly, without warning?”
“Yes.”
“They would be so sudden, that he would be unable to finish anything he had started doing?”
“Quite.”
“It wouldn’t surprise you to be told that if he was struck by one of those fits when he was bending forward to switch off his engine, he should tinder the pressure of a fit omit to do so?”
“It would have been remarkable in the circumstances if he had.”
“And would you have expected him to notice that a door had been blown to?”
“He’d have been most unlikely to have heard it.”
“Precisely. Thank you. That is all. Nor do I think,” he said, turning to the jury, “that there is any need for me to call further witnesses.”
He paused, and his voice took on its most leisured pitch.
“You have heard the evidence of those five witnesses,” he said. “I am not allowed naturally, and very properly, to influence you in any way. I merely set the facts before you. I leave you to form your own conclusion. And during my long experience in this court I have never, I am very sure, been asked to present a simpler set of facts: facts that admit, that can admit of one explanation only.
“We all knew Gerald Montague. Everyone in this island knew him. Everyone who knew him loved him. He had a smile for everyone. He was the happiest man that most of us have ever known. He loved life. He had no troubles. It is one of the difficulties, but also one of the privileges of life in a small community, that we know everything about each other. If we have troubles, everybody knows them. We know that Gerald Montague had no such troubles. He was happy in his home. We have not examined the ledgers of his business, but for that again there is no need. We all know more or less how each of us is doing. Nobody is making a great deal of money. Most of us barely show a profit. But we carry on. We have, we know, at the back of us nature’s illimitable resources. Prosperity must return to us. Indeed, there are many of us who feel that it is already on its way, that a new enterpise is about to open a new source of wealth. Gerald Montague believed that. He would have been himself one of the first to profit by that enterprise. He had every reason for facing the future hopefully. I think we can say with confidence that four days ago there was not a man in the community who was happier in his present, with greater immediate hopes of happiness. There is no one who would be more anxious to go on living. There are some of whom we could say that the accident of death was a happy accident, a release. No one could say that of our lost friend. The accident that has robbed us of that friend was in every way a tragic accident. I do not think, gentlemen and ladies of the jury, that you will need long to deliberate your verdict.”
26
There were a number of Mary’s friends outside the court-house. A number of them had been in court. The women bowed, the men raised their hats. Her solicitor led her to his car. Till the car had begun to mount the hill he did not speak. Then he laid his hand on hers.
“You were admirable, my dear. You were perfect. You were so brave.”
He spoke in an affectionate, slightly patronising manner. It was a manner that was habitual to him, that in the past had irritated her. He was so obviously honest, so obviously well intentioned. Yet, in the very certainty of his honesty, in the unquestioned nature of that certainty was a menace. Because he was honest, it was assumed that he must be competent. He fussed. And because he was perturbed over detail, it was imagined that he was accurate in detail. But it did not follow. It did not follow in the least. For all she knew, he might be responsible for half the muddled finances in the island, particularly for Gerald’s, that he had managed now for over thirty years. At ordinary times his manner never failed to exasperate her. But now she welcomed it. His note of patronage was the proof of her success. His honesty was the defence of hers.
“I thought Mr. Camberley was very kind,” she said.
But there he was not prepared to follow her. He pursed his lips, shaking his head knowingly.
“Kind, that’s just the trouble. He was too kind.”
“What do you mean?”
“That summing up of his, an obvious direction of the jury. And some of those questions—to you, particularly, and to the doctor—he put the answers into your mouth.”
“He was only trying to get everything settled as quickly as he could.”
“I dare say. That’s one way of looking at it. But it’s not the way an opponent would. If one saw that evidence down in black and white, and were trying to pick holes in it …”
“But who would ever want to be picking holes in it?”
“I know. That is a point. But if someone did … Looking at it hypothetically, as a lawyer should, as a lawyer must, I could wish, yes, I must say I could wish very strongly that those questions had been put just a little differently. For instance…”
She scarcely listened, as he elaborated his point. How like old Carrington this was. This insistence upon minute detail. She could picture him in just this way poring over a balance-sheet, searching for an unaccounted sevenpence, failing to recognize the misappropriation of several thousand pounds.
“Mr. Camberley’s conduct of the whole case,” he was concluding, “confers high powers upon his character, but not upon his intelligence. I don’t say that anyone is at all likely to question it. And in a sense, that is of course the thing that matters. At the same time …”
Monotonously, his voice ran. She did not listen. How typical this was. It was what she had always told Gerald. If she could only have had this case to use in one of her many arguments. “Can you bring forward any concrete example of a case he’s bungled?” How often had Gerald not said that. And she’d never had the concrete example. She had it now. “Look at the inquest,” she could retort.
She checked, struck by the incongruity of her thoughts.
It was strange how, after you’d lived with a person for seven years, they’d become so much a part of you that you thought of them as being always there: so that even now she found herself thinking, I must tell Gerald that—that’ll make Gerald smile.
“And you will remember, now, won’t you,” the lawyer’s voice ait across her reverie, “that if there’s anything I can do for you, not merely in a legal sense, in a personal way, I mean, you have only to command me. There’s nothing that would be too much trouble.... Old Gerald, after all. We’d been boys together. I’ve never had a friend like him. You won’t hesitate to ask me, will you?”
She shook her head. No, she would not forget. And he had been kind, more kind to her than she could say.
“You’ll stay, won’t you, and have a punch?”
He shook his head. He had not the time. He had to get back to his office. There was always a lot of extra work on boat days.
“In less than an hour, she’ll be docked,” he said.
Turning, he pointed across the Windward Channel, to the high white superstructure of the Lady Grenville.
With an odd sense of dramatic irony, she looked at it. The docking of the Lady Grenville. The moment she had so dreaded, that she had marked on the calendar of her
mind, counting the days to it, the hours. Only a week ago, less than a week ago, she had been wondering how she would find courage to face this moment. And now that it had come....
She stood staring across the bay, shading her eyes against the glare, then turned back into the bungalow. As she did so a memory, an associated memory, struck her: of how just in that way nearly a year ago, she had stood here, gazing over Rodney harbour, shading her eyes against the glare, to turn back into the bungalow, to the thought, Has this really happened to me? Am I the same person still?
There had been dented cushions in the hammock: an American magazine face downwards on the chair. In the bedroom, a Chinese dressing-jacket across the bed, slippers kicked against the wardrobe, powder sprinkled along the glass surface of the dressing-table. She had picked up that snapshot of herself: that childhood snapshot. What would that girl have thought, if she had known that this was going to happen to her?
She had stared at her reflection in the glass. She had been surprised to find that she looked the same. She had expected to look ‘different. The seventh commandment. How solemnly it had sounded when, as a child she had heard it intoned from a high choir stall. It had seemed to contain such a condemnation: to lay such a slur. And yet in point of fact, to what did it amount? that you were lying in a hammock reading a story in a magazine: that you were disturbed by the ringing of a telephone: that slippers were kicked across a room, a Chinese dressing-jacket tossed across a bed, powder spilt across a table: that you hurried through a crowded street: that you leant against a wooden balcony: that in the street below the sound of Congo music thudded along your veins : that its rhythm beat upon your nerves : that in your ear a voice was whispering: that a hand was insistent upon your elbow: that through a half-closed jalousie a declining sun cast zebra-like shafts of black and yellow across a damp white shoulder: that two hours later you were lifting a photograph, to think “could this have happened to you “: that you were examining a reflection in a mirror. She ought to have looked different, yet she didn’t. The seventh commandment, which had sounded so solemn from that high choir stall. That was all it was.