He went upstairs to his room in a rage and began to pack. He must get away at once. What enraged him was the thought that he had been followed, spied upon. Louie must have gone to the police. What right had they to pursue him like this? He had done no wrong; in fact, he was trying to do the right thing, the sensible thing. No doubt, Louie felt offended; perhaps she was hurt in her pride. She didn’t want her friends to know that her marriage had failed. But if there were any publicity now it would be entirely her own fault. He had done everything to avoid publicity. He rang the bell for his bill before he remembered that it did not ring; none of the bells rang. But almost at once a maid, as if summoned by telepathy, appeared. She looked with surprise at his suitcase, half packed, and said that luncheon was ready and that someone was waiting for him.
‘Someone waiting?’ he demanded. ‘Who’s waiting?’
‘In the coffee-room, sir – a gentleman.’
‘What gentleman?’
The maid did not know, and seemed startled by the question. She hurried away almost at a run, and he realized that he had been shouting at her.
Tom banged his suitcase shut. The maid was obviously a spy, just as Mr Sims had certainly been a spy, and all barmen like to keep in with the police. That policeman had certainly talked to the barman, and how had the police got to know about him except from spies in the place? All at once Westford seemed to him almost as loathsome as his own suburb at home, full of people making demands upon him, thinking about him, discussing him. Certainly everyone in the pub would be discussing him – this mysterious affair, Mr Sponson’s disappearance.
And who was this gentleman? Probably a detective. It must be a detective. He took his suitcase with him down the back stairs. He would escape by the yard. But the barman was at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at him with a thoughtful air, and when he turned towards the front hall, there was his brother, Fred. Fred was shaking hands with him before he realized who he was.
‘Hullo, old chap, how are you? This is a bit of luck, to find you here,’ Fred said.
‘What do you mean, find me here? What do you take me for? You’ve come after me – I suppose Louie sent you?’
‘My dear old chap, that’s none of my business. It’s only that – there’s one or two small points about our own family affairs – about some of our father’s things.’
Fred was in the Army, a major. Tom and he had always been good friends, but they had no family interests in common except their memories. Fred was married, with three children, the paternal estate had been divided long ago, and Tom suddenly lost his temper. ‘Look, Fred,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how you got on my tracks – I suppose I’m being spied on all the time – but it’s no good coming after me like this. You won’t get me to go back.’
‘My dear chap, I wouldn’t dream of it. In fact, I’m all for this idea of taking a holiday, a real holiday. You’ve not had a real holiday for years. Why not come ski-ing with me in Norway?’ He slapped Tom on the shoulder with a smile that was just a little too hearty, too brotherly.
Tom pushed the hand from his shoulder. ‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ he said. ‘The thing is to humour the lunatic, isn’t it? Go along with the poor chap in his wildest fantods.’
‘Good heavens, no, old boy. I never saw you looking better.’
‘Because the fact is that I’ve just got sane – for the first time in years. I’ve just waked up to the kind of imbecile nonsense that my life had become.’
‘Exactly. I couldn’t agree more. All work and no play – a real holiday – ’
‘Of course I want a holiday – for the rest of my life. You think this is a breakdown. It isn’t. It’s a breakout. What do you suppose my life is like at home – as they call it? Bob and April stopped being my children years ago when they went away to school, and as for Louie, I often wonder whether she ever has been my real wife. Certainly I’ve never known just what she was after or what she thought of me. And these last two years I’ve simply been a nuisance to her. This is a break, in fact, for her as well as for me. It isn’t so much a new life we need as a real life. As it is, we just carry on this marriage by habit. It’s just an imitation marriage, a robot marriage. We go through the gestures because we’ve been wound up and can’t stop the machinery. Well, now I have stopped the machinery and I’m going to have some life on my own and give Louie some life, too. She needn’t be afraid she will be left flat. There’s plenty of money for both of us.’
Fred made a face as if to say, ‘Really, I don’t want all this talk,’ and said, ‘Quite. I quite see your point, old chap, though, in fact, I gather she’s upset, quite ill, they say – But what about some lunch? I’m hungry.’ He sat down at a table in the coffee-room and called the waiter.
But Tom was not going to be wangled in this manner. He wasn’t going to have Fred go on pretending that this act of justice and sincerity was a trifle. He would not even sit down at the table. He bent over it towards Fred and said, ‘So she’s made herself ill. She would, but why? Because she’s upset at what people will say. Because she may have to give up a few parties. Because her routine is changed – like someone who’s knocked off cigarettes and doesn’t know how to pass the time.’
The waiter had arrived with Fred’s chop, mashed potato, and brussels sprouts, the standard lunch at the pub. Fred took a mouthful and then shouted, ‘Waiter, half a can of old and mild!’
This affectation of ease still more irritated Tom. ‘You don’t believe me,’ he said. ‘But what do you know about it? I tell you I’m nothing to Louie but a provider and I’m going on providing. That’s to say, she’ll get exactly the same income as before.’
The waiter came with the beer. Fred took a sip and said, ‘Might be worse’, and then, sticking his fork in the chop, remarked, ‘The children.’
‘Yes, the children. And if I’m nothing much to Louie, I’m still less to the children. They have their own lives, they’ve had ’em for years.’ And when Fred went on eating his chop, Tom, now very exasperated, began a long speech about the children. He wasn’t blaming them, he said. They were nice children. It was, in fact, quite right that they should be having their own lives. What was wrong and perfectly stupid was this pretence that he was needed any more – this hypocrisy, which was just as bad for them as for him, and all for nothing. His own life was simply being wasted for nothing.
Fred still went on eating, and Tom, leaning across the table on his knuckles, felt like some village orator addressing a meeting so bored that it cannot even listen. Abruptly he stopped. He was so angry that for a moment he had an impulse to take up Fred’s beer and throw it in his face. The impulse was so strong that he hastily turned away and went out of the room, and, catching up his suitcase, hat and coat, made for the door. But before he could escape, the barman popped out from the saloon bar. ‘Your bill, sir.’ When he had paid the bill, Fred had picked up the suitcase and was saying, ‘Let me give you a hand, old chap. What about the old heart?’ Fred carried the suitcase all the way to the bus. He talked of their childhood. Some old album of photographs had turned up in his attic. Would Tom like to see them? There ought to be a share-out.
Tom said nothing; he could not speak for fear of screaming his rage at Fred. He knew that if he began to speak, if he said a word to him, it would be a shriek, and he dared not shriek.
The bus was standing in front of The Lobster Pot, the village beerhouse, but it was not to leave for half an hour yet. Fred proposed that they should go in for a parting glass, but Tom hastily climbed into the empty bus and took his seat. For a moment he was afraid, he was terrified, that Fred would sit down beside him and go on talking, go on trying to smooth him down, to make him feel that nothing was really wrong, that all this that had happened was quite an ordinary event.
But Fred apparently had more sense, or possibly better instructions. He put down the suitcase beside Tom and held out his hand. ‘Well, old chap, I suppose you don’t want me here, but if there’s anything I can do, I hope you’ll send alon
g and let me know.’ Tom did not take the hand. He wanted to do so, he was fond of Fred, but it seemed to him now that if he touched his hand he would be acknowledging that Fred’s mission was not completely nonsense, that after all there was something in the conventional shibboleth of family unity that had sent him to Westford. He could not touch his hand, and after a moment Fred said good-bye again and went off. What a relief. Tom felt such a sense of release that he was full of gratitude to his brother. He thought, I must write to him, I must tell him that I didn’t want to be rude. It wasn’t a personal matter; it was just a question of principle.
That night he was in Liverpool, at a quiet back-street hotel, a commercial hotel. His plan was to go abroad, to Eire or Europe. He had sent to the office for a letter of credit, addressed Poste Restante. But when he called at the Central Post Office, there was only a note from his chief clerk saying the credit was on its way. When it had not arrived by next morning, he wrote again, with some indignation. And on the next day, the fourth, as he came from the hotel to go to the post office, Louie stepped out of a taxi that had been waiting at the kerb. She threw her arms round his neck and broke into tears. She said nothing – after that warm embrace she only stood gazing at him with an anxious and embarrassed smile. Louie’s smile through her tears struck Tom as especially artificial and disgusting. How ridiculous to try to get round him in this manner. As if he were a child to be wangled by caresses and ‘darlings’.
‘What exactly do you want?’ he demanded. ‘Didn’t you get my letter?’ Just then he remembered that he’d never sent that letter. He’d never quite decided how to finish it. So he added quickly and impatiently, ‘What’s the point of chasing me about like this? That can’t do any good to anybody.’
Louie only continued to gaze with the same tearful and exasperating look of grief.
Another person had now descended from the taxi – Tom’s family doctor, Bewley, an earnest young man, whose long, solemn face had caused Tom to say that he was more fitted to be an undertaker. He was much valued by all those valuable private patients who like to have their kinks taken seriously. Tom did not care for him, and shouted, ‘Good God, and what do you think you’re doing here?’
Bewley did not seem to hear. He did not even look at Tom but addressed himself to a stranger standing a couple of paces behind Louie – a man with very large and very black horn-rims, and very high, square shoulders. His face was square, too, with a pug nose and a large mouth, which was fixed in that habitual, professional smile that marks a floor manager in a store or the master of ceremonies at a palais de danse.
Tom had hardly wondered who the fellow was and where he had come from before he noticed, just behind, as if to take cover from his broad back, both the children. And a little to their right, he suddenly recognized, in a mysterious skulker with an immense coat collar turned up almost to the brim of a bowler hat, the long white nose and little steel goggles of his chief clerk. His whole life seemed to have gathered about him again in this back street – all those ties that had gradually bound him and wrapped him round in that cocoon of dead matter, that dusty nonsense, which, if he could not break through it now, once for all, would smother him.
‘What on earth is all this about?’ he asked Louie.
She opened her mouth to speak, and then lost courage and looked round at the stranger. It was he, with a slight extension of that professional smile, who answered, ‘It’s all right, Mr Sponson. We don’t want to bother you in any way. We’re just going.’
‘The sooner the better,’ Tom said, and, with a sudden conviction, added, ‘So you’re the private eye that’s been spying on me.’
‘Not at all, Mr Sponson.’ The man stepped forward with outstretched hand. ‘I don’t suppose you remember me.’
‘No, I’m damned if I do. Who the devil are you?’
The stranger did not answer, and for some reason Tom did not press him for an answer. He was too angry, too infuriated by that professional, confident grin. What had the brute got to be pleased about? He wanted to hit him, to knock that grin off his pug face. But he saw that this would be a giveaway; it would be just what the brute wanted. To see him rattled. He ignored the fellow, and said to Louie, with an easy, nonchalant air, ‘Now, Louie, you’re a sensible woman. You know perfectly well that all this fuss is completely unnecessary. It’s not helping either of us to see straight. Do realize,’ he went on, in a sympathetic tone, ‘that I’m not accusing you of any conscious hypocrisy, of putting on an act. Not at all. I realize perfectly well that you think you’re doing the right thing. For instance, I’m prepared to bet that you think you need me at home. Don’t you?’ Louie didn’t answer. She only gazed sadly, anxiously. Tom thought, ‘She’s not even listening,’ and he became more urgent. ‘But don’t you see all this is simply because you won’t stop to ask yourself what you’re really doing – what we’re all playing at?’
His voice rose, and he wanted to wave his hands. But he kept them firmly under control. He smiled in a nonchalant, lazy manner. ‘My dear old girl, really, you know – ’
At this moment, he noticed that the party had closed on him. As the stranger had moved in, they had followed, as if drawn by some magnetic centre of attraction. The children were within a yard; the clerk, on the other side, was at his elbow. All at once he lost the thread of his calm discussion with Louie. He started back. He had actually been on the brink of running away, declaring himself a fugitive. And what from? Nonsense? To run away from nonsense, just pretence, a made-up delusion – that would be simply madness. And what enraged him as he looked round at all these nonsense-mongers was their nonsense looks. The children seemed even more terrified than Louie – the self-confident Bob, the popular and rather too successful freshman, now wore the face of a child who has seen a spectre, and April, a plump girl, whose cheeks were normally round and rather too rosy, seemed lank and pale. The lugubrious Bewley had a ferocious glare, as if affronted, and the chief clerk, a highly respectable and rather timid person whose favourite recreation was dominoes, had that desperate frown of resolution that one sees in dentists’ parlours.
Tom waved one hand and muttered, ‘But it’s perfectly stupid’, then turned on the girl. ‘Why aren’t you at school?’
The girl looked frightened, as if she were going to cry, and all the rest turned their faces towards her, as if imploring her to do the wise, the intelligent thing. And obviously, she felt her responsibility but hadn’t an idea of what was expected of her. Then abruptly she stepped forward, gave her father a timid peck on the cheek, quite unlike her usual vigorous embrace, and said, ‘I was so worried about you, Daddy.’
‘But why, why, why?’ He appealed to this child of whom he was so fond. ‘Look at me – I’m all right.’ He laughed gaily. ‘It’s you who are worried, darling, it’s you who are running about with looks of horror simply because I’ve told the truth for once.’ He laughed again, and now both his arms were waving, but he didn’t care. Why care? Why pretend? What hypocrisy, what nonsense! ‘It’s so f-funny,’ he said. ‘Look at you. Chasing me all over England – and why? You don’t want me, you know – you haven’t wanted me for years.’
Suddenly he grew disgusted. What was the good of talking? They absolutely refused to understand. They had simply sold themselves to nonsense. They simply didn’t want to understand truth any more. Talking to them was like talking to Chinese. They were so completely foreign that they could not interpret even his looks, his tone.
‘I’m so so-sorry,’ said the girl, and she gave a sob.
The sob had a kind of echo in Tom’s breast, a physical echo. He took a long breath. He wanted to console the poor child, but he didn’t know how. She was too strange, too cut off from him.
And then, catching the stranger’s eye, noting again his smile, he saw that the fellow quite understood the situation. He was a brute but not a fool. Tom found himself smiling at him in a confidential manner.
The stranger at once stepped forward and opened the taxi door. Tom, percei
ving at once how right he had been about the fellow’s intelligence, climbed in and joyfully took his seat. He was surprised for only a moment when the stranger followed him; he saw at once that this, too, was an intelligent act. He had a lot to say to him – he wanted to explain the whole ridiculous affair. As the taxi drove off, he said with a cheerful and knowing air, ‘I spotted you at once – one of Louie’s psychiatrists.’ The stranger simply smiled, in fact, beamed at him. He now looked like a floor manager who has made a good sale. ‘But all the same,’ said Tom, ‘I’m not having a breakdown. ‘I’m simply fed up with nonsense.’
‘I know. I know. So am I. So’s everybody. You just want to get away.’
‘Get away from the nonsense,’ Tom said. ‘But it comes after you all the time. And it won’t even listen when you tell it it’s nonsense. It won’t even believe it’s nonsense. It’s so absolutely soaked in its own nonsense that it can’t take in anything else. Like fish.’ He didn’t stop to explain this point; he was quite sure that the stranger understood. He smiled hastily to show this confidence. ‘Or whisky. If you cut it off, they’d get the shakes, they couldn’t breathe.’
The stranger’s very spectacles were full of understanding, and Tom waved his hands and leaned towards him. ‘Words,’ he said. ‘It’s all words, words, words. They live on words – they can’t understand anything but words. They think words. You talk to them, but you might as well be burbling in a madhouse to a lot of tape recorders – they only get a lot of noises. You saw that poor child – all the family in tears – for nothing. For absolute nonsense. For words. It makes you laugh.’ And to his horror, he began to cry.
The stranger patted his shoulder and said, ‘All over now’, in a professional but understanding tone.
The taxi drove up in front of a large, discreet building standing back from the road in a surburban street.
‘Is this an asylum?’ Tom asked.
The Penguin Book of English Short Stories Page 26