Out of the Blackout

by Robert Barnard

  ‘But it wasn’t true?’

  ‘As far as Len was concerned it was one big laugh. He’d tried to stop Teddy enlisting, as you heard. You’d only got to watch him reading the papers. As soon as the phoney war ended and they started going into Holland, Belgium, Norway, Len used to sit there reading the news, and snuffling to himself with the pleasure of it.’

  Simon glanced at his watch. After midnight. Before long Len might come to investigate, and he wanted to hear Connie’s version before that, the view of a comparative outsider.

  ‘What happened between Len and Mary?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, not much really . . . not anything you could really pin down, not at first . . . It was all a consequence of him getting more and more jittery. They’d take him in for questioning and that’d scare the pants off him for a few weeks. Hardly a peep out of our Len. Then he’d start getting uppitty again. It wasn’t so much what he said. That was hardly more than “Won’t be long now.” It was the way he carried on: throwing his weight around in the house, laying down the law about little things, playing the big boss. Even Mother couldn’t do anything with him. She was looking forward to Hitler marching down Whitehall as much as Len was, but she didn’t like to see her son getting above himself in her house. She was the boss there, and always had been.’

  ‘She was tarred with the same brush, I gather.’

  ‘Politically? Oh yes, it all went back to Ma. I think that what she loved was power, and she never got enough of it. Dad submitted too easily and died too early. People like Mary just lay down in her path and let her drive over them. It was too easy; there was no relish in it. She loved the Nazis because you could see the power, see it being exercised. Oh yes, it was Ma behind Len . . . So, as I say, those early years of the war were all up and down with Len—no sooner had he decided the Germans would be here in a couple of weeks than he’d be hauled in for questioning, or the boss of the Paddington Mosleyites would be interned. That happened early in 1941. I remember Len panicked—scared bleeding stiff. “I don’t think you’re the stuff dictators are made of,” I said. “Not even the tinpot kind.” He hit me then—but I kicked him in the groin. He wasn’t often violent towards me, because he knew I’d hit back, and where it’d hurt.’

  ‘Unlike Mary.’

  ‘Unlike Mary.’ The smile of complacent superiority mantled her face again. ‘Silly cow. She had only to let him have it once and he’d have given over.’

  ‘What went wrong between them?’

  ‘Oh, a lot of things. Sort of combination of circumstances. She never went along with him politically, of course. She’d do what he told her—even take little Davey along to meetings if Len really made an issue of it—but there was always this silent disagreement. She’d say, “I don’t meddle with politics,” but Len knew what that meant, and so did Ma. Then, when the raids started, she wanted to take Davey out of London, for his own sake. She wanted to go with him. I don’t think it was just the raids. I think she wanted to get him away from Len. Give Mary her due, she was a good mother: if you like the doting parent line you had to admit she was good with the boy.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t he let her go? He always says how fond he was of the boy.’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine. Thousands were going into the country every day, and he said he wanted Davey out of the raids. Because London was hell—for months on end it was pure hell. If you want my guess as to why he wouldn’t let her go—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It was pure jealousy. He was jealous of her with Davey. It wasn’t that he wanted Mary in Paddington (though he did need someone there to bully), it was that he didn’t want her in Sussex with the boy. You know Len—suspicious as hell. He thought she’d turn Davey against him. Thought that even if she didn’t (and she wouldn’t have, she wasn’t the type at all), she’d become everything to him, and he, Len, nothing. Davey was the apple of his eye; he never could have borne that. So things got worse between them. Mary never put herself up openly in opposition to him, but there was that dumb resistance—all silent, passive, and doubly aggravating. Len got riled! His own wife! Len was always bloody primeval in his attitudes.’

  ‘So there was . . . violence.’

  ‘Now and then. You don’t want to hear details, do you? He roughed her up a bit. First the isolated blow—you didn’t need more than that with Mary . . . But then he rather got a taste for it . . .’

  ‘Until he murdered her.’

  Connie drank down the last of her whisky, and swivelled round in her chair to face the sad-eyed young man who was standing over her.

  ‘That’s your word. I never used that word.’

  ‘You suggested manslaughter.’

  ‘Well, I might go along with that. If you listened to Len you’d think it was nothing more than an accident—pure bad luck. That’s nonsense, of course, but you know she was a sickly little thing. Didn’t your mother ever mention that? One endless series of complications, her pregnancy. I wouldn’t mind betting she had a brittle skull. Of course, if the police had known what happened, they would certainly have charged Len with something—especially as they were so interested in him anyway. It would have given them a handle, and the authorities a propaganda point. But I never entirely blamed him, because he never intended more than roughing her up a bit, and I know I’d have found Mary infuriating if I’d been married to her.’

  ‘You take it very lightly,’ said Simon bitterly. Connie shrugged.

  ‘Just being honest. Of course, I pretended to blame him . . .’

  ‘To get him worked up? Scared out of his wits?’

  ‘It didn’t need me for that. He knocked her to the floor, and when she just lay there and didn’t move, he started shouting at her. It was the third or fourth time he’d hit her that night, and he thought he might have gone too far. When she went on just lying there, he was absolutely pissing himself.’

  ‘So you moved the body—’

  Connie had pricked up her ears. She had heard something from outside the room. Once again that expression of self-hugging delight appeared on her face.

  ‘Ah well—now you can have the pleasure of telling him what you think we did next. Len! In here, Len . . . I knew you’d come back. Guess what Simon here’s been doing, Len.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Looking for evidence to convict you of murder.’

  Len’s face had been haggard when he came in. At Connie’s words he flinched as from an expected blow, and his eyes became wild with fear. Connie had got up, and had said her piece rather as if introducing the two men for the first time. Now she sat on the table, jiggling her foot up and down as if in time to some unheard Beatles song, forgetting even to pour herself a drink. Her mouth was curved into a cat-like smile of anticipated pleasure, and she watched Len’s every reaction, every symptom of his panic, with the relish of a connoisseur. Len and his mother were not the only members of the family who enjoyed the exercise of power, who fed greedily on the terrified twistings and turnings of the cornered weak.

  ‘Murder?’ said Len, his voice suddenly rising to a squeak, after which he swallowed convulsively two or three times. ‘What are you talking about? She’s not even dead yet.’

  ‘Who isn’t?’ asked Simon.

  ‘Mother. She’s still alive. They say she’ll pull through, with luck. You must be out of your mind to talk of murder. I was over by the table when she fell. Yards away from her.’

  ‘I know you were,’ said Simon. He was in command of the room now, with Len stealing covert glances at him and trying not to catch his eye. Please God let me not get enjoyment from this, said Simon to himself. Aloud he went on: ‘I could see you by the table when she cried out. You were nowhere near her. I’m not accusing you of murdering your mother.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Len. His sigh of relief was audible. Suddenly he turned on his sister. ‘What the hell do you mean by saying he was? You’ll be sorry for this, you bitch.’

  ‘What interested me,’ said Simon, breaking in on him
, ‘was what you said after your mother fell.’

  Len swung back, his panic renewed.

  ‘Why? What did I say?’

  ‘You said: “Bear witness I was nowhere near her.” ’

  ‘Well, no more I was. You saw me. You can bear witness.’

  ‘I can,’ said Simon, still looking straight at him. ‘But that wasn’t the reaction of an innocent man, was it? Why should you think you needed anyone to bear witness? Innocent of this—but guilty of what? You’d been afraid, for years, of being accused of killing somebody. Who was that somebody?’

  ‘That’s nonsense! I was just confused.’

  Connie smiled with feline solicitude at her writhing brother.

  ‘You shouldn’t imagine he just got this idea tonight, Len. Why do you think he’s been all palsy-walsy with you? He’s been into it, knows about it all. He was just about to tell me, when you came in, how we moved the body.’

  ‘What body?’

  ‘Your wife Mary’s,’ said Simon. ‘Whom you killed.’

  ‘My wife? I loved my wife. I’ve told you, I worshipped the ground she walked on.’

  Simon took a step closer to him, his eyes still fixed on the terror-stricken face. Len cringed back. Simon spoke as if he were reciting a charge.

  ‘Mary, whom you killed. It was early in the war, and you were all het up. You had to hit out at something, and she was there. You couldn’t stand opposition, and you knew that in her heart she stood against you. You hit her—then more, then more still. Real beating. You found you liked it. It gave you something you needed—when the fix of meetings and marches and salutes had been taken away. It was the sort of pleasure you might have had a great deal of, if the war had gone the other way. You enjoyed it, and you went too far.’

  ‘I never did. This is fantasy.’ Len was hopping in an ecstasy of panic, and then he turned on his sister. ‘What have you been telling him?’

  ‘Make up your mind, Leonard, do. Either it’s fantasy, or I’ve been telling him things. As a matter of fact, I haven’t told him anything he hadn’t already worked out for himself.’

  ‘Then you moved the body,’ resumed Simon, his voice rising a tone or two. ‘It was May ‘41, the last big raids of the Battle of Britain. The sort of marks she had on her could easily have been confused with injuries gained when a house was bombed. Especially when the medical services at the time were stretched almost out of existence. I expect one of you went to prospect for the nearest badly bombed house—’

  ‘Ma,’ said Connie. ‘Ma went.’

  ‘Then you took her to the house in Fisher Street. Where was that? Through the back yard and into the ruins?’

  ‘Further than that,’ said Connie feelingly. ‘A bloody sight further than that.’

  ‘You shut your lying mouth.’

  ‘I just said that Fisher Street was further away from Farrow Street than Mr Cutheridge implied,’ said Connie in a sweetly genteel voice. ‘Where could be the harm in that?’

  ‘And you left her there with the other bodies. And when she was found, I suppose you told the authorities she was visiting there. That they were friends of hers.’

  ‘I always said “slight acquaintances”,’ said Connie, again looking with relish at her brother to see the effect of her words on him. ‘I thought there might be relatives or friends to pop up and say the dead couple had never heard of the Simmeters. Though as it turned out the poor things were new in the district, and hardly had any family.’

  ‘Shut your mouth, you bitch,’ shouted Len, in a vitriolic burst of self-assertion. ‘You’ll make him think this crap he’s imagined is the truth.’

  ‘Well, isn’t it?’ asked Simon. ‘What’s your version?’

  ‘I don’t need a version. It was accepted at the time. Mary was out visiting. She was visiting a house that was hit by a bomb. Everyone in the house was killed.’

  Suddenly, to Simon’s amazement, Connie began to laugh. It was a laugh that began small, but billowed out, as if she had been saving up the humour of it for twenty-five years, having had nobody with whom she could relish the comicality of the thing.

  ‘Oh dear, Simon: it’s a good job nobody had the time to go deeply into the story at the time. Isn’t it, Len? Nobody seemed to find it at all strange that Mary was out visiting at the Rosebournes’, did they? It never occurred to them. If they’d looked into it further, they’d have realized that she never could have been.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Simon, and was greeted by a further billow of laughter.

  ‘It wouldn’t have been allowed. Because they weren’t really called Rosebourne, were they, Len? They were called Rosenbaum. And they were Jewish. Poor refugees from Nazi Germany. You wouldn’t have let Mary nod her head in the street to them. We’d put Mary in the home of a Jewish family!’

  ‘You . . . stupid . . . bitch!’ said Len, spitting it out slowly, trying to endow it with the concentrated bitterness of three decades.

  ‘The funny thing was . . .’ said Connie, her words still interrupted by gusts of laughter, ‘that we heard afterwards . . . that the man was on the list of the authorities . . . as a suspicious alien . . . If things hadn’t turned out as they did . . . he and Len might have been interned together!’

  And Connie had her last gleeful laugh over the long-past pains of others, and then subsided somewhat.

  ‘But as it was,’ Simon put in quietly, ‘you pulled up your roots and got the hell out of Paddington.’

  ‘That’s about it. Len never really felt safe in Paddington again. About a month after that he took a job at the Angel, and we bought this house. Made a big loss on the Paddington house, but Len insisted. The only thing Len values higher than money is his own skin. Of course, if anyone had wanted to trace us, they could have. It wouldn’t have been difficult. But Len insisted no one would go to so much bother, and for once he was right. He was never called in for questioning after we moved. You just weren’t a big enough fish, were you, Len?’

  ‘Look,’ said Len hoarsely, turning on Simon. ‘I want an end to this. What she’s been babbling on about is spite, nothing but spite. Not a grain of truth in it. You don’t imagine, do you, if you go along to the police with a story like that, that they’ll take you seriously and start looking into it?’

  ‘No,’ said Simon, suddenly strangely weary. ‘No, I don’t. I don’t think I ever envisaged it becoming a matter for the police.’

  ‘I heard the word “murder” used,’ said Len, feebly aggressive.

  ‘Justifiably, from all I’ve heard tonight. But you’re quite right: even if I wanted to, I could never get the police interested. And I’m not sure that I’d do it, even if I could. I just wanted to know. I’ll be getting out of here tomorrow.’

  ‘And why,’ demanded Len, his body now held more confidently, expressing, indeed, an almost cocky confidence now that he seemed safe, ‘should you “want to know” may I ask?’

  ‘I’m sure he’s a Spurling,’ announced Connie, with obvious self-congratulation at her own perceptiveness. ‘I’d put my money on one of Enid’s. She was one of those dull, plodding women, Enid was, who’d go worrying away at a thing, year in, year out. And she was very fond of Mary. She had a son a year or two older than your David, but I can’t remember his name. They never liked us, Len.’

  ‘So you’re one of the Spurlings, are you? By Chrr-ist, that was a dull family if you like! I don’t congratulate you on your parentage, young man. Pillars of the Baptist Church—that’s what you lot are, or were. The Church deserved you, and you deserved the Church, if you ask my opinion. Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do: in the morning I’m going to send you packing.’

  ‘You won’t need to.’ Simon still seemed possessed by this great weariness, and he made no attempt to reassert dominance over Len. ‘I’ve found out most of what I was looking for. That you were a bully inside the house as well as out of it. That you mistreated your wife, and when eventually you killed her, you covered up the killing with the help of your family. I th
ink the fear you’ve lived with since has been some sort of punishment. I hope so. If I’ve added to it I’m glad. I’d like to think you suffered something for what you did.’ He paused. ‘There were some other things I’d like to have found out. I’d like to know what happened to your son.’

  At his mere mention of the word, there sounded through the room an animal-like cry, a howl of anguish.

  ‘My son!’ cried Len. ‘You talk about punishment, and then about my son!’

  His face was crumpling, as it had in the pub, and he suddenly sank into a chair.

  ‘Oh Gawd,’ said Connie, with unshakable calm. ‘Don’t start him off about his son.’

  ‘You talk about punishment,’ howled Len again, his shoulders heaving up and down. ‘That was my punishment. If anyone had said, “What’s the worst thing that could happen to you?” I’d have said, “To have Davey killed in a raid.” And that’s what they did to me. Some Luftwaffe pilot on his way home, just getting rid of his surplus stuff. On my David. If you want me punished, then you’re too late. That was it. Talk about suffering—a boy like you doesn’t know what suffering is. I wish I’d died the day I heard.’

  There was something so anguished, so intense, so drained about the man, coming through his inadequate language, that Simon momentarily felt a twinge of doubt. Did he believe this? Could it be that it was Connie who had got rid of him, and foisted some kind of death notification on Len? As a super-vicious joke, presumably? He looked at Connie. If she had, then surely there would be some sign on her face of that secret knowledge—some hugging to herself of what she had done all those years ago. But there wasn’t. There was nothing in her look but sheer contempt Len must be acting—acting out grief for a child he had himself got rid of. Got rid of, surely, because he had seen too much.

  Suddenly Simon’s weakness gave way to a desire to retch. All he wanted to do was get away from this house, these people. His people. Suddenly he wanted to make acknowledgement that his people were those who had made themselves his people, and that these were nothing to him.