by Anne Morice
“No, no hurry at all. It’s quite informal.”
“The trouble is that Sunday evenings are apt to be tricky because I don’t know whether my neighbour will be able to oblige for an hour or two. It’s a busy period on the lock gates when the weather’s fine and she sometimes has to be on hand to help. You see, I’ve got my invalid brother here at present.”
“Yes, I did hear. How’s he getting on?”
“Not at all well. He can’t be left on his own for very long, especially after dark. His nerves are completely shattered, unfortunately. It’s not that he needs company, but he’s virtually helpless and terrified of being alone in the house, in case the bogeyman calls. As you’ve just seen, I have to lock him in whenever I do have to go out. It’s the only way he feels at all safe.”
“It must be frightful for you. I am sorry.”
“Oh, I expect I’ll survive,” Chloe said, getting up and tossing the invitation card on to the typewriter before re-filling her cup. “Can I top you up too?”
I joined her by the table, thinking hard and fingering the card as she poured me out some more coffee. There was something derisory, almost contemptuous in her manner which had gone far towards overcoming my earlier scruples and to send me veering over to Brenda’s side again, and it prompted me to say:
“You’d better write down my telephone number on the back of this, Chloe. Then you’ll be able to call me up some time and let me know whether you can come or not.”
She turned the card over and wrote the number as I dictated it. It was reasonably conclusive, but to make absolutely sure I added hastily:
“And now put ‘after seven, or lunch time, and ask for Robin, if I should be out’,” throwing in all the wordy detail I could think of, in order to get a fair specimen of her handwriting. When it was done I went on:
“I’ve just remembered one other thing I meant to ask you: have you had any news of Mike Parsons?”
Chloe dropped her pen on the table and replied in a matching throwaway voice:
“I heard rumours that he’d left his wife, which, if true, doesn’t surprise me in the least.”
“Oh, really? I wouldn’t have said she was that bad.”
“Don’t misunderstand me. I’ve never laid eyes on her and I know nothing about her, except that she’s reputed to be an alcoholic, which doesn’t surprise me either. What I meant was that it was just the kind of lousy trick that Mike would play.”
And considering that this was just about the most unlikely remark I had expected to hear, I felt that I managed to conceal my astonishment reasonably well.
“Why do you say that? I’ve always found him such a kind little man.”
“Oh, he’s kind all right. That’s the trouble.”
“I don’t understand you,” I said, walking away from the table and sitting down again. “You say you’re not surprised and yet how could it be called kind to abandon a wife and two young children, especially when he’s always kept them tucked them in such an isolated compartment that now he’s gone they have no one to turn to?”
Chloe, who had also returned to her chair, regarded me coolly over the top of her cup.
“It beats me why you seem to have a stake in this, but before you get any further involved it might be as well to set the record straight about Mike.”
“I agree, although I haven’t become involved of my own volition. It was simply that his wife came to me in great distress and asked me to help her. I had met her once before at a studio party and that was why she picked on me. She thought I might know who Mike’s friends were and perhaps find some clue through them as to what had become of him. I felt sorry for her and he’s always been the soul of kindness to me, so the least I could do was to make some effort in that direction. Which reminds me, Chloe: did you ever hear him mention someone called Sandy?”
“Never, as far as I recall. Why? Is he another like me who has been marked down to assist the dreary little woman in tracing her runaway husband?”
“Not necessarily,” I replied. “And I hadn’t specially placed you in that category either,” which was true, in so far as I had kept an open mind on the subject until I saw her handwriting.
“Alec didn’t throw out any hints?”
“No, certainly not.”
“I see. So in that case you struck lucky because there does happen to be a great deal I can tell you about Mike, if you’re interested. On the other hand, you may not be because none of it will throw the faintest light on his present whereabouts.”
“I would be interested to hear why you appear to dislike him so much.”
“And so you shall. To begin with, what you patently have not grasped is that this kindness of his is carried well beyond the bounds of sanity. It has become a mania with him and he not only has to be kind, often in a ridiculous unnecessary way, he also has to be seen to be kind. None of your doing good by stealth for Mr Parsons.”
Naturally I regarded this as an exaggeration, possibly emanating from spite, and yet I had to concede that in my own experience of this characteristic of Mike’s he had not, finally, left me in ignorance of the enormity of his self-sacrifice or the extent of my indebtedness to him. So I did not argue and Chloe went on:
“God knows what’s made him like this. Some deep rooted sense of failure or inferiority complex, for all I know, but the fact is that whatever natural, spontaneous kindness he may have started out with has now become a consuming passion. It’s more of a weapon than a virtue.”
“A weapon for what?”
“Power, probably. I know what I’m talking about, believe me, Tessa, and I think it works like this; he begins by going out of his way to do someone a great big favour, usually at some cost or inconvenience to himself, and he asks nothing in return except eternal gratitude and admiration. And that, as it often turns out, is quite a lot to ask.”
“Most people would be quite content to give it though.”
“Oh, I grant you, but it doesn’t stop there, you see. With all this loving trust and helping hand around, the next time they find themselves in a spot of trouble they naturally turn to him. And he’s oh, so delighted to move heaven and earth to get them on their feet again. So very delighted, in fact, that imperceptibly they feel almost a compulsion to ask him for help, as the one means they know of giving him pleasure. It’s as though they tried to express their gratitude by burdening themselves with an even bigger load of it, and of course he uses it to insinuate himself still further into their lives. In no time at all they find they’ve practically been taken over.”
“Well, that’s not been my experience at all,’ I said, feeling on firmer ground here. ‘It’s true that he once did go out of his way to do me a very good turn, and perhaps it did rather exceed what was necessary. I mean that he didn’t really have to drive an extra sixty or seventy miles just to take me home because I could easily have hired a taxi. In fact, I’d have positively insisted on it if he’d told me before that he had to go all the way back to Reading. So to that extent I’ll go along with you, but I can honestly say that since then I’ve had no special reason to be grateful to him. He’s always sympathetic and helpful, but not in an overdone way.”
Chloe considered me appraisingly. “Well, perhaps you’d be flying a bit high for him and besides, except for that one occasion, which he described to me with becoming modesty, by the way, you’d make rather a tough proposition. You’re doing pretty well in your career and you seem to have got your private life running smoothly too. Presumably, you’re not short of money and you don’t go in for affairs on the side, so it’s hard to see what sort of a jam you could have got yourself into which would send you running to Mr M. Parsons.”
“I’d have said you were doing pretty well yourself, come to that.”
“You could say so, but unfortunately it doesn’t apply to my brother.”
“Oh yes, your brother. Is he at the root of all this bitterness?”
Chloe placed her empty cup on a small table, then leant back
in her chair and stretched out her elegant, slender legs.
“You know that expression ‘killing with kindness’?” she asked me. “In this case, it’s literally what happened. You think I’m dramatising it, but Mike has effectively destroyed poor little Johnnie. There’s nothing left to him now which is any use to himself or anyone else, which is precisely why I am so delighted to hear that dear Mr Parsons has vanished from the scene. Personally, I hope he’s gone a long, long way and will never come back, because so long as he’s not around there may still be a chance to pull something out of the wreck.”
“Was it your brother I caught a glimpse of through the window just now?”
“Yes. Gave you quite a scare, I expect? Don’t worry though, he won’t show himself so long as you’re here. He can’t bear anyone to see him as he is now and he’s become terrified of strangers. It’s a shame because he used to be such a sweet, trusting sort of boy; amazingly cheerful and friendly, all things considered.”
She was forced to break off at this point because the telephone rang. I guessed that, once launched on her story, she resented having to interrupt it, for her responses were laconic to the point of rudeness. As near as I can remember, they went as follows:
“Hallo! . . . Yes . . . I see . . . Yes, very well . . . Yes, goodbye.”
She then slammed the receiver down and I said:
“And am I to understand that you blame Mike for the change in him?”
“Most certainly I do and I’ll tell you why. You see, poor Johnnie was born with an incurable disease of the spine and he grew up to be a cripple. It affected his brain too. I don’t mean that he was an idiot or anything, just slightly retarded and he had to go to a special school, so he didn’t get much of an education. On the other hand, they did teach him various simple crafts to keep himself occupied and on the whole he was quite happy. Also my mother adored him. She insisted on keeping him at home, which I think may have been the main reason for my father eventually getting a divorce. It was an awful tie, you see, and they could never go away together unless Johnnie went too. After she died I simply couldn’t keep it up. For one thing, I had to earn my living and I soon saw that I hadn’t a hope of making any sort of life for myself so long as I was stuck with Johnnie.”
“So you put him in a home, I gather?”
“Right. Our own doctor arranged it for me. It was quite a nice place, but of course I felt pretty lousy about it and Johnnie made the most devastating scene when it came to the point. Screaming hysterics for hours on end. I’d never seen him like that and I hadn’t even realised that side of him existed.”
“But you still went ahead with it?”
“I promised myself that if he was still unhappy after a month I’d bring him home, no matter what, but the miraculous thing was that in less than a week he’d settled in beautifully. He never gave anyone the slightest trouble and he seemed perfectly content. He made lots of friends among the other patients too, and in many ways I think he was much better off than when he was living at home with my mother. I sometimes thought it was too good to last, and I was bloody well right, thanks to Mike and his rotten kindness.”
“You surely don’t mean that he talked you into having your brother to live with you again?”
“Oh dear me, no, nothing so simple. He’s a very devious character, you know, and it all began when he got the full story out of me over a cup of tea one afternoon. That wasn’t too difficult because there weren’t a great many people I could talk to about it and certainly none who would listen with such sympathy as he did. Among other things, I told him that I made a rule of visiting Johnnie at least once a month, taking him for drives round the countryside and so on; not because I wanted to or that he was ever particularly thrilled to see me, but really to square my own conscience, if you can understand?”
“Oh yes, I can. It’s exactly what I’d have done myself.”
“Well, anyway, that was where I made my first mistake, because Mike immediately offered to drive me up there the following Saturday. It was around sixty miles there and back and he said it couldn’t be much fun for me going on my own, particularly as I was only doing it out of this ghastly puritan sense of duty, and just to have some company on the journey might help. Naturally I was grateful and it did make the whole difference. It was far less of a strain with a third person along and Johnnie took to him at once. The whole thing went off so much more pleasantly that I ignored the red light even when Mike suggested that he should come with me every time I visited. Looking back on it, I could see what an ostrich I’d been. For a man with a family of his own, who hadn’t the faintest interest in me personally, that was really too altruistic to make sense. There had to be a catch in it.”
“He kept it a close secret from his wife,” I remarked. “That is, I mean, I don’t think she had the faintest suspicion.”
“No, I’m sure of it. I realised when I got to know him better that that has always been his policy. As far as humanly possible, he keeps his life running in separate compartments and if he wants to pursue some course of his own he simply tells her that he’s working overtime. For all I know she swallows it, although it might have occurred to her that anyone who chalks up overtime at his rate ought to be a millionaire by now.”
“By the way, Chloe, on these outings of yours, I suppose you occasionally went into pubs and so on? Did Mike ever have a drink?”
“No, never. He’s completely teetotal, didn’t you know?”
“Yes, but from what you’ve been telling me, he sounds such a different person from the one I know and I just wondered if he’d lied about that too.”
“Oh no, that was all on the level. I’ve an idea he’d been in some kind of accident at one time and it had scared him off alcohol for good, but I forget the details.”
“And to get back to you, how long did this situation with your brother go on?”
“About eighteen months. I’d become more than slightly bored with it by then, but having fallen into the routine it was difficult to break it up. Mike was very insistent about keeping things as they were and although I could have coped with that on its own, there were other complications. You see, Johnnie had developed such a crush on him by this time that he passionately looked forward to our visits. He really used to light up when we arrived. He had so few pleasures that I simply couldn’t bring myself to deprive him of this one merely because it had become a nuisance for me. You know, Tessa, I sometimes wonder if most of the harm people do to each other isn’t caused by misguided unselfishness.”
“And what harm did yours do?” I asked, putting aside the general premise for future consideration. “So far, it all sounds reasonably satisfactory.”
“Oh, sure, but unfortunately that wasn’t enough for Mike. Perhaps he had begun to feel we were taking him too much for granted and the halo was growing a bit dim, for the upshot was that one Saturday morning on the drive up he told me about some article he’d read in the Lancet. It was by a surgeon who’d been experimenting with a new kind of operation for spinal complaints and Mike wanted, or pretended to want, my permission to find out more about it.”
“Why do you say ‘pretended’?”
“Because I suspect that he had already gone quite deeply into it before he even broached it. I told him to go ahead if he wanted to, but that people were always coming up with these so-called miracle cures they’d heard about, whereas our own doctor, who is no doddering old stick-in-the-mud, was convinced that none of them could do Johnnie any good. However, I was beginning to get Mike’s form by this time and I did make one firm stipulation.”
“What was that?”
“That he should not mention a word of it to Johnnie, at least until we had a few more facts to go on.”
“I should hardly have thought that needed saying.”
“You wouldn’t, would you? But you must remember that Mike is so exceptionally kind. He can’t wait to bring hope and cheer into people’s lives.”
“You can’t mean . . . ?�
�
“Oh yes, I can. He went up to visit Johnnie one week day without bothering to tell me. The patients aren’t allowed out of the grounds except with relatives, so Mike spent the afternoon pushing him around the garden in his wheel chair and filling him up with all this rubbish about how he’d have to spend a few weeks in hospital and then he’d be able to swim and play football just like any other boy, and probably later on he’d get married and have some children of his own. Oh, I can’t tell you the absurdities! And the heartbreaking thing was that Johnnie swallowed it whole. Mike was his hero and whatever he said was gospel.”
“So what did you do?”
“What could I do? He was right up in the clouds with happiness and how could I be the one to drag him down? He would always have believed that I had taken away his one chance of being cured.”
“But surely the specialist, if not your own doctor, could have made him understand that this was just a pipe dream?”
“Well, that was my lifeline, actually. I agreed that he should see this surgeon and I said that I’d abide by his decision. If he honestly considered that Johnnie had a chance I wouldn’t do anything to oppose it. I guessed the poor boy was in for a crushing disappointment, but at least it would come from an outsider and not from me. But of course nothing is ever simple, is it? Doctors will never make the ultimate decision, you can’t really expect them to. All they will do is present you with the facts and leave you to make up your own mind. In this case, we were told that there was a fifty-fifty chance of the operation making a partial improvement in muscular coordination, but we were also warned that there was a one per cent chance of things going horribly wrong. I must say that really scared me, but Mike was quite undaunted. He said that surgeons always threw in that sort of warning, even when it was just a straightforward case of taking someone’s tonsils out. They had to do it to cover themselves against the million to one chance of a patient’s heart giving out, or something of that kind. Well, you can guess what happened?”
“The million to one chance came off?”
“Right. Not that his heart let him down. In fact, I’m given to understand that all the vital organs are in fine shape and he’ll probably live to a ripe old age which is a big comfort, isn’t it? But in all other ways he’s much worse off now than before and the most terrifying thing of all is the personality change. Nothing left now of the rather sweet-natured creature he used to be; just a snivelling, quivering jelly.”