by Alan Hunter
CHAPTER EIGHT
AFTER LUNCH THE Great Man is to be seen on the cliffs, wandering lonely there, if not like a cloud, at least like some roving demi-god. The reporters mark him; they would wander with him if they could overcome their shyness, in the manner of disciples following a peripatetic philosopher, to grave his words upon their memory. But shy they are, or perhaps unchosen. They wander apart, below on the beach. He wanders above, aloof, unchallenged, his words unspoken and so un-graved. What does he know, moving so slowly in the fire-blue sky, hidden now by scenting gorse, now marching large on stony hillock, along the crumbling cliffs northward, while all the larks sing? He has been telephoning, this is known, and the calls were trunk calls. To Whitehall? To Grosvenor Square? Rumour stays not the question. But there was matter worth transmitting, and this surely irks the reporters, so that, though shy, still they will not let the Great Man from their sight, and follow, from the common sands, his heavenly motions aloft, his slow, sightless, mindless motions, informed, heavy with news. He has it, they are certain, what they can print in explosive type in the late editions, and they may not, cannot, and on all counts will not, let this seminal figure stray from view.
He wanders, and above the pill-box stops to take a bearing. He looks outwards into a jewel of arching sky and splendid sea. The sun twinkles in a corner and floods the jewel with far blaze and shows illimitably blues strained with gold grey and green. And pressing behind him like firm hands is the gorsey heat of the cliff-top within which the larksong, a trembling spirit, wreathes, to be felt more than heard. And centrally in that jewel (because thus he has placed it, where the heel of the compass ethereally sweeping from north to south shall rest) lies the concrete lump, tilted and burying, hooking its rusty claws savagely, exposing broken surfaces, weathering but obdurate, and moulded surfaces, their purpose lost. All below him lies that lump and in the lump Stody’s theorem. The lump, descended thunderously, had blundered clear of the still-scarred cliff. You cannot drop a pebble on it. You must needs throw the pebble. Neither can you drop a body on it. You must needs throw the body. Throw a body? The theorem requires it: must be thrown to reach the lump: must be picked up, or, if alive, grappled with, and thrown or hurled, say, three yards. A notable feat on a dark night! Yet the theorem requires it. Clooney limp or Clooney kicking, he would need to be heaved three yards. Had Clooney then been inflated with hydrogen? Or was his heaver no mortal man? Had the Devil himself descended on Clooney and whirled him, with supernatural precision, thence? The Great Man perhaps considers the Devil along with another dozen surmises, which cannot help including Brother Fred’s concept of a walking, running or leaping American; for the Great Man and Brother Fred are one in seeing clearly what is set before them, and, while not entirely discounting the Devil, alike prefer the obvious answer. A leaping American? With limbs whirling, furiously from the dewy brow, in perfect darkness, or near enough, towards the invisibly murmuring and spreading sea: frantic to do, yet coolly accurate to choose his spot within feet, sans marker, sans light, sans any view of the lump below. Did he do it by the stars, this leaping marvel, astrally guiding himself to oblivion? The Great Man retires with measuring steps. He halts but five strides from the brow. He sees now below the dejected reporters and the combers washing, but the lump he does not see. And where it is below the mute cliff-line stretches faceless and unbroken, grassed thinly, a smooth extension offering direction to no man. Even in the staring light of noonday, how could Clooney have hit that bugger head-on? Or less than the Devil, who could have heaved him so irresistibly and correctly? Yet, with the coin suspended, one remembers again the bruises and the twenty-two cuts, and the obvious, about to proclaim itself roundly, retires a little, still to wait. A mystery here! Not what was done, but how in the Devil it could be doing.
The Great Man’s figure shrinks further but does not wholly disappear, and the watchers, kicking the dried bladder-wrack, know he ponders the spot where the hat was found. Stody has marked this spot: at first with a twig, but later with a finely-fashioned stake: it stands boldly beside a gorse-thicket and bears his signature in indelible pencil. The spot is pleasant. It is a sort of haven protected by the thicket from the sea-breeze, an odorous sun-trap, inviting for lovers, exquisite for picnics and such traffic. The breeze sifts among the gorse and stirs the sweetness of ten thousand blooms, each straining its yellow hood in the high heat of afternoon. What terror of death could harbour here? Only Stody’s stake insists on it. The dried grass meekly refuses to bear evidence in support. Here was the hat, Stody insists, inferring, Here Clooney was thrown down and tortured, but the spot, speaking in its own language, allows this assertion no reality, saying instead, These things are pictures less in truth than a humming bee. Two kinds of reality? Ah, but, define the term. If Clooney’s agony is unreal then no bee hums. All is real or none is real or all and none are real/unreal: make-believe is come again, and that’s an attitude, mark. The spot and Clooney, raw essence, equally turn their backs on labels. They are modes of feeling, to use words. We, not they, contradict. But here this Man selects his mode, though aware of its illusory character, and while not preferring it to other modes, which he acknowledges, yet pursues it with single mind: among the gorse, with bees humming, he insists with Stody on Clooney dead. And what sees he, pursuing his mode? Nothing more revealing than the stake. There is nothing to see, not the ghost of a print, not a shred of material caught in the gorse. Stody has been here many times, Shelton, Williams have both been here, the reporters, to a man, have gleaned on their heels, spurred on by fame to make discoveries. But the hat was all, and the position of the hat, and the fact that the hat was lying on its crown: was, was here, and was thus, period, is the whole story. Why then does the Man stand so long and so dreaming at the spot? What new intelligence has he brought, to extract fresh matter from the gorses?
He comes out of this dream. Another approaches him. The reporters are alert and apprehensive. Has one of them, less shy than his fellows, braved the Great Man’s displeasure? But no, the newcomer is quickly recognized: is Stephen Halliday, the doctor’s nephew: their ruffled feathers sleek again and they fall into surmising. Stephen Halliday ranks not over-high in their private list of hot suspects. They watch him, seeing his mouth move, but hearing naught save the fret of the sea. I wanted to talk to you alone, Stephen Halliday is saying, facing Gently across the stake, there may be nothing in what I have to tell you, and it’s rather embarrassing to tell you at all. Is it to do with Clooney? Gently says. Stephen says, Well, it’s up to Gently to decide, it’s, in a way, a psychological matter, but, really, he thinks he ought to mention it. Right, carry on then, Gently says, and Stephen Halliday makes as though he will; but instead, for some moments, he stares at the stake, though all the while speech is straining at this throat. Then he comes out with it, saying, It’s Frieda, saying it in a forced, low tone, as one might admit to some embarrassing disorder which may no longer be concealed. And he lets it hang there, the bare name, as though merely to mention it tells all, and Gently, being cognizant of the concept, Frieda, can flesh the bones without further prompting. And Gently can, so it seems, for he makes no reply. With Stephen Halliday he silently considers the name thus sounded, like a key in music. Frieda, Miss Breske, sullen Frieda: like thunder rolling on the cliff-top, a black cloud, muting the larks, sealing the scent in the blooms of the gorse. It may be nothing, Stephen says, but already he has made it too much. By speaking the name, and in that tone, he has given the matter a violent twist. He has moved it bodily. It will never again return to its aspect of a moment before. He has turned it a little into the light and the light can never now be dispelled. And he is too conscious of having done this, standing there, his eyes on the stake, conscious and confounded that through him, and so simply, the revolution has taken place. He did not mean it. He was adding a little, a very little to Gently’s stock: then that little was suddenly much and an avalanche descending. He had snapped his fingers and brought the roof down.
GENTLY<
br />
When was this?
STEPHEN
Oh . . . more than a year ago. I hadn’t met Trudi, you understand. Trudi was away at a school in Hertfordshire. Trudi’s a good deal younger than Frieda.
GENTLY
Tell me about it.
STEPHEN
I simply met her, you know how it is. I was down from Edinburgh on the long vac and mother, uncle, we all dined here. Uncle knows the Breskes of course, a G.P. knows everyone. So we had our coffee in the parlour along with all the gash furniture.
GENTLY
How far did it go?
STEPHEN
Oh, hell . . . all the way, I suppose. Frieda has no morals, you know: none. She just hasn’t developed a moral sense.
GENTLY
And this went on till you met Trudi?
STEPHEN
You make it sound so damned odious. But it wasn’t like that. Frieda wasn’t in love with me, it wasn’t a question of love between us.
GENTLY
What was it a question of, then?
STEPHEN
Of, of sex, I suppose you’d say. She made a point of letting me know she was willing, and, of course, I was; so that was that. I mean, when you’re my age you want sex. It’s a hellish great thing and you want to know about it. Women gnaw at you, all women. Any woman will do. It isn’t love.
GENTLY
And with her it was the same.
STEPHEN
I don’t say that. Not quite the same. It isn’t the same with women, you know. Sex is always a means with them.
GENTLY
She taught you that?
STEPHEN
Now you come to mention it. Yes, that’s something I learned from her. Before then it didn’t really come home to me, perhaps I didn’t want to believe it. You like to think . . . oh, I don’t know! Of course, I’m as romantic as hell. I’d like to think women come to it on the same footing though of course they don’t. Perhaps not even Trudi.
GENTLY
And what was sex a means to with Frieda.
STEPHEN
Oh, power. That’s her god.
GENTLY
She wanted you to marry her?
STEPHEN
That was her target. God help me if I’d ever fallen for that.
GENTLY
You were never actually engaged.
STEPHEN
No. My Scots canniness saw me through. I think people like Frieda always overreach themselves unless they’re dealing with positive fools. She tried the old pregnancy trick, you know? Imagine that – with a medical student! I offered to do the tests myself, and of course she had to cry off. God she was furious.
GENTLY
I can well imagine it.
STEPHEN
She’s rather frightening when she’s angry. Doesn’t get hysterical, doesn’t shout. It just burns away inside her.
GENTLY
When was this incident, Mr Halliday?
STEPHEN
At the end of the long vac. Now I think of it, just before Trudi came home – yes, it was. Just before.
GENTLY
And when Trudi came home . . . ?
STEPHEN
Look, that was the end of it, that business about the pregnancy. Frieda knew she’d shot her bolt, there were no more get-togethers after that.
GENTLY
Frieda quietly faded out.
STEPHEN
Yes – no. In effect, yes. If you’ll only listen to me—
GENTLY
You may be sure I’m listening.
STEPHEN
Well, that’s entirely what I’ve come to tell you.
And once more Stephen hesitates, as though again weighed down by a word of thunder, such a word as, when spoken, may chain-react to infinity. He stares aslant at the thicket gorse of the tender pod and nesting spines, the spicy gorse, always glad, where (X) Clooney’s hat has rested.
STEPHEN
Actually, it could have been quite innocent. I mean, one is apt to imagine things.
GENTLY
What sort of things, Mr Halliday?
STEPHEN
About people’s motives, of course. For instance, you see a man looking into a car and at once you think he’s a thief, but he may be only the owner of a similar car, or perhaps he’s considering buying that model.
GENTLY
You caught Frieda looking into a car?
STEPHEN
Not exactly into a car. They had some rats under the floor in a storeroom. She asked me to get her something to poison them.
GENTLY
After . . . Trudi came home.
STEPHEN
(Nods.)
GENTLY
And you suspected a connection.
STEPHEN
Yes, I did. Don’t ask me why. I thought she was aiming to do us in.
GENTLY
Trudi and you.
STEPHEN
Yes.
GENTLY
Well, your uneasiness is understandable. Did you give her the poison?
STEPHEN
Not bloody likely. And she didn’t ask for it again, then.
GENTLY
(Looks inquiringly.)
STEPHEN
Oh yes. She had another try three weeks ago. And the rats are there, that’s a fact, because she took me in and showed me. So I gave her some sodium bic crystals done up in a jar labelled arsenic, and presumably they did a good job, because I’ve heard no complaints.
GENTLY
You think she used them?
STEPHEN
(Shrugs.)
Anyway, that’s what I had to say. Maybe it’s a lot of damned nonsense on my part, but I felt it ought to go on the record.
GENTLY
Why, Mr Halliday?
STEPHEN
Why? Because I’m afraid of her, that’s why.
GENTLY
You afraid of her?
STEPHEN
Because of Trudi! Frieda hates her, don’t you see?
Does Gently see? His eyes rest on Stephen with no particular focus, so that he seems rather to be listening to some far-off sound than to be hearing Stephen’s words. Is it the cries of children below, or the piping scold of sea-swallows? Or is he so far beyond and behind those words that his hand is on the root to which they are the flower? Perhaps after all his eyes are seeing, through Stephen, whole tapestries of deed and secret enactment. Why? he says. Why?
STEPHEN
But I’ve just told you why!
GENTLY
Why should Frieda be dangerous to Trudi now? Isn’t that what you’re asking me to assume?
STEPHEN
Yes, but—
GENTLY
No. Listen to me. It’s over a year since you met Trudi. During that year Frieda is apparently resigned to Trudi’s taking you from her. If there is anything in this notion of yours that Frieda had murderous intent, then plainly she gave up the idea when you refused to supply her with rat-poison. But now you say she’s at it again. So why? What’s happened to stir her up afresh?
STEPHEN
How should I know—
GENTLY
Who would know better? You are in Miss Trudi’s confidence.