Red Anger

by Geoffrey Household

  Suicide was another way out. I found the thought of poor Adrian stark and cold most touching. Also it would put Sokes and Len Shuffleton on the spot, for it would certainly occur to the police that one of the neatest ways to explain a shortage of cash was to blame someone who was no longer alive. A pity that one couldn’t kill oneself without the inconvenience of dying!

  Weary of me arguing with me—though the argument was becoming more genial—I finished the bottle and opened the evening paper. And there at the bottom of the front page was my answer! There, thanks to Uncle Vasile, was my pretended, pathetic, embarrassing suicide if only I had the impudence and could think quickly enough.

  The front page before my eyes, short of a murder or some photogenic débutante in trouble with her parents, was playing up the mystery of one of the first Russian trawler fleets to pass through the English Channel. South coast towns, wrote the reporter, would be able to see the lights of the fleet. What were the Russian intentions and was the Channel becoming a mere highway to the North Sea? He then quoted a Russian Embassy press hand-out which stated flatly that their intentions were to fish, that next day the fleet would be out of the Baltic on its way to the African grounds and that it would pass through the Straits of Dover between two and three a.m. the following night.

  I was at once reminded of my mother’s brother, Vasile. Social revolution, bribery and old friendship with the Captain of the Port of Sulina had made of him a trawler skipper in the Black Sea. He was quite content with his lot. Even when he had been a young man of fashion in pre-war Bucarest his chief interest—when not messing about with girls—had been messing about in boats. He was prepared to accept any political regime which actually paid him to do so.

  On his rare visits to Bucarest he invariably called on us. My mother and stepfather welcomed him with fixed grins as the family curse but I liked him. He would gather me into his arms, stinking of fish and vodka—the true breath, I thought, of ocean—and prophesy that he would see me through the storms of life. In a sense, by his mere existence, he did.

  One of my duties in Paris was to use my languages in order to extract money for nothing from communist tourists. While I was loosing off my spiel to a mixed bunch of them walking up the Rue Pigalle I was suddenly embraced with a roar of delight by Uncle Vasile. It turned out that he was something of a Stakhanovite; he had caught more Black Sea herrings in one season than any other skipper. Being a staunch and reliable Party member he was rewarded by a free trip to Paris—ostensibly for an international conference on sizes of mesh. The Fishing Board offered to send his wife too. He had a job wriggling out of that. He said the hardest trial for the keen worker was not tough, daily routine but the irrational and inconvenient bursts of generosity.

  For two weeks my uncle compelled me to spend all my free time with him, slipping his official guides who were only too glad to get rid of him. For once I was well fed, but he was far from the romantic figure of my boyhood. Sober, he could talk of nothing but fishing. Drunk, he had an engaging habit of putting on his navigation lights—red wine in the left hand, green chartreuse in the right—and proceeding round any restaurant under power. When I finally saw Uncle Vasile pushed into the train and said goodbye to the boot dangling from the window, I knew as much about the Romanian fishing industry as the Board which ran it—not enough, that is, to catch a fish, but quite enough to write a report.

  Inspired by the evening paper which acted like a detonator on wine and thoughts of suicide, I reckoned that Ionel Petrescu, dock-side clerk to the trawler base at Sulina, due for promotion and allowed a trip with the Russian Baltic fleet to see how they did things, was going to be a difficult character to unmask. Petrescu’s education would be my own between 1954 and Egypt. Between 1961 and 1965 I would have to invent an uneventful career as a clerk, substantiated by plenty of precise details gathered from Uncle Vasile. If interrogated by a free Romanian, I could pass with flying colours. A naval security officer with some knowledge of trawling would be far more dangerous. However, the impersonation of a refugee could not be a serious criminal offence, and I could probably carry it on for a month or two before I was exposed and became a comedy pet of newspapers. By then Councillor Bloody Sokes, O.B.E., would have run for cover.

  The temptation to a desperate young man was irresistible. But how to get rid of Adrian Gurney? Walking into the sea was not very convincing since I had to reappear from the sea. Yet the sea it had to be; nowhere else could one vanish without the police becoming suspicious about the absence of any corpse. What of driving my old car over the edge of something? A cliff which I had seen on a short holiday in the Isle of Purbeck might do. I remembered an approach over turf and deep water a hundred feet below. But why isn’t the driver found drowned in his seat? Well, he was not killed by the impact and found a little late that he wanted to live after all; so he fought his way out of the car and was carried away by the tide. Not bad, provided there was convincing evidence. If that was worked out as the chief problem, all the rest looked possible.

  What sort of a letter to leave behind? It had to sound lonely, frustrated and balmy enough to fool a psychiatrist. I considered telling the truth about Sokes, Gunsbotham and Len Shuffleton and raving, as neurotically as my pen could manage, that I was revolted by a world in which a harmless, young employee could be so betrayed. But that was a blunt, provincial sort of revenge and it might fall flat. A subtler, more Latin stab was needed which would be festering in Sokes’s reputation for years and could never quite be scarred over.

  With the last of the bottle, genius for once sat on my shoulder. That, by God, would set the cat among the pigeons! Any competent detective constable could get the truth out of Sokes’s detestable young floozy in ten minutes. And then Sokes would lie. The possible combinations of a puzzled police and a frantic Sokes were almost infinite.

  I went home and composed my sad, last letter, to which I added a P.S.

  Please break the news gently to Miss Julie Tacket, 3 Pokes Buildings, Wandsworth, and tell her I still love her.

  My passport and a few private papers were packed into a knapsack together with a windbreaker and shorts for the hearty, nameless hiker I would be after the death of Adrian Gurney. At the bottom of the knapsack were Petrescu’s clothes: a pair of trousers, a tattered shirt and a holed sweater which I had worn on the voyage home from Egypt; they had been bought second-hand in Bucarest and still had the labels of pre-war shops. Then, with that deadly farewell letter in my pocket, I filled up the tank of my car, leaving an impression of hopeless melancholy with the garage man, and drove off very cautiously through the night, taking six hours to cover a hundred and sixty miles. At 3 a.m. I turned off the Swanage—Kingston road and then along a gated, rutted field track without lights. In a quarter of an hour I was on the headland, and a damned awful Gadarene Swine sort of place it was, with a sharp slope of slippery turf running down to darkness and the crump of unseen breakers.

  My next move was to smash the rear window from the inside to show the police that the missing driver, losing too late his taste for suicide, had escaped through it. Any of the side windows might be resting on the bottom but it seemed unlikely that the rear window would be, owing to the weight of the engine and air trapped in the car. I broke it with the starting handle, taking great care to see that none of the fragments fell on the turf, and made a hole big enough for a desperate, drowning man to get through—an improbable achievement but just possible if the window had already been damaged by the fall.

  Taking off my coat, I sawed it back and forth over the jagged remains of the window. What microscopes could or couldn’t do after a car had been under water I had not the faintest idea, but if they could detect threads and some blood I’d feed it to them with pleasure. I found myself incapable of making a shallow cut on my arm. Furious with this squeamishness I scraped too savagely on the glass and had to bandage myself quickly with a handkerchief.

  All well so far. Knapsack out of the car. Starting handle on the back seat. Farewell le
tter in a cleft stick driven hard down into the turf. And now for the real job which I did not like at all. It was obviously more convincing to send the car over the edge in gear than in neutral—proof that I had been inside it and had not merely taken off the brake and given it a shove from behind. I drove to the final slope in bottom, changed up once and jumped out through the open door. I managed to slam it shut but at the cost of sliding down after the car, clutching frantically at turf too smooth to stop me, until a patch of wild thyme and a rabbit hole pulled me up. I heard the car hit the water and clung to solidity amazed that people could ever find the courage to kill themselves.

  Changing into the shorts and windbreaker, I strode off over the Purbeck Hills to Studland at a good four miles an hour. The light was growing and it was essential to get clear before dawn without attracting attention or allowing anyone to record a memory of me. After dozing for a few hours in the sandhills and shaving off a dark, furry moustache of which I had been youthfully proud I took a train from Bournemouth to London—and to a much needed lunch—inconspicuous among other early holiday-makers.

  A map of the Kent coast suggested that a very reasonable place for a refugee to swim ashore was the beach east of Folkestone below the railway line to Dover. It would have to be thoroughly reconnoitred but looked the sort of place where a few enthusiastic swimmers might appear early and not a soul would be wandering about in the small hours of the morning. I needed nothing else but darkness and a trowel.

  The railway put me within walking distance of my objective—cautious walking, for there was always an outside chance of Ionel Petrescu being recognised by someone who had seen Adrian Gurney the evening before. By half past nine when dusk was falling I was among bushes and tumbled chalk above the beach. That was an unexpected bonus; the map had not indicated such very good cover where I could lie up and watch. On the other hand the time of high water was as inconvenient as could be. No pretence of being stranded high and dry at the top of the tide was possible. I would have to keep moving up the beach with the waves until I was found.

  After dark I changed into those old relics of Egypt and Bucarest and buried my passport with all other possessions, cutting out a square of turf, carefully replacing it and scattering the surplus earth down a slope of rubble. I was oddly relieved by my new identity, accepting with surprise that the last two years in Caulby had been an utter waste—a planting of myself in soil where my roots could never take hold, where my pride of birth would have rotted away and where a return to that agricultural life of which I dreamed would become less and less likely as time passed. Some day I hoped to come back as a self with an assured future and to recover that passport well-wrapped in polythene, its tomb marked by a seemingly casual pattern of lumps of chalk. Meanwhile Adrian Gurney must wait for the day of resurrection. I was well aware that I had condemned myself to a purgatory of self-discipline, but had not the sense to foresee what could be waiting for me.

  A little before dawn I went down to the beach and walked along the water’s edge, where my footmarks would be washed out, until I came to a blackness between groyne and weed-covered rock. There I lay down on the sand, crawling up the empty beach just ahead of the tide. That became too risky in the growing light. I had to allow the arcs of foam to ripple over me and to endure the cold until somebody discovered the pitiable bit of flotsam.

  ‘Oo, ma! ’Ere’s a fella!’

  Mr. Petrescu opened an eye under the lifeless hank of black hair which the Channel waves were washing back and forth across his forehead and thanked God that at last he had been noticed. He was as cold and miserable as if he had really swum to shore from outside the three-mile limit. He could see only a pair of unattractive shins patterned—for it was 8 a.m. on a cold July morning—in red and blue, belonging to some intrepid Britannia ready to rule the waves regardless of temperature or perhaps leaping at any respectable opportunity for taking off her clothes.

  ‘You come away from there, Marlene!’ an older voice screamed. ‘Don’t yer touch it! ’Elp!’

  Some more before-breakfast swimmers gathered round me. I did not dare raise my head to see how large my public was. They on their part were content to stare and shiver. The rising tide washed the weed of the groyne to and fro across my back, and I did not, I hoped, look as if artificial respiration would do much good. So long as no worthy citizen was tempted to try it, it was hard to see that my breathing was fairly normal.

  All the same, I was near my limit of endurance. I reminded myself that if I had really swum in from the Russian fishing fleet I should be feeling a lot worse. But heroism is comparative. An office worker, far from fit after the sunless sky and fried chops of Caulby, was just as entitled to be sorry for himself after mild exposure and two nearly sleepless nights as the imaginary tough trawlerman who had fought the sea and dropped exhausted on that democratic sand.

  At last a policeman appeared. The game was on.

  I allowed myself to be pulled up the beach and turned over. My excited heart was beating far too strongly for me to sham unconsciousness, so I sat up with a jerk and squawked convincingly. The constable and the onlookers jumped back startled. I dragged myself limply to the policeman’s sandy boots and kissed them.

  The point which had most bothered me was how much English I should have. Fluent? That would take some explaining. None? But what a handicap during the months when I was supposed to be learning it. This first meeting with the Law instinctively settled the problem. Hardly any English had to be the answer. I hesitated between ‘I escape’ and ‘Me escape’ and chose the latter.

  ‘That’s all right, mate,’ the constable said. ‘You won’t come to no harm here.’

  I felt my pulse pounding and the blood buzzing in my head. I did not try to control the faint. A bit of luck, I thought, as I passed out.

  I was being wrapped in a blanket by two ambulance men. Some member of the obliging public was declaring:

  ‘Saw him swim, I did! Saw his head out there like I see you!’

  An independent witness to something which had not happened was too valuable to be lost.

  ‘Why no fetch boat?’ I demanded indignantly.

  ‘Thought you was a Channel swimmer.’

  ‘In his clothes?’ somebody asked.

  ‘Couldn’t see no more than his head.’

  The policeman, pulling out his notebook, asked what time that was.

  ‘An hour ago, might be. Saw him from my bedroom window.’

  ‘It was my Marlene as found ’im,’ said the mother of the legs jealously.

  Still dizzy though I was, I marked carefully that I had been seen swimming in broad daylight. My intended story was that I had swum ashore in darkness and collapsed on reaching the beach, had collapsed in fact several times as I dragged myself higher up the sand with the advancing tide.

  This suspiciously weak bit of fiction was no longer necessary. The irresistible desire of the anonymous public to become a named individual in the news had vastly improved it. Mr. John Fulton of 12 Reservoir Road, Heaton Mersey, Manchester—he had given his name aggressively to police and onlookers—had seen me off shore about 7 a.m. I did not appear to be in difficulties and Mr. Fulton had thought no more about it. More accurate were two observers who claimed to have noticed me stuck between rock and groyne about 7.30 but at the time had not recognised the washed-up lump as a body. That was much what I wanted. I had intended the pathetically draped seaweed to keep me on ice—and, by God it had!—until there were a few early risers around to witness the near tragedy.

  As I was lifted into the ambulance I thought it had been a most convincing defection to the West, well worth being frozen and half drowned since first light. To be rescued by some knowledgeable local fisherman soon after I had dropped into position would not have been so satisfactory as my discovery by holiday-makers of such solid character that they were hopping around the beach before breakfast.

  The ambulance decanted me into a comfortable hospital bed, where the house physician, speaking
very slowly and clearly, told me that I was a brave fellow and that there seemed to be nothing wrong with me which a day’s rest would not put right. He gave orders that I was to have all the breakfast I could eat and remain undisturbed till evening when the police would want a chat with me, but I should not be afraid of that. Relaxing with a cigarette after porridge, bacon and eggs I decided that I was not afraid—not yet at any rate. Then gloriously warm I drifted into sleep and dreamed uneasily that I was winding an elongated Herbert Sokes into a forest of seaweed.

  I woke up in the afternoon to find the doctor leaning over me.

  ‘How are we feeling now?’

  I opened my mouth, swallowed the perfect English which nearly came out and instead pointed a finger down my gullet.

  ‘Hongry!’

  ‘What again? Well, let’s have a look at you.’

  Doctor and nurse spent half an hour on my lungs, heart and blood pressure. I was alarmed less they might find something really wrong with me. I had quite enough to do watching the road without listening to the engine.

  ‘We’ll keep him here tonight, just in case,’ the doctor said. ‘But there’s no reason why he should not get up and talk to the police.’

  In hospital dressing-gown and pyjamas I was escorted to a waiting-room where I was handed over to a police inspector and a tall, worn, aggressive civilian who turned out to be a Russian interpreter and of a type to justify revolution. It seemed best to deflate the fellow, so I just smiled, nodded and looked alternately obstinate and intelligent in the wrong places. After the Russian had worked himself into a temper with this illiterate peasant or probable spy he gave up.

  ‘It r-r-refuses to say anything,’ he reported.

  ‘You’ll have to tell us all about it some time, you know,’ said the Inspector kindly.

  ‘Me Romanian—spik—no—Rush,’ I brought out with an effort.

  The interpreter looked a fool. The Inspector hid a grin. I burst into rapid French which I spoke with the lifeless accent of any middle-class, educated Romanian. No catching me out there. Any knowledgeable linguist would spot me at once as coming from somewhere at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.