She took off her petticoat. “You saw what she was wearing? Her dress must have come from one of the top couturiers and cost a fortune. How could I turn up in what I was wearing?”
“She wouldn’t have worried, if she’d even thought about it.”
“Not much!”
“D’you think she worried how I was dressed?”
She didn’t answer and finished undressing, slipped on her nightdress, and began to read.
His trouble was, he thought, indulging in his weakness of a love of paradoxes, he was too successful and yet not successful enough. He made enough money at writing for them to be in a position to meet many of the wealthier and more socially prominent people in the area, yet not enough to allow them to offer much hospitality to those same people. More success and they could have mixed freely, less success and they wouldn’t have met them in the first place — relieving Gwen of much jealous frustration. He must, he decided, give up writing his present style of books and either produce another War and Peace or a ten-volume study of comparative religions.
CHAPTER II
Lower Offley Cottage stood a hundred yards back from the road, in a garden whose untidiness clearly betrayed Armitage’s dislike of gardening. From the outside, the cottage was very picturesque. Timber-framed, it had a long sloping roof to the south, covered in tiles that were patched with moss, and over the top half of the north wall were scallop-shaped hanging tiles, variegated blue and red, a squat central chimney-stack, and small leaded windows. When they’d first rented it, one year after their marriage, Gwen had said in tones of wonderment that it was the kind of place she’d always dreamed of living in without ever believing her dreams could come true. But in the intervening years they’d met so many people whose houses were not just two up and two down, whose kitchens were not cramped and poorly equipped, whose furniture was not an odd collection from sales, that now if talking to wealthy friends she often referred to the place as “our hovel”.
He was not certain, looking back in time, quite why or when she’d become so dissatisfied, so envious of the lives other people apparently lived, so certain that the material things in life were what really counted. Perhaps this has always been her character but she had managed to keep the fact hidden, or perhaps she’d changed, little by little.
Except when he criticised books by other authors, he was reasonably self-honest and ready to admit that he didn’t earn very much by the standards of most of their friends. But then that was the traditional fate of authors. And at least their garret had two up and two down. But Gwen wasn’t interested in traditional fates and seemed unable to discover a sense of humour. She’d read there were authors who made so much money they had to go and live in Switzerland because of British taxation and she felt aggrieved — and ashamed — that he wasn’t one of them. For his part he’d have liked to have made more money for normal reasons, yet, perhaps abnormally, he wasn’t really disturbed that he didn’t. He wasn’t interested in large houses, fleets of cars, expensive hospitality, but he was interested in maintaining his freedom to be able to be rude to anyone he didn’t like.
He didn’t know why his books didn’t sell better. Other authors (much less able) sold foreign rights all round the world. His sold to countries whose advances only looked good in their own currencies. His publishers usually said his books were quite good, and friends — though he placed no faith at all in their honesty in this matter — told him they really enjoyed his work. But the public in every country in which his work was published largely remained indifferent to it.
He was in the spare bedroom which he used as an office, typing with three fingers as he’d never learned how to use more without chaos at the keyboard, when he heard Gwen’s call. “George. The car won’t start.”
He leaned back, flexed his fingers, then stood up.
“Come on. I’m in a hurry.”
Opposite him was a bookcase in which were all his published books, both in English and foreign editions. An American film company had once become interested in the end book on the top shelf and his agent had even reached the point of discussing how many tens of thousands of dollars he’d be paid. An old pro, hardened by the years, he’d sat back and waited, but Gwen had translated the dollars into pounds and decided what kind of a house they’d buy, how she’d furnish it, and even where she’d get all her new clothes. Of course, the whole thing had never got beyond that and there hadn’t even been ten per cent option money. Gwen had been filled with bitter despair, as if the money had actually been paid to them and then taken away. Perhaps that was when her dissatisfaction had crystallised and hardened, he thought, recognising the possibility for the first time.
“Are you coming or shall I call a taxi?”
He hurried out of the room and down the stairs. She would call a taxi and leave him with the bill.
She was standing by the front door in the hall, a grand name for a space so small that neither the door of the sitting-room nor that of the dining-room could be opened whilst more than one person was standing in it. She was wearing the trouser suit which she’d bought in a sale a few months before and altered. He could never understand her passionate longing to buy expensive clothes: she had an instinctive dress sense and managed to look smarter than many of their far richer acquaintances in clothes which had cost only a tithe of those the other women wore.
“I must be at Joan’s in a quarter of an hour,” she snapped. “Why can’t the garage do something to make the car more reliable?”
“The foreman told me that if they tried to do very much more to it, it would fall apart at the seams.”
Her lips tightened and the lines of angry discontent deepened. She completely lacked his ability easily to overcome the lesser annoyances of life.
He led the way out of the house and along the weed-infested flagstone path to the wooden garage which leaned slightly caterwise from a gale two years back.
Once inside, he sat down behind the wheel of the Hillman and checked. The choke was right out. Gwen would have turned over the engine again and again, refusing to push in the choke to see if that would make a difference simply because the car normally needed choke to start: there was a point at which she became so angry that she stupidly and stubbornly refused to try alternative methods to finish whatever it was she was trying to do. He pushed in the choke, floored the accelerator, and tried the starter. The engine fired after a while.
She said: “You’ll have to take me and fetch me: I’m going to be stranded halfway.”
“I’m in the middle of a tricky…”
“It’s funny how your work always suddenly becomes tricky whenever I ask you to do something for me.”
He sighed. “All right. I can carry on to the public library — I’ve been meaning to check up on something.”
“But you’re surely not thinking of going dressed like that? Without a tie, in a shirt with a frayed collar, and a sweater that’s only fit for a dog basket?”
“That’s just the way I’m going,” he answered, and suddenly there was a snap in his voice which told her he was no longer interested in her opinions or complaints. He had his limit. Below it, he would humour her, blunting her frequent ill-humour with gentle ironic amusement: above it, he became inflexible and no amount of anger or wheedling on her part would make him alter his mind.
Joan lived in a mock Tudor house of unique ugliness. She was a lot older than she hoped she looked and expert attention tried to keep her. She was very wealthy and liked people to envy her possessions. She did not like Armitage.
After dropping Gwen, he drove back to the main road and then the two miles into town. Ethington was a market town that in the past twenty-five years had suffered an expansion which altered its character completely, stripping it of most of its previous charm. Family stores in the High Street gave way to supermarkets, Victorian houses with large gardens vanished and in their place came many-storeyed office blocks, streets were made one-way in a despairing effort to cope with the vastly increased flow of traffic, a l
arge bleak car-park was built where there had once been two rows of Elizabethan cottages, the parish church with its unique small wooden steeple on the ground by the side — legend said a bishop in the time of Henry the Fourth had stolen too many church funds for the steeple to be put on the tower — lost the green lawns which had surrounded it, and the market was banished to the outskirts where it became a ghost of its former self. Amidst so much that had been modernised and ruined, the public library was unusual in that it had been altered yet improved. The main library was large and spacious, there was a separate children’s library, reading and reference rooms, and above a large conference hall.
He went into the main library and had a quick word with the head librarian — she always ordered three copies of each of his books — and then carried on into the reference room where he crossed to the shelves with the encyclopaedias. He had picked out the volume he wanted and turned towards the nearest chair before he realised that the only other occupant of the room was smiling at him. For once, he identified a face in time not to give offence. He went round the table and sat down next to Patricia Broadbent.
“Have you come in to do some research?” she asked.
“That would be rather a grand way of saying I’ve come to check up on a fact or two.”
“I’m glad you take the bother. So many writers these days don’t seem to think it’s worthwhile.”
“Shall I let you into a trade secret? If I’m sufficiently authoritative at the beginning of a book on one fact, and can be seen to be, readers will accept me as authoritative throughout the book on all subjects.”
“But what about those who don’t?”
“If they’re that intelligent, they won’t be reading my books.”
She frowned slightly and her blue eyes stared straight at him with disconcerting directness. “Why are you always slightly embarrassed by talking about your work?” Then she shook her head. “I’m sorry, I should never have asked that. Dudley’s always telling me that I don’t think nearly enough before I speak.”
“I’d always prefer that to someone who thinks far too much before speaking…I suppose I’m slightly embarrassed because people always seem to think they have to praise my books, even when I know that they can’t possibly enjoy them because of the kind of people they are.” He changed the conversation. “And you? What are you doing in here? Laying the groundwork for a magnum opus?”
She smiled, and again he noticed how much charm there was in her slightly lop-sided mouth. “I couldn’t write a book — at school I was always very near the bottom of the class for English.”
“In these days bad English is almost an asset.”
Two middle-aged women, dressed in tweeds and looking very earnest, came into the reference room.
“Oh, dear,” Patricia murmured, “now we shall have to be quiet.”
“I’ll be no more than five minutes. How about having a cup of coffee afterwards?”
She hesitated, then said: “That would be nice.”
“Good. All I need to find is a street plan of Bombay that will give me the names of a few roads. Put them in and people will think I’ve actually been there.”
She said: I’m beginning to think you’re really a bit of a reverse humbug. I’ll bet you’ve actually been to Bombay?”
“Only once, and it was a long time ago.”
*
Weir fitted a cigarette into a long ivory holder and lit it.
“I saw Butch Thomas this morning,” said Farnes. He looked across. “’E’s a job what could be lined up quick.”
Weir lowered the cigarette holder. “If that little bastard had the perfect nick on the Crown Jewels, I wouldn’t go near it.”
Farnes rubbed his forefinger across his right cheek, unconsciously tracing out the puckered scar which was a memento of a knife fight. He’d thought it a good idea to work with Butch, but if Lofty said no, that was it. He was far from being the thick-headed, strong-arm man his manner sometimes suggested, yet he knew an unquestioning, unhesitating belief in Lofty that was proof against anything, even the failure of their last job which had landed them in jail. It was a strange, and in many ways unlikely, friendship and there were even times when its essential quality changed so that Farnes would feel a responsibility for looking after Weir.
Weir stood up, crossed the poorly furnished room in the house that stood on the outskirts of Whitehaven, and poured himself out a drink. “Wally, d’you remember that punk in the nick: the one what talked about a job worth a million? What was his name?”
“I’ve forgotten.” Farnes’ chunky, scarred face expressed contempt. “’E was a creep. In for ‘is first stretch — at ‘is age!”
“But he talked about this bank job.”
“Like I talk about paintings,” replied Farnes, naming something about which he knew absolutely nothing.
“I’m not so sure…”
Farnes poured himself another drink and returned to his chair. There were just occasionally times when he found Lofty inclined to be a little stupid, too ready to believe.
They heard the front door slam and seconds later a blonde came into the room. “How are things, then?” she asked. She was in her early twenties and attractive, but in a manner which said she’d learned what life was all about. She showed no surprise when she was ignored. “I’ve got the grub so d’you want to eat right off?”
Weir at last spoke to her. “Yeah.”
She left, hurrying because it was clear Lofty was in a bad mood. He scared her because there were times when an inner force seemed to explode inside him. She’d made the mistake, early on, of making some reference to his small size. She never did so a second time.
Back in the sitting-room, Farnes said: “D’you mind the music on, Lofty?” When there was no answer he went over to the radio and switched it on to the music programme. He had an uncritical love of classical music.
Weir’s thoughts continued to be gloomy. Money was running out fast and he needed a good job. That punk in the nick had talked about a million. A bank could hold that much. The punk had claimed to know some weakness in the construction of the strong-room…The name flashed into his mind. “The guy’s name was Healey. Go find him.”
“Lofty, don’t you reckon ‘e was just talking?” When there was no answer, Farnes drained his glass. It hurt his pride to be ordered out to look for such a punk.
CHAPTER III
There were certain infallible signs that Gwen was angry and one of these was if, at the beginning of a meal, she banged the plates down on the small refectory table, bought at a sale cheaply because it had been badly damaged by woodworm. She banged the two warmed plates down on the table in front of Armitage and then, without a word, left to return through the hall and the sitting-room to the kitchen.
He sharpened the old-fashioned, bone-handled carving knife on the steel and wondered what the trouble was this time? Lack of more housekeeping money, lack of a fixed dress allowance, lack of all the things other women had?
He heard her swear in the hall. When she returned she banged down the battered stainless-steel carving dish. Even before carving the chicken, he could be certain it was either under or overdone. When she was angry her standard of cooking deteriorated dramatically. He often wondered whether this was deliberate and, if so, her real desire was to make his life at least as momentarily unhappy as hers. “How are things going, darling?” he asked. Experience had taught him that it was much better to try to promote an explosion rather than to damp it down.
Again she said nothing before she left. She brought back roast potatoes and Brussels sprouts and the potatoes were obviously not crisp and the sprouts lay in a pool of water. He sighed. He began to carve and cut off one hind leg: the chicken was underdone. “Will you have some dark meat as well as white?”
His quiet patience finally exasperated her into speech and as she sat down opposite him she demanded: “Where were you three days ago?”
The question surprised him since he’d expected to
find the cause of the trouble was financial. “Three days ago?…As far as I know, I spent all day upstairs, working.”
“No, you didn’t.”
He was a skilful carver and the three slices of breast he put on her plate were uniformly thin. “Wasn’t I?”
“No. And you know very well you weren’t.”
He added the lower half of the leg to her plate and then passed it. When he saw the expression of sullen anger on her face he thought how much older she looked.
“You were at the Vandyke cafe and you weren’t on your own.”
He at last realised the cause of her anger.
“You were with Patricia Broadbent. The woman you spent all evening of the Hunt Ball with.”
Deciding it was useless to try yet again to explain about the first meeting, he said: “I’d clean forgotten I met her in the library.” He spoke lightly. “We had a quick cup of coffee together and, as I remember it, if that coffee wasn’t made from acorns, it was made from something worse.”
“Why were you having coffee with her?”
“Why not? We happened to meet at the library…”
“You’d arranged to meet her there, knowing I wouldn’t be around.” She helped herself to a potato and sprouts. She cut a slice of chicken with more force than was necessary. “It must be a bit of a shock for you to learn I know about the hole-in-the-corner assignation.”
He still managed to speak pleasantly. “If you stop to think about it, you’ll remember that I’d no intention of going anywhere on Tuesday morning. I was working. But you couldn’t get the car started and called me down and when the car was going you insisted I drove you to Joan’s. So since my being out that morning was purely fortuitous, how in the hell am I supposed to have had an assignation?”
She was uncertain, but still antagonistic. She seemed to be searching for some flaw in his argument.
As he finished carving, being careful to leave half the bird for the next day, he wondered why she was always so jealous? It hardly seemed worth the bother if he was so poor a husband as she often made out.
The Colour of Violence Page 2