by C. P. Snow
Others were laughing, as though the let-down was a relief, as though they had forgotten the moment in which they stood – or perhaps as though they wanted it to linger. Tess watched Stephen, unable to restrain, for an instant, a sardonic smile, which she had seen when he was happy. Emma said: ‘Have we got it all wrong? Is there a chance we’ve got it wrong?’
She meant, could they all have been loyal after all. She asked like one grasping at a new hope and wanting to believe. Not quite at once, but after an instant’s silence, Mark said: ‘I’m sorry.’
He said it gently but with certainty.
‘What are you getting at?’ Emma asked harshly, but she knew.
‘We’ve not got it wrong.’
‘How can you tell–’
‘No. I know.’
‘We don’t believe in bleeding clairvoyance,’ said Neil. ‘You’d better explain how.’
‘I can’t. But I know.’
Stephen was certain who was Mark’s source, and Lance could make a guess. In fact, though, the others were convinced. The moment of hope – and it had been a moment of hope – had vanished. They were back with the harsh clarities of the night before. Even though Neil had started to argue, his tone had been tired and resigned. Now he said: ‘Oh, have it your own way. Then where do we go from here?’
In the high room, all lights switched on, faces had become guarded once more. Again each was hesitating before he spoke. Until Lance shouted: ‘I’ll tell you where we go. We’re going to have the hell of a good party. If it’s the last thing we do.’
He added with a sidelong grin: ‘Of course it may be.’
Astonishing as it seemed afterwards, their mood had swung, wildly swung, and they were to remember afterwards that none of them said no. More than that, Lance, that odd-man-out, had touched a trigger releasing unknown forces.
There was one level voice. Unobtrusive, matter-of-fact, Bernard said: ‘Isn’t there work to do?’
As they looked at him, quietened, he went on: ‘We ought to settle the contingency plan. Plan B2.’
That was the plan which they had argued about, which Neil had pressed, on the two preceding nights. If the exposure was coming within days – still none of them knew their enemies’ timing, nor whether it was fixed – then they should get their own attack in first. Some of it would be ragged: their political contacts weren’t ready, though most of their press was. It could be mounted within seventy-two hours, by Thursday afternoon. It wouldn’t be the operation they had planned for. Nevertheless they wouldn’t have been silenced.
Although Neil, with his ally Emma, had demanded a decision the night before, they hadn’t made one. For a reason which didn’t need saying, and had, with the curious delicacy of distrust, not been said. They could name a date – but then security would be broken again. All they were arranging, there was someone to listen to. The realization had the crystal sharpness of paranoia, except that it was true. They assumed – certainly Stephen assumed – that this talk of the contingency plan had already been reported.
That would be so with what they decided that night. Yet did it matter? Either/or. Either wait, and the other side got in and stopped you. Or mount the plan, knowing it will have been leaked by next morning: in which case you might still be stopped. But there was a finite chance that way, against a certainty.
‘That may be right,’ said Stephen, in answer to Bernard. But though Stephen’s intellect gave a clear answer, he had to control himself to sound positive and give a lead.
‘Of course it’s right,’ said Neil.
At once they began to take part in a committee meeting. In the future some of them recalled it as the strangest committee meeting they had had: on the spot there was nothing outwardly strange about it. The sense of a spy among them flickered in and out of minds but it may have been more omnipresent in retrospect than there, in the prosaic well-lit room, discussing in the business like fashion they had used so many times before.
By this time they were all trained to business. When the others applied themselves, so did Lance. They were as competent as a meeting of officials – probably more so, certainly less long-winded, than a meeting of executives at Mark’s father’s firm. The standard of relevance was high. The proceedings were quite short, all over in less than half an hour. At any meeting of decision, as opposed to theorizing, they had always taken secret minutes, kept by Bernard, and deposited in a safe at Stephen’s bank. The minute of that meeting had its own terse eloquence.
Moved: To put plan B2 in operation by 6.00 p.m. Friday, 16 January, 1970.
In favour: St John, Forrester, Knott, Kelshall.
Against: Boltwood, Robinson.
Carried
There hadn’t been a vote on paper. Stephen had asked each of them where he stood, for or against, and had then, with what seemed to others like uncharacteristic indifference, not cast a vote himself.
‘That’s all,’ said Lance, after Bernard had read out the minute.
‘Perhaps that’s all for tonight,’ said Stephen.
‘We can’t do anything tonight,’ Lance looked round. ‘Right?’
‘Right,’ said Neil.
‘Now it’s a party,’ Lance proclaimed. ‘Anything you like.’
Again the mood swung. A good many people, including some of those in the room that night, elected to face a disaster, and even more an issue hanging undecided, stone cold, without any softening to the nerves. As a rule, that was so with Stephen. But not this time. He too, before he began to drink, had already been taken into the collective mood. When he did drink, the mood – it was something like well-being – ran through his bloodstream and his senses. A first whisky wouldn’t usually affect him like this: in the fashion of his kind of family, he had been used to alcohol since he was a child. Yet, after another whisky, he was gazing round at his companions with euphoria, with yearning, with hope. There was Bernard, across the room, near the side window, sipping at a glass of beer: he had never seen Bernard with a drink before. Closer at hand, Lance was standing by the sofa, and Stephen listened to him exhorting Emma: ‘Come on, girl. Take a trip.’
Any other night, Stephen would have told her not to. Now he watched, the sight was sharp, the sounds were pleasant, as Emma answered: ‘Oh, I don’t mind if I do,’ and Lance picked up a bottle and poured a few drops into her gin.
Stephen wasn’t drunk, or even getting drunk, nor was anyone there. Yet excitement, strain, perhaps even lack of sleep, blended with alcohol, had brought him – and this was true of others – into a state of synaesthesia, in which the senses were confused, bright lights clanging like noise, cries, laughter approaching and receding like light and dark. So that the room was a riot of confusion, sights and sounds clashing and bringing pleasure, resonating with each other as from the interior of a telescoping cave. Together with that synaesthesia, there was another confusion, as though feelings had become blended too, so that, more soothing than at any time since last Saturday night, it seemed simultaneously that nothing would happen and that all that would happen would dissolve into ease.
He was later to regard that interval with incredulity and shame. He couldn’t believe that all his caution, his concentration, had – for no reason, on that special night – evanesced. And yet he couldn’t deny his own experience: he had to recollect that, for a couple of hours in that room, he was basking on an island of peace. Later, he knew that it lasted for a couple of hours, but then he had no sense of time passing. No one had mentioned eating: some must have been in a condition like his own. Time too had its relativistic shortening. Once he looked at his watch, and noticed that it was 7.55.
Not long afterwards – he was listening to Lance, whose face was softened with Stephen’s own benignity – he heard a shout. No, not a shout, a bark of exclamation.
It came from Neil.
‘Bernie.’ That was all he said.
They looked to the end of the room.
Neil, stiff-armed, pointed to the side window. It stood wide open. That was no
thing new. It had been opened long since, to waft away the smell of Lance’s reefers.
‘Bernie. He walked out.’
Neil said it without expression. For an instant, others gazed without expression at the open window. The rectangle was innocent, a curtain stirring gently in a draught of air. It was an instant of dead blank. Shock hadn’t reached them, it was the vacuum before the shock. When afterwards they tried to explain what they saw and felt, the accounts contradicted each other, but all were reconstructions after the fact. Tess believed, and held to it, that she had heard the smash on the pavement: but that was almost certainly an illusion. She was sitting near the front window, talking to Mark, some distance away, with her back towards where Bernard had been sitting and nothing to draw her attention. Neil was close to him. His story, from which he never departed, was that he watched Bernard get up, stand quite straight, take two steps and then another over the sill and through the window. Others began to think that they had seen the same sight, but that might have been in retrospect.
15
Neil was the first to act. ‘Come on,’ he said, and vanished out of the room. Following him, from the top of the stairs Stephen heard the footsteps clattering below. It was some distance, perhaps a hundred yards, round the front of the building, along the New Walk, down the side street under the window. Along that street there was no one in sight, but only, near a lamp standard, a heap on the stone flags.
Neil was there first, and had already turned away when Stephen joined him.
‘I think he’s had it,’ said Neil.
There was no inflection in his voice: and, as he told Stephen that he would ring the ambulance, he might have been making efficient arrangements with a stranger. His quick footsteps departed in the direction of the apartment, and Stephen knelt down beside the body.
He had not seen a corpse before (he had been born at a time curiously sheltered from the sight of death), nor a man dying. He hadn’t seen wounds.
Bernard’s right shoulder was twisted under him, but his face was looking upwards. In the lamplight the skin shone a livid blue. His eyes were open, pupils dilated: but Stephen was looking at the black courses, three or four almost in parallel, running from the side of his head down to his temple and cheek. From two of these a flocculent mass had issued, and could, like ectoplasm, still be seen ballooning out: Stephen thought of it as white, for he knew that was the colour of brain tissue, but on a colour film, taken under the lamp, it would have been nearer green. There was a lake of blood percolating over the flagstones, more on his clothes, missing his coat, darkening his trouser legs below the knees. As Stephen stood there, he was, without being conscious of it, shifting his feet to avoid two disjected pools. There was the sweet thick smell of blood.
Afterwards Neil said that, when he first arrived, he had heard the sound of quick pulsing breaths. Stephen heard nothing. He felt nothing, not pity or remorse or fright (all of that came later), except the hollowness of not knowing what to do. Perhaps he felt how un-human death could look.
Mark and Tess had come beside him. Tess gazed down at Bernard, and said: ‘We mustn’t move him.’
The three of them stood silent. Very soon, from the other side of the quiet street, two or three passers-by stopped and crossed over. ‘What’s happened? What’s happened?’ said someone in an officious, kind, inquisitive tone.
‘He fell out of a window,’ Mark replied.
‘Poor chap.’ Their interlocutor, who was wearing a bowler hat and carrying a briefcase, made his own inspection and then faced them with a brisk glance: ‘You must send for an ambulance.’ ‘That’s been looked after,’ Stephen said. All this sounded a long distance away.
‘In that case,’ said the bowler-hatted man, ‘I’d better go and find a policeman.’ He jogged off towards the main road – from which, only a minute or two later, blue light flashing, siren hooting, the ambulance arrived. Neil had returned by now, and two ambulance men were asking the same question as the passers-by, and getting the same flat reply.
As the two men, quick-handed, laid Bernard on a stretcher, Tess asked: ‘Is he dead?’
‘Can’t tell you, miss. They’ll let you know about him from the hospital.’
Stephen had written down his own name, Bernard’s, and the telephone number of Lance’s flat (that was the first time that any of them thought of how to tell Bernard’s parents), but before the ambulance drove away a policeman half ran down the road, the organizing man behind him.
The policeman had some whispered words with one of the ambulance men. As the flashing and hooting started again, and the vehicle swirled round the corner, the policeman asked Stephen whether he knew Bernard.
Hearing the reply (or really the tone which Stephen, in trouble, couldn’t subdue) the policeman changed his manner.
‘I’m afraid it looks bad for him, sir.’
The policeman, whose name was Shipman, was a local lad, quite young, fresh-skinned. His questions were unassertive. Where had he fallen from, did they know? Who lived there? Had anyone seen him fall? It was Stephen who told him that they had been in the room themselves.
‘I see,’ said Shipman. Tentatively, soft-voiced, he thought they had better go up there again: he’d have to take statements, of course they knew that.
On the way upstairs, Shipman asked Stephen: ‘What were you all doing there, sir?’
‘Just a party.’
A very small party, Stephen added.
‘A bit of drinking, was there?’
‘A bit.’ Stephen recollected that his breath must be obvious enough. ‘I’ve had three whiskies myself. Maybe four.’
‘That’s all right, that’s all right.’
Stephen was utterly alert, not numb but chilled, chilled into control, as much by fear as shock. Fear, purely selfish fear, or rather a set of fears, one replacing another. What would this man notice? Would Lance have had the wit to get his drugs away? What state would they be in?
As soon as they entered the sitting-room, light brilliant after the dark landing, cold air blew in their faces. The side window, to which Stephen’s eyes were compelled, had been left open, untouched: but so were the other windows open, over-bracingly for a January night. Lance at least had been active. He was standing up, explaining hospitably that there had been too much of a fug: his speech was connected, the synapses were working, he was cool, serious, not too facile. As for Emma, her head lay back in the armchair, but she gave a half-smile which might have meant distress.
Shipman took off his helmet, and appeared younger than before, hair as fair as Mark’s, nearly as low on his neck, and trimmed in the same style. He was shown the window, and Neil began to retell how he had seen Bernard walk across towards it and then out–
‘I’d better talk to you one at a time, if you don’t mind.’
Pulling out a notebook, he sat with Neil in the corner, asked low-voiced questions in his soft midland accent, and wrote as carefully as, much more slowly than, Bernard had written the minutes two and a half hours before.
While he was compiling Neil’s statement, the telephone rang. Lance answered it, and called to Stephen. ‘It’s the hospital. They want you.’
A womans voice said: ‘It’s about Mr Kelshall. The ambulance gave us your name. DOA. Dead on arrival, I’m afraid.’
‘Yes.’
‘There’s a police officer here. He’ll want–’
‘We have one here already.’
‘Oh. Will you put him on?’
As Shipman spoke, inaudibly to the rest of them, Stephen said: ‘He’s dead.’
‘We knew that,’ said Neil.
‘Yes, we knew that.’
Not shifting her head, Emma said: ‘It’s a shame.’
So far, they had said nothing to each other. They had asked no questions, those who had stood by the body in the road, and no one had asked questions in this room. Some of them, coming out of shock as though it was an anaesthetic, watched each other to identify (it brought back some feeling) the lin
eaments of their own fear. They watched the young constable, now sitting with Lance at the coffee table, close by the still open window.
In a short time – Lance looked casual, but wasn’t spreading himself on lawyer-like diversions – Stephen had replaced him at the table. It all seemed so unclimactic, so simple. Once or twice Shipman gazed at him, as though in puzzlement, with light-blue Nordic eyes. In holidays years before, Stephen had played village cricket in the county with boys who looked like this.
Bernard’s name, his address, Shipman had written down already. Stephen didn’t know his date of birth; he wasn’t much over twenty.
‘Did you see him go out, sir?’
‘No.’ Stephen pointed out where he had been sitting; he had been in conversation, and hadn’t noticed what Bernard was doing, for some time past.
‘What was the first you heard of it then?’
‘There was some sort of noise. I think it came from Neil St John.’
Shipman wrote carefully away.
‘Then you went down into the street, did you?’
All simple, like all actions.
More writing: Shipman stared down at his composition.
‘Should you say that he had anything on his mind?’
Suddenly a jangle of suspicions, fear renewed, fear breaking out in a new place.
‘Do you mean, to make him kill himself?’
It was a half-evasive answer, but Stephen’s reactions were quick, it would have taken an observant man to pick out the change in tone.
‘Well, he threw himself out of this window, didn’t he, so I’m told?’
‘Did he?’
It wasn’t precisely what Stephen had been told.
‘You don’t believe he meant to do away with himself, sir?’
‘I think it’s very unlikely.’
That was an honest answer. It might have been wiser, he thought later, to have been less positive: the trouble was, in the shock, in the presence of the fact, nothing else had entered his mind. He hadn’t wondered about suicide, or any other motive behind the fact. To an extent, his caution had returned, enough to be anxious about what a policeman might suspect in Lance’s flat. But, for the first time since Saturday night, his intelligence hadn’t been working. He might have comforted himself that he was more sensitive than most to the sight of death: but in fact it was a source of self-reproach for a long time after.