by A. L. Barker
*
As Rumbold went across to the café the streets were still bloomed with last night’s rain and old Chloe Fletcher was on her knees washing between the tables.
“Where’s Evie?”
Chloe slopped out a fan of grey suds. “She’ll come when the streets are aired.”
Rumbold sat at one of the tables.
“We ain’t open for business yet, Mr Rumbold.”
“Neither am I.” It wanted twenty minutes to eight and this was his eighth cigarette. His mouth felt as if chickens had roosted in it.
“I saw Mrs Rumbold yesterday,” said Chloe. “Her and me’s got the same trouble. Conglomeration. We should have been born in the sunshine, Madeiry or Californian where the syrup of figs comes from.”
But for Pyefield Rumbold could have missed knowing and for people like him who couldn’t do anything yet always had to try it was better not to know. He was here because he couldn’t keep away—which was the same as asking to be tramped on.
“I reckon she’s an angel, what she has to put up with.” He looked up to see Chloe squatting there with her arms all blown and pudsy from the hot water, blinking at him like a fat frog. “What are you talking about?”
“Her and me carry the same cross. It ain’t generally appreciated,” said Chloe, soaping the floorcloth, “but first thing every morning before I draw breath I look death in the face. Every blessed morning when I put me stays on. It’s me membranes, they’re all furred up.”
The truth was he was sick and tired of Evie, sick of wanting. His thoughts moved in a beaten circle, every morning he had the same ache in the same place, for all the world as if there were something to miss, as if she’d warmed his bed and gone, leaving the cold hollows. He knew what he would think as he scraped the stubble off his cheeks, he’d look in the mirror and ask, ‘What’s here for her?’ And remember Monty Brind’s rimless gold eyeballs and ask, ‘What’s there?’—and get the answer. And all day the same: moments, jokes, habits, things—every one on a string that led back to her.
“I don’t look for sympathy,” said Chloe, “though it costs nothing. Only one ever said he was sorry was the nigger doctor. ‘Take it easy, Mrs Fletcher,’ he said, ‘you want to take it easy.’ And I said, ‘I can’t, Doctor, I got to put my heart in everything.’ ‘It’s your lungs I’m concerned about, Mrs Fletcher,’ he said. ‘You keep your lungs for yourself.’”
Here, where she spent her days, there were no reminders. It wasn’t the same place until she walked in the door and then it wasn’t a place, it was Evie’s.
“You’ve got a customer,” said Chloe. “Someone wanting petrol.”
A car had turned into the bay and someone had his thumb on the klaxon. When there was no answer, the man got out and kicked at the workshop door.
“You going?” said Chloe.
“No.”
“You’re losing business.” She lifted one of the downturned cups on the counter and took a cigarette from under it. “Why not go and open up—I’ll give her a message when she comes.”
“There’s no message.”
“Please yourself if it don’t bear talking about.”
What was it they said? ‘Waiting is such sweet sorrow—’ Sweet sorrow! He laughed outright.
Chloe gave him a bitter look. “Mrs Rumbold, poor soul, she ain’t only got her membranes.”
Evie came late, but not hurrying. He watched her along the street and he couldn’t stop it from brimming round her. The pavements and the hoardings and the brindled brick turned warm and promising, there was comfort in the air because a girl with yellow hair and hips like a church door was walking down Shop Street.
He stared at her as she came in, reducing her to that—and for a split second she was no more. He threw his cigarette butt where Chloe’s suds had dried into rime and pushed his chair aside.
“Hallo, Barty.” It only needed that to put him back in line. “You’re early this morning.”
“You’re late.”
She yawned and stretched and her body arched with longing. “I didn’t want to get up.”
The need to hit her was so strong that for a minute he thought he had and he was surprised to see her still smiling.
“What’s the matter?”
“Does something have to be the matter when I come in here?”
She sighed and took off her coat. With it over her arm she went to the window and looked across at the garage. Joe was rolling back the workshop doors.
“It’s going to be nice after the rain.”
She had always been pretty free and he hadn’t minded. She seemed like something in nature, with a capacity enough to bestow on the unjust as well as the just, on the good, on the bad and on the unclassified like himself. It was Brind who had made it personal and made it hurt.
“I’d like to be in the country today.” She leaned her forehead against the window. “Remember that place we went to by the river? There was a field full of poppies and tall daisies, it was so pretty. We’ve got a picture like that at home, I always think of it when I look at that picture.”
He could hardly believe his ears. “You mean you remember that day?”
She looked round, smiling. “Well, I should hope so. It was only last summer.”
“It seems years ago, it seems like another life.”
She touched him with that ready compassion of hers. “There’s only the one life, Barty—it’s not so bad.”
“Evie—” He caught her hand. “We could have another day like that, couldn’t we? We could go back there, anywhere you like—this Sunday—”
“Not Sunday, Barty. I can’t go Sunday.”
“Why not?”
“I’m going to my sister’s.”
“Your sister’s!” He spat the words at her.
“You needn’t say it like that.” She drew her hand away. “What’s come over you?”
“Is that where you were last night—at your sister’s?”
“Yes, I was. Why?”
“You’re a liar.”
The colour ran up her neck and even at this moment he wondered where it started from. “You were with Brind last night. I saw his car going up the Finchley Road and the two of you in it. I know his style—pink gins and a double room.”
He didn’t miss her moment’s relish for the thought. “You’re crazy. Mr Brind was in Manchester last night.”
“Do you call him Mister Brind when you’re in bed with him?”
Evie smacked him across the mouth, she was nothing if not a prude.
*
It had been about five o’clock when Joe awoke and the sky was getting thin along the edges. He lodged himself on his elbow, remembering nothing, and watched the chimneys blacken. Lights, strings of them like berries, hung along the river with the wind busying them.
He looked out of the window because he didn’t want to sleep any more. After a while he thought that was because he was hungry, so he went downstairs and cut a slice of bread. He spread jam on it and had eaten half when he remembered why he had had no supper the night before—as if what had happened had been coming along the road after him ever since. Now it had arrived. He felt it settle in, the weight ran down into his bones like lead, like cold lead, and his gust of terror was the first since it had happened. He retched on the half-eaten bread.
It all began again, but not in any sort of order. He’d see the dead woman in the road and Esther turning on her toes in the blaze of the headlamps. ‘I heard them tell you to clean out the you-know-what—’ and the needle climbing up the clock and the lorry driver cursing and he’d feel the power of the car, but now it wasn’t part of him, he wasn’t the flesh and blood of it, it was a fist in his back, pushing him along the black highways to the place where he was going to kill someone.
That wasn’t how you killed, ambling along like the family Florrie, with both hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road looking out for trouble. He had seen killings on the films, they acted death, but it had to be true to
life. There was always someone with a screw loose, or something to gain, or lose, or run for. You didn’t kill without having your mind on it, you didn’t spill life like a packet of panel pins.
She was dead, just the same. She was out of this world and Joe Munn had put her out. Everything moved an arm’s length away, the table where he sat, the cups with last night’s grouts in them, the whole familiar room stood off and left him out in front alone. He wasn’t just Joe, he was somebody, his name had a name and there weren’t so many of the kind he had turned out to be, they were a cut apart from the rest. There was no same, even the taste in his mouth had changed.
Fear made him talk up, as if he had already been accused, saying it wasn’t his fault, saying he hadn’t meant to do it, he hadn’t even seen the woman—
“I was going slow, thirty on the clock and that’s legal—I didn’t have to be legal on the bypass—I could have been doing ninety—it would have been my fault that she stepped out—you can’t tell how fast lights are coming in the dark—”
He told the empty room, the morning shadows and his own self that was stone deaf with fright. “I was only creeping, she saw me creeping, she must have—”
The shadows moved on their haunches and turned a yellow wink in his direction. Christy’s cat, at least, was listening.
“She meant it to happen!”
He couldn’t be blamed for that, could he, for being the way a woman killed herself? “She meant me to hit her!”
They didn’t have to believe it, nobody had to believe you if you were sixteen and had no licence and took and drove a car without the owner’s consent.
“You wanted to push it to the limit—eighty, ninety, a hundred miles an hour, and that’s when you ran her down.”
They would know about the car getting away from him too. “You were frightened, you couldn’t hold it, could you? You nearly bought it on Battersea Bridge.” And they’d know about Esther. “It was your way of being someone.”
They? He asked the shifting eye of the cat who were they, these faceless wonders that knew all about him? Where were they?
The sharp light across the wet blades of the roofs peeled away the shadows, except where a bunch of coats hung on the door. He rushed at them, scattering them with his fists. They fell at his feet and the last one dropped spreadeagled, the outflung sleeve still had the shape of an arm in it.
*
It was midday before Brind came back. Rumbold had waited all the morning, sitting in the office watching the café. Nobody knew it yet, but he had been through that door for the last time. It was over, he had resurrected a shred of pride that he didn’t know he still had, he was never going begging again. It was the end of humiliation and hope—a thin enough thread of hope, but he missed it already, he’d been dangling and making do on it so long. Half the time it had had nothing to do with Evie, half the time he forgot what he was hoping for. Just being able to was enough, expectations were like stomachs, the less they had to chew on the smaller they got.
The brush with Evie had taken the heart out of his anger. When Brind came at last he said, “How was Manchester?” as if he was asking only to be told.
“Wet.”
“It rained here too.”
“I saw someone you know,” said Brind. “Harry Bagger—he spells it Bagehot now.”
“The rag and bottle merchant?”
“He’s turned into a supply company with a board of directors.”
“Harry Bagger? That used to trade a bowl of goldfish for a sack of rags?” Rumbold pitched his cigarette over Blind’s shoulder. “I know you weren’t in Manchester last night.”
Brind said nothing and Rumbold had an inclination to leave it at that: he hadn’t eaten the peach, but he might be left to spit out the stone.
Joe came to the door of the office asking, “Can I go to dinner?”
“At eleven o’clock?”
Brind said, “What’s the matter, Joe? Hungry?”
Joe turned away. “I thought it was later.”
“If you moved quicker so would the clock,” said Rumbold. They watched him shamble back to the pumps and stand looking down Shop Street, slowly rubbing his hands over his thighs. He seemed not to belong there or anywhere.
Brind kept his beak nose turned Joe’s way. “Where was I last night—if I wasn’t in Manchester?”
“My guess would be any of the three-star houses between here and Baldock.”
“Why?”
“I’ve got eyes,” said Rumbold, “and when I put one and one together it adds up to a double room and a phoney name in the register.”
Blind sounded as if he were smiling. “Your guess is better than mine. Who was she?”
“That’s one thing I don’t have to guess—and I’d know that car of yours anywhere.”
“It’s been in the shop for two days with a flat tyre and a broken fan belt.”
“Joe and I fixed that yesterday afternoon. Lucky to find it done, weren’t you?”
Brind was looking at Joe, whose only movement was the steady wiping of his hands on his thighs. “Is he listening for something?”
Rumbold said bitterly, “Some sounds only a dog can hear.” The touch of malice freed his own pity. “Why did you have to take her? Haven’t you got enough of them on the dangle? Harry Bagger was her idea, wasn’t it, to make the Manchester story stick? Oh, I recognise the touch. When I told her what I’d seen last night—” Rumbold laughed through his nose. “She colours up for a lie like she does for love.”
He was conscious of angling after some solidarity, however sneaking, against her. He would have welcomed solidarity even with Brind—especially with Brind.
“What did you see?”
“Your car in Fitzjohns Avenue and the two of you in it.”
Watching Joe who was watching nothing, Brind said absently, “It’s a nice idea. Pity I didn’t think of it.”
“Whose honour are you shielding? Yours?” Rumbold’s voice reached even Joe, who raised his head and looked at them. “I gave you the benefit of the doubt—sodium lighting, back view, rain on the glass and all, and when I got back here the car was gone.”
“Did they bring it back?”
“They?”
Brind turned for the first time. “I was in Manchester.”
“Can’t you do better than that?”
When the light did not catch the lenses of his pince-nez his eyes looked homely. “It’s good enough for you.”
“I shouldn’t have thought she was your type, seeing she’s everyone’s type if you know what I mean.” Rumbold started to shout. “Don’t think this was one of your victories—the only difference between you and the rest of us is that you paid!”
“I’m more modest than you,” said Brind. “I don’t expect anything for love.”
“What’s love got to do with it? Do you think she knows?”
“You’re under-privileged all round, aren’t you?”
He had hated her often when the other feeling went sour on him, he had often blamed the whole tribe on her, the monstrous race of women that was every man’s enemy. He had said they were all tarred with the one brush and it was easy to drabble her in their ordinary dirt. He was well rid, then, of what he could not have. But if the pain of not having was bearable, even pardonable, the ignominy of it was not. This time he hated her for herself alone, without recourse to other women’s unsavouriness, admitting and positively exploiting all that made him desire her. He hated her as she was at this moment and as she had been at Cookham. He held her directly responsible for the kind of smile that Brind was smiling, she had put it there as surely as if she had stroked it in with her fingers.
To jump up in that confined space, kick aside his chair and hit Brind in the face was not the clean controlled movement it should have been. All that Brind needed to do was to step out of range through the open door.
In the act of following through with his fist, Rumbold was caught off balance when the falling chair hit him in the slack of t
he knees. He went down, as on a holy impulse, and ended by kneeling at Blind’s feet, and as if that wasn’t enough, without anyone laying a finger on him the blood started to leak from his nose. It crept over his mouth, salt and soft. He had a moment of panic when the first drop fell, then a kind of fatalism—part stubbornness, part degradation—kept him on his knees while the blood blossomed over the floor.
*
Joe knew now what it was to be empty-handed and still be carrying a weight around. A dead weight. It had settled in deep where he wouldn’t be able to shift it. Already the time without it was a million days ago.
Worst of all was not knowing what they were up to. Did they find the body last night, digging it out of the dark with headlamps, reading his name all over it—“This is what Joe Munn did—he killed her, without a licence to kill, driving a stolen car. Here’s where he stopped, under the hedge, and walked back and got down beside the body, here, looking for a sign of life. Here’s where he put his hand over the heart, only one person in the world would put his hand over this heart. Name of Joe Munn. Pick him up tomorrow, in the daylight, give him time to think he’s dreamed it. Give him more time and he’ll think he’s got away with it.”
Perhaps nothing had happened and the body was still there, nobody had stopped to look, or they thought she was sleeping. It had rained all night and her head was in the gutter, she wouldn’t look like a woman asleep. He should have rolled her into the ditch out of sight. Then she never would have been found until it was too late—For what? And how late would it have to get?
Other questions, like what was he afraid of, what had he done, anyway? he could answer himself. The answer being what it was, being nothing, because nothing was his fault—with luck she would have stepped out and got her packet from someone else—that ought to be the end of it and he ought to feel light if he couldn’t feel easy.
Once he looked up from serving petrol to see a policeman across the street watching, and a voice said, “That’s him, that’s your man.” He stood there with the juice running and his heart still until the policeman turned away, then he had something else to worry about because he had overfilled and petrol was splashing on the ground.