The BRIGHT DAY

by MARY HOCKING

  She dressed and went out. And came back again. ‘Be honest,’ a voice said. ‘You’re not doing this for Geoffrey. You have forgotten more about him than you ever knew.’ Here, the voice ran out of inspiration, or courage. But it had spoken the truth. Should she stay here? Close the doors and the windows, build up a nice fug, turn on telly, light a cigarette, pour a drink. Be safe?

  She went out.

  It was foolish; more than that, it was irresponsible. Geoffrey had told her once that she did irresponsible things deliberately, it was some kind of aggression she was working out. Perhaps he was right. At least when you were aggressive you knew you were alive. She felt aggressive now.

  She went down to the garage. She hoped she had enough petrol. She switched on the engine. The indicator on the petrol gauge flickered weakly and managed to raise itself to a point just above the E. They always say you have half a gallon in reserve, don’t they, those people who know everything about cars? Or is it a full gallon? Perhaps it was only a quarter, because the car gave up just short of Picton’s Quay. She didn’t mind. She was glad of the walk.

  The river was full and running fast, it wasn’t blue but pearl grey, flecked with silver, which she found much more exciting; a blue river is just a reflection of the sky, but now the river was itself. On the opposite bank, the fields and distant hills were dark green and static in contrast to the life that was within the river. Weren’t there people who believed the river was a god? It seemed as good an idea of God as any other. She would be happy to give her soul to the river; if only she could be sure that the thing one referred to as ‘oneself would go with it, that there would be nothing left inside this frame of bone still struggling to get out.

  The river curved out of sight of Picton’s Quay, she could see a few cattle in the fields, a barn. The river curved again and the barn was gone. There was a line of pylons and nothing else. She was suddenly desperately tired and her soul, which a moment ago had seemed so much larger than her body, had shrivelled to the size of a walnut which was lodged somewhere in the region of her chest, hard and indigestible. She flopped down on the bank and rested her head on her knees. The air was still now and she was sweating. She’d done too much today. She hunched there, trying to gather herself together. After a while, someone came and sat beside her.

  ‘I thought we said we’d meet at the cottage.’ His voice was strangely unclear, as though his tongue had come up against an impediment.

  She said, without raising her head, ‘My car broke down.’

  He did not answer. Quite what she had expected, she didn’t know – a blow, perhaps, her shoulders had certainly been braced. Now, as she raised her head, she saw that he was not even looking at her. He was staring at the hurrying river, as remote as the figurehead of a Viking ship, its force unhampered by any civilising restraint. There had been other moments like this, when she had had to wait for him to come back to her. She had always found him frightening; this had been his hold over her. Now, his isolation seemed so complete that she had to try to break it. She put up a hand and ran a teasing finger down his spine. ‘Why are you so angry, then? Didn’t everything go as you planned?’

  His body twitched as though she had pared flesh from the nerve. ‘I never plan.’

  She ran her finger up the back of his neck, fascinated by this newly discovered power to torment. He jerked away from her.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’

  The storm had circled away to the north and a steady rain was beginning to fall.

  ‘We’ll get wet. And I thought something tremendous was going to happen.’ She eased up against him, wary, but very excited. ‘I thought we would have a terrible, rending fight, there would be thunder and lightning. . .’ She had been rubbing her cheek against his shoulder, now she jerked away, crouching in front of him, looking at him with a different expression. ‘You’re soaking wet already.’ She put out a hand and touched his chest. ‘What’s the matter? Aren’t you well?’ Her voice became sharp. She grabbed him by the shoulders, they were rigid as though he had cramp. ‘You can talk, can’t you?’ she shouted. ‘Talk! Talk! For God’s sake, you can’t be ill here. . . .

  ‘No! No, I don’t want that. . . . No, no, not now, not here . . . .’ She lost her balance and slid part of the way down the bank, pulling at the grass with her fingers, trying to get a hold on something. The world tilted over and he was on top of her. Grey sky above. Seagull flying low. She screamed to the seagull. Then hands were round her throat. She drew up her knees and fought to let the power that was in her flow out through her lungs, but it was dammed up inside her and hurting terribly; the greyness was torn aside by brilliant needles of light which seared a way through flesh and bone, and following the path of the needles came the river, a great roaring crimson torrent which grew louder and louder, and louder beyond all belief, pushing at the walls of the skull until the whole universe was inside her head.

  The rain, which had been falling steadily, now began to come down much more heavily. The visibility was reduced; the Downs became first of all a grey smudge above the fields, and then dissolved in mist; the mist moved insidiously forward, dissolving everything except one pylon which remained rising forlorn on the far side of the river. The rain drummed on hard ground, and then, as time went on, it fell with less impact on sodden ground. The river rose perceptibly, only the tops of the reeds showed above it. The man and the woman lay still, side by side, she on her back, her head tilted acutely so that her hair began to trail in the slime at the river’s edge, he on his face, his hands limp at his sides, palms upward. The darkness came early. There was no light and no sound except the rain and the river running fast.

  Rodney Cope had no idea what time it was when he came to himself. His body was heavy and he seemed to have no strength to move it; his head felt light and sore inside, as though someone had rubbed salt into it. His first thought was that he had had a bad nose bleed. He rolled over to one side and looked at his watch. The illuminated dial said eight o’clock, which couldn’t be right; he held it to one ear, the rain seemed to have made him rather deaf, but he thought it had stopped. Above his arched wrist, he saw Pauline lying on the ground. It was so dark, he had to hunch down beside her to see properly, but even before he did this something about the angle of the head told him she was dead. The tide was running out, but because of the rain the river was still high; he put his hands beneath her body and eased her gently into the water, steering her clear of the tangle of reeds.

  When he tried to get up the bank, he nearly fell. He was very weak and guessed he had a high temperature. His mind was working very sharply, however, although it could only cope with essentials, such as car, home, and bed. He stumbled and fell, and stumbled and crawled, until he came to the cottage at the back of which he had left his car. The hood was down. At first, he thought the engine was not going to fire, but at last it started. By the time he reached the main road, he wasn’t sure if he was driving a car or an aeroplane; he nearly landed in a ditch twice. He reached the outskirts of Scotney in the early hours of the morning, which was probably a good thing; there weren’t any people about to see him weaving along the road. There had been a flood under the railway arches and the police were occupied with that. He weaved his way to his garage which was just round the corner from Cadogan Crescent. There was a shoe repairer’s to one side and the yard of the Downland Dairy to the other; the nearest residential accommodation was a few hundred yards away and only one small window to the side of the house faced in his direction. Even so, he cut off his lights and tried to make as little noise as possible.

  It was getting back to his room which was really difficult. He had to hold onto the railings in the Crescent as he went along; twice he sank down on the pavement. Fortunately, his room was entered by a separate door, and Mrs. Simpkins slept on the first floor; it was unlikely that she would hear him. His fingers were as awkward as a bunch of bananas, but at last he managed to open the door.

  He wasn’t finished yet. He had on a cotton sh
irt and drill trousers. He washed them and his socks and underclothes, and hung them with other clothes on the rack in the bathroom. He had to sit on the floor with his head in his hands at intervals while he was doing the washing, and once he passed out for a time. But he got it done at last. He couldn’t cope with his shoes, they would have to be dealt with later. He put them in an old suitcase. Then he lay down on the bed and let the fever take him.

  Chapter Ten

  Mario Vicente lived in a terraced house in a road which climbed steep and straight up the hill from the harbour. The house was nearly at the top of the hill. It had no splendid view since from the front it looked onto the houses on the opposite side of the street and at the back it was hemmed in by the Baptist Chapel and a private hotel called The Larboard Light. Mario’s house, like all the others in the road, consisted of three living areas placed one above the other; what was made of this space depended on the ingenuity of the occupants, and the way they wanted to live their lives. Mario had accepted his house much as it had been during the two centuries since it was built. The front door opened into the living-room and the stairs went up from the living-room; somewhere in the regions above a bath and lavatory had been installed, but few other structural alterations had been made. The back window of the living-room opened onto a narrow paved courtyard where Signora Vicente had been successful, in spite of little sunlight, with a creeper, and plants which trailed from tubs and an iron bucket. Lomax imagined it to be much the same as the house in which Mario had grown up in Naples, except that there were three people living here (since Mario’s son now lived over the restaurant in Pelham Square), instead of twelve.

  Lomax liked Mario for this. He was aware that the fact that Mario chose to live in this way did not mean that he possessed the sterling qualities which are sometimes naïvely assumed to go with a simple style of living. Lomax liked him just the same. It was hard to explain why; but he was at pains to try to do so because this liking for Mario had revealed a part of himself of which he had not previously been aware. Lomax was not one of those people who coast through life only half-alive, aware of things within themselves which must never be released, a dark self locked away in the east wing of personality. So he gave some thought to his reasons for liking Mario.

  Lomax was frightened by violence; but sometimes he suspected that he admired Mario because of the violence in his life and not in spite of it. Violence was a part of the life of Scotney, but most people pretended that it was something that happened in another part of the town. Not so Mario. Mario’s dealings were direct and uncomplicated; his empire was not spread far and he still lived in a world where a man must face the people who have wronged him, or whom he has wronged. Not for him the immunity of a Heffernan, isolated from the more unpleasant consequences of his acts.

  There was corruption as well as violence in Mario’s life. Lomax hated corruption. But he was aware that a certain austerity in his own nature, combined with a lack of respect for material possessions, meant that it would be as hard for him to be corrupt as for Mario to accept his standards of honesty. When they sat talking on the rare occasions when they met, Mario would tell stories of his youth in Naples. Listening to these accounts of a life so completely alien to his own, Lomax could understand that Mario would have had to evolve a totally different set of values. This was one of the differences between Mario and a man like Heffernan. If Heffernan had stolen as a child, it would have been to gain attention. Mario had stolen because he was hungry. It was a way of life and well understood by those around him; he belonged to a gang which had laws and customs, he knew his world and had his place in it. He had not grown up in a jungle. There was a solidity about Mario and about his house; in spite of the peeling plaster, the missing tiles on the roof, the house would not easily be shaken. Mario was a Roman Catholic, and in his religious observances appeared to be devout; sometimes on weekdays he could be seen kneeling in the church at lunchtime. This was absource of considerable amusement to many Protestants whose vices were less primitive.

  Mario, if asked about this strange friendship, would have given a simpler answer. He would have said that he found Lomax ‘sympathetic’. Mario was a man who loved and hated, and had very little idea of what went on in the no-man’s-land in between in which so many people live their lives.

  On the evening when he was due to dine with Mario, Lomax left his car at the bottom of the hill. He did this partly because he liked to slop every now and again to look at the view over the harbour. Also, he wanted time to think. When he and Mario met it was not usually because Lomax looked for news or Mario for co-operation. Tonight, whether they liked it or not, things would be different. Lomax was sorry about this; but as Hannah had had reason to suspect, he was not one to let sentiment govern his behaviour on such an occasion. And neither was Mario.

  After dinner, Signora Vicente went into the kitchen where she would occupy herself for the rest of the evening. The window over the courtyard was open and from time to time she appeared, shaking out a cloth, putting bottles in the dustbin, unpegging clothes from the line. Mario poured brandy and made his opening move.

  ‘Why does your paper wait so long to attack Heffernan?’

  Lomax shivered. It had been a hot day and now the first breeze of evening, light though it was, caught one unprepared.

  ‘We’re not attacking Heffernan,’ he said. ‘Just asking questions about the West Front development.’

  ‘But what makes you begin now?’ Mario persisted.

  Lomax looked into his glass. From the Baptist Chapel came the sound of people singing with lusty unconcern. Brief life is here our portion. Brief sorrow, short-lived care. . . . Lomax said, ‘Information has gradually been coming into the office.’ But he knew, now that the question had been put, that his own suspicions had been aroused when Pauline Ormerod walked into his office on the night of the election.

  Mario, too, looked into his glass. Whether he was content with the answer or not, he did not pursue the matter. He said, ‘Who is this Heffernan?’ He could be naïve; Scotney was the whole of England to him.

  ‘A property developer among other things,’ Lomax said. ‘He owns a chain of hotels and one or two big stores. I believe he started in footwear.’

  ‘Who handles the deal for him here?’

  ‘Officially, you mean? He owns one of the firms of estate agents – Randalls.’

  ‘And unofficially?’

  Lomax thought it was Mario’s turn to put a little information into the pool. He said, ‘I thought you were going to tell me that.’

  Mario sipped his brandy. The Baptists had got as far as the sweet and blessed country, the home of God’s elect. Signora Vicente hurled something into the courtyard, there was a lot of spitting and snarling followed by the clatter of a dustbin lid. When the vibrations had died away, Mario said, ‘Heffernan put money into this Neil Moray’s campaign. You know that?

  ‘I had begun to wonder about it.’ Lomax was cautious.

  ‘I KNOW. He is behind the Whittaker Enterprises.’

  Whittaker Enterprises was a wealthy outfit which invested in industrial projects which showed promise but needed help in getting off the ground.

  ‘I would hardly have thought Moray’s enterprise would qualify for help from them.’ This was not the first time that Lomax had heard of this, but he was interested to know how much Mario had found out. ‘We can look into it, of course: but these things are complicated and they take time. . . .’

  ‘No, no.’ Mario shook his head and smiled with the weary patience of the professional for the laborious efforts of the amateur. ‘There is nothing complicated at all. If you do not understand something, you just ask. Ask and it shall be given to you.’ He sighed, suddenly melancholy at the ease with which these things could be done.

  ‘Can I have facts and figures?’ Lomax asked briskly.

  ‘Ah, no, no. I give you the information. You find the sort of facts and figures you need. That is fair, yes?’ He offered Lomax a cigar and took one
himself. As he lit his cigar, he said, ‘Another thing. A large contribution from a small business – Cosgrove’s Travel.’

  Signora Vicente, who was sweeping the courtyard, began to sing Santa Lucia in competition with the Baptists. Lomax let her get through the first verse before he said:

  ‘Do you know anything about Cope?’

  ‘No.’ Mario dismissed Cope and the match with a flick of the hand. ‘He must work for Heffernan, though. No one works for nothing.’

  Lomax was inclined to agree with this.

  Mario eased himself more comfortably into the wicker chair which creaked beneath his weight. ‘I want to open one restaurant at the West end of the town.’ He was becoming expansive. There would be no more exchange of information. ‘One restaurant! And they will not give me permission. They say it is residential. It is important to keep some part of the seafront residential. I have the trattoria at the corner of Pelham Square, the Aubergine in The Strand, the Delia Conti on The Avenue, and do they harm the residential area? Since I open the trattoria, you see how Pelham Square has improved. Do any places do badly where I have a restaurant? But no. Here, they say, is too grand, too beautiful. I must not come here. I will bring the harbour atmosphere to this end of the town. And this new development is not one restaurant, is a whole new town.’ He enunciated the words ‘whole new town’ very clearly, accompanying each word with a jab of the left hand, fingers spread wide. ‘Is that just?’